The Might-Have-Been

by Joe Schuster

  He was worrying, Edward Everett knew. You’re not happy unless you’re anxious, Renee had joked to him once when they hadn’t been married long, when his flaws were still part of his charm. It was true: by all other measures, the team was successful. They came back from the trip in second place, two games out of first—not bad for a club without a home, he thought wryly. And other things were going well. Martinez had started listening to him about plate discipline and he was walking more; the chart recording the locations of Tanner’s hits showed that he had stopped trying to pull everything to left, was collecting hits to right and center; Singer, on the other hand, had started to pull the ball more, take advantage of his size and power. He had no business being a slap hitter.

  Maybe, Edward Everett thought, he was a good enough coach that more of his players would survive the post-season purge than he had expected before the road trip. Riding the bus back to Perabo City, he went through his game log cards, scrutinizing the numbers on them as Johansen would, asking who would survive, who would not? The first time he sorted them, he decided that eleven would make the cut, thirteen would not. The second time, it was a dozen on each side of the ledger. He hoped he was wrong; he hoped that more of them would end up being outliers.

  Then Nelson came back.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  When he got to the high school for the first home game after the long road trip, Edward Everett found that someone had put duct tape over the latch bolt, preventing it from locking. “Hello?” he called, stepping tentatively into the locker room. From the darkness, he heard something clatter, someone say “Shit,” and then bare feet slapping on cement. He wondered if he should get out, call the police. But he flicked on the light switch next to the door. “Hello,” he said again, walking cautiously across the locker room. In the equipment cage, a silhouette of a man pressed into the back corner, wedged between the wall and a stack of boxes.

  “Nelson?” Edward Everett said when he recognized him.

  “I’m sorry, Skip,” Nelson said, still hiding in the corner.

  “Come on out, Nels,” he said gently.

  Nelson hesitated, then stepped out of the corner, blinking in the light. He looked terrible—pale and unshaven, wearing boxers and a ripped Houston Astros T-shirt.

  “Jesus. You look like crap,” Edward Everett said, not meaning to.

  “I don’t know what to do,” Nelson said, working a finger into a hole in his shirt.

  “The first thing is to take a shower.” Edward Everett went back to where he had dropped his equipment bag, took out the towel he had meant for his own shower after the game and brought it to Nelson, who regarded it suspiciously. “It’s a towel,” Edward Everett said. “You use it to dry yourself after a shower.”

  While Nelson showered, Edward Everett sat at the small desk in the corner of the locker room and began transferring the data from his game log cards into the spreadsheet. After Nelson finished, Edward Everett became conscious of him sitting on a bench behind him, watching him type the figures into the Excel sheets and make notes about what he wanted to highlight in his email to Johansen in his attempt to improve more of his players’ chances at surviving the cuts the team was planning, if it wasn’t too late.

  “Is that what done me in?” Nelson said, his voice small.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Edward Everett said.

  “The numbers,” Nelson said.

  “It’s complicated,” Edward Everett said.

  “Complicated,” Nelson said. “That’s the kind of shit someone says when they don’t want to tell you the truth. Like when Cindy said she was going to stay with her folks. ‘Why are you going?’ I asked her. ‘It’s complicated,’ she said.”

  “Nelson,” Edward Everett said, turning to face him, weighing whether to tell him Cindy and her brother had come to see him. Nelson didn’t look much better than he did before he showered; the only noticeable difference was that his hair was wet and he had pulled on a pair of jeans. “Why aren’t you home?”

  Nelson laughed. “I don’t have a home. Got to have a job to have a home.”

  “Well, what about …” He hesitated, not wanting to do something as intimate as saying Cindy’s name. “… your wife and kids. I think they miss you.”

  “Jesus fucking Christ!” Nelson bellowed. “Haven’t you been listening? She’s gone back to her folks.”

  “I only meant that you could go there, too,” Edward Everett said, quietly hoping his tone would defuse Nelson’s anger.

  “Right,” Nelson said. “Go knock on her daddy’s door. ‘Here is little loser boy.’ ”

  “Ross,” he said.

  “I don’t know what to do besides this,” Nelson said, patting the bench he sat on.

  “But you’re not really doing this.”

  Nelson was silent, clearly thinking. “All I’ve ever done is baseball,” he said finally. “Cindy says I took my shot and … Christ almighty, Skip. ‘I took my shot’—like it’s a fucking carnival game and either you win the doll or you don’t.”

  “Look at yourself,” Edward Everett said. “You’re sleeping in a locker room in a closed-down school, and when’s the last time you ate anything?”

  “I eat,” Nelson said defensively.

  “What? What do you eat?”

  “Food. What the fuck do you think I eat?”

  Edward Everett knew he would regret doing it but he reached into his hip pocket and brought out his wallet, fingering first a ten and then the ten and a twenty. Nelson might be crazy but he had to eat. “Here,” he said, holding out the thirty dollars to him.

  The outside door to the locker room squealed open. Because whoever came in was backlit by the sun and the locker room was dim, all Edward Everett could make out was a silhouette. “Oh, fuck, Nelson,” the figure said—Tanner. Nelson looked at the money that Edward Everett held out, perhaps weighing his empty belly against his need for pride. He swiped at the bills, grabbing the twenty but dropping the ten, and dashed out of the locker room, shoving Tanner aside as he went through the door.

  “Shit, Skip,” Tanner said, coming in, rubbing his shoulder where it had banged against the steel doorjamb. “You should call the cops or something.”

  “Tanner …” That’s you maybe in a month, he wanted to say but didn’t. What was the point? They all thought they were invincible; that it would go on forever and ever, amen. “Just cut Nelson some slack, all right?” He picked up the bill Nelson had dropped.

  “He belongs in a psycho ward. Someone said they saw him going through a dumpster last week.”

  “Who needs a psycho ward?” Martinez said, coming into the locker room.

  “Oh, shit,” Tanner said. “We was just talking about you.”

  “Fuck you, Tanner,” Martinez said.

  And then Nelson was gone and Edward Everett did not see him again until the last day of the season.

  For half a day on the last Sunday of the home stand, they were tied for first when they won their third in a row from Peoria, one they almost lost save for what was most likely a gift from the field umpire, the final out coming with the bases loaded when the Peoria hitter lined a shot up the middle that Rausch snagged, diving, hitting the turf hard enough to knock the wind out of himself, the umpire throwing up his right thumb, signaling the out and the end of the game. The Peoria manager burst off the bench and onto the field, protesting that Rausch had trapped the ball, not caught it. “You weren’t in position to see for sure that he did,” he shouted.

  “You got no proof he didn’t,” the umpire said in a slow drawl, taking a stick of Big Red gum out of his pants pocket, unwrapping it, folding it into his mouth, where he already had half a dozen pieces, and then strolled off the field. The Peoria manager kicked at the dirt but said no more; Perabo City had come back from a long way down in the standings, two weeks to play and all even.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  They came into the final weekend of the season still tied with Quad Cities for first place, ju
st as Quad Cities was coming to town for a three-game series. The math was simple, Edward Everett knew: to win, Perabo City needed to take two of the three games. On Friday before the first game, Renz emailed the list of players Johansen would release after the season and the list of players he would assign to other teams in the organization. It stunned Edward Everett. They were releasing seventeen players and keeping but seven: Sandford, Martinez, Vila, Mraz, Rausch, Singer and Rojas. Thinking that his own secure place with the club might be enough that he could convince Johansen to change his mind on two or three players, he called his office. At the very least, he thought, he should be able to convince him to consider saving his pitcher Riggins, who had started poorly but had allowed only one earned run in his last eleven games out of the bullpen. It was not Johansen who answered the phone, however, but Renz, and the conversation echoed the one they’d had when he’d called on Nelson’s behalf.

  “The projection for him doesn’t make it work,” Renz said after Edward Everett made his case.

  “What about—” he started to say, wanting to remind Renz of the conversation he’d had with Johansen, about the club wanting to blend numbers with other, more human judgment. Certainly, Johansen had conveyed that to Renz.

  “The numbers are the numbers.”

  “But—” he said.

  “Oh, we might have added one more of your players to the list of ‘keepers,’ ” Renz said, and then went on before Edward Everett could ask who it was. “But that someone fractured his knee on your watch.” Before Edward Everett could correct him, telling him it was Webber’s shoulder, not his knee, Renz hung up.

  He went to the ballpark knowing he would share none of the news with anyone—not the lucky seven, not the unlucky seventeen. The organization had given him a future and he owed them some loyalty for that—but it didn’t extend to his breaking the hearts of nearly three-fourths of his players sooner than he had to.

  It was the weekend of the county fair. From the ball field at St. Aloysius, Edward Everett could see the fairgrounds that overlooked the school, a slash of the western edge—four booths and the top arch of the Ferris wheel. Because of the poor economy and the flooding, the radio told him, the fair organizers expected attendance to hit its lowest point in recent memory. “We considered canceling it,” a woman said. “But so many people have put so much time into this.” “Besides,” said a second woman, “at times like these, people need some sort of diversion.”

  As the team went through batting practice two hours before first pitch, the organizers’ prediction seemed accurate. At the visible edge of the fairgrounds, minutes passed between fairgoers appearing at any of the booths. At one point, the Ferris wheel seemed not to move for ten minutes, the purple and yellow neon lights tracing its circumference blinking off and on. Compared to his team’s attendance for the opening game of the series, however, the fair was successful. As he stood at home plate, handing over his lineup card to the umpires and the Quad Cities manager, he could count thirty people in the bleachers behind the Perabo City bench; there were no more than that in the bleachers along the third base line. Collier had given up any pretense of caring: he did not even pay anyone to open the concession stand, and while the umpire reminded the Quad Cities manager of the ground rules, Edward Everett caught sight of a heavy, balding man in a nylon Perabo City Owls windbreaker—a remnant from when the team had fans who wore clothing with their logo—leading a three-year-old boy up to what should have been the concession window, knocking on the plywood covering it, the boy saying, “Want ice cream.” They left the ball field, the boy crying all the way up the long flight of steps to the parking lot, a major dent in the attendance even before anyone had thrown a pitch.

  Early in the game, it became clear that the man had probably done a shrewd thing in leaving, as it was a sloppy contest. A cool drizzle fell intermittently throughout—never hard enough for the umpires to stop the game, although the field was wet. In the top of the fourth, Perabo City made three errors, two by Vern Stuckey after there were two outs. The first, he slipped on the wet grass in right field, his feet flying up in the air like a silent comedian stepping on a banana peel, the ball popping out of his glove, letting a runner on third score. The second, he fielded a base hit cleanly and snapped the ball toward second to try to catch a runner who had rounded the base too far, but his throw sailed over the head of Rausch covering the base, the Quad Cities runner banging into him trying to get back to the bag, knocking him down. For a moment, Rausch lay there, Edward Everett sending Dominici out to see if he was hurt, but he’d just had the wind knocked out of him, and Dominici helped him up. The perhaps five dozen people in the bleachers gave him polite applause. By the sixth inning, Perabo City was down eleven–three. On the mound, his starter, Matt Pearson, paused before nearly every pitch, looking pointedly at Edward Everett, as if to ask: When is it enough? Finally, with only one out and the bases loaded, Edward Everett called time-out and went to the mound to talk to him.

  “I’m sorry, Skip,” Pearson said, handing him the baseball. “I just can’t work the kinks out today.” Edward Everett took his left arm by the wrist, popping the baseball back into the pocket of his glove. “I’m sorry, Pearson. I didn’t come out to get you.”

  “Jesus Christ, Skip,” he said through clenched teeth. “I’m getting demolished.”

  “I know, and I’m sorry, but I need the pen for tomorrow and Sunday.”

  “You’re saying this one is lost and I’m the sacrificial lamb?”

  “I need you to give me whatever you can.”

  “Christ, my numbers.”

  Edward Everett regarded him. You’re on the wrong list, he thought. Your numbers don’t matter. “Look,” he said, not meeting Pearson’s eyes, “shut ’em down; the more innings with no more damage, the better your numbers.”

  “Fuck you, Skip.” Pearson walked away, rubbing the baseball between his hands.

  As it turned out, he might have done better to remove the pitcher when Pearson had wanted to leave the game. Perabo City scored four in the seventh and seven in the eighth and if he had replaced Pearson with someone who might have shut down Quad Cities, Perabo City might well have won; but he left Pearson out there and, perhaps through some perverse obstinacy, the pitcher allowed half a dozen more runs to score, glaring at Edward Everett each time someone got a hit or he walked a batter: Take that, you bastard. Finally, Edward Everett relented, sending someone else in for the ninth, Pearson stomping angrily up the steps to the locker room, no longer interested in any show of restraint, screaming, “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” the entire way up, the final score seventeen–fifteen, Quad Cities in first by one with two to play.

  The second game went better. Perhaps because his team had gotten such a large lead in the first game and Perabo City had picked away at it, the Quad Cities manager had not been as restrained in his use of the bullpen as had Edward Everett, and he’d used seven pitchers in all to lock down the win. As a result, when his starting pitcher got into trouble in the second game, it was his turn to leave him out there, resting his other pitchers for the final game—the one that would decide the league. Perabo City scored three in the second, two in the fourth, five in the sixth, and led twelve–one by the bottom of the eighth inning when the featured act for the weekend at the fair took the stage up the hill from the game: a Motown group that’d had a few top-40 hits in the 1960s. Their songs—some familiar, most not—floated down the hill, the volume increasing and decreasing with the direction and speed of the wind. On the Perabo City bench, with the lead they had, the team was loose. When the band played its most famous hit—one Edward Everett remembered from his junior prom, a slow number during which the disc jockey had lowered the lights and Edward Everett and his date held tightly to each other, turning in the slowest of circles while above them the fluorescent stars tacked to the gymnasium ceiling twinkled—Vila stood up on the bench.

  “My grandma used to play this to get me to go to sleep when I was at her house while my
mom was at work,” he said. He started swaying on the bench, singing the lyrics, trying to mimic the movements Edward Everett remembered the group going through when they performed on American Bandstand. Four or five other players got up, watching his moves, trying to imitate him, shouting out the lyrics when they knew them, getting them wrong when they didn’t. When the song finished, just as Vila had to leave the bench to warm up in the on-deck circle, the few fans in the ballpark applauded.

  On his way home, Edward Everett was restless. It has come down to the last game of the year, he thought; of course it has. The final game for the pennant and for Sandford’s shot at twenty wins. In all his years, he had seen few other pitchers he would rather have starting a game that mattered as this one did. He realized he had fooled himself when he’d said that winning the pennant would mean little to him and for a brief moment pictured his team pouring onto the field after the last out, hefting him to their shoulders, although he realized at the same time that it was something that would happen in the movies, a movie about a main character who was someone like him. In life, he knew, his players thought of themselves as the main characters. They were all driving home with their own visions of the team picking them up and carrying them off the field.

  He called Meg and she answered the phone after the first ring.

  “I was hoping you’d call,” she said.

  He told her about the game and the one tomorrow for all the marbles.

  “Not bad for a little old flour salesman,” she said.