Class A

by Lucas Mann

  I sit on an upside-down bucket to watch him hit balls off a tee. I listen to the lonely sound of bat on leather as it echoes off the aluminum roof. I find myself surprised, waiting for more. I don’t know why I haven’t been expecting this scene. Maybe it just seems too ordinary. When I was six, my father put tennis balls on a tee and told me to swing. And I did. Over and over. Hitting the plastic stalk instead of the ball, weeping with fury, my first memories of the game. That’s what I did in Little League and in my fluorescent, stinking high school gym. Perhaps part of me expected the chance to revel in awed, nerdy fandom, having access to something beyond what I can relate to. To see feats of strength and technology, some futuristic, performance-training playground, the kind of human laboratory that should be hidden from view. But Danny is alone in black shorts and a black T-shirt, feeding frayed practice balls to himself. This is it. This is what is hidden from everyone, from the players’ wives and their babies who totter around the fence outside waiting, from fans who speculate about what on earth could be going on in there. This is the process of making stars or fostering excellence or however else it is put by announcers and PR agents.

  Danny tries to make each swing just like the one before it. He doesn’t bend his knees much or get much torque. His swing is a leadoff hitter’s, a fast slap of the ball, designed for line drives that allow him to start running. He keeps his eyes focused on the wall about sixty feet away from him, as though there is a pitcher there. He takes a high step with his left foot, places it down right about where it had been, and swings. The ball skips off the strip of Astroturf beneath him and gets caught in the mesh at the other end of the room. He grabs another ball and repeats. Repeats again. It’s the same motion for a hundred balls or so. His expression hasn’t changed.

  “What are you thinking about?” I ask him as he stands, hands on his hips, looking at the pile he’s created.

  He gives me a quizzical look.

  “Nothing, dude,” he says. “It’s bad for you to think in here. I had to learn that. Because I’m naturally thoughtful.”

  There’s a pause as he adjusts his batting gloves.

  “That’s funny, right?” he says suddenly. “Like your mind has an off switch.”

  Danny Carroll does this every day but Sunday in the off-season and every day from April to September since minor-league baseball cannot take days off simply because God did. He swings, swings again, hears the same sound, watches balls fly and bounce. He grimaces when he hits them wrong, nods when he hits them right. Repeats. It’s a basic movement, one that millions do, it’s just that Danny does it more. And he must do it better. But the movement, so short, so ultimately uninteresting, remains the same,

  “Should I do another bucket?” he asks me.

  “Yeah, yeah, another bucket,” he says before I can answer.

  “Motivation,” he says, maybe to me, maybe to himself, or to no one.

  “You ever get tired of it?” I ask. “The same thing all the time?”

  “It’s just what you do,” he says.

  I have called Archer Daniels Midland, and there is no fucking way that they’ll let me see the factory on the inside. Like everyone, I will have to watch the metal and the smoke from the other side of the train tracks.

  “It’s just a bunch of pipes leading to more pipes,” said the media relations man on the phone. “It would probably bore you. It’s nothing too interesting.”

  “Don’t be so modest,” I said.

  There was crackling silence through the phone because he did not find me funny.

  Somewhere in there, the slurry is pumped, all day long, right now even, as Danny and his teammates dress and the sun begins to set, dull pink. It’s pumped into something that looks like a contraption that James Bond must escape, but the corn doesn’t escape. Toothy discs on long rods spin, and the corn is macerated, separating the germ of the plant, leaving a starch-and-acid milkshake ready to be processed. No more kernels, just mash.

  A man who used to work at the factory described the next step as being like a cotton candy machine, but fifty times the size. The slurry is spun in metal mesh colanders. The liquid passes through, and crystals are caught in the mesh. The crystals are the sugar. The liquid moves on, sitting again in glinting blue whale vats, where it’s mixed with more enzymes and chemicals, cooked until it ferments and becomes pure ethanol as smoke pours out over the town.

  The 200-proof liquor can be treated as anything. It’s raw. It can be booze. When the factory was smaller, and owned by a smaller company, you could climb into the freight cars, where there was always a little moonshine runoff pooled at the bottom. Workers bottled it quick and took it home. There’s a good chance that the first taste of alcohol Tom Bigwood had, like everyone else who grew up around here, was a tablespoon of fresh corn ethanol. Sometimes he couldn’t even swallow it, but he still got hammered drunk anyway, as if the stuff were seeping into his blood through his cheeks, foaming on his tongue.

  If the factory works at full capacity, 237 million gallons of ethanol will be exported from Clinton by the end of the year, a sizeable chunk of the 1.7 billion that ADM claims yearly. The baby corn the players drove by on the way in churned into something new and shipped back out along the highways and the railroads and the river.

  I stand close to Danny as he changes with the rest of the team before the first game of the season. I’m pressed against the divider between his locker and Hank’s. I try not to look down at bare penis, but in a tight room crammed with twenty-five of them, that’s a difficult thing to try.

  I seem to be the only uncomfortable one, something noted and then exploited by two players whose names I haven’t learned yet, who turn and whip their cocks for my benefit like cowboys getting ready to do some steer roping. There is no shame to it. In this place, there is constant, pragmatic exposure and assessment, even of things that should be private. In the training room, there’s a thick black cylinder used for shoulder stretching nicknamed in an honest reference to a well-endowed Dominican pitcher who has become locker-room legend.

  The players’ bodies, after all, are what got them here and what are under inspection. They poke and prod themselves and each other. They compare the diameter of lats, the density of thighs. They grab each other around the neck and squeeze, force each other to the ground in headlocks, the stubble of their shaved chests burning on one another’s skin until someone is forced to say stop, please, I can’t. They stand on the scale before going home every night and record the number on a hanging chart. There is a small, frantic man named BJ whose only job is to stretch and massage and monitor their bodies. Their bodies are the product.

  Some do push-ups to warm their muscles now, popping off the ground, coiling then springing. Most rub baby powder along their thighs and crotches so that the skin won’t burn when they slide on their Under Armour. They take stiff medical tape, wrap their forearms with it, then slap the tape to hear the hardness of the sound, “for no reason other than to be cool,” Danny says. They pass around aerosol cans to shine their cleats. They line the space between their bottom lip and bottom teeth with tobacco and give themselves brownish-green smiles in the mirror. They smear sun-reflecting eye-black along their cheekbones like warrior paint, even on cloudy days. There is ritual to all of it.

  As Tamargo emerges to tack up the first lineup of a season that will include 139 more, the bodies push into a clump by the corkboard dotted with Louie the LumberKing mascot stickers. It’s like the cast list for a high school musical has gone up, complete with all of the brutal, overly dramatic weight of high school anxiety, of this moment meaning everything. I see Danny holding his fists together, swinging them gently, as though gripping a phantom bat.

  There are shouts from players who will play tonight, shouts of “Let’s do it boys.” And, “First win! Right now!” And, “Let’s fuck these faggots up!”

  Danny isn’t in the lineup. There’s someone newer than him, someone he will compete with all season, maybe for the rest of their caree
rs. Matt Cerione wasn’t drafted three years ago. He is shiny and unblemished, selected in 2009 from the University of Georgia, a perennial powerhouse, their bulldog mascot seen cavorting on ESPN during the College World Series.

  Matt Cerione says, “Game time, bro,” and shoves a teammate hard, who then reciprocates. They both smile.

  Danny doesn’t say much as he walks back to his locker. Just, “Well, I’m gonna have another sandwich.” And then, “Dang, I need to clean my cleats.” I want to tell him something reassuring, but it would be absurd. This isn’t a place of reassurance. This isn’t a place where one is supposed to be found seeking validation or giving it freely. Danny stands alone, pushing two fingers into the flesh of his pectoral muscles, reminding himself how little give there is. I watch his torso until the others in the room behind him, some bigger, some darker, mostly the same, begin to run together into a mural of skin. It will be like this every day now for half a year, the hopeful waiting to show their distinction. The way it’s been for eight decades, when professional players first showed up in Clinton, arriving on passenger trains that no longer stop here, through the corn.

  “Long season,” Danny says to me. And then, “God is good.”

  · · ·

  Tom Bigwood died two weeks ago. It had been a long time coming. He said he was going to make it to opening day, he said no way in hell he wasn’t, but then he died of colon cancer. In the same paper that ran “L’Kings’ Carroll Seeks Fresh Start,” there was a paid obituary for Tom, who was never famous the way Danny could be. It commemorated him as a son, a brother, a friend, a season-ticket holder for thirty-three years.

  I sit in Tom’s seat, like an idiot.

  “You know where you’re sitting, don’t you?” I’m asked by a woman named Betty, with white hair and a face that looks like a chipmunk Christmas tree ornament that my grandmother used to have.

  My silence works as an answer.

  “That’s Tom’s seat.”

  I look around for Tom.

  “Oh no, he’s dead. You can stay there, I suppose.”

  Betty gives a short, sad laugh and then says, “I’m Betty, what’re you writing?”

  She points to my notebook and I flush, mumbling, “Oh, well, everything seems so interesting here.” Betty announces to the whole section that a young man wants to write a book about us. I flush more. A couple of people ask me why in the hell I would want to waste my time like that. Betty says, “Oh, hush.” She leans in and tells me that she wishes Tom were here. He could have told me anything. Nobody sat here watching more than him. And he remembered specifics. People. Faces. Games. Betty and some others around me chipped in to buy a season ticket for the empty seat where Tom always sat. It seemed right. And they chipped in to get him a brick on the small walk in front of the stadium. A brick engraved with his name and his favorite saying, “Instant replay,” called out when something awesome happened and he wished he could see it again. Tom’s family got him one, too, so now he’s doubly there in the ground as we all walk in to watch.

  “Oh, there’s Danny,” Betty says. She points to the left-field line, where the players are ambling toward the dugout. They all look the same from here. She must have remembered his walk.

  As the players get closer, Betty waves to Danny. He trots over and says hi. He looks happy, at least amused. He remembers her. Danny was one of Tom’s favorites, she tells me. Tom watched Danny in the last year that he watched anything. But this year, when Danny was at spring training in Arizona, Tom was buried in a cemetery two miles from where he was born. The fans from his section were there, and Ted, and some former players who stayed around the area when their careers ended. They brought LumberKings trinkets to enhance the ambience: a cap, a ball, a pennant, leftover green beads from some beer promotion a few years back.

  Betty starts to tell me everything about the Baseball Family, which has a lot of overlap with her real family but is bigger. I am in the middle of the Family. There are Julie, Cindy, Joyce, the one who collects all the baseballs. Bill, Betty’s husband. Then Tammy, Betty’s daughter, Tim, her son, never moved away. And Deb and Dan and Gary, all of them rolling through shared history with a rhythm at once familiar and still surprising. Dan used to work at ADM, quit a few years ago to go drive a truck. Gary still works there, doesn’t want to talk about it. Everyone laughs at that. Then Betty asks what’s home for me. I tell her I don’t really know. She says, sincerely, to me, this near stranger, in a way that would make me laugh in almost every other situation in my life, “We will take care of you.”

  Betty watches Danny as he runs to play catch, and I wonder how many players she’s seen doing that and if the sheer volume and interchange-ability makes each one fade a little. She’s smiling because it’s opening day and everything’s happening all over again, like you can always count on it doing. And Danny is back, a nice boy, full of shiny-eyed, resilient belief.

  “Tom said Danny just looked like a ballplayer should,” Betty tells me.

  And I look at him the way she does for a moment, the way Tom must have. I see the soft youngness of his face. His tanned white skin, his sturdy jaw. I see the way he seems to bounce around the field, his grin. The understated wooden cross hanging off him and the dated earnestness with which he periodically reaches his fingers up to hold it, dutiful and devout, inarguable.

  I am not good at faith. Sometimes I find it difficult to think of life as anything other than the loss of things, and I know that sounds big, too big, but it’s true. I read that the term “nostalgia” originated in a seventeenth-century medical student’s dissertation, when he mixed the Greek word nostos, “return to the native land,” with algos, “suffering, grief,” to describe the madness of mercenaries who spent all their lives moving and trying to remember. It was classified as a potentially fatal disease. Isn’t that crazy? To die from wanting to return. But I miss things that were never mine, want to return to a place, more of a feeling, that never really existed, and doesn’t baseball always promise that there was once something more?

  The game ends. The LumberKings are 0-1. I didn’t really pay much attention to the action. It was a boring game.

  “Well, all uphill from here,” Tim says.

  “Or same old, same old,” Tammy says.

  Danny pops out of the dugout, walks over. He isn’t sweating, nor is he dirty. He smiles and nods. Everyone does, bobbing their chins at the shared expectation of what he might someday be, what it might mean to watch him, or maybe just a much needed breeze that everyone felt at once. I look out at what will always be there at the end of every game, running each one into the next.

  There is sky, and there is smoke. There is water beyond that. There are train tracks. There is a parking lot. There is dirt, right in front of us. There is this stadium, the splinters in the wall that we don’t look close enough to see. Betty asks if I will be back tomorrow, and I say yes.

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  Things

  A BLOND ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD in too much makeup and her freshly shined church shoes is standing on the grass of the infield singing the national anthem. She is the best singer in the sixth grade at Washington Middle School, as well as in the local youth choir, though judging by one kid’s comments to his father sharing a picnic table with me along the third-base line, that’s debatable. I like her. After she nails the high note on proudly, she gets confident and waves her arms a little in front of her, sending a spastic, I-taught-her-that jolt into her father, leaning over the home team’s dugout with his camera aimed. She waves toward the diamond in front of her, the center-field fence beyond that. She slashes her hand through the air on land of the free like an auctioneer or an HDTV product girl. I follow her gestures. There is the flag, yes, it is still there. It is whipping hard, as loud as her singing, because it’s spring in Iowa and often that means you don’t want to go outside, let alone stay stationary, watching baseball. Next to the flag, panning left along with her fingers, there is the Lumber Lounge, the VIP area befitting a lumber king,
where private parties pay twenty-five dollars a head for unlimited food and drink. It carries corporate sponsorship now, technically the Leinenkugel’s Lumber Lounge. Opposite that, behind the left-field fence is the Coors Light Picnic Pavilion. And the more family-friendly Dr Pepper Picnic Garden. In between, the old wooden fence in right center and left center is covered with advertisements for huge, international companies that claim an outpost in Clinton.

  The singing girl points at banners hailing Burger King and John Deere and Walmart and H&R Block Tax Relief and Motel 6 and Comfort Inn and Miller Lite and McDonald’s and LyondellBasell plastics manufacturing and Ashford University, “Serving the Community for 90 Years!” She warbles a bit on free and looks shocked for a moment, big blue eyes suddenly bigger, not understanding how her practiced voice could leap the way it just did. But clapping starts up and saves her so that by the time she hits brave, she’s owning it, every bit the best singer at Washington Middle.

  “How about that?” Brad asks us all rhetorically from the public address booth. “The kids in this town …”

  He leaves us to fill in the adjectives.

  More exemplary kids compete for attention with the singing girl, who is now bright red and shivering, from some combination of the adrenaline rush and the cold. Little Leaguers, most of them younger than she is, are proudly displayed in their ill-fitting uniforms, having teetered to their favorite positions along with the corresponding LumberKings, trying to keep up with the players’ shadows. They bow during the whole anthem, holding their oversized hats to their chests, solemn and adorable. They seem to understand the crucial sincerity of all of this. The critical boy at my table does not. When the song ends, he says, “Dad, why do we have to take our hats off for the anthem?” His father says, “Because people are dying for you right now.” The boy falls silent.