Class A

by Lucas Mann

  Do you remember? Do you remember?

  In Joyce’s notebook, there is the beginning of a draft of a letter that was supposed to be the first in a series. It begins with “Dear Brian.” So far, it ends with “I like the Beatles, but I also like ZZ Top. What kind of music do you like?” There was supposed to be more. It was supposed to begin a pen pal relationship in preparation for the day when Brian Moran left, but Brian Moran has already left, and he never wrote down his address. “Facebook me,” was the last thing he said to her, called out over his shoulder as he trotted to the clubhouse a few days ago.

  No, no, that’s not the point.

  There used to be a tin shed behind the stadium. If you got up there, you could stand and watch the whole game for free. Joyce and her brother could get there on their own. They could walk from their home in south Clinton, a mile down Second Street, right on Sixth Avenue North, as if blindfolded, stopping at the right moments, subconsciously measuring steps and knowing they were close when they smelled low tide off the river and heard the hollow pop of baseballs burrowing into old leather.

  On top of the shed, older boys jostled for position to see the game and then past it, the town, their neighborhood, the factories, the river, Illinois to the east, and the suggestion of all the other states beyond it, laid out next to one another like patches of fresh sod.

  Joyce was going to climb up. And she was scared of heights. But even ground-bound, she managed to watch. She stood alone, fingers gripping chain link, peering through a gap to see the players. And she didn’t feel closed-in like she usually did, like a bird caught in flypaper in the summertime, so much moving and flapping, losing feathers and going nowhere.

  I imagine her there watching, when she tells me about it. I imagine her shrunken down, unwrinkled, seeing the smoke, thinking of her father cleaning the petrified edges of corn syrup tanks with an old broom handle. She smiled when she looked at the field and the men in white uniforms, bleached every night, gleaming like teeth right after you come back from the dentist.

  There are two Cedar Rapids Kernels players whom Joyce hasn’t yet propositioned for an autograph. They’re new to the squad. Two budding stars have been moved up to AA-ball in Arkansas, and these are their replacements. Joyce bolts for the home dugout seven minutes before the game begins. I hold her bag and shuffle behind her, watching her broad, rounded shoulders dip and shimmy through the rows.

  When she reaches her destination, she glances back as I try to catch up. Speed is crucial. Some players will look for any pause or slackened body language as an excuse to flee. It seems that after spring training, the thrill of being sought out and cooed at and commodified wears off, and the players grow instantaneously world-weary, so damn tired of these overeager rubes squawking their names. But some stay nice. You can’t tell until you meet them. So you have to rush your pens and your keepsakes into their hands just to make sure. Joyce needs a ball.

  Finally reaching her, I rummage through her purse, shaped and designed like a baseball, for one of twelve baseballs that have been stored within. We picked them together last week behind the left-field fence, like careful farmers. She reaches out to the young men below her on the field. They are polite ones. They ask her name. “Joyce,” she says. “Joyce. Oh, you’ll know me soon enough.” They smile and they shrug and they sign. “The complete set,” she says.

  I used to want to be obsessed. Obsession, particularly with something odd or something past, felt like a badge of personhood. It was noble, careful. My brother was obsessed with über-masculine German folktales, so he bought them as instructions for how to be, tried to read them in their native tongue. He was obsessed with music, with listening to things nobody else listened to. So he saved records and mixed tapes, racked in immaculate order, even when everything else began to dissolve. It was pride I felt when, after the funeral, I was the one who laid claim to all his former possessions. But then I ignored his record player until it broke, threw his records and storybooks in a sloppy pile in storage, along with all the other gifts that I never cared for, that I left behind. I did not have it in me to appreciate what all the saved things meant.

  Maybe that’s why I feel nervous sometimes next to Joyce, yet surprisingly loving other times. I want a mania that feels noble and scholarly, the kind of obsession that comes to those with the capacity to see the importance of what might otherwise seem mundane. A legacy that I want to think I was born into, the way I have always imagined every person with a deeper sensitivity to the world to be.

  “It is a pleasant thing to sit here, this rainy afternoon, with the books and the ‘collection’ close at hand,” Adrian Joline wrote in 1902 in Meditations of an Autograph Collector. “I have certainly been arranging that collection for ten years, and it is not arranged yet.”

  I like that he doesn’t sound crazy, just precise.

  After I first met Joyce that day on the benches beyond left field, I drove home and watched a marathon of Hoarders, the reality show about pack rats. I ate a whole bag of pita chips, condescendingly enthralled by the directionless mania on-screen. People, mostly women with missing teeth, wailed at the camera and ran their hands through cracked, caked, arbitrary garbage as if it were tillable earth. Pet carcasses were discovered. Lives that had become forgettable in the accumulation of stuff. This was beyond sensitivity. Look at the freaks. I wondered if this was how I should categorize Joyce, the fierce dedication in her blue eyes, her dead front tooth left unfixed.

  But that was before I really watched her, when the misogynistic warnings about her were still fresh in my mind. That was before I saw how little was arbitrary in her actions. How delicately she approached each morsel of memorabilia. There was care to everything, and thought. Like a true collector, I’ve begun to think, Joyce musters up affection for each saved name and object. Like Joline’s books. Like my brother’s old Abba records with the chicken-scratch notes still taped on: Every song is just a little bit flat. That’s what makes it work. It’s not so much the keeping as the breathing of significance into the boredom of what is kept.

  All these afternoons together and I’ve begun to study, maybe fetishize, the work involved in assuming the importance of baseballs and signed names, especially in a world that is easily distracted and increasingly digital. I see her swimming upstream. There is always, to the collector, something new to threaten her pursuit.

  Bored at his lawyer’s desk in Princeton, New Jersey, a century and a thousand miles from this Clinton, Joline wrote: “The type-writing machine is the discourager of autograph enterprise, the grave of artistic collecting, the tomb of ambition.” And in this stodgy pride, I see Joyce. She doesn’t Facebook Brian Moran or any other ballplayer, the way so many fans do. And she hasn’t bought a cell phone or set up an e-mail account just to have the fleeting satisfaction of flippant digital messages from players, saying, “thx for the support, ttyl maybe.” That dilutes the care, the craft of possessing a tangible piece of history. Of holding a part of the game until you, still holding tight, have made it resonate.

  After the season, Brian Moran and Nick Franklin and some others will stop texting and will drop their public Facebook accounts. Nick will change his number. Joyce alone, clutching discarded equipment and permanent ink, will be the chronicler of their time in Clinton.

  Joyce’s father was never a noisemaker or a rabble-rouser, whatever you want to call it. And neither were her uncles. Or her brother. Joyce sang at the breakfast table.

  Fathers were always around in 1980, during the strike. In Clinton, a town built on an endless cycle of production, the old cliché of a high school degree and then the next day a union card, like all the Springsteen songs I love and half-understand, this was chaos. How demeaning it must have been when the strike continued and fathers stood in the kitchen scrubbing breakfast dishes with stooped heads, their gnarled hands holding Brillo pads and tea saucers.

  The impermanence felt so cruel and made Joyce’s father and the other men who were around now at two in the afternoo
n grumble. When did seniority and dedication and patience cease to mean anything? That was a question worth asking. There had been, the union leaders said, a “social contract” by which the company and the workers had peacefully coexisted, with promotion coming from inside the ranks and reasonable benefits going unquestioned. And then it ended, so quick and flat, but to fight it, to be loud, was going nowhere. And by June, nearly a year after the strike began, when the voices of protest grew more panicked, less sure, a memo from the company lay open on the coffee table, blandly stating that temporary strikebreakers, the men whose Tennessee and Missouri plates stood out in every parking lot, were to become “permanent replacement workers.”

  Joyce thought, I’m never going to work in a factory.

  She has brought me her writing today, professionally copied on thick white stock, bound with clear plastic on the front and red plastic on the back. She has had so many muses, two decades’ worth of lithe, remarkable young men in white jerseys and green hats. Boys otherwise forgotten. She calls some of her pieces stories and some poems and some letters, but all of them, I think, are odes. The players get a copy if she can find them when she’s done. She asks them to sign the original and send it back.

  On the field, Erasmo Ramírez strikes out the last batter of the first inning and bounces off the mound back to the dugout.

  “Attaboy, E-mo!” Joyce yells.

  She leans into me.

  “Maybe he’ll get a story,” she says. “E-mo. That’s a good name for a story. Who knows. There are so many things that I want to say, you know?”

  I wipe nacho grease off my hands and flip through her pages. A story about the tallest umpire in Midwest League history. A story about the LumberKings first, brave batgirl. A tribute in couplets to some super-stud named Chad Tracy, who, three years after his star turn in Clinton, still hasn’t played a game in the majors. It ends, “And when you make it, like I know you will, all the way to the Show/Perhaps these words will hang in Cooperstown—hey, you never know.”

  I tap her shoulder and say, “I like this one.”

  “Hey, yeah,” she agrees. “It’s good.”

  She has turned her attention away from the action, focusing on the relief pitchers, a tangle of legs splayed, spitting sunflower seed shells in the bullpen along the left-field fence. Brian Moran would have been third from the end, probably, next to his buddy Cooper. She would have been able to see his smile because he was so tall and he smiled so big. His spot has been filled by a boy from Arizona with a frowning, acne-pocked face.

  “Did you know Moran pitched for North Carolina?” she says. “He was the best relief pitcher in all of college. It helps he’s a lefty. Did you know it helps you as a pitcher if you’re a lefty?”

  A man with a strawberry-blond crew cut and his two boys with strawberry-blond crew cuts turn around from the row in front of us to look at Joyce, this rasping, unending monologue of minor-league baseball knowledge. She straightens up and peers down at the boys.

  “Do you want an autograph?” she asks. They stare back, blank. Their father stares, angry more than blank. He takes a swig of his beer.

  “Do you want an autograph?” she repeats. “I can get you one. You want one?”

  The little boy nods, and the bigger one shrugs.

  “Why?” the bigger one asks.

  “Because then you have it,” she says.

  She roots into her bag and finds a newly signed baseball. She holds it out, and I stare at its peculiarities, the small things I notice now that I watch games with her. There are gossamer fingerprints in smudges of dirt. And bruises from bats, chalk from baselines.

  There are, I think, many things that she wants to tell this strawberry-blond family. Look. Look at everything that makes this baseball unlike any other one. And then the name goes on top of it, the swoop of a G, how an S can become an underline, the way a player will write his Class A number next to his signature as though it will come to define him, as though this arbitrary assignment will be the number that he makes famous in the majors. And then there’s the teasing possibility that it might actually work out that way.

  The inning is over, and Joyce half leaps from her seat.

  “Vinnie!” she calls. “Vinnie! Vinnie! A ball for the kid?”

  He flicks one with easy assurance, doesn’t watch it into her hands.

  She presents it to the boys. The younger one grabs it, and the older one shrugs.

  “Keep this,” she says.

  Joyce became a dealer at the casino boat moored on the Mississippi River in Clinton, right beyond the outfield fence. This was before the Wild Rose outgrew the boat and built an expansive new home on the edge of town. It was in 1991, that year again. The end point of the steepest drop in the steady drop that would continue through the present. It came a full, depressing census report after the strike, when her father lost along with the rest of the union, ducked his head, ceased his protest quietly, and returned to the factory, only to get hurt on the job and have to find new work as a janitor at a coupon warehouse. A decade after the Local 6 Grain Millers were disbanded and 750 people who shouted for what they deserved never got their jobs back, many, like Joyce’s brother moving out of state for good. A decade after everything went quiet and the media vans left and the Communist Party stopped sending in supporters, and it became abundantly clear that Angela Davis would not be coming back to town to give another speech.

  Nothing significant had happened since. Nothing was gained. Archer Daniels Midland now owned the factory, bought it pretty soon after the labor force was disorganized. The plant still looked the same from the outside, just a little bigger and newer with fewer people working it. All the white wooden houses looked the same, too, the only difference being that more of them had gone empty.

  Iowa had just become the first state to pass riverboat gambling legislation in an effort to save its river towns that were losing people and industry. The chance to win brings in those who want to. The LumberKings happened to be winning. Maybe that was a good sign, too.

  A dealer’s hands are specialized hands. They move in a way other hands can’t.

  Four decks of cards flowed in a cascading wave with the flick of her wrist and then back. Farmers said, “My God, look at Joyce’s hands moving.” And the music overhead. And the water below her feet, the tide tugging like the line could just break and she would no longer be moored. And the ballplayers who came in after games, how you could always tell them by their cologne and collared shirts, their rigid posture, boys who never let themselves sink into a couch or forget what day it was. I imagine them smiling at her, saying, “Man, look at those hands.” I imagine them signing cocktail napkins before they left.

  Once she was going to deal on cruise ships. She drove down to Galveston and began to call it her home for a few months. She woke up every day and saw the gulf expanding in front of her, cleaned ships when they docked, planned to stay working on them when they departed, until her grandmother died and she spent all her money getting back to Iowa. She thought she might go again, to somewhere, but she didn’t. She is now the senior-most nonmanagerial employee of the very-landlocked Wild Rose. There is no current underneath her, no chance of floating away.

  In the fifth inning, Nick Franklin gets a hold of an inside curveball that didn’t curve. He takes his long, exaggerated step and then yanks, his still-growing shoulders helicoptering the bat into the ball, into the air, into the parking lot over the right-field fence.

  We stand.

  “Nick Franklin, you’re hot!” Joyce screams.

  The strawberry-blond family turns again.

  I can tell what the father thinks. That this is some expected case of women in love with baseball. It’s the movie image of jock groupies that he saw in Bull Durham and that his sons can find in Summer Catch: they take the boys home, rub at their sore, naked bodies, cook them something soulful, fuck them and mother them all at once. But there is no permanence in that. Carnal connections are fleeting. Unless of course there
is a baby, unintended permanence. It happens. As one fan put it to me, with a smirk, “This is a lily-white town. You see a girl who looks like she was once pretty with a mulatto baby, you sort of know what happened.”

  No, I want to say on Joyce’s behalf. No, that’s not the point.

  She flips through the program for today’s game and finds Nick Franklin’s home run total. He’s at fifteen already. Eight more and he’ll surpass the franchise record. I am often amazed at her memory, and now, as though the fact had been waiting in her mind to leap out, Joyce informs everyone in earshot that the record hasn’t been broken since Dick Kenworthy set it in 1961. Kenworthy died in April, in obscurity outside Kansas City—I don’t know how she knows.

  “Can you imagine, a race for his record the year that he’s gone?” Joyce says. “And you and me, right now, we’re saying his name, we’re remembering him.”

  “I’m going to write a story,” she says. “ ‘Nick and Dick.’ Is that a good title? It’s going to be about a skinny boy chasing a record that’s older than him.”

  It hasn’t cooled off, and I feel sweat molding my thighs to my shorts to my chair. The game seems to halt entirely as young pitchers get wild and look panicked, their managers trudging onto the field to calm them down. And so we sit and melt while they pace around the mound.

  “You tired?” Joyce asks me.

  “No.” I try to sit up. “No. It’s just, I want to get home.”

  “Oh, I never want it to end,” she says. “It’s the lasting that makes the game.”

  I stifle a yawn. I feel bad when I yawn around her.

  “Did I ever tell you about the rain delay in Burlington?” she asks, after a pause.

  Yes.

  “No.”

  “Nine hours. I was the only one stayed.”

  She tells me about it until the game ends and the LumberKings win. Then we walk as if there’s no other place we could be going, down to the exit by the visitors’ clubhouse, waiting for them. Joyce readies everything that can be signed and can be written with—blue pen, red pen, notebook, hat, three baseballs, and a Nick Franklin card. He comes out last, as always, because he’s the best and he’s nineteen, so he likes to test the limits of what the best can get away with. I stand a few paces back and watch their bodies close as Joyce rushes over to him.