Class A

by Lucas Mann

  From the grocery store to the Big Show.

  He knows his father is seeing him succeed, even though his father is blind after that meth lab fire.

  Returning to that village, no longer a starving fisherman’s son, he gives out brand-new gloves and tells toothless children, “You could be the next me.”

  I don’t remember which player was in which story, which sport even, which Bob Costas rain delay special informed me. I do remember crying at most of them.

  He, He, He, He. Came from nothing. Suffered. Won.

  “Don’t talk to him about it,” Erasmo tells me, the first time I’ve ever heard him be didactic. “It is no point to talk about.”

  When I sneak back toward the dugout, sneakers noiseless in the concrete tunnel, Hank and Pollreisz are still standing together, still touching. They’re on the grass by third, looking out. They are, both of them, pantomiming. Swings, throws. Hank catches an invisible ball, transfers it to his throwing hand, pretends to nab a base-stealer in slow, absentminded progression. Teens rake the dirt, ignoring them. AC/DC is playing over the speakers, Brian Johnson proudly proclaiming, “I’ve got big balls,” and the teenagers are laughing at that, making pantomimes of their own, pretending to lug testicles the shape and weight of a pair of cantaloupes. Above the left-field fence, an intern starts the hot tub, where drunk, young, possibly attractive people will watch the game tonight. It sounds like an outboard motor, and Hank and Pollreisz jerk their heads up to look. Hank isn’t talking. He is standing straight, unmoving, seems to be concentrating all his energy on that. Eventually, Pollreisz says, “All right, pal?” because it’s time to get ready for the game and this moment has to end.

  Pollreisz walks past me, gives a suspicious glance, but still calls me “partner” anyway. Hank trails, dragging his spikes through the dirt. We leave the dirt, enter the tunnel.

  Clackety-clack. Clack-clack. Then we stop.

  “You’ll be back,” I say, hearing how false it sounds.

  “Nah,” he says. And then, objectively, “Well, maybe, but probably not.”

  When Hank walks in the locker room, everyone looks at him. He sits against the wall nearest the door, at his locker between Bantz and Danny. Jones is standing there, too, discussing testimony. A member of the Cedar Rapids grounds crew walked up to him after batting practice and asked for permission to testify.

  “He said he saw a YouTube video of me from spring training talking about Jesus,” Jones tells everyone. “He was, like, waiting to talk to me.”

  “Were you creeped out?” I ask.

  He and Bantz don’t glare; they just pity me.

  “No,” he says. “It’s not creepy to hear faith.”

  They tell me the groundskeeper confessed to being a bad man, drunk and misguided, a waste of God’s love. And then he saw something, that light, and he was saved, and he’d been working the dirt hard at baseball games ever since. He was going to be a grandfather soon. He wanted to tell it all, and Jones was the kind who had the chance to spread his story among the still faithless.

  “Amen,” the players say now.

  Hank is putting on his shin guards, not looking up. Hank gestures that he needs to clean his cleats and is handed the spray. He works them over until the black leather is almost soaked, blacker than before. He wipes all six inch-long spikes carefully, flicks excess dirt off his fingernails and onto the floor. He knocks them against the cement wall. Clack.

  Jones spreads his long fingers over the middle of Hank’s back, kneads him a little.

  Bantz is next, flanks him, grabs his hair, shoves the back of his head.

  “Don’t be sulking,” he says, and they all laugh.

  It’s an after-school special. It’s the black kid from Brooklyn, the former captain of the Dallas Baptist Patriots, and Hank, second-generation Mexican, living out his father’s most impossible aspirations while his father toils in the vanity orange trees in wealthy people’s Pasadena backyards, paid cash for hard labor. The connecting thread is this work ethic, something inarguably good and American. Hank doesn’t want any of it now. He cuts his laugh short and shrugs his shoulders, flinging off the condescending hands.

  “I’m done,” he says.

  “Done what?” Incredulous and smiling, even though they know exactly.

  “I’m out. I’m going home.”

  “No,” they tell him.

  “This is just one little thing,” Danny says.

  “It’s weak to lose faith over something like this.” That’s Jones.

  Bantz completes it: “Stay believing,” less Journey, more New Testament.

  “I’m twenty-four fucking years old,” Hank hisses, louder than he wanted to say it. His teammates pull back in unison.

  Danny manages a “So?”

  “I’m fucking twenty-four and I’m supposed to start over?”

  I think this the only context in the world where that statement doesn’t sound like a joke.

  “Don’t do that,” Jones says.

  “Why?” Hank’s voice cracks, and the room is stilled. Some teammates look over; some look away.

  He stops himself. He lets the hands return to his back, bows his head, and absorbs the kind dishonesty.

  “You’re all good, old man,” Jones says, and all four of them laugh into one another, Hank’s eyes still on the ground. He suits up because he will play tonight, even though any ember of consequence has been taken from his performance. He could play to a level that he’s never achieved, and still there is no way that he will play here tomorrow.

  Hank announces, in an attempt at bravado, that he will get two hits tonight. This is met with unanimous approval, quiet but heartfelt, the way stern grandfathers shake hands in the important moments of life. It feels like a eulogy. Something mythic. Dave, old Dave, from The Kid from Tomkinsville. Or De Niro in Bang the Drum Slowly, ending in sad triumph as Michael Moriarty intones, “From here on out, I’m never gonna rag anybody.” Or Kevin Costner in Bull Durham, finally done with playing, content to settle in a good town with a good woman, that expected, treacly conclusion. But that character set a record and got the girl and then he walked off, disappointment softened by glory. And that character could famously debate the merits of Sontag and tell long, looping stories about his wild life because that was the point, he was a baseball player but also something more. I have always loved the idea of losing when beauty is gained from the loss, when there is deep, orchestral consequence to what is ending.

  Hank must believe in those things, too, or else he wouldn’t have shined his cleats up. But real failure is muted and swift, especially in the minor leagues, especially at this level. There are no options to it, no metaphor attached. No wisdom to be gained.

  This doesn’t mean anything, Hank. I want to tell him that. This is something staged, constructed to be redemptive, so that there is a kind feeling with you in the middle seat on the 5:00 a.m. flight to Pulaski, Virginia.

  I watch him play from the stands, sitting up for his at bats as always.

  I lean over to Joyce, who is, of course, present, and say, “Hank is gonna be sent down.”

  She looks out at him. “Mmm, yeah. Seems like it should be about time. I don’t have him yet. Remind me to get him before he leaves.”

  We will wait for him after the game, I know, and Joyce will grab his arm before he gets on the bus, ask for his signature on a ball, tell him he’s been wonderful, tell him good luck. He will give a sardonic smile for the benefit of his teammates, but this might be the most appreciated request that Joyce will make all year, a memento for her wall, third row, fifth column under the big window by her kitchen table, the section reserved for those who still technically have a chance.

  Hank and I are the same age. I have never thought of myself as old. In fact, my happiest thoughts, the ones that I force in at least once a day, revolve around youth, around the notion that whatever is happening now, I am incomplete. When I talk with the few younger fans, we talk about everything with open ends, no borders,
a summer watching and then who knows? That is the appeal, or part of it. It dulls for three hours, sometimes four when the pitchers are wild, any feelings about anything outside the boundaries of one game, a drunkenness that extends beyond the cheap beer—a game as of yet untold, a life, then, that is in no hurry. It is a gift that the players give us, a sense of urgency that is theirs alone to shoulder.

  In the first at bat of what may be his last game as an A-ball player, Hank swings at the first pitch. He slashes it, a line drive over third, slides safely into second, the LumberKings’ first hit of the game. He is applauded harder than usual by his teammates. He scores on a single up the middle, sliding once again, dirt-adorned as he trots back to the dugout, having tied the game at one. In his third at bat of the day, he muscles a grounder over the bag, a probable out with a better third baseman, but no matter. He got his two hits. He’s a man of his word. Freeze. It should be over. This is the moment he wanted.

  He comes up in the ninth. Jones is on first, there are no outs, the LumberKings are losing 5–3. He gets ahead in the count. He gets a lucky, meaty mistake of a pitch. It is waiting for him, and he swings too hard. He grounds out.

  He will propose to his girlfriend, he knows that much, when he is done playing. He will finish college in South Central L.A., the same Cal State satellite school where he started. Maybe he’ll get it done in a year or two, working with his dad full-time trimming hedges. Eventually, he will be a cop. He likes uniforms and order, so he will be a cop. He will save. He will buy a house near his parents. There are worse things. Welington Dotel has nothing else, beyond unaffiliated independent ball and perhaps a winter stint in the Mexican League, no country that is fully his anymore, no written English, no high school diploma, never worked a job other than the one he just lost. But to be here, to be good enough to not quite hang on in an A-ball squad for one of the worst major-league organizations in baseball, you need to have embraced rigid, single-minded optimism. The kind that makes any other option so hollow and pointless that it hurts.

  Hank is wearing his blue-and-white-checked collared shirt coming out of the locker room. He is wearing black jeans, black sneakers. His hair is gelled, and the wind, hard tonight, does not move it. He drags his bat bag across the parking lot, the heaviest piece of luggage that he will bring to the airport. Joyce moves, stands by his shoulder, as I knew she would, calls him Henry, asks him to leave ink behind, asks him with reverence.

  I am glad that I resist the temptation to tell Hank everything about myself in the twenty paces he takes between the door to the visitors’ locker room and the bus. And it is a strong temptation, because he will be gone and because he seems, even as he doesn’t want to, so bare that he should be met with some unburdening in return. I am drifting, Hank. And I think that I am ill equipped. I find it difficult to think of life as anything other than loss, and I know that sounds big, too big, but it’s true.

  I want to tell Hank that I’ve been thinking about the term nostalgia, the root of it. How I learned that the word originated when a graduate student mixed the Greek word nostos, “return to the native land,” with algos, “suffering, grief.” I want to tell him that it was born to describe mercenaries who traveled Europe for a job until they weren’t sure what they missed, that it was classified as fatal. I want to ask him, Isn’t that crazy, Hank? To die from wanting to return. I want to tell him that 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 purer?

  I like you because you are sturdy, Hank, and there is supposed to be poetry, holiness, other overblown paeans to the way a dependable catcher is always squatting for some other guy’s benefit. And maybe you were told that, too, so you live it. You were never not sacrificial.

  “I’ll see you soon,” I tell him.

  “Write about me,” he says.

  “Use my name,” he says.

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

  The Middle

  IT’S HOT. We say that to each other four or five times. Danny is in his workout clothes—black shorts, black LumberKings T-shirt. He wants to take the shirt off, lean his bare skin against the wooden picnic benches, pretend he’s at the beach, pretend the Mississippi is the Pacific and this is his summer after high school. He’s not allowed to—look like a goddamn professional—so he settles on rolling his shirtsleeves up above his shoulders and pulling the bottom of his shirt above his abs, letting the sun hit some skin at least, running his fingers along the muscle mounds that cover him effortlessly. Muscles are a small comfort in the face of today’s slight. The all-star game rosters have been released—Nick Franklin, Erasmo, two other LumberKings. Not Danny. He isn’t angry, he says. He won’t say that he’s sad, either, because sadness is, well, too sad. It’s just a bit unfair, is all. And, man, it’s hot today.

  There is a game to play: seven o’clock start time, nothing unusual. But the quiet and routine boredom hangs heavier, feels like smoke, thick, black, and chemical, with a smell and a taste. Danny smiles at a ginger teenager in too-short shorts passing by to set up the concession stands.

  “Hey, do you think I could get a Pepsi?”

  She turns in a hurry, looks at Danny and then the ground, says, “Yeah.”

  “Like for free? And you’ll bring it to me?”

  He knows that she’ll do it, they both do. She smiles into her chest, says yeah again, walks off, her body clenched as she forces herself not to move too fast, returning with twenty-four ounces for him, asking, “Is that too much ice?” This is a perk.

  Danny’s wife, Chelsea, is down the street at the public pool. She does that a lot, lies by the pool during the many hours when he’s at the park and she’s not allowed to be. She moved here once it became apparent Danny wasn’t getting called up to High-A anytime soon. Now there is a limit to the different ways she can fill an afternoon. Sometimes she has lunch with a group of girls who lust after Danny’s teammates or with her dowdy host mother and the host mother’s church friends. Then most of the time she comes to the field early, drinks iced tea, sits in her California girl cutoff shorts, and lets her legs stretch across rows of empty plastic seats. When Betty and the others shuffle in and say, “Hi, dear,” she hugs them and agrees, “Gosh, it’s hot.”

  I have spent a lot of time with Chelsea because she is always there waiting and so am I. Other wives and girlfriends, mostly girlfriends, come and go, but she is the constant, committed fully and daily. Committed not just to Danny but to all of this: wifedom, fidelity, baseball, sacrifice, God, positivity, smiling. She seems like a missionary of sorts, a Mormon pamphleteer, far from home and with a job to do. She walks into the stadium both a part of it and above it, an outsider willing to be happy here.

  She is told she is beautiful, every day, God, Chelsea, you look beautiful, because she always does, tanned skin, just enough of it there for us to see, not too much, jangling bracelets, intricate sandals with leather that snakes up her calves and makes everyone else tuck their flip-flops back under their seats. She responds with “Thanks” and “You’re too nice” and “Cheer for Danny tonight.” Everyone does. She makes rounds through the pockets of loyal fans during every game, ending up next to Betty and Tim, all of us, while people pull out photographs of Danny looking clean and ready and powerful, showing his image back to her the way she wants to see it.

  Danny runs through his numbers that Chelsea has already reminded me of—batting in the high .270s, a surprising eight home runs, and, most important, second in the Midwest League in steals, a ranking that would be higher if Danny played every day. He tells me that now, outright, more outright than any player has been with me: If they let me play every day, I’m the best leadoff hitter in this league. He nods once, fast, punctuating the sentiment. He sounds very close to believing it. I agree. He smiles at me, not quite trusting.

  Then he veers off, brings the conversation somewhere nicer, lying flat on the picnic bench, looking straight up at the sky.
He’s telling me that story again, the one about when he was eighteen, which was only three years ago, but he tells it with distance in his voice. He doesn’t address the money outright, but it’s there, more than $300,000 the summer after high school, paying for a sweet car and money for his parents, covering a big chunk of his older brother’s college tuition, which made him feel so awesomely benevolent. And then he went to short-season rookie ball in Arizona, tore the place up as if everybody else were moving in slow motion, stuck in the mud. He proposed to Chelsea and they married, and they went to Hawaii for six weeks. He played invite-only fall tournaments during the mornings, and then they lay on the beach and talked about how there was nowhere else they had to be, so comfortably alone, tossing each other into oncoming waves, collapsing gleefully into the sand.

  I heard this story yesterday from Chelsea, sitting at this same bench, waiting for Danny to get dressed after the game. Same details, the beach, the warmth, Danny’s on-field success, as if nobody was capable of stopping him from becoming who he wanted to be. Same tone, same panic underneath the perfect memories. Same quiet, unsure anger, both feeling let down, cheated for the first time.

  Danny sits up, slurps his Pepsi like a little boy, greedy, easily sated for an instant and then not at all. He feels, or reaches to express feeling, which is what I would do, what most people I know would do, and that lack of complete stoicism, his willingness to at least voice hurt, is a relief on this day when the first half’s best have been decided and announced. Sometimes the drone of suppressed emotion can be the most unforgiving aspect of the clubhouse. So many things happening to these players, so much stubborn silence. Sitting next to a young man, raw and bruised, I think of a baseball camp I went to a month after my brother died. I think of the men who coached me there, the water bottles they filled with spit, the cup checks they conducted, strolling through the lines of players in the morning, picking crotches at random, and bringing the handle of the bat up to clip the bottom of the sack, the undefended boy shrieking and then nodding when informed, “Now you will come to the field prepared.”