Class A

by Lucas Mann

  I remember in pregame warm-ups when one boy called another boy a faggot and then a third boy with big, wet eyes, not me, said, “Don’t do that. That’s an awful thing to call someone.” I remember the boy with the big, wet eyes running laps while our coach yelled, “Shut the fuck up and don’t ever act like you’re better than your teammates again.” Despite the baseball played there, camp was something not comforting, something truly frightening, a place that was meant to hurt me. And it was the first time I had ever played badly, leaping away from inside pitches, apologizing to teammates for mistakes, and then apologizing when told not to apologize. At night, I read Harry Potter with a flashlight under my comforter, didn’t fall asleep, but still dreamed of the ability to become invisible, the ability to bring those unjustly lost back to life. Before my coaches told me as much, it was then under the covers that I began to allow for the realization that there was something hysterical and needy in me that could never be an athlete in the way I’d been taught to believe I could. That easy tears did somehow correlate with an inability to win.

  Danny is not that boy, of course, not thirteen and in a pubescent, mourning free fall, not taking asthma breaks during wind sprints or making secret calls home to be told he is good. But in a locker room rigid with the absence of outward doubt or fear or melancholy, he is the closest thing. He is that someone who cannot help but express that he wants more, a cardinal sin in both Dickensian orphanages and minor-league baseball clubhouses.

  He begins to describe feeling small. Or not so much small, but less. He tries to piece together why he isn’t an all-star, and I’m glad that I can be a yes-man for him right now, my presence like his wife’s or parents’, or Betty’s or Joyce’s, those dedicated to the idea of him and without the need to be impartial. Yes, .280 is pretty darn good. Yes, nobody is faster than he is. Yes, I watch him every day. I see him run like nobody else. Other people should see it, too.

  Erasmo is an all-star. He is the only starting pitcher from Clinton to get the distinction. In the clubhouse, the other starters, all friends, are playing cards and unloading a torrent of mutual complaint. Erasmo is not a part of that conversation, nor is he celebrating with his Venezuelan friends, because they, too, have not been recognized. Erasmo is alone, his laptop warming bare knees. He is looking at the same pictures of himself that he always looks at, this time under fresh headlines that call him “all-star.” His Facebook page is up, covered now in Spanglish messages from Nicaraguan journalists who want the first quote about his achievement.

  Erasmo gets no bonus for his all-star inclusion, nor does it guarantee anything other than a lack of a rest. Still, he is elated. He is an allstar in America. The game is to be played six hours away, and the team hasn’t paid for bus or plane tickets. Nick Franklin will drive the two other American-born all-stars, bass thumping out of his car, slick lines cooed at teenage girls at rest stops, briefly free from any responsibility. Erasmo will get a ride from Ted, the general manager he’s never spoken to, sitting in the backseat with Ted’s tween son, flicking his eyes back and forth to their conversation. But none of that, the kid, the smell of strangers’ farts in a closed vehicle, the endless miles of drive-thrus and corn, will rob him of the feeling of expansive, crescendoing satisfaction.

  Erasmo is a pleasant surprise. Low overhead, easy upkeep, the unsqueakiest of wheels.

  Tamargo told me just the other day, pointing at his best pitcher running sprints alone, “You’ll see him in the bigs someday.” If so, he will be the greatest kind of investment, a career maker for whatever low-level scout first saw him. Fifty grand up front, with no negotiation, no other options. Two years in Venezuela, cheap room and board with a small salary, moving up to the United States ahead of schedule. And he’ll keep moving up, never dominant enough at any level to get a big head about it. Special attention, personal trainers, psychological counseling, these extra resources will not be necessary for a boy who never feels comfortable speaking beyond his responsibilities, describing himself as anything other than one of many. Give up less, get out more. That’s the ideal.

  Archer Daniels Midland picked up a town that needed lifting. The company turned it into a town less dying than it had been, and so the town is tied to it, pulled tighter with each construction project and tax break. It is not a unique relationship between power and weakness, I know, just easily visualized here, the way that lives can so casually be lived in the shadow of an institution or an idea or both.

  The strikers and Clinton Corn sapped the life out of the town, out of thousands of lives ultimately. Even before the massive corporate structure of ADM found root in Clinton, the strike organizers noted how Clinton Corn was a part of Standard Brands, a conglomerate controlled by J. P. Morgan in New York, and how the powers that be within the company had become “increasingly remote.” The strikers encouraged all Clinton residents, all their people, to boycott what their town helped make, a list of fifty-three products—Planters peanuts, Baby Ruth candy bars, Royal cheesecake, Acadian Canadian whiskey, Dr. Ballard’s pet food, Jujubes, Blue Bonnet margarine. And on and on, seeming like everything you could ever think to ingest.

  The products were still made, of course, only this time by non-union workers willing to walk through pickets to a job because, in a poor area, even lowered, non-guaranteed factory salaries are better than you can find anywhere else. Those striking workers who refused to give in were driven away, or they collapsed and went back after too many unemployed months. And within a year of the strike’s end, Standard Brands had merged with Nabisco. And by 1982, the factory was losing money and had given up on Clinton, and sold the plant that it had fought so hard to control to ADM. ADM drastically cut the numbers of workers, poured money into new buildings, newer machines. ADM grew.

  Clinton, unlike most towns of its size, isn’t anything close to a square or even a fat, lopsided circle. Clinton is close to ten miles long and never more than a few miles wide, a sliver of brick and smoke packed tight in between the river and a state’s worth of farm. Its survival and identity are defined by what can be done with the commodities on this little strip. Look at a map of Clinton, zoom in, zoom in more, and see how the block of buildings connected with tunnels and tracks that make up the ADM factory has swollen into a tangible presence among the rest of the sprawl, a proportion that makes me think of the scale of a figure drawing, head on body.

  The head is eating the body. Over two hundred homes have been lost in south Clinton. Eminent domain was never actually used to take people’s houses, but the residents had no reason not to know they were being forced out. The company and the city government did successfully petition an Iowa court to approve the legality of eminent domain in this instance. The threat was there, and that was all that mattered. I spoke to south Clinton residents who said that the men in suits who walked door-to-door like Jehovah’s Witnesses, except frowning, shook hands, promised a small sum, told homeowners they should embrace a gesture toward choice over a total lack of it.

  So it became an issue of what their homes, some that had been their parents’ homes and their parents’ before that, were worth and who would make that determination.

  Forty thousand dollars. That’s what I’m told many of the first houses were appraised at. The deals were quick and quiet, so it’s hard to know for sure.

  There was a second round of buyouts, the offers increasing a little, more incentive added when the city sold south Clinton’s school, its playground, its church. What’s a home with nothing around it?

  You hear stories of people getting better deals. Non–south Clinton residents grumble about the odd shrewd negotiator squeezing a brand-new home across the river out of the company.

  Plenty of people were never approached with an offer. Now, just a narrow street or two removed from the barbed-wire fence and the “Private Property” sign, the smell and the light and the heat, their houses are worth practically nothing. No more offers are made. If a homeowner breaks down, approaches the company and asks to be bought out,
sure they’ll help him. It is, to use baseball jargon, the ol’ squeeze play. Joyce’s friends the Brodericks, Ed and Mike, they are still making noise. Consequently, they haven’t been offered anything for their homes along Twelfth Avenue South, half a block away from the house they grew up in, now half a block away from the polymer plastics section of the factory. They do not expect an offer any time soon. Because the factory will make their homes unlivable and nobody else will buy them. Because you don’t live in a place like that unless you’re holding on to a memory of what it used to be or what you want it to have been. And someday, Ed concedes, the unchanging living conditions, the losing battles, it will all be too much. They’ll be squeezed into submission, and that’s when ADM will be kind enough to buy their houses at market value, which will be insanely low, but inarguably just. Ed is sure he will be remembered as the guy who held out to the end looking for a sweetheart deal.

  It’s about controlling the narrative.

  In 2006, Clinton made national news, with environmentalists’ articles pointing to it as an example of something wrong. The coal-powered ADM plant produced twenty thousand tons of airborne toxins in a year, while the EPA’s standard for a plant being a “major source of pollution” was a hundred tons of any one toxin. A group called Environmental Defense ranked the Clinton plant the twenty-eighth largest emitter of carcinogenic components in the country. Now I read local articles proudly pointing out that pollution has been drastically reduced, something that should be celebrated, even though drastically reduced from drastically dangerous still isn’t ideal. In the local paper last year, when the Department of Natural Resources registered Clinton as consistently flirting with the boundaries of legal particulate levels in the air, citizens were assured that local industry was constantly working to reduce emissions, that it kept its own air-quality monitors, held itself accountable so that others didn’t have to. An ADM spokesperson assured residents that the company did in-house testing and that all of its emissions levels were compliant, though no numbers were given. The focus was then shifted to the personal responsibility of each citizen: How can you, the specific you, the individual living in town, do your part for your neighbor’s lungs?

  These are articles that I read alone at night after the drive home, nine Google tabs glowing onto my face, oddly frustrated, still searching. I’m not sure why I keep driving through south Clinton, looking up at all the gray steel and smoke. Perhaps because driving by the factory after games feels surprisingly appropriate and because this issue, ever present to me, seems so easy to forget for anyone other than the people living in it. And the Baseball Family. They don’t forget either. They speak of the things demolished, flattened, eaten, in the same gentle voice with which they frame baseball games from seasons before I was born, stories of fans now gone.

  When Joyce drives into south Clinton to visit her friends near where she grew up, she is followed by white cars with ADM’s logo on them, the green-and-white leaf floating against a blue diamond, bucolic to the point of profane. They do not say anything to her, but the questions are there in the steady distance between her bumper and theirs: What is your business here? What motivation could somebody have to visit other than to gawk or ring some alarm?

  Nobody has followed me, but I usually drive through at night, after the games, sometimes after dropping Hank or Erasmo off at home, sliding again through the empty downtown, slowing for the potholes under the railroad bridge, reemerging in a place that feels as if it doesn’t exist. I got out of the car once and entered one of the vacant houses through a hole in the plywood on the porch door. I don’t know what I expected to see besides the nothing I saw. Of course it was nothing. No sign of the family who lived there or the things they had accumulated. Nothing was left behind, that’s the point.

  I thought of Betty and Tim and Tammy and Joyce describing the value of things. Tim wants to build a museum in the corner of the stadium, fill it with all that he’s saved. That is what we talk about in the stands when the game isn’t interesting. Tim describes how important it is to have something to commemorate this place and what has happened in its confines, before it all goes away. Because everything does go away at some point. Tim always makes sure to acknowledge that.

  The signs on the south Clinton houses are all the same, cut maybe from the same board. The wood is painted white with red-stenciled lettering that makes me think of grade school: ADM Poly Is Not a Good Neighbor. In what seems to be an affirmation of their point, the signs are losing their whiteness, covered in soot and coal dust, some of them fuzzy and tinted green from an unexplained chemical effect that I see on the sides of houses, too, like a collection of worn pennies.

  I don’t know if anybody who isn’t looking sees them, though. The houses and signs are blocked from view. They face the train tracks and the factory, the trains with no passengers to look out, the factory with no windows, no open gates, nothing to suggest that anyone can see.

  Danny looks away from the field, tired of it. He looks past the waterfront, the lighthouse, and the riverboat and focuses on the shoreline of Beaver Island. You used to be able to ferry to it from the dock in south Clinton. The ferry is long gone. ADM rents the dock from the city but is trying to buy it outright for five million dollars that the cash-strapped city could use now, in the process losing the long-term income generated from ADM’s lease.

  “That’s nice over there,” Danny says.

  “What is?”

  “All the green.”

  He’s quiet, then continues. “I grew up in a pretty brown place. The green is beautiful.”

  He’s right. There is something heartening to the lushness, the depths of the hues, a rounded, sensuous color unlike anything you see traveling west into Iowa.

  Beaver Island is a ghost town. Skeletons of houses are still there in neat rows, the outlines of properties that were once farmed. Some of the LumberKings fans, not many anymore, but some, were born there.

  “People used to live there,” I say.

  “Nuh-uh,” Danny says.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Farmers and stuff, I think.”

  I know all this because Tim keeps promising to take me to Beaver Island. He describes it for me, how he camps there with a friend who has a boat. He waits until the LumberKings are on the road and packs fishing gear. They anchor in a protected inlet, jump ashore. They catch walleye, trout, other kinds I’ve never heard of. I think of them in ancient black and white—I think of Huck Finn’s Mississippi—the only image I had before I came here. Sometimes they sneak the fish into games in a little red cooler, hand out newly cut steaks to us in the stands the way Betty gives Danny his candy.

  “I want to live on an island,” Danny says. “Wouldn’t that be cool? Like nothing on the island but you?”

  “I think I’d be scared,” I say. “All that quiet.”

  He considers this. He leans back against the picnic table, runs his hands over his abs. I watch him do so, the familiar desire present to touch them or even slap my palm down and feel it bounce off his skin. Sometimes I am guilty of a middle school type of envy—does he really appreciate the way he was made? The natural perfection that I would call athletic genes, that he would call God’s hand? He doesn’t work out that much, he is always eating, but his body is an efficient furnace. He has to worry if it’s not enough for the majors. I sulk because it’s still more than I got.

  To see him and not hear him, Danny is everything that I ever imagined myself developing into on the most optimistic days of my childhood. He is a lot of people’s boyhood fantasy of adulthood, a lot of people’s adult fantasies of adulthood, too. He plays baseball with a grin, sliding headfirst, popping up, and running again, as though devoid of bones, packed full of only muscle. Chelsea meets him after the games in her cutoffs or a sundress, with bare legs that should make me ache but don’t. She is beautifully desexualized in a way that I’ve read about in all the old baseball books written by men—the exact model of the kind of woman who makes a ballplayer settle down, th
e opposite of the kind who makes him stray.

  “I think I could be a farmer,” he says. “It’s one of those jobs where you still get to use your body. That might be fun.”

  He laughs because it’s ridiculous, but maybe not.

  “I bet it’s hard,” I say. “I’ve never done it.”

  “Me neither.”

  This is almost a friendship conversation. Or it’s the kind of conversation I have with my actual friends who are all far away from here and have never done anything with the pressure or persistence with which Danny will swing a bat tonight. It is a conversation of indecision, the maudlin self-pity of young men who feel they deserve more. It is a conversation of the purely naive, staring out at fields that look the way fields have always looked and ignoring that it takes two thousand acres to turn a profit now, all corn or soy never meant to be eaten, that young guys like us don’t just walk up to a patch and plant a livelihood, that half of Danny’s biggest fans can talk about their families’ farms that are no longer. But never mind the truth, we are having this conversation of indecision that mirrors most of my internal conversation. Danny is not an all-star, he’s not being treated as anything great, so he could be anything at all or nothing at all, like everyone else, like me.

  It’s a thought that he is not supposed to have. The moment you can be anything else at all, you are not aimed toward being great at one thing. It’s why nobody in the game will ever tell any player it’s time to stop until his official release. Because the moment the conversation starts, chances are a career is over. That is simplistic, sure. As though there were something divine and implacable that makes an athlete, hard to have, easy to lose. But to play the game or to love those who do, it’s the half-lie that must be believed.