Class A

by Lucas Mann

  I never manage to ask the players about reading those words mid-chase. I am always afraid that they will think I am taunting them when I ask them things that are never asked. And I am always feeling guilty that maybe I am, in fact, taunting, or at least condescending, trying to point out their futilities that they don’t want to see, because so many of them carry themselves with swollen superiority that can only come from a young jock and that is a tempting thing to want to deflate.

  The LumberKings are winning 6-0, an occasion that should be happy. I see Hank trying to make it so, yelling one-syllable encouragement to his teammates after Wild Thang has given his last wave and driven off the field, his sheep standing proudly atop the truck, his American flags fluttering. But Wild Thang’s exit should have been the end of this game. It cannot be topped. Neither team manages a hit over the next two and a half innings, and the crowd sags. Even the Baseball Family, though staying dutifully until the end, is showing that sense of duty on their faces. Hank stays on the top step of the dugout. He grabs Blake Ochoa, the man starting over him at catcher, by the shoulders after he pops out in the eighth, says something supportive in Spanish. The same with Matt Cerione after he strikes out. And then finally to Danny, playing left field, the LumberKings’ last hitter who swings at a fastball near his eyes and grimaces the moment he hears it pop into the mitt behind him.

  At the end of the game, Danny, Hank, and Sams trudge off the field in a row, none of them looking as if they’ve won, none of them embodying Brad’s ecstatic tone from the PA booth—“How about those LumberKings?!” They pass us in the stands. Betty asks them to stop for just a moment; she wants to take a picture for that little girl who looks even younger than she is, who has a crush on Danny. They pose, smiling big, Danny in the middle, Sams and Hank flanking him. They rest arms on each other’s shoulders. They look just right. They are always posing.

  · · ·

  Hank and I are in my car days later. It is midnight and it is pouring rain. He found me in the locker room and said, “Can we go somewhere to get drunk?” I was not sympathetic but thrilled, tapped for something important. He played this night and went 1-5. The game was delayed because of rain, an hour in the clubhouse, then a respite from the wetness, more playing, continuing this time even as the rain returned, grew harder.

  I am a bad driver, a worse rain driver, and an even worse rainy night driver. I clutch the wheel as we slosh past the factory, bright. Driving up to the mass, before the buildings become impenetrable, I think I can make out south Clinton through the barbed-wire fencing. I think I can make out the signs on the houses of those who refused to leave or were never offered a buyout—ADM Poly Is Not a Good Neighbor, lit ironically by the fluorescent glare of what they are protesting. I feel us starting to drift. A train is sliding by, louder than my radio. It would crush us so fast.

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to drive?” Hank asks. “It feels like I’m about to die in fucking Clinton.”

  “I apologized ahead of time,” I say. We laugh.

  We are going to Applebee’s because a radio commercial announced that Applebee’s is open until 2:00 a.m. on weekends now—even more fun in the neighborhood. But this neighborhood is dark, and it closes early because nobody lives here. Hank is unconvinced, sprints out into the rain to bang on the door. Nothing. We go to the Rodeo, a chain bar like Hooters but with a mechanical bull to go along with wings and flat beer. Closed. As is Legends Sports Bar. Hank makes an unintentional noise, a low, breathy groan. He says, “How can it be so fucking hard to get a drink when I want a drink?”

  We drive on to the Wild Rose Casino because it is always open, the only center of early-morning activity and light beyond the factory. I ask him his mother’s name and his father’s, his brother’s, his sister’s. I forget them all as he says them. They all live together still. I will see their place in six months, drive out on a sunny Southern California highway far from here to eat his mother’s empanadas and look at his sister’s quinceanera pictures and hold his high school trophies that they still keep in the living room.

  The parking lot at the Wild Rose is packed. I recognize some of the cars from the stadium lot. We walk in and squint into the lights that come from everywhere, a row on the floor even, leading from room to room, like airplane emergency lights except not pointing to any exit. We walk to the Coaches Corner Sports Bar, and it is closed. Hank gives his best smile to the off-duty hostess and says, “Miss, I’m a ballplayer. We just won and now I’m hungry.” She says congrats, but closed is closed. We drift down the hallway, past pictures of pastures and baseball mitts and sawmills and money and the grinning faces of part-time models. It’s only hard-core gamblers left.

  We stand in the middle of everything. People shuffle past to the bathroom before going back to their games. There are so many stories being hollered in robot voices out of so many differently themed slot machines: Win the riches of King Tut’s Tomb! Yarrgh, a pirate’s booty for ye! So many things to make pressing buttons and hearing winless whirs not what it really is.

  We leave the Wild Rose and run back to the car, puddles drenching our socks. Hank brings up how pathetic those people were, desperate like that, just wasting away their time and money on a Saturday night. I join his harsh laugh at the button pressers waiting for something that won’t come. It is important to have somebody to look down on. He asks if I want to give up on this night or maybe drive to another town. He says it’s okay for us to give up on it. I say, “Really?” He says that he understands. We drive to a gas station and buy a six-pack of tall-boy bottles of Coors Light. He begins to chug in my car and says, “This is cool, right?” He knows I am still somebody who would never say no to him, and that is a nice addition to his life right now.

  We get to the parking lot outside his place. He doesn’t want to go in for a while, so we sit and drink in the car. He is drinking fast, so I am, with stupid, college muscle memory, trying to drink fast, too. His phone rings, and it’s his mother in California. He speaks in one-word Spanish answers, hangs up quickly, like a teenager.

  “Does she like you being out here playing still?” I ask.

  “Oh yeah,” he says. “She’s cool with it.”

  “Nice mom,” I say.

  “She knows that I’m living my dream, right?” he says.

  He nods to himself.

  I say yes and want to say more. I want loving voices to answer for me when I call, affirm that I am okay and that whatever it is I’m doing here is worthwhile.

  He is booze-cheered and ready to sleep. He finishes his third beer and thanks me, says, “See you tomorrow, probably.”

  “Yeah, probably.”

  “You, uh, gonna be okay?” he asks.

  I don’t know what to do. I am the observed, the pitied, drenched and quiet, surrounded by candy bar wrappers and Cheez-It crumbs, the debris of all my time alone. And if he is doomed to me, albeit nobly so, what am I to him? Just a guy watching him, tailing him, asking, Is it worth it? Is it worth it?—the same questions since the beginning—and then driving home alone, returning alone to watch more. I cannot say out loud what I think, that I like the story of himself that he tells, that I’m attracted to it on an almost prenatal level, jealous and protective at the same time. I like stories, Hank. And I need to believe that there is a point to you.

  He tells me to drive safe, shakes my hand, and looks me in the eye. He trots to his apartment, and I watch his shadow in the parking lot light, stretched enormous until it disappears.

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

  Voices

  I’VE BEGUN TO LEAVE BORING GAMES EARLY. I feel bad about it. I apologize to Betty and Tim and Joyce. I am forgiven, though Joyce is often perplexed that in a never-ending sixth inning of a stagnant game, I cannot find anything to be interested in. I have begun to think of it as a character flaw, but I can’t explain the guilt I feel to friends or to my girlfriend, all the people I never invite here.

  What’s happening?

  Nothing, really.
r />   Well, why stay?

  Now I’m on Highway 30, which will then turn into 61, which I will exit off onto I-80. The drive has become subconscious—when to turn just a little, how to hold my eyelids open for all the moments when I don’t have to turn and the only things to sustain my gaze are grayer-than-usual clouds or a swaying FedEx truck on a particularly windy day.

  The last vestiges of the town are behind me, so everything is black.

  Dave’s voice is on the radio, but he’s already starting to fade into crackling that sounds like when you hold a conch shell to your ear and pretend it’s the ocean. The first time I met Dave, that day with the tour and the snow and the Mountain Dew, I asked him for a sample of his Radio Voice, capitalized, the official one. He gave a polite smile, unnatural and short-lived. He said, “No Radio Voice. That’s a common misconception.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “There’s a lot of misconceptions about broadcasting,” he continued. He shook his head at hypothetical misconceivers. “I just go out there and speak, and it’s the naturalness that people respond to.”

  This, I have surmised, is a lie. Dave’s Radio Voice is part infomercial, part film noir private eye. It is nasal yet strong, something that has to be intentionally dated, meant to come from a man in a fedora, chewing on an unlit cigar. Dave sounds tired tonight, but he doesn’t waver. It is something like the hundredth game of the season—who knows exactly?—one that, even fresh in my mind, not actually over yet, I cannot distinguish from any other game. Dave’s is the stamina of the voice and the mind, not the body, the need to keep consistent as each day stretches into the next. Other than proclamations about Nick Franklin and Erasmo Ramírez, Dave hasn’t had much to raise his voice for.

  Tonight’s game is tied, he reminds any listener. It’s been a long one, lots of walks and lots of errors, lots of runs that feel accidental, that leave everyone but Joyce unsure of who scored when. This is where the art of the baseball broadcaster comes in, and I imagine Dave’s neck straining, nervous but prepared as he tries to fill up the air with practiced, natural chatter.

  Gabriel Noriega takes the plate with men on base in the eighth.

  “Well, here’s a kid who’s been struggling,” Dave announces. He sighs into the microphone, a heavy, almost pornographic noise that can’t have been intentional. “He’s nineteen, folks. When you’re nineteen and there’s pressure on you, it’s hard to adjust to professional pitching. This is a tough spot to see him in at the plate, though. But, you know, this is the kind of moment that could change the season around for a guy.”

  Untrue. And there is not much conviction to the words. Dave takes another long breath, and without his talking I hear the panicked squeak that my car makes somewhere in its bowels every time I hit the smallest bump. Kevin’s voice breaks through the coverage, warbling and ecstatic.

  “Let’s go LumberKings!”

  “Well, Kevin Cheney is still here, folks,” Dave announces.

  Kevin Cheney, not to be confused with the chicken-dancing Kevin, is the sometimes tolerated, sometimes beloved mentally challenged man who is allowed into every home game and given one free cheeseburger with extra pickles each night. He is kind and proud and will announce at various intervals that he is the number one fan, which nobody will disagree with. It is perhaps condescending but also wonderfully contained, the satisfaction he is allowed to feel here, a localized sense of purpose rivaled only by Dancing Bobby in his scoutmaster’s outfit in Burlington. That doesn’t matter right now. Kevin is in Dave’s air, cutting into a soundscape that is Dave’s own. And Joyce, too, I hear her—“Come on, Gabby,” as if she knows the boy. I know that Dave doesn’t like the intrusion.

  I slow down along Highway 30, even though there are never cops. I let his voice hang in my car a little bit longer. It seems right. He gets thirty minutes pregame and fifteen minutes postgame and the game itself. He gets those moments on 1390 KCLN, one of the few stations small enough to serve only Clinton and its surrounding rural sprawl. Before he begins, there is an endless block of brassy, lilting pop songs from the 1950s and 1960s. When he stops, depending on how late it is, I’ve heard an antiques appraisal show or more music or nothing. There’s no way to know how many people are listening.

  “Maybe nobody,” Dave has said to me. He is squat, average to look at. His hair is cut short like most of the players’, but his is beginning to gray, even in his mid-twenties. He wears a wisp of a goatee, just on his chin. His mouth is a flat line. He doesn’t look like his voice.

  We were silent together for a moment, and then, uneasy with his own words, he said, “No, that’s not true. People listen. Thousands of people.”

  Betty listens to Dave every night the team is out of town, and she tells him so. And she tells me things like “Oh, it was a heavy, humid one out in Bowling Green. Dave said they were sweating through their hats.”

  I can’t see Gabriel Noriega miss a breaking ball in the dirt, but I know what Dave sees. I hear Dave describing Noriega’s body lunging. He calls him eager and off balance. He says it with a tone that is caring but disappointed, ultimately unsurprised. Something paternal. And so I picture Noriega wincing as the ball falls under his bat, the way his young head must be pulled, prematurely, toward left field, as though this pitch is going to be the one he really gets into. I picture Dave wincing, too. He takes it hard when the team is losing.

  When Dave’s voice runs out, I ride with Delilah. I found her by accident. So few things catch my broken antenna in between towns, and the night is silent except for disappointing fuzz. So when I heard anything in my early drives, I stopped searching and willed the signal to stay. Delilah entered my world with majesty, her overblown entrance music like a batter’s walking up to the plate. I heard a slow, mounting drumbeat, with one hammered guitar chord over it, a sugary soprano sax riff, and then De-Li-Lah. I was enchanted.

  “Was this one of those days?” she asks me. “You know the kind of day I’m talking about. It’s long and it’s hot and all you want to do is come home and put your feet up and have a glass of lemonade?”

  She knows. She chuckles because she knows that she knows.

  I switch back to 1390 KCLN, just to give Dave another shot. Sometimes I can hit a pocket when I pass DeWitt, the closest thing to a town for a good ten miles, where there are so few wires to interfere that the signal fades back in, just for a moment. Dave is barely audible tonight, though. There is angry static. I’m guessing the game is over. The only words I can make out are “tough” and “tomorrow,” noticeably strained even as they are swallowed. He’s got fifteen minutes of recap ahead of him, which I won’t hear and which he will cram with prepared material, interviews saved from earlier, and a little bit of time allotted for analytical ad-libbing, a display of his personality because in this business you’ve got to have personality.

  I return to the clear signal. Delilah tells me about her children, the young ones, her boys. They had a baseball game today. “Isn’t it always the way?” she says. She wishes that we could have seen them. But she knows we can imagine it—we’ve seen it with our own babies, haven’t we? They grow up and they take their brother’s old mitt and they put on a hat and everything is so perfectly the same.

  She chuckles. She says, “Oh,” and then lets it trail off into contented nothingness. She plays the Dawson’s Creek theme song, the one that promises a lot. She likes that song. It is kind and inoffensive and evocative. I’ve heard it a dozen times by now, at various intervals on the highway, the easy music stroking the blackness. I sing along, loud, until the song ends. She will be with us from seven until midnight.

  I make sure to tell people about these moments over drinks. They are less uncomfortable when not secret. If spoken about, preemptively joked about, they’re no longer overpowering, embarrassing intimacies, the thing that I wait for and must experience alone. I can nod to the fact that I know how ridiculous Delilah is and, thus, the whole scene of me and her and the car and the loneliness is the hilarious constru
ction of a self-aware mind. I don’t acknowledge to anyone that her patronizing soothes me. That it is the exact level of communication I want. That I am relieved when I hear her in the in-between, taking me home.

  Linked to the LumberKings’ Web site is the LumberBlog, an addition initiated and run entirely by Dave, a platform that he thought out thoroughly and that I imagine him presenting to the rest of the front office using phrases like youth culture and mixed-media presence, concepts entirely antithetical to untelevised minor-league baseball played in a Depression-era stadium. “Well, all right,” Ted told him. “David, if you want to do it, just do it.”

  He did and he did it well. It looks sharp. Not just A-ball sharp, either. Slicker and far more up-to-date than any other blog in the Midwest League. He is holding steady at the forty-sixth spot on the list of top fifty baseball blogs in the country that another blogger has unofficially compiled, a commendation that he notes when he thanks us readers and listeners for the support. Tonight, after he signs off the postgame show, rereads his notes, and slips them into his computer bag, after he drives three blocks to his apartment, where he will look out the window at the McDonald’s across the street and then the stadium lights powering down just beyond it, he will blog.

  Sometimes he live blogs the world. When it’s raining and a game is delayed, he tells us, “It’s raining, folks.”

  When it’s windy, “It’s windy,” and maybe he’ll throw in a picture of the flag contorted above the right-field fence.

  Sometimes he lets himself go. He blogs not about baseball, not about Walmart’s super savings or the after-game karaoke services of DJ Dawg or the limited-edition pink home jerseys auctioned off for breast cancer awareness. Sometimes he gives us something of himself, outright. Take, “Behind the Scenes: Tools of the Trade.” It’s for all those out there who hear him and want to be heard the way he’s heard.