Class A

by Lucas Mann

  “There,” he will say, though all we’ll be able to see are trees and a towering Burger King sign. “That could have been me in there.”

  It will be me and him and Erin in the car, Erin, exactly my age, getting her first experience with a microphone in her hand this season, working as the field announcer, celebrating the winners of the miniature John Deere tractor race and the rubber-chicken toss. Erin and I will look out the window at Brad’s possibilities and say, “Wow.” I will ask Brad why he didn’t take the gig, and he’ll give a long, proud sigh. He’ll tell me that he is a part of the LumberKings. He has a good job at the county landfill each day and a thousand people listening to him every summer night, telling him so the next day at the grocery store. I won’t be sure if all that is true. Because the current version of Clinton and baseball is not like the one that I’m always told used to exist, that I am so ready to mourn. The field was the center of a town that had a center, a perfect keystone. It made sense, or at least it does now that it’s gone. And Betty remembers her grandfather’s farm, the horses, the way he would listen to the radio broadcast of the baseball games while milking his cows and she’d sit on the hay and watch him listen. But Brad is too young to remember any of that—the old teams, the old town. He never got to live through the times that he wants to remember.

  I will not say any of this to Brad, and he will look past the Burger King sign and smile.

  We are watching SportsCenter now.

  I’m at Manning’s because the players ditched me, promising to make me a part of their night and then showing me that they still have the power to leave me. I stood outside the clubhouse in the rain for an hour and finally ran in, finding only Tyler, paid to do the team’s laundry, rubbing grass stains out of their pants. “Gone,” he said, and I said nothing. I knew Brad and Dave would be here, and they are, drinking whiskey, in no rush to leave. The best players in the world are on the screen in front of us in six-second clips of their best moments from today. We say their names out loud, each one.

  In a clip from St. Louis, Albert Pujols hits a home run.

  Brad says, “Peoria Chief, Albert Pujols. That was in 2000, I think.”

  “Yep, 2000,” says Dave, though he wasn’t here then.

  Brad simulates his decade-old announcement: “Now batting for the Peoria Chiefs, third baseman Albert Pu-jols.”

  Then it’s Joe Mauer on TV hitting a home run—“Mauer,” we say. He was in the Midwest League, too. He played against Clinton. Then it’s Ian Kinsler on the Rangers, who was a LumberKing not long ago. Dave rode the bus with him for the two months that he was kept around.

  “Nice guy,” Dave says.

  “Mmm,” Brad says.

  SportsCenter turns to a joke clip. A man runs onto the field drunk and takes a serpentine route, avoiding security with his arms raised in triumph. Dave tells us about how he used to work for the Brewers’ grounds crew when he was still a college kid, thin and fast, he was really fast. A fan leaped onto the field, and Dave sprinted across the grass in front of, what, forty thousand people? He caught the man in shallow center, speared him, wrapped his arms around the man’s waist, and didn’t let go until he felt them falling together. He stood to a beer-fueled ovation. He asks us if we can imagine the size of a stadium like that when you’re in the middle of it. We say no.

  I tell Dave that I played summer ball in high school with a kid who’s in AAA with the Brewers now. I say the guy’s name and then say a nickname that I was never really friendly enough to call him. I ask Dave if he’s heard of him, and he says no.

  Are we all just trying to repeat the feeling of a moment when we felt most important? Yes. Obviously. But if that’s such an obvious thing, why does it hurt to realize it, sitting here watching SportsCenter at Manning’s Whistle Stop? What we’ve seen, what we’ve said, the way we saw it, the way we said it, hanging out there over the volume of the flashy ESPN anchors who just show us the choice moments and then yell, “Boom goes the dynamite!”

  Dave thinks that I’m pushing it. That I’m talking too fast, saying “remember” too many times. Remember how fat Kirby Puckett was? Remember how crazy Carl Everett was? As if these were the former cast members of family Thanksgivings. He doesn’t want me here, intruding on his bar, his game, his knowledge. He looks around under his LumberKings hat, at Brad and me, at the unused pool table, at the obese basset hound that the bartender has left tied to a stool. He says, “Fuck.”

  I leave by eleven. Delilah is still on. It’s Friday night, girls’ night. All the ladies are invited to get metaphorically cozy by Delilah’s hearth in a well-hidden compound somewhere in Seattle. A crackling fire is evoked, though it is eighty-five degrees here even in the rain, and who knows what they’re feeling in Tucson or Honolulu. But it doesn’t matter, because we are friends who have never met, me and the girls, and I imagine us in a room that may or may not exist, and I imagine Delilah like Aslan from The Chronicles of Narnia, with her golden mane and her Jesus complex.

  I am in between again, in the dark. I am allowing myself to feel some heightened magnitude in the potential of a black horizon with nothing on it. Delilah speaks of nothing like it’s everything, and that’s why it resonates. She doesn’t ask her callers where they’re from or how old they are, so unless that information is offered up, they are nobody and they are all of us. She tells us that she is so happy to be here with us, that we’re all together. She tells me she hopes that I am feeling good, that I am realizing what a special thing it is to be me on this night. I let myself believe her.

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

  The Night

  WHEN NICK FRANKLIN TRIED to hop into my front seat, Hank said no. Nick looked at both of us, seemed to understand, and ducked into the back. Hank is something like my protector, maybe something like a friend. Nick is sandwiched in the middle now between Luis Núñez and Fray Martinez, his other two new roommates, complaining about the odor from whatever product it is that Fray puts in his perm.

  Fray, a relief pitcher, was terrible again tonight and is quiet. He is always quiet but usually listens and tries to smile in the moments when he understands things. Not tonight. Tonight, after he seemed unable to throw two strikes in a row, after even Clinton’s most loyal began to mutter and boo, he is staring down at his bilingual Baseball Chapel pamphlet with drawn, fast-blinking eyes.

  Nick speaks.

  “Hank, Hank, Hank, Hank—”

  “What?”

  “Where are we going tonight?”

  “Oh, you’re coming?”

  “Yeah, man, why do you have to say it like that?”

  Hank is smirking a little. Nick doesn’t like to be smirked at. He recovers quickly.

  “You’re just worried because I’m gonna walk in and all the girls are gonna be like, Oh. Oh.”

  Nick repeats himself a few times, making a circle with his lips, making a wave of his eyebrows, delighting in the approximation of what will come over every young woman’s face tonight when they get a look at him. Fray Martinez inches away from this display, glances up from his cheaply printed prayers, looking for an explanation.

  We stop at Walmart for Coors Light and energy drinks, Stouffer’s TV dinners and Pop-Tarts for tomorrow. Nick stands and waits by the door, texting, maybe his father, maybe telling him no, it’s fine, he’ll be good tonight, really, it’s fine. Fray Martinez is trying to pay for his eighteen-pack of Coors but is left staring, frozen, at the clerk who says, “ID,” louder and louder, as though volume were the problem. Hank puts a calming hand on his teammate’s shoulder and says something. Fray pulls out a Dominican driver’s license, which does not clear anything up. Hank inserts himself between the two blank faces and assumes his usual position of smiling translator.

  “Dominican,” he tells her. “Dominican Republic? The island? And see it says right there: twenty-one.”

  “Oh. Baseball?”

  Fray smiles and nods vigorously at the mention of his profession.

  Hank walks away to have the
stilted girlfriend conversation that develops as the days of no privacy mount: Hey … lost … yeah … nope … not sure … I will … you too. I follow him out into the parking lot, and we lean together on the hood of my hatchback. He smiles as it groans under our weight, and I jump away to protect it.

  “It’s a piece of shit,” I say.

  “It runs,” he says. “It’s stupid to ask for more than that.”

  He doesn’t say it with venom, just flat honesty. We watch the rest of the players file out into the glow of that neon red sign that is the same everywhere.

  “Can I drive it?” Hank asks. “Your car? I’m a way better driver than you.”

  This, too, is not cruel, just true.

  “Of course,” I tell him.

  “That’s what I miss the most,” he says. “I have a Jeep at home. It’s mine. I drive myself everywhere.”

  “Sweet,” I say.

  The other three cram in the back, this time with Franklin telling Núñez to sit in the middle. Núñez mutters, “Coño,” eyes the wunderkind whom he now backs up on the field, realizes that this isn’t a fun or winnable fight, and defers. The beers are stacked in between Fray’s long legs, and he places his Baseball Chapel pamphlet on top to keep reading.

  It’s always about perseverance, always a challenge, always brief, one page English, one page Spanish, so that the stoic redemption is absorbed by all.

  God uses trials to help grow our faith.

  Dios aprovecha estos momentos difíciles en nuestra vida para que nuestra fe desarrolle.

  God uses trials to discipline us when we aren’t living for Him.

  Dios usa las pruebas como instrumentos de disciplina cuando no andamos en Sus caminos.

  The translations are stilted and too long, the product of an organization that’s all-American Baptist, running its message through a Google function and assuming that the gravitas holds up. It reads like how the Latino players sound when they do their mandatory biweekly Rosetta Stone sessions, forced formalities that will never be natural no matter how hard they try to assimilate—May I purchase some milk? Excuse me, where is the nearest library?

  Hank hits a bump on the cracked Clinton roads, and the beer clinks in between Fray’s legs, drawing concerned whips of all the heads in the car. Fray looks contrite.

  The baseball players are primping now. There are pre-torn jeans and fake-rhinestone T-shirts being tossed aside, picked up, and then discarded again. There are hats, not worn and dirt streaked like their LumberKings hats, but hats of major-league teams preserved in almost plastic newness, the brims subtly curved by expert hands.

  I have nothing to change into, so I sit with Fray on the rented living room couch, watching a Kate Hudson romantic comedy while he slicks and buffs his Jheri curl. He finishes eventually, wipes his hands on the couch, and puts all his tools back into an ever-present prized possession, a leather, monogrammed toiletries bag. Fray likes alcohol and he likes women, or, more precisely, the way women look at him, his giant frame contrasted with full, soft lips and eyes that always seem to be pleading for something. Núñez, the other Dominican left on the LumberKings, likes to go out as well, and from the doorway to his bedroom Hank yells to me that you can always count on a Dominican as a wingman. Fray understands this and smiles.

  The most fun of all the players, it is universally agreed, was Welington Dotel, with his willing, hilarious butchering of English slang, with his limber dance moves. American girls loved him here in Clinton, everywhere really. He’s probably back in Oregon with the dimpled blond girl who loved him the most and married him and then got pregnant. He is off being a twenty-four-year-old small-town American father with conversational English, facing an entirely different ocean than the one he was born surrounded by.

  Núñez puts on a pristine black fitted cap that Dotel left behind and cocks it to the left.

  “I am a sexy motherfucker,” he declares. He dances alone, with no music, his socks making muffled scratching noises on the gray wall-to-wall carpet that accompanies cheap rent across Iowa, that I recognize exactly from the apartment I arrived at a year ago.

  “Do you talk to Dotel still?” I ask, hopeful. “Are you gonna call him tonight to say whatsup?”

  “No,” Núñez says. “He’s gone.”

  “You have his number, right?”

  “I dunno. I think so. He’s gone.”

  Núñez shrugs and looks over to Hank, as if maybe something had been lost in translation.

  “We don’t really stay in touch,” Hank says. “If you’re here, you’re here. If you’re not, we don’t have time.”

  Núñez nods. “It’s his bad luck,” he says with a sly smile that fades quickly, absorbed by the unadorned white walls and the bare lightbulb, nothing cheerful in the room around him to support the sentiment. We are all still, all quiet. All thinking that Núñez has been with this organization four years, that he, too, is a Dominican who has done nothing but play for all his adult life and is now playing less and less, watching more and more. He will be living in Brooklyn next year, out of baseball, not a citizen, posting a lot of random videos on Facebook. I might see him on the subway in two Christmases on my way to a party, and we will just nod at each other through a Saturday night crowd. Or maybe I will nod and imagine reciprocation from him. Or maybe that won’t be him at all because a young Dominican dude in street clothes doesn’t stand out on the A train the way he might in a LumberKings uniform. Fray will be gone in a few weeks, yanked home with a visa issue that nobody helped him with. He will return to America for spring training, then another season here, then he’ll get cut, too. And then there’s Hank.

  I want them to all be memorable to one another, but how do you say that out loud?

  “I think I want to get fucked up tonight,” Hank says to break the silence.

  There’s a carton of thirty eggs on the counter that should be in the fridge. It shouldn’t be here at all, in fact. Iowa eggs have been recalled from major chain stores because of a small E. coli breakout, something that has been headline news for weeks around here and, thus, has probably gone unnoticed by every minor-league baseball player in the area. I point to the carton and tell Núñez to get rid of these eggs. He shrugs and asks what else are they going to do for breakfast and why would eggs be sold at Walmart if they’re bad for you? It has been the same through the oil spill in the gulf, through the passing of anti-immigration laws in Arizona, a blatant affront to a third of the team that elicited nothing more than shrugs and distrustful glances when I tried to bring it up in the locker room. And through a collapsing economy reflected in the lives of their families back home, and in every city they travel to. Maybe there is some grumbling about why in the hell would these Ohio teams have such beautiful, big stadiums and suddenly no fans to fill them, but that’s all. Newspapers are not read, or printed material of any kind, save for the stacks of Baseball America that show up biweekly and make everyone nervous as they look for a boldfaced mention of their own names. And the bilingual God pamphlets. Locker-room TVs are set to ESPN, and only that. At home, screens are turned to Xbox fantasies, games that can be won and then turned off in a matter of forty-five minutes. There is a complimentary LumberKings calendar magnet on the fridge in this apartment so that the players can track where they will play and also what day it is, but the dutiful marking of the passage of time with wins and losses ended sometime in May.

  Hank’s recent brush with reality came in the form of a call saying that his father fell on a landscaping job, shattering bones in his knees, rendered unable to work for months. Even that cannot be dealt with, not really, until the season is over. It is life. This is life, too, but also something else.

  Nick Franklin walks out of the biggest room in the apartment and holds up a pair of white patent-leather loafers fit for a television pimp from before he was born. He raises his eyebrows to ask for approval.

  There’s whistling.

  “I like to look distinct,” he explains to me.

  We pour
out into the dark hallways, out into the parking lot, past the shirtless man grilling hot dogs in his Vietnam vet hat, into my car, and into the night, toward fun. There is a small nuclear power plant down the street from the Indian Village apartments, glowing and growling. It’s the first of three factories we will see at various distances, through barbed-wire fencing on the way to the bar, gradually growing bigger, ending with ADM.

  “People work there,” Nick Franklin says with gravity as we drive past. “Right now, people are working there.”

  “Turn the music up,” Hank demands.

  I fumble with the dial, which fades and rises as it pleases. I flush as they laugh at my lack of control. It is a level of innocent but ever-present pressure that still overwhelms me, so specific to being on a team or among one, the feeling of never being alone, never exhaling fully. Often my weakness, my sensitivity, is highlighted in the briefest of interactions—when a joke is turned on me, when a hard, cocksure hand pokes at the softest part of my flesh, the kind of matter-of-fact cruelty that these boys can take and are defined by, that leaves me gutted.

  “Nobody’s car is perfect,” Hank says, too gently, next to me.

  I finally get the radio loud, and Delilah bellows out.

  Hank’s head snaps toward me, part amused and part betrayed by her syrupy, middle-aged proclamations of love and faith that mark me as something other than how I appear. Núñez laughs in the back and, seeing his reaction, so does Fray Martinez. I am about to switch channels when Nick Franklin yells, “Yo!” And then, when he has everyone’s attention, “It’s Delilah.”

  He is leaning forward toward the radio now, as though to protect the dial and protect the voice. His face is between mine and Hank’s, half visible in the weak light of my dashboard. I see him, I think. Maybe for the first time. I see the slight slant of the Superman chin that I always assumed was without a break in symmetry. I see baby-ness around the eyes, the cheeks. I see excitement uncontrolled, and kindness, and youth in him in the semi-dark, hear it in his voice as he experiences Delilah. And, yes, it’s just a moment, but he is so rarely ever really there.