Class A

by Lucas Mann

“He thinks he’s big-league now. Once you leave, you come back and you’re not one of us.”

  Is it that tenuous? Well, how could it not be? If the connection, the brotherhood, the shared triumph and despair, is a hurried fabrication, it should end swiftly and arbitrarily as well. What is shared is a sense of wanting and of injustice. Nick wanted to move up, and then he did, so there is no bond left.

  I look at Hank. He is both himself and not. Or he is not the person I saw before. He is just there. I have ascribed so much to him. I have rooted for his success because he needed to be rooted for and I needed to feel as if I noticed beauty previously unseen. I have made him tragic because sometimes I think he is, but also because it makes him so worthy of attention. He is bored. Somebody is playing piano. There is a bachelorette party. The bachelorette, in her plastic crown, stumbles past us toward the bathroom and back again.

  “I want to get a ring,” he says, down into his beer, a reminder. “That’s what is important. That’s what we’re here for.”

  I am tired. I accept the platitude.

  Chris, the bus driver, has let me crash in his hotel room, and so I end up sneaking in late, tiptoeing and brushing my teeth to cut the booze, fifteen again. He likes to fall asleep to Fox News at high volume, so that is what I fall asleep to. Pundits are screaming. People are accusing. Take responsibility. I hear that phrase clear enough. I’m sick of you, voices assert, back and forth in a contest of apportioning blame. There is terrorism in this world. And famine, too. There are godless people with sinister intentions. Chris knows this, worries, talks about it often. I say, “Uh-huh.” I agree with nothing he says, but I think we’re scared in the same way.

  Chris worked in restaurants for thirty years, which fed both his type-A personality and his drinking. But about a decade ago, he decided no more drinking, and because he decided, it was done. It’s about personal responsibility. That’s why he likes driving ballplayers. Bird-watchers and family reunions and tour groups that travel east to see the leaves change, they all tip better, but they are not en route to a job, not working, always working.

  “It’s about personal responsibility,” he says. “If the players come to me saying, ‘Chris, I left my stuff in the clubhouse, drive me to get it,’ I say, ‘Son, it’s about personal responsibility. It’s only a mile and a half. Walk.’ ”

  I wake him up screaming in my sleep, and he says, “Good goddamn, boy. You know why I never dream? I was having bad ones and I just said to myself, stop.”

  I was dreaming about hands around my neck squeezing me like a bat.

  We’re both up, and we go to Cracker Barrel for eggs.

  In the stands, Captains fans who remember Brad come over to say that they recognize some of their own—at the park early, always loud, always knowing the count, the score, the inning. Brad gives a serious handshake, says likewise.

  The talk turns, naturally, to who likes who in the grand expanse of all leagues and teams. Well, all the Cleveland teams suck. Brad tells them he roots for Chicago teams, but not the way he roots for the LumberKings. He tells them that he’s been the PA announcer for LumberKings games since he was seventeen, waits for them to be impressed. They ask how big the town is. Brad says, “Not too big, not too small.” They chuckle. They ask how their own PA announcer is doing. Brad says, “Doing okay, but he’s a bit busy. Needs to learn to let the action speak for itself.” Brad tells them all the players who have come through Clinton whose names he’s spoken. The same list I was led to the first day I came to Clinton.

  We talk about LeBron James because this is the summer of his treachery, when he left his native Ohio to go live a flashy life in Miami, thus bringing into question his own values and the state of society at large. Brad says, with real empathy, “That must have hurt.”

  “You know it, brother,” says one Captains fan.

  “Nobody likes to be left behind,” Brad says.

  “You know,” says the fan, “I had my suspicions. Everybody called him the savior, called him the king and our hero, like he was some great guy. But I knew it. Look at him now. We were tricked. Underneath all the good things we thought about him, he’s just another nigger.”

  Brad and I are silent. I focus on my curly fries, afraid, I think, of seeing the casual grin on the fan’s face. He goes to take a piss eventually. I lean into Brad, say, “Jesus Christ, what kind of fans are these, huh?”

  Brad says, “What?”

  I say, “The n-word?”

  Brad says, “It’s hard. With what that man did to his hometown … It’s tough to say how hurt you’d be.”

  And then, “Things are said when somebody hurts you.”

  Brad is a good man. In the time I’ve known him, I’ve seen only that. He is open and he is loyal. He takes a pleasure in speaking the names of all the players who arrive in Clinton, wishes each one well. Brad admires a guy like Erasmo for his sturdy build and serious face, for the effort he always puts forth on Clinton’s behalf. But if Erasmo lost the championship game and gave a terse postgame interview, too tired and disappointed to be polite, would Brad just listen as an opportunistic racist called him a spic or another liar from some south-of-the-border shithole? It’s the flip side of adoration. It’s supporting a guy so much, investing so much in the hope for his success, that it feels reasonable to be personally hurt by his failures. To hate him and flail against the talent that you feel he is wasting. And rarely, if ever, does a fan know what a player will feel when a game is over. What he cares about and what he doesn’t. Where he sleeps away from all the eyes. No matter if Erasmo ends up loved or reviled or just forgotten after this season, he will be on a bottom bunk in the jungle in a month, and then home to Rivas, sleeping in a house that his money helped fix.

  But not yet. The LumberKings squeak out a one-run win to stay alive. Brad exhales like a cartoon portrayal of the wind. The series is 2–2. Tomorrow will decide it.

  Nick Franklin makes loud contact in the first inning. Brad screams, grabs my forearm. The ball dies in center, caught easily. He is the only LumberKing in the first eight batters who doesn’t strike out. The score is tied at zero through four innings. Brad is squirming. Pastor Ray Gimenez is, too. He’s from the Bronx, was a star second baseman for the Clinton Pilots in the 1970s. Like a few other players before him, after his career fizzled, Ray came back to Clinton, where people still knew him and remembered his talent, where jobs were then easy to find. He made Clinton home, and now he roots the way he was himself rooted for. Ray started an outreach shelter down the street from the stadium. At first seldom used, now its forty-eight beds are filled every night. He brought some of his boarders to the game to root. The men with Ray are cheering, they’re appreciating their nachos, but they are not the Roadkill Crew. I have no memories of the Crew at away games. I wasn’t there. But I assume, believe, that they were more imposing than what is here now.

  Tim calls me.

  “Buddy,” he says. “Buddy, can you hear me?”

  As though there should be a deafening roar cutting through our connection.

  “Do you see any Roadkill T-shirts in the crowd?”

  “I don’t think so. Can’t see everybody.”

  Nobody stands out. I see lots of hats with bald eagles on them. Lots of work shirts from jobs still held down or from past lives, the name tags impossible to read from afar. Tim tells me that anyone who was ever in Roadkill, or who ever met and loved Roadkill, has been waiting for Clinton to return to a championship. There was an agreement, never stated, but felt. When the LumberKings were in the championship again, they would all be there, that’s what they’d do. Something so shared, so imprinted, couldn’t be forgotten.

  “Yell it,” Tim says. “Please. Yell, ‘Rooooadkill,’ nice and long, the way I do it. They’ll hear it and they’ll know.”

  Brad hears through the phone, says he’ll yell with me. Brad likes tradition.

  “Rooooadkill,” he begins. The word hangs, wavers, disappears over the field.

  He does it again
and I join in.

  “Rooooadkill,” until these clueless Ohioans turn and look at us like, Who howls mournfully into the crevices of a stadium? Start a wave at least.

  Nobody stands to respond. The only person, no, the only thing that moves toward us is the mascot, a ship’s captain cum enormous purple furry beast. He has taken our yells as some sort of taunt pointing out how slow this scoreless game has become. He bounces over, pantomimes a challenge for a fight, pinches the tip of his snout to show that we smell, turns and shakes his furry ass in Brad’s face.

  I hold the phone to my ear for a while and don’t have anything to say to Tim.

  I can tell that he is alone. Nobody is clamoring to speak over him in the background. Tammy might be with Dan, watching to make sure he doesn’t sneak out for cigarettes with that bad heart. She will try to care for him during the times that he is still in Clinton. She texted me earlier: Cheer loud for us. Tell them we’re sorry we couldn’t be there. Betty and Bill must be at home, Bill sick again, confused, not at all the man who took driving shifts in 1991, who drank with umps, who sometimes mustered a yell of derision at the opponents that got chuckles from a whole stadium section. And Mailman Matt, who screams until he cannot breathe. And other Crew members: Eileen and Gary—him working the twelve-hour at ADM, her listening to the radio, arms folded. And Tom, dead. And Joyce’s friend, I don’t remember the name, dead. A bunch of others dead or moved, a job lost or a home or a cancer battle. That is how life progresses. It shouldn’t feel remarkable, shouldn’t wield the vicious sting of tragedy, but it does.

  Medina gives up a run in the fifth, and the possibility of the LumberKings not being destined to win, or losing in spite of destiny, begins to feel very, very real. We need a rally. Hank is on the top step of the dugout. He begins to warm up, rotating his shoulders in circles, twisting his torso so that his eyes are looking at us in the stands for a moment, and then back again.

  I grab Brad and point.

  “He’s gonna be the hero,” I say.

  “I knew it,” he says. “If it should be anybody, it should be him.”

  We rise to cheer. He tips his cap. From somewhere in the stadium, far away but still booming, our answer finally comes. “Roooooaaadkill.”

  None of that happened. It is too clean a fantasy. There is no way that it can be true. Hank is on the disabled list, officially, irreversibly inactive. Nothing, not him wanting it, not me wanting it, not the team needing it, will make the right thing happen. Erasmo will not play tonight either. He pitched a few days ago, and he is being monitored, 151 innings this year, thrown by a body that is still growing. It doesn’t matter if he is the best chance at winning this championship for Clinton. He has a future now. It has been decided. He is worth protecting. He is better than this place. Joyce would be protesting if she were here, E-mo, put in E-mo. But after four more innings he will no longer be on this team. Already he isn’t. Joyce is on blackjack tonight, dealing to friendly faces as they lose and lose and win and lose again.

  I haven’t been sleeping, not well anyway. And it started before I was draped over Bus Driver Chris’s couch fighting to squeak out much-needed rest over the high-volume punditry on TV.

  Isolation. And failure. And heat. Thunderstorms that shake the house and the bed, lightning that sounds like something being ripped. The loss of a game is not like the loss of anything real. Not like the loss of life. Not like the loss of big, loud words—innocence, belief, desire, childhood. My father texts along with Tammy now. He is listening to the game on his computer as if it is a game that I’m playing in, the way it used to be, because this is important to me, so it can be important to him, too. He is rooting. We love to root. That is what we do together. All those seasons after my brother when my father didn’t miss a Yankees game on TV, and I passed by his room every night, lit only by the screen glow, and I joined him to watch and yell. His shoulders were rounded when I went home this summer. It is to be expected. An old man shrinking, a son surprised.

  The LumberKings score one in the sixth, but so does Lake County. And the Captains score another in the seventh with bloop singles and a bunt and an error by Medina, scoring to soft cheers, the whimper of small ball. Now it’s the ninth inning, so slow and fast all at once that I don’t even realize until I say, “Wait, is this the—?” Brad says, more sighs, “Yeah.” Then he whispers, “Nick’s up this inning.”

  There he is, going through the rhythms that all Clinton baseball fans have subconsciously memorized. Feet spread, leaning back on his hips, rotating, a looseness that he has worked very hard to achieve. He taps his bat on the edge of the plate, settles in, and we rise. A lanky closer I’ve never heard of stares him down, winds up, throws.

  Nick likes the pitch. He steps forward. He swings.

  It’s not that I like happy endings. I think I like sad ones better. There is more to talk about, more value, somehow, when there’s failure. And Tim and Joyce, Betty, Brad, everyone—no matter if they’re smiling, they’re almost always talking about losing, the humor within it, the effort behind it, how close it came to being not losing. I used to map my maturity by how I took in baseball. At first, the win was everything. Ends were only acceptable when those that I wanted to win won. Then everything was redeemed. There was no point to doing or watching, or being read a story, if it didn’t end in victory.

  But he held that ball. And the game was over.

  Those Russell boys can’t be beat.

  Thump-thump. Thump. Thump.

  That was the sound of the happy crowd in John R. Tunis books, the sound of fervor.

  I told my father that the thump-thump was like a heartbeat. He smiled and said yes. He held a hand to my chest.

  “Thump-thump,” he said. “Still alive. Thump-thump.”

  At a certain point postpuberty, it’s satisfying to doubt, to deflate and mock the certainty with which we were told games matter. I could go to games in high school, sneer at the fat drunks with high-and-tights who looked so serious during the national anthem, as if they were doing their part by watching a full nine innings. I could laugh with friends about grown men in replica jerseys, an adulthood that we would never have once our band got its break.

  But mocking is the last thing I want to do now. I like that it feels as though I’m surrounded only by people who never took pleasure in saying fuck you to those who thought they knew better. As Nick Franklin swings, he believes fully in how infallible his talent is, the way his whole family believes, the way everybody around him has always believed. He hasn’t ever doubted what he’s been told he is. His father can sip whiskey while telling me with a straight face, “Nick’s just always been a free spirit,” because it’s such a lie that it comes with no fear of repudiation.

  And in that willingness to believe, maybe Nick is like Tim, who should be here, a part of this. Tim, who has spent all of his adulthood watching with his parents, sharing in the value of their presence in this town that needs people, good people, to stay. They are a whole family intact, believing in the same things, occupying the same space, something as unbelievable and comforting as any perfect season I’ve ever read about.

  A year later, I’m in Venezuela, on the tallest mountain above Caracas, and being up so high, I am no longer scared. I wander, cold at such altitudes, awash in fast Spanish that I can’t make sense of. And then I hear soft, southern English as I sit on a rock to watch the bowl of a city below.

  “Praise God, that’s a view,” one voice says. And then a bunch of others: “Amen.”

  The leaders of the voices are baseball chaplains, taking a church youth group from South Carolina to tour a land beautiful but not quite yet saved. They come for a month each year, and then some stay longer, getting rides into the jungle to lead baseball players in the right kind of prayer.

  The extent of the faith is so stunning, and the fact that through thousands of miles and testy governmental relations, cultural and linguistic barriers, the same fidelity to notions of progress and winning and God translates
so seamlessly. I’m alone in Venezuela, or I’m surrounded in the Midwest—it’s all the same content. It’s not so much the God-ness that is important; it’s how well that dogma fits into what is being sold.

  The potbellied white pastors shake my hand and bless me, look over the sprawl of Caracas, and tell me about the character of the ballplayers they’ve met in Venezuela. How they had a devout quality to them that made everyone in their hometowns yearn to be better, how that quality transcends the circumstances into which they’d been born.

  It’s amazing when you bring people a game and a God to keep them good, how well they will respond.

  So sure.

  And when the Mariners re-sign to house their Low-A affiliate in Clinton for another three years, the Baseball Family is happy, but they expected it.

  There will always be baseball here. Show teams a good place full of good people, they’ll want to be a part of it.

  And when the census numbers come out after the season and sum up another decade of losses, there is a rebranding of this fact.

  We lost less than we thought we would, which is like gaining.

  Stubborn, happy belief. Even if it’s forced at times, it is constant—a cement foundation on which everything is supported. I drive and drive, and then I sit with and watch people who’ve never said outright, I am unhappy. Or, This isn’t worth it. I don’t know what people are really feeling, what they want to feel, but I love the surface of it as I find myself longing for what was maybe never really there. I’m awake gasping most mornings before the sun comes up, that invisible hand, again, gripping me like I’m a bat and it’s the ninth inning. When I close my eyes, fail to sleep, open them again, all I want is to see Tim dancing with his mother during the seventh-inning stretch.

  In Lake County, the center fielder is moving back, worried. I lose the ball for a second in the moon, which isn’t full but I imagine it to be. Nick is watching as he rounds first base, betraying no emotion. The center fielder’s name is Delvi Cid, a Dominican kid who played a couple of years ago in a complex just like the Venezuelan ones I will visit. But tonight, he is the Ohio home team’s long-legged hope to catch Nick Franklin’s drive.