Class A

by Lucas Mann

  Cid stops right at the warning track.

  He waits.

  He taps his glove once, watches the ball drop, catches it, tosses it in.

  We sigh, all the Clinton fans. I’m sure Tim is screaming at home and on the casino floor Joyce is begging them to let her put the radio on. Nick Franklin got under it, and now the game is almost over. He swung too hard. It was a pop fly, nothing more.

  “It’s not over,” Brad says. “We want it more. We deserve it.”

  “Twenty years,” he says. “We’ve been waiting.”

  And then there’s another fly out and a strikeout, so fast, so matter-of-fact, that it feels as if we were robbed of watching the conclusion to this season. And then the last strikeout victim is throwing his bat in disgust, and the LumberKings have lost.

  Hank walks alone and Nick walks alone and Erasmo walks alone back to the visitors’ clubhouse. A bunch of Lake County boys collapse on the mound and wait for their trophy. There it is, the same one Tim held those years ago, still simple and wooden. Still smaller than you’d like it to be.

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

  Ride Home

  BRAD IS WHIMPERING. He is a very big man who cries like a very small child, and nobody knows quite what to do with that. Perhaps it’s the volume of his emotion that allows me to, for a while at least, ignore my own. But, yes, my body is slumping, my cheeks a little wet, my eyes stinging. We are in the parking lot, and we can see the Captains sprinting out of the home locker room in various states of champagne-doused undress, tackling each other in the small patches of grass in between walkway and parking lot, giggling, shouting, coltish in a way that would be adorable to both Brad and me had we not already decided to hate these young men.

  Earlier, I walked the second tier of the new, empty Classic Park stadium, watching the two-dimensional fireworks on their not-quite-jumbo Jumbotron. I called home, and my father picked up and said, “Where are you?” He sounded far away. He was. He’d been listening to Dave’s broadcast online, or trying to, but the signal got fuzzy.

  They lost, I told him. I’m not sure how I’m going to get home and they lost.

  I went to the visitors’ locker room. I moved into the center of the crowded, square space, the steam resting on the tile walls, settling in the dampened blue carpet. Hank didn’t shower, because he didn’t work up a sweat. He has his jeans on already, a black undershirt clinging to his torso with no dress shirt over it because the season ended exactly thirteen minutes ago and pointless rules, like wear a collar to represent your team with pride, ceased to apply. BJ asks him if he wants ice, for the hand, for the leg. He says no, no more, not this season. BJ shrugs. He’s busy.

  Pollreisz is shirtless and sagging, moving around the room, smiling, clapping shoulders, shaking hands, saying all the things that a man deepened by experience is supposed to say to those who still feel acutely. Matt Cerione throws his bats into his locker, and the crash, the sound of wood on wood, makes everyone realize how hushed it had been. He yells, “Fuck,” and slams his palms against the wall, kicks at his chair. He is roundly mocked.

  “Easy, Slappy,” Catricala says, and laughs. “It’s over.”

  “Can anybody tell me what the fuck we’re doing here?” a big, jovial reliever says, laughing before he finishes his sentence. He wraps a towel around himself, walks to the showers whistling. He stands in a clump with his teammates, shoving each other, slipping on sudsy tiles, in violent, naked contact, the way they’ve been since April.

  In the parking lot, John Tamargo is ready to leave. His enormous SUV is waiting. He’ll drive home to Tampa, taking a halting, leisurely route, sleeping in quiet, starchy motel rooms, feeling the hours alone. He looks maybe impatient, maybe nervous, waiting for all his players to file onto the bus. Brad is standing near him, and Tamargo is trying his best not to acknowledge the sounds of how much this hurts him. Brad takes a quivering breath, then a more stable one. He holds out his hand to shake Tamargo’s.

  “Thank you for a hell of a season,” he says. “We’ll all remember this one.”

  Tamargo nods, mumbles out something like, My pleasure or Happy to do it.

  “We’ve been waiting a long time,” Brad says.

  “Yeah,” Tamargo says.

  They will never speak again. Tamargo boards the bus for a second, lifting his tired catcher’s legs up the stairs, facing the group that’s no longer his team. They all look up.

  “All right,” he says. “Hell of a season.”

  He waves one short, thick arm and leaves. The players laugh.

  I hound him for the last time until we’re standing by his car. I don’t want him to leave without any ceremony. I want some acknowledgment of all that’s happened, though I’m not sure what has happened. He looks at me like I’m Brad.

  “Wow,” I say. “It’s crazy that it’s over.”

  “Yeah,” he says. “Seasons end.”

  I ask, “Where to now?”

  Home. Sit on the couch for a month or two. Eat breakfast late with his wife. See his grandkids, watch them scoot around in the dirt. In late November, he will go to Venezuela and manage a pro team there for a pretty decent influx of extra cash, dodging riotous, beer-throwing fans, standing in cold showers. Maybe his family will visit. They’ll go to the beach. Then spring training. Then repeat.

  He gets in his SUV, honks once, drives away.

  I am not the biggest intruder on the bus ride home. Ted wanted to ride with his boys, to be among them, not above, let them know that he appreciates their work. He even canceled his flight home. He is not some suit. He is in cargo shorts and an old, torn shirt. He is built like a stuffed bear. He played football and baseball in college. He still loves buses that smell, packed tight with exhausted, gaseous men, and he will display that now, before it’s all over. Yeah, he sits in an office, but he does it for moments like this.

  The players have found something to focus on in the post-loss hush, so they lean heads together and whisper viciously—we bust our asses all season, this guy makes money off us, and now we have to double up so he gets a seat?

  I’m in the crosshairs as well, no longer with anything to give, a ride or adulation, just a person who wants a piece of their space, wants to watch their movies and watch them sleep. I don’t deserve what the players deserve. Everything they have done for me, for the fans, the team; all they ask is two seats on which to spread out one sore body. The simmering indignity of six months has finally boiled. Ted Tornow sits alone in the front. I sit opposite him, next to Dave, the only one on this bus not practiced enough in the art of the manly rebuttal to tell me no. Ted pulls out a bottle of Crown Royal and a pile of crumpled clear plastic cups. He pours, tells everyone around him to take one. Dave, laptop out, says, “In a while, I have to finish the game notes.” Ted says, “David,” and Dave sighs, takes a cup, sips. The whiskey has been sitting under a stadium seat for hours and is the temperature and texture of cough syrup. It burns.

  Erasmo is in the back with the Latino players that ever-flank him—Ochoa, Mario, Noriega, Medina, a couple of others. They are laughing quietly. Even after a whole season, a team that has, by all accounts, jelled well remains segregated. The Latinos sit with each other and talk about places and games that only they know. This is only a fraction of the year’s baseball competition for the Dominican and Venezuelan players. In their lives of repeated tryouts and shuffling allegiances, the only constants are each other’s presence and the very real sense that every performance is as important as the next. How could this one loss, then, be the end of anything? There are no ends until nobody in any country pays you to swing or throw.

  A collective decision has been reached in the back, and Ochoa, the oldest and least accented in his English, walks forward as spokesman. He stands at the front of the bus, deciding what authority figure to address. He speaks to everyone who might have power—BJ, Ted, Pollreisz, Bus Driver Chris.

  “We have decided,” he says, “that we should watch a Spanish mo
vie for the last bus ride.”

  Silence.

  “We haven’t watched one all year. And it’s not fair.”

  It’s not so much that somebody says a definitive no, there just isn’t a yes. And when the American players start yelling, Bullshit, no fucking way that the last bus ride will involve the crooning of Marc Anthony in El Cantante, no older man feels like entering the fight. Subtle anger mounts. No malice is expressed, nothing directly racially inflammatory is mentioned, but the subtext is thick and choking. Only eight or nine men on this team are here on a temporary work visa, and they are always in the back with the engine vibration and the bathroom piss stench. And the look on Ochoa’s face, the faces of all his friends standing up in support, suggests an inflated importance placed on Marc Anthony’s eyes-closed angel voice, the feeling of this as a first and last stand. The American players shout over him.

  BJ starts shouting, too, at everyone.

  “Oh, just shut the fuck up, majority rules.”

  Catricala jumps up and pops in an American action flick. Ochoa is told to sit down. He says no, even as he begins to walk back to his seat. He turns to yell again, but his legs keep moving away from what he’s yelling about.

  “Bullshit!” Mario Martinez yells, and Noriega echoes him unintelligibly.

  I spot Erasmo in the farthest-back seat of the bus, watching closely, not participating. He leans into Medina to teach him one more thing—this isn’t worth it. Also, keep smiling. He won’t sleep during the bus ride. He will stare out the window for ten hours, occasionally tapping Medina on the shoulder, pointing out the window, happy to be able to explain something to someone newer than he is to the middle of this country.

  That is an extra-long truck, that bright thing with a fountain in front of it is a casino, that smoke is coming from some factory somewhere. This is Ohio. Now this is Indiana. Do you know what comes next?

  He has learned a lot. He has aged.

  He will, when we leave the bus at dawn, shake my hand as I try to position my body for a hug.

  “I’ll call you soon,” I will say.

  “We’ll see,” he will say. “Facebook is better. I will be working.”

  I’ll stand near him for too long in the clubhouse, until he nods at me, then jerks his head toward the meager pile of his possessions waiting to be packed, my cue that I am in the way of his moving forward. He will fly to Rivas alone early in the morning, see his mother, father, sister, grandmother, grow restless, will go to live in the Agua Linda dormitories in November. He will e-mail me periodically: “I am here. It is good. I am working.” I will see him at spring training in Arizona, thinner, more muscular, walking with an adult composure so different from how he was when I met him.

  “No more Clinton,” he will tell me, standing by the practice fields, new sunglasses reflecting the desert sun, arms across his chest, smirking a little.

  “Double-A?” I will say.

  And he will allow himself to say, “Maybe.”

  “Triple-A.”

  “Hey, come on.”

  “Major leagues.”

  “I’m gonna do it,” he will tell me, a blatant period to our last conversation. “Soon. That is the goal. You can see me on TV.”

  He will turn his back, talk to a frightened, eighteen-year-old Venezuelan pitcher spending his first week in America, looking at Erasmo the way I used to look at my brother. He will point at the English bulldog that belongs to the visiting Orange County family of another pitcher, in town to watch their son.

  “Feo,” he will say, and go so far as to do an impression of the dog’s underbite. His new friend-fan will laugh. He will look at ease, an ease that has been earned by nothing easy. I should feel happy for him, but I won’t because of his disinterest, because I will be one of the people that he very obviously has moved past. I will put my hand on his shoulder, feel the heat and the swell of fifteen extra pounds of muscle, no baby fat floating on top. He will give a small shrug. I will wish him good luck and he will say, “No luck.”

  The players haven’t eaten since three o’clock this afternoon, and that was peanut butter and jelly with mealy apples for a locker-room lunch, scarfed down with one-bite adrenaline before the game. Now there’s no adrenaline, just anger. Anger exacerbates hunger. We must stop.

  Ohio rest stops look like pods, something extraterrestrial, all circular, all uniform. There are no lights on in any stores. We pile out anyway, find nothing open but bathrooms and vending machines, return to the bus, then repeat fifteen miles down I-80. It feels like a dream where you wake up still inside that dream, wake up again, same place, quick relief, and then the realization.

  Fuck. Fuck. Cocksucker. Fuck. Bullshit.

  It is a chorus of irritation. What kind of shithole rest stop is this? Shithole state? Shithole life? I think that the furious fake questions are exacerbated by the fact that just a couple of hours ago there were bright lights, there was a mini-Jumbotron, a trophy, even if this team didn’t win it. It feels as if something should be open in honor of these circumstances—God, or at least the owner of a roadside Quiznos, should be aware of this fact, should know what tonight is. These are near champions. And me and Ted and BJ and Dave—we’re the guys who hang around near champions. How can that not be enough to get a sandwich?

  Everyone is a little boy now, cell phones out, searching for service, wanting to tell moms and dads and girlfriends that we’re somewhere in Ohio and that everything sucks. Wanting to hear kind, patient lies in return. Soon the bus is loaded, ready to try again. BJ does a head count. No Nick Franklin. BJ curses. Pollreisz gives a little smirk that I think is meant to suppress anger. The players’ eyes are hard. Nick comes walking out of the glass doors, pauses to send a text under the two floodlights still on at the front of the building. The whole bus watches him, breathing into the glass separating him from us, but he doesn’t notice. Or maybe he does. I lean too close to the window watching him, my forehead touching the grimy surface. I wipe my breath off the glass and watch him adjust the collar of his shirt, opening it one more button. I have my notebook out. I try to conjure adjectives to encompass him, an exercise that is just forced disappointment after six months. And it’s not particularly unique, the effort to sum him up. It’s the job of a whole slew of people, those who watch and laud and critique and brand the Nick Franklins of this small world.

  Slick. Indifferent. Cold. I tilt it the other way. Statuesque. Ripe. Flawless. I angle the notebook away from Dave, but he isn’t looking anyway. He is quantifying the season online already. He is archiving everything that happened with all of the men on this bus, the numbers they will leave behind. Nick sees, finally, the eyes on him, begins a trot.

  I will see him running next March, not an easy trot but an almost sprint, legs still spindly enough to look like a suburban boy scooting through the yard in a Cheever story. He will be running from his former agents, left behind in the trajectory of his career and relieved of their charge of him on a rainy Orlando afternoon while Nick’s mother spoke to them of opportunity and Nick lingered in the back of their office crying. I will be standing next to his former agents in Arizona as they watch him on the practice field, scowling and relaying the story. Mid-sentence, they will take off in pursuit of Nick as soon as the team breaks for lunch, running with the limp of the formerly athletic, now stiff, bound by loafers and slacks. I won’t know what they’re hoping for if they catch him, just a reprimand or maybe a last negotiation after the fact. They won’t get anything. Nick will make it to the safety of the locker room, where nobody is allowed unless invited, and he will wait them out, wait me out, too, for an hour while I sit in the parched parking lot, running my hand across the chrome of his Escalade.

  The next day, I’ll be the one running to catch up to Nick as he walks with his new agent, a representative of the Boras Corporation, the most hated, feared, and successful sports agency on earth. I will introduce myself to this new agent, his eyes hidden behind sunglasses. I will ask him, foolishly, if Nick has said my
name, mention, foolishly, our time in Clinton as though he might say, Wow, what a season that was! I will ask to talk to Nick again, maybe sit down with the two of them. He’ll say Nick’s busy, not just busy for me, I shouldn’t feel bad. Everything anybody has to say to Nick now goes through this man in front of me, I will be told. He will reach into his pocket to look for a business card and say, “Whoops, all out,” will pat me on my shoulder, and say, “Have a safe trip back to Iowa.”

  “Fuck, Franklin,” somebody calls from the back of the bus. “It’s cool. We weren’t just sitting here waiting.” Nick glares toward the face behind the voice, obscured in semidarkness, and he begins to yell, or maybe it’s grunt—furious, guttural exclamations, almost unintelligible but with a clear message.

  I don’t want anger to be the only thing felt now, because this is a bus full of people who shared something. The something isn’t exactly clear, and maybe the something isn’t much, but it existed, didn’t it? And I want to be somebody who has gathered momentum with everyone else toward a collective crescendo, who watches all the way through to its end, invested. Invested in a moment that becomes impossible to erase as Dave writes down the last stats that will exist always, somewhere in a Google search, for anyone looking to find.

  Nick sits near the front, speaks to BJ as if he were a hallway monitor.

  “I wanted a snack.”

  He’s gone from teammate to mercenary in a week and a half. He was tearing up in the lobby of the Pzazz! FunCity, remember? I saw it. I tell myself that. He was crying because he was connected to these people, and now, since he left and was asked to return, just the fact of being asked has reminded him that he is different, that he is alone.

  My phone rings and it’s Tim. I hear the choking slur of drunk and grieving together as soon as I answer.