Class A

by Lucas Mann

  “Hi, Tim.”

  A pause. “Hi. It’s Tim.”

  I know where he’s sitting, his couch, brown and soft. I know the black cat is nuzzling his leg, pawing at the loose fabric of the Roadkill Crew ’91 tank top that I know he’s wearing. I know that the TV is on mute, the radio is on, Dave’s postgame report long over, leaving behind the crackling horns of music older than Tim himself, but he always did like the sound of older things. I know that next to the TV, there is a shrine to the former members of the Baseball Family, a compact, well-maintained vigil that never goes away. That picture of Tom is there, from near the end, strangely thin, the brim of his LumberKings hat making a little shadow on his face.

  We apologize to each other. He sighs into the phone. He asks me what the bus is like, how everybody is. I tell him quietly, hand over my mouth, that it’s a deflated and silent bus. I use those words instead of “angry.”

  “Poor guys,” Tim says. “They came close.”

  “I thought they were going to do it,” I said.

  He breathes into the phone for a while and says, “You know, maybe the better thing is to lose.”

  I’m not sure what to say.

  “Winning is easy,” he says. “It’s a …”

  He trails off, takes a halting breath, begins again. “It’s a lie.”

  I try to think if I agree with him.

  “I wish I could’ve been there,” he says. “Not because it would have done anything, but, you know.”

  “I wish you could’ve been there, too.”

  “Did I ever tell you that I was on the field with the players in ’91?” he asks. “I was on the pitcher’s mound holding the trophy.”

  He continues for a while, and I say nothing to interrupt.

  “Where are you guys now?” he says when the story is done.

  I look over Dave out the window through a small slit in the curtain. Shimmering black highway, the darker black trees alongside the highway, headlights like flames as cars pass us. We are somewhere.

  “I don’t know.”

  “When will you be home?” he asks, and I’m stuck on that word. Home. Clinton isn’t, not for me, certainly, not for anybody on this bus except for Ted and Dave, who hates that fact. But I don’t think “home” means Clinton, not as Tim is saying it. Well, it does, but it’s also a feeling or just an end point, someplace to stop.

  “We want to be there when the team gets home,” Tim says. “All of us. The Family. They deserve to have us tell them thank you.”

  His voice is still shaking when we say good-bye, but he will call everyone, rally them even if they’re sleeping. They’ll be waiting. He promises. I tell him that he is a good guy for doing so, surprised at how serious it sounds when I say it, how much I want him to know that I think that. He tells me to hush.

  There is an oasis in Indiana, an open one, made for sleepless truckers.

  The players wait in a line that pushes out the door of the McDonald’s. Teenagers in their uniforms and official drive-thru headsets stumble through orders, slipping, bumping into one another, not expecting so many big, demanding young men at one in the morning on a Monday. It is Monday, isn’t it? Hank is standing in line with some others, trying to reconcile the day, the time, the place.

  Hank limps his way forward, grimacing a little, but still going, his perseverance now directed toward a bacon double cheeseburger. It’s the twentieth, he announces, which everyone kind of knew, but still. No, wait, it’s morning. It’s the twenty-first. Some of his teammates groan because they have training that they are both honored and obligated to be attending in a couple of days. They will not go home. They received word of the next mission from Tamargo, relayed from the front office on high—pack up for Arizona, Puerto Rico, Australia. This is good, ultimately. The longer you live at home, the less chance to be forgotten. Hank will fly into Burbank. His father will pick him up in the work truck, take him home. He will sleep in his old twin bed, under his old posters and old trophies. It will feel as if he never left, as if he won’t again.

  When I visit him in January, I’ll be around for his only baseball-related activity. We’ll drive to Pasadena, where Hank teaches his game to the uncoordinated children of wealthy families whose gardens his father tends. He’ll lob them batting practice in a cage that his father helped build in their yard, as nice as the one he used in Clinton. He’ll let himself have fun, get intense, turn each lob into an important pitch, turn each day into a pennant race, and they will love him.

  “We get taught by a major leaguer,” they will say to me.

  He will force himself to correct them.

  Hank gets his burger and returns to the bus. He eats with his head on the window, and as he bites, his reflection gnaws his own face. I impose thoughts into his head, about home, family, girlfriend. She will be his fiancée soon. Maybe that’s what he is thinking. Maybe that’s what tepid McDonald’s in an Indiana rest stop, a throbbing ankle, a thumb where you can push the bone chips around, makes any person think about.

  He will tell me about his proposal sitting outside the Comfort Suites in Peoria, Arizona, drinking watered-down hotel lobby coffee. He will sound more sure than I’ve ever heard him, saying that the team should be ready to give him a chance, that the only thing he’d heard thus far at spring training was “Boy, you earned it.” And his girlfriend, now his fiancée, she knew that, too. She knew what he could be, and she was happy to let him have a last good shot at it.

  “I’m not going back to Clinton,” he will tell me, certain. “If they send me back there, it’ll be to back up Baron, and I’m not doing that again.” It’s time to move forward. He is a man. He has a life to live. He’ll tell them that, he promises.

  I will leave Arizona that night and for a month scan the Web site for each team in the Mariners system, looking for his name, finding it nowhere. I will Google search for some recognition of the end of his career, and find nothing. He kept his word. Faced with a return to a backup role in Clinton, he went into the office, said I deserve better, said I’ll quit before I go back. The team said they understood. He was free to go.

  But when I see him for the last time, it will not be in a starter apartment with his future wife or leaving class as he tries to finish his degree; it will be in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where he signed on to catch in the American Association of Independent Professional Baseball, unaffiliated with any major league organization, dotted in random places with fields spanning a continent—Amarillo and Gary, Indiana, and Winnipeg. Hank will be finishing up a pretty solid season, not playing the last two weeks after getting concussed in a home plate collision and having to wait for the team’s volunteer doctor to return from vacation and confirm that diagnosis.

  We will get hammered drunk in an apartment that looks like his old Clinton place, the only difference being that Hank is now the youngest of his roommates, so they all drink legally, and a lot of them smoke a lot of weed because nobody cares. We will chug until I feel as if I’m choking, then crush the cans and play a game where you try to fling the empties into a small trash bin without looking, Coors Light splattering on wall-to-wall carpet. An outfielder from Massachusetts will tell me about his time in AAA, describing in exquisite detail how nice the buses are, how far the seats recline. An infielder will pass me a blunt and tell me he was offered $100,000 by the Yankees but turned it down to go to college. Got hurt, got high, flunked out—I’m half-listening because I know the end. They will both tell me that Hank was such a goody-goody when he got here, the way many freshly released are, still used to important eyes watching them. They will point at Hank now, chugging, his hair hanging over his eyes, newly long, his fledgling beard wet.

  They will, Hank included, describe themselves as warriors or at least as those born to compete, to be a part of this thing. This thing, the game, it can validate all. Hank is still telling the story of himself, a man quietly suffering but not quitting, never that. I’ve driven six hours diagonally across Iowa to find him in a new place just
like the old place. He is treading water in his own myth, Hank, who is still worth watching, worth remembering for some, for me.

  John R. Tunis wrote about the end of a baseball career, and to me that used to mean the end of a life. I remember his images of an older body gone loose, slackened, and wrinkled, doubled over itself on a wooden bench, unable to move for a while to pack and leave. I tried to sit like that, perfectly still, heavy, to show when I was anxious or afraid, depressed and unable then to put a word to the feeling. And that’s how I explained to myself the way my father sat after his son died and I saw him feel the loss, silent but loud. I made the pose understandable.

  Erasmo has forsaken McDonald’s and gone to get a gas station hot dog, showing Medina, his new sidekick, how all the condiments are hidden in little drawers beneath the rotating grill, a crucial detail of American life. Men in camouflage hats buying Skoal and energy drinks, women with tired eyes over by the magazine rack, they all watch the pair of foreigners. Erasmo doesn’t notice, or he does notice and doesn’t care. He is so used to being watched.

  Soon the new home page for the LumberKings will be up—Nick Franklin tracking a home run along the left side of the screen, Erasmo opposite him staring intently into Hank’s catcher’s mitt along the right side. Erasmo is one of the two worth being a reminder of a season that was good, almost great. After next season, he will be replaced on the Web site by a couple of other pitchers, each hard-throwing and new, but for now he is the one to see.

  The rest of the drive is drunk and loud, then hungover, nearly muted. The bus smells like freshly opened cans of cheap beer, then smells like burps, then just staleness. Chris keeps us at an even sixty-five, always in the right lane, and we drive straight, no bathroom breaks, until it feels as if we’re not even moving. Ted keeps passing around whiskey, pounding plenty of it himself, until he is drunk enough to announce that, goddamn it, these players did all the work, he shouldn’t have a seat by himself while they’re doubled up. Their bodies need space. He stands up, says, “Take my seat,” not to anyone in particular, just to the whole back of the bus, and he goes to sit on the stairs at the front, still holding his Crown Royal, wincing as his back seizes when we hit a bump. He raises his plastic cup to the men who, after tonight, are no longer his charges and, under their quasi-shared corporate umbrella, never really were.

  “To you fellas,” he says. “You played your hearts out for us. You deserve to be comfortable.”

  A movie with a lot of car chases is still on, and nobody is watching it. Pollreisz does his crossword and I help. Next to me, I think I hear Dave listening to the clips of some of his best calls from the season, happy ones that he has saved—his announcements: “The LumberKings are going to the Midwest League Championship!” And, “Ladies and gentlemen, your new home run king, Nick Franklin!” Some of the players read, mostly the Bible or books about how to win at blackjack. Some talk low into their phones, all the same answers to what I imagine to be the same questions—not sure where I’m at right now, not sure when I’ll be back, then the only certainty: we lost.

  First light happens in Illinois.

  “Almost home,” Pollreisz says.

  We pull onto Highway 30, past the air freshener factory, past the plastics factory, past the gravel roads that turn off into the corn. And then we’re in town. Past the Wild Rose. Joyce just left after the late shift, didn’t get to hear any of the last game. Past ADM, pumping. Past the trains and the trucks, moving in and out. Past the blank, still-matted patches of grass where houses had been, where men protested three decades ago and lost and never protested again.

  The players are already packing, some standing in the aisle, bouncing on the balls of their feet, ready to move, ignoring Chris’s pleas for safety. They’re planning to go in and out in five minutes, what they hope will be the last time they ever see that locker room, leaving nothing behind.

  The sun has been rising behind us, like we’re driving away from it, trying to preserve this night. But at Sixth Avenue North, we turn, drive the last block to the clubhouse heading east. The sun, orange and pink, climbs out of the river. It’s morning.

  The bus pulls up to the clubhouse, and they’re all there. Tim kept his word. There are maybe twenty people in a tight group, squinting up at the tinted windows. They begin to clap as the bus slows, then stops. Tim, in the front, lets out a wolf’s howl, maybe mournful, but reverent, too. Betty is next to him and Tammy and Bill, the whole family that is a part of this place, something close to mortar.

  Joyce is here, running on no sleep, LumberKings sweatshirt over her casino vest, notebook out, folder full of the pages of a story just begun, Nick Franklin and his home run chase. Cindy is here, her husband still in Afghanistan, and Julie, her son at a base getting ready to go, neither one worrying in this moment. There are others that I recognize, peripheral members of the Baseball Family, clapping in unison. And others that I’ve never talked to—the ladies who sit behind home plate, the hecklers from the top row, the Indian doctor and his daughters, lost in and in love with this ultimate assimilation. Brad, who beat us back to Clinton and parked here to wait.

  All of them clapping and giving thanks.

  I don’t think the players know what to do with this.

  They hop off the bus gingerly, wade through the adoration and the brightness off the river. There are twenty feet of pavement between the bus, which is theirs alone, and the locker room, closed off, full of their smell and their possessions. Twenty feet of interaction with everyone who wants to tell them what they mean. Betty hugs. Tim slaps backs with a familiarity both earned and not. Children scramble around legs. Joyce reaches out her pen and paper and balls and hats, anything to hold a last drop of inky permanence.

  I hear one player whisper to another, “I bet that bitch is gonna ask for your sweaty underpants,” and then there are some kind shut ups, and some chuckling that I choose to read as apologetic, not just uncomfortable. Because she would, I think, and not in some sexual fantasy, ringing his sweat out into her LumberKings coffee mug, but because anything can be saved and can be made worth saving. And nobody will care as much about his underpants as this small group of people do by this stadium in this town by this river under this sun.

  “This was almost the greatest season,” Tim says.

  Brad begins to weep again, reaches out for fellow fans to hug.

  “Nicky,” Joyce says. “Nicky, I wrote a story about you.”

  Some of the players pause. Hank stops, says thank you to Betty, to Tim, says good-bye, signs a ball for Joyce, says, “Hold on to that now,” with a smile. She will. I watch him limp into the locker room, and he is, for the last time, everything I want him to be, head proud and erect even as his body fails, his injured catcher’s legs never resting, old Dave from the books my father read to me, Bruce from Bang the Drum Slowly when he let me stay home from school and watched with me, each born to crouch and born to lose with symphonic beauty. Hank is just a guy moving back to his teenage bedroom. Failure is only romantic if it’s not really failure.

  Nick Franklin moves quickly. He silently accepts a shout of “We thought we’d never see you again!”

  And then, “You’re gonna make it.”

  And then, “I’m gonna tell everyone you were here, after you make it, when we watch you on TV.”

  And then, “Did you like it here?”

  And then, “What happened to your Facebook account? I can’t see it anymore.”

  Brad says, “People will remember this one for a long time. This was a great one to be a part of.” He claps my back like I’m part of it, too.

  I walk over to the front of the stadium to find Tom’s brick. I rub my thumb across his engraved name. It costs $75 for one of these, $150 if you want a duplicate for your mantel. Just print out a PDF of the form from the LumberKings Web site, mail it with a check. Those are nasty and unimportant truths. Brick never fades, that is the thing to think.

  Another year happens.

  The corn is all harve
sted, and the husks decompose into the soil.

  Joyce gets certified to work craps. She celebrates her twentieth year at the casino. She is the oldest dealer on staff and the bosses take her to dinner for that.

  Bill gets sicker, and Betty says, “Well, getting older happens.”

  Tammy and Dan are having money problems, the trucking life bringing a less steady paycheck than he had at ADM. He ends up chasing a job to North Dakota, hauling dirt for an oil pipeline, living in a town that barely existed a year ago. She waits.

  Cindy’s husband comes home, and he doesn’t like crowds. He fishes a lot and does not talk about Afghanistan.

  Every month, the whole Baseball Family meets at Pizza Ranch to talk about this season and other seasons.

  Alliant Energy Field, formerly Riverview Stadium, is renamed Ashford University Field.

  Flavor Flav opens a fried chicken restaurant in Clinton, a decision so strange that it makes national news. At a theme night in a hipster bar in my college town, a guy with thick glasses and an ironic Pocahontas braid says, “Thank God somebody’s bringing a little flava to one of Iowa’s greatest dying cities.” I laugh with the rest of the crowd. The chicken joint closes, and the building stays empty.

  South Clinton residents, the ones left, file a lawsuit against ADM for ruining the ground and air and light, everything. They say, Our dogs are dying off. They say, The sides of our houses are turning green. They say, Everybody is sick. Look at our trees, they say. They are dying. Trees don’t just die in bunches. That is not progress, they say.

  A new season starts, new faces on the field, a new name for the stadium, new manager. Tim gives his howl and then speaks about how perfect this moment is, another perfect beginning to a season just like all the others.

  On a hot, hot day, Joyce and I ride the gravels together. There are back roads through every mammoth, thousand-acre property, with occasional street signs identifying the intersection of 307th Street and 265th. There isn’t a pattern. Or maybe there is, we just don’t know it.