The girl stood still in the middle of the locker room, hands at her sides, looking around expectantly, a little nervous but not afraid, as though searching for someone she was ten minutes early to meet. All the players came to their senses and interrupted the whodunit vibe to cover their crotches with whatever material was handy: mitts, hats, folding chairs, Scientology pamphlets.
By the time all fourteen position players and eleven pitchers and six coaches and nine female reporters and a trainer and a guru and a willowy redheaded translator (who read Tacitus just for kicks) made it clear they had no idea who this girl belonged to, it was quiet enough to hear Engelmann’s lips moving as he gently rocked on his hinges and committed the day’s statistics to memory.
Calls were made and messages sent. The girl didn’t talk, didn’t respond to questions, didn’t cry, didn’t let on to who she was. Outside in the ballpark, though the bleachers were drained of all but a few autograph-seeking fans, the PA announcer put the word out to the stadium that a little girl was missing her mother. Nobody knew what to do. It was like we had another Engelmann on our hands, but smaller and less valuable. An hour passed. Two. Exasperation set in.
The Barons were scheduled to board a flight to Portland that night (not the Portland you’re thinking of, probably) and with the police unable to take the girl into custody (due to all those controversial missing-person laws) and the reporters insistent that something had to be done and second and third phone calls made to hospitals and news stations by Marketing and Communications so that a mother would know for sure the girl was safely aboard the Barons’ jet if she sought her out via those channels, Happy Truman finally growled, “Aw, hell, we got a schedule to keep,” and carried the girl on the bus.
I know that sounds far-fetched. That we just up and loaded the girl onto a bus full of spitting, scratching ballplayers when she was clearly lost from home. But remember that the Barons were a bunch of twentysomething guys (and a few crotchety vets) with their minds on baseball and beer and those slits up the backs of tight linen skirts—anything except how to deal with a lost child. If they’d wanted that sort of job, they would have assumed responsibility for their own kids.
Plus, our spirits were already taxed to the limit. We had the weight of discerning and sometimes hateful crowds on our shoulders. Performance anxiety. The thing with the female reporters always tipping their eyes toward our cocks while we tried to explain away four consecutive losses. None of us had much energy to spare. It was easier to hope that someone else would handle it.
That’s what the skipper of the team is there for. He grabs the bull and the buck stops there. The whole locker room (including the doting reporters, who immediately understood that coursing estrogen had written checks for the girl’s caretaking that none of their ambitious lifestyles could cash) breathed this massive whoosh of relief, and we all filed onto the bus. Happy put on his best grandfather act and handed the girl a sandwich and asked if she’d like to come on a plane ride, if she’d like to stay with us until we found her parents. He looked uneasy, but he did what he had to.
The girl rode next to him and chewed a bit of the sandwich (never really swallowing), staring forward, smiling a little once in a while and looking at her toes, then staring forward again. She maintained an unnervingly erect posture and didn’t seem the least bit worried. She dangled her legs off the seat and swung them to and fro, like any kid would.
Next night, we clobbered Portland, 13–1. The girl sat in the dugout with the team and never left Happy’s side, even when he sprinted onto the field to argue a close call with the umpire in the third inning, kicking up dirt with his cleats. Tommy pitched a gem of a game, only gave up three hits and one run. Engelmann threw out two base runners at second. The bats were on fire, and even old Pudge Morrison banged a double off the wall in right center that scored two runs.
Night after that? Walloped Portland again. Last game of the series on Wednesday afternoon? You guessed it. Another bloodbath in favor of the good guys. So there went any misgivings about swooping a mysterious orphan up into our traveling road show like some goldfish we’d won at the fair. You can imagine how the Barons ignored the sad weirdness of nobody coming to look for the girl, how victory served as grist for denial. Fan-frigging-tastic, the players said. Keep that little charmer in tow. Hitsui Takahashi’s translator (who used a pen to solve those bridge problems next to the horoscopes in the paper) bought her a new dress and tried to comb her hair, but still that pigtail stuck out like an arrow. After Portland came Columbus (not the Columbus you’re probably thinking of), and the Barons put on another dazzling display. The Penobscots threw back-to-back shutouts, and Engelmann hit eight consecutive singles to the exact same part of the field. He’d apparently rigged that labyrinth in his noggin to make additional room for some hitting data, upgraded his brain with an extra chunk of RAM.
After the Barons ticked off eleven wins in a row, everyone stopped asking where the girl had come from. Baseball players are medievally superstitious, and when things are going well, you neither alter the arrangement nor speak its name. You eat the same breakfast with the same fork pocketed from Elias Brothers, following the same counterclockwise path around the dish. You only chew the second piece of gum from each pack. You don’t wash your stirrups. And if a little girl in a red dress with a pigtail wanders into your clubhouse and you subsequently embark on a double-digit winning streak, you most certainly do not try to find that girl’s parents or muse out loud about what the heck’s happening. What you do is you put on your spikes and jog out to left field and bounce there on the balls of your feet and shag high flies until the end of the inning when it’s time to trot in for some cuts, and then you pick up your bat and swing at the ball and maybe you run to first base but soon you’re back in left to do it all over again. No need to try to throw the runner out from the warning track. Just hit the cutoff man and let him make the relay. One task after the next. Each successive moment becomes its own entire universe. Don’t get ahead of yourself. One at a time. Ninety-four percent of your consciousness suspended.
Two-thirds of the way through the season, the Barons found themselves one game out of first place. In the month of July they’d gone 23–4. If the arms and bats and luck held up, they’d go on to win the division and be favored to take the whole shebang come championship time. We all felt good. Even Happy Truman. He embraced his grandfatherly role, spoiled the girl with Cracker Jack and cotton candy and expensive kiddie manicures. The sun rose and set at just the right times for everyone to get enough sleep. The food was expertly cooked. The air oozed with that warm-bath quality that makes a summer night feel like the perfect opportunity to ignore time’s passage and live perfectly still among fireflies and crickets and damp green grass, richly blended infield dirt raked free of pebbles, and the crippling beauty of two chalked foul lines. That summer felt like the dawn of Creation for the Birmingham Barons. Pure paradise.
As the season crested over Labor Day and headed toward the playoffs, Pudge Morrison began to contemplate his family life while riding on buses, drinking in hotel rooms, sitting on restaurant bathroom toilets. With so much still on the line, it was bad form to think about anything other than hitting and catching, but he was giddy with victory and granted himself the indulgence.
Pudge had been given a rare second chance. If he’d been injured at twenty-eight and forced to retire, sleeping under the same roof each night with his wife and kids might have been bearable. His existence could have been something like that of a fierce king wounded in battle during his physical prime. The subsequent failures (running a car dealership into the ground, embarrassing sitcom cameos, handcrafting leaky and porous kayaks that sank like barbells) would have been easily forgiven as the eccentricities of a retired warrior. People would have accepted the fact that Pudge was no businessman or actor, but my goodness, what a damned fine ballplayer.
But Pudge had not gone out on top. He’d lingered and languored and declined in public. Now, at thirty-five, dete
rioration and failure had poisoned the fruits of his sole talent, rendering his youthful accomplishments moot. To his wife and kids, Pudge Morrison was a screech of the tires that made them flinch, dreading the unsightly crash to come. If he retired with a fizzle at the end of another lackluster season, the world would believe that Pudge had been driven from the game and put out to pasture. Deposed kings didn’t get to while away their graying years as charming dilettantes. They became the fools of their own courts. Pudge could sense it in the way his family looked at him, the two blonde daughters and the one brunette, the diabetic pet chinchillas and the day-trading gardener, the wife who tactfully refrained from asking about life on the road but who also might never have liked him.
All that would change if this streak kept up and he retired on the heels of a championship season, a great diamond ring all aflash on his knuckle. He could play thrice-weekly golf and not take flack for the clogged-up gutters, because, after all, he was a world champion, who’d labored many years and finally acquired the ultimate prize in his field. His wife would shake her head, bemused on the phone, and say to her friends things like “What can you do,” and “You know what they say about an old ballplayer.” That was a life he could handle.
During the first home stand of September, Pudge went five for thirteen against Salem and made a diving catch in left center that saved a run and secured another victory for either Tommy or John (I forget which). The girl adopted the customs of the rally and wore the same red dress each game, laundered by Delilah, who kept the new dress she’d bought in her luggage, just in case, next to the Tacitus. The girl sat in the same spot in the dugout, at the center of the bench, next to Happy Truman, with her socks pulled up and her feet dangling. Nobody called or claimed her, not even falsely, and though each player had surely tinkered with his own version of an origin myth, these were never discussed out loud.
As Pudge jogged back to the dugout following his second home run of the Salem series, he noticed the girl gazing distractedly into the upper deck and making, for the first time since she’d arrived, a kind of disconcerted squinting face. Not once in the six weeks since her arrival had the girl said a word or expressed dissatisfaction, but this look she now gave was not of her previous arsenal. Then it disappeared, and she twisted her neck just slightly to look him directly in the eye, which is another thing she’d never done. The gesture opened her eye sockets and created a hall-of-mirrors effect. Where Pudge faced down a disorienting row of thousands of nested images of the girl and himself, himself and the girl, stretching on through her eyeholes into a distant otherness of time and space that his brain couldn’t fathom. It lasted only a fraction of a heartbeat, but right there Pudge knew exactly what the story was. Not a doubt to be had. Sitting in the Birmingham Barons’ very own dugout, dressed up in sheep’s clothing if he’d ever seen such, was bad luck itself.
A shudder ran down through Pudge’s shoulders and into the tight cords of his hamstrings and calves, escaping through his toes to skitter off into the subterranean dampness from whence such shivers are issued. Pudge was not then nor had he ever been a spiritual man, but he’d played baseball long enough to understand about Fortune and the universe. If things were going too well, in defiance of logic, for no good reason, it meant the pendulum was gearing for a nasty return trip. This highly pinchable and unexplained good-luck girl was nothing of the sort. She’d arrived to swap victories with the Barons for a spiritual debt to be named later. Who knew what demand she’d make when the time came? Pudge took off his batting gloves and helmet and grabbed his mitt. He accidentally offered a high five to Engelmann, which was always awkward. He drained a paper Gatorade cup and stretched his neck and looked down the bench to where the girl sat next to Happy Truman, just waiting to turn on them. He shrugged. They were winning 4–1. It was a beautiful fall evening with plenty of summer still touching the air. What the hell difference did it make how they got their wins?
Three hours after Pudge’s realization—which didn’t stop him from sending another booming sacrifice fly into right field that scored a run—he gathered with the rest of the team around Hitsui Takahashi and Delilah on the plane from Salem to Springfield (yes, that Springfield). Lenny Penobscot’s performance on the mound that night had been so nasty, his stuff so wicked and brutal, that the rest of the team could take it no longer. Someone had to ask. We all dispensed with protocol and began pestering our Buddhist teammate for some framework by which to better understand the elevated plane the Penobscots had reached during this recent streak of shutout masterpieces. The twins themselves slept soundly with smiles on their faces a few rows up in reclined seats. The little girl had taken to riding in front with the pilots, which allowed everyone else to relax a little bit.
“Where the body intrudes,” Delilah translated for Hitsui Takahashi, “the mind precludes.” It was difficult for Pudge to hear Delilah say the word “body” without subsequently regarding hers. He fought through the impulse and caught up with her a few seconds later.
“Hold up,” said Pudge. “Is that really how he said it?”
Takahashi nodded, as though he’d understood and approved of what his translator had just said. In truth, what this indicated was not that he understood English but rather that his confidence in Delilah was supreme, due to she’d been a Rhodes Scholar and worked those problems in pen and so forth. “The rhymes are slightly different in Japanese,” she admitted. “But I feel I’ve preserved the meaning.”
“What about . . . ?” Muddy Alvarado gestured as lightly as possible with his no-longer-dead left arm toward the front of the airplane. He made a face that suggested what he wanted to say but couldn’t say, which was along the lines of, “What about—you know—the nameless one? What does your Buddhist knowledge make of her?”
This was borderline treachery. Unlike in the theater—where a taboo phrase can be euphemized by offering hopes of a broken limb—in baseball, any reference whatsoever to the unspeakable (an in-progress no-hitter, a batting streak, a tendency to get beaned by a pitcher you knew you couldn’t hit) was a blatant infraction. But the Barons were all so privately curious that once Muddy had broken the seal, we all hung around to catch a whiff of what followed.
Delilah directed a different set of hand and facial gestures toward Hitsui, which I guess was her way of translating Muddy’s American body language into Japanese. She was dressed in the green pantsuit I loved so much, the one that pulled tight across her hips and outlined a perfect freckled V of exposed, flattish chest.
Hitsui nodded, again, understanding, and I was struck by how much knowledge resided in that slight, simple gesture. I meant to remark on this, but just as Hitsui was about to speak to Delilah, the plane hit a rough patch that sent bags tumbling from overhead compartments and tossed unbuckled ballplayers into the aisle. The lights flickered. The floor dropped and swooped up to meet us. Then it was still again.
Everyone, even Hitsui, looked horrified. We gathered ourselves together and straightened our ties and pants and returned the luggage to where it belonged. No one spoke for the rest of the flight. It had nothing to do with gravitas or fearing for our lives. Everyone knew we’d broken a rule and it was all going to end. We’d blown it. Who was to blame? Was it Muddy, for making that face? Delilah, for translating it? All of us for sitting idly by? Even Engelmann, to my mind at least, seemed to twitch nervously just a little bit in the upper part of his right cheek as he stared into the seatback in front of him.
The plane landed in Springfield without incident, and the Barons glumly disembarked. The next day, as expected, the girl was gone. No one could say when it happened. She rode with the team to the hotel, showed up for the team meal, was there in the clubhouse while players taped their wrists and soaked their aching limbs in cold whirlpools. But when we took the field and looked back over our shoulders, Happy Truman sat by himself in the dugout. I think we all secretly hoped she was in the bathroom or something, but then we’d never known her to use the bathroom. Good old denial kept us fro
m losing our composure, but it didn’t stop us from losing the game. Marty Penobscot couldn’t find his pinpoint control and walked eight guys in six innings, gave up nine runs. Some knuckleballer with an 8–10 record and a 5.29 ERA held us to three hits and no runs. The ball looked like a drunken mosquito flying toward me. I never had a prayer of hitting it.
The flight home, again, was silent. In a way, the girl’s disappearance had broken a tension that had begun to feel unbearable. The Barons had understood the rules. We’d known this winning couldn’t go on indefinitely and that no lucky streak or strange orphan was permanent. In the same way the anticipation is worse than the actual blow when you offer your debtor a free punch to the face and you’re standing there waiting for it, so is Fortune’s actual reversal less agonizing than the dread of its arrival.
Eventually, the spell broke. Various wisecracks and jokes found their legs and a steady outburst of chatter filled the plane. We’d been freed from the constraints of a superstitious vigil, but it wasn’t a full or authentic relief. The Barons had made a crucial mistake and allowed themselves to peek too far down the road, to wonder if maybe just this once the universe would cut them a break, turn a blind eye, allow them a disproportionate share of the glory. They’d fallen into the trap of anticipating the future, of expanding their minds to occupy more than one moment. They’d let themselves hope. And what better recipe for disappointment?
Day One, Year One: Best New Stories and Poems, 2014 Page 23
