Class A (21 page)

In the first at bat of what may be his last game as an A-ball player, Hank swings at the first pitch. He slashes it, a line drive over third, slides safely into second, the LumberKings’ first hit of the game. He is applauded harder than usual by his teammates. He scores on a single up the middle, sliding once again, dirt-adorned as he trots back to the dugout, having tied the game at one. In his third at bat of the day, he muscles a grounder over the bag, a probable out with a better third baseman, but no matter. He got his two hits. He’s a man of his word. Freeze. It should be over. This is the moment he wanted.

He comes up in the ninth. Jones is on first, there are no outs, the LumberKings are losing 5–3. He gets ahead in the count. He gets a lucky, meaty mistake of a pitch. It is waiting for him, and he swings too hard. He grounds out.

He will propose to his girlfriend, he knows that much, when he is done playing. He will finish college in South Central L.A., the same Cal State satellite school where he started. Maybe he’ll get it done in a year or two, working with his dad full-time trimming hedges. Eventually, he will be a cop. He likes uniforms and order, so he will be a cop. He will save. He will buy a house near his parents. There are worse things. Welington Dotel has nothing else, beyond unaffiliated independent ball and perhaps a winter stint in the Mexican League, no country that is fully his anymore, no written English, no high school diploma, never worked a job other than the one he just lost. But to be here, to be good enough to not quite hang on in an A-ball squad for one of the worst major-league organizations in baseball, you need to have embraced
rigid, single-minded optimism. The kind that makes any other option so hollow and pointless that it hurts.

Hank is wearing his blue-and-white-checked collared shirt coming out of the locker room. He is wearing black jeans, black sneakers. His hair is gelled, and the wind, hard tonight, does not move it. He drags his bat bag across the parking lot, the heaviest piece of luggage that he will bring to the airport. Joyce moves, stands by his shoulder, as I knew she would, calls him Henry, asks him to leave ink behind, asks him with reverence.

I am glad that I resist the temptation to tell Hank everything about myself in the twenty paces he takes between the door to the visitors’ locker room and the bus. And it is a strong temptation, because he will be gone and because he seems, even as he doesn’t want to, so bare that he should be met with some unburdening in return. I am drifting, Hank. And I think that I am ill equipped. I find it difficult to think of life as anything other than loss, and I know that sounds big, too big, but it’s true.

I want to tell Hank that I’ve been thinking about the term
nostalgia
, the root of it. How I learned that the word originated when a graduate student mixed the Greek word
nostos
, “return to the native land,” with
algos
, “suffering, grief.” I want to tell him that it was born to describe mercenaries who traveled Europe for a job until they weren’t sure what they missed, that it was classified as fatal. I want to ask him, Isn’t that crazy, Hank? To die from wanting to return. I want to tell him that I miss things that were never mine, want to return to a place, more of a feeling, that never really existed, and doesn’t baseball always promise that there was once something purer?

I like you because you are sturdy, Hank, and there is supposed to be poetry, holiness, other overblown paeans to the way a dependable catcher is always squatting for some other guy’s benefit. And maybe you were told that, too, so you live it. You were never not sacrificial.

“I’ll see you soon,” I tell him.

“Write about me,” he says.

“Use my name,” he says.

I
T
’
S HOT
. We say that to each other four or five times. Danny is in his workout clothes—black shorts, black LumberKings T-shirt. He wants to take the shirt off, lean his bare skin against the wooden picnic benches, pretend he’s at the beach, pretend the Mississippi is the Pacific and this is his summer after high school. He’s not allowed to—
look like a goddamn professional
—so he settles on rolling his shirtsleeves up above his shoulders and pulling the bottom of his shirt above his abs, letting the sun hit some skin at least, running his fingers along the muscle mounds that cover him effortlessly. Muscles are a small comfort in the face of today’s slight. The all-star game rosters have been released—Nick Franklin, Erasmo, two other LumberKings. Not Danny. He isn’t angry, he says. He won’t say that he’s sad, either, because sadness is, well, too sad. It’s just a bit unfair, is all. And, man, it’s hot today.

There is a game to play: seven o’clock start time, nothing unusual. But the quiet and routine boredom hangs heavier, feels like smoke, thick, black, and chemical, with a smell and a taste. Danny smiles at a ginger teenager in too-short shorts passing by to set up the concession stands.

“Hey, do you think I could get a Pepsi?”

She turns in a hurry, looks at Danny and then the ground, says, “Yeah.”

“Like for free? And you’ll bring it to me?”

He knows that she’ll do it, they both do. She smiles into her chest, says yeah again, walks off, her body clenched as she forces herself not to move too fast, returning with twenty-four ounces for him, asking, “Is that too much ice?” This is a perk.

Danny’s wife, Chelsea, is down the street at the public pool. She does that a lot, lies by the pool during the many hours when he’s at the park and she’s not allowed to be. She moved here once it became apparent
Danny wasn’t getting called up to High-A anytime soon. Now there is a limit to the different ways she can fill an afternoon. Sometimes she has lunch with a group of girls who lust after Danny’s teammates or with her dowdy host mother and the host mother’s church friends. Then most of the time she comes to the field early, drinks iced tea, sits in her California girl cutoff shorts, and lets her legs stretch across rows of empty plastic seats. When Betty and the others shuffle in and say, “Hi, dear,” she hugs them and agrees, “Gosh, it’s hot.”

I have spent a lot of time with Chelsea because she is always there waiting and so am I. Other wives and girlfriends, mostly girlfriends, come and go, but she is the constant, committed fully and daily. Committed not just to Danny but to all of this: wifedom, fidelity, baseball, sacrifice, God, positivity, smiling. She seems like a missionary of sorts, a Mormon pamphleteer, far from home and with a job to do. She walks into the stadium both a part of it and above it, an outsider willing to be happy here.

She is told she is beautiful, every day, God, Chelsea, you look beautiful, because she always does, tanned skin, just enough of it there for us to see, not too much, jangling bracelets, intricate sandals with leather that snakes up her calves and makes everyone else tuck their flip-flops back under their seats. She responds with “Thanks” and “You’re
too
nice” and “Cheer for Danny tonight.” Everyone does. She makes rounds through the pockets of loyal fans during every game, ending up next to Betty and Tim, all of us, while people pull out photographs of Danny looking clean and ready and powerful, showing his image back to her the way she wants to see it.

Danny runs through his numbers that Chelsea has already reminded me of—batting in the high .270s, a surprising eight home runs, and, most important, second in the Midwest League in steals, a ranking that would be higher if Danny played every day. He tells me that now, outright, more outright than any player has been with me:
If they let me play every day, I’m the best leadoff hitter in this league
. He nods once, fast, punctuating the sentiment. He sounds very close to believing it. I agree. He smiles at me, not quite trusting.

Then he veers off, brings the conversation somewhere nicer, lying flat on the picnic bench, looking straight up at the sky. He’s telling me that story again, the one about when he was eighteen, which was only three
years ago, but he tells it with distance in his voice. He doesn’t address the money outright, but it’s there, more than $300,000 the summer after high school, paying for a sweet car and money for his parents, covering a big chunk of his older brother’s college tuition, which made him feel so awesomely benevolent. And then he went to short-season rookie ball in Arizona, tore the place up as if everybody else were moving in slow motion, stuck in the mud. He proposed to Chelsea and they married, and they went to Hawaii for six weeks. He played invite-only fall tournaments during the mornings, and then they lay on the beach and talked about how there was nowhere else they had to be, so comfortably alone, tossing each other into oncoming waves, collapsing gleefully into the sand.

I heard this story yesterday from Chelsea, sitting at this same bench, waiting for Danny to get dressed after the game. Same details, the beach, the warmth, Danny’s on-field success, as if nobody was capable of stopping him from becoming who he wanted to be. Same tone, same panic underneath the perfect memories. Same quiet, unsure anger, both feeling let down, cheated for the first time.

Danny sits up, slurps his Pepsi like a little boy, greedy, easily sated for an instant and then not at all. He feels, or reaches to express feeling, which is what I would do, what most people I know would do, and that lack of complete stoicism, his willingness to at least voice hurt, is a relief on this day when the first half’s best have been decided and announced. Sometimes the drone of suppressed emotion can be the most unforgiving aspect of the clubhouse. So many things happening to these players, so much stubborn silence. Sitting next to a young man, raw and bruised, I think of a baseball camp I went to a month after my brother died. I think of the men who coached me there, the water bottles they filled with spit, the cup checks they conducted, strolling through the lines of players in the morning, picking crotches at random, and bringing the handle of the bat up to clip the bottom of the sack, the undefended boy shrieking and then nodding when informed, “Now you will come to the field prepared.”

I remember in pregame warm-ups when one boy called another boy a faggot and then a third boy with big, wet eyes, not me, said, “Don’t do that. That’s an awful thing to call someone.” I remember the boy with the big, wet eyes running laps while our coach yelled, “Shut the fuck
up and don’t ever act like you’re better than your teammates again.” Despite the baseball played there, camp was something not comforting, something truly frightening, a place that was meant to hurt me. And it was the first time I had ever played badly, leaping away from inside pitches, apologizing to teammates for mistakes, and then apologizing when told not to apologize. At night, I read
Harry Potter
with a flashlight under my comforter, didn’t fall asleep, but still dreamed of the ability to become invisible, the ability to bring those unjustly lost back to life. Before my coaches told me as much, it was then under the covers that I began to allow for the realization that there was something hysterical and needy in me that could never be an athlete in the way I’d been taught to believe I could. That easy tears
did
somehow correlate with an inability to win.

Danny is not that boy, of course, not thirteen and in a pubescent, mourning free fall, not taking asthma breaks during wind sprints or making secret calls home to be told he
is
good. But in a locker room rigid with the absence of outward doubt or fear or melancholy, he is the closest thing. He is that someone who cannot help but express that he wants more, a cardinal sin in both Dickensian orphanages and minor-league baseball clubhouses.

He begins to describe feeling small. Or not so much small, but less. He tries to piece together why he isn’t an all-star, and I’m glad that I can be a yes-man for him right now, my presence like his wife’s or parents’, or Betty’s or Joyce’s, those dedicated to the idea of him and without the need to be impartial. Yes, .280 is pretty darn good. Yes, nobody is faster than he is. Yes, I watch him every day. I see him run like nobody else. Other people should see it, too.

Erasmo is an all-star. He is the only starting pitcher from Clinton to get the distinction. In the clubhouse, the other starters, all friends, are playing cards and unloading a torrent of mutual complaint. Erasmo is not a part of that conversation, nor is he celebrating with his Venezuelan friends, because they, too, have not been recognized. Erasmo is alone, his laptop warming bare knees. He is looking at the same pictures of himself that he always looks at, this time under fresh headlines that call him “all-star.” His Facebook page is up, covered now in Spanglish messages from Nicaraguan journalists who want the first quote about his achievement.

Erasmo gets no bonus for his all-star inclusion, nor does it guarantee anything other than a lack of a rest. Still, he is elated. He is an allstar in America. The game is to be played six hours away, and the team hasn’t paid for bus or plane tickets. Nick Franklin will drive the two other American-born all-stars, bass thumping out of his car, slick lines cooed at teenage girls at rest stops, briefly free from any responsibility. Erasmo will get a ride from Ted, the general manager he’s never spoken to, sitting in the backseat with Ted’s tween son, flicking his eyes back and forth to their conversation. But none of that, the kid, the smell of strangers’ farts in a closed vehicle, the endless miles of drive-thrus and corn, will rob him of the feeling of expansive, crescendoing satisfaction.

Erasmo is a pleasant surprise. Low overhead, easy upkeep, the unsqueakiest of wheels.

Tamargo told me just the other day, pointing at his best pitcher running sprints alone,
“You’ll see him in the bigs someday.”
If so, he will be the greatest kind of investment, a career maker for whatever low-level scout first saw him. Fifty grand up front, with no negotiation, no other options. Two years in Venezuela, cheap room and board with a small salary, moving up to the United States ahead of schedule. And he’ll keep moving up, never dominant enough at any level to get a big head about it. Special attention, personal trainers, psychological counseling, these extra resources will not be necessary for a boy who never feels comfortable speaking beyond his responsibilities, describing himself as anything other than one of many. Give up less, get out more. That’s the ideal.