Class A (24 page)

Danny and I were going to go see
The Expendables
, which looks epic, but we’re late because I was at Manning’s Whistle Stop, hiding from the rain, drinking Old Style, and scarfing down frozen pizza. He was at a fan’s house having a steak dinner and missing home. They played pool and said grace. He called Chelsea and put her on speakerphone, and she talked to everyone for a while.

She reminded Danny that he needs to start being proactive, making calls for part-time winter work. He was a salesman at Staples last off-season, red T-shirt, pleated slacks, a name tag saying, “Hi, I’m Daniel.” In five months he sold more than anyone else on staff, set a new branch record, commemorated with a plaque bearing both his photograph and his name.

We’re too late for all the epicness of Sly Stallone and “Stone Cold” Steve Austin sharing the screen, and Danny refuses to pick up the movie in the middle. We see the next available show,
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
, a semi-animated hipster opus about a drifting Canadian boy a little older than Danny, a little younger than me. The theater is nearly empty, just us, an elderly couple who may have remained in their seats from the last movie, and two teenage girls who clearly don’t like high school.

We watch Michael Cera’s impossibly narrow shoulders.

We listen to him kick at his sheets and say things like “I just want to lie here.”

We watch two pale men awake next to each other, kiss on the lips, and go for coffee.

We watch a mass of freaks vie for a purple-haired girl’s affections—a skater, a vegan, a chubby lesbian who only wears black.

Danny is writhing at the weirdness. He whispers questions to me, the first time he’s seen me as somebody who might be able to answer something: Why would a straight guy lie down next to two gay guys? What makes a bass guitar different from a guitar guitar? What are these people’s jobs? Is that what your house looks like?

He wants to know if I, too, have the kinds of knickknacks, band posters, instruments, and books that we see on-screen. He wants to know if I understand these people in glasses identical to my glasses, strewn about on beanbags, talking constantly, never doing. Maybe he has never known anybody who fits the role of lovable white male movie protagonist, outside a war movie, a church movie, or a sports movie. I like to think that there’s a yearning in him for such aimlessness, but how can I know that? His type of hero is better, doesn’t need irony or music trivia proficiency. I come to games for that.

He misses Chelsea. He texts her. I smell his cologne and hair gel, more pungent from the rain outside. He bolts right after the credits, calls Chelsea from the parking lot. When he hangs up, he says, with a touch of true sadness, “Man, this might be the last time I’m ever at this theater.” Then he catches himself, smiles, says, “I said that last year.” He looks back at the Clinton eight-plex, and so I do, too. It’s a movie theater. The names on the marquee are misspelled in places. A kid is taking a cigarette break outside.

“You should take a picture of it,” I say, not sure if I’m kidding.

He shrugs and I drive him to Walmart to buy toilet paper.

He stands in front of the Walmart sign, the shimmering red, almost extraterrestrial, hovering above the stretch of black parking lots around us. He looks up, turns his palms to the sky, gives a high-pitched, holy hum, and then breaks into a soft giggle.

“This is the place,” he says.

And it is. Most of my greatest intimacies in the baseball season have occurred here. Clinton’s Walmart is a super one, complete with clothing, groceries, home and garden, an eye doctor, a Subway, a gas station, a Tire and Lube, and a bank, where you can deposit checks directly for store credit.

Danny even recognizes some employees, says hello, says thanks when
they tell him they heard he’s doing well. He doesn’t know that a year ago a ten-year lawsuit was finally settled, begun by Clinton Walmart employees, extending throughout the entire state, becoming the collective action of ninety-seven thousand current and former Iowa Walmart workers who all were victims of a “uniform scheme of wage abuse.” Some of these people saying hi to Danny were probably part of the group that took a stand over being screwed out of minimum wage, and when the victorious dust settled, Walmart paid out $11 million total, or an average of $113 per employee.

There are similar grumblings happening among ADM workers right now, though we don’t know it yet. In the coming months, they will officially file their own lawsuit against two small companies that subcontract hourly labor at ADM, complaining about a lack of fair overtime pay and the fact that in a factory so big the punch clock is half a mile from the exit, that there are always extra tasks, off-the-clock work, that they must do on the walk out to their cars. And another suit will be filed a week after the baseball season is over, by the Brodericks and forty-five of their remaining neighbors. They will claim that the factory is so big, so loud, so bright, pouring so much unidentified runoff into what looks like an Olympic-sized pool across the street from their windows, that they can’t sleep, that they can’t live, not in a way that makes them feel human.

What does this have to do with us? With Danny? It’s just a group of people dwarfed. But the scope of dissatisfaction is palpable, affects so many people whom we walk past, looking for toiletries. Danny pushes a shopping cart like a little kid, running, riding, turning on two wheels. I trot to keep up, and he talks back to me, a tumult of complaints and truths that could never be voiced in the clubhouse. He talks the way he does to Chelsea, only Chelsea really, and I think the words come so fast because of the realization that she isn’t here and that she is the only one, has been the only one since fourteen.

He was yelled at today for trying to steal a base on his own, and rightfully so. He tried to steal third with the team losing, the kind of selfish move that sends Little League coaches into embarrassing, hat-stomping fits. Tamargo didn’t exactly stomp his hat, but he was furious, and everybody saw him glare at Danny, who refused to lock eyes. Everybody noticed that Danny was pulled from the game, too, for committing that
cardinal sin of putting himself above the team. Danny recognizes the hypocrisy. He is
trying
to be noticed. That’s the whole point. If he isn’t noticed, then he isn’t worth anything, and then he isn’t on any team at all. And the thing that makes him noticeable is his speed. Thus, he will run. He
should
run. Nick Franklin, he points out, makes bad decisions all the time. Tamargo hates Nick Franklin, Danny assures me. Hates him. But Nick isn’t some regular guy like Danny. Nick has, as Danny puts it, the right to do anything he wants.

Danny’s eyes are wide, his voice hushed as he says it, but nobody is listening, and these aren’t exactly secrets just because they’re never voiced. Tamargo is middle management, and he knows it. This is his team to run the way he is told to run it from a thousand miles away. Nobody pretends that Nick Franklin doesn’t matter more. That the further you are from Nick Franklin status, the more you become just a guy with a really poorly paying job who complains loudly about it to his wife and mumbles under his breath to everyone else.

I want to see Danny run. That’s what I want. I want to see him run.

It is such a clear thought, acute and dominating and sudden. I want to see him sprint through Home Cleaning Products, through Waste Disposal, hands raised as he coasts into Lawn Care along the back wall that must be ten base paths away from here. He doesn’t break out into a full sprint. He doesn’t stand in front of the discount mowers, fists in the air like Rocky. That’s too much.

I have to remind myself that Danny is still some version of a star. He still plays in a professional baseball stadium because no matter what has happened in Clinton, there is a professional baseball team here. It’s still fun to watch, maybe more so for the accomplishment of lasting and never changing while other institutions erode around it. And Tim is a little tanked on Mike’s Hard Lemonade because he’s trying to get away from the carbs of beer and the boozy citrus tastes pretty fucking good against the heat. And Danny is on the bench today, but the day before he hit a line drive home run over the left-field fence, and nothing feels better than that. And in the seventh inning lull of a sloppy, slow game, something remarkable happens. Two bats extend up over the top of the dugout, as though floating. Latex gloves have been blown up by an
unseen mouth, taped to the handle of each bat. Somebody has made them into arms.

“Look,” Tim yells and begins guffawing as everyone else notices, too.

The bat-arms begin to clap, and Tim takes the cue, claps along with them, screams at his people to follow suit. They do. The bat-arms move faster, whipping a thousand people into something like a frenzy. Then the bat-hands switch tack, begin waving back and forth in time with the rhythm they created. This is too much, and applause breaks out. I find myself laughing like somebody far less sober than I am. I find myself crazed. My shoulders bump into Tim’s. We rock into each other, saying, “What the hell?” Joining the chorus of fans who have forgotten that a game is being played and only want to know who is making this simple, wooden robot clap.

The game ends, and Danny emerges holding one bat-arm in each hand. I am wholly a fan as we all cry out that we knew it, we knew it was him. Betty is overwhelmed by the silly kindness of the gesture. Danny turns and hands her a bat. She hands him a picture she’s been saving, one she took weeks ago and printed out, him standing in that classic baseball pose, head high, one hand resting on his bat like a cane, the other on his waist.

I
T
’
S THE MIDDLE OF THE SEVENTH INNING
. The LumberKings are slaughtering the South Bend Silver Hawks. Yet again, and not surprisingly, it is hot. We talk about that fact in the stands. But today brings tolerable heat, nothing too bad, not one of those days when “hot” is the only thing to say, not like the one last week when the stands were packed because the ADM work floor overheated to 137 degrees and people got bused out early, taken to the game to drink and not be angry. So things are good. And despite the LumberKings’ overall trend of losing as much as they win, there is a sense of optimism. The team is on a two-game winning streak. The season is more over than not and Nick Franklin is still here; there he is, nibbling at a leather tie on his glove, waiting to take the field. Tim is saying that there is a good feeling to the bunch out there right now, saying that this one feels as if it has the potential to be a dream team. He is providing no proof.

Also, three sheep are running onto the field, displaying pure terror as we begin to cheer them. They break away from one another, one sprinting right at the bleachers, toward the noise, one grazing behind second base, as though if it behaves normally, all this will go away, another trotting along the outfield fence, trapped. We watch. They are all novelty. They can do nothing but be, and I think that their appeal—grazing on a
baseball field
?—will soon grow thin.

“Here we go, here we go,” Tim says next to me.

Two sheepdogs sprint in from right field, saddled. Monkeys are perched atop the saddles, little hands clutching little reins, torsos flailing as the dogs gallop.

The monkeys are capuchins, of course. What other monkey would
let itself be slipped into baby-sized leather chaps? These are monkeys to worship. Even the name, “capuchin,” originally referred to a group of friars. People saw brown fur, white tuft on the head, and they thought it looked like a brown robe and white hood. They were holy, humanish little things.

Somebody screams, “Oh my God, those are
monkeys!
”

Somebody else says, “Thanks, Captain Obvious,” but the derisive laughter that should follow is muted because something amazing is happening, which is way more interesting than scorn: fucking
monkeys
are riding on dogs as if they’re
people
.

“Get ready for the greatest show on earth,”
Brad tells us from the PA booth.

The show is the herding. While we are transfixed by the improbable animals, an extended-cab Dodge Ram pickup creeps onto the field and parks between home plate and the pitcher’s mound. On each side, the word “Dodge” is written big, all capitals, part of a sponsorship agreement. Also, there are two American flag decals, a bald eagle’s head blown up to the size of a beer keg, and the stenciled slogans “Grab life by the horns” and “Be the best of the best.” Two real American flags fly above the roof, and the four white wooden walls of a miniature cattle pen rest on the flatbed. “Wild Thang” Lepard leaps from the pickup, and Mitch runs out to help him assemble the pen.

Wild Thang grabs a microphone and faces the twelve hundred or so of us scattered in the stands in front of him. He asks, “Are y’all ready to see something you won’t believe but that is 100 percent, God’s honest real?”

Hank is standing on the top step of the dugout with a plastic smile. He unwraps a strawberry sucking candy that Betty gave him, pops it in his mouth, raises his eyebrows as if surprised by the sweetness. He showed up again a few days ago, walked into the locker room with his two duffel bags and his bats. He found his old locker untouched, his jersey, the arbitrarily chosen 31, hanging, clean and pressed, the way it had been throughout his brief demotion.

“We kept you here, Hanky,” Danny told him. There were smiles and
shouts, a lot of soft sentiment that made everyone quickly uncomfortable. Hank nodded and tried not to give such a childishly wide grin, such open admission of being truly, vulnerably touched.

I was standing next to Pollreisz in the hallway next to the trainer’s room talking about crossword puzzles, a shared hobby that we get too much mileage out of. He hit my shoulder and flicked his head toward the kindly drama happening among his charges, toward Hank.

“
That’s
what it’s about,” he told me. “When you are the kind of man that the team wants around, we keep a piece of you.”