Class A (30 page)

We stop at Walmart for Coors Light and energy drinks, Stouffer’s TV dinners and Pop-Tarts for tomorrow. Nick stands and waits by the door, texting, maybe his father, maybe telling him no, it’s fine, he’ll be good tonight, really, it’s fine. Fray Martinez is trying to pay for his eighteen-pack of Coors but is left staring, frozen, at the clerk who says,
“ID,”
louder and louder, as though volume were the problem. Hank puts a calming hand on his teammate’s shoulder and says something. Fray pulls out a Dominican driver’s license, which does not clear anything up. Hank inserts himself between the two blank faces and assumes his usual position of smiling translator.

“Dominican,” he tells her. “Dominican Republic? The island? And see it says right there: twenty-one.”

“Oh. Baseball?”

Fray smiles and nods vigorously at the mention of his profession.

Hank walks away to have the stilted girlfriend conversation that develops as the days of no privacy mount:
Hey … lost … yeah … nope … not sure … I will … you too
. I follow him out into the parking lot, and we lean together on the hood of my hatchback. He smiles as it groans under our weight, and I jump away to protect it.

“It’s a piece of shit,” I say.

“It runs,” he says. “It’s stupid to ask for more than that.”

He doesn’t say it with venom, just flat honesty. We watch the rest of the players file out into the glow of that neon red sign that is the same everywhere.

“Can I drive it?” Hank asks. “Your car? I’m a way better driver than you.”

This, too, is not cruel, just true.

“Of course,” I tell him.

“That’s what I miss the most,” he says. “I have a Jeep at home. It’s mine. I drive myself everywhere.”

“Sweet,” I say.

The other three cram in the back, this time with Franklin telling Núñez to sit in the middle. Núñez mutters,
“Coño,”
eyes the wunderkind whom he now backs up on the field, realizes that this isn’t a fun or winnable fight, and defers. The beers are stacked in between Fray’s long legs, and he places his Baseball Chapel pamphlet on top to keep reading.

It’s always about perseverance, always a challenge, always brief,
one page English, one page Spanish, so that the stoic redemption is absorbed by all.

God uses trials to help grow our faith.

Dios aprovecha estos momentos difíciles en nuestra vida para que nuestra fe desarrolle
.

God uses trials to discipline us when we aren’t living for Him.

Dios usa las pruebas como instrumentos de disciplina cuando no andamos en Sus caminos
.

The translations are stilted and too long, the product of an organization that’s all-American Baptist, running its message through a Google function and assuming that the gravitas holds up. It reads like how the Latino players sound when they do their mandatory biweekly Rosetta Stone sessions, forced formalities that will never be natural no matter how hard they try to assimilate—
May I purchase some milk? Excuse me, where is the nearest library?

Hank hits a bump on the cracked Clinton roads, and the beer clinks in between Fray’s legs, drawing concerned whips of all the heads in the car. Fray looks contrite.

The baseball players are primping now. There are pre-torn jeans and fake-rhinestone T-shirts being tossed aside, picked up, and then discarded again. There are hats, not worn and dirt streaked like their LumberKings hats, but hats of major-league teams preserved in almost plastic newness, the brims subtly curved by expert hands.

I have nothing to change into, so I sit with Fray on the rented living room couch, watching a Kate Hudson romantic comedy while he slicks and buffs his Jheri curl. He finishes eventually, wipes his hands on the couch, and puts all his tools back into an ever-present prized possession, a leather, monogrammed toiletries bag. Fray likes alcohol and he likes women, or, more precisely, the way women look at him, his giant frame contrasted with full, soft lips and eyes that always seem to be pleading for something. Núñez, the other Dominican left on the LumberKings, likes to go out as well, and from the doorway to his bedroom Hank yells to me that you can always count on a Dominican as a wingman. Fray understands this and smiles.

The most fun of all the players, it is universally agreed, was Welington Dotel, with his willing, hilarious butchering of English slang, with his limber dance moves. American girls loved him here in Clinton, everywhere really. He’s probably back in Oregon with the dimpled blond girl who loved him the most and married him and then got pregnant. He is off being a twenty-four-year-old small-town American father with conversational English, facing an entirely different ocean than the one he was born surrounded by.

Núñez puts on a pristine black fitted cap that Dotel left behind and cocks it to the left.

“I am a sexy motherfucker,” he declares. He dances alone, with no music, his socks making muffled scratching noises on the gray wall-to-wall carpet that accompanies cheap rent across Iowa, that I recognize exactly from the apartment I arrived at a year ago.

“Do you talk to Dotel still?” I ask, hopeful. “Are you gonna call him tonight to say whatsup?”

“No,” Núñez says. “He’s gone.”

“You have his number, right?”

“I dunno. I think so. He’s gone.”

Núñez shrugs and looks over to Hank, as if maybe something had been lost in translation.

“We don’t really stay in touch,” Hank says. “If you’re here, you’re here. If you’re not, we don’t have time.”

Núñez nods. “It’s his bad luck,” he says with a sly smile that fades quickly, absorbed by the unadorned white walls and the bare lightbulb, nothing cheerful in the room around him to support the sentiment. We are all still, all quiet. All thinking that Núñez has been with this organization four years, that he, too, is a Dominican who has done nothing but play for all his adult life and is now playing less and less, watching more and more. He will be living in Brooklyn next year, out of baseball, not a citizen, posting a lot of random videos on Facebook. I might see him on the subway in two Christmases on my way to a party, and we will just nod at each other through a Saturday night crowd. Or maybe I will nod and imagine reciprocation from him. Or maybe that won’t be him at all because a young Dominican dude in street clothes doesn’t stand out on the A train the way he might in a LumberKings uniform.
Fray will be gone in a few weeks, yanked home with a visa issue that nobody helped him with. He will return to America for spring training, then another season here, then he’ll get cut, too. And then there’s Hank.

I want them to all be memorable to one another, but how do you say that out loud?

“I think I want to get fucked up tonight,” Hank says to break the silence.

There’s a carton of thirty eggs on the counter that should be in the fridge. It shouldn’t be here at all, in fact. Iowa eggs have been recalled from major chain stores because of a small
E. coli
breakout, something that has been headline news for weeks around here and, thus, has probably gone unnoticed by every minor-league baseball player in the area. I point to the carton and tell Núñez to get rid of these eggs. He shrugs and asks what else are they going to do for breakfast and why would eggs be sold at Walmart if they’re bad for you? It has been the same through the oil spill in the gulf, through the passing of anti-immigration laws in Arizona, a blatant affront to a third of the team that elicited nothing more than shrugs and distrustful glances when I tried to bring it up in the locker room. And through a collapsing economy reflected in the lives of their families back home, and in every city they travel to. Maybe there is some grumbling about why in the hell would these Ohio teams have such beautiful, big stadiums and suddenly no fans to fill them, but that’s all. Newspapers are not read, or printed material of any kind, save for the stacks of
Baseball America
that show up biweekly and make everyone nervous as they look for a boldfaced mention of their own names. And the bilingual God pamphlets. Locker-room TVs are set to ESPN, and only that. At home, screens are turned to Xbox fantasies, games that can be won and then turned off in a matter of forty-five minutes. There is a complimentary LumberKings calendar magnet on the fridge in this apartment so that the players can track where they will play and also what day it is, but the dutiful marking of the passage of time with wins and losses ended sometime in May.

Hank’s recent brush with reality came in the form of a call saying that his father fell on a landscaping job, shattering bones in his knees, rendered unable to work for months. Even that cannot be dealt with, not really, until the season is over. It is life. This is life, too, but also something else.

Nick Franklin walks out of the biggest room in the apartment and holds up a pair of white patent-leather loafers fit for a television pimp from before he was born. He raises his eyebrows to ask for approval.

There’s whistling.

“I like to look distinct,” he explains to me.

We pour out into the dark hallways, out into the parking lot, past the shirtless man grilling hot dogs in his Vietnam vet hat, into my car, and into the night, toward fun. There is a small nuclear power plant down the street from the Indian Village apartments, glowing and growling. It’s the first of three factories we will see at various distances, through barbed-wire fencing on the way to the bar, gradually growing bigger, ending with ADM.

“People work there,” Nick Franklin says with gravity as we drive past. “Right now, people are working there.”

“Turn the music up,” Hank demands.

I fumble with the dial, which fades and rises as it pleases. I flush as they laugh at my lack of control. It is a level of innocent but ever-present pressure that still overwhelms me, so specific to being on a team or among one, the feeling of never being alone, never exhaling fully. Often my weakness, my sensitivity, is highlighted in the briefest of interactions—when a joke is turned on me, when a hard, cocksure hand pokes at the softest part of my flesh, the kind of matter-of-fact cruelty that these boys can take and are defined by, that leaves me gutted.

“Nobody’s car is perfect,” Hank says, too gently, next to me.

I finally get the radio loud, and Delilah bellows out.

Hank’s head snaps toward me, part amused and part betrayed by her syrupy, middle-aged proclamations of love and faith that mark me as something other than how I appear. Núñez laughs in the back and, seeing his reaction, so does Fray Martinez. I am about to switch channels when Nick Franklin yells,
“Yo!”
And then, when he has everyone’s attention, “It’s
Delilah
.”

He is leaning forward toward the radio now, as though to protect the dial and protect the voice. His face is between mine and Hank’s, half visible in the weak light of my dashboard. I see him, I think. Maybe for the first time. I see the slight slant of the Superman chin that I always assumed was without a break in symmetry. I see baby-ness around the eyes, the cheeks. I see excitement uncontrolled, and kindness, and youth
in him in the semi-dark, hear it in his voice as he experiences Delilah. And, yes, it’s just a moment, but he is so rarely ever really there.

“My mother used to play this,” he says. “I thought it was just a Florida thing. She used to play it as I fell asleep.”

I want to cry and to pat him. Pat him somewhere, his head maybe, if he wasn’t wearing such a new, rigid hat, brim tilted to the side at a perfect forty-five degrees. Or maybe his back, a pat that turns into a rub, something not quite fatherly, but close.

“What the fuck is this?” Hank says, not thinking about patting anything.

“It’s, like, soothing, you know?” Nick says. “Like old songs. Love songs.”

And then he closes his eyes. Just for a moment, but still, eyelashes pushed together, face slack, no smirk or scowl, an impression of what he may have been like in a childhood that he is still balancing on. It feels as though something important has been revealed here, an interior I guess, which of course he has, but that has never seemed important. It feels like he has shared a connection, a trust, a commiseration about the slow melancholy of life with me, born from more than the simple facts that he is in my car and we both only just realized that Delilah is widely syndicated.

“I like to be quiet sometimes,” he adds. “I like to sort of chill and think about things. I’m like that.”

He gives a look that scans all of us. He sees Hank, who has become some combination of big brother and hired help to him. He sees these Dominican boys whom he cannot really understand, but who he feels should understand him. He sees me. For a lengthy moment, me.

When I was nineteen and had graduated from high school, I went to college, bought a hookah, got dumped by my high school girlfriend, smashed an orange against my dorm room wall, smoked a lot of pot, gained a lot of weight, wrote a poem that involved the image of myself as a snowflake, and did mushrooms with friends, hugging each one individually, making a solemn pact that no matter what happened, we would none of us become hamsters running on the wheel. And I missed being read to, not that it had happened in years. But for the first time, on a dorm cot, I mourned that embarrassing routine. I mourned the absence of a soft sound that never changed, of the unmistakable presence
of my father next to me and the safety it promised. I missed it all silently, stoned, unable to sleep, listening to my roommate pummel himself and sigh as he came into a dirty sock. It was painful, I remember, but it was vivid. I know all of it still. I remember the ridiculous weight of those days, and for some reason I will swear that they were necessary. There is value in melancholy and uncertainty, in desperate, exaggerated memory. I talk about it with Tim in the stands. How it is important to remember the way something felt and smelled and sounded. To miss it. Sometimes it feels like I miss everything, Tim has told me, staring past me at the players on the field. And I know that he will miss them soon. And Nick Franklin misses things, too, so maybe he will miss his time here.

The players drink at the Lyons Tap because it’s not the Main Avenue Pub, where the coaches are every night, shirts tucked into their jeans, stumbling outside to deposit green spit on the curb. And it’s not Manning’s across from the stadium, so quiet, so empty except for Brad and Dave at the bar with their whiskey and
SportsCenter
. The Lyons Tap is where you go if you want to dance, and hip-hop songs are played in between loud country, when girls who look angry at something take the floor to grind torn jean shorts up against big men, their backs arched, their bodies dwarfed, like kittens against a scratching post.