Class A (32 page)

I hear a train outside, a screeching stop, the grumble of restarting. I feel the dance floor shake from more than rhythmic feet. The train is louder than any of us, louder than Randy, who switches gears into a country rock anthem, the kind of song that the players have learned to ignore at stadiums, engineered for baseball a generation before they were born. There is a mass dance floor exodus of those who are young and are even vaguely ethnic or want to be. They are replaced by those who have been coming to the Lyons Tap for a very long time and for whom this place and this song haven’t lost any luster.

“Oh my God, I
hate
country,” says Mango Hair to Hank but loud enough for all of us to hear. “It’s like, come on, just play hip-hop.”

She wants to prove something to him, that she listens to what he does. And that by extension she’s only here in this town because of forced circumstances, like birth.

“I’m going to the bathroom,” she says. She doesn’t say, “Follow me, follow me,” but we all hear it anyway.

Hank lets her go alone.

“She’s nothing special,” Nick Franklin says.

“Fuck you,” Hank says.

This is interrupted by a rush of cheers for Erasmo, who has somehow danced his way into the pack where others are dancing, a sea of white forty-somethings, the only person not mouthing the words to the song, staying silent and concentrated. He is in the middle of two women, careening between their breasts.

“Erasmo!”
His name is howled by the whole group, a dozen familiar fingers pointing at him, highlighting him. Inspired, he dances down low to the ground, lets one woman’s ass bounce on his forehead, arms around her legs, face with a jack-o’-lantern smile. Others turn and look and yell, not words, just warbling exclamations to signify that something funny and memorable is happening, and they’re around for it. Erasmo looks overwhelmed by his dance partner in a tank top that covers almost nothing, with a tattoo of a rose that looks so different now
than it must have when she got it, all that time ago, on tight, unblemished skin.

She tells him things on the dance floor. I want to hear. I want to hear her tell him that she saw him on the baseball field. Tell him that she likes his shirt; it’s classy like something a TV star would wear, or a magician. Tell him she has a car. Tell him that her kids are with her sister tonight. Tell him that they’re nice kids but he doesn’t have to meet them.

He tells her his name. I hear that.

“Erasmo,” she parrots to him as they grind, her body arched so that her ass rubs on him while she whispers, upside down, in his ear. “Erasmo. Erasmo.” Over and over until it becomes part of the beat of the song, and I watch her sweaty lips move from the edge of the dance floor, saying words, random words, just to hear them disappear.

Erasmo will take this woman home tonight, and I will imagine even more as I lie on the floor next to two players—the sounds of their sweat and bare backs making a ripping noise against a plastic couch, how she won’t have to say
shh, the kids
because it will be just her and Erasmo, this serious boy with a real future, and she’ll be able to call out his name as loud as she likes. Why is it important to me that she calls his name? He will walk home in silence, through the deserted downtown, and he will start to run, as he often does when going anywhere, the pound of his dress sneakers bouncing off century-old brick. She will come to games for the rest of the season. She will write on his Facebook wall, and I will eavesdrop on her Internet pleas all through the winter, while he lifts weights in an academy in a jungle in Venezuela and she is in this town in the snow.

He will never answer, because he will have learned how to be an important person and he will never go back to Clinton, and sometimes I will feel like her, stuck, waiting, listening.

·   ·   ·

A fan meets us at the bar. He sits behind home plate every game and talks to Nick when he’s in the on-deck circle. He is an avid supporter and, apparently, a formidable softball player, once a formidable high school baseball player, also a counter guy at the Pizza Hut down the block from the stadium who takes too-long breaks to hustle in and watch one half inning at a time. He is so, so excited to see Nick here, each of them in street clothes, talking as peers, even though he must be a decade older. His excitement makes Nick happy, and he puts his hand on the fan’s soft back to feel his body tighten with glee.

“You like good beer?” the fan asks.

“Yeah,” Nick says. “I like the good stuff. I’m not a Coors Light kind of guy, you know?”

Together, they order microbrews with hints of raspberry infused in them. Nick says that he totally loves microbrews. And raspberries. He swigs.

“I like your shoes,” the fan says, and Nick smiles.

The fan ropes a woman he knows with an outstretched forearm and corrals her into the pack of players. They meet eyes and his say,
What-sup, baby?
until hers say,
I don’t want to be here
, and then his say,
Please
.

Out loud, he says, “This is Nick Franklin, the LumberKing.” He doesn’t say her name.

“Nick Franklin,” she says.

“I’m sure you’ve heard his name.”

“I don’t really come to the games,” she says, and then, “Sometimes I hear people yelling when I drive by,” as an apology or a compromise.

Nick says nothing; what to say if she doesn’t already know him? She, still nameless, is unimpressed, and that doesn’t make sense. There’s nobody here to buffer. Nick’s parents, visiting for the third time already this season, are at their hotel, probably awake thinking about him, but they’re not here. And his agents are in Florida. They’ll be back in a couple of weeks, and then again once more before the season ends, assuring Nick that their phones just don’t stop ringing and everyone on the other end of the line is saying his name.

Here, now, Nick Franklin has been swallowed. Here, now, strange bodies push and sway as Randy orchestrates from behind his console. Here, now, a wedding party just burst through the back door, bride still in her dress, dyed red hair, makeup running with sweat and happy tears,
screaming, “This is
my
fucking night, bitches. I’m the bride. I’m the fucking
bride
.”

The fan keeps trying to show Nick a memorable time, his voice straining through the music and the dead, thick air between all of us.

“You better talk to him,” he says to his still nameless friend. “Nick ain’t gonna be here long. Right, Nick?”

“Oh,” she says.

“You’re going to hear his name on fucking
SportsCenter
, and you’re going to be like, damn, I could have talked to him.”

There is gravity to this conversation that the woman didn’t want or expect. She is drunk and willing to flirt, maybe. Not mull over hypothetical regret. She gives a defensive giggle and says, “That’s nice for you.”

“Oh, yeah, I guess,” Nick says.

She says that a friend needs her, she’s puking—can’t we hear it?—and she leaves. The fan tells Nick that she’s a total slut, and Nick says he’s bored with beer. He heads to the bar and returns with a Bloody Mary, a pickle and two olives serving as a phallic, late-night replacement for a celery stick. Nick refuses to imbibe the same thing twice—bad beer, good beer, vodka. Pickle. He swigs and sways a little.

Some of the other players have made it to the dance floor, still in a group, huddled tight and performing their moves as much for each other as for any prospective women, yelling and laughing into each other’s faces. Noriega, with an elastic body that allows him to cover an amazing amount of ground in the infield, bounces in perfect rhythm, and his teammates holler, surrounding him. Women, three of them, break into the circle, and everyone slides closer to Randy looming over the ones and twos, closer to the bass, where nobody can, or needs to, talk. They press tight, denim scraping, hands roving, eyes closed. Randy has switched back to hip-hop, and the bass is like standing in the stadium parking lot when a factory train goes by, sound that becomes physical and burrows in your stomach. The words of the song are commands, and everyone listens.

“Teach me,”
raps a woman’s voice, dripping with a suggested orgasm.

And then response, a calm, sneering man: “
All my bitches love me
.”

A guy I’ve never seen yells in my ear.

“Get in there, brother,” he says. “You’ve got to make yourself known”

“No,” I yell. “I’m watching.”

“I’ve got a girlfriend,” I yell, too proud, leaning into him, my spit flecking his ear.

“She here?”

I don’t answer, so he repeats himself: “Grab one. Make yourself known.”

He smiles in commiseration, both of us clumsy and plain. I want to throw him into something solid that would make a pop when he hit it. I want to tell him that we are not peers, not equally alone, not equally overripe in our shirts that we bought when we were thinner, our faces that haven’t been pressed into anybody else’s all night.

“Look at
those
guys,” my new friend yells.

He means the players, the sinews of their forearms crossing over bodies that they dwarf, the uniform stomp of their dancing feet as they move together, taking cues from one another, meeting eyes in celebration.

“They’re LumberKings,” I say, my voice a child’s. “I’m with them.”

Outside, in the corner of the parking lot, local boys in a pack smoke and dip and throw bottles into a brick wall to hear destruction echo off asphalt. They laugh and that echoes, too. They yell at Hank as he leaves the bar, a cacophony of curses. Maybe one of them was with Mango Hair, or maybe they just didn’t like the rise of whispers and shouts at the edge of the dance floor, anointing these visitors as superior simply because they aren’t from here and are better at one thing.

This is
their
bar, was and will be maybe for their whole lives. Hank’s fists are clenched, and I think he might respond, but he looks and sees that everyone else has stumbled back to the car and it’s just me, silent, withering. He walks away.

In the car, he yells, half kidding, that nobody from a team of
professional athletes
had his back, that he was left to be stomped by a bunch of hillbillies. Slumped in the backseat, Nick Franklin is lucid enough to remind us that he can’t be getting into fights.

“Jesus Christ,” Hank says to no one. And then to me: “Don’t crash this car. If we crash the car with Nick Franklin in it, I’ll be released and you’ll be killed.”

We all laugh, and that sputters out quickly as we all ponder how potentially true a statement it was.

“Delilah,” Nick attempts to command.

I hope he won’t puke. I turn on the radio, looking for Delilah as though she’s Alka-Seltzer, but she’s gone. It is nearly two in the morning, past her demographic. She’s meant to coax mothers to sleep, maybe with their little boys tucked into the pockets of their armpits. She’s not meant to be bumped out of cars going exactly the speed limit to avoid being pulled over.

“Not on,” I tell Nick, and he says “Whatever” with such petulance that I want to laugh and then I want to hug him. My volume dial decides to stick at zero, and there is no sound. My car squeaks over potholes. The engine groans. I listen for a voice outside, even the buzzing of a sign turned on. There is nothing. There is no one. We all breathe, and we are all aware of it.

It is loud for the first time in the drive as we pass the factory. Floodlights on the ground point up at the metal, the vats and smokestacks, creating a glow that seems to emanate from the noise of corn being pulverized and burned and poured. We do not know what we are hearing exactly. The hiss is steam. What sounds like the ocean is some kind of heated runoff from the creation of biodegradable plastics hitting the walls of a newly built storage pool, smelling like poison, separated by fifty feet and a barbed-wire fence from those few homes that remain in south Clinton, the homeowners unavoidably awake, listening. The sound of manufactured wind comes from somewhere inside, I think, where the coal is burned.

We no longer hear the squeak of the car, the engine, our breath.

I told Tim that I couldn’t watch the meteor showers with him tonight, or I should say this morning. He told me he’d be out along the side of I-30, turning off on one of the gravel, cornfield roads, then walking until free from lights or sounds. At three-ish, something amazing is supposed to happen in the sky.

I asked him if it was safe, walking out in the dark like that, alone. He said that nothing was safer. He said he’d walked home plenty of times
when he was younger, from a bar or party in DeWitt or another town, fifteen miles of walking. Sometimes he’d howl, sort of how he does at the stadium when a LumberKing hits a home run, but different because there was nothing else around to meet his sound, dwarf it or bounce it back.

“I am the kind of person that bothers to look up,” Tim told me. “You are, too. Aren’t you?”

I’m not sure if I am. Or if I want to be. What does looking up get you? As we pass the former Laundromat with its windows smashed and the Democratic Party headquarters and the makeshift union hall, Nick says, “I’m going to be the first player to go twenty, twenty, twenty this year. In the country.”

We all turn to him.

“Twenty home runs, twenty steals, twenty doubles. Soon. I’m almost there. My dad told me. And my agent.” He holds up his phone. “I didn’t even know.”

This news, once he actually completes the trifecta, which of course he will, is going to reverberate. It will be spoken by coaches, by the scouts who descend for a weekend and call him kiddo, slap his back like family in front of everyone, certainly by the reporters who call his cell phone from restricted numbers, maybe even on some baseball show that buzzes in the background of the locker room, with somebody catching the mention of his name and screaming,
“Yo,”
so that all noise shuts off except for the famous people talking about Nick.