Class A (33 page)

He isn’t bragging now. He’s sleepy, merely stating a fact, relaying what was told to him.

“Wow,” I say.

“Oh, yeah, I guess,” he says.

He begins to text on his phone, a new phone, the fastest phone with the most possibilities of any phone in the world. He loves that phone. He speaks of it with an exuberance that he lends to nothing else, that he cannot muster even for this bellowing accomplishment.

All anyone can tell me about Nick Franklin—parents, agents, coaches—is that the kid loves baseball. They say it with bulging, dramatic eyes. He understands baseball and continues to study it without a trace of apathy. That, I believe. He feels comfortable within it, he is interested in how good he can be at it, but love necessitates reflection,
risk, pain, joy. I don’t think that Nick has been allowed to feel any of those things. People feel for him, through him, but he—the most important piece of commerce that will ever sit in my car, hero of the stories that Hank and Fray and Núñez will likely tell in bars not far from where they grew up after their careers are over—I think he just knows how to do.

“Oh, fucking shit, fucking shit,” Hank says next to me, after the factory noise fades. A train has beat us to the crossing right before the Indian Village apartments.

“Every fucking time,” he says. “Every night, I sit here, I hold my ears, and I wait.”

It is a long train, the kind that can block every exit of the stadium parking lot for half an hour when it comes to an arbitrary stop, even though it’s legally required to move after fifteen minutes, in case it’s blocking an ambulance or a house is on fire or a child is separated from his family, screaming pointlessly over the grain cars. Tim says that’s never enforced, how could it be, what entity is around to tell these trains that trace the edge of the city, that flow to the beating heart of the factory, move it along?

My car stalls as we wait. The train horn, unnecessary, blows out, echoing on the river, so lovely and sad and benign when it is far off. Up close it is an angry howl. And there is the sound of metal on metal, the groan of some of the oldest train tracks in America, leading to one of the oldest, most worrisome train bridges crossing the Mississippi, a connection between East and West deemed a potential hazard fifteen years ago but untouched since then.

Trains are no longer repaired here. Now they just move through, and we wait for them. Hank and I try to count the cars over the din, but there are so many and they look so similar and the ground is shaking and we’re drunk, so we quit and sit silently.

Fray Martinez leans his head out the window and looks up.

“Bonita,”
he says. He smiles.

Nick Franklin cranes his head out to look, too, and Fray is pleased with his interest. He points up.

“Estrellas,”
he says, barely audible over the train.

“Estrellas?”
Nick says. “Stars.”

“Stars,” Fray repeats and gives a shy laugh.

“Moon,” Nick says, and there it is, nearly full.

“Moon,” Fray parrots. “Moon is
luna
.”

They both nod. “The sky is big,” Nick says as though he only just realized it.
“Grande.”

“Sí,”
Fray says. He looks surprised at the power of his voice as he continues,
“Grande, sí.”

I sleep in the living room, on extra blankets stacked in a pile, separated by inches from Fray on an air mattress, Núñez on the couch. Nick is talking to his girlfriend on the phone. She waited up. Nick is telling her about his home runs and his doubles and his steals. She, I assume, is saying something along the lines of “I love you, I miss you,” because then he is saying, “Uh-huh.” Hank closes the door to his room to talk to his girlfriend, and I think of Mango Hair, the way she seemed certain of his power, and I wonder if he is thinking of her, too. Lying among baseball players who get to feel desirable, I feel dull and I want to call home, but nobody settled is awake.

Núñez snores. Fray coughs and kicks at the dirty sheets that a teammate lent him. He is too big for his air mattress. I hear a rustling of paper, and it’s the Baseball Chapel pamphlet. He reads by the light of his cell phone. He has waited until nothing else is happening, and he has grabbed at the words that should comfort. He whispers his clunky, translated prayers until his whisper quivers and he coughs again, and then he continues to pray and I continue to listen until he stops making noise.

L
AST NIGHT
, Erasmo was sharp, throwing hard, hitting ninety-three miles per hour for six innings. The game moved fast. He pitched, they hit the ball weakly to a fielder, he returned to the rubber, nodded, repeated. The stadium remained almost silent. Erasmo, when he is functioning at full capacity, is so good that he’s boring. Fastball outside, fastball outside, a changeup wasted in the dirt, then a fastball inside, leaving the Wisconsin Timber Rattlers with their chests heaved forward, asses out, like cartoon elephants afraid of a mouse. That pose was the highlight of the game for the meager crowd in attendance on a sweltering Saturday plagued with shadflies moving in sinister clumps off the river, crashing and spraying deep purple blood off the Coors Light sign in left.

“Oh, I wish he would slow down,” Joyce said above me in the bleachers. “It’s a nice night.”

Everyone agreed that Joyce was insane. It was not a nice night. It was choking and humid, bearable only by those who tally weeks toward the end of the season and begin wincing come August, because this will soon be over.

Even as the LumberKings pummeled the Timber Rattlers’ pitching, with Matt Cerione hitting a towering home run into the Lumber Lounge, putting the game seven runs out of reach and finally rousing the fans to stand in the heat, Erasmo did not relax or slow down. He didn’t even take Betty up on a personalized candy offer.

“He seems like one of the real religious ones,” Betty said, as though there were a connection between anti-candy and pro-God. “He has a churchgoing face.”

“Remember Salomon Torres?” Tammy said. “He was religious. He became a minister. Good guy.”

“We used to barbecue for him,” Tim said. “He was on the championship team in ’91. We were with him before the last game, remember?”

Salomon Torres was the best pitcher in Clinton in 1991. He went on to play in the majors, kept at it until 2008. Now he focuses on his faith and his daughters. He hasn’t been back to Clinton since, but he is a type here—sincere, brown, funny name, kindly relatable and exotic all at once. He, or the memory of him, is Erasmo, and Erasmo, the moment he did well here, became interchangeable with Torres, though he isn’t aware of it. We watch his back as he returns to the clubhouse to ice, another number 50.

It is the next day, and we’re stuck in the clubhouse before the ninetieth game of the season. Erasmo is dripping sweat, working the soreness out of his body, grunting his stats as he lifts, dips, squats. He knows every numerical way he can be quantified. He recites his wins and his losses, his strikeouts and his walks, how few he surrendered. He hasn’t learned to lie and say that the only thing he cares about is team. He is upset because he hasn’t been allowed to pitch a complete game, not yesterday, not ever. Never mind that the Mariners are trying to protect his young arm, complete games are recorded, and they show durability, both mental and physical. It is a blemish on the master list that he is sure someone important somewhere possesses.

I’m tucked out of the way, perched on a medicine ball, watching him dominate the weight room on his own, as usual. The strength coach should be looking at people’s conditioning charts, and if he were, he might find names that are supposed to be in here and aren’t, as well as proof that Erasmo should be resting by now. But he is looking at a used paintball-gun auction online. Erasmo has free rein to overwork. He looks in the mirror.

“Eight wins, four losses,” he tells me again as he hoists and exhales.

People are looking over and listening, but he doesn’t realize it.

“Not bad,” he continues.

“It’s
great
,” I say.

“No, not great. It should be better. If we score more runs, I win more.”

He says it not as an attack on the teammates sprawled around him. I don’t think they or their potential reactions enter his thought process.
They haven’t done their jobs, and it reflects poorly upon Erasmo. That is just true and there’s nothing he can do about it and that’s frustrating.

“I mean, come on,” he says with finality.
“Come on,”
spoken quick and flat, is the English phrase that Erasmo has gravitated toward to express shame, derision, fury, the same way all the American players have taken to
maricón
to supplement their own native homophobia.

“I could be 12-2,” he says.

“Well, I’m sure they know that,” I say, too paternally maybe. “I’m sure they don’t blame you or anything.”

He says, “The numbers are what they see.”

As though to emphasize the importance of numbers, he grabs a heavier weight. I watch his knuckles whitening against his skin as he strains. His hands are still a boy’s, like mine, fingers short and chubby, knuckles indented when he is not straining, and that makes me feel good. That was the first thing I noticed when I met him and he shook my hand. Baby palms, dimpled knuckles. I thought it was charming in that moment of quiescence. But now he is always straining, and the stillness has rarely reappeared. There’s always been some reason to grip.

Erasmo lived and played in Venezuela for two years, never anywhere you’d find easily on a map. A year from now, I will try to retrace his steps, which won’t be easy. First, it’s a plane from Chicago to Miami to Caracas, the capital. From there, it’s a bus to Valencia, exiting the station past military police who stand near where the taxis wait, machine guns cradled like babies. I meet John Tamargo at his hotel in Valencia. He’s been demoted, even though his new title sounds better. He is now director of Latin American operations for the Mariners, but all that means is that he is farther from home, farther from the majors, too, overseeing those with the most outside chance at success. To get to the Mariners complex, we drive an hour and a half, winding up hills, pushing farther into the jungle. We stop only at random police checkpoints, roll down the window, say “baseball,” and are treated as unsuspicious, almost royal. Ilich is our driver, a former player, now a scout. He is one of the thousands who scour fields in every Venezuelan province, a network that ensures that if a player is nearing puberty and decent, he’ll be noticed. On the drive all we notice are the girls, eighteen, I try
to convince myself, who hop out of the brush by the side of the road with thermoses full of coffee and miniature plastic cups. They put their chests up against the windows and pretend it’s an accident, and so we buy coffee.

Tamargo makes a low moan, says something about the
bodies
on Venezuelan women, I mean, Jesus Christ, the bodies.

“
Everything
is beautiful here,” he says.

And he’s right.

I have never been to a jungle before. The leaves are a different kind of green, and bigger, too. It gets cooler as we drive farther, a hallucinatory, horror-film mist over everything, and Ilich has to run his wipers, even though it isn’t raining. It helps if I ignore the shacks dotting the hillside next to us, wood-bodied with recycled-aluminum tops. Though I find the blight romantic and expected, I cannot reconcile the size and newness of the satellite dishes perched atop the aluminum roofs. Or Ilich’s casual comments about how the poor don’t want to get themselves running water; they just want to steal electricity to watch MTV.

Incidentally, there’s a small TV in Ilich’s dashboard blasting reggaeton music videos. We watch polished, glitter-doused women smushing their breasts together as we climb into the mountains. Erasmo made this drive, I know, as alone and unknowing as I am now, but he was seventeen and joyous, fresh off being signed, feeling impossibly rich and validated. He’d packed his two suitcases that he’d been living out of at the academy in El Salvador and moved again, heading to be the only Nicaraguan on this team of thirty-five prospects, not knowing how long he’d be allowed to stay. I try to think of him maybe in this same car, looking out the windows, the farthest he’d ever been from home, but far from done, farther still from where he wanted to be.

Agua Linda is the name of the complex the Mariners rent. It’s maybe twenty acres of manicured grass and a dorm fronted by a brick wall, so much more solid than anything else around it. Ilich gets out and bangs on an iron door painted bright blue to evoke water. The gatekeeper and his son wave as we drive in. We hear the sound of heavy hooves on wet grass, and to our right horses are trotting. The baseball farm occupies only half these grounds, sharing space with a horse farm, the stables facing the windows of the dorm so the players can make out the shadows of the beasts as they fall asleep.

I think Erasmo told me once that he liked the horses. That one day he would buy one. In the mornings here, after his runs, he would stroke their noses, and they would lick the salt off his sweaty arms.

Tamargo and I agree that the horses are beautiful, another
beautiful
thing.

“That’s a fucking horse,” Tamargo says. “Look at the size of that thing.”

“Mmm,” I say. And then, to welcome Ilich into this mood of wonder,
“¿Bonito, sí?”

“Sí,”
Ilich says.

Tamargo says it wouldn’t be so bad to get a piece of land out here, huh? A hundred acres with nothing around but jungle and mountains. Buy some horses. Let them run. You wouldn’t even know what year it was; that’s the kind of life to want. Of course, Chávez might take the fucking thing at any time, so this isn’t the best buyer’s market, but still, someday.

Hugo Chávez, president of Venezuela, is a reviled figure in professional baseball. He is, at least nominally, a socialist in the face of an industry that is as purely profit-driven and as top-down as any on earth. Less than a decade ago, there were eighteen major-league teams with academies in Venezuela. Now, as Chávez’s term has extended twelve years, there are eight. The Houston Astros were the first organization to invest as much infrastructure in Venezuela as in the Dominican Republic. Andrés Reiner, the Astros scout who first defined Venezuela as a place worth investing in, has since moved on to Colombia and then to Brazil, predicting that with a combination of poverty, love of sport, and a pliable, U.S.-friendly government, Venezuela’s neighbors could become baseball’s next El Dorado.