Class A (48 page)

John R. Tunis wrote about the end of a baseball career, and to me that used to mean the end of a life. I remember his images of an older body gone loose, slackened, and wrinkled, doubled over itself on a wooden bench, unable to move for a while to pack and leave. I tried to sit like that, perfectly still, heavy, to show when I was anxious or afraid, depressed and unable then to put a word to the feeling. And that’s how I explained to myself the way my father sat after his son died and I saw him feel the loss, silent but loud. I made the pose understandable.

Erasmo has forsaken McDonald’s and gone to get a gas station hot dog, showing Medina, his new sidekick, how all the condiments are hidden in little drawers beneath the rotating grill, a crucial detail of American life. Men in camouflage hats buying Skoal and energy drinks, women with tired eyes over by the magazine rack, they all watch the pair of foreigners. Erasmo doesn’t notice, or he does notice and doesn’t care. He is so used to being watched.

Soon the new home page for the LumberKings will be up—Nick Franklin tracking a home run along the left side of the screen, Erasmo opposite him staring intently into Hank’s catcher’s mitt along the right side. Erasmo is one of the two worth being a reminder of a season that was good, almost great. After next season, he will be replaced on the
Web site by a couple of other pitchers, each hard-throwing and new, but for now he is the one to see.

The rest of the drive is drunk and loud, then hungover, nearly muted. The bus smells like freshly opened cans of cheap beer, then smells like burps, then just staleness. Chris keeps us at an even sixty-five, always in the right lane, and we drive straight, no bathroom breaks, until it feels as if we’re not even moving. Ted keeps passing around whiskey, pounding plenty of it himself, until he is drunk enough to announce that, goddamn it, these players did all the work, he shouldn’t have a seat by himself while they’re doubled up. Their bodies need space. He stands up, says, “Take my seat,” not to anyone in particular, just to the whole back of the bus, and he goes to sit on the stairs at the front, still holding his Crown Royal, wincing as his back seizes when we hit a bump. He raises his plastic cup to the men who, after tonight, are no longer his charges and, under their quasi-shared corporate umbrella, never really were.

“To you fellas,” he says. “You played your hearts out for us. You deserve to be comfortable.”

A movie with a lot of car chases is still on, and nobody is watching it. Pollreisz does his crossword and I help. Next to me, I think I hear Dave listening to the clips of some of his best calls from the season, happy ones that he has saved—his announcements:
“The LumberKings are going to the Midwest League Championship!”
And,
“Ladies and gentlemen, your new home run king, Nick Franklin!”
Some of the players read, mostly the Bible or books about how to win at blackjack. Some talk low into their phones, all the same answers to what I imagine to be the same questions—
not sure where I’m at right now, not sure when I’ll be back
, then the only certainty:
we lost
.

First light happens in Illinois.

“Almost home,” Pollreisz says.

We pull onto Highway 30, past the air freshener factory, past the plastics factory, past the gravel roads that turn off into the corn. And then we’re in town. Past the Wild Rose. Joyce just left after the late shift, didn’t get to hear any of the last game. Past ADM, pumping. Past the trains and the trucks, moving in and out. Past the blank, still-matted patches of grass where houses had been, where men protested three decades ago and lost and never protested again.

The players are already packing, some standing in the aisle, bouncing on the balls of their feet, ready to move, ignoring Chris’s pleas for safety. They’re planning to go in and out in five minutes, what they hope will be the last time they ever see that locker room, leaving nothing behind.

The sun has been rising behind us, like we’re driving away from it, trying to preserve this night. But at Sixth Avenue North, we turn, drive the last block to the clubhouse heading east. The sun, orange and pink, climbs out of the river. It’s morning.

The bus pulls up to the clubhouse, and they’re all there. Tim kept his word. There are maybe twenty people in a tight group, squinting up at the tinted windows. They begin to clap as the bus slows, then stops. Tim, in the front, lets out a wolf’s howl, maybe mournful, but reverent, too. Betty is next to him and Tammy and Bill, the whole family that is a part of this place, something close to mortar.

Joyce is here, running on no sleep, LumberKings sweatshirt over her casino vest, notebook out, folder full of the pages of a story just begun, Nick Franklin and his home run chase. Cindy is here, her husband still in Afghanistan, and Julie, her son at a base getting ready to go, neither one worrying in this moment. There are others that I recognize, peripheral members of the Baseball Family, clapping in unison. And others that I’ve never talked to—the ladies who sit behind home plate, the hecklers from the top row, the Indian doctor and his daughters, lost in and in love with this ultimate assimilation. Brad, who beat us back to Clinton and parked here to wait.

All of them clapping and giving thanks.

I don’t think the players know what to do with this.

They hop off the bus gingerly, wade through the adoration and the brightness off the river. There are twenty feet of pavement between the bus, which is theirs alone, and the locker room, closed off, full of their smell and their possessions. Twenty feet of interaction with everyone who wants to tell them what they mean. Betty hugs. Tim slaps backs with a familiarity both earned and not. Children scramble around legs. Joyce reaches out her pen and paper and balls and hats, anything to hold a last drop of inky permanence.

I hear one player whisper to another, “I bet that bitch is gonna ask for your sweaty underpants,” and then there are some kind
shut ups
, and some chuckling that I choose to read as apologetic, not just uncomfortable.
Because she would, I think, and not in some sexual fantasy, ringing his sweat out into her LumberKings coffee mug, but because anything can be saved and can be made worth saving. And nobody will care as much about his underpants as this small group of people do by this stadium in this town by this river under this sun.

“This was almost the greatest season,” Tim says.

Brad begins to weep again, reaches out for fellow fans to hug.

“Nicky,” Joyce says. “Nicky, I wrote a story about you.”

Some of the players pause. Hank stops, says thank you to Betty, to Tim, says good-bye, signs a ball for Joyce, says, “Hold on to that now,” with a smile. She will. I watch him limp into the locker room, and he is, for the last time, everything I want him to be, head proud and erect even as his body fails, his injured catcher’s legs never resting, old Dave from the books my father read to me, Bruce from
Bang the Drum Slowly
when he let me stay home from school and watched with me, each born to crouch and born to lose with symphonic beauty. Hank is just a guy moving back to his teenage bedroom. Failure is only romantic if it’s not really failure.

Nick Franklin moves quickly. He silently accepts a shout of “We thought we’d never see you again!”

And then, “You’re gonna make it.”

And then, “I’m gonna tell everyone you were here, after you make it, when we watch you on TV.”

And then, “Did you like it here?”

And then, “What happened to your Facebook account? I can’t see it anymore.”

Brad says, “People will remember this one for a long time. This was a great one to be a part of.” He claps my back like I’m part of it, too.

I walk over to the front of the stadium to find Tom’s brick. I rub my thumb across his engraved name. It costs $75 for one of these, $150 if you want a duplicate for your mantel. Just print out a PDF of the form from the LumberKings Web site, mail it with a check. Those are nasty and unimportant truths. Brick never fades, that is the thing to think.

Another year happens.

The corn is all harvested, and the husks decompose into the soil.

Joyce gets certified to work craps. She celebrates her twentieth year at the casino. She is the oldest dealer on staff and the bosses take her to dinner for that.

Bill gets sicker, and Betty says, “Well, getting older happens.”

Tammy and Dan are having money problems, the trucking life bringing a less steady paycheck than he had at ADM. He ends up chasing a job to North Dakota, hauling dirt for an oil pipeline, living in a town that barely existed a year ago. She waits.

Cindy’s husband comes home, and he doesn’t like crowds. He fishes a lot and does not talk about Afghanistan.

Every month, the whole Baseball Family meets at Pizza Ranch to talk about this season and other seasons.

Alliant Energy Field, formerly Riverview Stadium, is renamed Ashford University Field.

Flavor Flav opens a fried chicken restaurant in Clinton, a decision so strange that it makes national news. At a theme night in a hipster bar in my college town, a guy with thick glasses and an ironic Pocahontas braid says, “Thank God somebody’s bringing a little
flava
to one of Iowa’s greatest dying cities.” I laugh with the rest of the crowd. The chicken joint closes, and the building stays empty.

South Clinton residents, the ones left, file a lawsuit against ADM for ruining the ground and air and light, everything. They say, Our dogs are dying off. They say, The sides of our houses are turning green. They say, Everybody is sick. Look at our trees, they say. They are dying. Trees don’t just die in bunches. That is not progress, they say.

A new season starts, new faces on the field, a new name for the stadium, new manager. Tim gives his howl and then speaks about how perfect this moment is, another perfect beginning to a season just like all the others.

On a hot, hot day, Joyce and I ride the gravels together. There are back roads through every mammoth, thousand-acre property, with occasional street signs identifying the intersection of 307th Street and 265th. There isn’t a pattern. Or maybe there is, we just don’t know it.

We get high, and that makes the logic of the gravel road grid system
even more incomprehensible. I get giggly, and Joyce looks at me like someone she never expected to get giggly.

“Where
are
we?” I say.

“I don’t know exactly, but I know where we’re going,” she says. “At least it’s not night.”

Her pipe is copper and shaped like a baseball bat.

“Isn’t that great?” she says.

I grip it between my thumb and my index finger, moving them in little circles so the bat waggles.

Creedence is playing, drums like a horse trotting. We pass some horses. They are the color of tanned skin. I look at their legs flexing even as they’re just standing there, and I think stoned thoughts about how
vain
they are, horses, just standing there, useless, flexing all their muscles to look pretty, a cowboy version of a Pomeranian.

“Look,” I say. “Horses.”

“Mmhmm,” she says.

She tells me stories. She talks about her friend, using only a first name, as if I know her, so I say, “Uh-huh,” as if that were true. They used to drive the gravels together, not to baseball games, just to nowhere, driving until one of them realized something and said it was time to turn around.

“Like that game,” I say. “The one where you swim until one person gets scared they won’t make it back to shore.”

“I never played that,” she says. “I saw the ocean once. In Texas. I lived in Texas.”

“I never played either,” I say, maybe as some sort of apology, although it’s also just true. “I was always scared of things like that.”

Her friend, whose name I don’t remember, is dead now. “She was older than me,” Joyce says. She used to know the way better. Or guess better at least. She found the oldest tree in Iowa. It was in a field, all alone, next to a red house, with a copper plaque that said “This is the oldest tree in Iowa.” They stopped and walked over, touched the bark.

They found a cow’s skull once, half buried in the dirt by the side of the road, when they stopped to take a piss. They picked it up and let the soil spill out of its eyes. They put it in the trunk.

They stole corn, like Robin Hoods of the ethanol era, the friend
standing lookout for the sight of a tractor or a dog, Joyce wrapping her hands around the ears until one felt plump, ready, then snatching it off with an expert yank, running back to the car, laughing, thinking, When was the last time a single hand touched a single ear of corn on all these acres?

Joyce doesn’t go as far now, just south or west to baseball games, Quad Cities, Cedar Rapids, Burlington, always a destination. Together they used to go north until they could feel the weather change, but cars feel smaller and dark feels darker when you are alone.

We are alone. We keep the windows open to let the smell of earth in and the combined smoke of old weed and Pall Mall 100s out. Tire on gravel sounds like part of a Creedence song and I say that and Joyce says, “
Doesn’t
it? I’ve always thought that.”

We pass a river with an old Indian name and creeks with no names. We pass trucks headed the other direction, toward I-80, and from there toward Clinton, to drop the corn off at ADM, to be heated with burned coal, beaten to mush, turned to fuel and candy and potato chip bags. We crank the windows up when we feel the ground vibrate, the first signal of the trucks, because they kick up dirt and it will seep through open windows, settle on the dashboard and in our lungs. And then the trucks are gone, we are calmed, the air clears, the windows open again.

We finish the pipe and drink Cherry Pepsi until we stop coughing. I get that leaden, impenetrable kind of stoned sleepiness. I feel her glancing at me as I close my eyes, force them open, close them again.

I wake up because we’re no longer moving, perched on the unfinished banks of a man-made lake. There are backhoes on the new hillside, idle for the day, paused, frightening with all those teeth.

“Where
are
we?” I ask.