Class A (6 page)

I leave for air, pretending to have to make a call, and hear the screech of a row of ten-ton train cars hitting the brakes.

The trains that run alongside the stadium parking lot don’t go fast. There is no rush. There will always be more. There is corn in these train cars, thousands of ears packed in so tight that it’s impossible to distinguish individual kernels. Later, in the stands, I will be told that it looks like gold when the tops of the train cars are opened and the sun hits the product. I walk toward the train now, looking, I guess, for a weak spot, an opening. There are ladders running up the side of each car, but I will never see anybody on them, can’t picture hands on the bars. I want to see inside, want to feel like I can know more than what is shown, but the size of everything, all the metal, all the weight, it scares me. Instead, I watch the graffiti glide by, names over the corporate logos, written in small towns on quiet nights when the wheels finally stopped.

The corn keeps running across the state, nearly five million Iowa tons per year, and so much of it stops here to be processed on the banks of the Mississippi. The factory opens up and trains and trucks unload their wares, a process that I have never seen happen, will never see happen, a steel door that I imagine opening in slow silence.

The Clinton facility processes its corn with a wet milling procedure, drawing water from beneath the ground, from eight-hundred-foot wells that go deeper than the city wells. There was grumbling from when the wells were proposed, then allowed, in 2006, residents wanting to know how the company got first dibs on water, but that quieted down eventually. The water comes up somewhere into the middle of the gray windowless buildings, and it meets the corn in vats the size of blue whales. The corn is “steeped,” which makes it sound like tea, but that’s not at all the case. The corn sits in chemical-aided water heated to exactly 50°C, until the kernels soften, ready to be separated into all their parts.

There’re five million gallons of water heated each day. There is corn slurry sitting or heating or processing, always. And the smell that pours out from the smokestacks when corn and water and sulfur dioxide are processed with coal-burning energy, the smell that some still complain about, that most shrug and laugh about, that Steve Baron threw up from, that a local congressman tells me is “toasty and comforting,” is accepted as routine, as was last year’s Department of Natural Resources warning that the particulate matter in Clinton’s air was bordering on unallowable, as is the ominous billowing sky on a heavy production day.

·   ·   ·

Back in the clubhouse. I follow Danny into the batting cages, housed next door in a big shed with a twenty-foot-high aluminum roof and no windows. He’s holding his bat in his right hand like a club, label out. I think I see him looking at his own name. Last year there was talk about Danny having a bad attitude, which Danny didn’t like. He wasn’t brought up that way. Some people still think that he’s pouty, think that he’s soft. When he got hurt for the second time, he started thinking too much, and then he started to get mad because that’s what thinking does to you.

How can there be so many bones in a hand, each one breakable? He didn’t deserve to break two different bones in the
same
hand, each one at the fifteen-game mark of the season, 2008 and 2009.

“Like it was a curse,” he tells me.

I laugh, but then he looks serious.

“No, not really,” he says. “I don’t believe in curses.”

Danny lost a little bit of faith last year, and he doesn’t plan to again.

Yesterday he talked to a reporter from the local paper for an article called “L’Kings’ Carroll Seeks Fresh Start.” He told the reporter that God gave him a gift as a hitter and that he didn’t plan to waste it. He told the reporter that God’s challenges only make us stronger, that he had become a stronger Danny Carroll. He tells me those same things now because he doesn’t know me yet. Because I’m an out-of-shape guy with glasses and a sweaty notebook and baseball players are taught to speak to us all that way, self-assured, sober, noncommittal.

I sit on an upside-down bucket to watch him hit balls off a tee. I listen to the lonely sound of bat on leather as it echoes off the aluminum roof. I find myself surprised, waiting for more. I don’t know why I haven’t been expecting this scene. Maybe it just seems too ordinary. When I was six, my father put tennis balls on a tee and told me to swing. And I did. Over and over. Hitting the plastic stalk instead of the ball, weeping with fury, my first memories of the game. That’s what I did in Little League and in my fluorescent, stinking high school gym. Perhaps part of me expected the chance to revel in awed, nerdy fandom, having access to something beyond what I can relate to. To see feats of strength
and technology, some futuristic, performance-training playground, the kind of human laboratory that should be hidden from view. But Danny is alone in black shorts and a black T-shirt, feeding frayed practice balls to himself. This is it. This is what is hidden from everyone, from the players’ wives and their babies who totter around the fence outside waiting, from fans who speculate about what on earth could be going on in there. This is the process of making stars or fostering excellence or however else it is put by announcers and PR agents.

Danny tries to make each swing just like the one before it. He doesn’t bend his knees much or get much torque. His swing is a leadoff hitter’s, a fast slap of the ball, designed for line drives that allow him to start running. He keeps his eyes focused on the wall about sixty feet away from him, as though there is a pitcher there. He takes a high step with his left foot, places it down right about where it had been, and swings. The ball skips off the strip of Astroturf beneath him and gets caught in the mesh at the other end of the room. He grabs another ball and repeats. Repeats again. It’s the same motion for a hundred balls or so. His expression hasn’t changed.

“What are you thinking about?” I ask him as he stands, hands on his hips, looking at the pile he’s created.

He gives me a quizzical look.

“Nothing, dude,” he says. “It’s bad for you to think in here. I had to learn that. Because I’m naturally thoughtful.”

There’s a pause as he adjusts his batting gloves.

“That’s funny, right?” he says suddenly. “Like your mind has an off switch.”

Danny Carroll does this every day but Sunday in the off-season and every day from April to September since minor-league baseball cannot take days off simply because God did. He swings, swings again, hears the same sound, watches balls fly and bounce. He grimaces when he hits them wrong, nods when he hits them right. Repeats. It’s a basic movement, one that millions do, it’s just that Danny does it more. And he must do it better. But the movement, so short, so ultimately uninteresting, remains the same,

“Should I do another bucket?” he asks me.

“Yeah, yeah, another bucket,” he says before I can answer.

“Motivation,” he says, maybe to me, maybe to himself, or to no one.

“You ever get tired of it?” I ask. “The same thing all the time?”

“It’s just what you do,” he says.

I have called Archer Daniels Midland, and there is no fucking way that they’ll let me see the factory on the inside. Like everyone, I will have to watch the metal and the smoke from the other side of the train tracks.

“It’s just a bunch of pipes leading to more pipes,” said the media relations man on the phone. “It would probably bore you. It’s nothing too interesting.”

“Don’t be so modest,” I said.

There was crackling silence through the phone because he did not find me funny.

Somewhere in there, the slurry is pumped, all day long, right now even, as Danny and his teammates dress and the sun begins to set, dull pink. It’s pumped into something that looks like a contraption that James Bond must escape, but the corn doesn’t escape. Toothy discs on long rods spin, and the corn is macerated, separating the germ of the plant, leaving a starch-and-acid milkshake ready to be processed. No more kernels, just mash.

A man who used to work at the factory described the next step as being like a cotton candy machine, but fifty times the size. The slurry is spun in metal mesh colanders. The liquid passes through, and crystals are caught in the mesh. The crystals are the sugar. The liquid moves on, sitting again in glinting blue whale vats, where it’s mixed with more enzymes and chemicals, cooked until it ferments and becomes pure ethanol as smoke pours out over the town.

The 200-proof liquor can be treated as anything. It’s raw. It can be booze. When the factory was smaller, and owned by a smaller company, you could climb into the freight cars, where there was always a little moonshine runoff pooled at the bottom. Workers bottled it quick and took it home. There’s a good chance that the first taste of alcohol Tom Bigwood had, like everyone else who grew up around here, was a tablespoon of fresh corn ethanol. Sometimes he couldn’t even swallow it, but he still got hammered drunk anyway, as if the stuff were seeping into his blood through his cheeks, foaming on his tongue.

If the factory works at full capacity, 237 million gallons of ethanol
will be exported from Clinton by the end of the year, a sizeable chunk of the 1.7 billion that ADM claims yearly. The baby corn the players drove by on the way in churned into something new and shipped back out along the highways and the railroads and the river.

I stand close to Danny as he changes with the rest of the team before the first game of the season. I’m pressed against the divider between his locker and Hank’s. I try not to look down at bare penis, but in a tight room crammed with twenty-five of them, that’s a difficult thing to try.

I seem to be the only uncomfortable one, something noted and then exploited by two players whose names I haven’t learned yet, who turn and whip their cocks for my benefit like cowboys getting ready to do some steer roping. There is no shame to it. In this place, there is constant, pragmatic exposure and assessment, even of things that should be private. In the training room, there’s a thick black cylinder used for shoulder stretching nicknamed in an honest reference to a well-endowed Dominican pitcher who has become locker-room legend.

The players’ bodies, after all, are what got them here and what are under inspection. They poke and prod themselves and each other. They compare the diameter of lats, the density of thighs. They grab each other around the neck and squeeze, force each other to the ground in headlocks, the stubble of their shaved chests burning on one another’s skin until someone is forced to say stop, please, I can’t. They stand on the scale before going home every night and record the number on a hanging chart. There is a small, frantic man named BJ whose only job is to stretch and massage and monitor their bodies. Their bodies are the product.

Some do push-ups to warm their muscles now, popping off the ground, coiling then springing. Most rub baby powder along their thighs and crotches so that the skin won’t burn when they slide on their Under Armour. They take stiff medical tape, wrap their forearms with it, then slap the tape to hear the hardness of the sound, “for no reason other than to be cool,” Danny says. They pass around aerosol cans to shine their cleats. They line the space between their bottom lip and bottom teeth with tobacco and give themselves brownish-green smiles in
the mirror. They smear sun-reflecting eye-black along their cheekbones like warrior paint, even on cloudy days. There is ritual to all of it.

As Tamargo emerges to tack up the first lineup of a season that will include 139 more, the bodies push into a clump by the corkboard dotted with Louie the LumberKing mascot stickers. It’s like the cast list for a high school musical has gone up, complete with all of the brutal, overly dramatic weight of high school anxiety, of this moment meaning
everything
. I see Danny holding his fists together, swinging them gently, as though gripping a phantom bat.

There are shouts from players who will play tonight, shouts of “Let’s do it boys.” And, “First win! Right now!” And, “Let’s fuck these faggots up!”

Danny isn’t in the lineup. There’s someone newer than him, someone he will compete with all season, maybe for the rest of their careers. Matt Cerione wasn’t drafted three years ago. He is shiny and unblemished, selected in 2009 from the University of Georgia, a perennial powerhouse, their bulldog mascot seen cavorting on ESPN during the College World Series.

Matt Cerione says, “Game time, bro,” and shoves a teammate hard, who then reciprocates. They both smile.

Danny doesn’t say much as he walks back to his locker. Just, “Well, I’m gonna have another sandwich.” And then, “Dang, I need to clean my cleats.” I want to tell him something reassuring, but it would be absurd. This isn’t a place of reassurance. This isn’t a place where one is supposed to be found seeking validation or giving it freely. Danny stands alone, pushing two fingers into the flesh of his pectoral muscles, reminding himself how little give there is. I watch his torso until the others in the room behind him, some bigger, some darker, mostly the same, begin to run together into a mural of skin. It will be like this every day now for half a year, the hopeful waiting to show their distinction. The way it’s been for eight decades, when professional players first showed up in Clinton, arriving on passenger trains that no longer stop here, through the corn.

“Long season,” Danny says to me. And then, “God is good.”

·   ·   ·

Tom Bigwood died two weeks ago. It had been a long time coming. He said he was going to make it to opening day, he said no way in hell he wasn’t, but then he died of colon cancer. In the same paper that ran “L’Kings’ Carroll Seeks Fresh Start,” there was a paid obituary for Tom, who was never famous the way Danny could be. It commemorated him as a son, a brother, a friend, a season-ticket holder for thirty-three years.

I sit in Tom’s seat, like an idiot.

“You know where you’re sitting, don’t you?” I’m asked by a woman named Betty, with white hair and a face that looks like a chipmunk Christmas tree ornament that my grandmother used to have.