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Authors: Lucas Mann

Class A (7 page)

BOOK: Class A
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My silence works as an answer.

“That’s Tom’s seat.”

I look around for Tom.

“Oh no, he’s dead. You can stay there, I suppose.”

Betty gives a short, sad laugh and then says, “I’m Betty, what’re you writing?”

She points to my notebook and I flush, mumbling, “Oh, well, everything seems so interesting here.” Betty announces to the whole section that a young man wants to write a book about us. I flush more. A couple of people ask me why in the hell I would want to waste my time like that. Betty says, “Oh, hush.” She leans in and tells me that she wishes Tom were here. He could have told me anything. Nobody sat here watching more than him. And he remembered specifics. People. Faces. Games. Betty and some others around me chipped in to buy a season ticket for the empty seat where Tom always sat. It seemed right. And they chipped in to get him a brick on the small walk in front of the stadium. A brick engraved with his name and his favorite saying,
“Instant replay,”
called out when something awesome happened and he wished he could see it again. Tom’s family got him one, too, so now he’s doubly there in the ground as we all walk in to watch.

“Oh, there’s Danny,” Betty says. She points to the left-field line, where the players are ambling toward the dugout. They all look the same from here. She must have remembered his walk.

As the players get closer, Betty waves to Danny. He trots over and says hi. He looks happy, at least amused. He remembers her. Danny was one of Tom’s favorites, she tells me. Tom watched Danny in the last year that he watched anything. But this year, when Danny was at spring training
in Arizona, Tom was buried in a cemetery two miles from where he was born. The fans from his section were there, and Ted, and some former players who stayed around the area when their careers ended. They brought LumberKings trinkets to enhance the ambience: a cap, a ball, a pennant, leftover green beads from some beer promotion a few years back.

Betty starts to tell me everything about the Baseball Family, which has a lot of overlap with her real family but is bigger. I am in the middle of the Family. There are Julie, Cindy, Joyce, the one who collects all the baseballs. Bill, Betty’s husband. Then Tammy, Betty’s daughter, Tim, her son, never moved away. And Deb and Dan and Gary, all of them rolling through shared history with a rhythm at once familiar and still surprising. Dan used to work at ADM, quit a few years ago to go drive a truck. Gary still works there, doesn’t want to talk about it. Everyone laughs at that. Then Betty asks what’s home for me. I tell her I don’t really know. She says, sincerely, to me, this near stranger, in a way that would make me laugh in almost every other situation in my life, “We will take care of you.”

Betty watches Danny as he runs to play catch, and I wonder how many players she’s seen doing that and if the sheer volume and interchange-ability makes each one fade a little. She’s smiling because it’s opening day and everything’s happening all over again, like you can always count on it doing. And Danny is back, a nice boy, full of shiny-eyed, resilient belief.

“Tom said Danny just looked like a ballplayer should,” Betty tells me.

And I look at him the way she does for a moment, the way Tom must have. I see the soft youngness of his face. His tanned white skin, his sturdy jaw. I see the way he seems to bounce around the field, his grin. The understated wooden cross hanging off him and the dated earnestness with which he periodically reaches his fingers up to hold it, dutiful and devout, inarguable.

I am not good at faith. Sometimes I find it difficult to think of life as anything other than the loss of things, and I know that sounds big, too big, but it’s true. I read that the term
“nostalgia”
originated in a seventeenth-century medical student’s dissertation, when he mixed the Greek word
nostos
, “return to the native land,” with
algos
, “suffering, grief,” to describe the madness of mercenaries who spent all their lives
moving and trying to remember. It was classified as a potentially fatal disease. Isn’t that crazy? To die from wanting to return. But I miss things that were never mine, want to return to a place, more of a feeling, that never really existed, and doesn’t baseball always promise that there was once something more?

The game ends. The LumberKings are 0-1. I didn’t really pay much attention to the action. It was a boring game.

“Well, all uphill from here,” Tim says.

“Or same old, same old,” Tammy says.

Danny pops out of the dugout, walks over. He isn’t sweating, nor is he dirty. He smiles and nods. Everyone does, bobbing their chins at the shared expectation of what he might someday be, what it might mean to watch him, or maybe just a much needed breeze that everyone felt at once. I look out at what will always be there at the end of every game, running each one into the next.

There is sky, and there is smoke. There is water beyond that. There are train tracks. There is a parking lot. There is dirt, right in front of us. There is this stadium, the splinters in the wall that we don’t look close enough to see. Betty asks if I will be back tomorrow, and I say yes.

1 2
3
4 5 6 7 8 9
Things

A
BLOND ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD
in too much makeup and her freshly shined church shoes is standing on the grass of the infield singing the national anthem. She is the best singer in the sixth grade at Washington Middle School, as well as in the local youth choir, though judging by one kid’s comments to his father sharing a picnic table with me along the third-base line, that’s debatable. I like her. After she nails the high note on
proudly
, she gets confident and waves her arms a little in front of her, sending a spastic, I-taught-her-that jolt into her father, leaning over the home team’s dugout with his camera aimed. She waves toward the diamond in front of her, the center-field fence beyond that. She slashes her hand through the air on
land of the free
like an auctioneer or an HDTV product girl. I follow her gestures. There is the flag, yes, it is still there. It is whipping hard, as loud as her singing, because it’s spring in Iowa and often that means you don’t want to go outside, let alone stay stationary, watching baseball. Next to the flag, panning left along with her fingers, there is the Lumber Lounge, the VIP area befitting a lumber king, where private parties pay twenty-five dollars a head for unlimited food and drink. It carries corporate sponsorship now, technically the Leinenkugel’s Lumber Lounge. Opposite that, behind the left-field fence is the Coors Light Picnic Pavilion. And the more family-friendly Dr Pepper Picnic Garden. In between, the old wooden fence in right center and left center is covered with advertisements for huge, international companies that claim an outpost in Clinton.

The singing girl points at banners hailing Burger King and John Deere and Walmart and H&R Block Tax Relief and Motel 6 and Comfort Inn and Miller Lite and McDonald’s and LyondellBasell plastics manufacturing and Ashford University, “Serving the Community for
90 Years!” She warbles a bit on
free
and looks shocked for a moment, big blue eyes suddenly bigger, not understanding how her practiced voice could leap the way it just did. But clapping starts up and saves her so that by the time she hits
brave
, she’s owning it, every bit the best singer at Washington Middle.

“How about
that
?” Brad asks us all rhetorically from the public address booth. “The kids in this town …”

He leaves us to fill in the adjectives.

More exemplary kids compete for attention with the singing girl, who is now bright red and shivering, from some combination of the adrenaline rush and the cold. Little Leaguers, most of them younger than she is, are proudly displayed in their ill-fitting uniforms, having teetered to their favorite positions along with the corresponding LumberKings, trying to keep up with the players’ shadows. They bow during the whole anthem, holding their oversized hats to their chests, solemn and adorable. They seem to understand the crucial sincerity of all of this. The critical boy at my table does not. When the song ends, he says, “
Dad
, why do we have to take our hats off for the anthem?” His father says, “Because people are dying for you
right now
.” The boy falls silent.

I have been sitting in Tom Bigwood’s memorial seat for two weeks now, welcomed. The season is still in its infancy, but it feels old already, creaking with routine. I notice that Matt Cerione is in center field instead of Danny Carroll again, sheathed in unnecessary layers of skin-tight thermal wear under his uniform, unsure, it seems, how to deal with the adoring Little Leaguer who wants to hold his hand. Kalian Sams is in left field with a boy so much smaller, so much paler than him, gaping upward with a look that says,
Who
is
this?
Steve Baron is squirming at catcher next to a husky boy, only eight years his junior and with roughly the same amount of facial hair.

Jimmy Gillheeney, a quiet, precise pitcher from Rhode Island, begins to warm up, and the kids are shooed off the field to tepid applause. From the PA booth, Brad welcomes two visitors from Clinton’s sister city.

“All the way from Erfde, Germany”—his pronunciation is, as always, flawless—“here to watch our LumberKings play.”

Betty waves to them. Others gawk. The German visitors are plied with American beer and smile politely when asked if they like it. The
flag whips. Jimmy Gillheeney throws the first pitch. It is a strike and there is clapping. Betty smiles at her husband, son, daughter, friends, and says, “Oh, good.” Beyond the outfield fence, in the parking lot in right field, three teenagers burn garbage. Refuse, some broken planks of wood, some grass debris from a tidying of the infield. They stand around it and smile, threatening to shove each other into the flames to see what happens. They were supposed to finish burning before the game, but they didn’t and now there is smoke, like its own flag, drifting toward the river.

There is nothing on the river right now. It is still. The only boat is tied to the dock and has been for twenty years. It was once called the
Omar
, and it pushed freighters down a productive Ohio River. Then it was turned into a party boat during the 1960s. Then Clinton bought it to look like the ones that used to be here. Now it houses summer stock theater.

A man is walking a German shepherd on the path along the river. Two teenagers are making out on a bench, rubbing each other over sweatpants. Down the path, farther away from the field, there is the shuttered historical society that used to be a firehouse. It is open on weekdays from 9:00 until 11:00 a.m. The walls there, the ceiling even, are crammed with pictures of buildings and men and women with huge hats. One long picture shows the smudgy outlines of people dwarfed by a beached boat propeller bigger than all of them. It is there to show the size of the boats that used to churn the river. Sometimes the boats carried people, and sometimes they carried wood. Clinton borders the widest point of the Mississippi, and so you can fit five barges, side by side, from Iowa to Illinois. I didn’t know that; Tim and Tammy told me. The rest of the Baseball Family confirmed it in chorus.

There’s a wooden sign between the historical society and the banks of the river. It is made to look old, but it isn’t. It says, “Clinton, Iowa: Gateway to Opportunity,” a reference that could take a passerby all the way back to 1855, right after Clinton was named Clinton. Up until then, it had been called New York, a name adopted by the man who built the first store among the log cabins, believing there must be gold in such fertile soil, that there was profit to be made and a city to build around that profit, and that the town should be named for the metropolis it would inevitably emulate. There are a lot of towns along rivers in Iowa
with held-over mottoes from their beginnings. Most have
gateway
in them, or
opportunity
, or both.

Clinton, Iowa, is the middle. The in-between. Railroad men, prospectors, those gambling with family wealth, planned the straightest routes connecting Chicago to the West, probing a still-new country, and Clinton, Iowa, was a stop on one of those routes, the very first place west of the Mississippi. People came to build the bridges and they stayed, made a place from nothing.

The past was always referenced here. Even when the town was only fifty years old and lumber was booming, there was still nostalgia for that simpler beginning, just river and dark earth, all potential. In 1911, Patrick Wolfe, Clinton’s first local historian, wrote a wistful eleven-hundred-page ode to what his town once was.

To the older members of the family, those unpretending old homes are full of sacred memories and tender reminiscences. Every nook and corner about them is filled with shadows and lights of the past wherewith “all houses in which men have lived and died are haunted.” Inconvenient, cramped and rugged as they were, about them rests the halo of the fireside, the family altar, the cradle, and possibly the deathbed of dear ones.

Clinton’s inaugural railroad bridge was the second to cross the Mississippi, and in the wake of the Civil War it opened up the country. In pictures that people have shown me, their ancestors are standing by bridges, standing on trains, as though a metal giant can be a favorite member of the family, as though they are embracing.

That is Great-Grandpa. He built bridges.

That is the man I was named after. He built trains.

In the stands, as the LumberKings get through the top of the first with no runs, fans tell the German visitors that maybe they’re all related, and the Germans say,
“Uh-huh.”
Immigrants from Erfde, after all, helped build the bridges. They came
here
, here specifically, not just to America or even the Midwest, but here, passports stamped with a final destination: Clinton, Iowa, out of every place that Ellis Island could lead to. Once the sound of their hammers on metal rang out along the
river. Now a boy rides his bike in lazy swerves, and there is the sound of worn rubber on asphalt, the sound of a dog barking, the sound of wind.

BOOK: Class A
3.15Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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