Class A (10 page)

The players sign autographs along the third-base line. I watch children’s hands, stubby and eager, reaching for Nick Franklin’s shirtsleeves to feel the coarseness between their fingertips, marvel at the thick fibers
given to real pros. It’s amazing how quickly we can edit what we see in the tangle of what is in front of us. Nick invites that. It’s as though, in a few seconds, I’ve made a frame out of my fingers and held that makeshift lens to the scene, cropping in the ten or twelve closest kids, their giddiness, their reach, keeping Nick and the other players at enough of a distance so that I can’t see the poor fit of recycled uniforms and how they hang off a narrow player’s shoulders or clump in unflattering ruffles around a big guy’s middle. Making sure Nick is centered, backlit somehow. I allow myself to think absurd words. I think of
majesty
, of
grace
. I think in sweeping circles of the significance in each gesture he makes, as though there is a normal, drab, human way to reach out and pat a child on his head, and then there’s the way he does it, sinuous arms unfurling, everything so easy.

“Hoo,” Tim says, an unintentional exhalation in response to this scene that he has been at the fringes of so many times.

Matt, the mailman, says, “Yep,” in answer to “Hoo.”

Derek makes a guttural noise, and Ryan, too, the youngest and newest of the Baseball Family. He wasn’t there for the glory days. He does not remember a better team or town. But he shows an interest in the legends, and that is enough for inclusion now that there is a noticeable absence of adults under fifty at the stadium. Ryan is a thin, shy boy who has dedicated himself to lifting weights and wearing tight shirts, to finding the loudest man in a crowd, standing next to him, and repeating everything he yells.

“Gave Nick a ride home last night,” Ryan volunteers now with attempted nonchalance. “Played video games. I beat him in hockey. It’s not that he’s bad at it, because he’s good. It’s just that I am so fucking killer at hockey video games.”

His gaze holds on Nick as he talks. Nick, who isn’t much bigger than he is, who is nearly three years his junior. I wonder if I appear as Ryan does when I look at Nick, his head tilted, mouth a little open, body leaning forward into the air. Ryan looks like old childhood pictures that my father saved, me looking up at my brother, squinting at the sun and the magnitude of him, loving but not fully understanding. The adulation you only expect from one too young to know any better. Yet here it is. And somehow it’s Ryan who can walk out of gas stations holding
a twelve-pack of Bud Light above his head like a trophy, while Nick sits in the rental car waiting, hoping nobody comes out to check his ID and find that he is just a boy far from home, but that fact doesn’t change this gaze.

Ryan nods at Nick as he gets close and says, “Nick, Nick, Nick.”

Nick leads off the game.

He steps in to bat lefty. He is not naturally left-handed, but he hits from both sides and is better now from the left. When he was old enough, twelve or so, his father thought it was good to flip him into the opposite of the way he’d always been and make him hit that way. Nick swung looking into a mirror, his father standing just behind him, over and over, until swinging lefty wasn’t just a stiff copy but its own movement, one smoother and stronger than the original. He takes his time in the batter’s box. He runs his cleats over the dirt, tills it, claims it as his own. He places his back foot, his left, just inside the chalk line of the batter’s box and twists until he’s dug in. Then he lets his weight bob down on his back leg. He looks almost serene.

We watch him wave his bat. He starts slowly, little loops made with hands and wrists that have been described on blogs and scouting sites as a trigger, a blast, a whip crack. The circles move faster and tighter as the pitcher steps back and begins to wind up. When the pitcher lifts his leg, Nick’s bottom half moves, a glide of his weight onto his back leg until he is coiled and there is nowhere for his body to go except forward, at the ball. We watch him as he unloads his body, sliding his right leg up until he is stretched broad and then launching, violent and smooth, a rotation of his hips followed by the sudden trigger or blast or whip crack of his wrists.

Baseball, and this is why we nonparticipants here get to feel so participatory, is a game that allows ample time for reflection and appreciation. Each movement isn’t followed by a quick, dangerous response. The moment stands. The mover, the idol, holds his pose, and we can hold him in still life. Nick follows the ball into the sky, sees it hang for a moment at its apex and then come crashing down over the last row of seats in right field, out of sight because it’s out of the stadium. There is
a surprisingly muffled popping sound as the ball hits the concrete of the edge of the parking lot that we can’t see. There is a minor explosion in the bleachers. Standing, clapping. Tim gives out some hugs.

From the PA booth, Brad, who will assert confidently to anyone that Nick is a good kid, the right kind of kid, announces,
“Home run number seven for Nick Franklin!”

“Did you
see
that?” Derek says.

“I saw it the whole way,” Ryan says. “I
never
lost sight of it.”

Tim starts a
Here we go, LumberKings, here we go
chant.

Nick rounds the bases slowly, looking down, not letting himself show a smile that would reveal him to be a giddy boy, one who just hit a ball maybe farther than he ever had, one who will text his father about it in all capital letters in the locker room and then pull out the marble notebook that he keeps with him always, making a notation of this exploit before sliding it back into his bag and walking to the showers. Tamargo, coaching third, is waiting with his hand up for a high five. They nod at each other, and Tamargo gives him a shove on the back, as if claiming his role in this moment. I feel my body rise and lean forward with the others as Nick walks back toward the dugout and toward us sitting above it. Hank Contreras meets him at the top of the dugout steps, whispers something in his ear. Hank is fast becoming like Nick’s older brother, but without the competition that strains familial bonds. Nick smiles finally. He turns away from all of our voices—
Nick, Nick
—and looks back at the path that his home run has just traveled, eyes pointed past everything.

The Roadkill Crew doesn’t really exist anymore, but it feels as if it does, sitting next to Tim. The Roadkill Crew was the Baseball Family before they started aging and then dying, when they had the time and the energy to drive to away games, attaching themselves to the team. I have, quite happily, become a sort of story receptacle. It helps that the structure of the stadium is still in place, still exactly the same, so sentences can begin with,
I was over there, right there, see where that guy in the red shirt is?
Now, and during every game, Tim makes a second story line, spoken over the image of Nick, as though the two were related—this
perfect boy in front of us and all the games that Tim and his friends drove to decades ago.

Tim speaks to me in
“we.”
In fact, I have never met a man less concerned with the “
I
.” In his stories, he is always with somebody or many somebodies, often not named, just there. Every exploit is shared. Tim has never married. He lives in a one-bedroom house a few blocks from the stadium. He walks to games alone, then walks home alone. He makes venison chili in a big Crock-Pot, eats a little, saves the rest for days. He falls asleep in a single bed. These are things that I know but cannot picture.

They drove twenty thousand miles in a summer, easy. And that’s not including the trips they made down to Arizona for spring training, never stopping through Missouri and then Kansas and then Oklahoma and then Texas and then New Mexico, speeding through the desert and watching the sun rise over the cacti that stood waving in warning or welcome. Tim has never ridden an airplane, has never seen a reason to. He has absorbed every mile that he has traveled away from Clinton, and then he has retraced them all. The Roadkill name isn’t just a joke. More than a few possums were sacrificed for their pilgrimages over the years, left dying with his tire treads in them, tokens of his travels until finally their corpses dissolved in the rain.

Tim calls out to Nick when the half inning is over and he takes the field.

“We love you, bud,” he says.

There’s that
“we.”
And it’s a little different, I think, from the most common uses of the word when screamed by a sports fan. At most stadiums, in most bars, you hear
We did it!
Tim takes no credit. He doesn’t include himself in the perspective of the doers, wouldn’t presume to. His
“we,”
and, sitting next to him, his bare arm around my shoulders, I am included in it, claims only to love.

Nick Franklin doesn’t turn around to Tim’s voice. He gets to where he needs to go and stops on the edge of the infield to adjust the brim of his hat. He’s not being rude; I don’t mean to suggest that. Imagine if he did stop and turn and wave. Imagine, good God, if he did what most people in most relationships do: Awww, I love you guys, too. How the stadium would freeze, all nine hundred people scattered about the
front rows. He is not supposed to gush. He is not supposed to feel the way we feel. Sometimes I think he’s not supposed to feel at all, a strange demand for a teenage boy.

Tim goes back to the stories, a jumble of them rolling in on top of one another, conflating time and place and character.

Once, back when Springfield had a team, we showed up with maybe fifty or so Clinton folks. We organized a full-on caravan down I-74. We got to the stadium like a swarm of bees, and it was like there were more of us than there were Springfield fans. After we won, the Clinton players said,
We couldn’t have done it without you
, which was pretty nice to hear.

Once, we got drunk with the umps before a game in South Bend. It was a generous strike zone that game.

More than once, we had the boys over for barbecues when they looked lonely.

We rode back alongside the bus after the championship in 1991. We honked the whole way. The players pressed their faces on the windows and smiled.

It is easy to reduce Tim’s
“we,”
easy to poke fun at the very use of the word. I feel myself pushing away from it when not unavoidably in his proximity. Players see me in the stands next to Tim, ask me later if I’m a part of that ever-present cadre of rooters, and I feel myself distancing, avoiding the reality that when I’m in the clubhouse, surrounded by individuals consumed with competitive excellence, I long to see them all from Tim’s perspective again. I know how Tim seems to the players, and sometimes to me, and maybe sometimes to himself. He is a man who is attached to nothing—no job that means more than a paycheck, no family that wasn’t the family of his childhood, no voiced desire for wealth or accolades, for any fantasy. His craft, like his fraternity, is his appreciation of things.

The arguments are common enough.

Maybe religion was once the opiate of the masses, but now it’s sports.

Every sad sack wants a chance to win.

Those who cannot do root.

But that can’t be it. You can’t reduce a lifetime of devotion to that—those born unremarkable living vicariously through those who are better, a stranger’s body serving as everybody else’s metaphor for the type of perfection they will never achieve.

The most frighteningly poignant account of fandom I’ve ever read was
A Fan’s Notes
, a novel that was really memoir. But even that narrator, looking out from the depths of alcoholism, from the back room of an insane asylum, devalued his own infatuation.

“It was very simple really,” he wrote. “Where I could not, with syntax, give shape to my fantasies, [his jock hero] Gifford could, with his superb timing, his great hands, his uncanny faking, give shape to his.”

So the shortcomings of one man’s life and art are confirmed, sublimated, ultimately soothed, by the effortless beauty of the art of another’s body. Is that really Tim, then? Is that his brand of devotion? Right now, as Nick warms up in the field, flipping the ball up over his shoulder, flexing, spinning, is Tim thinking about the things he cannot do, the things that have made him freeze and never leave Clinton, the way his body is aging into a stranger’s, that hole in the plaster of his living room ceiling?

Of course I’m thinking of my father now, and his voice, and all of those yellowed, overdramatic baseball books that he read to me, and the promises within them. I assumed and he hoped that he was reading a reflection of what I would become in protagonists like the Kid from Tomkinsville, the untainted Roy Tucker. The Kid is the attraction, made to be ogled, and that was what I should aspire to. The fans were written of as eager and malleable, nameless. The Kid, the great one, the lead, he looks up and sees them validated or deflated along with him, their own worth hanging on his lanky frame, a rabble that has to be there but not looked at head-on. I am rabble now. Everyone is rabble. And is Nick Franklin, in comparison, a born protagonist, or do I just need one, and he’s an easy fit?

There have been seventy-three bests in this town. Since 1937, there has been a star in Clinton, the only sure thing. Even in the worst years, when the team was in last place, one boy out of twenty-five presented something a little more hopeful than those around him. The best hitter in 1991, the year of all the giddy stories, when the Roadkill Crew traveled to every game and watched the team win its last championship, was Ricky Ward. His career ended in AA in 1994. He’s the hitting coach on a rookie ball team in Oregon now and still part of Tim’s “we,” when Tim chooses to remember him.

I don’t care about Ricky Ward when Tim describes him. A solid kid.
A tough kid. Didn’t come from anything fancy, so everybody here could relate to him. Swung like he was pissed off at something. Great, fine, that doesn’t mean anything to me, no face to it, no surprises. And maybe in five years, certainly in twenty, nobody will care about Nick Franklin. So what does that say about Tim, about Betty, about Tammy, and all the lost or not-so-lost people whose lives revolve around each new season? They are the ones who look at somebody hard enough until a player becomes what they need him to be. They make the fantasy.