Class A (43 page)

It’s the best crowd I’ve ever seen in Clinton’s stadium. Every seat is full in the photographs. And there are signs. Nobody in Clinton thinks to make signs now, not for Nick Franklin’s record-breaking home run, not even for a play-off win. In the pictures of the protest, all the signs say the same things, printed on the same flimsy white scrap wood with the same stenciled lettering that you see on the “ADM Poly Is Not a Good Neighbor” signs today in south Clinton. But these aren’t hidden in the neighborhood that nobody goes to. These say, “We Stand with Local 6.”

Three thousand people filled the stadium. It was Labor Day, 1979, and in the thirty-one years since then nothing has remained the same except for the skeleton of the stadium. There were union representatives on the field that day. Men from the Teamsters and the United Automobile Workers as well as from the national offices of the Grain Millers Union. The crowd paraded from the stadium down to the foot of the factory, arms raised in the pictures, flags waving, American flags, Iowa state flags, homemade banners to represent the Labor Congress, and then back to the stadium for prayer. They seemed to believe, from the language in the news clippings and personal recollections, that they would win, that they had to. And even a year later, when no more protesters flooded the stadium, when many had left town, when they had definitively lost, the newsletter for the struggle asserted a refusal of the
ending: “Personal differences divide the community we formed with one another. People are feeling burned out after the long, hard, bitter struggle. But a faithful remnant remains. And we shall overcome.”

It makes sense to think about the Clinton Corn factory that would become ADM while I’m in Cedar Rapids because ADM has a facility here, too, its smell mixing with the similar but softer odor of the Quaker Oats plant. What’s different, though, is that ADM doesn’t feel so omnipresent here. Maybe because it employs 500 out of 125,000 in the city. Or because, like in many other American cities, just not in Clinton, the plant is situated off a highway here, kept to the very edges of town. Or because the Teamsters established a local at the plant in the 1950s and the industry in the town has remained unionized ever since, no ire-filled arguments in the local paper, no lawsuits, no signs. Even the trains full of product sliding past the stadium don’t sound so
heavy
. You hear them if you want to listen, but they do not force you. And when I drive by Cedar Rapids with my university friends we all say, “
God
,” and hold our noses, but really the smell doesn’t seep into everything, or at least it doesn’t bother me so much. Cedar Rapids, to all who have traveled from Clinton, is sneered at. A rising economy, a booming population, uniform suburbs full of new homes. Yeah, there was that flood a couple of years back, but the new stadium looks just fine.

For the Clinton faithful who have traveled here, for me, Hank embodies that feeling as he stands waiting for a pitch. He limps every time he walks now. Even just standing in his half crouch in the batter’s box, he winces. The bat is loose in his swollen hand, resting on his broken thumb. The bases are loaded, too perfect. James Jones is on third, ready to sprint. And Kevin Mailloux, Nick’s replacement who was the home run leader in rookie ball, but who obviously no Clinton fan likes, he’s on second. Catricala is on first.

A fastball bores in on Hank’s hands. He swings and groans. The ball makes a pop on his bat, skids hard toward the hole between shortstop and third. My body tenses along with Betty’s and Joyce’s next to me. It looks as though the shortstop will get to the ball. Maybe he takes a bad route, but the ball slides under his glove, into the outfield. Everything is moving. Jones scores, Mailloux scores. Hank hobbles around first, ecstatic pain on his face.

Another run scores in the first, and the LumberKings don’t need anything
more. Erasmo, as he always has, does his job. His arm has been worked this season nearly twice as much as any year in his young life, and though his stuff is in no way electric—his fastball barely reaching ninety, his curve limp and flat—he does his job. He gives up an early hit in every inning, loud ones that quasi-excite the Cedar Rapids fans, but each time a couple of lazy fly balls or a double play ends their chances. In what could be Erasmo’s last performance as a LumberKing, he turns in a game that looks exactly like so many of his others. Seven innings, a lot of hits that amount to not much, no walks, two runs, and then he’s up on the top step of the dugout, jacket on, grinning a little. He is right there to see and he’s hard to notice. Joyce notices.

“You’re the best, E-mo,” she yells to him, and in a movement so small but so big he turns, smiles, nods once. She lists his accomplishments this year to everyone around us, him, too, easily within earshot. His ERA, his wins, his all-star selection, how few people he walked. All the numbers that only he and she and I remember.

In the clubhouse, after winning the first round of the play-offs, guys are happy and cheering, and then they turn their attention to sandwich orders. Tamargo is napping in his underwear with the door to the manager’s office left open a crack. Hank is on the trainer’s table tensing his body and trying not to yell.

Freeze this. The light is shitty. The room is cramped. There’s a radio on somewhere playing honky-tonk rock, Seger into Mellencamp into George Thorogood, and somehow no player has thought to drown it out with vibrating beats from his portable speakers. BJ is looking through cupboards and coolers that have already been emptied, trying to find enough tape and enough ice. Other players are standing, waiting for treatment on blistered hands or sore knees, but they all come after Hank. There is one table in here, and it’s occupied by the number five hitter, the game winner, a crucial man.

BJ is leaning in and saying, “You can’t play.”

And Hank is saying, “Bullshit, I’m fine.”

And BJ is saying, “I know you want to. But you can’t run. You can’t throw the ball to second.”

And Hank is saying, “You all need me.”

And BJ is softening, saying, “Of course. Of course we do. That’s not what I mean.”

I am hanging by Hank’s shoulder. His pain is wonderful to me, brings with it soaring thoughts of
If this guy can last through this, then I can … then we all can
… Fill in the blanks. Or don’t. It is a feeling better undefined. But by now Hank doesn’t want to mean what I want him to mean. He doesn’t want to be hurt. He doesn’t want to be flailing against inevitability. He wants real things, like no pain and a contract beyond September.

He keeps playing against Kane County in the second round of the play-offs, but the pain only increases. By the time a foul ball bounces off his right hand, hitting the spot that is already fractured, leaving him looking more stunned than writhing, there is a fatalistic quality about him, intrigue already waning.

“That must’ve stung,” Betty says in the stands.

“He’ll be fine,” someone responds. “He ain’t in Afghanistan or anything.”

That comes up a lot. Tough game out there, or those boys must be hot, or they can’t catch a break. Hey, they’re not in Afghanistan.

True. But Hank’s gritting his teeth and trying hard to live up to the maxims of war movies and recruitment officers. He doesn’t get a moment to limp off, giving a little wave to tell the fans he will keep trying. He plays through the inning without much notice of his obstinacy. Then in the dugout, he’s told he’s done, he can’t help with anything as banged up as he is. He doesn’t reappear for the next inning. This moment that didn’t happen is his last moment as a player in Clinton, Iowa.

It feels as if the winning should end when he leaves the field, with how clutch he’s been, how he’s muscled himself into the center of the story. But the LumberKings coast to a 6–2 victory, easy, even with Ochoa’s two strikeouts in Hank’s stead. I’m almost annoyed about it. And then the next game, the deciding game. The LumberKings all hit; the bleachers are pandemonium. They win easily.

Hank limps to the mound to make a gesture at celebration with his team. They have done it. The thing that they worked for, the vague collective goal that they shared since April has arrived, though Danny’s gone and Sams is gone and young Nick Franklin has moved way
beyond. Still, without them, without Hank, the LumberKings will play the Lake County Captains from Ohio for the chance to be champions.

Everybody gets really drunk in Ohio. After a seventeen-inning game at home, the LumberKings winning on a wild pitch, bringing every player off the bench, falling all over one another at the plate when it was all over, a crazed exhaustion has settled over the team. Every pitcher who has pitched in this series knows he is done for the season, free to turn his attention to the hotel bar. The coaches will be returning home to wives and families soon. To grandkids, for Tamargo. To crosswords in the morning and then all day long nothing, for Pollreisz. To the grain farm and the gun shows for Dwight. No matter what the team does, this season and its frat-house, band-of-brothers conceit, the same one attached to every season, will end, and there will be boredom for five months, a lot of half promises about finally retiring before the inevitable report to spring training come February. So they’re drunk every night. And then there’s Hank, who will not play an inning here and who knows that. Who took a ten-hour bus ride for no reason other than to watch, no better than me and Brad and the other Clinton fans who carpooled from the Alliant Energy Field parking lot. He is alternately sullen and manic, looking to get numb with anyone at any time. Everyone feels a little sorry about how things panned out for him, so plenty of people oblige.

We stay at the bar until closing, drinking shots alongside middle-aged women with bleached, coarse hair. The women survey the tables with glassy eyes. They have seen ballplayers come through this place before. They don’t admit that they were waiting for some to show, but that is a distinct possibility.

“Are you pros?” one asks.

“Fuck yes,” Hank says, fast.

“Who do you play for?” she asks.

That’s when the mumbling comes in.

You wouldn’t have heard of us. Minor-league ball. Still pro, though. Clinton. Iowa. LumberKings. No, not Lumberjacks. LumberKings
.

It’s the usual caveats, spoken all at once, too quick to be a convincing defense of anything and ultimately an indictment. The pros they want
to be wouldn’t have to say anything. But these women don’t care. The boys are young and strong and proud enough to defend themselves. The women sit close, and their hands are grazing forearms soon, then foreheads, then legs.

“Let me tell you all who you are,” one says, slurring a little.

We let the implied depth fade into the jukebox, and she points around the table.
Pitcher. Pitcher. Pitcher
. She’s spot-on. She gets to Hank, and I see him flex a little, his white T-shirt stretched thin. She studies him, the calluses of his hands, his pronounced cheekbones and broad body.
Catcher
, she says, and he smiles. Then she looks over him, back toward the pitchers, elegant, tall even when sitting down. Catcher means the same for her as it does for everyone else. Identifiably middling.

She gets to me at the end of the table. I let myself think, as she pauses, that I blend in. I realize how important a nod of belief would be from her, validation that I’m better than all those people who buy these guys shots and have their pictures snapped next to them just to prove that their proportions are the same. The validation that I am not like those fish that ride on sharks, valuable to the ecosystem only with my need to be attached.

“Camera boy,” she says at me and giggles. Everybody giggles. I didn’t even know there were camera boys. I say that out loud, trying to keep my tone from moving into anything but a smirk. Hank shoves me, playful and satisfied. Someone is less than he is.

The players watch the women watch them. Phones ring, the women look, hit silent, and slide them back into their purses. The players say they’re competing for the championship. They say,
Maybe it’s been mentioned in the paper
. The women ask if they’re going to win, and the players say,
Definitely, without a doubt
. Everyone at the table likes that certainty. Bose is the most physically impressive of these guys. As the strength coach, he works out all day. And he is twenty-four, grown, fully filled out. The women think he’s the team’s star power hitter, and the players let him have that. They stifle laughs as one woman, a little too old to be his sister, a little young to be his mom, looks at him with pickled eyes, whispers something, leads him to the men’s room on precarious heels.

Hank is smiling, and then he isn’t. He says he’s tired. I follow him to the hotel lobby. He sits on a stiff couch that approximates leather.
He picks up a newsletter advertising the tourism gems hidden within Lake County, Ohio, highlighting an arboretum, two scenic rivers, and Gildersleeve Mountain, just waiting to be climbed. He makes almost comical expressions, raised eyebrows or down-turned lips, as though considering the merits of each option. As though he is just a salesman in town for a few extra days or a father who wants to show his children everything worth showing as they drive across America. But he will not go to any rivers or mountains or arboretums. He will go to the bar or Chipotle across the street, and the field. He will sit and wait until it feels as if there wasn’t a beginning and there won’t be an end to all his sitting and waiting.

The glass doors at the front of the hotel slide open. Nick Franklin walks in. The room doesn’t stop at first. It seems as though he should be here. Why not? But then Hank says his name and Nick smiles, and everyone realizes that there’s been no Nick Franklin for almost two weeks.

His parents are with him, dragging hastily packed suitcases. There’s a high school girl standing next to him with long, curly hair, a tan that isn’t fake like the ones you see in Midwest bars. She is wearing big sunglasses, and she is frowning. It looks like the beginning of a teen movie, the check-in scene before all the hilarious vacation pandemonium, except for the ring that Nick is wearing, from when his team won the rookie ball crown last year. It’s the kind favored by gamblers or grandfathers, meant to be worn on old, gnarled hands, not the smooth digits of the baby of the family. I’ve never seen him wear it before. Nick trots over to Hank, sits down next to him. The girl hovers above the couch and waits.