Class A (47 page)

The players haven’t eaten since three o’clock this afternoon, and that was peanut butter and jelly with mealy apples for a locker-room lunch, scarfed down with one-bite adrenaline before the game. Now there’s no adrenaline, just anger. Anger exacerbates hunger. We must stop.

Ohio rest stops look like pods, something extraterrestrial, all circular, all uniform. There are no lights on in any stores. We pile out anyway, find nothing open but bathrooms and vending machines, return to the bus, then repeat fifteen miles down I-80. It feels like a dream where you wake up still inside that dream, wake up again, same place, quick relief, and then the realization.

Fuck. Fuck. Cocksucker. Fuck. Bullshit.

It is a chorus of irritation. What kind of shithole rest stop is this? Shithole state? Shithole life? I think that the furious fake questions are exacerbated by the fact that just a couple of hours ago there were bright lights, there was a mini-Jumbotron, a trophy, even if this team didn’t win it. It feels as if something should be open in honor of these circumstances—God, or at least the owner of a roadside Quiznos, should be aware of this fact, should know what tonight is. These are near champions. And me and Ted and BJ and Dave—we’re the guys who hang around near champions. How can that not be enough to get a sandwich?

Everyone is a little boy now, cell phones out, searching for service, wanting to tell moms and dads and girlfriends that we’re somewhere in Ohio and that everything sucks. Wanting to hear kind, patient lies in
return. Soon the bus is loaded, ready to try again. BJ does a head count. No Nick Franklin. BJ curses. Pollreisz gives a little smirk that I think is meant to suppress anger. The players’ eyes are hard. Nick comes walking out of the glass doors, pauses to send a text under the two floodlights still on at the front of the building. The whole bus watches him, breathing into the glass separating him from us, but he doesn’t notice. Or maybe he does. I lean too close to the window watching him, my forehead touching the grimy surface. I wipe my breath off the glass and watch him adjust the collar of his shirt, opening it one more button. I have my notebook out. I try to conjure adjectives to encompass him, an exercise that is just forced disappointment after six months. And it’s not particularly unique, the effort to sum him up. It’s the job of a whole slew of people, those who watch and laud and critique and brand the Nick Franklins of this small world.

Slick. Indifferent. Cold. I tilt it the other way. Statuesque. Ripe. Flawless. I angle the notebook away from Dave, but he isn’t looking anyway. He is quantifying the season online already. He is archiving everything that happened with all of the men on this bus, the numbers they will leave behind. Nick sees, finally, the eyes on him, begins a trot.

I will see him running next March, not an easy trot but an almost sprint, legs still spindly enough to look like a suburban boy scooting through the yard in a Cheever story. He will be running from his former agents, left behind in the trajectory of his career and relieved of their charge of him on a rainy Orlando afternoon while Nick’s mother spoke to them of opportunity and Nick lingered in the back of their office crying. I will be standing next to his former agents in Arizona as they watch him on the practice field, scowling and relaying the story. Mid-sentence, they will take off in pursuit of Nick as soon as the team breaks for lunch, running with the limp of the formerly athletic, now stiff, bound by loafers and slacks. I won’t know what they’re hoping for if they catch him, just a reprimand or maybe a last negotiation after the fact. They won’t get anything. Nick will make it to the safety of the locker room, where nobody is allowed unless invited, and he will wait them out, wait me out, too, for an hour while I sit in the parched parking lot, running my hand across the chrome of his Escalade.

The next day, I’ll be the one running to catch up to Nick as he walks with his new agent, a representative of the Boras Corporation, the most
hated, feared, and successful sports agency on earth. I will introduce myself to this new agent, his eyes hidden behind sunglasses. I will ask him, foolishly, if Nick has said my name, mention, foolishly, our time in Clinton as though he might say,
Wow, what a season that was!
I will ask to talk to Nick again, maybe sit down with the two of them. He’ll say Nick’s busy, not just busy for me, I shouldn’t feel bad. Everything anybody has to say to Nick now goes through this man in front of me, I will be told. He will reach into his pocket to look for a business card and say, “Whoops, all out,” will pat me on my shoulder, and say, “Have a safe trip back to Iowa.”

“Fuck, Franklin,” somebody calls from the back of the bus. “It’s cool. We weren’t just sitting here waiting.” Nick glares toward the face behind the voice, obscured in semidarkness, and he begins to yell, or maybe it’s grunt—furious, guttural exclamations, almost unintelligible but with a clear message.

I don’t want anger to be the only thing felt now, because this is a bus full of people who shared something. The something isn’t exactly clear, and maybe the something isn’t much, but it existed, didn’t it? And I want to be somebody who has gathered momentum with everyone else toward a collective crescendo, who watches all the way through to its end, invested. Invested in a moment that becomes impossible to erase as Dave writes down the last stats that will exist always, somewhere in a Google search, for anyone looking to find.

Nick sits near the front, speaks to BJ as if he were a hallway monitor.

“I wanted a snack.”

He’s gone from teammate to mercenary in a week and a half. He was tearing up in the lobby of the Pzazz! FunCity, remember? I saw it. I tell myself that. He was crying because he was connected to these people, and now, since he left and was asked to return, just the fact of being asked has reminded him that he is different, that he is alone.

My phone rings and it’s Tim. I hear the choking slur of drunk and grieving together as soon as I answer.

“Hi, Tim.”

A pause. “Hi. It’s Tim.”

I know where he’s sitting, his couch, brown and soft. I know the black cat is nuzzling his leg, pawing at the loose fabric of the Roadkill Crew ’91 tank top that I know he’s wearing. I know that the TV is on mute,
the radio is on, Dave’s postgame report long over, leaving behind the crackling horns of music older than Tim himself, but he always did like the sound of older things. I know that next to the TV, there is a shrine to the former members of the Baseball Family, a compact, well-maintained vigil that never goes away. That picture of Tom is there, from near the end, strangely thin, the brim of his LumberKings hat making a little shadow on his face.

We apologize to each other. He sighs into the phone. He asks me what the bus is like, how everybody is. I tell him quietly, hand over my mouth, that it’s a deflated and silent bus. I use those words instead of “angry.”

“Poor guys,” Tim says. “They came close.”

“I thought they were going to do it,” I said.

He breathes into the phone for a while and says, “You know, maybe the better thing is to lose.”

I’m not sure what to say.

“Winning is easy,” he says. “It’s a …”

He trails off, takes a halting breath, begins again. “It’s a lie.”

I try to think if I agree with him.

“I wish I could’ve been there,” he says. “Not because it would have done anything, but, you know.”

“I wish you could’ve been there, too.”

“Did I ever tell you that I was on the field with the players in ’91?” he asks. “I was on the pitcher’s mound holding the trophy.”

He continues for a while, and I say nothing to interrupt.

“Where are you guys now?” he says when the story is done.

I look over Dave out the window through a small slit in the curtain. Shimmering black highway, the darker black trees alongside the highway, headlights like flames as cars pass us. We are somewhere.

“I don’t know.”

“When will you be home?” he asks, and I’m stuck on that word. Home. Clinton isn’t, not for me, certainly, not for anybody on this bus except for Ted and Dave, who hates that fact. But I don’t think “home” means Clinton, not as Tim is saying it. Well, it does, but it’s also a feeling or just an end point, someplace to stop.

“We want to be there when the team gets home,” Tim says. “All of us. The Family. They deserve to have us tell them thank you.”

His voice is still shaking when we say good-bye, but he will call everyone, rally them even if they’re sleeping. They’ll be waiting. He promises. I tell him that he is a good guy for doing so, surprised at how serious it sounds when I say it, how much I want him to know that I think that. He tells me to hush.

There is an oasis in Indiana, an open one, made for sleepless truckers.

The players wait in a line that pushes out the door of the McDonald’s. Teenagers in their uniforms and official drive-thru headsets stumble through orders, slipping, bumping into one another, not expecting so many big, demanding young men at one in the morning on a Monday. It is Monday, isn’t it? Hank is standing in line with some others, trying to reconcile the day, the time, the place.

Hank limps his way forward, grimacing a little, but still going, his perseverance now directed toward a bacon double cheeseburger. It’s the twentieth, he announces, which everyone kind of knew, but still. No, wait, it’s morning. It’s the twenty-first. Some of his teammates groan because they have training that they are both honored and obligated to be attending in a couple of days. They will not go home. They received word of the next mission from Tamargo, relayed from the front office on high—pack up for Arizona, Puerto Rico, Australia. This is good, ultimately. The longer you live at home, the less chance to be forgotten. Hank will fly into Burbank. His father will pick him up in the work truck, take him home. He will sleep in his old twin bed, under his old posters and old trophies. It will feel as if he never left, as if he won’t again.

When I visit him in January, I’ll be around for his only baseball-related activity. We’ll drive to Pasadena, where Hank teaches his game to the uncoordinated children of wealthy families whose gardens his father tends. He’ll lob them batting practice in a cage that his father helped build in their yard, as nice as the one he used in Clinton. He’ll let himself have fun, get intense, turn each lob into an important pitch, turn each day into a pennant race, and they will love him.

“We get taught by a major leaguer,” they will say to me.

He will force himself to correct them.

Hank gets his burger and returns to the bus. He eats with his head on the window, and as he bites, his reflection gnaws his own face. I impose thoughts into his head, about home, family, girlfriend. She will be his
fiancée soon. Maybe that’s what he is thinking. Maybe that’s what tepid McDonald’s in an Indiana rest stop, a throbbing ankle, a thumb where you can push the bone chips around, makes any person think about.

He will tell me about his proposal sitting outside the Comfort Suites in Peoria, Arizona, drinking watered-down hotel lobby coffee. He will sound more sure than I’ve ever heard him, saying that the team should be ready to give him a chance, that the only thing he’d heard thus far at spring training was “Boy, you earned it.” And his girlfriend, now his fiancée, she knew that, too. She knew what he could be, and she was happy to let him have a last good shot at it.

“I’m not going back to Clinton,” he will tell me, certain. “If they send me back there, it’ll be to back up Baron, and I’m not doing that again.” It’s time to move forward. He is a man. He has a life to live. He’ll tell them that, he promises.

I will leave Arizona that night and for a month scan the Web site for each team in the Mariners system, looking for his name, finding it nowhere. I will Google search for some recognition of the end of his career, and find nothing. He kept his word. Faced with a return to a backup role in Clinton, he went into the office, said I deserve better, said I’ll quit before I go back. The team said they understood. He was free to go.

But when I see him for the last time, it will not be in a starter apartment with his future wife or leaving class as he tries to finish his degree; it will be in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where he signed on to catch in the American Association of Independent Professional Baseball, unaffiliated with any major league organization, dotted in random places with fields spanning a continent—Amarillo and Gary, Indiana, and Winnipeg. Hank will be finishing up a pretty solid season, not playing the last two weeks after getting concussed in a home plate collision and having to wait for the team’s volunteer doctor to return from vacation and confirm that diagnosis.

We will get hammered drunk in an apartment that looks like his old Clinton place, the only difference being that Hank is now the youngest of his roommates, so they all drink legally, and a lot of them smoke a lot of weed because nobody cares. We will chug until I feel as if I’m choking, then crush the cans and play a game where you try to fling the empties into a small trash bin without looking, Coors Light splattering on
wall-to-wall carpet. An outfielder from Massachusetts will tell me about his time in AAA, describing in exquisite detail how nice the buses are, how far the seats recline. An infielder will pass me a blunt and tell me he was offered $100,000 by the Yankees but turned it down to go to college. Got hurt, got high, flunked out—I’m half-listening because I know the end. They will both tell me that Hank was such a goody-goody when he got here, the way many freshly released are, still used to important eyes watching them. They will point at Hank now, chugging, his hair hanging over his eyes, newly long, his fledgling beard wet.

They will, Hank included, describe themselves as warriors or at least as those born to compete, to be a part of this thing. This thing, the game, it can validate all. Hank is still telling the story of himself, a man quietly suffering but not quitting, never that. I’ve driven six hours diagonally across Iowa to find him in a new place just like the old place. He is treading water in his own myth, Hank, who is still worth watching, worth remembering for some, for me.