The Might Have Been (26 page)

“I gotta let it go, Ed,” Collier said, breaking the silence. “I got grandkids that need college.” At first Edward Everett misheard the pronoun as “you,” not “it,” and he couldn’t figure out why it was Collier telling him he was fired and not Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, nor what his abilities as a manager had to do with college for Collier’s grandchildren; would Iowa State send Collier’s grandson a letter that said:
Your ACT scores are good but there’s the matter of your grandfather keeping Yates on as manager. It suggests a congenital deficiency in intelligence
. As Collier went on, though, Edward Everett realized that he was talking about the entire team.

“When I was a kid, my daddy brought me into the business by cleaning out the slaughterhouses, scraping up guts and brains, but kids now—Ginger’s Kurt won’t eat meat, if you can believe it; an eleven-year-old vegetarian. Even the ones that’ll eat a steak don’t want to know how it got from Flossie mooing in the field to being on their plate, medium-rare.” Collier let out a deep sigh. “Any notion how much the team loses in a year?”

Edward Everett hadn’t a clue. He rarely paid attention to the attendance, focused as he was on the game. Twenty-five thousand, he thought, but doubled it. “Fifty grand?”

Collier laughed. “Times it by three.”

“Maybe …” Edward Everett ventured, although he had no idea what should follow the “maybe.”

“Unless you’re going to tell me about an oil well behind second
base, I thought of everything we could do. We got that stupid giant walking foam owl so that the little kiddies would have something. We got the Owlie girls in hot pants shooting T-shirts into the stands for the daddies of the little kiddies. Ginger says kids these days like rock music. What the hell do I know about rock music? We seen what happened with that.”

Late last season, Collier had brought in a band that was doing the county fair circuit. For a month before the date they were going to play, he ran ads on three of the local radio stations, bought billboards, but the concert attendance was sparse. The problem, Edward Everett realized later, was that Collier had brought in a band Ginger had liked in grade school, but they hadn’t had a hit in twenty years. Most of the people who stayed after the game for the show were women in their late thirties and beyond, who, even though they were mothers or even grandmothers, screamed the lead singer’s name shrilly while their kids slunk up the aisles pretending to be orphans.

Edward Everett didn’t know what to say. He read
Baseball America
, knew the stories: a single-A team in Piedmont, Virginia, disbanded mid-season, throwing the entire league into chaos; a low-A team in Pocatello, Idaho, offered for sale on eBay. The auction was a joke but the purpose serious: the owner was looking for publicity to sell it. Even in their own league, foul balls sometimes landed in the stands and rattled around while kids raced from eight, nine sections away to retrieve them.

“The drain thing is the last straw,” Collier said. “It wasn’t just the rains. When the Roto-Rooter guy come out, he found clay on the snake. Clay means cracked pipes. He says, knock wood, if we don’t get any more serious rain, we can get through the season with them not backing up again, but they’re gonna need to be replaced. You don’t want to know what it’s gonna cost. It’s more than your bosses pay you.” He regarded Edward Everett for a moment, then said, “I wanted you to know. I’m not telling anyone. Not even Ginger, who nags, ‘Dump the team; dump the team.’ We’re not pulling a Piedmont. I’m going to look for someone to buy it. Hope someone from the damn town wants it. That’s the first choice. Second is someone buys it and moves it to Bumfuck, South Dakota, or somewheres.
Third—” He arched his eyebrow and made a gesture as if scattering scraps of paper to the wind.

“What about obligations to the franchise?” Edward Everett asked.

Collier smoothed his mustache, a gesture Edward Everett had come to know meant he was considering his words. “Your bosses ain’t said nothing?”

“No,” Edward Everett said, his skin prickling.

Collier sighed. “This year’s the last on the contract.”

“I wasn’t aware of that,” Edward Everett said.

“My lawyers tell me a month ago your bosses shut down the talks.”

“I had no idea,” Edward Everett said.

Collier sipped his coffee and looked away as if he was composing a sentence carefully in his head. From somewhere in the house a vacuum whined and in the kitchen two women laughed. Collier shook his head. “I assumed your bosses would’ve told you. We’ve been talking to Cincinnati since they got a single-A contract up as well. They seem interested but …” He shrugged. “I can’t believe your boss ain’t said nothing.”

“Nothing,” Edward Everett said.

“Well, in a way, I’m relieved,” Collier said. “I thought we were friends and when I thought maybe you were holding out on me, I was hurt.”

He was relieved? Edward Everett thought.
I could be out of a job and he’s relieved?

He realized that Collier had stood, a gesture that said the meeting was over. “Give the missus my best,” he said.

Walking through the house, Edward Everett tried not to resent Collier pleading financial straits all the while he employed a platoon of women who were at that moment teetering on step stools to wipe dust off the crystal baubles in the dining room chandelier, taking small brushes to the grout in the tiled floor of the entranceway. Besides, he thought, whether Collier sold the team or dissolved it would not affect him in the end, since even if the Owls stayed in Perabo City, he wouldn’t have a job there next season, not if the big club moved the single-A team elsewhere and Cincinnati moved in. He
wondered what it meant that Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, hadn’t told him they’d stopped negotiating with Collier: did he already know Edward Everett was out, a sixty-year-old fossil who still preferred keeping penciled index cards on his players? He would have to get on the phone, go back to the baseball winter meetings and patrol the lobby of the hotel, taking his resume to player development directors alongside men half his age who understood all of the arcane formulae that people like Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, loved so well.

As he reached the front door, Ginger was walking in, laden with shopping bags, the eleven-year-old boy carrying a bag from the Apple Store, the girl carrying a suit bag from Macy’s over her shoulder—maybe more in retail sales, Edward Everett calculated, than he earned in a week, the benefit of Collier being born into a family that had the foresight to start a meat company eighty-something years earlier, when Edward Everett’s grandfathers were going down into a mine, the benefit of the Collier family realizing generations ago that it was better to be the sort of people for whom other people worked instead of, like Edward Everett’s family, people who worked for other people, people like Collier.

“Oh, good,” Ginger said when she registered Edward Everett’s presence. “There’s two bags from Williams-Sonoma in the trunk I couldn’t manage. Would you be a dear?”

A
t the game that evening, as Edward Everett brought out his lineup card to present to the umpires and exchange with the manager from Lincoln, the stadium announcer invited everyone present to serenade him with “Happy Birthday.” Phantom Frank struggled through a plodding version of the song, beginning by hitting keys that were off by what Edward Everett imagined was a handsbreadth. Although on most nights he wouldn’t have paid attention to the size of the crowd, after his meeting with Collier, he couldn’t help but notice there were maybe five hundred fans there; perhaps only a third bothered to sing, starting out and then falling silent as they tried to match what Phantom Frank played. After a moment, as if someone had picked up his hands and put them on the right keys, Phantom Frank played something that sounded close to “Happy Birthday” and a few more joined in, but without spirit. As he arrived at the final note, Phantom Frank added an awkward trill and a handful of fans applauded.

“I’ll give you one call today as a gift,” the plate umpire said, winking. He was in his mid-twenties, his head shaved since, Edward Everett knew, he was going off for his once-a-month Army Reserve training after the series was over. They were all young, Edward Everett realized: the field umpire might be thirty, tops, and the manager
from Lincoln couldn’t be any older than thirty-five. Two years ago, he had a pinch-hit double that drove in the tying run in the ninth inning of the seventh game of the World Series and then scored when the opposing pitcher tried to pick him off second base but threw the ball into center field. A picture of him sliding across the plate, the ball hanging just above his head as he smashed against the catcher’s outstretched left leg, had been on the cover of
Sports Illustrated
. They were all on their way up, he realized. In five or so years, the Lincoln manager would be managing at triple-A, mentioned in rumors whenever a major league manager’s job appeared in jeopardy; the umpires, too, would move up the chain, double-A, triple-A, fill-in when major league umpires took vacation.

Meanwhile, what would become of him after this season ended? Twenty-something years ago when he stopped playing and took a job as a hitting coach in the minor leagues, he had seen himself on the same track, fully expecting that one day he’d be in the dugout in the major leagues again—if not as a manager, then as a coach. He’d gotten stuck in the station, though, never offered a job above double-A. Once, he’d taken a job as a bench coach at Valdosta, Georgia, sitting next to a manager who, a year earlier, had retired after fourteen years as a second baseman in the major leagues, a legitimate star, someone whose face showed up in ads for a car battery, symbolizing the product’s reliability. As a manager, he was like a lot of former players who had enormous talent. He had little patience with the journeymen, couldn’t find the words to tell a shortstop how to react more quickly to a ground ball, became flustered when he tried to teach a batter how to change his stance to take the merest fraction of a second off the time it took him to swing through the zone.

But the All-Star was personable, funny and famous. Several times during the season, network TV crews came to Valdosta to cover his story; the angle was always that he was giving back to the game, teaching the new generation. He made jokes, repeated the same story, about a shortstop who had started the season making an error in each of the first dozen games and how he’d been patient with him and, within six weeks, he had been called up to triple-A. “That’s gratifying when you can help a kid do that.” He left out that the season
had started the day after the shortstop, a twenty-year-old from Venezuela, had learned that his sister had been arrested in their home country, that no one knew where she was, and that two weeks into the season, the State Department, pressured by the owner of the big club, had negotiated her release and, after that happy resolution, his play improved; he left out the story of the day in the clubhouse when he had screamed at the kid in pidgin English because he himself couldn’t speak a word of Spanish, “Bad play-o, bad play-o,” while the kid sat on the bench, looking at the floor, curling and uncurling his toes; he left out the story of how Edward Everett had taught himself enough Spanish that he could remind the kid of the basic lessons, using a few words and gestures. “Stay down.”
“Permanecer abajo.”
“Don’t pull away from the ball.”
“No torear.”
Miming the correct way. It was nothing the kid didn’t already know but Edward Everett worked with him for an hour every day until he found himself again; his patience, Edward Everett knew, more important than the instruction.

At the end of the season, the All-Star moved up to manage at triple-A Knoxville. Edward Everett expected he’d be promoted with him but the All-Star had a friend from his days in the major leagues and the friend ended up sitting beside the All-Star at Knoxville and, five years later, they were with the big club, manager and coach, and Edward Everett was back at single-A—the world spinning in excess of 800 miles an hour, him still standing still. Or perhaps, now, falling off it altogether.

The game went badly almost from the start. Pete Sandford was on the mound for P. City and he was throwing strikes, his fastball well into the nineties, but it was flat. In games when he was effective, his pitches moved like a trout through water, slippery, seeming to change elevation and direction on their flight to the plate, as if the ball were avoiding some obstacle only it could perceive. Today, they sat there as if they were on a tray of hors d’oeuvres circulating at a party.

The top two hitters for Lincoln went down: the first on a one-bounce shot to Webber at short, who snared it with a sideways flip of his glove and then tossed it on to first; the second hitter sent
Nelson back against the wall in left, where he caught it chest-high. However, with two outs, and Sandford standing on the back of the mound, facing away from the hitter, rubbing up the ball, Edward Everett felt a prickle of anxiety. He hoped it was only the day off causing Sandford trouble and that, as the game progressed and his arm warmed, his pitches would start moving again. But they didn’t.

Before the end of the first, Lincoln was up three–nothing, and when he saw Sandford’s shoulders sag, his posture saying “surrender,” he sent Biggie out to talk to him on the mound. There, Sandford nodded at whatever Vincent was saying but when Vincent got back to the dugout, he said to Edward Everett, “Better get someone up.” He called down to the bullpen, thankful that the day off because of the sewer backing up meant that his pitchers out there were rested. Five minutes later, Lincoln was leading five–nothing and Edward Everett was taking a walk to the mound to remove Sandford from the game, his shortest outing all season, two-thirds of an inning. A few of the fans sent out boos and catcalls, the attendance so spare that Edward Everett could make out what individual fans were shouting. One chanted, “Sandy boy, candy boy.” Someone else called out, “Go home so Mommy can wipe your nose.” Edward Everett had no idea where what the fans shouted came from; often it was nonsense, something that rose, he supposed, from their own childhoods—their father’s disappointment in them, bullying from classmates, the rejection by some girl that still burned years later. At the mound, Edward Everett gripped Sandford’s biceps. The pitcher was drenched in sweat; he let out a sigh and shook his head as he handed Edward Everett the ball. “You okay?” Edward Everett asked.