Class A (20 page)

But those things are distanced, an ache, not a stab. The shattering of the unspoken alliance between bleachers and field, the permeable but still present wall extending up from the top of the dugout, that is what will really hurt. The loss of the time that people claim to remember when fans wouldn’t have been made to feel shame. And Mailman Matt will get patted on his ample back, hear whispers of “That was out
of order” and “There wouldn’t be a game without fans like you.” And hours later in the clubhouse, Cerione will sit on the trainer’s table, his body sore from the pains of a season, and he will talk about the lack of care for him, about playing for the fans, leaving it all out on the field for
them
. How can people be so unappreciative?

I will hear both and think that maybe both are right.

So tensions are high.

At least Hank gets to play a little more now, a rebirth in the making, maybe, or a first birth, the shedding of a cocoon. Steve Baron and his abysmal batting average have left, sent down to Everett to do some growing up. It’s just Hank and Brandon Bantz, ordinary and persevering, entering their mid-twenties, splitting time behind the plate. Think Costner’s Crash Davis or Robert De Niro from
Bang the Drum Slowly
. That’s what I am thinking at least. They are on the field together in Cedar Rapids before the game, identical except for skin color, talking with a lovable, weary humor. They’ve been hitting. Hank two days ago, a hard grounder down the third-base line, driving in two. And Bantz yesterday, a double in the left-center-field gap, a triumphant dirt cloud rising as he slid into second.

It’s Hank’s turn today, mostly because Erasmo is pitching and it helps him to have a guy mumbling Spanish back at him during mound visits. But no matter, he will perform. I will watch. Hank and Erasmo stand on the bullpen mound and laugh together. Hank pulls his mask off and wipes the sweat from his dark, quiet eyes. I find him, in the most ridiculously meaningful sense of the word, heroic.

I have forgotten about Dotel. Everyone has. Hank, five feet away, readying himself to perform, fills the void for me, though
void
is too strong a word. Hank is here.

The team returns to the locker room, and Hank tapes his forearms. Then Hank and Erasmo leave the rest of them early, return down the cement hallway toward the light of the dugout, their spikes scraping, at first a staggered noise, then in unison.
Clackety-clackety-clack
.

Clack-clack, clackety-clack. Clack-clack, clackety-clack
. Their spikes sounded like music on the concrete floor.

It was a chorus in all the books that my father read to me,
Keystone
Kids, The Kid from Tomkinsville, The Kid Comes Back, World Series
, marking the end of moments of action on the field, announcing reflection. When I first bought cleats, oversized and unnecessarily metal, I wore them down the street to get milk, listening to the sound of me on the sidewalk trumpeting my presence, trying to conjure childhood memories from the old Italian men sitting on folding chairs outside the Laundromat, wheezing totems of what I thought manhood should be.

I sit next to them now, Erasmo and Hank, in the dugout. They drink water and speak as though I’m not there, and I am happy for that, catching the odd word of Spanish, smiling as they laugh just because they’re laughing, which, I realize only now, they hardly ever do. Erasmo is a giggler. When something is really funny, his eyes widen and creases like parentheses snake across his round cheeks. The sound of a still-pubescent nerd escapes, a gurgle almost, a squeak. He puts his hand on Hank’s shoulder, says,
“Coño, Diablo.”
I begin to laugh, too, like a child at Thanksgiving who doesn’t get the joke but loves the unhinged feeling at the table. It isn’t hard to see them as the next logical step in American baseball lore, not from small towns in the middle of cornfields, but from Mexican L.A. and Central America, still looking the part of well-worn fables, dugout shadow across their faces, youthful and grown-up all at once, sitting close on a long, empty bench.

Terry Pollreisz pops his head out from the hallway, shoves tobacco behind his lower lip.

“Hola,”
he says, and they smile at his effort.

He shuffles over to us, hunched. He tells me to leave. Hank looks frightened and then hopeful and then nods before anything has been said.

I don’t leave. I linger by the doorway. Pollreisz’s kind growl gets silenced in the space between, but I see him smile with his browned teeth. I see the white of his knuckles as he kneads his catcher’s shoulder harder than usual. I hear Erasmo say, “
Lo siento
.” I see him give his former teammate a half hug, arm across Hank’s back but body pulling away, unsure, the moment they touch.

Erasmo walks over to me, gives me a little shove.

“We go,” he says.

We go. Back down the cement hallway, his cleats clacking alone now, a scattered and weak sound. Erasmo runs his hand along the cinder-block
wall. He will not initiate this conversation. I begin to ask, “What just—”

He cuts me off, a swipe of his hand across the throat—done, over, isn’t it obvious?

It isn’t, but the subtleties are not something Erasmo wants to talk about. Hank hasn’t been cut, not like Dotel, but it feels like it. He has been sent, with compliments, to the purgatory of rookie ball, meant for prospects just signed, half a season of games in which they can dip their toes into professional waters. Hank has been sent there to be the backup to more eighteen-year-olds who have talent that he never will. It is doubtful he’ll be back. Hank is told, “They need you.”

These are things I know about athletes:

Player X worked fourteen hours a day on a watermelon plantation as a teen. No wonder he got so strong.

When you take a raft from Cuba, staring at circling shark fins, the World Series doesn’t feel like much pressure.

This guy was just about to quit and go work on the assembly line next to his father, but then fate intervened.

From the grocery store to the Big Show.

He knows his father is seeing him succeed, even though his father is blind after that meth lab fire.

Returning to that village, no longer a starving fisherman’s son, he gives out brand-new gloves and tells toothless children, “You could be the next me.”

I don’t remember which player was in which story, which sport even, which Bob Costas rain delay special informed me. I do remember crying at most of them.

He, He, He, He. Came from nothing. Suffered. Won.

“Don’t talk to him about it,” Erasmo tells me, the first time I’ve ever heard him be didactic. “It is no point to talk about.”

When I sneak back toward the dugout, sneakers noiseless in the concrete tunnel, Hank and Pollreisz are still standing together, still touching. They’re on the grass by third, looking out. They are, both of them, pantomiming. Swings, throws. Hank catches an invisible ball, transfers it to his throwing hand, pretends to nab a base-stealer in slow, absentminded
progression. Teens rake the dirt, ignoring them. AC/DC is playing over the speakers, Brian Johnson proudly proclaiming,
“I’ve got big balls,”
and the teenagers are laughing at that, making pantomimes of their own, pretending to lug testicles the shape and weight of a pair of cantaloupes. Above the left-field fence, an intern starts the hot tub, where drunk, young, possibly attractive people will watch the game tonight. It sounds like an outboard motor, and Hank and Pollreisz jerk their heads up to look. Hank isn’t talking. He is standing straight, unmoving, seems to be concentrating all his energy on that. Eventually, Pollreisz says, “All right, pal?” because it’s time to get ready for the game and this moment has to end.

Pollreisz walks past me, gives a suspicious glance, but still calls me “partner” anyway. Hank trails, dragging his spikes through the dirt. We leave the dirt, enter the tunnel.

Clackety-clack. Clack-clack
. Then we stop.

“You’ll be back,” I say, hearing how false it sounds.

“Nah,” he says. And then, objectively, “Well, maybe, but probably not.”

When Hank walks in the locker room, everyone looks at him. He sits against the wall nearest the door, at his locker between Bantz and Danny. Jones is standing there, too, discussing testimony. A member of the Cedar Rapids grounds crew walked up to him after batting practice and asked for permission to testify.

“He said he saw a YouTube video of me from spring training talking about Jesus,” Jones tells everyone. “He was, like, waiting to talk to me.”

“Were you creeped out?” I ask.

He and Bantz don’t glare; they just pity me.

“No,” he says. “It’s not creepy to hear faith.”

They tell me the groundskeeper confessed to being a bad man, drunk and misguided, a waste of God’s love. And then he saw something, that light, and he was saved, and he’d been working the dirt hard at baseball games ever since. He was going to be a grandfather soon. He wanted to tell it all, and Jones was the kind who had the chance to spread his story among the still faithless.

“Amen,” the players say now.

Hank is putting on his shin guards, not looking up. Hank gestures that he needs to clean his cleats and is handed the spray. He works them over until the black leather is almost soaked, blacker than before. He
wipes all six inch-long spikes carefully, flicks excess dirt off his fingernails and onto the floor. He knocks them against the cement wall.
Clack
.

Jones spreads his long fingers over the middle of Hank’s back, kneads him a little.

Bantz is next, flanks him, grabs his hair, shoves the back of his head.

“Don’t be sulking,” he says, and they all laugh.

It’s an after-school special. It’s the black kid from Brooklyn, the former captain of the Dallas Baptist Patriots, and Hank, second-generation Mexican, living out his father’s most impossible aspirations while his father toils in the vanity orange trees in wealthy people’s Pasadena backyards, paid cash for hard labor. The connecting thread is this work ethic, something inarguably good and American. Hank doesn’t want any of it now. He cuts his laugh short and shrugs his shoulders, flinging off the condescending hands.

“I’m done,” he says.

“Done what?” Incredulous and smiling, even though they know exactly.

“I’m out. I’m going home.”

“No,” they tell him.

“This is just one little thing,” Danny says.

“It’s weak to lose faith over something like this.” That’s Jones.

Bantz completes it: “Stay believing,” less Journey, more New Testament.

“I’m
twenty-four
fucking years old,” Hank hisses, louder than he wanted to say it. His teammates pull back in unison.

Danny manages a “So?”

“I’m fucking twenty-four and I’m supposed to start over?”

I think this the only context in the world where that statement doesn’t sound like a joke.

“Don’t do that,” Jones says.

“Why?”
Hank’s voice cracks, and the room is stilled. Some teammates look over; some look away.

He stops himself. He lets the hands return to his back, bows his head, and absorbs the kind dishonesty.

“You’re all good, old man,” Jones says, and all four of them laugh into one another, Hank’s eyes still on the ground. He suits up because he will play tonight, even though any ember of consequence has been taken
from his performance. He could play to a level that he’s never achieved, and still there is no way that he will play here tomorrow.

Hank announces, in an attempt at bravado, that he will get two hits tonight. This is met with unanimous approval, quiet but heartfelt, the way stern grandfathers shake hands in the important moments of life. It feels like a eulogy. Something mythic. Dave, old Dave, from
The Kid from Tomkinsville
. Or De Niro in
Bang the Drum Slowly
, ending in sad triumph as Michael Moriarty intones, “From here on out, I’m never gonna rag anybody.” Or Kevin Costner in
Bull Durham
, finally done with playing, content to settle in a good town with a good woman, that expected, treacly conclusion. But that character set a record and got the girl and then he walked off, disappointment softened by glory. And that character could famously debate the merits of Sontag and tell long, looping stories about his wild life because that was the point, he was a baseball player but also something more. I have always loved the idea of losing when beauty is gained from the loss, when there is deep, orchestral consequence to what is ending.

Hank must believe in those things, too, or else he wouldn’t have shined his cleats up. But real failure is muted and swift, especially in the minor leagues, especially at this level. There are no options to it, no metaphor attached. No wisdom to be gained.

This doesn’t mean anything, Hank. I want to tell him that. This is something staged, constructed to be redemptive, so that there is a kind feeling with you in the middle seat on the 5:00 a.m. flight to Pulaski, Virginia.

I watch him play from the stands, sitting up for his at bats as always.

I lean over to Joyce, who is, of course, present, and say, “Hank is gonna be sent down.”

She looks out at him. “Mmm, yeah. Seems like it should be about time. I don’t have him yet. Remind me to get him before he leaves.”

We will wait for him after the game, I know, and Joyce will grab his arm before he gets on the bus, ask for his signature on a ball, tell him he’s been wonderful, tell him good luck. He will give a sardonic smile for the benefit of his teammates, but this might be the most appreciated request that Joyce will make all year, a memento for her wall, third row, fifth column under the big window by her kitchen table, the section reserved for those who still technically have a chance.

Hank and I are the same age. I have never thought of myself as old. In fact, my happiest thoughts, the ones that I force in at least once a day, revolve around youth, around the notion that whatever is happening now, I am incomplete. When I talk with the few younger fans, we talk about everything with open ends, no borders, a summer watching and then who knows? That is the appeal, or part of it. It dulls for three hours, sometimes four when the pitchers are wild, any feelings about anything outside the boundaries of one game, a drunkenness that extends beyond the cheap beer—a game as of yet untold, a life, then, that is in no hurry. It is a gift that the players give us, a sense of urgency that is theirs alone to shoulder.