Class A (26 page)

We wait for those words.

“Koombai,” he says. He nods, somber. He offers no definition, but the dogs and the monkeys spring into action.

Terry Pollreisz pops out to stand next to Hank and Sams, puts a liver-spotted hand on the center of Hank’s back, as usual. He leans in and says things into Hank’s ear and Hank smiles, laughs with effort. I imagine that Pollreisz is telling him something cattle related. He looks to be pantomiming a lasso. He likes to tell stories, and his players like to half listen, hearing only the age in his voice, the general weathered, tame tone that his words always seem to take, boring but calming, too.

Pollreisz got to be a professional baseball player for one year, in 1969, and has since lived a fulfilling, accomplished life in service of trying to revise that failed moment. He played nineteen games in the minors, couldn’t hit, began to doubt himself as a player and a man, was of legal draft age and unmarried, was deemed not worth waiting through Vietnam for by the organization, was cut, and then felt worse than he ever had, felt a panic that spread over him.

He told me about it once, though, standing in the batting cage as men a third his age hit. His blood pressure spiked so high that the army wouldn’t take him, and at twenty-two, in a family of high school superstar athletes and veterans, he was washed up and useless to his country. It made him, he told me, doubt everything about himself, made him come to the conclusion that he was not worthy as a person, so quickly and quietly rejected from the only things he had ever equated with success. Eventually, he righted himself and got a master’s degree in education, taught U.S. history and coached high school baseball in a rainy green town in Oregon, won a state baseball championship, was hired to coach the University of Portland baseball team, did so for twenty years, had an office with lots of pictures in it, had a wife and children and grandchildren, had a house near a creek with decent fish, was, by his own account, a settled and satisfied man. All of which makes his willingness to quit, sell his home, uproot his wife from her job as an administrative nurse, move to the suburban sprawl next to a spring-training complex outside Phoenix, and spend six months a year on the road, back seizing after long bus trips, seem so inexplicable.

“Do you miss your life?” I asked him.

I think of how quickly he answered me as I watch him watching animals dressed as ranchers getting more applause than he ever did.

“God, never.” He was so sure. “All of that was nice, but it wasn’t this.”

He is as stooped as many of the Baseball Family’s aged, though you can tell that what was once there was exceptional—long legs, broad back, hands that even with their arthritic contortions are substantial and imply a capacity for the endurance of pain. He shuffles out to coach first base only slightly faster than Bill shuffles into the stadium, trailing little Betty by a good four yards. It is a wholly different dynamic when he approaches the fans before games, not bright and improving like the players, but something closer to them, a face and a body ebbing. It’s difficult to know whether he is someone to be envied.

“In 1962, a little boy was born,” Wild Thang tells us. “And that little boy’s only dream was to own one of these here dogs.”

He is kneeling now behind home plate, where Hank should be crouching. Two exhausted border collies flank him. Also, one of the
monkeys, finally off his saddle, has scampered up to sit on his shoulder, staring at the crowd, too panicked to move.

“And that little boy,” Wild Thang continues. “That boy, he loved a monkey by the name of Curious George. It all started there.”

He stops to let us absorb that.

“This has been my life,” he says. “These animals are my … life.”

It is a good pause. And in it I am able to realize that the music has changed seamlessly away from the honky-tonk rock that worked so well with small, galloping animals. The second movement in Wild Thang’s symphony is something like taps. Also a little like a stripped-down version of the theme from
Independence Day
. The scene is absurd, but we are all hushed, I think because Wild Thang has so fully embraced the meaning of this moment. Into the microphone, panting but resolute, he sounds as if he may be starting to cry, and even if he isn’t near tears, the tone is so intimate, this man kneeling as though in prayer, wearing the home team’s jersey and a cowboy hat that must be older than I am, surrounded by his animals, his
life
, giving thanks.

He sounds almost mournful when he continues.

“God has given me a talent, I know that he has.”

What a thing to know.

“I’m here with y’all tonight,” he says, and waits a moment for the appreciative smattering of cheers. “Tomorrow night I’m in, um, Davenport. Come Tuesday, I’m in Oregon. And the next week, Montana. And the next week, Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. And for me to do that, to be this man, to drive all these places, it takes people like y’all. Y’all, in your town, coming out to these games.”

It sounds as though he has more to say, and we are waiting for it, but he holds back, just enough to seem as stoic as we wanted him to be.

“I just want to thank y’all. May God bless you in the way he has blessed me.”

He stands, stiff, and walks with his animals to begin a circle of the field, stopping so that everyone in the crowd can take a last picture of monkeys sitting on dogs.

You can argue that one comes to every sporting event to see something new, each game unpredictable. But most sports have a clock ticking
down, a beginning and then a set amount of minutes until it is over. Baseball is untimed and languid. Though this is no great revelation, it’s still satisfying in an existential way to know that the game will never constrain you with a predetermined end.

When will you be done?
friends ask everyone here.
When is it over?
my girlfriend will text. And I can answer honestly:
I have no idea
. I have
no idea
what might happen with two on and two outs in the top of the eighth, a wild pickoff move to score the tying run or a walk to load the bases and a pitching change because the manager saw something scared on his boy’s face. If anything feels honestly dreamlike in baseball, in the action, the team, the crowd, the field, the itinerant entertainers, it is that we don’t know when it will be over while we’re in it.

And even when there is a final score, we can be stubborn, we can keep the game from ending. No wonder baseball is so weighted with literature and film versions. There are always stories left that we can tell, myths we can make, myths to fill in the spaces, observations that soon become hyperbole that then become outright lies, but so what? We can surprise ourselves by how we remember it, never exactly as what it was, a dream retold in the morning, boring probably, but at least open to interpretation.

With the invention of cell phones and the Internet, then the relationship between the two, Wild Thang has become famous. He is on his way to YouTube superstardom. It feels good to believe in a bayou boy who always wanted a life like the Man with the Yellow Hat. But also just his confidence that this was preordained, always an end point, an unquestionably substantive life to live. And if he says it with enough certainty, it is true. His wife is back in Mississippi. She is a
good, no, a great woman
, staying with his son and all of the things he has given up
nobly
not only to provide for them but to commune with a worthwhile existence, sleeping some nights at truck stops, nestled in the straw in his trailer, warmed by the body heat of three species that he dreamed of as a boy.

Variations of tonight’s speech have been spoken in places that look exactly like this one in Illinois, Delaware, Montana, and have gotten hundreds of thousands of hits with titles like: “Cowboy with Monkey Gives Crazy Inspirational Speech!!!!” And now people know ahead of time what is coming to town, and he surprises nobody with his entrance
or his sentiment. But he still speaks every time and for longer, a whole life’s story about struggle and triumph and dogs and monkey training and the gulf oil spill and triumph again. I see Jason, the guy who videos everything in Clinton, leaning over the opposing team’s dugout, smiling, turning his left wrist to zoom the lens. This will be his all-time most viewed video, the only video that brings thousands of visitors to his YouTube page, more than Nick Franklin’s home runs or Kalian Sams’s home runs or Danny Carroll’s, or Hank’s two-run bloop single to right, which got 147 views, two likes, and zero comments.

Tim is a dreamer, he has told me so. But I think that he is using the word differently, the John Lennon way, though without that cheeky venom that colored Lennon’s free love. “Dream,” in the stands, with Tim, means something kind. He is a gentle, sedentary man, and so he prefers to dream.

He tells me a story from thirty years ago, right around the time that a young Wild Thang, just a humble rodeo clown then, began his pilgrimage to find the animals that would become his life. It’s from the strike, that year of loud, angry stagnancy. Tim and his friends were of a younger, hungry generation in Clinton, coming into adulthood in a deep recession, jealous of the union men who had some and still wanted more. And the company had ways of being more persuasive than a group of old guys holding signs could ever be. The strike began at midnight on August 1, 1979. By August 2, the
Clinton Herald
, as well as local papers in other Iowa counties, in Illinois, in Missouri, ran a full-page ad listing every new position that had opened up at the Clinton plant, along with its hourly salary, and at the bottom of the page an extra bonus, forty-six cents per hour for out-of-towners to cover cost of living.

Tim had plenty of friends who were scabs out of necessity. Because they were making $5.00 an hour doing part-time shit as everything began to close, and $8.79 an hour, as was advertised, is the start of a life, and how is it bad to want that? Tim looked me in the eye in a way that seemed important when he said that he couldn’t do it because he knew some of those striking men and he knew their families and he felt the collective deflation of his home that the losing effort was beginning to create. Or at least that is what he tells me, and so I believe it, and I
look at Tim with melancholy reverence. He appreciates the things that deserve appreciation. He never worked a steady job at ADM, has never made what those guys make, but he does not want to be complicit in a corporation that would so happily crush people who were there first. All of it was a choice. It’s important I know that. He did the right thing, stupid maybe, but sacrificial, and why shouldn’t he be proud of that? Why can’t that be an achievement?

“At times,” Dan Peltier told Congress, “the minors seem to be a series of acts of desperation.”

There is a bluntness to these words that, when I read them out loud to myself, I realize I never hear, day after day after day in the clubhouse.

Of course, then he ends with “Despite these observations, I would not give up my experience in playing baseball for anything. There is no greater feeling in the world than the first time you get called up to the majors, and there is also no greater low than the day that you get sent back down. Knowing what I know, I would still do it all over again.”

I want to feel that certain about anything, but I don’t trust that I can. Who can? What real person that I know, that I love, has ever been that certain? I was brought up on doubt, the expectation of failure eventually validated because failure always happens. The only time that reality wasn’t discussed was during televised baseball games. And after my father told me that my brother’s problem was delusions of grandeur, that he actually thought he could be somebody amazing and that chasing a high was just an extension of incorrect logic, we turned on a baseball game. And he predicted a home run because his favorite player was due and had that look in his eyes.

Dan Peltier, the lucky one, the college graduate, the man who made the majors, and who now lives in the St. Paul suburbs with his wife and kids, got the chance to speak out, and he was still ignored. And a week before this season started, an article ran in
Baseball America
, the only reading material delivered to the clubhouse: “Playing for Peanuts: Many Minor Leagues Scrimp and Save to Survive.” It must have seemed a bit obvious to the players as they read it. It skimmed through difficult realities—the 2006 collective bargaining agreement that had no minor-league players in attendance, the fact that most minor leaguers interviewed said they would not unionize, fearing punishment and eventual release. But it ended on high redemption: “Their air mattresses will sit
in rooms decorated only by mold. And they’ll gladly accept this sacrifice. They’re chasing a dream.”

I never manage to ask the players about reading those words mid-chase. I am always afraid that they will think I am taunting them when I ask them things that are never asked. And I am always feeling guilty that maybe I am, in fact, taunting, or at least condescending, trying to point out their futilities that they don’t want to see, because so many of them carry themselves with swollen superiority that can only come from a young jock and that is a tempting thing to want to deflate.

The LumberKings are winning 6-0, an occasion that should be happy. I see Hank trying to make it so, yelling one-syllable encouragement to his teammates after Wild Thang has given his last wave and driven off the field, his sheep standing proudly atop the truck, his American flags fluttering. But Wild Thang’s exit should have been the end of this game. It cannot be topped. Neither team manages a hit over the next two and a half innings, and the crowd sags. Even the Baseball Family, though staying dutifully until the end, is showing that sense of duty on their faces. Hank stays on the top step of the dugout. He grabs Blake Ochoa, the man starting over him at catcher, by the shoulders after he pops out in the eighth, says something supportive in Spanish. The same with Matt Cerione after he strikes out. And then finally to Danny, playing left field, the LumberKings’ last hitter who swings at a fastball near his eyes and grimaces the moment he hears it pop into the mitt behind him.