Class A (29 page)

I look down to turn up the volume. I look up to see the eyes of something. It’s too small to be a deer, bigger than a rabbit, though. Whatever it is, it’s alive for a last second and its eyes are wet and black and I am the last thing it sees before the squelch that is louder than Delilah, louder than my engine. And then I am past it, and it makes no more noise. Delilah says that music is the language of angels. When you are listening to her, you are eavesdropping on something holy.

The truck stop by exit 271 is lit up in a harsh, alien glow. I stop here when I have to pee, mostly, but tonight I stop because I want to stop. I want to stand still and look at the blood on my bumper and then close my eyes. The semis are strewn along the grounds, not parked in distinct rows, just wherever. Nobody is in the hallway at the truck stop. One of the lights that run horizontally across the ceiling is broken. It makes a sound like a radio with no signal. I look out at all the trucks, and I know men are in them, sleeping or masturbating or just staring ahead, but there are no lights, and I let myself think, for the moment, that I’m the only person inert and off the highway for miles.

In the bathroom, a man is bending down over the sink to splash water on his face and then looking up at his reflection in the mirror, beads of water hanging off the edges of his beard. He does it a few times, slowly, and doesn’t look at me. I wonder who he listens to as he drives, how many times stations fade out and change with voices like Delilah’s extending across state lines, linking places and days.

Tammy goes to most games with her family still, but her husband doesn’t anymore. Dan was part of the Roadkill Crew, the wheelman a lot of the time, with Tammy riding shotgun and Tim howling in the back. He drove to Arizona for spring training for a few years, watching the sunrise on the fire-orange hills as they got close while everyone else slept. He organized all his vacation days at ADM around Clinton’s away games. But he’s quit ADM now. He hated it there for twenty-five years, the hours, the way his lungs hurt, the burn on his shoulders and arms after an afternoon inside the vats with a jackhammer, getting sludge
off steel. He had been a complainer, or at least he had complained to Tammy about the stuff he saw poured into the river and the way things were inside the factory, and she had made a stink until the plant manager told Dan to shut her up. Dan is a truck driver now, finally. Before the heart attack, and again right after the doctors cleared him, he lived a life hopping between places like this rest stop, no longer stationary, looking forward to the next game’s beginning. He is, Tammy says, who he always wanted to be, nobody’s employee, unmoored.

I try to think of myself as that kind of man, my face drawn and tired from staring down the whole country as I hurtle through it. I try to think of how many people I would see and nod to, exchange a word with, that I would never have to speak to again. That is all I think of these days—I
could
be that. I have the capacity to be that. The sound of an engine starting comes from outside, the whining chug until finally the clutch catches and then a roar.

It is a beautiful act to put language to the game, making it better than it really is. I want to think that for sure, and I want to tell Dave that, too. It is a noble thing. It is making something, even if it doesn’t last. Dave’s earliest precursors narrated games before they could produce clean, live audio from the stadium. Before teams sent radiomen to away games, they would get transcripts and sit in a windowless booth, overlooking nothing, and they would call the thing with urgency. They held miniature bats in one hand during broadcasts, and when a batter made contact, they voiced it, slapping their wood against the thick cardboard of empty teletape rolls. They simulated crowd noise and then pitched their own words above it, heightening the ambience that they’d created, yelling behind the fabrications to make you feel it. There were the facts—the ball was caught in right field, the score is tied at one—and everything else was theirs. They had the power to make people imagine what they knew to be true.

Ted told me that at the winter baseball meetings in Orlando, the LumberKings got 650 résumés and tapes from men looking for Dave’s job, a job that wasn’t vacated and might not be any time soon. Voices with names quickly forgotten, hoping that something in the timbre of their home run call would give them the right to move to Clinton, Iowa.
All Dave wants to do is leave. This was supposed to be a springboard, an entrance leading right to an exit. He is in his fifth year now. This past winter was the first when he didn’t return home to his parents’ house in Wisconsin and spend the off-season doing ticket sales for the Milwaukee Brewers, his voice clean and precise over the phone, wasted on repeating package deals to one listener at a time. Instead, he stayed in Clinton and called high school football games, tried to dramatize the stumbling movements of pimply sophomores to their grandmothers sitting at home.

Dave and I pretend to each other. We feign assurance. Dave knows everything. And he tells me everything he knows as though I should know it, too, as though anyone should. He has shaped a life around memorizing and interpreting players who can do things that he can’t. I look for that certainty. For talent that is certain, for scores that are official. For images that live up to what I expect them to be.

I tell myself again that the idea is to transcend, a word that does not gain clarity as I overuse it, but in fact grows more obscure. Still, to transcend. That vagary is what to reach for, found maybe in the clubhouse, the stadium, all of it. The broadcast. I’ve read quotations of men who said that watching baseball live for the first time was a disappointment after having listened to Harry Caray for years, because his version was so much more. And then they got to the park and everything had limits and the players were mortal men, maybe a little taller, a little faster than the average. That seems impossible, here and now, that sense of awe. Dave just wants more people to hear what he knows. I think we both want to look down on each other.

Brad and Dave, the local voices, go out after the games sometimes. They go to Manning’s Whistle Stop, across the street from the stadium. Brad has been going to Manning’s for a long time, it being the closest bar to the public address booth that he has manned since he was seventeen. Brad will tell me months from now, when we’re driving together across three states because the LumberKings are still alive when nobody expected them to be, that he could have ended up at various places along the route. South Bend, in particular, offered him a job to be their public address man, and they would have set him up with other duties
as well—stats, maybe some radio. But who knows? Sure, they promised him things, but what does that mean? We will pass the South Bend exit on our way to Ohio, and Brad will point.

“There,” he will say, though all we’ll be able to see are trees and a towering Burger King sign. “That could have been me in there.”

It will be me and him and Erin in the car, Erin, exactly my age, getting her first experience with a microphone in her hand this season, working as the field announcer, celebrating the winners of the miniature John Deere tractor race and the rubber-chicken toss. Erin and I will look out the window at Brad’s possibilities and say, “
Wow
.” I will ask Brad why he didn’t take the gig, and he’ll give a long, proud sigh. He’ll tell me that he is a
part
of the LumberKings. He has a good job at the county landfill each day and a thousand people listening to him every summer night, telling him so the next day at the grocery store. I won’t be sure if all that is true. Because the current version of Clinton and baseball is not like the one that I’m always told used to exist, that I am so ready to mourn. The field was the center of a town that had a center, a perfect keystone. It made sense, or at least it does now that it’s gone. And Betty remembers her grandfather’s farm, the horses, the way he would listen to the radio broadcast of the baseball games while milking his cows and she’d sit on the hay and watch him listen. But Brad is too young to remember any of that—the old teams, the old town. He never got to live through the times that he wants to remember.

I will not say any of this to Brad, and he will look past the Burger King sign and smile.

We are watching
SportsCenter
now.

I’m at Manning’s because the players ditched me, promising to make me a part of their night and then showing me that they still have the power to leave me. I stood outside the clubhouse in the rain for an hour and finally ran in, finding only Tyler, paid to do the team’s laundry, rubbing grass stains out of their pants. “Gone,” he said, and I said nothing. I knew Brad and Dave would be here, and they are, drinking whiskey, in no rush to leave. The best players in the world are on the screen in front of us in six-second clips of their best moments from today. We say their names out loud, each one.

In a clip from St. Louis, Albert Pujols hits a home run.

Brad says, “Peoria Chief, Albert Pujols. That was in 2000, I think.”

“Yep, 2000,” says Dave, though he wasn’t here then.

Brad simulates his decade-old announcement: “Now batting for the Peoria Chiefs, third baseman Albert
Pu
-jols.”

Then it’s Joe Mauer on TV hitting a home run—“Mauer,” we say. He was in the Midwest League, too. He played against Clinton. Then it’s Ian Kinsler on the Rangers, who was a LumberKing not long ago. Dave rode the bus with him for the two months that he was kept around.

“Nice guy,” Dave says.

“Mmm,” Brad says.

SportsCenter
turns to a joke clip. A man runs onto the field drunk and takes a serpentine route, avoiding security with his arms raised in triumph. Dave tells us about how he used to work for the Brewers’ grounds crew when he was still a college kid, thin and fast, he was really fast. A fan leaped onto the field, and Dave sprinted across the grass in front of, what, forty thousand people? He caught the man in shallow center, speared him, wrapped his arms around the man’s waist, and didn’t let go until he felt them falling together. He stood to a beer-fueled ovation. He asks us if we can imagine the size of a stadium like that when you’re in the middle of it. We say no.

I tell Dave that I played summer ball in high school with a kid who’s in AAA with the Brewers now. I say the guy’s name and then say a nickname that I was never really friendly enough to call him. I ask Dave if he’s heard of him, and he says no.

Are we all just trying to repeat the feeling of a moment when we felt most important? Yes. Obviously. But if that’s such an obvious thing, why does it hurt to realize it, sitting here watching
SportsCenter
at Manning’s Whistle Stop? What we’ve seen, what we’ve said, the way we saw it, the way we said it, hanging out there over the volume of the flashy ESPN anchors who just show us the choice moments and then yell,
“Boom goes the dynamite!”

Dave thinks that I’m pushing it. That I’m talking too fast, saying “remember” too many times.
Remember how fat Kirby Puckett was? Remember how crazy Carl Everett was?
As if these were the former cast members of family Thanksgivings. He doesn’t want me here, intruding on his bar, his game, his knowledge. He looks around under his
LumberKings hat, at Brad and me, at the unused pool table, at the obese basset hound that the bartender has left tied to a stool. He says, “Fuck.”

I leave by eleven. Delilah is still on. It’s Friday night, girls’ night. All the ladies are invited to get metaphorically cozy by Delilah’s hearth in a well-hidden compound somewhere in Seattle. A crackling fire is evoked, though it is eighty-five degrees here even in the rain, and who knows what they’re feeling in Tucson or Honolulu. But it doesn’t matter, because we are friends who have never met, me and the girls, and I imagine us in a room that may or may not exist, and I imagine Delilah like Aslan from
The Chronicles of Narnia
, with her golden mane and her Jesus complex.

I am in between again, in the dark. I am allowing myself to feel some heightened magnitude in the potential of a black horizon with nothing on it. Delilah speaks of nothing like it’s everything, and that’s why it resonates. She doesn’t ask her callers where they’re from or how old they are, so unless that information is offered up, they are nobody and they are all of us. She tells us that she is so happy to be here with us, that we’re all together. She tells me she hopes that I am feeling good, that I am realizing what a special thing it is to be me on this night. I let myself believe her.

W
HEN
N
ICK
F
RANKLIN TRIED
to hop into my front seat, Hank said no. Nick looked at both of us, seemed to understand, and ducked into the back. Hank is something like my protector, maybe something like a friend. Nick is sandwiched in the middle now between Luis Núñez and Fray Martinez, his other two new roommates, complaining about the odor from whatever product it is that Fray puts in his perm.

Fray, a relief pitcher, was terrible again tonight and is quiet. He is always quiet but usually listens and tries to smile in the moments when he understands things. Not tonight. Tonight, after he seemed unable to throw two strikes in a row, after even Clinton’s most loyal began to mutter and boo, he is staring down at his bilingual Baseball Chapel pamphlet with drawn, fast-blinking eyes.

Nick speaks.

“Hank, Hank, Hank, Hank—”

“What?”

“Where are we going tonight?”

“Oh, you’re coming?”

“Yeah, man, why do you have to say it like that?”

Hank is smirking a little. Nick doesn’t like to be smirked at. He recovers quickly.

“You’re just worried because I’m gonna walk in and all the girls are gonna be like,
Oh. Oh
.”

Nick repeats himself a few times, making a circle with his lips, making a wave of his eyebrows, delighting in the approximation of what will come over every young woman’s face tonight when they get a look at him. Fray Martinez inches away from this display, glances up from his cheaply printed prayers, looking for an explanation.