The Might Have Been (17 page)

“It don’t matter. I haven’t seen her so happy since before the day she came to tell us she was pregnant. The louse sat in the car at the curb, waiting to see if I’d shoot him. Which I mighta.” Walter laughed and was still laughing when Connie and Billy came through the gate, stumbling and weaving from dizziness in the wake of the ride.

“What’s funny?” Connie said, laying her hand on Edward Everett’s arm for balance.

“You are,” Walter said.

They wandered the fair for a while longer. Billy seemed determined to eat every variety of food they came across: a corn dog, an Eskimo Pie, cotton candy, and Edward Everett gladly paid for it all.

“You’re staying awake with him tonight when he’s throwing up the entire state of Pennsylvania,” Connie said.

“Oh, he’ll be fine,” Edward Everett said.

“Little you know.”

When it was nearly time to go back to their car to cross the Allegheny River for the ballpark, they came to a booth that featured a ball toss game: throw three baseballs at a pyramid of six milk bottles, knock them down and win a stuffed bear. Although Edward Everett was certain Billy considered himself too old for such a toy, the boy asked him to see if he could win one for him.

A lanky teenage boy was throwing at the bottles when they got to the booth, while a thin girl in pink eyeglasses and braces stood beside him, clasping her hands in hope. The boy’s first throw sailed wide of the pyramid and smacked into the canvas draped behind the bottles. His second nicked the topmost bottle, which spun, tottered and then fell, leaving the other five bottles standing. His girlfriend gave his
arm a squeeze. The boy took a breath, held the ball in front of his face, sighting toward the pyramid, and heaved it but it, too, was wide of the mark. The boy’s shoulders slumped. “It’s okay. It’s okay,” his girlfriend said, kissing his cheek. “I can’t believe you tried. No one ever tried for me before.”

The boy and girl turned to go but the carny called after them, “You got a prize here.” He held up a shallow cardboard box filled with inexpensive plastic trinkets, shaking it. The boy nodded to the girl, who began fishing in it until she found a green plastic spider ring, which she slipped onto the fourth finger of her left hand and held it up for the boy to admire, as if it were a diamond instead of some silly toy.

When they left, Edward Everett stepped to the front and handed the carny two tickets, the cost for three balls, and the carny pointed toward a cardboard box of baseballs. It was a motley collection: the seams of some of the balls split, showing the wound cord beneath the horsehide cover. Edward Everett picked one up. Faded red letters promised it was a “Professional League Baseball,” but the manufacturer had scrimped on the cover and the split in the seams showed clearly. He took a step back and hurled it toward the pyramid but he was no more accurate than the teenage boy before him: it hit the canvas backdrop a good three feet above the pyramid.

“Two mo’; two mo’,” the carny said.

Edward Everett reached into the box and plucked out another ball but its condition was too poor, a flap of the cover loose, and so he dropped it and selected another one, a ball whose surface was so worn any words that might have been stamped on its face were long gone. He realized it had been months since he’d held a baseball, whereas his entire life to that point had centered on it. The ball seemed foreign, as if he had never seen anything like it before. He could feel the imperfections in it: the frayed threads of the seams, a gouge where it rested in the V of his index and middle finger. He took in a breath and let it fly. His aim was better and he hit almost precisely between the two bottles on the second row of the pyramid, but only the one on the right fell, along with the topmost bottle. The left bottle on the second row teetered but held. He threw another ball, catching the
left bottle on the bottom row, sending it spinning away, but three bottles stood. He realized that they were weighted in such a way that even hitting them directly wouldn’t mean that all six would fall.

The carny brought out the tray of trinkets. Edward Everett ignored it and handed him two more tickets. The trick, he realized, lay not so much in strength—not throwing the balls as hard as you could directly at the pyramid—but hitting them when they were unstable. He plucked three balls from the box, took one in his right hand and held two in the palm of his left, stepped back and, echoing a drill he’d learned when the team considered briefly turning him into an infielder, a drill in which he threw as many balls as he could through the center of a tire in thirty seconds, took a breath and then snapped the ball in his right hand toward the pyramid with a quick release, like a second baseman flicking the ball to first to catch a quick runner coming down the line, then fed the second ball to his right hand, snapped it almost instantly after releasing the first toward the pyramid, not waiting to see if he was successful at dislodging the bottles and then, almost instantly, flicked the third ball toward the pyramid. By the time it hit the bottles, four were down, only the center and left bottle on the bottom row standing, but they were wobbling when he threw at them, and so when the ball hit them dead-on, the center bottle toppled almost immediately, while the left tipped to the right, hesitated, and then clattered off the shelf.

“You play ball in high school or something?” the carny said.

“Actually,” Walter started to say, but Edward Everett cut him off:

“Yeah. In high school,” he said.

The stuffed bear that Billy picked out was nearly as tall as he was but he insisted on carrying it to the car, nearly stumbling two or three times because he couldn’t see the ground in front of him. Connie walked hand in hand with Edward Everett, giving his hand a squeeze. “It’s not even noon yet,” she said, “and it’s his best birthday ever.”

At the car, Edward Everett opened the trunk so Billy could lay the bear into it, but he wouldn’t.

“He can’t breathe in there,” Billy said.

Edward Everett, Connie and Walter laughed but the bear rode in the backseat, between Billy and Walter, strapped into a seatbelt of his own.

Even stopping for the fair, they arrived at the ballpark before the gates opened, while the parking lot still had far more open spaces than cars. Billy worried that if he left his bear behind someone would steal it but Connie convinced him that the bear, whom he had already started calling Mr. B, would be safe on his own—although Billy rolled the rear windows down a fraction of an inch each so that Mr. B wouldn’t suffocate.

All around the perimeter of the stadium, vendors sold boxes of popcorn, Cracker Jack, peanuts, as well as pennants, T-shirts and caps. Billy wanted everything: even on top of the ice cream, corn dog and sugar waffle he’d had, he wanted roasted peanuts and a large box of Cracker Jack, as well as a T-shirt and a pennant. Connie told him he could choose one souvenir and that they’d buy him a hot dog in the third inning, if he was hungry then. In the end, he settled on a St. Louis Cardinals T-shirt. “Because Ed played there,” he said. Connie gave Edward Everett’s hand an affectionate squeeze.

Their seats were good: in the third row behind the San Diego dugout, courtesy of Edward Everett’s uncle. As they kept descending the steps, passing row after row, drawing nearer to the playing field, Billy repeated, “Wow. Wow. Wow.”

Even before they reached their seats, however, Edward Everett knew it had been a mistake to come. Perhaps it was how near they were to the field or perhaps he would have felt the same if they were in the nosebleed section, which is where he had sat the only other time he came into a major league ballpark as a spectator. That had been almost twenty years earlier, when his father had taken him to a game in Cleveland to celebrate Edward Everett’s birthday. Then, their seats were high in the upper deck down the left field line, part of their view blocked by an iron post, a third of left field obscured because their angle of vision didn’t allow them to see the near corner; when someone hit a ball there, Edward Everett had no idea whether
the fielder caught it or it fell in for a hit, except for the crowd’s response.

Now, near enough to the field that he could see the acne scars on the cheek of one of the Padres’ reserve catchers, near enough that he could hear the clatter of bats as players pulled them from the rack, the full effect of what had happened to him became clear. It was one thing when he settled into this life: putting on his tie, driving through the hills of southeastern Ohio, nodding sympathetically with bakery owners and restaurant GMs about the price of wheat and fuel, telling them about his ballplaying days. Then, the years he’d spent in the game had begun to seem like stories about an interesting person he once met, rather than a life he’d lived. In the new life, he’d never been a ballplayer: his life had always been flour and Connie and Billy and thinking about carpenters’ bids and bathroom fixtures; had always been the chart of sales in the company newsletter and where he and his uncle stood: neck and neck with Jerry Remmer for salesman of the year.

Less than a year ago, however, when he’d been the age he still was, he’d been running in this very outfield, taking his hacks in BP in this very batting cage. Perhaps, he thought, he should have waited fifteen years before going to a game, when he would be old enough that he would have no chance of getting back in, a middle-aged man whose life by then truly would have swallowed up the years he had spent in the game so sufficiently that it would be as if his ballplaying self were his own ancestor.

Out on the field, one of the Padres’ hitters taking batting practice sent a long fly ball to right. Standing halfway between the infield and the wall, a player who was so new that his number wasn’t even in the scorecard Edward Everett had purchased dashed toward the warning track, seemingly almost before the hitter made contact. Lined above the wall, a cluster of fans extended gloves and held baseball caps upside down like small woolen baskets, eager for the souvenir. As he reached the warning track, the fielder slowed, stretching out his bare hand, feeling for the wall. Finding it, pushing his fingers into the vinyl-covered padding, he paused, crouched and leaped, snaring the ball just at the yellow line at the top of the wall and then
tumbling to the ground. The fans there let out a selfish, disappointed groan but as the fielder scrambled to his feet, he—not looking—flipped the ball over his shoulder into the crowd, where it caught everyone off-guard and tipped off fingers and hands and seat backs, bounding away from all of them.

Edward Everett realized he was on his feet, that he had gotten to them at the moment he saw the fielder sprinting across the great grassy expanse after a ball that meant nothing except that the hitter was finding his stroke for the day, while the other fielders loitered in the outfield, joking among themselves, ignoring their teammate going back for the ball, as the fans finding their places in the boxes near Edward Everett were scanning the ballpark for beer vendors and peanut vendors, and women were wiping suntan lotion across their shoulders and arms, the air redolent of coconut, and boys were craning for autographs and souvenir baseballs, not caring who they were beseeching,
Hey, pitch, hey, pitch, throw me the ball, pitch
, and Connie was saying something in a low voice to Billy while her father was exclaiming, “You could touch them from here, we’re that close,” as the fielder dashed toward the wall (For what? Nothing in the world would live or die if he caught the ball or didn’t catch it), his head turned to track the flight of the ball across a sky so bright it was difficult for Edward Everett to see the ball, although in his memory he knew what it would look like, the way the gray horsehide and the red seams would be spinning in a tight spiral as it descended on its way toward the end of its meaningless flight, caught by a player who, it would turn out, wouldn’t even get into the game but would be up and down and up and down on the bench all day, crashing his palms together when one of his teammates hit a single or snatched a ground ball before it could skip into the outfield for a hit.

Two weeks later, without telling anyone, Edward Everett went to the tryout camp.

B
y nine in the morning, the field for the tryout was cluttered with players tossing baseballs back and forth, well more than a hundred balls arcing across the blue sky. Edward Everett was playing catch with a kid who appeared to be seventeen or eighteen, a skinny blond-haired boy who wore a cheap souvenir Cleveland Indians batting helmet perched on his head. He had little ability: his throws sometimes sailed over Edward Everett’s head, sometimes bounced three-quarters of the way to him. One caught another player on the ankle, sending him to the turf in pain. “Sorry; sorry,” the kid said. Once, chasing another errant throw, Edward Everett noticed two of the scouts—a short, burly man in his sixties with a crew cut, and a trim younger man with curly hair—pointing in his direction, the younger man making a note on a clipboard.

Everywhere was a mix of the talented and the inept. Perhaps twenty yards from Edward Everett and the blond-headed kid, two players in Ohio University jerseys played catch and even in the cacophony of balls smacking leather, Edward Everett could hear the sizzle of their throws. Near them, two stocky men who might have been in their thirties made lollipop tosses, dropping more balls than they caught.

Finally, the burly coach called for the players to stop warming,
directing them to line up against the outfield wall. Edward Everett tried to move away from the blond boy but he stuck to him like a lost puppy, following him so closely that several times he kicked the heels of Edward Everett’s cleats.

“You been to one of these before?” he asked when they reached the outfield wall and were waiting for whatever came next.

“No,” Edward Everett said, not really wanting to talk to the kid. He had bad breath, smelling of cigarettes and garlic, and was missing his left upper canine.

What he said was not precisely true. When he was the kid’s age, he’d been invited to a scouting combine workout at Crosley Field in Cincinnati: Edward Everett and seventy-five other ballplayers throwing, fielding and hitting while scouts from a dozen teams clicked stopwatches and made notes on index cards in advance of the professional draft. They were all talented, all of them all-state, all-American, all-everything and they were all going to be drafted—the only question was by whom and how high.