The Cactus League

by Emily Nemens

  So Dave and Betty weren’t there to hear the home alarm wail or notice when it unceremoniously stopped. They didn’t see the perps coming and going, wreaking havoc in the pool. But Michael had to admit that things started going south well before Betty’s fall. With the recession came a wave of bad mortgages, homeowners owing more than their properties’ worth. Foreclosures. Some people walked away. The house on the other side of them had been empty for a year, nominally on sale but even the broker had stopped coming around. Last spring, not in their development, but not too far away, either, he’d seen a row of houses that had gone to seed: boarded up, gap-toothed with broken windows, pocked with orange eviction notices. Was that coming for them? Michael didn’t know; he sure as shit hoped not. Theirs had been a nice neighborhood—kids biking in the streets and splashing in pools. Michael never sees children playing anymore.

  Long story short, the Johnstons sold quick, and for a too-low price, to some developer buying up lots like they were Monopoly houses—he had three on their block, four on the next. Dave had heard the guy was fixing to raze the whole neighborhood, but when Michael pressed, Dave changed the subject.

  * * *

  Michael and Audrey wait on the dead grass, holding hands. Michael hopes that by squeezing Audrey’s she can get his message: Hang on, sweetheart. We’ll be okay. The responding officer doesn’t use a siren, but the lights on his squad car flash red and blue. Officer Miller looks like he might’ve played high school football thirty years back. Michael gives him the short version of their rude welcome, and Miller stomps inside. He comes back out in what feels like ninety seconds and tells them they are lucky to still have their plumbing, which strikes Michael as a pretty rotten thing to say.

  The lights strobe, red and blue. “Could you turn that off?” Audrey finally asks, her voice sounding pinched. She closes her eyes and squishes up her face like she does when a migraine’s coming. Michael squeezes her hand again: I’ll take care of everything. And this time, he feels her press back, her thumb running over the callus at the base of his palm, pulling along the rim of his embroidered bracelet. Please, hers says.

  What would Joe DiMaggio do? Take care of fucking business.

  Miller continues without enthusiasm. “It could be anyone: your typical drugged-out vagrant, but maybe also a family down on its luck, a vet who’s a little out of sorts, some dumb kids from the university. You said there was booze in the house. Any drugs?”

  “What?” Michael’s mind flashes to the empty vials in the bathroom, pain pills left over from the last time he threw out his back. Those don’t count. “No. Nothing.”

  “So then how do you spot a squatter nowadays?” Audrey asks.

  “Yeah,” Michael says. “From what you’re saying, it’s not like they’re hoboes trailing a swarm of flies.”

  Miller sniffs. “They’re not. And you don’t. Y’all have homeowner’s insurance?” the officer says, capping his pen.

  Michael’s nod feels more like a shrug. “Sure.”

  “Get ready for a fight. They’ll nickel-and-dime you all the way to Kalamazoo. Document everything. Keep your receipts, take photos.” Miller hands Michael a card. “Call the station if you folks need anything. We’ll keep an eye out for the cars. You said the Cadillac was—”

  “Ebony. With a little tint of navy blue.”

  “That some sort of black?”

  “Right. And a sky-blue Toyota Camry, nineteen ninety—”

  “Seven.” Audrey remembers. Of course she does.

  After the patrol car leaves, Audrey and Michael stand there for a minute, just holding hands and blinking at the house. Then Michael heads for the curb—their suitcases haven’t budged since the Taylors first arrived, when the cabbie plopped them down with such cheeriness. Audrey stops him, her hand wrapping around his arm with a surprisingly strong grip.

  “I don’t feel safe here, Mikey.” Most days, his wife doesn’t look a day over fifty-five, big brown eyes and a cute nose and a smile that hardly sags. Not plastic surgery, just good genes, a little hair dye, and lots of moisturizer. But at that moment, her hair mussed out from its precise bun, her face damp from the heat and showing every one of its wrinkles, she looks frail. Like an old lady. “I don’t want to stay here.”

  As much as it kills him to hear that, Michael can’t blame her. “Sure. Right.” So he walks back into the stinking kitchen and calls another taxi.

  * * *

  Everyone thinks ballplayers are made of money, but the big salaries—like that ten-year, $150 million contract Jason Goodyear bagged, the biggest in franchise history—are a relatively recent development. Really, everything changed with free agency and the ascension of the mega-agent, guys like Herb Allison, who could bark and bite and get teams to bid against one another until they pushed salaries into nine figures. Even seven figures sounds nice to Michael. Hell, he would gladly take six. As a minor league batting coach he makes about $68,000 a year.

  In 1965, when Michael signed with the Reds (and in ’69, when he moved to the Lions), the major league minimum was twelve thousand bucks. Not exactly the lush life. Only a few dozen All-Stars and a couple of managers who could spin straw into gold went for top dollar. The rest of them, the assistant coaches and third-string outfielders, the career minor leaguers—they were just trying to get by. His minor league contracts were, well, humbling, and while Michael finally got a major league contract in 1974 (that year he’d had a streak in Triple-A that would’ve made Joltin’ Joe proud, batting nearly .500 in August), his bat cooled off, as bats inevitably do, and he was sent back down. He ran through his option years, and when he was released on waivers, he was like the homely girl at the middle school dance: no takers. He switched to coaching then; for a decade he strung together three seasons a year—Triple-A, the Arizona Fall League, and then winter ball in the DR. He missed just about every milestone in his kids’ lives, and after he couldn’t get home for Katie’s state championship (in oboe, not softball), Audrey started on him to quit. We’ll find another way, she’d said. The amateur clinics had him on the road plenty, but that was still less than three seasons a year. And the pay was better, even if the work was worse.

  Michael always assumed he’d send the kids to college. But then the expenses mounted, in unexpected ways. Melissa was uninsured in her twenties, which no one thought twice about until a bad bike crash cost the family six figures. Katie’s husband couldn’t hold down a job, even as they had one kid after another, four in six years. There’s such a thing as too many, Michael told Audrey when they heard another was on its way. He helped all the kids with houses because there were grandkids in the picture and he wanted them to be comfortable. And, if he was being honest, part of him still felt guilty for never being around. He knew money wouldn’t solve that feeling, but it wouldn’t make things worse.

  * * *

  When the cab pulls up to the Walshes’, Stuart and Helen are waving at the curb, smiles too big to be true. The Walshes have also been with the Lions organization for decades, Stu as a left-handed pitcher and then the team’s pitching coach. (Michael and Stu overlapped in Los Angeles only a few months, but these Arizona springs cemented a lifelong friendship.) The Walshes recently upgraded to a new construction on the north side of Scottsdale—three bedrooms plus a pool house, a small in-ground pool and fancy fixtures everywhere—buying at a point that many later identified as the exact bottom of the market. It was a lucky break that would’ve made Michael mad if it’d happened to anyone but Stu.

  Stu and Michael hump the suitcases to the pool house and meet the women inside. Helen has made everyone sandwiches, dainty triangles of ham and cheese for the ladies, a pair of bricks stacked twice as thick for the men. After eating over nervous, thin pleasantries, Helen takes Audrey to the kitchen to make some tea.

  Michael doesn’t need any chamomile, he needs a highball, which Stu provides from the living room’s wet bar. The men sink into leather recliners. The big TV is on some satellite channel, showing the Caribbean series,
the DR versus Puerto Rico, the volume low.

  The men watch a few pitches before Michael says, “Why’d they have to take the Caddy?” His was a top-of-the-line CTS. Probably a tad ostentatious, but he deserved it, he and Audrey had agreed, for taking care of his family for so long. Deserved it doubly, she’d pointed out, after they’d climbed back from 2008, when their retirement took a sick-feeling twenty-five-point dive. She’d be fine with the Camry another few seasons, she’d insisted. She’d seen how hard he was working—more and more of those awful clinics, barking at high school kids, ten-year-olds even, about how to stride and how to swing and how to wallop the ball so some college scout might notice you—and she knew how much he wanted it.

  Michael scoured road tests and reviews in Motor Trend. It didn’t make his decision, but it might’ve helped that Jason Goodyear started promoting Cadillac right around the All-Star break. Slick TV commercials and glossy magazine ads Audrey would flag, chirping about how he made those cars look handsome. Michael always liked Goody. Maybe because they’d both been left fielders, but more likely because Goody was a decent guy: a quiet, lead-by-example type. Respectful. During spring practice he always wanted Michael to check out his swing, and while they’re in the cage he’d make a point of asking about the girls. They were giggly undergrads his rookie spring, and he’d treated them kindly, flirting just enough to make them blush beet-red.

  “It’s insured, right?” Stu refills Michael’s glass. He’d waited for the end-of-year prices, put all of 240 miles on it before they’d had to double back to the Midwest for family obligations and a tween hitting workshop in Evanston.

  “Huh? Yeah,” Michael says. He has already run the numbers (last year’s model, six months used). “But I lost five thousand the minute I drove it off the lot.”

  “That’s the rub.” After watching a few pitches on the screen, a high fly that carries to the warning track, Stu clears his throat. “Listen, Mike. Helen and I want you and Audrey to make yourselves at home in the pool house—there’s a little kitchenette and everything back there. I know we have a few days before the team shows up, but you two, you should stay through till Salt Lake,” he says, “if that’d make it easier.” At the end of every March, when Stu and Helen head for Los Angeles and the major league season, Michael and Audrey lock up the house again and drive to Utah. They’d planned to take the Caddy up this year—they’d have to rethink that.

  “Thanks, but we’ll be here a week, tops.”

  Stu shakes his head, smiles. “It could be like back when you first got called up, and you and Audrey hadn’t found a place in L.A. yet. Remember that?”

  Michael watches his friend. Clearly Stu doesn’t remember the part right after the three-week slumber party, when the Taylors finally did find a little place in Hollywood and signed a year lease, only to get sent back to Salt Lake five months later. That was a blow, with the baby and a second on the way. Stu’s gaze slides over to the game, his face showing blithe, unknowing comfort.

  What would Joe DiMaggio do? He wouldn’t take the charity of no one, especially not a friend. “Thanks, Stu, but no one is going to keep me out of my own home.”

  * * *

  Why Joe? Giuseppe Paolo DiMaggio is part of Michael’s origin story. In May 1941 one Nelson Taylor, a newlywed New York professional, had an unfortunate run-in with a taxicab, breaking his leg in three places. There was little good news that wartime summer, save for the Streak and Nelson’s young wife’s attentive nursing. (In recounting his recuperation, Nelson said he rallied some strength every time DiMaggio got a hit—and his raised eyebrows said the rest.) By the end of the season Nelson’s leg had healed enough for him to enlist and be assigned to a classified desk in Brooklyn, and in February 1942, the Taylors’ first and only child was born.

  Michael was a quick fan of baseball, the Yankees, and Joltin’ Joe. Even after the Taylors moved to Milwaukee for Nelson’s work, young Michael continued to root for the Yankee Clipper. Michael started playing at four (wearing number 5, of course), varsity at fourteen—he was the best player at his high school, hands down. He followed Joe obsessively, calculating his batting average from the box scores in the daily paper. And though DiMaggio’s career had ended more than a decade before Michael’s professional play began, DiMaggio remained a lodestar. The only reason Michael switched from center to left was that a Double-A coach made it abundantly clear he’d be playing the corner or nowhere at all. And even this necessity felt like some sort of betrayal.

  Joe’s reputation for a quick temper, his habit of holding a grudge, even his postcareer controversies (marrying Marilyn, divorcing Marilyn, rumors that he was to marry Marilyn again) had not besmirched Michael’s view of the Italian American sports star. Who cared if sportswriters called him gristly, if he held a grudge: he had principles, and Michael respected him for it. If anything, in those tragic years Joe’d taken on mythic proportions. Joe as guiding light, Joe as amulet. So when Audrey discovered the mistyped Jesus bracelet in a remainders bin, the extra yellow D embroidered into the blue cloth—WWJDD—of course she bought it, and of course Michael knotted it around his wrist.

  * * *

  Michael slips out while Audrey is still asleep. He borrows the Walshes’ second car—a peppy little Honda that makes Audrey’s old Camry seem that much sadder—and drives to a diner. He orders a short stack and a side of bacon, and spends the meal on hold with the insurance company. When he finally gets a human on the line, the guy tells him they can get someone out to assess the damage the following Tuesday. “It’s Wednesday!” Michael bellows, loud enough to startle the sweet-looking waitress refilling his coffee.

  He takes the appointment, but knows he isn’t going to wait till next week to start fixing his home. No way. He goes straight to the hardware store, buys a new set of deadbolts and doorknobs that lock, chains for the front and back. A new piece of cut glass for the door. A motion-sensor kit to install around the bay windows, front entrance and back. The twerpy store clerk seems to think he should have a professional install it, but Michael tells him to mind his own damn business. He gets a new tool set—decent, but not nearly as nice as the kit that was stolen, which had been a sixtieth birthday present from the Stallions. Cleaning supplies, industrial garbage bags, bleach, and a mop. Two bottles of ant spray. He stops at a drug store for a disposable camera—his visitors had nicked his Nikon, too—then thinks better of it and buys two.

  He uses up both cameras and then starts to clean. The loose things first: he gathers empty bottles and junk-food wrappers from every room in the house, finds wadded-up napkins under the beds, in the bookshelves, behind the sideboard in the dining room. The discovery of a used needle under the couch makes his skin crawl, and he is a bit more careful about pawing around after that.

  Not all of what they left behind is junk: children’s underwear, Superman and Transformers briefs, are tucked into the corner of a closet. They might’ve belonged to one of his grandsons, but Audrey runs a tighter ship than that. In the garage, the washer is full of dank, damp laundry, kid-size T-shirts and the kind of neon-bright tops his preteen granddaughter wears. He stops scrutinizing the load when he finds his hands full of wet lingerie; at that point he throws the whole of it in a trash bag. He goes through one box of bags and starts another.

  The cop’s idea of it being a family down on its luck? Michael goes from thinking the cop is maybe right to spot-fucking-on when he finds a wide-ruled sheet crumpled up in the living room. He flattens it out—the paper shows the shaky hand of a little kid. My Thanks Giving by one Alex S. The kid struggled through a paragraph: We got a new hose on Thanks Giving. Moms friend Randy got us a turky. Michelle eat too much and got sick. We eat ice cream for desert.

  Michael reads it again and inspects the five-finger turkey. Little hand. The kid probably couldn’t get his hand around a regulation bat, much less swing the thing. What would Joe DiMaggio do? Michael doesn’t think Joe would have started a manhunt for some pipsqueak. So Michael balls up the page again an
d tosses it with the rest of the trash.

  * * *

  The visitors left Michael’s bats where they were, in a worn-looking canvas bag in the far corner of the garage, and at the end of that first long day, Michael begs off dinner plans with Audrey and the Walshes, grabs the bag, and heads to the stadium. He’s driven halfway to the old complex when he remembers it will be empty, or gone—it is getting turned into a parking garage for the adjacent mall. This spring, the Lions are playing at some brand-new complex, Salt Stick or Salt Lick or something; Michael can’t quite remember its name. He doesn’t have the keys yet—last week Woody Botter, the GM, sent out a long-winded e-mail about the procedure for getting a new set—so he’ll have to track down a maintenance guy or security to open up the cage. He’s got his credentials on him, always does. Hopefully somebody will be around, but not too many somebodies—he doesn’t want to pretend everything is la-di-da tonight.

  Michael isn’t quite sure where he’s going, but knows the complex is near the new casino on the east side, all of it built on Indian land. Talking Stick Casino is not a place he’s been, but it’s tall and gaudy and flashing spotlights into the night sky, and so he points the car toward its beacon. He has to loop around the sports complex twice to find the way in, an unlit boulevard that splits two parking lots, one still waiting for its stripes. The landscapers have dropped off the plants for the median but transplanted only a few; the rest loiter in black plastic tubs. For a flash he thinks about taking a couple of the smaller cacti to restart his own battered collection—Audrey loves her succulents—but he shakes the idea from his mind. He is not a thief.