The Cactus League

by Emily Nemens

  So every day this week, Dorsey Paine has picked up Jason at the stadium after the game, the left fielder showered and changed and waiting in the clubhouse. Tuesday they went for burgers, Wednesday to some sports bar to watch college basketball. Tonight, he brought Jason to Stephen’s house, where the first thing the owner did was to grab Goodyear into a bear hug and then punch him in the kidney. You fucking idiot, he’d said under his breath, even as he was grinning.

  It’s eight-thirty when Stephen comes into the kitchen to get more ice for the Scotch. He sees that Mona’s already drunk, waving around a smudged glass of white wine. He counts the empties by the sink—the women are four bottles into a case of nice sauvignon. If they’re going to swill something, he wishes they’d pick a fifty-dollar vintage. But rather than say anything snide and risk Mona’s ire, he just retrieves his ice and retreats. Mona, in the middle of some complicated, adoring story about Alexis’s basketball team, ignores her husband.

  Stephen heads down the darkened hall, proceeding toward the tiki torches of the patio, when a thick outline fills the doorway, backlit against flickering orange. That saunter, those shoulders: Trey. The low rumble of men at one end of the hall and the high chitter of women at the other enter the corridor and collide in the air above them. Both men slow as they move together, as the space between them shrinks.

  Stephen is not sure he has forgiven Trey for Monday’s revelations, what felt like two betrayals. But he also is not sure how to stay angry at the man. The past decade, outside of his family, it is this friendship that he holds most dear. They have shared so much.

  “The wife thatta way?” Even Trey’s inflection is Stephen’s, down to the now-deliberate extra syllables, WASPy affects picked up by one man, then passed to the other. It’s like a mynah bird spouting its new vocabulary. But all at once Stephen is uncertain if he should be proud of his pupil or if the creature is mocking him with its chirps. If the mimicker mimics—

  Stephen shakes the thought from his mind. This is Trey. Trey. His friend, his confidant. In another world, if this hallway were endless, not opening onto wives and colleagues, he would take this man in his arms. So why would Trey speak to him with malice? Stephen has no answer, just as he can think of no reason Trey would do something as deceitful as not telling him about the boy. Monday must have been a mistake, some disturbance in the air.

  He tilts his head back toward the kitchen. “Yes. But she’s in one of those moods.” They chuckle, understanding. “Consider yourself warned.”

  Once Trey’s down the hall Stephen backtracks, stopping a few feet shy of the kitchen, still in the shadow of the corridor. He listens from the dark as Trey thanks Mona for her hospitality and begins an excuse about heading home. Stephen peers around the doorjamb just in time to see her grab his bicep, her fingers not even close to making it around his arm, but squeezing her bony hand like she’s determined to make it happen, regardless. The ice in Stephen’s bucket rattles and he worries someone might hear him, but no one turns.

  Mona pulls him toward a woman Stephen doesn’t know, a new neighbor or someone’s recent girlfriend. “This one’s his favorite,” Mona tells the brunette. Mona has loosened her grip and puts a hand on Trey’s back. She does the same to Stephen when presenting him at parties. The pressure of her palm makes him feel like some sort of puppet. Mona’s creation, her captive, like saying, Here, here is a thing that I have. “Stevie’s favorite on the whole team.”

  The new woman mumbles some pleasantry that doesn’t carry, but Trey responds as clear as day, somewhat louder than his normal voice. “Mr. Smith has been a great friend over the years.”

  “Why don’t you ever bring a girl around, Trey? You’re so handsome,” Mona says, scrutinizing his face, pressing into his back. “Dontcha think?” If his posture could possibly get any straighter, it does. The new woman clucks in agreement, looks him up and down admiringly.

  Trey clears his throat. “It’s not easy to find the right one, Mrs. Smith. The right girl, I mean.”

  “Puh-lease. It’s Mona for my husband’s best friend. What’s so hard? Try one, and if it doesn’t work, try another. I mean, look at Jason—you get knocked down and you get right back up again. I heard he was canoodling with some barfly the night he—”

  “Being on the road all the time is tough. And I have … particular tastes.”

  “Tastes.” A flash passes over Mona’s face, and she indicates she wants to whisper something in his ear. She is trying for height, stretching on her tiptoes, but Trey still has to lean down for her to reach him. She squeezes his arm again, a hard cinch.

  “Did he fuck you?” She hisses it, but the question carries over the chinking of wineglasses, cuts through the rumble of men’s voices behind him. Its venom is a sharp, quick sting, and before Stephen realizes it he’s back in the kitchen, the ice bucket clattering on the counter as he puts a hand on Mona’s, their rings clicking, and pries her fingers off of Trey. With his other hand he pats Trey’s shoulder; short, hard raps trying to steer him toward the doorway. “Mona, dear, be careful.” Stephen lets Mona’s grip curl tighter, and he clenches his teeth to keep from grimacing. “That’s his throwing arm.” He chuckles like it’s funny. Stephen pulls their hands below the counter and squeezes back. She welps softly and eases her grip. “You doing well, Trey?” Stephen asks, ignoring the rustle under the counter. “You need anything else? Another Scotch?” Another rap lands on the player’s back.

  He shakes his head. “No, thanks.”

  Below the counter Mona finds the inside of her husband’s thigh, her fingers exploring the surface of his chinos in a way that makes Stephen squirm. Suddenly, her hand pauses and her face lights up. “Who wants to go swimming?”

  * * *

  In the time it takes the women to assemble on the patio Stephen has had another two fingers of Scotch and convinced himself Mona’s forgotten the whole idea and instead gone back to sucking on olives and squeaking in the kitchen. But then his wife announces herself in the doorway, howling like a banshee. She’s donned a short robe, most of the length of her legs at the mercy of the tiki torches’ light. She leads the conga line of barefoot women, some of them wrapped in towels, others in sarongs, in a strut across the patio, waving arms and kicking legs. The colors and prints look vaguely familiar to Stephen, swimsuits and cruise wear and poolside cover-ups he has bought his wife over the years.

  “Fellas, any takers?” Mona drops her robe at the edge of the pool and steps down the underwater stairs, doing her best sea-nymph impression. Her legs tremble with booze and the change in buoyancy. Behind her, another pair of women walk in, tentatively in step like amateur synchronized swimmers. “We brought trunks!” another guest—Helen Walsh, the pitching coach’s wife—yells and waves a pair like a flag. Stephen’s trunks. He recognizes others in the stack: they’ve raided his closet. “Stevie,” Mona says from the pool, submerged up to her shoulders, her body a ghostly mint color, “you don’t mind, do you?”

  “Sounds fun.” Stuart Walsh is drunk enough to think it’s a good idea to get in. He grabs the pair out of his wife’s hand. “I’ll be right back.”

  Within ten minutes there are a dozen people in the pool. Pandemonium, splashing and the kinds of shrieks you’d expect out of preteens on the hottest day of summer. The Walshes are playing a game of chicken with Ronnie and his new girlfriend. Goodyear’s in the shallow end with Dorsey, the athlete sulking and the manager well on his way to being drunk. Stephen can’t help noticing the athlete’s one visible tattoo, a jack of diamonds inked over his heart. Strange, that; Jason didn’t strike him as the card-playing type. Unless the diamond is some double entendre, a baseball diamond instead of a felt table. What would that mean?

  “Stevie, take off those pants!” Mona splashes to make her point, spraying an arc of water over the lip of the pool, to where Trey, Corey, and Stephen sit in a semicircle of lounge chairs. They are smoking cigars, hardly talking. Actually, just Trey and Stephen smoke; Corey has declined and continues to sma
ck on a large wad of gum. That won’t do, Stephen thinks, but it’s better than chewing tobacco—he’s known enough players who’ve had the cancer cut out of their jaws with a demented jigsaw.

  The pool’s splatter gets Stephen’s loafers wet. “Mona, dear, you’ve given away all my trunks.”

  “Pish-posh. You too old to skinny-dip?”

  “Yes, I believe I am.”

  She treads water for a few moments, lets her mouth dip below the waterline before kicking herself back up with a humph. “Trey, how about you?” Trey is quick to shake his head; thank you, but no. “Or your new friend?”

  The boy looks startled, as if he’d rather be mistaken for patio furniture, but she is bobbing and sputtering, waiting for an answer.

  “Corey. His name is Corey, Mona,” Stephen says.

  “Right. Corey. You know how to swim?” She dips down and pops back up, blinking at him. Her mascara has smeared an inch down her cheeks.

  “Jesus, Mona,” Stephen says. “That sounds racist.” He’s been correcting her for decades, though her bullheaded comments are less frequent now (their daughter, after all). Usually alcohol is involved, and it’s almost always sparked by ignorance. “Asking a black man if he knows how to swim.”

  “What? It’s a simple question. Maybe he doesn’t.”

  “I do,” Corey says.

  “What was that, son?” she says, spitting a spray of pool water from her mouth.

  “I do. Know how to swim.”

  “Well, good.” She smiles. “Hop in, then.” The boy is already kicking off his shoes, unbuckling his belt, pulling his shirt out from his waistband.

  “You’re not going in.” Trey’s voice is anxious, somewhere between a question and a command.

  “Why not?” Corey’s chest, hairless and ridged with muscles, is more striking than Stephen had imagined. Trey, also staring at the boy, looks stricken.

  The ferocity in Corey’s eyes and the pleading in Trey’s: suddenly, Stephen sees everything, all that has happened between these two men. He sees a physical bond, an emotional one. These men have been together, or else Trey desperately wishes it so. The locker room, indeed.

  His heart sinks. He thought Trey was better than this, more like him. Adaptable to the point of mimicry, flexible into the realm of acrobatics. But still composed of the kind of fortitude that would keep him from ever looking so desperate, so vulnerable, as the center fielder does in this instant. To be like Stephen, you have to be strong, stronger than everyone else. You go out and get—take—what you need. Never ask, unless you know the answer will be yes. Never plead. You’re not going in? The boy steps out of his pants, revealing short boxer briefs and long, lean legs. Even as Trey crumples, Stephen can see: this boy is fierce.

  Stephen knows what he has to do.

  As Corey steps down the ladder into the pool’s deep end, as Trey sulks back behind a potted aloe with the last puffs of his cigar, as Mona dives below the surface, kicking hard, Stephen marches around the pool to where Dorsey Paine is guffawing in the shallow end.

  “Where’s Woody?” Stephen looks around the pool patio; he doesn’t see the general manager anywhere.

  “Headed home early. Said he has a call with New York in the morning.” Dorsey shrugs and reaches for a sweating bottle of Corona on the pool’s ledge, but Stephen pushes the bottle with his foot. It slips into the water and begins to sink.

  “Hey!” Dorsey complains. The lime floats loose from the neck and bobs back to the surface of the water. Jason, still silent, grabs it and sets it back on the lip of the pool. He retrieves the bottle, too. “What gives?” Dorsey asks.

  Stephen, crouched next to the men, looks at the left fielder, at his chest. “Jason, will you give us a minute?”

  When he’s out of earshot, Stephen starts, his voice a whisper. “Trey Townsend.”

  “What about Trey?”

  “He has, what, three years left on his contract?” Corey climbs out of the pool, dripping wet, Adonis-meets-Venus under the desert moon.

  “I’d have to check with Woody, but that sounds right.” Could Trey not see that they are all the same? That the three of them are a continuum, not an either/or? One arc proceeds Corey, Trey, Stephen, if they are going by age. By net worth: Corey, Stephen, Trey. Or by potential: Stephen, Trey, Corey. Even as the order of each progression changes, as the trajectory shifts, they are all strung together. Or, they should be.

  Stephen had not asked too much of Trey. Just his appreciation, his loyalty. Instead, he’d folded so easily toward this new one, this washboard-stomached, rough-edged boy. And, as quickly as that, Stephen has lost him. He has lost his favorite. Trey comes forward with a towel, but the boy bats it away.

  Stephen crosses his arms. “I want him gone by opening day.”

  “Really?” Dorsey says.

  “Tell Woody to make it happen.”

  Just then, a great, guttural scream rings out. Everyone turns as Corey Matthews, standing at the end of the diving board, leaps up and gathers his lithe body into a tight ball. The guests, Mona, Stephen, Trey—they all watch as he soars through the air, as he quickly, perfectly, drops out of the blue-black sky. And then they all brace themselves for the loud splash of contact, for the spray of displaced water that will rise and spread outward in so many long, perfect arcs.

  FIFTH

  There were no glaciers in Arizona, save for the tips of a few tall peaks, ball caps you’d barely notice above the bulk of the rest of them. Nothing like the thick kind of ice that showed up in Washington: at one point the Mariners, the whole team, the stadium and the fans and all of Puget Sound, were under three thousand feet. Picture five Space Needles standing tip to toe, frozen into one big ice cube, and then imagine that kind of glacier suddenly sluicing. That’ll change your outlook for the game, your prospects for the weekend series.

  But fourteen thousand years ago, North America’s glaciers began dissolving in earnest. When the half-mile-deep daub of cool vanilla cream melted from its perch on the Colorado Plateau, it sent water south by southwest, a great gusher that must’ve looked like the rush onto the field that happens when you give the rookie squad the green light to warm up.

  These profound floods meant added vegetation in the region—ferns and bogs and big, leafy trees took root in Arizona—and all of a sudden the landscape was verdant. The land was covered in bushes with base-size waxy emerald leaves, was blanketed with soft-palmed ferns as big around as the pitching mound. That kind of green seems unlikely now, about as probable as a National League pitcher hitting an inside-the-park home run. But it happened, a brief spell of lush life that arrived with a big, splashing wall of water.

  The Lions ride their own wall of water, and surge forward through the spring. The fielders who went butterfingered over the winter regain their touch; the bats, under Coach Mike’s grouchy supervision, grow as strong and thick as banyan trees. The pitchers find their arms, their heat and precision fed by the newly fertile soil that is a team coming together. And the team is aligning, starting to look like a cohesive unit, like a contender for the division—the bullish among us suggest the pennant.

  “Among us”—how easy it is to insert myself back into the booth, to recall the smells of burned coffee and comped hot dogs and that neon-green relish, the anticipation of getting your stat sheet from some zitty media ops intern. How natural to put myself back in the postgame press conferences, Dorsey Paine bloviating in his charming way, Jimmy Cardozo cracking jokes, Jason, with his normal reticence, refusing to talk about anything but on-the-field action. He won’t talk about the Townsend trade or how he feels about that old-timer Monterrey starting again in center field. Won’t talk about the divorce or rumors that Nike is making him a shoe or anything at all about Frank Lloyd Wright. If I’d been granted access, if I’d been in the room, I’d’ve asked: Is it true you lost half a million on Thursday night after Dorsey dropped you off at the stadium to “get your car”? And another $500K on Friday, not even caring if people were watching you gettin
g mopped? Sara’s not the only one to see him scuttling back across the bridge between the casino and the field, late for his 7:00 a.m. date; I’ve seen it, too. A guy who works security at Talking Stick, he tells me that Jason Goodyear is in and out twice a day, pregame and post, if not another time in the middle (and how, I wonder, does he manage that?). And it’s not like he’s sleeping there; only baby Goslin and his helicopter mom have sprung for the six-week suite. If given the opportunity at the presser, I’d’ve asked: What the hell are you doing?

  There’s an obvious answer: poker, blackjack, occasionally craps. Just like there’s an obvious answer for the jack of diamonds tattooed on his chest: this guy’s an addict, hooked on poker like he was—hopefully still is—hooked on sport. Is it because one thing—baseball—became too easy that he had to hop to another table? Because now he’s seeking competition of any stripe, of all stripes. Hitting balls, throwing rocks, getting women—even mature ladies like Tami—to wobble over him. When you start seeing everything as sport, life as something to win, the thrills start piling up, or at least the possibility of them. That’s probably the straw that fucked the camel, to borrow a phrase from Herb, between Jason and Liana. She’d waited patient through the season, was looking forward to a quiet, a regular, a calm off-season with her still-new husband. Instead he went on a surge of his own, manic and brusque and only really focused on working out and then getting back to a poker table and staying there. The whole month of November, he was never once home for dinner. Liana didn’t tell me that detail, but her housekeeper was happy enough to share it in exchange for a hundred-dollar bill. The worst of it was when he said he was going to L.A. for a few days, only to drive across town, binge for two nights and a day on the floor, stopping just for food and the john. He played something like two hundred rounds, most of them lost. At the end of that epic session, he was down most of a million.