The Cactus League: A Novel

by Emily Nemens

  NINTH

  Many things are improbable. Geology—all of it. Sharks, their general existence, but especially that they were once in Arizona. That woolly mammoths were, too. That Arizona was a sea, a swamp, anything at all other than this stark brown desert. That oceans dry up, that oceans surge, that mountains climb into mountains and then they start to shrink.

  It’s improbable that once, millennia ago, men built coliseums and called them such; it’s also unlikely that centuries later men again arrived at coliseums and called them something else. The fierceness and ferocity of competition—but the growing industry and indifference of sport, too—these things are improbable. It’s improbable that even in the age of ESPN and digital ticker tape, of satellite TV and baseball apps, that after the death of the sportswriter, there is still room in this world for the story of the long game, that we’ve made time to tell it the meandering way around, to pull all the strings together. I’m thankful for that. Four home runs in a single game—only fifteen men in the history of the league have done that. Unassisted triple plays: I’ve seen only one. Bases loaded, and Goodyear was playing shallow left, close to the shortstop. Caught a quick-sinking fly—that’s one. Tagged second—that’s two. And touched the runner on his dash from first to second (so certain that Jason would drop it, he was already past the baseman). Three. That was something. Jason was a rookie that year, if my memory stands, and I believe that’s when I first really started to take notice of the man in left. The Lions weren’t even my beat back then—I had the Dodgers. But I watched him grow into his stride like a big-footed puppy, grow into his swing like the lumberjack he’s now known to be. And it was a joy. Later, I had seniority enough to write the weekly sports column, half human interest, half old-man opining, and I got to do more Lions coverage. I was the one to write about it when his first contract expired and ten teams were hoping to nab him, how Stephen Smith went near to the ends of the earth to come up with the cash to keep him in Culver City. I was the one on a soapbox when he was robbed of the MVP in 2006, and I was tossing confetti across the sports page when he won his first, then his second, trophy. Those columns were the kind of writing I thought (wrongly, apparently) a big-market paper needed, and that it had needed, right up until the axman cometh. Anyway, I kept watching. Wife dead too soon, kid grown and working back east—it’s not like I have anything better to do.

  But this isn’t a story about my career trajectory or how much I miss my wife. This isn’t about the downfall of newspapers or why my son won’t go ahead and make me a granddad already. It’s about Jason, all the improbable things that got him—us—to this very instant, to right now.

  This spring? It was improbable that Salt River Fields would open on time; they were still installing toilets the day before opening, much to Joe Templeton’s chagrin. Improbable that the Lions center fielder would get traded away because he bruised a very important ego, but that happened, too. Improbable they’d let William Goslin play so many games, Dorsey already knowing the kid needed two years and twenty pounds before he’d be ready for the big time, and then only maybe. And it’s improbable that Liana and Jason will ever get back together—though she does come to the hospital when he calls—but wait, now. I’m getting ahead of myself.

  TRIPLE PLAY

  Jason’s mother didn’t know a lick about sports, but saw in her young son an interest in baseball, an outsize eagerness to play with the bigger boys as they drove by the sandlot games and high school practices of their small Iowa town. So she signed him up for Little League, and, according to his coach, that enthusiasm quickly became a natural gift, which grew into real and profound promise. He could go pro—more than one coach told her that. The best they’d ever seen, they were saying even before his voice changed and his lanky frame filled out. She didn’t know what those sorts of compliments meant, just that she wanted a route out of Iowa for her boy. By the time Jason was fifteen, she understood she had a prodigy lurking in the basement and did what she could to facilitate his rise—which more often meant staying out of his way, working extra shifts to afford the travel-team dues, paying for that elaborate cable package (broadcasting East Coast starts all the way through the West Coast ninth innings), and buying him a gently used Jeep so he could get himself to early-morning sessions at the cages, to afternoon practice and home.

  There was no baseball on TV all winter, save for the occasional highlight reel, but on those same channels that had been showing the Lions all summer, ESPN2 or 3 or 13, Jason found another world series taking place: poker. It was better than drinking in the cornfields with the other kids—he cared about his body too much for that—and he wouldn’t waste his time with girls. Jason was interested in tits and ass like any sixteen-year-old, but set on avoiding a wet-blanket girlfriend who couldn’t understand his priorities. His teammates called him a monk way before anyone started in with Goody Two-shoes.

  Maybe the other boys were right to rib him, but watching the late-night tournaments was something to do. He gleaned the rules and the strategy, but also, as the camera panned around the table, the poker faces and the personalities, noting the signature hats (ten-gallon cowboy, goofy-looking beret, backward baseball), the wraparound sunglasses that never seemed quite fair, the twitchy tics that might give you away. Jason would play his own hand against the TV, throwing his grandfather’s old chips, excavated from a corner of the basement, into a kitty on the shag carpet. He’d go all-in a few times a night, lose everything by increments a few more, and when he was cleaned out just gather the pile right back into his lap.

  In high school he played against teammates on the back of the bus, unburdened them of their vending machine money. Same thing happened in college—across a few road trips he made a killing, everyone’s beer money and then some—until they decided it wasn’t much fun to lose to him all the time, and they opted to sleep on the long rides back from Evanston and South Bend. So he started going to casinos, right around when he went pro—that and turning twenty-one all syncing up in a convenient way. Long weekends during the off-season, maybe a few hands on the road—off-days only—if he knew of a casino or private game nearby. Nothing serious, even if the bets expanded with his salary to numbers his mother would have thought impossible. A day’s work as a physician’s assistant spent on one bet. A week’s effort in the doctor’s office won in a hand; a month’s lost in two.

  What did he like about it? The adrenaline, of course. Winning a hand gave him the same kind of thrill as connecting with a line drive. Folding felt like watching four balls wobble by before trotting to first; bluffing like digging a double out of a slider. End of a night at the tables, like at the end of the game, he could look back on his performance—two for four, once to second, one run—though recounting a poker session felt better than that, because it wasn’t just how he’d helped in the scope of the team’s effort. At the table, he and he alone could control the win-loss column. The Lions weren’t bad, particularly, but in their current configuration they were hardly their best. Sometimes Jason’s efforts felt like pulling a training sled across the outfield, the rest of the team lounging on its armature. When he was playing solo, he could win everything. He would. And if he didn’t, well, that was on him, too.

  And he met Liana at a casino. They tell everyone they met poolside at a resort—told everyone, now that the getting-to-know-you narrative is moot. Yes, the casino’s hotel did have a pool, and yes, had they both been poolside, they’d likely have noticed each other. She’d been a collegiate athlete (volleyball, and she might have made the Olympic team if she’d been born two years earlier or two years later), and Jason’s toned body was notorious among a certain segment of baseball fans. But their relationship didn’t begin at the pool—it started with her hollering, her voice husky after two days at the craps table. He looked over to see her tossing the dice down the felt, kicking her leg out and throwing her arm so far ahead she looked like some sort of six-foot-tall hood ornament. That’s what got Jason to fold his pair of nines, to stand up,
walk over, and say hello. She had him blowing on dice for a hot run that lasted an hour, worked the whole table and a dozen observers into a frenzy. By the time the streak had faded, when she was back where she started, chips-wise, and deflated like a rag doll, Jason was smitten. By her big smile, her teeth like bright chicklets; by her shoulders, which she knew still looked good five years out of competitive play, and so she kept them bare even in the frigid casino AC. By the way she shouted, halfway to a laugh; there was something infectious about it. Jason wasn’t attracted to showboats or the types of drama queens his teammates brought home, whom they bragged on and then rolled their eyes over. But when he sidled up next to her and she put a hand on his arm, when she looked at him, something clicked. That’s how it felt, or the best he ever was able to explain it—outside, with everyone else, she could present this ruckus and delight, but between the two of them was a quietude, a calm. It felt telepathic, almost, like Jimmy must feel with his pitchers. They didn’t need to talk, didn’t even need to signal: they just understood each other, and understood they’re better off playing together.

  That day (that night—they stayed on the floor until sunrise), after they’d both burned through their chips and then some, they went up to his room and fucked for hours. They changed that part, too, when they told their friends and family, or improved it to include a horseback ride, a picnic. But really they slept in a tangle of sheets through the afternoon, ordered room service hamburgers and champagne, screwed again, and then went back down to the floor. Like before, he started at poker, she at craps, but the second night she burned through her cash fast and wandered into the high-stakes room, watching him play, her fingers twiddling the tiny hairs at his neck. He didn’t need her next to him, but having a pretty woman by his side, having her put her hand on his thigh and whisper smut into his ear—everything good can be made better. They were married six weeks later.

  * * *

  She always played low stakes, being an elementary school teacher with bills to pay, but Jason seeded her the same $50K a night that he started with. They took weekend excursions to Vegas, Atlantic City, the tribal casinos up the coast of Oregon. On these off-season trips neither had the expectation of retiring at a reasonable hour, of eating dinner together—any meal, really—but that was fine. If you were hot, you stayed at the table, right through breakfast. No questions asked, no answers needed.

  They came to Arizona last January, not long after the wedding. The new couple visited her parents in Surprise. Talking Stick wasn’t open yet, but construction was well under way, and when they drove by the future casino, Jason squeezed her thigh and said, Just you wait. On that same trip they bought their spring house in a new subdivision of North Scottsdale. Jason didn’t think long about the insides, just wanted to make sure the backyard was flat and had room enough for a batting cage. Liana cared more about the interior, but didn’t quite know what to look for. Her parents were the original owners of one of those ranch-meets-adobe homes in Phoenix’s far-west subdivisions, and since moving out she’d lived in dorm rooms or studios or other unimpressive apartments. When she met Jason she ditched her one-bedroom for his L.A. home, which was some sort of modernist architectural landmark way up in the hills. Yes, four bedrooms would be fine, they told the Scottsdale agent. The open-plan grand room, the stainless kitchen—okay, okay. They paid cash, closing in time for pitchers and catchers.

  They had been married maybe six months when one of her credit cards was declined at a boutique on Rodeo. Isn’t that strange? Try this. She passed the clerk another. Back in the car she texted him about it. He was playing away, probably already at the stadium doing his pregame rituals—one of which was to avoid his phone at all costs—and by the time they connected there were other things to talk about, his stand-up double and something going strange with the house’s ancient plumbing. It’d happen every so often through the summer, a card getting declined, Liana blushing and apologetic and reaching for twenties. But by Labor Day all of the cards started falling like so many dominos. How her face burned behind her oversize sunglasses as she promised the sales clerk and the grocery checker and the waiter that she’d be back once she straightened things out with her husband, once she cleared things up with her bank, once she ran to the ATM. But when he came back through L.A. he was too focused on game prep to answer her texts or write back to the notes on the kitchen counter that she set out before heading to bed. Then he left again, for a long ten-game stretch on the East Coast. The Lions were probably not going to make the postseason, but there was a sliver of a chance that they’d get the wild card, and so she let him be. She took a few gowns to the consignment shop, sold some jewelry for cash. Five games into the road trip is when the orange notices started, mail with red stamps so bright they looked like they were bleeding. FINAL NOTICE.

  She finally got a hold of their bank accounts—the bank didn’t make it easy, even with her being his wife. Everything was drained, and there was a new mortgage on the Arizona house, a line of credit against their California home. Whatever was going on, this wasn’t a hundred thousand in chips every week or two like in their early days. Those were lavish weekends, first-class tickets and posh hotels, seed money for them both—but well within their means. She never went to the casino without him, but clearly he was going without her. And clearly he was losing, more every day. When, in late October, she and Jason were finally in the same place at the same time and both awake, she asked her husband, point-blank, but he was dismissive. I’ll take care of it. Would he take care of it by winning big? And how much, exactly, had he lost? He shrugged and she packed up her things and told him to call her when he got his shit together. She drove to Arizona that same night, arriving in Scottsdale just as the sky started to pink.

  His solution? Put the Saarinen house up for sale, which was fine by Liana. Jason and Herb were always fawning over historical architecture, but the goddamn house was crooked, and its plate-glass windows made the AC run like a vacuum cleaner. He called her in Arizona to tell her the news. But where would they live during the season? She meant to ask that in a reasonable voice, but of course it came out as a yell. We’ll cross that bridge, he said in a way that sounded like they never would. She gave Jason the option—the ultimatum—of gambling or her. When she’d arrived in Arizona she’d quit casinos cold turkey, chewing through a pack of gum a day and drinking more tequila and grapefruits than she should. He’d hung up at that.

  She’d quit Jason cold turkey, too—by January she had her job back and was ignoring voice mails and texts from anyone but her lawyer. She knew that sometime soon Jason would be driving across the desert in his beat-up, beloved Jeep. (He’d gotten two Cadillacs as part of his compensation for the ad campaign, but sent one to his mother and lost the other, he confessed, in a game of Texas Hold’em.) Whatever else was going on in his life he had to get ready for spring and the long season ahead. Where would he stay? She didn’t give a rat’s ass.

  At the time of their wedding the prenup had seemed conservative—an amount that would keep her comfortable but felt small in the context of Jason’s $150 million contract—but by early 2011 that number was most of what he had left, and he knew he had to give it to her. Liana was a kind soul but an imperfect one. She’s got a little wild in her eye is how Herb had put it. And Herb didn’t know about the craps, just remembered how once she convinced Marlene to go skinny-dipping in Herb’s hot tub; another time she took Melissa Moyers to a pole-dancing class. And without an NDA she might talk, as she had a gift for gab that made everyone, from first graders to baseball wives to recalcitrant Jason, feel at ease. And so their lawyers took care of the paperwork, shuttling back and forth their drafts and revisions, one of which included Jason’s request to have access to the new batting cage in the backyard of their Arizona house. He’d built it custom to his specs; construction had just finished in December. She struck that line and wrote in the margin, No fucking way.

  * * *

  Jason didn’t—still doesn’t—know what ch
anged, but something sent him spinning. Was it marrying Liana? Herb getting sick? Was some team dynamic bringing him down? The way his body had begun to creak? None seemed an obvious cause, but for whatever reason last season he started finding more casinos on the road, driving his rental as far as ninety minutes to play. He’d go for several hours before crawling back to the team hotel at sunrise. Sometimes he stuck to fifty a night, but sometimes he edged it up. Doubled it. He pulled out half a million a couple of times, just because he had a good feeling. It felt mostly fine when that kind of night was followed by a 7:00 p.m. start, but then he started hitting the tables with day games right behind. Running on fumes, operating on three hours of sleep, he always played well—but he also recognized that he was sinking.

  He knew he was sunk when he started playing during a game. Even if it was a practice game against Milwaukee’s B squad. Dorsey made it clear that they were a team—you were supposed to be there, suited up—and Jason felt the same, though not the same enough to keep him from making the excuse of a run, of actually running but then also jogging over to the casino. Greg Carver was there, trailing him like a wide-eyed puppy—harmless, or at least inconsequential, by Jason’s assessment. He knew Carver would say nothing. At the time it didn’t feel awful (afterward, it did). At the time, it was just an itch that had to be scratched.

  And it was an impossible itch, never satisfied. He couldn’t help it if he pushed past when his ATM stopped spitting out cash, past when his checks were no longer accepted at the cage. One of the guards was watching this, Jason chewing out some square-jawed cashier who kept a stern expression on her face, the woman too old to care about his flirting or his ire. As Jason walked away from the cashier, that guard passed him a slip of paper with a phone number.