by Joe Schuster
He hit Nelson another dozen ground balls until he began to find the timing, began to anticipate the way the ball would bounce. After he grabbed three in a row without missing, Edward Everett decided it was a good time to stop—when Nelson was feeling confident. It still wouldn’t be enough, he knew; ground balls would get past Nelson that wouldn’t get past an average second baseman, but he couldn’t do anything about it: he was just happy that Clinton had a primarily right-handed hitting lineup, which should cut down on the number of ground balls hit in Nelson’s direction.
As he surrendered the field to Clinton for their pre-game warm-ups, telling his hitting and fielding coach, Pete Dominici, to remind Nelson of the other things he’d need to remember as an infielder—when to cover second base if a runner on first attempted to steal, where to position himself for a relay if a ball went to the outfield—he glanced in the direction of the owner’s box in the stands. As Collier did before nearly every home game, he was holding court. He was a beefy man near Edward Everett’s age but looked considerably younger. He colored his hair and mustache and three months earlier his face had acquired a slightly plastic quality. “Botox,” Renee had said. He was with his new wife, a brassy redhead named Ginger who was twenty-seven years younger and whom Collier met when she applied for a job as a secretary at his meatpacking company.
“Can’t type,” he had said. “But she don’t have to.”
Tonight, they had brought her two children from her first two marriages—a sour-looking eight-year-old girl who slouched behind her mother, glowering, and a surprisingly bookish eleven-year-old boy who, when he came to the games, rarely looked up from his reading.
Surrounding them were people to whom Collier had given comp tickets, mostly butchers from area groceries, seven or eight of them tonight. Collier’s blond intern was carrying an armload of cardboard trays down the aisle, laden with hot dogs wrapped in paper and boxes of popcorn. Trailing her, three of the high school kids carried trays of cups of beer and soda. Although he disliked this pre-game ritual, Edward Everett stopped by the box to say hello. Collier liked him to talk to whatever group he had with him, give them each an autograph as a onetime big league player (whom none of them had ever heard of). “Once pinch-hit for Lou Brock,” Collier would always say. “You got to be pretty good to pinch-hit for a Hall of Famer.”
Lately, it seemed to Edward Everett that the butchers Collier entertained no longer even knew who Lou Brock was: some were born after Brock had finished his career; as far as they were concerned, he may have played a century ago in the dead-ball era. Nonetheless, Edward Everett sat with them for fifteen minutes and gave them some insight into the game: what to watch for so they could feel a little smarter when they anticipated a hit-and-run or a pitchout—all so they would buy even more Collier Fine Meats.
Twenty minutes later, Edward Everett was in his office, drafting and redrafting a starting lineup without Webber in it, first putting Nelson into the third spot, where Webber usually hit, and then moving him down to seven, putting Vila third, then trying something entirely different and writing Nelson into the leadoff spot and moving Martinez to number three. If Rausch were here, it would be simpler, or if Packer hadn’t decided to try to save the world. But neither was here, nor was Webber.
“Knock, knock,” Dominici said, appearing in the doorway. “We found Webb.”
“Where is he?” Edward Everett asked.
Dominici shook his head. “He said he’d only talk to you.”
“How the hell can I go talk to him? Game time is, what? Fifteen minutes?”
Dominici shrugged. “I’m just the messenger, boss,” he said, taking the lineup card Edward Everett handed to him. “I tried.”
Webber was in an apartment a dozen blocks from the ballpark, sitting on a fire escape four stories above an alley across from a furniture warehouse where Edward Everett had worked in two off-seasons after his then father-in-law had gotten him a job there, answering complaint calls in customer service. Going inside, Edward Everett felt foolish. He was in his uniform, his spikes clacking on the concrete as if he were some sort of damn tap dancer. A couple stepping out of the building as he came up the front stoop held the door for him but the man muttered something that sounded like “Trick-or-treat.” His girlfriend laughed.
In the foyer, at the bottom of the stairway, he looked with resignation at the flights that rose above him. His knee hurt: damp weather had a tendency to make the joint swell. Nonetheless, he had no choice. By the time he reached the top floor, the pain radiated into his hip, the joint popping with each step.
At apartment 4-B, he knocked on the door. Affixed to the jamb was a mezuzah, worn smooth as if whoever lived there was devout, touching their fingers to it hundreds of times across the threshold. A young woman answered. She was pretty: dark, Middle-Eastern, with long black hair, and a tiny diamond stud through her left nostril; she was wearing a black T-shirt and black jeans. “I don’t know what to do with him,” she said, and led him to a bedroom. There, it was obvious that someone had just pulled the comforter up over the sheets in a way to cover the bed but without making it neatly—because, beneath it, the pillows were askew and the top sheet hung crookedly, one edge touching the floor. Through the open window he could see Webber, sitting in the far corner of the fire escape landing, gazing across the alley toward the building where Edward Everett once spent his falls and winters. Edward Everett poked his head through the window.
“What’s going on, Webb?” he said. The landing was large enough that someone had set up a small sitting area, a wooden chair and table.
“Ah, shit, Skip,” Webber said.
“Personal chauffeur to the park.” Edward Everett hoisted himself into the window, resting his hip on the sill. “Game’s almost starting, Webb.”
“I know,” Webber said. “Katrina and I just had something we needed—”
“There’s nothing we need to talk about,” the woman said, leaning into the window beside Edward Everett.
“How can you say that,” Webber said. “After—”
“It’s been three weeks,” she said. “That’s not long enough to say ‘after’ anything.”
“What’s the problem?” Edward Everett asked. “Maybe I can help.” He pulled himself through the window until he was kneeling on the fire escape. Looking down through the iron bars of the platform, he had a brief moment of dizziness as he saw past the landings below—the barbecue grill someone had set up on the third floor, a large planter on the second—all the way to the broken asphalt of the alley. He felt an anger welling up in him. If it were up to him, he’d tell Webber: Fine. I’ll have Henley clean out your locker. But he couldn’t. He wondered if there was some statistical column that Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, didn’t know about: alongside on-base percentage there ought to be pain-in-the-ass factor. Webber might break the all-time record, his talent not a fair trade for his disappearances, the times he loafed to first on a ground ball or pouted if he took a pitch he thought was high but an umpire called “strike three.”
The woman sighed. “Brett. It’s easier if you just leave.”
Below, the steel rear door of the furniture warehouse banged open; a man in a white oxford shirt stepped outside and lit a cigarette.
“Easier on who?” Webber said.
“Whom,” the woman said softly.
“Whom,” Webber said loudly, banging his hand against the ladder of the fire escape so hard it rattled. In the alley, the man looked up.
“Fuck you,” Webber shouted down at him.
“This is partly why,” the woman said, stepping back from the window.
“Fuck you,” the man shouted back. He stalked toward the fire escape, jumping at the bottom of it, trying to grab the ladder that, thankfully, was retracted onto the first-floor landing.
“I’m sorry, Kitty Kat,” Webber said.
“Webb, maybe you and your friend could work this out later,” Edward Everett said. It had to be well past first pitch. Webber’s status as g
olden boy in the organization notwithstanding, Edward Everett should have stayed at the park, should have just let Webber show up or not show up. Except that would reflect badly on him. The best thing he could do was to nurse Webber through the season until the big club decided to bump him up the ladder. If he played to his ability, that could be as soon as a month from now.
“Two hours ago …” Webber said in a pleading voice but the woman didn’t respond. “Kitty Kat?” he called.
From deeper in the apartment, Edward Everett heard the click of heels on hardwood and then a door opening and closing and, after a moment, a lock turning.
“Kat?” Webber called again, moving past Edward Everett, giving no sign that he even remembered his manager was there, and stepped through the window. Edward Everett followed him inside and found him at the front door, which was locked with a dead bolt that required a key to open. Webber pounded on the door, bellowing, “Fuck!”
“I think she’s gone,” Edward Everett said, laying his hand on Webber’s shoulder.
“Skip,” Webber said, covering his face with his right hand. Edward Everett couldn’t tell for sure, but he appeared to be crying.
On the way to the ballpark, after they’d climbed down the fire escape—thirty minutes past first pitch, Edward Everett noted with anger when he looked at the digital clock in his dash—Webber was silent, staring out the passenger window. At a stoplight, the fountain in front of the Rand National Bank was on and three young children with their shoes off were kicking in the water while two women chatted nearby. He glanced at Webber. It struck him that, despite his enormous talent, he was still little more than a boy.
A week earlier, late in a game that P. City was leading by a run, Pittsfield had runners on second and third with nobody out. The hitter sent a line drive up the middle, over second base. Edward Everett resigned himself to two runs scoring but Webber ranged far to his left, diving for the ball. Just before it got to him, it hit the bag and bounced seemingly out of Webber’s reach, but he snatched it with his bare hand, belly-flopped onto the ground, leaped to his feet and fired home, where Vila took the throw and slapped a tag on the runner. It was one of the most remarkable plays Edward Everett had seen in forty years of professional ball but, since the high school kid Collier hired to record the games hadn’t shown up, there was no highlight video of it. The play was gone, save for in Edward Everett’s memory. Long after, he sat at his computer, trying to describe it for Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, but gave up—partly because he was no kind of writer but also because, unless it fit into a cell on a spreadsheet, Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, would have no interest in it.
As the light changed to green Edward Everett was trying to reconcile the two Webbers: the man who had both the physical ability to make the play and the game sense to know, in a fraction of a second, what to do when he had the ball, with the boy who was still near, in many ways, to the children kicking in the fountain. He was trying to think of something to say that would bring him out of his sorrow and put him back in whatever state he had to be in to make the kind of play he’d made nine days earlier, when Webber let out a bitter laugh.
“My dad had it right. Women is just bitches,” he said. “Them that ain’t bitches is just cunts.”
Chapter Seventeen
When Edward Everett got home after the game, it was nearly midnight but the street in front of his house was lined with cars, a party going on next door at the Duboises’. People were crowded on the deck, talking over one another, laughing; an indecipherable hum of voices. He stood for a moment in his garage before going into the house, wondering if he would be able to make out Renee’s voice or her laugh. What was the occasion? he wondered, thinking back through the years when he’d have been invited as her date and then her husband. It’s a Renee-came-to-her-senses-and-left-him bash, he thought, simultaneously hearing his mother’s voice, although she had been dead for years: Stop the pity party.
He closed the garage and crossed the yard in the shadows, not wanting anyone to see him. When he reached his deck, he found the bouquet of roses he’d left for Renee leaning against the back door, the card unopened. On the envelope, she had written two words in the angular printing she’d learned in her brief time as an architecture student, the same hand in which she annotated her drawings and elevations: “Please don’t.” He tucked the flowers under his arm, got out his key and went inside.
There, he discovered that Grizzly was having a seizure. Edward Everett knew it even before he saw the dog; he could hear his claws clicking in a steady rhythm against the tile. Indeed, Grizzly was lying there, quivering, his water dish overturned, his hindquarters wet, his front paws beating the floor, his head shaking side to side. Edward Everett set the roses onto the counter and went to the linen closet to fetch a towel, which he slipped under the dog’s head to make him more comfortable. Flipping off the light because the vet to whom he and Renee had taken Grizzly after his first seizure had told them that dark and quiet would help the dog recover more quickly, he sat on the floor beside him, stroking his fur, while the dog’s eyes squinted at him in a way that seemed beseeching. “I wish I could stop it, boy,” he said as the dog continued to quake.
Sitting on his kitchen floor until the seizure ended, he listened intently to the loud conversation next door, wondering if Renee’s voice or laugh would emerge from the general noise. “No, no, no, no,” a man said. There was an explosion of laughter, the squeak of someone raising a plastic cooler lid, the pffft when they opened the beer.
He had met the Duboises on the day he moved in: Ron and Rhonda and their three children, whose names also began with “R”: Ron Junior, Renee and Rose. Ron Junior was still in high school then and Ron and Rhonda had sent him over to help Edward Everett carry in boxes from the U-Haul and then had invited him for Sunday dinner. “You can’t have a thing unpacked yet,” Rhonda had said when he protested. “It’s just ussens and some KFC. Hope you won’t be offended by paper plates and plastic sporks.”
It was a crowded table: Ron and Rhonda; their three kids; Rose’s fiancé, Chuck; Ron Junior’s girlfriend, April; Renee’s husband, Art. The Duboises were all plump except for Renee, who had earned a college scholarship for track and still jogged four days a week. Everyone talked at once, nearly shouting, everyone reaching across everyone else for the bucket of legs and breasts, for the dish of potatoes and gravy, and he could make out nothing of what they discussed: it was as if they were piecing together conversations they had been having for years, arguing over ridiculous topics:
I found this picture, remember that Halloween …
You promised.
Speaking of that, Chuck, I heard that Paula was back in town.
Almost simultaneously, they all sang, It’s too late to turn back now, exploding into guffaws.
During the off-season, when Edward Everett was home on Sundays, they sometimes asked him back and began inviting him for family parties: for Chuck and Rose’s wedding reception; for the send-off when Ron Junior joined the Army; for Ron Junior’s wedding, when he and April decided to get married just before he was deployed to Iraq for his first tour. That was the start of his relationship with Renee.
Then, the yard was crowded with out-of-town relatives who had come to wish Ron Junior and April well and Ron Junior “Godspeed.” Over and over, tipsy, bleary-eyed uncles, aunts and cousins came up to him, asking, “Who are you, exactly?” Tired of explaining himself—“I’m just the neighbor”—and wanting to be useful, he’d gone into the kitchen and started scrubbing a pot in which Rhonda had burned the chili. At one point, while he was elbow-deep in the blackened water, his hands raw from the Brillo pad, Renee wandered in looking for ice.
“Hello, baseball man,” she shouted, obviously drunk. “Got you on KP.” She had shed the beige suit jacket she’d worn for the ceremony, and her white blouse was untucked from the skirt.
“I just thought I’d give your folks a head start on cleaning all this up,” he said. Out in the yard, April and her father were dan
cing to some country song, while the other guests stood along the perimeter, every once in a while a camera flash exploding.
“You’re a saint,” she said. “Saint. Saint. Saint.”
“Not really,” he said. “More like a lot of sins to make up for.”
There was no ice in the freezer and when Renee went to the bedroom where everyone had dropped their coats and came back with her purse, fishing out her car keys, he stopped her. “You can’t drive.”
“A saint and a safety patrol boy,” she said. “I’m fine, really.” But he had insisted, telling her he would take her for the ice. He rinsed his hands under the faucet and poured the dark water in the pot down the drain; disappointed at his lack of progress, he filled the pot with dish soap and water to soak, and followed her to her car.
It was a four-year-old red Corvette—a consolation prize for her recent divorce, she said—with a standard transmission. He had driven nothing but automatics for years, and twice before they even got to the end of his street, he killed it, letting off the clutch too quickly. Then lurching onto Carter, shifting from first to second, he ground the gears.
“I’ve only made three payments on this thing,” she said. “Be careful.”
On the way back from the Quik Stop, two bags of ice on the floor at Renee’s feet, she abruptly struck the dash with her fist while they were stopped at a traffic signal. “Fuck,” she said. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” Her sudden violence startled him; his foot slid off the clutch and the Corvette leaped forward and died. The signal changed to green and the driver of the jacked-up Chevy pickup behind them began flashing its high beams, honking. Edward Everett found the button for the window, lowered it and waved the pickup around. As it roared past, a teenaged boy riding in the bed flung a plastic drink cup at them. It spattered against the windshield, ice and soda trailing across the glass. He managed to get the car started and pulled through the intersection, stopping at the curb.