by Joe Schuster
“I don’t know how much longer I can do this,” Collier said. “You have any idea how much I’ve lost the last five years?” He patted the roof of his Escalade. “I coulda bought a fleet of these. Bought a fleet and drove them all into the river, and it woulda been the same thing.” He let out a small, bitter laugh. “I remember when my dad bought the team and moved it here. I was five or six and he come home and said, ‘Your daddy bought you a toy.’ Shit. I thought he bought me a box of Lincoln Logs.” He shook his head. “We’ve had some good times here. Remember that stretch when you first come, three league pennants in a row? That parade after the first was something.” Edward Everett had not thought of the parade Collier staged as impressive: six “Collier Fine Meats” refrigerated trucks, two floats and a half-dozen convertibles carrying those players who had showed up, waving embarrassedly to the sparse crowd, trailing the Perabo City High marching band for four blocks. Collier draped an arm around Edward Everett’s shoulders in a surprisingly familiar gesture. “It’s gonna die with us, amigo. We’re the last of the …”
“Old fools?” Edward Everett said, finishing Collier’s sentence.
“Old somethings anyway.”
It was only when he was back home, sitting at his kitchen table, drinking coffee and paging through the newspaper, that Edward Everett realized it was his birthday. Turning to the horoscopes, he saw the familiar date: If your birthday is today …
In most years, he gave the event little thought. They were in-season, the day little different from any other: the game, and long hours in the office before and after. Today, however, he had nothing to do and the prospect of the empty day stretched before him in a way that made him uncomfortable. “You work to avoid real life,” Renee had said a few months earlier. It struck him then: was that when she had decided to go? If he had said, You’re right, changed his habits, come home at eleven instead of midnight, would she still be there? He wondered if she would relent long enough to acknowledge his birthday; maybe he would find a card from her in the mail. His first wife, years ago, had been friendly after their divorce and sent him cards for a time until she told him that her new husband thought the practice odd. “You understand,” she said in a note. “It’s not that he suspects anything or is jealous.” Whatever her new husband had been, she’d stopped sending cards after that.
When the mail came, there were more than a dozen cards, but nothing from Renee. Most were from former players. One, Jack Clarendon, who was platooning at second base with the big club, getting into the lineup when they faced left-handed pitching, sent him a hundred-dollar card for Best Buy. Winston, God bless him, sent him a five-dollar card for Starbucks. Even Renee’s father, Ron, brought by a card with a twenty-dollar gift certificate for Lowe’s. When Edward Everett answered the door, Grizzly barking and skittering across the kitchen tile, Ron was uncomfortable, glancing repeatedly toward his own house, as if he were doing something illicit.
“Don’t tell Rhonda,” he said after declining Edward Everett’s invitation to come inside for coffee. Bending to scratch the dog under his chin, he went on, “She’s, well, she don’t want to do anything that suggests we’re taking sides. Between you, me and the lamppost, though, I’m hoping you guys work things out. Renee … I ain’t telling you something that’s a shock. Once she gets an idea, she’s like a dog with a bone. But …”
“But?” Edward Everett asked, wondering if Renee had confided something, the “but” being the one thing he could do that would cause her to change her mind, come home as she had before.
“I gotta get back,” Ron said, ignoring his question. “You’re not going to end up spending the day alone, are you?”
“No,” Edward Everett said. “I’ve got plans.”
“That’s good.” Ron turned to go, but hesitated. “You ever need anyone to watch the dog, you know where I am. He’s like a grand-doggy to us and I’d hate to see him go to one of those kennels.” As if he understood what Ron was saying, the dog stood on its hind legs, pawing at Ron’s shins. He bent down, gave him a pat and was gone.
Around noon, Biggie Vincent called. When Edward Everett saw the name on his caller ID, he let it go to voice mail. “Happy birthday!” Vincent said, his voice singsong, making Edward Everett wonder if he was celebrating the day off with a few beers. “Since there’s no game, amigo, how about you, the missus, Janice and me go to Outback? Not that I’ll pick up the check. You know how much I’m paid. Or not paid.” He laughed.
He considered calling Vincent, telling him that Renee had left. Vincent would take him out for the steak, just the two of them. He’d say the right things, condemn Renee or encourage him to court her, depending on what he perceived Edward Everett wanted. But the thought of the effort Vincent would exert made him tired. “It’s just you and me, Grizzly,” he said to the dog, deleting the message. Grizzly was lying in a corner of the kitchen and, on hearing his name, picked his head up, regarded Edward Everett and then laid his head back down, covering his face with his paws, as if to say: Pity party? Count me out.
“Yeah,” Edward Everett said, opening the freezer to find something for lunch. “That’s what I think, too.” He took out a dinner and put it in the microwave. How, he wondered, had he ended up celebrating his sixtieth birthday with an epileptic Pomeranian as his only companion, standing in the kitchen, watching a Lean Cuisine lasagna, a frozen meal Renee had left behind, rotating in a microwave in a house with a leaky basement in a town where he managed a team that played its games in an honest-to-God cesspool?
Chapter Nineteen
Although he had once promised himself he wouldn’t stay in the game if it meant celebrating his thirtieth birthday in a minor league town, he did: Holloway, Iowa. He was with the Cubs organization then, playing for their double-A team at Racine—his fifth franchise in less than three years; St. Louis, Cleveland, Oakland, Baltimore, Chicago, the trajectory of his career akin to a pinball bouncing off bumpers and flippers. He sometimes thought—back to hours on a bus and four-in-a-room at Travelodges and Motel 6s, deep in the heart of the heart of America, where, he was convinced, the only people who were there had gotten lost on their way to somewhere else—that the worst thing that had happened to him were the weeks he’d spent with the Cardinals until he got hurt. It was as if he had been tussling in the backseat with the prom queen: she was passionate, she let you touch her here, here, here, but not there, not just yet, before she dashed off to the powder room, just for a sec, just to freshen up, leaving you waiting with a hard-on, wondering, did she ditch you, was she laughing with her friends, the queen’s court, about leaving you there, but then thinking that maybe she didn’t after all, and you remember your hand in her bra, and maybe she was standing at the sink, dabbing the corner of her mouth to smooth out the line of lip gloss, thinking about you in the car, and so you waited, the promise enough to keep you waiting in the backseat as the moon set.
In the hinterlands of the Cleveland organization after the tryout camp—Erie, Pennsylvania, hitting .293—he was the number four outfielder and should have read the portents then: the prom queen doesn’t come back to the car for number four outfielders. The next year, back at Erie—never a good sign, two seasons in the same minor league town, the professional version of your tires caught in the mud, spinning—and then later that season traded to the A’s, at Peoria, Illinois, three weeks there, a throw-in as part of a seven-player deal, hitting .413 in forty-six at-bats, but then shipped out again, to the Baltimore organization, playing at Raleigh but then let go when the season ended, the market cold for twenty-nine-year-old singles-hitting outfielders. He should have read the signs then but didn’t, the last man in America who still had faith he could get back to the major leagues. So he stuck it out, made some calls, landed with a Cubs minor league team, and woke up starting the fourth decade of his life in a little town he couldn’t pick out on a map even though he’d been there.
At the ball game at Holloway, the organist played “The Old Gray Mare” when he stepped to the pla
te for the first time, and a drunken fan in the stands behind home plate shrieked the words of the song at him—a red-faced man maybe twice his age, venting whatever his life’s disappointments were on someone he didn’t know, as if it would bring him back whatever he had lost. When Edward Everett struck out, swinging wildly over a pitch that broke down and outside, the old man jeered at him: “Yeah, you go sit down now.”
After the game, at a Ponderosa, one of his teammates tipped a waitress—a buxom girl with steak sauce and chocolate pudding staining her apron—to bring him a corn muffin with a candle stuck in it, along with a note calling him “Mithoosla,” which took him a while to tease out as “Methuselah.” Looking down the table as they grinned back at him over their steaks and their baked potatoes slathered with sour cream, he realized how much older he was than they, thirty an impossible number for them to comprehend. A decade earlier, when he was their age and at single-A, still on his way up—up the only conceivable trajectory—and his hitting coach marked his thirtieth birthday (in a far more dignified manner than Edward Everett would; his wife and daughter meeting him at the ballpark, the daughter shyly offering up to him a package wrapped in paper she’d colored herself), another player confided, his face solemn, “I’m killin’ myself the day before I turn thirty.”
In his kitchen nearly a third of a century after that dinner at Ponderosa, taking the lasagna from the microwave and raising the steaming plastic dish as a toast to his sleeping dog, he thought he should have seen the writing on the wall then, but hadn’t. Thirty-one, in Dorsett, Nebraska, with the Brewers organization the next season, a year and a half older than the pitching coach, his legs starting to go, average sliding: .271. His roommates—nineteen, twenty, twenty-four—chipped in and bought him a cheap cane with a plastic handle shaped like a baseball. On the bus one night, riding along a dark blacktop road in Illinois, they reminisced about television shows he’d never seen—Hong Kong Phooey and Speed Buggy—because while they’d been slumped on their parents’ couches watching cartoons, he was on another bus coursing through the Midwest or trotting out to left in the shadow of an outfield wall. At one point, his roommate Mikey Phillips, sitting beside him, started a chorus of a TV theme song Edward Everett had never heard and most of the team began shouting the lyrics in unison until the bus hit a pothole, blowing a front tire, one a.m. in the middle of nowhere. Most of them disembarked while the driver tried to rouse a tow truck using the CB radio. As Edward Everett’s teammates stretched out in the grass along the shoulder, chatting or smoking cigarettes, he wandered up the road, away from them, to where the manager, Adam Johnson, was talking quietly with the pitching coach. “… let him go,” Johnson was saying and Edward Everett’s skin prickled, certain they meant him. “You weren’t supposed to hear that,” Johnson said. Edward Everett felt a stone drop in his belly. “Don’t say anything to Phillips. We need him for the series in Urbana.”
“I won’t,” Edward Everett said, feeling light-headed from relief that he was being spared but, at the same time, guilt from the lie he’d have to live with Phillips.
Back on the bus hours later, as dawn lightened the eastern horizon, Edward Everett asked Phillips, “Ever think about giving all this up?”
Phillips said, “Naw, man. Hell, guys kill to do this.”
“Seriously, what would you do if you couldn’t do this anymore?”
Phillips gave him a stricken look. “Skip say something? Fuck. It was two games.”
“No,” Edward Everett said. “Skip didn’t say anything. I was just—”
“Just feeling old,” a player behind him said. “Gramps is just feeling his age.”
“You’re right,” he said, but thinking: It’s not just two games. Anyone but you can see that hitters are catching up to your fastball; your slider isn’t breaking. Anyone can see that in triple-A they’d pound you. But he said none of it, simply repeated, “Feeling old. Don’t let it happen to you.”
For the first time since he had signed the contract after the tryout in Cleveland, he felt fear that he had made a mistake, one from which he could not recover: leaving Connie, giving up the job his uncle had given him, a job that would have guaranteed him a comfortable life for however many decades he lived, a life in which he’d eventually be one of the well-dressed men with Cadillacs, trips to Europe, extended winter stays in Arizona.
The next morning, he slipped into a phone booth at the back of the Denny’s where the team went for breakfast, poured a handful of quarters into the coin slot, dialed Connie’s number, but an old man with some kind of Eastern European accent answered.
“I’m trying to reach Connie Heidrich,” he said loudly into the mouthpiece.
The old man said something he couldn’t understand and Edward Everett said again, more slowly, “Con. Nie. Hei. Drich.”
The old man said something Edward Everett could not understand, maybe in Polish or some other language, and then hung up. He called his mother.
“What’s wrong, Ed?” she said, her voice anxious. “Did you get hurt again?”
“No. I’m fine. I just called for the heck of it.”
She let out a breath that whistled in the earpiece. “You never just call …”
He had wanted to ask her, by the by, just making conversation, did she ever see Connie anymore? But now he couldn’t because the question would have a weight he hadn’t meant her to perceive—a weight that she’d read as his coming to his senses, realizing she’d been right and he’d been wrong when he walked away from the life he could have had: the job selling for the mill, the pre-fab family with Connie and Billy. When he’d told her he was taking the Indians’ offer, six-fifty a month at double-A Erie, her face softened in the same way he imagined it would if he told her he had cancer. “Oh,” she said. She was clipping coupons from the Sunday Wheeling Intelligencer and she closed the paper, laid down her scissors and ran her hand over the slick coupon insert.
“What did Connie say?”
“I haven’t told her yet,” he said.
“I see,” she said, and he couldn’t read the meaning in that. “And your uncle?”
“I’ll tell him—”
She calmly picked up her scissors again and began cutting around the border for a coupon for breakfast cereal. “Your father had forty-seven dollars in the bank when he died,” she said. “Twenty-some years of working. Forty-seven dollars.” She shrugged. “What’s that, two dollars a year?”
“It’s not—”
She slammed the scissors onto the table with surprising force. He couldn’t remember a time when she had responded with overt anger. She was a long-sufferer, someone who won arguments with his father by silences that could go on forever. Once, when his father decided that he’d had enough of the Catholic Church and announced one Sunday that he would no longer accompany her to Mass, she was silent for a week. A week of his father teasing and cajoling; a week of her refusal to speak, punctuated by the sounds she made as she went about her work: the whisk of a wooden spoon on the side of a saucepan; the clink of dishes put away in the cupboard; the chopping of cabbage. After a week, his father was in the driver’s seat of their Studebaker at quarter to eight the next Sunday, waiting to drive her and Edward Everett to Mass.
“You kids have no idea. You think a Depression can’t happen again.”
“A Depression isn’t—”
“You go down to Liar’s Bench, on Chestnut, and ask those men who sit there all day drinking. ‘Oh, no, the mine can’t close!’ It closed! ‘Oh, no, milk prices will never—’ ”
“I signed a contract,” he said.
She nodded, got up, took her scissors to the utility drawer in the kitchen, opened it, set the scissors into it, closed it, and left the room without another word.
On the phone with her from Vandalia, he chatted for a few minutes, listening to her complain about the new pastor, who was using guitars at Sunday Mass instead of the organ; he asked about her sister, about the ladies in the altar society.
“What�
��s this really about?” she said at last, interrupting him.
He hesitated. In the restaurant, Phillips was jumping out of his booth as if he’d been burned, swiping his hands over his pants legs, which were stained with what appeared to be coffee. Across the table from him, a player they all called Ox was laughing. “I was just wondering what had ever happened to Connie—”
“Oh, Ed,” his mother said. “You can’t go back, honey.”
“I wasn’t talking about going back. She just crossed my mind.”
“She got married. A year ago. To Randy McLaughlin. He’s a vet in Somerville. You went to high school with him.”
He remembered McLaughlin, a boy who, in Edward Everett’s memory, wore braces the entire four years of high school. Could that be possible, or was just one image of McLaughlin frozen in his memory and that became the sum and substance of McLaughlin: the kid with glasses, braces and red hair, writing meticulous lab notes in biology class as he delicately separated the skin over the belly of a frog?
It surprised him to realize that he had thought, all the while he was on his pinball journey of a life, that everyone else would stay put, that Connie would be waiting, as if she were a deposit he’d made in some sort of lifestyle savings account: deposit it, forget about it and go back to make a withdrawal when he was ready.