by Joe Schuster
“That’s great,” he said, feeling foolish. For calling her. For thinking he could get off the bus in the middle of Illinois, roll the clock back to before the point at which he’d made his decision that, he saw, had ruined his life.
Four days later, however, Edward Everett had three hits in four times at bat, the last a run-scoring double that meant the win. As he came off the field after Urbana went down in order in the bottom of the ninth, a father with a young boy waved him over to the box seats behind the third base dugout. The boy held up a baseball shyly, along with a pen. “You were amazing,” the father said as Edward Everett scrawled his name across the ball and handed it back to the boy, who rubbed his thumb over the signature in a reverential way. By the time he got to the clubhouse, Phillips was in their manager’s office, his head bowed, while Johnson pushed a Kleenex box across the desk toward him. The rest of the locker room was loud: players snapping towels at one another. Ox, who’d hit a home run, pounded his chest like a triumphant ape, leaping onto a bench. They were jubilant, he knew—because of the victory, yes, but more because they weren’t the one in Johnson’s office, the one who’d sit there alone after Johnson left so he could compose himself, the one who would wait until they were all gone, on the bus, before he ventured out of the office and began stuffing his equipment into a duffel bag for the last time, the one on his way back to the World none of them wanted to see again.
Chapter Twenty
On the morning after Edward Everett’s birthday, Collier woke him again with a phone call. It was a more civil hour: six o’clock. Although the blinds across his bedroom window were closed, he could, nonetheless, tell that outside the day was clear.
“Don’t tell me that the drains backed up again,” Edward Everett said.
“No. All cleaned up. I just want you to come up to the house for a chat.”
He knew whatever Collier wanted to discuss would not be good news. In most years, Collier invited Edward Everett to his house only twice—once with the entire team for a pre-season barbecue the week before their first game, and again when he asked Edward Everett to come to his Christmas party, where most of the other people were Collier’s customers. Then, although he was officially a guest, Edward Everett felt more like part of the catering staff circulating drinks and canapés, serving up his stories of major league ball like conversational hors d’oeuvres. It was little different from when he’d told the stories with his uncle—except then they’d put money in his pocket, while at Collier’s parties the stories only earned him flat champagne and greasy, bacon-wrapped water chestnuts.
Driving to Collier’s home in the hills, Edward Everett passed home after home where the residents were still cleaning up after the storm, taking chain saws to boughs that lay in driveways, sweeping detritus from their front walks. At one house, two boys carried out a rolled-up carpet that had obviously gotten soaked, the smaller boy struggling to keep his grip around it. At another, a woman used a snow shovel to scoop shingles from her lawn.
At the entrance to Collier’s drive, Edward Everett pulled up to the wrought-iron gate, rolled down his window and pressed the “call” button on the intercom. Collier’s voice responded almost immediately, crackling with static. “Come on up the drive, boy.” Almost simultaneously, the electric gate swung open. At the front door, he pressed the bell. It played a chime version of some country song that Ginger liked but which Edward Everett could never remember the name of.
“That,” Collier said, raising the coffee mug he held toward the chimes mounted to the wall beside the door, “needs to go. The dishwasher man comes. ‘Tender Years.’ The electrician comes. ‘Tender Years.’ Her little girl’s friend comes for a sleepover. ‘Tender Years.’ It’s going to have me in the insane asylum.”
Collier led him back through the house. It was cleaning day; women in black slacks and white blouses worked throughout the rooms: one vacuumed the living room, while another polished the stainless steel appliances in the kitchen and a third stood on a step stool in the dining room, spraying Windex on the windows.
In the kitchen on the way to the sunroom, Collier asked Edward Everett if he wanted coffee. When he nodded, Collier said to the woman kneeling at the base of the refrigerator, cleaning it, “Honey, will you get Ed here a cup of coffee?” To his embarrassment, Edward Everett realized she was perhaps ten years older than he was. Without a word, she pushed herself to stand with some difficulty, opened the kitchen cupboard, took down a mug stamped with “Collier’s Fine Meats” in silver foil and poured out a cup of coffee from the coffeemaker sitting on the counter.
“Cream? Sugar?” she asked. Edward Everett preferred cream but he said, “Black is fine.” She nodded, handed the cup to him and then, using the face of the refrigerator to support herself, got back down onto her knees to resume her cleaning, first wiping away the fingerprints she left when she used the fridge to steady herself.
In the sunroom, Collier settled into one of two massive recliners that sat dead center in the room. “I can’t stand cleaning day,” he said, flipping the lever to lean back the chair. “I feel like the Czechs in 1939, invaded. I don’t have any space of my own.”
He indicated with a gesture that Edward Everett should take the other chair. Sitting, he had the feeling of being in a stadium skybox at life’s fifty-yard line. From here, he could look down the hill, through the yards of Collier’s neighbors—their gated streets, their miniature English rose gardens, their patios with five-thousand-dollar stainless steel barbecue grills—down into the yards of the more modest homes, the ranches and split-levels on postage-stamp yards, ending, at the bottom of the hill, in trailer parks and industrial buildings and finally the Flann River. It was as if the town’s topography were a geographic bar chart of wealth: the higher you were, the more you had. While he could not see his own house, he could spot the beginning of his neighborhood—roughly three-quarters of the way down—and, farther still, the ballpark. Near gate three, what seemed from this perspective a miniature beverage truck of some sort sat, the driver wheeling a handcart stacked with cases of beer or soda inside.
“I still remember the first time I sat here when the house was mine,” Collier said. “It was, I don’t know, seven, seven-thirty, and from here I could look down into the ballpark. It was November and I called the night guard and told him to turn on the lights. At first he didn’t believe it was me and wouldn’t do it. I said, ‘Hell, you’ll believe it’s me when I kick your butt and fire you.’ When the lights came on, it was the most beautiful thing. ‘It’s my ballpark,’ I thought. ‘My family name is on that ballpark.’ ” Collier laughed. “Cost me a boatload of money just to turn on the lights for an hour, but what the fuck.”
Edward Everett knew that Collier had not invited him to the house to reminisce, but he let Collier have his moment, sitting in silence, looking down the hill toward the ballpark. It had never, in the time since Edward Everett came to Perabo City, looked charming in the daylight. Up close, the cracks in the walls were evident; in places, great chunks of concrete were missing and, in a few of the hollowed-out spots, pigeons nested, the walls and walkways around them spattered with droppings. Edward Everett had not had many chances to see the park from a distance at night, when it was lit up, but on the occasions he had—when Collier rented it out for district high school football championships or a clown rodeo—it had looked like a small gem, the light towers washing out nearly everything that surrounded it, the warehouses, the buildings of Collier’s meatpacking business, the Diamond Trailer Park where home run balls sometimes knocked out windows. Then, it was almost enough to make up for the ugliness that bordered on it. At night, glowing, it made the entire town appear beautiful.
“I gotta let it go, Ed,” Collier said, breaking the silence. “I got grandkids that need college.” At first Edward Everett misheard the pronoun as “you,” not “it,” and he couldn’t figure out why it was Collier telling him he was fired and not Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, nor what his abilities as a manager had
to do with college for Collier’s grandchildren; would Iowa State send Collier’s grandson a letter that said: Your ACT scores are good but there’s the matter of your grandfather keeping Yates on as manager. It suggests a congenital deficiency in intelligence. As Collier went on, though, Edward Everett realized that he was talking about the entire team.
“When I was a kid, my daddy brought me into the business by cleaning out the slaughterhouses, scraping up guts and brains, but kids now—Ginger’s Kurt won’t eat meat, if you can believe it; an eleven-year-old vegetarian. Even the ones that’ll eat a steak don’t want to know how it got from Flossie mooing in the field to being on their plate, medium-rare.” Collier let out a deep sigh. “Any notion how much the team loses in a year?”
Edward Everett hadn’t a clue. He rarely paid attention to the attendance, focused as he was on the game. Twenty-five thousand, he thought, but doubled it. “Fifty grand?”
Collier laughed. “Times it by three.”
“Maybe …” Edward Everett ventured, although he had no idea what should follow the “maybe.”
“Unless you’re going to tell me about an oil well behind second base, I thought of everything we could do. We got that stupid giant walking foam owl so that the little kiddies would have something. We got the Owlie girls in hot pants shooting T-shirts into the stands for the daddies of the little kiddies. Ginger says kids these days like rock music. What the hell do I know about rock music? We seen what happened with that.”
Late last season, Collier had brought in a band that was doing the county fair circuit. For a month before the date they were going to play, he ran ads on three of the local radio stations, bought billboards, but the concert attendance was sparse. The problem, Edward Everett realized later, was that Collier had brought in a band Ginger had liked in grade school, but they hadn’t had a hit in twenty years. Most of the people who stayed after the game for the show were women in their late thirties and beyond, who, even though they were mothers or even grandmothers, screamed the lead singer’s name shrilly while their kids slunk up the aisles pretending to be orphans.
Edward Everett didn’t know what to say. He read Baseball America, knew the stories: a single-A team in Piedmont, Virginia, disbanded mid-season, throwing the entire league into chaos; a low-A team in Pocatello, Idaho, offered for sale on eBay. The auction was a joke but the purpose serious: the owner was looking for publicity to sell it. Even in their own league, foul balls sometimes landed in the stands and rattled around while kids raced from eight, nine sections away to retrieve them.
“The drain thing is the last straw,” Collier said. “It wasn’t just the rains. When the Roto-Rooter guy come out, he found clay on the snake. Clay means cracked pipes. He says, knock wood, if we don’t get any more serious rain, we can get through the season with them not backing up again, but they’re gonna need to be replaced. You don’t want to know what it’s gonna cost. It’s more than your bosses pay you.” He regarded Edward Everett for a moment, then said, “I wanted you to know. I’m not telling anyone. Not even Ginger, who nags, ‘Dump the team; dump the team.’ We’re not pulling a Piedmont. I’m going to look for someone to buy it. Hope someone from the damn town wants it. That’s the first choice. Second is someone buys it and moves it to Bumfuck, South Dakota, or somewheres. Third—” He arched his eyebrow and made a gesture as if scattering scraps of paper to the wind.
“What about obligations to the franchise?” Edward Everett asked.
Collier smoothed his mustache, a gesture Edward Everett had come to know meant he was considering his words. “Your bosses ain’t said nothing?”
“No,” Edward Everett said, his skin prickling.
Collier sighed. “This year’s the last on the contract.”
“I wasn’t aware of that,” Edward Everett said.
“My lawyers tell me a month ago your bosses shut down the talks.”
“I had no idea,” Edward Everett said.
Collier sipped his coffee and looked away as if he was composing a sentence carefully in his head. From somewhere in the house a vacuum whined and in the kitchen two women laughed. Collier shook his head. “I assumed your bosses would’ve told you. We’ve been talking to Cincinnati since they got a single-A contract up as well. They seem interested but …” He shrugged. “I can’t believe your boss ain’t said nothing.”
“Nothing,” Edward Everett said.
“Well, in a way, I’m relieved,” Collier said. “I thought we were friends and when I thought maybe you were holding out on me, I was hurt.”
He was relieved? Edward Everett thought. I could be out of a job and he’s relieved?
He realized that Collier had stood, a gesture that said the meeting was over. “Give the missus my best,” he said.
Walking through the house, Edward Everett tried not to resent Collier pleading financial straits all the while he employed a platoon of women who were at that moment teetering on step stools to wipe dust off the crystal baubles in the dining room chandelier, taking small brushes to the grout in the tiled floor of the entranceway. Besides, he thought, whether Collier sold the team or dissolved it would not affect him in the end, since even if the Owls stayed in Perabo City, he wouldn’t have a job there next season, not if the big club moved the single-A team elsewhere and Cincinnati moved in. He wondered what it meant that Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, hadn’t told him they’d stopped negotiating with Collier: did he already know Edward Everett was out, a sixty-year-old fossil who still preferred keeping penciled index cards on his players? He would have to get on the phone, go back to the baseball winter meetings and patrol the lobby of the hotel, taking his resume to player development directors alongside men half his age who understood all of the arcane formulae that people like Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, loved so well.
As he reached the front door, Ginger was walking in, laden with shopping bags, the eleven-year-old boy carrying a bag from the Apple Store, the girl carrying a suit bag from Macy’s over her shoulder—maybe more in retail sales, Edward Everett calculated, than he earned in a week, the benefit of Collier being born into a family that had the foresight to start a meat company eighty-something years earlier, when Edward Everett’s grandfathers were going down into a mine, the benefit of the Collier family realizing generations ago that it was better to be the sort of people for whom other people worked instead of, like Edward Everett’s family, people who worked for other people, people like Collier.
“Oh, good,” Ginger said when she registered Edward Everett’s presence. “There’s two bags from Williams-Sonoma in the trunk I couldn’t manage. Would you be a dear?”
Chapter Twenty-one
At the game that evening, as Edward Everett brought out his lineup card to present to the umpires and exchange with the manager from Lincoln, the stadium announcer invited everyone present to serenade him with “Happy Birthday.” Phantom Frank struggled through a plodding version of the song, beginning by hitting keys that were off by what Edward Everett imagined was a handsbreadth. Although on most nights he wouldn’t have paid attention to the size of the crowd, after his meeting with Collier, he couldn’t help but notice there were maybe five hundred fans there; perhaps only a third bothered to sing, starting out and then falling silent as they tried to match what Phantom Frank played. After a moment, as if someone had picked up his hands and put them on the right keys, Phantom Frank played something that sounded close to “Happy Birthday” and a few more joined in, but without spirit. As he arrived at the final note, Phantom Frank added an awkward trill and a handful of fans applauded.
“I’ll give you one call today as a gift,” the plate umpire said, winking. He was in his mid-twenties, his head shaved since, Edward Everett knew, he was going off for his once-a-month Army Reserve training after the series was over. They were all young, Edward Everett realized: the field umpire might be thirty, tops, and the manager from Lincoln couldn’t be any older than thirty-five. Two years ago, he had a pinch-hit double that drove in the tying run in the ninth i
nning of the seventh game of the World Series and then scored when the opposing pitcher tried to pick him off second base but threw the ball into center field. A picture of him sliding across the plate, the ball hanging just above his head as he smashed against the catcher’s outstretched left leg, had been on the cover of Sports Illustrated. They were all on their way up, he realized. In five or so years, the Lincoln manager would be managing at triple-A, mentioned in rumors whenever a major league manager’s job appeared in jeopardy; the umpires, too, would move up the chain, double-A, triple-A, fill-in when major league umpires took vacation.
Meanwhile, what would become of him after this season ended? Twenty-something years ago when he stopped playing and took a job as a hitting coach in the minor leagues, he had seen himself on the same track, fully expecting that one day he’d be in the dugout in the major leagues again—if not as a manager, then as a coach. He’d gotten stuck in the station, though, never offered a job above double-A. Once, he’d taken a job as a bench coach at Valdosta, Georgia, sitting next to a manager who, a year earlier, had retired after fourteen years as a second baseman in the major leagues, a legitimate star, someone whose face showed up in ads for a car battery, symbolizing the product’s reliability. As a manager, he was like a lot of former players who had enormous talent. He had little patience with the journeymen, couldn’t find the words to tell a shortstop how to react more quickly to a ground ball, became flustered when he tried to teach a batter how to change his stance to take the merest fraction of a second off the time it took him to swing through the zone.
But the All-Star was personable, funny and famous. Several times during the season, network TV crews came to Valdosta to cover his story; the angle was always that he was giving back to the game, teaching the new generation. He made jokes, repeated the same story, about a shortstop who had started the season making an error in each of the first dozen games and how he’d been patient with him and, within six weeks, he had been called up to triple-A. “That’s gratifying when you can help a kid do that.” He left out that the season had started the day after the shortstop, a twenty-year-old from Venezuela, had learned that his sister had been arrested in their home country, that no one knew where she was, and that two weeks into the season, the State Department, pressured by the owner of the big club, had negotiated her release and, after that happy resolution, his play improved; he left out the story of the day in the clubhouse when he had screamed at the kid in pidgin English because he himself couldn’t speak a word of Spanish, “Bad play-o, bad play-o,” while the kid sat on the bench, looking at the floor, curling and uncurling his toes; he left out the story of how Edward Everett had taught himself enough Spanish that he could remind the kid of the basic lessons, using a few words and gestures. “Stay down.” “Permanecer abajo.” “Don’t pull away from the ball.” “No torear.” Miming the correct way. It was nothing the kid didn’t already know but Edward Everett worked with him for an hour every day until he found himself again; his patience, Edward Everett knew, more important than the instruction.