The Might-Have-Been

by Joe Schuster

  “I’m not getting off,” Nelson said in a low, flat voice.

  “Ross,” Edward Everett said, “you can’t do this.” Nelson only shook his head. He did not look well; he was wan and there were dark circles under his eyes. He had a tic Edward Everett had never noticed before, scratching a fingernail rapidly against the lobe of his right ear and then flicking the underside of the lobe over and over. His eyes blinked rapidly as if he had just come into a harsh light.

  “No,” Nelson said, turning his attention to outside the window. Edward Everett regarded him, weighing his options: Did he order Nelson off the bus? Should he call the police, have them escort him away? He had never seen anything like this in the forty years he had been in the game. Players just went away: one day there, the next gone, their lockers emptied or a new player’s uniform hanging there.

  “You should—” he began but Nelson took an iPod out of his pocket, plugged the earbuds in, turned it on, the volume loud enough that Edward Everett could hear the music nearly as plainly as if he were plugged in as well. Did it make any difference, really? he wondered. He got out of the seat and made his way back to the front of the bus.

  “What the fuck you doing?” Dominici said in a low voice that was still loud enough that Nelson—and everyone else—could no doubt hear.

  “You go tell him to get off,” Edward Everett said.

  Dominici got up and strode back to Nelson, grabbed his arm, trying to yank him to stand, but Nelson wrenched free. “Get off,” Dominici said through clenched teeth. When Nelson shook his head, Dominici balled his right hand into a fist and raised it but then let it drop and returned to his seat near the front of the bus, behind Edward Everett. “You’re going to lose control of the team, letting him pull this shit,” he said.

  As the bus driver swung the doors closed and shifted into gear, Vincent moved from his own seat and slid beside Edward Everett. “This ain’t that kid all over again, Skip. That doctor’s son, what’s-his-name.”

  “Tripp Burroway,” Edward Everett said.

  “Burroway; yeah. How many kids you cut loose? You only run into one of them in a lifetime. If at all.”

  “He’ll get tired and just go away,” Edward Everett said.

  Nelson did not, in fact, go away. He dressed for the game in Quad Cities, appropriating a locker near the back of the clubhouse, setting up the small framed photograph of his wife and children on the shelf, just as he had all season; set up, as well, the tiny plastic baseball player his son had gotten for him out of a gum ball machine and a small polished stone he’d once told Edward Everett his wife had found on a parking lot on their honeymoon to Branson, Missouri—all of his good luck charms that had brought him nothing of the sort. During the team meeting Edward Everett held before the game, Nelson stood in a corner, listening intently and then, along with everyone else, trotted down the tunnel, laid his bats into one of the cubbyholes in the dugout, turning them all so that his initials and uniform number written in indelible marker on the end of the knobs faced right-side up, grabbed his glove and went out to shag flies with the other outfielders. When he tried to take batting practice, however, stepping into the cage when Webber was slow to take his turn, Webber yanked him away from the plate. “Get the fuck out of here.” They stood in a staring contest until Edward Everett approached them. Even before he said anything, Nelson ducked his head and slunk away.

  At game time, he sat at the end of the bench, popping sunflower seeds into his mouth, chewing them, spitting out the husks. When the team began a rally, he leaped to his feet, shouting, exhorting. When a run crossed the plate, he dashed out of the dugout and embraced the runner in a bear hug, lifting him off the ground.

  For most of the trip, Edward Everett wondered if his kindness in letting Nelson stay with them and pretend he was still a professional ballplayer had earned them all some sort of blessing. The weather turned in their favor as the gloom and rains that had colored nearly the entire spring and summer stayed behind them; their days and nights were warm, the skies clear and the trip was filled with marvels, some part of a game, some not. During the seventh-inning stretch on their second day in the Quad Cities, a stunt hang-glider sailed into the ballpark from over the right-field bleachers, landing on the infield, stutter-stepping as he touched down near second base, and when he stopped, his silk kite rippling, everyone could see the words printed on it: “Missy, will you marry me?” In Peoria the first night, the team brought out six-year-old triplets to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and as their flat and uncertain “braaaaaaave” finished the anthem, a golf cart bounced onto the field ferrying their father, a corporal on leave from Iraq, surprising his daughters, who’d had no idea he was coming home. Even some of Edward Everett’s players teared up on the bench when the girls rushed to the cart, shrieking, “Daddy,” in better unison than they’d had when they sang.

  On the field, Perabo City played inspired ball, taking two of three in Quad Cities and all three in Peoria, two of the wins small gems by Sandford, who seemed to have pushed past his five-inning limit, going seven innings in his first game and the full nine in the second, a neat, two-hit shutout. Webber, too, seemed a changed person; for the first time since he’d joined the team, he wasn’t surly; even more than his ten hits and four walks in twenty-six trips to the plate, what surprised Edward Everett was that in the eighth inning of the last game in Peoria, with the score two–two, a runner on second and none out, Webber shortened his swing and punched a slow ground ball to the right side of the infield. He was out, but the runner moved to third and scored what turned out to be the winning run on a fly ball by Tanner, hitting next. When Edward Everett looked at Webber’s game logs, he realized it might have been the only time all season Webb deliberately offered himself for the good of the team.

  In Urbana, however, their good fortune vanished. When they got to town, the rain caught up with them again, a vicious storm that froze traffic, their bus creeping along the highway at ten miles an hour and stopping entirely for twenty minutes because of an accident, their exit less than a hundred yards ahead of them. When they got to their motel, things got worse: their reservation was wrong. Consulting the computer when they tried to check in, the clerk—a strawberry blond girl who might have been eighteen—said, “I don’t have you here until next month.” Dominici, irritable because he had a corn on his right foot that had started bleeding from being squeezed into baseball spikes, snapped, “So, we’re just figments of your imagination?” He swept his hand in a gesture meant to call attention to the thirty wet men clustered in the small lobby, but accidentally knocked a glass dish of mints off the counter, shattering it on the floor.

  In the end, the motel manager found them six rooms, pushing folding cots in between the double beds. Edward Everett hadn’t shared a room in years—a single was one of his few perks as manager—but ended up bunking with Dominici, Vincent, Sandford and Webber. It was a miserable night. With the two folding cots made up for sleep, the already small room was cramped; the only way he could get to the bathroom was to sit on one of the cots, swing his legs around to the other side, take two steps to the second cot, sit on it, swing his legs around to the other side. Beyond that, Webber and Sandford clearly despised each other. Webber was loud, turning on ESPN even at midnight so he could watch the baseball report. When Sandford went into the bathroom before bed, Webber snapped at him, “Leave hot water. Not like in QC.” Sandford did not respond in an overt way but the manner in which his eyes flicked toward Edward Everett told him that if he weren’t there, it might have escalated into a physical response.

  Then, when the lights went out, the room became almost unbearable: Dominici was flatulent and every time he farted, Webber let out an obvious groan. Vincent, who fell asleep within moments of the room becoming dark, snored, as did Sandford and Webber once they fell asleep. It seemed the only one who could not sleep was Edward Everett. He lay on the cot, one of the metal braces digging into his shoulder blades through the thin mattress, listening to
the cacophony mixed with the traffic outside.

  Nelson seemed to have gotten worse. In the clubhouse, as he dressed before the game the next day, he muttered to himself, words that Edward Everett could not understand, and when he took his clothes off, he did so in anger, snapping his shirttail when he whipped it off, flicking it against Sandford. Someone else might have hit him back but Sandford just cocked his head to one side, curious, while Nelson hung his shirt on a hook in the locker he had taken for himself.

  During the game, P. City seemed transformed into a baseball version of the Keystone Kops, kicking easy ground balls, dropping pop flies. In the third inning, the Urbana hitter sent a grounder between first and second. Moose Shriver, his first baseman, snared it, sprawling on the wet ground, but when he came up to throw to the pitcher, who should have been covering the base, Petey Mosley was still standing on the mound, gazing at the play. “You’re not a fucking spectator,” Webber yelled. In the ninth, down four–nothing, P. City briefly woke up. With two outs, Webber, Mraz and Vila hit consecutive singles, Webber scoring. That was all they had, however. Batting next, Shriver swung at a pitch that bounced in front of the plate and trickled a ball that the catcher pounced on and threw to first for the final out.

  The next day it rained, the game washed out, the team cooped up in the motel. Fortunately, the wedding party that had booked so many of the rooms had checked out. Because the desk had made the mistake with their reservations, Edward Everett convinced the manager to let the team have enough rooms so that the players could be two to a room instead of four, meaning a bed each. Maybe it would change their luck back to good, he thought as he handed out the key cards; at least maybe the team would get some rest.

  In his own room, he stripped down to his boxers and T-shirt and got into the bed, tried to sleep but couldn’t. His room faced the parking lot and on the edge of it was a truck stop, diesel engines rumbling. He got up, resigned to exhaustion, and sat at the desk with his laptop so he could upload the stats from the night before, but found that if the room had wireless Internet, it wasn’t working. There was, however, an Ethernet jack in the wall at the base of the desk and so he started pulling open drawers, looking for a cable. He didn’t find one, but in one drawer he found a Gideon’s Bible, into which someone with a crude sense of humor had folded a flyer promoting a place that called itself an “adult supercenter,” featuring half a dozen badly photocopied pictures of naked women. He returned the Bible to the drawer after crumpling the flyer and putting it into the trash and then reconsidered: picturing a maid finding it there, thinking, Dirty old man, he tore the flyer into small pieces and folded them into a Kleenex before discarding it.

  In another drawer, he found a telephone book. Although it had been years since he’d done so, he opened it to the “A’s,” looking for an “Aylesworth.” To his surprise, he found one: “Aylesworth, Colin, MD.” It could be a cousin, he thought; had Julie a brother? It struck him that he still pictured her as the young girl who had exhausted herself pushing his wheelchair through Montreal, but she would be past fifty by now. Then it struck him: the boy might have her last name, and “Aylesworth, Colin, MD” could be the boy in the photographs she’d stopped sending him well more than twenty years ago. He opened his cellphone and punched in the number but then closed it in the middle of the first ring. What would he even say if someone answered? Was your mother …? Are you …? Maybe, it struck him, Julie had never told the boy anything about him. Your father died. Your father was lost at sea. Maybe she had married while the boy was an infant, too young to remember otherwise, and he’d gone through his life thinking someone else entirely was his father, calling the insurance broker or the druggist or the dentist or the chemistry teacher

  “Daddy.”

  He put the phone book back in the drawer, returned his laptop to its case and left the room, walking through the rain to the lobby to log onto the Internet there.

  Later that afternoon when he tried again to sleep, it came to him grudgingly and when he woke—what, forty-five minutes later?—there was a commotion outside. Loud voices. Banging. When he opened his door, he could see a semicircle of his players knotted on the parking lot in the rain, enraged by something, shouting. Two or three of them pushed forward and then he could see a fight going on, players trying to pull bodies apart.

  “Hey,” he shouted, jogging barefoot across the wet lot, the gravel prickling his feet, but the fight continued as if no one had heard him. He shoved into the scrum. Someone thrust him backwards and he pushed into it again, aware that Dominici and Vincent were there with him, shoving men backwards. An elbow caught Edward Everett in his cheek, stunning him. Dominici was yelling, “Stop it! Stop it!” Finally, they got to the bottom, two players grappling with each other on the ground. Webber and Nelson, Webber sitting on Nelson’s belly, Nelson grasping Webber’s wrists, straining under him.

  “You cocksucker,” Webber was shrieking, flailing, trying to get his arms free of Nelson’s grasp. Together, Dominici and Vila finally succeeded in pulling Webber away, Vila by locking his elbows in Webber’s, Dominici shoving against his chest until he tumbled backwards. There was a crack and then Webber stopped struggling,

  “What the hell happened?” Edward Everett said.

  The players looked everywhere but at him. Nelson was up on his knees, breathing hard, spitting something out of his mouth: saliva mixed with blood.

  “What happened?” Edward Everett said to Webber, who was still on the ground, moaning now, holding his right shoulder with his left hand, rolling side to side.

  “It was—” Sandford began, but Martinez interrupted him with a syllable: “San!”

  “What happened, Sandy?” Edward Everett asked.

  Sandford gave Martinez a look. Martinez shook his head, tight-lipped.

  “Oh, shit,” Sandford said. “Webber’s an asshole.” He turned to Edward Everett. “Webber just jumped Nelson, saying something crazy.”

  “Nelson don’t belong anymore,” Martinez said through clenched teeth. Nelson was on his feet now, rubbing his jaw. His left eye was swollen shut and his top lip was fat, curled into an exaggerated sneer. Martinez made a lunge for him, but Sandford restrained him. Nelson danced back. “You better fucking get out of here,” Martinez said, trying to wrest himself free of Sandford’s grasp. Nelson glanced briefly at Edward Everett.

  “What did Webber say?” Edward Everett asked him. Nelson shook his head and limped across the parking lot toward the service station next door, rubbing his left ear.

  “Skip,” Vincent said. He was crouched beside Webber, his hand on Webber’s shoulder. “I think he’s hurt. I mean bad.” When Edward Everett knelt beside Webber on the wet gravel, he could see he was pale and shivering. He gently tried to roll him from his side onto his back but Webber gave out a yell and stayed curled on his side.

  “Well, fuck,” he said, standing. “Somebody call 911.”

  They had to wait for four hours in the emergency room. It was Saturday night: “crazy night,” the girl at the reception desk called it when they registered. The place swarmed with patients and their friends and families: people who came in bloodied, children racked with coughs; EMTs rushing people on gurneys through the automatic doors. A gas station clerk stabbed in a robbery. An older man dying from cancer. As Edward Everett and Webber sat waiting for someone to call his name, Webber rocked in his chair, cradling his right arm, saying over and over, “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”

  When a nurse came to take Webber back to an examining room, Edward Everett followed them, lying, saying he was Webber’s father. Where she left them was not a room, exactly—merely a bed, a chair and a small table, separated from the other rooms by a drape. On the other side of it, the dying man moaned incoherently. Edward Everett could hear soft voices: a nurse explaining that she had given him something to ease the pain, the staff was doing its best to get him into a room upstairs. Edward Everett sat beside Webber and when he began weeping, Edward Everett laid his hand on his hurt should
er. Webber reached up abruptly and grabbed his hand; at first he thought it was a response to pain but Webber was squeezing tightly, as if he was afraid Edward Everett would leave him there, alone.

  By the time the doctor came to examine Webber, the dying man had been moved elsewhere and his place was taken by a small child who had pushed a piece of candy up his nose. “Don’t be mad, Mommy,” the child said. The doctor who came to see Webber was a willowy Indian woman who may have been less than thirty but was, despite her age, crisply efficient. “It would be better if you left us,” she said, already peeling back the sleeve of Webber’s hospital gown and touching his shoulder tenderly.

  When Webber winced even at her delicate touch, Edward Everett started to protest but Webber snapped, “Fuck, go, go, go.”

  He wandered down the hall to another waiting room farther from the admissions desk. It was quieter, only one other person there, a woman knitting. A television mounted to the ceiling played a ball game with the volume muted, the Cubs and the Cardinals, the top of the fifteenth, a one–one tie, and he sat down to watch. The Cubs’ half inning ended and the camera showed a long shot of the view from behind home plate in the new St. Louis ballpark, the one where he had played knocked down years ago by a wrecking ball. Beyond the center field wall, the city skyline rose and, at the center, the Saarinen Arch glinted. The camera panned the crowd: tens of thousands of people in red and blue, animated, raising index fingers, waving. It was all so prosperous, Major League Baseball was. He realized where he sat was roughly halfway between the two cities, but it might as well have been on another continent.

  When the doctor came out to tell him that Webber was asking for him, she told him that Webber’s shoulder was broken. “A proximal humerus fracture,” she called it. Her accent made it sound like something beautiful.