by Joe Schuster
“We don’t need any lawsuits,” the man said, unlatching the gate. “You can leave your car there so it doesn’t get filthy.” Once Edward Everett was through the gate, the man shut it and turned the current back on, the fence sparking briefly as an insect flew against it. “Be careful where you step.” The man pointed to a dollop of manure less than a foot from where Edward Everett stood, black and green flies swirling above it.
“I’m looking for—” Edward Everett said, trying to watch his feet among the manure piles and yet keep pace with the man who was taking careless strides along the gravel drive, clearly unconcerned when he stepped into one of the piles.
“Me,” the man said, and Edward Everett realized it was Marc Johansen, MS, MBA.
“I didn’t recognize you,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“I have no idea why,” Johansen said, his tone suggesting he might be joking but Edward Everett wasn’t sure. “This is one of my mother’s places and every year I come out and pretend to be a rancher for a week.”
He led Edward Everett to the porch, stopping at the bottom of the steps leading to it to slip off his boots. “Come on in,” he said. “Give me a chance to clean up and then we can get down to business.”
Inside, Johansen left him in a massive great room with a granite floor and a two-story-high exposed-beam ceiling. Along one wall, four large windows looked out onto another pasture, which ran unimpeded for as far as he could see. Dotting it, rolled bales of hay browned in the sun. The room was furnished with several dark leather couches as well as cherrywood coffee tables bearing carefully arranged arrays of thick, glossy magazines fanned out. He sat gingerly on one of the couches, waiting. A rush of water poured through the plumbing as if someone had flushed a toilet, soon followed by a steady hiss.
After a few moments, he felt uncomfortable sitting idly and so picked up one of the magazines and realized that every one of them was an identical issue of Architectural Digest. He flipped through it. “Italian Marble Renaissance,” read one headline for an article on bathroom floors. “Peak Performance,” read another about slate and tile roofs. As he started to close it he saw that the spine was broken and when he laid it flat, it opened naturally to the beginning of a spread about the very house he was in, a full-page photograph of the room in which he sat, sunlight slanting in through the windows. On page after page, the spread showed stone floors, granite counters, bathrooms with sunken tubs, cherrywood cabinets that reflected recessed ceiling lights.
He turned to the opening page: “As a girl, Sylvia Johansen cherished her family’s annual visits to the Missouri horse farm of her grandfather, Michael Gossage,” it began. “ ‘When my husband died, I asked myself where I wanted to spend the next thirty years of my life and I realized that was it,’ Mrs. Johansen said. Her family had sold the original property in 1973 and so she spent fourteen million for a rolling five-hundred-acre expanse in nearby Franklin County and another nine million re-creating her grandfather’s house. Using the family’s extensive collection of historical photographs, she turned to architect—”
He closed the magazine and returned it to the table. The house was silent, Johansen clearly finished with his shower, and Edward Everett wondered if they were the only people in it. This must be what real wealth sounds like, he thought, this almost utter silence, as if the house were reverential of the very money that had built it. Twenty-three million dollars, he thought. Did that include the furnishings? How much did the couch he was sitting on cost? Could a couch cost as much as five thousand dollars? The last one he’d bought came from a closeout sale at a bankrupt furniture store, the one he and Renee had bought last Christmas when she announced abruptly that she was tired of the used furniture they owned and he had taken her to the store as a way of placating her. It had cost what had seemed to him the improbable sum of nine hundred dollars and he had cringed when he signed the credit card receipt that, with tax and delivery, called for just north of a thousand dollars. For a short while, it had made her happy and she had scoured the ads from the Sunday Des Moines Register for other bargains, but then one day she noticed that Grizzly’s claws had begun snagging the fabric when he jumped on the couch to sit with them while they watched television and that had been the end of her happiness over it. Less than a year after he’d bought it, the fabric was water-stained and the cushion where he sat sagged. A thousand dollars, more than he had ever spent for a single piece of furniture in his life, but compared with the substantial piece he was on, it seemed made of balsa wood and cheap cotton.
Then it struck him: The furnishings in this room cost more than I earn in a year. He felt a sick weight in his chest. What could someone possibly do to afford such a place? It’s one of my mother’s places, Johansen had said. Edward Everett had thought of Collier as wealthy, with his splendid home in the hills of Perabo City and his eleventh-floor condo two blocks from a beach in Destin, Florida, but Johansen and his mother made Collier appear middle-class—made Edward Everett seem two inches from welfare. Perhaps over all the years of his getting up every day and going to a ballpark somewhere in a small town, he had earned a million; with the jobs he had in some winters, maybe as much as a million and a half. What was that? Five percent of the cost of this house?
“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting,” Johansen said, coming into the room. He was barefoot, his hair damp, his feet slapping on the stone as he walked across it. He had changed into black jeans and a beige polo shirt with the big club’s logo over the left breast, a cartoon snarling cougar. He sat on the couch perpendicular to the one where Edward Everett sat, glancing at the row of Architectural Digest magazines on the table. “I had hoped she would have put those away by now. There’s something gauche about it. Oh well, I didn’t bring you here to talk about my mother’s choice in magazines. Look—” He tapped a palm against his forehead. “Slow down, Marc; manners. How was your flight?”
Edward Everett considered telling him the truth but said, “It was fine.” He suddenly felt even more self-conscious in Johansen’s presence, here in the same pair of jeans and shirt he’d worn on the flight while Johansen felt comfortable enough to slouch on a how-many-thousand-dollar sofa and rest his feet on the coffee table.
“I hate like hell all the flying I have to do,” Johansen went on. “Last year, I logged ninety-six thousand miles. It’s a hassle and a half. All the security crap. I guess there’s a reason for it, post nine-eleven, but I’m thinking anything under four hundred miles, I’m driving.” He let out a breath. “Look, I’ve never been good at chitchat. I work on it because my wife tells me I ought to. ‘They’re not just employees, they’re people,’ she says. And so, fine. Cross that off the list.” He made a motion in the air as if he was drawing a check mark. “I hope you’ll forgive me if I get down to things. I have to get to Dallas for a breakfast meeting tomorrow. Things are … well, you’ll understand in a minute.”
He paused, evidently giving Edward Everett an opening to say something, but he wasn’t sure what the moment demanded, and so Johansen went on. “When I came on board I promised the brass I wouldn’t make any significant changes until I had reasonable confidence that I understood how things were. I think I’m there now.”
He paused again and, because the moment clearly demanded some sort of response from him, Edward Everett said, “I know there have been problems.”
“So, you’ve seen them, too?” Johansen said.
“I know that Webber’s getting hurt hasn’t helped things,” Edward Everett said. “Maybe I could have—”
“Webber?” Johansen said.
“The shortstop,” he said. “The one whose shoulder …”
Johansen furrowed his brow. Could it be that he had no idea, without being in front of his almighty spreadsheets, who Webber was?
“I filed a report,” Edward Everett said. “He’s having surgery this week but he’ll probably never—”
“Oh, wait,” Johansen said. “I remember. Kid we picked up from Baltimore. What about him?”
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“You mentioned problems and so I thought that was one I could explain.”
Johansen snorted. “This is about larger issues. We certainly aren’t going to kill one of our franchises over one hurt player.”
Edward Everett felt a flutter in his chest. “So, Perabo City is killed.”
“That’s a good part of the reason I brought you down here,” Johansen said. “We decided to shut it down sometime back. I thought you knew.”
“No,” Edward Everett said. So there it was, he thought. Killed, Johansen had said. He thought he had been prepared for this moment but it was like when his mother died. He’d been expecting it for more than a year but when a nurse called him from the hospital, it had still come as a shock—the finality nothing could prepare you for.
“We needed to rebalance our portfolio, to use some of the lingo from my former life,” Johansen said. “I know that the routine is to say, ‘It was a hard decision,’ but it really wasn’t. The fact of the matter is that the owner, what’s-his-name, the meat guy …”
“Collier,” Edward Everett offered.
“Collier. Right. A piece of work. He ran a shoddy, cut-rate franchise. I mean, who operates an entire baseball operation out of a meat company? Then he tried to play hardball with the wrong people. So when we had to get rid of one of our single-A teams it didn’t take long to decide where the hammer should come down.”
“What did he do?” Edward Everett asked, thinking that it was so much like Collier to make a mistake and leave others to pay the price.
“He’d probably sue me for saying I didn’t like his shirt and so I’ll just say he played his hand as if he were sitting on four aces when all he had was seven-high.”
So it was over, Edward Everett thought; there was no softening it. Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, had made him get on a plane that had nearly killed him and come here to sit in a house that cost more than what he would make in twenty lifetimes for this. You can’t fire people long-distance, he could hear Johansen’s wife saying. His being here was just another exercise in her making her husband into a better human being.
“Tell me,” Johansen said, “does he pull that shit with the Lincoln Logs story all the time?”
“What?” Edward Everett said, his tone perhaps sharper than he intended.
“You know. ‘My daddy told me he got me something and I thought it was Lincoln Logs’ and all that crap.”
“Oh,” Edward Everett said. “Yes.”
So, Edward Everett thought, I’m nothing more than collateral damage. He wondered how much longer he needed to stay. He pictured himself on the drive back to the airport hotel, defeated, someone who belonged in the slow lane, a frightened old man confused in traffic. What would he do now? He saw himself as Johansen surely must: gray, balding, fleshy, not much different from the lost old men that Edward Everett saw in supermarkets, lame men slumped in motorized shopping carts, straining to reach the canned soup on the higher shelves.
“So, look—” Johansen began. The door from the wraparound porch opened and Johansen stopped speaking. A woman was saying, “… have Dr. Tao look at his fetlock.”
“I hope it’s all right,” said another woman. “It’s so soon after you had to put down Falcon. I shouldn’t have taken that jump.”
“You’ve done it a hundred times,” said the first woman. “I’m sure—” The women stopped at the entrance to the room. In the dimness, they seemed to be twins, both slight, not much over five feet tall, their hair done in identical shoulder-length braids. “I’m sorry,” the first woman said. “I didn’t realize anyone was here.”
Johansen stood and Edward Everett did as well. “Mother, Joni,” Johansen said as the two women came into the room, their boots clacking on the stone floor.
“I’m Syl Johansen,” the first woman said, and as they came nearer, Edward Everett could tell they were not, in fact, twins. While the first woman was clearly older than he was, perhaps in her mid-seventies, the younger woman was no more than thirty. Syl extended her hand to shake Edward Everett’s, her grip much stronger than he would have expected from someone so tiny.
“I’m Ed Yates,” he said dully, not wanting to but nonetheless thinking of the money she had.
Syl cocked her head to one side. “Like the Irish poet or the American novelist?”
“I’m sorry?” Edward Everett said. “I don’t—”
“Ed manages for us up in Iowa,” Johansen said.
“Oh,” Syl said, giving the younger woman a look that clearly suggested the answer Johansen had given had immediately moved Edward Everett from one category, “men who were interesting,” to another, “men for whom she had no use.”
“Mother thinks of you as something like a two-legged polo pony,” Johansen said.
“I do not,” Sylvia said.
“Your words, Mother,” Johansen said, adding a wink, as if Edward Everett were now part of a conspiracy he didn’t fully understand. “As far as Mother is concerned, I live in two worlds. There’s my old world, working for my grandfather’s company, and there’s my new world, where I deal with two-legged polo ponies. Ed, sorry to say, you’re part of the second.”
“Stop it,” Sylvia said. “Mr. Yates, I don’t know what my son is—”
“Last month,” Johansen said, “at the Bridle Boutique—that’s B-R-I-D-L-E, as in horses, it’s a fund-raiser for abused equines—those things always have such clever—”
“I’m sorry,” Edward Everett interrupted, no longer masking his anger over being caught in a game between Johansen and his mother just when Johansen was about to tell him he was finished. “I’m sorry, but I think I’m just going to go.”
“I don’t understand—” Johansen said.
“I didn’t fly all the way here to lose my job and be made the butt of a joke.”
“Lose your job?” Johansen said.
“Marc, did you fly this man all the way—” Joni said.
“Good Lord, Ed,” Johansen said, laying a hand on Edward Everett’s shoulder. “I wouldn’t have flown you here to tell you I was letting you go.”
“He’s too much of a coward for that,” Sylvia said.
“Syl, you promised,” Joni said. “Mr. Yates, I apologize for my mother-in-law’s rudeness, interrupting your business with my husband.”
“Business?” Sylvia snapped. “The company his grandfather started is business. This is a hobby.”
Her daughter-in-law took her arm firmly. “Enough,” she said, sharply, pulling Sylvia with her out of the room.
“Joan, this is …” Sylvia began to say, but whatever this was, Edward Everett did not hear because they were soon beyond earshot.
“Please,” Johansen said, his voice soft, perhaps even penitent. “Sit down and hear me out. I wasn’t going to fire you. I was going to ask you if you wanted a job.”
By the time he left Johansen, it was dark, nearly nine p.m. As he crept down the long, narrow, steep road that led from the horse farm, he slid one of the CDs Johansen had given him into the car’s stereo. After a moment, a woman’s voice came from the speaker: “It’s a pleasure to meet you. Es un gusto conocerie.”
He repeated the phrase. He could hear the Midwestern awkwardness in his pronunciation and he said it once again before the woman’s voice went on: “The pleasure is mine. El gusto es mio.”
“El gusto es mio,” he repeated.
He was going to Costa Rica and he had Renz to thank. Renz, whose voice dripped with sarcasm when he complained about delinquent spreadsheets, when he spoke to him about pitiful Ross Nelson. He’d hated Renz and now he had to thank him for his new job.
“What do you know about any of the proprietary metrics we’ve been using?” Johansen had asked after the two sat down again.
“A little,” Edward Everett had said tentatively, thinking surely Johansen was not offering him a job centered on the arcane statistics he and Renz loved so much.
“There won’t be a test,” Johansen said, his voice still soft, no doubt to compensa
te for his mother’s shocking behavior. “The main point is that we’ve been taking a look at some of the Poe scores across the organization.”
“Poe?”
“I’m sorry. P-O-E. Performance Over Expectation. It’s a value we derive by combining several—” Johansen laughed. “Short story: Renz—did you know he sleeps maybe three hours a night? He’s going to have my job before the year’s out … That would make my mother happy, at least. At any rate, Renz started playing around with … well, the tools we use when we prepare for the draft. We think they can predict, with some accuracy, how a player will perform at various levels in the organization based on … well, never mind what it’s based on. At any rate, he thought that if we backdoored it, took a look at what the numbers might have predicted about players who already had a track record, we could tweak it so it would have even more accuracy as a predictor. Renz started to notice that some players were outliers—”
Edward Everett opened his mouth to ask what an “outlier” was but Johansen caught himself, smacking his forehead. “Look, I am who I am and so forgive the jargon, because the method is not important. What’s important is that Renz asked: what conclusions can we draw about the outliers—you know, the players who perform better than the numbers would have predicted—and one of the factors he looked at was coaching. I mean, it’s simple. I should have thought of that but I didn’t. Renz did. The already-too-long story made short is that he took a look at data for players that’ve run through your teams going back twenty years and found a not inconsequential—oh, hell. When we started correlating aggregate POE scores to coaching, your numbers were damn good. This year, for example, Martinez—we really thought he was nothing more than an organization player, maybe he’d get, best case, three years, but surely not much above A ball. But now he could turn out to be something. And there was that kid you had in Missoula, independent ball, who stuck it out for four seasons with the Giants. How many guys in indie ball ever get to the big leagues? One in a thousand? A handful of outliers—you can ascribe that to acceptable error, but yours were not statistically insignificant.”