Class A

by Lucas Mann

  There are similar grumblings happening among ADM workers right now, though we don’t know it yet. In the coming months, they will officially file their own lawsuit against two small companies that subcontract hourly labor at ADM, complaining about a lack of fair overtime pay and the fact that in a factory so big the punch clock is half a mile from the exit, that there are always extra tasks, off-the-clock work, that they must do on the walk out to their cars. And another suit will be filed a week after the baseball season is over, by the Brodericks and forty-five of their remaining neighbors. They will claim that the factory is so big, so loud, so bright, pouring so much unidentified runoff into what looks like an Olympic-sized pool across the street from their windows, that they can’t sleep, that they can’t live, not in a way that makes them feel human.

  What does this have to do with us? With Danny? It’s just a group of people dwarfed. But the scope of dissatisfaction is palpable, affects so many people whom we walk past, looking for toiletries. Danny pushes a shopping cart like a little kid, running, riding, turning on two wheels. I trot to keep up, and he talks back to me, a tumult of complaints and truths that could never be voiced in the clubhouse. He talks the way he does to Chelsea, only Chelsea really, and I think the words come so fast because of the realization that she isn’t here and that she is the only one, has been the only one since fourteen.

  He was yelled at today for trying to steal a base on his own, and rightfully so. He tried to steal third with the team losing, the kind of selfish move that sends Little League coaches into embarrassing, hat-stomping fits. Tamargo didn’t exactly stomp his hat, but he was furious, and everybody saw him glare at Danny, who refused to lock eyes. Everybody noticed that Danny was pulled from the game, too, for committing that cardinal sin of putting himself above the team. Danny recognizes the hypocrisy. He is trying to be noticed. That’s the whole point. If he isn’t noticed, then he isn’t worth anything, and then he isn’t on any team at all. And the thing that makes him noticeable is his speed. Thus, he will run. He should run. Nick Franklin, he points out, makes bad decisions all the time. Tamargo hates Nick Franklin, Danny assures me. Hates him. But Nick isn’t some regular guy like Danny. Nick has, as Danny puts it, the right to do anything he wants.

  Danny’s eyes are wide, his voice hushed as he says it, but nobody is listening, and these aren’t exactly secrets just because they’re never voiced. Tamargo is middle management, and he knows it. This is his team to run the way he is told to run it from a thousand miles away. Nobody pretends that Nick Franklin doesn’t matter more. That the further you are from Nick Franklin status, the more you become just a guy with a really poorly paying job who complains loudly about it to his wife and mumbles under his breath to everyone else.

  I want to see Danny run. That’s what I want. I want to see him run.

  It is such a clear thought, acute and dominating and sudden. I want to see him sprint through Home Cleaning Products, through Waste Disposal, hands raised as he coasts into Lawn Care along the back wall that must be ten base paths away from here. He doesn’t break out into a full sprint. He doesn’t stand in front of the discount mowers, fists in the air like Rocky. That’s too much.

  I have to remind myself that Danny is still some version of a star. He still plays in a professional baseball stadium because no matter what has happened in Clinton, there is a professional baseball team here. It’s still fun to watch, maybe more so for the accomplishment of lasting and never changing while other institutions erode around it. And Tim is a little tanked on Mike’s Hard Lemonade because he’s trying to get away from the carbs of beer and the boozy citrus tastes pretty fucking good against the heat. And Danny is on the bench today, but the day before he hit a line drive home run over the left-field fence, and nothing feels better than that. And in the seventh inning lull of a sloppy, slow game, something remarkable happens. Two bats extend up over the top of the dugout, as though floating. Latex gloves have been blown up by an unseen mouth, taped to the handle of each bat. Somebody has made them into arms.

  “Look,” Tim yells and begins guffawing as everyone else notices, too.

  The bat-arms begin to clap, and Tim takes the cue, claps along with them, screams at his people to follow suit. They do. The bat-arms move faster, whipping a thousand people into something like a frenzy. Then the bat-hands switch tack, begin waving back and forth in time with the rhythm they created. This is too much, and applause breaks out. I find myself laughing like somebody far less sober than I am. I find myself crazed. My shoulders bump into Tim’s. We rock into each other, saying, “What the hell?” Joining the chorus of fans who have forgotten that a game is being played and only want to know who is making this simple, wooden robot clap.

  The game ends, and Danny emerges holding one bat-arm in each hand. I am wholly a fan as we all cry out that we knew it, we knew it was him. Betty is overwhelmed by the silly kindness of the gesture. Danny turns and hands her a bat. She hands him a picture she’s been saving, one she took weeks ago and printed out, him standing in that classic baseball pose, head high, one hand resting on his bat like a cane, the other on his waist.

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

  Of Monkeys and Dreams

  IT’S THE MIDDLE OF THE SEVENTH INNING. The LumberKings are slaughtering the South Bend Silver Hawks. Yet again, and not surprisingly, it is hot. We talk about that fact in the stands. But today brings tolerable heat, nothing too bad, not one of those days when “hot” is the only thing to say, not like the one last week when the stands were packed because the ADM work floor overheated to 137 degrees and people got bused out early, taken to the game to drink and not be angry. So things are good. And despite the LumberKings’ overall trend of losing as much as they win, there is a sense of optimism. The team is on a two-game winning streak. The season is more over than not and Nick Franklin is still here; there he is, nibbling at a leather tie on his glove, waiting to take the field. Tim is saying that there is a good feeling to the bunch out there right now, saying that this one feels as if it has the potential to be a dream team. He is providing no proof.

  Also, three sheep are running onto the field, displaying pure terror as we begin to cheer them. They break away from one another, one sprinting right at the bleachers, toward the noise, one grazing behind second base, as though if it behaves normally, all this will go away, another trotting along the outfield fence, trapped. We watch. They are all novelty. They can do nothing but be, and I think that their appeal—grazing on a baseball field?—will soon grow thin.

  “Here we go, here we go,” Tim says next to me.

  Two sheepdogs sprint in from right field, saddled. Monkeys are perched atop the saddles, little hands clutching little reins, torsos flailing as the dogs gallop.

  The monkeys are capuchins, of course. What other monkey would let itself be slipped into baby-sized leather chaps? These are monkeys to worship. Even the name, “capuchin,” originally referred to a group of friars. People saw brown fur, white tuft on the head, and they thought it looked like a brown robe and white hood. They were holy, humanish little things.

  Somebody screams, “Oh my God, those are monkeys!”

  Somebody else says, “Thanks, Captain Obvious,” but the derisive laughter that should follow is muted because something amazing is happening, which is way more interesting than scorn: fucking monkeys are riding on dogs as if they’re people.

  “Get ready for the greatest show on earth,” Brad tells us from the PA booth.

  The show is the herding. While we are transfixed by the improbable animals, an extended-cab Dodge Ram pickup creeps onto the field and parks between home plate and the pitcher’s mound. On each side, the word “Dodge” is written big, all capitals, part of a sponsorship agreement. Also, there are two American flag decals, a bald eagle’s head blown up to the size of a beer keg, and the stenciled slogans “Grab life by the horns” and “Be the best of the best.” Two real American flags fly above the roof, and the four white wooden walls of a miniature cattle pen re
st on the flatbed. “Wild Thang” Lepard leaps from the pickup, and Mitch runs out to help him assemble the pen.

  Wild Thang grabs a microphone and faces the twelve hundred or so of us scattered in the stands in front of him. He asks, “Are y’all ready to see something you won’t believe but that is 100 percent, God’s honest real?”

  Hank is standing on the top step of the dugout with a plastic smile. He unwraps a strawberry sucking candy that Betty gave him, pops it in his mouth, raises his eyebrows as if surprised by the sweetness. He showed up again a few days ago, walked into the locker room with his two duffel bags and his bats. He found his old locker untouched, his jersey, the arbitrarily chosen 31, hanging, clean and pressed, the way it had been throughout his brief demotion.

  “We kept you here, Hanky,” Danny told him. There were smiles and shouts, a lot of soft sentiment that made everyone quickly uncomfortable. Hank nodded and tried not to give such a childishly wide grin, such open admission of being truly, vulnerably touched.

  I was standing next to Pollreisz in the hallway next to the trainer’s room talking about crossword puzzles, a shared hobby that we get too much mileage out of. He hit my shoulder and flicked his head toward the kindly drama happening among his charges, toward Hank.

  “That’s what it’s about,” he told me. “When you are the kind of man that the team wants around, we keep a piece of you.”

  He was speaking metaphorically.

  Now, on the field, I stare at Hank like always. He’s in better shape than he was at the beginning of the season, one of a handful of players who can make that claim. Instead of preparing to play each day, he has prepared his body to look more worthy of playing. Sometimes I see him running his hands down his torso and grinning to himself. But his shirt, his 31, is just as pristine as it was in his locker. This strawberry sucker is his eighth, I’ve counted. His hands are getting sticky, but it doesn’t matter.

  Sams is next to him, benched as well, three inches taller, maybe three inches wider than Hank, so next to each other they look like an evolutionary progression out of a high school textbook. Sams is staring at a sheep that has wandered toward them, puzzled, maybe a bit frightened. He is flexing his forearm. I can see it from the stands, contorting with sinuous lines and then snapping back as he clenches his fist, then unclenches, then clenches again. Sams’s right forearm has a black ink tattoo on it, spelling out Rivalino, his middle name. He told me once that it means something powerful, something royal, he doesn’t remember what exactly, but it is important to him, that general feeling, and so it is embossed on him. A crown dots one i; there is a cross, as well as other symbols of great significance, hidden somewhere in the word.

  He touches this tattoo often, does it now as the sheep, rigid and unblinking, glares at him from the grass along the third-base line. It is his most visible marking, also his most opaque, but it isn’t the big one. The big one spans his back, shoulder blade to shoulder blade, enough room for bold, capitalized script announcing a decree: Live Your Dream.

  “What’s it mean?” I asked, the first time we spoke, as he hurried out of the shower in a cold early April clubhouse. It was a question that should have been laughed at—no meaning could be more obvious. Another man with another profession would have pointed that out. But this game, the clubhouse, they’re spaces free from irony, and Kalian Sams reached a hand around to feel the words, raised with his goose bumps, and told me, “It’s everything,” while teammates nodded.

  On the field, Wild Thang makes a guttural, military noise, and something in the monkeys or the dogs or both tightens. Muscles perk, eyes focus. They gallop with purpose toward the sheep, who, even after nearly three hundred shows a year, are somehow not ready for this shift in the drama. Shrieks of laughter are swallowed by shrieks of fear as the monkeys ride their beasts up close to the sheep, who twist and buck, and for a moment it seems as if one will get caught in between two species of stomping legs, that we will be left with the most hopeless image of all, a monkey in people clothes motionless on the outfield grass of a minor-league stadium. Betty grabs Bill’s arm and closes her eyes. Tim screams, “Ma, you old softy, nothing is gonna go wrong!”

  Dreams, from the beginning, were erotic. Or, if not explicitly erotic, still undeniably sexy in that they were linked with the fulfillment of what is desired. The granting of wishes that awake, open-eyed, seemed far-fetched.

  See Middle English folklore: This lady was the same / That he had so dreymd of.

  Even when not literalized with the female form, the dream, as a concept, was still a success: Good is to dremen of win. “Good” meant “God” and “win” meant “joy,” but also “striving.” And that faint sense of desperation became clearer later, when dreams were found to be metaphors, and even then, the desperation was hidden in the subtext, never in the intent of the speaker.

  Shakespeare: We are such stuff as dreams are made on.

  Tennyson: Like a dog, he hunts in dreams.

  It is stupid, probably, pretentious, definitely, to be thinking of Tennyson while looking at Kalian Sams’s back. To impose literature and metaphor onto a game and a group of people that want to be taken literally. But it is difficult not to grope for something a little deeper in a space where clichés are not clichés and things are taken so literally that it’s impossible to know if I’m being fucked with because, most of the time, even when I should be, I’m not.

  My dreams, when I remember them, are horrible. It is, I know, not directly related to Sams’s ink, but when I dream of women, they are those I know but with contorted faces. They are on top of me, and they are disappointed. They are asking questions that I cannot answer, and sometimes, often, my body is heavy, almost permeable, as strangely familiar hands prod my skin and tell me to be better. I yell in my dreams, and it is always silent.

  The players never seem to be afraid to fall asleep, but it is hard for them, I know that, far from home, always under pressure. On nights when I stay out after games with the players and it’s too late to sleep in my own bed, I crash on their floors, pressed against the legs of rented coffee tables. I see light from under Hank’s bedroom door until I finally fall asleep, and when I open my eyes in the morning, the light is still there, and I think he never wanted to turn it off. Sometimes I hear whispered, unintelligible conversations with his girlfriend; sometimes I hear the creak of footsteps in circles, of a heavy body doing push-ups on a thin floor. And Erasmo and Mario and Noriega, lying like a bar graph in their one-room apartment, how can they not be in one another’s dreams, the sound of close, tense breath ever present, turning into wind and warning when they finally fall asleep just before the sun rises?

  But this is not the dream on Kalian Sams’s back. Nor is it the dream that is the answer to almost every casual question I ask anybody just to break the silence of waiting for the game to start.

  How’s it going? Living the dream.

  Is it hard to be away from your newborn son? This is my dream.

  Don’t you think you should get paid a little more? If dreams were easy, they wouldn’t be dreams.

  There is stubbornness to it. Honor, maybe, but plodding obstinacy, too. That is where Tennyson comes in, dogs dreaming of the hunt, the way they look as they sleep. Twitching, pawing at the air, a conclusionless effort that does not allow them rest.

  I can find only one person who stood up and said the phrase “minor leagues” before a Senate Judiciary Committee during baseball’s antitrust hearings in 1997. He was Dan Peltier, a career journeyman, parts of nine years in the minors, 108 games in the bigs with Texas and San Francisco, one home run against the Cleveland Indians, the highlight of it all. Peltier began his testimony as a baseball player is taught to speak. He acknowledged how much the game had given him, called himself lucky, reiterated that quickly. He was lucky to have been able to play a game for a living, the way so many want to, and he was especially lucky to have an accounting degree from Notre Dame and enough saved to begin an adult life at thirty. Then he spoke of reality
. In A-ball, he made $850 per month. Take out a good $50 per month for clubhouse dues, an archaic system in which players have to help the guy whose job it is to wash their jockstraps make a living. Subtract rent, which he was responsible for. Subtract food. Unlivable.

  Baseball salaries are different now. The highest-paid major-league player in 1997 made $16 million less than Alex Rodriguez does right now, a goal too lofty for Hank and Sams to even consider as they hang bored on the dugout railing. Minor-league inflation has not caught up. Hank makes $200 more per month than he would have in 1997, and in rookie ball the salary is still $850 monthly.

  If it was easy, it wouldn’t be a dream.

  It doesn’t matter that this sentence doesn’t make sense.

  Tim is wearing a bright yellow-green tank top from 1991, custom-made, advertising his Roadkill Crew in hard-angled lettering above a cartoon picture of what looks like a possum, eyes marked with Xs, tongue out in gleeful death. If the color of the shirt has faded in twenty years, I am frightened to know how bright it was originally, just how proud and blinding it must have been when a row of fifteen identically neon shirts walked into an opposing stadium to cheer the LumberKings, no, not the LumberKings then, the Clinton Giants.

  Nineteen ninety-one was a dream season, a dream in its symmetry and smooth story lines, a dream in the way that it can be relived, retold, take on significance in the context of two decades’ worth of new happenings. And things are scaled differently in dreams.