by Lucas Mann
“Oh my God, I hate country,” says Mango Hair to Hank but loud enough for all of us to hear. “It’s like, come on, just play hip-hop.”
She wants to prove something to him, that she listens to what he does. And that by extension she’s only here in this town because of forced circumstances, like birth.
“I’m going to the bathroom,” she says. She doesn’t say, “Follow me, follow me,” but we all hear it anyway.
Hank lets her go alone.
“She’s nothing special,” Nick Franklin says.
“Fuck you,” Hank says.
This is interrupted by a rush of cheers for Erasmo, who has somehow danced his way into the pack where others are dancing, a sea of white forty-somethings, the only person not mouthing the words to the song, staying silent and concentrated. He is in the middle of two women, careening between their breasts.
“Erasmo!” His name is howled by the whole group, a dozen familiar fingers pointing at him, highlighting him. Inspired, he dances down low to the ground, lets one woman’s ass bounce on his forehead, arms around her legs, face with a jack-o’-lantern smile. Others turn and look and yell, not words, just warbling exclamations to signify that something funny and memorable is happening, and they’re around for it. Erasmo looks overwhelmed by his dance partner in a tank top that covers almost nothing, with a tattoo of a rose that looks so different now than it must have when she got it, all that time ago, on tight, unblemished skin.
She tells him things on the dance floor. I want to hear. I want to hear her tell him that she saw him on the baseball field. Tell him that she likes his shirt; it’s classy like something a TV star would wear, or a magician. Tell him she has a car. Tell him that her kids are with her sister tonight. Tell him that they’re nice kids but he doesn’t have to meet them.
He tells her his name. I hear that.
“Erasmo,” she parrots to him as they grind, her body arched so that her ass rubs on him while she whispers, upside down, in his ear. “Erasmo. Erasmo.” Over and over until it becomes part of the beat of the song, and I watch her sweaty lips move from the edge of the dance floor, saying words, random words, just to hear them disappear.
Erasmo will take this woman home tonight, and I will imagine even more as I lie on the floor next to two players—the sounds of their sweat and bare backs making a ripping noise against a plastic couch, how she won’t have to say shh, the kids because it will be just her and Erasmo, this serious boy with a real future, and she’ll be able to call out his name as loud as she likes. Why is it important to me that she calls his name? He will walk home in silence, through the deserted downtown, and he will start to run, as he often does when going anywhere, the pound of his dress sneakers bouncing off century-old brick. She will come to games for the rest of the season. She will write on his Facebook wall, and I will eavesdrop on her Internet pleas all through the winter, while he lifts weights in an academy in a jungle in Venezuela and she is in this town in the snow.
U just crossed my mind. I wanted to say “hello.”
How’s the baseball? U still practicing?
I miss u so very much my friend.
R u coming back this year?
He will never answer, because he will have learned how to be an important person and he will never go back to Clinton, and sometimes I will feel like her, stuck, waiting, listening.
· · ·
A fan meets us at the bar. He sits behind home plate every game and talks to Nick when he’s in the on-deck circle. He is an avid supporter and, apparently, a formidable softball player, once a formidable high school baseball player, also a counter guy at the Pizza Hut down the block from the stadium who takes too-long breaks to hustle in and watch one half inning at a time. He is so, so excited to see Nick here, each of them in street clothes, talking as peers, even though he must be a decade older. His excitement makes Nick happy, and he puts his hand on the fan’s soft back to feel his body tighten with glee.
“You like good beer?” the fan asks.
“Yeah,” Nick says. “I like the good stuff. I’m not a Coors Light kind of guy, you know?”
Together, they order microbrews with hints of raspberry infused in them. Nick says that he totally loves microbrews. And raspberries. He swigs.
“I like your shoes,” the fan says, and Nick smiles.
The fan ropes a woman he knows with an outstretched forearm and corrals her into the pack of players. They meet eyes and his say, What-sup, baby? until hers say, I don’t want to be here, and then his say, Please.
Out loud, he says, “This is Nick Franklin, the LumberKing.” He doesn’t say her name.
“Nick Franklin,” she says.
“I’m sure you’ve heard his name.”
“I don’t really come to the games,” she says, and then, “Sometimes I hear people yelling when I drive by,” as an apology or a compromise.
Nick says nothing; what to say if she doesn’t already know him? She, still nameless, is unimpressed, and that doesn’t make sense. There’s nobody here to buffer. Nick’s parents, visiting for the third time already this season, are at their hotel, probably awake thinking about him, but they’re not here. And his agents are in Florida. They’ll be back in a couple of weeks, and then again once more before the season ends, assuring Nick that their phones just don’t stop ringing and everyone on the other end of the line is saying his name.
Here, now, Nick Franklin has been swallowed. Here, now, strange bodies push and sway as Randy orchestrates from behind his console. Here, now, a wedding party just burst through the back door, bride still in her dress, dyed red hair, makeup running with sweat and happy tears, screaming, “This is my fucking night, bitches. I’m the bride. I’m the fucking bride.”
The fan keeps trying to show Nick a memorable time, his voice straining through the music and the dead, thick air between all of us.
“You better talk to him,” he says to his still nameless friend. “Nick ain’t gonna be here long. Right, Nick?”
“Oh,” she says.
“You’re going to hear his name on fucking SportsCenter, and you’re going to be like, damn, I could have talked to him.”
There is gravity to this conversation that the woman didn’t want or expect. She is drunk and willing to flirt, maybe. Not mull over hypothetical regret. She gives a defensive giggle and says, “That’s nice for you.”
“Oh, yeah, I guess,” Nick says.
She says that a friend needs her, she’s puking—can’t we hear it?—and she leaves. The fan tells Nick that she’s a total slut, and Nick says he’s bored with beer. He heads to the bar and returns with a Bloody Mary, a pickle and two olives serving as a phallic, late-night replacement for a celery stick. Nick refuses to imbibe the same thing twice—bad beer, good beer, vodka. Pickle. He swigs and sways a little.
Some of the other players have made it to the dance floor, still in a group, huddled tight and performing their moves as much for each other as for any prospective women, yelling and laughing into each other’s faces. Noriega, with an elastic body that allows him to cover an amazing amount of ground in the infield, bounces in perfect rhythm, and his teammates holler, surrounding him. Women, three of them, break into the circle, and everyone slides closer to Randy looming over the ones and twos, closer to the bass, where nobody can, or needs to, talk. They press tight, denim scraping, hands roving, eyes closed. Randy has switched back to hip-hop, and the bass is like standing in the stadium parking lot when a factory train goes by, sound that becomes physical and burrows in your stomach. The words of the song are commands, and everyone listens.
“Teach me,” raps a woman’s voice, dripping with a suggested orgasm.
And then response, a calm, sneering man: “All my bitches love me.”
A guy I’ve never seen yells in my ear.
“Get in there, brother,” he says. “You’ve got to make yourself known”
“No,” I yell. “I’m watching.”
“I’ve got a girlfriend,” I yell, t
oo proud, leaning into him, my spit flecking his ear.
“She here?”
I don’t answer, so he repeats himself: “Grab one. Make yourself known.”
He smiles in commiseration, both of us clumsy and plain. I want to throw him into something solid that would make a pop when he hit it. I want to tell him that we are not peers, not equally alone, not equally overripe in our shirts that we bought when we were thinner, our faces that haven’t been pressed into anybody else’s all night.
“Look at those guys,” my new friend yells.
He means the players, the sinews of their forearms crossing over bodies that they dwarf, the uniform stomp of their dancing feet as they move together, taking cues from one another, meeting eyes in celebration.
“They’re LumberKings,” I say, my voice a child’s. “I’m with them.”
Outside, in the corner of the parking lot, local boys in a pack smoke and dip and throw bottles into a brick wall to hear destruction echo off asphalt. They laugh and that echoes, too. They yell at Hank as he leaves the bar, a cacophony of curses. Maybe one of them was with Mango Hair, or maybe they just didn’t like the rise of whispers and shouts at the edge of the dance floor, anointing these visitors as superior simply because they aren’t from here and are better at one thing.
This is their bar, was and will be maybe for their whole lives. Hank’s fists are clenched, and I think he might respond, but he looks and sees that everyone else has stumbled back to the car and it’s just me, silent, withering. He walks away.
In the car, he yells, half kidding, that nobody from a team of professional athletes had his back, that he was left to be stomped by a bunch of hillbillies. Slumped in the backseat, Nick Franklin is lucid enough to remind us that he can’t be getting into fights.
“Jesus Christ,” Hank says to no one. And then to me: “Don’t crash this car. If we crash the car with Nick Franklin in it, I’ll be released and you’ll be killed.”
We all laugh, and that sputters out quickly as we all ponder how potentially true a statement it was.
“Delilah,” Nick attempts to command.
I hope he won’t puke. I turn on the radio, looking for Delilah as though she’s Alka-Seltzer, but she’s gone. It is nearly two in the morning, past her demographic. She’s meant to coax mothers to sleep, maybe with their little boys tucked into the pockets of their armpits. She’s not meant to be bumped out of cars going exactly the speed limit to avoid being pulled over.
“Not on,” I tell Nick, and he says “Whatever” with such petulance that I want to laugh and then I want to hug him. My volume dial decides to stick at zero, and there is no sound. My car squeaks over potholes. The engine groans. I listen for a voice outside, even the buzzing of a sign turned on. There is nothing. There is no one. We all breathe, and we are all aware of it.
It is loud for the first time in the drive as we pass the factory. Floodlights on the ground point up at the metal, the vats and smokestacks, creating a glow that seems to emanate from the noise of corn being pulverized and burned and poured. We do not know what we are hearing exactly. The hiss is steam. What sounds like the ocean is some kind of heated runoff from the creation of biodegradable plastics hitting the walls of a newly built storage pool, smelling like poison, separated by fifty feet and a barbed-wire fence from those few homes that remain in south Clinton, the homeowners unavoidably awake, listening. The sound of manufactured wind comes from somewhere inside, I think, where the coal is burned.
We no longer hear the squeak of the car, the engine, our breath.
I told Tim that I couldn’t watch the meteor showers with him tonight, or I should say this morning. He told me he’d be out along the side of I-30, turning off on one of the gravel, cornfield roads, then walking until free from lights or sounds. At three-ish, something amazing is supposed to happen in the sky.
I asked him if it was safe, walking out in the dark like that, alone. He said that nothing was safer. He said he’d walked home plenty of times when he was younger, from a bar or party in DeWitt or another town, fifteen miles of walking. Sometimes he’d howl, sort of how he does at the stadium when a LumberKing hits a home run, but different because there was nothing else around to meet his sound, dwarf it or bounce it back.
“I am the kind of person that bothers to look up,” Tim told me. “You are, too. Aren’t you?”
I’m not sure if I am. Or if I want to be. What does looking up get you? As we pass the former Laundromat with its windows smashed and the Democratic Party headquarters and the makeshift union hall, Nick says, “I’m going to be the first player to go twenty, twenty, twenty this year. In the country.”
We all turn to him.
“Twenty home runs, twenty steals, twenty doubles. Soon. I’m almost there. My dad told me. And my agent.” He holds up his phone. “I didn’t even know.”
This news, once he actually completes the trifecta, which of course he will, is going to reverberate. It will be spoken by coaches, by the scouts who descend for a weekend and call him kiddo, slap his back like family in front of everyone, certainly by the reporters who call his cell phone from restricted numbers, maybe even on some baseball show that buzzes in the background of the locker room, with somebody catching the mention of his name and screaming, “Yo,” so that all noise shuts off except for the famous people talking about Nick.
He isn’t bragging now. He’s sleepy, merely stating a fact, relaying what was told to him.
“Wow,” I say.
“Oh, yeah, I guess,” he says.
He begins to text on his phone, a new phone, the fastest phone with the most possibilities of any phone in the world. He loves that phone. He speaks of it with an exuberance that he lends to nothing else, that he cannot muster even for this bellowing accomplishment.
All anyone can tell me about Nick Franklin—parents, agents, coaches—is that the kid loves baseball. They say it with bulging, dramatic eyes. He understands baseball and continues to study it without a trace of apathy. That, I believe. He feels comfortable within it, he is interested in how good he can be at it, but love necessitates reflection, risk, pain, joy. I don’t think that Nick has been allowed to feel any of those things. People feel for him, through him, but he—the most important piece of commerce that will ever sit in my car, hero of the stories that Hank and Fray and Núñez will likely tell in bars not far from where they grew up after their careers are over—I think he just knows how to do.
“Oh, fucking shit, fucking shit,” Hank says next to me, after the factory noise fades. A train has beat us to the crossing right before the Indian Village apartments.
“Every fucking time,” he says. “Every night, I sit here, I hold my ears, and I wait.”
It is a long train, the kind that can block every exit of the stadium parking lot for half an hour when it comes to an arbitrary stop, even though it’s legally required to move after fifteen minutes, in case it’s blocking an ambulance or a house is on fire or a child is separated from his family, screaming pointlessly over the grain cars. Tim says that’s never enforced, how could it be, what entity is around to tell these trains that trace the edge of the city, that flow to the beating heart of the factory, move it along?
My car stalls as we wait. The train horn, unnecessary, blows out, echoing on the river, so lovely and sad and benign when it is far off. Up close it is an angry howl. And there is the sound of metal on metal, the groan of some of the oldest train tracks in America, leading to one of the oldest, most worrisome train bridges crossing the Mississippi, a connection between East and West deemed a potential hazard fifteen years ago but untouched since then.
Trains are no longer repaired here. Now they just move through, and we wait for them. Hank and I try to count the cars over the din, but there are so many and they look so similar and the ground is shaking and we’re drunk, so we quit and sit silently.
Fray Martinez leans his head out the window and looks up.
“Bonita,” he says. He smiles.
Nick Franklin cranes his head out to look, too, and Fray is pleased with his interest. He points up.
“Estrellas,” he says, barely audible over the train.
“Estrellas?” Nick says. “Stars.”
“Stars,” Fray repeats and gives a shy laugh.
“Moon,” Nick says, and there it is, nearly full.
“Moon,” Fray parrots. “Moon is luna.”
They both nod. “The sky is big,” Nick says as though he only just realized it. “Grande.”
“Sí,” Fray says. He looks surprised at the power of his voice as he continues, “Grande, sí.”
I sleep in the living room, on extra blankets stacked in a pile, separated by inches from Fray on an air mattress, Núñez on the couch. Nick is talking to his girlfriend on the phone. She waited up. Nick is telling her about his home runs and his doubles and his steals. She, I assume, is saying something along the lines of “I love you, I miss you,” because then he is saying, “Uh-huh.” Hank closes the door to his room to talk to his girlfriend, and I think of Mango Hair, the way she seemed certain of his power, and I wonder if he is thinking of her, too. Lying among baseball players who get to feel desirable, I feel dull and I want to call home, but nobody settled is awake.
Núñez snores. Fray coughs and kicks at the dirty sheets that a teammate lent him. He is too big for his air mattress. I hear a rustling of paper, and it’s the Baseball Chapel pamphlet. He reads by the light of his cell phone. He has waited until nothing else is happening, and he has grabbed at the words that should comfort. He whispers his clunky, translated prayers until his whisper quivers and he coughs again, and then he continues to pray and I continue to listen until he stops making noise.
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The Numbers
LAST NIGHT, Erasmo was sharp, throwing hard, hitting ninety-three miles per hour for six innings. The game moved fast. He pitched, they hit the ball weakly to a fielder, he returned to the rubber, nodded, repeated. The stadium remained almost silent. Erasmo, when he is functioning at full capacity, is so good that he’s boring. Fastball outside, fastball outside, a changeup wasted in the dirt, then a fastball inside, leaving the Wisconsin Timber Rattlers with their chests heaved forward, asses out, like cartoon elephants afraid of a mouse. That pose was the highlight of the game for the meager crowd in attendance on a sweltering Saturday plagued with shadflies moving in sinister clumps off the river, crashing and spraying deep purple blood off the Coors Light sign in left.