by April Smith
“Then why do these people, whoever they are, say he did this?”
“You’re very nervous right now. When you’re nervous, you don’t sleep, your mind goes all over the world. You think Alberto hit this poor woman and someone saw and now they want money. I think you are putting two things together that don’t belong. Alberto could not live with this on his shoulder.”
“He didn’t hit her?”
“No, I will bet money she was killed in the hurricane, like you said, and now some bastard wants to blame this tragedy on our boy. They got these scams all the time in the Dominican—”
Cassidy remembers the blank tapes and switched cigars.
“—They’re trying to scare him so he’ll pay.”
“Then we have to prove he’s innocent.”
“We don’t have to prove nothing. Relax, the police gonna figure it out. A reporter who was interviewing me one time said, ‘The way you care for these boys is like a priest.’ I laughed. I said, ‘It is my job to get them to the church. The rest is up to the Holy Father.’ Come on, we gonna understand a lot more when we see Alberto play.”
Scrimmage is in progress as Cassidy and Pedro sit on the bench next to Hoot Hawkins, an African-American outfield coach who played three years in Triple A until tearing out his knee. Hoot is holding a stopwatch and making notes next to players’ names on a roster with a very sharp pencil. Two other coaches stand at first and third like sentinels in their blue jackets, arms folded, expressionless, surveying every player in the shrewd unblinking crossbeam of their stares.
Cassidy watches, motionless as the rest. There is a way the pros watch ball and it has to do with becoming a rock, a slow process of petrifaction that takes place over twenty-five or thirty years of sitting on narrow bleachers, in windy biting springs, in drop-dead summers and cold wet falls, and never once giving anything away. Cassidy has learned not to hunch the shoulders in frustration or twist the hips in joy, certainly not to jump up and shout, “Get in the game!” even as it becomes increasingly difficult to retain the demeanor of a chunk of anthracite while watching with distress as Alberto Cruz takes three strikes in a row and goes down without lifting the bat.
Nobody says anything.
Alberto stalks out to right field and stands there practicing the swing as if he were all alone in the world.
Hoot makes a note on the roster in tiny handwriting.
“Ted Williams used to do that,” Cassidy remarks casually. “If he had a bad at-bat he’d swing away out in the field, try to get it right.”
Hoot takes a small metal pencil sharpener out of a pocket, not seeming to hear.
Meanwhile, because he is preoccupied (apparently talking to himself), Alberto fails to notice the dugout is waving him over. Therefore he is out of position when the ball is hit. Cassidy could close her eyes and see the rest: see him charge the ball and try to pick it up like a shortstop, see him make the superhero throw to third instead of hitting the cutoff man, see a straightforward play become a ’tweener that doesn’t do anybody any good.
“Reaction time is bad,” mutters Pedro.
“Who? Cruz?” Hoot grinds the pencil with deliberation. “Yeah.”
Yellow curls of wood fall slowly to the grass. Twenty other prospects are showing their stuff and it is impossible not to get caught up in the drama of the ticking clock as they move toward the end of spring training and the weakest are eliminated, a few more every day, sent to the farm director’s office for a fatherly talk and a plane ticket home. Cassidy’s attention goes to the third baseman from Placentia, California, seventh pick in the draft. To the Filipino catcher who drove in 21 runs in 11 games. She slides a bound scouting report from her backpack and becomes engrossed in matching stats with the faces of kids she hasn’t yet seen—surprised to find practice suddenly over and Pedro down the first base line talking to Cruz.
“I can play better,” Alberto is saying in Spanish when she joins them.
He shakes hands with Cassidy, brushing her briefly with his eyes, then lowers his head.
“We know you can,” Pedro assures him.
“Concentration,” Cassidy prompts. “Mental toughness. Remember how we talked about that?”
“Yes.”
A warning siren starts to warble in her head. Alberto Cruz does not look like a prospect. The Midwest kids, the California kids, are pumped up and confident and Alberto’s shoulders are slumped. He hasn’t gained weight, in fact in the week or so since she’s seen him he looks even thinner, as if that spirit bottle had worked its evil magic. She has the real and terrifying sense of life force slipping away.
“All right!”
Pedro claps his hands and Cassidy knows he has seen it, too.
“Tonight we gonna take you out to dinner and have a good meal and relax and talk about what’s happening and what’s gonna happen. You are too good a player to let the pressure get to you.”
Alberto ventures a look at Cassidy. There are hollows beneath his eyes.
“Great idea,” she agrees vigorously.
The squad is trotting off to the indoor batting cages.
“Later,” mumbles Alberto.
They watch his skinny butt blend in with the flashing whites of the departing troops.
Pedro: “I don’t like the way he looks.”
“He does not look good.”
“Hoot said he collapsed on the field.”
“No! What happened?”
“He fell down.”
“I mean, what happened?”
“He got dehydrated. Electrolyte imbalance. What’s the matter?”
“That’s exactly what happened to Gregg when he got sick the first time.”
“It’s not the same thing.”
“He fell down on the first base line and couldn’t breathe.”
“Stop it now.” A hand on her shoulder. “Cruz has the stomach flu. It’s not the same.”
They walk through the quiet industry of the camp.
“Do you realize Gregg’s been gone almost twenty years?”
“Can’t be.”
“Right now he’d be retiring from his major league career …”
“Not your brother. He would have gone to college, gotten a couple graduate degrees—”
Cassidy takes in the sunny fields.
“No,” she says softly. “He would be here.”
Six diamonds. Batting practice and bull pens. Running and stretching. The ancient crack of leather on ash, the timeless cries, “That’s the baby! Good hands! Good hands! Look at that! OH, what a play!” sometimes one squad in a circle rolling on their backs, sometimes jogging by in twos and threes, occasionally the whole parade, two hundred young men in one long spread-out pack lapping it around the big green, all of it working from a deep sense of tradition like a fine old military academy.
Pedro takes a deep breath off the fresh breeze: crushed grass and salt spray.
“Some things haven’t changed since your dad and I were here for spring training. We used to rent two little bungalows way back in there—”
At the edge of the camp you can see a patch of shady residential streets.
“I remember that bungalow. I was five so Gregg had to be nine. He played with your Carlos and Migue. Was Esteban even born?”
“He was a baby.”
“I have a vague picture in my mind of you and Rhonda and my parents doing the cha-cha on the patio.”
“Oh, sure. Those were good times.”
They walk in silence. Cassidy takes Pedro’s hand.
“I miss them both so much.”
He squeezes her fingers. She returns the squeeze gratefully.
“Don’t worry, your dad and your brother are up there right now, playing catch, and your dad is yelling, ‘Concentration should be effortless!’ ”
Cassidy wipes at her eyes.
Outside the clubhouse the crowd of autograph seekers has grown thick. The Dodgers face the Mets at Holman Stadium in half an hour and the Pear is holding up the line by
shoving card after card under the nose of Hideo Nomo, who is applying great mental toughness in his resolve to ignore a tightening circle of belligerent Asian camera crews.
Someone is calling her name, high-pitched and sweet, the voice of an angel.
“Cass-i-dy! Cass-i-dy!”
She looks down. There, at her waist, is an eleven-year-old girl.
“Would you sign my baseball card?”
“Don’t worry about Cruz,” says Pedro. “We gonna straighten him out,” and hurries toward the clubhouse.
The girl squints up at Cassidy, one eye closed against the sun. She is wearing a T-shirt that says L’il Sharpshooters.
Cassidy squats, looking for the small face beneath a bill of kelly green.
“You play softball?”
“BobbySox League.”
“Where?”
“Springs, Nevada. I followed your career, I read about you on the sports page. How you became a scout.”
“Really?”
“You were always my favorite player.”
Cassidy takes the silky still-fresh card in her hand. CASSIDY SANDERSON, it says on a banner across the bottom, Colorado Silver Bullets. She looks at a photo of herself in red and gray: bent at the waist and low, glove down, both hands well out in front of the body, eyes focused on the hop, textbook breakdown position. Long body, precise angles, all in motion. The quads are tight, and the cords in her neck. She remembers the feeling: indestructible.
“Which do you like better?” asks the girl. “Softball or hardball?”
“I love softball. But hardball is the game I wanted to play. What about you?”
“Softball is good for me,” she pronounces matter-of-factly.
Amused, “What position?”
“Center field. I’m small but I’m fast. Our team made the playoffs, but we lost the last game by one lousy little run. We tried too hard.”
“Trying too hard is just as bad as not trying at all.”
It’s Coach Dad, standing behind his daughter, wearing the same kelly-green shirt and shorts but with a carefully groomed brush mustache. Cassidy has to remind herself not all these guys are assholes.
“Your team deserves credit,” she says. “Tough to have a loser in a situation like that.”
She signs her name.
“When I grow up,” says the girl with assurance, “I want to be like you.”
Cassidy pauses in reply. Coach Dad pipes up with how he’s always been a Dodgers fan, there’s a rookie he knows from Nevada they should keep an eye on, and it’s great to get away from the snow. Cassidy finds herself in another place entirely, entranced by the girl’s pure blue eyes. Clear as the sky. No static. No history. No pain.
She used to be that little girl, wearing a baseball cap with a long ashblonde ponytail down her back. Back then there hadn’t been a softball league for girls (not enough girls for a team even in junior high), so there she was, holding her mother’s hand on the sideline, waiting to try out for boys’ Little League.
She had been taken to her brother’s games since she was a toddler, penned inside a portable chicken fence while Smoke had coached and Maggie worked the hot dog stand. She had grown up biking and skateboarding with her brother’s friends, and when she was seven she and another girl, D. J. Reed, spent the summer playing baseball with the dirty-faced ripped-in-the-knees neighborhood scrappers. You didn’t need anyone’s permission to play, the game was out there like open territory to be claimed, democratic as America. Besides, they needed the girls to make up two teams.
But during that tryout every one of those pals from the neighborhood was on the field shagging flies and running bases except Cassidy, who kept close to her mother, knowing something was wrong. The coach, a roosterish opinionated little man with the sideburns of the day and a big mustache like Li’l Sharpshooter’s dad, had been yapping aggressively that it was league rules—girls were not even allowed to pick up a bat and try. “She’ll get hurt.” “How would it look?” “These boys are here to play a serious game.” “You don’t understand.” “There’s a reason we have regulations.” “She doesn’t have the skills. She’ll slow down the play—”
And Cassidy had felt ashamed. For herself and her mother (why did Maggie have to wear those overalls and Swedish clogs?), as if, by simply walking out onto the field, they had committed a repugnant act. Girls, she realized, must be pretty worthless, even loathsome compared to boys, who were unquestionably entitled to everything—even the scrawniest, most spastic, weak, dumb and talentless among them.
Then it got all mixed up with Gregg. After he was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis at age fifteen (they had thought it was asthma), everyday playfulness in the Sanderson family gave way to a state of siege. Strange machinery and odd routines moved into their lives. Brown bottles of enzymes. Vaporizers. Inhalers. Oxygen delivered to the home. At that time, before lung transplants and gene therapy, the life expectancy for a person with CF was eighteen years of age. It was unthinkable that Gregg, a star athlete, Smoke Sanderson’s son, might not live to see his twentieth birthday, but twice that year he was hospitalized with infections and the chest physical therapy he needed at home every day consumed the family. Smoke’s initial stoicism eroded, giving way to a hard, impenetrable anger; once he stopped the car in the middle of the hospital parking lot, said nothing, got out, and walked ten miles back to the house. Maggie marched around to the driver’s side determined to take control. Instead, she put her forehead down on the steering wheel and sobbed.
Gregg was the one who said, “Come on, Mom. I haven’t been dealt the worst hand.”
It was Gregg who insisted Cassidy was good enough to play with the boys, even though she was his annoying little sister. When they chose up sides, he’d always pick her first—a feeling of specialness Cassidy has carried to the ball field ever since.
Eventually her parents filed a legal complaint with the National Little League.
Cassidy was put on the roster.
“My son could be a professional ballplayer,” the father of a twelve-year-old once told Maggie. “Your girl is taking a spot on the team.”
She was teased, booed, boob-tagged, ignored, slashed with a razor blade by the catcher’s girlfriend, hit by the pitcher, put out in right field or kept on the bench. She once hit a triple that won the game and the coach yelled, “Don’t look at the ball, look at the coach!” She took the punishment with nothing but an abiding, blue-eyed stare. It hadn’t been until much later, with Gregg and Smoke both gone, that she had been sitting on a barstool in Papa’s and seen a story on ESPN about the all-women Colorado Silver Bullets. She had called Maggie up at one in the morning and said, “Mom, there’s a chance I can play baseball,” and she and her mother both cried.
“Work hard,” she tells L’il Sharpshooter. “Never lose the feeling of happiness.”
They say in sports you always play for someone. Mom or dad or coach. Cassidy’s eyes follow the girl and her father into the crowd as another mix of faces comes to view, farmland faces with white skin, turned-up noses, strawberry hair, tank tops showing fleshy arms—4-H kids, cowboys, ski team, stoners—the memory of taking the field for the Grizzlies high school intramural softball team, of not even having to turn around to know Gregg was in his usual seat to the left of the plate, but to feel him in her chest reverberating with the cheers, to understand for whom she’d stuck it out.
She played for her brother, for all the reasons you would suppose, but also because in those spring days, when you could open any window and smell apple blossom flooding the valley, she had not yet known to love her own gift.
14
Late that afternoon Cassidy goes for a run on the track that follows the perimeter of the camp. Only a couple of players are out there; most are wiped after a week of nonstop pressure, back in their rooms cooling out for a western barbecue the O’Malleys are putting on tonight. On the second lap, on impulse, she veers out the gate toward the neighborhood where thirty years ago the Sanderson and Pedrillo fa
milies rented houses on the same street.
Pedro had been right about the drive up from Miami, all you could see from the interstate were factories and malls and flat open land. Turning off Route 60, past flimsy motels and fast food drive-throughs with cartoony playground equipment, you wind into the town of Vero Beach. The scale of things suddenly goes conservative and small and you find yourself driving more leisurely, as if slowed by the heavy southern air, peering down shade-tunneled residential streets where life seems contained and known.
Cassidy jogs through a high-end section, raw stucco redos with luxury cars in the driveways, working up to a seventy-five-percent effort, crushing beneath her feet tiny round flowers from the buttonwood trees that line the avenue. She passes a municipal park where half a dozen little kids have gathered around a tall thin good-looking young man who, despite the nondescript tank shirt and baggy shorts, must be a Dodger, one of the young lords from behind the gates.
The light has gone weak, the tropical air taken on a chill. Only one old guy is watching the children in the park, from way up in the empty bleachers, a bearded grandpa wearing white. The Dodger has an arm around a paunchy eight-year-old, squaring him to the plate, hands on his, bringing the bat back together and whipping it around—extension—then having to hang on to the kid so he doesn’t go flying down the third base line with the force of real, big-league power.
In a flash as she goes by, Cassidy recognizes the player is Alberto.
He could be kicking back in his room. Doing extra work in the cage. Instead he’s out there coaching kids he’ll never see again. She thinks about the packs of boys in the Dominican—boys everywhere—from the airport to an empty field outside Micheli Stadium where they had been mimicking the game in progress with gloves made of cereal boxes; boys with no place else to be except in the heat of the developing play. Far from home, her kid is giving something back, even to these working-class children of Vero Beach.
Does that mean he is incapable, also, of the most ruthless abandonment?
She continues down a funky block of pink duplexes and white single-family homes with scalloped metal awnings from the forties. There’s the little market with its damp sawdust smell where she stopped when she first hit town, thirsty, compelled to buy a Coke and half a pound of fat cooked shrimp with hot sauce for four bucks; sensations teased from the edge of memory by shelves full of huge sacks of rice, boiled peanuts in cans, gumbo and grits, biscuit mix and homemade pies.