The Might Have Been (12 page)

The man gave just a twitch of his eyes in the direction of the paper, as if he had seen hundreds of them, and then thrust it back toward Edward Everett and mumbled something that took Edward Everett a moment to decipher: “Guwuhma.”
Go warm up
.

“Yes, sir,” Edward Everett said, and stepped out of the dugout onto the field in search of someone to play catch with.

The release had come in the mail on the day after Christmas. He was carrying out the holiday garbage—a trash can overflowing with torn wrapping paper and the carcass of the turkey his mother had cooked for dinner the day before—when the postal truck pulled to the curb. The mail carrier gave him a honk and a wave out the window and then held the mail aloft for Edward Everett. “I think you’re gonna wanna see this one,” he said, waving a business envelope in the air. They had been classmates, Edward Everett and the carrier, Geoff Symons. “It’s from the Cardinals,” Symons said, opening the door. He was vastly overweight and thrust himself out of the truck only with a great effort, then waddled to the curb with the mail in his hand, the letter from the Cardinals on top. “What’re they offerin’ this year? A hundert grand, I’m guessin’.”

Edward Everett felt his head go light when he saw the envelope. Contracts came in thick manila envelopes, but only one thing came
from the team in a thin business envelope. He took the mail from Symons dumbly and walked back inside.

“Ain’t you gonna open it?” he was aware of Symons calling after him, but went on into the house. “Man, you’re going to have one great-ass season.”

“What on earth are you doing?” his mother asked. She was rehanging the ornaments the cat had knocked off the tree and he only then became aware that he was still holding the trash can, canted at an angle so that daubs of dressing and cranberry sauce oozed onto the carpet. He set the trash can down and stared at the mess he’d made.

“Oh, my God,” his mother said. “Someone died. Who died?”

“I did,” he said.

By then, he was nearly fully healthy, walking without pain. When he ran, he was still conscious of the fragility of his joint, though: doing laps at the high school track, his knee was often stiff and he could hear disconcerting pops. He had yet to test it completely, running full-out, but he knew he would have to get past his fear if he was to play again: speed had been his greatest asset, compensating for his shortfalls—it added points to his average because it gave him eight or ten more hits in a season than someone slower might have, and that was the difference between batting .300-something and .280-something; without power, .280 didn’t get you noticed, but .300 did.

He called Hoppel, certain someone in a rush had copied a wrong name onto the letter. It would turn out to be something they laughed about.
Frame it, kid
, Hoppel would say.
The letter will be as famous as “Dewey Defeats Truman” someday
.

Hoppel’s wife answered the phone. He couldn’t remember her name: “M” something. Madeline. Martha. She was large-boned and lacked what Edward Everett’s mother would call “polish”: her voice was gruff and her movements awkward. On the one occasion Hoppel brought her to the clubhouse, he seemed to show her off as if she were a great prize of a woman. Some of the team was undressed, coming out of the shower, wet towels draped over their shoulders, but she gave them no mind. “Hell,” she snapped as one of them—
a young black kid who played second base—darted back into the shower when he saw her, “ain’t nothin’ I ain’t seen before.”

“Yeah?” she said into the phone now, as if challenging whoever called. When Edward Everett asked to talk to Hoppel, she shouted, without taking the receiver away from her mouth. “Hop? Hop?”

“What is it?” Hoppel said when he picked up. In the background, Edward Everett could hear voices: loud laughter and the squeal of a baby.

“It’s—” Edward Everett started to say, but Hoppel interrupted him.

“Hang on.” To someone in the background, he yelled, “I ain’t done with that plate yet. Leave it.”

It was obvious that Edward Everett had interrupted a family meal, Hoppel and his children and grandchildren.

“Sorry to bother you, Skip,” Edward Everett said.

“Who is this?”

“Yates,” he said.

“Yates?” Hoppel said as if he were trying to place him.

“Double E,” he said, hating the nickname as he said it, as if he were a pair of shoes for some large man.

“What’s goin’ on?”

“I got this letter—” he began.

“Those fuckers,” Hoppel said.

“Yeah, I thought it was a mistake,” he said, thinking that Hoppel was going to say the letter was meant for someone else or at least curse the team for cutting him loose, but Hoppel went on: “Christmas. They send those things out at Christmas. Christ.”

Edward Everett felt a stone in his stomach. “It’s not—”

“Look, here’s my advice. Go sell straw or whatever the fuck it is guys sell in whatever neck of the woods you’re from. Indiana, right?”

“Ohio.”

“Ohio, Indiana, whatever. Go sell straw or whatever. Tell guys stories. Civilians eat that shit up. If you can’t think of a story, make one up. You’ll sell a lot of straw.”

“Straw?” Edward Everett said dumbly.

“Straw. Tractors. Pitchforks. It don’t matter a crap.”

“Are you saying—”

“Hey,” Hoppel shouted. “Leave my fucking plate alone.” He hung up and Edward Everett looked at the phone in his hand for a moment before he replaced it in the cradle. He’d expected Hoppel at least to say that the team had made a mistake; that Edward Everett would surely hook up with another organization. It was as if, now that he was dead to the team, he was dead to Hoppel as well.

H
e didn’t sell straw, or tractors or pitchforks, but he did sell flour. His father’s brother, Stan, repped for a mill in Steubenville and Edward Everett went to work for him shortly after the start of the new year. At first, his job consisted primarily of getting into his uncle’s Cadillac at five-fifteen every morning, Monday through Friday, and riding with him as he made his rounds of the restaurants, groceries and bakeries in the valley.

His uncle was a beefy man, less than five-foot-six, and so big-bellied that, after he yanked himself behind the steering wheel, he could barely reach the accelerator. When he drove, he was frantic, constantly moving, scratching his cheek, picking his nose with his right pinkie, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel, smoking. In the car, at least, he rarely finished the sentences he began:

“John Roberts is the purchasing …” “Christ, I …” “Can you reach …?”

Despite that, Edward Everett was soon able to pick up on what he meant: John Roberts is the purchasing
agent at the supermarket in Oriole
. Christ, I
hate this song
(stabbing an angry finger at the selector button to change the station). Can you reach
back and grab afresh pack of cigarettes from the carton on the backseat?

His uncle smoked constantly, often lighting one cigarette from
another, flicking the spent butt out his window. More than once, it bounced back into the car, landing in his lap, and his uncle would bat frantically at it to knock it to the floor, taking his eyes off the road, the car weaving madly from the shoulder to across the center line. Edward Everett was certain he would be dead by March.

In the offices of supermarket purchasing agents or the owners of mom-and-pop bakeries, his uncle was a different man, however. He kept a metal file card box perched on the backseat and, before going in for a meeting, he flipped through the cards until he found the one that corresponded with the person they were meeting. On each, in surprisingly delicate handwriting, his uncle had made careful notes about the names of wives, the health of parents, the school activities of children, along with symbols that reminded him of changes he needed to make in his attire: tie, no tie; jacket, no jacket; pinkie ring, no pinkie ring. He’d glance at the card, spritz Binaca onto his tongue, yank himself out of the Cadillac and toddle inside for the appointment. There, in offices or industrial-sized kitchens, he was friendly and solicitous, flirty with the women, no matter how old, how attractive. To some of the men, he would relate a dirty joke but, outside in the car, he would say, “Christ, if Margaret,” shaking his head. Christ, if Margaret
knew I told jokes like that, she’d have me going to confession seven days a week
.

Edward Everett hovered in the background, watching his uncle work. If someone glanced in his direction, he would give a smile and say, “I’m just here to learn from the pro.” His uncle had told him to say that. “Jokes,” he said, shrugging. Jokes
break the ice
. Jokes
make people like you
. Jokes
make the sale
.

In his second week, at a family-run bakery in Otto, overlooking the Ohio River, his uncle drew him into the conversation for the first time. It was a sale that was not going well. The owner—a thin young man with a face pockmarked by acne scars, who wore his pants high on his waist, secured by bright yellow suspenders—countered every claim Edward Everett’s uncle made with one of his own:
Our current supplier gives a larger discount. Our current supplier can respond to special orders within forty-eight hours
. It was past one in the afternoon and Edward Everett was hungry, leaning against a stainless
steel counter, where the man had been wrapping loaves of fresh-baked pumpernickel, and the scent of the bread made his stomach gurgle. Through the door to the sales floor, he was watching the owner’s sister chat with customers, pluck sugar cookies and banana nut muffins from the display case and drop them into white bags. She was pretty—how such a person could be related to someone as unappealing as the owner was beyond his understanding. She was twenty-one or twenty-two and reminded him slightly of Julie: redheaded, wearing a sweater with a V-neck that showed the curve of her breasts disappearing into her robin’s egg blue bra whenever she bent to fetch a sheet of baker’s tissue from the shelves behind the register. He was wondering how he could manage to talk to her rather than her unpleasant brother, when he realized his uncle was talking about him.

“Ed would know,” he was saying.

“What?” he said.

“How the Pirates are going to do this year.”

He had no idea; he hadn’t paid attention to the game since the letter from the Cardinals arrived. Every week,
The Sporting News
showed up in the mail (a gift from his mother) but he had not opened a single issue. In one, he knew, in an agate type column listing player transactions, was his name, followed by the single word: “Released.” The rest of the paper would be optimistic projections for the season: the promising rookies, the feel-good stories about veterans making gallant comebacks, articles about players he knew. He could tolerate none of it.

“If their pitching holds up, they have a shot,” he said, cringing because he sounded like the TV sportscasters he despised: jovial and slick-haired, spouting clichés that he and his teammates laughed about in the clubhouse.
You have to score if you’re going to win in this game. You play them one at a time
.

“Ed here played for the Cardinals,” his uncle said.

“That so?” the baker said, dubious.

“Yes,” Edward Everett said. In the shop, the baker’s sister was leaning across the glass counter toward a man wearing a weathered leather cowboy hat over stringy blond hair. “Yes,” Edward Everett repeated in a tone that held more defiance than he intended.

“Ed got hurt last year in a game … where was it?” his uncle asked.

“Montreal,” Edward Everett said. In the shop, the baker’s sister playfully tugged on the cowboy’s hair. The cowboy grabbed her hand and she laughed, snatching it away.

“Really?” the baker said. “I played in high school. But that was—man, the Cardinals. Brad Gibson. Lou Brock.”

Bob Gibson
, Edward Everett wanted to correct him, but a look from his uncle prevented him from doing so.

“Yeah, Gibson, Brock. All those guys,” Edward Everett’s uncle said, reaching up to squeeze the back of Edward Everett’s neck in an affectionate manner. “Maybe you guys could compare notes sometime.”

“Sure,” the baker said.

His baseball career became as much a means of closing deals as were the bits of information on the cards in his uncle’s file box or the jokes he told. At first, Edward Everett felt uneasy, both because his ambition had become a kind of currency to exchange for contracts for a half ton or a ton of flour a month and because of the false impressions he left with people, talking about Brock and Gibson as if he knew them, although he had never spoken more than a word to Brock and had not actually played with Gibson, who had retired the season before his one-and-only in the major leagues. He had, in fact, only been in the room with him once, at a dinner the organization held for Gibson the spring the pitcher announced he was retiring. It was in the St. Petersburg Hilton, in a banquet hall decorated with a life-sized cardboard image of Gibson delivering a pitch, heaving it as he did with the entirety of his being, a wonderment of balance, able to stay upright at the same time he was flinging not merely the ball but his
self
toward the hitter. As a minor league player, Edward Everett had been at a table near the kitchen, and several times a server carrying out trays of steak dinners banged into his chair. He and the other minor leaguers had been in awe at the dinner, speaking among themselves in quiet voices as if they were in a church, while Gibson’s former teammates at tables near the dais told loud stories and every once in a while erupted in raucous laughter. They were men used to
deference and privilege and Edward Everett watched them, wondering if he ever would belong among them. At one point, a stranger opened the door and peeked in: a gaunt man with his greasy black hair in an obvious comb-over. He gave a slow blink and Edward Everett caught his eye. He realized that, to the man with the comb-over, he was no different than the men at the loud tables, part of the fraternity. He leaned into the player beside him and made a comment about the waitress who’d just brushed against him laying a roll onto his plate. The player laughed and Edward Everett glanced again at the man with the comb-over, who blushed, shutting the door.