The Might Have Been (27 page)

“I couldn’t find it, Skip,” Sandford said apologetically.

“It’s one game,” he said, holding on to Sandford’s arm, not letting him leave the mound just yet, while the fans continued to boo him. “It’s happened to Clemens, Gibson and Maddux. You’re in elite company.” But the joke didn’t work. Sandford gave him a pleading look, his eyes cutting toward the dugout, where he wanted to be.

“Okay,” Edward Everett said. “One thing: head up when you go.” He was always telling his pitchers that when he took them out; it was his idea of dealing with baseball’s version of “flop sweat.” Don’t let
the fans know they got to you. Sandford heeded him, trotted off the mound, head up, but when he got fully off the field and into the shadow of the dugout, he flung his glove the width of the bench before storming into the tunnel and into the clubhouse, where, Edward Everett knew, he’d brood, seeing every pitch over and over until Edward Everett sent Biggie in to tell him to shower.

The game got no better from there on; it was as if the bullpen were infected with whatever ailment Sandford had. By the bottom of the seventh, it was twenty-three–four. Clouds had pushed in by then and Edward Everett found himself hoping they would open up in one of the sudden deluges that occurred sometimes in the Midwest, an all-out soaker, players and umpires scurrying for the cover of the dugouts and tunnels, fans racing for their cars, but God wasn’t merciful. While rain did begin to fall in the top of the eighth, it was not much more than mist, and they had to play the entire nine innings. By the last out, there were fewer than a hundred fans remaining in the stands. As Josh Singer grounded out, third to first, to end it, a fan sang out, “Gir-rils; gir-rils, gir-rils.”

In the clubhouse, the team was quiet: a post-slaughter shock. Sandford had been showered and dressed for perhaps two hours by then but he’d waited for everyone, in his khaki slacks and Hollister pullover. “I’m sorry,” he said in a quiet voice, while other players stripped off their sweat- and dirt-stained jerseys and headed off into the shower room. Edward Everett sat in his office, running up the line totals in the scorebook, listening to the hiss of the water, the plop of wet towels when players dropped them to the floor. The conversation was quiet; he couldn’t hear words, just the drone of voices sandwiched among long stretches of silence. He had been present for worse scores—not many, but some. At Green Castle, he once lost forty-one–one, the game summary and box score picked up by the Associated Press because it was the most lopsided score in professional ball in sixty–two years. Another time, six years ago, Perabo City had lost thirty–nothing. It was ugly, there was no question about it, but what he’d said to Sandford was true: it was just one game. They just needed to leave it confined to the box on the calendar corresponding to today, not let it bleed over to the next day.

When he heard the last shower shut off, he went out of his office into the locker room. Nearly everyone was silent, looking at him expectantly, save for Webber, who sat hunched in front of his locker, talking quietly into his cellphone, his right hand cupped over his mouth as if that would make it impossible for anyone to hear what he was saying. “I can’t help it.”

Edward Everett cleared his throat and Webber looked up, annoyed. “Got to go,” he said in a sarcastic tone, as if to say to Edward Everett,
I went two-for-four; I turned two double plays. Don’t pin this on me
. Webber might not ever understand, Edward Everett thought, the place of individual glory in a team game.

Edward Everett regarded his players. They sat on the benches, blinking back at him slowly, still stunned. It was easy for him to forget how young they were, not a one more than twenty-three; the oldest had been perhaps in junior high when Edward Everett first came to Perabo City; on the day when he and his team suffered the thirty-run drubbing, some of them were still in eighth grade, their voices only then on the verge of changing. They wanted him to absolve them, explain the reason they had to endure the humiliation.
Oh, now I understand
, they wanted to think. He considered telling them about how that team a half-dozen years ago had sat here, stunned, as they were, but had finished the season in first place—but it was only in the movies that teams responded well to a rousing pep talk after a humiliating defeat. He felt a fury welling in him, not at his players but at Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, and everyone with the big club in whose hands all of their futures lay and who had decided not to tell anyone about whatever plans they had for the team. But it wasn’t his players’ fault and he took in a breath so they wouldn’t see his anger—anger they would read as directed at them. Everything that occurred to him was a cliché but, as Hoppel used to say, there was a reason the cliché was the cliché: tomorrow is another day; don’t bring it to the ballpark tomorrow. It was true and it would only be when they discovered for themselves the truth of the clichés that they would be able to move on.

“Go on home,” he said quietly, and when no one reacted, he said again, “Go home. We’ll get them next time.”

After they filed out, he stripped off his uniform, tossed it into the bag for the clubhouse kid to wash and went into the shower room. As he held his hand under the spray, waiting for it to warm, he gave the room a sniff, wondering if the heavy rains banging against the ballpark would make the sewers back up again. All he could smell was bleach, wet concrete and a mix of his players’ body washes and shampoos. A crack of thunder exploded, loud enough that it might have been just on the other side of the wall. He remembered something about not showering in an electrical storm but thought, giving a small laugh, if lightning struck him, he wouldn’t have to worry about finding a job after the season.

T
he next morning, when he logged onto his email, intending to ask Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, about the organization’s plans for his team and whether they’d have a job for him next season, there was already a message from him. A single line: “Acq: J Mraz OF. Uncon Rel: R Nelson OF. MJ MS MBA. Sent from my BlackBerry.”
Acquired: Jake Mraz, outfielder; unconditional release: Ross Nelson, outfielder
. He considered typing a single letter expressing his acknowledgment: “K,” but Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, would see it for the sarcastic response it was and his position with the organization was too tenuous to risk it. Instead, he picked up the phone. Even as it rang in his ear, he knew the call was fruitless. For one thing, he knew he would not ask directly about his own future or the future of the team. For another, he knew he could not persuade Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, to keep Nelson; he just wanted to tell Nelson something when he called him into his office later that afternoon, something beyond the facts of his status with the team.

But Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, was not at his desk. Instead, Renz answered.

“It’s a done deal,” he said curtly when Edward Everett told him he was calling about Nelson. “It’s on the wire.”

“I understand that,” Edward Everett said. “I just wanted to tell him something he could take with him.”

“What are you, his fucking mommy?” Renz said. “Take with him?” In the background, Edward Everett could hear fingers clicking on a keyboard. “Two-eleven; two-fifty-six; three-oh-one,” Renz recited—Nelson’s batting average, on-base percentage, slugging average: the numbers were beyond abysmal and revealed Nelson as a hitter—impatient, undisciplined, without power. Edward Everett and Dominici had worked and worked with him, trying to rid his swing of a hitch that had him behind anything but an average fastball, trying to change his stance, the position of his head so that he could get a better look at the ball when it came spinning off the pitcher’s fingers. In batting practice, he got it; with Dominici standing behind the cage, snapping “Head!” to remind him to stop tucking his chin so much against his shoulder, snapping “Angle!” to remind him to stop dropping his bat head so far, he sprayed line drives all over the field. But once game time came, everything they had worked on vanished and he flailed at pitches, ticking weak grounders back up the middle, swinging at balls that bounced in the dirt.

“Tell him,” Renz went on in his high, nasal voice, “that he’s the greatest fucking ballplayer since Babe Ruth but we’re too fucking stupid to see that.” Then he hung up.

It was eight-thirty; Nelson was probably sleeping at that moment, certain in his life, knowing what he would do today and tomorrow and the next day. Edward Everett could not remember how many players he had given the bad news to; over all his years as a manager it might have been seventy or eighty. Most had been angry. Four years ago, a kid whose name he couldn’t recall, Jim or Jack something, flipped a chair across Edward Everett’s office with so much force that one of the legs chipped a small chunk from the concrete block wall. The gouge was still there, visible when Edward Everett closed the door.

Anger he could tolerate, even though he was just the messenger boy, a Western Union–gram of disappointment; as long as they did
not become violent, he could let them vent. After they ran out of steam, he told them he had been there, on their side of the desk. He told them about the form letter the Cardinals sent him, and sometimes added an embellishment: that they had misspelled his name. The worst were the kids who fell silent. Edward Everett could not tell what they were thinking. One of the first players he gave the bad news to—a kid whose name he would never forget who played for him in Cumberland, Florida: Tripp Burroway; William T. Burroway, the third, the son and grandson of heart surgeons—killed himself an hour and a half after he left Edward Everett’s office. When Edward Everett told him: “I’m sorry. It’s not my decision,” Burroway sat in silence, blinking slowly, the color washing out of his face, before he nodded, stood up, sat back down again as if he had lost his balance, then left the ballpark without even passing by his locker. When the three players he shared an apartment with got home after the game, they found him dead from an overdose of Halcion. Edward Everett had no idea Burroway was medicated, that he suffered from serious anxiety. He was intense: in the dugout, when he wasn’t on the field, he would sit jiggling his legs up and down furiously, so hard that it sometimes made the entire bench vibrate. But Edward Everett thought it was just competitive fire. When he called Burroway’s family a week later to offer condolences, his mother hung up on him as soon as he told her who he was. He would forever be, for the Burro-way family, the man who killed their son.

At ten, the rain started again, so hard Edward Everett could hear it hissing against the ballpark as he sat in his windowless office. He went down the tunnel toward the field and even before he reached the dugout, could see it might be the heaviest rain of the year so far; it blew in waves into the dugout, spraying water back up the tunnel toward him. Puddles stood deep in the outfield grass and streams of water ran down the creases in the bright yellow tarp stretched across the infield.

As he stood there, a brilliant fork of lightning flashed beyond the far edge of the right field wall and the nearly simultaneous boom of thunder shook the stadium so hard he felt the vibration in his chest.
The fluorescent tubes illuminating the tunnel flickered, went out, came back on and then went out again. An odd silence fell on the ballpark—a silence of the systems shutting off: no more buzzing of the fluorescent tubes, no more drone and rattle of the air-conditioning—just the incessant roar of the rain beating against the roof of the dugout and rattling against the tarp.

He knew the ballpark from his years of nearly living in it but still he could not remember being there in pitch darkness. He stepped carefully back along the tunnel, inching over until he felt the rough concrete of the wall, and then crept slowly toward the clubhouse, keeping his right hand in contact with the wall, trying to remember if there were any obstacles—a stack of Coke cases or baseball bats that he might fall over. In the clubhouse, making his way in the total blackness toward his office, he barked his shin on one of the benches. He sat down heavily, waiting until the throbbing subsided, letting his eyes adjust to the dark. After a moment, he could begin to make out vague silhouettes: the lockers, the refrigerator against one wall for water and soda, the cubbyholes of athletic tape, gauze and analgesic cream, the barrel of cracked bats. He stood up, his right shin still smarting, and went back to his office. There, he sat in the darkness, considering what to do.
It is pointless to stay
, he thought. He closed his laptop, gathered his game log cards and shoved them into his accordion file. At the door to the parking lot he stood for a moment, his laptop and folder tucked under his arm. The rain whipsawed the lot. Hail the size of gum balls bounced crazily across the pavement. Everywhere, water had taken over: pouring off the flat roofs of the warehouses across the street, pulsing against the storm drains along the periphery of the parking lot, pelting the roof of his car.

It was perhaps fifty yards to his car and he had no umbrella but he knew he could not stand there forever and so he sprinted across the lot, splashing through ankle-deep puddles, wishing he had paid for a remote key entry, as he had to fumble with the lock when he reached his car. Once inside, he started the engine and turned the defroster on full force. He was soaked, his jersey plastered to his back, water dripping from his face and hair pooling in his lap. He wiped his palm across the glass and as he waited for the windshield to clear
enough that he could see, he thought about where to go. What he wanted to do was go home, take a hot shower, change out of his wet uniform. But first, he decided, he would go give Nelson the bad news. Better, he thought, to tell him sooner rather than wait for the next time he would be at the ballpark.

Nelson rented a small house trailer in River View Gardens, roughly a mile from the ballpark. The wooden sign hanging on a post just at the entrance bore a painting of a log cabin sitting beside a river with a trout jumping out of the water. As did many real estate signs, it lied, because River View Gardens consisted of a tight circle of eight narrow trailers and nothing resembling a garden. Three of the trailers were vacant and at one, two windows were broken, rain beating inside. The trailer that Nelson rented for himself and his family—although he was barely twenty, he had two children, three and six months—was missing part of the plastic skirting designed to hide the cinder blocks on which the trailer rested. Beneath it, a child’s wagon with one wheel missing tilted in the shadows and, when Edward Everett pulled up, a cat sat up in the wagon long enough to make note of him, gave a stretch and hunkered back down.