The Might Have Been

CHAPTER Twenty-two





The 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 f*cking 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 f*cking ballplayer since Babe Ruth but we’re too f*cking 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.

Walking to the stack of cinder blocks that functioned as the trailer’s front steps, Edward Everett sloshed through puddles, his bad knee sending jolts into his hip. He wondered if he would ever be dry again; the legs of his pants were caked with mud. At the trailer, he rapped lightly on the door, the cheap aluminum shaking.

“Ah, jeez,” Nelson said when he opened the door and saw Edward Everett.

“Come in,” Nelson’s wife said from behind her husband. “Ross. It’s pouring.”

Edward Everett hesitated, wondering if he should, indeed, go in. It was clear that Nelson already knew why he was there; a manager did not drop by for a social call. He could just turn around, get in his car, go home, take a hot shower.

“Come in,” Nelson’s wife repeated, and Edward Everett mounted the steps. “I’m Cindy,” she said. She was a round-faced girl, perhaps not even twenty, in shorts and a man’s T-shirt that fell almost to her knees, her long dark hair pulled back with an elastic band.

“I’ll ruin your carpet,” he said and, indeed, he was dripping all over the small braided rug set just inside the trailer.

“I’ll put something down on the sofa,” Cindy said, and she disappeared around a corner and was back almost instantly with a beach towel that, when she unfolded it to lay on the sofa, bore a large screen print of a baseball sitting in the pocket of a mitt, and the words “Baseball is life. All the rest is just details.” She handed him a second towel and said, “You can dry off.” Edward Everett toweled off his hair, face and arms and Cindy took the towel back from him, disappearing around the corner again. He didn’t want to sit but his knee ached so much that he plopped down onto the towel Cindy had spread over the couch for him, sinking because the springs were bad.

“Skip—” Nelson said, sitting in a recliner chair across from him, the chair tilting to the left, creaking under his weight.

“I’m sorry,” Edward Everett said but before he could go on, Cindy was back, carrying the six-month-old and bringing the three-year-old into the room by the hand. The older one, a boy, was blond and shy, curling himself around behind his mother’s legs, poking a finger into his mouth, peeking out at Edward Everett. The infant wore a one-piece sleeper and, although her hair was wispy, there was a plastic pink bow clipped to it—perhaps to signify she was a girl.

“This is Sarah,” Cindy said, kissing the infant on the top of her head, “and Jacob,” giving the boy’s hand a gentle tug so that he emerged for a moment from behind his mother.

“They’re very cute,” he said, not wanting to know this about Nelson, not wanting to think of him in this way, someone’s daddy, someone other than a name on his roster he was deleting.

“I just thought you’d like to meet them,” she said. “They’re the apples of Ross’ eye.” She regarded him for a moment in a way he knew carried meaning and then took the children back down the short hall and Edward Everett heard a door click shut.

“Skip …” Nelson said. “I know I haven’t hit like I could. My little girl, she has colic and I don’t get the sleep I—”

“It’s not my call,” Edward Everett said, knowing he was about to say something he shouldn’t—that he was going to give Nelson hope he shouldn’t have. “You’re a helluva team player. If it was up to me …” He gave a shrug. “I’ll make a couple calls. See if we can’t find another organization.” He hated himself for the lie as soon as it was out of his mouth. What was wrong with him? he wondered. The years had made him efficient in delivering this kind of news. Maybe it was a mistake coming out here, to Nelson’s turf, where Nelson’s wife could make him feel guilty by bringing out their children as if that would change things: You’re hitting barely two hundred but you have two kids so here’s a ticket to the major leagues. Edward Everett couldn’t tell who made him angrier: Renz for reducing everything to a string of numbers or Nelson and his wife for reducing everything to the human factor, the yin and the yang of baseball.

He couldn’t tell but it seemed Nelson was tearing up and then he was weeping like the boy he still was—a boy-man with a wife who slept beside him and children who shared a room across the narrow passageway that served for a hall in this cramped trailer—hunched over, his face buried in his hands, and then Cindy was back beside him, sitting precariously on the left arm of the recliner, the chair cracking under the weight. She leaned into Nelson, plopping the infant onto his lap, while Jacob stood to the other side of him, patting his father on the knee. “Don’t be ’set, Daddy; don’t be ’set.”

“Maybe you should go,” Cindy said. “You’ve done whatever you came to do.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have come. It’s just that we won’t have a game.”

“We don’t care a damn about the game,” Cindy said in a measured tone, stroking her husband’s hair.

What Edward Everett had wanted to say was that he wanted to spare Nelson coming all the way down to the park in the downpour, that he thought he was doing him a favor by coming out here, but there was no point in his saying it.

At the door, he stopped and studied the family huddled together in the face of what they most likely saw as a worse storm than the one battering their trailer, Nelson planting kisses on his daughter’s head as if she were the one who needed comforting.

Before he turned the knob of the door to go back out into the deluge, he stopped and decided to do Nelson one last act of kindness, although he might never see it that way—not even in sixty years, if he lived that long. The chances were, he would see it as one more act of cruelty. But no matter: a generous act was still a generous act even if the person receiving it could not recognize it.

“I lied,” Edward Everett said. “You should do something else with your life. Sell straw,” he said, echoing Hoppel’s last comment to him more than thirty years earlier—my God, a third of a century in the past, he thought—a remark he had heard as sarcasm but which, he realized, was the kindest thing anyone might have said to him. “Sell straw,” he said again, and let himself back out where the rain continued to pound, while behind him, Nelson, whether he knew it or not, was on his way to a better life. Before he closed the door, he glanced once more at the family. Nelson certainly had far more than he ever had.