The Might Have Been

CHAPTER Thirty-three





They came into the final weekend of the season still tied with Quad Cities for first place, just as Quad Cities was coming to town for a three-game series. The math was simple, Edward Everett knew: to win, Perabo City needed to take two of the three games. On Friday before the first game, Renz emailed the list of players Johansen would release after the season and the list of players he would assign to other teams in the organization. It stunned Edward Everett. They were releasing seventeen players and keeping but seven: Sandford, Martinez, Vila, Mraz, Rausch, Singer and Rojas. Thinking that his own secure place with the club might be enough that he could convince Johansen to change his mind on two or three players, he called his office. At the very least, he thought, he should be able to convince him to consider saving his pitcher Riggins, who had started poorly but had allowed only one earned run in his last eleven games out of the bullpen. It was not Johansen who answered the phone, however, but Renz, and the conversation echoed the one they’d had when he’d called on Nelson’s behalf.

“The projection for him doesn’t make it work,” Renz said after Edward Everett made his case.

“What about—” he started to say, wanting to remind Renz of the conversation he’d had with Johansen, about the club wanting to blend numbers with other, more human judgment. Certainly, Johansen had conveyed that to Renz.

“The numbers are the numbers.”

“But—” he said.

“Oh, we might have added one more of your players to the list of ‘keepers,’ ” Renz said, and then went on before Edward Everett could ask who it was. “But that someone fractured his knee on your watch.” Before Edward Everett could correct him, telling him it was Webber’s shoulder, not his knee, Renz hung up.

He went to the ballpark knowing he would share none of the news with anyone—not the lucky seven, not the unlucky seventeen. The organization had given him a future and he owed them some loyalty for that—but it didn’t extend to his breaking the hearts of nearly three-fourths of his players sooner than he had to.

It was the weekend of the county fair. From the ball field at St. Aloysius, Edward Everett could see the fairgrounds that overlooked the school, a slash of the western edge—four booths and the top arch of the Ferris wheel. Because of the poor economy and the flooding, the radio told him, the fair organizers expected attendance to hit its lowest point in recent memory. “We considered canceling it,” a woman said. “But so many people have put so much time into this.” “Besides,” said a second woman, “at times like these, people need some sort of diversion.”

As the team went through batting practice two hours before first pitch, the organizers’ prediction seemed accurate. At the visible edge of the fairgrounds, minutes passed between fairgoers appearing at any of the booths. At one point, the Ferris wheel seemed not to move for ten minutes, the purple and yellow neon lights tracing its circumference blinking off and on. Compared to his team’s attendance for the opening game of the series, however, the fair was successful. As he stood at home plate, handing over his lineup card to the umpires and the Quad Cities manager, he could count thirty people in the bleachers behind the Perabo City bench; there were no more than that in the bleachers along the third base line. Collier had given up any pretense of caring: he did not even pay anyone to open the concession stand, and while the umpire reminded the Quad Cities manager of the ground rules, Edward Everett caught sight of a heavy, balding man in a nylon Perabo City Owls windbreaker—a remnant from when the team had fans who wore clothing with their logo—leading a three-year-old boy up to what should have been the concession window, knocking on the plywood covering it, the boy saying, “Want ice cream.” They left the ball field, the boy crying all the way up the long flight of steps to the parking lot, a major dent in the attendance even before anyone had thrown a pitch.

Early in the game, it became clear that the man had probably done a shrewd thing in leaving, as it was a sloppy contest. A cool drizzle fell intermittently throughout—never hard enough for the umpires to stop the game, although the field was wet. In the top of the fourth, Perabo City made three errors, two by Vern Stuckey after there were two outs. The first, he slipped on the wet grass in right field, his feet flying up in the air like a silent comedian stepping on a banana peel, the ball popping out of his glove, letting a runner on third score. The second, he fielded a base hit cleanly and snapped the ball toward second to try to catch a runner who had rounded the base too far, but his throw sailed over the head of Rausch covering the base, the Quad Cities runner banging into him trying to get back to the bag, knocking him down. For a moment, Rausch lay there, Edward Everett sending Dominici out to see if he was hurt, but he’d just had the wind knocked out of him, and Dominici helped him up. The perhaps five dozen people in the bleachers gave him polite applause. By the sixth inning, Perabo City was down eleven–three. On the mound, his starter, Matt Pearson, paused before nearly every pitch, looking pointedly at Edward Everett, as if to ask: When is it enough? Finally, with only one out and the bases loaded, Edward Everett called time-out and went to the mound to talk to him.

“I’m sorry, Skip,” Pearson said, handing him the baseball. “I just can’t work the kinks out today.” Edward Everett took his left arm by the wrist, popping the baseball back into the pocket of his glove. “I’m sorry, Pearson. I didn’t come out to get you.”

“Jesus Christ, Skip,” he said through clenched teeth. “I’m getting demolished.”

“I know, and I’m sorry, but I need the pen for tomorrow and Sunday.”

“You’re saying this one is lost and I’m the sacrificial lamb?”

“I need you to give me whatever you can.”

“Christ, my numbers.”

Edward Everett regarded him. You’re on the wrong list, he thought. Your numbers don’t matter. “Look,” he said, not meeting Pearson’s eyes, “shut ’em down; the more innings with no more damage, the better your numbers.”

“F*ck you, Skip.” Pearson walked away, rubbing the baseball between his hands.

As it turned out, he might have done better to remove the pitcher when Pearson had wanted to leave the game. Perabo City scored four in the seventh and seven in the eighth and if he had replaced Pearson with someone who might have shut down Quad Cities, Perabo City might well have won; but he left Pearson out there and, perhaps through some perverse obstinacy, the pitcher allowed half a dozen more runs to score, glaring at Edward Everett each time someone got a hit or he walked a batter: Take that, you bastard. Finally, Edward Everett relented, sending someone else in for the ninth, Pearson stomping angrily up the steps to the locker room, no longer interested in any show of restraint, screaming, “F*ck, f*ck, f*ck, f*ck,” the entire way up, the final score seventeen–fifteen, Quad Cities in first by one with two to play.

The second game went better. Perhaps because his team had gotten such a large lead in the first game and Perabo City had picked away at it, the Quad Cities manager had not been as restrained in his use of the bullpen as had Edward Everett, and he’d used seven pitchers in all to lock down the win. As a result, when his starting pitcher got into trouble in the second game, it was his turn to leave him out there, resting his other pitchers for the final game—the one that would decide the league. Perabo City scored three in the second, two in the fourth, five in the sixth, and led twelve–one by the bottom of the eighth inning when the featured act for the weekend at the fair took the stage up the hill from the game: a Motown group that’d had a few top-40 hits in the 1960s. Their songs—some familiar, most not—floated down the hill, the volume increasing and decreasing with the direction and speed of the wind. On the Perabo City bench, with the lead they had, the team was loose. When the band played its most famous hit—one Edward Everett remembered from his junior prom, a slow number during which the disc jockey had lowered the lights and Edward Everett and his date held tightly to each other, turning in the slowest of circles while above them the fluorescent stars tacked to the gymnasium ceiling twinkled—Vila stood up on the bench.

“My grandma used to play this to get me to go to sleep when I was at her house while my mom was at work,” he said. He started swaying on the bench, singing the lyrics, trying to mimic the movements Edward Everett remembered the group going through when they performed on American Bandstand. Four or five other players got up, watching his moves, trying to imitate him, shouting out the lyrics when they knew them, getting them wrong when they didn’t. When the song finished, just as Vila had to leave the bench to warm up in the on-deck circle, the few fans in the ballpark applauded.

On his way home, Edward Everett was restless. It has come down to the last game of the year, he thought; of course it has. The final game for the pennant and for Sandford’s shot at twenty wins. In all his years, he had seen few other pitchers he would rather have starting a game that mattered as this one did. He realized he had fooled himself when he’d said that winning the pennant would mean little to him and for a brief moment pictured his team pouring onto the field after the last out, hefting him to their shoulders, although he realized at the same time that it was something that would happen in the movies, a movie about a main character who was someone like him. In life, he knew, his players thought of themselves as the main characters. They were all driving home with their own visions of the team picking them up and carrying them off the field.

He called Meg and she answered the phone after the first ring.

“I was hoping you’d call,” she said.

He told her about the game and the one tomorrow for all the marbles.

“Not bad for a little old flour salesman,” she said.

Although he knew it was crazy, he suggested they meet at the Holiday Inn. He wouldn’t get there until almost midnight and would have to leave the next morning by five to get back home to prepare for the game, and yet he didn’t want to be alone.

“What makes you think I can just pick up like that, at this hour?” she asked, and then, as disappointment was settling on him, said quickly, “Just kidding. I didn’t think I’d get to see you until after the season, when you’d exploit me to help you pack to move.”

This time, even stopping at home to care for Grizzly, he was at the hotel first and had to wait for her, worrying that she had changed her mind. He sat on the edge of the bed, half watching the MLB Network, video of the best plays of the day, men doing extraordinary things on the field: a first baseman for St. Louis leaping onto a rolled-up tarp to backhand a pop foul; a Tampa Bay shortstop diving into left field to snag a deep ground ball and then throwing to second while still on his back. If Webber hadn’t gotten hurt, that might have been him in a few years. Not long before Webber’s accident, Edward Everett remembered, he was convinced that it would be Webber who survived the season and that he would be out—but the story is not over until the story is over; he was still in the game and Webber was back home in Ohio, going through physical therapy to build up the muscles in his damaged shoulder, but only so he could live a normal life in the World. It would not be enough for him to ever play again.

When Meg got there, she tapped nervously on the door, quietly, as if she were afraid someone in the hall might hear. When he opened the door, she was wearing a London Fog raincoat, which surprised him, since it was dry and 90 degrees, but in the room, the door shut, she dropped it to show him that she was already naked under it.

“I always wanted to do that,” she said, hugging him, helping him pull off his shirt. “It was something on my bucket list. So there you have it, check off something else.”

After sex, he was usually sleepy, but tonight he was alert, nervous, and she fell asleep while he lay there, thinking, first inning, second inning, third inning, going through the Quad Cities roster in his mind, thinking, If they bring in Wong, I’ll pinch-hit Perkins; if they bring in Didier with Rausch up, I’ll tell Rausch to look for the slider.

At one point, Meg woke and saw him sleepless. “I think it’s sweet you care so much about this for them,” she said, shifting so that her head lay on his shoulder. He kissed her hair and realized she didn’t smell of tobacco.

“I quit a week ago,” she said as if she knew what he was thinking. “Now, don’t run scared, because I’m not expecting anything from you. I’m going to miss you when you go to Costa Rica but maybe you’ll come back, and then, who knows? That’s something to live for, in my book.” She opened her eyes, looked at him briefly, and then shut them again. “And at my age. Who woulda thunk it.”