But he knew he wouldn’t do that; he would sacrifice.
At the plate, he took his stance and looked out at the pitcher, who was rubbing the ball between his palms. He was a rookie himself, younger than Edward Everett, maybe only twenty, a stocky, round-faced kid who seemed more like a fast-food fry cook than a professional athlete. The thought pushed into Edward Everett’s head: five or six years ago, the pitcher might have been in junior high. Edward Everett saw him as a boy in a white oxford shirt and blue slacks, sitting in a … but he shoved the thought aside. The past meant nothing. There was only this moment: the pitcher nodding to the catcher’s signal, holding his stretch for a scant second, as Edward Everett slid his right hand along the barrel of the bat, noticing and then dismissing a rough spot in the wood, cradling the bat partway over the plate.
The pitch came in on the outside corner, and Edward Everett caught it with the meat of the bat, dropping a slow ground ball that trickled toward first base. Stay fair, he thought, dashing down the baseline for the bag, wanting to make it more than a sacrifice, thinking, if this were grass instead of artificial turf, it would die in the grass and he could beat it out, but this was not grass but turf. He willed himself to go faster, leaping for the base, urging his body to take off, hearing the ssszzz of the first baseman’s throw from behind him, hearing the slap of the ball into leather at perhaps the instant his foot met the bag, just a touch off-stride, making him stumble slightly as he took his turn into foul ground, thinking he was on with a single, but the umpire was throwing his right fist into the air, and grunting, “Out.”
Edward Everett waited for the coach to argue but he just clapped his hands and shouted, “Good sac, good sac.” And indeed, Fairly stood on third. Edward Everett had done his job.
He jogged off the field. In the stands, fans gave him polite applause before resuming their roaring and stomping as the announcer introduced the next hitter.
Then it was over. With the infielders drawn in for a play at home on a ground ball, the hitter punched a flare over the second baseman’s head that fell just at the edge of the outfield grass, and Fairly was in, the game won.
Later, in the hotel room the team had rented for him across the street from the stadium, Edward Everett stood in the dark, looking eight stories below at the ballpark. The game had been over for hours by then, and the infield was covered by a blue tarp that glinted under the stadium lights. In the bleachers, workers moved through the aisles, bending to pick up trash. From some blocks away, where the city was staging a fireworks show on the riverfront, Edward Everett could hear the muted explosions celebrating the holiday. Every once in a while, a red or blue trail streaked across the sky within his field of vision. He stood there until the finale lit the sky in brilliant yellows, oranges and greens, and as the last flares faded, as the lights went out in Busch Stadium below him and all he could make out was the great dark gaping bowl of it, he thought about calling someone.
His mother would be at his aunt’s house for the barbecue she had every year. If he called there to tell her about what he’d done, she would pass the telephone around, to uncles, aunts, cousins, and he would have to repeat his story over and over for everyone. His mother would say, Oh, if only your father were still alive to see this, and then she’d cry and he didn’t want that, not tonight, not when he’d finally made it this far, the beginning of what he knew would be his years in the major leagues. He thought of the girl he had been seeing in Springfield, Julie, but whom he had stopped calling for no reason he could think of, just made a decision one day when he got back from a road trip that he didn’t want to see her again. For the first time since then, he regretted it, because she was someone he could call to tell, but now he couldn’t.
Stepping away from the window, he caught his dim mirrored image in it, and