of player clubhouse attendants sometimes tried to chase off as if he were trying to sneak in to collect autographs. And now he was in the major leagues, his cheerfulness and love for the game condensed to a single typed line, a single at-bat.
Down on the field, the final runner was at the starting line for his dash. Edward Everett could see most of the other players scattered throughout the grandstand, some there on a lark but others there to get a chance to have their own line on a mimeographed sheet in a press box somewhere. Hoppel had said he was one-in-ten for getting as far as he had; most of the men down on the field would say they’d be satisfied with that: a chance to step to the plate just one time in Pittsburgh or Kansas City in a uniform, under the lights, in front of twenty thousand fans. They were wrong, he thought. Nothing would ever be enough. If he played five years, he’d want six. If he made it ten, he’d want fifteen.
He thought about Connie and his uncle and how he had deceived them. He had told them he was going to Cleveland but, to each, he had told a different lie—Connie that he was going to a trade show; his uncle, that he and Connie were taking a short vacation. The previous night, before he had gone to sleep, he had called Connie to say good night.
“I miss you,” she had said. “Two months ago, we weren’t even in each other’s lives and now I’m sitting here on the bed, thinking how it’s going to be empty tonight.”
He had almost told her the truth then, struck with remorse. Sitting in the press box, he thought of her. It was the last week of school and she would be in her classroom, having a party, cookies and Kool-Aid they’d bought with their own groceries. In part to assuage the guilt he felt because he was withholding from her the information that he was going to the tryout camp, that the life they had discussed might not happen, he’d taken her to a Waldenbooks in Wheeling to buy paperback classic novels that she could pass out to her students to encourage summer reading. “It’s too much,” she’d said when he wrote the check, nearly a hundred dollars, as a clerk stacked cartons of Dickens, Austen and Hugo onto a hand truck to wheel out to his car.
“I’m just trying to help you encourage your students to be better,” he replied. In the press box, he imagined her in her classroom, her students lined up at her desk as she handed each a book when they filed past. She really was a good woman, he thought: most of the students would never open the books, he knew, spending their summers working at the Tastee Freez or the new McDonald’s in St. Martinsville, drinking illegal beer, having sex by the reservoir. The notion struck him: he should pack it in, walk away from the tryout camp, drive back, take up the life into which he had only begun to settle, sell flour, become wealthy like his uncle, marry Connie, be a good father to her son. It would be, he thought, a kind of retribution for the fact that his own son, wherever he was, would not have a father; would, at least, not have him as his father.
He stood, stretched, started to walk down to the field. There was a slight hitch in his knee. It didn’t hurt, but there was a pop and stiffness. He shouldn’t have sat down; he should have kept moving. As he walked along the concourse, looking out over at the lake, it struck him that, if he could see to the other side of the water, it was Canada—another country, where he had been eleven months earlier. He saw himself crossing into it that first time, waiting in the long line at customs while the officials methodically searched the team’s carry-on bags. He was naïve then, he realized, thinking he was at the start of everything, the road of his life mapped out like one of the AAA TripTiks his mother ordered before a vacation, the path drawn out in dark black arrows pointing in one direction, page after page of the spiral-bound TripTik, leading inevitably to where he planned to end up. He felt a little sorry for the confident self he had been then. That younger him hadn’t