“But how could I pass up a chance to come out here?” He touched the padded wall beside them tenderly. “I called in sick.” He held up his palms alongside each other, imitating a balance scale: Left hand higher: “Sit at my desk, listening to an asshole from Toledo bitch about a broken office chair.” Right hand higher. “Come to the ballpark where Bob Lemon and Lou Boudreau played.” He dropped his hands. “Easy peasy.” He pulled a sheet of paper out of his jeans pocket and unfolded it. It was the same information letter the team had sent to Edward Everett when he called about the tryout; the only difference was the name and address. “I’m going to frame this. Tell my grandkids I had a tryout with the Indians.”
Edward Everett understood then that the team had handed out invitations to anyone who asked, the day as much a public relations gimmick as a search for players for the organization, and he wondered how many others had come down as if it were an amusement park. Instead of roller coasters and Ferris wheels, there was a romp in the outfield grass. The customer service clerk. The fat guy in the Stroh’s shirt. The kid in the cracked souvenir helmet. It made him angry: so much wasted time for people on a lark.
When it was his turn to run, he lined up beside the customer service clerk.
“You could use a sundial to time me,” the clerk shouted to the two scouts at the finish line holding stopwatches. He pounded his chest, coughing. “Two packs a day.”
“Ready,” said the scout beside them. “Go.”
Edward Everett was off at the word. He had babied his knee in his training runs, not so much worrying that it would fail but expecting it, thinking with each step, Is this the moment? Is this the moment? As he ran across the outfield grass in Cleveland Stadium, it struck him that he despised his knee. Fuck you, he thought. Go ahead and give way. Once, when he was eight and his father was hitting ground balls to him at the Little League field, teaching him to play, a ball hit a pebble in front of him and bounced up, driving his lip back against his teeth, drawing blood. Edward Everett fell to the ground, curling up. “Little baby,” his father taunted, then hit another ground ball toward him, and it slammed against his stomach. Edward Everett staggered to his feet and his father hit another ground ball toward him; he snagged it and hurled it back at his father in a rage, surprising his father, who threw his hand up, blocking his face, and the ball ticked off the tip of his middle finger, tearing the nail partway off. He thought his father would punish him, but he merely sucked on his finger and gave him a wink, as if Edward Everett had learned something.
That same rage, he felt for his knee. Fail, he thought, dashing toward the finish line, his left foot finding a small crease in the ground, his right a clod of dirt, his left a slick spot, his right another crease. Fail, fail, fail. From behind him, he could hear the customer service clerk gasping, but on he ran, waiting for the instant when the ligament in his knee would tear, once and for all, but it held, and he raced past the finish line, dimly aware of the scout clicking the stopwatch and muttering something to the scout beside him, making notes on a clipboard.
“Man. You was. Fast,” the customer service clerk said, wheezing, doubled over, hands on his knees. “It was like. You was being chased. By a man. With a gun.” He let out another wheeze. “If I die. Tell my kids. I love them.”
Then there was nothing to do but wait for the other players to finish their runs. He sat in the box seats behind the home bullpen, where the pitchers were throwing, two at a time, side by side. Throughout the box seats, families of some of the players had turned the day into a picnic. They had brought baskets of food, small coolers of Coke and Tab. Not far from where he was, a middle-aged couple sat behind a kid, obviously their son, the mother squeezing his shoulder as he sat with his head bowed, the father with his head turned aside, tapping an index finger alongside his nose in a show of disappointment.
Out on the