second baseman, but he couldn’t do anything about it: he was just happy that Clinton had a primarily right-handed hitting lineup, which should cut down on the number of ground balls hit in Nelson’s direction.
As he surrendered the field to Clinton for their pre-game warm-ups, telling his hitting and fielding coach, Pete Dominici, to remind Nelson of the other things he’d need to remember as an infielder—when to cover second base if a runner on first attempted to steal, where to position himself for a relay if a ball went to the outfield—he glanced in the direction of the owner’s box in the stands. As Collier did before nearly every home game, he was holding court. He was a beefy man near Edward Everett’s age but looked considerably younger. He colored his hair and mustache and three months earlier his face had acquired a slightly plastic quality. “Botox,” Renee had said. He was with his new wife, a brassy redhead named Ginger who was twenty-seven years younger and whom Collier met when she applied for a job as a secretary at his meatpacking company.
“Can’t type,” he had said. “But she don’t have to.”
Tonight, they had brought her two children from her first two marriages—a sour-looking eight-year-old girl who slouched behind her mother, glowering, and a surprisingly bookish eleven-year-old boy who, when he came to the games, rarely looked up from his reading.
Surrounding them were people to whom Collier had given comp tickets, mostly butchers from area groceries, seven or eight of them tonight. Collier’s blond intern was carrying an armload of cardboard trays down the aisle, laden with hot dogs wrapped in paper and boxes of popcorn. Trailing her, three of the high school kids carried trays of cups of beer and soda. Although he disliked this pre-game ritual, Edward Everett stopped by the box to say hello. Collier liked him to talk to whatever group he had with him, give them each an autograph as a onetime big league player (whom none of them had ever heard of). “Once pinch-hit for Lou Brock,” Collier would always say. “You got to be pretty good to pinch-hit for a Hall of Famer.”
Lately, it seemed to Edward Everett that the butchers Collier entertained no longer even knew who Lou Brock was: some were born after Brock had finished his career; as far as they were concerned, he may have played a century ago in the dead-ball era. Nonetheless, Edward Everett sat with them for fifteen minutes and gave them some insight into the game: what to watch for so they could feel a little smarter when they anticipated a hit-and-run or a pitchout—all so they would buy even more Collier Fine Meats.
Twenty minutes later, Edward Everett was in his office, drafting and redrafting a starting lineup without Webber in it, first putting Nelson into the third spot, where Webber usually hit, and then moving him down to seven, putting Vila third, then trying something entirely different and writing Nelson into the leadoff spot and moving Martinez to number three. If Rausch were here, it would be simpler, or if Packer hadn’t decided to try to save the world. But neither was here, nor was Webber.
“Knock, knock,” Dominici said, appearing in the doorway. “We found Webb.”
“Where is he?” Edward Everett asked.
Dominici shook his head. “He said he’d only talk to you.”
“How the hell can I go talk to him? Game time is, what? Fifteen minutes?”
Dominici shrugged. “I’m just the messenger, boss,” he said, taking the lineup card Edward Everett handed to him. “I tried.”
Webber was in an apartment a dozen blocks from the ballpark, sitting on a fire escape four stories above an alley across from a furniture warehouse where Edward Everett had worked in two off-seasons after his then father-in-law had gotten him a job there, answering complaint calls in customer service. Going inside, Edward Everett felt foolish. He was in his uniform, his spikes clacking on the concrete as if he were some sort of damn tap dancer. A couple stepping out of the building as he came up the front stoop held the door for him but the man muttered something that sounded like “Trick-or-treat.” His girlfriend laughed.
In the foyer, at the bottom of the stairway, he looked with resignation at the flights that rose above him. His knee hurt: damp weather had a tendency to make the joint swell. Nonetheless, he had no choice. By the time he reached the top floor, the pain radiated into his hip, the