herself.
In the sunroom, Collier settled into one of two massive recliners that sat dead center in the room. “I can’t stand cleaning day,” he said, flipping the lever to lean back the chair. “I feel like the Czechs in 1939, invaded. I don’t have any space of my own.”
He indicated with a gesture that Edward Everett should take the other chair. Sitting, he had the feeling of being in a stadium skybox at life’s fifty-yard line. From here, he could look down the hill, through the yards of Collier’s neighbors—their gated streets, their miniature English rose gardens, their patios with five-thousand-dollar stainless steel barbecue grills—down into the yards of the more modest homes, the ranches and split-levels on postage-stamp yards, ending, at the bottom of the hill, in trailer parks and industrial buildings and finally the Flann River. It was as if the town’s topography were a geographic bar chart of wealth: the higher you were, the more you had. While he could not see his own house, he could spot the beginning of his neighborhood—roughly three-quarters of the way down—and, farther still, the ballpark. Near gate three, what seemed from this perspective a miniature beverage truck of some sort sat, the driver wheeling a handcart stacked with cases of beer or soda inside.
“I still remember the first time I sat here when the house was mine,” Collier said. “It was, I don’t know, seven, seven-thirty, and from here I could look down into the ballpark. It was November and I called the night guard and told him to turn on the lights. At first he didn’t believe it was me and wouldn’t do it. I said, ‘Hell, you’ll believe it’s me when I kick your butt and fire you.’ When the lights came on, it was the most beautiful thing. ‘It’s my ballpark,’ I thought. ‘My family name is on that ballpark.’ ” Collier laughed. “Cost me a boatload of money just to turn on the lights for an hour, but what the fuck.”
Edward Everett knew that Collier had not invited him to the house to reminisce, but he let Collier have his moment, sitting in silence, looking down the hill toward the ballpark. It had never, in the time since Edward Everett came to Perabo City, looked charming in the daylight. Up close, the cracks in the walls were evident; in places, great chunks of concrete were missing and, in a few of the hollowed-out spots, pigeons nested, the walls and walkways around them spattered with droppings. Edward Everett had not had many chances to see the park from a distance at night, when it was lit up, but on the occasions he had—when Collier rented it out for district high school football championships or a clown rodeo—it had looked like a small gem, the light towers washing out nearly everything that surrounded it, the warehouses, the buildings of Collier’s meatpacking business, the Diamond Trailer Park where home run balls sometimes knocked out windows. Then, it was almost enough to make up for the ugliness that bordered on it. At night, glowing, it made the entire town appear beautiful.
“I gotta let it go, Ed,” Collier said, breaking the silence. “I got grandkids that need college.” At first Edward Everett misheard the pronoun as “you,” not “it,” and he couldn’t figure out why it was Collier telling him he was fired and not Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, nor what his abilities as a manager had to do with college for Collier’s grandchildren; would Iowa State send Collier’s grandson a letter that said: Your ACT scores are good but there’s the matter of your grandfather keeping Yates on as manager. It suggests a congenital deficiency in intelligence. As Collier went on, though, Edward Everett realized that he was talking about the entire team.
“When I was a kid, my daddy brought me into the business by cleaning out the slaughterhouses, scraping up guts and brains, but kids now—Ginger’s Kurt won’t eat meat, if you can believe it; an eleven-year-old vegetarian. Even the ones that’ll eat a steak don’t want to know how it got from Flossie mooing in the field to being on their plate, medium-rare.” Collier let out a deep sigh. “Any notion how much the team loses in a year?”
Edward Everett hadn’t a clue. He rarely paid attention to the attendance, focused as he was on the game. Twenty-five thousand, he thought, but doubled it. “Fifty grand?”
Collier laughed. “Times it by three.”
“Maybe …” Edward Everett ventured, although he had