that he could get a better look at the ball when it came spinning off the pitcher’s fingers. In batting practice, he got it; with Dominici standing behind the cage, snapping “Head!” to remind him to stop tucking his chin so much against his shoulder, snapping “Angle!” to remind him to stop dropping his bat head so far, he sprayed line drives all over the field. But once game time came, everything they had worked on vanished and he flailed at pitches, ticking weak grounders back up the middle, swinging at balls that bounced in the dirt.
“Tell him,” Renz went on in his high, nasal voice, “that he’s the greatest fucking ballplayer since Babe Ruth but we’re too fucking stupid to see that.” Then he hung up.
It was eight-thirty; Nelson was probably sleeping at that moment, certain in his life, knowing what he would do today and tomorrow and the next day. Edward Everett could not remember how many players he had given the bad news to; over all his years as a manager it might have been seventy or eighty. Most had been angry. Four years ago, a kid whose name he couldn’t recall, Jim or Jack something, flipped a chair across Edward Everett’s office with so much force that one of the legs chipped a small chunk from the concrete block wall. The gouge was still there, visible when Edward Everett closed the door.
Anger he could tolerate, even though he was just the messenger boy, a Western Union–gram of disappointment; as long as they did not become violent, he could let them vent. After they ran out of steam, he told them he had been there, on their side of the desk. He told them about the form letter the Cardinals sent him, and sometimes added an embellishment: that they had misspelled his name. The worst were the kids who fell silent. Edward Everett could not tell what they were thinking. One of the first players he gave the bad news to—a kid whose name he would never forget who played for him in Cumberland, Florida: Tripp Burroway; William T. Burroway, the third, the son and grandson of heart surgeons—killed himself an hour and a half after he left Edward Everett’s office. When Edward Everett told him: “I’m sorry. It’s not my decision,” Burroway sat in silence, blinking slowly, the color washing out of his face, before he nodded, stood up, sat back down again as if he had lost his balance, then left the ballpark without even passing by his locker. When the three players he shared an apartment with got home after the game, they found him dead from an overdose of Halcion. Edward Everett had no idea Burroway was medicated, that he suffered from serious anxiety. He was intense: in the dugout, when he wasn’t on the field, he would sit jiggling his legs up and down furiously, so hard that it sometimes made the entire bench vibrate. But Edward Everett thought it was just competitive fire. When he called Burroway’s family a week later to offer condolences, his mother hung up on him as soon as he told her who he was. He would forever be, for the Burro-way family, the man who killed their son.
At ten, the rain started again, so hard Edward Everett could hear it hissing against the ballpark as he sat in his windowless office. He went down the tunnel toward the field and even before he reached the dugout, could see it might be the heaviest rain of the year so far; it blew in waves into the dugout, spraying water back up the tunnel toward him. Puddles stood deep in the outfield grass and streams of water ran down the creases in the bright yellow tarp stretched across the infield.
As he stood there, a brilliant fork of lightning flashed beyond the far edge of the right field wall and the nearly simultaneous boom of thunder shook the stadium so hard he felt the vibration in his chest. The fluorescent tubes illuminating the tunnel flickered, went out, came back on and then went out again. An odd silence fell on the ballpark—a silence of the systems shutting off: no more buzzing of the fluorescent tubes, no more drone and rattle of the air-conditioning—just the incessant roar of the rain beating against the roof of the dugout and rattling against the tarp.
He knew the ballpark from his years of nearly living in it but still he could not remember being