Class A Read Free Page A

picture of this scene, tinted it sepia, and burned the edges, it would be believable as something pulled from a time capsule of the game, from rubble, from ash. This is a Depression-era building,a WPA initiative, one of thirty-three hundred stadiums built in a two-year sprint, all virtually identical, now mostly gone. The crown jewel of the project, Tiger Stadium in Detroit, was bulldozed into a parking lot two years ago.
    I wander through the fans.
    Children ask me to sign things. A man named Kevin who has come to the games for twenty-seven years for the sole purpose of dancing the chicken dance in front of a crowd turns to me between innings and announces, “Louie, it’s time for the chicken dance.” A toddler sitting in the front row reaches out to me, blue tendrils of cotton candy covering his cheeks. He’s the son of one of the team’s catchers. Born in Venezuela, he’s spent ten of his first eighteen months in basement apartments of American houses and in stadiums. I see his mind begin to work on centering himself when he notices me, a landmark for where he is and what’s happening. I’m not the portly bee in Burlington or the ear of corn with arms and legs in Cedar Rapids or the stupid firefighting canine of Peoria.
    I am Louie, and he is home.
    I hold him so that people can take pictures of his little head pressed against my enormous one. People like the way that he’s fascinated with me, overwhelmed by me. I like it, too. It’s so easy to trust my own significance in the suit and in the stadium, to be sure that he will remember me and remember this whole tableau, always, even if soon he can’t quite place the memory. His mother urges him to tell me, “
Te amo, Louie
,” but the boy has been mute since he got here.
    By most standards, Erasmo has had a fantastic season, but he’s failed to win two of his past four games, due to a combination of opposing players walloping his fastballs for disconcerting home runs and his teammates’ inability to score. This quasi-failure has contributed to a change in his demeanor. He arrived as the grinning, agreeable little brother of the locker room, but now his quiet is the sullen kind, even as his team is slowly pulling itself into the play-off hunt. He sucks down fruit cups and wanders around, ending up back in the weight room, staring at himself as he hoists dumbbells over his shoulders, ignoring coaches who tell him that’s enough.
    Tonight, he wills himself back into the game. In the third inning, he begins to feel his changeup working, a pitch relatively new to him, and he throws it again and again. He gets the massive Dominican prospect Rainel Rosario to freeze and watch a changeup float past him, his legs unsure, his face frantic. Erasmo lets himself crack a quick smile before bouncing off the mound. Brad in the public address booth presses the button that delivers the
ha-ha
sound, like in
The Simpsons
, and everybody laughs at Rainel Rosario.
    In the middle of the fifth inning, I judge the miniature John Deere tractor race. Two brothers, four and five, struggle to pedal rusted tires on the grass by the dugout. I hold out my hands as they finally pass me, and I indicate, lying, that the race was a tie. I’m cheered by most for my benevolence and booed by two drunk men with thin facial hair around their jaws and indecipherable neck tattoos. They believe in hard truths.
    They throw peanuts shells, try to get them stuck in my crown. Betty comes to my defense. There’s a sense of etiquette here, woven into the boring spaces of every home game. For fans who’ve come year after year, fifteen, twenty, thirty years, seventy home games each year, until thousands of innings run together in memories, all from the same view in the same seat in the same park, there is pressure to represent all of the noble tradition that should be, that is, still here.
    “Why on earth would you do that to Louie?” Betty asks these drunken man-children. And they can’t answer her.