stadium lights. In the bleachers, workers moved through the aisles, bending to pick up trash. From some blocks away, where the city was staging a fireworks show on the riverfront, Edward Everett could hear the muted explosions celebrating the holiday. Every once in a while, a red or blue trail streaked across the sky within his field of vision. He stood there until the finale lit the sky in brilliant yellows, oranges and greens, and as the last flares faded, as the lights went out in Busch Stadium below him and all he could make out was the great dark gaping bowl of it, he thought about calling someone.
His mother would be at his aunt’s house for the barbecue she had every year. If he called there to tell her about what he’d done, she would pass the telephone around, to uncles, aunts, cousins, and he would have to repeat his story over and over for everyone. His mother would say,
Oh, if only your father were still alive to see this
, and then she’d cry and he didn’t want that, not tonight, not when he’d finally made it this far, the beginning of what he knew would be his years in the major leagues. He thought of the girl he had been seeing in Springfield, Julie, but whom he had stopped calling for no reason he could think of, just made a decision one day when he got back from a road trip that he didn’t want to see her again. For the first time since then, he regretted it, because she was someone he could call to tell, but now he couldn’t.
Stepping away from the window, he caught his dim mirrored image in it, and he actually seemed to be outside, hovering in an incomplete,ghostlike room. There was the reflection of a bedside lamp, a slash of the bed, the table where he’d laid his suitcase. He pressed his face against the window again. Below, knots of people leaving the fireworks show moved up the street toward their cars and, he knew, eventually home. He felt suddenly the fact of his being a stranger in a city of two million people where he knew no one.
He turned from the window and switched on the television, flipping channels until he found a sportscast. The announcer was talking about the game and Edward Everett sat on the edge of the king-sized bed, wondering if he’d be mentioned.
The account of the final inning showed Brock’s catch and throw for the double play, twice—once at full speed, and once in slow motion. Then it cut to Fairly’s double to start the home half of the inning, but then it jumped ahead, and Fairly was taking his lead off third.
“Then with one out,” the sportscaster said, “and Fairly on third, Hernandez singles over the drawn-in infield and the Cards get the win.”
It was, Edward Everett thought, like a baseball miracle—there is Fairly on second and then abruptly on third, through no human agency.
Poof
. In a way, he might never have even been there. Indeed, he knew what his line would be in the box score the next day, all zeros—no at-bats, no hits, no runs, no RBI, just “Yates PH 0000”—a miracle of nothing.
Still, he thought, he was here. There was a uniform in a locker across the street with his name on it and only six hundred men out of how many tens of millions of men in America could say that. Tomorrow was another game and the day after another still. He would have his chance and he would do something with it.
Chapter Two
T he end of Edward Everett’s season came with such abruptness that, even years later, it could nearly take away his breath to think about it: in the latter part of July, three weeks after he was called up. The Cardinals were in Montreal for a three-game weekend series and on Saturday, he came to the park and found he was in the starting lineup. It surprised him: since his sacrifice bunt on Independence Day, he had ridden the bench—game after game in St. Louis, then Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia—suppressing a dread that his single plate appearance would be the sum of his major league career. Perry would heal and Edward