My mother said he was a quiet man, meaning a nice man,
but the kid who never got to play said
his father said our manager was a lush.
And he works for an exterminator, the kid said—
he’s a drunk fuckin’ bug-killing loser.
When he loaded our gear into his dirt-on-rust Biscayne
and pulled away in his Ohio Vending cap, trailing smoke,
he looked like a loser no matter how we’d done.
The kid’s father said so, who was some big-shot executive,
which is why his son, the kid said, never got to play.
So whenever he yelled at me for turning my head on a grounder
or for backing off Bob Maxwell’s fastball,
I’d tell myself so what? He’s just a loser—something
most of us were only on the field and only sometimes
and almost always because of someone else.
And if he was a loser, that helped explain our defeats,
and so what then if maybe he knew that off the field
is where we did our hiding behind a ball cap,
and so what if on the field, like him, we thought we had a chance
mostly if others managed to fail more than we did?
After one game when I’d refused to try to bunt
he chewed me out in front of everyone, yelled
about teamwork and how I wasn’t his only shortstop.
He benched Frankie Fields for a week once for talking dirty,
shook his head and lit a Lucky when parents booed.
One time he pulled the team and forfeited the game
after Don Hawk hit a homer but got called out
for failing to touch third, then bought us all Nehi’s
and said how, yes, small things matter
but were no reason to take a home run away from a boy.
When he gripped my wrists to show me how to hit to right,
I thought he’d break my arms, but I’ve him, I think,
to thank for making the all-star team,
and so what if his sweaty tee-shirt smelled like Raid,
and so what if one time at practice,
watching the kid who never got to play run out a lucky grounder,
he joked to his coach, our mailman, that some day
they’d have to get a calendar and time the kid,
the coach grinning in a way that left me certain
mailmen were callused and cruel and in love with danger.
Off the field, having given what light he had
until the next game or weekend practice,
when the Biscayne, its muffler dragging,
pulled into Gibby’s down the street from the ball field
and across from General Industries, where the big shot worked,
he became for us as meaningless as the sunsets that only called us home,
as pure of meaning as the game itself until upon its blankness
we wrote ourselves with every error and awkward catch
who were ourselves like the sheets of exterminator stationery
on which before each game that drunk wrote down our sunny names.