“Louisiana Heat”
by Ben Vanelli
The minimum salary for a Minor League Baseball player is $46,600. In 2018, the living wage in the United States was $16.54 per hour, or $68,808 per year.
The sweat fell from Holden Eckhert’s nose and onto the baseball that he was holding behind his glove. More perspiration crawled off of his eyebrows and into his eyes, burning them, at which point he was forced to wipe his forehead and reset his windup. They can wear shorts in basketball, and they don’t even play outside. But God forbid you skin your calf sliding into second.
It was the sixth inning of his final start of the season and Holden was approaching a hundred pitches, with the game tied at 4. He glanced towards the dugout as he adjusted his cap and paced around the mound, briefly locking eyes with Terry Lincoln, the older-than-dirt manager who didn’t believe that pitch count was important to the health of any young pitcher’s arm. It was then where Holden noticed the crowd and their various sounds; the old men whose best days were behind them, heckling a minor leaguer who was better at twenty-five than any of them ever were; the complaints of small children whose single mothers thought that a baseball game would be good fun on an August afternoon in New Orleans, of all places; and the cries of vendors who may have been the only people in the stadium more frustrated, more sweaty, than he was.
Holden brushed his hand against his pants and regrouped with a drier ball. He licked his lips as he tended to do in these situations, inadvertently tasting the saltiness that was waiting for him. He got the sign from behind the plate and, unable to trust his own judgments at that point in the game, nodded and gripped his fingers around the seams for a curveball. The batter, Dominguez, was a Dominican top prospect for Miami, who was already two-for-three on the day. His bat moved back and forth with vigor in his hands above his head with men on the first two bases, but he swung right over the curve. That was the feeling that got him this far. Throwing a ball to a guy who thought he would be the next Griffey, with movement that seemed almost impossible or velocity that would crack a skull if it was only a few feet in the wrong direction. Having that hotshot’s giant head rear back as their bat completely missed the ball– it was priceless. That was the feeling that would cool him off.
Holden got the ball back and nodded at the next sign, displaying his full trust towards his catcher, Grant Reynolds. He signed what Holden’s dad had always said. Something about a gun.
A one hundred mile an hour fastball on the lower outside corner was unhittable, but that’s not what Holden threw. Instead, the baseball slung towards the upper-middle of the zone, and with hands faster than the pen that signed Holden’s minimum salary contract, Dominguez cracked the baseball into the setting sun. He stood there for a while, the bat still in his hands, admiring his work as it sailed into the air. But before Holden could pick a fight, he was rounding first.
The home crowd, expecting a third out instead of a three-run deficit, was now silent. It seemed to get hotter even as the sun went down. Holden knew that Lincoln was heading toward the mound, ready to take the ball, but he didn’t look in his manager’s direction until Lincoln was right there on the mound with him and Reynolds.
“You had your stuff today, kid,” was Lincoln’s usual reaction to a poor start. No different here. The pat on the back was new.
Holden let go of the new baseball. It seemed to thank him for letting it go. Player and manager walked back to the dugout together. Holden watched the new pitcher hustle from the outfield bullpen to the mound, his mouth wide open as he huffed for no particular reason. He was always breathing like every step was the last of a marathon. Even though he was a hundred feet away by the time Holden was in the dugout, he could hear him gasping. From there he watched the rest of the game, which New Orleans would go on to lose to no one’s fault other than his own, and the team returned to the clubhouse afterward.
This wasn’t Minnesota. Cold showers were a necessity, and God, did they feel good. The winter of St. Paul would always be preferable to the summer of New Orleans. To be in St. Paul again… how cool it would have been if the Twins had selected him. Hometown hero gets the Opening Day start. Goes 14-3 with a 3.20 ERA, 167 strikeouts, to keep it realistic. Wins the Cy Young. This was when the old arm started to hurt, and reality was reintroduced with the feeling of a rotator cuff becoming just a little more detached from the bone.
The locker room had no windows. It was the bottom floor– half a basement– of a damp minor league ballpark in a section of New Orleans that was about twenty feet underwater in August of 2005. Gray carpet, gray lockers, giant bricks painted white for the walls. The only color came from the manager’s office. Its door frame was lined with mahogany. The inside had brighter lights and the most color on the entire floor, though that didn’t make it any less depressing. It was this room that Lincoln would call Holden to after he finished up at his locker, approaching him as the last of Holden’s teammates were stuttering out of the stadium.
“Got some time.” He was asking, but said it like a statement. The wad of chewing tobacco slapped Holden’s olfactories.
“Yeah.” He sniffled, a habitual reaction to when he was off-put, but immediately regretted it with the overload of nicotine. Holden then followed his manager into his office, slowly lowering his sore glutes onto the cushion of the chair across from the desk. He saw the picture of Lincoln and his elderly wife on the manager’s desk. She had short hair that was rolled up in curls and was revealing a set of teeth that featured some truly awful open spaces. She was fat, too.
Lincoln let out a deep sigh. It’s never good when someone sighs before they even start talking. In the middle of a sentence, it means it’s nobody’s fault. Simply an expression that “It is what it is, and we’ll deal with it.” At the end of a sentence, a sigh is more rare, but it’s more upon the realization of the speaker. Less personal to the listener. It creates some distance. But a sigh at the beginning.
“How are ya?”
Oh, God.
“Y’know.”
“Right.” Lincoln pursed both sides of his lips, hiding them behind the full, gray beard he sported year-round. That was when Holden knew.
“Son, the guys upstairs are lettin’ ya go. I had nothing to do with this. Couldn’t if I tried.”
Typical of the old hack to make it about him, even subtly. “Not his fault.” How could it be his fault? He’s a Triple-A baseball manager, not a billionaire executive who drafts the handsomest faces out of college, regardless of on-base percentage. Why would this be at all his fault? Did he think Holden was stupid enough to believe that it was his fault? Is that why he felt the need to say that?
“Am I gonna be traded?” Holden choked.
“Unconditional release.” Lincoln seemed to talk a bit easier now.
“Oh.” Holden had never remembered a time in his life before this when he had responded to news with “Oh.” It just slipped out, like how a sob can. Maybe it was the fact that he had expected it. Maybe it was that Lincoln knew about this for at least a couple of days now and had only decided to tell him after the final start of his professional career. If he had been told earlier, Holden could have at least put everything he had into that performance. Or maybe it was that, even before a seven-run outing, he was deemed not good enough to be a part of the club. And the front office was right about him. He was expendable. He was a liability.
He sucked.
Terry Lincoln sat there with his chubby arms folded across his belly, looking at his former player from over the lenses of his glasses with a resting frown that expressed a perennially subtle look of disappointment, even when he interacted with a guy who had done pretty well in a game. How Holden wished to sock him in the face. Now that he could give his all.
“Now what?”
Terry didn’t move anything except for his mouth as he said, “Clean out your locker. They’ll send you your final check by the end of the week.”
It was Sunday.
“Good having ya, Eckhert.”
“Skip,” he addressed him, standing up and walking back to his locker. He was halfway out the door.
“You’ve got a hell of an arm.”
This paused all space and time. There had never been a complement greater than “You had your stuff today.” Never a word more than “See ya tomorrow, boys,” or “Give it your all today.” The prick probably just felt bad. There really was no reason to say that, either. He was just a fat, stinking old man who had no knowledge of the modern game and would probably have been on the wrong side of history when Jackie Robinson was first coming up. Holden could still hear him cursing out the one Colombian kid on the team for getting caught stealing second, even though everyone had done the same thing at one point or another. And here he was, saying he had a good arm. He must have been joking.
Holden turned around. “Thanks. Doesn’t mean much now. But thanks.”
He thought he found a smile of yellow teeth under that disgusting beard, but he couldn’t be sure. Holden wasn’t smiling.
The locker slammed with more force than he had meant, so loud that it made him physically cringe, more than he ever did after giving up bombs to thirty-year olds who never had a chance to make the majors. It reminded him of the sound of a baseball being smashed against wood. He had to walk out of the stadium taking deep breaths.
New Orleans apartments smell and feel worse than they look. During an off day, just sitting at home, it’s not that bad. You get used to it, the same way you get used to your own sweat. The smell of expired shrimp and marshland that swirled up the nostrils became merely an atmospheric detail after a while. Then you wade through it as you move about, the humidity substantial and permanent. But after being in the open air– when you’re tired and hot and so thirsty that you’d kick a child out of the way for a cup of water– it’s another punch in the face.
Holden turned the key into the lock, hoping the window would be open or something, but the air had the same thickness inside as it did in the hallway. Veronica, his girlfriend and senior by three or four years, was covered by sheets on the bed in the far corner. It wasn’t even sunset yet.
Figuring it was time for her to get up anyway, Holden didn’t stop himself from making an over-acceptable amount of noise as he put his bag down and opened the fridge, where he poured himself a giant glass of orange juice. The sheets began to rustle and Veronica sat up, pushing the stringy brown hair away from her face. Her olive skin matched the walls of the room.
“Hi,” was all she could muster, half-conscious.
Holden raised his eyebrows at her, halfway through his orange sprint.
Veronica got out of bed and put her shorts on. They hugged her legs with force that should’ve cut off bloodstream somewhere. The pink tank-top was apparently enough out of bed, despite her requirement of four blankets just to be able to sleep.
“I’m tired,” she yawned. Holden wanted to tell her that naps after 3:00 would only make her quality of sleep worse, and that’s what happens when you drink until four in the morning. But he just finished his drink and put the glass on the counter.
“You teaching next week?”
“Yeah.” He still hadn’t taken his right hand off the cup, his left holding the side of the counter like he was trying to lift it up.
“Gonna put that in the sink?”
Sink. How funny this language is. Words can have no connection to each other, but they’re spelled the same or they sound the same and they eventually get tangled in some cosmic way. I should’ve thrown the sinker, Holden thought. But it didn’t matter.
“They cut me.” He positioned his right hand to mirror his left. Holden still wasn’t looking at Veronica, but he felt her wake up.
“Why?” She sounded disgusted. He didn’t answer. “What does that mean? Do we have to go somewhere else?” The light peeling of her feet from the hardwood approached him. He turned around to defend himself.
“I’m done there, and I don’t have an income unless the school calls me in every fucking day of the week, which won’t happen, so…”
He talked impertinently, tracking off because of his own inability to think of anything else to say. He saw the slender bridge of her nose, how her nostrils seemed to turn upward. He sniffled. He was suddenly agitated at Veronica’s mere presence, the audacity she had to come up to him like that and stick her skinny nose into his crisis. Holden had broken his nose once when he was seventeen. He put his glove up to catch a ball, but it went right through the webbing (a possibility when the throw is hard enough and the glove is thin enough), and suddenly his white uniform had been polka-dotted with blood, like a first grader had decorated it. It kept him off the field for two weeks. Two weeks that could have been instrumental in his development.
Wind chimes clanged outside of the restaurant across the street. Even with the window closed, he could still hear those goddamn wind chimes.
“Honey…” She put her hand on his aching shoulder. It didn’t cool him down, but the thoughts racing in loops around his head ended. “Another team will want you. They’ll see something.” She sounded like his mother– unsure of what was really happening. Comforting him to make him feel better, but only invalidating herself to him, showing that she would rather go to false feelings of comfort than just accept the fucking consequences of his decision not to go to college.
He wanted to say something like, “Then we’ll have to move. And I don’t wanna move you. And I won’t make any more money than I did here. And I’ll need a full-time job in the fall and the winter. And I don’t have a resume. And that’s all assuming a team would want someone who can’t get a ball past a bat to pay his own rent.”
“I don’t know,” is what he said.
“Bullets,” his dad would say during practices. “Look out for friendly fire!” It made him smile when he was nine. It embarrassed him when he was in high school. But at twenty-five, standing in a pool of saltwater fog and with the hand of a woman who made him feel nothing on the same shoulder that ached, that had promised him so much and delivered him so little, it made him smile again.