Donnie Trainor was meticulous. When he was on the hill, everyone knew they had extra time between half-innings. Outfielders took additional tosses. Infielders got a few more grounders, and the opposing hitters—the first two or three due up—got a half-dozen extra dry-cuts while Donnie stood atop the mound and shuffled dirt around, against, and behind the rubber.
Donnie Trainor was like an old Timex: predictable and bullshit-free.
The first time I met him, I was in the parking lot outside our old practice facility up at Parson’s. I heard a car door slam harder than it should’ve and turned around to see a relative giant walking away from a gold Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight.
“What up, dawg?” the giant sputtered. His head gave a slight bob, eyebrows raised. He carried a bag over his shoulder embellished with raised stitches that spelled out D. Trainor 61.
“I’m all right,” I replied. “What’s good with you?”
“Ain’t nothing shakin’ but the landscapin’,” he chimed. His voice shifted an octave as he gruffly drew out the last word: laaaaan-scapin.
Over the course of the three years I played with Donnie Trainor, I swear I heard him utter that same phrase ten million times. It was as if he earned royalties off it: large, hefty sums that piled up and up.
When Donnie spoke, it was almost always from behind a big smile that revealed a single, gold incisor he somehow got on his sixteenth birthday. He wore his brim flat a good decade-and-a-half before any of the Dirt Bags at Long Beach State made it famous. In fact, Donnie’s brim was so flat that even Columbus wouldn’t have dared to sail across it. The cap, itself, was always two or three sizes too big, which caused it to tilt a bit and slide to the left every time he uncorked his massive right arm and hurled the ball home. Donnie was so predictable that, if I hadn’t known better, I’d have sworn his whole shtick was some sort of ruse, an attempt to cover some insecurity or compensate for a deep deficit in ability.
But Donnie Trainor was about as legit as they came.
On the mound, Donnie was a mountain. By the time he turned 17, he stood 6’5” tall and weighed 270 pounds. He wore his uniform loose, too, which made him look even bigger. Donnie should’ve been something more than what he was. He never broke out, though, never got the big options or earned as much as he was probably worth. The last time I heard from Donnie Trainor, he was pitching for some independent club in Montgomery, Alabama.
***
One late-July afternoon, a bunch of us sat in the clubhouse (or what served as a clubhouse up at Parson’s) talking shit and scattering dreams we swore we knew so much about. We talked contracts and scholarships, shots at The Show, and routes through the minors that ran farther and farther up the ladder. We were teenage kids and only knew how to think big; the world hadn’t yet applied its heavy restraints. Those would come, though, sooner and less forgiving for some than others.
“I just want a shot,” Justin Robbins muttered, his bottom lip pursed with half a tin of Copenhagen. “I’ll make something of the rest.”
“You gotta hit to stick,” Melvin Jonson chided. “And your bat’s a fuckin’ pool noodle.”
We laughed, but a slight sputter haunted the noise. We knew Melvin was right; Justin couldn’t hit for shit. But, we also knew Justin wanted it more than any of us. And that’s not to say we all didn’t want the hell out of it. Justin Robbins, though, wanted to play ball so bad, I swore he would’ve killed to do it. Maybe that’s what finally did him in. A person can’t run that hard for that long; it’s just not sustainable.
“Look,” Alvin Davis chimed. “I’ll have a crib big as fuck. Pool for miles,” he chuckled. “Y’all welcome any time. Except you, Mason,” he paused to ratchet down his laughter. “Can’t have none of that westside grease up in there.”
“Shit,” Mason rattled. “You’d be lucky. With me, “ he added, “you might actually pull a few women.”
The more we talked, the more outlandish our statements became. We knew nothing. Maybe less.
But not Donnie Trainor.
“I just wanna throw,” he said, finally. “Throw til they ain’t let me no more.” He leaned back in his chair and laced his long, heavy fingers behind his head. “I don’t even care for who or nothin’.” He shook his head and tipped his flat brim farther back on his head; the tape arced above his hairline. “I just wanna throw,” he repeated.
And he did. Near as I can tell, he spent a two or three years in the Gulf Coast League before a glimmer of hope carried him across parts of several seasons in the Carolina League. Then, he floated through Texas and Arizona, before he finally landed his last job in Alabama.
All the while, he stayed steady and meticulous with his landscaping routine: He scooped and dug around the rubber, scraped and piled, leveled and graded so much dirt and clay and Turface. The metal cleat on the very front of his spikes stayed as exact and delicate as a surgeon’s scalpel. By the time he got to Alabama, he’d probably turned and tamped his landing spot tens—maybe even hundreds—of thousands of times, and he’d drawn a T on the back side of more mounds than he could possibly count, a move that started by accident, then became somewhat of a superstition, before it morphed into pure muscle memory.
***
I asked Donnie about his landscaping routine one night after practice just before the midpoint of the summer season our junior year of high school.
“But,” I said, when he told me that his routine always (and he stressed the word always as if he was slowly spelling it—A-L-W-A-Y-S—in his mind) had to be done in the exact same order, “why spend so much time with it? I mean,” I smiled, careful with my words, “you’re out there forever, trying to get things just right.”
“Exactly,” he said. “Exactly.” He paused and smiled, his gold tooth gleamed. “Otherwise,” he added, “why do it at all?”
It bothered me, though, that he really hadn’t actually answered my question.
***
By the time he finally stopped playing, Donnie Trainor had notched 24 seasons of professional baseball. He never made The Show, but from two days after he turned 18 until three weeks before his 42nd birthday, someone paid Donnie Trainor to play baseball. The money was never ridiculous, but for awhile it took care of everything, and, over the years, Donnie managed to squirrel away enough to have a comfortable cushion, a cushion that softened matters toward the end when his salary wasn’t what it once was and far from what it should’ve been for someone like Donnie Trainor.
But even for as meticulous as Donnie Trainor was, being meticulous just isn’t always enough. Besides, nobody—not even Donnie Trainor—could be that meticulous all the time. It’s just not sustainable. There’s a difference, after all, between meticulousness and vigilance. Donnie Trainor might have been both, but it only takes a moment to ruin everything. For Donnie Trainor, that moment came one Monday afternoon in August, on an off-day between back-to-back home stands with Biloxi and Huntsville.
Donnie was over at his neighbors’ house—Gus and Martha Walters—an elderly couple who asked Donnie to help them with odds and ends whenever he was in town. They kept an ever-changing list connected to their refrigerator by a Montgomery Stars baseball magnet.
Donnie didn’t mind the list or the work; he thought of his neighbors as family and called them Aunt and Unc about a week after he met them. Neither Gus nor Martha could pinpoint exactly why, but they almost instantly thought of Donnie as a son. They cared about Donnie, kept tabs on his health and well-being, the trajectory of his sunsetting career, and what he had in mind when it was finally over. They might’ve even loved him.
That afternoon, Donnie wrestled with an overgrown and twisted buckthorn stump while Martha hung laundry from a gently-sagging cable that ran along what had once been a fence line. Donnie chatted with Martha about her Carolina cornbread recipe as he picked and shoveled and yanked, without much success, at the gnarled root system that anchored the nasty shrub to the back corner of the Walters’ yard.
“But,” Martha chimed as she snapped a pair jeans at the waist and pinned them from the cuffs, “you gotta grease the pan all the way to the corners—really get in there.”
Donnie nodded and smiled. “And with pork fat?” he queried.
“Always,” Martha answered. “Ain’t really any other way.” She paused and inspected the hem of a flowered house dress. “I suppose butter or Crisco or somethin’ like that. But,” she continued, “pork fat is how we always done it, for as long as I can remember.”
“So,” Donnie replied as he rocked the stubborn stump back and forth, “you just pour it in or—“
A few dozen feet away, Gus worked an old lawnmower up and down a small rise that pushed against a rickety, white-washed picket fence that marked the far edge of the Walters’ property for as long as they’d lived at 29 Mulberry Street. The engine’s choke and slight backfire swallowed Donnie’s question.
“You just gotta work it with your hands,” Martha said. “Scoop it out, then use your fingers to get the bottom and all the way up the sides. The cornbread,” she continued, “will bloom and rise, and you don’t want that to run up against nothin’. Uh-uh,” she added and shook her head, lips pursed. “All that work, spoiled,” she sighed, “by something as foolish as no grease. Just a shame,” she finished.
Donnie pulled a grouping free. “Now you done it.” He smiled at Martha as he shook the dirt-stained work gloves from his hands. “I ain’t gonna think of nothin’ else now all day. Only cornbread.”
Donnie’s laugh blended—in near-chorus—with Martha’s as Gus’s 2-cycle engine sputtered and kicked once again, this time with significantly more violence. Donnie turned and saw Gus on his back, gasping, both hands on his chest. The mower coughed and slipped backward toward a flailing Gus Walters.
Donnie Trainor never would have willingly put himself in harm’s way. After all, he wasn’t reckless; he was meticulous. And Donnie Trainor wasn’t a runner. He didn’t do extra sprints or go out for a jog or anything like that. For Donnie, running was pure utility. He’d mastered its efficiency during PFPs: a quick burst, an economical route, and meticulous footwork, usually angled toward the inside corner of the first-base bag. As a result, Donnie knew a lot about the shortest distance between two points, and he knew effectiveness boiled down to a delicate balance of speed, efficiency, and quickness.
The spoiled lawnmower backed up like a vicious slider, and Donnie’s reaction arced on pure instinct; he moved quickly and efficiently. He grabbed the lawnmower’s handle to steady the awful machine, but he couldn’t have anticipated the collapse of the crossbar, which sent him reeling, off-balance, toward the mower deck. Donnie Trainor couldn’t have expected the timing to be as absolutely brutal as it was and for his hand to slip beneath the mower deck where the terrible blade spun in reckless rotation.
Donnie Trainor didn’t actually feel the blade slice across the back of his hand and over his knuckles—it happened so goddamned quickly. The blade spun wickedly fast; his skin and bones were nothing more than soft butter beneath the edge of a hot knife. Maybe, if Donnie Trainor had been running from the other direction, it might not have been his right hand—his throwing hand—that found its way under the mower deck, but it was.
And so as Donnie rode in one ambulance and Gus rode in another, both angled for the same hospital but with very different priorities, Donnie knew his career was over. Donnie Trainor knew this fact as sure as anything, but he couldn’t quite fit it into the scheme of the present moment. The reality of his sudden, tragic circumstance was a roughly-cut puzzle piece that didn’t quite fit but most surely belonged.
Baseball, Donnie thought, is over.
It’s easy to imagine that a thought like that could simply crush a person almost to death. How much, after all, is just too much? But Donnie Trainor wasn’t crushed in the slightest. He expected to be, but he wasn’t. Instead, something broke loose inside him—inside his chest—and then it vanished in a measure of time nearly non-existent. All Donnie’d ever been was a ball player. Playing baseball was all he’d ever known. And he loved it. But if he was honest, baseball brought something Donnie hadn’t ever counted on, something he never expected. Donnie couldn’t explain it; he couldn’t even really describe that something to himself, much less anyone else. He just knew it was there. It was more than a feeling, though, more than a sense: It was an entity. Donnie always felt a little crazy thinking of it this way, but an entity is exactly what it was. And that entity had its own agenda, which was mostly at odds with Donnie’s. Donnie was okay, for instance, being nervous, but his entity pushed him toward being scared. Donnie was fine making a mistake. Mistakes, after all, were opportunities to learn, to become more effective. Donnie was fine with failure, too, but the entity pushed him toward perfection. Maybe worst of all, Donnie’s entity tried to make him feel like he wasn’t enough, as if he’d never been and never would be enough. Donnie’s entity was awful; it pressed and weighed on him, occupied space, and took energy and time and anything else Donnie didn’t mind. But then, suddenly, in the back of that ambulance, Donnie’s entity disappeared. It was finally, completely gone.
***
Donnie Trainor always felt that a somewhat-measurable distance existed between what he was and what he thought he should be. Donnie often felt as if what he worked toward lingered, a tiny dot that shifted in and out of focus far off on the horizon. The distance between what Donnie wanted and what he had—what he was and what he thought he should be—made him desperate.
Year after year after year, he’d chased that blurry dot—the one he’d dreamt about so often, the one that marked the space between the life he had and the life he told himself he wanted. He’d never actually been able to qualify (much less quantify) exactly what that dot was, what it stood for or meant. He had ideas, of course: a successful baseball career, a lucrative—but not ridiculous—contract, a chance to develop, be supported, and grow. These ideas, though, were vague and fuzzy, seemingly distant, much like the dot, itself.
***
The ambulance sped faster and faster across pavement free of bumps or disturbances, absent any imperfections at all. There were no seams or cuts or cracks to catch and quiver. Donnie closed his eyes, and the adrenaline continued to course through his body. There, in the back of that ambulance, with the siren’s wails barely audible any longer, Donnie Trainor floated a few centimeters above the gurney as the once-blurry dot that had always stayed busy demarcating an immeasurable space grew fainter and fainter until suddenly it, too, became absolutely nothing at all.
