Field of Reams
Field of Reams
Kiyoshi Hirawa
The midday moon was majesty and mistrust, a beauty mark on the blue cheek of a sky that thought it a blemish. The silver nick went unsmoothed by the clouds and unvarnished by the sun, holding its chalky dangle as a pair of binoculars found it.
“Your binos are scratched.” J.R. Bryson rubbed the lenses with a sweaty shirt flap.
“Those are yours, remember?” Adrián Robinson hooked his foot around his backpack and slid it behind his leg. “You accidentally drop-kicked them in Kansas City.”
J.R. closed his right eye and squinted through the blurry left lens at the moon. “Ah, shit, that’s right, I forgot. Hey, if you’re not using–”
“Nope.” Adrián had grown tired of J.R. breaking his gear: cameras, tablets, water bottles, all cracked, scratched, or dented. His partner wasn’t clumsy, just chronically careless.
J.R. swung his binoculars from the bone-white crescent to a deeply tanned arm snapping a baseball fifty yards away. “So that’s him, huh?”
Adrián adjusted his radio and earphones, watching everything else but the rubberband-arm phenom. “That’s him.”
“How old again?” J.R. marveled at the kid’s velocity.
“Not sure exactly. Just know he’s under eighteen.”
“Anybody clock him yet?”
Adrián exhaled in exasperation. “Are you serious, J.R.?”
“Hey, I’ll bet you a hundred bucks that kid’s throwing 88, maybe 90. And I’ll bet you a thousand bucks nobody from the majors knows about him.”
The kid was lithe and lanky, each pitch a measured economy of motion. Every whap into the leather glove was met with murmuring from bystanders. And pointing. Not at the teenager or his whiplike arm, but at his other arm, a taut rope that ended at the wrist. Fresh flesh wrapped over the joint where a hand should have started, the ragged, recent scars shining like the surface of the moon.
Adrián finally pulled a pair of binoculars from his backpack. “You see any movement?”
J.R. panned east to west. “Not that I can tell. Crazy, some unknown rocket arm in the middle of Iowa.” He adjusted the binoculars and focused on the horizon. “Hey, do you think we’re near that Field of Dreams farm? Maybe I can see it.”
“Not through all the corn in late July. Besides, it’s at least a hundred miles away.” “You ever been?”
“Nope. Not on my list.”
“Really? The greatest baseball movie ever made, and you don’t want to visit the field?”
Adrián grimaced but said nothing. J.R. caught his irritation and nudged him. “Ohhh, you didn’t like the movie, did you?”
“The movie was fine, man.” Adrián critiqued the kid’s wind-up, wondering if a bit more torso rotation could coax a few more miles per hour.
“Bullshit. You got beef with Field of Dreams.”
Through the binoculars, Adrián stared at the wide placement of the kid’s index and middle finger. Splitter, he thought, The kid’s already throwing splitters.
J.R. elbowed him again.
“So what’s your problem with a movie about baseball heaven?”
“See, that’s just it.” Adrián put his hands on hips and the binoculars bounced against his chest. “Baseball heaven. They made a movie about a bunch of players coming back to play baseball on some hallowed ground…except that the players who got to come back were cheaters, guys who were banned for throwing the World Series.”
“Yeah, but–”
“And when other players started showing up, they were all white.”
“There weren’t any Black major leaguers from that era, remember?”
“So baseball heaven is just for cheaters and white players from the early 1900’s, is that it?”
“Not always about race, brother.” J.R. looked white but was part Cherokee. He had family stories about the Trail of Tears.
“C’mon, man, there’s a scene in the movie where an old Civil Rights leader–who’s Black, by the way–watches a game in ‘baseball heaven’ played by a bunch of white guys from the segregation era…and he doesn’t say a word about it?” Adrián felt his voice rising and took a breath. He wasn’t about to lose six months of work because his partner was maybe trolling him. “I don’t know, man, my dad’s Black and my mom’s Hispanic, so yeah, maybe you’re right, maybe I got some beef with Field of Dreams.”
J.R. didn’t answer, and Adrián figured he’d pissed off his partner.
“Look, J.R., I like the film. I do. It’s just…I just wish I could’ve seen myself in the movie like the other kids did. Like, they couldn’t have had Satchel Paige or Smokey Joe Williams walk out of the corn at some point, too? Williams was half-Comanche,” he added.
J.R. wasn’t listening. His normally languid shoulders were bunched, rumpling his collar. “I got movement.”
“Yeah?” Adrián took a last glance through his binoculars at a glass window a couple stories above the corn. “Owners are up there, right?”
“Probably.”
“You think they can see us?”
J.R. dropped into a crouch. “Not unless they got binos.”
* * *
The owners did indeed have binoculars, but they, too, were focused on the teenager’s rhythmic lasering.
“Kid’s got four legit pitches already.” Rick Maier stood at the window behind his brother, Branch, who was preoccupied with a stack of contracts on his desk.
“They out there again?”
“Yeah, lunchtime.”
“Who’d they sucker into catching?”
“Dunno.”
Reluctantly, Branch leaned back from the desk and grabbed his brother’s binoculars just as another wind-up began.
“Shit, is he throwing splitters?”
Rick laughed. “Yeah, started last month.”
“What’s his name again?”
“Darién. But they call him ‘The Abbot.’ “
“Why? Is he religious or something?”
Rick laughed again. He wiggled his hand at his brother. “Think pitcher, not priest. Jim Abbott? Angels’ pitcher born without a right hand? Threw a no-hitter in the early nineties?”
Branch twisted the center focus wheel of the binoculars and stared at the scars on Darién’s residual limb. “Huh. Pretty sure that kid had both hands at some point. How old is he?”
This time, Rick did not laugh. “Nineteen.”
“Bullshit. I’ll give you sixteen.”
“Branch…”
“Fine, fine.” They’d buried this discussion long ago. “Where’s he from?”
“I asked around. Nobody knows, not even him. You know his full name? Darién Alas Estados.”
“His middle name is ‘Alas’?”
“That’s just for the documents. He says it’s really ‘a los.’
“Darién a los Estados?”
“Yep, it means ‘Darién to the States.’ He crossed the Darién Gap when he was two or three years old, apparently.”
“Seriously?” Branch’s command of geography was mainly limited to the Midwest, but he knew about the Darién Gap, a 60-mile stretch of jungle between Columbia and Panama so treacherous that no road or rail line had ever been built connecting the two countries. People literally vanished into the jungle.
“Yeah, I guess his mother drowned when they were crossing a river. Another family rescued him, renamed him, and just kept moving north.”
Branch watched the kid pitch, contemplating the walk from Columbia to Iowa. “Hey, you made the call, right?”
Rick took back the binoculars. “Yeah, but…”
“But what?”
“They’re buried in clients, Branch, you know that.”
“This kid’s different, though.”
“Why? Because he’s a left-handed pitcher?”
This was an argument that had never been buried, one that periodically resurfaced, boiled, and then temporarily cooled until the next eruption.
“They’re all not gonna make it, Branch–it’s a business, not a charity, you know that. Dad knew that. Grandpa knew it. Their grandfather knew it.”
Branch shoved the contracts across the table and stood up, confronting his frustration, not his brother.
“I don’t care if–”
Staccato rapping sounded on the black cherry door. Branch’s wife rushed into the room, panic clouding her eyes.
“They’re back.”
Branch hugged her, feeling tension ripple through her shoulders. “Don’t worry about it, probably just another knock-and-talk.”
“It’s not.” Rick had the binoculars back out and was watching people bolt in all directions. “This looks like some serious shit, Branch.”
* * *
In 1856, German immigrant and early forty-niner Friedrich Maier fled California with his Chinese-born wife. Tired of the intimidation and violence faced by immigrant miners, they decided to use their modest, newfound fortune to settle in a less cutthroat territory. They found Iowa, and amid the skepticism of their neighbors, they started a paper mill, initially relying on straw instead of wood pulp due to the lack of timber.
Business unexpectedly boomed, and despite lucrative buyout offers from major paper companies, Maier resisted selling for two reasons. One, he wanted the business to remain in his family. And two, remembering the abuse he and his wife had suffered in California, Maier wanted the paper mill to remain an employment haven for the newly arrived.
Over the next century and a half, the company’s fortune waxed and waned, but eventually constricted until it settled into a niche as a producer of custom stationery for artists and bookmakers. Yet Maier’s legacy endured: the company remained in family hands and the paper mill maintained its immigrant-friendly reputation.
* * *
It was the latter portion of that legacy which now threatened the company’s future.
Branch Maier burst out into his company’s parking lot and saw a surging sea of ballistic armor and tactical belts. “ICE” placards on vests and hats bobbed in the surf of swarming agents.
Seething, he found a familiar face to unload his rage.
“What in the actual fuck, Lane?” Branch stopped short of grabbing his old high school teammate, but he jabbed a finger deep into the agent’s tactical vest. “You said you would keep me in the loop.”
Lane Frankel had played shortstop and had relayed hundreds of Branch’s left field throws to home plate in high school; they were the only pair of all-state teammates during their senior year. He smacked Branch’s hand away. “No, I said I would keep you in the loop if you kept me in the loop. And you didn’t. You got illegals working in your mill.”
Branch ignored the accusation like a 3-0 pitch. “Get off my property.”
Lane slapped a handful of papers into Branch’s chest. “Search warrant. And detainers.”
Branch sent the papers into the wind where they blew across the fertile blackness of Iowa’s famous topsoil, two feet deep in places. “This is such bullshit, Lane, these people just want to work.”
Lane pointed to a couple of handcuffed workers seated in an SUV. “The one on the left? Armed robbery in Louisiana–gang member. The one on the right? Stole a car in Arkansas–assaulted the owner.” He turned back to Branch and spread his hands. “If you can tell me–definitively–that no illegal here has committed a serious crime, we’re gone. I’ll walk. We ain’t talking about shoplifting here, Branch.”
“So just burn it all down, is that it? Send ‘em all back? Where’re we gonna find workers, Lane? You got a couple of kids–they want to pick fruit and vegetables in the heat and rain? Clean hotel rooms? Roof houses? Work the kill floor in a packing plant?”
“Glad you mentioned that.” Lane plucked a sheet of paper blowing around on the ground and held it out to Branch. “Sixteen-year-old Darién Estados. Two years ago, he got his arm caught in a band saw in a slaughterhouse. Lost his right hand–fourteen years old. He still working here?”
“We haven’t had a major injury in over ten years.”
As if confronting an umpire, Lane stepped almost chest-to-chest with his former teammate. “If you can tell me–definitively–that your mill will never, ever have another serious accident, I’m gone. Shit, I’ll even let you keep the kid.”
Branch realized that the last time they were this close, they were dogpiling at the state championship. “Get outta my face, you fucking stormtrooper.”
Lane didn’t move, didn’t even blink. “You know what’s worse than a stormtrooper, Branch? Somebody who’s got kids and carjackers working in a paper mill.” He stepped even closer. “Where’s the kid?”
* * *
Darién a los Estados had been chased before. Through jungles. Across deserts. Into rivers. Down alleys and under bridges. And he’d learned that it was better to be sly than swift.
So when ICE agents interrupted his lunchtime pitching exhibition, he hunkered down behind a series of air conditioners and generators, waiting for the first burst of agents to pass. Then slowly, he crawled along a warehouse wall towards the cornfield, a hundred yards away. Fifty yards. Then twenty-five. And finally, the corn was within reach.
Like a pair of ambush predators, Agents J.R. Bryson and Adrián Robinson burst out of the cornfield, shouting at him in English and Spanish. Darién immediately understood and disobeyed both sets of commands, leaping up and sprinting inside the warehouse.
Guns drawn, J.R. and Adrián lunged through the warehouse door and stared, overwhelmed. The warehouse was dim and colossal, nearly every square foot stacked with shrink-wrapped pallets, an area the size of a baseball outfield stacked to the ceiling with reams of paper.
After clearing the first twenty feet, Adrián stared down the narrow row that ended in darkness. “We gotta stop, we need more people.”
“There’s only one way out–the other exit.” J.R. urged from behind. “We’ll either catch him or flush him out.”
“Maybe. Unless he hunkers down…or doubles back.” Adrián whirled around and caught Darién in the blaze of his flashlight. “No se mueva!”
Darién froze. The “dash and double back” ploy had never failed him before, and now he was trapped.
“Good catch, Adrián.” J.R. was twenty yards away and bearing down on the teenager like a wolf.
Hold up.” Adrián grabbed his partner’s shoulder. “Look, he’s got a box cutter.” The weapon trembled in the teenager’s hand.
“Suelta el cuchillo,” J.R. barked.
“It’s not a knife.” Adrián tried to move past J.R. in the narrow row of reams. “Do not fucking shoot that kid, J.R., it’s a box cutter.”
“Suéltalo!” J.R. took another step forward. “Drop it!”
“Give him a chance to put it down.” Adrián tried to gently pull his partner backwards to create time and distance. “Let’s get him talking.”
Darién was a statue, rigid except for his face. His eyes were the portholes of a sinking ship, water cascading down his cheeks.
“Suéltalo!” J.R. shouted. “Drop the fucking knife, cabrón.”
“He’s a crying kid with a box cutter, J.R. Back up.”
Darién took a small step towards the exit, the box cutter shaking, and J.R.’s finger slid down the frame of the gun to the trigger, touching, tensing, curling.
A dark flash hurtled out of the shadows, knocking Darién to the ground, and Adrián heard a soft pop. The boxcutter spun and skidded under a pallet.
The ICE agent on top of Darién grinned up at J.R and Adrián. “Saw you boys go in after him, thought I’d sneak in the other side, just in case. Good thing, too.” He yanked the teenager’s arms behind his back, and Darién screamed in pain. “Yeah, it fucking hurts when you pull a knife on a federal agent, doesn’t it?” He stood and yanked Darién to his feet, who howled and doubled over.
Adrián inhaled sharply, noticing a bump distending along Darién’s collarbone. He remembered the quiet pop and saw the boy’s shoulder angled like a branch twisted by a tornado.
“We’re gonna need medical.” Adrián grabbed his radio. “Broken collarbone, maybe his shoulder, too.”
The agent sat Darién down and then noticed the kid’s missing right hand. “Well, shit, how do you cuff an injured cripple?”
* * *
After the raid, the parking lot of the Maier Paper Mill became a respite of sorts. Agents yawned and guzzled water as they stood over rows of sweating, handcuffed workers. With the mill shut down, workers who hadn’t bolted or been arrested hugged each other under the canopy shade of a couple of Bur Oaks. The other Maier employees stood in a huddle, united in silence against the agents attempting to interview them.
Branch was still seething, still arguing with Lane, when J.R. and Adrián walked out of the warehouse with Darién.
It would be his last image of the teenager, a boy staggering, sobbing, holding one dangling arm with the stump of another, sweat and snot running into his mouth.
“What did you do to him?” he shouted. The agent who’d tackled Darién walked by, shrugging. “Was that you, fuckhead?”
Rick wrapped him up, trying to walk him away. “Branch…”
“What’s your name, asshole?” Branch pointed over Rick’s arms. “I got a lawsuit with your name on it.”
And that’s when Rick saw it. “Oh, shit.”
It was the aghast despair in Rick’s voice that staunched Branch’s rage. “What?” “His shoulder.” Rick pointed. “His left shoulder.”
Branch stared as Darién was escorted toward an ambulance. The arm that had conjured fastballs, change-ups, curveballs, and even sliders could not even lift itself. It was a torn canvas, a cracked sculpture, a splintered violin, and Branch felt something collapse within him.
He lunged past Rick and grabbed Lane with both hands. Another agent immediately grabbed him from behind, and Branch instinctively wheeled, his elbow snapping up and cracking the agent’s nose.
“You’re done,” Branch shouted, backpedaling, pointing. Every agent came running, led by J.R. and Adrián, who left Darién with the paramedics. “All of you. This shit you started? I’m finishing it.” He turned and ran back into the mill’s executive offices.
Like fire ants from a nest, the ICE agents poured after Branch, trailed by Lane and Rick. “What do you think he meant by ‘finishing it’?” Lane asked.
“No idea.”
“You guys got any weapons up in that office?”
“No…well, just an old handgun, a Glock.”
“Okay, stay here.” Lane radioed the information about the gun and jogged ahead, taking the steps by two. He found a bottleneck of agents stacked up near a door.
“Locked?”
J.R. nodded, and Adrián urged, “Maybe we wait? Use time and talk?”
Lane hesitated, then shook his head. “I’m not waiting for him to find that gun, especially after he hit one of our guys. We go now.” He took stock of the agents crouching in a line down the hallway and began assigning duties. “Ram. Shield. Rifle. Rally on me.”
They stacked by the door, and Lane flicked his hand forward. The first agent blew the door with a single swing of the battering ram, and Lane pushed the shield man into the room…and almost instantly locked eyes with Branch, who was bladed away from him.
Lane watched his old high school teammate turn towards him, a black object in his hand coming up. Lane felt his gun buck one, twice, and Branch collapsed on the floor.
The other agents cleared the room as J.R. and Adrián entered. Lane hadn’t moved, and as Adrián approached Branch, he understood why. A black cell phone lay on the ground next to him, a voice shouting from the receiver.
Adrián picked up the phone as J.R. knelt next to Branch. “Who’s this?”
“I’m Darién Estados’ immigration attorney,” the man on the phone screamed. “Were those gunshots? Who the fuck is this?”
Branch was alternating between gasps and groans.
“Get those paramedics up here,” Adrián barked into the radio. He looked down at J.R., who stared past him, confused. Adrián turned and saw the paramedics already in the doorway, swiveling their heads, equally perplexed.
“How’d you know he was shot?” J.R. asked.
The first paramedic looked completely bewildered. “We didn’t. That kid you left us with? He escaped, ran out of the ambulance when we started to move.”
“Wasn’t anybody with you guys?”
“They were, but all of sudden, everybody started running up here. That’s what we came to tell you–that he’s gone, and we couldn’t find him.”
“Are you shitting me?”
But the paramedics were already working on Branch.
The scene turned slow-motion for Adrián. There was the heaving chest of Branch and the bloodless face of Lane, who still hadn’t moved, was cradling his gun and trembling; Rick screaming, trying to claw his way past three agents in the threshold; J.R. bellowing into the radio, next to the smirking agent who’d tackled Darién, the one rolling his eyes whenever someone looked his way.
Adrián backed away with heavy steps, finally bumping into and staring out the window overlooking the makeshift baseball field. At the edge of the outfield, he saw a figure creeping along the corn with a posture that seemed to wince and moan, even at a distance.
The figure was tide and twilight, eclipse and echo, pausing only briefly before flitting into the corn like a ghost.
Kiyoshi Hirawa is a poet, writer, and former police officer who was wrongfully terminated after reporting sexual misconduct and rape committed by fellow police officers. Hirawa’s writing focuses on mental health, trauma, resiliency, hope, and providing a voice for the unheard, ignored, and overlooked. Hirawa grew up on Braves baseball and still has dreams about being the fourth starter in the rotation behind Maddux, Glavine, and Smoltz.
Jason David Córdova (“Field of Reams”) lives in Puerto Rico as an illustrator and painter. Some of his art can be seen on Instagram at @jasoni72. You can visit his shop on Red Bubble.
The Twin Bill is a nonprofit organization with 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status. You can support The Twin Bill by donating here.