Rough Trade

people in the box.
    “Gus Wallenberg, of course.”
    “He’s here?” I demanded, surprised.
    “That’s him over there with Beau, the one with the mustache who sort of looks like Hitler. I wish he would just choke.”
    “What’s he doing here?”
    “Beau invited him if you can believe it,” she continued as she drew me out the door, down the corridor, and into an adjacent box, which was vacant—another symbol of the Rendells’ distress. Since the completion of the city’s new I baseball stadium, there were no municipal funds left to renovate the football venue, and the corporate boxholders had defected in droves, lured by plush luxury boxes that actually afforded a decent view of the game. This one was now apparently being used to store dozens of stacking chairs. Chrissy boosted herself up and perched on top of them.
    “So how did the meeting go this morning?” she asked. “Are we moving to La-La Land?”
    “Have you talked to Jack? How does he think it went?”
    I countered.
    “We didn’t really have a chance to talk about it. Why? What happened?”
    “Let’s just say that your father-in-law didn’t exactly embrace the idea.”
    “Do you mind explaining what that means in plain English?”
    “He tore up the proposal and told Jeff he’d die before he moved the team.”
    “Then I wish he would,” she announced, fiercely.
    “Would what?”
    “Die,” replied Chrissy. “I wish he would die.”
    “You know you don’t mean that,” I replied, genuinely shocked. Chrissy was fun-loving and nonjudgmental by nature. This wasn’t like her at all.
    “You don’t understand,” she blurted. “We’re going to lose everything.” The last statement was delivered in something very close to a sob.
    “What?”
    “You heard me. If the team goes bankrupt, so do we. Jeff, me, the baby... personally we lose everything.”
    “How is that possible?”
    “Easy. The team hasn’t paid Jeff a salary in eleven months. We’ve borrowed every penny we can against our house just to cover our living expenses. The rest we’ve lent to the team so that they could make payroll. Can you believe it? Jeff and I are in hock up to our eyes so that his father could keep paying players whose weekly paychecks are more than most people make in a year. We haven’t paid our own bills in months.”
    “My god, Chrissy, why didn’t you tell me?” I said, reaching for my purse. “I’ll write you a check right now.”
    “For $18 million?” she countered, bitterly. “Unfortunately that’s what it’s going to cost to get us out of this mess.”
    “What about for your bills?”
    “What would be the point? Either we move the team, in which case everything’s going to be all right, or...”
    “Or what?”
    “Or it’ll be like pissing into a forest fire—a complete waste.”
    I took her by the hand.
    ‘It’ll be all right,” I said. “I promise.”
    For a second we eyed each other with the ferocious intensity of fifth graders swearing a blood oath, but it quickly evaporated into awkwardness. Nothing in our careful upbringings had ever prepared us for how to gracefully navigate this moment.
    “Oh my god!” exclaimed Chrissy, as if suddenly remembering something. She hopped lightly off the pile of chairs. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to show you and the way things have been going, who knows if I’ll have another chance.”
    “What is it?”
    “You’ll see when we get there,” she replied, giving me the same mischievous look I recognized from high school,, the one that had landed me in the headmaster’s office on more than one occasion.
    I followed her down the stairs and through the labyrinthine back corridors of the stadium. As soon as we’d strayed from the main concourse I was astonished by how a structure that held more than eighty thousand people could suddenly seem so empty. I trailed her down a dim corridor illuminated by a series of naked light bulbs hung at intervals from dripping pipes overhead. I suddenly found myself thinking about rats. A building this old was sure to have thousands of them. After years of feasting on dropped popcorn and spilled beer they were probably as big as goats.
    We walked faster, hurrying toward our destination, though as we traversed the bowels of the aging stadium I couldn’t even begin to imagine what it was. Eventually I became aware of a noise, a kind of continuous roar like the sound of machinery or running water. As we walked, it grew louder, and