Walla Walla

Bats distributed to date: zero. Equipment managers contacted: nine. Pitches made on this stop: zero, by design. Status of the field correspondent: not where he was supposed to be.

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Tate dozed off an hour east of Snoqualmie Pass, his head tipped against the door, his sunglasses still on. The bats were quiet. The Roadmaster was holding sixty-three on the cruise. We were due in Denver Monday night, the Elevation Bureau hosting the Outer Borough Club.

I had a sleeping coach and a wagon full of bats and three hours alone with the AM dial. I thought about Lewis and Clark. They came through here in 1806, headed back. Pacific to St. Louis. I wrote a paragraph in my head and rejected it. I wrote a better one and saved it for Tate.

We came down out of the foothills onto the dry side of Washington state and picked up I-82 South at Ellensburg. Yakima, Toppenish, the Tri-Cities — the route to Boise was straight through, across the Columbia at Umatilla and onto I-84 East. We didn't make the Columbia. At Pasco a green sign came up for US-12 East. Walla Walla was that direction. Tate had played there in '76 and '77. I had heard about it from other people, never from him.

I did not consult anyone. I took the exit.

---

He woke up well past Pasco. He looked at the mile markers. He looked at the position of the sun. Then he looked at me.

"Are we in the right place?"

I had had an hour. I still didn't know how to start.

"US-12 East," I said.

He took out his phone.

"I thought we could swing through Walla Walla," I ventured.

"Boise tonight," he said, after a minute. "Or we lose Tuesday too."

I had not done the arithmetic. Tate had done it on his phone in twenty seconds.

"This wasn't on the route," he said.

"It's still on the way."

"We should've been in Oregon by now."

The sagebrush didn't end. The bats rattled when we crossed the rumble strips between lanes.

---

We pulled into a motel on West Pine in Walla Walla a little before five. The rate was sixty-two dollars. I brought the bats inside in three trips, wool blankets and all. Tate watched from his doorway.

"Pretty quiet in a town this size."

I had researched nothing. Walla Walla at six on a Sunday in May had the air of a place where nobody had eaten dinner in a long time — except for Ice-Burg Drive-In on Birch, whose neon was on. We pulled into the lot and walked up to the window. They had onion rings made from Walla Walla Sweets. I ordered a burger and the rings. Tate stood reading the menu for a beat longer than he needed to. "Burger and a banana milkshake," he said.

We ate at a picnic table. The rings were good. The burger was a burger.

---

Borleske Stadium is north of downtown — a single grandstand from 1926, the field facing southeast where most parks face northeast. Whitman College's Blues had played their last home game of the season last weekend. The Walla Walla Sweets — a collegiate summer-league team, named for the onion — don't start until late May. The field was between tenants. Monday morning the maintenance gate at the third-base side was propped open with a five-gallon bucket.

"Want to walk it?" I asked. "See if it feels like anything."

Tate looked at me. He looked at the gate.

"It feels like a field," he said.

He came anyway.

The infield was dry. The foul lines hadn't been laid. Down near the home dugout a man on a small Toro mower was working the foul territory in slow widths and not looking up at us. A vinyl banner along the right-field fence advertised the Sweets' home opener — June 2, against the Corvallis Knights.

I stood at home plate. I tried to feel what I had come here to feel.

"This wasn't the place," Tate said, looking out toward center. "It was a place. Tri-City. Salem. Tucson. Half a dozen towns between here and AAA."

We walked back toward the wagon. The bats were visible through the rear window. For a half-second I thought — wouldn't a Walla Walla bat distribution be poetic — and the half-second passed before I had finished it.

I checked my phone. The text I had sent Asher Sunday morning was still unread.

---

I started the wagon. We pulled out of the lot, back through downtown and onto WA-125, southbound for the Oregon line. Milton-Freewater came and went.

"The expedition came through here," I said, after a few miles. "Lewis and Clark. They wintered down the Columbia in '05. We're on their road home, give or take."

Tate looked out his window.

I let it die.

---

We climbed into the Blue Mountains east of Pendleton. The sun was behind us, low across the wheat we'd come up out of, throwing a long bar of orange across the dash. Tate had not taken his sunglasses off all day. The radio was losing a station I wasn't trying to find.

"Ozzie was a couple years older than me," Tate said.

I held still. Hands at ten and two.

"Came up from college after the draft. Mid-June of '77. I'd been at short the year before. Bunked on the same hallway. Ate most meals together."

The grade kept climbing.

"He wasn't called The Wizard back then. But by July, everybody knew. I knew. He got to balls nobody got to. Deep in the hole on a one-hopper, he'd have the throw away before you knew he had it. They moved me to second by August."

"Got called up to San Diego in '78. We didn't trade addresses."

I did not turn my head.

"I wanted the best for him."

---

We crested the summit and started down. Tate had taken his sunglasses off.

"Boise's two hours," he said.

I drove.

— Freely