Memorable

Bats distributed: four. Caipirinhas imbibed: five, plus or minus two. Terms received: conditional.

---

I came up out of a black, dreamless sleep with a mouthful of ashtray. It took me a minute to recognize my own motel room — dark, but the light from outside said late morning. My phone was on the charger. My shoes were on the floor, neatly. My head was very bad. My eyeballs had their own pulse that did not match my heart's.

I sat up. The room turned ten degrees and settled. There was a stamp on the back of my left hand. Black ink, smudged, some kind of small lettering I could not read.

I collapsed back into the pillow. The popcorn ceiling weaved a slow figure-eight above me.

Phone.

I stretched my arm, grasping. It saw something different in my face and refused to unlock. Took two more tries. By then my eyes could focus. No outbound calls. I scrolled my texts. Tate at the top. The rest was old. Nothing to Asher, who had surfaced Monday and gone quiet again. Nothing to my ex-wife. Her Mother's Day reply was where I had left it, unanswered.

I let my breath out and put the phone back on the charger.

---

I made it across the hall. I knocked twice.

"Yeah."

Tate was at the desk by the window writing something on a legal pad. He did not look up.

"What time did we get back."

"Around three-thirty."

"What's this on my hand."

Tate looked over. "Ball and Chain."

"That's the bar?"

"That's the bar."

"I need coffee."

"Downstairs. Next to Emilio."

---

The motel was four blocks from the airport. The lobby had a parrot in an enormous cage. Green. An older man behind the desk was reading a Spanish newspaper. I took two paper cups of burnt coffee and stood for a moment looking at the parrot.

Had it been there at check-in?

"Does he talk?" I asked.

The man looked up. "Emilio? Sí, all the time."

The parrot looked at me sideways.

Back upstairs Tate was slipping on his shoes.

"Somebody put something in my drink," I said.

Tate took the second cup.

"Which of the five?"

"That feels like a lot."

"That's just an estimate. Sugar, lime and cachaça. That's all they put in your caipirinhas."

---

The Miami Art Deco Preservation Society — The Decos — who we had just seen across the state in Tampa, were home at loanDepot at four p.m. We had cheap seats out beyond third base. The roof was closed. The air was over-cooled. I wore sunglasses anyway. A water bottle, cold, against the side of my neck. Tate wore his ballcap.

In the second inning my phone buzzed.

good to see you guys last night. you guys held it down. — h

I had not put the number in my contacts. Showed it to Tate.

Tate looked. "Hector. From last night."

I sat with that. The first thing that came back was a hand on my shoulder steering me off something. A floor, maybe. Or a chair. Bright color overhead. Spanish I could not follow being spoken near my ear, friendly, somebody apologizing for me to somebody else.

"Did I —"

"You were fine."

A vendor came up the steps yelling peanuts. Tate had his eyes on the field.

"I think I tried to speak Spanish."

"You did try."

"How did I do?"

Tate chuckled.

I looked at the field for a while. The Decos pitcher worked through the side.

The Decos put one over the wall in right and the section around us mostly did not move. A man two rows down clapped twice and sat back. The crowd was thin and unhurried. It felt like a Tuesday.

I drank my water. The Decos went up three-nothing.

Something came back, sharp and small. Tate on the dance floor with a woman all hips and curly hair, his hand up while she turned. He was doing the steps.

"You were dancing."

"I was."

"You were good."

"You were dancing too."

"With who?"

"Several people."

"Tate."

"You were having a good time."

A foul ball came up two sections over. Somebody snagged it.

"Tate."

"Yes."

"There was a tall girl. In a green dress."

Tate watched the field.

"I think I — "

"It was a fun night. You had a good time."

There was something un-baseball about a closed roof. The hangover did not care. I was grateful.

In the bottom of the fifth, the same hitter put another one over the wall. Nobody in our Wallop league had him. Tate had not touched his roster since March.

In the bottom of the eighth there was a delay on the field, and a man appeared on the steps in a Decos polo, an earpiece in, a clipboard under his arm. He came up our row sideways.

"Marshall. How we doing." His jaw was set, concerned.

"Somebody put something in my drink," I said.

Hector looked at Tate.

"He keeps saying that," Tate said.

"Marshall." Hector squatted in the aisle so he wasn't blocking anyone. Maybe thirty-five, neat beard. "You had like six caipirinhas."

"Six," I said.

"Plus whatever Lourdes kept handing you. Probably water by the end."

"Who is Lourdes."

"The girl in the green dress. You danced with her for like an hour."

"Oh."

Hector watched my face for a second.

"Drag queen, Marshall. No? Like a six-foot J Lo. She made you sit down when you needed a break. She liked you, man."

I didn't say anything. I looked at Tate. Tate was watching the field.

"Hey. Miami, right?" Hector said.

He looked at the field, looked back.

"Listen. Reed is going to call you guys tomorrow morning. I just wanted you to know. He's going to walk you through what we'd need. He liked you."

Tate said: "We appreciate it."

"You guys held it down last night. Reed doesn't usually want to keep going on these. He told me he wanted to make the call himself." Hector shrugged with his eyebrows. "So. Tomorrow morning."

He stood up. He started to leave, then turned back.

"Oh and Russell says hi."

He went sideways back down the row and was gone.

"Okay, I do remember Hector," I said, to nobody.

"Yes," Tate said anyway.

"Who is Reed."

"The quiet one. From dinner."

---

I remember, by then, in fragments: the Spanish on the floor, the person in the long green dress with a hand under my elbow, a glass of water that somebody put in my hand and that I drank and asked for another of. Tate at a small table watching, smiling, not stopping any of it. A car ride with the windows down. Tate counting steps to the room from the elevator: "Four, five, six, here." Tate setting my shoes by the bed, side by side.

It came back in shards. A song I will not be able to name. A wedge of lime in my pocket the next afternoon I could not account for.

I asked Tate, in the car after the game: "Did I have a good time."

"Oh you? You had a great time."

"Did you?"

"It was memorable."

---

Reed called at nine-fifteen Sunday morning. I was upright, in a chair, having eaten three pieces of dry toast from a tray downstairs. Tate had the phone on speaker on the desk between us, legal pad open.

Reed was younger than Hector by a decade and easier to picture once I heard his voice. Soft, careful, a little dry. He thanked us for the night. He asked how Marshall was holding up. I said I was holding up. He laughed once and got into it.

"Here's where we are. We can't sign off on bats without data, and you guys don't have data yet. Here's what I can offer. We work with two independent labs. You send them samples — three, four bats per grain you want tested. They run our protocol: exit velocity across grain, barrel weight tolerance, smash factor, durability curves under MLB game conditions. They send the numbers to both of us at the same time. We agree in advance that the numbers are the numbers. Whichever way they cut."

There was a long pause.

"And then?" Tate said.

"Then we look at the numbers. If they're competitive, we have a real conversation. If they're not, you have a lab report that says what your wood actually does, which is useful to you either way."

"What's the timeline."

"Six weeks at the lab. Two weeks for us to look. Call it a couple months."

Tate wrote 8 wks and underlined it twice. He looked at me. I had nothing in my face that was useful to him. He looked at the speaker.

"We need to talk to the home office," he said. "Can we get back to you by end of business tomorrow?"

"Take the time you need."

"Thank you."

"Thank you guys."

---

I went back to my room to pack.

The duffel was on the chair, half open. I sat on the edge of the bed. The room smelled like burnt motel coffee and ashtray and me.

Wait a minute — I pulled out my phone.

Tate remained at the top of my messages. I opened the thread. I had sent the last four messages, which came up in a stack.

Where are you?!?

How are you so good ad dancing

And just everything

They like us right?

Read 2:50 AM.

I read them twice. Then a third time.

I was writing to him.

Two forty-seven, two forty-eight, two forty-eight, two fifty. Still at the bar as they came in.

He had seen them when he counted me to my room. He had seen them at his desk in the morning when I asked about the stamp on my hand. He had seen them in the bleachers when Hector said drag queen.

He had not said a word.

I put the phone face-down on the bedspread.

I finished packing.

— Freely