Posted

Bats distributed: fifteen. Bats I did not see go: three. Days past the tuition deadline: one.

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Pittsburgh and Cleveland are close enough that for about four miles Wednesday night two radio stations came in at the same spot on the dial — one town still working on the club we'd left, the other on the club we were driving to. Cecil slept through the changeover. Two and a half hours, and a motel on the west side at the rate I wanted.

Thursday nobody played anywhere in this city. The Cleveland Cuyahoga were coming home from Cincinnati and the Arizona Copper Works were following us west out of Pittsburgh and the ballpark sat downtown with its gates shut, so I walked.

Cleveland is losing people and the counties around it are gaining them. Nobody left. They moved fifteen minutes.

I stood on a bridge over the Cuyahoga watching a freighter come up it. The river down in the flats is less a river than a run of turns somebody regretted, and the boat was six hundred feet of iron ore that had to be walked around them — tugs working both ends, a man out on the bow with a radio, four bridges lifting ahead of it in order and settling back down behind. It took the better part of an hour to move a mile. A man stopped his bicycle beside me with one foot down and stayed that way the whole time. I ate four dollars of pierogi off a counter on Lorain and walked back.

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Friday morning Cecil asked me to pull three bats out of the back. I stood them against the passenger door and went off to do my own errand, and when I came back in the afternoon they were gone and he was in a chair by the window with the paper.

The bank downtown keeps two machines in the vestibule that will take a cash deposit. The machines take fifty bills at a time. I had a hundred and thirty-five of them.

They go in face up in a stack with nothing around them. The machine takes the stack out of your fingers with a sound like a shuffled deck, counts it, puts the number on the screen, and asks if that is right. You say it is right. It prints a slip. Then you do it again. A woman came in during the second one and used the other machine and was gone before I finished. On the third the machine sent four bills back out twice and then took them.

Twenty-seven hundred dollars.

The payment site has the school's name across the top in its color and a box underneath it, and a line telling you a card costs three percent and a draft off a checking account costs nothing. I typed the routing number off a check I have been carrying since March. The whole thing took under two minutes. The screen said submitted and then it said received, and by the time I was back out on the sidewalk there was an email with a confirmation number in it.

Then I texted her one line.

Sent what I have.

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The cheapest seat on the main level at Progressive Field is out in the left-field bleachers, sections one-eighty through one-eighty-five, and it costs less than the upper deck, which is the second park in a week where that has been true. Twenty-two dollars. The hot dogs were a dollar that night and I ate two.

A woman said Cecil's name at the gate. Sixties, sun visor, canvas tote with a pitching-machine company printed on the side. Bev. Her husband coordinates pitching for somebody — I had the club for a second and lost it — and the two of them went at it for a few minutes about people I have never heard of and one man they both thought had gotten heavy. Then she put a hand on my arm like we had met before and said, "It's good Cecil's keeping busy."

I said it was.

She turned back to him. "Walt got your message. He's been on the phone since last Sunday and he'll be on it till Monday night. He'll know Monday night."

Cecil said he wasn't in a hurry, and we went and found our seats.

The bleachers out there sit up above a nineteen-foot wall, so during batting practice the visiting outfielders stand around thirty feet below you and you hear them before you hear the bat. The Coppers came out and shagged and threw and stood in twos with their gloves under their arms. One of them was carrying a bat around with him in the grass, and the mark burned into it was ours. Three days from the deadline. They talked about a restaurant one of them had been to, and somebody's kid's tooth, and whether the wind was going to keep doing what it was doing, and not one man out there said a word about Monday.

Cecil watched them a while and said two of their names out loud. Then he said the one in the middle had the best arm out there and hadn't had to show it yet.

Then the sun came off the upper deck and the lights took over, and the downtown buildings past the far side of the park stopped being buildings and became lit windows. Cecil got a coffee he didn't drink much of and put it down by his shoe and left it there the whole night. Between innings the man on the other side of me explained to his son why the wall out there is as tall as it is, and got it wrong, and his son took it.

Cleveland scored in the first, two out, on a single that brought José Ramírez around, and did not score again. Arizona did not score until the eighth. Then they walked twice and singled four times, three of the four to the same corner of right field, and Cleveland used three pitchers getting out of it. The runs came across one at a time — one, then two on a ball the right fielder got a glove on and did not hold, then one more. All of it happened at the other end of the park from us, small and far off.

Cecil stood up somewhere in the middle of it. People were already going up the steps behind us and the noise had gone out of the place, so a man standing was easy to see. He kept his hands down at his sides. Then he sat back down.

We stayed to the last out and then for the fireworks, because everybody did. They announced thirty-six thousand six hundred and thirty-nine. The twenty-two dollars and the two after it had been the whole of it.

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Saturday morning the school wrote to me.

It came in at ten past eight with my kid's name in the subject line, and it was addressed to Authorized User.

A payment in the amount of $2,700.00 has been posted to the student account referenced above.

Amount past due: $3,540.00.

Please remit the balance at your earliest convenience.

There was no name at the bottom of it and no address to send anything back to. Only a phone number for Student Accounts and the hours they keep.

She didn't write anything all day.

Cecil had somewhere to be by noon and didn't say where. There was an arts festival going on out in Lakewood, Detroit Avenue closed off from Arthur to Belle, so I went and walked it. The buildings along there are two stories with apartments over the stores, and people had their windows up and were watching from their own front rooms, one or two with an elbow out on the sill. Watercolors of the lake. Watercolors of the bridges. A man with a folding table of birdhouses built out of Ohio license plates, and a woman two tents down selling earrings cut from the same plates, one numeral apiece, and I could not tell from looking whether they had come together or were competitors, and neither one of them looked over at the other the whole time I stood there. It was warm and it stayed warm.

Arizona won the next one twelve to eight. It went the same way as the night before, except five balls left the park this time.

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It is four blocks from the ballpark to where we had the wagon, and about ten minutes from there to the motel with the lights. Cecil waited until we were most of the way back.

"I got about six hundred if—"

"No," I said, before he had it out.

He didn't say anything else about it. He rolled his window down a few inches and looked out at Detroit Avenue going by.

I didn't find out what the if was.

— Freely