A Decent Hour

Bats distributed: twenty-one. Bats going back to Knockwood: forty.

---

We got in a little after two Monday morning, off the interstate and into a place west of the ballpark with the doors on the outside and a walkway running the length of it. Two rooms. I wrote the Milwaukee one and sent it before I slept, and then I slept until after ten, which I have not done since March.

I meant to call Gary at a decent hour.

The phone went at twenty past eleven and it was him. He had read it.

"Marshall." Then nothing for a second. "Nobody told me about any list."

"Nobody told me either."

"No. I know that."

He wanted to hear how the man in Milwaukee had said it, so I gave it to him in that man's own words as near as I could get them. The ten thousand dollars. The insurance policy. Forty-eight the year before it and fifteen the year after. He did not interrupt any of it, which is not like him. When I was done he was quiet long enough that I took the phone off my ear to see whether the call had dropped.

"Okay," he said. "Well. That's it, then."

I waited for the rest of it. Then I asked whether he wanted to take it to anybody there before we did anything.

"There's nothing to take, Marshall. There's nothing to decide. We can't sell it." He was into the next part before I had caught up to that one. "Somebody'll be in touch about the rest of it. There's a process for it, I think. I've never had to do this."

"All right."

"How's the Roadmaster holding up?"

"No complaints."

"Good. That's good." Then he said we would get on the phone properly next week, the two of us, and talk it all the way through, and that he wanted to do that.

I said okay.

---

I sat on the end of the bed for a while with the phone in my hand. Then I went out.

Cecil was at the wagon with the tailgate down, straightening blankets that did not need straightening. I told him.

"All right," he said, and put the tailgate up.

I had a place written down from before we came. We drove twenty minutes south to it, a small dark bar on Cedar Avenue that puts the cheese inside the hamburger instead of on top of it. They spell it Jucy, no i. There is another place across town that spells it with the i and says it had it first, and people here have a side. Cash only. I had one. Cecil ordered a plain hamburger.

We were back a little after two. There was tennis on. Cecil sat through two sets of it with the sports page open on his knee and did not turn the page. Sometime in the second one he asked whether it meant now or after this week.

I said I did not know yet.

"All right," he said again.

At four we got in the car and drove over, because that is what four o'clock has been for since March.

---

The ballpark is on the west edge of downtown, pale limestone. Out past center field there is a sign with two ballplayers on it in old uniforms, shaking hands over a river.

"It goes when they hit one," Cecil said, before it did.

We were through the gate early and went out to the bleachers, and we had the row to ourselves and most of the one behind it. Cecil sat forward with his forearms on his knees and watched them throw before the anthem, and I did not have anything to do with my hands.

Minnesota hit four home runs and beat Detroit eleven to one. Two of them came back to back in the first.

---

Tuesday morning Cecil took his phone out to the walkway after we ate. He had a man here he had set up for Wednesday, from before. He was out there a few minutes and came back in and did not say anything about it, and I did not ask.

He went and got the paper. I sat on the end of the bed with the television going and no sound in it. Nothing came from Knockwood all morning, and I did not call anybody either.

The email came a little before two. A woman there whose name I did not know needed to know which of two boxes should have been ticked on a supplier's form from the spring. She said to check with Gary if I was not sure.

I was not sure. I walked down to the end of the walkway and called him.

He knew which box. It took him about four seconds.

I do not know how I got off the form and onto the rest of it.

I know I gave him the mileage, because I did the arithmetic out loud while I was talking and came up short and had to do it over. Somewhere above twelve thousand. Twelve four. Twenty-eight ballparks. Twenty-one bats, and I said the twenty-one more than once, because it is the only one of the three I have never had to work out.

"I'm in a spot here too, Marshall," he said, somewhere in there.

I could not tell you now what else I said. I was not loud. I went the length of that walkway and back and then down it again, past our two doors both times, and I do not remember deciding to. There was a woman two doors up with her door propped open and a housekeeping cart outside it, and she did not look over once, and I came to a stop at the far rail over the parking lot with the traffic going by out on the avenue.

Gary went quiet. When he came back he was not warm.

"You boys have been taking thirty a day out of here since March," he said. "Whether you spent it or not."

I did not have anything for that.

"It was never that tight. The budget. It was never what you made it."

I had something else started and I stopped in the middle of it. He said he had to go.

The phone said nineteen minutes when I looked at it after.

Cecil was in one of the plastic chairs outside the doors with the paper on his knee when I went down the walkway, and he was in it when I came back.

---

I slept an hour and a half in the afternoon, which I do not do, and came up out of it not knowing the room.

It was the first of September. Minnesota scored ten in the sixth inning and won it fifteen to two. There were numbers on the field late that neither of us knew, and Cecil watched them the way he watches everybody.

---

Wednesday morning I opened the Wallop standings, which I have looked at most days since April, and the picture at the top of the page was gone. Cecil's face and mine and the bats done up in red, white and blue. It had been up there since the Fourth of July. The page came up without it and everything else on it worked the same.

The email came at ten. Return of company property. It asked that the vehicle and the remaining inventory be brought back to Knockwood, and it gave the address, which I have had in my phone since March, and it asked me to confirm receipt.

Cecil was not in it.

I read it twice and did not answer it. I told him what it said. He nodded and went back to what he was doing.

We got lunch. He went out to the chair after and stayed there most of the afternoon, and I stayed in with the door open, and neither of us went anywhere. At four we drove over.

It went twelve innings. Detroit got five in the twelfth and won it eleven to six.

---

We went out with the crowd and stood on the plaza a few minutes because it was quicker to let it go by, and the trains came and took most of it, and then we walked back to the lot and got the car and drove the eleven minutes to the motel. Neither of us said anything on the way. It was warm enough to sit outside, so we sat down in the chairs.

"You put twenty-one as a numeral," I said.

He looked over.

"In the dispatch you wrote. The bats. You put the figure. I have always spelled them out."

"That's how I'd write it down," he said.

"I know it is."

He let that go by. A man came out three doors down and shook a towel over the rail and went back in.

"You added your first name when you signed off," I said.

"That's my whole name."

He was quiet a while. Then he said, "Four ballgames and nothing went out. That's all it was."

"You could have left it."

"I know it." Then, a while later: "You going to keep doing them. Nobody's paying for them."

"What's left to write?"

"Monday was gonna be Kansas City," he said.

I did not say anything.

"I'd as soon keep going."

I got my phone out and looked up how far it was. Four hundred and thirty-seven miles. One road the whole way.

— Freely