Working Life

Bats in the wagon: forty-two. Per diem: zero dollars.

---

We came down Sunday. Des Moines a little after noon and Kansas City before dark.

The ballpark here is eight miles east of downtown, out past the end of it, with a football stadium beside it and a great deal of parking around both of them and nothing else out there. We took a place off the interstate on that side.

The card did not go through. The woman at the desk ran it and it came back declined, and she ran it again and it came back the same, and then she typed the number in off the front of it and it came back the same a third time. She said it could be the machine and it could be the card and there was no way for her to know which from where she was standing. I said I understood that. She was not unhelpful. There was nobody to call about it. I paid for the room out of my pocket and she gave me a receipt.

I took one room with two beds.

---

We drove over a little before noon. The radio had the holiday traffic on it, and then the gas, the most expensive Labor Day at the pump on record, and then the forecast, and then we were in the lot.

Monday's game started at ten after one. It was ninety-one at first pitch and ninety-four by the fourth.

"Should be a night ballgame," Cecil said.

We were out in left, and there is no shade in those seats at any hour of a day like that. Beyond the fence in right there is water. Fountains and falls, running from the foul pole around to center. The falls go the whole time and the jets come up between innings. Out past center the scoreboard is a crown. Ten stories, if somebody made me guess. A family four rows down, and then our section, and then nobody until the corner.

Cecil kept going under the concourse and coming back out.

The Kansas City of Fountains had the Arizona Copper Works in for the last three of a nine-game homestand, and after Wednesday they go east to Boston.

Nobody scored for nine innings. Arizona got five in the tenth and Kansas City got four back.

---

Cecil made a call Monday night. After it he said there would be tickets at the window for Tuesday and Wednesday, and that a man would take us down on the field before the gates if we came at four. He did not say anything else about it and I did not ask.

We stayed in until the middle of the afternoon with the air unit going. Cecil went out for the paper and later for the drugstore. It got to ninety-nine.

The man's name is Curtis. He and Cecil had two years together in A ball, back when Curtis was still driving the bus. He is the minor league field coordinator here now, a job he took four sentences to explain and that I could not tell you the first thing about. He met us inside the gate at twenty past four. He took Cecil's hand and said, "Coach Tate." Then he walked us under the stands and out.

We did not take anything out of the car.

There was no air moving down there at all. The cage was out and the home club was hitting, and every few seconds a ball went up and out to the men waiting in the outfield for it. Curtis put us down the left field line, well behind all of that, told us to stay in foul ground, and went off.

There were gloves on the end of a bench and a bucket of balls beside it.

"You want to throw?" I said.

"In this heat?"

"Ten minutes. Five months of ballparks and we've never tossed a ball."

He took a glove off the bench without looking at more than the one.

We threw.

The first one I threw did not get to him. It went into the dirt six or eight feet short of him, and he had the glove down where it came up, and then it was in his hand. He threw it back.

We threw for a while after that. He does not throw hard. The ball comes where you are.

The one that got me came the same as all the others. But I got the glove up late and it went off the top of it and hit me in the mouth.

The throw was fine. I had the glove in the wrong place.

I went down on one knee and then I sat. There was blood on my hand and then on my shirt. Curtis got to me first, and then a man in uniform who had been shagging out in left, and then a man with a bag, and then somebody came back with ice in a towel. They asked me twice whether I had lost a tooth. The man in uniform told me he took one off the face in Wilmington in 2011 and lost two, and that this was nothing, and then he stayed and watched them work on me anyway.

They were very nice about it.

Cecil stayed where he was with the glove still on. When he saw the shirt he came across. He got there behind the man with the bag. He bent down, looked at it for about two seconds and said it was the lip and not the teeth, and that it would be up by that night and down by Thursday.

We did not throw any more. He put both gloves back on the bench. It had not been ten minutes.

Curtis took us up and pointed us at the seats and told Cecil to call if we came back through.

---

The seats were down the third-base line, eleven rows up. You can hear them talking from down there.

The lip was up by the third. I had ice cream out of a paper cup in the fifth because it was the only thing I could get past the lip, and Cecil had a bottle of water and nothing else.

It went eleven and Arizona won it again, five to three.

---

Ninety-nine again Wednesday, and the room was the only place to be in the middle of the day. Cecil had the sports page. The four things he gave me in Louisville in August were across the top of a page in my pad, and nothing under them.

I asked him whether he ever got called up. The lip was still fat and it did not come out clean.

He folded the page over.

"September," he said. "Eighty-four."

I got the pad. My pen was in the wagon and I wrote with the pencil off the nightstand.

His club in Louisville was in the finals that year, he said. They had come through Indianapolis and they had Denver, and he played the first two of the series.

He stopped there.

On the twelfth St. Louis wanted a body, and a man came into the clubhouse after the ballgame and told him he was going up in the morning.

"They won it out in Denver three days later," he said. "That club's first championship."

"You weren't there."

"No."

The air unit came on and went off twice while he was talking.

He was up nineteen days. They put his name on tape over a locker in the middle of the room and not down at the end of it, and they gave him sixty-one, and he took infield before every ballgame of the nineteen.

He gave me the number twice.

"Never got put in," he said.

He waited while I got it down, as he had in Louisville.

"Best week of my working life," he said.

Then he picked the paper back up.

I looked it up in the afternoon. Louisville beat Denver ten to eight on the fifteenth.

---

"There's a place out this way," Cecil said, so we drove out to it. A low building on the east side ten minutes from the motel, a smoker going against the back wall, a screen door, four tables. Six people in line at three in the afternoon on a Wednesday.

I got burnt ends. It was the first thing I had chewed since Tuesday and it took me a while.

Cecil had a sandwich and ate about half of it and waved off the woman with the sauce.

We went over from there and got in early. I had the pad in my pocket and did not get it out.

It rained before first pitch and they held the game fifty minutes.

Curtis came down the row in the second with a ball in his hand and gave it to me. There were five or six names on it in different colors and I could not read any of them. He said something to Cecil that I did not catch, and went back up the steps. It did not go in a pocket so I held it.

"You said working," I said.

He looked at me.

"In the room. Best week of your working life. You said working."

"That's what you asked me."

I had the ball in both hands and I turned it over.

"Better than Naomi?"

"Marshall," he said.

It went nine and Kansas City won it, five to two.

— Freely