Every Word

Bats in the wagon: forty-two.

---

FREELY: Friday. Ten past ten. Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, Eighteenth and Vine.

FREELY: It's going. That's the counter running.

TATE: Hold it where it'll get the both of us.

FREELY: Here?

TATE: That's fine.

TATE: It gets everything.

FREELY: Every word.

TATE: All right.

FREELY: There's a line out the door.

TATE: Mm.

FREELY: Ten in the morning on a Friday in September.

WOMAN: You have to go in around the back. We just came from up there.

FREELY: Thank you. You been in already?

WOMAN: Yesterday. We came back today.

FREELY: From where?

WOMAN: Lincoln.

FREELY: That's a drive.

WOMAN: My boy wanted to see the Satchel Paige. It was on that show and now he won't hear about anything else.

FREELY: What show is that?

WOMAN: The soccer one.

FREELY: I don't know it.

WOMAN: Well you are missing out.

FREELY: One adult and one senior, please.

CLERK: That'll be twenty-seven dollars.

FREELY: You tell me when you've had enough of it.

TATE: I like to take my time here.

[a turnstile]

FREELY: Is that a ballfield through the chicken wire?

TATE: You come out on it at the end.

FREELY: Who's the statue?

TATE: Buck O'Neil.

[voices, overlapping]

[a child, close]

FREELY: Did you ever play for anyone who was in these leagues?

TATE: One or two.

FREELY: Which ones?

[voices]

TATE: They're in here somewhere.

FREELY: That's not what I asked.

TATE: No.

[footsteps]

FREELY: What are you looking at?

TATE: The glove in there. Second from the left.

FREELY: It's the size of my hand.

TATE: There's no pocket in it. That's flat leather and a little lace. You take a ball in that, your bare hand's on it before you know you've caught it, because it has to be.

FREELY: That sounds like a hard way to do it.

TATE: It's a quicker way to do it. Ball's out of that before you'd have it out of the web on one of the ones they use now.

FREELY: I'd have thought you'd want the bigger one.

TATE: You want the bigger one if your job's catching it.

FREELY: What else is there.

TATE: Getting rid of it.

FREELY: Right.

[voices]

FREELY: Here's the gate.

[footsteps, the floor changing under them]

FREELY: You can walk right out on it.

FREELY: Which one's which?

TATE: Paige is pitching. Gibson's catching. There's an umpire back of him.

FREELY: They put an umpire in.

TATE: Somebody thought about it.

[footsteps]

TATE: Frank Evans.

TATE: First base coach at Louisville. Eighty-four and five.

FREELY: Stay where you are a second.

[a shutter; then the motor running]

GUARD: Sir. No flash photography in the museum.

[the motor stops]

FREELY: But I can't turn it off.

GUARD: No flash photography, sir.

FREELY: There's no switch on it. It's an old one. It fires by itself when the room's dark.

GUARD: Yes, sir.

FREELY: All right.

FREELY: Exit's through the store.

---

FREELY: Friday. Twenty past two. Interstate seventy, east of Odessa.

[road]

FREELY: You went past me in the standings.

TATE: Mm-hm.

FREELY: At the freeze. I've had the Wallop league open most days since April and I never once saw you touch that roster, and then I looked in Kansas City and there were three hitters on your side I'd never heard of.

TATE: Waivers shut that night.

FREELY: You didn't say anything about it.

TATE: Wasn't anything to say.

FREELY: You're fourth.

TATE: Is that good?

FREELY: It's better than I've ever done.

FREELY: You know, we went at it wrong the whole way. With the bats. It should have been the minor league clubs. Your Triple-A club in Louisville took two out of my arms under the stands and I never had to ask them for it. And Durham. And Hillsboro.

TATE: Same list might cover them.

FREELY: What list?

TATE: The one that got us shut down in Milwaukee.

FREELY: That's the majors. That's a major league rule.

TATE: Sure.

FREELY: It's a different business entirely down there.

FREELY: I've got to get gas before Columbia.

TATE: There's one at the next exit.

FREELY: I'm not paying four thirty at an interstate pump.

---

FREELY: Friday. Ten of four. The other side of Columbia.

FREELY: Fourteen miles of that.

TATE: They're putting a lane in.

FREELY: They're putting it in from the river all the way to Columbia. There was a man standing on the line with a sign.

[the bats rattling in the back]

FREELY: Can I ask you something.

TATE: You'll ask me anyway.

FREELY: What are you going to do after?

[road]

FREELY: After the season. When we're done with this.

[a truck goes by]

FREELY: All right.

FREELY: I sublet my apartment till the end of October.

FREELY: There's a woman at the Sumner facility said they're taking people on for peak in November. I did four years of that. It isn't hard to get back into.

TATE: You'd do that.

FREELY: I'd do that. It's four months and I'd have something put away before the spring semester.

TATE: Semester.

[road]

FREELY: There's a spring bill.

FREELY: The fall one's paid.

FREELY: My ex paid it. Not the school. Her.

FREELY: Three thousand five hundred and forty. That's what I was short. To the dollar.

FREELY: I asked her about it on the phone. She said financial aid came through in July.

FREELY: I said okay.

TATE: Mm.

FREELY: I found out up there. From Asher, getting textbooks. Kid thought I knew.

FREELY: I carried a duffel and a desk lamp up two flights and that was what there was to carry.

FREELY: They put sixty of the returning kids on move-in. Second- and third-years. Those kids carry everything.

FREELY: She had the building and the room number and the papers. She had all of it.

FREELY: They do the goodbye at five o'clock on a hill. Everybody stands out on it and then the parents drive off.

FREELY: I had the room Thursday and Friday. Saturday morning I went down to the desk and paid for Saturday. Sunday morning I went down to the desk and paid for Sunday.

TATE: You see the kid again?

FREELY: No. I walked across campus thinking I might.

FREELY: Monday I got out on eighty and went west. I got to the edge of Des Moines before I turned around.

TATE: How far is that?

FREELY: Forty miles.

[road]

TATE: You turned around.

FREELY: I had two thousand seven hundred to send her at the first of August.

FREELY: I had that because…

[the blinker going a while]

FREELY: The bat's still in the back.

TATE: I know where it is.

FREELY: Asher never saw it. I had it Thursday night in the motel and I had it Friday in the car and I went up those stairs twice with a lamp and a bag and I never once went back down for it.

FREELY: It says go the distance.

TATE: I stood there while he burned it in.

FREELY: I know.

FREELY: There's another thing and I've had it a month.

TATE: All right.

FREELY: Naomi wrote me. Louisville, the tenth of August. I've got it here. He says not till the season's done. If that's what y'all worked out I'll quit asking him to come down.

TATE: Watch the road.

FREELY: That's the whole of it. I never wrote her back.

[a window going down]

[road, louder]

TATE: The tenth of August.

FREELY: Yes.

[road]

TATE: She left me a note in Washington.

FREELY: Under the salt shaker. I saw it sitting there. I didn't read it.

TATE: I know you didn't.

[road]

TATE: She asked me about Earl. And her grandparents. And what we came up in.

[a truck goes by]

FREELY: Twenty-two to Kingdom City.

---

FREELY: Sunday. Half past nine. Out front of the room.

[a chair on the concrete]

TATE: That thing going?

FREELY: It's going.

TATE: All right.

FREELY: It's going to be hot again.

TATE: Should break this afternoon.

FREELY: You think.

TATE: Mm.

[a paper opening]

FREELY: Says here St. Louis put three in their hall of fame yesterday. Pujols. Molina. And some pitcher from the twenties.

FREELY: They moved it out onto the field. More people than they figured on.

[a page turning]

FREELY: Ozzie Smith came out for it.

[cars, off]

TATE: What are they taking up there?

FREELY: Taking.

TATE: Classes.

FREELY: I don't know. They don't pick the first year. Not till spring of the second one.

[a door down the row]

FREELY: I could ask.

TATE: You could.

[a car]

FREELY: Coffee's in the lobby till ten.

TATE: I've had mine.

— Freely