The Whole Way

Monday came up eighty-eight with a shower at noon that did not amount to anything. By five the pavement downtown was dry again and the heat was coming back off it. We left the car in a lot north of the ballpark and walked down Eighth, which was a route I had picked in the room the night before.

The statues are out along the sidewalk at Eighth and Clark, in front of the team store, set well apart, each one on a low block of black granite. Cecil slowed and did not stop.

I stopped. A bronze Ozzie Smith is out flat in the air with the glove up. I read the plate on the granite under him and it had his name and his years and nothing on it I did not already know. He had been out on the field in there on Saturday. It was in the paper.

I caught Cecil up at the corner.

"Nineteen days in eighty-four," I said. "Was he in there?"

"He was on the club," Cecil said.

Across Clark they have put up a block of bars and restaurants on the ground where the old ballpark stood, and out behind it, in the open, they have laid the infield back down where it had been. I had read about that. It is green turf in the shape of a diamond with a mound in the middle of it and a tan concrete apron running the baselines, and the bases are marked where they were. There was a stage at one end with a man on it testing a microphone, and tables out under umbrellas, and the markers were out past all of that.

I went out and read them. First base, then second.

"Did you take infield with him?" I said. "Like the Walla Walla days?"

He went on across. He was at the far curb with his back to me, waiting on the light.

A woman came out of one of the places with two boys and the boys ran the whole thing, first to second to third and across home, and I stepped off to let them by, and she called them back inside.

I went over, and we crossed with the light, and I did not ask him again.

We were out in left. The seats out there are benches with a back on them and no arms on them, so a row either fills in shoulder to shoulder or it does not fill in at all, and ours did not. The St. Louis Gateway to the West had the San Francisco Creeping Fog in for three.

The kid they had on the mound was twenty-five and it was his seventh major league start, and he had not given up a hit through five. Then McCray doubled into the gap in right-center to lead off the sixth and that was the end of it, and a single brought him in, and San Francisco did not score another. They took him out with two down in the seventh. It went nine and St. Louis won it, two to one.

It was still eighty-two at nine o'clock.

I looked the eighty-four season up that night with the lights off and the screen turned down as far as it would go. Cecil was asleep on the far bed. September thirteenth had been in Philadelphia. The fourteenth, the fifteenth and the sixteenth they were home, against Pittsburgh. It was the fourteenth.

---

Tuesday got to ninety-eight.

We stayed in with the air unit going. I called the Sumner facility in the afternoon and a woman took my name and asked whether I had worked there before. I said four years. She said that was good, they would not have to put me through the training again, and to come in the first week of November.

I went out in the middle of the afternoon, in the worst of it, and was gone about an hour. He did not ask where I had been.

We went over at five. The wagon had been sitting in the heat all day and I got the tailgate up and stood off it a minute before I put a hand anywhere. Cecil opened the cooler and looked in it. The aluminum bat was lying across the load where it has ridden since Toronto and I moved it to get at the water, and then I had it in my hand.

"Why are we still carrying this?" I said.

He shut the cooler.

"You don't throw away a bat," he said.

I put it back where it had been.

It was Clemente Day and they had the twenty-one patches on, and there was something at home plate before the game that we could see but not hear from where we were.

There is nothing out past that fence to put between you and it. We sat in it.

I got a scorecard on the way in and kept it through three innings and then I quit keeping it. It was seven to two by then.

In the fourth I wrote three numbers up the margin of it instead. Thirteen thousand miles. Thirty ballparks. Twenty-one bats, which is still the only one of the three I have never had to work out.

Cecil had his cap off and in his lap and he was watching the ballgame. He has watched all of them.

The last time I ran the tally I did it out loud on a walkway in Minneapolis and came up short and had to start over. I did it in pencil this time and did not say any of it.

The rest of it will not go in a margin. Forty-two more bats in the back of a car that is not mine, going home to a company that is doing fine without them. Six weeks until the sublet runs out, and then a warehouse in Sumner whose smell I already know. And these, which I have been writing since March and am writing still, for a readership I have never gotten the shape of.

In the seventh I said, "That September."

He had his eyes on the field.

"Did you know while you were in it that it wasn't going to come again?"

The sun was off us by then and the concrete under the seats was still giving it back, and he let it sit a while.

"You don't know that," he said. "They kept me to the end of the year. I dressed and took infield and then everybody went home."

The inning ended.

"Never got called again."

I went up in the eighth and got two waters. The line at the stand went around the corner and it took most of the inning.

It went nine and San Francisco won it, ten to three.

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Wednesday was ninety-six and they played at a quarter past twelve, which is the worst arrangement there is. There is shade in that building and most of it is over on the first-base side.

I had the bag with me from the day before. I gave it to him in the seats before the anthem, and the thing I had ready for it did not come, and what I said was that it was his.

He took the jersey out and opened it and held it up by the shoulders with the front of it toward him. Then he turned it around. There are two things on the back of it and he took his time with them.

"Sixty-one," he said.

"That's the one they gave you."

"It is." He held it a while longer. "That's a kind thing."

Then he folded it over once and laid it across his knee and put a hand on it and left it there. He did not put it on.

The Creeping Fog got one in the third and for a long time that was it. In the seventh both clubs got two. San Francisco got another in the eighth and it was four to two, and people started up the aisles into the dark under the concourse and did not come back out of it.

"The wagon has to go back to Washington," I said.

"I know it."

"I'm in no hurry about it. Two weeks, if I wanted to take two weeks."

He was watching the field.

"It's two thousand miles," I said. "There's room in it."

They changed pitchers. The row in front of us got up while the new one was throwing and went out.

They put men on in the ninth.

"Your place is let till the end of October," he said.

"It is."

"Naomi's still got that foldout."

"I don't know what I'd—"

Then the fly ball went up and the man came in from third, and a base hit brought another one in behind him, and it was four to four, and everybody in our section was up, and I was up with them. We sat down when everybody sat down.

In the top of the tenth Gilbert hit one out to center, four hundred and fifteen feet, with a man on, and it was six to four and the building went quiet.

They start a man on second in extra innings now. In the bottom of the inning it was Burleson.

Jordan Walker hit first. The last time we watched him hit a ball he was in Philadelphia with the whole park against him, needing four in a row to win the Derby, and he hit four.

I did not see this one. I saw Cecil get up.

He was out of his seat with the shirt in one hand and the hand down at his side. The center fielder caught it and came in a step doing it. Burleson went to third.

Cecil sat back down.

They walked the next man and sent somebody out to run for him, and they walked the one after that, and the bases were full with one out. What was left of that crowd came up out of the seats and stayed up. They had been leaving since the eighth and the ones who had not were louder than the whole of them had been at one o'clock.

The next man hit a fly ball to center deep enough to bring Burleson in and it was six to five. Two out.

The one after him hit it in the air, and the right fielder came in a few steps and made the catch to end it.

---

I wrote to Naomi that night.

Naomi — you wrote me on the tenth of August and I never answered you. There is no reason for it except that I didn't, and I'm sorry.

I told you in the spring I'd keep you posted and what I sent you was a picture of a plate of fish with the good half of the table in the frame. That was the last thing I sent you. So here is the rest of it.

He asked me to come down with him. I'm not coming. I wanted you to know he asked.

I'm taking the wagon west in the morning. They shut us down a couple of weeks ago and wrote asking for the car back in Washington, and I never answered that either, but I'm taking it anyway.

It's the path Lewis and Clark took west. They started from here, and I'm going to follow it the whole way, give or take. I said a version of that to your father in May, in Oregon, and he looked out his window. I have had it in my pocket since.

I asked him questions for five months and he answered about nine of them. I'd have kept asking. The one time we ever threw a ball he put it exactly where I was and I still found a way to miss it, and he checked my mouth for about two seconds and told me it was the lip and not the teeth and that was the end of it. That is the closest I've gotten.

I had a St. Louis jersey made at the store by the ballpark. His, from the nineteen days in eighty-four — TATE across the back of it and sixty-one, which is the number they gave him. I gave it to him at the game on Wednesday. He gave it back to me at the station.

I have it on.