The Long Season

It had rained all night in Las Palomas, the hard sideways rain that came up off the Gulf in January and beat on the tin roofs of the packing sheds like somebody wanted in. By morning it had stopped. By morning the baseball field behind Esperanza High School was a lake.

Elias stood at the top of the third-base bleachers at twenty to seven on the first Monday of the job, a thermos in one hand and a set of keys nobody had explained in the other, and looked at it.

The water was brown and flat and perfectly still, and it reached from the backstop almost to the outfield fence. The pitcher's mound stood up out of it like a small island. The bases were gone. Second base might have been anywhere. Out in what had been left field, three white egrets were wading slowly through the shallows on their long black legs, stopping, looking, stabbing at something, as if they had been hired for the season and had arrived early to get the lay of the place. Beyond the fence, across the farm road, the irrigation canal ran full to its concrete lip, and beyond the canal the onion fields went flat and green all the way to the line of palm trees along the old highway.

Elias had grown up forty miles east of here, in a house where the palms rattled at night, and had left at eighteen, and had been back for exactly one day.

In the first-base dugout, which was below ground level by about a foot and a half and therefore, at the moment, a swimming pool, a man was standing up to his shins in water beside a small red gasoline pump. The pump was chugging. A fire hose ran from it up the dugout steps and across the grass and over the fence into the canal. The man wore rubber boots, a canvas work jacket over a pressed shirt, and a feed-store cap that said LA FERIA GIN in faded letters. He was about sixty. He was not hurrying. He had the look of somebody who had done this exact thing many times before and expected to do it many times again.

He glanced up at the bleachers, took in Elias with one long look that did not miss the thermos or the new keys or the good shoes, and nodded once.

"You're the coach," he said. It was not a question.

"Starting today."

"Mm." He looked at the water. "Then this is yours too." He bent and adjusted something on the pump, and it coughed and settled into a lower, steadier note. "Héctor Villarreal. I do the grounds. And the boilers. And the gym floor, and the windows on the second story that nobody else will climb to." He straightened. "The field floods when it rains. It has always flooded when it rains. It is in a low place, and the school board in 1931 built the school on the high place, which was smart, and put the field in the low place, which was not." He shrugged. "Ni modo. Two days, if the sun comes out. Three, if it doesn't."

The egrets went on fishing in left field. The pump went on chugging. On the far side of the fence the canal took the water and carried it away, very slowly, toward the river and the Gulf.

Elias looked at the field, and at the man in the dugout, and at the thermos, and made a decision.