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.

There was a five-gallon bucket upside down under the bleachers with PROPERTY OF ESPERANZA ISD stenciled on it in paint that had been green a long time ago. Elias rolled up both pant legs to the knee, took off the good shoes and set them on the top step, and went down into the dugout in socks.

The water was cold. It was January cold, Gulf cold, the kind that went straight to the bone. Elias said something under his breath that the principal would not have liked and started bailing.

Héctor watched for a minute without comment. Then he said, "Not like that," and showed him: not scooping, which threw half of it back, but sinking the bucket flat and letting it fill and lifting it with the legs. He did it once. He did not do it again. He went back to the pump.

They worked without talking for twenty minutes. The pump did most of it. The bucket did the corners where the hose couldn't reach, the low spot by the water fountain, the drain under the bench that had been clogged since, as far as Elias could tell, the Eisenhower administration. Under the bench, in the mud, Elias found an old baseball, gray and swollen and heavy as a stone, with the red stitching almost gone, and set it on the step to dry.

"That one is older than you," said Héctor.

"How old?"

He looked at it a long moment. "Older than you," he said again, and that was all he said about it.

When the dugout floor finally showed, cracked gray concrete with a drain in the middle and a sunflower-seed hull in every crack, Héctor shut off the pump. In the sudden quiet the egrets lifted out of left field all at once and flapped away, low and white, over the canal.

"Not bad," said Héctor, which Elias would learn later was the highest praise he had.

At a quarter past seven the principal found Elias in the hallway outside the gym, with mud on his trouser cuffs and the morning sun coming in sideways through the tall old windows.

Alicia Benavides was small, quick and tired, with gray at her temples and a stack of folders against her chest like a shield. She had been principal of Esperanza High for nine years and a teacher there for twelve before that, and she had the look of somebody who had been fighting for the same building for a very long time.

"I should tell you something before your first period," she said. "Since you're here, and since you didn't know enough to say no." She shifted the folders. "Nobody else applied. For the job. I put the notice up on the second of January and I left it up until the ninth, and you were the only one." She looked at Elias with frank, unsentimental sympathy. "And the district is talking about closing us."

"Closing the school?"

"Merging. That's the word they use. Las Palomas High across town has room, and we have a hundred and ninety kids in a building from 1931 with a boiler Héctor keeps alive by talking to it. The board has been talking about it for two years. This spring they vote. In June." She glanced at the glass case on the wall beside them, and Elias looked too.

It was a trophy case, old wood and older glass, mostly empty. There were a few band plaques. There was a framed photograph of a football team from the 1940s, all leather helmets and serious faces. And on the middle shelf, by itself, with a crack running through its marble base, there was a small gold baseball player on a pedestal, frozen in the act of swinging, and a plate that read BI-DISTRICT CHAMPIONS — ESPERANZA HALCONES — 1956.

"That's the last one," said Alicia Benavides. "Thirty-one years. I'm not asking you to win anything. Nobody expects you to win anything." She hesitated. "But if the town had something to come out for this spring, it wouldn't hurt."

She went off down the hall to unlock her office, and the first bell rang, and the building filled at once with noise.

On the gym door, at eye level, someone had taped a sheet of notebook paper. BASEBALL, it said at the top, in the departed coach's blocky capitals, and under it there were lines numbered one to twenty-five. Three of them had names.

R. Treviño. T. Garza. E. Cavazos.

Elias stood and looked at the three names for a long moment, while kids pushed past with backpacks and band cases and looked curiously at the new teacher with the muddy cuffs. Then Elias took a pen out of his jacket pocket, and above the first line, in clear capitals that could be read from across the hall, wrote: TRYOUTS — MONDAY, JANUARY 26 — 3:45 — THE FIELD (IF IT'S DRY).

And then, after a moment's thought, underneath: EVERYBODY WELCOME.