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.

Mara 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.

Mara 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 Mara 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.

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

The main office was just opening. The secretary, a woman in a red cardigan with reading glasses on a beaded chain, looked at the keys in Mara's left hand and sighed in a way that suggested this was not the first time.

"The shed is the brown one," she said. "Behind the gym. The key is the brass one with the tape on it. The tape says SHED. It is not the key to the shed. The key to the shed is the one with no tape. The tape key opens the old band room, which is where the shed key used to be, before Coach left." She took off her glasses. "He left in a hurry, Coach. Over Christmas. He took his whistle. He did not take anything else."

The shed was cinder block, painted brown, with a padlock rusted to the color of the paint. The key with no tape opened it on the third try. Inside it smelled of old leather and mildew and gasoline.

Mara stood in the doorway and took inventory.

Two canvas bags of baseballs, perhaps forty balls between them, most of them gray. A bucket of older ones, which were brown. Eleven aluminum bats, two of them dented, one of them bent in a way no bat should be. A catcher's mask with a cracked bar, chest protector, shin guards that had been mended with duct tape and then mended again over the tape. A stack of cardboard boxes marked UNIFORMS — 1969, and inside them, in mothballs, gray wool-flannel road uniforms with ESPERANZA across the chest in green script, beautiful and heavy and full of little holes. A rake. A drag mat made from a length of chain-link fence. A bag of lime for the foul lines with a hole in the bottom, so that someone, at some point, had drawn a line across the floor of the shed itself, very straight, from the door to the back wall.

On a nail by the door hung a clipboard. On the clipboard was a sheet of paper that said, in ballpoint, in a careful hand, Things that need fixing, and under that a list that went on for two pages and ended, near the bottom of the second, with the field (everything).

Mara took the clipboard off the nail and kept it.

At a quarter past seven the principal found Mara in the hallway outside the gym, with mud on her 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 Mara 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 Mara 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.

Mara 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 Mara took a pen out of her 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.