Sparrows Beneath the Grandstand

First Inning

Howie tapped the microphone twice and the sound came back at them from the PA system bolted to the grandstand roof, a thud-thud that crossed the empty field and returned as its own echo, thinner, like a word repeated until it loses meaning.

“We’re live,” he said.

Lyle looked at the console. Three of the five slider controls were missing their caps, and the one labeled MONITOR had been stuck at zero since before either of them could remember. The broadcast frequency was 1610 AM, which in the Pecos Valley reached about as far as a man could throw a rock, assuming the man had an arm, which Howie did not, not anymore.

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Roadrunner Field, home of your Pecos Valley Roadrunners, where tonight’s matchup brings the Roswell Invaders to town for the first of a three-game set.” Howie’s voice changed when he went on-mic. It lost ten years and a divorce. “Beautiful evening for baseball. Temperature sitting at about eighty-two degrees, wind out of the southwest at maybe four miles an hour, just enough to push a fly ball toward right-center. Lyle, what do you make of this lineup tonight?”

Lyle leaned toward his microphone. From the booth you could see the whole diamond, or where the diamond had been. The infield was baked clay and crabgrass. The pitcher’s mound was still identifiable — a raised hump of dirt with a rubber slab visible through the weeds, the only feature that insisted on its own geometry. Beyond the outfield wall, which was plywood and still bore a faded ad for Chávez Irrigation, the desert started without fanfare and went on for a long time.

“I make of it what I made of it last time,” Lyle said. “Which is that Dominguez is batting fifth again, and I’d have him third.”

“Interesting. Interesting. You’ve been saying that all season.”

“And I’ll keep saying it until someone with authority does something about it, which is to say I’ll keep saying it.”

Howie called the first pitch: fastball, inside corner, called strike. He described the catcher’s setup, the batter’s hands shifting on the grip, the small adjustment of weight from back foot to front. The level of detail was troubling. Not because it was wrong — there was no game against which to measure it — but because it was so specific that it had the texture of memory. A fastball on the inside corner is a fact or it isn’t. Howie said it like a man who had watched it happen.

“Ball one, outside. Missed his spot. He was going for the corner again but the ball ran back over the plate — no, sorry, ran off the plate, caught too much of the hand, and the catcher had to reach for it. That’ll get your attention.”

“Will it,” Lyle said.

“It will if you’re paying attention.”

“I’m always paying attention. I’m paying attention right now. I’m paying attention to a man describing a pitch that nobody threw to a batter who isn’t standing in a box that doesn’t exist, and the thing is, Howie, I can see his hands.”

“Whose hands?”

“The batter’s. He’s got a loose grip. Bottom hand doing the work. He’s going to try to pull this next one.”

Howie looked at Lyle the way you look at someone who has just crossed a line they didn’t know was there.

“Fastball,” Howie said. “Pulled foul, left side. One and two.”

Second Inning

There were sparrows under the grandstand. You could hear them between pitches — a rustling and piping from somewhere below the concrete tiers, where the birds had found gaps in the infrastructure and made nests of whatever was available: hot dog wrappers, cigarette filters, the insulation leaking from the press box walls. They had been there longer than Howie and Lyle. They would be there after.

“Ground ball to short,” Howie said. “Fielded cleanly — the throw — in time. One down.”

The grandstand seated sixteen hundred. The Roadrunners had played here from ‘77 to 2009, first in the Pecos League and then in whatever came after — Howie could never keep the league names straight because they kept reorganizing, folding into each other like bad hands of poker. The team moved to Tucson. The stadium stayed.

“Fly ball to left. Routine. Two down.”

“You know what I keep thinking about,” Lyle said.

“I do not.”

“Thermoclines. In the ocean. The layer where the warm water sits on top of the cold water and they don’t mix. There’s a boundary, a physical boundary you can feel if you’re diving. You go down and at a certain depth the temperature drops fifteen, twenty degrees. Your body knows before your mind does.”

“We’re between innings here, Lyle.”

“I’m providing color. This is color.”

“This is marine biology.”

“Color takes many forms. My point is that the game has thermoclines. You’re in the third inning and everything’s warm — routine grounders, nobody on base, the kind of baseball that could be anything. Then you drop through a layer and it’s the sixth inning and something’s happened, the character of the night has changed, and you couldn’t say when the temperature shifted. You just know you’re in colder water.”

Howie looked at him. “That’s pretty.”

“I’ve been saving it.”

“For how long?”

“Put it in the book.”

“There’s no book.”

“There’s always a book,” Lyle said. “Somebody’s keeping track.”

Third Inning

A strikeout. Howie called all six pitches with the care of a man reconstructing a car accident for the insurance company. The batter chased a slider down and away. Howie said he could see it in the hands, the way the grip was already wrong before the swing started, the barrel coming through the zone late and underneath, and Lyle said “Mm” the way he said “Mm” when he wanted to convey both agreement and the suspicion that agreement was beside the point.

“Three up, three down,” Howie said. “Quick inning.”

“Too quick. A quick inning is like a short conversation with someone you haven’t seen in years. You walk away thinking: I should have asked about the kid. I should have said something real.”

“You’re overthinking a one-two-three half.”

“I overthink everything. That’s my role. You narrate, I overthink. Between the two of us we’ve got most of the useless human functions covered.”

Down on the field, or what had been the field, a dust devil spun up near the third-base line and crossed toward the pitcher’s mound. It picked up a scrap of something — paper, plastic, the shed skin of the stadium’s former life — and carried it thirty feet before losing interest. Lyle watched it the way you watch anything that moves in a place where nothing is supposed to.

Fourth Inning

“I had a wife who told me I narrated my own life,” Howie said during a pitching change that wasn’t happening. “She said I couldn’t scramble eggs without calling the play-by-play. Egg one, cracked on the rim, into the bowl. Egg two, same procedure, good form. She said it was unbearable.”

“Was it?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t the one listening.”

A bird landed on the press box window ledge — a house sparrow, brown and gray, with the kind of face that conveys no opinion about anything. It sat there for ten seconds, turned its head twice, and left.

“Pitching change is complete,” Howie said. “The left-hander, Kovács, in from the bullpen. Hungarian kid. Picked him up from the independent league in Bisbee where he was throwing in the mid-eighties with a curve that drops like bad news. Story is he was an engineering student in Budapest — thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, that type of thing — and came over on a study visa that he let expire because somebody saw him throwing in a park and said, Son, that’s a professional arm.”

“Is any of that true?” Lyle asked.

“What does that mean?”

“I’m asking if you’re remembering or inventing.”

Howie considered this for a while. The PA system hummed. Somewhere in the grandstand, the sparrows were conducting their own affairs.

“Those are the same thing,” Howie said. “A good memory and a good invention use the same muscles. You’re building a picture from what’s available. The difference is just sourcing.”

“The difference is sourcing,” Lyle repeated. “I’ll have that put on my gravestone. Here lies Lyle Farris. The difference was sourcing.”

“You shouldn’t joke about your gravestone.”

“Who’s joking? I’ve thought about it. You get one line. One line that somebody walking by in fifty years might read. Most people waste it on beloved father, devoted husband. Administrative language. You’d think a person’s final sentence would be better than something from a form.”

Howie called a ground ball to first. Routine. He said the word “routine” and neither of them questioned it.

“Kovács has settled in,” Howie said. “That curveball is breaking sharp. Sixty-eight, sixty-nine miles an hour, dropping out of the zone at the last second. The hitters are seeing it up, thinking fastball, and by the time they recalibrate—”

“Gone.”

“Gone.” Howie smiled. “You can’t hit what you can’t believe.”

Fifth Inning

Nothing happened in the fifth. Howie called a one-two-three inning. A pop fly. A grounder. A called third strike that the batter didn’t argue because there was nobody to argue with.

The light was copper now. This deep in the valley, the sunset lasted an hour and went through stages that nobody had named. They just happened.

Neither of them said anything for a while. The PA hummed. The light changed.

Then Howie said, “Bottom of the fifth,” and they went on.

Sixth Inning

“Dominguez steps in. First pitch, ball one, high.”

“Let me tell you about Dominguez,” Lyle said.

“Please.”

“Dominguez is the kind of hitter who makes you believe in things you shouldn’t believe in. He’s got a stance that looks wrong — feet too close, hands too high, the bat waggling like he’s trying to get a fly off it. Every coach he ever had wanted to fix him. You look at him and think: that cannot work. And then he drives one into the gap and you’ve forgotten his stance is wrong because the result is right.”

“Ball two, low and away.”

“He’s out there looking like a man trying to kill a snake with a broomstick and he’s hitting .314.”

“He’s hitting .291,” Howie said.

“He’s hitting .314 in my version.”

“Your version has a lot of career highs in it.”

“My version is generous. Generosity is the least we can do for the people who show up.”

A hit. Howie called it as a line drive to right-center, one bounce off the wall, Dominguez holding at second, standing on the bag and clapping his hands once, dust on his uniform. Lyle could almost see the dust. That was the dangerous part — the almost.

Seventh Inning

“Seventh-inning stretch,” Howie said.

They stood. In a real game, the organ would play, and sixteen hundred people would roll their necks and remember they were bodies. Here in the booth, Howie and Lyle stood, and then Howie opened the press box door and went down the stairs.

Lyle watched him through the window. Howie crossed the concourse — the concrete path behind home plate where you used to buy churros from a woman named Dolores who wore her visor backward — and then he was on the field, walking through the weeds toward what had been second base.

Lyle leaned into his microphone.

“And during the stretch, we’ve got a situation developing on the field. A man — appears to be a member of the broadcast crew — has wandered onto the playing surface. He is currently standing in the area of the basepath between first and second. He appears to be looking at something, though from this distance it’s difficult to determine what. He may be having a moment. We’ll see if it develops into a play.”

Howie was standing still now. The weeds came up past his knees. The light had gone to violet and his shadow stretched long and thin toward center field, a dark line on the cracked earth.

“The man on the field has not moved. He may be examining the soil conditions. He may be lost in thought. He may be trying to remember something that happened here — a play, a season, a night when the stadium was full and the lights were on and the dirt was raked and the game was the game and not whatever this is.”

Lyle’s voice caught. He let it.

Howie came back up. He didn’t say what he’d seen or whether he’d seen anything. He sat down, put on his headset, and said, “Top of the eighth.”

Eighth Inning

The eighth was fast and brutal. A double play. A hit batter — Howie described the sound of the ball hitting the batter’s elbow, the specific dull thud of cowhide on bone, and Lyle winced though he knew there was no sound, no ball, no elbow, no bone. The PA crackled. The booth smelled of old electrical insulation and dust and the ghost of coffee from a pot removed years ago.

“The trainer’s out there now,” Howie said. “He’s checking the elbow. Doesn’t look broken. Bruised, probably. He’ll stay in. These guys always stay in. It’s the minors. You come out of a game in the minors and you’re telling the organization you can be hurt, and an organization that knows you can be hurt knows it can replace you.”

“When I was married,” Lyle said, “my wife — my second wife, Sandra — she said I talked about baseball the way other men talked about God. She meant it as a criticism. She said I used the sport to avoid having to look at anything directly. I’d say: the count was full, the wind was blowing out, the runner took a big lead. And she’d say: but what were you feeling? And I’d say: I was feeling the count. The count was what I was feeling.”

“Sandra left?”

“Sandra stayed. That was worse. Sandra stayed and I left, which means she was right about the avoiding. But I wasn’t avoiding. I was looking directly at something she couldn’t see.”

“Or you were hiding.”

“Or I was hiding. Both of those can be true. You’d know something about that.”

“I’ll tell you what I think about when I think about baseball,” Lyle said.

“I think about the foul balls. Not the home runs, not the diving catches. The foul balls. All the balls that go into the stands, into parking lots, onto rooftops, into storm drains. Thousands per season. They just go. And some kid picks one up and puts it on a shelf and forty years later the ball is still there and nobody remembers the count. The ball outlasts the game.”

“Foul ball, right side,” Howie said. “Into the seats.”

Nobody caught it.

Ninth Inning

“Last of the ninth,” Howie said. “Roadrunners trail by two.”

Lyle wasn’t sure when a score had been established. It had accreted over the innings like weather — not decided, just arrived at. The Roadrunners trailed. They had been trailing, perhaps, from the beginning, or perhaps the deficit had materialized in the middle innings when neither of them was paying full attention.

“First batter, Aguirre. Batting .267 on the season. First-pitch swinger. The kind of man who finishes your sentences and is usually wrong about where they were going.”

“I knew an Aguirre,” Lyle said. “Not a ballplayer. A roofer. He lived in a trailer off Route 285 and kept finches. Hundreds of them, in cages he built from scrap wire. The noise was like standing inside a radio tuned between stations. He said he could tell each one apart by its song.”

Howie didn’t reply. He was looking at the field.

The sparrows were louder now. With the sun gone, they were settling into whatever sparrows do at night — shuffling, rearranging, disputing territory in their small and total way. You could hear them through the floor of the press box, through the concrete, a sound like a building whispering to itself.

“Single up the middle,” Howie said. “Man on first.”

“Everything is available,” Lyle said.

“Next batter, Figueroa.”

“Everything is available and nothing is required. You’ve got a man on first and a two-run deficit and the season — let’s call it the season — the season is on the line, and none of it matters and all of it matters and you cannot tell the difference.”

“Strike one. Curve, dropped in. Good pitch.”

“Good pitch,” Lyle agreed.

“Ball one, inside. Strike two — swinging. He chased it. Slider away.”

“He always chases the slider. You’d think a man would learn.”

“Nobody learns. Every hitter knows the slider’s coming. Knowing doesn’t help.”

“One-two count.”

Howie paused. The PA hummed.

“The pitch.”

He was quiet for a long time. Three seconds. Five. The sparrows had gone quiet. One of them was watching something and the other was watching him watch.

“Fly ball,” Howie said. “Deep left-center.”

Lyle closed his eyes.

“Going back. At the wall.”

A long time. Long enough for the ball to enter the sky and live there, suspended, above a field that was and wasn’t a field.

“Gone,” Howie said. “Gone.”

Lyle didn’t open his eyes for a while.

“We’re tied,” he said.

The sparrows started up again under the grandstand.

Howie called two more outs. The game continued into extra innings, but that was for tomorrow. He leaned into the microphone one last time.

“That’s going to do it for tonight, folks. We’ll be back tomorrow, same time, same place. For Lyle Farris, I’m Howie Beals. You’ve been listening to Roadrunner baseball. Good night.”

He clicked off the microphone. The red light on the console — the one light that still worked — went dark. One of them said something to the other, quietly, but nobody was listening.