Chapter 10: Volume

I paid my eighty-five dollars out of the tip jar and went in just after it opened, behind sixty retirees and their camp chairs.

Abuela had watched me count the bills.

She said, "Take the thermos," and then, "Come out," and she did not say anything else.

The threshold felt like walking into a walk-in cooler in August.

My ears popped, the sound of the park behind me cut off, and the air tasted of salt.

Then I was standing in Milander Park, and it was Milander Park the way a map is a city.

The sky was white from edge to edge with no sun in it.

The ball fields were there, but the infields and foul lines were drawn in ring salt and the grass between them was gray and dry.

The stadium stood where the stadium stood, a concrete bowl with its seats the color of chalk.

There was no wind and no insect, and my phone said NO SERVICE.

I turned on the spot and noticed what was missing.

The batting cages by the entrance had not been there when I was a kid, and they were not there now.

The dugouts had no roofs, and the parking lot was a field.

It was the park as it had been in 1986, the year it was filed with the county.

I laughed once, out loud, in a gate that could kill me.

The Registry had gotten its map from the county recorder.

I filed that too, under things that were funny, which was becoming a very long list.

The retirees set up their camp chairs in a line across the pitcher's mound.

They sat in them and loaded.

Their captain was a retired electrician with a mustache and a whistle.

He told them to hold the line, aim low, and keep a round in reserve.

It was a good plan, and I wished he had laminated it.

"You're the Cooler Kid," he said when he saw me.

"Yes, sir."

"Stay behind the chairs and carry the first-aid bag," he said. "If it goes bad, you tell the wounded to hold on."

I took the bag.

Minutes later the first palmetto came over the outfield wall.

After that they came in sixes and then in dozens, low and fast on the salt.

The retirees opened fire in rolling volleys of ten.

Palmettos do not bounce.

Every round that hit one put it down, and the line stood up from its camp chairs and cheered.

It was a good fight for about ninety seconds.

Then the Inside began to teach them its rules.

The first rule was the floor.

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