Page 76 of Levi

“No, I didn’t.”

He laughs. Short, surprised out of him, but genuine.

“My father’s watching this game right now,” I tell him. “Guaranteed. TV sound off, radio on, because he doesn’t trust any man who calls baseball from a booth with air conditioning. He grew up in Cuba on Luis Tiant. El Tiante. The windup — back to the hitter, a look up at God, then the ball arrives from somewhere behind third base. My father is seventy-one and can still do the entire thing in the kitchen with a wooden spoon. My mother has learned to cook around it. I tried the windup once at eleven and put a ball through the neighbor’s screen door. My father paid for it and told everyone I had promise.”

“Did he come to your games?”

“Every one. Kept score in a spiral notebook — his own system, half the marks aren’t legal scorekeeping anywhere on earth. Every at-bat I ever took is in a drawer in that house.” I shrug. “There aren’t many. It’s a thin notebook.”

Levi listens. “That’s a good dad.”

“He is.” I lob one back. “Where’d you play?”

“Left field. I could run. Our field didn’t have lights though.”

The games ended when the sun did. That’s all he gives me. I take it and don’t push.

The gate buzzes with the pizza delivery. He jumps up, and is back in two minutes with the boxes stacked to his chin. There are four of them.

“I said enough for two hungry men.”

“And that’s what I ordered.”

We dig into the pizza. The game tightens. Bottom of the sixth there’s a play at the plate, and we’re both up off the sectional yelling at the same replay — him with “He’s out, he’s out, look at the tag,” me around a mouthful of pizza going “Safe. Safe. The foot’s in,” and the umpire sides with Levi. He points at me across the cushion like he won money on it. He’s lit up with it, grinning.

First argument we’ve had that neither of us needed to win.

Seventh-inning stretch, the crowd sings “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” and next to me — barely there, under his breath — Levi sings with it. Not even knowing he’s doing it, I’d swear.

The sound goes straight through me. Low, rough, warmer than a stadium jingle has any right to be, and I keep my eyes fixed hard on the screen. Levi’s voice should not be able to do that to the seventh-inning stretch.

My intentions were to drop off a phone and get back on the road. That was five innings ago. Levi seems good and has finally quit looking like the floor’s about to go out from under him.

I stay as the innings stack up, one cushion from a man I know better than to touch, and I don’t get up.

Chapter 27: Levi

The game won’t end. It was tied an hour ago, it’s tied now, the two teams trading hits back and forth across a field two time zones west. The pizza’s down to grease and a couple of crusts I’m too far gone to finish. Dante’s sunk deep into the other end of the couch watching ball like there’s nowhere on God’s earth he’s due.

It’s the best thing I’ve had in a long time, and I know to the day how long I get to keep it.

The Panhandle Country Bash starts next Saturday, but that’s not the clock that matters. My crew comes before that. Any day now, tomorrow for all I know. A van of them rolling up to flip the lights back on and start the operation that pays for all of this.

And Dante finds out the no-name bum he’s been hauling around had a name the entire time. A loud, famous one. After that, nothing in this room happens again like it’s happening now. I do the only thing I can with a good night I can’t keep. I bank it to remember later.

Sometime past midnight I get up for water.

I’m gone two minutes, no more. Glass from the tap, a look out the kitchen window at nothing, the Gulf you can hear and can’t see. And when I come back Dante’s out. Dead asleep. Quick. Just like that. Head gone back against the cushion, one arm slack across his stomach, the other hand open on the seat between us, palm up, fingers loose. Hair falling across his forehead. The assembled thing he wears has slid off him. Under it is just a tired man who closed his eyes and didn’t mean to.

I stand there in the middle of the room and I can’t move.

I’ve never seen him off guard. And here he is, gone clean under in front of me. Door wide open, me ten feet away. Defenseless as a kid, because sometime during this last week he decided I was safe to fall asleep in front of.

I’m not waking him up.

No way in hell.

The throw’s on the arm of the couch. The one I’ve carried around all week. I pick it up, and I lay it over him. Carefully so I don’t wake him. Easing it up over the slack arm and the open hand and the rise and fall of his breathing.