Up the cactus-covered hill he climbed, gasping for oxygen and bleeding where the yucca stabbed him. The old man never once looked back.

“In the beginning was baseball,” he repeated over and over, twisting and turning to avoid the prickly pear cactus and the sharp-pointed yucca, pushing his way through the yellow-flowered rabbit brush, stumbling over rock outcroppings, shredding what was left of his hospital slippers in the process.

He stopped to suck more air, heard the sirens above the rasping of his lungs and beating of his heart, but refused to look back down the hill to where his fate followed doggedly.

“In the beginning,” he repeated, “in the beginning … baseball.” The thought got him moving again. Though he had forgotten where he was going or even why, he knew what he was running from. Them. Sirens pursued him.

His left hand clutched the pillowcase slung over his shoulder—though what was inside he couldn’t remember just now—while his right hand held tightly to the cell phone. That he knew about, that he remembered. He was awaiting a phone call, a life-changing phone call. “A lifeline,” he said aloud and had the vague sense the phrase had once meant something quite different, but what or when he had no idea.

He didn’t stop when he reached the top of the hill but kept right on going, down the other side, much easier on the lungs, but harder on the feet and legs, and what with his slippers nothing but shreds now and his bleeding leg and the loose gravel of the hill, he lost control, skidded and skied down the scree, slipping this way and that, bouncing off boulders and barreling through brush, until his feet slipped right out from under him and he was tobogganing on his butt into the barrel of a melted prickly pear.

Melted?

Do cactus melt? he wondered. The shriveled stems of the cactus stopped his slippage down the hillside and held him in their thorny grip. He expected to be needled to death, but the thorns bent on impact, tickling rather than piercing, and he found himself flat on his back in the middle of an old, withered cactus plant.

Melted? he wondered again. The cactus looked melted. Like some holocaust had sucked all the life out of the plant and left this softened shell of bent and burned stems and barrels.

Then he remembered the fire, the smoke that had hidden his escape, and the singed landscape he’d wandered in. When was that? He couldn’t remember. “Before,” he said aloud. “It was before,” and that’s all that mattered. Now was now and before was back then and … and something else, something about now … something he needed to remember.

He looked at his bleeding legs buried in the cactus. He pulled the pillow case from off his shoulder, and then he held up his right hand, the one with the phone in it, and it all came back as clear as the red stitches on a brand new baseball.

He was waiting for a phone call. The phone call. His lifeline.

He heard the sirens still wailing below, on the other side of the hill, and he began once again to repeat the comforting words: “In the beginning was baseball … in the beginning was baseball …”

The phone rang.

“Hello!” he shouted, because he was outdoors, on a hillside, buried in cactus, who knows why, but he shouted.

“Bob? Is that you? Kevin Lewis here.”

“Yes! Me!” the old man shouted, confirming as much for himself as the voice on the other end of the invisible line.

“No need to yell, we have a good connection.”

“Oh,” said the old man, unaware he’d been yelling. “Better?”

“Yes, fine. Where are you? I heard—we all assumed, that is— I mean, not to be rude but—”

“I’m here,” the old man said, looking around at the cactus and rabbit brush. He could hear the sirens in the distance. Getting closer. “Doesn’t matter where. We got a deal?”

“Oh, I just didn’t— Doesn’t matter. You’re right. Stick to business.” The voice on the other end took a deep breath. “The trade. Yes. Dan said you might be interested in swapping your young pitcher Latham for my slugger Burton. That right?”

“Whatever Dan said, yes, that’s right,” the old man said, then added, “As long as it’s a big trade, you know, something everyone will sit up and take note of.”

“Oh, they’ll take notice. We’re about to swap the two hottest minor league talents in the entire PEBAverse. It’ll generate some buzz.”

“Buzz … That’s good, right?”

Kevin Lewis laughed. “Dan said you wanted something splashy.”

“Splashy,” the old man repeated.

“This is a lot of splash,” Lewis continued. “Big waves.”

“Waves,” the old man repeated, “even better. Let’s swamp the mutter-mumblers!”

“The what?” Lewis asked.

“The mudder-muckers, the ballboy-bangers, the vendor-victimizers, the hamburger-humpers—”

“Okay okay,” Lewis said, laughing. “I’ll make a public announcement. I don’t suppose you … y’know … Can you?”

“Can I what?”

“Make a public announcement. I don’t suppose, in your, uh, situation …”

“Me?” said the old man. He listened to the sirens. “Maybe I can. Sooner than I think.”

“What?”

“We’ll see,” said the old man, pulling himself up out of the melted cactus plant. “You announce it and we will see what we will see.”

“Okay,” Lewis said but the line had gone dead. “Bob? Hello?” Lewis waited a moment, then put his phone down. He wondered where the call had come from and why it had ended so abruptly. “He’s an old man,” the Featherheads’ General Manager said to himself. “Maybe that’s all it is.

But that was hardly all it was. Never is.

The old man stood on the side of the hill, shook the dirt from the sheet he was cloaked in and opened the pillow case to toss in the cell phone. He was surprised to find dozens of cards inside. Cards with names printed on them. Names he thought he recognized.

Kaline, Pierce, Yost, Aaron, Jensen, Spahn, Banks, Valo, Doby, Mantle, Williams, Erskine, Newcombe, Fox, Hodges, Zernial, Irvin, Lemon, O’Dell, Roberts, Trucks, Grammas, Colavito

A small electrical impulse in his brain, one synapse connecting with another, made his right hand reach into the pocket of his shorts and pull out two more cards.

He studied the cards.

“In the beginning …” He paused and smiled. “… baseball.”

The sirens surrounded him. At the bottom of the hill he could see the flashing lights of the police cars.

“There he is!” a voice shouted. The old man turned to look back up to the top of the hill he had just slid down, and he saw three giants silhouetted against the twilight sky. One of them was pointing at him.

The game was up. He was going back. Fate had found him.

He should be sad, he thought, but he wasn’t. Never felt better. His mind was clear, he knew where they were taking him, and he knew what they would do to him once they got him back inside. They were nothing if not predictable. Nurse Peters would see to that.

He smiled. And then he laughed. Out loud.

One of the officers had made his way down the hillside to the old man, and when he heard him laughing, he said, “I don’t know what you’re laughing about, we gotta take you back, you know that. I’m sorry.”

The old man just smiled and nodded.

“Maybe you don’t know,” the officer said. “Maybe you don’t understand a bit of what’s happening to you. And maybe you don’t deserve to be stuck in a place like … well, you know. But my job is to take you back, okay? Let’s take it real easy and get you off this hill without hurting you.”

The officer noticed where the old man was bleeding. “And we’ll get you fixed up before we return you, okay?”

The old man nodded and smiled some more.

A second officer had arrived. “Another crazy one?” he asked the officer helping the old man down the hill.

“Hard to tell,” the first officer said.

“Gotta be crazy to laugh about this.”

“Maybe,” the first officer said. “And maybe he knows something we don’t.”

That made the old man’s eyes twinkle in the twilight. “You’ll see,” he said to the officers.

“See what?”

“Just how crazy I am. In a couple days. Watch the news. Crazy like a fox. You’ll see.”

His laughter bounced off the boulders and rebound from the rocks until it seemed to fill the narrow canyon where the police cars waited.

The old man was going home.