Back to the scorched earth he ran, cell phone in one pocket, Matthew and Luke in the other, a dirty pillow case dragging along behind.

“Hold up right there!” the orderly’s voice followed him as his old-man’s-stumbling-semblance-of-running led him past the Men’s Ward, past the laundry room and the bins of dirty sheets, past a storage room and a female patient in her gown who stood waving at him as he shuffled across the open quad, past the last building on the hospital grounds and through the miraculously wide-open Gate 38, across the one lane road that circled the State Hospital and into the chaparral, the charred chaparral, the blackened chaparral and scorched earth, where he hid to catch his breath.

Gasping behind a large yucca, he heard the orderly yelling at him, “Whatcha doin’, man? Where you be headin’?”

But the orderly wasn’t chasing him anymore. The young man in hospital whites stood in the one lane road and called again. “Doncha know they’s jist gonna call the police to come round your sorry ass up? You don’ want that, man. Come on back in here where you belongs.”

For a minute, no one moved. The old man panted behind his yucca. The younger man waited in the street.

“I ain’t comin’ in there to getchya, y’know. Not into that mess a’ thorns, no way, man. ‘Sides, ya dropped yer pillow case,” the orderly added, pointing to where the dirty white sack hung from the sharp thorn of a yucca.

The old man stared at the sack but he couldn’t place it. Was it his? Or was the orderly just trying to trick him?

“Doncha want it?” When the old man didn’t respond, the orderly said, “Okay, man, but I’m leavin’ it right there ‘cuz you’ll be wantin’ it when you git yer mem’ry back.”

The orderly turned and started walking back toward Gate 38. When he got there, he grabbed the big iron gate and gave it a tug, swinging it toward closure. But he paused before clanging it tight against the cement wall and shouted out toward the chaparral one more invitation.

“Last chance, ol’ man. Otherwise, I gonna slam this gate shut and you’s gonna be stuck out here till the cops finds ya.”

The orderly waited a moment and when the ghost he’d been chasing didn’t emerge from the thorns and brambles of the chaparral, he swung the gate shut with a loud CLANG! and headed back across the grassy quad toward the main hospital building.

The old man sighed in relief, swallowing air by the lungful. His eyes teared up and he wondered why. What am I crying for? I’m free. By the time the cops show up, he thought, I’ll be long gone.

Then he looked around, as if to decide where to go next. To his right, the cactus-covered hillside rose steeply into the air. He would cut his legs to shreds trying to penetrate the cactus barrier. To his left, the hillside sloped down gently through rabbit brush towards the main road from town to the hospital. Cars slid along the asphalt. He expected to see the flashing red and blue lights of police cars coming from that direction in a few minutes. Behind him, the chaparral stretched uninterrupted for a mile or more, until it ended at a dirt road, on the other side of which stretched another mile or more of agricultural fields. In the far distance he could make out a truck and tractor.

Someone must be working the fields, he thought. That way? Maybe, but not till later, after the workers leave. Maybe.

He turned back to face the hospital. Why had he left in the first place? He couldn’t recall, his memories eluding him again. He shook his head to clear it, but still he couldn’t remember why he was standing outside Gate 38. The creamy white walls of the buildings and the cheerful burnt-orange tiles covering the hospital roofs promised more comfortable lodging for the evening than cactus and scorched earth.

Scorched earth! He remembered something. He’d been here before, well, not here, exactly, but here in the chaparral, surrounded by cactus and fields, here, outside the hospital. Yes, it all came back, the burnt earth, the smell of smoke, the firemen who looked like aliens, and …

He stuck his hand into a pocket and pulled out two baseball cards.

“Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John,” he said aloud. That’s why he’d returned to the hospital, to recover his cards, to continue the quest for the four cards. And he had two. But where were the others? Where were Mark and John? Were there cards in the pillow case swinging from the yucca plant on the edge of the road?

He looked at the dirty white sack only a few yards away. Was that his? Only one way to find out, he thought, and began to look for a path through the prickly pear and yucca.

What if it’s a trap? Sure, he thought, the orderly hung it there to lure him out of the chaparral so they could tie him down to a gurney and wheel him back inside. They must be waiting for me to come out, hiding down there behind the walls, them in their white coats, them and their drugs, their gurneys and … and the white jacket they forced you into and tied you down with, the straitjacket that kept you straight as a board, still as a gourd, dead as a doornail.

He’d check out the pillow case after dark, after the staff went home and after the security guards had checked the gates. He could wait. What was a little waiting to a man who was free? A man who had Matthew and Luke on his side. A man with …

He reached his hand into the other pocket of his shorts and found … a cell phone!

What was he doing with a cell phone? Was it his? Couldn’t be, patients didn’t have phones, and yet—

He held it in his hand. He was a patient and here was a phone, so maybe …

He pressed the button and the screen lit up. A phone could make a call, a phone could get him out of here, a phone could be his salvation. He would use this phone, he decided. Of course, he would use this phone to call someone. To call …

Who? Who could he call? Who would take a call from a patient who’d just escaped from the state hospital?

He sat down in the dirt. The smell of burnt creosote filled his nostrils. He had two cards and a phone. He’d snuck back into the hospital to recover the cards. Had he intended to take the phone too? Must have. Must have had a plan. Yes! A plan. But what was it?

“Damn memory!” he said and slapped the side of his head.

Ow! The slap hurt. He promised himself not to do that again. But something jiggled, something shifted, and another piece of the puzzle fell into place. It had reminded him of something—the slap, or the hurt, it didn’t matter—but it was as if a memory, a fragment of a memory, had been dislodged when he slapped himself. An image—no, a sensation. Something he’d felt before.

If he could just remember what it was. What he had felt. Then he could remember the plan. And why he had had to sneak back into the hospital for a pillow case. And a phone. If he could remember this one thing, this one feeling, this one sensation … maybe then he would remember other things. This, he thought, could be the key that unlocked all his missing memories.

The moment he thought it, he knew it was a lie. There was no key. No simple solution to the missing puzzle pieces. Sometimes you just had to wait, just sit and wait and think about something else, and then Shazam! just like that, a piece would fall in place.

He remembered working puzzles when he was a kid. Those puzzles with lots of pieces cut in strange shapes. What were they called? He couldn’t find the word, but he remembered some of the pictures. He rarely finished the puzzles, but the pictures were on the box covers, and those he remembered. There was one of a farmhouse on a stream, and another of airplanes, and there was one … one special one … one he’d finished, or nearly finished … yes!

It was a wooden puzzle, the pieces worn and faded, but he could still make out the picture of an old fashioned baseball game being played on an open field, no bleachers, just fans standing along one side and lining the outfield. The men wore blousy white shirts and the fielders had no gloves. The pitcher was tossing the ball underhand to the batter, so this game must have been played in the 19th Century, before the National League permitted overhand pitching. (When was that? He used to know.) Or maybe it wasn’t a picture of an organized ball game at all, just a group of boys and men playing ball. Maybe.

 

He’d loved that picture, and he’d finished putting the puzzle together, except for the missing pieces, one smack dab in the middle of the outfield where the centerfielder should have been, the other in the sky blue of the upper right hand corner. He could see it clearly.

Funny how memory works—or doesn’t work, he thought. He couldn’t remember his reason for breaking back into a hospital he was fortunate enough to escape once, but he could bring up the image of that baseball puzzle perfectly.

“In the beginning was baseball,” he muttered aloud and then wondered why he’d said it. “In the beginning was baseball,” he repeated, but he still couldn’t remember what it meant or why he was repeating it. “In the beginning,” he started a third time, and then, in a flash, it hit him: he should call another general manager and trade a player! A baseball player!

That’s what the cell phone was for. Make a trade. Show them who’s boss. Show them he was still in charge!

He remembered! He’d been a General Manager once, of that he was certain, though he couldn’t quite recall where or what team, but he’d run a ball club, he’d done that, yes, he was sure of that, he’d hired people and fired people and made trades and …

“Make a trade,” he said aloud. “Call someone and make a trade. Now.”

He stood up, excited, ready to do business. He stood, and he looked around at the scorched earth, the hillside of cactus, the yellow flowers of the rabbit brush, the locked hospital gate, and, finally, at himself, at his feet in their soot-covered slippers, his legs poking out beneath the grimy sheet, and at his hands, well, his left hand, the hand of an old man, wrinkled and liver-spotted. When had that happened? How had he gotten so old? And what was he doing here, in slippers and a sheet, standing among the cactus?

A moment ago, he seemed to know, but it all evaporated like so much smoke.

His eyes were wet again. His feet ached. The dirty sheet scratched against his thighs. And he had to pee. He turned to look for a spot, then realized it made no difference.

“Here is as good as anywhere,” he said.

He shifted the phone from his right hand to his left and pulled aside the sheet with that hand, using his right to pull his penis out of his shorts, and held it in the open air, waiting for the urine to flow.

Nothing happened.

He waited a little longer, but nothing. He started counting aloud, a ritual from his childhood: “43, 32, 21, hike!”

But nothing came.

He looked down at his shriveled old dick, limp in his right hand, and tried to will it to pee, tried to force urine out of it by squeezing his ass muscles as tight as he could and grunting aloud, “Unh!”

Nothing.

He gave up. Tucked his failed member back in his shorts, dropped the sheet to cover himself, and switched the cell phone from his left hand to his right …

… and stopped.

The phone. He’d been holding the phone the whole time. The phone was the missing piece of the puzzle. The phone was why he was here, standing in the cactus and rabbit brush, needing to pee. He remembered!

The urge to piss was suddenly so intense he nearly dropped the phone in his haste to pull his dick back out and release the urine that was screaming inside him.

He pissed a slow but steady yellow stream onto the scorched earth. Relief washed over him like a cooling breeze. His hands tingled, his legs tingled, the top of his head tingled, and he shook himself like a dog as he finished. God, he’d needed that.

One moment he couldn’t pee and the next he couldn’t not pee. What was happening to him? he wondered. Is this what old age will be like—standing in a field of cactus unable to piss when you want, and unable to stop it a second later?

Spare me, he thought.

Spare me the indignity of not being able to piss myself when I need to, or not being able to clean myself after. I don’t want my last days to be spent wearing sheets and dirty slippers. And I sure as hell don’t want to be hiding in the cactus anymore!

What I want, he thought.

What I want, he tried to remember.

“What I want,” he said aloud, looking at the phone still gripped by his right hand, “what I want … is to be who I was.”

A man with a phone. A man who did things with the phone. A man who could make a phone call and something would happen. But what? What would happen if he made a phone call? A moment ago he’d known. A moment ago he’d been ready to make the call. But what call? And why?

For the life of him, he couldn’t remember.

“Damn inconsiderate memory!” he sputtered aloud. “Damn memory-mucking brain cells!” What was the point of having a brain if you couldn’t rely on it for a few crucial memories?

He slapped the side of his head again. It hurt again. But nothing fell into place. He slumped back down to the ground.

“Damn me, damn me, damn me!” he muttered, slipping the phone into his pocket and resting his face on his hands.

Slumped forward, head in hands, knees pulled up against his face, he felt like crying. He waited for the tears to come, for the sobs that would bring some relief from this agony, but like the piss before them, no tears came. He was as dry as an old bleached bone.

His hands massaged the spot where he’d slapped himself. Beneath his brittle skin, he could feel the sutures that separated the bones of his head. What were their names? He couldn’t remember. He’d known once, but now … He pushed against one soft spot above his right ear and felt a deep ache, like he’d touched a bruise. He searched for a similar spot above his left ear and when he found it, he pushed. It hurt. He moaned aloud, and … another piece fell into place.

He closed his eyes and pushed both spots simultaneously and he suddenly remembered why it hurt. He remembered the electrodes the nurses had placed there, just above his ears, and the sound of the machine warming up. Then, without warning, the smell of the anesthetic came back to him, acrid and nauseating. It made him dizzy for a moment, but he hung onto the knowledge of where he was and why he was trying to remember the therapy.

That’s what they called it, therapy, like it was a walk in the park, a chat in your flat, scones and cream tea with the Cat in the Hat.

He shook his head. Where the hell had that come from?

What he remembered was the pain, the excruciating, mind-numbing, toe-curling seconds of agony as the electricity shot through the brain like a spike driven through the roof of your mouth, rearranging all the synapses and erasing all your memories. When it was over, for a few minutes or hours or days (who could tell the difference?), you remembered nothing. Not who you were or where you were or why strangers were staring down at you. Then they’d remove the electrodes and pull the rubber plug out of your mouth and sit you up, and the memories would begin to leak back into your empty head. Very slowly. Drip by drip.

First to return were the ghosts, confused images of people you didn’t quite recognize but knew you should recognize, people from long ago, neighbors during your childhood perhaps or someone you went to school with. Later, more recent memories returned, noisy memories with the wrong colors and irritating sounds, as if a film of your life were being shown with the wrong projector lens and the soundtrack from a slow-motion car crash. Nothing fit. Finally, clear and specific memories returned, from sometime not too long ago, memories from early days at the hospital or just before you were moved to the hospital, memories trying to answer a question you hadn’t yet asked but soon would be obsessed by: Why am I here?

“Why am I here?” the old man asked aloud. He listened for an answer, but the mute yucca just pointed at him and the singed earth mocked him. But he knew. He knew why he was here—right here, in the chaparral outside the hospital, among the cactus and yucca and rabbit brush. He was here … to escape being there.

Across the road Gate 38 stood closed and silent. No one peaked out between its bars. No one called to him. He had escaped. The realization filled his lungs with air, and the old man stood tall above the brush and thorns, stood and yelled back at the silent gate, “You can’t have me!”

Then he laughed. He laughed aloud. Laughed and laughed and laughed.

If someone saw me now, he thought, an old man in a dirty sheet laughing in the cactus, they’d think I belonged in a nut house! That made him laugh more.

The laughter filled his eyes with water. “But I’m not crying!” he shouted. Still, the tears reminded him of the pain, the pain reminded him of the “therapy,” and thoughts of the therapy led him to realize all he’d lost.

He’d had a job once, an important job, running a ball club. Why with one phone call he could—

One phone call, he said to himself, and pulled the cell phone out of his pocket. He looked at the phone. He pushed its button. He watched the screen light up. He recognized the small green image of a telephone on the screen and he touched it. A number pad appeared. What numbers should he dial?

He looked at the screen of numbers. He looked at his right index finger. He wasn’t going to be able to dial anything with this phone. When had phones ceased being dialed? The world was moving too damn fast, if you asked him. His finger twitched, so he started to tap out the numbers he couldn’t dial.

As if his finger could remember what his brain could not, he started tapping out a string of numbers by rote, automatically, as if some intelligence in a remote corner of the universe were making him do it. As if someone were writing his story and this was the next event, the anticipated moment, the obligatory scene.

3, 2, 3, 0, 8, 8, 7 his finger tapped.

Nothing happened. So, on a hunch from another corner of the universe, he touched the green telephone icon again.

A two-note melody blared back at him: DEE-dum! Then a women’s voice told him, “To place a call in this area, you must dial the area code and the number.”

“Thank you,” he told the woman, but she ignored him.

Area code? He puzzled that one over. He remembered area codes, but when had Ma Bell started using them? Back in the Sixties? Or the Fifties, even? So how old did the phone number he’d just dialed have to be if it didn’t have an area code? Was it a number from his childhood? What number …

And then he remembered. Puzzle pieces fell into place. It wasn’t 3230887, no, it was FA-30887. Yes! FA for Fairview, back in the days when phone numbers began with the first two letters of some name, a geographic location perhaps. Or maybe Ma Bell just used letters instead of numbers because they were easier to remember. True enough, look at him, he remembered, with some help, Fairview 30887 from 50 some years ago. But could he remember his current phone number?

Did he have a current phone number?

He stared at the phone, but it was no help.

He walked himself through the memory. He tried to visualize how it had been. He was managing his club (something to do with tractors, he thought, but he had no idea why he thought that), and he would pick up the phone and press a button and Abracadrabra! just like that, a phone somewhere else rang. He didn’t remember any numbers, certainly no area codes, all he remembered doing was pushing a button.

He looked at the illuminated screen of the phone again. He wondered, for a moment, if the phone were newer than the one he’d used in his job. If it were designed differently or had different buttons—but wait, he remembered using this phone, yes! The nurse, the nice nurse, the one who’d given him the phone—what was her name? Sherry, Terry … Mary!

Images and voices filled his head as the memory returned, full blown, live and in technicolor!

He remembered how she’d teased him about having a phone call, because patients weren’t allowed incoming calls, and then, like magic, she’d produced a cell phone out of her pocket and handed it to him. “It’s yours now,” she’d said. His own phone. Like the one in his office, you didn’t dial it, you touched it, a button for everyone you needed to call.

This phone must have a button like that, he figured. If he could find that button, then all he had to do was push it, and whoever answered it would have to be someone connected to him, or someone who used to be connected to him. Somewhere on that phone was the number of somebody who would remember him, somebody who had done business with him before, somebody who could tell him who he was and what he needed to do next.

He pushed the green telephone icon again. The number pad came up on the screen again, only this time he noticed the word “Contacts” below it. He touched the screen and an alphabetical list appeared.

Perfect, he thought, a list of everyone I called, ready and waiting for me. I wonder how it got in the phone? Who put it there? Who would have all my numbers?

Puzzled, he looked more closely at the list. Doctors and nurses and medical offices … this wasn’t his list! Whose? One of the staff?

He shook the phone. Nothing happened.

He shook his head. And a tiny fragment of a memory broke loose and fell into place. Nurse Peters! He remembered seeing her face on the phone once. The phone was hers, the nurse had stolen it for him, stolen Head Nurse Peters’ phone! Outrageous, but he remembered it now. How they’d laughed.

But where was that picture of Nurse Peters he’d seen on the phone before?

He pressed buttons quickly, haphazardly, and the phone responded by revealing different screens, but none of them were the smiling face of Peters. Then he noticed an icon in the upper corner: “Photos.” He touched it. A screen full of images popped up and there, in the middle, was Nurse Peters smiling at him.

It was her phone. Which means, he said to himself, those are her contacts, not mine. For a moment he relished the thought of calling someone on Peters’ list and reporting that good old Peters had been arrested! That would shake things up, he thought, but even as he chuckled he realized no one would believe him. Nurse Peters would never be arrested. She was too careful, too ethical, too … good.

Besides, he didn’t want to waste the phone making prank calls, he wanted to contact someone somewhere who would know him and help him out. He touched the phone icon again and studied the list of names that popped up. Could any of Peters’ contacts lead him to someone he knew? He went down the list and realized it was unlikely. But at the bottom of the screen he noticed a series of icons and words, one of which looked like a clock and said “Recents” below it.

“Recents”? Was that even a word? Something could have happened recently, and so be said to be recent, but how could you have more than one recent? What would it even mean?

He had no idea, but he touched the icon anyway and a new list appeared, accompanied by numbers. He was about to click away from the screen when he recognized one of the names on the list, Dan DiVincenzo.  

Where did he know that name from?

He looked at the list more carefully. At the very top was a number with the word “Unknown” below it. 323-0887. The number he dialed earlier! His old home phone number from his childhood. FA 30887. He’d just dialed it, so did that mean this list was a list of calls he’d made? Recently?

That’s what Recents are, he realized. Recent numbers called. Of course! Stupid me!

That meant he’d used this phone to call somebody named Dan. He noticed the date adjacent to the name: April 2018. When was that?

The old man realized he had no idea what the date was, even what year it was.

“Damn memory!” he cursed aloud. “Damn therapy!”

But wait, he thought, it didn’t matter, did it? All he had to do was touch this Dan’s name and the phone would call him, right? And then he could ask Dan who he was and when he’d last called and …

He touched the name and the phone began dialing.

What if this Dan guy has changed phone numbers? Do people still do that? What if his phone has been stolen, like Nurse Peters’? Who will answer then? What if Dan doesn’t want to hear from him? What if …

Before he could work out all the possibilities, a voice on the other end said, “Bulldozer Bob, the last man on the planet I expected to hear from. How the hell are you?”

“Hi, uh, what’d you say?”

“I just asked how the hell—”

“No,” interrupted the old man, “what’d you call me?”

“Bulldozer Bob?”

“Yeah. What’s that mean?”

“What’s the matter, Bob? Off your meds?”

“What’s a bulldozer?”

“You’re kidding, right?”

The old man considered it for a moment. “Is this Dan?”

“Yeah, who else? You called me, remember?”

The old man wasn’t sure he had. “How’d you know I was calling?”

“My phone identifies callers, doesn’t yours? You got some antiquated, Luddite-like phone?”

The old man looked at the phone. “It ain’t antiquated, that’s for sure. I could hardly figure out how to make a call. But Luddite? I don’t think I know what that means.”

Dan started to explain, “The Luddites were a group of—”

“They connected to bulldozers?” the old man interrupted.

“Hah! Good one. Luddites and bulldozers, that’s one for the books, Bob. So, what’d you call about? Got a trade in mind?”

The old man’s memory lit up when he heard the word trade. “Yes! Trade, that’s it, that’s it exactly. Thanks, Dan. A trade. That’s what I called for. I gotta make a trade. You in?”

Dan laughed. “Wait a minute, not so fast. I gotta know what’s on the table before I start talking horseflesh.”

“We trade horses?”

More laughter. “No no, just a manner of speaking. What do you need?”

“To trade,” the old man said.

“Yeah, I know, I mean …” There was a silence on the other end, then Dan’s tone shifted and he asked, “Is there something wrong, Bob? You don’t sound like yourself.”

So, he knows what I usually sound like, the old man thought. And this isn’t it.  “What am I supposed to sound like?”

“You’re usually on top of things. You know what you want and what you have to offer. Hell, you and I usually complete trades in a couple minutes. Not like this.”

“Dan, you know me right?” Dan concurred. “So help me out. I’m … I’m a little confused. The damn meds they’ve got me on, you know. What I want—what I need—is to make a trade that proves I’m still, uh, you know, uh …”

“Still in the game?”

“Exactly!” the old man said, happy that someone finally understood. “I gotta get back in the game.” A phrase suddenly jumped into his head. In the beginning was baseball. He thought he understood what it meant, so he said, “Baseball, that’s the game, right, Dan?”

“Right,” Dan confirmed. And then he said something more, something that told the old man that he did indeed understand, more than he was saying. “Baseball is the game, Bob. And the Bulldozers, they’re your team. You built them, you drafted them, and they took them away from you.”

The Bulldozers!

A door opened in the old man’s brain and light poured in, and with it came strains of a song he knew well but couldn’t quite name, a song about peanuts and Crackerjacks, and then the smells of hot dogs and peanuts and popcorn flooded over him and he nearly cried, he was so happy, so relieved, to remember, to know why and where and who he once was.

“Bob? You still there?” Dan’s voice came from the phone.

“Thanks, Dan, thanks … for reminding me. Sometimes it all gets lost, forgotten, and then … well …”

“You don’t have to explain.”

“I can’t explain, it just overwhelms you.”

“Memories,” Dan said.

“Memory,” the old man said and the phone was silent for a moment or two.

“You wanna work out a trade?” Dan asked.

“What have I got to trade?” the old man asked. “I mean, I don’t even know.”

“They don’t let you stay in touch with the club?”

“They don’t even let me keep my baseball cards.” And the moment he said it, he remembered what was in that pillow case he’d been dragging behind him, the case that hung on a long yucca thorn a dozen yards in front of him. “I gotta remember to take those with me,” he said.

“Take what?” Dan asked.

“Sorry, talking to myself. Occupational hazard,” he added and chuckled. “If my current occupation is mental patient.”

Dan laughed, then said, “What you want is to show them you’re still boss, right?” The old man assented. “So the trade has to grab their attention, something bold, something they’d never consider doing themselves.”

“Yeah, that’s it.”

“Well,” Dan said, “if I remember right, you guys—the Dozers, that is—have a young pitcher just about ready to be promoted to the majors. Number one pitching prospect in all of the PEBA, if I remember right.”

“Peebah?” the old man echoed.

“The league we all belong to. You got the best pitching talent in the league. If you trade that kid for, let’s say, the best hitting prospect in the league, that’d put the fear of God in them.”

“The fear of God.”

“Just an expression,” Dan said.

“I like it,” the old man said. “Let’s put the fear of God in them. You willing?”

“As much as I’d like to, Bob, the Bureaucrats don’t have any hitting prospects that measure up in any way against your pitcher. No, you probably want to talk to Kevin.”

“Kevin?”

“Florida’s GM, Kevin Lewis. He’s got that young hitting star—what’s his name? Burton, I think. His nickname’s Hitman. Perfect, huh?”

“Perfecto mundo!” the old man said, but he had no idea where such a phrase came from. “Thanks again, Dan. Oh, wait. How do I contact this Kevin Lewis guy?”

“Not in your Rolodex, eh?” Dan chuckled. The old man didn’t get the joke. “Let me contact him for you,” Dan added. “I’ll tell him to call you at this number. You’ll keep this phone with you?”

“Everywhere I go,” the old man said, clutching the phone like it was a lifeline.

“Okay. Give him a day or so to think it over, but you’ll hear from Kevin soon. One way or the other. Oh, man, I hope he goes for it. It’ll really send a tremor through those Yuman beings.”

“Who?”

“Never mind, just another joke. Good to hear from you, Bob. Welcome back.”

Welcome back.

He was in the game again. A man with a mission. A manager with a trade to make. He was back.

In the beginning was, indeed, baseball.

The sound of the sirens wafted across the chaparral, a gentle wailing, the sound of someone coming for him. He shook himself out of his reverie and looked down the hillside toward the road. In the distance he could see the red lights blinking their way towards him.

Gotta move, old man, he told himself. It’s late, it’s late. And don’t forget the pillow case!

He was on the run again, a rabbit pursued by hounds. He stuffed the phone in his pocket, plunged through the yucca, scraping his legs and hands, grabbed the pillow case and threw it over his shoulder before beginning the long and torturous climb up the cactus-covered hill. On the run again, yes, but a different man altogether. A man with a plan, a man with a mission, a manager once more, with a trade to make.

He smiled at the thought, then grimaced when a yucca stabbed him. Bleeding now, and shuffling in dirty slippers up a hill of cactus and yucca and rabbit brush, he was nonetheless a new man, a free man, a man with a phone, a pending trade, and a sackful of baseball cards.

What more does anyone need?