Slummings sat in the snack bar on the lower level of car #3 of Amtrak’s 3:10 train to Yuma, stalled somewhere east of Fullerton and still hours west of Yuma. He had already made the phone call, though he wasn’t confident the office assistant had understood, but that didn’t matter right now. What mattered was how he was going to tell the man next to him, the Yuma GM and his friend, Mayberry.

He had no plan, so he figured he ought to use this time, while the train was stuck on a siding, to conjure one up. But he couldn’t focus; he kept wondering about the train and why it just sat here in the desert darkness when it was already an hour late.

Maybe we’ll never get to Yuma, he thought. This train will be a sort of Purgatory, a waiting room, he thought, like in Jean Paul Sartre’s play No Exit.
That made him chortle. There sure ain’t no exiting this train!

Slummings didn’t travel by train often, but he’d heard that Amtrak had a consistent record of running certain trains late. Something to do with who owns the tracks themselves. 

He pulled out his cell phone and learned that the rails from LA to Yuma were laid between 1873-77 and have been owned by various entities, all of which were eventually bought up by or incorporated in Southern Pacific Railroad. It was Southern Pacific, then, who owned the track the train was sitting on right now. Amtrak, he discovered, owns no track but rents the right to run its trains on other people’s tracks, like So. Pacific. And since So. Pacific makes its profits from hauling freight, Amtrak’s passenger trains are scheduled so as not to conflict with So. Pacific’s freight trains. So, when Amtrak trains run on time, few notice the many freight trains waiting on sidings for the passenger trains to roll by. But if an Amtrak train gets behind schedule, especially at night when freight trains operate, then the freight trains have priority, in order to meet their schedules, and Amtrak passengers sit on sidings wondering why their train isn’t moving.

Which is exactly what happened last night when the 3:10 to Yuma was delayed out of Union Station in LA (a faulty computer wouldn’t load the program necessary for the train to run on the appropriate tracks), then delayed again at Fullerton (an irascible passenger who insisted he should be on the train to Yuma when his ticket clearly said he was traveling to San Diego). Both problems were eventually resolved: new computer for the train, new ticket for the passenger. (Let him go where he wants to go was the thinking of the Amtrak conductor. Just make him buy a new ticket.)

Nearly an hour late out of Fullerton meant the 3:10 to Yuma had to wait at several stations and a couple desert sidings while freight traffic thundered by at enormous speeds. Passengers in the sleeping compartments felt their beds rock precipitously from side to side while the freights flew by. Passengers resting in coach or enjoying the view from the lounge car could watch the heavily tagged and graffitied box cars zip by—like a Cheong-Sang Yun fastball, Slummings thought.

He rocked and rolled every time a freight went by, but his companion hardly noticed the freight trains or the delays or the empty rum bottles piling up on their table—little rum bottles, the kind they serve on airlines. With his hospital gown peaking out beneath his heavy winter coat, Mayberry was sleeping. And occasionally snoring, much to the chagrin of everyone else in the snack bar. Slummings was scratching his chin and stroking his beard and trying to count the freight cars as they passed. To no avail, they were too fast. Which is what made him think of Yun’s fastball and wonder why Yuma didn’t have a flamethrower like Yun.

Maybe I should buy Yun, take him and his salary off Kalamazoo’s hands, he thought, then wondered when Yun’s contract expired. He longed for “the good old days,” when owners could just buy any player they wanted, if they had enough money. And then he realized owners never could do that, the Reserve Clause prevented it. How’d he forgotten that? He shook his head, but nothing fell out. Memory slippage, he thought, as unpredictable as a knuckle ball. Owners had never been able to buy any player they wanted, and baseball had never had any such “good old days.”

“Still, I wish I could do that with my money,” he muttered aloud, which caused his sleeping companion to snort and sputter and yawn himself awake. Slummings was surprised. He’d never seen anyone wake themselves up by yawning. Mayberry seemed to be doing it all backwards: you yawn and then you go to sleep. Not wake up.

But there he was, eyes open, mouth open, drool dripping onto the table, trying to say something but not yet having found the words.

“Want something?” Slummings asked.

Mayberry shook his head, then took a long hard look at Slummings. “Who are you?” he mumbled.

“Good question,” Slummings smiled. “For the time being I’m still the Arroyo’s owner.” Slummings paused, then decided it was time to step up to the plate. “And we need to discuss something. Look, I’ve noticed since we left the hospital that—”

“Hospital?!” Mayberry snapped, then leaned in close to study Slummings’ face. “Just who the hell are you? And what are you doing in my room? And where the hell—”

His sentence was muted by a freighter passing. The snack bar rocked wildly, patrons grabbing the nearest support. 

Mayberry’s eyes got big as saucers. “What the hell was that? Can’t a man take a nap without waking up in the middle of a war zone?” He looked around at the snack bar,
with its smiling attendant  and the windowed cabinets with food for purchase, and at the passengers waiting to select their drink or sandwich or bottle of wine, then he looked back at Slummings. “We ain’t in Kansas, are we, Toto?”

Slummings snorted. “Nope, we ain’t. Though just then it did feel a lot like a Kansas twister. Saw a few of those in my years in Oklahoma. They sail through Kansas just long enough to pick up all the Kansas topsoil and drop it along the Cimarron River in Oklahoma.”

“You’re from Oklahoma?”

Slummings cocked his head in disbelief and studied Mayberry. “You all right?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“A little tired, maybe?”

“What business is that of yours?”

Now Slummings was not only perplexed, but troubled. If Mayberry’s memory had gone on strike, if he didn’t have nine players on the field and an umpire to make the calls, well, there was probably no point in discussing the very thing Slummings needed to discuss with Mayberry.

So he decided on an alternate approach to the subject. Establish a common ground, work from there. 

“Our train’s been delayed. An hour out of LA and now—”

“This is a train?!” Mayberry blurted out. Several passengers turned to look at him.

Slummings decided to go even slower.

“Yes,” he said, “we’re on a train.”

Mayberry looked around. “Well, that explains them,” he pointed to passengers standing in line for food, “but you ain’t said who you are.”

Not slow enough, Slummings realized. Maybe we need to back it up. Like a Christy Mathewson fadeaway.

“Okay,” Slummings said as slowly as he could, “you seem to have forgotten what we’re doing.”

“And you seem to have forgotten who you are,” Mayberry retorted.

Slummings smiled. “True, true, I often do. Okay then,” he took a deep breath. “I’m the owner of the Yuma Arroyos and—”

“No shit? What’s the owner of a baseball team doing on this tiny little train, judging from the size of this dining car.”

“No,” Slummings said, laughing in spite of himself, “this ain’t the dining car. Snack car, cafe car, whatever they call it, it ain’t no dining car.”

Mayberry took another look at his surroundings. “Oh,” he said. “I see.”

But Slummings wasn’t sure he did. “It’s a long train—I don’t know how many cars, but many, including sleepers. It’s headed for New Orleans, but—”

“Never been to New Orleans.”

“And I’m afraid you won’t be going there tonight.”

Mayberry gave Slummings a skeptical look. “You just said—”

“We’re getting off in Yuma.”

“Yuma?”

“Yuma,” Slummings confirmed, then asked, “You remember Yuma?”

Mayberry laughed, “How could I not? Lost my virginity in Yuma, to a lovely lass who never wore no bra, just a t-shirt, and had the softest, sweetest—”

“You were a kid in Yuma?” Slummings asked, as much to cut Mayberry off at the pass as to learn about his GM’s childhood.

“Me? No, never. I don’t actually recall ever being in Yuma.”

“You just said …” Slummings stopped himself. He recognized the symptoms. No point in proceeding right now. Like the Amtrak train, he needed to sit on the siding and wait for the tracks ahead to clear. How long that would take, no one ever knew.

“What did I just say?” Mayberry asked.

“Oh … nothing,” Slummings lied.

“You said I said something, not nothing. What was the something?”

Slummings tried to find a way out of this jam. Rather like being called in as a relief pitcher with the bases loaded. Any mistake will cost you. Even non-mistakes, routine fly ball outs, can be costly. So what do you do? What, Slummings considered, does he want his bullpen staff to do in such situations? Go for the strikeout. Keep the ball off the plate, persuade the hitter to swing at balls he can’t hit. Okay, Slummings thought, here goes.

“The something was about a woman who wore no bras. Someone you—”

“Ah, Ruthie! What a dreamboat! I was telling you about her?”

Slummings nodded, “Yup,” hoping the batter would chase the pitch.

“Did I tell you about the time she showed up late one night at my apartment door?”

“I don’t think so.”

“She was wearing a big overcoat, but it was dry out. This was Nevada, it’s always dry. When I invited her in, she took her coat off. All she was wearing were bright red long johns, from neck to toe. You coulda knocked me over with a feather!”

“A feather?”

Mayberry waved off the comment. “Something Roberta used to say all the time.”

“Roberta Tipitina?”

“You know any other Robertas?”

Slummings studied Mayberry’s eyes. The old man looked sharp and aware and … well, he didn’t look like he was pulling a con. He knew what he was talking about. So maybe this was the right time. “I promoted Roberta,” Slummings said and watched for the response.

“About time,” Mayberry said. “Whatcha been waiting for? She’ll make a top notch GM.”

“But …” Slummings started to say, then stopped himself. No reason to upset the apple cart, right? “Yes,” he said instead, “she will.”

“Good,” Mayberry said. Slummings thought he saw a sort of sparkle or twinkle in his companion’s eye. “You want to hear the rest of the Ruthie story or not?” Mayberry asked.

Slummings smiled. “Oh, yeah. That I want to hear.”

And so, as the Amtrak 3:10 to Yuma pulled away from the siding and resumed its delayed journey, Mayberry told him the whole story, especially all the juicy bits, until tears came to Slummings’ eyes from laughing so hard.