10 October 2021: Yuma, AZ — At 6:30 pm Pacific Daylight Savings Time on the 9th of October, a huge collective sigh could be heard coming from the troubled burg of Yuma, Arizona. The sigh rustled the tumbleweeds spinning their way up Main Street and tussled the few leaves remaining on the trees at Gateway Park. Boys in their bedrooms, old men in rockers, wives bent over the sink, and husbands returning from work all sighed together when they heard the news. Downtown, solitary hookers shifted their weight from one tired hip to another. Abandoning their hopes of entertaining one last customer before calling it a night, the working girls exhaled their collective sigh of disappointment, their breaths joining the exhalations of all the mothers, fathers and children listening to the radio or watching tv, until the whole jumbled tumbleweed of collective sighs rolled out of Yuma, Arizona like some seismic quake fleeing its own epicenter, rolling in concentric waves across the cool waters of the Colorado River, rolling through the empty lanes of the riverside trailer park just across the state line in the tiny burg known as Yuma, California, rolling up the Chocolate Mountains to the north of town and rolling down the long flanks of the dunes to the west, until the sigh rolled itself across the entire state of California and over the edge of the continent, splashing silently into the Pacific. In the distance a lone coyote howled for its missing companions.

The Yuma Bulldozers had just lost the final game of the playoffs with Bakersfield.

Trucks rumbling over the Colorado River bridge upstream from downtown Yuma suddenly slowed as the leading edge of the seismic sighs slammed into cabs and trailers on the interstate. But the sighing winds blew unimpeded over the empty railroad bridge not a hundred yards from the interstate, because the 6:10 to Yuma, Amtrak’s Sunset Limited, was running a little late. The clock above the train station said 6:30, but the New Orleans-bound train was rarely on time. Who cared? The station platform was empty.

The stationmaster sat behind the ticket counter reading some hardboiled noir fiction. The kind with femme fatales in various stages of undress pictured on the cover. He wouldn’t care if the train never arrived, at least until he finished the book, at which point he’d begin to wonder where the train was and when he was getting off work so he could go to the Corner Bookshop—at their new location, just down Main St. from the Amtrak station—and exchange this novel for one he hadn’t read, but one with a nearly identical cover: a man in shadows and a woman lying on the ground, her dress in disarray.

The stationmaster heard the train whistle in the distance, folded down the corner of the page he was reading, gathered his gloves, and headed into the next room to get the luggage cart and wheel it out to the platform, grumbling all the way. The moment he opened the door on the luggage bay he felt the force of the gathering sigh. It struck him in the face and sent him reeling. He landed smack on his butt on the luggage cart.

“What the hell?” he thought.

“What was that?” he said aloud.

The wind answered with a morbid moan as the collective sigh blew by the Amtrak station house. The station master felt nothing but relief.

“Damn,” he said, and then he heard the whistle in the distance again. “Time to get moving” was what he said, but he wondered why he had to wheel the damn luggage cart out to the train every dag-blasted evening when no one ever got off the train in Yuma, and very few ever get on.

“Who wants to get up from their dinner to catch the 6:10 from Yuma?” the stationmaster thought for the hundredth or thousandth time. Modern folks take the bus or drive. A few hardy souls might wait up until midnight for the westbound Sunset Limited, but only because it promised to deliver them to the temptations of Los Angeles by dawn.

“Still,” he thought, “it’s a nice way to spend the night, clickety-clacking your way across the desert.” The thought comforted him, even though he knew that with the new track they completed a few years back, trains don’t clickety-clack any more. “Shame,” he said aloud. He used to enjoy the rhythm and the hypnotic spell it brought about.

The stationmaster heard the whistle blow a third time and rolled his cart into position alongside the tracks. He used to keep an accurate count of exactly how many trains he’d met with his trusty luggage cart and how many times he’d returned that cart to the station empty. For years he’d taken pride in the steadily increasing numbers of trains and empty carts. He’d even posted the impressive totals on the station walls for his fellow Amtrak employees to marvel at. But he’d given up his record keeping recently, well, not so much given it up as forgotten to keep up with it a few times (actually, more than a few times) until he realized he had lost the accuracy of the count. But that was the whole point of it: the precision of the numbers. Other numbers had crowded into his consciousness, pushing trains and empty luggage carts to the side. Baseball numbers.

The stationmaster had become a baseball fan, a Yuma Bulldozers fan, to be precise, and he, like so many other Yuman Beings, had been swept up by the team’s surprising success the past two seasons. Last year Yuma had made it to the seventh game of the championship series before losing. This year, they’d made the playoffs again. Hope ran high in the desert town, and with hope came its constant companions: disappointment and depression.

Winning, the stationmaster told the various train conductors who rolled through town with their predictable questions about how the Bulldozers were doing—winning was like a whore’s teasing: the harder the “sell,” the more excruciating the fall. The whole town had “bought” the idea of the Dozers as champions, and oh how they had suffered when the club lost last year. Suicides, the newspaper reported, had more than tripled during the Dozers’ pennant run. Curiously, those numbers had fallen off after the Dozers lost. This year promised to repeat last years’ anguished ending.

But that didn’t stop the stationmaster from following the Dozers with a passion his wife had never known in 40 years of marriage. The trials and tribulations of the Yuma ball club so occupied the station master that he no longer had any interest  in keeping records of trains and carts, nossir, he was keeping records of baseball events now.

He preferred to listen to Dozer games on the radio during his graveyard shift at the train station, not because he couldn’t afford a new fangled tv or iPhone, but because he liked hearing the announcers describe the game to him. There was something about the language of baseball that captured his attention. He’d fallen asleep as a child listening to the dulcet tones of Vin Scully narrating Dodger games in the old MLB, and now he found the voices of the Dozer announcers equally soporific. Sleep was his second favorite way to pass the time in the station house waiting for the next train.

When he was awake, he kept records of the baseball events that fascinated him, things that wouldn’t show up in the box scores, tiny events that might not have any direct effect on the outcome of a game but which, by the very nature of their obscurity, intrigued an old man who had rediscovered the joys of baseball late in life. Things like the number and length of visits coaches and managers made to the mound each game, the frequency with which batters stepped out of the box or asked the umpire for time out, the number of new baseballs used every game, and foul balls. Ah, foul balls! The station master was obsessed with foul balls. He rewarded himself with a peanut or a corn chip each time a foul ball was announced on the radio, and when he attended a game himself, he charted each and every foul—the ones that reached the stands as well as the ones that died at the plate—and collected his charts in a binder he kept at the station house. Foul balls, having little or no bearing on the outcome of a game, provided solace to the stationmaster. He could record them, chart them, statistically analyze them, and never concern himself with whether his team had won or lost. Because while winning provided momentary pleasures, defeat lasted. Defeat was permanent.

Defeat was as inevitable as death itself.

The whistle sounded a fourth time, just before the 6:10 to Yuma appeared coming round the last bend before the station. The stationmaster put aside thoughts of baseball and held onto his cap as the train, pushing the warm evening air before it, blasted its way into the station. For the second time, the stationmaster felt sudden and complete relief, as the desert air sighed its way over and around him.

“Too bad about the Dozers.”

“What?” the stationmaster said as he turned to see the familiar face of one of the train conductors step onto the platform.

“The Dozers,” the conductor said again. “Too bad they lost.”

“They lost?” the stationmaster asked.

“Yup, 4-3. Hell of a game—but heh, I thought you always listened to it in there.” He thumbed in the direction of the station house.

“Forgot, I guess.”

“Forgot?” the conductor said. “Forgot the final game of the first round of the playoffs? Gunner against that Hancock fellow. You didn’t forget. More likely you was pre—occupied,” he said with a sly grin and a quick up-down shake of his right fist.

“What? Me? Hardly,” the stationmaster said. “Too old.”

“You’re never too old for a little of this-and-that,” the conductor said, laughing. Then he called out to the ghosts waiting on the empty platform, “All aboard!” and disappeared into the train car. The train whistle blew and the iron wheels began their torturously slow revolutions as the train scraped and groaned into motion again. As it slowly gathered speed, the stationmaster caught a glimpse of the conductor through the door window, still laughing. Then, with another blast from the whistle, the 6:10 to Yuma was gone.

“Too old for this AND for that,” thought the stationmaster, “but not too old for baseball.” He felt, for the third time that night, a surge of relieving wind as the collective sigh from Yuma passed by him again.

“I should be sad they lost,” he thought. “But I’m just relieved.” He pushed the empty luggage cart back towards the station house.  “Probably better for Yuma in the long run,” he mused. In the distance he thought he could hear the wheels of the Sunset Limited clattering over the old train bridge where it crossed the Colorado.

Clickety-clack, clickety-clack, clickety-clack