The cold came up through the aluminum plank into the backs of my legs, and the river bottom smelled like wet leaves, mud, and somebody's cigarette by the fence. Third week of October, the Rock River flats. Out past the backstop the diamond ran into dark timber, but under the pole lights the last inning was running through my head. I dug a carpenter's pencil out of my jacket.
First mark on the back of a scorecard: Sunday League Est. Always, locked to bone and oxide rust. Nobody at the fence could say what year the league started, so the date went on as a word instead of a number, the whole lockup printed off-square the way the scoreboard hung behind it.
The pole lights buzzed and my breath started showing, and a ball came off a bat harder-sounding than July. Nobody tracked it. It hung up there scuffed, the size of a low moon over the black treeline, and Beer League Champions went down before it came back — a trophy for a season that ends on a Tuesday in a field nobody mows, the cup heavy and low-slung, faded gold on bottle black.
They called it when the shortstop lost one at his feet. The lot stayed full, headlights on through the exhaust, leaves flat on every windshield with one wiper arc cut through. Three more pages went down under the dome light, already working out where the second color had to break.
