“I hope not.” They laugh at that.

Jason nods to the bag over Michael’s shoulder. “You want in?”

Michael waves the notion away. “No rush. I could watch that swing all night.”

“I was just finishing.” Jason ducks into the shadows, and Michael can hear him dropping balls into the bucket. “What speed?”

Michael thinks briefly about telling him to set the pitching machine at seventy-five, eighty miles per hour, something a big-leaguer could respect. But then says an honest number. “Fifty-five.”

“You got it.” Jason adjusts the machine, then walks to home plate. “Good to see you, Coach.” The men shake. “My best to the family.”

“Thanks, Jason. And to yours.” Michael thinks he sees an unpleasantness flash across the younger man’s face, but then it is gone. “See you around.” The ballplayer walks into the darkness, in the direction of the blinking casino.

There’s something cathartic about swinging a piece of wood at a hurtling knot of leather and yarn. The sting that happens in your palms when you connect, the ball bending ever so slightly at the collision. The reverberations of that rubber center that run up your arms, plugging into your shoulders with a little zing. The sound of it.

As he swings he thinks about what Joe DiMaggio would do with all of this, the wrecked house and the lonely stadium and the desert night blowing cold all of a sudden. His mind drifts to that famous profile in Esquire. Late sixties, written after Joe’d been retired for maybe fifteen years. Some writer tracked him down in San Fran, ran him off the end of the wharf practically, played a game of cat and mouse with Joe in his own flipping restaurant. The snook even talked his way into breakfast with DiMaggio’s sister at their dead parents’ house. But Joe, he stayed classy, like you’d expect out of a guy who always dressed in pressed slacks and a nice silk tie, who drove a Cadillac as soon as his contract with Dodge was done. The whole long article, through all the provocation, Joe never did say a bad thing about Marilyn and only got close to throwing a drink in the guy’s face. What’d Joe do? He’d keep it together. Michael takes another swing.