When they hit asphalt again, Herb’s phone chirps and chirps again, then makes another buzzing noise Sara doesn’t recognize. “Oh, fuck.” Herb scrolls down the screen. “Jason! I thought you said there wasn’t any press!”

“There wasn’t.” Jason and Sara are following a few feet behind Herb, not arm and arm but with their shoulders close, Sara’s cactus flower tucked behind her ear. Sweat makes a dark V on his chest and dark circles under his arms, and his face is pinking without his hat. Her cactus arm isn’t quite bleeding anymore, but the thorns’ punctures make tiny bubbles of blood that Jason periodically swipes with the hem of his shirt.

“‘Golden handcuffs for the Gold Glove’?” Herb shouts, loud enough to make them wince. “‘Goodyear has a bad night’? What the fuck!”

His phone rings. Herb rolls his eyes and accepts the call. “Woody, hello! Long time no—Jason? Yes, he’s with me. No, I don’t have any idea why the fuck he did such a bozo thing. No felony charges, just a misdemeanor—that’s good, right?”

As Jason wipes the blood from her arm again, she sees a flash of the tattoo on his chest: it looks like a playing card, a jack, on his left pec. “Thanks,” she mouths.

Herb’s eyes are locked on Jason, and he talks slowly, trying to tamp down the anger in his voice. “Yes, Woody, I understand. I’ll get him to the stadium pronto. And I guarantee, on Kirby Puckett’s grave, this is the beginning and the end of the funny business with Jason Goodyear.”

But what Sara sees on Jason’s haggard face just then suggests that that’s anything but true. She might not be a good judge of character, but after all she’s been through, she’s very good at spotting a man in trouble, and Jason Goodyear, blood-streaked and sunburned, is still in the middle of some serious shit. She hands him back the cactus flower and, without another word, he crushes it in his fist.

FOURTH

As the tectonic plate’s weak spot pulled west, another line of mountains cracked through the seam, then again, and again, until Arizona was neatly striated: mountain, valley, mountain, valley. Temporally, it was not unlike the Lions’ own draft system—big player, journeyman, big player, journeyman, the positions cycling through apogee and ho-hum every few years. But if you look across the land, consider the topography at the start of 2011, the Lions outfield is synced up into a moment of peak, peak, peak; Goodyear plus Trey Townsend (several years apart in age, but both 2010 Gold Gloves), plus Corey Matthews, a high draft from UNC. Matthews reported to Single-A Carolina in August, spent the fall in Arizona, and played winter ball in the DR. His stats were good in Chapel Hill, but reports from coaches—all that different letterhead, the Carolina Clappers and the Arizona Arroyos and the Gigantes del Cibao stacked in a pile on Botter’s desk—are that he’s been making unbelievable progress, the kind of development that poises him to do the improbable: jump to the majors in his first full season. Which would mean that across the Lions outfield: mountain, mountain, mountain.