“I can’t stand it either,” said a man to my right, “when the season closes out.”

“Giants still have a chance.”

“Sure about that, miss? Look around.”

I followed his advice. The seats were empty. Crumpled garbage whipped around the infield. Ushers moved down the rows with brooms, sweeping up cigarette butts and abandoned scorecards. The game had been finished for an hour.

“What’s that you been whistling?” he said.

“Awful, isn’t it? I heard it two days ago, and I can’t shake it.”

“‘We’ll skin your back, make your bones crack, and burn your face with lye,’” he sang, in a voice bottomless and smooth.

“Pardon me?”

“There’s more to the words, but I don’t know it.”

“But tell me, please tell me, that you remember the name.”

“As far as I know, it doesn’t have one. They used to sing it in the saloons on Sixth Avenue, back when the Westside was just a curiosity and not a mass grave.”

“You lived there?”

“I drank there. For a few years, it was the same thing. And while it would be charming to reminisce about my wasted years, the ushers are looming.”

“We have to go, don’t we?”

“I’d stay all winter, if I could,” said the man. He took off his hat and ran his hand through a few strands of thin gray hair. “Let’s get before they kick us out.”

I followed him up to the concourse. At the top of the aisle, I glanced back for a last look at the patchy brown grass. It wasn’t my ballpark, but it was better than nothing.

I said goodbye to the old man outside the main gate.

“Lucky, aren’t you?” he said. “Giants fan. Series starts Wednesday, don’t it? Season’s not over yet.”

The train inched over the Manhattan Bridge. The walls of the tent city that crowded the riverfront flapped in the late-afternoon breeze. Beneath my seat, I found a crumpled copy of the afternoon Sentinel. Max got his front-page byline, attached to a rancid portrait of the pride of the NYPD: the valiant Lieutenant Edward Thorne. His statement was strictly official, the kind of concrete verbiage that Thorne could have never wrapped his lips around even while sober. It gave no details of the massacre, describing it simply as “a joint action of the police and the fire department,” but assured readers that the “unsavory element” of “that blighted district” had at last been “routed, turned back like the tide.”

“The day will dawn soon,” it claimed Thorne said, “dearest reader of the Sentinel, when gentility returns to Eighth Avenue, and ordinary folk reclaim their homes, and the fence comes tumbling down. This I promise.”