The Number 14 crosstown bus groaned as it labored uphill, its diesel engine rattling against the rusted floorboards beneath Wesley’s feet.
He sat on a torn vinyl seat near the rear exit, the antique glove resting on his lap. He had slipped his fingers inside it again, feeling the rough, unpadded interior leather against his palm. His hand was small, but his fingers were long, the tendons on the back of his wrist standing out like thin guitar strings. Where the hole in the pocket opened to the air, his skin was stained black from old grease and red from the Riverside dirt.
Through the scratched acrylic window, the city began to change.
The green expanses of Riverside—with its private tennis clubs, gated residential cul-de-sacs, and shaded boulevards lined with ancient live oaks—faded into the gray transitional zones of highway underpasses and strip malls. Then came the industrial basin: rows of cinderblock automotive repair shops, scrap-metal yards guarded by lean, barking dogs behind chain-link fences, and block after block of narrow shotgun houses with peeling paint and sagging porches.
This was the Bottoms. It was the place the local newspaper only mentioned when there was a shooting or an environmental spill from the chemical plant downriver.
Wesley pulled the overhead cord. The bus hissed to a halt at the corner of 24th Street and Canal.
He stepped down onto the broken asphalt. The air here was different from Riverside. Up on the hill, the air smelled of cut rye grass, sprinkler water, and expensive fertilizer. Down here, it smelled of fried oil, damp concrete, river mud, and the sharp, sulfurous bite of exhaust from the freight trains that ground along the levee every forty minutes.
Wesley walked three blocks south, keeping his head down.
On the corner of 26th, outside an abandoned corner grocery with boarded-up windows, three older boys were sitting on overturned milk crates, passing a bottle wrapped in a brown paper bag. One of them, a lanky nineteen-year-old with a braided fade named Marcus, looked up as Wesley passed.
"Hey, Little Wes," Marcus called out, raising a lazy hand. "You still carrying that dead animal around?"
The other two laughed, a dry, bored sound.
Wesley didn't stop, but he raised his glove in a brief, respectful salute. "Still throwing, Marcus."
"Don't throw too hard, boy," Marcus said, taking a sip from the bag. "Ain't nothing down here to catch it except brick walls, and brick walls don't pay nobody."
Wesley turned down an alleyway between two sagging wooden houses. At the end of the alley stood a small, two-room cottage whose front porch had settled unevenly into the soft river soil, giving the entire structure a weary, tilted posture. In the small dirt yard, there was no grass—only hard-packed earth swept clean with a broom, and a solitary wooden crate set against the rear fence.
The crate was marked with thousands of small, circular indentations where a baseball had struck the wood over hundreds of hours, day after day, until the pine boards were splintered into soft fibers.
Wesley opened the screen door, which creaked on its rusted spring.
"Wesley?" a voice called from the back room.
The voice was thin, raspy, punctuated by a dry, rattling cough that sounded like dry leaves scraping across a driveway.
"It's me, Mama," Wesley answered, slipping his shoes off at the threshold to avoid tracking dirt across the worn linoleum floor.
He walked into the small bedroom at the back of the house. The blinds were drawn against the afternoon heat, casting the room in a dull amber gloom. On a narrow iron-frame bed lay a woman who could not have been older than thirty-five, though illness had hollowed her cheeks and darkened the skin beneath her eyes until she looked sixty. A clear plastic tube ran from her nostrils to a humming oxygen concentrator in the corner—a machine that clicked every four seconds like a slow, metallic clock.
Her name was Clara. Her hands, resting atop a faded quilt, were frail, but her eyes—large, dark, and observant—were identical to her son's.
"You were gone a long time," she said softly, turning her head toward him with an effort that caused the plastic tubing to stretch. "You walk all the way up to the hill again?"
Wesley pulled a wooden chair up to the bedside and sat down. He laid the glove on the bedside table next to three amber prescription bottles whose labels were stamped with red PAST DUE notices.
"I went to see their field, Mama," he said.
Clara smiled faintly, a tired, knowing expression. "They tell you to go away?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"Did they let you throw?"
Wesley paused. He looked down at his right hand. The skin along the inside seam of his middle finger was raw, slightly swollen from the violent, ungodly friction required to snap off that final knuckle-forkball.
"I threw three pitches to their coach," Wesley said quietly.
Clara’s eyes flickered with a sudden, faint spark. "The big man? The one they put in the newspaper with the gold ring?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"And?"
Wesley reached over and gently took his mother’s thin, cool hand between his own dirt-stained palms.
"He didn't touch one," Wesley said.
Clara closed her eyes. A long, shuddering breath passed through her chest, making the oxygen machine click twice in rapid succession. She did not ask if they had given him money. She did not ask if they had offered him a scholarship. She knew the world on the hill far better than her twelve-year-old son did; she had cleaned their offices and washed their linen for ten years before her lungs had filled with industrial dust from the plant.
"Your granddaddy threw three pitches to an owner once," Clara whispered, her eyes still closed, her thumb stroking the rough knuckles of Wesley's pitching hand. "Back in sixty-two. In an empty park in Montgomery after the gates were locked. Three pitches. The man told him he was the finest pitcher he'd ever seen with his own eyes."
"What happened, Mama?" Wesley asked, though he had heard the story a hundred times.
"The man told him," Clara said, her voice dropping into the quiet rhythm of an old church hymn, "'You're ten years too early, boy, and you're ten shades too dark. Now take your bag and get on the train.'"
She opened her eyes, looking directly into Wesley’s face with a fierce, quiet intensity that defied the weakness of her body.
"They think they own the game, Wes," she said. "They own the grass. They own the lights. They own the paper they write the contracts on. But they don't own the flight of the ball once it leaves your fingers. That belongs to God, and that belongs to you. You hear me?"
"Yes, Mama," Wesley whispered.
Outside, in the alleyway, a car door slammed. It was not the rattling, hollow bang of a local clunker; it was the heavy, solid thud of precision German engineering.
Then came the sound of hard-soled leather shoes walking up the wooden steps of the front porch.