The Ballpark

Hector Morales had helped pour the concourse under the third-base stands on a morning the winter before, when the frost still whitened the rebar and his hands ached inside two pairs of gloves, and now, on the third Friday of April, he sat on top of that concrete with his family and watched a groundskeeper chalk the batter’s box on a field he had watched come up out of the mud. He was forty-six. He had finished concrete for twenty-six years, since he was twenty and his father got him on with a crew, and in all that time he had never once worked a job that people lined up around the block to see.

He poured foundations and loading docks and the flat gray aprons of warehouses out toward Sparks, the kind of work that vanished the day it cured, that a man drove past for the rest of his life without ever thinking that somebody had knelt on it with a trowel. This was not that. This was going to have his whole family sitting on it eating food off paper trays, nine thousand people around them, and it was going to stay here, four blocks east of Virginia Street, longer than he would.

The strange thing, the thing every man on the crew had understood without saying much about it, was that they had been building at all. They had broken ground in the last week of February the year before, and by the time the steel was up the rest of the valley had quit. The subdivisions out in the north and the south sat half-framed behind chain-link, the studs graying in the weather, the money gone. His brother-in-law, who hung drywall, had not worked since summer. Men Hector had known his whole working life were down at the union hall by seven in the morning to sit in folding chairs and not get called. He had read that the county led the whole country in houses taken back by the banks, and he believed it, because he could see it, a lightless window at a time, all down his own street. And in the middle of that, on a rail-yard lot east of downtown, there had been this one job with a deadline nobody would move, a baseball team coming north from Arizona whether the concrete was ready or not, and so the ballpark had gone up in a little over a year while everything around it stopped. He had been one of the lucky ones. He had felt the luck of it every cold morning, guilty and grateful at the same time, laying down floor for a game while his brother-in-law sat home.

The pace of it had been the thing he would remember. A stadium was supposed to take two years and they had been given a little over one, because a baseball season did not wait, and so through that fall and winter the crew had run long and hard, pours scheduled around the frost, concrete trucks lined up in the dark with their drums turning, the whole thing coming up so fast that Hector could see the difference week to week, the ramps and the rows appearing under his own hands. It was the only site in the valley with a light on it and a clock running against it. He had come home most nights too tired to talk, and his wife had rubbed the cramp out of his hands at the kitchen table, and he had lain in bed doing the math of how many days of work were left in it, the way another man might dread the end of a thing he had prayed for the end of. When the last pour cured he had stood on it alone one evening after the crew went home and felt, under the ordinary tiredness, something he did not have a word for, that he had helped make a place.

His mother sat on his left with her hands folded in her lap. Maria was sixty-nine, retired three years from the city, and she had spent the back half of her working life drawing plans for a downtown that kept getting smaller, casinos going dark one at a time up the north end of Virginia, whole blocks she had zoned and re-zoned and watched empty out anyway. She looked at the field a long time before she said anything.

“You built this,” she said. It was not quite a question.

“I built the part you’re sitting on,” Hector said. “Somebody else gets the field.”

She nodded slowly, the way she did at things that pleased her and that she did not entirely trust. All her life the work of her family had gone into this town and mostly disappeared into it. Her grandmother Guadalupe had come up from Sonora in eighteen sixty-nine, a girl of twenty-two, to work the railyard when the railyard was the only reason there was a town, and that same rail line still ran right there, forty feet beyond the outfield wall, freight cars grinding through behind the scoreboard even now as the grounds crew dragged the infield. Her father Eddie had driven a cab out of the same yards in the fifties. None of it had a plaque. None of it was anywhere a person could point. And now her son had put his hands to a thing that thousands of people were going to sit inside of on a Friday night and call by its name.

Ruben was on Hector’s right, nineteen, restless, jiggling his knee and watching the players stretch in the outfield grass. He had helped on the pour too, one summer, carrying and screeding, and had hated every hour of it, the heat and the tedium and his father’s patient corrections, and had told Hector more than once that he was not going to finish concrete for a living, that there was nothing out here anyway, that a man had to go somewhere things were happening. Hector had not argued. He knew the boy was half right. He knew that whatever was going to happen for Ruben would happen somewhere further out than this, east past the rail yard, out where the desert was still just desert and someday maybe would not be. He hoped the boy would remember, wherever he went, that he had once put his hands in the ground his family had worked for a hundred and forty years.

The public-address system said something none of them caught and the crowd stood up. Hector stood with them, his knees complaining, and put one hand flat on the cool painted concrete of the seatback in front of him without deciding to, feeling for the little ridge where he knew a form seam had been, finding it. The Salt Lake team took the field. Then the Reno team came out of the dugout to a noise Hector felt in the concrete before he heard it, a low roll coming up through the stands and into his hand, and a boy no older than Ruben walked to the mound and stood a moment looking around at all of it, the lights not yet needed in the last of the afternoon, the freight train easing off eastward behind the wall, nine thousand people in a town that had not built anything in a year sitting on the one new thing it had, and then he set his foot on the rubber and leaned in for the sign, and threw the first pitch of the season toward home.

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