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The day after the Baltimore Orioles lost their ninth consecutive home game, Mike Hargrove called Keith into his office.
"We got four guys in the rotation over 5.50," Hargrove said. "The fuck is that?"
Keith lifted his head and looked over Hargrove's shoulder, out the window toward the ballpark and the grounds crew hosing down the infield. "Well," he said slowly. "I guess you could say that you get what you pay for."
Hargrove stared at him. Keith looked away from the window and met his eyes. "Should I submit my resignation now, or would you rather have the pleasure of firing me?"
Hargrove chose Option B, and Keith walked out of Camden Yards with the contents of his locker stuffed into a duffel bag. He waved goodbye to the grounds crew as he left.
That was August 3rd, late in the summer of 2001. By August 6th, Keith had rented an apartment in Brooklyn on the top floor of a six story walk-up, using the money he made from selling his car to a ragged-looking grad student when he got to New York. The keys to the roof came with the place, and he climbed up the stairs his first night there. There was nothing that actually belonged to him in his apartment except a case of Corona, the duffle bag, and nine boxes of books, but the previous tenants had left behind furniture and a fridge, along with an old battery-powered Motorola radio Keith had discovered shoved under the sink. He brought that and a bottle of beer up to the roof, and called Dan on his cell phone while he tuned the radio.
"I need a job," Keith said.
"I figured," Dan said.
"I'm at Grand and Lorimer."
"Be there soon." The line went dead and Keith found a signal, tuning in John Sterling as he called a double play to end the sixth inning.
He saw Dan walking down Lorimer St. half an hour later, and called to him from the roof. Dan stopped on the opposite sidewalk and looked up, shading his eyes even though the sun was long gone. Keith met him on the sidewalk a couple minutes later and let him into the building. "When you told me the cross-streets, I thought maybe you were at a bar," Dan said. "Not ... your apartment building."
"Yeah. I thought you might." Keith kicked the security door closed and let Dan go ahead of him on the stairs. "I didn't really mean to move back here."
"It just sort of happened?" Dan was out of breath by the second flight. Keith thought about making fun of him, but then remembered that he needed Dan's good will.
"Yeah. I drove north, thinking, what the hell, I'll go to Philly, see ... you know." Keith trailed off and Dan grunted in acknowledgment, both of their minds filling in the blank left by the name Keith rarely spoke. "I guess I missed my exit on the turnpike."
"Worse places to end up than New York. Better baseball here, anyway."
They reached the sixth floor and Keith tossed Dan the keys to the roof, told him to head on up while Keith grabbed them a couple more beers. When he reached the access door, two beers dangling from each hand, he found Dan already sprawled on his back on the roof, staring up at the dark sky. He'd turned the volume up on the radio.
"You're going to stick to the roof," Keith said, passing a beer down to him and popping the cap off his own.
"Nah, it's not tar-paper, it's some reflective thing. My building has the same thing, keeps it from overheating." Dan patted the surface next to him. "Cop a squat, lil' buddy."
Keith sat down. "I'm taller than you."
"Which makes it funnier."
"How are the Mets?" Keith asked, even though he knew the answer.
Dan sighed. "Frustrating. Which is enough about that. What happened?"
The lights of Lower Manhattan were enveloped in a haze, making the island look as though it had somehow levitated into the clouds. Keith glanced up, saw the moon rising over the Williamsburg Bank, and, for a brief moment, missed his small house in Glyndon with its lawn and its fence and its broad dome of sky rising over the trees. He could still go back, he knew. But he wouldn't. "There's always a fall guy," he told Dan. "You've seen the Orioles. They haven't posted a winning season for years."
Dan hummed, sat up and took a sip of his beer. "Sometimes the fall guy deserves it," he said mildly. "Did you?"
"No," Keith said immediately, then amended, "well, yeah, a little bit. I stopped caring, so I stopped trying. There's only so many turds I can shine up per season, Dan."
Dan laughed into his beer. "Boy, don't I know it."
They watched the lights across the river flicker on and off. Keith's new building had a perfect view of Manhattan: the Financial District and its skyscrapers, the neon aura of Midtown. Keith finished his beer and noted that the lights on the Empire State building were blue and white, and wondered what that meant.
"Do you still want to do this?" Dan asked suddenly. "Coach pitchers, I mean."
Keith opened his third beer. "Yes," he said, then shook his head. "No. I mean -- I don't know."
"Huh." Dan picked up the bottle-cap and started flipping it over his knuckles like a coin. "Yeah."
"You know how -- I love this game, Dan. I have done nothing but play baseball since I was four. Thirty-some years of it and I still get goosebumps when I hear a bat strike the ball and I -- I don't know what else I could do." Keith heard himself say it and realized that was the issue, there. Baseball was his reason for being. And wasn't that just sort of sad -- knocking on the door of middle age and still keeping score in his leather-bound notebook.
"Well," Dan said.
They fell quiet, while New York City put itself to bed.
Five weeks later, Keith stood in the same spot on the roof and watched the North Tower fall.
Dan showed up within the hour. Keith threw his keys off the roof and Dan let himself in.
He was the only person Keith had to worry about in the city. Keith made coffee while Dan showered, scrubbing ash out of his hair. When Dan came out of the bathroom, Keith handed him a mug and said, "I need to leave this place."
Dan didn't argue with him.
It was six months before he finally managed to leave.
Syracuse was nothing like he'd expected. He'd seen small parts of the city once or twice before, tagging along with scouts when they visited LeMoyne or Syracuse University, watching 18 year olds wear their arms out in games no one would remember come the spring. And while Ithaca wasn't far away, the distance was enough that Keith had never managed to make the drive north in his four years at Cornell. But driving through the city toward P&C Stadium, stopping his car in the gravel lot that used to be McArthur Park, he suddenly understood what it really meant to be a part of the Rust Belt.
He didn't know how Dan got him this job. All he knew was that it was three weeks into April and somehow the Chiefs had no general manager.
Not that it mattered much, or so Dan told him. The team hadn't posted a winning season for six years, and probably playing without a manager would've actually done some good.
He turned off his car and stood in the lot, digging his hands into the pockets of his jeans and trying to think of some reason to not go into the stadium just yet. He was just about to get back into his car and come back when he had some kind of plan, when a baseball suddenly thudded into the dust not five feet from him.
"Holy shit," he yelled, scrambling for cover behind his car like a soldier ducking for a foxhole in a rain of grenades. "What the fuck?"
Which was how he met Anderson Cooper.