Marshall Put A New Padlock On The Pitching Room Door

I caught the baseball before it hit the back of my head.

I hadn't looked up. The return belt had kicked it sideways, and the sound told me where it was going. I set it in the bucket beside my boots.

At forty-five, I was a white man with a long, sunburned face, sandy hair going gray at the ears, and broad hands marked by old belt burns.

My name was Owen Bellamy. I fixed batting cages for a living, mostly the five machines at my own place on the west side of Dayton.

River Bend Batting Yard sat behind a row of small shops off West Third. You could hear freight cars bump together beyond the fence. In warm weather, the air smelled of cut grass, warm rubber, and the river when the wind turned.

That morning, it smelled of hot chain oil.

I had taken the guard off machine three when Marshall Pike walked through the gate carrying a padlock.

Marshall Pike was a white man of fifty-eight, with a pink bald crown, a thick gray mustache, and a tan coat that always looked new.

He watched me fit a red fiber washer behind a loose screw.

“Your daddy used to fix those with whatever fell out of his truck,” he said.

“This is the right washer.”

“Sure is, son.”

I was old enough to have a daughter paying her own car insurance. Marshall still called me son when he wanted something.

He closed the pitching room door and fed a chain through its outside handles.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Taking control of my property.”

The padlock clicked.

Inside that room were the feed controls, the breaker panel, and my bench. Outside it, all five lanes stood silent. A mother waited by the quarter machine with two boys in cleats.

“We open in twelve minutes,” I said.

“Not today.”

He handed me one sheet.

UTILITY BALANCE: $6,840.

Below that, he had typed that the premises and all operating equipment were now his because I had failed to pay.

“You can't make that true by typing it.”

He gave the mother a soft smile.

“Little family matter, ma'am. We'll have things running again real soon.”

She took her boys away. One had already put on his batting gloves.

“Every charge is paid into escrow,” I told him.

“Money sitting someplace else isn't money paid to me.”

“It's where our agreement says to put disputed utility charges.”

His smile thinned.

“Your father rented this patch on a handshake. Don't dress it up.”

Dad had started with two machines in 1998. The rent had been cash, and the fence had leaned toward the alley. Marshall liked that version of the business. He brought it up whenever I asked for a bill.

He never brought up 2019.

That year, after Dad's second heart surgery, we had sat around Marshall's desk and signed an actual lease with my name on it. I had needed one for a repair loan. Marshall had wanted higher rent.

We had both gotten what we wanted.

“Go home, Owen,” he said. “Let somebody handle this who understands property.”

I looked at the chain. Then I took three pictures, one close enough to read the lock's number.

“You're taking pictures now?”

“Yes.”

“Always thought you'd have your father's common sense.”

I put the guard back on machine three without reaching through his chain. I could not finish the repair, but I could leave the loose screws in a labeled bag.

That was how Dad had taught me to stop a job.

At home, I set Marshall's sheet on the kitchen table. My daughter, Leah, called while I was opening the gray file tin.

“Did he really close you?” she asked.

“For now.”

“Don't let him say you gave up.”

“I haven't.”

Under the tax returns lay a blue folder. A red fiber washer rested on its cover, the spare Dad had kept beside his adding machine.

He used to put it on any stack he had finished checking.

“Small things keep big things from shaking loose,” he would say.

I moved the washer and opened the folder.

There was the lease, signed by Marshall and me. There were the numbered pages, each bearing our initials. There was Schedule B, listing my pitching machines, coin towers, return belts, and removable net frames by serial number.

There were six escrow receipts for $1,140 each.

I called the number printed across the top.

“Utility clearing desk. Zuri Coleman.”

“Marshall says I owe him sixty-eight forty.”

“Your account has sixty-eight forty,” she said. “Let me guess. He left that part out.”

Before I could answer, my phone buzzed with a photograph from the shop next door.

Marshall had taped another notice to my gate.

It read: OWNER'S WALKTHROUGH FRIDAY. COMPLETE BATTING BUSINESS AVAILABLE.