“Working out, ha!” Jackie said from behind the bar. “Alex McKnight working out. That’s a good one.”

“I’ll tell you something,” Randy said. “This man right here was one hell of a catcher. I don’t think I ever saw him give up a passed ball.”

“Too bad he couldn’t hit his weight,” Jackie said as he brought the beer around.

“Just give the man his beer,” I said. I sat him down in front of the fire and watched him take a pull right out of the bottle.

“So this is Canadian beer,” he said.

“Can you taste the difference?”

“Um, sure,” he said.

“You’re lying,” I said. “No matter how long it’s been, I can still tell when you’re lying.”

He laughed. “I can’t lie to my catcher.”

“Damned right,” I said. “But seriously. It’s great to see you. Except for that mustache and that goatee thing.”

“Makes me look pretty smooth, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah, in a satanic, serial killer sort of way. What’s that on your arm, a tattoo?”

He looked at the back of his left wrist. There were three parallel lines. The line farthest from his hand had a gap in the middle. “That’s a trigram,” he said. “You know, from the I Ching, It’s called ‘the joyous lake.’ A Tibetan monk used a needle dipped in spider blood.”

“You’re lying again,” I said. “I told you, don’t even try it. I can see right through you. Even thirty years later.”

“How about I got drunk one night in San Francisco?” he said. “When I woke up, I had no wallet, no shoes, and a brand-new tattoo?”

“That’s sounds more like it,” I said.

He laughed again. It was the same laugh. For one year of my life, I’d heard that laugh at least twenty times a day.

“So tell me already,” I said.

“What?”

“What’s going on? How far did you have come to get here, anyway?”

“Well, I’ve been living in L.A. for the last few years,” he said. “I was watching a Cactus League game a couple weeks ago, and the guy on TV was talking about how a good catcher is a pitcher’s best friend. I said to myself, ‘Ain’t that the truth,’ and I started thinking about the old days in Toledo. I was wondering whatever happened to you, so I started poking around on the Internet to see if I could find you. I saw your Web site, man, and I figured, Hey, I’m gonna go see him!”