I got off the plane at five p.m. and waited for my friend and fellow Grumble writer Elfpants to get me from the airport.  It had been raining a hard and warm and steady Carolina rain all day and I knew that meant that there was a hurricane or a tropical storm moving somewhere up the Atlantic coast and it was probably called something like Edouard or Achille or some other sissified French name which usually meant that the whole weekend would be a washout because that's what the French are like.  I waited there under the roof overhang by the pedestrian walkway as the hard and warm and steady rain slowed down and didn't fall as hard anymore.  I watched a young blonde in a white shirt and a pair of those pants that the kids wore nowadays that looked like they came out of a Krylon can flag down a car and throw her bag in the trunk and get in and give a quick peck on the cheek to the close-shorn linebacker in the driver's seat and pull away while I watched.  In the rain.

My friend Elfpants came along a while later and I threw my bag in the trunk and got in just like the blonde had done earlier, but without the quick peck on the cheek because we prided ourselves on being hard-drinking free-swearing Grumble writers who didn't get up to that sort of thing no matter what those envious bastards at Salon dot com said.

"Hi," I said.

"Hey there, Martini," Elfpants said.

"What's the good word?" I said.

"Change of plans," he said.

I looked at him as he drove the car past the terminal and signaled to the airport policeman and got in the lane for the exit. In the rain.

I said, "How so?"

He said, "On the dashboard."

I looked on the dashboard and there was a sheaf of papers. I picked them up and looked at them.

"What are these?"

"Tickets. For the game."

"The Mudcats game?" I said. I had talked to Elfpants a couple of weeks earlier about going to a Carolina Mudcats baseball game when I came down there. I had been to a Durham Bulls game down there before and wanted to see a Carolina Mudcats game at some point. He said that would be a good idea and maybe his girlfriend, Elfskirt, would like to come and watch the game when she got down there.

"The game. The game tonight."

"We're not going Saturday?" I said.

Elfpants shook his head no. Apparently Elfskirt had decided that she didn't want to go to the game when she got down there but that if we wanted to go she was fine with that. I looked at the tickets again and saw that they were electronic tickets for the game that you could purchase on-line and print out. I was disappointed that Elfskirt has decided that she didn't want to go to the game but not half as disappointed as Elfpants was. If she didn't want to go to the game then that was her business. In any event we were going that night and I was fine with that.

We drove through the warm and steady Carolina rain and the rain petered to a drizzle and the inside of the windows were misty from the change in temperature. We drove east around Raleigh to a town called Zebulon, which was named after somebody or somewhere from the Bible but which always sounded to me like something out of a science fiction tale. I mused on the idea that a lot of people and places in the Bible sounded a bit science-fictiony and wondered what that meant. It probably meant that most science-fictiony type writers had little imagination when it came to naming things. I laughed inwardly at the thought that maybe it meant that everything and everyone in the Bible was actually descended from extraterrestrial beings but let it go because that way lay madness and a stack of Erich von Daniken books on your shelf and no one deserved that.

We drove on in the rain and Elfpants said, "Look for a sign for Five County Stadium."

I looked and after a while I saw off in the distance what I thought was the sign. It was a brown highway sign atop a green one and I looked at it but I didn't look any farther than I wanted to until Elfpants said, "That must be it."

"How do you know?"

"The light towers."

Elfpants pointed to a spot further along the road and above the tree line and that was when I saw them. There were four light towers thrusting tall and firm from the moist yielding foliage (and I realize that that last clause probably made those of you readers with a more delicate constitution uncomfortable, but with all due respect you could hardly expect a hard-drinking free-swearing two-fisted Grumble writer like myself to engage in auto-bowdlerization for the sake of a few milquetoasts who can't handle good old plainspoken descriptive literature. If you're the type of person who'd rather get his prose couched in euphemism then you can damn well click over to Slash Dot dot com and the Hell with you).

We turned off the exit and drove to the stadium. It wasn't Yankee Stadium where the great DiMaggio played but it was a baseball stadium with real baseball players and that was good enough for me. I had sat in a number of professional baseball stadiums, both major- and minor-league, throughout the years and was never one to be tetchy about the quality of the digs. We drove into a graveled parking lot and I gave Elfpants two dollars for the parking fee and he paid the attendant who directed us to a space. There weren't any lines painted for the cars so it took a minute of expert wheel turning and employment of the reverse gear for Elfpants to maneuver us into a spot.

We parked and got out and walked up to the main gate of the stadium and gave our tickets to another attendant who ran a scanner over them and let us in. A bubbly young co-ed was selling programs just inside the entrance but we didn't buy one and instead went up an interior staircase to our seats. The seats were thirteen rows behind home plate and cost eight dollars apiece. I thought that an excellent price considering that in most of the baseball stadiums I had been to in my life eight dollars wouldn't get you so much as a how's-your-father from the cotton candy girl, much less a seat behind home plate.

We sat there in the rain and watched the Mudcats warm up on the field. They looked decent from where we were sitting and I asked Elfpants how they were doing that season, because Elfpants knew anything about anything about baseball, or so it seemed. He could break down the starting rotation for a Northern League second-division dweller if you wanted. I didn't want it but I did want to know about the Mudcats since that was the team we had paid eight dollars apiece to see. In the rain.

"They won the first half of the season, so they're pretty much set," he said.

"The first half?"

"Yeah," Elfpants said, "they play a split season schedule down here." By that he meant that the season was split into two halves and the winner from the first half played the winner from the second half for the championship. I looked at the scoreboard and it flashed the second-half standings and I thought it was a good thing that the Mudcats had won the first half because they were fifteen games under .500 in the second half.

There was practically no one in the stands at that point so we decided to get up and get something to eat and possibly drink and we got up and went back down into the concourse under the stands. We looked around at the various food stalls and it was then that we came to a table set up directly in the center of the concourse.

It was a table for people to sign up to be in contests in between innings. There was a place where you could sign up to see if you could throw a ball through a target and win a prize. There was one to see how far you could hit a ball. There was even one where you could sign up to be in a sumo wrestling match in the middle of the third inning. On the field. In the rain.

"You want to do this?"

"Do what?" I said.

Elfpants was holding a sign-up form for the sumo wrestling match in the middle of the third inning on the field in the rain.

I looked at the form as if it were something Elfpants had pulled from the bottom of his shoe.

"Sumo wrestling?" I said.

"Sumo wrestling," he said.

"You want to do sumo wrestling?"

"I want to do sumo wrestling."

"On the field?"

"Yes."

"Out there?"

I pointed to the field.

"Yes," he said.

"You're serious."

"I'm serious."

"Really?"

"Yeah."

"Oh, go ahead, it's a lot of fun," said the lady who was staffing the table.

"Do we win anything?" Elfpants said.

"Each participant wins a bag of peanuts and the winner gets a ten-dollar gift certificate to Harris Teeter." She said it with enthusiasm and verve. Harris Teeter was the name of a local grocery store in the Raleigh area, and at that point I was having some doubt because even if I were persuaded to do sumo wrestling in the middle of the third inning and won I'd never be able to use the gift certificate. I made a move to mention this paradox to Elfpants but he had already shoved a pencil into my hand and demanded that I fill out the form.

Resignedly, I did.

I filled out my name and address and phone number and age (you had to be at least twenty-one to wrestle in the style el sumo) and gave the form to Elfpants. He gave it to the lady who put our forms into a clear plastic box where the forms that people who wanted to do sumo wrestling filled out went. I looked at the box and saw that ours were the only two forms in it. I wasn't particularly worried about this because it was still early in the evening and more people would doubtlessly arrive and fill out more forms to go in the plastic box.

They'd never pick us.