The Fox Steals Home (4 page)

A few kids were knocking out flies with a softball in the outfield, but the infield was clear.

Bobby noticed his grandfather glancing toward the road now and then, as if he were expecting someone. But he thought no more
about it as Grandpa Alex began issuing orders.

“Okay. Let’s get down at first base. The first thing you’ll need to learn is how to take your lead. It all depends on the
pitcher, of course. That’s the cheese you have to keep your eye on every minute. And if he’s a lefty, you’ve got to be that
much more alert. Get what I mean?”

They walked to first base. “Okay,” said Grandpa Alex. “You’re the runner, I’m the first baseman. Say there’s a right-hander
pitching. Okay. Take your lead.”

Grandpa Alex stood in front of the first-base bag with one of his gloves. “Okay. He’s looking over his shoulder at you. Now
he’s looking at the batter. He’s throwing. Go!”

Bobby took off, slipped, almost fell.

“Come back, come back,” ordered Grandpa Alex, not too kindly. “You stripped your gears, the worst thing you can do when you’re
stealing bases.”

A car drove into the parking lot next to the first-base bleachers. Grandpa Alex saw it and flashed a knowing smile.

“Let’s hold it a minute, Bobby,” he said, watching the driver emerge from the car. “We’ve got some help.”

Bobby sucked in his breath as he recognized the old blue car and the tall, middle-aged man wearing a yellow cap coming toward
them across the field.

“Dad!” he said. An ache came to his throat.

“That’s why you were so long in the house, Grandpa! You were telephoning Dad!”

Grandpa Alex’s smile broadened. “That’s right, Bobby. I knew he worked nights, so I thought I’d have him come over and give
us a hand. You don’t mind that, do you?”

“No. But what if Mom finds out?” Bobby answered, fear taking the place of the warmth that had glowed in his eyes for that
brief moment. “She might make him stop seeing me entirely.”

“Pooshwah,” snorted Grandpa Alex. “She would never do that. Hi ya, Roger,” he greeted his son-in-law with an outstretched
hand. “Glad you could come.”

“I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” said Roger. His brown eyes fastened warmly on his son. “Hi, Bobby. How you doing?”

They shook hands. “Good, Dad.” Then his father wrapped his arms around the boy and held him for a minute. Bobby kept his eyes
closed, giving his father squeeze for squeeze.
Oh, I love you, Dad!
he thought.
I really love you very much!

They pulled apart, Bobby blinking his eyes slightly, then smiling at his no-holds-barred, cunning grandfather.

“Thanks, Grandpa,” he said.

Even after the personal preliminaries were over, Bobby was still somewhat worried that his father was willing to risk their
weekend get-togethers. But maybe his father figured it like Grandpa Alex did. Maybe he didn’t think that Bobby’s mother would
carry out the threat, either, if she saw the two of them together now.

But how could she see them? She was cooped up in that air-conditioned office. They were safe as money in the bank.

“So you want to be a base stealer, do you?” said his father. “And a darned good one, which is the
only kind. Okay. Get on first base. Grandpa, how’s your throwing arm? I know your eyes aren’t the very best.”

“Never was better,” lied Grandpa Alex, who had played baseball until arthritis had incapacitated him at the age of forty-three.

“Okay. Get behind home plate and take that ball with you. You’re going to try to throw Bobby out as he runs to second base.”

“Eewowwwww!” yelled Grandpa Alex as he trotted like an old but nimble racehorse to the position behind the plate. He was in
baseball heaven.

Bobby, leading off the first-base bag, waited for his father to give the word. Suddenly it came. “Okay, Bobby! Go!”

Bobby took off as if he were catapulted. His father waited a moment, then yelled again, “Throw it, Alex!”

Grandpa Alex threw it. The ball got there a moment before Bobby did, except that it was about ten feet short. Bobby went into
the bag standing up.

“Oops! Lost my target!” said Grandpa Alex.

“That isn’t all you’ve lost,” replied Roger, grinning. “But that’s all right. The important thing is that it still is something
for Bobby to run against. But next time slide, Bobby. Hit the dirt as if it’s a close play. You know how to slide, don’t you?
A little on your side and your knees a little bent. And come in hooking the base with your foot. You know all that?”

Bobby nodded. “I’ve done it before, Dad.”

“Good. Okay, get on first. Try it again, and slide this time.”

He tried it again, and Grandpa Alex tried to heave the ball farther, succeeding by about eleven inches. Bobby slid into the
bag, hooking it with his right foot. All the major leaguers in the world couldn’t have done better.

“Hey, kid!” exclaimed his father, his eyes glowing with pride. “You’re a pro!”

Bobby grinned as he got up and brushed himself off.

“I want to get real good at it, Dad,” he said.

They rested for a few minutes, then went at it again.

A car drew up slowly along the street, paused
awhile, then accelerated and went on its way. The car didn’t look familiar, nor did the man behind the wheel, but Bobby got
worried, anyway. He still feared his mother might not like him seeing his father during the week, even though his father and
grandfather didn’t seem to worry. Saturdays and Sundays yes, but not weekdays. It was in the papers that way, the papers that
Mr. Ferris had filed away in his black satchel.

L
et’s try something different,” suggested Roger Canfield. “I’ll get on the mound and pitch. It might work out better that way.”

He strode to the mound, while Bobby got into a runner’s position on first base. His father looked ten feet tall there, and
like a real pitcher as he stretched up his arms, brought them down, then furtively glanced over his shoulder at Bobby.

Bobby took a long lead, crouched, ready to spring the instant his father made the initial motion toward home.

Suddenly his father took his feet off the rubber, twisted to the left, and made a quick throwing motion to first. Bobby raced
back and stepped onto the bag, a wide grin spreading over his face.

“Would’ve had you,” said his father. “That ball was right there in front of the bag.”

“And if I was ump I would have called him safe!” boomed Grandpa Alex.

You knew where his heart lay.

Two kids came up and lay on the grass about ten feet from the foul line. They had long, straggly hair and wore moth-eaten,
printed T-shirts. After glancing their way five or six times, Bobby finally made out what the printings were. One read
I
’
M A MARTIAN
, the other
LOVE ME LOVE MY MONSTER.

Their presence began to irritate him, make him self-conscious. He thought that their watching him was preventing him from
putting his best effort into his runs to second base. But his father offered no hint that they should stop.

Mr. Canfield had him running to third base, too, reminding him that there was no law against stealing the hot-corner sack
if he could.

“Hey, man! You steal bases like a fox steals chickens!” one of the long-haired kids piped up.

“Yeah, you’re some quick, sly fox,” remarked the other.

A fox? Bobby conjured himself having a long
snout and a long, flowing tail. He grinned.
Oh, sure, man!

Another car slowed up on the street. Once again the premonition welled up in Bobby that the driver might recognize him and
his father, squeal to his mother like a CIA spy, and drop the bomb that would separate him and his father. Again he didn’t
recognize the car, but the female driver looked familiar. Could she be one of his mother’s bridge-playing friends? Or one
of her acting friends? His mother was involved in so many things, she must have had a million acquaintances.

At last Grandpa Alex said that they had better call it quits, or Grandma Reenie would make him sleep with the chickens. They
had gone way over the half-hour limit — by twenty-five minutes to be exact — and it was really high time they got back.

Bobby and his father shook hands again, reminding each other of their get-together Saturday morning at nine sharp, then started
on their separate ways.

“Hey, Fox! Think you can steal a base like that
in a game?” one of the kids yelled at Bobby as he started off the field with his father and grandfather.

“I’m going to try,” he replied.

“I’d like to see you try it against Walt!” the other kid said. “Bet you’ll never steal against him again!”

If I did it before, I’ll do it again,
thought Bobby.
Well, at least I’ll try to do it again.

As a matter of fact, he told himself, after the kind of workout he had just gone through with his father and grandfather,
stealing against Walter Wilson should be as easy as ABC.

“See you at the next game, Fox!” the other kid promised.

Bobby smiled and waved. Fox, he thought. What a name they had tagged onto him. Crazy guys.

He and Grandpa Alex stopped at his house on their way to Grandpa’s home. He changed back into his other clothes, then rode
on up to his grandparents’, wondering just how angry Grandma Reenie might be, because they had returned later than promised.

It would be something if she made Grandpa sleep with the chickens. The image of his grandfather snuggling down among all those
hens and roosters made Bobby smile.

As it turned out, she never mentioned it, though she did appear slightly put out that they were nearly an hour late for lunch.
Bobby showered first, then his grandfather did, and it wasn’t until he sat at the table that he realized how famished he was.
He had two big helpings of chicken and dumplings, and then a triangle of strawberry pie, all of which filled every nook and
cranny of his belly.

“You won’t be able to eat tonight,” Grandma Reenie said as she collected his empty plates.

“You wanna bet?” Grandpa Alex said, small eyes twinkling.

Bobby smiled. He felt like a stuffed sausage, and didn’t think he’d be able to eat for a week. Anyway, his mother undoubtedly
had someplace to go tonight and wouldn’t have the time to make a big supper. Since the separation she kept herself so busy
it seemed they never sat down to a big supper anymore.

It turned out that she didn’t go out, and that she didn’t make a big supper, either. Maybe it was because Bobby told her what
he had eaten for lunch. “All that for lunch?” she ranted. “What got into that crazy head of your grandmother’s, anyway? She
seldom cooks for lunch. In that case, it’ll be canned stew tonight. I can stand a rest from cooking after slaving in that
hot office all day. Whew!”

“Hot?” he said. “I thought it was air-conditioned.”

“Not this week it hasn’t been. The air-conditioning unit has been kaput and Lord knows when it’ll be working again.”

The woes of a working mother. Wonder if I’ll work in a hot or an air-conditioned office when I get a job?
Bobby asked himself.
Never. Not if I can become the best base stealer of the year and pull in a couple million bucks. Then retire when my legs
give out, say at thirty.

They played the Finches on Thursday under a boiling hot sun. For two and one-half innings it was a pitcher’s battle, both
hurlers managing to keep the batters hitting the ball into the mitt of a
defensive player just as if it were planned that way. Ollie Hitchcock, the Sunbirds’ right-handed pitcher, so self-conscious
of his height that he walked slightly stoop-shouldered most of the time, seemed to become more erect each time he strode off
the mound.

“Let’s change those eyeballs to numbers,” said Coach Tarbell, referring to the zeroes decorating the scoreboard. “What do
you say, Ollie?”

Ollie seemed not to have heard him as he rummaged around the bat rack for his favorite home run slugger, found it, and walked
to the plate. Ollie, who wore glasses and wanted to be a concert pianist when he grew up, slugged the first pitch to short
for the first out.

Here we go again,
thought Bobby as he left the on-deck circle and replaced Ollie’s position in the batter’s box. He tried to conceal his nervousness
by pretending he was Graig Nettles, gripping his bat so hard that his knuckles shone white. Sixty feet away from him, standing
like a gargantuan on the mound, stood Bert Sweeney, the Finches’ ace right-hander.

Bert fired two pitches that the ump called
strikes, getting well ahead of Bobby to be able to waste a couple.

But the next pitch was in there, too, and Bobby swung.
Crack!
The ball hopped like a rabbit through the hole between third and short, and Bobby was on.

Glancing at the third-base coach, he got the sign he was hoping for. The steal sign.

“Hey, Fox! Let’s see what you can do now!” yelled a voice from the first-base bleachers.

Bobby didn’t have to turn around to see whose voice that was. It belonged to one of the two longhaired kids who had watched
him practice base stealing. He should have known they would be here today.

Bert got on the mound, stretched, looked over his shoulder. Bobby, leading off as far as he dared, waited for that right moment,
that split second that could make the difference between success and failure.

Swiftly, Bert stepped off the rubber and whipped the ball to first. Bobby got back, hardly a fraction of a second in time.

“Watch it, Bobby,” warned Snoop Myers, the first-base coach.

The first basemen tossed the ball back to Bert. Once again Bert got ready to hurl, and Bobby got ready to run. This time Bert
fired his pitch in, and Bobby took off. Dirt sprayed from the heels of his shoes as he sprinted for his target, second base.
He lost his cap and helmet as he slid into the bag, hooking it with his foot long before the second baseman tagged him with
the ball.

“Yay! Thataboy, Fox!” yelled the long-haired kid, as other fans joined in with a chorus of cheers.