Waiting for Teddy Williams (11 page)

“Hitter has to wait for his pitch,” he continued. “That's why your team couldn't do nothing against that schoolteacher fella. They was swinging at too many curve balls, too many pitches just out of the strike zone. Look.” He pointed up at the wooden tank where the osprey sat watching the river. He whistled, and the bird turned its white head their way. “See that customer up there eyeballing us?”

E.A. nodded.

“Watch him.”

As they watched, the bird rose into the air and began to circle above the river. Suddenly it went into a plunging dive, hit the surface so hard it vanished momentarily in the spray of water, and took off with another trout wriggling in its talons.

“That's a hard way to get your breakfast,” Bill observed. “Ethan,” the drifter said, “how many times you ever see her dive and miss?”

Ethan thought. “Never.”

“Why come?” said the man. “I'll tell you. Because she's patient. She'll work a pool for ten, fifteen minutes, like a good fisherman, then go along to the next, come back later, work it again for as long as it takes. She watches. If a hatch of flies comes over the water, she'll work harder. She knows the fish'll be coming up to feed. I don't know how she knows, but she does. She's careful to keep her shadow off the surface, and she can see right down into the water several feet on account of her eyes are naturally tinted, like a fancy pair of sunglasses. She can see eight times as good as I and you can see. But none of that would matter if she wasn't patient.” It was the most he'd ever said to E.A. at one time.

“How is it,” E.A. said, “you come to know so much about ospreys?”

“I read up on them in a bird mag.”

E.A. looked at the stranger in his tramp clothes. He did not look like the sort who read
Audubon
or
Nature
, bird magazines like the ones the Memphremagog optometrist who visited Gypsy brought her from his waiting room, six or eight months out of date but still interesting.

“Where?”

“Where what?”

“Where'd you read that bird magazine?”

The man paused, then said, “In college.”

E.A. was surprised. He would not have guessed that this man had been to college any more than he would have supposed he read
Audubon
. He didn't talk like Judge Charlie K, say, or Editor Jim Kinneson, or even Gypsy, who had spent that year at the state university before getting knocked up with him.

E.A. said, “Gypsy says I can go to college. Get an all-expense scholarship for my baseball. Paid for by the state.”

“I had something like that,” the drifter said. “But I never got beyond college ball. To take your baseball as far as you can, you have to learn to be very patient at the plate.”

“I guess I'm patient enough,” E.A. said. “I never missed one pitch you threw.”

The man shrugged. “Them was BP pitches.”

“Fine,” the boy said, reaching for his bat. “Throw me your best pitch. Game situation. I guarantee I can get my bat on the ball. Drive it somewhere.”

The man looked at E.A. Then he nodded.

“Oh Lordy,” Bill said.

The drifter went back out to the mound in the morning sunshine. Ethan stood in.

“You all set?”

E.A. nodded.

Again the big man threw with no wind-up. Before E.A. could swing, the ball cracked into the side of the barn, between a blue-and-white Montana Big Sky Country and a Rhode Island the Ocean State plate, bending them back and leaving a hole as big as a fist in the multicolored southeast wall.

E.A. had never seen a thrown baseball travel that fast in his life. All he could do was stare at the hole.

“Look, Ethan. The time'll come when you'll drive a pitch like that into the river. But that telephone pole you use for a bat? It's way too much timber for you.”

E.A. rapped the taped handle of the bat on home plate. “It's got good wood.”

The drifter shrugged. “Like Ted said. What good's wood—”

“If you can't handle it,” Ethan finished. “Hey. This was a good morning.”

“A man should have a lot of good mornings like this in his life,” the drifter said. Then, “Well, I'll see you when I see you.”

He started down across the meadow toward the tracks.

“Wait. Mister. What else should I work on? Besides being patient?”

“That's enough for now.”

The 9:30 local was coming, whistling as it slowed for the crossing before the trestle.

“What's your name?” Ethan called out.

Just before the drifter swung through the open door of a Pine Tree State boxcar, E.A. thought he heard him call back, “Teddy.” Teddy seemed an odd name for so big a man.

“Did he say his name was Teddy?” E.A. asked Bill, who was still staring at the hole punched in his license-plate tableau.

“I couldn't swear he didn't,” Bill said.

The train was on the trestle now. Bill muttered something else, something about his damaged license plates. But E.A. was thinking about what the drifter had said just before he left. A man should have a lot of good mornings in his life. Not a boy. A man. He felt strangely alone as he headed up to the house from a good morning of baseball.

G
YPSY WAS WAITING
for E.A. in the dooryard, watching the freight train wind out of sight over the trestle. E.A. had no idea how long she'd been there.

“Ethan, who was that guy you were playing baseball with?”

E.A. shrugged. “He's the fella who gave me that new baseball a couple years ago. I think he said his name was Teddy.”

Gypsy bit her lip and frowned. “Well. I've told you before. I don't want you hanging out with tramps and strangers. I don't care if he says his name is Joe DiMaggio. Understand?”

“Why not, ma? He's just a—”

“Because I said not,” Gypsy said abruptly. “That's reason enough.” And with that she turned and hurried into the kitchen.

E.A. sulked for the rest of that day and the next, avoiding Gypsy or shooting baleful looks at her and at Gran, too, for good measure.

Finally she sat him down at the table and said, “Look, sweetie. I know you're mad at me. I'll tell you what. I'll let you practice with that guy, assuming he ever shows up again. But you have to promise you'll only do it when I'm home, and you won't go anywhere with him. Is that fair?”

“I reckon so,” E.A. said, still mad.

“Well, I reckon it better be, sweetie,” Gypsy said good-naturedly. “It's called a compromise. Like the Missouri Compromise we studied. Remember?”

“I don't like compromises.”

“Nobody does. But it's that or nothing. Okey-dokey?”

“Okey-dokey,” E.A. said after a pause. Then he grinned at her, and she gave him a hug. Gypsy was the one person E.A. couldn't stay mad at for long, as much as he would have liked to. The important thing was that he could continue playing ball with the drifter.

 

E.A. spent most of the rest of that summer waiting for the man called Teddy. He showed up half a dozen times, always early in the morning, always to play baseball. He brought the balls and, the second time he came, a new Green Mountain Rebel Little League bat, which he gave E.A. to keep.

Until Ethan started playing with Teddy, he thought he knew something about baseball. What he learned that summer was how imperfectly he understood the game.

Teddy would appear just after dawn, always on a fair day. Bill was usually ready to shag balls, though the two men rarely spoke to each other, and Bill rarely spoke of the drifter to E.A., and then only as “that fella” or “that Teddy fella.”

There he'd be, leaning against the barn or the cedar rail fence around the family graveyard or walking up from the tracks by the river. E.A. would run down and they'd work out at Fenway for an hour or so.

Their routine was always the same. First they'd play catch. Then Teddy would throw him a few dozen pitches while Bill shagged balls in the outfield. After that they'd sit on the back seat of a '38 Packard Bill had once owned, along the third-base line, and the drifter would drink from the pint in his jacket pocket while E.A. drank from the bottle of Hires root beer Teddy always brought him. Root beer for breakfast.

As the daisies and orange hawkweed and black-eyed Susans in the meadow gave way to purple vetch, chicory, steeplebush, and, finally, New England asters, E.A. became more comfortable taking instruction. For one thing, Teddy didn't give much advice. Often he offered none at all unless E.A. asked. But once, in midsummer, haying time, Teddy told him there were two kinds of ball players. Major-leaguers and players who couldn't take advice. “There are very few major-leaguers, Ethan, who can't take advice.”

“Okay,” E.A. said. “How come I can't drive your slower pitches? I'm listening.”

“Take a shorter stride when you swing. Don't get out on your front foot so soon.”

E.A. nodded. “What's happening when I pop the ball up?”

“Move your right hand counterclockwise around on the bat handle a little. That keeps your right hand on top when you swing.”

E.A. tried it. “It doesn't feel right.”

Teddy shrugged. By the end of the summer E.A. had stopped popping up.

“How come I couldn't pull that pitch?” he said one morning.

“It was on the outside corner. Go with the pitches. Hit 'em where they're pitched. That pitch, you want to poke it over the second baseman's head.”

That was the gist of Teddy's hitting advice. Fundamentals. The same for fielding. E.A. would go out to shortstop. Teddy would hold the Green Mountain Rebel in one hand, his glove on the other, ball in the webbing of the glove. He'd flip the ball up in the air and swat it out to E.A. one-handed. Nothing very hard. E.A. would field the ball and zip it back to him at home plate. Over the course of the summer Teddy showed E.A. how to keep his feet closer together when he fielded the ball and plant his back foot to throw, how to do a slick little slide-step over second base when executing a double play. Sometimes they worked on base running. Teddy showed him how to get a good jump on the pitcher, how to come up standing out of a slide.

“Why don't you ever teach me anything about throwing?” E.A. said one day in late August when the first splashes of red had appeared in the soft maples along the river.

“You throw pretty good already,” Teddy said.

That was as close to a compliment as E.A. ever got, but Teddy never criticized him, either. If a grounder squirted under his glove, all Teddy said was “That's baseball.”

By degrees E.A. came to trust the big man, though he had no more idea who he was than he'd had when he first saw him. The Colonel refused to say whether this was the fella he'd promised to send, and if Old Bill knew anything more about the drifter than E.A. did, he wasn't telling.

Teddy rarely spoke about anything but baseball, and when he did he immediately connected it to baseball. He never asked Ethan about school and didn't seem interested when Ethan told him one morning that he was being homeschooled. He never talked about fishing or hunting. He never asked about Gypsy or Gran.

Otherwise, little changed at Gran's place that summer. E.A. continued to watch Kingdom Common carefully, patiently, with unflagging persistence. In a more detached but no less curious way, the Common watched E.A.

The Common was watching the man E.A. knew as Teddy as well. No one approached him. There was something forbidding about the big, laconic, watchful stranger who seemed to appear out of nowhere. An air of something almost dangerous hung about him. As if you couldn't quite tell what he might or might not do. But to E.A. he never seemed forbidding, much less dangerous, though all they ever spoke of was baseball. And that was fine with both of them.

E.A. continued to keep score for the Outlaws and to take BP with them. They noticed that he was choosier at the plate and that he hit the ball sharper. Once against St. Johnsbury, when Moonface didn't show, E.A. played an entire game at shortstop. He got two singles and a walk and didn't make an error in six chances in the field.

When E.A. reported on the game to Teddy, he shrugged. “Town-team ball,” he said. “There's a big difference between town-team baseball and even, say, single A. That's a different world, Ethan.”

“I reckon an eleven-year-old boy who can go two for four and field his position without a miscue in a men's league game has got a shot at A ball and more when he grows up,” E.A. said.

“Time will tell,” Teddy said.

All in all, it was a fine time in the life of Ethan E.A. Allen. He had just two problems. Their names were Orton and Norton Horton.

 

Orton and Norton had lived with Devil Dan and R.P. Davis for as long as E.A. could remember. They were foster children who had been removed from their own home in southern Vermont and shipped north to “live in bondage,” as Gypsy put it, with the Davises. Other than doing R.P.'s laundry every morning and counting empties at Devil Dan's redemption center, their main job was to help Dan around Midnight Auto, cleaning out junk vehicles and salvaging anything of value. If the brothers Horton found a dime under a floor mat, they were not allowed to keep it. At random intervals, Dan ran a metal detector over them and their room, and they had to turn out their pockets for R.P.'s inspection whenever they entered the house. Under different circumstances E.A. might have sympathized with Orton and Norton. But they routinely tormented him, lying in wait under the railroad trestle or iron bridge and shagging him home with rocks in the summer and ice balls in the winter, rabbit-punching him in the back of the neck, drenching him with water bombs made from condoms they found in the glove boxes of cars wrecked by teenagers, and, worst of all, siccing Devil Dan's watch-goat, Satan Davis, on him.

Orton and Norton never hunted or fished or played baseball. The one time E.A. had invited them over to join him at Fenway, Norton had thrown his ball into the river, then heaved E.A. in after it. At fifteen, Orton was still in the fifth grade at the Common Academy. His fourteen-year-old brother was mired in grade four. The headmaster, Prof Benton, who was as kindhearted and jovial as his mother, Old Lady Benton, was hateful, had early on in their tenure at the Academy taken the Horton boys under his wing, assuring them that he wished to be their best friend in the world. When Norton set fire to the contents of their best friend's office wastebasket while he was reasoning with Orton over the propriety of sliding a hand mirror hidden between Miss Lottie Presault's feet while she was helping him with desk work, then looking up her dress and shouting “Miss Lottie wears red undies!” Prof calmly put out the blaze.