Waiting for Teddy Williams (16 page)

“I told him I never wanted to see him again,” Ethan said, wishing more than anything that he hadn't.

“That doesn't matter. He wants to see you. For better or for worse, he's your pa. Now skedaddle. BP's beginning down yonder on the ball field.”

 

As the Colonel had predicted, Teddy came back, and E.A.'s thirteenth summer turned out to be a good one. E.A. heard that Teddy was running a lathe at the bat mill and staying at the hotel. They didn't talk about the accident again, or about Teddy's being E.A.'s pa. Two or three evenings a week he'd appear at Gran's and they'd go through BP and fielding practice, and around dusk he'd drift back over to the village. Sometimes Gypsy watched them for a minute from the dooryard, but Gran stayed inside, hunkered over the yard-sale Philco, trying to pick up the Red Sox games through the mountain static. One night in late June Boston blew an eight-run lead and lost to Seattle 12–11. The Sox never bounced back from that loss and neither did Gran.

Ethan made the Outlaws. It was getting harder to recruit new players, interest in town ball was waning, and teams were dropping out of the Northern Border League. Even in the Common attendance had fallen off. In another five or six years, E.A. figured, town ball would be a thing of the past. But when Moonface got drank and stumbled into the Colonel's pedestal and broke his toe, E.A. began starting regularly at shortstop.

What was the book on him? Well, that he had a quick bat. It was hard to get a fastball past him, though he'd still occasionally swing at a hard pitch up and out of the strike zone. In the field he was nearly flawless. He rarely made an error, and he held his ground on Cy's throws down to second to nail stealing base runners. He had some trouble hitting curve balls. He didn't shy away or stick his foot in the water bucket or get out on his front foot too fast, and he saw the ball all the way to the bat and tried to go with the pitch. But the craftier curve-ball pitchers could get him to pop up or ground out weakly three out of four times with a hook on the outside corner. Still, by mid-July he was hitting .340, second-highest on the team after Earl, and leading the Outlaws with walks, steals, and on-base percentage. The men called him the Kid. Kid Allen, like a prizefighter. But they teased him less than they used to. He had a knack for being in the right place to make a big play in the field and for knocking in the game-winning run or scoring it by taking an extra bag with his daring base running. He had an instinct for the game, they said. And he had the most heart of any player anyone, including the elderly bat boys on the hotel porch, could remember. Nothing daunted him. In any clutch situation he wanted to go up to the plate. In the field he wanted the ball to be hit to him.

True, E.A. had Gypsy's slender build. He was never going to be as rugged as Earl, much less Teddy, and this troubled him. He wasn't sure he'd ever be able to hit the really long ball. Also, at night, and even during the day, he was confused by thoughts about “holding intimate commerce with girls,” as Gypsy had put it. But since he didn't attend school and lived outside the village, he knew few girls, and none well, and in fact had little commerce of any kind with them. Mainly E.A. concentrated on baseball, as he always had, working hard on his game, bribing the Outlaws to give him extra BP in exchange for duplicate baseball cards, working out on his own, and continuing to run everywhere he went.

At first Gypsy wouldn't let him go to away games with the Outlaws because she correctly suspected that they drank and drove. Not only did they drink prodigious quantities of beer coming home from games late at night, they drank en route
to
their games as well. E.A. wheedled and begged to go along, but to no avail until the Outlaws had to play a double-header in Woodsville, New Hampshire, one Sunday with only eight players, and he talked Earl into making him the designated driver. That was fine with Gypsy. At thirteen he drove as well as or better than most of the men on the team anyway. Certainly he drove better sober than they did drunk. Usually he drove Pappy's big Buick, driving forty-five or fifty at most, to New Hampshire and western Maine, up into Canada (Pappy drove through the checkpoints), over into upstate New York. Anyplace they could pick up a game.

Teddy continued to practice with him regularly, but he didn't come to many of E.A.'s games. Teddy had little interest in town-team ball. When E.A. admitted that curve balls tied him in knots, Teddy threw him breaking pitches by the hour, spotting them wherever E.A. requested. He continued to give the boy very little advice. This was part of what made him a good teacher. When E.A. punched a breaking ball on the outside corner over first base and was mad at himself for not driving it into a gap, Teddy said, “That's about all you can do with that pitch, Ethan. That was a good piece of hitting.”

He never gave E.A. any advice at all about throwing but continued to insist that they toss together before every workout. They'd start twenty feet apart. Then thirty. Fifty. Sixty. As if, E.A. thought, playing catch was some kind of father-son ritual. Once Teddy asked E.A. if his arm ever hurt him. Ethan said no.

In September, orange-and-black monarch butterflies began to congregate in the high mowing meadow. As part of E.A.'s home-schooling, Gypsy borrowed Big Earl's Rand McNally Road Atlas and traced out the southward flight of the monarchs, teaching him history and geography along the way. “Now they're going over the old Erie Canal, hon—Clinton's ditch, they called it. It opened the way for westward expansion. Here's Gettysburg . . .” And she told him all about Pickett's charge and gave him a wonderful book to read called
The Killer Angels
, about General Robert E. Lee and General James Longstreet and an incredibly brave young man from Maine named Joshua Chamberlain.

 

Once again color was appearing on the mountainside, creeping down from the top, past Wild Woodsflower Gulf, past Warden's Bog, the first blush of the maples gradually intensifying to vivid reds and yellows. Bill said it hurt his eyes to look at the fall foliage. He didn't know why the leaves had to bother to change; it seemed like a lot of trouble to go to, just to drop off a few days later. Gypsy said the only other place in the world where the fall foliage was as bright was a province in northern China. Gran said the Red Sox could all go to China in a handbasket. Maybe they could beat the Taiwan Little League All-Stars, though she had her doubts. E.A. was studying algebra and Latin that fall, which Gypsy said he needed for his college boards. He didn't mind. Gypsy had been a whiz at algebra and Latin.

Late in the afternoon of the last day of September, Teddy showed up at Gran's with his bat bag, his metal spikes lashed through the canvas handles by their laces. E.A. figured his father would be heading out for the winter right after their workout. He missed him already. That afternoon, while Bill stood in the outfield and complained about the fall colors, they played a game of Twenty-seven Outs, the '48 Sox against the '48 Yankees. Ethan fielded and hit for the Sox. On one defensive play, with Joe DiMaggio on second, Berra singled to left center. E.A. ran out from short and took the cutoff from Bill, whirled and nailed Joe D at the plate by ten feet.

“He's coming back to third—throw it!” E.A. said, racing to the bag.

Instead, Teddy faked a throw to third, then sprang up the line four or five steps and tagged Joe on the back, just the way he'd shown E.A., ball in the hand, hand in the glove, tag with the glove.

E.A.'d never seen a man move that fast in his life, much less a six-foot-three man weighing nearly two hundred pounds. Teddy moved the way Bucky Dent, Bill's cat, had pounced on a weasel in the woodshed last winter.

“I'd say you got him dead to rights, E.W.,” Bill said. It was the closest thing to a compliment E.A. had ever heard from Old Bill.

Afterward Teddy got a bottle of Hires for E.A. out of the springhouse, and they sat on the Packard seat while E.A. sipped the icy root beer, which tasted like nothing else on earth but root beer. Bill and Teddy sipped Crackling Rose. Bill said he hoped they were satisfied, he'd lost an afternoon of work, and now he might better not try to do anything except sweep out the barn, because if he did it would all just be catch-up. Crickets chirped. Up at the house, Gypsy was patiently at work on the second verse of “Nobody's Child,” the guitar chords floating softly down over the ball grounds.

“Why don't she go to Nashville?” Teddy said suddenly. “See what she can do with them pretty numbers?”

“She has a boy to raise is why,” E.A. said. “She didn't up and walk out on that boy is why.”

“E.W. didn't exactly walk out, E.A. They put him away in prison,” Bill pointed out.

Teddy was turning his big, mahogany-colored catcher's glove over in his hands. E.A. secretly hoped he'd give it to him to practice with during the off-season.

E.A. sipped his root beer. Gran's octagonal barn glowed in the sunset, the low rays reflecting off Bill's multicolored license plates like sunshine on a crazy quilt. It was a handsome building, with a dormer over the highdrive to the hayloft and a cupola. On rainy days E.A. stood between the soaring bays on either side of the loft and played Twenty-seven Outs off the back wall. Or threw his red rubber ball through the swinging tire. Recently Devil Dan had driven the D-60 right up to the side of the barn and lifted the blade above the row of windows in the milking parlor and menaced with it while Gypsy drew a bead on him with Grandpa Gleason Allen's 30.06 Springfield from the kitchen door. E.A. had no doubt she'd use it if Dan so much as touched the barn with the Blade. Then she'd be in prison and he'd be all but orphaned. He wished Teddy would stay for the winter.

Tracing his finger across the cold mist on the Hires bottle, he said to Teddy, “You headed out tonight? On the eight-oh-six?”

“Maybe, maybe not,” Teddy said. “I've been thinking.”

“Thinking what?”

Teddy nodded at the red-and-gold mountain. “You recollect what I said to you up there this past spring?”

“How could I forget? A boy doesn't find out every day of the week that his pa was a jailbird.”

“Do you recollect what I said about no more fibbing to you?” Teddy said. “About being in college and such?”

“Yes.”

“Have I?”

“Have you what?”

“Told you any stretchers this summer.”

E.A. considered. “Not so far's I know.”

“Tell me again what you want, Ethan.”

“You know what I want. To do what they say overstreet that you could have but didn't.”

“Which is?”

“I don't want to jinx it.”

“There's no such thing as a jinx. Say it.”

Bucky Dent rubbed against Teddy's spike, and he pulled his foot away. E.A. could tell he was uncomfortable with the cat and so could Bucky Dent, who now jumped up on Teddy's lap. Teddy picked him up and tossed him aside. The cat purred and arched its back with pleasure.

Teddy looked back at E.A. “I was saying. There's no such a thing as a jinx. All that happy horseshit about not mentioning a no-hitter in progress? That saying it's a no-no? I don't hold with none of that. Pitcher has a no-hit game going and gets away with a mistake, fastball down the center right in the hitter's wheelhouse, I point it out to him. ‘Do that again, bub, there goes your no-hitter,' I tell him. I'll ask you again, Ethan. What is it you want?”

“He wants that Lori gal over to the hotel to ask him out, it's all he can think about,” Bill said, to E.A.'s surprise. Just when you thought Old Bill was the next thing to brain-dead, he'd surprise you. In fact, he'd had a crush on Lori, the hotel waitress, who was nearly twice his age, for six months, though he hadn't breathed a word about her to anyone, even Gypsy.

Teddy paid no attention to Bill or to E.A.'s red face as the boy quickly said, “Go all the way to the top. Be a big-league hitter. Play shortstop, maybe even catcher.”

“It'll never happen.”

Teddy said this exactly the way he might say no rain was in sight. Showers before the weekend? Never happen.

E.A. jumped to his feet. “What do you mean? What do you mean, it'll never happen?”

Teddy, still sitting, held up his hands as if to fend off another attack. “Don't you be flying off the handle, boy. I said I wouldn't lie to you again. Not even in kidding. Well, I won't. And you won't ever be a major-league hitter, either. Or a shortstop or catcher.”

“You can just bet I will.”

“If I said that, I'd be fooling myself and you, too.”

“Well, why the hell not?” E.A. was nearly shouting, and despite himself his eyes were reddening. He could feel them smarting.

“I'll tell you why not. One, you ain't quite big enough and likely won't be. Two, you're fast afoot but you ain't quite fast enough. Three, you have a quick pair of hands but not quite quick enough. Your bat ain't quite quick enough, neither. Yes, in the field you're smooth. But you ain't quite smooth enough. Ethan. Listen to me. You could play college and do real good at it. Single A, maybe. Maybe even double A. But not all the way and be a big-league hitter or shortstop, much less a catcher.”

Now tears were beginning to come, and as hard as it was for E.A. to hear all this with no warning whatsoever, it was harder yet to think he might cry in front of his father. He clenched his fists.

Teddy grinned. “You going to charge the mound again? Rush me?”

“You think it's funny.”

“No, sir. I don't. But I don't think misleading a kid, much less a fella's own kid, is funny, either. Stringing you along to waste five, six, eight years of your youth riding old buses around the South or out West or wherever until you finally find out for yourself in Chattanooga at twenty-seven with your two-twenty-seven batting average that you ain't going one step further. I don't want that for you, Ethan. You don't want that for yourself.”