Waiting for Teddy Williams (2 page)

As for the Colonel telling E.A. what he most wanted to know, there was less chance of that than of the Red Sox winning the World Series.

 

E.A. was all but certain that Prof Benton knew. He could see Prof sitting in his shirtsleeves by the open window of his headmaster's office on the ground floor of the Academy, across the street from the long east side of the green, listening to the now nearly listless Voice of the Sox announce, “New York eight, Boston three, after seven.” He'd never seen Prof out at Gran's place, or Judge Charlie Kinneson, either, who was no doubt listening to the game in his chambers in the granite courthouse next to the Academy. The judge was Editor Kinneson's older brother and a great favorite of E.A.'s. But the judge wouldn't tell him, either.

Next to the courthouse was the railway station. Only three passenger trains a week stopped there now, though ten daily freights still rumbled through the Common, and a decade ago there'd been twice that many. E.A. supposed it might possibly have been a conductor on the Montrealer. Or maybe an engineer off the Green Mountain Limited. He didn't really think so, though. Most of Gypsy's RFD clients were local.

At the short south end of the green he stopped behind the double-chicken-wire backstop and stared across the street at the Reverend, out cutting the lawn in front of the United Church with a clickety-click push mower to demonstrate to his parishioners that he wasn't afraid of day labor. Showboat stuff, E.A. figured. Daniel praying in the lion's den. He gave the Reverend a glacial stare, which the man of God pretended not to notice. The Reverend was the only Commoner E.A. had encountered this afternoon who was not listening to the Sox game, and as far as the boy was concerned that was just one more strike against him. He'd offer up his '74 Topps Bill Lee, and maybe throw in his '62 Fleer Willie Mays, if Our Father Who Art in Heaven would turn the Reverend into a pillar of salt right there on the church lawn. E.A. closed his eyes and said a little prayer to this effect. When he opened his eyes the Reverend was still there.

E.A. linked his fingers through the chicken wire and peered through the backstop at the Outlaws, taking batting practice. Viewed through the wire, the scene had something of the quality of an old black-and-white documentary of the early days of baseball. In most parts of the country, town ball was a thing of the past. In Kingdom Common this afternoon the bleachers were filling up fast. Cars and pickups were parked along all four sides of the green. Some radios were still broadcasting the Sox game—11–4, Yanks.

E.A. pressed his face close to the chicken wire and watched the Outlaws hit. Earl No Pearl was loosening up on the sideline. Drunk or sober, Earl was unhittable, though in either condition he could not find the strike zone, so he had to pitch in a semistupefied state midway between sobriety and inebriation, maintained by one longneck Budweiser every three innings. It was a sobering enough sight for the visiting team to watch Earl warm up, uncorking his 90-mph fastball between sips. Few batters crowded the plate against him.

The Three Shoeless Farmer Boys, Merle, Elmer, and Porter Kittredge, played the outfield and batted barefoot. The book on the Farmer Boys was that you couldn't get a ball by them, in the field or at the plate. It was confidently said in Kingdom Common that if they'd been willing to wear cleats, all three brothers could have gone all the way to the majors. Moonface Poulin at shortstop could have gone all the way too, said the Common, and so could Squint Currier at second, except for the unfortunate fact that they'd “never had the coaching.” Bobby Labounty, now looking at the centerfold of a
Penthouse
magazine while waiting his turn to take BP, had tragically and unfairly been denied his major-league career by an errant arm. Something of a drawback, E.A. thought, for a third baseman. Pappy Gilmore at first, and Cy McCoy, the Outlaws' longtime catcher, had played some single-A ball in Canada decades ago. Both men were now in their fifties. In the estimation of the Common, Pappy and Cyrus could have gone all the way but for their careers having been interrupted by the war. Which war, E.A. had never been sure.

Several of the ball players regularly called on Gypsy Lee, and E.A. supposed that the one he was looking for might have been an Outlaw. If so, he had mixed feelings about it. True, the townies were good old boys who paid him a nickel for every foul ball he shagged during BP, ten cents if he caught it on the fly, and let him go up to the plate and take ten raps when they were through. But when it came to baseball, E.A. was already something of an elitist. Even at eight years old, the birthday boy was certain that regardless of what the Common said, not one of the Outlaws had ever had the ghost of a chance of setting foot on a major-league baseball diamond, as he fully intended to do someday, and wearing a Red Sox uniform at that.

“E.A.'s giving us the hairy eyeball again, Cy,” Elmer Kittredge said to the catcher. Elmer winked at E.A. “You're up next, Bubba B. After me.”

Bubba B was one of a dozen nicknames the Outlaws had devised for E.A., none of which met with his approval, but he was too happy to be hitting to care much. He swiped Elmer's thirty-eight-inch Green Mountain Rebel and choked up three-quarters of the way to the trademark. Standing in to take his cuts, he felt right at home. This was where he belonged. He drove Porter Kittredge's floating BP pitches out toward short, toward second, even pulled one down the line over third. The Outlaws nodded and said the ball jumped off his bat right quick for a shaver. That he had a right fast bat and he was one to watch. It felt good when the ball met the fat of Elmer's old Rebel. Like the solid weight of a big brown trout on his line in the trestle pool.

“That's eight, E.A.,” Porter called in.

He got just ten chances when he took BP with the Outlaws. If a pitch was wide or tight or high or in the dirt, he swung anyway. The tenth pitch was right in his wheelhouse, and he drove it into left field.

With E.A. on the bench keeping the book, the Outlaws jumped out to a five-run lead in the first inning and never looked back. From his station in deep center, the Colonel watched the game with his usual bemused expression. A few cars honked when Elmer Kittredge hit the Colonel's pedestal on the roll, and there was a flurry of polite horn taps when Earl No Pearl struck out the Memphremagog side on ten pitches in the third. But by then the Outlaws were far ahead. Though everyone knew that the competition wasn't what it once had been, any baseball was better than no baseball. So the Colonel said anyway. The Colonel was also fond of saying that while change, like spring, came slower to the Kingdom than to the rest of Vermont, the day would certainly arrive when there'd be no town ball on the common at all.

Then the game was over and the boy started home across the outfield grass.

“Outlaws thirteen, Memphremagog two. New York fourteen, Boston five,” he told the Colonel on his way by, hoping for a hint in return. But the statue didn't say a word, and E.A. was as much in the dark as he'd been when he first woke up that morning, remembering that he was no longer seven but eight.

As the Colonel said, everything changed.

E.A.
BEGAN TO RUN
. First he ran around the darkening common a couple of times, bouncing off the balls of his feet, increasing his pace the second time around, pushing himself down the backstretch across from the baseball bat factory and the courthouse and the Kingdom Common Academy before heading out the county road toward Allen Mountain, looming dark against the twilit sky. East of the village he ran between the Kingdom River on his left and abandoned farms on his right, the fields fast growing up to puckerbrush. Earl No Pearl, who never ran except when he was legging out an extra-base hit, and then lumbering more than running, had told him that to stay in training, baseball players ran. So E.A. ran everywhere he went.

In fact, he liked to run. First because he was good at it. At eight he could already outrun much older boys and often had to. Second because he wanted very much to stay in training so he could play for the Sox someday. And third because when he was running, once he hit his stride and was skimming over the cracked old macadam of the county road between the murmuring river and the brushy, disused farms, he no longer thought about his search, or the scoldings the Colonel gave him, or how much he detested Old Lady Benton and Sissy Quinn. He just thought about running.

E.A. crossed the river on the M&B trestle because it was fun and he wasn't supposed to. The 7:46 southbound hooted, but he had plenty of time before it arrived. He scanned the sand beside the trestle pool far below for the tracks of deer, moose, railroad tramps. All he saw was a neat set of raccoon prints and the long, three-pronged indentations of a great blue heron. Across the river he followed the tracks past the old water tank to where the dirt road off Allen Mountain crossed the M&B line. A number of people had been killed there: a farmer in a stalled hay truck, a hobo who fell asleep on the tracks, some kids in a hot rod racing the train to the crossing. The freight rumbled by. As it passed, E.A. read the names on the cars. Gaspe and North Shore. Pine Tree State. Burlington Northern. Santa Fe. Baltimore and Ohio. Southern. Canadian National. Gypsy had taught him how to sight-read from these names, and as often as he'd seen them they still thrilled him.

Gran's place sat in an overgrown field at the base of the mountain, just past Devil Dan Davis's automobile junkyard. Gran's house and eight-sided barn were weathered as gray as the big granite boulders that had tumbled down into the back field from the mountain over the eons. The dooryard was overrun with weeds, but Gypsy Lee had set out some potted begonias—red, yellow, and orange—compliments of an RFD Escort client who worked at a greenhouse in Memphremagog. Gypsy's rig, the Late Great Patsy Cline, assembled from a '51 Chevy, a '53 Ford, and a '78 Pontiac, was parked on the drive sloping up to the hayloft of the barn. Named after Gypsy's all-time favorite singer, the Late Great Patsy Cline faced downhill so that Gypsy could pop the clutch and jump-start her on the run. That was the only way she would start.

“You're late, boy,” Gran said when E.A. banged in to the kitchen. “Where have you been? Over in the village consorting with those good-for-nothing baseballers, no doubt.”

“I wasn't consorting. I was looking.”

“What for?”

“That's for me to know and you to find out.”

“Shameful. To speak so to a crippled old woman. Never mind. I know what you were looking for. And who. And you're not about to find him, for he's Gone and Long Forgotten.”

Gran cackled, her little round black eyes fall of humor and malice, as she peered up at him from the old-fashioned wicker wheelchair with big wooden wheels, to which she had been confined since her stroke, caused by Bucky Dent's fateful home run in 1978.

“If he's gone, why doesn't he have a regular stone?” E.A. said.

“Because he doesn't merit a stone. You'll go the same way if you continue to seek out bad companions. Not to mention playing baseball day and night. The devil's pastime.”

“Why the devil's pastime?”

“Did you ever know any good to come of it? Disappointed hopes, is all.”

“Where's Gypsy Lee?”

“Primping.”

“Who for?”

“How should I know? Where's my newspaper?”

“I forgot it.”

“I expected no less.”

“I'll pick it up tomorrow.”

“Don't bother. Why should a crippled old woman have her newspaper? Her one small pleasure.”

E.A. took a rolled-up tabloid out of the hip pocket of his jeans and dropped it in Gran's lap. The
Weekly World News
. Her black eyes snapped as she read the front-page headline:
PRESIDENT GREETS ALIENS ON WHITE HOUSE LAWN
. The accompanying photograph showed the chief executive watching a gigantic saucer hovering just over the Rose Garden.

Gran's face was as wizened and sour as a dried crab apple. As Gypsy had explained to E.A., Bucky Dent's pop-fly home run had been the perfect excuse for Gran to take to her wheelchair, even though there wasn't the least thing wrong with her. Moreover, Gran claimed that the unwelcome surprise of getting pregnant after she believed she was safely past childbearing age—Gran detested children almost as much as she detested the Red Sox—had further contributed to her permanent posttraumatic stress. “I was going through the change when I had your mother,” she liked to tell E.A. with grim satisfaction. “That's probably what's wrong with Gypsy Lee.” E.A. didn't think there was anything wrong with Gypsy Lee. He couldn't imagine a better mother, and the only change he'd ever detected in Gran was a rather steady progression over the years from mean to meaner.

Gypsy Lee came in from the parlor. “Hi, sweetie.” She ruffled E.A.'s hair and patted Gran on the shoulder and straightened the frayed throw rug on the old woman's lap. Noticing the tabloid headline, she laughed.

“Stranger things have happened,” Gran said.

“Like what?” E.A. said, as Gypsy began to fry bologna slices for supper.

“Do you think the
News
would print it if it wasn't fit to print?” Gran said.

Gypsy winked at E.A. “I can't decide who to be tonight,” she said. “Any ideas?”

Gran turned the page. Tami Janis Kage, a twenty-one-year-old model in a bikini from Brisbane, Down Under, smiled up at E.A. Gypsy looked at Tami Janis over Gran's shoulder. “There we go. Bingo.”

E.A. grabbed his fried bologna sandwich, got his red rubber ball and the old Rawlings glove with the padding leaking out that he'd found under the melting snow on the green three springs ago, and went out to the dooryard. He began to replay the Sox's most recent victory over New York, a month and a half before, throwing the rubber ball against the side of the house and catching it to represent each play. “Twenty-seven Outs” he called this game. As E.A. worked his way through the innings, Gran wheeled herself to the kitchen door, propped it open with her chair, and watched with bleak interest. On the slanted roof above the sideways window of his loft bedchamber, a row of young sparrow hawks, hatched out earlier that summer under the rotting eaves, waited for their parents to feed them. High overhead in the evening sky the dark, short-winged chimney swifts that lived in the village church steeple soared and dipped.