Waiting for Teddy Williams (3 page)

In the top of the seventh E.A. hobbled a ball on the short hop. “Do that often enough, and you can play for the Sox yourself someday,” Gran called out.

As E.A. retired the final Yankee hitter in the last of the ninth, a car pulled into the dooryard. There was just enough light left to read its front plate:
JESUS
2
. The Reverend got out. “Pastoral house call,” he announced. “Is Mother at home?”

“No,” E.A. said. “She just left for Brisbane.”

Gypsy Lee stepped out into the dooryard in a blond wig and a short gold lamé dress. “G'd evening, mate,” she said. “Tami Janis, from Down Under.”

“Catch,” E.A. said, whizzing the rubber ball past the Reverend's head.

“Here. Here now,” said the Reverend, hurrying inside with Tami.

By now it was too dark to catch his ball, so E.A. went inside to play high, low, jack, and the game with Gran while Gypsy entertained the Reverend in the parlor. E.A. won five hands and Gran won six. Then E.A. went up the loft stairs to bed with a jelly glass of milk and two Pop-Tarts he'd bought at the dented-can store where he'd gotten Gran's newspaper. He pulled the string of the single bulb hanging from the ceiling. In the glaring light the poster of Ted on his door was bright and alive-looking. Ted was leaning on a bat in the on-deck circle at Fenway, giving the eyeball to a very young-looking pitcher in a White Sox uniform. No doubt Ted was already planning where he would drive the ball.

E.A. reached under his bed and pulled out the White Owl cigar box containing his baseball cards. Most were ragged and stained and dog-eared. Not one could be graded Mint or even Good. Many he'd won by flipping for them in the dives where Gypsy Lee sang on weekends. His favorite was a recent Topps, in near-Good condition, of the great Sox manager G. P. “Spence” Spencer, known to the Red Sox Nation of Greater Boston and New England as “the Legendary Spence.” Spence had won more games than any other manager in the history of the Red Sox franchise, and it was E.A.'s dream to play for him someday. In all he had one hundred and twenty-four cards, most of them Red Sox, many of which he could identify by touch from a turned edge, a crease, a bit of bubble-gum residue, or a missing corner.

He slid the White Owl box back under his bed. He snapped off the light and went to his dormer window and looked out over the dooryard at the
WYSOTT
family cemetery. The moon was not quite full. In its white light the granite stones gleamed pale. The small cedar-wood slab they called Gone and Long Forgotten was just visible in the moonglow. E.A. turned away from the window, shucked off his Keds and jeans, and got into bed.

“Our Father,” he began with the best of intentions, but before he reached “Give us this day” he was murmuring, “It's the last of the ninth in the seventh game of the World Series, folks. The next pitch will tell the story. The young batter from Vermont is set. The pitcher is ready . . .” Who was the pitcher? He could see himself waiting in the batter's box, but the pitcher wasn't clear. “He comes to the set. Checks the runners, kicks, and delivers . . .” Then the unmistakable sound of straight-grained ash meeting horsehide and a roar expanding outward from Fenway through Boston, sweeping north over the towns and mountains of New Hampshire and Vermont to Kingdom Common, filling all New England. But exactly what it signified—long-awaited triumph or a long foul ball—Ethan E.A. Allen had no idea. The birthday boy was asleep.

 

Sometime in the night he came suddenly awake. The moon had shifted around so that its light was coming directly through the slantwise window, falling onto the bare pine planks of the loft floor. The moonlight on the floorboards reminded him of a story Gran liked to tell from her girlhood. As a small child (she said), she'd waked up one night, in the very loft where E.A. now slept, to behold a man standing, sopping wet with his own blood, in the moonlight at the foot of her bed. She didn't recognize him, and after a while he was gone. But the next morning, when Gran told her ma, ma showed the little girl a photo of her dead pa, Outlaw Allen, killed in a running gun battle with revenuers. He was the gory fellow she'd seen standing at the foot of her bed.

“I swear before God above, E.A., there was a bloodstain on the floor when I woke up,” Gran always concluded the story. E.A. had never been able to make out the stain, but it was a scary story, and a strange one for a grandmother to tell her only grandson.

E.A. got up and walked across the floor to the window, his arms and legs pale in the moonlight. Outside, everything looked the same. The Reverend's car,
JESUS
2, was still parked in the dooryard near Gran's old-fashioned pump, where the Allens drew their water. Beyond, the graveyard stones gleamed faintly. The abandoned hay-loader down in the meadow looked like a big school slide. Along the river the black willows were shrouded in fog.

Then E.A. saw him. He was leaning against the grill of Gypsy's rig at the top of the barn highdrive, looking up at the house. He wore what looked like an old suit jacket over a tieless shirt that might once have been white and old slacks baggy in the moonlight. The red pinpoint of a lighted cigarette stood out against his face. At first E.A. thought he was one of Gypsy's callers. But except for Patsy Cline and the fool's
JESUS
2, there was no other vehicle in the yard. E.A. watched the man watch the house. His hair was cut short, not quite a brush cut, but flattened off straight and stiff on top, like Mickey Mantle's and Whitey Ford's, in E.A.'s
Illustrated History of Major League Baseball
. What he looked like was a drifter, up off the M&B line wanting a back-door handout. E.A. didn't like him smoking that close to the buildings. If a match or a smoldering butt got loose, the whole shooting match, house and barn and all, could go up in flames. He decided to run the drifter off the premises.

He slipped into his jeans and sneakers and went downstairs, through the dark kitchen, outside and across the yard to the highdrive. The drifter was still there, smoking in the moonlight.

“Gran doesn't want people smoking around the buildings,” E.A. said.

“You say?” The drifter's voice was as raspy as a chain saw. Like he'd already smoked a hundred million cigarettes and intended to smoke this one right down to the butt. Especially if someone told him not to.

“I said, my gran doesn't allow smoking on the place.”

“Don't she now?”

“No, she doesn't. You up off the freights?”

The stranger puffed at his cigarette, narrowing his eyes to size up the boy through the smoke. In his chain-saw voice he said, “I saw you hit today. Overstreet on the common.” He shifted the cigarette between his lips a quarter inch without touching it. The tip flared. “Keep your hands back,” he said.

E.A. looked at his hands. “What?”

“Keep your hands set back even with your back shoulder until the ball gets there and you take your cut.”

“I reckon I know what to do with my hands. I went six for ten today in BP. That's two hundred percentage points better than Ted in 'forty-eight.”

“If you keep your hands set back from the start,” the stranger said, “you won't have to jerk them back just before you take your cut. That jerk throws off your swing.”

The cigarette moved slightly. The man was tall. E.A. put him at six two. Maybe six three. Taller than any of the Outlaws by at least an inch.

“What would you know about anybody's swing?” E.A. said. “A drifter up off the railroad.”

The outside light came on and the kitchen door opened. The drifter faded back into the barn entry as Gypsy and Tami Janis came out, Tami's heels clacking on the wooden steps. E.A. didn't see how this could be. Gypsy
was
Tami. No, by Jesum Crow.
Tami was the Reverend
—now removing the blond wig, now stepping out of the gold gown and high-heeled slippers.

“God Jesus, will you look at that,” the drifter said in a low voice. “Will you just take a gander at that, now.” He spit out his butt, took one short step, and crushed it under his beat-up work shoe, as if he were grinding the life out of the cross-dressing Reverend.

“Ta-ta,” Gypsy said.

Just before the fool got into
JESUS
2, he lifted his hand palm outward and intoned, “May the Lord bless you and keep you and make His everlasting light to shine upon you.”

As the Reverend drove away, Gypsy snickered and said something that sounded to E.A. like “horse's ass.” Then she stepped back inside the house and the light went off.

The dooryard was quiet. The drifter continued to stare at the house. He shook his head. Then he looked back at E.A. “So you like baseball.”

“You bet I do,” E.A. said. “I intend to go all the way to the top.”

“When you get there,” the drifter said, “you won't have time to jerk back your hands and swing. Assume your stance.”

“What?”

“Take a make-believe bat and assume your batting stance.” Hesitantly, E.A. did as he was instructed. “That's right,” the drifter said. “Now. You want to start out with your hands back here.”

He took E.A.'s hands and moved them back six inches. He smelled like tobacco, beer, sweat, and the wool of his old-fashioned suit jacket.

The man stepped back, surveyed E.A., and nodded. “Now you're a hitter.”

E.A. experimented, moving his hands up and back, up and back. “It doesn't feel natural,” he said. “Starting with them clear back there.”

“It will. After two, three days, it'll feel as natural as riding your bike.”

“I don't have a bike,” E.A. said.

The drifter looked at him curiously. At the crossing the 5:15
A.M.
local whistled. The man looked off in the direction of the train whistle as he rummaged in his suit jacket. He brought out something that glistened white in the moonlight and tossed it to E.A. The boy's hands closed around the seams. He stared, unbelieving.
★ OFFICIAL ★ AMERICAN LEAGUE
, the writing said in the moonlight. He smelled it. Genuine horsehide. Hand-stitched. The real article. A major-league baseball.

When E.A. looked up, the drifter was walking across the meadow toward the tracks, his long, cuffless pant legs swishing through the wet grass.

“Hey. Hey, mister!” E.A. trotted partway down the meadow. He could see the local coming, its headlamp glaring through the fog. Indistinct in the river mist, the drifter was trotting alongside an open boxcar. In a smooth, practiced maneuver, he swung aboard the train and vanished.

The local hooted again. E.A. tossed the baseball up in the air and caught it. On the side opposite
★ OFFICIAL ★ AMERICAN LEAGUE
he read, in large blue printed letters,
HAPPY BIRTHDAY ETHAN
.

“‘I
T IS A TRUTH
universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.'”

Gypsy sat at the kitchen table in the number 8 Outlaws jersey Earl No Pearl had given her, homeschooling E.A. from the classics. They had just started
Pride and Prejudice
, and E.A. could already tell that it was likely to be heavy sledding. Gran would have rescued him. Gran hated the classics, every last one of them. But she was sleeping in, recuperating from the Red Sox's loss to New York the day before.

Gypsy took a sip of coffee from the sixteen-ounce plastic cup Earl had brought her with the picture of his eighteen-wheeler, which had Gypsy Lee's name embossed on its side in red. Earl hauled the Green Mountain Rebel factory's genuine, real-wood, white ash baseball bats to unlikely-sounding places like Muncie, Indiana, and Tupelo, Mississippi. Besides the personalized thermal coffee cup, he'd brought Gypsy all kinds of other souvenirs from the open road, including several belt buckles as big as saucers, in the shapes of leaping deer, crossed shotguns, and more eighteen-wheelers, which Gypsy wore with her size-two jeans; baseball caps embroidered with the names of truck stops from coast to coast; and tapes of Gypsy's favorite singers. Earl No Pearl had promised to take E.A. on a cross-country road trip with him in the
Gypsy Lee
when he turned twelve. “We'll have us a time, I and you,” he'd said, winking at E.A. and looking at Gypsy out of the tail of his eye. “See some good country, listen to the ball games over the radio. Get us some of that Californy poontang.” E.A. wasn't sure what Californy poontang was but he looked forward to the trip with Earl, seeing good country and listening to baseball as they rolled west.

“Ma, is Earl in possession of a good fortune?” E.A. said.

Gypsy laughed. “Earl still owes forty-nine thousand, eight hundred, and seventy-four dollars on the
Gypsy Lee
. He isn't in want of a wife, either. He's already paying alimony to two that I know of.”

“Speaking of Earl, I thought maybe you'd throw me a little BP this morning.”

Gypsy ruffled E.A.'s hair, the same fire-engine red as hers. “What morning when the temperature's over twenty below don't you want me to throw you a little BP, sweetie? Okay. We'll compromise. How about a little field trip? A little nature walk, get some life science in. What do you say?”

“Throw fingers? You win, we take the nature walk. I win, you pitch me BP.”

“Okey-dokey,” Gypsy said. “Rock beats scissors, scissors beats paper, paper beats rock. Ready?”

E.A. nodded.

“I'll count,” Gypsy said. “One. Two. Three.”

On three she threw three fingers, and E.A. one. Three—paper—covered one, rock, so she won. Gypsy was a veteran sleight-of-hand artist, like Gran before her. She'd wait a split second to see how many fingers E.A. was throwing, then throw whatever beat him. She was so quick he could never catch her at it. She did the same at cards. Nobody could cheat at high, low, jack, and the game as skillfully as Gypsy Lee.