Waiting for Teddy Williams (32 page)

With the count full and the bases loaded, E.A. was thinking only about his pitch selection. He felt he had to challenge Jacks with his best pitch, fastball pitcher against fastball hitter. But when he put his foot on the rubber and got set, Sally, to his astonishment, signaled for the bases-loaded pickoff play, a sign he could only have gotten from Spence. It was the oldest trick in the book, and making it work required perfect timing. E.A. stepped back on the rubber and started the count in his head. One thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three, and he stepped toward third, bluffed a throw, whirled, and fired the ball to his first baseman, catching the Mets' base runner flat-footed three feet off the bag. The first baseman's glove went down and slapped the runner, lunging back too late. The oldest trick in the book had worked. The World Series was over.

E
XCEPT
that it wasn't.

The first-base umpire hesitated. Still hesitated. And finally extended his hands waist-high, palms down.

“Time out,” Sally shouted, as Spence burst from the dugout. Until the tag went down and the umpire gave the safe sign, the Red Sox manager had not known how much he'd wanted the championship. Now he felt as if a lifetime of baseball had been snatched away from him.

“Appeal,” he shouted. “The runner was out by two feet. Appeal!”

“He hooked in around the tag, Spence,” the first-base umpire shouted over the bedlam. “The tag was up on the shoulder. The runner already had his hand on the bag.”

The replay went up. Spence studied it, jaw thrust out; everybody at Fenway studied it. You couldn't tell, really. E.A. couldn't tell. But the tag
had
been high, and it did appear that the runner might have grabbed the bag first. It looked as though the first-base umpire was right.

“Appeal!” Spence shouted again, turning to the home-plate umpire.

The umpire shook his head. “I was too far away, Spence. I couldn't make a judgment. The call stands.”

Later Spence would confide to the Curse that at this point he realized that, unlike his friend old Maynard, he was probably not destined to die of sheer disappointment over the outcome of a baseball game, even the seventh game of a World Series. So he did the only thing he could do. He grinned at E.A. and went back to the dugout, with the count 3–2, two outs, and the bases loaded, while Sally signaled E.A. to challenge Miller Jacks with his best heat and let what was going to happen happen.

The instant E.A. released the pitch, he knew it was a good one. Better than good. Miller Jacks knew it, too, and he hit E.A.'s best fastball as hard as it is possible for a man to hit a baseball. His bat moved so fast that afterward E.A. could not remember seeing it move. The ball was twenty-five feet high and climbing as it left the infield.

As the Sox left-fielder raced to his right and back, Jacks broke out of the batter's box toward first. Then he did a near-perfect imitation of Fisk in '75. Jumping, waving, conjuring his home run fair, gesturing with both hands, willing the rising baseball to stay fair. From his angle, E.A. couldn't tell whether the ball was fair or not as it sailed high over the pole on top of the Green Monster. But there was no delay on the part of the third-base umpire, who immediately and emphatically signaled that it was a foul ball.

Jacks was beside himself. He continued to gesticulate and jump as the replay went up, and the Fenway organist played a couple of bars of “Spence's Hornpipe,” which made Jacks angrier still.

Meanwhile E.A. played catch with his third baseman to keep his arm loose. He'd glanced once at the replay, which continued to flash up on the scoreboard, and it seemed to him that Jacks's home run was foul, just as it had seemed, on the pickoff play at first, that the runner had gotten in just before the tag.

Sally was on the mound, reminding him that Jacks's blast was just a long strike.

“He
pulled
it,” E.A. said, his teeth gritted. “He didn't just get his bat on it. He pulled my best pitch.”

“Don't worry,” Sally said. “That's all she can do with one on the fists. That don't hurt. Now look. This guy looking for one on the corner away now, so we give what she don't expect. Same pitch as before. See? Spence already send me the signal while Jacks cry and hop around. She going to strike out for sure. You get you win. We get our rings. Spence get to go fisha. Club stay in Boston. Okay?”

“Okay,” E.A. said.

“No, not okay,” Sally. “Not yet. Look, kid. This Jacks, she got some six sense. Somehow, I don't know how, she always know where I set up. So when you wind, I setting up on the outside corner. Then when you release, I move glove back in toward fists and you hit it. Okay?”

E.A. nodded. They all had such confidence in him, he thought. Not that he'd ever lacked confidence in himself. After all, he was a
WYSOTT
Allen. But they all had such great faith that he could throw the ball wherever they asked him to. Sally. Teddy. Spence. Even Stan had believed in his control.

“Well,” the Colonel said in his head, “what are you waiting for?”

“Teddy,” E.A. said, scanning the stands. “I need to find Teddy.”

He searched the stands. Teddy and Gypsy weren't there. E.A. stepped off the rubber.

“What is it?” said the Colonel. “Why are you delaying the game?”

“I'm waiting for Teddy.”

He knew ahead of time what the Colonel was going to say.

“You're on your own, boy. Get up there and throw the ball.”

E.A. stepped back on the rubber. Sally ran through the signals, stopped with one finger down, pointed in. Fastball on the fists, as they'd agreed.

Once more E.A. scanned the seats, but now everyone was standing, it was too packed to see any one individual. The crowd blurred into a faceless sea of color.

Then E.A. knew exactly what he was going to do, and he knew he would not be giving the best fastball hitter in the National League another opportunity to hit his fastball. As the Fenway fans clapped and stomped, louder and faster, faster and louder, screaming “ONE, ONE,” for one more strike, and Gypsy Lee clasped her hands together and prayed to Our Father Who Art in Heaven, and Teddy watched with an unlighted Lucky in his mouth, and Spence watched with one foot on the top step of the dugout, on his shoulder the bird named for the jinx that either would or would not be lifted in the next seconds, and the Commoners two hundred miles to the north watched the snowy old hotel television, and Gran, just across the river, listened to the Voice over the Philco, waiting to leap out of her wheelchair and kick up her heels when Jacks connected, and Moonface watched his portable radio beside the ladder on the factory roof, and even the lummox in his box seat suddenly understood, for the first time in his life, what being a Red Sox fan was all about and wanted the Sox to win more than he'd ever wanted anything, even his Ph.D., Ethan adjusted the ball in his glove. He lifted his hands, kicked, brought his arm whipping down with all the speed of his 21st-Century Limited, and everything else was easy.

Miller Jacks looked ridiculous. The best fastball hitter in the National League lunged out on his front foot and waved at E.A.'s change-up like a Little Leaguer in his first at-bat, swinging when the baseball was scarcely halfway to the plate. Sally was taken off guard and dropped the ball, then picked it up and tagged Jacks hard on the back, really hard, but it didn't matter. With first base occupied, Jacks was out the moment he swung and missed.

The Boston Red Sox had won their first world championship since 1918.

 

It was reported in the special edition the
Globe
put out that evening that the windows of the Pru and the Hancock shook and the car horns and sirens and church bells of Boston joined in a medley of pure, heavenly noise, radiating from the Old North Church to the farthest reaches of New England. In Aroostook County, Maine, loggers started their chain saws and waved them over their heads. One hundred miles offshore in the Atlantic, the Gloucester fishing fleet blared their foghorns, bringing up the swordfish to see what the ruckus was. Reliable longtime fishermen reported that humpback whales rose to the surface and sang, in unison, a song that sounded like “Spence's Hornpipe,” which the Fenway organist was blasting out for all the world to hear. The Faithful were dancing in the aisles, and a million more citizens of the Red Sox Nation were dancing in the streets of Boston and Bangor and Burlington, and of Concord, New Hampshire, and Concord, Massachusetts, where Thoreau had traveled much and seen much, but never anything like this. The tugs and freighters and liners in Boston Harbor blasted their whistles. Locomotives hooted. At correctional centers, escape sirens shrieked.

Sally ran out to the mound and pressed the game ball into E.A.'s hand, and here came the lummox, clambering down over the roof of the Sox's dugout. Pumping his big-knuckled fist, he made his way toward the celebration between the mound and home plate.

As he was lifted on high by his teammates, E.A. saw Spence head toward Miller Jacks, who was standing at home plate open mouthed and stunned, his bat still in his hands. Maynard Junior was just a step or two away. “Spence, we did it,” the lummox blubbered and knuckle-punched his manager in the arm, twice.

Spence dropped the open Budweiser pounder in his hand at the lummox's feet. “Oh,” he said, bending over. “Sorry.”

But instead of picking up the beer can, Spence straightened up and socked the lummox in the stomach as hard as one man can punch another, driving the boy up off his feet and into the arms of Miller Jacks and knocking them both to the ground in front of fifty million television viewers.

“You're fired, Spence,” the boy owner wheezed, struggling to his feet. “You'll never set foot on a major-league ball diamond again.”

“Let's hope not,” said the former manager of the World Champion Boston Red Sox as, without breaking stride, holding tight to the legs of the macaw on his shoulder, he fought his way through the celebrating fans and players toward the tunnel and freedom.

 

 

 

 

IMPOSSIBLE DREAMS

“D
RIVER
,”
SPENCE SAID
from the back seat of the taxicab, hunkered down in his fishing hat and sunglasses. “What's all this hullabaloo?”

“You don't know? God love you, man, where you been? The Boston Red Sox have just won the World frigging Series.”

“Well,” Spence said, holding out his first pounder of the long trip south for the Curse to open and feeling the tension begin to drain away from him with the air whooshing out of the beer can. “Will wonders never cease.”

The cabdriver, who'd picked Spence up on Boylston Street and agreed, for a thousand dollars and expenses, to take him to Florida, twisted the dial of his radio. The ebullient Voice of the Sox came into the cab. “. . . punched the owner . . . in front of an estimated fifty million television viewers . . . unconfirmed reports that he's being held at precinct headquarters on assault charges . . . the people of Boston threatening to march on the station to free the Legendary Spence . . . Bastille Day . . . mayhem . . .”

“Punched the owner?” Spence said. “I never heard of such doings. What is this fella, some kind of raving psychopath?”

“Oh, yeah,” the driver said happily. “Oh, yeah, he is.”

 

As E.A., now in his street clothes, drove over the bridge, he could hear the victory procession behind him, winding downtown like a great, happy dragon. He threaded the car he'd borrowed from Spence through the complicated back streets of Cambridge into Somerville, where he picked up I-93. An hour later, in the slant late-afternoon sunlight of this perfect October day, he was in New Hampshire. Cars were still honking madly, drivers and passengers giving each other thumbs-up, the tollbooth operators at Manchester giving the drivers high-fives.

Two hours later he got off the interstate at Littleton and stopped at the state liquor store he and Gypsy and Gran used to visit on their wrong-way whiskey runs. He spoke briefly with a guy in a hunting jacket headed into the store, then gave him a bill. On the street, cars and pickups with
GO SOX
banners and
CURSE OF THE BAMBINO
bumper stickers were lining up for a parade. Three or four minutes later the man in the hunting jacket came out of the store and handed E.A. a brown paper bag.

Crossing the Vermont state line, he felt good to be heading home.

The sun dropped behind the Green Mountains. Off in the distance sat a farmhouse with a sideways window under the eaves, like his window at home. He would cut some wood for winter, he thought. Set up a better place to throw in the barn. Maybe hunt partridge. Get in touch with Louisianne if he could.

He stopped for gas in St. J, his cap pulled down over his eyes.

The guy at the counter shoved his money back at him. “Gas is free to anybody wearing a Red Sox cap, dude.”

“Why's that?” E.A. said.

“You don't know? Local kid, an Allen from up in the Kingdom, just won the World Series for the Sox. He got the Mets' big hitter with a change-up, but you know something? I've seen the replay of that pitch maybe thirty times. You ask me, I'd say it looked as fast as his other pitches.”

“It's supposed to, I reckon,” E.A. said. “That's the trick.”

“Oh, we got an expert here,” a guy beside him said.

E.A. grinned at him. “Get a bat,” he said.

“What?”

“Have a good day,” E.A. said.

“Say,” the guy said. “Ain't you—”

E.A. was on his way to the car.

 

He didn't get back on the interstate. He drove the rest of the way up old Route 5, wanting to immerse himself in this homecoming, in the experience of home, feeling the pull north as surely as the geese now going south would feel that pull in the spring. The mountain villages were pretty in the falling darkness. He'd played town ball in some of these hamlets just a year ago. Here and there pumpkins sat on lighted porches, and colorfully dressed harvest figures slumped in wheelbarrows. Outside the towns he kept his speed down to about forty-five in order to savor coming home, so he was surprised to see flashing blue lights coming up behind him just south of Kingdom Landing. The cop approached the window in the dark, a tall man, a few years older than E.A. Ethan had his license out and ready. The policeman looked at it, looked back inside at E.A., then began to laugh.