Mickey & Me (5 page)

“If Chicken can throw a ball through Hitler's
tooth,” boomed the announcer, “he will be throwing a strike for freedom!”

“Nobody told me I would have to throw a ball,” I complained, shrinking back into the dugout.

“Get out there,” Mickey said as she and the rest of the team grabbed me and pushed me out of the dugout, “and quit your bellyaching!”

The two burly guys—each of them had a name tag that said
BOB
on it—took me by my wings and half led, half dragged me out to the mound. One of the Bobs flipped me a ball. I kept shaking my chicken head.

“What are you, chicken?” a fan yelled, to the amusement of the crowd. That got the rest of them going, and in seconds the whole place was either jeering or cheering for me.

“Just to make things interesting,” the announcer said, “if Chicken throws the ball through Hitler's tooth, each and every man, woman, and child in the ballpark tonight will receive a free pass to see Judy Garland in
Meet Me in St. Louis, now playing in air-
conditioned splendor at the Palace Theater on Wisconsin Avenue.”

“Ooooooooooooooooooh!”

“B-but I need a warm-up,” I protested. “I haven't practiced.”

“Shut up and throw,” one of the Bobs said. “We ain't got all night.”

“Yeah,” said the other Bob, “and you better throw it through the hole, Chicken, 'cause I really want to
see that picture.”

I toed the rubber and fingered the huge ball, doing my best to wrap my hand around it. I've always had a pretty good arm, but I wasn't used to this kind of pressure. At our Little League games, usually only the moms and dads showed up. There must have been four or five thousand people watching me.

“You better not miss, Chicken!” somebody yelled.

“If he does, let's fry him!”

“You can do it, sweetie pie!” Merle shouted from the Chicks dugout. “Concentrate.”

I looked over at her. She had her hands clasped together, like she was praying. Man, she was beautiful. I wanted to throw the strike just for her.

Right above Merle, in the third row behind the Chicks dugout, I spotted that kid who had shown up for the mascot job. He was giving me a dirty look.

The crowd began to clap their hands and stamp their feet in rhythm.

I gripped the ball and concentrated on Hitler's face. I took a deep breath. It was hard to do a regular windup with the chicken suit on, but I did the best I could. As I let go of the ball, my forward momentum almost caused the chicken head to fall off.

The ball sailed two feet over Hitler's head. The crowd let out a groan.

“Ohhhhh!” moaned the announcer. “Too bad, Chicken! Maybe next time!”

“Booooooooooooooo!”

“He's a bum!”

“Get a new chicken!”

“Kill the chicken!”

I ran off the field, dodging lemons, bottles, and other junk that came flying out of the stands. Luckily, I made it back to the Chicks dugout with only a few small objects hitting me.

Connie, Merle, Mickey, and Tiby told me to forget about it. They said that hardly anyone can throw very accurately under the circumstances. Max Carey just looked at me.

“Pathetic,” he muttered. “Just pathetic.”

IN THE BOTTOM OF THE FIRST INNING
,
THE CHICKS
offense exploded. A clean single, an infield hit, and an error loaded the bases for Mickey, who delivered with a double in the gap to drive in all three runs.

Dolores Klosowski got a double too, and Ziggy singled her home. Connie Wisniewski poked a grounder through the infield.

By then, the fans were going crazy. When Teeny Petras got hit by a pitch, they started booing. The manager of the Peaches came out to protest that the ball had hit Teeny's bat, but she held up her left arm to show that the seams of the ball had made an impression in her skin. The umpire waved her to first. Tiby Eisen got hit too, on the hand. Max Carey made a quick splint out of two Popsicle sticks supplied by some fans, and Tiby stayed in the game.

The only bad thing that happened to the Chicks
was that third baseman Doris Tetzlaff got called back to the dugout by the umpire and fined five dollars because she had forgotten to put lipstick on.

Mickey taking a cut.

When the inning was over, the Chicks had batted around and pushed six runs across the plate.

“You're our good luck charm, sweetie pie!” Merle said as the Chicks piled into the dugout. Max Carey shot me a puzzled look and I just shrugged.

“I didn't do anything,” I said.

“Well, keep not doing anything,” he replied. “Whatever you're not doing, it's working.”

In the second inning, the Peaches put runners on second and third with two outs. But the runner on second was taking a very long lead, so Mickey called
for a pitchout and picked her off.

Chicks 6, Peaches 0.

The innings went by and Connie Wisniewski was cruising. The Peaches were baffled by her pitches, which appeared to rise and curve at the same time.

After each side was retired, there was some sort of promotion for the crowd. In the second inning, the Milwaukee Fire Department drove their new pumper out on the field, to the applause of the fans. In the third inning, there was a dog obedience demonstration. Two random fans were awarded a bag of groceries and an electric roaster in the fourth inning. Through it all, vendors circulated around the stands, selling not just hot dogs but also war bonds, to support the troops fighting overseas.

By the fourth inning, the sun was gone and the lights—not nearly as bright as the outdoor lights I had seen in the twenty-first century—were turned on. Swarms of insects that had been buzzing around the field took turns flying suicide missions into the hot bulbs.

The Peaches had squeezed out a couple of runs by that time, so the score was 6-2 when the Chicks came to bat in the bottom of the fourth. Mickey was swinging a bat in the on-deck circle.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the public address announcer said, “an important news bulletin has just come over the wires from Europe.”

Everyone in the ballpark—even the hot dog vendors—stopped what they were doing.

“We have just received word that the Allies have captured the city of Rome. I repeat, the capital of Italy has fallen to the Allies! On to Berlin and Tokyo!”

A roar swept across the crowd. People were hugging each other and throwing their hats in the air.

I didn't know that much about World War II, but I did know we fought against Germany, Italy, and Japan. I knew that the war ended when we dropped atomic bombs on Japan. If Rome had been defeated and the D day invasion had begun, that meant we were winning the war.

Everybody in the Chicks dugout was happy about the news. Then I noticed Mickey in the on-deck circle. She wasn't swinging her bat back and forth anymore. She was just standing there, as if she was frozen.

Then I remembered. Her husband was fighting in Italy. His rhyme had stuck in my head—“When the Allies take Rome, I'm coming home.” After being apart for two years, Mickey and her husband would finally be together again.

One by one, the other Chicks noticed Mickey, standing like a statue in the on-deck circle. I waited for a big smile to break out across her face, but it didn't come. She looked very serious, like she was deep in thought.

“Didja hear that, Mick?” Tiby Eisen bubbled, running out of the dugout to give her a hug. “Tom's coming home!”

Mickey hugged Tiby for a few seconds. Then she spit and wiped her hands on her dress as she went up to home plate.

“I heard it,” she said. “Let's play ball.”

The Chicks were silent, shooting puzzled looks and shrugged shoulders at each other.

“What's with her?” I asked Merle.

“Beats me.”

After she grounded to short and sat back on the bench, nobody said a word to Mickey. She didn't look like she wanted to talk about it. It was like the announcement had never been made.

Dolores Klosowski went back to peeling her potatoes. Max Carey went back to flashing signs and barking encouragement. I went back to flirting with Merle.

Then in the top of the fifth inning, Connie Wisniewski's fastball must have lost a few miles per hour, because the Peaches suddenly started hitting. After a pair of singles, a passed ball, and a triple, the score was 6-5, and the Peaches looked like they were about to break the game wide open. They had runners at second and third with their cleanup batter—a lefty—strolling to the plate.

“Two outs, girls!” shouted Max Carey. “We need an out, bad.”

Mickey asked the umpire for time out, and she came rushing to the dugout.

“You okay, Mick?” Carey asked her.

“Yeah, I'm fine. Flip me one of those potatoes,
will you, Stosh?”

I grabbed a potato out of the bucket on the ground near the end of the Chicks bench and tossed it to her.

“Why do you need a potato at a time like this?” Carey asked.

“You'll see,” Mickey said, slipping the potato inside her chest protector and going back behind the plate.

Connie looked in for the sign. The batter pumped her bat back and forth slowly. The infielders got ready. The runners danced off second and third.

“Come on, Connie babe!” Mickey hollered. “Put it in here.”

Mickey's sign must have been for a pitchout. As soon as Connie let go of the ball, Mickey jumped to the left of the plate. The pitchout was right where she wanted it. She grabbed it and whipped it to third.

Or, I thought she whipped it to third, anyway. What she had actually done was catch the ball, take the potato out from behind her chest protector, and whip the potato to third.

Not that anybody in the ballpark knew that at the time. It looked like a baseball.

Doris Tetzlaff, playing third, reached for the pickoff throw, but it was way too high. The potato sailed into left field.

Mickey Maguire behind the plate.

The runner on third base saw the errant pickoff, clapped her hands gleefully, and trotted home with what she thought was the tying run.

Mickey, however, was standing in front of the plate with the ball in her hand. She calmly tagged out the runner, who had a look on her face like she had seen a ghost.

“Yer out!” cried the umpire. Then he stopped. “Hold everything! What'd she throw?”

One of the Peaches ran out to left field to
retrieve the unidentified flying object.

“It's a potato!” she screamed, jogging back to show the evidence to the umpire.

“So what?” Mickey said. “It's not my fault if she's so dumb she can't tell the difference between a baseball and a potato.”

“You can't throw a potato!” the umpire yelled at Mickey.

“Why not?”

“It's against the rules!”

“Show me where it says in the rule book that throwing a potato is illegal,” Mickey challenged.

“A potato is a foreign object!”

“It is not,” Mickey claimed. “It's from Idaho!”

In seconds, both teams were crowding around home plate, yelling, kicking dirt at the umpire, and shoving each other. Fruit and vegetables of all sorts were thrown on the field by the fans, who, for the most part, considered the potato incident amusing. I grabbed a few more potatoes out of the bucket and tossed them to the fans in the front row for the fun of it.

It took fifteen minutes before the ump was able to restore order. In the end, he ruled that Mickey had interfered with play, and the runner was safe at home.

At the end of five innings, it was Chicks 6, Peaches 6.