Mudville (16 page)

“What's he up to anyway?”

“He said he had stuff to do.”

“So you don't know?”

“No,” he says, but he's not a very good liar. I bet he knows exactly where Sturgis is or at least has a pretty good idea.

I think about Sutton. It's a big enough city that there are a dozen places a kid might go if he was bored and on his own. I guess most kids would head to either the mall or the business district near the river, where lots of hippies and skate punks like to hang out. Neither of those strike me as places that would tempt Sturgis, though. He hasn't shown much interest in shopping or being cool.

On the other side of town, there's not much in the way of fun stuff. Just houses and businesses. One business towers above all the others: the state prison.

“He's visiting his dad, isn't he?”

“I didn't even know his dad was at the penitentiary,” he says innocently.

“I didn't say anything about the penitentiary. I just said he was visiting his dad.”

“Oh yeah.” Peter mutters at himself under his breath. I decide not to press, since he's driving us around and everything.

“Can we stop and eat?” PJ. asks as we hit the outskirts of Sutton.

“Do you want to?” Peter asks me. “I can treat.” I'm glad he offers, because the second PJ. mentions food, I realize I'm really hungry, but I'm broke.

“I can pay you back later, but I didn't bring any money,” I tell him.

“Don't worry about it.” Peter pulls off at a divey little hot dog stand called Uncle Franky's.

We eat outside, dripping Uncle Franky's special sauce on our shirts. I'm usually a mustard and onion guy, but that sauce is amazing—kind of like mayo, but spicy. It complements the mustard and onion perfectly.

“So I was wondering about that Native American kid,” I tell Peter between bites. “The one who didn't really drown.”

“Ptan Teca?”

“Yeah, him. If he's, like, mad at us and everything, why isn't it raining anymore?”

“It's not about the rain,” he says. “It never was about the rain.”

PJ. gives me a look, and I guess that he's heard his father's theories far too many times.

“Well, what was it about, then?” I know I'm driving P.J. crazy by not dropping it, but I'm curious.

“Baseball,” Peter says. “It was about baseball.”

“Come on. I've never heard of an Indian curse being about baseball.”

“You've heard of the curse on Moundville. They always lost to Sinister Bend.”

“That wasn't a
curse
curse, though. It's just one of those things people make up because they can't explain why their team loses all the time.”

“Ptan Teca loved baseball. He loved to beat the settlers at their own game. After he disappeared, the two teams kept playing, and his team won every time. I don't just mean for the next few years but every year for over a hundred years. You tell me that's just people making something up.”

It could be explained by percentages. You take all the towns that play baseball against other towns, and one of those towns might put together a streak like that. At least, I think so. I don't know how to do the math. I don't think Peter would buy it, even if I did. I have a more practical question anyway.

“How could
his
team keep winning if the Dakota all had to leave?”

“By that time, there was no line to draw between white and Native American. The trading post had already been around for two or three generations. Everyone was a little bit of one or the other. If you were supposed to be a Native American, you had a German grandfather. If you were supposed to
be white, you had a Dakota grandmother. That's just how it was. Some of the Dakota left, but a lot of the people who stayed were a little bit Dakota in blood and spirit. The town that became Sinister Bend was made up of those people.”

“So what was the curse? Sinister Bend beating Moundville every year?”

“I don't know if it was a curse exactly. A curse is when things go bad just because someone said they would. This was things going bad for Moundville because the spirits made them go wrong.”

“Or maybe Sinister Bend was just better.”

“You would think that if you never saw a game,” he says. “You weren't there, though.”

“I guess not.”

“I saw nine games,” he says. “Eight and a half, at least. Every year, you could feel the spirits at work. Swirling winds that carry balls into the gap. Rays of sunlight that would break through the clouds just in time to blind a fielder, allowing a ball to drop in. One year a crow squawked when-ever Moundville batted and fell silent whenever Sinister Bend batted. If you were there, at those games, you knew that Moundville was meant to lose.”

My dad tells some of those stories. He says they always felt doomed when they played Sinister Bend. I always thought it was just making excuses. Well, maybe Moundville was cursed or plagued by evil spirits or whatever. The only problem is, I don't believe in stuff like that.

“Why the rain, then?” I ask. “The rain didn't help Sinister
Bend win. The rain washed out a game they were a few outs away from winning.”

At this point, PJ. gets up and just starts walking around, kind of agitated.

“You always assume things,” Peter says.

“Like assuming Sinister Bend was going to win? They were ahead by
ten runs.”

“Moundville was getting to the pitcher, though. He'd thrown a bunch of pitches already, and they were catching up to him. I was batboy for that team, and I remember how worried we were about getting through the last couple of innings. We'd seen it happen before. When he lost the edge on his fastball, he could give up a dozen runs, easy. Once you figure out a pitcher, he's useless. Then that guy—your dad—he made our guy throw another thirty, forty pitches. We didn't have anyone else in our bullpen. I think it could have turned into a disaster.”

“Are we going soon?” PJ. whines.

Peter ignores him. “Maybe Bobby Fitz would have come back, too. We never played by big-league rules where a guy can't come back after he leaves the game. Bobby just had a tweaked muscle. He still could have come back and sparked the team to a big rally. The rain prevented Moundville from turning it around.”

“So you think the rain saved Sinister Bend?”

“That's a weird way to put it.” Peter stands up and carries everyone's garbage to the bin. I think about the floods and realize he's right.

“Exactly! Why would the spirits drown the whole town?” I figure I have him there. “Maybe he'd wash out the game, but why would he wash out his whole hometown?”

“You don't know about Ptan Teca's temper. He's still just a little boy. The kind who holds his breath until he turns blue. The kind who takes his ball and goes home. The kind who tips a board game when he's losing and makes all the pieces fly around.”

“Okay.” It figures he'd have an answer for everything.

“Where do you want to go?” Peter asks me once we're back on the road. “The store where your dad works?”

“Might as well go straight to the prison,” I tell him. PJ. groans, probably because the store is a lot closer than the prison. I look carefully along both sides of the street as we drive there, making sure we don't pass Sturgis on his way back downtown. We don't. Peter pulls into the parking lot of the prison and points off to the left of the truck.

“The store is a mile back that way. Walk straight there and don't take a ride if anyone offers. Call me if you need anything.”

“Will do. Hey, you never did tell me why it isn't raining anymore. If that stuff about Ptan Teca is true, why did he stop it from raining all of a sudden?”

He ignores my question. “Seriously. Don't hitchhike or anything.”

“No way. I'll call if I need a ride.” I realize only after he's driven off that I don't even have his number.

There's a big door marked “Visitors,” so I go on in and ex-plain to a guard that I'm looking for Sturgis Nye, who's visiting Carey Nye. He looks at his registration book and nods.

“He's still there,” he says. “You want to go in, too?”

“You mean I can? I'm not family or anything.”

He shrugs. “This isn't the hospital. It's prison. You don't have to be family. Sometimes nuns just come by to visit any-one who wants company.” He makes me sign a form and asks me to empty my pockets, but I don't have anything in them. We don't usually lock our doors in Moundville, so I don't even have a house key.

The guard buzzes the door, and I go into the visiting room. They don't have glass walls, like they do in the movies. It looks more like a school cafeteria, with the same kind of collapsible tables set up around the room and posters hanging up all over, with feel-good messages like “No Physical Contact of Any Kind” and “Clean Up Your Visitation Area or Disciplinary Action Will Be Taken.”

Sturgis is not surprised to see me. “Hey, Roy,” he says. “This is my dad.”

“There he is,” says Carey Nye, like he's expecting me. He has a shaved head now, but I recognize him from his baseball card and the photos I saw on the Internet. I offer to shake his hand. He holds up his own handcuffed hands, apologetically, and points to the sign about physical contact.

“I was telling him you might come,” says Sturgis. “I told
him you were a big baseball fan and were excited to meet a real former major leaguer.”

“I've read about you,” I tell Carey. “You once pitched a no-hitter.” I decide to focus on his best moment, never mind if it was in the minors.

“Yeah, I no-hit the Charlotte team. It wasn't easy,” he says. “I think I threw about a hundred and fifty pitches. I thought my arm would fall off. I was crap for the rest of the season.”

“It's still a pretty big achievement.”

“Yeah,” he says. “I guess so. You know who batted for the Knights in that game?”

“No, who?”

“Jim Thome.”

“No kidding?”

“Struck him out twice,” he says.

“Cool.”

“He got me back,” he says with a sigh. “When he was an Indian and I was an Oriole, he hit a grand salami off of me. Catcher made me throw a junkball.” He shakes his head, remembering. “Whatever happened to Jim? Is he still with the Tribe?”

“He's with the White Sox now. By way of the Phillies.”

“Hard to keep track of the standings in here, let alone players.” He takes a deep breath. “Everyone thinks we have the Internet and cable TV, but it's not all that.”

“Yeah,” I say, as if I know from experience.

“So you're a catcher, huh? Catchers have it the worst,
man. It's torture. Your knees take a killing. You get run over at the plate and banged up by bad pitches. I don't know why anyone does it.”

“They don't call the catcher's gear the tools of ignorance for nothing,” I agree.

“You got that right,” he says, laughing.

“Sturgis is quite a good pitcher, too,” I tell him. “He's got a great fastball.”

“Always knew this kid would be a good one,” says Carey. “Remember the crab apple incident?” He laughs and slaps the table, rattling his cuffs.

“Oh yeah,” says Sturgis. I can tell that for him, it's not such a treasured memory.

“I got called into his kindergarten because he was lobbing crab apples at kids on the playground,” says Carey. “I mean, throwing them hard. He really nailed those kids. It looked like a scene from the
Godfather
movies, these four kids riddled with red splotches.”

“I don't remember it very well,” says Sturgis.

“I told the lady those kids just picked on the wrong guy,” says Carey. “You were a mean little cuss, weren't you?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“And then there was the rabbit. Oh, man. You're a chip off the old block, all right.”

“Dad.” Sturgis slumps back in embarrassment.

“My boy took down a jackrabbit at forty paces.” Carey mimics the throw, rattling the cuffs. “How old were you, Sturgis?”

“I don't know.”

“You were like eight or nine, since it was before I checked into this place. How many kids that age have done
that
?”

“Probably not many.” Sturgis looks miserable.

“I was pretty proud of you,” says Carey with a gleam in his eyes.

I get a weird déjà vu feeling when he says it. I can't quite figure it out, but it's something about Carey Nye. He doesn't look too much like Sturgis, but he looks familiar. Like some-body I've known for years.

“What made you think I'd come to the prison?” I ask Sturgis as we walk to the home and garden store.

“I couldn't see you doing anything else,” he says.

“So why didn't you just ask me to come?”

“I don't know.”

“I would have gone with you.”

“You're that eager to meet a real big leaguer, huh?”

“Well,” I start to explain, but I realize he's kidding me. He knows I'd go for him, not for me, and not for Carey.

“I think it was great what you did, making my dad feel like a big shot,” he says. “Bringing up his no-hitter. That was cool. It meant a lot to him.”

“Do you see him often?” I ask.

“Only a couple of times since he went in,” he says. “You know, I saw him on the Fourth of July. That was the first time I even saw him since he went to jail. That was almost four years ago.”

“So that's why you guys went to Sutton.”