Mudville (23 page)

“Thanks,” I say to Frank and Lou.

“Hey, no problem, Roy. I guess Bobby there just wants to relive his glory days.”

“Bobby? You know that guy?”

“That's Bobby Fitz. He used to play ball, you know.”

I remember the boy on the old video who mows down the opposition in the top of the first but is injured trying to take an extra base. “My dad says he's the best pitcher Moundville ever had.”

“Great hitter, too,” adds Lou. “Almost a better hitter than he was a pitcher.”

“Are you kidding? He had an ERA in the decimals.” Frank shakes his head at Lou's ignorance.

“I did say ‘almost,’” Lou protests.

“He could steal bases, too,” says Frank. “He was an all-around great player. Had all the tools. Should have gone pro. Problem was, you know, the nagging injuries.”

“And the fact he maxed out at five foot six.” Lou crouches down to illustrate. “Not too many pros that size.”

“And that was him?” I can't believe it. My dad talks about him all the time. They used to be good friends. I never met him, though.

“That's the guy. If he's acting like a jerk, it's just because he's really fanatical about Moundville baseball.”

“Just a sec!” I take off in a sprint and chase the balding man about a block and a half. He's just getting into his car, maybe heading back to his insurance job in Sutton.

“Hey, Mr. Fitz!”

“Call me Bobby.”

“Can you teach Rita how to throw a fastball?”

“That's what I was trying to do.”

We walk back to the field, and he picks up where he left off. I don't know what the magic is, but pretty soon Rita is throwing straight. Not fast, but for now I'll settle for a straightball.

It's lonely at home. My dad and Sturgis are talking shop and cooking something together in the kitchen. Sturgis proves to have the same improvisational flair. Under my dad's tutelage, he invents the enchilada stew.

Over dinner, my dad tells us he found a place in Sutton
where he can rent a food service tent and a big grill. “I can get everything I need for the game,” he says cheerfully.

“Um, what are you going to cook?” I ask nervously.

“Just hot dogs and stuff.”

I'm relieved. Even my dad can't mess up hot dogs that much.

“So what's in this?” I ask a few minutes later, taking a forkful of stew and looking skeptically at a piece of meat. “Is it
rabbit meat
?” I give Sturgis a hard, squinty look I hope is menacing.

“No, it's chicken,” my dad says, confused.

Sturgis just squints back at me. “There's beans in it, too,” he says. “You
love
beans, don't you, Roy?”

“Huh?” my dad says. “I'd say Roy is ambivalent about beans.”

“Oh, I bet he'd like to feast on beans,” says Sturgis.

When my dad isn't looking, he mimes a pitch, then a batter getting hit in the ribs. “Oof,” he mouths, then pantomimes a man falling dead, his tongue poking out of his mouth. It's pretty childish.

I wake up long before Sturgis on Thursday morning. Sleep has become more and more elusive for me. I get dressed in the dark and go to the kitchen. Yogi pads after me, quietly meowing for breakfast. I give him some, although he's sure to get a second helping when the others wake up.

We have three days until the game. We can't even
practice tomorrow because they're installing bleachers. I don't see how we can possibly be ready. Everything we've done as a team has revolved around Sturgis being a lights-out pitcher.

I turn on the TV, muted, to catch the sports scores. The blue screen comes on for the DVD player, and instead of flip-ping the switch to TV, I use the universal remote to turn on the DVD. I'm curious what someone's been watching.

It's the same old DVD of the game from twenty years ago. My dad must have been watching it, reliving his defining moment. There's Bobby Fitz cruising through the first in-ning, and there's the Sinister Bend pitcher warming up, with the familiar sneer and hair in his eyes.

The familiar sneer.

In English class, we learned the word “epiphany.” I forget what the story was about, but an epiphany is when a guy is going about his business and
bam,
he has a realization about something. I think in the story, the guy suddenly realized he didn't believe in God. Or maybe he realized he
did
believe in God. It doesn't matter.

What matters is that I have an epiphany, right in the middle of a bowl of cereal, two seconds before I flip over to the sports news channel for the ticker with last night's base-ball scores.

The epiphany is this: The mean kid on the mound is Carey Nye. That battered baseball cap Sturgis wears is his father's old cap. Sturgis doesn't want to beat Moundville for Sinister Bend. He wants to do it for his old man.

It must have been Sturgis, not my dad, who stayed up
late watching that DVD. I imagine him watching that fatal last pitch over and over, his teeth grinding as he vows revenge. Never mind that my dad has taken him in and even bought him his baseball glove.

Well, that's his prerogative.

I venture out, heading for the ballpark, as if extra hours by myself can make any kind of difference.

That morning at the ballpark, a woman parks a rented car illegally, brushes past the crowd, and makes her way to the bullpen, where Bobby is helping Rita with the fastball. She greets Bobby Fitz with a familiar hug.

“He's got a pretty cute wife,” says Steve.

“That's not his wife. I think it's my mom,” I tell him. Steve's mouth drops open.

“I just haven't seen her in so long,” he tries to explain as I walk slowly to the bullpen, taking off my mask.

“Hi, Roy,” my mom says.

“Hey.”

She gives me a hug and a peck on the cheek. “I can barely get my arms around you with this thing,” she says, tapping the chest protector. “And you're so big now!”

“That's what happens,” I tell her.

“So I hear you're the big man out here,” she says.

“Yeah, I'm captain.” I mean it to be matter-of-fact but come off sounding like a small boy trying to impress his mommy. I'm surprised she doesn't give me a cookie. Or maybe I'm just self-conscious because Rita is looking on.

“Well,” my mom says, “I thought I would come see your big game.”

“You know about that, huh?”

“Word gets around. I would have been here sooner, but I was in Barcelona. I took the whole weekend off and came straight here.”

So that's how big this game is. Long-lost relatives fly in from Mediterranean ports, arriving just in time to watch us lose.

“Mom's here,” I tell my father that evening as I try to find an entry point to a cabbage thing that might have been Sturgis's idea. My dad has done some awful things as a cook, but he's never made me eat cabbage before. Now I've got a massive raw cabbage leaf on my plate, folded and tied around a mysterious lump.

“Is she?” he says, trying to act casual. He's poking at his thing with a fork. Sturgis has already eaten his and taken off somewhere, probably with his new baseball friends.

“She seemed pretty happy to see Bobby Fitz,” I tell him.

“Well, we used to all be friends,” he explains.

“Including you and Carey Nye?” I ask.

“Sure, a little.” He goes after his cabbage leaf with a knife. A cascade of minced chicken, celery, carrots, and red pepper flakes spills out. I hack at my own cabbage thing until I get at the filling. I take a bite. It's not bad, actually.

“So you know Sturgis's dad?”

He takes a long time to chew and swallow. “It sounds like maybe you've done some sleuthing.”

“Not really. I just figured out stuff.”

“Well, the fact is…” He takes a deep breath, bracing himself. “Carey used to work for me. He worked
with
me, I should say. I wasn't the boss or anything back then. We were just a couple of guys doing odd jobs together, you see.”

“It seems kind of weird, that you'd be friends, after that game and everything.”

“Well, that was only baseball, for one thing,” my dad says. “Carey was a hard worker, and putting up those rain systems, you really need two sets of hands, and it made sense for us to do it together.”

“Why him, though? You must have had other buddies. What about Bobby Fitz?”

“Roy, Carey was practically family. He was engaged to Evie.” Aunt Evelyn is little more than a rumor to me. She's the one who died in a car accident. I was a baby at the time. I don't even remember meeting her. My dad hardly ever talks about her.

“They met in high school,” he says, “and that was that. My sister was crazy about him. They got serious fast. Maybe it had to do with our dad not being around. I needed help and Carey needed work, so …” He shrugs.

“Well, I guess it's not a big deal,” I say. “So did they like break up or something? When he went off to be a baseball player?”

My father takes a long, deep breath. “Roy…” He looks at me, and suddenly I get it.

“They
were
married?”

“Yes.”

“So Sturgis is…”

“My nephew. Your cousin. We're his next of kin. That's why he's here. I never signed up for foster parenting.”

“Why didn't I know him when we were little?”

“Carey was always a bit of a bully, and when he went into pro ball, he got worse. You give the wrong kind of guy a little money, and it ruins him. He was arrogant, and he wasn't good to my sister, and I just didn't like him much. We drifted apart. That's all. It happens.”

“Me and Sturgis could have hung out, though.” I imagine a pint-sized Sturgis lobbing Nerf balls at me. “We could have always been buddies.”

“I'm sorry,” he says. “You probably would have been good for each other.”

“So why didn't you tell me all that? At least, when Sturgis moved in.”

“I don't know,” he says. “I meant to. I guess there's just a lot of old scabs I didn't want to pick at. Like losing Evie.” He looks forlornly at his cold supper like he might start blubbering. I decide against making him pick at that scab any more.

I meet Miggy and Google at the ballpark on Friday. We can't practice, but we have other plans. Carlos, as always, is in tow.

“Let's go,” I tell them.

“Vamos”
says Miggy, and the four of us start walking through town.

“Sinister Bend stinks!” someone screams at us as we walk by the town hall. A few other drivers are happy just to honk their horns. I also notice a bedsheet has been carelessly hung from the water tower, spray-painted in red: “Go, Mudville Nine!”

We walk to the brink of the hill heading down to Sinister Bend. Miggy and Carlos translate for me, explaining the situation to Google. We need him to be our scout, Miggy tells him, because he's the only player Sturgis and P.J. don't know. He is to go join the Sinister Bend team for the morning. If they don't let him play, he should just watch. He'll come back after a couple of hours and tell Miggy everything, and Miggy will tell me. What are the team's strengths? What are its weaknesses? How many right- and left-handed batters do they have?

I give him directions to where the Sinister Bend team plays, and he hurries off. In the meantime, the three of us toss a ball around.

“We don't live far from here,” says Miggy after about an hour. “I could go get lunch and come back. I'll make sandwiches for everyone.”

That sounds good to me. Miggy trots off, and Carlos waits with me.

“You guys are pretty close, eh?”

“Of course,” he says. “We're brothers. Like you and the mean boy.”

“We're not brothers.”

A moment later, we hear shouts and footsteps. Google is flying up the road toward us. He's crying, and yelling in Spanish.

Carlos shouts back in Spanish and runs to meet him. They go back and forth for a while, Google talking excitedly and Carlos trying to calm him down.

“He says they're chasing him,” Carlos says. He looks down the hill, searching for someone, and shakes his head. He talks to Google. “I just told him there's nobody there,” he says.

Google talks some more and rubs his head. There is already a knot growing on it.

“He says they let him play,” says Carlos, “but then …”

“I think I can guess what happened,” I say.

The moment Sturgis walks in, I jab him in the chest and back him up to the door.

“What's with you?” he asks.

“You plugged Google!” I say.

“Who?”

“You hit our player. In the head!”

“He was a spy,” he says calmly.

“He wasn't a spy, he was a scout. It's part of the game,” I tell him. “And, by the way, you and PJ. know everything about our team, so why shouldn't we know anything about yours?”

“We don't need any information about your team,” he says. “Do you think we're breaking down each batter, figuring out how to pitch you and how to play you? That's a laugh. I can strike every one of you out, and that's all I need to do.”

“If you're so sure, what do you care if we send a scout over?”

“Because it's dirty business,” he says. “That's all.”

“It's part of the game,” I tell him. “Anyway, you never throw at a guy's head. Never!”

“Ah, I just wanted to scare him,” he says casually.

“You could have seriously hurt him.”

“It was just a junkball. About a three.”