The Youngest Hero (26 page)

“Coach asked me to call you. He just wanted you to let him know when Elgin got home. Wants to make sure he got home, I mean.”

“Why wouldn’t he?”

“He left before practice was over, and Coach wants to talk to him.”

“What happened?”

“Coach Rollins got hurt, and he wants to come over and talk to Elgin.”

“How’d he get hurt?”

“Line drive.”

When Elgin reached the top of the stairs, it was obvious he was exhausted.

“You run all the way?” I said, taking him in my arms.

He nodded. He was boiling, his soaked sweatshirt steamy.

“Mr. Rollins is on his way over.”

“Here? Please, Momma, anything but that.”

“You ashamed of where you live?”

“Momma, I need to quit baseball.”

I knew when to keep quiet.

“I wasn’t even thinking. Just like with Coach Fred, I just swung hard and nailed him.”

“Why’d you run, El?”

“I can’t stand it! It smashed him right in the knee!”

“Elgin, you can’t quit,” I said, and we heard a knock at the door.

It was Mr. Rollins, Coach Fred, and Tim, an outfielder from a couple of miles farther south.

Rollins limped in, a heavy bandage bulging from beneath his jeans. Fred was strangely quiet, and Tim nosed around the flat,
looking at everything I had on the walls.

“Elgin,” Mr. Rollins said, “I wanted you to know I was okay and that it wasn’t your fault.”

“Wasn’t my fault?” Elgin said. “Who hit the ball?”

“Who dished up the candy pitch?” Rollins said.

“That was no candy; that was heat.”

“Well, sure, but a straight fastball is no challenge for a hitter like you.”

“I don’t want to hurt anybody else ever,” I said.

“You won’t. We’re going to get one of those little fences that protect the pitcher, like they have for big-league batting
practice.”

“That’s going to make me feel like a freak.”

“Let me tell you something, Elgin: you
are
a freak. You hit like an adult, son. But we’ll leave that barrier up for everybody; it won’t be just you.”

“Everybody will know why it’s there.”

“Boy, you’ve got something nobody should be ashamed of. You’ve got talent that should make you proud.”

Proud
? I didn’t feel proud.

“You’ve got that quitting look,” Coach Fred said. Tim yawned. “You’re not thinking about quitting this team, are you?”

“Thinking about it, yeah.”

“We don’t want you to,” Rollins said. “We’re the two you hit, and we’re saying stay, you’re good, we need you, we want you.
Got it?”

I nodded, but I still wasn’t sure I wouldn’t quit. I wanted to be a good ballplayer, even a powerful hitter, but I didn’t
want to be a monster.

My coaches seemed nervous. They talked a lot and were still talking on their way out. “So, don’t give it another thought,
Elgin. You won’t have to worry about hitting anybody else.”

“What about during games?”

“That’s a different story,” Rollins said.

I reached to tap fists with Tim as he followed the coaches out. “You sure live in a hole,” he whispered. That bothered me
worse than what I’d done.

When they were gone, my mother sat next to me on the couch. “You’re hittin uncatchable liners up the middle. Even I know enough
to know that’s what hitters want to do.”

“If it means hurting people, it’s not what I want to do.”

“You hardly ever hear of big leaguers being hurt by line drives, do you?”

I shook my head. “And those guys hit a lot harder than I do. I guess it’s just the difference in the distance between the
mound and the plate.”

My mother sighed. “Is it possible you’re already too good for this league?”

“Could be. But who’s gonna let me play in an older league?”

“Whoever sees what you can do.”

“You know what I feel like doing?”

She shook her head.

“Like hitting where no one can get hurt but me.”

“Go ahead. You didn’t hit last night, did you?”

“Nope.”

“Do it, El. Your chance will come to play where people can compete with you. And you want to be ready.”

Either because I had taken one night off or because my mother had encouraged me much more than my coaches, something was different
in the basement. I felt more relaxed,
more comfortable. In the batter’s box I let pitches come within an inch of me, even though I could hardly see them. I didn’t
try to hit every pitch. I waited for ones that broke just so, spun just right, came into not just the strike zone but
my
strike zone.

That night I hit six solid shots in one session and five in the next. If just standing in against the machine had made me
a dangerous hitter, what would happen if I mastered it? Was it possible? I went upstairs to bed in a better mood.

Several parents showed up at the next practice. They looked grim. From shortstop I studied the protective screen. The first
eight batters seemed to be trying to hit the thing, despite Coach Rollins’s advice—from a chair behind the backstop where
his leg was elevated—that they ignore it and hit as usual. Coach Fred was on the mound. It took him a while to get used to
the screen. His first dozen pitches were high.

I was embarrassed that the man on the mound had a purple blotch from just above his mouth to his eyebrow. The white of his
eye was filled with blood. I had also, of course, been responsible for Coach Rollins’s injury. No wonder there was a crowd.

I made a couple of good plays, but I knew people were there to see me hit. By the time it was my turn, I’d made a decision.
I was not going to hold back. I found my favorite aluminum bat and felt everyone’s eyes on me. I hurried to the plate. People
came to see a show; they would see a show.

Fred started by whistling a fastball to the plate. It was better than the stuff he had been throwing the night he’d been hit.
Interesting
, I thought.
Fred’s thinking about the audience too
.

I wanted to explode on that first pitch. Start with a homer. Set the pace.

I
unleashed just as I realized that the coach had let the ball roll out of his palm and off his fingers. It floated before
my eyes as my swing carried me in a circle and spun me to my seat. As I sat in the dirt I heard the laughter—first from Fred,
then the catcher, then Rollins, then everybody.

So that was how it was going to be? I would be fooled, even in batting practice? Well, maybe I had it coming. Either I was
a good hitter or I wasn’t. Hitting against a thinking pitcher was even tougher than facing the machine, no matter how hard
it threw the tiny balls.

I was wondering now, thinking. Had Fred’s smile faded? As he rocked back, he actually waved his glove at the catcher—back
of his hand first, the way pitchers signal a breaking ball during warm-ups. So this was it? He was going from busting me with
a change-up to telling me what he was going to throw?

If I was wrong, I’d be on the ground again. I wanted to catch up to this stuff and show Coach Fred who was better. So many
things raced through my mind as that spinning, high-and-outside pitch came in: if it was just a spinner, I would never reach
it. Fred couldn’t break off a curve of more than a few inches. At best this pitch would barely touch the corner of the
plate. It might drop into the strike zone at the letters, but no one would criticize me if I let it go.

But I didn’t want to. It was not as slow as the change-up but way slower than the golf balls. I watched for that tiny movement,
that rotation that signaled me that the ball would move within reach.

My eyes were locked on the ball, chin tucked almost to my chest. As I uncoiled, Fred was safe behind the new pitcher’s screen.
I realized as I hit the ball that it had not dropped as far as I hoped. But I got all of it and drove it two hundred feet
to left center, and before the fielders could react, it bounced all the way over the fence.

I had no time to admire it. Fred was into his windup again, signaling curve again. This one broke on the inner half at the
belt. I ripped it over the right center field fence. I hit a slider to the fence down the right field line. I smacked a fastball
back up the middle, just over the protective barrier.

“Trying for the other eye?” Fred said. Everyone laughed.

Fred came back with a fastball inside, and I smashed a one-hopper to the first baseman in shallow right. Raleigh Lincoln Jr.,
a skinny black kid, stabbed it but was completely turned around by the force. He lobbed the ball in to Fred, then held his
hand over his heart as everyone laughed.

A gigantic black man came out from behind the backstop. “Can I pitch to this kid?” he rumbled.

“Be my guest, Raleigh!” Fred said, tossing him his glove and pointing to the bucket of balls.

“Know who that is?” Geoff, the catcher, said.

“Must be Raleigh’s dad,” I said, staring.

“Raleigh Lincoln Sr. threw the only no-hitter in an Olympic game. Almost made the big leagues with the Red Sox.”

The catcher was taking off his gear.

“Where you going?” I said.

“Deep,” Geoff said. “I can’t catch him, and I’m not gonna try to stop your shots.”

“Ho, hey, whoa, stay there,” Mr. Lincoln called. “At least warm
me up. It’ll take me a while to get loose. If nobody can catch me, we’ll move the hitter back and I’ll pitch to the backstop.”

Mr. Lincoln looked at least six-three and well over two hundred pounds. He was a friendly looking man with big eyes and high
cheekbones, but he looked mean on the mound. He yanked down the pitching screen and set it aside. “One thing I don’t need
is this!” He put Fred’s glove on his right hand and began throwing easily lefty. From the first pitch, I knew he was the type
of pitcher I had seen only on television. His mechanics were perfect. He wore deck shoes and dressy clothes, but he looked
at home on the mound.

Mr. Rollins motioned me over. “This guy still pitches, you know.”

“Looks like it. Where?”

“City League. They say he can still throw in the eighties.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Well, hey, Elgin, I never saw anybody you couldn’t hit. Give it a try.”

I couldn’t wait. I didn’t care if Mr. Lincoln made me look like a fool. At least I would know that I fell somewhere between
the league I was in and a man who had been an almost–major leaguer.

As he got loose his fastball began to pop into Geoff s glove. Everyone seemed mesmerized. The man began to sweat, dark circles
appearing under his arms and in a line down his back. It looked like Mr. Lincoln was going to enjoy this as much as I was.

Finally, Geoff had had enough, so Mr. Lincoln moved several feet in front of the mound and began throwing at the middle post
of the backstop. He came close with every pitch, banging at least six out of ten off the post.

“I’m ready!” he hollered. “Get in there and take your cuts.”

Fred’s fastball was better than any of the kids’, but Raleigh Lincoln threw harder warming up. And I wasn’t going to be seeing
any of those warm-up pitches once I stepped in. If there was anything readable in the man’s face, it was that he was not about
to signal any pitches or make things easy on me.

It was written all over him that he wanted to show there was
one man in the crowd who wasn’t intimidated by some kid. There was little ceremony, no pretending to take a sign, no waiting
between pitches. Mr. Lincoln held four balls in his glove and just kept throwing. It was like facing the machine. But this
machine had a brain and a heart and pride and experience.

This machine was one mean pitcher.

T
hat evening I moseyed to Elgin and Chico’s old fastpitch street and watched others playing. I recognized a couple as old acquaintances
of Elgin’s.

A crazily spinning foul ball dropped to my right and skipped into my lap. I surprised myself and the boys by catching it and
tossing it back. Several would whisper and one would look, then others would whisper and another would look. A big black kid
looked defiantly at me, but I stared right back.

Then I noticed it. An aluminum bat against the wall near where the kids hit. One said, “Ricky, c’mon, man, let me use the
bat, huh?”

“No way!”

“Yeah!” someone else said. “You stole that a long time ago. That boy’s gonna come bust you for that.”

“Uh-huh,” big Ricky said. “He send his momma already.”

I felt a chill. So this was the boy who had stolen Elgin’s bat. He had stayed away until he heard that Elgin never came around
anymore. I wanted that bat back. It was only right.

Ricky looked about sixteen, hard and wiry as a grown man. When it was his turn to hit, he grabbed the bat, glared at me, and
stepped in. He took the first pitch, then skied the next one for a home run near the top of the building across the street.
As
the ball caromed about the street, Ricky let the bat clang to the pavement and went into his home run trot. Coming around
first brought him as close to me as he would get. He stopped dead when I whispered something.

“What’d you say?”