Waiting for Teddy Williams Page 13

  Late in the afternoon of the last day of September, Teddy showed up at Gran’s with his bat bag, his metal spikes lashed through the canvas handles by their laces. E.A. figured his father would be heading out for the winter right after their workout. He missed him already. That afternoon, while Bill stood in the outfield and complained about the fall colors, they played a game of Twenty-seven Outs, the ’48 Sox against the ’48 Yankees. Ethan fielded and hit for the Sox. On one defensive play, with Joe DiMaggio on second, Berra singled to left center. E.A. ran out from short and took the cutoff from Bill, whirled and nailed Joe D at the plate by ten feet.

  “He’s coming back to third—throw it!” E.A. said, racing to the bag.

  Instead, Teddy faked a throw to third, then sprang up the line four or five steps and tagged Joe on the back, just the way he’d shown E.A., ball in the hand, hand in the glove, tag with the glove.

  E.A.’d never seen a man move that fast in his life, much less a six-foot-three man weighing nearly two hundred pounds. Teddy moved the way Bucky Dent, Bill’s cat, had pounced on a weasel in the woodshed last winter.

  “I’d say you got him dead to rights, E.W.,” Bill said. It was the closest thing to a compliment E.A. had ever heard from Old Bill.

  Afterward Teddy got a bottle of Hires for E.A. out of the springhouse, and they sat on the Packard seat while E.A. sipped the icy root beer, which tasted like nothing else on earth but root beer. Bill and Teddy sipped Crackling Rose. Bill said he hoped they were satisfied, he’d lost an afternoon of work, and now he might better not try to do anything except sweep out the barn, because if he did it would all just be catch-up. Crickets chirped. Up at the house, Gypsy was patiently at work on the second verse of “Nobody’s Child,” the guitar chords floating softly down over the ball grounds.

  “Why don’t she go to Nashville?” Teddy said suddenly. “See what she can do with them pretty numbers?”

  “She has a boy to raise is why,” E.A. said. “She didn’t up and walk out on that boy is why.”

  “E.W. didn’t exactly walk out, E.A. They put him away in prison,” Bill pointed out.

  Teddy was turning his big, mahogany-colored catcher’s glove over in his hands. E.A. secretly hoped he’d give it to him to practice with during the off-season.

  E.A. sipped his root beer. Gran’s octagonal barn glowed in the sunset, the low rays reflecting off Bill’s multicolored license plates like sunshine on a crazy quilt. It was a handsome building, with a dormer over the highdrive to the hayloft and a cupola. On rainy days E.A. stood between the soaring bays on either side of the loft and played Twenty-seven Outs off the back wall. Or threw his red rubber ball through the swinging tire. Recently Devil Dan had driven the D-60 right up to the side of the barn and lifted the blade above the row of windows in the milking parlor and menaced with it while Gypsy drew a bead on him with Grandpa Gleason Allen’s 30.06 Springfield from the kitchen door. E.A. had no doubt she’d use it if Dan so much as touched the barn with the Blade. Then she’d be in prison and he’d be all but orphaned. He wished Teddy would stay for the winter.

  Tracing his finger across the cold mist on the Hires bottle, he said to Teddy, “You headed out tonight? On the eight-oh-six?”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” Teddy said. “I’ve been thinking.”

  “Thinking what?”

  Teddy nodded at the red-and-gold mountain. “You recollect what I said to you up there this past spring?”

  “How could I forget? A boy doesn’t find out every day of the week that his pa was a jailbird.”

  “Do you recollect what I said about no more fibbing to you?” Teddy said. “About being in college and such?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have I?”

  “Have you what?”

  “Told you any stretchers this summer.”

  E.A. considered. “Not so far’s I know.”

  “Tell me again what you want, Ethan.”

  “You know what I want. To do what they say overstreet that you could have but didn’t.”

  “Which is?”

  “I don’t want to jinx it.”

  “There’s no such thing as a jinx. Say it.”

  Bucky Dent rubbed against Teddy’s spike, and he pulled his foot away. E.A. could tell he was uncomfortable with the cat and so could Bucky Dent, who now jumped up on Teddy’s lap. Teddy picked him up and tossed him aside. The cat purred and arched its back with pleasure.

  Teddy looked back at E.A. “I was saying. There’s no such a thing as a jinx. All that happy horseshit about not mentioning a no-hitter in progress? That saying it’s a no-no? I don’t hold with none of that. Pitcher has a no-hit game going and gets away with a mistake, fastball down the center right in the hitter’s wheelhouse, I point it out to him. ‘Do that again, bub, there goes your no-hitter,’ I tell him. I’ll ask you again, Ethan. What is it you want?”

  “He wants that Lori gal over to the hotel to ask him out, it’s all he can think about,” Bill said, to E.A.’s surprise. Just when you thought Old Bill was the next thing to brain-dead, he’d surprise you. In fact, he’d had a crush on Lori, the hotel waitress, who was nearly twice his age, for six months, though he hadn’t breathed a word about her to anyone, even Gypsy.

  Teddy paid no attention to Bill or to E.A.’s red face as the boy quickly said, “Go all the way to the top. Be a big-league hitter. Play shortstop, maybe even catcher.”

  “It’ll never happen.”

  Teddy said this exactly the way he might say no rain was in sight. Showers before the weekend? Never happen.

  E.A. jumped to his feet. “What do you mean? What do you mean, it’ll never happen?”

  Teddy, still sitting, held up his hands as if to fend off another attack. “Don’t you be flying off the handle, boy. I said I wouldn’t lie to you again. Not even in kidding. Well, I won’t. And you won’t ever be a major-league hitter, either. Or a shortstop or catcher.”

  “You can just bet I will.”

  “If I said that, I’d be fooling myself and you, too.”

  “Well, why the hell not?” E.A. was nearly shouting, and despite himself his eyes were reddening. He could feel them smarting.

  “I’ll tell you why not. One, you ain’t quite big enough and likely won’t be. Two, you’re fast afoot but you ain’t quite fast enough. Three, you have a quick pair of hands but not quite quick enough. Your bat ain’t quite quick enough, neither. Yes, in the field you’re smooth. But you ain’t quite smooth enough. Ethan. Listen to me. You could play college and do real good at it. Single A, maybe. Maybe even double A. But not all the way and be a big-league hitter or shortstop, much less a catcher.”

  Now tears were beginning to come, and as hard as it was for E.A. to hear all this with no warning whatsoever, it was harder yet to think he might cry in front of his father. He clenched his fists.

  Teddy grinned. “You going to charge the mound again? Rush me?”

  “You think it’s funny.”

  “No, sir. I don’t. But I don’t think misleading a kid, much less a fella’s own kid, is funny, either. Stringing you along to waste five, six, eight years of your youth riding old buses around the South or out West or wherever until you finally find out for yourself in Chattanooga at twenty-seven with your two-twenty-seven batting average that you ain’t going one step further. I don’t want that for you, Ethan. You don’t want that for yourself.”

  “You don’t know what I want,” E.A. shouted. Now Gypsy was out in the dooryard, watching. She’d probably thought Devil Dan was on his way to dozer down the barn.

  “Yes, I do,” Teddy said equably. “Now looky here.”

  He took E.A.’s wrist in his hand. “To hit the ball really hard, your wrists have to be bigger.”

  “Gypsy says if Our Father Who Art in Heaven’d wanted me to be bigger, I would have been.”

  “There you have it.”

  “I can improve.”

  “There’s no doubt of it. But not enough.”

  Now E.A. thought he saw wh
at this was about. For some reason Teddy had gotten sick of helping him with his baseball, living in the hotel, running a lathe for minimum wage at the bat factory. Sticking in one spot instead of drifting from place to place the way he was used to. Teddy was tired of being a father, and this was his way of getting out of it. A way to leave and not come back again.

  “I can learn to hit the long ball.”

  Teddy shook his head. “That, you need to be a big old slabsided, ham-handed, rawboned fella like your pa, Ethan. Six two. Six one, anyway.”

  “I could get to be six one.”

  “You could. Five eleven’s more likely. Plus you’re built like that Yankee fella. Cajun boy out of Louisiana, pitched for them fifteen, twenty years ago. Fella with the good heat.”

  “Guidry.”

  “That would be it. Ron Guidry.”

  “I’d work hard. Harder than any player they’ve ever seen.”

  “Yes, and that’s in your favor, but it ain’t enough.”

  He reached into his pocket, brought out a baseball, and tossed it to E.A. “Look at it,” he said. “Heft it. Now tell me. How do you feel about it?”

  “Feel about it?” Gypsy’s psychologist client, Dr. Fuller from St. J, was always talking about feelings. His own feelings, mainly. Once a month, regular as clockwork, he’d show up on a Sunday evening and have a cup of tea with Gypsy and Gran in the kitchen and talk about his feelings over the past few weeks, how he needed to “take care of himself” and “nurture the child within” before repairing to the parlor with Gypsy to have her dress up as Sigmund Freud or Carl Jung and “examine his feelings.”

  “I like it,” E.A. admitted. “I like the way it feels in my hand.”

  “How about the way it looks? You like them neat red stitches? The leathery way it smells?”

  E.A. nodded.

  “Well, a natural hitter hates the ball. Wants to kill it, drive it out of his sight. He hates the pitcher, too. But you look here. Your wrists ain’t too big, or your arms, but you got fairly long fingers, like a pianer player. You can wrap ’em halfway around the ball or more. See? That’s good.”

  “How can it be good if I’m not going to make it all the way to the top? What difference does it make how long my fingers are?”

  Teddy lit a cigarette. “I didn’t say you weren’t going to make it all the way to the top. I said you weren’t going to be a big-league hitter. Or shortstop. Now, as a pitcher, that might be something else again.”

  E.A. had never once considered being a pitcher. In all his fantasizing late at night or playing Twenty-seven Outs in the dooryard or in the barn, he was always the hitter or a fielder. Never the pitcher. He’d never pitched to a live batter in his life.

  “You said I wasn’t big enough. Aren’t pitchers big, too? Earl No Pearl? Clemens? Even that Ichabod from Pond is six feet.”

  “A lot of pitchers are big. Randy Johnson. That old boy from Texas, What’s-his-face Ryan. Then again, you got your Guidrys. Got your Martinezes. With a pitcher, Ethan, size helps. But you can be five ten if you’ve got long fingers, strong legs, whip in your arm. Plus”—he squinted at E.A. through the cigarette smoke—“it’s all right for the pitcher to like the baseball.”

  E.A. thought about this as the sun sank behind the Green Mountains. “I never thought about winning the Series as a pitcher. How do I know you ain’t stringing me along?”

  Teddy shook his head. “Whoa, boy. Nobody said nothing about winning any Series. Like I’ve told you, the only guarantee in baseball is there ain’t no guarantees. All I said so far is you got fairly big hands, fairly long fingers.”

  “Do I have a shot as a pitcher or not? I want you to tell me right now.”

  Teddy stood up and checked the sky to see how much playable daylight was left. He put on his catcher’s glove.

  “Let’s toss,” he said, starting for the plate. “Begin in close. Work your way back toward the mound.”

  22

  IT WAS APRIL AGAIN, and the ospreys were back, the female bird already sitting on her nest atop the water tank, the male feeding her big spawning rainbow trout that got by Gypsy’s homemade fish weirs just downriver. Even with the weirs, there were plenty of trout left for the ospreys and for the fishermen who stood elbow to elbow along the river below the High Falls, if the fishermen knew how to catch them. Most were from Away, outside of the Kingdom, and didn’t.

  Devil Dan had a trout weir of his own. It directed the current through a narrow sluiceway, where he shot the fish with his automatic rifle, then netted them when they floated up to the surface. He was out doing it today while E.A. threw to Teddy off the mound at Fenway. During the off-season, E.A. had worked on his pitching in the barn, throwing to his swinging tire suspended from the rafters. As the winter progressed, he refined the game, pitching whole simulated innings. Sometimes he pitched like the Sox’s great Cy Young, who’d begun his career throwing underhand. Sometimes he was Luis Tiant, spinning around on the imaginary rubber to look out the open barn door and down the highdrive and across the snowy barnyard. He could throw Bill “Spaceman” Lee’s sky-high eephus pitch, calculating exactly when it would descend to meet the pendulum arc of the tire, and he liked to do Bill Monbouquette finishing up his no-hitter in ’62 against the White Sox’s Nellie Fox and Luis Aparicio, and big Dick Radatz in ’63, coming in against the Yankees to punch out Mantle, Maris, and Elston Howard in ten pitches. He was never Calvin Schiraldi, giving up three consecutive singles to the Mets in ’86 to let the Series slip right through his fingers, much less poor Mike Torrez pitching to Bucky Dent in the one-game playoff with the Yankees in ’78. The barn was as cold as a freezer locker. It seemed colder than the outdoors. But as the Colonel said, any baseball was better than no baseball, and by spring, when Teddy returned, E.A. could throw as hard as most men. He’d grown some over the winter, too. Just fourteen, he was already nearly five foot eight. But if Teddy was surprised by his new height or speed, he didn’t say so.

  “How come you never give me any throwing advice?” E.A. said as he stood on the old tire strip he used as a rubber. “If you’re going to make me a pitcher.”

  “I’m not going to make you a pitcher,” Teddy said. “You have to do that yourself. As for ordinary throwing, you don’t need much advice. You throw naturally. When we get to the pitching part, I’ll show you what I know.”

  “They say you were the best catcher ever played in the village.”

  “I imagine Judge Charlie K was that. No, I take that back. Fisk was the best catcher ever to play in the village. I wasn’t close to him.”

  Ethan, his eyes the color of rainwater on a stormy day—Teddy’s eyes—looked right at his father. “How good were you?”

  Teddy considered. “I was a good country ball player with a knack for knowing the hitters’ weaknesses. Still am. When I was in college”—he looked at E.A. to make sure the boy knew what he was referring to—“when I was inside, the pen down to Woodstock got overcrowded. They bid out a few of us to facilities down South. I wound up in Florida. Warden found out I’d played some ball, and he shipped me over to the big state prison in Texas. They had a top-flight team, the Lone Star Gang, but their catcher got an early release for good behavior and they needed a quality replacement. The Florida warden traded me for two rodeo stars, a bull rider and a bronc buster.”

  Ethan was impressed. His pa, traded for two convict rodeo stars.

  “By and by the Texas warden cut me a deal. If I’d agree to come back and play five more years for the Lone Stars in the winter season, work at the prison in the rec department, he’d put me up for early parole. So I went up in front of the board, and they asked if I was sorry about them two boys in the car with me, and I said I was. But to tell you the truth, I was more sorry to have missed those first eight years with you. Four or five years old is when a boy wants to begin to develop his swing. Maybe if I’d of been around then—but never mind that. Now you’re a pitcher.

  “Listen, Ethan. Racing that train was the dumbest-
ass thing a young fella could ever do. But I never meant for them boys to get killed. And I’m sorry I missed them early years with you. Now that’s all I’m going to say about it. You have a good winter?”

  “Fair,” E.A. said. “But Devil Dan”—he jerked his head at the owner of Midnight Auto, stalking along the riverbank with his rifle, looking for fish to shoot—“he says he intends to dozer down our barn and house before another year is out.”

  Teddy glanced over just as the junkyard owner fired into the river five times in rapid succession. The startled male osprey, soaring overhead, loosed a viscous white fluid right onto Dan’s fedora and shiny shoes.

  Dan cursed and smote his thigh with his dripping hat. The fish hawk landed near its mate, and before E.A. knew it, Dan had shot the bird off the water tank. Then he killed the female for good measure.

  “No!” E.A. shouted. He broke toward Dan. Something jerked him off his feet.

  “Ethan,” Teddy said, holding his shirt collar. “There’s nothing you can do. Nothing’ll bring those birds back. There’s a better way.”

  “What?” E.A. shouted. “What way?”

  “You’ll see,” Teddy said. “And you listen. That man isn’t going to destroy your barn and house. I give you my word.”

  Later that day, at Gypsy’s insistence, Warden Kinneson came out and investigated the killing of the fish hawks. But by then Dan had burned them, feathers and all, in his illegal open-air dump, and without evidence there was nothing the warden could do, assuming he was disposed to do anything anyway. When he couldn’t find the birds he said that the Allens had probably made up the entire story.

  23

  ONE SATURDAY Teddy took Ethan up Allen Mountain to the woods above E.A. and Gypsy’s special place and showed him a stand of white ash trees, tall and straight and good for making baseball bats. He told the boy that ashes favored sunny, south-facing clearings, out of the wind. Wind stressed their grain. He said that white ash liked a loamy soil, not a clay base. And that a good sawyer could get twenty bats out of one tree.