Waiting for Teddy Williams Read online

  Horns honked and air horns blatted in congratulatory unison. Some of the church ladies on the bus cheered.

  Teddy picked up the smashed cell phone. “I believe this belongs to you, madam,” he said, handing it to the tour guide and tipping his cap.

  “Oh!”

  She was looking past Teddy at Bill. Everyone on the bus was looking at Bill, standing on the shoulder of the highway and loosing an arcing yellow stream down into the swamp.

  “I told you I was all coffeed up,” Bill said, still going. “I don’t know what everyone’s gawking at.”

  Cooperstown was situated on a north-south-lying lake that E.A. was fairly sure had been made by the Great Wisconsin Ice Sheet. The museum was larger than he’d thought it would be. First they walked around the circular room where the Hall of Famers each had a plaque listing his statistics. There were all the greats—Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner, Babe Ruth, Christy Mathewson, and the rest. Carlton Fisk had been inducted in 2000. At the entrance of the Hall was a life-size wooden sculpture of Ted Williams and another of Babe Ruth, made of basswood, by a French Canadian carver from Rhode Island. Bill tapped Ted’s statue with his knuckle. “I don’t know why anybody would make all this work for them self,” he said.

  Upstairs they watched videos of famous moments in Series games, toured the Negro League room, examined the home uniforms of each team, enshrined in glass cases, and paused over famous bats, balls, spikes, and photographs of major-league ball parks past and present.

  “Is that the way you’d throw out a runner?” E.A. asked Teddy as they watched a video clip of Johnny Bench gunning the ball down to second to nail a base runner attempting to steal.

  “That’s one way to do it,” Teddy said.

  “Teddy?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Say you hadn’t—say you’d gone right into baseball out of high school. Could you have wound up here?”

  Teddy stepped out of the way of a contingent of Cub Scouts. He lit a cigarette in front of a PLEASE DO NOT SMOKE sign. “No,” he said. “I doubt I ever could have gotten to the majors, you want the truth. The thing is, I’ll never know. Look, Ethan. Say you try and don’t make the grade. That’s nothing to be ashamed of. Only a few ever do. You can live with trying and not making the grade. But you’ll know. It’s the not knowing that eats at you.”

  “Sir,” a museum attendant said. “There’s no smoking in the Baseball Hall of Fame.”

  Teddy dropped his cigarette on the tiled floor and ground it under the heel of his work boot, and a few minutes later they left for home.

  “You were clocked at sixty-five,” the New York constable said, but he was lying through his teeth. E.A. had checked the speedometer. Teddy had been driving exactly forty-three miles an hour.

  The cop had sneaked up behind them with his lights off, then switched on his blue flashers. Later Bill admitted that he’d thought a spaceship was taxiing in for a landing behind them.

  “You fellas set tight,” the constable said. “I’m going back to the cruiser.”

  “What are we going to do?” E.A. said. He was terrified that Teddy would have to go back to prison.

  Teddy shrugged. “We’ll be okay,” he said. “This asshole’s going to ask for a fifty-dollar bill to let us off the hook.”

  The constable shone his flashlight in their faces. “Where you boys been? What’s your business in New York at this hour?”

  “We took the boy to Cooperstown for the day,” Teddy said.

  “Well, you were clocked at sixty-five. You can pay the fine here, seventy-five dollars, or we can take a little ride up the road, pay a visit to the JP.”

  “I was going forty-five,” Teddy said.

  “JP don’t like to be rousted out in the middle of the night,” the constable said. “He might make that fine two hundred and a free overnight stay at the county motel. The one with bars on the windows.” He flashed the light full in E.A.’s face. “You ever been in jail, boy?”

  From the back came a thumping, scrabbling sound. The constable jumped. “What’s that?” He stepped back from the window and put his hand on his holster.

  “Something you’d like to see, officer,” Bill said. “A specimen of early life here on earth.”

  “A what? What you got back there?”

  “His name’s Jolting Joe, we’ve got him in a sack. He likes to ride that way,” Bill said.

  “Good Christ!” the constable said, shining his light in the back. “You get out of the vehicle, mister,” he said to Teddy, “and keep your hands where I can see them. I want to see who’s in that sack.”

  Teddy got out. E.A. got out, too, though the constable hadn’t told him to. When the constable opened the back door, the bat bag appeared to be moving across the floor of its own volition. The policeman played his light on the bag. “You,” he said to Teddy. “Open up that sack and let him out of there.”

  Teddy loosened the drawstrings. The officer leaned forward, tugging at the chin strap of his hat.

  “Joe don’t seem to want to come out very bad,” Teddy said.

  As the officer bent over to look inside, the turtle’s head and neck shot out of the sack. The constable leaped back, striking his head on Patsy’s metal door frame. Immediately Teddy said to the stunned man, “Here, officer. Let me help you back to your car.”

  Teddy assisted him to the cruiser and eased him in behind the wheel. He reached inside and snapped off the flashers. The turtle, for her part, had lurched out of Patsy and was lumbering toward a depression beside the road filled with cattails.

  “Is the cop going to be all right?” E.A. said a minute later as they continued on east at a moderate speed.

  “He’s going to have a major-league headache,” Teddy said.

  In the headlights E.A. saw a concrete bridge. “Won’t he come after us?”

  “Not right away,” Teddy said. He held up the keys from the cruiser’s ignition and, as they crossed the bridge, pitched them far out into the darkness.

  Just beyond the bridge their lights picked up a large green sign with white letters: WELCOME TO VERMONT.

  “Thank the Jesus,” Bill said.

  “Amen,” Teddy said, and all three of them began to laugh.

  26

  JUDGE CHARLIE KINNESON’S private chambers behind the courtroom looked out over the baseball diamond on the west, the Lower Kingdom River and U.S. Route 5 on the south, and the Green Mountain Rebel factory on the southeast. On the walls were reproductions of the famous Orvis trout, leaping out of a boggy green stream with a dark fly in the corner of its jaw; a Frederic Remington painting of two Canadian voyageurs and a wolfish-looking dog in a canoe; and a Montana butte by Charlie Russell. There was a color photograph of Carlton Fisk waving his ’75 home run fair and snapshots of Charlie’s wife, Athena, and their twin daughters. On the judge’s desk, atop a stack of old Outdoor Life magazines, sat a small bronze reproduction of Remington’s sculpture of a mustachioed cowboy aboard a bucking bronc. In the floor-to-ceiling bookcases between the windows, wedged in with legal tomes and bound reports from each session of the Vermont legislature back to 1848, were scores of books on the American West.

  Judge Charlie liked to say that if he’d known, really known, what was out in Montana and Wyoming when he was young and right out of law school, he’d never have set foot back in Kingdom County. But the fact was, Charlie Kinneson loved the Kingdom and was as much a part of it as the Kingdom was of him, and today of all days, E.A. was glad that Charlie had not lit out for the frontier years ago. Deputy Warden Kinneson, in his auxiliary capacity as truant officer, had hauled him and Gypsy up in front of the judge for “flagrant habitual truancy over the past eight years.” Charlie had put off hearing the case for as long as he could. Now the deputy was petitioning him to order E.A. to attend school and, if Gypsy balked, to remove him from her custody. Because the case involved a minor, Charlie had decided to hear it in his private chambers rather than in the open courtroom. So here they were, a week after E.A.’s tr
ip to Cooperstown with Teddy and Bill.

  Ethan and Gypsy sat on an old leather couch also occupied by Charlie’s elderly springer spaniel. Charlie sat in a Morris chair by the west window. The deputy, at Charlie’s suggestion, sat behind the judge’s desk. The judge wore his black steel-capped shoes and blue umpire’s shirt because he had an American Legion ball game to officiate later that afternoon in Memphremagog. In his hand he held a manila folder.

  “Now, Ethan,” Charlie said with a broad smile, “Deputy Warden Kinneson, my estimable cousin and Kingdom County’s favorite game warden, truant officer, and dogcatcher—did I get all your titles, cousin?—is alleging that Gypsy doesn’t raise you properly at home.”

  He waved the folder, and some documents fell out on the floor. Charlie ignored them. “Is that what all this boils down to, deputy?”

  “We have proof,” the warden said, “that Gypsy Lee Allen has been encouraging a minor to break the fish and game laws, stay out of school, and procure clients for her pornographic shows. Plus he don’t eat properly and he’s running wild all over town, driving without a license and talking to himself on the common and I don’t know what all.”

  “Well,” Charlie said, winking at E.A., “those are serious charges. Let’s look at them one at a time. Is it true, Ethan, that Gypsy doesn’t send you to school?”

  “You know she doesn’t, Charlie. Never has.”

  “Moving right along, do you have enough to eat at home?”

  “You bet I do,” E.A. said. “Venison every meal and all I can eat of it. Except for last winter when we ran out and had to eat moose instead. But that was just as good.”

  “I don’t believe this,” the warden said. “Moose. This is too—”

  “Does Gypsy mistreat you, E.A.? Smack you around?”

  “Of course not.”

  “We aren’t claiming outright abuse, Judge. It would be more like neglect. What we’re saying here, the boy hasn’t attended school a day in his life.”

  “Warden, before I pursue this further, who is we?”

  “We?”

  “Yes. You keep saying we. ‘We’ aren’t claiming abuse. What ‘we’re’ saying. Who is this we? The royal we? You and God?”

  “Why, no, Charlie, it’s I and—I and the state. The state of Vermont.”

  “Was it the state of Vermont that pronounced you truant officer?”

  “No, sir. Elected at Town Meeting. Town officer.”

  “Warden?”

  “Yes?”

  “Unless you have multiple personalities—a theory that I, for one, have never entirely subscribed to—I want you to stop referring to yourself as we.”

  “Well, all right, but what about the psychiatric evaluation in that folder?”

  Charlie leaned down and picked up a note, handwritten on yellow tablet paper, that had fallen out of the folder. “Do you mean this scrawled report, signed not by a licensed psychiatrist but by you, that on three occasions this past summer you observed E.A. talking to the statue of the Colonel out on the common?”

  “Well, I did.”

  “Ethan, do you talk to the Colonel’s statue?”

  “You know good and well I do, Charlie. I visit with everybody in this town, always have. Even the warden.”

  “Does the statue talk back to you, boy?” the deputy said. “Tell you to set fires, does he? Hurt people?”

  “You be quiet,” Charlie told his cousin. “I’ll ask the questions this afternoon. To tell you the truth, Ethan, I’ve always been curious. What do you and the old Colonel talk about?”

  “Baseball, mainly. He loves to talk baseball.”

  “Well, he lives in the right town, then.”

  “Charlie, I think at the least you should order the boy evaluated. He ain’t right in the head, and you and I both know it.”

  “No, you and I do not both know it. His mother schools him at home. He’s well-fed. He seems well-adjusted. And he knows more about baseball than anybody in the county.”

  “Look how skinny he is.”

  Charlie reached over his head and pulled down the 1904 legislative report, a very thick volume. He put it on his desk in front of the warden. “Ethan, put your elbow up here and twist wrists with my cousin. He thinks you’re undernourished.”

  E.A. jumped up, took three quick steps, and set his elbow on the tome, with his forearm and wrist jutting up at a ninety-degree angle.

  “What?” Warden Kinneson was saying. “I don’t understand—”

  Charlie stood up, took the officer’s right hand, and placed it in E.A.’s. “One, two, three, go,” he said. E.A. slammed the back of the warden’s hand down onto the desk so hard that the bronze bronc jumped. Gypsy cheered.

  “He had a book to give him leverage, plus he was standing up,” the warden whined, rubbing the back of his hand.

  “Switch places with him,” Charlie suggested. “You use the book.”

  “Never mind.”

  “That was a sorry display on your part, cousin,” Charlie said. “You let a mere lad beat you twisting wrists.”

  “All this is about is the boy missing school, cousin. He isn’t getting the right academics. I don’t know if he’s reading up to grade level. I don’t even know if he can read.”

  “Don’t you?” Charlie picked up an envelope from the corner of his desk. From it he removed a typed letter, which he handed to E.A. “Ethan, would you please read the first paragraph of this letter aloud? To show this versatile peace officer that you’re reading at grade level. It’s a letter the local sheriff—your boss, deputy—showed me this morning. Addressed to him. From the sheriff of Washington County, over in New York State.”

  E.A. cleared his throat and read aloud.

  “Dear Sheriff Cunningham,

  I am writing to inform you that on the early morning of June 9, one of my constables, Fred Hawkins, stopped and searched a speeding vehicle with plates registered to Deputy Warden Kinneson, of Kingdom Common, Vermont, a game warden and a deputy in your employ. The officer, Constable Hawkins, was attacked by an unknown assailant, assisted by your deputy, in the back of Deputy Kinneson’s vehicle, after which the Vermont officer fled the scene with two accomplices.”

  “God Jesus!” the warden shouted. “I swear I haven’t been in New York for twenty years. On June ninth I was—I was watching for walleye poachers up where the river comes into Memphremagog.”

  “I don’t care where you were or what you were doing,” Charlie said. “I’m going to let you and Sheriff Cunningham and the sheriff of Washington County, New York, thrash this matter out yourselves. It’s none of my affair—yet. Now get up from my chair, warden, and get out of this room and don’t ever come to me with charges like these again.”

  “Charlie, I swear—”

  “Skedaddle.”

  Warden Kinneson gave his cousin the judge one last pleading look, then scurried out of the room. E.A. almost felt sorry for him.

  “Well,” Gypsy said. “I guess he won’t try that stunt again.”

  “Do me a favor, Gypsy Lee. Lay off the poor guy for a few weeks. Give the deer and moose population and the lady’s slippers a breather and lay off the whiskey smuggling and let the warden catch his breath.

  “Stick around a minute, Gypsy. You, too, E.A. I want to ask you something. Don’t take this wrong, Gypsy Lee. Ethan, would you like to go to school?”

  “No. It suits me just fine not to.”

  “Charlie—” Gypsy started, but he held up his hand.

  “Let E.A. answer. He’s old enough for this to be his decision.”

  “I can’t abide schoolteachers, Judge K,” E.A. said. “I don’t have the slightest use for the whole pack.”

  The judge thought for a minute.

  “Charlie,” Gypsy said, “the reason I don’t send Ethan to school is that kids are cruel. I know. I know exactly what it’s like for a kid without a father to go to school. I was the frigging salutatorian and it still didn’t matter. Can you imagine what Ethan would have been subject
ed to with a father who’s in prison?”

  “Teddy isn’t in prison any longer, Gypsy.”

  “No, but that wouldn’t matter. They’d still call Ethan the B word. Our depraved neighbor, Devil Dan Davis, calls him the B word. One of these fine days when my Allen’s up I’m going to shoot that wicked old son of a bitch. I swear to Our Father Who Art in Heaven I am.”

  “Ethan, before your wonderful mom gets her Allen up with me, would you step outside for a minute. She and I need to talk some turkey.”

  E.A. went into the small hallway between the judge’s chamber and the courtroom. He shut the door hard, with the handle turned all the way to the right, then silently reopened it a crack. He heard Charlie say, “Gypsy, how much longer do you intend to protect Ethan from this town? Don’t you think he’s old enough now—”

  “I don’t protect him, damn it. He comes with me when I sing out. He grew up in honky-tonks and roadhouse dives. He plays with the Outlaws. He hunts and fishes all over Allen Mountain. He’s well educated and you know it. But I will not subject him to the cruelties of that school or any school.”

  “You going to let him go to college?”

  “I’m going to make him go to college. If we can afford it, that is.”

  “I’ll make you a promise, Gypsy. Athena and I will see to it that you can afford it.”

  There was a pause. Then E.A. heard the judge say, “So Teddy’s been teaching E.A. baseball?”

  “He has. When E.W. first showed up I wanted to shoot him. But Charlie, I just didn’t see how I could deny Ethan the right to know his father. Even a father like Teddy.”

  “People change, Gypsy. If Teddy’s decided to do one decent thing in his life by showing E.A. how to play baseball, more power to him. Nobody knows more about the game than E.W. Williams. If Ethan pays attention—and knowing E.A., he will—nobody could show him more.”