Waiting for Teddy Williams Page 18

  The old man thought fleetingly of that hit he’d gotten off the great Sox southpaw as his fielder waited for the ball. The runner on third had already crossed the plate. The man from second was rounding third. None of that mattered, though. Neither run would count. The fielder whacked his glove twice with his fist, and then he lost the descending baseball in the sun. He threw up his hands wildly, and the ball bounced off his forehead onto the outfield grass at exactly the same moment that the second runner plated what turned out to be the winning run for Chicago, the Sox going down one, two, three in the last of the ninth. But that didn’t matter to the old man. By then nothing mattered to Maynard Flynn Senior. Because before the ball lost in the sun had rolled to a stop, he’d dropped dead in his skybox of what was later diagnosed as a massive coronary but which the entire Red Sox Nation, from the Legendary Spence to old Fletch in Kingdom Common, knew to have been sheer, ultimate disappointment.

  29

  “HENCEFORWARD,” the lummox intoned, “we shall be conducting business quite differently.”

  Standing in front of the new owner’s desk, with the Curse of the Bambino perched on the shoulder of his Red Sox warm-up jacket, Spence tried to recall whether he had ever heard anyone say “henceforward” before. He didn’t think so.

  Maynard Flynn Junior looked past the manager and his macaw and out his office window, down on the ball diamond below. What was it that writer had called it? “A lyric little bandbox of a ball park.” The lummox smiled slightly, thinking, Not for much longer.

  Spence sighed. Already, with spring training still months away, the lummox had let Boston’s four-time Cy Young Award-winning free-agent pitcher slip through his fingers. He’d sold the Sox’s twenty-game-winning sinkerball pitcher to Baltimore and traded their American League MVP left-fielder and beloved shortstop to Los Angeles for two utility players and an undisclosed but undoubtedly colossal amount of cash. The only reason the big lummox had not been able to dump Spence’s five-time All-Star catcher, Sally Salvadore, was that his contract still had a year to run. But he’d more than made up for that unfortunate constraint by doubling the price of every seat at Fenway Park, whose ticket prices already, under the old man’s tenure, had been jacked up to half again the amount at any other ball park in the majors.

  In fact, Spence believed that the reason he had been summoned to this audience with Maynard Flynn Junior was to be fired, for good this time. He’d told the macaw as much just before they went up to the skybox office. What’s more, with the dispersing of the great team that he and the old man had put together over the years, and along with it Spence’s hopes of ever getting to a Series again, much less winning one, he no longer wanted to do the only thing he’d ever wanted to do all his adult life and had done so well for more than twenty years. He no longer wanted to manage the Boston Red Sox. Or so Spence told himself. After the fly ball that should have brought the championship to Boston had gotten into the sun and smacked his outfielder in the forehead—there had been talk in the front office of trying to hook up the player with the government witness-protection program to keep the more extremist members of the Red Sox Nation from lynching him—Spence’s heart had pretty much gone out of the game.

  Spence regarded the lummox. He was a good-size boy, give him that—six one, six one and a half maybe—with limp blond hair and wet-looking, protuberant eyes of a washed-out shade and something of a potbelly, even though Maynard Junior had worked out at a karate club downtown for years, attempting to exorcise the memory of a boyhood trauma.

  Spence had been on hand to witness that event. It was young Maynard’s first Little League tryout, to which the old man had literally dragged him over his mama’s shrieking protests. He’d talked Spence into helping coach the kid’s team, to give the lummox an advantage. At eight he was not really a lummox, just a scared little boy who at the tryout actually soiled himself out of stark fear of the ball. Worse, the old man had made him stay on and complete the practice. It was the one thing Maynard Senior had done that Spence deemed utterly unforgivable. In the manager’s opinion, it accounted for much of the boy’s subsequent behavior, including his recent decision to eviscerate the superb team his father had left him.

  “Time to go fishing, Curse,” Spence had said to the macaw just before entering the lummox’s office. He was looking forward to it.

  As the new owner smirked out at him from behind his departed father’s huge desk, Spence remembered how the old man had sat there and pounded his fist on the green felt blotter and gone up one side of him and down the other and damned the Red Sox and the fans and the umpires and other owners, and he thought what a sad spectacle his out-of-place son, the professional graduate student of literature, made behind that same desk. Spence looked down at the canvas-covered playing field. A dusting of new snow lay on the tarp, and little white drifts had whisked up against the many odd nooks and crannies around the field. Spence remembered how Maynard Senior had loved to introduce his many threats with the phrase “By the time the snow flies in Beantown.”

  “By the time the snow flies in Beantown, Spence, you’ll be history. I guarantee it.”

  Spence missed the old man.

  The lummox put the tips of his fingers together like a church steeple. Spence suspected that much as he wanted to say “You’re fired,” he didn’t have the guts. He was actually squirming in his chair. Spence was afraid that the boy might go in his pants again. Suddenly the winningest active manager in baseball realized that the final indignity of his big-league career might well be having to broach the subject of his own dismissal because the lummox didn’t have the sand to do it.

  “Look here,” Spence said. “You want to give me the boot, go ahead. It won’t hurt my feelings none. It won’t be the first time I’ve been sent down the line.”

  The lummox reached for his hand-strengthening flexer, which he began to work quite sadistically. He said, “I am not, as you so elegantly put it, going to send you down the line. I want you to be around this coming season to see what happens.”

  Spence wondered what more could happen now that half of his team had been sold off or all but given away.

  “Or, more precisely, what doesn't happen,” the lummox said. “First, you will have a new general manager. I fired Henry earlier today.”

  Spence was speechless. Henry O’Leary was perhaps the finest general manager and front-office man in baseballdom. Also a longtime drinking bud of Spence’s and the old man’s.

  “But I have an able replacement waiting in the wings,” Maynard said, squeezing the very daylights out of the flexer.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Moi,” the boy said, standing up and coming around the desk and punching Spence in the arm with the knuckles of his index and middle finger. “Maynard Flynn II. New owner and general manager of the Boston Red Sox.”

  30

  “HOW IN THE NAME of the Great Jehovah and the First Continental Congress can you expect to control your curve ball when you can’t control yourself? Look at you. Drinking and tomcatting all night up to Canady. Not just once in a while, either. It’s every weekend. You’ve got to get aholt of yourself, boy.”

  “Just the way you did,” E.A. said, stumbling up against the Colonel’s pedestal. He had the spins so bad he thought he might be sick right there on the common. He was just getting in from another all-nighter, and he couldn’t deny a word the Colonel had said. Worse yet, Teddy was two weeks overdue. Usually he showed up by the second week of June, and E.A. was beginning to fear that he wasn’t coming. That something had gone terribly wrong with his agreement with the warden, and he was stuck inside some hellhole of a Texas prison, maybe for the rest of his life.

  At seventeen, E.A. was five ten and a half—a little taller than either he or Teddy had expected—and threw well over ninety miles an hour, with good movement on the ball and the same pinpoint accuracy that had impressed Teddy all those years before when they’d first played toss. He had a good slider and a fine off-speed breaking pitch,
at least until last night, when he’d lost under the lights 8–1 to Trois Rivieres. In the Common there was talk that of all the players who had ever come out of the village, E.A. was the one to watch.

  “You’re the one to watch, all right,” the statue said. “Watch make a fool of himself. Staying out the night long at them over the-border taverns. Hooring with French barmaids. Getting trounced by a bunch of Canuck stumblebums because you’re letting yourself go to the dogs. Now you attend to what I’m going to tell you.

  “For the past maybe one hundred years,” the Colonel continued, “there has been a persistent myth in this so-called village that it has turned out many players who, but for some unforeseen stroke of misfortune, could have gone all the way to the top. But the fact is, there have been only two ball players from this forsaken village that had any kind of shot at playing any kind of professional ball at any level. And they are your father, who unfortunately spent his best years in jail, and you, who seem to be headed straight down that same path. If you aren’t careful you’re going to be part of the same sad little myth, E.A. Allen. Mark my words. With talent comes a high price. Self-discipline. Setbacks. Sacrifice. Risk of failing. If you aren’t willing to pay that price, you don’t have a snowball’s chance.”

  “Well, I reckon you know just about everything.”

  “I don’t know much,” the Colonel said. “I don’t even know what I don’t know. But I know you have to take hold of your life, boy.”

  Despite his dressing-down from the Colonel, E.A. got drunk again the next Saturday after beating Sherbrooke, and he stayed over with Earl and Moonface at the Jolie Blon with a woman who didn’t speak two words of English. Gypsy was waiting for him in the kitchen when Earl slowed down just enough for E.A. to stumble out of his car and stand shakily in the dooryard in the sunrise.

  The 6:05 whistled at the railway crossing, reminding E.A. of Teddy. He felt bad. He felt like crying. Something was wrong, and it was more than just being hung over. He remembered learning how to read from the names on the sides of the boxcars, but he couldn’t remember exactly how he’d gotten to the Jolie Blon or when they’d left. He vaguely recalled Earl and Moonface helping him into the car.

  He stood in the dooryard, watching the freight pass like a ghost train in the mist. Gypsy sat at the kitchen table, watching E.A. out the window, Grandpa Gleason Allen’s deer rifle in her hands, pointed at the door. Gran sat in her old-fashioned wicker wheelchair by the table. For the first time in years, she’d gotten up before ten A.M.

  They watched E.A. drink out of the pump spout. They watched the train pass out of sight. They watched as Teddy Williams walked up from the tracks out of the mist, bat bag over his shoulder, and stopped a few feet away from E.A. Teddy looked different. Instead of the ratty suit coat, he was wearing a neat blue windbreaker, and there was no Crackling Rose bottle sticking out of his pocket. He wasn’t smoking, and as hung over as E.A. was, he could see that Teddy was stone sober. Teddy slung the bat bag off his shoulder and down at E.A.’s feet and said in his raspy voice, loud enough for Gypsy and Gran to hear him through the screen door, “You look like death warmed over, Ethan.”

  E.A. said nothing.

  “Jesus, Ethan. You’re just getting in, aren’t you? Why, your ma must be worried half out of her mind.”

  “What do you care about my ma?” E.A. said, staggering against the metal pump. “You misused her way worse.”

  “I never laid a hand on Gypsy, Ethan. Or any other woman.”

  “No. I reckon it wasn’t your hand you laid on her.”

  Inside the farmhouse kitchen Gypsy figured Teddy’d be about ready to fly at E.A. She’d have to aim Grandpa Gleason’s rifle at Teddy. But all he said was “Ethan. Listen. I know I weren’t no good for Gypsy and I know I weren’t no good father for you.”

  “You weren’t here for me is what you weren’t,” E.A. said.

  “That, too,” Teddy said. “But it don’t excuse this display.”

  E.A. said, “I’ll tell you the same thing I told you a few years ago. I want you off these premises.”

  Teddy reached out and grabbed Ethan by the back of his neck and held his head under the pump. He pumped the handle until E.A. was soaked and spouting.

  “Ethan,” Teddy said. “I’ll make you a deal. We’ll go down to the ball field. You pitch to me. You strike me out, I’ll leave. I get a hit off you, I’ll stay on and work with you and you stay out of the roadhouses.”

  “You’re on, mister man,” Ethan said, shaking his head and shoulders like a drenched dog. “You got yourself a deal, Mr. Gone and Long Forgotten. Get your bat and stand in there.”

  E.A.’s first pitch was three feet over Teddy’s head. It whanged off North Carolina, First in Flight, folding it up in the middle so that it looked as if it had been in a head-on collision. The second pitch just missed Teddy’s head. The third pitch was a foot outside and ricocheted off Missouri, the Show Me State. With a 3–0 count, E.A. managed to get the fourth pitch over the plate, and Teddy took a short stride and a short, compact swing and hit the ball farther than Ethan had ever seen a man hit a baseball in his life. Over the dike of clay Devil Dan had thrown up, over the river, over the railroad tracks, into the willows behind the commissionsales auction barn in the village.

  The ball must have traveled five hundred feet. Maybe more. Until that moment E.A. had not known it was possible for a batter to hit a ball so far. He thought of the ball Teddy had driven onto Old Lady Benton’s porch above the drugstore. He could only imagine that hit. This one he’d seen, and he still had trouble believing it.

  Teddy’s mammoth home run over the river sobered E.A. up more than the pump—that and the dozen line drives and sizzling ground balls up the middle past the mound and between third and short that Teddy hit during the next ten minutes. He sent two more towering shots over the river. Each swing was economical, just a short step and then that lightning crack when the ball hit the wood of Teddy’s Green Mountain Rebel. He swung only at strikes and didn’t miss a one, and every ball he swung at was a hit. Finally E.A. threw a perfect slider that just clipped the outside corner before diving out of the strike zone. It was his nastiest pitch, but Teddy drove it on a line two feet over first base. A sure triple for a fast runner in any park.

  Ethan heaved his glove at the old Packard seat slumped in the tall grass. He felt exactly the way he had the day Teddy told him he’d never be a major-league hitter. In ten minutes his dream of pitching for the Boston Red Sox had come unraveled. If he couldn’t get a ball past an over-the-hill catcher for a prison team in Texas, how could he ever expect to pitch in the majors?

  “I can’t do it, can I? It was all a lie, me going all the way. What I am is just another Kingdom County loser.”

  “You’re not a loser,” Teddy said. “You listen to me, Ethan. You was hung over today and I had my batting shoes on. Ordinarily, you’d get me out half the time, maybe more.” Teddy glanced up at the dooryard, where Gypsy stood watching, still holding the deer rifle. Speaking louder, Teddy said, “Now. No more breaking training. No drinking. No smoking. No staying out to all hours.”

  “You drink.”

  “I haven’t touched a drop in five months,” Teddy said. He reached into his bat bag and pulled out his catcher’s glove. “We’ll toss now. Then we’ll run.”

  “I don’t feel so hot,” E.A. admitted.

  “I don’t imagine you do.”

  Somehow E.A. made himself head back out to the mound.

  31

  E.A. WENT TO WORK at the bat factory, tailing saws, sweeping up sawdust, stacking lumber. The Common was surprised. Gypsy had publicly vowed that her son would never set foot in the factory, which she feared would trap him, doom him to small-town life forever. Teddy said he’d see to it that didn’t happen, but by God, E.A. was old enough to have a job where he had to show up every morning at seven and couldn’t stay out all night drinking the night before. It was part of Teddy’s plan.

  Making a good wooden baseball bat,
E.A. learned, was an art, from selecting the right ash tree in the woods to shaving the handle of the bat to the right thickness to give it maximum whip and strength. E.A. liked the heady, sweet scent of the varnish applied to the finished bats, which filled the whole village like the scent of bread near a bakery. He liked the thump and clack of the stamper impressing the words GREEN MOUNTAIN REBEL on the barrel of each bat. Best of all he liked watching Teddy shape a bat on the lathe, his big hands as capable and delicate as a surgeon’s as, magically, the round barrel began to appear out of the wood. He worked to the rhythm of the throbbing belts and pulleys and shafts in the old mill. The planer screeched, the molders grumbled. Out in the factory yard the big log saw added its heavy rasping to the medley. The ripsaw whirred and Teddy’s lathe buzzed, and the result of all this humming and whirring and roaring was the steady music of a wooden baseball bat being produced.

  At noon Teddy ate on the bleachers or under the old elm on the south end of the common. Occasionally E.A. ate with his father, but they didn’t talk much. Even when he was working with the other men at the factory, Teddy was a loner. Sometimes Baxter Benton, the foreman, would bring him a finished bat that didn’t seem balanced correctly, and Teddy would shave the handle a little thinner with a shard of glass from the bottom of a broken beer bottle, taper it just a little finer. “How do you know when it’s right?” E.A. said.

  And Teddy said, as he’d said of the ash trees on Allen Mountain, “Oh, I know.”

  At seventeen, E.A. could not imagine anything better than working days with his father in the bat factory and playing town-team ball in the early evenings and on weekends. Except, of course, playing for the Sox. In Baxter Benton’s office was a glass display case. Inside were a dozen or so bats with white smudges on them, like some of the famous bats at Cooperstown, including one that Teddy Ballgame had hit a home run with, one that Pudge Fisk had used, one of Johnny Pesky’s, and one that had belonged to the Little Professor, Dom DiMaggio. E.A.’s favorite was a forty-inch Green Mountain Rebel wielded by none other than Babe Ruth himself, before he was traded to New York. E.A. always paused for a few seconds to gaze at the Babe’s bat when he went into the mill in the morning and left in the late afternoon.