Waiting for Teddy Williams Read online

  “Oh, that son of a bitch,” Gypsy shouted. “Did you see that, Ethan? Did you see what that twisted little Nazi in a fedora hat did to those birds?”

  E.A. felt bad for the killdeer, but he wasn’t surprised. He’d seen Devil Dan hitch a hose to the vertical exhaust pipe of the Blade and gas out a whole lodge of beavers, seen him shoot a loon fishing on the river last summer.

  “I’m sorry, Ethan, but that little SS pissant should be put in jail for the rest of his life.”

  “He’s a pretty bad fella, mom. Remember how he shot that loon?”

  “That was the most gratuitously cruel act I’ve ever witnessed.”

  “He said it was eating his fish.”

  “What fish? He’d already poisoned all the fish with crankcase oil. You want to wait until he’s finished before taking BP, hon?”

  E.A. shook his head. “I reckon I better get it in. It might turn off to rain later.”

  “You sound like Old Bill, sweetie. ‘Turn off to rain.’”

  “At least I don’t sound like Devil Dan.”

  “No, thank Jesus,” Gypsy said. “Thank the sweet Jesus you do not sound like Devil Dan.”

  E.A. stood at home plate, a slate shingle that had fallen off the roof of Gran’s eight-sided barn. Now he crowded the plate like Jimmy Collins, the great player-manager of the old Boston Americans, now he stepped out of the box and looked over the diamond like Teddy Ballgame, checking to see if they had the Shift on. Now he was Pudge Fisk in the sixth game of the ’75 Series, adjusting his batting glove, pulling down his sleeves, seconds away from blasting the shot heard round the world. He stepped back into the box and grinned out at Gypsy on the hill, which in fact was an abandoned anthill. Keeping up a steady chatter, atta girl, atta girl, come to mama, she glowered in at E.A., tipped back, and spun around, her long red hair swinging wildly. She kicked high, revealing under her Outlaws jersey one slender white thigh, and pitched. The BP ball, wound in black electrical tape, waterlogged, half again as heavy as a new baseball, sailed four feet over E.A.’s head and whanged into the southeast wall of the barn, patched with license plates Old Bill had purchased from Midnight Auto, putting a dent in New Mexico.

  The book on Gypsy Lee Allen was that she was wild in every way. Gypsy was just eighteen when she was knocked up, not in Knoxville but in Kingdom County, right down past Devil Dan’s, under the railroad trestle. One of her most popular early songs was called “Buck-Wild in the Back Seat of a ’54 Chevy.” She was wild off the mound, too. Four of her first five deliveries came nowhere near the strike zone, either hitting the dirt in front of the plate or caroming off the license plates on the barn. What’s more, though Gypsy Lee had pretty blue eyes that smiled like a cat’s when her hair was pulled back, she was nearsighted. She missed most of Ethan’s underhand tosses back to her, holding her arm straight out with the glove pocket up as if the ball were a pet bird she was trying to coax into landing on it.

  E.A. used a thirty-six-inch, thirty-eight-ounce Ethan Allen model bat made at the local factory, one that Earl No Pearl had split fighting off an inside pitch. Earl had taped it and given it to E.A.

  “Come to mama,” Gypsy said, sticking out Ethan’s glove and missing the ball by a foot.

  Out in the gap in left center, the Blade was throwing up a high wall of Kingdom County blue clay along the edge of the river. A little closer, standing in the asters in his black rubber barn boots, Old Bill had materialized. He looked like half of the painting American Gothic. Bill liked to shag balls when E.A. took BP, because it wasn’t work and it gave him an excuse to complain about getting farther behind. There he was in his slouch hat and suspenders, his mouth already going. E.A. couldn’t hear him over the Blade, but he knew what Bill was saying. “Hurry up and throw the ball, Gypsy. I ain’t got all day. The longer I stand here the behinder I get.”

  Gypsy wound up, lifting her hands high over her head. She threw the ball more like a shot put than a baseball. No amount of coaching on E.A.’s part ever made a difference. The pitch was outside, but E.A. swung anyway, just to swing at something. He missed.

  “There,” Gran called from the kitchen doorway. “You’re on your way, boy. You’ve got all the makings of a future Sox hitter.”

  Gran was watching E.A. through the 8× scope one of Gypsy’s RFD clients had mounted on Grandpa Gleason Allen’s deer rifle for her. Having someone look at him through a rifle scope made the hair stand up on the back of E.A.’s neck, particularly given the long-standing WYSOTT Allen gun safety policy of never keeping an unloaded firearm on the premises. Other boys’ grans sat around gossiping and telling tales of the olden days. They put up blackberry jelly and snap beans for the Kingdom Fair, complained to each other over the horn about their ailments and their neglectful grown children. Gran Allen read her Weekly World News and conducted a one-woman jihad against the Boston Red Sox and sighted in on E.A. with a loaded deer rifle.

  Gypsy threw the ball straight at his head. Luckily, she didn’t throw very hard. E.A. ducked and the ball bounced off a 1947 SEE VERMONT license plate. The next pitch landed on the barn roof. As it rolled back down, Ethan caught it behind his back, a trick he’d worked on with his rubber ball for hours every day last summer. Gypsy clapped.

  “Just what the Sox need,” Gran called out. “Another clown.” The next pitch was low but hittable. E.A. grounded it over the first-base bag, feeling the vibrating jolt of the rock-hard taped ball all the way up to his elbows. He dropped the bat and tore around the bases, crossing home just as Bill reached the ball. Bill picked up the baseball and stared at it as if it were a small meteorite newly fallen from the heavens. “What I don’t see,” he said, “is why a fella would want to smack at a ball with a stick and then race clear round Robin Hood’s barn just to get back where he started.”

  E.A. had an idea. “Wait a minute, ma. I’ll be right back.”

  He ran to the house, past Gran with the rifle scope still clapped to her eye, now watching the Blade down at the far end of the meadow, and climbed up to his sleeping loft. He reached under his pillow and took out the official American League baseball the drifter had given him. As E.A. came back out onto the stoop, Gran said, “That last hit was pathetic. It reminded me of the dribbler Buckner booted in ’eighty-six, just when I was beginning to regain strength in my legs again. That set me back another decade.”

  Upriver from where Devil Dan was building the dike, the white-headed fish hawk that nested on top of the water tank hit the river hard and came up with a sucker in its talons.

  “Try this one, ma.”

  E.A. flipped the new ball to Gypsy and she actually caught it. There was something about a brand-new baseball, he thought, that defined newness. Just the way a brook trout in its spawning colors defined prettiness and Devil Dan Davis defined meanness.

  “Where’d you get this, hon?”

  “A fella gave it to me.”

  Gypsy was too nearsighted to read the inscription. “What fella, sweetie? One of the Outlaws?”

  “A fella up off the railroad tracks. A drifter.”

  “Oh, hon. Some of those old drifters are very perverted men.”

  “More than the Reverend?”

  “Well. Maybe not more than the Reverend. But I don’t want you holding commerce with railroad tramps, Ethan.”

  “I wasn’t holding commerce with him. He was standing by the barn and I went out to run him off the property and he gave me the ball.”

  Gypsy bit her lip. “What did he look like?”

  Ethan thought. “Like a ball player.”

  “What does a ball player look like?”

  “He wears pinstripes and a cap with the letters NY on it,” Gran called out.

  E.A. got set at the plate. “It’s an official American League ball, ma. One of those lively balls. Earl says you can drive a lively ball twenty, thirty feet farther than what the Outlaws use for baseballs.”

  “You sure you want to practice with it? It’ll get all scuffed up.”

  “I jus
t aim to give it one good lick.”

  “You better aim better than last time,” Gran said.

  “I don’t know about this, hon. This is a special ball. Like our special place up on the mountain.”

  Gypsy tossed the official baseball up into the air six inches and stuck out E.A.’s glove. “Oops.”

  The ball rolled to a stop at the foot of the anthill mound. Gypsy picked it up and bit her upper lip with her lower teeth. Most people bite their lower lip with their upper teeth. Not Gypsy. Leave it to a WYSOTT Allen, E.A. thought. Gypsy’s teeth were as white as the osprey’s head. Why she hadn’t made it to Music City yet, Ethan couldn’t imagine. Unless it was him. Taking care of him.

  “One lick,” he said, leveling the taped bat over the plate waist-high to show where he wanted the pitch. “Try throwing out of the stretch.”

  Gypsy nodded. Just behind E.A.’s forehead, where he heard the Colonel’s voice, the Voice of the Red Sox said, “It’s the last of the ninth at Fenway, folks. The final game of the World Series, with the bases loaded and the Sox down by three. Allen’s coming to the plate . . .”

  Gypsy looked in at the imaginary catcher. She shook off his first sign, shook off another, nodded, came to the set position. Checked the runners.

  “Fling the ball, Gypsy,” Bill whined. “As much as I’m backed up on my chores, I ain’t got all day to stand out here in the cowpies while you make up your mind.”

  Gypsy pitched the baseball. Which, glory be, came right down the pipe over the heart of the plate. E.A. kept his hands back exactly the way the drifter had told him and waited on it and swung. He caught the ball on the fattest part of the bat and sent it high over Old Bill’s head. Bill looked up with his mouth open as the ball kept going and going until at last it landed far out in the meadow where the Blade had dozered the grass down to raw clay. E.A. was astonished. Already he was thinking of running overstreet for Bumper’s tape measure. He’d never hit a ball that far in his life. Maybe not even half that far.

  “Wow,” Gypsy said. “Wowee! You’ve got your batting shoes on, hon. Where’d it go?”

  Ethan was running now, out past shortstop, past Bill. There in the blue clay was the ball, buried halfway up its seams. And here came the Blade, martial music blasting.

  “No,” E.A. shouted. He broke toward the ball like a base runner breaking for second. Gypsy arrived just in time to snatch him back.

  As the monstrous yellow bulldozer came on, Devil Dan’s voice blasted out of the loudspeaker. “Stand clear, boy. This machine will dozer you down to Chiny.”

  The white baseball disappeared under the treads of the D-60, which continued down the meadow. E.A. ran up to where the ball had landed. All he could find was the muddy horsehide cover, the writing and birthday inscription no longer visible. It hung from his hand, as limp as shoe leather. For the first time in three or four years he started to cry.

  The D-60 had turned around at the far end of the meadow and was proceeding back in their direction, a windrow of blue clay curling away from the huge steel blade.

  Through his tears E.A. did not see how Gypsy got there. But she was standing in the path of the oncoming machine, hands on her hips, refusing to move. “Come ahead,” she shouted. “Run over me, you impotent little rat’s prick.”

  “You go, girl,” Gran screeched from the doorway. “You tell him where the bear shit in the buckwheat, Gypsy Lee.”

  “Get outen my way, hoor,” Devil Dan shouted through the loudspeaker.

  When Gypsy didn’t, Dan shut off his machine and climbed out onto the top step. “You and your little bastard get off my premises or I’ll run you off with this Cat.”

  “This isn’t your property, it’s ours,” Gypsy shouted back. “There’s a place in hell for you, Devil Dan. To deliberately run over a little boy’s baseball.”

  “A curse on you and yours, Dan Davis,” Gran screamed. “Unto the seventh generation.”

  Dan stood on the top step of his machine and shook his little fist. He was dancing mad. E.A. could see his feet going up and down in place, like the feet of a wind-up toy.

  “You and your bastard get offen my property,” Dan shouted again, feet hopping.

  “This is Allen land. You’re on our land,” Gypsy shouted back.

  “What’s going on here?” It was R.P.—Rolling Pin Davis—cruising down the meadow, holding her housedress up to the tops of her high buttoned shoes. In her other hand she wielded the formidable culinary instrument from which her name derived.

  Whipping her Outlaws jersey up over her head and flinging it down at her feet, Gypsy stood in the meadow in her birthday suit, except for a tiny yellow G-string. Gypsy’s breasts were not much larger than a young girl’s and she had freckles on her shoulders. “Here I am, Devil Davis,” she shouted. “I guess you didn’t get enough of me last night. Or if you did you forgot to leave the twenty dollars on my dresser. Pony up. You owe me twenty bucks.”

  “What’s this all about?” R.P. demanded. “Put your shift back on, Gypsy Lee.”

  “Not until your wayward husband pays me. He wanted me to dance buck-naked for him last night. Then he stiffed me. That was the only stiff thing about him.”

  “I never—” Devil Dan said, his shiny little dress shoes going fast on the top step of the Blade.

  “Look, he wants to dance,” Gypsy said. “I’ll dance for him.”

  She ran up the steps of the Blade, shoved Dan out of the way, clambered onto the roof of the yellow cab, and began to do a furious jig. “Here’s the River Dance,” she screamed. Gran began to clap rhythmically. “The same one we did bare-naked together last night, Devil Dan. Will you pay me for services rendered, or will I have to take you to small-claims court? Uh-oh. Here comes the judge.”

  R.P. bore down on the machine. She drew back her throwing arm and let fly with the rolling pin, which whistled through the air end over end like an old-fashioned hand grenade, grazing the top of Devil Dan’s fedora and crashing through the side window of the cab.

  “What are you doing, woman?” Dan shouted.

  R.P. clawed her way up the steps, following the rolling pin into the cab, where she set to work on the instrument panel. As R.P. hammered at the levers and gauges with the rolling pin and Gypsy danced and Gran screeched, Bill remarked, “Well, E.A., I got to get overstreet to the feed store now. You need anything from town?”

  Ethan, holding what was left of his official American League baseball, shook his head.

  6

  IT WAS RAINING in Kingdom County. The wind blew out of the west, off the Green Mountains, and the rain came riding in on the wind, falling steadily on Gran’s piney woods, bringing out the evergreen scent, falling on the scarred and ruined meadow by the river and on the brook that ran down the mountain, washing worms and bugs into the current, so the brook trout would bite like crazy in the morning, falling tick tick tick on the license plates Bill had used to patch the octagonal barn. E.A. lay in his loft bed and listened to the driving rain and thought over the events of the day. He decided to count his family’s blessings and thank Our Father for them, just the way Gypsy had taught him to. They had a falling-down house that they were cannibalizing for stove wood and a rig named Patsy. They had an eight-sided barn patched with license plates of places he longed to see, a barn where, on rainy days, he liked to read books like Kidnapped and Huckleberry Finn and to practice throwing his red rubber ball through the tire swing. He, personally, had the largest collection of Red Sox baseball cards in Kingdom County, also the leftover hide of an official American League baseball, also a Green Mountain bat with a cracked handle. He had a pretty young ma who wrote beautiful songs about wildwood flowers and knocked-up girls, who pitched him BP and took him fishing and stripped down to her birthday suit and did the River Dance on Devil Dan’s earthmoving machine in the broad light of day and, even now, as E.A. was counting his blessings, was sitting in the front parlor dressed as Little Nell, the Queen of the Gold Dust Saloon, drinking assorted Twining teas with Corporal
Colin Urquahart, in his full official regalia, from the RCMP barracks in Sherbrooke, Quebec. Corporal Urquahart was known more familiarly to E.A. as Sergeant Preston of the Yukon. Besides being one of Gypsy’s most faithful clients, the jovial Mountie was a great favorite of Ethan’s, bringing him air rifles and ice skates and hockey sticks and fishing rods, and E.A. was thankful for him, too. For all these blessings, E.A. thanked Our Father, tacking on a request that He reveal the name of Gone and Long Forgotten, if not now then soon.

  E.A. went straight from counting his blessings to reciting Our Father Who Art in Heaven. He had never been exactly sure what “deliver us from evil” meant, but he assumed it had something to do with revenge. Gypsy had enjoyed revenge that morning, setting R.P. on Devil Dan and the Blade. E.A., however, still had a score to settle. He and Dan weren’t even—not by a long shot. He would dump a ten-pound sack of Shurfine sugar in the gas tank of the Blade. He would set fire to Dan’s machine shed with the Blade inside it. He would shoot Devil Dan with Grandpa Gleason Allen’s deer rifle and hang him up by his little feet in Gran’s dooryard maple like a deer.

  E.A. began again. “Our Father who art in heaven . . . thy kingdom come . . .” Thy kingdom come must be Kingdom County, Our Father being somehow connected with the Colonel. E.A. no longer supposed that the Colonel actually was Our Father, or his father, either. But the Colonel had been as much a father to him as anyone had. The Outlaws, Earl and the boys, were more like indulgent uncles, or grown-up brothers, than fathers. Thinking about brothers sidetracked E.A. yet again, because he wished he had one, or even a sister. He seemed destined tonight not to get to the end of his prayers, so finally he just slammed through the whole shebang without thinking what any of the words meant, adding a quick P.S. wish for Gypsy to find a good man, like Randolph Scott or Jimmy Stewart in her song “A Good Man Like Randolph Scott or Jimmy Stewart Is Christly Hard to Find These Days,” and a P.P.S. for Gran to get her Series ring at last and be easier to live with, and finally for Devil Dan to fall off the Blade and get squashed under its treads like the official American League baseball.