by Tim Green
“I thought you were a supervisor.” Mr. Starr’s voice lost its shrill edge; in fact, it had a begging quality to it that seemed to surprise the guard as much as Ryder. “Can’t you help me?”
“I wish I could.” The security man’s eyes misted. “My mother is in a wheelchair. I understand how you feel.”
Mr. Starr just stared. Ryder thought of Star Wars and some mind-control trick, but the guard didn’t budge.
“Then let the boy in.” Mr. Starr’s voice was hypnotic, neither weak nor obnoxious, just strong and certain.
The guard shook his head. “I can’t do that.”
“But someone else can?” Mr. Starr asked.
The guard looked around and lowered his voice even more. He kept his hand down at his waist and held out one of the tickets they’d given. “If he happened to go to another gate and you weren’t there . . . well. I guess it might be hard to know he was even with you.”
Mr. Starr looked at Ryder and nodded. “Take it,” he whispered urgently, forcing the ticket into Ryder’s hand.
Ryder looked around before pinching the ticket in his fingers and slipping it into his pants pocket.
Slowly, the guard let himself back inside the gate, eyeing Mr. Starr warily until it clanked shut.
Mr. Starr used the control to rotate the chair until he faced Ryder. “Get going.”
“Alone?”
“Of course. You know what to do.”
“I don’t know . . . you’ll be okay?” Ryder didn’t feel comfortable at all going in alone.
“I’ll meet you back at the hotel.” Mr. Starr started to rumble off, cruising through the crowd, people parting for him right and left.
Ryder hurried to catch up. “That gate?”
Mr. Starr stopped his chair and flicked his eyes in the direction Ryder pointed. “Yes. That gate will work fine. Don’t worry. You can do this. Think of your mom.”
Ryder choked on the idea of her lying there with those beeping machines. He swallowed and straightened his back. “Okay. I’ll see you at the hotel.”
“Don’t forget me,” Mr. Starr said, “if he decides to take you home for dinner or something.”
Ryder flashed a smile back and he saw the smile in Mr. Starr’s eyes if not his face. The idea lifted his spirits and he bounced on his toes as he waited in line at the next gate over. He began to worry about someone asking where his parent was, but they ran their wand over him and took his ticket without a word besides “enjoy the game.” Ryder marched through the arch and up some stairs before he emerged inside the stadium. He blinked back the sun and shielded his eyes with a hand, locating the Braves’ dugout.
Ryder worked his way through the stands and finally made it to the crowded area around the dugout where people pushed and wormed their way for position on the rail. Ryder felt some elbows, but he was determined to get close. When he finally broke through two older men and got to the rail, Justin Upton, the Braves’ left fielder, was signing a couple gloves kids had brought before he held up his hands and disappeared into the dugout.
“Where’s Thomas Trent?” Ryder cried out to no one in particular, the signed ball clutched tight in his hand.
Freddie Freeman, the Braves’ first baseman, looked up as he hit the dugout steps, and chuckled. “Hey, kid, you won’t get Trenty. He never comes out of the bull pen during warm-ups, but Tim Hudson will sometimes sign something.”
Freeman disappeared and a string of other players filed into the dugout as the ushers began to shoo people away from the field toward their seats. Ryder clung to the rail with his free hand.
“Let’s see your ticket, kid.” A balding gray-haired usher put a thick hand on Ryder’s shoulder.
Ryder held his breath, not knowing if he was going to be kicked out. He reached in his pocket and held out his ticket.
“This is for 502 out in left field, kid, in the upper deck.”
“Is it near the bull pen?”
“Nowhere near it. You can’t get autographs in the bull pen anyway, kid. Sorry. Get going, now.” The usher didn’t sound mean.
“Can you tell me how I can get Thomas Trent’s autograph, mister?” Ryder held up his ball to show he was for real.
The usher’s face practically lit up. “Sure, kid. That’s easy.”
“It is?” Ryder’s blood raced. “How?”
“Autograph Day.”
“Autograph Day?”
“They have it every spring.” The usher was still beaming, but Ryder had a bad feeling.
“Like, it’s coming up?” Ryder asked.
The usher scowled. “Well, no, it was three weeks ago, but there’s always next year, kid.”
“But I need it now,” Ryder said.
“Well,” the usher said, brightening again, “just wait after the game by the players’ parking lot. Hold it through the fence and they sometimes will sign things. Depends on the day, how they played, that kind of thing, but . . .” He looked down at the ball Ryder was holding. “Hey, it looks like that thing already got signed.”
The usher eyed him suspiciously now.
“Yeah. I . . . wanted to get it again. I mean, another one.” Ryder knew waiting after the game by the players’ parking lot wasn’t an option.
“Okay, well, get to your seat, kid. This is the last time.”
Ryder hurried away, and he did go to his seat. He stayed and watched the game for a few innings. But Thomas Trent was a faceless figure whose number Ryder could barely make out in the bull pen. He watched Trent hit a double in the top of the sixth, driving in the only run so far in the game and lighting up the crowd. When the people around Ryder began to sit back down, he decided to leave. As he left the ballpark and crossed the street, he heard the roar of the crowd again and knew something big must have happened, maybe a home run. He tried to let the sound lift his spirits, but it didn’t, and as he walked through the front entrance to the hotel, tears blurred the faces of the two women at the front desk.
Part of Ryder was afraid to face Mr. Starr, because after all this, he had failed to get the job done. He felt certain he must have missed something obvious, something Mr. Starr would have figured out. It was unfair that Mr. Starr couldn’t get in when he had a ticket. It was unfair that his mother had been struck by a car. It was unfair that his father left them alone over twelve years ago and now he drove a Maserati.
Ryder opened the hotel room door with his key and saw Mr. Starr sitting near the window. “I’m back,” he said, his voice glum.
“So?” Mr. Starr replied in anticipation.
Ryder sat on the edge of the bed and explained what had happened.
“What will we do?” Ryder asked after silence settled in on the room.
“I don’t know, Ryder. I need to think. Set that iPad up on the stand here at the desk. Maybe I’ll play Candy Crush.”
“You’re not giving up?”
“I don’t give up.” Mr. Starr’s voice was so bitter that Ryder stood up and looked out the window, where he could make out the green steel beams and brick of the stadium through the treetops. Mr. Starr sat, muttering to himself about police brutality and corporations sucking the life out of sports. Ryder opened the window, and through it heard the cheers spilling out of the stadium again so that he knew someone must have made another big play. He sighed and wondered what was next, even though he was afraid to ask.
It made him crazy to just sit there, not talking, and watching Mr. Starr struggle with the iPad.
“Can’t I help?” Ryder asked.
“Nope.” Mr. Starr’s voice was a flat line, his limbs bent and jerky like a spider off of its web.
Ryder smelled the breeze and took in the sunshine. A truck rumbled past leaving behind a gray cloud of exhaust.
“Aha!” Mr. Starr exploded. “Aha! This is what we need. It’s what we needed all along! I had such a feeling. You see, when things look their very worst, those who keep going are rewarded. I’ve seen it all the time.”
“What reward?” Ryder turned
and peered over Mr. Starr’s shoulder. He had opened the Atlanta Journal and Constitution website.
“That’s what happens when you google. You don’t just google ‘Braves.’ You google ‘meet the players’ and google ‘autographs’ and regoogle ‘Braves players’ and google ‘contest’ and ‘autographs’ some more and then . . . then it happens. Just look!” Mr. Starr gave the machine a little shake with his crooked hand.
Ryder studied the screen. “It’s a preview for the Dodgers game today. I don’t get how that’s a reward. Is there something about Thomas Trent in the article?”
“Not the article. The ad!” Mr. Starr shook it again. “On the banner there. Read it.”
“The one for Baseball World?” Ryder knew about Baseball World. Back in New York, he’d heard his teammates talking about how their fathers took them to the one in Fort Lee, New Jersey, just over the George Washington Bridge.
“Yes.” Mr. Starr was quickly losing patience. “Read it.”
Ryder read aloud. “Batter Up, Braves Batboy Contest. It’s tomorrow.”
“Look at the prize.”
“Be batboy for the Braves when they take on the St. Louis Cardinals in a doubleheader on Saturday, April 26th. Hey, that’s the day after tomorrow.” Ryder tried to read Mr. Starr’s eyes. “So, I’m going to try and win this batting contest? Won’t there be hundreds of kids, thousands?”
“So? Why can’t you win it? I thought you were a good baseball player? I thought your mom always said you got that from your dad. He’s batting .313 this season. If you’re his son, you can win this.”
“What do you mean if, Mr. Starr?” Ryder grew hot. “Why would you even say that?”
“Just what I said. We don’t know.”
“We came all this way.”
“I know—”
“What will they even do at this contest?”
“Have you hit, what else? It’s a batting cage place, so you’ll bat in the cages.”
Ryder’s palms began to sweat. “I don’t even have a bat.”
“Well, we’ll have to get you one.”
“Maybe I should practice a little.”
“We’ll go there now and see what we can do.”
“How can you even do that?”
“They have buses and trains. We’ll get the bat at the mall and Baseball World is right on Peachtree so it can’t be too far from a bus stop. Don’t worry about that. It’s our chance. I know it is.”
While thousands of fans spent the afternoon at the Braves game, Ryder and Mr. Starr rode around on buses, got him a baseball bat and batting glove at Sports Authority in the mall, and found the closest stop to Baseball World. Signs for the contest were everywhere. It was for twelve-year-olds only and whoever could hit the biggest number of one hundred pitches from the machine would win. If there was a tie, they’d up the speed from seventy miles an hour to eighty-five and do a single-elimination contest. Kids could sign up online, or at the front desk. Ryder and Mr. Starr signed up at the desk. There was a thirty-nine-dollar entry fee. When they finished, they bought tokens for one hundred balls and found an empty cage in order to practice up for the contest.
Ryder swung his bat a few times to warm up, then he put a token in the red metal box next to the plate and the pitching machine whirred to life.
“You look like you know what you’re doing.” Mr. Starr spoke from where he sat, outside the cage.
“I haven’t done it but it looks pretty obvious.” The light went green on the box and Ryder stepped up to the plate. The pitching machine spit out a ball. Ryder could only blink as it clanked into the backstop behind him.
“You didn’t swing.” Mr. Starr let loose a squeak of a laugh. “That was pretty obvious.”
“The balls are yellow.” Ryder hit the pause button on the red box, crouched to pick up the ball from the concrete floor, and examined its dirty yellow surface. “And rubber.”
“Well, they get a lot of abuse. You don’t want them falling apart on you, right?”
“I wonder if it hits any different.” Ryder was speaking to himself.
“A sphere is a sphere,” Mr. Starr commented.
Ryder pressed Start, stepped up to the plate again, and this time hammered the pitch right back at the machine.
“That looked like a pro.”
Ryder had to smile. He felt good and quickly got into a rhythm. Token after token he deposited into the machine and before they knew it, the red light went on, and he had no more tokens.
“How many do you think I hit out of those?” Ryder shouldered the bat and let himself out of the cage.
“You hit eighty-seven—that’s if you include the nicks, the foul balls, and I gave you the benefit of the doubt on that first ball you let through.”
Ryder nodded and began rolling Mr. Starr’s chair back toward the clubhouse.
“Let’s ask and see what won it last year. I gotta believe eighty-seven could take the cake,” Mr. Starr said.
They asked. The man behind the cash register was busy and he glanced up at them, doing a double take before he forced his eyes away from Mr. Starr’s frozen face. “Uh, well, there were three kids tied. They all hit ninety-nine, then we did a sudden death with the machine on big league speed. It only took four of those before there was only one guy left and he won.”
“Wait,” Ryder said, “ninety-nine?”
“Yeah. I get kids in here all the time. There’s a knack to it, but I think it’s mostly concentration. That’s a lotta balls to hit, you know? Well, you do know because you just hit a hundred. How’d you do?”
“Uh, eighty-seven,” Ryder said.
“Ouch,” the man said.
Ryder looked at Mr. Starr. “Ouch is right.”
After a quick dinner, Ryder and Mr. Starr took the bus back to the hotel just as the moon peeked up over the shoulder of the stadium as if to keep watch. Ryder pushed the wheelchair up the street into the face of a hot and dusty breeze. Two dark figures walked along the other side of the street, mumbling to each other and drinking something from a paper bag. Ryder hurried along. By the time they got to the air-conditioned room, Mr. Starr looked exhausted.
Ryder helped Mr. Starr into bed before washing up himself and collapsing into the bed by the window. He lay there in the dark for a long while and could hear the sound of the traffic on I-85 even over the steady hum of the air-conditioning unit. Ryder sighed louder than he intended.
“Can’t sleep?” Mr. Starr’s voice rose up from the darkness like a ghost.
“Ninety-nine, that’s all I can think of. That and I wish there was another way. Couldn’t we just try and go to his house?”
“Maybe if you hadn’t pulled your stunt at Yankee Stadium,” Mr. Starr snapped at Ryder. “We’re on thin ice. If the police get a hold of us rolling around inside Country Club of the South, they won’t just send us back to our hotel. They’ll make some inquiries up in New York and they’ll find out you’re a fugitive.”
“I’m not a fugitive.” Ryder hated the sound of the word.
“Really? You’re on paid leave?” Mr. Starr’s voice hung in the darkness.
“Mr. Starr, Doyle says he’ll get everything taken care of. This is all hard. Do you have to sound so crabby?”
The silence swelled all around him and Ryder began to regret his words.
“Tomorrow, I’ll buy you a cupcake.” Mr. Starr sounded sweet, but Ryder could tell he was forcing it.
Ryder burst out laughing and Mr. Starr brayed like a donkey. They laughed themselves out until it grew quiet again and Mr. Starr sighed.
“Go to sleep, Ryder. Tomorrow? You’re going to hit a hundred.”
“A hundred? How do you know?”
Mr. Starr sucked in some air, then yawned. “I just know. Our luck is bound to change. Now go to sleep.”
They got up early and had breakfast in the dining room off the hotel lobby. Ryder wasn’t too hungry, but managed a bit of Raisin Bran and a glass of orange juice. Mr. Starr seemed like he was getting read
y to attend a birthday party and he practically bubbled with confidence.
“I’m nervous.” Ryder made his confession as he wheeled Mr. Starr to the bus stop, the bat laid out over the handles of the wheelchair.
“Of course you are,” Mr. Starr said cheerfully. “You’re supposed to be. That’s going to help you win this thing. It’s all going to happen, Ryder.”
“Mr. Starr?” Ryder stopped on the curb beneath the orange-and-blue-and-yellow MARTA sign.
“Yes?”
“I think I liked it better when you were crabby,” Ryder said. “It makes me less nervous.”
“I don’t care about you being nervous. I just told you that. You’re supposed to be. Everything is riding on this.”
“Jeez, Mr. Starr.”
“Did you bring your baseball?” Mr. Starr asked.
“What? No.” Panic filled Ryder.
“Well, why not?”
“Because . . . I’m not going to see Thomas Trent at this thing.”
“No, but it’s luck. It’s an inspiration. Go get it.”
“The bus will be here.” Ryder’s palms were sweating.
“Just go. You need that ball.” Mr. Starr wasn’t kidding.
“Mr. Starr?” Ryder hollered back. He was already jogging down the sidewalk back toward the hotel.
“I’m fine!” Mr. Starr shouted.
Ryder crossed the street, burst into the hotel, scrambled to their room, and dug the baseball out of his bag. He flew out of the room and sprinted back down the street, circling the stadium to where the bus would stop. The woman at the front desk had told them that the buses weren’t as regular on a day where there wasn’t any game, so he had no idea if he’d miss it or not. Ryder’s side hurt and his throat burned. He saw the bus appear and round the corner where the stop was. He found a new gear and ran even faster, clutching the ball tight. When the bus came into view, he saw it had its wheelchair ramp out, but Mr. Starr was half on and half off of it, toggling his control back and forth.
As Ryder approached, he could hear the bus driver’s shouts for Mr. Starr to stop fooling around. In the huge rectangular mirror up by the bus’s front door Ryder could see the red, angry face of the driver looking back at Mr. Starr before he threw his hands in the air. Ryder huffed and gasped. He grabbed hold of the handles and pushed the chair up the ramp.