Waiting for Teddy Williams

by Howard Frank Mosher

  Several of the ball players regularly called on Gypsy Lee, and E.A. supposed that the one he was looking for might have been an Outlaw. If so, he had mixed feelings about it. True, the townies were good old boys who paid him a nickel for every foul ball he shagged during BP, ten cents if he caught it on the fly, and let him go up to the plate and take ten raps when they were through. But when it came to baseball, E.A. was already something of an elitist. Even at eight years old, the birthday boy was certain that regardless of what the Common said, not one of the Outlaws had ever had the ghost of a chance of setting foot on a major-league baseball diamond, as he fully intended to do someday, and wearing a Red Sox uniform at that.

  “E.A.’s giving us the hairy eyeball again, Cy,” Elmer Kittredge said to the catcher. Elmer winked at E.A. “You’re up next, Bubba B. After me.”

  Bubba B was one of a dozen nicknames the Outlaws had devised for E.A., none of which met with his approval, but he was too happy to be hitting to care much. He swiped Elmer’s thirty-eight-inch Green Mountain Rebel and choked up three-quarters of the way to the trademark. Standing in to take his cuts, he felt right at home. This was where he belonged. He drove Porter Kittredge’s floating BP pitches out toward short, toward second, even pulled one down the line over third. The Outlaws nodded and said the ball jumped off his bat right quick for a shaver. That he had a right fast bat and he was one to watch. It felt good when the ball met the fat of Elmer’s old Rebel. Like the solid weight of a big brown trout on his line in the trestle pool.

  “That’s eight, E.A.,” Porter called in.

  He got just ten chances when he took BP with the Outlaws. If a pitch was wide or tight or high or in the dirt, he swung anyway. The tenth pitch was right in his wheelhouse, and he drove it into left field.

  With E.A. on the bench keeping the book, the Outlaws jumped out to a five-run lead in the first inning and never looked back. From his station in deep center, the Colonel watched the game with his usual bemused expression. A few cars honked when Elmer Kittredge hit the Colonel’s pedestal on the roll, and there was a flurry of polite horn taps when Earl No Pearl struck out the Memphremagog side on ten pitches in the third. But by then the Outlaws were far ahead. Though everyone knew that the competition wasn’t what it once had been, any baseball was better than no baseball. So the Colonel said anyway. The Colonel was also fond of saying that while change, like spring, came slower to the Kingdom than to the rest of Vermont, the day would certainly arrive when there’d be no town ball on the common at all.

  Then the game was over and the boy started home across the outfield grass.

  “Outlaws thirteen, Memphremagog two. New York fourteen, Boston five,” he told the Colonel on his way by, hoping for a hint in return. But the statue didn’t say a word, and E.A. was as much in the dark as he’d been when he first woke up that morning, remembering that he was no longer seven but eight.

  As the Colonel said, everything changed.

  2

  E.A. BEGAN TO RUN. First he ran around the darkening common a couple of times, bouncing off the balls of his feet, increasing his pace the second time around, pushing himself down the backstretch across from the baseball bat factory and the courthouse and the Kingdom Common Academy before heading out the county road toward Allen Mountain, looming dark against the twilit sky. East of the village he ran between the Kingdom River on his left and abandoned farms on his right, the fields fast growing up to puckerbrush. Earl No Pearl, who never ran except when he was legging out an extra-base hit, and then lumbering more than running, had told him that to stay in training, baseball players ran. So E.A. ran everywhere he went.

  In fact, he liked to run. First because he was good at it. At eight he could already outrun much older boys and often had to. Second because he wanted very much to stay in training so he could play for the Sox someday. And third because when he was running, once he hit his stride and was skimming over the cracked old macadam of the county road between the murmuring river and the brushy, disused farms, he no longer thought about his search, or the scoldings the Colonel gave him, or how much he detested Old Lady Benton and Sissy Quinn. He just thought about running.

  E.A. crossed the river on the M&B trestle because it was fun and he wasn’t supposed to. The 7:46 southbound hooted, but he had plenty of time before it arrived. He scanned the sand beside the trestle pool far below for the tracks of deer, moose, railroad tramps. All he saw was a neat set of raccoon prints and the long, three-pronged indentations of a great blue heron. Across the river he followed the tracks past the old water tank to where the dirt road off Allen Mountain crossed the M&B line. A number of people had been killed there: a farmer in a stalled hay truck, a hobo who fell asleep on the tracks, some kids in a hot rod racing the train to the crossing. The freight rumbled by. As it passed, E.A. read the names on the cars. Gaspe and North Shore. Pine Tree State. Burlington Northern. Santa Fe. Baltimore and Ohio. Southern. Canadian National. Gypsy had taught him how to sight-read from these names, and as often as he’d seen them they still thrilled him.

  Gran’s place sat in an overgrown field at the base of the mountain, just past Devil Dan Davis’s automobile junkyard. Gran’s house and eight-sided barn were weathered as gray as the big granite boulders that had tumbled down into the back field from the mountain over the eons. The dooryard was overrun with weeds, but Gypsy Lee had set out some potted begonias—red, yellow, and orange—compliments of an RFD Escort client who worked at a greenhouse in Memphremagog. Gypsy’s rig, the Late Great Patsy Cline, assembled from a ’51 Chevy, a ’53 Ford, and a ’78 Pontiac, was parked on the drive sloping up to the hayloft of the barn. Named after Gypsy’s all-time favorite singer, the Late Great Patsy Cline faced downhill so that Gypsy could pop the clutch and jump-start her on the run. That was the only way she would start.

  “You’re late, boy,” Gran said when E.A. banged in to the kitchen. “Where have you been? Over in the village consorting with those good-for-nothing baseballers, no doubt.”

  “I wasn’t consorting. I was looking.”

  “What for?”

  “That’s for me to know and you to find out.”

  “Shameful. To speak so to a crippled old woman. Never mind. I know what you were looking for. And who. And you’re not about to find him, for he’s Gone and Long Forgotten.”

  Gran cackled, her little round black eyes fall of humor and malice, as she peered up at him from the old-fashioned wicker wheelchair with big wooden wheels, to which she had been confined since her stroke, caused by Bucky Dent’s fateful home run in 1978.

  “If he’s gone, why doesn’t he have a regular stone?” E.A. said.

  “Because he doesn’t merit a stone. You’ll go the same way if you continue to seek out bad companions. Not to mention playing baseball day and night. The devil’s pastime.”

  “Why the devil’s pastime?”

  “Did you ever know any good to come of it? Disappointed hopes, is all.”

  “Where’s Gypsy Lee?”

  “Primping.”

  “Who for?”

  “How should I know? Where’s my newspaper?”

  “I forgot it.”

  “I expected no less.”

  “I’ll pick it up tomorrow.”

  “Don’t bother. Why should a crippled old woman have her newspaper? Her one small pleasure.”

  E.A. took a rolled-up tabloid out of the hip pocket of his jeans and dropped it in Gran’s lap. The Weekly World News. Her black eyes snapped as she read the front-page headline: PRESIDENT GREETS ALIENS ON WHITE HOUSE LAWN. The accompanying photograph showed the chief executive watching a gigantic saucer hovering just over the Rose Garden.

  Gran’s face was as wizened and sour as a dried crab apple. As Gypsy had explained to E.A., Bucky Dent’s pop-fly home run had been the perfect excuse for Gran to take to her wheelchair, even though there wasn’t the least thing wrong with her. Moreover, Gran claimed that the unwelcome surprise of getting pregnant after she believed she was safely past childbeari
ng age—Gran detested children almost as much as she detested the Red Sox—had further contributed to her permanent posttraumatic stress. “I was going through the change when I had your mother,” she liked to tell E.A. with grim satisfaction. “That’s probably what’s wrong with Gypsy Lee.” E.A. didn’t think there was anything wrong with Gypsy Lee. He couldn’t imagine a better mother, and the only change he’d ever detected in Gran was a rather steady progression over the years from mean to meaner.

  Gypsy Lee came in from the parlor. “Hi, sweetie.” She ruffled E.A.’s hair and patted Gran on the shoulder and straightened the frayed throw rug on the old woman’s lap. Noticing the tabloid headline, she laughed.

  “Stranger things have happened,” Gran said.

  “Like what?” E.A. said, as Gypsy began to fry bologna slices for supper.

  “Do you think the News would print it if it wasn’t fit to print?” Gran said.

  Gypsy winked at E.A. “I can’t decide who to be tonight,” she said. “Any ideas?”

  Gran turned the page. Tami Janis Kage, a twenty-one-year-old model in a bikini from Brisbane, Down Under, smiled up at E.A. Gypsy looked at Tami Janis over Gran’s shoulder. “There we go. Bingo.”

  E.A. grabbed his fried bologna sandwich, got his red rubber ball and the old Rawlings glove with the padding leaking out that he’d found under the melting snow on the green three springs ago, and went out to the dooryard. He began to replay the Sox’s most recent victory over New York, a month and a half before, throwing the rubber ball against the side of the house and catching it to represent each play. “Twenty-seven Outs” he called this game. As E.A. worked his way through the innings, Gran wheeled herself to the kitchen door, propped it open with her chair, and watched with bleak interest. On the slanted roof above the sideways window of his loft bedchamber, a row of young sparrow hawks, hatched out earlier that summer under the rotting eaves, waited for their parents to feed them. High overhead in the evening sky the dark, short-winged chimney swifts that lived in the village church steeple soared and dipped.

  In the top of the seventh E.A. hobbled a ball on the short hop. “Do that often enough, and you can play for the Sox yourself someday,” Gran called out.

  As E.A. retired the final Yankee hitter in the last of the ninth, a car pulled into the dooryard. There was just enough light left to read its front plate: JESUS 2. The Reverend got out. “Pastoral house call,” he announced. “Is Mother at home?”

  “No,” E.A. said. “She just left for Brisbane.”

  Gypsy Lee stepped out into the dooryard in a blond wig and a short gold lamé dress. “G’d evening, mate,” she said. “Tami Janis, from Down Under.”

  “Catch,” E.A. said, whizzing the rubber ball past the Reverend’s head.

  “Here. Here now,” said the Reverend, hurrying inside with Tami.

  By now it was too dark to catch his ball, so E.A. went inside to play high, low, jack, and the game with Gran while Gypsy entertained the Reverend in the parlor. E.A. won five hands and Gran won six. Then E.A. went up the loft stairs to bed with a jelly glass of milk and two Pop-Tarts he’d bought at the dented-can store where he’d gotten Gran’s newspaper. He pulled the string of the single bulb hanging from the ceiling. In the glaring light the poster of Ted on his door was bright and alive-looking. Ted was leaning on a bat in the on-deck circle at Fenway, giving the eyeball to a very young-looking pitcher in a White Sox uniform. No doubt Ted was already planning where he would drive the ball.

  E.A. reached under his bed and pulled out the White Owl cigar box containing his baseball cards. Most were ragged and stained and dog-eared. Not one could be graded Mint or even Good. Many he’d won by flipping for them in the dives where Gypsy Lee sang on weekends. His favorite was a recent Topps, in near-Good condition, of the great Sox manager G. P. “Spence” Spencer, known to the Red Sox Nation of Greater Boston and New England as “the Legendary Spence.” Spence had won more games than any other manager in the history of the Red Sox franchise, and it was E.A.’s dream to play for him someday. In all he had one hundred and twenty-four cards, most of them Red Sox, many of which he could identify by touch from a turned edge, a crease, a bit of bubble-gum residue, or a missing corner.

  He slid the White Owl box back under his bed. He snapped off the light and went to his dormer window and looked out over the dooryard at the WYSOTT family cemetery. The moon was not quite full. In its white light the granite stones gleamed pale. The small cedar-wood slab they called Gone and Long Forgotten was just visible in the moonglow. E.A. turned away from the window, shucked off his Keds and jeans, and got into bed.

  “Our Father,” he began with the best of intentions, but before he reached “Give us this day” he was murmuring, “It’s the last of the ninth in the seventh game of the World Series, folks. The next pitch will tell the story. The young batter from Vermont is set. The pitcher is ready . . .” Who was the pitcher? He could see himself waiting in the batter’s box, but the pitcher wasn’t clear. “He comes to the set. Checks the runners, kicks, and delivers . . .” Then the unmistakable sound of straight-grained ash meeting horsehide and a roar expanding outward from Fenway through Boston, sweeping north over the towns and mountains of New Hampshire and Vermont to Kingdom Common, filling all New England. But exactly what it signified—long-awaited triumph or a long foul ball—Ethan E.A. Allen had no idea. The birthday boy was asleep.

  Sometime in the night he came suddenly awake. The moon had shifted around so that its light was coming directly through the slantwise window, falling onto the bare pine planks of the loft floor. The moonlight on the floorboards reminded him of a story Gran liked to tell from her girlhood. As a small child (she said), she’d waked up one night, in the very loft where E.A. now slept, to behold a man standing, sopping wet with his own blood, in the moonlight at the foot of her bed. She didn’t recognize him, and after a while he was gone. But the next morning, when Gran told her ma, ma showed the little girl a photo of her dead pa, Outlaw Allen, killed in a running gun battle with revenuers. He was the gory fellow she’d seen standing at the foot of her bed.

  “I swear before God above, E.A., there was a bloodstain on the floor when I woke up,” Gran always concluded the story. E.A. had never been able to make out the stain, but it was a scary story, and a strange one for a grandmother to tell her only grandson.

  E.A. got up and walked across the floor to the window, his arms and legs pale in the moonlight. Outside, everything looked the same. The Reverend’s car, JESUS 2, was still parked in the dooryard near Gran’s old-fashioned pump, where the Allens drew their water. Beyond, the graveyard stones gleamed faintly. The abandoned hay-loader down in the meadow looked like a big school slide. Along the river the black willows were shrouded in fog.

  Then E.A. saw him. He was leaning against the grill of Gypsy’s rig at the top of the barn highdrive, looking up at the house. He wore what looked like an old suit jacket over a tieless shirt that might once have been white and old slacks baggy in the moonlight. The red pinpoint of a lighted cigarette stood out against his face. At first E.A. thought he was one of Gypsy’s callers. But except for Patsy Cline and the fool’s JESUS 2, there was no other vehicle in the yard. E.A. watched the man watch the house. His hair was cut short, not quite a brush cut, but flattened off straight and stiff on top, like Mickey Mantle’s and Whitey Ford’s, in E.A.’s Illustrated History of Major League Baseball. What he looked like was a drifter, up off the M&B line wanting a back-door handout. E.A. didn’t like him smoking that close to the buildings. If a match or a smoldering butt got loose, the whole shooting match, house and barn and all, could go up in flames. He decided to run the drifter off the premises.

  He slipped into his jeans and sneakers and went downstairs, through the dark kitchen, outside and across the yard to the highdrive. The drifter was still there, smoking in the moonlight.

  “Gran doesn’t want people smoking around the buildings,” E.A. said.

  “You say?” The drifter’s voice was as raspy as
a chain saw. Like he’d already smoked a hundred million cigarettes and intended to smoke this one right down to the butt. Especially if someone told him not to.

  “I said, my gran doesn’t allow smoking on the place.”

  “Don’t she now?”

  “No, she doesn’t. You up off the freights?”

  The stranger puffed at his cigarette, narrowing his eyes to size up the boy through the smoke. In his chain-saw voice he said, “I saw you hit today. Overstreet on the common.” He shifted the cigarette between his lips a quarter inch without touching it. The tip flared. “Keep your hands back,” he said.

  E.A. looked at his hands. “What?”

  “Keep your hands set back even with your back shoulder until the ball gets there and you take your cut.”

  “I reckon I know what to do with my hands. I went six for ten today in BP. That’s two hundred percentage points better than Ted in ’forty-eight.”

  “If you keep your hands set back from the start,” the stranger said, “you won’t have to jerk them back just before you take your cut. That jerk throws off your swing.”

  The cigarette moved slightly. The man was tall. E.A. put him at six two. Maybe six three. Taller than any of the Outlaws by at least an inch.

  “What would you know about anybody’s swing?” E.A. said. “A drifter up off the railroad.”

  The outside light came on and the kitchen door opened. The drifter faded back into the barn entry as Gypsy and Tami Janis came out, Tami’s heels clacking on the wooden steps. E.A. didn’t see how this could be. Gypsy was Tami. No, by Jesum Crow. Tami was the Reverend—now removing the blond wig, now stepping out of the gold gown and high-heeled slippers.