“God Jesus, will you look at that,” the drifter said in a low voice. “Will you just take a gander at that, now.” He spit out his butt, took one short step, and crushed it under his beat-up work shoe, as if he were grinding the life out of the cross-dressing Reverend.
“Ta-ta,” Gypsy said.
Just before the fool got into JESUS 2, he lifted his hand palm outward and intoned, “May the Lord bless you and keep you and make His everlasting light to shine upon you.”
As the Reverend drove away, Gypsy snickered and said something that sounded to E.A. like “horse’s ass.” Then she stepped back inside the house and the light went off.
The dooryard was quiet. The drifter continued to stare at the house. He shook his head. Then he looked back at E.A. “So you like baseball.”
“You bet I do,” E.A. said. “I intend to go all the way to the top.”
“When you get there,” the drifter said, “you won’t have time to jerk back your hands and swing. Assume your stance.”
“What?”
“Take a make-believe bat and assume your batting stance.” Hesitantly, E.A. did as he was instructed. “That’s right,” the drifter said. “Now. You want to start out with your hands back here.”
He took E.A.’s hands and moved them back six inches. He smelled like tobacco, beer, sweat, and the wool of his old-fashioned suit jacket.
The man stepped back, surveyed E.A., and nodded. “Now you’re a hitter.”
E.A. experimented, moving his hands up and back, up and back. “It doesn’t feel natural,” he said. “Starting with them clear back there.”
“It will. After two, three days, it’ll feel as natural as riding your bike.”
“I don’t have a bike,” E.A. said.
The drifter looked at him curiously. At the crossing the 5:15 A.M. local whistled. The man looked off in the direction of the train whistle as he rummaged in his suit jacket. He brought out something that glistened white in the moonlight and tossed it to E.A. The boy’s hands closed around the seams. He stared, unbelieving. ★ OFFICIAL ★ AMERICAN LEAGUE, the writing said in the moonlight. He smelled it. Genuine horsehide. Hand-stitched. The real article. A major-league baseball.
When E.A. looked up, the drifter was walking across the meadow toward the tracks, his long, cuffless pant legs swishing through the wet grass.
“Hey. Hey, mister!” E.A. trotted partway down the meadow. He could see the local coming, its headlamp glaring through the fog. Indistinct in the river mist, the drifter was trotting alongside an open boxcar. In a smooth, practiced maneuver, he swung aboard the train and vanished.
The local hooted again. E.A. tossed the baseball up in the air and caught it. On the side opposite ★ OFFICIAL ★ AMERICAN LEAGUE he read, in large blue printed letters, HAPPY BIRTHDAY ETHAN.
3
“‘IT IS A TRUTH universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.’”
Gypsy sat at the kitchen table in the number 8 Outlaws jersey Earl No Pearl had given her, homeschooling E.A. from the classics. They had just started Pride and Prejudice, and E.A. could already tell that it was likely to be heavy sledding. Gran would have rescued him. Gran hated the classics, every last one of them. But she was sleeping in, recuperating from the Red Sox’s loss to New York the day before.
Gypsy took a sip of coffee from the sixteen-ounce plastic cup Earl had brought her with the picture of his eighteen-wheeler, which had Gypsy Lee’s name embossed on its side in red. Earl hauled the Green Mountain Rebel factory’s genuine, real-wood, white ash baseball bats to unlikely-sounding places like Muncie, Indiana, and Tupelo, Mississippi. Besides the personalized thermal coffee cup, he’d brought Gypsy all kinds of other souvenirs from the open road, including several belt buckles as big as saucers, in the shapes of leaping deer, crossed shotguns, and more eighteen-wheelers, which Gypsy wore with her size-two jeans; baseball caps embroidered with the names of truck stops from coast to coast; and tapes of Gypsy’s favorite singers. Earl No Pearl had promised to take E.A. on a cross-country road trip with him in the Gypsy Lee when he turned twelve. “We’ll have us a time, I and you,” he’d said, winking at E.A. and looking at Gypsy out of the tail of his eye. “See some good country, listen to the ball games over the radio. Get us some of that Californy poontang.” E.A. wasn’t sure what Californy poontang was but he looked forward to the trip with Earl, seeing good country and listening to baseball as they rolled west.
“Ma, is Earl in possession of a good fortune?” E.A. said.
Gypsy laughed. “Earl still owes forty-nine thousand, eight hundred, and seventy-four dollars on the Gypsy Lee. He isn’t in want of a wife, either. He’s already paying alimony to two that I know of.”
“Speaking of Earl, I thought maybe you’d throw me a little BP this morning.”
Gypsy ruffled E.A.’s hair, the same fire-engine red as hers. “What morning when the temperature’s over twenty below don’t you want me to throw you a little BP, sweetie? Okay. We’ll compromise. How about a little field trip? A little nature walk, get some life science in. What do you say?”
“Throw fingers? You win, we take the nature walk. I win, you pitch me BP.”
“Okey-dokey,” Gypsy said. “Rock beats scissors, scissors beats paper, paper beats rock. Ready?”
E.A. nodded.
“I’ll count,” Gypsy said. “One. Two. Three.”
On three she threw three fingers, and E.A. one. Three—paper—covered one, rock, so she won. Gypsy was a veteran sleight-of-hand artist, like Gran before her. She’d wait a split second to see how many fingers E.A. was throwing, then throw whatever beat him. She was so quick he could never catch her at it. She did the same at cards. Nobody could cheat at high, low, jack, and the game as skillfully as Gypsy Lee.
Still, it was worth trying. “Cut the cards? All or nothing?” E.A. offered.
“Sure,” Gypsy said. “High card wins.” She shuffled the worn deck of Playmate playing cards Earl had brought back from the P and K Service Center in Reno, Nevada. She handed the deck to E.A., who shuffled, set it on the table, and cut. He drew the jack of diamonds he’d spotted shuffling. Pretty good. He handed the pack to Gypsy, who drew the queen of hearts. E.A.’s face fell.
“Hey,” Gypsy said. “Look. Who says we can’t have our cake and eat it, too? Let’s take our coffee up to our special place, do a little field-tripping, then, when the grass starts to dry out in the meadow, I’ll pitch to you. Okey-dokey?”
E.A. grinned. “Okey-dokey.”
They started up the path beside the barn where E.A. had seen the drifter the night before. This morning that seemed like a dream. Gypsy, barefoot, still in her Outlaws jersey, went ahead of him a few steps. She’d brought along her old Gibson in case she was inspired to do some composing. E.A. considered telling her about the drifter. But somehow he wanted last night to stay between him and the stranger.
Above Old Bill the hired man’s trailer they passed through the piney woods, which smelled green and fresh in the early dew, though the season was too far along for many birds to sing, just a lone ovenbird. They came out of the pines into the maple orchard, overgrown with brush, the tops blown out of many of the larger trees.
Their special place was just above the maple orchard and just below the first steep pitch of the mountain. It was a clearing in the woods about the size of a baseball diamond, which Bill called the high mowing meadow, though no one had mowed there in years. From here, on clear summer nights, Gypsy had taught E.A. the names of the stars and constellations. She’d explained the Big Bang theory and told him the old Greek myths about the constellations. Looking over at the Presidential Range of New Hampshire’s White Mountains from the high mowing meadow, he’d learned the names of the early presidents—Washington, Madison, Jefferson. Gypsy had told him about Thomas Jefferson’s beautiful slave mistress, Sally, who was also his deceased wife’s half sister. And about George Washington’s wooden false teeth. For a time when he was small,
E.A. thought the jagged peaks with snow on them eleven or twelve months of the year actually were the presidents.
On mornings like today, when the dew was heavy, E.A. and Gypsy sat on a gray boulder in the shape of a crouching lion at the top of the meadow. Gypsy had explained that the lion-shaped boulder had been deposited there ten thousand years ago by the Great Wisconsin Ice Sheet. E.A. was the only eight-year-old in Kingdom County, homeschooled or otherwise, who could tell you the difference between an esker and a drumlin. When Gypsy first read him “The Fall of the House of Usher” and came to the part where crazy old Usher’s house collapsed into the tarn, he’d known what a tarn was.
Gypsy Lee Allen was as smart as a whip. She knew all about things like the Great Wisconsin Ice Sheet and Edgar Allan Poe because she had gone away to the state university on scholarship for a year before she got pregnant with E.A. and had to come home to support him and herself with Gypsy Lee’s RFD Escort Service, Inc. She’d even written a country song called “Knocked Up in Vermont.” Then, guessing that nobody would buy another song with the word Vermont in the title after “Moonlight in Vermont,” she’d changed the title to “Knocked Up in Knoxville.”
As the sun came up behind the Presidential Range, Gypsy strummed her guitar and sang a few bars.
“Knocked up in Knoxville;
Made up in Memphis;
Hitched up in Nashville,
Tennessee.”
Gypsy had a clear, strong voice, with every bit as much vibrato as Loretta Lynn’s, and E.A. thought the title change was a good one. Even so, he couldn’t imagine Music Row buying a song that began “Knocked up in Knoxville,” or WSM, the Voice of the Grand Old Opry, playing it over the American airwaves. But the crowds at the bars and roadhouses where Gypsy sang loved it no matter how many times she performed it for them. She’d dedicated “Knocked Up in Knoxville” to E.A.
They watched the sun light up Kingdom County. It sparkled off the village church steeple and the slate roof of the courthouse. It brought out the emerald of the grass in Gran’s meadow and the sheen of the river and the silvery blue surface of Memphremagog, the big lake to the north that stretched twenty miles into Canada between tall peaks.
The rising sun lit up the yellowing tops of the sugar maples below them, and it glinted off all the glass and chrome and shining metal of the old cars and pickups and cranes and logging skidders and dozers and backhoes and draglines and tractors in Devil Dan Davis’s Midnight Auto Junkyard.
Gypsy hummed a new song she was working on called “Nobody’s Child.” E.A. looked off at the September snow on New Hampshire’s Mount Washington. Gypsy had told him that the highest wind in the world had been recorded there, 231 mph, in 1934.
“Look, hon.”
Near the edge of the maple orchard a woodchuck had popped out of its hole. E.A. put his fingers in his mouth and whistled. The chuck swiveled its sleek head around and whistled back. E.A. made an imaginary rifle with his hands. Bang. He and Gypsy had shot more than one hundred chucks this past summer with Grandpa Gleason Allen’s 30.06. Orton and Norton Horton, the state boys who lived with Devil Dan Davis and his wife, R.P., called E.A. a woodchuck because his family ate them, just as they ate muskrats and crawfish and whatever else they could shoot or catch. Chucks from the mountain meadows of Kingdom County had a diet of clover and wild grasses and were as flavorful and clean to eat as western beef, but that didn’t cut any ice with Orton and Norton.
Gypsy stopped picking her guitar. She nudged Ethan and grinned. Gypsy Lee Allen was twenty-six, but when she grinned at Ethan, she looked about fourteen. A low-flying gray hawk, a male harrier, was gliding over the field, tracing the contours of the ground, occasionally dipping down so that its wings nearly touched the grass to see if he could flush out a mouse or a snake for breakfast. The chuck sat in the sun with its back to the approaching hawk. Gypsy nudged E.A. again.
The harrier made two strong wing beats and picked up the woodchuck, struggled to rise, couldn’t, dropped the chuck. The chuck froze for a moment, like a runner caught napping off first base, then dived into its hole.
Far below, Devil Dan came out of his house, wearing his fedora, and went into the machine shed near the entrance of Midnight Auto. Norton and Orton appeared a minute later, carrying R.P.’s wash out to the clothesline. A growling cough, followed immediately by a deep rumbling, emerged from the shed. Devil Dan appeared in the glassed-in cab of his D-60 bulldozer, headed across the flats toward Gran’s meadow.
4
DEVIL DAN DAVIS was a miser and a bad-tempered man who, like his bad-tempered father before him, had lived all his life next to the Allen place at the foot of Allen Mountain. Dan sold used parts and machinery out of his junkyard and did contract jobs requiring heavy equipment like his Blade. His avocation, however, was feuding with the Allens.
Dan’s sixty-ton D-60 Blade was the biggest bulldozer ever made—powerful enough, Dan said, to push over a courthouse. He cut logging roads and maple sugaring roads and farm roads and roads into gravel pits, doing great and irreparable harm to the environment. Dan Davis frequently proclaimed that there was no such thing as the environment. A small man with a sharp face like a meadow vole’s, Dan averred that the environment was a lie made up by the socialists who ran the government in Montpelier. Dan said that if anyone doubted him he would prove his point by running them over with the Blade. “Can you eat the environment?” he roared out at the March Town Meeting, where he fancied himself something of an orator. “No, you cannot. Can you sell it? No, sir, mister man. Can you put it in the bank and draw down two and a half percent interest on it? Not that I ever heard of.”
Every Monday morning Devil Dan changed the crankcase oil of the Blade whether he’d used the machine that week or not. He dumped the old oil into Allen Mountain Brook, which ran into the Kingdom River just below the meadow where Ethan and Gypsy played ball. When brown trout and rainbow trout and suckers and perch and bullpout and bass floated belly-up on the surface of the river, Dan said there were too many fish in the crick to start with—it was good for the fish to be thinned out now and again. Otherwise, they would become stunted and develop overly large heads. Dan said that if there had been such a thing as the environment, which there was not, it would be good environmental policy to cull out the weak fishes from the strong ones. Gypsy said the crankcase oil from the Blade would cull out Jonah’s whale, it was that toxic.
On the side of his machine shed, Devil Dan had painted a huge sign that said TAKE BACK VERMONT. Who from? Ethan wondered. Take Vermont back how? When? And where? He had no idea what the sign meant, and neither, Gypsy assured him, did Devil Dan. But “Take Back Vermont” sounded good to the junkyard owner, and to others of his mind who did not believe in the environment.
The older boys of the Common called Devil Dan’s junkyard Midnight Auto because late at night they would slip under his high-voltage Weed Chopper electric fence and strip junk cars of their antennas, radios, tape decks, and hubcaps. These forays were fraught with peril because Dan patrolled the yard with his shotgun at all hours and did not hesitate to pepper any trespassers with number-eight birdshot. Nor did he shoot first and ask questions afterward; Dan Davis prided himself on shooting first and asking no questions at all. Also, he kept a free-ranging billy goat with ferocious yellow eyes and large horns, which, along with Orton and Norton Horton, Dan’s state boys, was the bane of E.A.’s existence. The goat’s name was Satan. Sicced on E.A. by Orton and Norton, who were three or four years older and had shaved heads and swastika tattoos inked on their skulls, Satan Davis would shag E.A. all the way home from the railway trestle, butting him and sometimes rolling him into the ditch. E.A. didn’t dare tell Gypsy about these assaults because he was afraid she would shoot Satan, and perhaps Orton and Norton in the bargain, and have to go to jail. Then he’d be out a mother and a father.
The goat attacks had continued for more than a year and gotten worse rather than better until at last, this past spring, E.A. had confided his misery to the
Colonel. After thinking for a minute, the old soldier said, “My advice to you, boy, is to cut you a stout ironwood stick, and the next time those rapscallions set upon you, do what you can with it.” He’d followed the statue’s suggestion and done considerable damage to both boys and gotten in a solid lick to Satan’s head as well, before Orton and Norton overpowered him and frailed the daylights out of him with his own stick. But since then they’d mostly confined their assaults to verbal abuse, calling him a woodchuck and a woodchuck-eater from a distance. The goat, too, stayed out of range of the stick. So the Colonel’s advice had worked in part, which the statue said was the most any advice had ever worked for him. Scarcely a night went by that E.A. did not append to his prayers to Our Father a short request to drown Orton and Norton and the goat in the river, or burn them up in a glorious junkyard conflagration, or arrange for them to slip and fall under the massive treads of Devil Dan’s Blade.
5
E.A. AND GYPSY watched the bright yellow bulldozer rumble down Gran’s meadow, throwing up a barrier of earth and stones along the edge of the river to prevent the spring highwater from flooding Dan’s junkyard. Dan was bulldozing dirt from the outfield of E.A.’s ball diamond, Fenway Park. Right field looked like the start of an open-pit mine.
The Blade’s air-conditioned cab was equipped with a tape deck and a PA system with two large loudspeakers mounted on the roof, over which Devil Dan blasted John Philip Sousa marches. To the beat of “Stars and Stripes Forever,” E.A. watched a killdeer run out of the asters in front of the dozer, dragging one wing, like a partridge luring a fox away from her nest. Dan plowed up the patch of wildflowers where the killdeer’s chicks were hiding. Then he swerved the machine to the left and got the mother bird as well.
Waiting for Teddy Williams Page 3