Waiting for Teddy Williams

by Howard Frank Mosher

  “Wait. Mister. What else should I work on? Besides being patient?”

  “That’s enough for now.”

  The 9:30 local was coming, whistling as it slowed for the crossing before the trestle.

  “What’s your name?” Ethan called out.

  Just before the drifter swung through the open door of a Pine Tree State boxcar, E.A. thought he heard him call back, “Teddy.” Teddy seemed an odd name for so big a man.

  “Did he say his name was Teddy?” E.A. asked Bill, who was still staring at the hole punched in his license-plate tableau.

  “I couldn’t swear he didn’t,” Bill said.

  The train was on the trestle now. Bill muttered something else, something about his damaged license plates. But E.A. was thinking about what the drifter had said just before he left. A man should have a lot of good mornings in his life. Not a boy. A man. He felt strangely alone as he headed up to the house from a good morning of baseball.

  13

  GYPSY WAS WAITING for E.A. in the dooryard, watching the freight train wind out of sight over the trestle. E.A. had no idea how long she’d been there.

  “Ethan, who was that guy you were playing baseball with?”

  E.A. shrugged. “He’s the fella who gave me that new baseball a couple years ago. I think he said his name was Teddy.”

  Gypsy bit her lip and frowned. “Well. I’ve told you before. I don’t want you hanging out with tramps and strangers. I don’t care if he says his name is Joe DiMaggio. Understand?”

  “Why not, ma? He’s just a—”

  “Because I said not,” Gypsy said abruptly. “That’s reason enough.” And with that she turned and hurried into the kitchen.

  E.A. sulked for the rest of that day and the next, avoiding Gypsy or shooting baleful looks at her and at Gran, too, for good measure.

  Finally she sat him down at the table and said, “Look, sweetie. I know you’re mad at me. I’ll tell you what. I’ll let you practice with that guy, assuming he ever shows up again. But you have to promise you’ll only do it when I’m home, and you won’t go anywhere with him. Is that fair?”

  “I reckon so,” E.A. said, still mad.

  “Well, I reckon it better be, sweetie,” Gypsy said good-naturedly. “It’s called a compromise. Like the Missouri Compromise we studied. Remember?”

  “I don’t like compromises.”

  “Nobody does. But it’s that or nothing. Okey-dokey?”

  “Okey-dokey,” E.A. said after a pause. Then he grinned at her, and she gave him a hug. Gypsy was the one person E.A. couldn’t stay mad at for long, as much as he would have liked to. The important thing was that he could continue playing ball with the drifter.

  E.A. spent most of the rest of that summer waiting for the man called Teddy. He showed up half a dozen times, always early in the morning, always to play baseball. He brought the balls and, the second time he came, a new Green Mountain Rebel Little League bat, which he gave E.A. to keep.

  Until Ethan started playing with Teddy, he thought he knew something about baseball. What he learned that summer was how imperfectly he understood the game.

  Teddy would appear just after dawn, always on a fair day. Bill was usually ready to shag balls, though the two men rarely spoke to each other, and Bill rarely spoke of the drifter to E.A., and then only as “that fella” or “that Teddy fella.”

  There he’d be, leaning against the barn or the cedar rail fence around the family graveyard or walking up from the tracks by the river. E.A. would run down and they’d work out at Fenway for an hour or so.

  Their routine was always the same. First they’d play catch. Then Teddy would throw him a few dozen pitches while Bill shagged balls in the outfield. After that they’d sit on the back seat of a ’38 Packard Bill had once owned, along the third-base line, and the drifter would drink from the pint in his jacket pocket while E.A. drank from the bottle of Hires root beer Teddy always brought him. Root beer for breakfast.

  As the daisies and orange hawkweed and black-eyed Susans in the meadow gave way to purple vetch, chicory, steeplebush, and, finally, New England asters, E.A. became more comfortable taking instruction. For one thing, Teddy didn’t give much advice. Often he offered none at all unless E.A. asked. But once, in midsummer, haying time, Teddy told him there were two kinds of ball players. Major-leaguers and players who couldn’t take advice. “There are very few major-leaguers, Ethan, who can’t take advice.”

  “Okay,” E.A. said. “How come I can’t drive your slower pitches? I’m listening.”

  “Take a shorter stride when you swing. Don’t get out on your front foot so soon.”

  E.A. nodded. “What’s happening when I pop the ball up?”

  “Move your right hand counterclockwise around on the bat handle a little. That keeps your right hand on top when you swing.”

  E.A. tried it. “It doesn’t feel right.”

  Teddy shrugged. By the end of the summer E.A. had stopped popping up.

  “How come I couldn’t pull that pitch?” he said one morning.

  “It was on the outside corner. Go with the pitches. Hit ’em where they’re pitched. That pitch, you want to poke it over the second baseman’s head.”

  That was the gist of Teddy’s hitting advice. Fundamentals. The same for fielding. E.A. would go out to shortstop. Teddy would hold the Green Mountain Rebel in one hand, his glove on the other, ball in the webbing of the glove. He’d flip the ball up in the air and swat it out to E.A. one-handed. Nothing very hard. E.A. would field the ball and zip it back to him at home plate. Over the course of the summer Teddy showed E.A. how to keep his feet closer together when he fielded the ball and plant his back foot to throw, how to do a slick little slide-step over second base when executing a double play. Sometimes they worked on base running. Teddy showed him how to get a good jump on the pitcher, how to come up standing out of a slide.

  “Why don’t you ever teach me anything about throwing?” E.A. said one day in late August when the first splashes of red had appeared in the soft maples along the river.

  “You throw pretty good already,” Teddy said.

  That was as close to a compliment as E.A. ever got, but Teddy never criticized him, either. If a grounder squirted under his glove, all Teddy said was “That’s baseball.”

  By degrees E.A. came to trust the big man, though he had no more idea who he was than he’d had when he first saw him. The Colonel refused to say whether this was the fella he’d promised to send, and if Old Bill knew anything more about the drifter than E.A. did, he wasn’t telling.

  Teddy rarely spoke about anything but baseball, and when he did he immediately connected it to baseball. He never asked Ethan about school and didn’t seem interested when Ethan told him one morning that he was being homeschooled. He never talked about fishing or hunting. He never asked about Gypsy or Gran.

  Otherwise, little changed at Gran’s place that summer. E.A. continued to watch Kingdom Common carefully, patiently, with unflagging persistence. In a more detached but no less curious way, the Common watched E.A.

  The Common was watching the man E.A. knew as Teddy as well. No one approached him. There was something forbidding about the big, laconic, watchful stranger who seemed to appear out of nowhere. An air of something almost dangerous hung about him. As if you couldn’t quite tell what he might or might not do. But to E.A. he never seemed forbidding, much less dangerous, though all they ever spoke of was baseball. And that was fine with both of them.

  E.A. continued to keep score for the Outlaws and to take BP with them. They noticed that he was choosier at the plate and that he hit the ball sharper. Once against St. Johnsbury, when Moonface didn’t show, E.A. played an entire game at shortstop. He got two singles and a walk and didn’t make an error in six chances in the field.

  When E.A. reported on the game to Teddy, he shrugged. “Town-team ball,” he said. “There’s a big difference between town-team baseball and even, say, single A. That’s a different world, Ethan.” />
  “I reckon an eleven-year-old boy who can go two for four and field his position without a miscue in a men’s league game has got a shot at A ball and more when he grows up,” E.A. said.

  “Time will tell,” Teddy said.

  All in all, it was a fine time in the life of Ethan E.A. Allen. He had just two problems. Their names were Orton and Norton Horton.

  Orton and Norton had lived with Devil Dan and R.P. Davis for as long as E.A. could remember. They were foster children who had been removed from their own home in southern Vermont and shipped north to “live in bondage,” as Gypsy put it, with the Davises. Other than doing R.P.’s laundry every morning and counting empties at Devil Dan’s redemption center, their main job was to help Dan around Midnight Auto, cleaning out junk vehicles and salvaging anything of value. If the brothers Horton found a dime under a floor mat, they were not allowed to keep it. At random intervals, Dan ran a metal detector over them and their room, and they had to turn out their pockets for R.P.’s inspection whenever they entered the house. Under different circumstances E.A. might have sympathized with Orton and Norton. But they routinely tormented him, lying in wait under the railroad trestle or iron bridge and shagging him home with rocks in the summer and ice balls in the winter, rabbit-punching him in the back of the neck, drenching him with water bombs made from condoms they found in the glove boxes of cars wrecked by teenagers, and, worst of all, siccing Devil Dan’s watch-goat, Satan Davis, on him.

  Orton and Norton never hunted or fished or played baseball. The one time E.A. had invited them over to join him at Fenway, Norton had thrown his ball into the river, then heaved E.A. in after it. At fifteen, Orton was still in the fifth grade at the Common Academy. His fourteen-year-old brother was mired in grade four. The headmaster, Prof Benton, who was as kindhearted and jovial as his mother, Old Lady Benton, was hateful, had early on in their tenure at the Academy taken the Horton boys under his wing, assuring them that he wished to be their best friend in the world. When Norton set fire to the contents of their best friend’s office wastebasket while he was reasoning with Orton over the propriety of sliding a hand mirror hidden between Miss Lottie Presault’s feet while she was helping him with desk work, then looking up her dress and shouting “Miss Lottie wears red undies!” Prof calmly put out the blaze.

  He told Judge Charlie K and Editor James K, over their regular six A.M. coffee in the hotel dining room, that, evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, he believed Orton and Norton were not bad boys at all but just needed a break. He added that in his opinion there was no such thing as a genuinely bad boy. Charlie took issue with this pronouncement, citing himself as exhibit A, an assertion his brother the editor did not contradict. Moreover, Charlie said, during his several decades as a defense attorney he had represented many bad boys and later, as a judge, had sent not a few such incorrigibles down the line to the state reform school without a moment’s hesitation. At this the headmaster pounded his fist on the table and said by God, Orton and Norton were good, skylarking country boys, and he would stand by them until Doomsday.

  Doomsday arrived the following Wednesday afternoon when the skylarking country boys tiptoed into Profs office while he was taking his customary after-lunch snooze, tied him to his chair, stood on his desk, and peed first into the wastebasket, then on him. For this, Prof summarily expelled them and declared them officially uneducable and unofficially (to the judge and the editor) depraved. After that they worked full-time for Devil Dan.

  And if, now that E.A. was old enough to outrun them, Orton and Norton were not quite the bane of his existence, they were a constant source of anxiety and often appeared in his prayers to Our Father, whom he fervently beseeched to annihilate the brothers from the face of the earth. He was more or less resigned, however, to having to put up with them until he turned fourteen or fifteen, at which point he believed he would be able to kill them himself and bury their skinny, underfed, tattooed remains up on the mountain where they’d never be found. Not that anyone would look real hard.

  One morning in September when Teddy was giving him BP, E.A. smacked a long foul ball into Devil Dan’s junkyard. As usual at this hour, Orton and Norton were out hanging up sheets and blankets under R.P.’s all-seeing eye. The ball came to rest beside Dan’s 1943 Bucyrus Erie crane, which he called the Hook, and which he occasionally used to haul a wrecked tractor-trailer or a derailed boxcar up an embankment or out of a deep ditch.

  “You want to fetch that one back, Ethan?” Teddy said.

  Orton and Norton had already started for the ball.

  “Not really,” E.A. said. “There’s two of them. Plus that goat.”

  Teddy nodded and started toward the crane himself. Norton and Orton watched him.

  “Hey, mister,” Norton shouted. “What you looking at?”

  Teddy took his time answering. “Right now I’m looking at you boys.”

  He continued to look at them as he walked over and picked up the ball.

  “Who give you permission to trespass on us?” Orton said.

  Then, for the first time, E.A. heard Teddy laugh out loud. He looked right at the Horton boys and laughed.

  Finally Orton yelled out, “E.A.—you, E.A. Allen. This old drunk ain’t always going to be here to protect you. You’re on our list, boy.”

  Teddy and E.A. finished BP while the Horton brothers finished hanging up the wash. E.A. figured that sooner or later he’d have to pay for this morning. But he was delighted that someone had faced down the brothers.

  After practice he and Teddy sat on the Packard seat in the mild fall sunshine, E.A. sipping his Hires, Teddy and Bill drinking from Teddy’s Crackling Rose bottle. The sun felt good on the back of E.A.’s neck.

  Over at Midnight Auto, Orton and Norton had started hoeing out the inside of a car totaled in a head-on wreck at Memphremagog over the weekend. Three elderly people, the driver and two passengers, had been killed on their way to services at the local Pentecostal church.

  “Them boys are bullies, Ethan,” Teddy said, pointing the neck of his bottle at the brothers. “Time’s coming when you’re going to have to go up against them.”

  “I know,” E.A. said.

  “What are you waiting for?”

  “To grow a little more. One more year, two at most, I figure I can take them both.”

  Teddy nodded. “Well, I’ll tell you how to put an end to that bullyragging right now.”

  E.A. thought about the two shallow graves high on the mountain. Maybe three, the third somewhat wider to accommodate Satan Davis.

  Teddy said, “The thing with bullies—or for that matter with anybody you go up against—you have to get an edge. The way you did with that schoolteacher pitcher. Ichabod. Once you get an edge, they’ll be afraid of you.”

  “I’ve tried to fight them. Pitched into them three, four times. Right now they’re too much for me.”

  “Sock my hand.”

  “What?”

  Teddy held up his right hand like a traffic policeman. “Go ahead. Sock it. Hard as you can. You won’t hurt me.”

  Ethan wound up and reared back. Teddy reached out and grabbed his wrist before he could throw the punch.

  Still holding his wrist, Teddy said, “You don’t want to telegraph your punch like that, Ethan. The other fella, he’ll see it coming a mile away.

  “Do like this.” Teddy’s left hand, closed into a fist, moved so fast Ethan couldn’t follow it. The fist stopped an inch shy of E.A.’s jaw. “That’s the one they don’t see coming.”

  He dropped E.A.’s wrist and stepped around behind him. Reached over E.A.’s shoulder and took his left hand. “Make a fist.”

  E.A. did. “Like this,” Teddy said, and showed the boy how to throw a short punch straight out from the shoulder, then another with the same hand. Two short jabs.

  “Put your shoulder into it but don’t wind up. There. Go for the nose. Straight on, hit the nose both times. One, two. Other fella’ll put his hands up to protect his schnoz, it’ll be
spouting like Old Faithful. When his hands come up, you take a short sideways step toward him, like this.” Teddy nudged Ethan’s left sneaker with his steel-toed work shoe. “That’s right, like stepping into a fastball and driving it. Only instead of driving a baseball you throw a right to the breadbasket. That will double him up. Then you come up with your left hand. Don’t wind up. Use all short punches. That’s it. Two left jabs to the schnoz, step, one right to the breadbasket, one more left to the jaw. He’s done.”

  “What about the other one? He’ll pile on.”

  “No doubt. When he does, you have to be ready to take a punch or two. That’s all right. In a go-round, Ethan, you have to be prepared to take a punch. But as soon as the bigger one goes down, turn tail and run.”

  “I’d take any pounding rather than run.”

  Teddy nodded. “I understand. But turn tail and run—until the boy chasing you starts to get winded. Then let him catch you and serve him the same. Two jabs to the nose, hook to the gut, uppercut.”

  E.A. thought. “Only thing is, like I said, those boys don’t mind getting beat up all that much. They’ll just lay for me again, with Satan Davis.”

  “That’s where the edge comes in. Get something on them and get it quick, the way you did that pitcher from Pond a year ago. Once you get that edge, it makes them afraid of you. That’s what stops the bullying. Stops it in its tracks. Ethan, listen. Everybody has a weak point. You find their weakness. Let ’em know you know what it is. Then they’ll back off. What do them boys do first thing every morning?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yes, you do. Think.”

  E.A. thought. “Well, first thing, they hang up R.P.’s wash.”

  “All right. You watch when they do that. Then we’ll talk again.”

  “What about Satan Davis?”

  “What about him?”

  “Even if I whip the bullies and get an edge on them, he’ll still get me down and roll me around.”

  Teddy looked over at Midnight Auto. The goat was standing on the roof of a 1956 Ford Power Wagon, staring back at Teddy with his yellow eyes. “You just watch what them skinheads do every morning and report back to me,” Teddy said. “I’ll tend to the goat.”