Waiting for Teddy Williams

by Howard Frank Mosher

  “‘Mr. Steinbrenner ain’t interested,’ the driver say and pull through the gate. But ten, fifteen minutes later he come back and ast to see inside that valise. I open it up a crack, pull out a file on the New York manager, all full of made-up lies. ‘Got one on every player,’ I say, and stick the file back in the grip. ‘How much you want for this stuff?’ the driver say. I say, ‘Man, I don’t sell, but this what I tell, don’t fret, ’cause I want to bet.’ ‘What that jive suppose to mean?’ ‘Mean this,’ I say. ‘Mean I bet Mr. Steinbrenner all the dirt in this little traveling bag ‘gainst his nice black lemonzene I can strike out the three top hitters in they Yankee lineup.’

  “Well, sir,” Stan continued, “that big old bodyguard driver start to laugh. Then he tell me Mr. Steinbrenner don’t never bet or gamble. So I say fine and get ready to go ’bout my business, me. But the driver call out, hey, he might bet me, gentleman agreement, if Mr. S authorize him. He tell me come back with the suitcase next morning, seven sharp. Before any fans or press get there.”

  Stan took a big bite of the store-bought cake. Louisianne was tossing a baseball from hand to hand. Abruptly the ball vanished and she looked at her father, waiting for him to tell the rest. Teddy had been staring out the window at Devil Dan, who was surveying his property line where it cut close to Gran’s barn. Now he, too, shifted his gaze to Stan. Everyone, even Bill, was listening.

  “So what happened?” E.A. said.

  “Well, next morning I show up, go out on the mound with no warm-up. Slam bam, thank you, Stan—three Yankees up, three Yankees down. Nine pitches, nine strikes. Old George, he so disgusted he throw the lemonzene keys at my head and away I go.”

  “Wow!” Gypsy said. “That’s the con of all cons.”

  “He furious at his players for striking out,” Stan chortled. “Fine them a thousand apiece. Me, I have the lemon painted pink, and there it sits.” Stan gestured with his fork at the battered, cotton-candy-colored limo in Gran’s dooryard. It was hitched to a silver camper trailer with CAJUN STAN THE BASEBALL MAN painted on the side in rainbow colors, both camper and limo displaying Louisiana plates.

  “That the best con of my life,” Stan said. “Worth going to prison for all them other cons.”

  “No,” Teddy said, watching Dan fold up his transit in the dusk.

  “No?”

  “No,” Teddy said. “Nothing’s worth that.”

  Teddy looked at Gypsy. Then he did something E.A. had never heard him do before. He spoke directly to her, by name. “Is it, Gypsy?”

  Gypsy shrugged. “I wouldn’t know,” she said, and hurriedly got up and began to clear the table. If E.A. hadn’t known her better, he’d have sworn she was fighting off tears.

  In the awkward silence that followed, Gran wheeled herself back into her bedroom off the kitchen and Bill went out to his trailer behind the barn. Then Stan said, “Louisianne and I going to get over to that New York State fair, con some would-be baseball players out of they money, we gots to get a move on it. You ready, girl?”

  Louisianne nodded. Two minutes later they were gone, having departed almost as suddenly and unaccountably as they had appeared.

  Gran’s place felt lonely after the Paiges pulled out of the dooryard, the single red taillight on Stan’s camper winking out of sight as they passed Devil Dan’s and turned toward the railroad crossing. Standing with his father on the stoop in the mountain twilight, E.A. missed them sharply, especially Louisianne.

  Teddy lit a cigarette. Then he turned to E.A. “All right, Ethan.”

  “All right what?”

  “It’s time.”

  “To leave for Boston? I thought we were going in the morning.”

  “We are.”

  Teddy took a drag on his Lucky. “Tell your ma I need to make a call from her phone, will you?” he said. “It’s time to settle up with old Davis.”

  Teddy and E.A. entered Dan’s machinery shed, E.A. holding Gypsy’s Battery Beam. Five minutes earlier, Devil Dan and R.P. had left the junkyard towing Dan’s huge Bucyrus Erie crane on a flatbed. They had just received an urgent call from the Memphremagog state police barracks dispatcher (as the caller identified himself), telling Dan there had been a wreck on I-91 just south of the Canadian border. Two cars had plunged over a one-hundred-foot bank into the Kingdom River, the dispatcher said, and Dan and his Hook had to get there “immediately if not sooner.”

  The Blade loomed up in E.A.’s deer-jacking light. It was even bigger than he’d thought. Teddy climbed up into the cab and did something under the dash. Suddenly the engine began to rumble.

  Ethan bounded up the steps and stood next to Teddy, in the leather driver’s seat behind the controls. As Teddy eased the Blade out of the shed, E.A. was amazed by how high off the ground they were. The engine throbbed the way airplane engines in the movies do. The cab smelled like the inside of a brand-new car, like the deputy’s new truck when he picked up E.A. and Gypsy to interrogate them. It smelled like the leather of a baseball glove and the Windex Gran made Gypsy use on the kitchen windows so she could spy on E.A. working out at Fenway.

  E.A. and Teddy started along the Canada Post Road, the headlights of the earthmover illuminating a wide swatch of forest as they headed up Allen Mountain. They passed Gran’s maple sugar orchard, passed the lane leading to E.A. and Gypsy’s special place and the fork to Warden’s Bog. Wild Woodsflower Gulf fell away to their right. Then they were on top of the mountain, parked beside Long Tom.

  It was a warm night, the moon full and bright. Far below, Lake Memphremagog shimmered in the moonglow, which reflected off the cliffs above the water. Except for the light of a single motorboat two or three miles to the north, Memphremagog seemed as empty as it had been that day in 1770 when the Colonel first laid eyes on it and claimed every last drop of water, including the four-fifths of the lake that lay in Canada, for the Republic of Vermont.

  “Hop out,” Teddy said. “I’ll be with you directly.”

  Ethan got down, and the Blade began moving along the concrete base of Long Tom.

  “Teddy!” E.A. yelled. But his father was already emerging from the cab, jumping lightly onto the ground as the sixty-ton dozer unhurriedly nosed over the edge of the cliff. A third of the way down, it bounced blade-first off the face of the escarpment. Halfway to the lake it crashed into a projecting ledge. The cab sheared off and continued to fall separately, like a detached space capsule. The dozer hit the face of the cliff once more, dislodging a thunderous avalanche of boulders. Then it struck the surface of the lake, sending a geyser fifty feet high and disappearing into three hundred feet of dark and icy water.

  THE LEGENDARY SPENCE

  37

  IT WAS UNUSUALLY hot that summer in Boston and in the other cities of the American League as well. Many days, and many nights too, were hotter then E.A. had ever thought possible. By the time he’d thrown five minutes of BP, he was wringing wet. Though his arm stayed loose and strong, just breathing was an effort in the sweltering weather. At home in Kingdom County there might be three or four really hot days a year, usually right in the middle of haying time. But northern Vermont heat was nothing like this heat, which radiated up from the crowded sidewalks and off the sides of the soaring buildings that blocked any breeze there might be and hung oppressively inside Fenway Park well into the evening.

  The weather was just one of the unpleasant surprises for Ethan when he joined the Sox. He hated having to pitch BP day in and day out, never getting the nod from Spence for so much as a single inning in a real game. He hated having to answer the same questions from sportswriters in every city. Questions about growing up in the backwoods of Vermont and pitching to imaginary hitters and a swinging tire, about never playing high school baseball and subsisting on poached venison and moose meat and woodchucks. Though he liked his roommate, Sally Salvadore, he didn’t like being odd man out in the clubhouses and hotels because of his age. Hardest of all was the terrible homesickness he felt for Gypsy and Teddy and the Colonel and eve
n Gran and Bill. It swept over him several times a day like a debilitating nausea and kept him from sleeping at night and wasn’t even entirely absent when he was throwing BP. True, he talked regularly on the phone to Gypsy and, occasionally and briefly, to Teddy. But he was now in a different world, about which they knew nothing and he as yet knew little. He looked forward to the last game of the regular season, with New York at Fenway, because Spence had given him two complimentary tickets, and Gypsy and Teddy were planning to drive down in the Late Great Patsy Cline.

  In early September the Sox swept Seattle and moved a game ahead of New York in the American League East. Then they traveled to the Bronx, into the lion’s den, and won three out of four. Riddled by injuries, without their Cy Young Award winner, without their American League MVP left-fielder, without their beloved shortstop, with the demise of their franchise hanging over their heads with every pitch, every at-bat, every chance in the field, the team somehow kept winning.

  It had truly been a season not so much of impossible dreams as of downright miracles. The minor-leaguers Spence had brought up from Providence and Portland and Bristol, twenty- and twenty-one-year-olds who’d never faced major-league pitching, had played like seasoned veterans. They’d hit everything the opposing pitchers had thrown at them, then on defense had pulled home runs back out of the stands and turned game-losing singles up the middle into game-winning double plays. The dwindling pitching staff had shaved the corners and moved the ball in and out and up and down and, with Sally’s uncanny ability to know what the batter was expecting and to call for something different, bluffed their way to one win after another. The Alien Man alone had won eight games in a row.

  In most arenas of human endeavor, the Legendary Spence was probably the biggest optimist in the city of Boston. His romanticism even extended to the aesthetics of baseball. “Long’s it has natural grass, I call a baseball diamond the most beautiful sight on the face of the earth,” he announced at least once during every game. And of his wretchedly failed marriages, he continued to maintain that he could not understand “what went haywire,” since after baseball, fishing, the macaw, and ice-cold beer in a tall red, white, and blue can, he had thought more of each of the three Mrs. Spencers than of anything else in the world. Yet despite these proofs of his boundless capacity for hopefulness, when it came to the chances of winning or losing a baseball contest, G. P. Spencer was a clear-eyed realist.

  He was everywhere, chivvying his players and the umpires and the opposition. He had runners tag up and score after short fly balls. He used the hit-and-run and bunt with two outs, had his hitters swinging on first pitches and on 3–0 counts. In a thousand Spencerian ways, he defied all conventional baseball wisdom.

  And he was lucky. In a game at Fenway with the bases loaded and Boston ahead by three runs in the top of the ninth, a high drive by Cleveland’s cleanup batter that had grand-slam home run written all over it struck a seagull over second base and dropped into the glove of the Sox shortstop. After a prolonged and furious argument, in which Spence danced two hornpipes at home plate, it was deemed a ground-rule double, scoring two of the three runs Cleveland needed to tie the game. On came the Alien and struck out the next batter on a slider that swerved half a foot, stranding runners on second and third and giving Boston the win. The following night, with the bases loaded and the game tied, Sally smashed a high Baltimore chop off the dirt in front of the plate. He crossed first three steps ahead of the catcher’s throw while the winning run scored. Boston hit pop flies over the Green Monster, easy outs in any other ball park. Their opponents drilled singles off the wall that would have been home runs anywhere but Fenway.

  But even the Legendary Spence could have only so many miracles in him, and everyone in the Nation wondered how he could possibly summon any more when, as in ’78, the division title came down to one game between the two fiercest rivals in baseball, the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox, with the Sox absolutely out of rested pitchers.

  On Spence’s desk beside his macaw was a small portable tape player, a present from a well-wisher in Newton, from which blared the voices of Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, singing “Luckenbach, Texas.” Spence was tipped back in his office chair with a clean blue-and-white-checked engineer’s bandanna over his face to keep out the light so he could think properly about the upcoming game. When the song ended, he reached out, groped for the switch, and turned off the tape player. “Thank God above,” the macaw said.

  Spence said, “I like them old honky-tonk numbers, even if the bird here don’t. The ones you don’t hear over the airwaves so much. You ever been there?”

  Sally Salvadore, standing across the desk from his manager, looked at him blankly. After a minute, he said, “Where?”

  “Luckenbach, Texas.”

  “No.”

  “Me neither,” Spence said from beneath the bandanna. “Not really been there. I been through once or twice. But the winningest active manager in baseballdom, you’d think he’d be able to say he’d gotten away just once to visit Luckenbach. You wouldn’t think doing that or going fishing down in Florida”—he jerked his thumb at the picture of the old man in his Sox cap, standing beside the long-billed marlin—“would be out of reach for a fella that’s managed the Boston Red Sox to one thousand nine hundred and eighty-four career wins.”

  “All that going to change now you got another good young pitcher ready to go,” Sally said. “That new kid, from Vermont, she ready. She walk right through New York’s lineup. You get you Series ring, get to go fisha, go to Lucken with Willa and Waylie. This the year, chief.”

  “This is the year, all right,” Spence said, feeling around in the picnic cooler beside his chair. He pulled out a tall boy, which he held out toward the macaw. The bird inclined its head and in a single vicious swipe ripped off the tab with its beak.

  “Because win or lose, my friend, this old baseball whore is on his way after it’s over,” Spence continued. “To repeat. Win or lose. A little ice-cold beer, a little fisha, a little honky-tonk music.”

  “You throw the kid, we don’t lose,” Sally said. “I guarantee it.”

  “Ain’t no such a thing as a guarantee in this game,” Spence said. “You know that, Sally.”

  “Go with the kid,” Sally wheedled. “We win today, win the playoffs and Series, you go catch you nice blue fish. Have some confida in the kid.”

  “Oh,” Spence said, adjusting the bandanna so he could drink his beer, “I have plenty of confida in the kid. That ain’t the difficulty. I just got more confida in them boys from New York.”

  “New York, number one,” the macaw said.

  Spence removed the bandanna, poured the remaining half of the pounder down his throat, and said, “What do you think, Curse? Who gets the ball tonight? My number-four knuckleball pitcher with the tired arm and pulled hamstring or Mr. Confida in Person from the Great State of Vermont?”

  “Bud, the king of beer,” the bird replied.

  “You got that right, pal,” Spence said.

  “Give her the ball, chief,” Sally said. “I been watching, she ready. She don’t disappoint.”

  Spence sat up straight. He set the empty pounder down on the corner of his army surplus desk. Very carefully, he folded up his engineer’s bandanna, patted down his bald head, wiped the sweat off his big, red, earnest face, and put the bandanna in his back pocket. “She don’t disappoint,” he said. “Well, now, Mr. Sally. I have managed the Boston Red Sox for the past twenty years and more, and I believe I could tell you a thing or two about disappointment. For instance, I could tell you what it is like to win one thousand nine hundred and eighty-four games and five division titles and three American League pennants and nary a World Serious. I could tell you what it is like to be fired on down the road twice by a man who died right here on these very grounds a year ago when that pop fly got up in the sun and played hob with our Gold Glove outfielder. And how that man’s sorry son took over, and the first thing he did, he all but give away thre
e of the premier players in the game today and then opened negotiations with a gang of picture-show radicals to move the franchise west if we don’t win the Serious. And I could even tell you what a disappointment it might be if, by some one-in-a-billion chance, we do win the championship and I get rehired and have to come back and do this all over again.”

  “We win, you quit. Retire. Go to Florida,” Sally suggested. “Nope,” Spence said. “I’m a lot of things, but I’m no quitter. I got a better plan.”

  “Spence has a plan,” the Curse said.

  “You’re damn right he does,” Spence said. Then, loud enough to be heard out in the players’ dressing room, “ALLEN. GET YOUR SKINNY ASS IN HERE!”

  As E.A. stepped through the doorway a minute later, Spence reached into his bottom desk drawer and got out the brand-new baseball that he’d intended all along, in the boldest move of the boldest season of an astonishingly bold career, to give the boy.

  He stood up and flipped Ethan the ball. “Kid,” he roared, “go get them pinstriped sons of bitches!”

  38

  DUSK WAS FALLING sooner now. By 6:30 that evening the stadium lights were on, and when E.A. came out of the tunnel from the clubhouse onto the playing field, his first impression was of color. The Home of the Boston Red Sox was the most colorful place he’d ever seen. The ball park as it filled up reminded him of the Kingdom in the fall, with each bright, short-sleeved shirt and top and cap a different splash of foliage on an autumnal mountainside. The square, gleaming white bases, the snowy chalk lines newly laid down on the red dirt of the infield, the shimmering emerald of the natural grass under the lights, the deeper green of the fabled wall in left field, the cardinal red of the players’ socks—it was all dazzling.