“Things change,” the Colonel said again. “They did for me. They will for you. Don’t expect it always to be this way.”
“I don’t.”
“I hope not. Because you’ll have good seasons and off seasons. Good games and off ones. The team won’t all stay together, and you may or may not stay in Boston. You might like the new manager, you might not. Change, boy. It’s what you can count on. Thankee for the rum.”
“I’m the one who ought to thank you,” E.A. said. “For sending me Teddy.”
“Whoa,” the Colonel said. “I never sent you Teddy.”
“Of course you did,” E.A. said. “You said you’d send me a fella. To teach me baseball.”
“And so I did,” the Colonel said. “But it wasn’t Teddy. Good Jehovah, boy. Is that what you’ve been thinking all these years? I never said a word to Teddy. The fella I sent was Stan.”
“Stan?”
“Stan,” the Colonel said. “Teddy came on his own, son. Because he was your pa.”
47
THE PHONE RANG as E.A. stepped into the farmhouse.
“Hi, hon. Congratulations. E.W. and Patsy and I are on the road.” Gypsy Lee broke into song, imitating Willie Nelson. ‘“On the road again. I can’t wait to get on the road again . . .’”
“Where are you, ma?”
“On the road, hon, like the song says. We’re on the interstate, coming up on New York and headed for Nashville. We stopped at a Wal-Mart and bought a quart of blue paint and a brush, and E.W. painted The Gypsy Lee Allen Old-Timey Country Music Show on Patsy. Music City, here we come.”
“Well. Good luck, ma. In Nashville.”
“Thank you, sweetie. So long. I’ll call you from Guitar Town.”
“So long, ma,” E.A. said, and hung up the phone.
“I’ve come home,” he said to Gran.
“I can see that,” Gran said. “I haven’t lost my eyesight, you know. Just the use of my legs.”
“I thought you weren’t ever going to finish up down below,” Bill complained. “That baseball game run way on along into the late afternoon, and I never did catch up on my evening chores. Where’s Gypsy?”
“Headed for Nashville with Teddy,” E.A. said.
“Gypsy and Teddy,” Gran said. “They make my ass ache.”
“We listened to it all,” Bill said. “There’s one thing I don’t understand. Why grown men would stand out in the hot sun playing a boy’s game don’t make a particle of sense to me.”
“We get paid well to do it, Bill.”
“I was hoping you’d bean Jacks,” Gran said. “Bounce one right off his noggin. Did you remember my paper?”
E.A. handed her the Weekly World News he’d picked up when he stopped for gas.
The headline said, SPACE CREATURE THROWS OUT FIRST BALL AT WORLD SERIES. Below was a doctored picture of Spence on the mound at Fenway, shaking hands with a bubble-headed creature about two and a half feet tall. On one of the creature’s splayed, twelve-fingered hands was an old-fashioned baseball glove.
Bill shook his head and headed out to his trailer.
E.A. went up to his room and looked out the sideways window. In the moonlight he saw a tall man leaning against the barn door smoking a cigarette. He saw a kid taking BP from a pretty young woman. He saw the moon’s pale reflection off Gone and Long Forgotten in the family graveyard.
He went back downstairs. Gran had fallen asleep. He pulled her quilt up around her, and in a sharp voice, her eyes shut tight, she said, “You ruined our losing streak, E.A.”
“Don’t be too disappointed, Gran,” E.A. said. “There’s always next year.”
Spence and the taxi driver had had an altercation the other side of New York City over Spence’s drinking beer in the vehicle. So Spence had paid him two hundred dollars and was now hitchhiking through the pitch-black night. A big man in a windbreaker and a Red Sox cap, carrying a gym bag, with a large tropical bird on his shoulder. He’d left his fishing hat and sunglasses in the cab. He was thinking that if he didn’t get a ride he’d hoof it to the next truck stop and talk some semi driver into carrying him and the bird into Philly, jump a Greyhound from there to St. Pete. With any luck he’d be on the Gulf in three days.
He walked with his back to the streaming traffic, left arm stuck out, thumb up. That was how he and Stan used to hitchhike to their games in Texas and Louisiana when they were just breaking in. Later the whole team had a ’43 Nash coupe with wide running boards. You could only fit six inside, so the others would ride on the boards, linking hands over the roof so as not to fall off if one man went to sleep. “That was what responsibility was all about,” he was telling the macaw. “You held a fella’s life right in your hand, you know.”
“I ought to know, you’ve told me a hundred times,” the Curse said.
“Are you cold?” Spence said. “Is that it? Do you want to come inside my jacket?”
“I want to know where we’re going,” the bird said. “What the plan is.”
A vehicle stopped, a beat-up jalopy with writing on the doors. Spence couldn’t quite make out what it said. Then he recognized the fella driving. It was the kid’s old man. Beside him was a young redheaded woman strumming a guitar.
Spence got in back. “Where you folks headed?”
“Down south,” the driver said. “Tennessee.”
The song the woman was playing had an old-timey sound, and Spence found himself tapping his finger to it. “That’s a nice number, if I do say so,” he said.
“I’m going to sing it at the Opry,” the woman said.
Spence thought for a minute. “I like that song a lot,” he said. “It’s way better’n most of what you hear on the radio. I hope they listen. At the Opry.”
“Oh,” the driver said. “They’ll listen.”
Spence nodded. “I’m going south, too,” he said. “Fishing.” The driver lit a cigarette. They rode on for a while, the woman singing a sad song called “Nobody’s Child,” about a woman who’d lost her lover, killed in a trucking accident on a mountain. She was left with a baby, but then the baby died, too.
“Night turns to day and the day finds the evening
And once I looked up when I heard someone breathing.
And I saw them fly away over the pines.”
“Oh, yeah,” Spence said when she was finished. “You just bet they’ll listen.”
Later they stopped for coffee. “Look,” Spence said, closing the door gently so as not to waken the macaw. “Will you just look there.” Behind the truck stop was a lighted softball diamond with a late-night game going on. Old-timers, it looked like. Men up in their forties and fifties, just dubbing around having fun.
Spence stood stock-still, watching the softball players.
“You want to watch an inning?” Teddy said.
“I might at that,” Spence said. “I like to watch me a little ball from time to time. Course, it ain’t baseball.”
“No.”
“Thank the Judas, no,” Spence said, walking fast now, toward the softball park.
As he pushed through a gate, a batter hit a lazy fly ball between the left- and center-fielders. It fell in for a hit. A runner who’d been on first rounded second, and the left-fielder picked up the ball, which Spence figured should have been caught anyway, and lobbed it back in to the second baseman, allowing the runner to advance to third.
“Hey,” Spence shouted. “You out there in left field. You never throw behind the runner. Not unless he’s already headed back to the base. You just gave him another bag, free for the taking.”
The outfielder, gray at the temples, looked like a local real estate agent.
“Yeah? I suppose you could do it better,” he said.
“I could take that cowplop you call a ball so far over the wall you’d never find it.”
“Get a bat and stand in, old man,” the pitcher said.
Spence shucked out of his windbreaker.
“Serve it up,” he said, leveling his bat
. The pitcher did, and Spence belted it fifty feet over the center-field fence onto some railroad tracks. Then he and Teddy and Gypsy had their coffee and got back in the car.
Teddy drove, Spence and the Curse dozed, Gypsy worked on a new song to sing as an encore at the Opry. When Teddy stopped again, in Harrisburg, Gypsy was asleep, too. He picked up the morning newspaper. On the front page was a wire photo of Ethan, looking in at Miller Jacks, under the headline sox TAKE IT ALL. And halfway down the page, a photo of Spence punching the lummox.
They drove on into the dawn. In Front Royal, Virginia, the sun lifted over the Blue Ridge, illuminating fall colors nearly as bright as Vermont’s. Something in Patsy’s engine began to tick. The odds were they wouldn’t make it another fifteen miles down the line, much less to Nashville.
Then again, just maybe they would.
About the Author
HOWARD FRANK MOSHER is the author of ten books, including Waiting for Teddy Williams, The True Account, and A Stranger in the Kingdom, which, along with Disappearances, was corecipient of the New England Book Award for fiction. He lives in Vermont.
Waiting for Teddy Williams Page 26