It went for a home run.
On the mound, Walter’s shoulders drooped as if something had happened to his collarbone.
“Send him to the showers!” yelled a Sunbirds devotee.
Sherm flied out to left, and B.J., who wasn’t much with the stick, anyway, grounded out to short.
Sunbirds, 6–5.
In the top of the sixth, the Cowbirds connected with two hits, one walk, and two runs, to forge ahead, 7–6.
“Come on, Bobby!” encouraged Coach Tarbell as Bobby walked to the plate to start off the bottom of the sixth inning. “Let’s get that run back — and more!”
Images of Graig Nettles, Pete Rose, and Wade Boggs floated through Bobby’s mind as he strode to the plate.
Walter gazed at him through narrowed lids, stretched, and delivered. The pitch was wide. “Ball!” snapped the ump.
Bobby fouled off the next two.
Then Walter seemed to have lost sight of the plate, and Bobby walked.
Bobby trotted to first, then looked across the diamond at the third-base coach, who was watching Coach Tarbell standing at the side of the dugout. Whatever the sign was that Coach Tarbell related to the third-base coach Bobby didn’t know. But the sign directed to him was clear as the hot shining sun.
Thumb to cap, to belt, to chest, back to cap. The steal sign was on.
Oh, man! Well, grease your joints and gas up your tank, Bobby. You’re going to move!
Walter stepped on the mound, looked over his shoulder at Bobby, then started his delivery. Bobby took off, dirt puffing from his heels as he sprinted toward second base. Just before he reached it he saw the Cowbirds’ second baseman covering the bag, waiting for the throw from his catcher.
Bobby hit the dirt, slid, and touched the bag a second before the Cowbird touched him with the ball.
“Safe!” called the ump.
On the mound Walter Wilson looked on, not liking the call one bit.
3
Bobby tried not to show it, but deep inside he was as proud as could be.
He wished again that his father was there, that his father could have seen him run. But, as before, the thought of his father reminded him of the divorce.
Why couldn’t you two get along like millions of other married people? Why did it have to happen to us?
Bobby was nuts about baseball. But right now he was never happier to see a game coming to an end. It was a wonder that he had played as well as he had, because worrying about family problems had taken a lot out of him. And he hadn’t been able to concentrate at the most crucial times.
“Drive ‘im in, Eddie!” he heard Marv Goldstein yell. “Tie up the score!”
Who was to blame for the mess? His father or his mother? He didn’t know. How could he? He didn’t know every little thing that had gone on between them. No kid would. You didn’t see everything. You couldn’t hear everything.
Let’s be careful about this, you and me. We don’t want him to worry his little head over our problem. This is strictly between you and me, see?
That was the way the mess — the whole rotten mess — had seemed to exist to him. He didn’t know when the smelly business had started. That was pretty difficult to tell. But it had been about a year ago when he had begun to see the signs: the cold tone of voice between his mother and father, the angry questions, the angry answers. Then the hours of awful silence, which were even worse.
Bobby shut out the ugly thoughts and concentrated on the batter, Eddie.
Eddie took three swings, striking out, and walked away from the plate, his lips pursed.
Billy got up and popped up to third. Andy Sanders grounded out to second, leaving Bobby stranded.
Neither team scored in the seventh, and the game went to the Cowbirds, 7-6.
Eddie’s parents came off the stands and hugged Eddie for the double he had hit. Andy’s father came down and shook Andy’s hand for the three hits he had pounded out. Hank’s parents and his two sisters came down and hugged him for the single and the colossal home run he had smashed. Almost every one of the guys had somebody meeting him, either to congratulate him on his hits, offer sympathy for losing, or both.
No one was there to meet Bobby. His mother wouldn’t meet him, of course. She didn’t care sour apples for baseball. Or, he thought, for anything he did, for that matter.
“Hey, Bobby! Tough game to lose!” said a voice out of all that maze of voices.
Bobby looked around in surprise and saw that it was Mr. Trollop, Billy’s father.
Bobby tried to smile. “That’s right, Mr. Trollop,” he said.
He walked home with some of the crowd, not saying anything to anyone, because no one said anything to him. He might as well be on the street alone.
“A broken home.” That was a term he used to hear now and then at school, at play, and occasionally at home. It had meant very little to him. “Hey, Jimmy! Hear about Dave’s parents? They broke up!” The usual response was “That right? Wow. That’s tough.” Or, sometimes more frankly, “Oh? So what else is new?”
But, since the terrible thing had happened right in his own home, a “broken home” had suddenly taken on a definite meaning. For a long, long time there were the three of them — his mother, his father, and himself. And then one day he woke up and there were just the two of them — he and his mother.
It was too hard to believe.
There was a court trial about something to do with custody, a trial that had made him wish that he had never been born. Not that there was any violence between his mother and father. No, it was nothing like that.
It was just the strained calmness that had gone on between his parents, his mother’s lawyers, and the judge. His father had not wanted a lawyer to represent him. He had said that he knew beforehand who would take custody of Bobby, and he was entirely agreeable to it.
He explained it to Bobby, saying that he was moving a few towns away. If he and Bobby’s mother shared custody of Bobby, Bobby would have to bounce back and forth between them like a Ping-Pong ball. It would be better for Bobby to stay in one place; his dad would visit him on the weekends. Everyone agreed it would be best.
It was that darned agreeableness that had bothered Bobby so much, because sometimes he felt that he loved his father more than he did his mother, even though he knew that the right thing to do was to share his love equally between them. That was hard to do sometimes, because both of them were so different. They had different interests. She liked shopping, cards, acting in local plays — things that his father didn’t care a hoot about. He was an outdoorsman. Give him a gun, or a fishing pole, and a free weekend in the mountains, and you wouldn’t find a happier man.
How the two of them had ever gotten together and married was beyond Bobby’s imagination. And having him, their only child, must have just complicated the unimaginable union.
He arrived home, and saw a car parked at the curb — a shiny white car with tinted glass and chrome trim. It was a car he had never seen before. Only a person rolling in dough would sport such luxurious wheels.
Bobby paused in his tracks and looked at the house. It was an old, two-story building that his father had renovated from an old two-story shack. Somebody had said that it had first been constructed as the village post office. That was only thirty years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
Whose car is it? he wondered. A salesman’s? An insurance man’s? It could be any one of a dozen people who might want to see his mother.
Maybe it was her lawyer’s, Mr. What’s-his- name. Hugo Ferris. But why should he want to see her again? The case was over, wasn’t it? Well, maybe he just wanted to drop by and see how she was doing. A short, gray-haired man in his sixties, he had that warm, sympathetic quality about him that Bobby’s mother seemed to have needed.
Or it could be one of her bridge-playing friends. She had a lot of them. Maybe they were having a chitchat, “woman talk,” as his mother called it. His mother usually got home from work at ten afte
r five, so whoever it was visiting her couldn’t have been here very long.
He walked onto the driveway, noticing his mother’s banged-up Chevrolet in the garage, and walked past the house toward the lawn in back. A hundred feet beyond was the lake, a spacious body of water covered with gently rolling waves and an array of sailboats and motorboats.
A three-foot-wide dock extended out to a hoist in which an inboard-outboard motorboat sat like a setting hen. It used to be Roger Canfield’s favorite mode of transportation to various fishing spots on the lake. Since he had left, the boat had not been touched, although Bobby knew how to run it almost as well as his father did. He just hadn’t felt like taking it out, that was all.
He sat on the edge of the dock and watched other boaters and water-skiers skimming across the lake, having the time of their lives. He had waterskied a few times himself. Man, it was fun. But that was before the breakup. Maybe, when he felt like it again — when the turmoil and the pain of his parents’ divorce were behind him — he could get Billy Trollop and some other guys and go waterskiing again.
After about ten minutes, he thought about going up to the house. He was hungry, and his mother was probably expecting him, anyway.
When he reached the side of the house and looked around to the front, he saw that the white car was gone.
Well, if it were Mr. Ferris, the lawyer, his mother would have enjoyed the visit. He was an old guy, smart as a whip, but with a subtle sense of humor that would help Bobby’s mother forget her cares for a while.
On the other hand, if it were somebody like Mrs. Trundle — that gossipy woman who used to be a neighbor and had moved to another part of town — Bobby’s mother might have welcomed an earlier appearance by him.
Well, he didn’t like to bother her when she was having company, that was all.
He entered the house through a side door, closing the door quietly behind him.
“Is that you, Bobby?” his mother’s soprano voice carried to him from upstairs.
“Yes, Mom. It’s me,” he said.
“I’ll be right down, dear,” she said.
He went to the living room and started up the stairs to his room. He was only halfway up when she emerged from her room, wearing a bright yellow dress and high-heeled shoes, and carrying a small white purse.
“Bobby sweetheart!” she cried. “You look terrible!”
She stopped on the steps and brushed back his hair.
“You better get that uniform off and take a shower,” she went on hastily. “And use a lot of soap.”
“Where you going?” he asked her. He didn’t remember her telling him that she was going somewhere this evening.
“Where am I going?” She stared at him as if that were the number-one dumb question of the day. “It’s my bridge night, dear. I told you that this morning. Didn’t I?” she added, a frown suddenly forming on her forehead. “Oh, I’m sorry, dear. Maybe I didn’t. Anyway, it’s Tuesday night, and you should know by now that I have a bridge party every Tuesday.”
He looked at her pensively, wondering if she would tell him who her visitor had been.
But she didn’t. She was too much in a hurry to leave. She just told him to get washed up, put on clean clothes, and to find his dinner in the oven.
“What is it?” he asked. He hoped it wasn’t franks and beans again. He was getting tired of franks and beans.
“Pizza,” she said, smiling.
He smiled back. Pizza he liked.
4
His mother woke him up the next morning at 7:15.
“Gee, Mom,” he cried, looking sleepily at his Mickey Mouse alarm clock. His father had bought it for him when he was eight, and it was still ticking along as merrily as ever. “It’s the middle of the night!”
“You know what time it is,” she replied, her voice coming up the stairway in one giant leap. “Get your b-o-d-y down here, so you can wash up and eat breakfast. You’ve got only fifteen more minutes before I have to leave.”
“Why can’t you leave without me?” he retorted. “I can make my own breakfast. All I eat is cereal, anyway.”
“This morning I want you to have eggs,” she said. “Protein is good for you. Now come down here and don’t argue with me.”
“Okay,” he sighed.
He shoved off the covers, rolled out of bed, and silently dropped upon the floor. The hardness of it was unbearable. But he lay there awhile, his eyes closed, until his back began to ache. Then he got up.
The sun was shining brightly through the curtains of his window, proving that it and the clock were both working against him. He dug clean socks and underwear out of his dresser, put them on, then put on his pants, shirt, and shoes, and went downstairs. He managed to do it without falling, which was somewhat remarkable since he had kept his eyes closed all the way down.
“Well, good morning, bright eyes,” said his mother, who was already dressed in her work clothes and ready to go. She was a manager in an office, and her work clothes were a trim-fitting suit and low heels.
“’Morning,” said Bobby, heading for the bathroom.
“Scrambled or sunny-side up?” shouted his mother while he was washing his face.
“Sunny up!” he replied, finding it an effort to raise his voice enough to get it through the door.
After a while he managed to get dried and out of the bathroom. His sunny-side up eggs, atop a piece of dark toast, were waiting for him, along with extra toast and a glass of milk.
“I want you to go to Grandma’s today,” said his mother as she pulled on her jacket. “You don’t have a baseball game again today, do you?”
“No,” he said, sitting down on the chair in front of the eggs. “Our next game is Thursday. Why do I have to go to Grandma’s?”
“I want you to, that’s why.”
“When do you want me to go?”
“Sometime this morning. At least before lunch, so you’ll have something else besides peanut butter and jelly for a change.”
Grandma Reenie makes good peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, too, he almost told her.
“Good-bye, dear,” his mother said, kissing him on the forehead. “See you this afternoon.”
“’Bye, Mom,” he said, and watched her go out of the door.
While he ate, he heard the old Chev grinding away in the garage as his mother tried to start it. It suddenly sparked to life, then roared madly as his mother pressed down on the accelerator. That’s right, Ma, he thought, smiling to himself. Goose it. Clean out the carbon good, and maybe burn up the rings one of these days. Can’t you remember Dad warning you about that?
He finished his breakfast and put the dishes into the sink. Then he stared at them a while, pondering whether to wash them or not. One part of his brain told him he didn’t have to, the other part advised him that he should.
He got to thinking about his mother struggling all day to make the right decision about a work problem, then worrying that she hadn’t made the correct decision after all. And he grinned. Oh, sure, he thought. I know that mother of mine better than anybody else does. She would never worry that any decision was wrong.
He did the dishes.
When he was finished, he went into the living room and headed for the CD player. He’d put on a CD, he thought, and then switch on the TV to get the baseball scores.
His attention was drawn to the ashtray on the coffee table. He had forgotten about his mother’s visitor, but apparently whoever it was smoked, too, just as his mother did. He stared at the stubs of two cigarettes, one that he recognized as his mother’s brand, the other, which was different. It had a tan band around the tip of it.
Suddenly he was Sherlock Holmes investigating the clue of the tan-banded cigarette stub. Come on, Watson. Let’s take a closer look and see what’s elementary about it. Shall we, old boy?
He stepped closer to the coffee table, and made a unique discovery. Both stubs had lipstick stains on them. Well, at least it wasn’t a man. That would leave out the lawy
er, Mr. Ferris. But that was as far as his investigative powers were able to go. He had determined that his mother’s visitor was a woman: that was all.
For Mom’s sake, he thought, I just wish it wasn’t Mrs. Trundle. That old bag of wind would talk the ears off of anyone who would listen to her. And Mom would listen to her even though she would never take Mrs. Trundle seriously.
Glancing at the clock, he saw that it was nine-thirty. News time, followed by the baseball scores, would be coming on shortly. He didn’t care about the news, but he had to listen to the scores. Without them you could throw your TV out the window.
At twenty-five minutes of ten he turned on the TV, heard the last bit about a railroad train derailment somewhere in Illinois, then the all-important, team-by-team scores in both the American and National leagues. The Yanks topped Boston. The Orioles downed the Brewers. The Oakland A’s just eked out a victory over the Angels.
He kept staring at the brightly lit screen, looking at it as if hypnotized, while he listened to the rundown of the scores.
“The Mets three, the Cardinals two. Los Angeles eight, the San Diego Padres one.” The voice droned on, clear, monotonous.
His thoughts drifted to yesterday’s game, and he saw himself hitting the old apple, getting on base, and sliding into second.
Man, he enjoyed running the bases, and making that steal. There was something especially challenging about it. Hey, Joe Morgan! Lou Brock! Watch out! There’s a new base stealer on the way up!
“The Reds took it on the chin, five to four, from the Houston Astros, after winning four straight —”
“Oh, no!” Bobby cried, slamming his fists against the air.
After a while it was over, and he shut the set off. He took a quart bottle of orange juice out of the refrigerator, poured himself a glass, and drank it. Returning the bottle to the refrigerator, he wiped his mouth with his shirtsleeve and picked up his baseball cap. Blue, long brimmed, it fit his head perfectly.
He left the house, making sure that all the doors were locked and that the key to the side door was placed on the lamp beside it.
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