The Youngest Hero

by Jerry B. Jenkins

  Elgin clenched and unclenched his fists, his eyes dark and narrow, lips pressed tight. I didn’t want him to grow bitter.

  “You understand why we can’t go to the funeral,” I said as we approached the hotel.

  “Uh-huh. I know.”

  “You gonna be okay, baby?”

  “I’m not sure. This really feels weird.”

  “Ah! You’re back! And how was the trip? Let me help you with those!”

  “Thank you, Ricardo. I’m afraid we suffered a death in the family, however, so we’re not much in a talking mood.”

  “Oh, how horrible! May I ask whom?”

  “Elgin’s father.”

  “Not an old man. Sudden?”

  “Heart attack and complications.” I put my finger to my lips and glanced at Elgin, who was studying the floor.

  “Well,” Mr. Bravura said, and I would always be grateful he left it at this: “I am so sorry.”

  He helped carry our suitcases from the elevator to our apartment, set them in the middle of the floor, bowed to me without a word, and slipped out. Just as I was wondering if he’d had a transfusion of sensitivity, he knocked and poked his head back in.

  “Forgive me, I almost forgot. A small but heavy package came for your son from Lucky’s Secondhand Shop. May I run it up?”

  I had undressed and was sitting on the couch when Momma brought me the heavy shoebox wrapped in brown paper. A note inside read:

  Master Woodell, Mr. Harkness has already paid me $120 for this rebuilt motor with the clutch and gears you desired. You’ll notice that it can be run with or without engaging the gears. If it works as you hope, you may settle up with him. Any problems, call me at the number below. It’s been a pleasure.

  I set the box aside and thought about turning on the television but decided against it. I didn’t even want to talk to my mother, who seemed to be watching me carefully.

  Well, I thought, Daddy won’t make it to my first big-league game. But he’ll be the reason I’m there.

  45

  My sympathy card to Neal’s parents crossed a scathing note from my own mother about my not getting Elgin “to his own father’s burial. I can understand your not wanting to go, but to keep that boy away is shameful.”

  My own grieving for Neal was a strange, unpredictable progression of emotions. Sometimes I was overcome with melancholy. The memories didn’t seem so distant now. The man I had prayed to be rid of was now more a part of my life than when he was alive and in prison. He dominated my thoughts, reminded me of how things had been.

  When I found myself weeping, sometimes sobbing, I knew it wasn’t over missing him or longing for a man in my life. I wept for the sad, frustrated, miserable lonely man he had become before he died.

  I found it difficult to draw out Elgin now. His face was more sober, his eyes darker. He was nearing puberty. I looked forward to how manly that would make him, but I dreaded the mysterious new interests and passions. I prayed he would keep his sweet innocence, though I knew I was dreaming.

  Every time I thought of Daddy, I reminded myself of my goal. I wanted to be the best baseball player I could be. My dad had drilled into me: “Find your level, find your limit, push it until you know. Only when you’ve done that will you be the best you can be. Don’t worry about who’s better or different. Your job is to be the best you can be, because you can’t do more than that.”

  I was the best ballplayer of my age I had ever seen. I wondered if there were any others like me anywhere. If there were, I knew what they were thinking. They didn’t want to compete with kids their own age any more than I did. They would want to get on a team—of teens, college kids, adults—where they could forget who was ahead for his age and just play some ball. Competitive baseball. That’s what I wanted, and that’s what I missed.

  I worked every day at Lucky’s and worked out every night in my private batting cage. The new motor for the pitching machine was so good it was scary. Not only did I use it with the gear sometimes engaged and sometimes not, but I also figured out that I could tighten a screw halfway and cause the machine to throw hundreds of pitches with no predictability.

  It was like facing the monster for the first time again. I had no idea which pitch was coming, how fast, or from which angle. The thing could fire a straight pitch at my head so fast I could barely evade it, then come back with a dancing, sweeping curve that looked like it might hit me in the rear but would break across the outside of the plate. There was no more hitting a half dozen or more solid shots for every bucket of fifty-seven balls. I tried to read the spin and location of each pitch in time to dive for cover or get a bat on it. I was light on my feet, knowing I had to keep the back foot buried for a perfect swing, yet always ready to jump out of the way of a fastball at the shins.

  I used only my heavy, skinny fungo bat, but I fought through lots of hitless buckets knowing I would eventually catch on. This would make hitting a baseball like breathing.

  Lucky sometimes hit balls to me, but he couldn’t hit hard enough to challenge me. I compared everything with what I could do in the cellar. Nothing would compete with that until I found a whole team I could match in ability. Hector Villagrande had such a team, and my goal was to make that team the next year when I was thirteen. What drove me crazy was that I knew I was ready now.

  I stood at the plate in the basement with my glove on, trying to catch as many pitches in a row as possible. Once I caught fourteen straight before a wicked curve skipped off my glove, banged off the wall, and hit me in the triceps. I jumped and howled and rubbed my arm, then flung my glove at the machine.

  Eventually I learned to catch fifty pitches per bucket, sometimes standing near the machine and catching the grounders and liners after they came off the wall. I dove and lurched and reached and stretched until I sweat through my clothes, and I was getting into great shape, matching my frame with muscle and coordination.

  I took Raleigh Lincoln Sr. up on his offer to pitch batting practice. I needed the competition and especially some feedback, some coaching.

  By the middle of the summer I was hitting only a dozen or so balls solid from each bucket, but I hit Mr. Lincoln like I owned him. The man shook his head. “It’s like facing a big leaguer,” he said. “I don’t want to puff you up, but you hit me like nobody ever has, and I mean nobody. I can’t believe your eye. Where in the world did you develop that?”

  “I guess I just have a sense of the plate,” I said. “My dad said good hitters walk a lot. And my stance gets both my eyes on the pitch.”

  “I need to have a talk with Hector,” Raleigh said. “He doesn’t know what he’s passing up.”

  “His team’s doing okay.”

  “I should say! They’ve only lost two and they’re going to win the state. But I never knew a team that couldn’t be improved. You could start on that team, boy.”

  “Maybe next year.”

  “Maybe? You don’t make that team next year, and I’m gonna get Hector fired and take it myself. You don’t make it next year, I’ll get you in the City League!”

  I laughed. “You have to be eighteen for that.”

  “You’d be one of the best hitters in that league, son, and I am not putting you on.”

  That was the kind of encouragement I needed. How I wanted to play in a live game! I thought about pleading with Hector Villagrande to let me work out with his team. I dreamed of being so dominating, so impressive that he would have to make room for me, not just on the bench but in the starting lineup.

  I continued to read and think and dream baseball. By the dead of winter, everything seemed to fall together for me.

  A bad cold kept me away from the cellar for two days. That break made me sharp somehow. Though it had taken hundreds of thousands of pitches, I seemed to succeed overnight. I was hitting consistently.

  I began to focus on March and local tryouts.

  I didn’t know what to think anymore about Elgin’s obsession. It was as if his devastation at not making the team
and the loss of his father had driven him deep into himself. There was a determination, a dedication in him that frightened me. Had anyone anywhere ever been so committed to anything?

  One night at dinner, as the snow outside turned to slush and the spring tryouts and his thirteenth birthday approached, he said, “Momma, I’m ready for you to come to the basement and see something.”

  “I thought you’d never ask,” I said. “What in the world have you been doing down there?”

  “You’re not going to believe it.”

  The basement was as dark as ever. Elgin’s skinny little bat looked heavy and impossible to hit with. The machine was ugly and noisy. I had not seen it with the new motor, but I had heard him talk about it enough.

  But what was this? The machine looked closer to the batters’ boxes. “Elgin?” I said as I approached it.

  He nodded. “Yup. Closer. By more than ten feet.”

  “You had it as close to the back wall as possible. You said—”

  “I said it was only two-thirds of major-league distance. Now it’s half.”

  He told me to stand with my body outside the doorframe, peeking in.

  “Nothing should hit you, but be ready to duck,” he said.

  46

  Elgin cleared the room of everything but himself, his helmet, his bat, and the machine, tossing everything else past me near the stairs.

  The machine whirred to life, but strangely, Elgin did not hurry to the box but merely moved left and strolled in that direction. The first pitch slammed so hard off the wall that it carried all the way to the other end and whapped against the canvas drop. I jumped, ready to get out of the way, but Elgin seemed to casually study the ball. He stood just outside the left-hander’s batter’s box, his bat dangling from his right hand, as the next pitch swept at him and in over the plate.

  He stepped into the box and set himself. The next dozen or so pitches flew all over the place. One started high and dropped into the strike zone. One appeared to be ankle-high until the last instant when it flashed up to his knees. The only pitch he didn’t swing at came in right under his chin. He moved only a fraction to elude it.

  On all the other pitches, Elgin turned and erupted with a controlled but mighty swing. The sound of metal on plastic resounded from the walls as each pitch was driven to the canvas. As far as I could tell there was not even a pop-up or fly ball. All sped to the other end of the room in a line, most directly over the machine.

  As I watched in awe, Elgin slipped around to the other batter’s box. Now a righty, he continued his barrage, stepping, swinging, driving, recoiling, doing it again and again. His eyes looked alive, narrow, piercing in the dim light. He seemed to see nothing but the ball. At that distance each pitch came in what seemed like milliseconds. How could he react? How could he hit with such authority? I knew it could be only the hours and hours of practice. They had cost him bruises and frustration. But now they had paid off—if being able to hit the hideous machine was payment enough.

  Elgin had hit fifty line drives as if he and the pitches were part of the same script. “Help me pick em up!” he exulted. “I want to show you something.”

  I gathered up a few balls as if in a trance and dropped them into the bucket as Elgin hurried past. I wanted to compliment him, to express wonder, to ask what the future might hold. Words would not come. Apparently, he understood. He just looked at me and grinned.

  He knew, I decided. There was nothing to say, nothing to be said ever. He had made himself into a miracle. I wondered if an adult athlete could have done the same. Surely a big leaguer could do this. But would he have the patience to teach himself?

  As I picked up three balls in a corner, I envisioned my son on television, on programs about people who do amazing things. Was it marketable? Could he make a living at it? Would other people copy him and get better at it? “Watch this!” Elgin shouted. “Take cover!”

  He poured the balls into the machine. I skipped out of the way. He leaned past me and traded his fungo bat for his glove. He stood on the plate, eyes wild as the first pitch came.

  He was not quite ready, and it swept above him, hitting the wall within inches of his head. He whooped and hollered, and I wondered if he had lost his mind. I wanted to tell him to stop, to quit showing off, to not try to do something he couldn’t do. But still I was speechless. What was I watching? Who was this child? Had he come from my womb? Yesterday he was a baby, a kid, who like everyone else, loved baseball. Now he was a marvelously gifted and trained and honed and polished machine with a brain, which made him so much more and better than the metal conglomeration that had helped turn him into what he was.

  The pitches bounced in, swept in, sped in, dropped, rose, spun, danced, curved, slid, broke. He caught one after the other, his face set, eyes afire. As each slammed into his glove he casually shook it loose and let it bounce away like a too-small fish. Then he set himself again, left foot slightly forward, knees bent, bare hand and glove first on his knees, but only for an instant. As the sound of the machine changed slightly, he let his hand and glove fall away from his knees and he crouched even lower. His glove flashed like a turbine-powered vacuum cleaner, picking up every pitch.

  Finally I found my voice. “How do you know?” I shouted.

  “Know what?”

  “Where the ball will go! They all look different!”

  “They are different! You have to be ready for anything and watch where it goes and what kind of a spin it has!”

  Catch and drop, catch and drop, catch and drop. He looked like a big leaguer. What team could possibly be good enough for him?

  Half an hour later, as he sat at the table in the kitchenette, eating popcorn and still sweating, I could tell he was thrilled that he had impressed me. He never asked what I thought. He just sat and watched me, his smile huge, his eyes wide. I could tell he knew.

  “What are we going to do, El?” I managed finally. “You have got to do something with this.”

  “This is nothing,” he said. “This is just for baseball. This is what I’ll do every day for the rest of my life to keep me sharp for hitting live pitches. That’s all.”

  “You don’t think people would pay to see you do something that no one else anywhere would even dare try?”

  “Momma! I’m not a freak.”

  I wasn’t so sure. “But you could challenge people, make them guess whether you could do it. Show them, demonstrate it. Then get them to bet that you wouldn’t dare even stand in against it, let alone be able to hit it with a skinny, heavy bat.”

  His face fell. “Momma, even if I could do that or wanted to—which I don’t—what do you think it would pay?”

  “A lot.”

  “Millions a year?”

  “Well, no, of course not, but—”

  “That’s what I can make as a big leaguer.”

  “That’s a lot of years away.”

  “I know. But by then I’ll be able to make even more. You know what? I’m on a schedule.”

  “To become a big leaguer?”

  “Nope. That’ll come when it comes. I’m on a schedule to move the machine even closer to the batters’ boxes.”

  “Oh, Elgin, no.”

  “You think I can’t do it?”

  Would I ever again think he couldn’t do anything? I didn’t want to watch. I didn’t want to see that machine taking aim at my son from twenty or even twenty-five feet away. I just listened to him tell of it every day for the next several weeks.

  “Just for fun,” he told me, “I moved the thing to about fifteen feet away. I think I finally found out what I can’t hit.”

  We both laughed. If he came even close to that, he might be the best hitter of all time.

  “You coming to my tryout a week from Saturday?”

  “If you’ll let me.”

  “From now on, I want as many people watching as I can. Lucky’s bringing his family.”

  My heart seemed to stop. My voice was weak. “His family?”

&n
bsp; “He’s got two younger brothers and a bunch of nieces and nephews.”

  “Is he married?” I tried to sound casual.

  “I told you, Momma. His wife died. Cancer or something.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Luke Harkness, his two brothers, their wives and six children, and Momma were not the only spectators at the high school all-star summer traveling team tryouts. I guessed there were a hundred in the stands.

  Hector Villagrande had eight spots to fill, and he required his six returning players to try out again too. There were no guarantees, and he proved that nearly every year by cutting at least one returnee.

  About twenty ballplayers, plus the six returnees, had been invited. I finished second in the wind sprints to one of the returnees, a six-foot, two-hundred-pound shortstop. I finished fourth in throwing for distance, behind the shortstop, his twin-brother second baseman, and a muscular Mexican pitcher. When we ran around the entire field, I leaped to an early lead and held off a small, skinny outfielder I guessed would not make the team.

  I had a little trouble running down everything hit to me in the outfield, but that was the one area in which I had the least experience. Hector and his assistants sent fly balls to the fence on almost every shot.

  It was in the infield where I shined. My throws from short were straighter and truer than they had been the year before, but I knew I could not compete against the huge twin. I felt more comfortable at second where the throw was shorter, and I quickly picked up the double-play pivot. The other twin seemed to have a lock on second as well. My only hope was to hit so well that Hector would be forced to find a place for me.

  Coach Villagrande saved hitting till last. He called all the players around him and assigned them to various spots in the field. Fourteen would trade off at the infield and outfield positions with every hitter. His returning catcher would handle all of batting practice. The remaining players would get ten pitches each.