by Paul Haven
One caller even claimed to have spotted Danny stepping on at least three cracks in the sidewalk. An outright lie!
“Good going, wonder boy!” said Max when Danny got home from school. “Sarah McAllister just dumped me.”
An hour before game five, Danny walked down to Willie's cart alone, his Sluggers cap pulled down low over his eyes. The line was long, but not nearly as long as it had been when the Sluggers were winning every game. The luster was off the sauerkraut, so to speak.
“Hey, man,” Willie said when Danny approached. “Gotta win tonight, right?”
“Yep,” Danny replied. “It's a must-win. A must-win.”
“You feel good or what?” Willie asked as an assistant prepared Danny's hot dogs.
“I guess,” Danny lied. “They can do it.”
“So, you gonna catch the game with Molly and Lucas?” Willie asked, grabbing the hot dogs from his assistant and handing them over to Danny. “Come to think of it, where are Molly and Lucas? I never see you guys together anymore.”
“I've been sort of busy.” Danny sighed. “And, uh, well, they're sort of angry with me.”
Danny told Willie about the showdown outside school and how Molly and Lucas didn't even care when he told them about the meeting with Diamond Bob. He didn't mention Molly's grilling about the study.
Willie shook his head as he listened to the story.
“My friend,” he said finally, “if I've learned one thing in life, it's that you've got to be humble. No matter how famous you become, you've always got to remember your friends.”
Willie was right. Even though he had just been named Vendor of the Century by Hot Dog Weekly, he still walked to his stand every morning and gave extra onion goop to all his old customers.
“If they ever talk to me again, I'll keep that in mind,” Danny said glumly.
“They'll get over it.” Willie chuckled. “It's like my brother always says: ‘Stuff happens.'”
“Isn't your brother in jail?” Danny asked.
“Yeah.” Willie shrugged. “So he knows what he's talking about.”
Diamond Bob's Masterpiece
There have been some great strokes of deception in human history, but none more breathtaking than the one Diamond Bob Honeysuckle IV orchestrated in game five. Games three and four—with their stolen signs, muddy drinking water, and uncomfortable seating arrangements—were mere parlor tricks in comparison to the masterpiece of trickery that was this crucial fifth act.
If cheating had its own museum, game five would have had a wing all to itself.
Danny and his family were pressed close to the living room television, hoping against hope that the Sluggers could find a way to win. Even Harold had taken the night off from the campaign to be home for the all-important game. Danny had found a twice-chewed wad of Kosmic Kranberry stuck under his bedside table and was trying to get by with that so he'd have the full stick left for game six.
Lydia Gurkin had washed and rewashed the dishes every other inning. Harold had his fingers crossed, and even Max had stuck a pencil under his nose.
It seemed to be helping.
The color had returned to the Sluggers players' cheeks since they started drinking bottled water instead of the silty stuff Diamond Bob had provided for the locker room. Finchley Biggins had purchased several dozen phone books for his boys to sit on to make the dugout bench more comfortable, and Chico Medley had taught his pitchers a complicated new series of hand signals to make it harder for the Tornadoes to steal his signs.
The Sluggers looked like a new team.
By the eighth, the score was tied at four runs apiece, and even the nonchalant Tornadoes fans were biting their nails and sitting on the edge of their seats. The Gurkins were perched in a semicircle around the television, frozen with excitement.
Bigersley led off the inning with a shot into the gap, pumping his fist from first to encourage Spanky Mazoo to do the same. Mazoo looked bored as he let the first two pitches whiz by him for strikes, but he didn't make the same mistake a third time.
“There's a shot down the line!” Wally Mandelberg gushed, pounding his hand against his announcer's desk. “Bigersley on third, Mazoo on first, and just one down. This is not a good time to run to the bathroom, huh, Bullet?”
“You got that right, Wally,” Santana replied. “I've been holding it in since the fourth, but I'm not going anywhere. The only problem is, I'm so nervous I can barely watch.”
Suddenly, the Gurkins' television set blinked off!
A second later, all the lights in the house flickered and went out!
“No!” Danny and Max screamed in unison.
“What in blazes?” Harold snapped, jumping up. “It must be a fuse.”
Lydia looked out the window and gasped.
“It's a blackout!” she said.
Sure enough, the entire city was dark. Not a bulb burning. Not a television glowing in the distance.
“Oh my God,” Danny screamed. “What do we do?”
“Quick, quick, get a radio,” Harold said. “One that takes batteries.”
Danny had a small hand radio in his room that he'd gotten with his subscription to Sporting Digest. He raced through the darkness to find it.
By the time he got back to the living room, his parents had lit a few candles, and the family gathered around the small table as Danny tried to find the Sluggers game.
He turned the dial to where WBUB was supposed to be, but instead of the familiar sounds of baseball, the station was blaring country music.
“What the … ?” Harold said furiously.
In his perch at Tornado Stadium, Diamond Bob leaned back and laughed as he hadn't laughed in years. It had all gone so perfectly he could pinch himself.
It had only taken a single phone call to Ultimate Power, Inc., the electric company subsidiary of the Diamante Group Ltd., for Diamond Bob to cut electricity to a quarter of the country. Danny Gurkin's quarter of the country, to be precise.
The power-company executives would have to come up with an excuse for the blackout later on.
“These things happen, after all,” Diamond Bob chuckled to himself.
He was feeling like a million bucks. Make that a billion bucks, actually!
Secretly buying a controlling stake in WBUB radio the day before was the stroke of genius that made the scheme so beautiful. Diamond Bob's first act as principal shareholder was to schedule a three-hour country music tribute!
The important thing was to make sure Danny Gurkin had no way of watching or listening to the Sluggers game. You can't be lucky if you don't know what's going on, Diamond Bob figured, and he was dead right.
The Tornadoes scored three times in the bottom of the eighth inning, then shut the Sluggers down in the ninth for a 7–4 victory and a three-games-to-two series lead. They had turned the tables on the Sluggers entirely.
They were just one win away from the World Series!
The power came back on in Danny's apartment and every other apartment in town just in time to see the Tornadoes players run onto the field to celebrate.
Danny, Max, Harold, and Lydia sat in silent disbelief.
“Our goose is cooked,” Mandelberg groaned.
“Another year of heartache staring us right in the face,” Santana agreed, weeping.
Danny's Big Choice
Everyone in town took the game five loss hard. You could see it in the long faces on the streets. You could hear it in the sad shuffling of feet.
It was there in the deep sigh of an old man searching his pockets for change, in the glance to the sky of a mother waiting for the light to turn green.
One hundred and eight years! When would it finally be the Sluggers turn?
Nobody took the loss harder than Danny, of course.
It was all his fault!
Danny walked out of John J. Barnibus and made his way slowly to Quincy Park, the last stick of Kosmic Kranberry clutched in his hand. He walked with his head down, barely noticing the cars zi
pping past or the chill in the October air.
Misery is all-consuming stuff.
Danny rubbed his finger over the bubble-gum wrapper. It was hard to believe that three full packs of magic gum had dwindled to this. Why hadn't he used one less piece during the regular season? Why hadn't he paid more attention to division in math class?
“Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!” Danny berated himself.
In a little over twenty-four hours, he would be sitting in the Sluggers' dugout for game six, surrounded by a team whose heart had been ripped out in the most disastrous road trip since Custer's last stand.
Danny didn't even know if they would want him around anymore.
“Some lucky kid I am,” he mumbled. “What a joke!”
He hadn't felt this small since he'd seen that astronomy movie at the science museum.
“In relation to the universe, each of us is tinier than a grain of sand on the most distant beach of the most unimaginably large ocean,” the narrator had said. “We're tinier than the smallest amoeba swimming aimlessly along in that ocean. I'm talking small.”
Feeling like an amoeba would have been a step in the right direction, Danny thought. At least they were surrounded by lots of other amoebas.
Danny was all alone.
There were no more interview requests, no more party invitations, no more piles of fan mail. Briny Anderson hadn't phoned Danny once since the Sluggers began their slide.
Danny turned into Quincy Park and made his way toward a large oak tree behind the basketball courts. It was his favorite spot in the park, but that wasn't why he was headed there today.
He needed help, and there were only two people in the world he could truly count on. If they showed up, that is.
Danny, Molly, and Lucas hadn't said a word to each other since the fight outside school. Not a “Hello” after the losses in games three and four, not a “How're you doing?” after the blackout in game five. Even in Mrs. Sherman's history class, Molly and Lucas kept to themselves.
Danny was sure they both hated him, and he didn't blame them.
Still, a sacred pact is a sacred pact and a secret password is a secret password.
“They have to come,” Danny said to himself, and for the first time he realized how nervous he was. This could be the most important meeting of his life, Danny thought. More important than the one with Diamond Bob. More significant than meeting Mayor Frompovich. There was still time to back out, but Danny knew that wasn't an option. He had made up his mind and there was no going back.
Danny threw his backpack down on the grass, sat down under the oak tree, and waited.
Not since Molly's parents had split up three years earlier had someone invoked the secret password of the Order of the Watermelon, the club Danny, Molly, and Lucas had set up when they'd first become friends. There were just three members.
Right before he left school, Danny had taped two identical notes on Molly's and Lucas's lockers. The notes said simply “4 o'clock. V. important.”
Below that Danny signed each loose-leaf paper with the club password, a single word that meant attendance was mandatory, even after the biggest fight of their lives.
“SMEGNY!” the notes read.
Danny Spills the Beans
“Holy cow!” Lucas said, shifting his gaze nervously from side to side.
Danny had just finished telling him and Molly about the narrow escape from Mr. Sycamore, the secret room in the baseball-bat tower, and the dusty box of magic gum.
They were sitting in a tight circle under the oak tree, and Danny was holding the stick of Kosmic Kranberry in the palm of his hand. Danny's story was so mind-bendingly extraordinary that none of them could think of anything else to say, and they sat there for several minutes in silence.
“So you're telling me,” Molly finally whispered, “that you hid in a closet in the study, and that closet was in fact a secret passageway, and at the end of that secret passageway was a secret room, and in that secret room you found this ancient gum, and that's what's making the Sluggers win?”
“I know it's hard to believe,” Danny replied. “But I swear it's true.”
He told them how he began to suspect the gum's power when little Thelonius Star hit a grand-slam home run while Danny chewed it the very night they got back from the mansion, and how Sam Slasky had turned a lion killer into a pussycat in the next game. When Tito Calagara flew around the bases like an Olympic sprinter, Danny was finally sure.
It had to be the gum!
Danny told them about the strange old books and the science equipment he had found on the table in the secret room, and how the box with the gum in it had been marked TESTING: LONGEST-LASTING KOSMIC KRANBERRY—MANCHESTER E. BODDLEBROOKS'S 53RD EXCITING FLAVOR.
“Think about it,” Danny said. “It's the only explanation.”
Molly stared into the distance.
Could it be true?
The Sluggers certainly had gone on an unprecedented roll ever since the three of them had gotten back from the old house. It just might be possible, she thought.
“Why didn't you tell us?” Lucas asked.
Danny looked down at the ground. He'd known Molly and Lucas for most of his life, and the three had shared a thousand secrets about a thousand different things. There was no real excuse.
“At first, I sort of forgot,” Danny lied. How could he explain not wanting to let go of a secret he shared with a dead bubble-gum tycoon?
“Then when I realized what was going on, I thought you wouldn't believe me,” he added. “And then … I guess I just got a little caught up in everything.”
“I'll say,” said Molly. Lucas took a deep breath.
“You know, it really isn't fair,” Lucas said. “You got to be the most famous Sluggers fan in the world. All I got out of all this was six months of car-washing duty and a lifetime of piano lessons! I hope that's on your conscience.”
Danny put the Kosmic Kranberry in his pocket carefully as a pair of joggers ran by.
“Danny, I just have one more question,” Molly said after a minute. “If that gum is so magical, how come we've lost the last three games?”
Danny told her how he had saved four sticks of gum for the big series against the Tornadoes—one for every win the Sluggers needed to prevail. Everything was going perfectly until the Sluggers lost game three in Texas, even though Danny was chewing as hard as he could.
“I honestly don't understand how we lost that one,” he said.
Lucas started doing the addition on his fingers. He was never very good at math either.
“So, what you're saying is …,” Lucas began.
“We've only got one stick left!” Molly finished the sentence.
Danny nodded.
Two games to win. One stick of magic gum. It was pretty easy to see the dilemma.
“We're doomed,” Lucas said.
“Maybe,” said Danny. “Maybe not.”
Clubhouse Blues
Fifty-four hot dogs with everything are a lot to carry, but Danny could hardly feel the weight of the overstuffed plastic bag as he walked into the Sluggers' locker room. He had finally told Molly and Lucas about his adventure at the Boddlebrooks mansion, and he felt as if an enormous burden had been lifted off his shoulders.
At least, one enormous burden had been lifted.
There was still the small matter of the Sluggers facing elimination against the most ferociously overpaid mercenaries in sporting history.
Danny walked around the clubhouse, handing out two hot dogs to every man on the team. He had ordered them with extra sauerkraut since Canova wasn't pitching, but there was still plenty of onion goop to go around.
“Boy, am I glad to see you again,” said Finchley Biggins with a sigh as Danny handed him his dogs. His eyes were heavy and he'd lost at least fifteen pounds from Diamond Bob's dirty water. He looked as if he had been to hell and back, not just Texas.
“What's the matter with everyone?” Danny asked quietly, looking around at the glum
faces. It felt more like a funeral parlor than a locker room.
“What do you mean?” said Biggins.
“Well, don't you think the guys look a little down?” Danny whispered.
Biggins glanced around the room.
Boom-Boom Bigersley was sitting on a bench, a towel draped over his head. Sid Canova was muttering something to himself as he struggled to tie the laces on his shoes. Thelonius Star was pacing vacantly, his hands clasped behind his head.
This was how the Sluggers' locker room had looked for years, before they started winning.
“I hadn't noticed,” Biggins said. “I guess we're just not looking forward to going out there. It's not much fun having your lunch handed to you in front of fifty-five thousand people, you know.”
“But this is the biggest game of your lives!” Danny said to Biggins, his voice echoing in the quiet clubhouse.
Every major leaguer in the room turned his eyes toward Danny.
Danny froze, clutching the empty bag. He stood in the center of the room and looked up at the faces of the Sluggers players.
Planter and Minsky, Calagara and Mazoo, Sidewinder and Spagu.
“Uh,” Danny stammered, “it's just … I mean … you've got to stop feeling sorry for yourselves.”
Nobody said a word.
“You can't give up now,” Danny went on. “You have a whole city behind you.”
The Sluggers stared at him in silence, and Danny felt his heart sink. They'd never beat the Tornadoes like this, even with a piece of magic gum. The Sluggers were toast.
“You're my heroes,” Danny said softly.
Finally, a low growl came from across the room.
“The kid is right!” said the voice, and everyone turned to see who it was.
Boom-Boom Bigersley was nearly motionless under the big white towel. Slowly he got up, pulling the towel off his head to reveal a pair of bloodshot eyes and a scowl that could have killed a cat.
“What have they got that we don't?” Bigersley said, holding his hands out in front of him for emphasis. “Other than the big contracts and Hall of Fame careers, of course.