“Good!” I said to Winky. “Looking good!”
I was on the edge of my seat, even though baseball is wicked boring. I was hoping to pick up some baseball fact or other that Mr. Mee didn’t already know. The mascot, Harry the Hot Dog, was doing his job, waving his skinny arms at Manchester’s bug-eyed Pollywog. Harry’s legs stick out the bottom of the buns, so he can waddle-run around the bases before the start of every game. The puffy foam hood goes over the head of the person inside the costume, and rises up high, making the whole hot dog about seven feet tall. Harry does a push-up every time a Hot Dog player crosses home plate. He does his push-ups on a grassy spot just outside first base, so that the zigzag of yellow mustard down the front of the hot dog doesn’t get too dirty. I would never ever wish legal blindness on anybody, but there are some things it’s better not to see.
Winky listened to Mr. Schmottlach’s play-by-play with one ear, and to the crowd and the crack of the bat with the other ear. In the middle was his face, which had a big smile on it. The two mascots led the fans in a seventh-inning stretch. When it was all over, Harry ended up having to do eight push-ups beside first base, and the Pollywog did five push-ups. Yay, Dogs!
“Well, here’s your chance, Wink!” I said. “Let’s go get Joe Viola’s autograph.”
Winky shook his head. He shook all over, actually. “Naaayalll. Naahht—noh—not guh,” he said. The guy wasn’t even speaking in English.
“I hear you,” I said. “Next game. Give him a chance to get used to the place, right?”
“Guh.”
On the dusky walk home, we passed by Weston’s big blueberry field. Everything was quiet, since most of the Hot Dogs’ traffic goes straight out to Route 4 and not into town. A light caught my eye in my side vision. I turned quick, but it was gone. Then a second light blinked in the corner of my other eye. Gone! Keeping an eye on fireflies is about as easy as spotting a shooting star—there and gone, and then you wonder if you really saw it at all.
As soon as the snow melts, Hamburg is full of insects. For biters, we have black flies, horseflies, deer flies, moose flies, midges, no-seeums. And we have pinchers, of course, and large spiders (some of them colorful and striped and I am only pretending to be cool about this), and once I had to scrape a leech from my ankle after a dip in Pickerel Pond. But all of the biters and pinchers and spiders and leeches are worth it, long about the month of June.
I stopped walking and tugged on Wink’s sleeve.
“Can you see them, Winky?” I said. “The fireflies?”
Winky faced into the field and stood quietly for a few moments.
“No.”
“Remember when we used to run around and catch them in a Hellmann’s jar?”
“No.” He turned his head a little one way and then the other way, as if he was trying to hear the fireflies since he couldn’t see them. Maybe he was just trying to jog his memory by moving his head side to side. “No,” he said again.
“Oh.” Winky forgot fireflies. Ouch, my heart! Like that horror movie I watched by accident at Bonny Bodeau’s birthday party in third grade, where an alien stuck a pointy hand straight into this lady’s chest and squeezed. Bonny was my friend, but she moved away to Portland when her mom got a job there. Anyway, memories can be like that. Like aliens squeezing your heart.
“Well,” I said, “they’re little jabs of light. Blinky light. Flashes every which way.”
I was explaining fireflies about as well as Winky explained how he sees. Some things are too much, too large, to talk about even for someone with all their senses. I closed my eyes.
“If you can imagine soft pulses of greenish light, so bright and… surprising… you figure they might sound like chimes or… or light sabers! Or flutes! But they’re silent, like a bunny rabbit hiding. And there isn’t any pattern to how they go on and off,” I told him, “no human pattern anyway.”
Winky didn’t say anything. He didn’t even have his eyes open.
I tried again. I had to! “It’s like… fairies talking.”
Still he didn’t open his eyes. He just stood there. Maybe I wasn’t helping him get it. Maybe I was making him feel bad. And then I was feeling really bad, because it was just… really important that Winky remember fireflies—how they blink and glow and catch you by surprise like how Mom used to put candles on cupcakes even if it wasn’t my birthday and how could he forget fireflies?
Then Winky said, “I think I can hear them. The fairies talking.”
I let out all the breath I didn’t know I’d been holding.
Winky opened his eyes and smiled. “I have pretty good hearing,” he said.
* * *
Winky walked me home from the game and continued on his way. The mudroom steps were clear. The squirrels must have been sleeping, or else watching me under cover of darkness. Because it was pretty dark. The porch light wasn’t even on. I let myself in. Grandpa wasn’t home. His note read “Gone fishin’,” which is what he writes to let me know all is well, he’ll be back soon, won’t be late.
But it was late. He hadn’t come back soon.
Grandpa?
I ran out the door and up the driveway, skittering pea gravel under my Keds, and called out into the night: “Winky!” And my friend turned around and came back. He’s my best friend, after all.
* * *
“He’s been out at night before,” Winky said. “He’s gone out in the middle of the night. How come you’re worried?”
“There’s a difference between sneaking out, and just—just not bothering to be home in the first place!” I said.
Winky pointed out that when Grandpa first started sneaking out at night and lying about it, it seemed really bad. And the next time it didn’t seem so bad, and then it was not normal, but normal for us.
“This is not normal!” I said. “Can you just be quiet and help me find him?” I said.
“That’s what I’m doing!”
“Okay!” I was not being very friendly, and I didn’t know why.
Winky patted my shoulder. “It’s okay to be scared,” Winky said.
“Duh, I know that!” Still not friendly.
* * *
We walked left on Maine Street past the courthouse and the bank, as far as Moody’s Diner. We turned down Desirable Street and went by Unexpected House, and it looked creepy at night. We saw the TV on at Winky’s, and his parents sitting on the couch. We kept going. Right on Pine past the cemetery, right on Garden Street, left and back down Maine along the other side, left on Portland Avenue, by Books ’n Things, the Pay ’n Takit. No Grandpa.
We walked on. “He’s going out at night and leaving me alone. He’s doing something he doesn’t want me knowing about. Maybe he’s unhappy.” I thought about that full-color brochure in the secretary. “Maybe he’s out trying to make new friends. Maybe he’s trying to make lady-friends. Maybe he should go to the Downeast Best Rest, where there are lots of vegetables and old ladies!”
“Holy moly, calm down! Josie! Listen.” Winky stopped walking, so I did too. He put his hand on my shoulder right there in the middle of Portland Avenue and gave me a tiny little shake. “He can’t move into a home.”
“Why not?” I was still breathing hard.
“My great-aunt Georgia is in a home.”
“So? Grandpa should join her!”
“Aunt Georgia drools. Here’s a lady who always wore pearls, and a cardigan sweater buttoned to the neck. Mom got out of bed on Saturday, and put on a different tent-dress, the gray one, and she took me to see Aunt Georgia, and you want to know what she was wearing?”
“Nope! I do not!”
“A Hot Dogs sweatshirt. Hot Dogs!” he said, wicked loud, “in block letters so big I didn’t need this,” he said, waving his magnifier. “And embroidery of Harry the Hot Dog! It’s insulting.”
“So she’s proud of our team. Go, team!” I crossed Pine and started walking toward Route 4. Winky caught up and tugged my arm till I stopped.
“There were swe
atpantssss,” he said. “Matching sweatpants.” He swallowed, and his Adam’s apple slid up and down. “You want to know what the sweatpants said in big block letters?” Winky asked.
“Nope! No sir!”
“Hot-hot-hot,” Winky said. “Hot-hot-hot!” he shouted, “right across the—” He shuddered. “The bottom,” he whispered. “Aunt Georgia is ninety-four years old. They’ve got her on drugs or something to regulate her moods, or else she’d never be caught dead in that get-up.”
I thought about Great-Aunt Georgia’s buttons and pearls, and her matching sweatshirt and pants. I thought about the drugs.
“I’m telling you,” Winky said. “It was sad.”
I don’t know anything about drugs, but I’m sure Grandpa doesn’t like drugs any more than he likes to wear sloppy clothing with logos.
“And that’s not the major reason your grandpa can’t go and live at the Downeast Best Rest,” Winky was saying. He leaned so close that he could look me in the eye. “Think about it, Josie.” His magnifying glass swung on its lanyard and tapped me right in the stomach. “If your grandfather went away, then what would happen to you?”
Grandpa!
There’s Grandpa’s truck!” We’d walked right on Pine Street, all the way to where it fed onto Rural Route 4. Grandpa’s truck was parked alongside some other cars in the lot of a cinderblock building that looked exactly like the criminal hangout in a TV cop-show. We waited for a lone car to pass going south, and then we crossed to the other side.
“There’s no sign, no windows, it’s nighttime, it’s scary.” I grabbed Winky’s hand. “I’m scared.”
“Me too,” said Winky.
“Here goes,” I said, and I opened the sheet-metal door.
Inside were some tables, and a long bar with a sign hung above it on the wall: LOYAL ORDER OF THE CHICKADEE. The chickadee had a hooked beak and a crew-cut hairdo, and beady, beady eyes. I have never seen such a tough-looking chickadee.
A man behind the bar wearing an old Believers cap and peeling a hard-boiled egg looked up and stopped. Seven or eight men talking and playing cards at the tables turned their heads and stopped. The whole place stopped.
Except for one single person sitting on a spinny stool in the back of the room.
“Oranges!” he blurted.
Grandpa was not with any lady-friends, but he seemed very friendly with a slot machine. How I know it was a slot machine is because of its light-up name: Slot Machine! and slogans like Win Win Win! Try Your Luck! and You Won’t Win if You Don’t Play!
I had a lot of questions: Are slot machines legal? Is this why he wasn’t paying the bills? Does this explain the wads of money hidden around the house? Was the cash I found money he’d won, or money he hadn’t lost yet? What the heck is the Loyal Order of the Chickadee? But all I could say was, “Grandpa?”
The machine went fwap-fwap-fwap-fwaahh, like when a rascally cartoon character gets foiled by another cartoon character.
Grandpa did not seem glad to see me and Winky. First his knees swiveled slowly in my direction, followed by his middle and shoulders, then his head, his eyes moving last from the slot machine as if they were stuck with Krazy Glue to the rolling reels of little fruits. I half expected his eyeballs to be spinning. Instead they were… blank.
Then the hard-boiled-eggs man hollered from behind the bar. “Members only!” he boomed. “And positively no minors allowed!”
Grandpa raised a hand. “It’s all right, Leonard,” he said.
The other men didn’t seem too interested in a couple of minors showing up past bedtime. They went back to their muttering and their cards.
Then Leonard said, “I got the number for Child Protective Services right here.”
I fake-laughed even though Leonard is a big, red-faced man with bulgy muscles and a thick neck and I didn’t know if what he said about calling Child Protective Services was or was not a joke. Then Winky fake-laughed too, and even slapped his knee and shook his head like he could hardly believe what a jokester Leonard was. So then I said, “What a jokester!” and Winky said, “Funny, funny stuff.” Leonard kept slowly wiping the bar top and bulging his muscles and looking hard at us from under his greasy baseball cap. Probably memorizing our features for the police report.
Grandpa slid off the stool with a last, longing glance at the slot machine. “Hope is the thing with feathers,” he said. Another of his wood-burning projects, the motto that made about as much sense as the words of the mystic Suso.
Leonard waved his bar towel at us, and we all went out of the Loyal Order of the Chickadee and climbed onto the seat of Grandpa’s truck to go home.
I thought about the Home. And I thought about my home. Only an hour ago I’d thought that my problem was squaring away enough money to pay some bills. But maybe those things were the least of my trouble. Maybe I had bigger problems than I thought. What if Leonard hadn’t been joking about making that phone call? What if he was making that call right now?
Winky pressed his arm into my arm as if to say, “I’m here.” I pressed back, to mean, “Thanks, Winky.”
I had to keep Grandpa’s situation—the slot machine, the mortgage statement PAST DUE, the squirrels, for Pete’s sake—I had to keep it all a secret.
Joe Viola’s First Game
Saturday afternoon’s Hot Dogs game crept along like molasses running uphill on a cold day in March, as they say. More than a week had gone by since the night we found Grandpa at the Chickadee, a place he vaguely and uneasily explained was “a clubhouse, sorta.”
The Hot Dogs were playing the Florida Flamingos. Winky shook like a leaf at the idea of being in the presence of his sports hero, who was pitching for the first time wearing Number 5. Joe Viola sauntered to the mound, chewing a big wad of gum and blowing lazy pink bubbles. Based on what they yelled, some people took Joe’s bubble-activity as a slap in the face of the home team, since blowing Bazooka-pink bubbles is what the fans who travel with the Flamingos always do.
“How’s he looking?” Winky asked. I tried to read Joe Viola’s face. Mostly, I read boredom. Gone was the smile from the card in the heart-shaped frame. He had shiny circles under his eyes, and they were not from a tube of eye black. He had not recently shaved. The number 5 buckled and sagged on his mostly untucked shirt. His posture was—sorry, Wink—slumped.
“He looks… awake in a way that he did not at the night game,” I said kindly.
Viola tended to have a hard look for whoever was at bat. If I’d been the batter, I’d have run crying to the dugout, is what I mean by a hard look. Someone scary in an unwelcome dream might wear a look as hard as Joe Viola’s.
Winky listened to Mr. Schmottlach call the play. He groaned and cheered along with every fully sighted fan.
Some of the fans yelled positive things and some of them yelled things that were not as positive. An old man with two long braids and a bandanna tied around his head had brought a violin, and every so often he’d drag the bow across the out-of-tune strings.
“His name’s Viola, not Violin,” Winky said. “That guy is only embarrassing himself.”
“How do you know it’s a violin and not a viola?” I wondered.
“Oh, believe me, I know,” Winky said. “That guy might as well be playing a French horn.”
Deep in the third inning, the Dogs were down by two. One woman stood and yelled, “Give ’em what-for, Joe!” She was wearing very short purple shorts. Barely meeting the hem of the shorts was a long T-shirt with Tina Taylor! Whole Lotta Love Tour across the chest. She sat down again. She had very big hair, like a storm cloud gathering around her head. The people behind her had to lean or stretch up tall to see the action on the field. She hollered more, and louder, than anybody else in the stands. “Show ’em whatcha got, Joe!”
“Shaddup, Tina Taylor!” shouted that rude old man with the violin. The lady did look a lot like Tina Taylor, though.
All during the game, Winky practiced what he would say when he finally met the baseball star
formerly known as Number 23.
“Hello, extend hand, it’s not every day you get to meet your sports hero.”
“That’s good, Winky. That’s very professional.”
“My name is Elwyn Wheaton. I am your biggest fan.”
“Nice. Good stuff, Winky.”
Things like that. Over and over and over again.
In the fifth inning, Joe Viola threw his glove down and stood there with his hands on his hips, looking at the sky and shaking his head when an outfielder botched a catch and the Flamingo runner rounded third and pounded home. Viola looked like he wanted no part of his new team. He threw a couple wild pitches after that, but he finished up okay, and the Hot Dogs won 6–4.
Viola jogged off the mound and straight to the stands, where the Tina Taylor lady had made good time down the stands, even in her high heels.
“Joe Viola kissed Tina Taylor right on the mouth!” I said to Winky.
Winky frowned, and pulled at the rawhide strings of his glove. “Does she look worthy? Does she look nice?”
“How should I know?” I said. “You can’t tell a book by its cover, Winky, even if your vision’s 20/20.”
“I know that,” said Winky.
“Plus, people can cover up their real selves as easy as a Brenda’s Book Cozy!”
“I’m just asking what she looks like!”
“She’s wearing basically a mini-dress to a baseball game, for crying out loud. And those shorts are not the athletic type. Her shoes don’t seem very sensible for a baseball game.”
Josie Bloom and the Emergency of Life Page 7