Josie Bloom and the Emergency of Life

by Susan Hill Long

  “I’ll walk you out, Josie,” said Asa Pike.

  “No, thank you,” I said. As soon as I rounded the corner in the hall, I slumped. The money, and Amanda Mandolin, my mom kissing me goodnight, the smell of her Wella Balsam shampoo… I heard Asa Pike’s footfalls coming down the hall. Openopenopenopen! I whispered to the door as I tugged. Then I remembered to push, and out I went.

  A Sign at the Cemetery

  I ended up in the cemetery.

  Cynthia McPhee Bloom. I ran my fingers over the letters. The carving still felt new and deep.

  “I’m right about Joe Viola,” I said to Mom’s gravestone. “Aren’t I?”

  Aren’t I?

  I sat right down on the grass. A raindrop hit my arm. Then a few more drops pattered around me on the ground. Maybe Winky was right, I thought. Maybe I’m bad luck. A jinx. Or maybe I need money so wicked bad that my words and deeds can’t be trusted. You Are What You Do, it said on Grandpa’s plaque. I’m a check-forger who hangs around in shady clubs and prisons.

  Maybe I’m making Joe Viola into my father, I thought. Making him up just like he says Management made up Number 23. Maybe, I thought, I want a dad just the way Winky wants a hero, and we both think Joe Viola’s him, but he isn’t.

  But—isn’t he? I was so sure, and then I wasn’t.

  I was feeling sorry for myself, just like how I’d accused Joe Viola.

  I’d misremembered my tarte tatin memory. Did I misremember the daffodil memory too? Was I not someone who could take care of things? Was Mom wrong to think I was better than I can ever be? If Grandpa goes (goes to the Home, goes squirrel-crazy, goes to jail for illegal gambling!), then I don’t have anybody, is what I was thinking.

  Then I heard, “Josie!”

  It was Winky. He was holding a bunch of flowers, plastic ones. I watched Winky come across the cemetery. I thought about him and his ever-present baseball glove when he was little, and what he’d lost and what I’d lost, and how we were lucky to be friends. We are lucky. He’d said so. And he was right. That much I did know.

  He handed over the flowers and we stood there like stones, if stones could have hearts and those hearts could ache.

  Winky cleared his throat. He pointed at the flowers. “I brought those ’cuz I’m sorry,” he said at the same time I said, “I’m sorry I said you’re stupid.”

  We both went quiet again, but now it wasn’t so achy.

  Flash! Heat lightning.

  I counted, slow. One, two, three, four, five—

  Rrrrrummmmmble…

  The sound of thunder. The storm was five miles away.

  “I thought I was low when Grandpa didn’t pay the oil bill,” I said to Winky. “I thought I was low when I found that first big mortgage statement. I was wicked low when Becky caught me doing laundry in the girls’ bathroom.”

  Winky just nodded. There wasn’t really anything to say. Mom’s gravestone sure wasn’t helping.

  I dropped down and flattened myself full-length on Mom’s grave, I don’t know why. At that moment I was in every way as low as I could go. I need a sign, I thought, any sign. Please, somebody send me a sign!

  Just then, an eerie wail deafened my ear, a warm wind blew oily fumes to my nose, and the earth rumbled beneath my entire body. I pushed myself up on my knees like a person about to pray or throw up.

  Then I saw the Peter Pan bus grumbling toward us along Pine Street, destination BOSTON, and plastered big as life on the side of the bus as it passed was Peter Pan himself, pointing the way.

  And then it started pouring warm, soft rain.

  The BBL

  It was a sign,” I said to Winky. We were sitting side by side on the Peter Pan bus, heading south on I-95. That’s right, we were Boston-bound. “Maybe from my mother.”

  Winky pulled on his chin. “Mrs. Blyth-Barrow says the dead are with us. She has a lot of knowledge about world religion and the occult.”

  “Did she used to have a minister-job?” I wondered.

  “Maybe,” Winky said. “She’s had a lot of jobs. Maybe sorcerer.”

  * * *

  Here’s what happened: I still had the eighty-four dollars in my pocket. Joe Viola had refused to believe the truth. Winky had come and stood by me when I was wicked low, which is what he really always did. I thought of what Mandy Mandolin would do, and I did it.

  “Your sports hero’s in a slump—that’s right,” I said, hopping up from Mom’s grave. “The slump of all slumps! He’s in jail, for Pete’s sake!” I smacked Winky in the arm, with the plastic flowers. “The Believers aren’t going to the playoffs. Forget about the playoffs. Us two, the two of us, we are going to take this money, and we are going to Boston this very Saturday on the Peter Pan bus, and we are going to the Boston Beep Baseball Bash,” I announced.

  We went straight from the cemetery to Winky’s house. Mr. Wheaton was the first to speak from the couch. “How’re you gonna pay Peter Pan? You can’t have a penny from Brenda’s Book Cozies. We require every last cozy penny for ourselves!”

  “Right you are, Bob,” said Mrs. Wheaton.

  Mr. Wheaton clasped his hands behind his head, thereby thrusting forward the design of his sweater, a machine-knit summer-weight number featuring an owl in flight across the great golden moon that was his belly.

  “Never you mind,” I said, lofty like a lady on The Sands of Time. “I’ve got the money.” I whipped out the good-faith bail money and smacked my palm with it.

  Winky gasped. “But what about Joe Viola?”

  “That bum?” said Mr. Wheaton, bringing his arms down and ruffling the owl’s feathers.

  “That bum can rot in prison for all eternity! I couldn’t possibly care any less than I do!” I said. I was doing very well with the dramatic delivery, I thought. I tossed my head like a horse for good measure. Mr. Wheaton seemed impressed. His mouth dropped open. Then, noticing the opportunity, he put a sour ball in it.

  The Wheatons agreed to let Winky go to Boston on the bus and go to the Beep Ball Bash as long as it was “scot-free” and as long as we were accompanied by an adult who was “not us.” Grandpa, too, agreed to the trip, but wasn’t up to going. No problem. We told the Wheatons that Grandpa was going with us, and we told Grandpa that the Wheatons were going with us. So here we were, just me and Winky, alone and on our way to Boston. Sure, it was sneaky. Yes, we lied. But it was barely a blip on the lie-o-meter. We had it all planned out so nothing could go wrong.

  * * *

  The first thing to go wrong was we got lost right outside the bus station. Hamburg has Maine Street, and the other streets go off of that one in a likely sort of pattern. Boston hasn’t got a Maine Street or even a main street. It has lots and lots and lots of streets. It hasn’t got any kind of pattern we could figure. Cars were honking and drivers were hollering out their windows at each other. A grubby-looking old man was just sitting on a stoop. He smiled at us, but he didn’t have any teeth. He asked us for money. When I got close to give him a quarter, I noticed he smelled like he took even less baths than I did. There were lots of people walking and hurrying.

  Luckily, we got so lost we went in a circle and ended up at the bus station again. I went in and got a little map from the guy at the ticket counter. For free! And it turns out we were even closer to Fenway High School than I’d thought. Wicked!

  The next thing to go wrong was when a policeman stopped us.

  “Where are your parents?” he said.

  I kind of stammered, but Winky thought fast. “They’re parking the car. We’re all going to Fenway High School because of the Beep Baseball tournament going on there. Because I’m blind.”

  The policeman brightened right up. I have noticed that sometimes people go out of their way to be nice and helpful to Winky once they notice he’s blind. And when this happens, and people are wicked friendly and want to lend a hand, Winky isn’t all that thankful. He doesn’t even always act polite!

  “Well, what you wanna do, is, you go straight down the end of the
block, here, right on Elm, left on Wickham…” The policeman didn’t talk in slow motion, like some people do, like Joe Viola’s girlfriend did, that time, when they realize Winky can’t see. “Well, see here,” said the policeman, “I’ll just walk you there myself, no trouble at all.”

  That would sure be trouble for us, though.

  Just then I saw a man and a woman getting out of a car up ahead. “There they are!” I said, and I waved. After a little hesitation, the lady waved back. “See?” I said to the policeman. “We’d better catch up to Mommy!”

  I grabbed Winky’s hand and started running. “Bye now!”

  * * *

  Sure enough, we found our way to Fenway High School. Once at the field, we sat on the sidelines with what seemed like friends and families of the players. We’d missed the first game of the day, but another game was in full swing.

  We sat down where there was some space on the grass, beside a lady in an orange T-shirt who was the kind of person who likes to talk a lot. We introduced ourselves, and she told us she was married to the right fielder. She pointed to a chubby guy wearing a black blindfold that looked like one of those little Halloween eye-masks, with the itchy elastic that goes around your head, only without any holes to see out of. He had on a baseball hat, and sweatpants, and a team jersey that said Boston Bats.

  There were six fielders, all wearing blindfolds, and two guys out on the field who weren’t wearing blindfolds. I explained all this to Winky, and then I asked the orange lady, “How come they’re wearing blindfolds, if they’re blind?”

  “Well, it’s so everybody’s got the same level of vision. My husband is completely blind, can’t see at all, but other players have some sight, like you, Elwyn,” she said, and patted his hand, “so the blindfolds make everybody’s vision the same: zero.

  “Now, there are those two players on the field that don’t wear blindfolds, and those are the spotters, and they’re sighted. They’ll call out where the ball’s headed, once it’s hit. ’Course, the pitcher and the catcher are sighted folks too.”

  A player from the other team, the Holyoke Hawks, got up to bat. He was kicking his cleats in the dirt and fussing with his hat, and everybody went quiet as Sunday service.

  She whispered in my ear. “We have to simmer down so the batter can hear the ball,” she said.

  The pitcher being a sighted person made sense. The pitcher being on the same team as the batter made less sense, till I saw how it works.

  “Ready!” the pitcher yelled. Then he threw the ball. We could hear the ball beeping on its way to the batter.

  “Swing and a miss,” I whispered to Winky after the first pitch. The catcher tossed the ball back to the pitcher.

  The next ball was a hit. A spotter yelled out “Two!” and orange lady’s chubby husband stuck his glove out, but missed. “Typical,” his wife said. There was a lot of yelling and then another fielder got the ball.

  While the fielders were trying to get the ball, the batter was running pell-mell straight for the base. The base was this foam-encased upright thing about as tall as me, and it buzzed the whole time the runner was running toward it.

  The fielders got the ball before the runner got to the base, so he was out. And that was the end of the inning. During the changeover, the lady explained how it works.

  The game is played with six fielders and one or two “spotters” from one team, and the pitcher, catcher, and batter from the other team. The ball is a modified softball that beeps. Batters time their swings—and players field the ball—by listening for the beep. When the ball is hit, the batter runs to one of two bases located at about the positions of first and third base in regular baseball. The base buzzes when a base-operator turns on either one of them and it keeps on buzzing while the batter runs for it. Meanwhile, a sighted “spotter” yells out the number that indicates the part of the field the ball is headed for. If the batter touches the base before the ball is fielded, it’s a run. If not, it’s an out.

  The way she rattled off the rules, you’d have thought she wrote them herself. “You sure know a lot about it,” I said.

  “Well, you go to every game, like I do, you pick it up pretty quick. Naturally, there are nuances,” orange lady said.

  “Naturally,” Winky said.

  * * *

  I always thought regular baseball was boring. This was different. This was wicked exciting. Maybe because we were right on the sidelines, and maybe because the orange lady was so friendly. But probably mostly on account of my idea and my wish that Winky might actually be able to play baseball again.

  There was another game after that one, and after that game was all done, orange lady said, “Come on and meet Coach Bart.”

  Winky was going all nervy again, like he did when he met stupid Joe Viola, a person I did not want to think about. I wasn’t about to let this go. We’d come all this way and we weren’t leaving without Winky getting what he came for. Or getting what I wanted Winky to have come for.

  Coach Bart was a bowling-pin-shaped man, wearing a stretchy, zip-neck shirt with wide black-and-white stripes. His shorts were black, and also stretchy. Good thing, because he did a lot of bending of knees while he talked, and he even hopped up and down a couple times.

  Coach Bart took out a handkerchief and patted his sweating, red face. “Join us!” he said to Winky. “We take all comers,” he said, “providing you’re to some degree blind.”

  “Stargardt disease,” said Winky. “But even I can tell there are stripes on your shirt.”

  “That’s why I wear it,” said Coach Bart. “To aid and assist my players, off the field. ’Course, during play, they’re all blindfolded.”

  We all mumbled a little, how people do when they don’t know each other very well.

  Winky said, “Our teacher once coached a winning slo-pitch softball team to a pennant in Punxsutawney.”

  Coach Bart hopped. “She interested in a job?” he said.

  “Well, she’s already got a job,” Winky said.

  “But maybe we could talk her out of it!” I said. I was already thinking how great it would be to have a teacher who didn’t threaten to take steps.

  “Whattaya say we give it a go!” Coach Bart said to Winky. And this was the very best part of the day. Winky went up to the plate and put on a blindfold. He dug his toe into the dirt. He brought the bat up high.

  “Ready!” called Coach Bart.

  Winky hit that beep ball, first try. Orange lady threw the switch to make a base buzz, and then—okay, this part was the best—Winky ran!

  The crowd went wild! Sure, I was the only person left in the crowd, but I yelled my head off. “Go, Winky! Yayyyy!”

  * * *

  It was a good day. A great day. I glanced at Winky in the window seat of the Peter Pan bus, heading home. He still had a big smile on his face. The Beep Baseball League had put it there. But I’d helped.

  All Is Lost

  The sun had gone down and the sky was deep dark blue when the bus rolled into Hamburg. We said our goodbyes at the station, feeling like more than just one day had happened. I didn’t even flinch when Winky gave me a big hug. I knew it was coming because he had already thanked me fifty times for sneaking him to Boston. And the whole entire adventure had gone off without a hitch. It couldn’t have gone any better if Amanda Mandolin had planned it herself!

  They say everything looks different after a day of success. I don’t know if anybody really says that, but that’s what I was thinking. It felt good that I helped Winky get back, in a certain way, something he’d lost. Wicked good. I’d barely thought about Joe Viola all day! I strolled past the school, happy as a clam. The recess field was full of pretty dandelions. Dandelions everywhere! Yellow ones, and also ones all gone to puff and ready for wishing on.

  Those bills for the mortgage and things aren’t so much, really, I was thinking. Grandpa gets checks that go into his bank account, sometimes—it isn’t all money going out.

  Walking by the Pay ’n Tak
it, I waved to Mr. Miller. He waved back and I saw his mouth go, “Hi, Josie!”

  Leonard from the Chickadee Club wasn’t going to call Child Protective Services. No way! If he was, he’d have done it by now!

  I glanced over at Books ’n Things, and saw myself in the window, wearing my new baseball hat. I’d splurged on one for me and one for Wink. I straightened the bill, and gave myself a thumbs-up. Lookin’ good!

  Grandpa’s fine! He’s dandy! Slot machines aren’t so horrible. Lots of people gamble. It’s entertaining! And the blurting? Blurting is normal! There’s nothing wrong with a blurt every now and then. Lots of times, the words even make sense, sort of!

  I came to the corner of Portland and Maine, and the air smelled smoky, like a BBQ on the Fourth of July, right when you squirt the lighter fluid onto the charcoal briquettes. A patriotic song came to mind, and I hummed a little of it. Humm—hummmhmm—humm-de-dummm…

  I crossed Maine and cut through the parking lot of what had been the House of Harmony Church, and that’s when I heard the siren.

  * * *

  I ran after the fire truck, top speed, because that’s what you do with a fire truck. You run and see what’s the emergency!

  I chased that wailing fire truck all the way up my own street and my own block and—

  Oh no—

  my own driveway, and—

  I could barely see the house—

  billowing smoke. No!

  Orange flames. Crackling hissing roaring.

  Thumping—my chest.

  Pounding—my ears. No!

  “Grandpa!” Gasping. “Grandpa, Grandpa, Grandpa!” Coughing.

  A huge, faceless thing loomed up and blocked my way and shovels came down on my shoulders. I screamed. The thing lifted a shovel to its not-a-face and pulled off—a mask. It was a person, a firefighter, and he steadied me with a heavy gloved hand on my shoulder. “Stay back!”