“So when we first got Tiny—that’s my cat’s name, because he’s tiny? So when we first got him, my mom was sneezing a lot, and I was just thinking that it reminded me so much of that Brady Bunch episode? The one where Jan keeps sneezing whenever she’s near Tiger? Do you know the Brady Bunch? My grandma got me all the DVDs. Except on that Brady Bunch episode? It’s not Tiger she’s allergic to? It’s Tiger’s flea powder? Except they don’t realize that until it’s almost too late? And the dog’s going to have to leave the family? But then they—”
“Sylvia?” Zeke said.
“SLY!”
“If you’re coming with us, Sly, you must accept that this is a silent mission.”
She made a face.
“But I want to talk to you about your cat later. Would you like to try to get your cat on TV?”
I saw Sly’s jaw drop, and at that moment, I saw a way out, like a lit-up neon arrow pointing away from trouble. “Why don’t we talk about that now?” I said.
“You know what? Forget it. I don’t need help here. Casey, you and Sly can hang here. I’m going to go up by myself and see if I can figure out which room is his, and—”
“Which room is whose?” Sly asked. “My grandma knows all this stuff. I can help.”
Oh, great. So now Sly was starting to understand what we were doing. “Nice work,” I said. “Listen. Let’s just say Mission Aborted, okay? This is a bad idea. I can feel it, you know?” I tilted my head toward Sly, raising my eyebrows. I realized my shoulders were practically in my ears—I was all scrunched up with nerves and fear. Fear of my best friend.
“What? I don’t get what you guys are talking about.”
Zeke turned and headed up the stairs, but I called after him, “I have a better way of finding out, but you have to stop what you’re doing now.” After a few seconds, I heard his feet slowly coming back down.
“What’s your plan?” he said.
“Yeah,” Sly said.
Excellent question. I had no plan. This was what was known as bluffing. “Not now,” I said with a slight tone of mystery in my voice. Zeke nodded knowingly.
Then I asked, “Sly, how old’s your cat?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “He’s a baby to me, because we just got him, but the vet says he’s three, which isn’t really a baby.”
Zeke’s eyes were about to roll back in his head—he was never known for his patience.
“So Zeke,” I asked, “how are you going to get Tiny on TV?”
Getting the Call Right
AFTER Zeke left, with plans made for me to help him shoot video of Sly’s cat, I went to talk to Mrs. G. about You Suck, Ump! Day. She was pouring a ton of white powder—fake milk, I think—into a big cup of coffee.
“Dad said you could order the You Suck, Ump! Day flyers for me. Do you know how many and stuff?”
Mrs. G. nodded and looked through a file cabinet. “I’ll take care of that. And you might want to look through this,” she said, handing me a thin file with a few papers in it.
“Thanks. Do you know how I can reach Steamboat?”
She frowned. Then nodded again. “I have his phone number somewhere.” She opened a couple of drawers and then closed them. “It should be . . .” I expected her to reach into her bun and pull something out, but she turned to a bulletin board and found a crumpled piece of paper with lots of names and numbers. “Here it is,” she said, copying the number onto a piece of paper for me.
“Thanks.”
I went back outside. Students were working on different fields, reviewing angles for viewing plays and taking turns making the “He’s off the bag!” call. On field two, Jorge Washington and the guy I thought was Lincoln Cabrera were standing next to each other, watching students race down the line.
A lot of people believe the most important umpiring goes on behind the plate. Of course balls and strikes, and calling them right, is a big deal. But the most important part of being an umpire is being in the right position to make the call. You need to get to where the play is going to be made and pretty much stand at a right angle to that exact spot—close enough to see, but not so close that you get in any player’s way.
Pop had a friend, when he was umping in the majors, who missed a call. That happens sometimes, of course. But this guy called a player safe when he was out, and it was the only at bat scored as a hit in the entire game. So that pitcher’s only shot in his whole career at throwing a no-hitter was taken away from him all because Pop’s friend missed the call. Pop told me that when I was a little kid, and it stayed with me, how important it is to make the right call. How you only get one chance.
Today Pop wasn’t even trying to hide how disgusted he was with some of the students’ techniques. He kept yelling, “You can’t make a long-distance call! Hustle faster!” or “Tell your happy feet to stay still.” I could see his hand practically crushing a ball and strike indicator.
I looked over at field four, empty, and wondered what that meant for next year. It was hard for BTP to compete. If you had to choose between spending five weeks in Florida or five weeks in New Jersey—well, do the math.
On field one, students were in all player positions, except Lorenzo was pitching, and Bobbybo was batting. He was hitting shots to different field positions with the fungo bat, seeing if the field and base ump would remember where to go to make the call.
He hit one to right field, and the guy who was playing there caught it and gunned it home. I mean, he really gunned it. A few guys whistled, and Lincoln and Washington started slow-clap applauding and then did some long and complicated high-five, complete with wiggly fingers. The student working as base runner, trying to score from third, was out by a lot, and he looked shocked. We didn’t usually see arms like that here.
“That was some throw!” Bobbybo called out. “You’ve got a major league arm!”
The right fielder tipped his cap. It was Patrick MacSophal.
Out of My League
I SHOULDN’T have been on the stairs in the first place. I hardly ever got hungry in the middle of the night, but I was starving. Like crazy, could-never-fall-asleep-if-I-didn’t-eat starving. Almost chew-off-one-of-my-own-limbs starving. So I started heading downstairs. I knew it was really late—the last time I’d looked at my clock it was after midnight.
Dad was talking to someone. I thought it was Pop, since, well, he was the only other person who lived here, but that was weird. I mean, Pop hadn’t been up after eleven (except for postseason games on TV) for as long as I could remember. Then again, I wasn’t usually up after midnight either.
I moved down a few more steps, but didn’t go near the one right before the landing—that one squeaked no matter where you stepped.
I sat and listened. And I’ll never forget what I heard.
It was Dad. Talking. I figured out pretty quickly that the person he was talking to was “Patrick” MacSophal.
“Baseball’s been my whole life,” MacSophal said. “I love the game. It’s all I’ve ever wanted to do. So when it ended, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I had enough money that I didn’t really need to decide right away. I went home, spent some time with my folks, my girlfriend. Tried to figure out what my next step should be. In some ways, I think I’m still trying to figure that out.”
“A lot of us could say the same thing.” Dad said.
“What do you mean?” MacSophal asked. “It seems like you’ve got everything in order here. A pretty good life.”
Yeah, I thought. What do you mean?
“Don’t get me wrong,” Dad said. “I love what I do. I love my life. What I don’t love is . . . not being more successful at it.”
“I still don’t get what you’re saying.”
“Well, why did you come here, to this school, instead of one of the Florida schools?” Dad asked.
“So what you’re saying is you wish this place was one of the top-ranked schools?”
“Answer my question,” Dad said.
He always so
unded like a teacher. And like a dad. He wasn’t letting this guy get away with anything. If he’d been standing, he’d have been rolling back on his heels.
“I’ll answer yours if we can get back to mine.”
There was one of Dad’s famous teacher pauses and then he surprised me with, “Okay. Fair enough.”
“I came here because I thought I had the best chance of flying under the radar.”
“I suppose that makes good sense. And to answer yours: Of course I wish my school were more successful—who wouldn’t want to be successful?” It was quiet for a minute and then Dad asked, “So when did you start thinking about umpiring?”
“When I couldn’t find any other way back into baseball. I couldn’t even get a college coaching job back home. My name’s mud.”
If Zeke had been there, he’d have been unable to resist putting out his hand and saying, “Hi, Mud. Nice to meet you.” But that’s not exactly right, because what he would really have been doing was jumping up and down on the creaky step, screaming, “I TOLD YOU THIS DUDE WAS J-MAC!!!”
“And no offense to your school intended, but I figured I had a better chance of being recognized if I went to one of the Florida schools.”
“Even if you used this new name?”
“I used my given name on the application. My father’s a Patrick, too, so everyone always used my middle name, called me Jimmy. The J-Mac thing sort of happened in the papers when I had that great streak. I pitched seventeen scoreless innings, and I guess that’s when the papers decided I needed a nickname. But here, I wanted people calling me Patrick, not MacSophal. I want to stay out of the spotlight, you know?”
“There’s one thing I don’t understand, Patrick: Why didn’t you ever try to clear your name?”
“You want the truth?” MacSophal said.
I held on to the step. I did not want to fall. I did not want to make a noise. I did not want to risk this moment not happening. Imagine the headline: KID MAKES STEP SQUEAK, MISSES STEROID-USER’S CONFESSION.
Dad must have nodded or something, because MacSophal kept talking. “I couldn’t. I’ve used. And I have a lot of friends who have too. Steroids, growth hormone, amphetamines. I probably know more players who did than who didn’t.”
Dad was silent.
“Getting myself into a whole lot of trouble—that I could handle. Maybe. But I could not bring down my friends. So when Rhodes named me, it seemed like the honorable thing to do was just disappear.”
My mouth was literally open. I wanted to yell, Honorable? How can a drug-taking cheater be talking about what’s honorable and what isn’t?
“But enough about me. Tell me what you think about having the third-ranked school in the country.”
“Out of three,” Dad added.
MacSophal laughed a little.
“It’s how my life works right now,” Dad said.
“Do you dream of more?”
“Sometimes,” Dad said.
“Why don’t you move the school to Florida, compete head-to-head with the others?”
“My life is here.”
“You mean your kid?”
“Among other things.”
“But what if you did Academy down there and kept the other classes, the school, your life here the rest of the time?”
“Five weeks is a long time for a kid.”
“He’s not really a little kid. Isn’t there someone who could take care of him for five weeks?”
There was a very long pause while I waited for my dad to explain that Pop would need to come to the school with him too, so really, I’d be all alone at home, and of course he couldn’t do that. And then Dad said, “You know? There might be.”
He didn’t have to say that it was Mrs. Bob the Baker. I knew. I also knew it could never, ever happen.
Little League
I DIDN’T sleep. Or at least I didn’t think I did. My brain was all over this MacSophal thing. How could my dad allow that cheater to attend his school? And how could this cheater be telling my dad it was okay to go to Florida for over a month, every year, without me?
I wanted to talk to someone about this, but I couldn’t tell Zeke. The potential for him to do something stupid with this information was too great, so I decided to wait and keep thinking. Which I would have liked to do at home. But Zeke had decided this would be the day we filmed Sly’s cat.
So there we were in front of Mrs. G.’s house on a Saturday afternoon—me with my bike and Zeke with his skateboard. Sly was waiting for us with a big cardboard box on her lap.
“You’re not going to hurt him, are you?”
“Of course not,” Zeke said. “Definitely not on purpose, anyway.”
Sly stood and started carrying the box back to the house.
“I’m kidding!” Zeke said. He looked at me and said, “Kids!” Then he asked Sly, “So what tricks does your cat know?
“He’s supposed to know tricks?”
“Unless it’s some kind of stupid cat.”
Sly looked stunned. I think Zeke really didn’t get that you couldn’t talk to little kids the same way you talked to . . . people. Or maybe it was that Sly was a girl? Or some combination. I was definitely not Sly’s biggest fan, but he shouldn’t have been mean to the kid when she was trying to help him out.
“Hey, boys,” Mrs. G. called from the front steps, her hair hanging down instead of in that holding-pencils-and-other-surprises bun. “It’s so nice of you to come over to play with Sylvia today.”
Sly just mouthed the word “Sly.”
“Actually, we’re really just—”
I cut Zeke off. “We wanted to meet her cat!” I said. You have to know how to play the old people. You didn’t tell them that you wouldn’t be caught dead here if it weren’t for the fact that your slightly off-in-the-head best friend was trying to get something—anything—on TV and that he’d decided her granddaughter’s cat just might be the ticket. And you definitely didn’t mention that eleven- and twelve-year-old guys did not play with eight-year-old girls in any universe anywhere, ever.
“It’s probably a good thing she’s taken the cat out of the house. Her mom starts sneezing whenever she’s near him.”
Zeke gasped and put his palm flat on his cheek. “That is JUST like Marcia Brady!” he said.
“Jan, you idiot,” Sly said.
“Please be careful. It’s a busy street,” Mrs. G. said before going inside.
The Concerns of the Old, a list by Casey Snowden:
It’s a busy street.
You could take someone’s eye out with that thing.
Now you’re laughing; soon you’ll be crying.
Turn on a light! How can you read in that dark room?
Wash your hands before you eat!
Move back from the television! You’re way too close!
You can’t swim; you just ate.
***
I always wondered at what age you officially got old and started saying stuff like that—it was somewhere between Dad and Pop. I had to remember to write it down the first time I heard Dad talking like an old person.
“So really, now,” Zeke said to Sly. “What does your cat do?”
“He eats. He sleeps. He can arch his back that way that cats do. He poops. And pees.”
Zeke gave me a look like, THIS is what I have to work with?
“What do the animals do on That’sPETacular?” I asked Zeke.
“That’sPETacular? I love that show! Oh, my God! Tiny’s going to be on That’sPETacular? I can’t believe it! Oh, my God! Thank you so much!”
Zeke shook his head and sat on his skateboard. “I have no idea if your cat will get on. We might have to teach her some tricks or something. Can we at least see her?”
I wondered if trouble was coming. What if the cat ran away? “Has she been outside before?” I asked. I’d never had a pet, but if I were stuck inside all the time, told to eat out of a bowl on the floor, to do my business in a little box where everyone could see, I’d
run away the first chance I got.
“Yeah,” Sly said. She opened the box and pulled out a black and white cat. Tiny blinked a few times, getting used to the light. “And stop saying her and she. Tiny is a boy cat.”
“I thought you said he was tiny,” Zeke said.
“Well, he was when I named him. But he eats a lot. When I put out food, he finishes it, and then when I put out more, he finishes that too, and it takes a long time before he stops eating.”
This was one fat cat. When he started walking in slow circles around Sly, and then over to check out Zeke and me, his stomach almost touched the driveway’s asphalt. The stomach swung back and forth as he walked.
“What about the swinging stomach?” I said. “Is that a good trick?”
“Only if you could sort of set it swinging to music or something. But maybe . . . I mean that is really a hugely fat little cat.”
Tiny put his paws on Zeke’s skateboard and lowered the front of his body to stretch.
“I think he wants to ride your skateboard,” Sly said.
Zeke smiled. “Now you’re talking!”
He got off his board and went to pick up the cat—his arms stretched out straight in front of him, like the cat had cooties or something. “You don’t pick up a cat like that!” Sly yelled. She rushed over and took Tiny from him.
She tried placing him on the board, but he walked right off. She did it again, and the cat just kept leaving. It was as though Tiny had met Zeke before and knew nothing good could come of this. Headline: CATASTROPHE AVOIDED IN CLAY COVES. No matter how many lives Tiny might have had, I wasn’t sure any should be trusted to Zeke.
“What if we start with you sitting on the board with the cat on your lap, to get him used to it. Would that work?” Zeke asked.
“I’ll try,” Sly said.
“And I’ll shoot for practice,” Zeke said, pulling out Dad’s reject camera.
“I’ll just stand at the bottom of the driveway and make sure no cars are coming,” I said.
“Oh, she’s not going to ride all the way down there. Just a few feet, from the garage, maybe like not even a third of the way down. To get the cat, you know, used to it,” he said, as though he’d been doing this kind of thing his whole life. Putting little girls and obese cats on skateboards and sending them down a sloping driveway. Sure. Just a third of the way. To get them used to it. Of course.
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