In 2076, Grandma announced the One Class initiative, which ignored any distinctions between DVs and Regs. One Class, One Country was the slogan. You kept up like everyone else, no excuses for where you lived or your families or your culture or anything that was once thought of an excuse.
Your mind is yours. Take care of it, said Grandma’s Nineteenth Insight.
Frecklie rushed through the school day, seeing little in any of the seven classes that would prepare him for his career as a baseball architect. By the time he finished homework and sex with Dale, it was after seven, sending him on a frantic dash to the grocery store; he barely got home before his mother.
Beth walked into the kitchen and sniffed. Something unfamiliar smoked slightly from the oven while seemingly every dish they owned was stacked in the sink. Puffs of white flour spotted her immaculate floor and a reddish ingredient clung to her blue-striped kitchen curtains.
But she had to smile at the flickering candles on the table flanked by the correct place settings. She wearily dropped her heavy bag of sewing to the floor. Frecklie whisked it away and gave her a big kiss on the cheek.
What had he done?
“Smells interesting,” she said.
“Greens and sea life casserole,” he said proudly.
“And wine?” Beth lifted up the half full glass.
“From Pittsburgh.”
“I hear they’re making good stuff.”
“Yeah. Sit, sit.” Frecklie pulled the chair out and she sat, hands clasped. “How was your day?” He refilled her glass.
“The usual. Yours?”
“Productive.”
“Yes?”
“School.”
“What’d you learn?”
“So much I wouldn’t know where to begin.”
“Work?”
“Great. Everyone loved the uniforms.”
Beth nodded; Puppy had left her a squared note of thanks.
“You’re in the Hall of Fame for uniform making. Thank you. They even fit.”
“That’s helpful.”
“You’re the expert. Best tailor in the Bronx. Maybe America. Now you have a chance to really show what you can do.”
Beth took a long sip and waited.
“Grandma’s Forgiveness.”
She darkened. “What about it?”
“Well, we want to promote it.”
“Who’s we?”
“Puppy has nothing to do with this. It’s my idea.”
She made a doubtful face.
“We want to sell t-shirts at the stadium. I need you to design them.”
Beth squeezed the stem of the glass. “You want me to participate in this charade?”
“What does charade mean?”
“I guess Dale isn’t doing your English homework too. Farce. Game.” She slammed down the glass and turned off the food before they were overcome by the smoke curling around the stove like a tornado. “I won’t have anything to do with it. And neither should you.”
“I already do.”
Beth flushed. “Grandma’s selling us out again.”
“She’s finally saying baseball is good.”
“So we don’t see what she’s doing. It’s a distraction. Like her Story, saying we killed refugees who wouldn’t have been refugees if the Allahs hadn’t thrown them out. We were trying to save those poor people. Now this bullshit about forgiveness. Accept wrongs on all sides. As if they’re all equal. They nuke our cities and it’s our fault because we fight back? What crap, oh, the world will be better if we turn hate to love. There’s going to be another Surrender, Ruben. A worse one, where we’ll all live under sharia, tyranny, as slaves, and I won’t let you stain the memory of brave men and women…”
“I know all that. I’ve seen them,” he shouted.
“Who?”
“The skeletons. The Miners underneath the stadium. They were trapped and gassed. Children, too. All over the balllpark. I’ve seen them. I know what the BTs did. So don’t tell me I don’t know like I’m a damn child.”
Beth controlled her trembling and took his hand. “Tell me what you saw.”
Frecklie described the ten storage rooms below the stands.
“Who else did you tell?”
“No one.” His eyes narrowed. “Neither can you. It’d get the government angry.”
She sighed. “Yes it would.” Exposing the lies of 10/12. The brave BTs gassing children and slaughtering prisoners. Who knows what other lies would come out about that day? Why’d Hazel want to see all the hiding places?”
Frecklie shrugged. “Who cares? He loves baseball and helped us.” He teared up. “Everyone thinks there’ll be another season now that Puppy and Dara are going to be role models for Forgiveness. I can really be a baseball architect, Ma. A second season means a third and a fourth and you’ll see, Grandma will have to build more parks.”
She doesn’t have to do anything, you stupid little child.
“Please.” Frecklie squeezed her hand in a pleading, needy way he hadn’t shown since he was ten. “Design the t-shirts.” Like a tender grown-up, he cupped Beth’s chin as she turned away.
• • • •
AT LEAST TEN thousand people waited by the podium on a brisk day outside the ruins of Phillies Stadium. Kenuda bored them very quickly by droning about the love behind Grandma’s new Thirty-Third Forgiveness Insight and how this wisdom would providing equipment for needy DVs all over the country. When he started reciting exactly how many gloves would be shipped via the finest highways in the world, the barking began.
Soon everyone was woofing it up. Kenuda reddened, thinking he was being booed, but he kept his balance, anchored by his egomania, and introduced Puppy for the inspirational part. Give him this much, Puppy Thought, Kenuda recognized he was dull.
Puppy talked about his baseball career and how it got him out of the DV, even after he hurt his shoulder, because in Grandma’s Family, we take care of our own, and then about what it was like to play major league baseball again in this last, thrilling season, and how baseball should no longer suffer for the sins of a few, but should rejoin the family of sports. As should everyone be permitted and encouraged to rejoin The Family.
That’s where Kenuda jumped back into the ceremony to formally open Phillies Park. Overnight, DV workers had planted an entire miniature baseball park, about one hundred feet to dead center, with old-style seats, very intimate, probably lifted from a semi-banned book. Two racks of baseball bats stood around home plate, stamped Property of Phillies Park, along with a halved beer barrel filled with balls and a wooden locker brimming with gloves. All new equipment.
Shy kids queued up and Puppy showed them a few basics: a pitcher’s motion, a batting stance, fielding a grounder, while the sullen Hazel, who hadn’t smiled all day and gave no indication he’d start anytime soon, filmed Kenuda holding up a baseball as if it were a piece of real juicy fruit.
After Philadelphia, Puppy dozed as the ‘copter journeyed north, settling behind a clump of trees at the Fenway Garden Society, where they crossed Boylston Street to Yawkey Way. Another large crowd, bigger than Philadelphia, swelled onto Brookline in a semi-circle. Puppy greeted them with a wave of his Yankee cap, earning a few good-natured boos from the sea of bobbing red B caps.
Again, Kenuda jumped onto the stage which overlooked another mini-park, same specifications, as if when they stamped the bats and balls and gloves, they’d somehow stamped an exact replica of what they thought a ballpark should look like.
Better than nothing, Puppy told himself, launching into the same speech which already, inside five hours, had become rote. He was scheduled, somehow between games, to visit Chicago’s Wrigley Field, Pittsburgh’s Forbes Stadium and Cleveland’s Civic Center. Only the sites of the stadiums, he reminded himself.
He finished ad-libbing a crack about the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry when an older woman with tall gray hair shouted, “When do we get the real Fenway back?”
With a big smile, Puppy stepped aside t
o let Kenuda answer that.
“That’s why we built this little park for you,” the Commissioner said brightly.
“Ain’t Fenway,” she snapped.
The crowd muttered and applauded; Puppy realized the semi-circle was around the ruins of Fenway, as if they were protecting it from further damage, a beaten living thing that could rise again, so don’t even think about removing another stone or a crumpled seat or burnt light.
“What’s important is the notion of forgiving baseball…” Kenuda tried.
“Baseball didn’t do anything,” a man shouted.
“Which is why we’re forgiving you.”
“How can you forgive us if we didn’t do anything?” someone else called out.
The few Blue Shirts on the edge of the crowd smiled nervously.
“Tell Grandma to rebuild Fenway,” a man cried out.
That let loose another chant of “Fenway, Fenway, Fenway.”
Kenuda was about to lose his patience when Puppy finally rescued him, grabbing the microphone.
“First we finish refurbishing Yankee Stadium, then Fenway.”
The crowd cheered.
“You really think you can beat the Yankees?”
A brief chant of “Fuck New York” startled Kenuda, who backed away, expecting to be trampled. Hazel and Puppy exchanged grins.
“You wish.” Puppy waved his Yankee cap to pleasant jeers. “Now let me show the next generation how to play so maybe that can happen someday.” He couldn’t resist and shouted out, “And that’ll be a long time since we got forty-five world championships and you only got nine.”
Rousing boos that only someone who loved baseball could understand showered Puppy as he happily conducted the brief clinic, barely making it back in time for the ‘copter to take them home.
Kenuda grumbled in the far corner, “That was very rude behavior.”
“I thought I was great.”
“Not you, Nedick. The crowd. I can see why.”
Hazel paused, cleaning his camera as if it were a weapon. “Why what, sir?”
“Why the whole damn sport was banned. You’d never see my football or basketball fans behave like that.”
“Aren’t these also your baseball fans?”
Kenuda stared at Hazel. “I don’t want anything from that crowd in your report.”
“Course not, Third Cousin. I’m just here to make you look good.”
Elias grumbled out the window at Connecticut.
“And make Puppy look good.” Hazel smiled.
That earned a resentful glare.
The ‘copter hit some headwinds northeast of the Bronx. Kenuda huffily insisted he had pressing affairs to attend, so they dropped him off onto the roof of the Cousins building, where the wind swept him a few feet off the ground, much to Hazel and Puppy’s delight.
“I was rooting for the wind.” Hazel snickered as they drifted toward Amazon Stadium.
Puppy didn’t disagree. “I thought you guys were buds.”
“No one’s buds with Elias Kenuda unless they can do something for him.” He stored the camera back into his back pack and grabbed the rope as the ‘copter let them down to a desolate playground, four blocks away.
Puppy pressed into the stadium through the mass of fans backed up 161st Street. He hurried down the ramp, humming with slow-moving siblings marveling at the glittering white ceilings or entranced like hungry zombies by the new food stands, curry, barbecue, the wondrous smell of fried foods magnetizing long lines. Lots of excuse me, sorry didn’t see your foot, please don’t spill any more of my beer.
The entire stadium had new seats, top to bottom, all three levels. Even the bleachers. Grass, real green grass. Pale brown infield dirt free of bones and glass. A clean pitcher’s mound. Sparkling white paint along the foul lines. Gleaming brocades on the upper decks.
If not for the skulls heads stacked in left center field and only one third of the scoreboard intact, this could’ve been Amazon Stadium on October 12, 2065.
Puppy burst into the clubhouse like one of Dale’s baseball demons were chasing him. The team fell silent as if their eyes were on a string between his padlocked locker and Ty’s closed office, which opened with a slow, theatrical squeak.
“Well look who’s honored us with his glorious presence,” Cobb snarled from his doorway.
Puppy squeezed the lock. “So sorry. I’ve been busy.”
“Well you are famous…”
“Damn straight. I’ve been killing myself promoting this game so all of you can play. Now open my locker.”
“Uniforms and equipment are for players who show up on time.”
“Open my fucking locker.” He whirled challengingly.
Cobb raged over with clenched fists. “Never talk to me that way again. I don’t fucking care how many cameras you suck off, you hear me?”
Mantle dragged the kicking, red-faced Ty into the office. Puppy glowered at Vernon.
“Warm me up.”
Puppy stomped along the foul lines, darkly waving past the barking fans and into the back of the bullpen. Even the skeletons were gone. An HG fighter jet whooshed overhead, singing the Rolling Stones’ Satisfaction.
Jackson stared. “What’s with you and all that attitude?”
“Famous people can be assholes,” he said. “It used to be allowed all the time. Encouraged actually. I’m just tired. Sorry.”
“Ain’t me you gotta worry about.”
Puppy sighed knowingly and spun his cap backwards. “Know how to catch a knuckleball?”
Vernon didn’t like the sound of that. “What is it?”
“It’s a knuckleball which you don’t throw with your knuckles. I need a glove.”
“I don’t have one except mine.”
“If I take yours, then how will you catch?”
Vernon brightened at this little ray of sanity.
“Fine. I won’t use a glove which, since I don’t have a uniform, makes sense.”
The catcher encouraged this continuing logic with a vigorous nod and squatted, holding out his mitt. “How do you throw it?”
The first pitch fluttered over the bullpen fence. Jackson retrieved the ball, ducking under a car full of cackling dancing HG clowns.
“It does lots of crazy things, this pitch,” Puppy explained.
“Oh?” Vern rolled his eyes. “Can you control it?”
“I don’t know,” Puppy admitted.
“Then use your regular pitches.”
“I can’t,” he said between gritted teeth.
“Shoulder?”
Puppy nodded sadly.
“Can you even throw a change-up?”
“I can barely brush my teeth,” he said softly.
“Frecklie said there’s about thirty-five thousand people here,” Vern said helpfully.
Puppy winced.
“But they’re probably just here to see how the stadium looks, not to watch you.”
He fought back tears of pain, fear. “The stadium looks this way because of me, Vern. It’s a lot of pressure. Responsibility. What if I’m not up to it? Then what happens?”
A coquettish HG player in blonde curls and a long pink dress tapped her fingers over center field. “Hello everyone.”
The fans yelled back like an ill-tuned orchestra.
“Are you ready?”
More yells.
“I don’t hear you.” The player’s ears grew elephant-sized.
The fans turned it up.
“Then say a big Bronx welcome to Your. New. York. Yankees.”
The Yankee logo turned into a magic carpet which whisked the somersaulting HG into the scoreboard. The team raced onto the field. Vern gave Puppy a pleading look.
A pair of spikes landed on Puppy’s head. Then he was hit by a glove, uniform pants and a parachuting blouse, followed by socks and underwear landing daintily on his shoulders.
Mick scowled from the bleachers railing. “Ty may be a miserable piece of shit, but he’s still our miserable pi
ece of shit manager, so never talk that way to him again.”
Puppy nodded, rubbing his head. “Should I apologize?”
“When he stops promising to kill you. Now get dressed.”
“He can’t throw anymore,” Vern offered.
“What do you mean?”
“His arm’s shot and he has to throw the knuckleball.”
“That true?” Mick demanded.
Puppy nodded, feeling relief in the truth.
“I hate knuckleballs. They make you look like shit.”
“He can’t control it, either,” Vern added.
“And he can’t catch it.” Puppy nearly stuck out his tongue.
“You both better learn,” Mantle threatened. “I was out late getting laid and I ain’t chasing line drives all day.”
• • • •
ZELDA DIDN’T BOTHER to pretend as if she’d just fallen out of her two-day sick bed. Glazed eyes, snotty tissue stuck in her pocket, epidemic coughs and hurricane-like sneezes. Nah. She bounced into the office with a cheery smile proclaiming to concerned colleagues that this was the greatest day in the history of humanity.
She busied herself in the office, making random notes on a marketing plan based on the battle-tested eenie meenie miney mo analytic school, joining along wih Mooshie’s new A Mound Over Hell album, blasting the music and her voice on the song Foul Balls.
“And keep on fouling ‘em off
Until you get me right.”
“Hi.” Katrina closed the door with grave concern.
“Katrina doll, how are you?” Zelda spun around in her chair.
Boar Face sighed. “This behavior is normal.”
“What, darling?” Zelda blinked slowly.
“This reaction,” she whispered. “The manic glee.”
“Did that happen to you, too, sweetie?” Zelda made a sad face, deeply worried about Katrina’s emotional scars.
Katrina nodded. “I felt like I was drunk.”
A Mound Over Hell Page 48