Waiting for Teddy Williams

by Howard Frank Mosher

  “What is an outrage, Mr. Deputy Warden Dogcatcher Truant Officer Kinneson, is for you to persecute this hard-working single mother and songwriter slash singer. What is an outrage is for you to haul her and her redheaded boy into court when there are jackers skulking along I-91 every night of the week spotlighting deer and selling the venison to five-star restaurants in Montreal and Boston. What is outrageous is that because you aren’t smart enough to catch those professional poachers, you go after Gypsy Lee and E.A. I’m fining you fifty dollars for bringing a frivolous charge in front of this court, and that I’m not waiving. From now on, you leave these good people the hell alone on their own property.”

  12

  ANOTHER SUMMER arrived, and the Fourth of July came and went with no sign of the drifter or of anyone else to help E.A. with his game. A week after the Fourth he woke up at dawn and decided to go fishing. As he looked out the slanted window of his bedchamber, he saw the drifter leaning against the rail fence of the Allen family cemetery in his worn old suit jacket and grimy shirt, baggy slacks, and scuffed work shoes. Red Sox cap. Dragging on a cigarette stub. Just standing there, looking at the grave markers.

  E.A. got dressed fast and went out to the cemetery.

  “Hey,” he said, touching his finger to the bill of his cap.

  “Hey,” the drifter said back, touching his cap.

  “You may as well hear it right now,” E.A. said. “Devil Dan Davis ran over that new ball you gave me with his Blade.”

  The drifter shifted his Lucky Strike. He smelled like the cheap booze at the dives where Gypsy sang. “His Blade,” he said, not quite a question.

  “His D-60 bulldozer.” E.A. glanced over toward Midnight Auto and the open-sided machinery shed. “Biggest bulldozer made—weighs sixty tons. Another five minutes, it’ll be light enough to see it.”

  “What does he need a sixty-ton dozer for?”

  “Ma says he uses it to wage war on the environment, except Devil Dan doesn’t believe in the environment. He shoves junk cars over the riverbank. Built up that big levee out in center field so the highwater won’t flood his junkyard. Drives logging roads up mountainsides, knocks down buildings on the Historical Register.”

  “The what?”

  “The Historical Register. A list of all the old rundown buildings in the county dating back to I don’t know when. Gran’s eight sided barn’s on it, only we’ve had to burn quite a bit of the barn lately for firewood. Devil Dan said at Town Meeting he didn’t believe in the Historical Register. Said he’d knock down the Washington White House if they’d pay him enough.”

  The drifter stared over at Midnight Auto, at the hundreds upon hundreds of junk cars and trucks acquiring color in the strengthening light. “How did this fella come to run over your baseball?”

  “Gypsy—that’s my ma—was pitching to me down at Fenway. The ball diamond over yonder. She was throwing BP?”

  The man nodded.

  “I wanted to hit that new ball one good lick. See how far it’d go. I caught it right on the sweet spot of the bat and drove it over Old Bill’s head, he’s our hired man.”

  The drifter nodded again. One thing Ethan liked about him was that he didn’t ask too many questions. He didn’t crowd a boy with questions the way the Colonel did, or a schoolteacher. Not that E.A. knew for sure what a schoolteacher would do, never having attended regular school. But he was pretty sure that pressing a fella with questions he didn’t want to answer was a schoolteacher’s style, and he didn’t want any part of it. Questioning E.A. Allen tightly was a sure way to get him to clam up.

  It wasn’t just not asking questions that made the drifter different from most grownups. Earl and the Outlaws didn’t ask him many questions, either, except to tease him. But the drifter actually seemed to listen. He waited for E.A. to finish what he was saying, and he thought over his replies. Listening was unusual. Gypsy listened to him, and the Colonel listened, but just to find out whether he was going to say what the Colonel wanted to hear, and then got mad if he didn’t. But the stranger seemed genuinely interested.

  “Dan was building that bank, and he swerved out of his way to run over the ball. Gypsy shucked off her top and did the River Dance on the Blade’s roof. Old R.P. Davis, that’s Devil Dan’s wife, smashed the dozer’s instrument panel all to pieces with her rolling pin.”

  The drifter was grinning a little. “That must have been quite a show.”

  “Dan called me a little bastard.”

  “Did he?” The man narrowed his eyes through his cigarette smoke. “That’s harsh language. How come your pa didn’t deal with him?”

  E.A. shrugged. The stranger was studying him, using the cigarette smoke as a screen so that E.A. couldn’t read his expression. But then he looked back at the slate stones in the cemetery. “Gleason Allen, 1860 to 1922, blown sky high while trying to blow up his loving family,” he read aloud.

  “Gypsy’s got a song about him,” E.A. said. “She wrote it when she was a little girl. It starts out, ‘Grandpa Gleason, crazy and mean, got blown up to smithereens.’”

  They looked at the stones, BABY, MOTHER, SISTER, OUTLAW ALLEN—Outlaw his given Christian name—MURDERED BY REVENUERS. And old Patrick Allen, who, with a few of his drinking cronies, decided one night to annex the province of Quebec to Kingdom County. They got as far as the first farmstead across the border before they were gunned down in their tracks by local farmers.

  The drifter was looking at the wooden marker with GONE AND LONG FORGOTTEN scratched on it. “That’s my pa,” E.A. said.

  “Your pa?”

  “Yes. Well, I think so. Sometimes Gypsy calls him Mr. Nobody.”

  The man looked at him. “You want to hit a few balls?”

  “You mean like BP?”

  The drifter nodded. “I got a few baseballs in my coat pocket. Not official balls like the one Davis run over. But they’ll do. You want to hit a few?”

  “You bet I do,” E.A. said.

  The boy and the drifter walked toward the baseball diamond laid out in the meadow. Over at Devil Dan’s, Norton and Orton Horton were hanging out R.P.’s wash. The skinheads stared at E.A. and the drifter.

  “This isn’t a bad ball field,” the tall man said.

  “Gypsy and I laid it out. Bill was supposed to help but didn’t on account of his bad back.”

  E.A. looked up at the man with pale eyes. “I got to ask you something, mister. Before we get started. The Colonel—the statue overstreet—said he might send somebody. A fella to help me along with my game.”

  “Hold on here. You’re overrunning me on the base path. You say the statue told you this?”

  “You bet. Ethan Allen, over on the common. He’s my—let’s see—great-great-great-great-great-grandfather. I used to think he was my real father on account of we had the same name. And when I said my Our Father Who Art in Heaven I’d think of him. I asked him to do things for me, but he never did jack. Not that I could see. Him or Our Father Who Art in Heaven, either.”

  “What’d you ask him to do?”

  “Well, to help the Sox win the Series so Gran could walk again.”

  “That would be a tall order.”

  “I know. I didn’t really expect he’d pull that off. So I asked him to help Gypsy make a record and get to Nashville. When he didn’t step up to the plate on that one, I all but begged him to smite down Devil Dan and his first-born and his oxes and asses for running over my official American League baseball with the Blade. But he hasn’t seen fit to smite Dan yet, either.”

  The drifter looked over at the Davis place. He stared at Norton and Orton, and they stared back at him. After a minute they looked away.

  E.A. wondered if he’d told the man too much. That he’d think E.A. was crazy for talking to a statue. Maybe not toss him any BP after all. He wished he hadn’t blurted those things out, didn’t know what had come over him. But all the man said was, “Usually, you want something done like what you asked that statue for, your best bet is to tend to
it yourself. Like in baseball. You have to find a way to get on base, make something happen. Same with learning the game. Maybe I can show you a thing or two you’d be a while coming to figure out yourself. Mainly, you have to do it on your own.”

  E.A. wondered if the drifter was suggesting that he should smite down Devil Dan himself, pop him some morning with Grandpa Gleason Allen’s deer rifle when he was emptying crankcase oil from the Blade into the river. Maybe rub out the two skinheads, Orton and Norton, at the same time. It was an appealing idea.

  The man walked out to the mound. E.A. stood at home plate and took several hard practice cuts. He said, “You’ll be surprised to see how far I can drive the ball this year. Since I hit that game-winning line drive on the common? I’ve grown a lot. You can see that.”

  The man was looking at the anthill pitching mound. “You’ve grown some,” he said.

  Bill emerged from his trailer behind the barn. The drifter looked up and touched his cap with his index finger. Bill nodded.

  “Put your glove on, Ethan. Warm me up a little.”

  The man stood on the mound, took a scuffed baseball out of his jacket pocket, and tossed a few practice pitches to E.A. He caught Ethan’s returns barehanded.

  “Sixty feet eight inches, maybe nine,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Your mound is sixty feet nine inches away from home plate. It’s long by three inches.”

  “How do you know?”

  From the other pocket of his jacket the drifter produced a steel tape measure. “Come here and hold this on the rubber,” he said.

  E.A. held the reel on the pitcher’s rubber while the drifter walked backward, unwinding the bright yellow tape. He put the end down on the front of the plate. Ethan looked at the tape emerging from the spool: 728¾ inches. Sixty feet, eight and three-quarters inches. The man’s estimate was off by a quarter of an inch.

  “Stand in,” the man said. E.A. assumed his batting stance. He was careful to set his hands back behind his ear.

  Without winding up, the drifter brought the ball in his hand back like a catcher gunning out a base runner attempting to steal second and threw. It was a perfect BP pitch, waist-high and out over the plate. Ethan waited, stepped, and smacked the ball over second base. A solid single.

  The man reached into his jacket for another ball. This one Ethan hit sharply on the ground between short and third.

  He swung around and bunted the next pitch ten feet down the first-base line to show that he knew how to advance the men he’d already put on first and second. On the next pitch he hit a fly ball to center field.

  “Where are your base runners?” the drifter said.

  “The guy on third tagged up and scored. The guy on second advanced to third. Man on third, two out, one in.”

  The man nodded.

  “Put something on them,” E.A. said. “Put some mustard on them.”

  The drifter threw the next pitch a little faster. Ethan was ready. He lined the ball straight back at the mound as hard as he could hit it. As fast as a boxer slipping a punch, the drifter jerked his head aside. At the same time he reached up and snagged the ball barehanded.

  Ethan stared. He did not believe there was a ball player in Kingdom County who could have caught that hit in his bare hand. Not Earl. Not Moonface. Not Pappy Gilmore in his prime. He had never seen a man’s hand move so fast.

  “Jesum H. Crow,” E.A. said. “Where’d you learn that?”

  “Nowhere.”

  “Nowhere?”

  “Nowhere. Smart base running, which base to throw to, some parts of hitting, you can learn. Quick hands, you’ve either got or you don’t got. The side’s retired, Ethan. One run in. You want to go again?”

  They played three more innings. Ethan’s team scored once or twice each inning. Old Bill shagged the balls in the outfield, muttering and grumbling, in no way surprised by the drifter’s presence. E.A. had never seen Bill surprised. He suspected that if the Red Sox manager, the Legendary Spence, showed up one morning to pitch BP, Bill would be entirely unastonished. Bill lived in a perpetual state of mild disgruntlement in which surprise had no place.

  By now the sun had been up for half an hour. The osprey that nested on top of the water tank by the trestle had caught a trout and taken it back to its nest. Orton and Norton were cleaning out an old pickup. Later they’d count bottles at Dan’s redemption center at the back of the junkyard, polishing off any leftover beer in the cans. Devil Dan was getting ready to go out with his flatbed and pick up more wrecks. Gypsy and Gran were sleeping in.

  “That’s good for this morning,” the drifter said, dropping the half-dozen balls one at a time back into his pocket.

  “Well?” E.A. said.

  “Well what?”

  “How’d I do? Hitting?”

  The man shrugged. “Fair.”

  “Fair? I never missed once. You want to know the book on me? I never strike out. One way or the other, I get my bat on the ball.”

  The man lit a Lucky with a wooden match, which he flipped still smoldering into the grass. He squinted at E.A. through the smoke. His eyes were smoke-colored.

  “The book on you,” he said, “is you swing at a lot of pitches.”

  “So what, as long as I connect? Yogi’d drive ’em someplace if they bounced in front of the plate.”

  The drifter dragged on his cigarette. He took a bottle of Crackling Rose out of a pocket and unscrewed the cap and had a drink. Wiped the mouth of the bottle on his jacket sleeve and passed it to Bill.

  “Ethan,” the man said, “a hitter has to be very patient.” He said this in a patient voice, as though to illustrate what he meant. He sounded, again, like one man talking factually to another. He could have been commenting on the weather.

  “Hitter has to wait for his pitch,” he continued. “That’s why your team couldn’t do nothing against that schoolteacher fella. They was swinging at too many curve balls, too many pitches just out of the strike zone. Look.” He pointed up at the wooden tank where the osprey sat watching the river. He whistled, and the bird turned its white head their way. “See that customer up there eyeballing us?”

  E.A. nodded.

  “Watch him.”

  As they watched, the bird rose into the air and began to circle above the river. Suddenly it went into a plunging dive, hit the surface so hard it vanished momentarily in the spray of water, and took off with another trout wriggling in its talons.

  “That’s a hard way to get your breakfast,” Bill observed. “Ethan,” the drifter said, “how many times you ever see her dive and miss?”

  Ethan thought. “Never.”

  “Why come?” said the man. “I’ll tell you. Because she’s patient. She’ll work a pool for ten, fifteen minutes, like a good fisherman, then go along to the next, come back later, work it again for as long as it takes. She watches. If a hatch of flies comes over the water, she’ll work harder. She knows the fish’ll be coming up to feed. I don’t know how she knows, but she does. She’s careful to keep her shadow off the surface, and she can see right down into the water several feet on account of her eyes are naturally tinted, like a fancy pair of sunglasses. She can see eight times as good as I and you can see. But none of that would matter if she wasn’t patient.” It was the most he’d ever said to E.A. at one time.

  “How is it,” E.A. said, “you come to know so much about ospreys?”

  “I read up on them in a bird mag.”

  E.A. looked at the stranger in his tramp clothes. He did not look like the sort who read Audubon or Nature, bird magazines like the ones the Memphremagog optometrist who visited Gypsy brought her from his waiting room, six or eight months out of date but still interesting.

  “Where?”

  “Where what?”

  “Where’d you read that bird magazine?”

  The man paused, then said, “In college.”

  E.A. was surprised. He would not have guessed that this man had been to college any more than he would hav
e supposed he read Audubon. He didn’t talk like Judge Charlie K, say, or Editor Jim Kinneson, or even Gypsy, who had spent that year at the state university before getting knocked up with him.

  E.A. said, “Gypsy says I can go to college. Get an all-expense scholarship for my baseball. Paid for by the state.”

  “I had something like that,” the drifter said. “But I never got beyond college ball. To take your baseball as far as you can, you have to learn to be very patient at the plate.”

  “I guess I’m patient enough,” E.A. said. “I never missed one pitch you threw.”

  The man shrugged. “Them was BP pitches.”

  “Fine,” the boy said, reaching for his bat. “Throw me your best pitch. Game situation. I guarantee I can get my bat on the ball. Drive it somewhere.”

  The man looked at E.A. Then he nodded.

  “Oh Lordy,” Bill said.

  The drifter went back out to the mound in the morning sunshine. Ethan stood in.

  “You all set?”

  E.A. nodded.

  Again the big man threw with no wind-up. Before E.A. could swing, the ball cracked into the side of the barn, between a blue-and-white Montana Big Sky Country and a Rhode Island the Ocean State plate, bending them back and leaving a hole as big as a fist in the multicolored southeast wall.

  E.A. had never seen a thrown baseball travel that fast in his life. All he could do was stare at the hole.

  “Look, Ethan. The time’ll come when you’ll drive a pitch like that into the river. But that telephone pole you use for a bat? It’s way too much timber for you.”

  E.A. rapped the taped handle of the bat on home plate. “It’s got good wood.”

  The drifter shrugged. “Like Ted said. What good’s wood—”

  “If you can’t handle it,” Ethan finished. “Hey. This was a good morning.”

  “A man should have a lot of good mornings like this in his life,” the drifter said. Then, “Well, I’ll see you when I see you.”

  He started down across the meadow toward the tracks.