by Paul Haven
“Older brothers can be rough,” said Willie. “Mine's in the slammer. Robbed a bank.”
Danny had to admit Willie's brother sounded worse. A little worse anyway.
Danny bought two hot dogs and walked off to the park.
Quincy was the only park within walking distance of Danny's apartment, and on warm summer days it was always packed with kids from John J. Barnibus Middle School and Louis Canfield High School.
Louis Canfield was where Max went to school, and it was right down the street from John J. Barnibus.
Max spent a lot of time at Quincy Park too, but he would usually ignore Danny and stick with his friends. It was a rule of the street. Kids from the Can—as Canfield High was known—never talked to those from the John in public, even if they were related.
Quincy Park had one full court, but that was always taken by the bigger kids from Louis Canfield. Danny, Molly, and Lucas had to make do with one of the single baskets off to the side.
Molly and Lucas were in the middle of a game of horse when Danny arrived. He took a seat by the fence under the basket and popped the last bit of hot dog into his mouth.
“Bank shot, over the shoulder, nothing but net,” Molly said as Lucas shook his head and scrunched his eyebrows.
Lucas was two inches shorter than Danny, with ruddy cheeks and big meaty arms. Some kids in the neighborhood suggested that he had a weight problem, but Lucas looked at it as more of a weight advantage. He was forty pounds better than everybody else.
“No chance, Mol. You got nothin',” he shouted as she lined up the shot. “Miss it!”
But Molly didn't miss. The ball clanked off the metal backboard and swished through the red hoop. Actually, it didn't swish because somebody had stolen the net. But it went through the basket without touching the rim all the same, just as Molly had called it.
“Looks like you're in a bit of trouble, Doughboy,” Molly said.
Molly Fitch was the only person who could call Lucas Doughboy without getting socked. She was the tallest of the three friends and by far the best basketball player. She had straight red hair, freckles, and a high forehead that made her look extremely smart. Molly's father also had the coolest job of all of their parents, hands down—he was a sportswriter for the Daily Bugler.
He got free Sluggers tickets. Enough said.
Molly had been voted an honorary boy by Lucas and Danny when they were all six years old, and had kept the title even though earlier that summer she had been observed using nail polish, a troubling development.
As Molly strutted triumphantly toward Danny, Lucas ran down the ball and came back to get set for his shot. He had to heave it over his shoulder exactly as Molly had done or he'd pick up another letter and be up to H-O-R-S, one miss from losing the game.
He licked his index finger and put it in the air, pretending to get a read on which way the wind was blowing. He took three uncertain steps and flung the ball over his shoulder, but he was way too close to the basket.
Clank!
The ball banged off the rim and back into Lucas's body. His cheeks were even redder than usual as he brushed himself off.
“The game is a draw,” Lucas said. “Danny's here now, so we should start over.”
Lucas had a way of convincing you of something even if you knew it was ridiculous, and Molly accepted the draw even though she was thrashing him.
Having a friend like Lucas could be a very good thing if you were on the scrawny side like Danny. He'd never been in an actual fistfight, but Lucas was a master of the angry stare that would make the other guy think twice. He had come to Danny's defense on more than one occasion.
Lucas was no bully, and he never picked on anyone who hadn't picked on him first, but he just couldn't stay out of trouble. Danny had figured out with a calculator one night that Lucas had been grounded for various offenses for approximately three of the five years they had known each other.
“Terrible game last night,” Lucas snorted as he grabbed the ball from Molly and chucked it toward the basket. “Canova looked like he was pitching uphill.”
“My dad said he saw him throwing up in the locker room after the game,” Molly said, grabbing the rebound and dribbling it between her legs, then around her back. “Apparently he's afraid they're going to send him back to the minors.”
“Wow!” said Lucas. “That's rough.”
For Danny, the little tidbits of locker-room gossip Molly got from her father were like pennies from heaven. He would play them over in his head endlessly during the day until it was time for another game.
Danny tried to imagine what it would have been like to be the sad young pitcher. He felt responsible for the rookie's suffering.
“Sid Canova's future in the big leagues is the least of our worries,” Molly said. “He may have gotten shellacked last night, but at least he doesn't have an entire year of Mrs. Sherman's history class staring him right in the face!”
Danny slouched and his stomach churned at the thought. It was getting harder and harder to ignore the fact that in fourteen days, thirteen hours, and six minutes the three of them would be sitting face to face with middle-school Armageddon.
Mrs. Sherman, known by generations of children at Barnibus as the Sherman Tank, was an unblinking woman who barked out commands as if she were addressing troops storming a mountain instead of kids trying to learn the ins and outs of American history. Max had been in her class five years earlier, and Danny could remember the long, vacant stares he came home with each afternoon, and the pages and pages of frantically completed homework he would leave the house with each morning.
Lucas had been pretending all summer that he couldn't care less about being in Mrs. Sherman's class, but Molly and Danny were both big enough to admit they were terrified. Even Danny's mother, who taught eighth-grade English at Barnibus, thought Mrs. Sherman was scary.
“I have a cunning plan for dealing with her,” Lucas said, bouncing a shot off the rim.
“Go ahead, I'm all ears,” said Danny.
“Well, I'll get her a gift on the very first day of class, and then after she likes me I'll just sit in the back of the room and not say anything the rest of the year.”
“Don't you think other people have tried that before?” said Molly, sticking the basketball under her arm. “George Mincy's older brother brought Mrs. Sherman a box of chocolates on the first day of class three years ago, and he's still in her class. She's flunked him every year!”
“I don't believe you,” said Lucas. “And anyway, I have a plan B.”
“Which is … ?” said Danny.
“If she calls on me, I'll pretend to have laryngitis.”
“Good plan!” said Danny with a laugh.
Molly was laughing too. She lined up a three-point shot and rattled it in.
Troubling News
Two days—and two Sluggers losses—later, Danny and Lucas were playing catch at Quincy Park when Molly came running over. Something was bothering her, and her hair was frizzed up as if she'd left the house in a hurry.
“I have to show you guys something,” she said breathlessly, pulling a folded newspaper clipping out of her back pocket and spreading it out on the grass. Lucas ran over from the other side of the field and the three gathered round and took in the news.
BODDLEBROOKS MANSION TO BE CONDEMNED screamed the headline in the West Bubble Eagle, a small paper from out of town. Molly's father often got Sluggers news before anyone else, and when he did, he passed it on to Molly to share with her friends.
Lower down, the article read: Rotting Bubble-Gum Building a Blight to Suburban Community—Residents Want It Removed to Make Way for Shopping Mall.
Danny and Lucas were shocked.
“I've never even been there yet,” mourned Danny. “They can't just tear it down. It's history!”
“There's got to be some kind of law against that,” huffed Lucas. When Lucas got angry, he swayed from side to side and breathed out through his nose. He looked like he could tot
ter either way, which had a tendency to make those around him nervous.
“My dad says there's nothing anybody can do to stop it. The West Bubble Town Council owns the land and the building because Skidmore Boddle-brooks had to turn it over to them when he lost his fortune,” Molly said. “They can do whatever they want with it.”
Danny had read about the mansion in books about the Sluggers' early days, but the building had been closed to the public for a decade pending repairs that the town council said it didn't have the money to complete. Danny desperately wanted to go.
The house had fifty-two bedrooms, one for each flavor of gum Boddlebrooks created. One room was said to hold a giant popcorn-popping machine for when Manchester threw his famous parties.
Then, of course, there was the backyard. Manchester had servants stick thousands of pieces of bubble gum to the branches of the trees so that guests could pick all his unusual flavors. There was a prize for whoever got the most.
After Manchester's death, Skidmore tried to sell the house, but he couldn't find anyone to take it. There weren't that many billionaires interested in a red fifty-two-bedroom mansion, especially one tainted by the Curse of the Poisoned Pretzel.
Still, nobody had had the heart to tear the place down—until now. For some time it had been a sort of pilgrimage for Sluggers fans, a place to relive the fleeting glory of that long-ago season. But the numbers of visitors dwindled year after year. After more than a century, many people had forgotten the mansion existed at all.
The article said the West Bubble Town Council had voted to bring the building down with explosives in what they referred to as a “controlled implosion.”
Danny felt his temperature rise and an angry knot form in his stomach. It was like finding out that the Taj Mahal was being bulldozed to make room for a gas station.
There was also the matter of the Sluggers' slim playoff hopes. An act of desecration like this would surely hurt the team's cosmic vibes, and no number of crossed fingers or properly topped hot dogs could undo the damage.
“We've got to stop it,” Danny said, his voice deeper than usual. Molly and Lucas looked up with surprise.
Danny had seen people on television chain themselves to trees to stop roads from being built, and others go on hunger strikes to protest this or that. Danny wasn't sure he was the tie-yourself-to-a-tree type of kid, and he certainly couldn't imagine going more than a few hours without eating. There had to be something he could do!
Danny stared at Molly and Lucas, and the look in his eyes said it all. They weren't going to let the town tear down that house.
Not without a fight.
Not without at least seeing the place first.
A Desperate Plan
“Why not!?” Danny cried when his father told him he was too busy to drive up to the mansion that weekend. Danny had launched what he thought was a gripping appeal—connecting with his father as a human being in need, a cherished offspring, and most importantly, a fellow Sluggers fan.
“The election is only two months away, Danny, and things are way too busy in the office right now,” said Harold Gurkin, gripping his morning coffee and flipping rapidly through the newspaper at the kitchen table. “I promise I can take you anywhere you want to go … after November.”
“November! What good will that do?” Danny moaned.
Hadn't his father heard a word he was saying? The Boddlebrooks building would be a heap of rubble by then.
Danny's father was the campaign manager for Mayor Fred Frompovich, and he was suddenly a very busy man. Frompovich was behind in the polls, and it was Mr. Gurkin's job to get him reelected in November.
The mayor himself wasn't helping matters any.
Just three weeks earlier, Frompovich had been caught smoking in the backseat of a movie theater, even though his administration had pushed to ban smoking in public places.
At first, the mayor pretended he was carrying the cigarette for a friend and that it had spontaneously lit itself when his overcoat rubbed back and forth, but Frompovich's election opponent hired a physicist to prove that the story was impossible.
Soon other scientists joined in, and the consensus was that a cigarette could not light itself.
The newspaper tabloids loved the story.
FREDDY FRICTION CAUGHT IN FANTASTIC FIB! read one headline.
SPONTANEOUS COM-BUST-ED! screamed another.
Finally, the mayor was forced to go on television and tearfully admit he had lit the cigarette himself. He acknowledged he had a smoking problem and said he was going to deal with it with the help of his family, a spiritual adviser, and $29.95 worth of nicotine gum that a friend said just might work.
The scandal meant lots of late nights for Harold Gurkin, who was trying to get the campaign back “on message.”
Danny didn't know what “on message” meant, but his father told him it had to do with economic growth and happy families.
The message evidently didn't extend to Mr. Gurkin's own family because correcting the mayor's missteps meant Danny's father had been too busy that summer to throw a baseball around, take Danny to the movies, or even watch the Sluggers.
“And I'm sorry, Danny, but there is definitely no time to take you kids out to that old house!” his father said, tapping his foot anxiously on the leg of the table.
What was happening to this family? Grandpa Ebenezer would spin in his grave if he could see how Danny's father and brother had abandoned the team.
Danny was sure Tornadoes fans never had these types of family issues.
The Tornadoes were in first place, as usual, a healthy seventeen games in front of the Sluggers. They didn't just beat teams. They crushed and humiliated them. They chewed them up and spat them out and left them quaking in misery. The team had won the last four World Series, and they looked to be marching toward a fifth title behind the ferocious pitching of Magnus Ruffian, a six-foot-eight Swede who grew up in a Nebraska prison, where his father was the warden. He was mean, and so were the Tornadoes.
Their fans' maniacal support never wavered for a second—as sure as fleas on a dog, as constant as homework, as powerful as a baseball in the nose.
It wasn't the desperate, nail-biting, toe-curling, scream-to-the-skies type of support Sluggers fans embraced. Tornadoes fans didn't need that, and they wasted no time on superstitions, either.
They had money instead.
Tornadoes fans spent their days laughing loudly about a lifetime of championship seasons, lucky bounces, and stirring comebacks with the confidence of people who felt that success was bestowed on them from the heavens.
These people were not like Danny. They were different. They were happy.
They were from Texas.
The Tornadoes' history could not have been more different from that of the Sluggers. Even before their first game, in 1904, a worker breaking ground on the stadium put his shovel in the dry Texas soil and struck oil, sending a geyser of black liquid high into the sky. It took two weeks to bring it under control, and by then the dizzying stench of oil was everywhere. Rivers of it snaked away like trails of lava.
The team owner, a door-to-door saddle salesman named “Diamond” Bob Honeysuckle, was suddenly filthy rich.
Diamond Bob flaunted his newfound wealth, building an oil field right around the stadium and ringing it with giant pumps and drills. There were even oil pumps in the parking lot. The clank of machinery went on day and night, even when a game was on, a reminder to visitors that the team's wealth and power had no end.
When Danny was six years old, the Tornadoes stole away his favorite Sluggers player, shortstop Rocco Barn-worthy, by buying him a private plane and promising him buckets of money and his own personal oil field. Barnworthy didn't hesitate to leave the Sluggers and sign on the dotted line. It was Danny's first hard lesson in how the world works, and it wasn't until he turned eight that he began to get over it.
Danny could see that beating the Tornadoes would take a miracle.
And the last
time the Sluggers had had a miracle, people were riding horses to work and wearing funny hats.
Danny couldn't help thinking that it was because of people like Max, and now his father, that the team could never make good.
Danny hoped Lucas and Molly would have better luck convincing their parents to take them to the Bod-dlebrooks mansion, but when he met them down at the Quincy Park courts the next day, they'd come up empty.
“Our car is in the shop,” said Lucas, his eyes darting to the ground. “My mother said it won't be in any shape to make the trip even after it's fixed.”
Lucas's parents' car was always breaking down or catching on fire or getting a flat tire. It was a rusty blue 1978 Chevy Nova that Mr. Masterly called a classic but all the kids in the neighborhood considered an eyesore. Mr. Masterly was very proud of how long he'd kept it on the road, even if it did barely work and you could hear it coming a mile away. It was not something you wanted to tease Lucas about unless you were in the mood for some pain.
Lucas and Danny turned to Molly as their last hope.
“Don't look at me,” she said. “My dad is going out of town this weekend with Cheryl. I'm staying with my mother and she doesn't own a car.”
Cheryl was Mr. Fitch's new girlfriend, and Molly was not particularly crazy about her. She was an interior decorator and had an annoying habit of changing everything she put her hands on, including Molly's dad.
“How about your mom?” Molly asked.
“She doesn't like to drive on the highway,” Danny said.
The world was a deeply unfair place. Danny heaved the basketball at the rim in disgust and was surprised when it went straight in.
“We could always bike it,” he said, and the fact that he'd hit the shot gave his words extra weight. Danny, Molly, and Lucas stood in silence for a few seconds as the idea floated between them.
“It's only about thirty miles. I think we could do it,” Danny continued. “I printed out a map off the Internet last night.”
“I would get so grounded if my parents knew I was biking out of town. It would be like a year before they let me out again,” Lucas said.
