by Paul Haven
He leaned forward and turned up the volume.
The next batter was Boom-Boom Bigersley, a former monk who started playing first base for the Sluggers after he was kicked out of a monastery for making too much noise. He was convinced he'd been cursed because of his failure, and had resolved ever since then to let his bat speak for him whenever possible.
“And that's a long fly ball by Boom-Boom. It's going way, way, way back …,” Carson screamed. “It's off the top of the center field wall. Did you see that? Of course you didn't, this is radio, but take my word for it! Call your aunt Edna in Florida! Bigersley has a triple and the Sluggers have just scored two runs. It's four to two, folks. Why, that's the first time Boom-Boom has hit a ball out of the infield since July twenty-second!”
“Wooohoooo!” Danny shrieked. He was standing on the bed now, bouncing up and down. The Sluggers were back in the game!
Sluggers shortstop P. J. Planter was next, and Danny plopped back down on the bed and went into his lucky yoga position. He blew a cranberry bubble.
Planter walked on four pitches in the dirt from the rattled Bruisers pitcher, Tug Johnson.
“Bruisers manager Sebastian St. Croix is out at the mound to calm down Johnson,” Marv Maxwell said, his tinny voice hard to hear over the buzz of the crowd. “Johnson looks like a man who's just been told his house is on fire. He looks livid. This could get interesting.”
“Tug Johnson must have been expecting a cakewalk against the Sluggers,” Danny thought. Now he was on the ropes. Men on first and third base, still nobody out!
The crowd moaned as second baseman Spanky Mazoo walked to the plate. Mazoo was one of those players everybody loved to hate. He never talked to reporters, refused to stay at the same hotel as the rest of the team, and had a contract that allowed him to take his personal trainer, massage therapist, and accountant with him wherever he went. He was supposed to be the Sluggers' best player, but he never seemed to try very hard.
Danny stuck the gum between his front teeth as Johnson delivered the first pitch to Mazoo.
Clunk!
“Would you look at that?” Carson marveled. “Mazoo has been hit by the pitch. That's going to load the bases with Sluggers. I can't remember the last time I said that.”
“That had to hurt,” Maxwell added. “You know, that's the first time I've seen Mazoo use his head all year. He took one for the team there. His accountant has got to be nervous.”
The bases loaded! The Sluggers down just 4–2! Nobody out in the bottom of the ninth inning!
Danny decided to hold his breath until the next batter batted or until he passed out. Whichever came first! He took the gum out of his mouth and held it in his hand, then breathed in sharply and closed his eyes. What a relief it was to be free of the taste of cranberries, Danny thought. He could see why Manchester had never released his fifty-third flavor. It never would have sold.
“Ooh, that's strike one on the inside corner …,” Maxwell said.
“Strike two, right down the pike …
“Swing and a miss! Swing and a miss!” Maxwell said. “Tito Calagara goes down swinging, and that's one out.”
“No!” Danny moaned. “Say it ain't so, Tito!”
Danny put a pencil under his nose for good luck as Sluggers left fielder Bruce Minsky stepped to the plate. He took in another sharp breath.
“Johnson has the sign from his catcher and he's ready to deliver the pitch. Boy, he looks mean. He's screaming something at Minsky, but I'm not sure what he said, Marv,” Carson said. “Probably better if we don't repeat it anyway.”
Danny scrunched his nose down on the pencil as hard as he could.
“Here's the windup and the pitch …,” Maxwell said. “Oh no! Minsky pops out. That was not a good time to have a bad at bat. That's two away.”
“The bases are still loaded, but the team is down to its final out. It looks like the Sluggers are about to waste one of their best chances of the season,” Carson moaned.
Danny slammed his fist down on the bed. He had been squeezing the Kosmic Kranberry gum in his palm, and now it was stuck to his fingers like a web.
He bit the gum off his fingers with his teeth and gobbled it into his mouth. The taste made him shudder.
The Sluggers' last hope was Thelonius Star, the team's tiny right fielder. Star was so small locker-room attendants would sometimes mistake him for the ball boy, but now he held the game in his hands.
“The crowd is on its feet—men, women, and children cheering like mad,” Maxwell said. “You know, Chad, I've been in this business for thirty-four years, but it still hurts to see them get so excited when you know the Sluggers are just going to let them down. It's depressing.”
“I know what you mean, Marv, but you never know,” said Carson. “The Sluggers might just win a game one of these days.”
Both men laughed.
Danny didn't think it was funny.
As the Bruisers' pitcher got ready to deliver, the crowd screamed and stomped on their chairs. Danny held his hands together, his fingers locked in prayer.
“Here's the pitch from Johnson …,” Maxwell said in a whisper.
Crack!
Even over the radio, even with the crowd on its feet, Danny needed no announcer to tell him what that sound meant. It was the sweetest sound in the world. The sound of leather hitting the purest part of the bat.
“Star's hit the ball. He's crushed it into the night sky!” Marv Maxwell screamed, his voice cracking. “That ball ain't coming back! Home run! Home run! Thelonius Star has hit a grand-slam home run! Six to four! Six to four! The Sluggers have won the ball game! The Sluggers have won! They've won!”
Who Won It for the Sluggers?
Danny pulled open his bedroom door the next morning and crept out to the kitchen. It didn't matter that he would soon find out what punishment his parents had in store for him. It didn't matter that he had tossed and turned all night, unable to shake off a dream in which he was imprisoned in a dungeon by the evil Captain Cranberry, overlord of the planet Tart.
The Sluggers were on a one-game winning streak, and that meant that the world was a wonderful place.
Still, he approached the kitchen slowly. His mother was sitting at the table with her back to the door, reading the newspaper and nibbling on an English muffin. Danny stopped at the doorway and peered in at her.
Any kid facing the Grand Canyon of punishments will tell you that you should never sneak up on a potentially dangerous parent without first getting a good read on his or her mood. Parents can be unpredictable, and caution is key. But from his position in the doorway, it was hard—even for an experienced parent observer like Danny—to tell whether his mother was still angry.
He sidled over to the fridge and reached inside for a carton of orange juice, trying to make himself as small as possible.
“What a game, huh!” Danny's mother exclaimed.
In the Gurkin family, some things were more important than handing out punishments, even extra-large, bubble-gum-tycoon-sized punishments like the one Danny expected.
A dramatic come-from-behind victory by the Sluggers in the bottom of the ninth inning on a grand slam by the smallest player on the team pretty much overrode anything else that might have happened in the preceding twenty-four hours.
Danny closed the refrigerator and turned around. His mother held up the newspaper so Danny could see the headline on the back page.
STAR-STRUCK! it read, above a full-page photo of Thelonius Star swinging with all his might. If you looked closely at the photograph, you could see that his eyes were closed. The newspaper also noted that the Sluggers were still sixteen games out of first place.
“I'll tell you a secret,” Lydia Gurkin said. “I won the game for the Sluggers!”
“What's that, Mom?” Danny asked, taking a seat at the table across from her.
“It was me. In the bottom of the ninth inning, I figured they needed a little extra help, so I got up and started washing the dishes. They
weren't even dirty. I just rewashed clean ones. That always seems to help,” his mother said. “The second I started washing, they started their rally!”
Danny was taken aback. Sure, he was aware of the extraordinary things that could happen when his mother stopped watching a game and left the room. It always helped the team. Everyone in the family agreed on that.
But Danny was fairly certain that he had won the game for the Sluggers.
It was he who had held his breath, scrunched his nose against a pencil, become a baseball yoga master, and popped a wad of century-old gum into his mouth. Surely he had done more than anyone to take the Sluggers to victory.
But Danny didn't want to be rude, so he didn't say anything.
“I have to admit, it wasn't the same watching the game without the Sluggers' biggest fan,” Mrs. Gurkin said, reaching over and ruffling Danny's hair. “But what you and your friends did yesterday was very dangerous and very stupid.”
“Yeah, I guess,” Danny said.
“We'd be bad parents if we didn't punish you for it,” his mother continued.
“I wouldn't be so hard on yourselves,” Danny offered.
Danny's mother put the newspaper down on the table and looked at him.
“You know, last night your father and I agreed on a punishment for you,” she said. “Grounded and no television until school starts.”
“Grounded and no television!” Danny exclaimed. It was unnatural.
“But …,” she continued, “after the game we had a long talk. You wouldn't believe some of the crazy things your father did for that team when he was younger. Why, there was the time he ran away from home to try to win a job as the Sluggers' ball boy, the time he sold your grandfather's car in exchange for season tickets, and the time he parachuted onto the field during the national anthem.”
Parachuted onto the field! Danny hadn't heard that one.
“In any case, we're upset that you lied to us, and we're upset you would do something as dumb as what you did,” Danny's mother said. “But Gurkins have always done stupid things for the Sluggers. It's a family tradition.”
This was much better than Danny could have hoped for. It was amazing how a simple win by the Sluggers could make everything brighter. Imagine what a championship would do!
“So does that mean I'm not punished?” Danny asked.
“Oh, we still have a punishment for you, I'm afraid,” Mrs. Gurkin said. “Well, more of a favor than a punishment. Actually, more of an order than a favor. It involves your aunt Betty.”
“Oh no!”
“Yes, I'm afraid it does,” his mother went on. “You see, your father has promised to help her move next weekend, but he really can't with the campaign in full swing. He thought you might want to do it for him, as a way of making it up to us.”
“What about Max? Is he coming?” Danny asked. Danny's aunt Betty was all right, but her two kids, Gertrude and Philip, were awful, and Danny couldn't stomach seeing them alone.
“Not exactly,” his mother said.
“Why not?” Danny asked. “Why does he get out of it?”
“Well, mostly because Max didn't almost get himself and his friends killed yesterday by taking a bike ride on the Harry Tinkleford Highway,” his mother said.
“This is so unfair!” Danny protested, but he knew he was in no position to push it.
“Danny, who ever told you that life was fair?” his mother replied with a smile. “No Sluggers fan I know would say a thing like that.”
A Knock at the Door
On a moonlit night in 1934, Skidmore Boddlebrooks opened the heavy front door to his bayside mansion in East Bubble to find himself staring into the eyes of a stooped old man. The man was clutching a small suitcase in one hand and a flimsy cardboard box in the other, and he seemed to have come out of nowhere.
“Can I help you?” said Skidmore, leaning against the doorframe with a cigar in his mouth and a crystal glass filled with bourbon in his right hand. His hair had grayed in the decades since the pretzel tragedy, and his face was creased by thin wrinkles.
Inside, Skidmore's party was going strong. Jazz music from a quartet Skidmore had hired wafted out the door and into the night. Skidmore had been in the middle of telling a joke to the governor when he'd heard the doorbell ring.
“Are you all right, sir?” Skidmore asked brusquely. “Are you in some sort of trouble?”
Skidmore did not like being taken away from his party, and he especially didn't like being interrupted in the middle of telling a joke to the governor. He considered himself a man of respect and breeding, and he was one of the wealthiest people in the country. Sure, he still owned a terrible baseball team that he'd inherited from his dead brother, but he had many other businesses as well.
Good businesses, like the Twisty-Doughy Pretzel Co., Inc., which boasted five thousand warehouses around the country, each filled to the rooftop with piles of pretzels.
Successful businesses like the Ball-Park Mustard Goo Conglomerate, which produced enough extra-spicy mustard each year to flood the Mississippi, the Amazon, and the Yangtze, or so Skidmore had been told by his managers. Certainly that was a lot of mustard, and anyone who could produce it was not someone to be trifled with.
Who was this little man at the door, and what was he doing intruding on his night? Skidmore thought.
“I came about the ad,” the man said. His voice was thin, but it held a listener's attention, even a listener as important as Skidmore Boddlebrooks. “About the caretaker you're looking for for your brother's mansion.”
“Well, that's lovely, sir, but it's after midnight right now. Why don't you come around to my office in the morning and we can discuss it?” Skidmore said. He gave the man a hard look.
“I'll take the job,” the old man said, meeting his stare. “I'm going to move in tonight.”
Skidmore paused. He wasn't used to being talked to like this. He swirled the ice around in his drink and took a puff on his cigar. There was something familiar about the man, but Skidmore couldn't put his finger on it. He was sure that he had never seen him before in his life. He would have remembered someone like this.
“We can talk about it in the morning,” Skidmore said nervously.
“We can talk about it at the house after I move in,” the old man said matter-of-factly. “Why don't you come by one morning any time after ten o'clock.”
And with that, the little man turned his back on Skidmore and shuffled quickly down the drive. Skid-more Boddlebrooks stood in the light of the doorway and stared after him, a thin trail of smoke rising from his cigar and the ice melting slowly in his drink.
The Reckoning
Danny shot out his front door and down the stairs, on his way to Quincy Park and what he figured was almost certain doom. He might have gotten off easy with his mother, but he certainly wasn't going to be so lucky with Molly and Lucas. After all, parents pretty much have to forgive you eventually since you all live together and you're related and everything. Friends have more options.
Of course, if Molly and Lucas were grounded, they might not be at the park. Danny could only hope.
Danny strode through the park gate with his heart in his throat. He looked around at the crowds of children.
There were a few girls from school hanging out on a bench, and some seventh graders shooting hoops at the farthest court.
The whole walk over from Chorloff Street, Danny had been rehearsing ways of apologizing, but none seemed adequate. He had dragged his two best friends on a grueling bike ride to West Bubble, insisted on making them late getting back by sneaking into Boddle-brooks's study, and then snitched about the whole thing.
He was pathetic! What could he say?
Danny spotted Lucas first, walking down a gravel path toward the basketball courts about twenty feet away. Lucas was coming straight at him. Then he saw Molly. She was approaching from the other direction, bouncing a basketball with the tips of her fingers, her Sluggers cap pulled low over her face.
He considered making a run for it, then realized that would probably be the lamest thing anyone in the world had ever done.
“Hey, Lucas,” Danny said, looking down at his shoes. “Hey, Mol.”
“Hey,” Lucas said sheepishly.
“Hey, Danny. Hey, Doughboy,” Molly whispered.
There was dead silence.
Danny couldn't take it. They hated him. His stomach was churning.
“I'm so sorry!” Danny blurted, and was surprised to hear the exact same words come out of his two friends' mouths.
“You're sorry?” Danny said.
“But I …,” said Molly.
“Huh?” said Lucas.
Everyone laughed.
“I lasted five minutes before I crumbled,” Molly said. “I just couldn't stop myself. I tried the cat-down-the-manhole story, but my mother saw right through me. She said if the next thing out of my mouth wasn't the truth, I'd be in three times as much trouble. I'm sorry. I blabbed.”
Then it was Lucas's turn.
“I actually had my parents going there for a while with the story about being hit on the head by a beam and losing my memory,” he said. “But then they insisted on taking me to the hospital to see a brain specialist, so I just came out and told them the truth. I figured if someone could look into my brain, they'd probably be able to see what really happened anyway.”
“Doughboy, you really are an idiot!” Molly said. “They can't see into your brain!”
Danny told his friends about his own performance. He was so relieved.
“So weren't either of you punished? I figured you'd be grounded forever, Lucas,” Danny said.
“Oh, I was punished, and it was much worse than being grounded,” Lucas said. “I have to wash my parents' ugly car once a week for six months, and … I have to take piano lessons!”
