by Paul Haven
As he watched the kids play, he would indulge in a running daydream that he would one day buy his very own major-league team. It would be the greatest team of all time, winning championships every year as simply as blowing a bubble.
Manchester Mastications, Inc., had already come up with dozens of exciting bubble-gum flavors, and they were churning out a new one every three months. It wouldn't be long until he had enough money to build a stadium.
One Saturday morning in early May when Manchester was at the park, his eye was caught by a talented eleven-year-old shortstop who sucked up every ball hit to him like a vacuum. Actually, the first motorized vacuum cleaner would not be invented for another couple of years, and that was a ghastly contraption that required a long rubber hose, a large tank of gasoline, and a horse. Still, the kid was good.
“What do they call you, son?” Manchester asked when the teams changed sides between innings.
“The name's Smegny,” said the boy. “Lou Smegny.”
Manchester looked the boy up and down. He was wearing a torn baseball jersey and a dirty cap, and his glove was practically as old as he was. It looked as if he'd stitched it together himself to keep it from falling apart.
“Smegny … Smegny …,” Manchester said, trying to recall the name. “Doesn't your father work down at the docks?”
“Yes, sir,” said the boy. “Actually, my pop does all sorts of things to get by.”
“Of course he does,” Manchester said. “He's a good man.”
Smegny turned to go back to the game, but Manchester stopped him. He had an idea.
“Lou, how'd you like to come work for me?” said the bubble-gum tycoon. “You can start by coming to the factory after school; then we can find more steady work when you get older.”
The boy shrugged. Times were tough back then, and people didn't turn down work, not even eleven-year-olds.
“Sure,” said Smegny.
“We have a little ball club down at the factory,” said Manchester. “Would you like to be on it?”
“Yeah,” said Smegny. “Super.”
As the boy grew, his baseball talents increased, and he proved to be just as good a worker. He started off delivering gum after school, but moved up quickly. By the time he was fifteen, young Lou Smegny was in charge of inventory for all of Manchester Mastications, and at seventeen, Boddlebrooks made him vice president of new flavors.
Manchester and Smegny spent hours in the lab in the baseball-bat tower where Boddlebrooks worked on his secret new concoctions, decanting beakers of boiled-down fruit syrup into jars of rubbery goo. The two of them perfected Simply Sauerkraut, Victory Vanilla, and Patently Peanut Shell in a single month.
The following year, Manchester had saved up enough money to build a stadium in town and to start up his very own big-league ball club. He called the team the Sluggers because he thought it sounded nice.
In the early days, many of the players were drafted straight off the company pickup team. Back then, ballplayers didn't earn the big bucks they do today, and most had to work other jobs to make ends meet. Smegny was the Sluggers' star shortstop, but he continued to work down at the factory.
Manchester had become one of the wealthiest men in the country by then, with assembly lines pumping out fifty-two different bubble-gum flavors, each one more popular than the last.
But the tycoon wasn't satisfied. He was convinced there was one more flavor out there, and he thought about it night and day.
As a little boy in the old country, Manchester had been crazy about a small red fruit called the lingonberry that the village grocer sold for next to nothing in a brown paper bag. They were as sour as the czar of Russia and just as reviled.
“Disgusting,” his friends said.
“Filthy,” his grandmother snapped.
“Repulsive,” his younger brother belched.
Young Manchester didn't listen to any of them. He carried the berries around with him wherever he went. As a matter of fact, he had just run out of them on the day his parents died—the day he decided that he and his brother would immigrate to America.
“Ah, how I miss the simple tartness of that great fruit,” Manchester groaned from behind the desk at the plush executive office of Manchester Mastications. “America is a wonderful country, but it is missing this one important thing.”
“I don't know lint from lingonberries,” Smegny admitted when Boddlebrooks told him about the fruit. “But they sound a lot like cranberries.”
“Cranberries?” Manchester asked, raising his eyebrows.
“I think they grow up north,” Smegny went on. “I never cared much for them myself. Sour as all hell! People eat them at Thanksgiving.”
The bubble-gum tycoon sat up in his leather seat, his eyes twinkling with excitement.
“Can you get me some, Lou?” Manchester asked. “They need to be right from the source. As fresh as possible.”
“Whatever you say, boss,” Smegny replied. “But it'll take a while.”
It was no small thing to head north in those days. There were horses to prepare and lodging to arrange. Smegny did not return for several weeks.
While he was gone, Manchester continued to pore over the old books he had brought with him from his homeland. Books on food and fortune. Books on fate and the universe. Books full of potions and ancient recipes.
Smegny's travels took him to every cranberry bog in the Northeast, and to the frozen lands above.
When he finally returned, Smegny had a bushel of cranberries under each arm and a wagonful of the tart fruit in a carriage out front. Strapped to the roof was the longest canoe Manchester had ever seen, and sticking out the window was an old-fashioned fishing rod.
“What's that smell?” Manchester said after the two men shook hands.
Smegny thought for a moment. Then he pulled a crumpled-up paper bag out of his jacket pocket and held it up to his boss.
“Must be these fish sticks,” he said. “Some locals up north gave them to me.”
Manchester helped Smegny carry the cranberries in from the carriage, and the two men went straight to the lab. They worked around the clock for weeks until finally Manchester was satisfied.
“This is it!” the bubble-gum tycoon cried out late one evening, a beaker of concentrated cranberry syrup in his hands. “Try that. It's delicious.”
He handed the beaker to Smegny, who took one sip and nearly spat it out.
“But this is awful,” he said, wiping his mouth. “It tastes even worse than Simply Sauerkraut.”
“Maybe it could do with a bit more sugar,” Boddle-brooks conceded. “I'll tell you what, you concentrate on baseball and I'll keep tinkering.”
The Sluggers had fallen back in the standings while Smegny was away. Now they started to play a bit better.
Each day, the shortstop would take Manchester's latest cranberry concoction to the ballpark and chew it during the game to see if the bubble-gum tycoon's fine-tuning was helping the taste. It wasn't, but Smegny owed everything to the giant bubble-gum tycoon, and he didn't want to be rude.
As the season wore on and the Sluggers rose in the standings, Boddlebrooks became more and more convinced that his Old World books were right. Whether they were lingonberries or cranberries, there was more to them than their controversial taste.
The better the team played, the more sure Boddle-brooks was. He cornered Smegny in the locker room after the Sluggers beat the Charleston Bruisers 19–3 and moved into first place.
“Lou, let me ask you something,” Manchester whispered. “When you're chewing the cranberry gum, does anything strange happen?”
“What, you mean besides feeling nauseous?”
Smegny laughed. “I've been meaning to tell you, boss. I think that gum needs more work. It's still way too sour.”
“No! No!” said Boddlebrooks. “I think it's perfect. It's more than perfect. In fact, I think the gum is behind everything!”
Smegny looked confused.
“What do you
mean, the gum?” he said, taking a seat on the bench and pulling off his cleats.
“The cranberries. Don't you see?” Boddlebrooks said excitedly, sitting down next to him, his eyes shifting from side to side. “They're different. They're … lucky.”
“What are you talking about, boss?” Smegny asked skeptically.
“Lou, I've been looking into it. You've got to read more if you're ever going to learn anything,” Boddle-brooks huffed.
He told Smegny about the thousands of years of calamity that went into producing a single cranberry. The ice ages and mass extinctions necessary to create the perfect growing conditions. The centuries of rot and decay.
“They're just like lingonberries,” Boddlebrooks whispered, a faraway look in his eyes. “Since I was a boy I've always known there was something about them. It's all in the books.”
What he was saying might have seemed crazy to some people, but Manchester had seen much stranger things as a child growing up in his native country. In the Old World, there were miracles and there was misfortune, and nobody doubted for a minute that the two could be controlled. How else to explain why some elephants could learn to swing on a trapeze and some simply could not?
Smegny looked his boss in the eye. There was no doubt the team had been on a roll since he'd come back from the North, but Smegny chalked that up to his stellar play at shortstop, not the gum. Still, Manchester Boddlebrooks was the greatest man Smegny had ever known, and he had never seen him more convinced of anything in his life. Perhaps there was something about the Kosmic Kranberry.
“So, what do we do?” Smegny said.
Boddlebrooks put his hand on his young friend's shoulder and smiled.
“Just keep chewing, Lou,” he said. “Just keep chewing.”
Fingers Crossed
“So that's what I did,” the old man told Danny, leaning back on the couch. “I kept chewing that awful gum for the rest of the season.”
There was a long pause. Danny stared at Mr. Sycamore, his eyes nearly popping out of his head.
“You're Lou Smegny?”
“Well, I was,” Mr. Sycamore replied.
The old man explained how he disappeared following the championship season, his body crippled by the tumbling bubble-gum tycoon and his mind a blank slate. If it hadn't been for the name tag on his hospital bed, he would not even have known his name.
The young shortstop lay in the hospital for a week, and every night he had the same vivid dream. He was sitting in the glow of a warm fire in a cozy igloo, a bowl of delicious fish sticks in his hand.
He checked out of the hospital and headed for Canada.
Mr. Sycamore told Danny about his days with the Nabutee, a tribe he had first come across when he drove too far north during his search for cranberries, and how he had taken the name Seeyamoora.
“I decided to shorten it to Seymour when I came back,” Mr. Sycamore explained, recalling his 1934 confrontation with Skidmore Boddlebrooks in front of the great mansion. “It was a spur-of-the-moment kind of thing.”
“What did make you come back?” Danny asked.
“Well, it's a bit boring up there,” Mr. Sycamore said. “Except for the fish sticks. Darned tasty, I must say. But after thirty-six years, you get a little tired of them.
“Actually, if it hadn't been for the Great Thaw I'd probably still be up there,” Mr. Sycamore mused.
“The Great Thaw?” Danny asked.
“One day in the spring of 1934, the sun came out and it didn't go away,” Sycamore explained. “The snow began to melt, and the igloos started to droop.
“I was patching up a corner of my little home that had melted away when I noticed something in the ice deep under my feet,” the old man told Danny. “I grabbed my pick and dug down to it, and found something I hadn't seen for decades.”
It was the brown cardboard box he had been carrying when he arrived, and it was filled with Kosmic Kranberry.
“One taste of that gum and everything started to flood back,” Sycamore said. “Two weeks later, I packed my few belongings into a little suitcase, said goodbye to my Nabutee friends, and headed south.”
“But …,” Danny said finally. “If you're Smegny, that would make you, like, more than a hundred years old!”
“One hundred and twenty-six, to be precise,” Mr. Sycamore said proudly. “I know I don't look it.”
“But that's impossible!” Danny exclaimed. “You should be …”
“Dead?” Mr. Sycamore said. “Well, it's a funny thing about cranberries. They taste awful, but if kept in a very cold environment and eaten in great quantities, they're extremely good for you. Keep the arteries from clogging up, or so I'm told.”
Danny was speechless.
“I only wish they did something for my cataracts.” Sycamore shrugged, his milky eye shooting off toward the ceiling.
Suddenly, there was a loud thumping at the front door.
The taxi driver!
Danny looked at his watch. It was two minutes to seven.
“Mr. Sycamore,” Danny said. “Quick, the game starts in five minutes! We need more gum!”
Seymour Sycamore stared straight into Danny's eyes. For the first time, his wandering pupil was at rest.
“But, my dear boy, there's no need for the gum anymore,” said the old man.
Danny was confused. Of course they needed the gum!
“But this is it! It's game seven!” Danny cried. “We can't lose now.”
“Son, the Sluggers aren't winning because of the gum!” Mr. Sycamore said. “They're winning because of you!”
Danny furrowed his brow. What was the old man talking about? He had been rooting for the Sluggers all his life, but the team had only started winning since he found the Kosmic Kranberry.
The volume was turned down on the old television set, but Danny could see Sid Canova taking his warmup pitches.
The banging from outside was growing louder and louder.
“Who in the world could that be?” Mr. Sycamore said, getting up and shuffling out of the room. He returned a minute later with a very nervous-looking taxi driver trailing behind him.
“This is your grandfather?” the cabbie said, giving Danny an anxious glance.
“Yeah,” Danny replied. “Sort of.”
“I'm Lenny,” said the driver, extending his hand to Mr. Sycamore. “Lenny Pobjoy. Kid, what's up? I've been out there for half an hour. You coming?”
“Oh, you can't go now,” Mr. Sycamore said. “The game's about to start. Make yourself comfortable. You'll have to watch it here.”
The driver looked from Danny to Mr. Sycamore and back. He ran his hand through his hair.
“Well, I guess nobody will be looking for a taxi now, especially not all the way out here,” he said, glancing over at the television. “Don't mind if I do.
“Let me see if I can get a better picture on that old set of yours,” said the cabbie.
Danny pulled Mr. Sycamore to one side.
“What do you mean they're winning because of me?” he whispered.
“What do you think?” Mr. Sycamore replied. “That the cranberries do everything? If cranberries were that powerful, why would they be stuck out in smelly marshes?”
“But isn't the gum magic?”
“Oh, it's magic all right,” said the old man. “But I've always believed it has as much to do with who's chewing it. It has to be a die-hard, a true believer. The kind of fan who only comes along once in a generation.”
Mr. Sycamore smiled at Danny.
“Someone like me,” he said. “Or someone like you. Anyway, the gum's already done its part.”
“But I don't understand,” Danny said.
“It's a bit like those tugboats down at the docks where my father worked,” Mr. Sycamore explained. “They helped get the big ships out to sea, but once they got past the sound they were on their own.
“It's up to us now. There isn't a fan out there that doesn't think we can win tonight. There isn't a player on
the team who isn't convinced he's going to the World Series. That's more powerful than all the Kosmic Kran-berry in the world, if you ask me.”
“What a great night for baseball, my friends! A perfect night for baseball.”
Wally Mandelberg's voice burst out of the television set as Lenny Pobjoy fiddled with the volume. The Sluggers were whipping the ball around the infield.
“You got a beer?” the taxi driver said.
“I'm afraid not,” Mr. Sycamore replied. “I do have some popcorn if you want, but it's a little stale.”
The old man turned to Danny.
“So! You're the boy with all the superstitions,” he said. “What should we do now?”
Danny looked around the room. There wasn't much time.
“Well, first we have to close all the windows,” Danny began. “And, uh, I've actually got some hot dogs with everything in the bag over there. There's extra onion goop because Canova's on the mound.”
“Of course,” said the old man. “That makes perfect sense.”
Mr. Sycamore and Lenny Pobjoy scurried around the room closing all the windows, while Danny tore open the bag of hot dogs. There were two for each of them.
“Sorry,” he said. “They're cold, but they'll still do the trick.”
Mr. Sycamore turned to Danny.
“There's still time to run and get the gum if you want,” he said.
Danny paused for a second.
“That's okay,” he replied. “I think we'll be fine without it. The most important thing is to be in position for the first pitch.”
The three fans squeezed in together on the sofa just as the television camera showed an overhead shot of a packed Winning Streak Stadium, the grass glowing in the bright lights.
“I really like our chances tonight,” Lenny said. “What about you?”
“We'll have to pull out all the stops if we want to beat the Tornadoes,” Danny said. “Do you know how to cross your toes?”
The camera panned down the Sluggers bench. Sitting in the dugout, on either side of Finchley Biggins, were Molly and Lucas, each of them screaming their lungs out.
