Strikeout of the Bleacher Weenies

by David Lubar

  “I know just where to put it,” his mom said. She walked to the wall opposite his crib and took down the painting of three men in a tub that hung there. Then she hung up the quilted clown, gave Quentin a kiss, and left the room. Quentin liked the men in the tub, but he’d seen them all of his life, so he was ready for something different.

  Quentin watched the clown, and smiled. He was happy all morning and afternoon. He was happy for part of the evening—until the clown smiled back.

  It wasn’t a nice smile, like the clown had worn until now. It was a mean smile. And it didn’t happen until the sun set and the room grew dark. Quentin lived in a house on a corner where two busy streets crossed. Every time a car drove past his house, the headlights would shine in through his bedroom window, sweeping across the wall.

  As another pair of headlights highlighted the smile, which had grown larger and scarier, Quentin screamed. His mom and dad came running into the room. They flipped on the lamp next to his crib.

  “What’s wrong?” his mom asked.

  Quentin hated this question, because there was never any way he could answer it. No matter what was wrong—hungry stomach, wet diaper, itchy bottom—he didn’t know how to make the words that would explain the problem.

  He wanted to scream, “Get that clown out of here!” But he lacked the skills to do that. So he pointed and howled.

  “I think he’s scared of the clown,” his dad said.

  “He couldn’t be,” his mom said. “He loved it. You should have seen how his face lit up when I showed it to him. He watched it all day. He loves the clown.”

  “No I don’t!” Quentin wanted to scream.

  His mom picked Quentin up, whispered, “Hush,” and rubbed his back.

  Quentin was powerless against that sort of magic. Despite his fears, he fell asleep and didn’t wake until the next morning.

  Across the room, hanging from the wall, the clown looked safe and cheerful in the early sunlight. The evil smile was gone. Quentin wondered if anything had actually happened last night. He was still getting used to seeing and hearing things. And he was often wrong about what he thought he was experiencing. He didn’t quite understand how his father made his whole face disappear when he played the peek-a-boo game or how the pictures appeared and disappeared on the television. And things were tricky to watch in the moving beams of headlights that danced across his walls at night. So maybe there was nothing evil about the clown.

  He changed his mind when night fell.

  The clown gave him the same evil smile. Things grew rapidly worse after that. Even in the dim light between the cars, Quentin could see the quilt jerk, as if someone inside were pulling down at it. The frame bumped the wall, but not loudly enough to wake his parents. More bumps followed, like the beating of a slow heart. Then, Quentin heard another sound that was far worse.

  Rip.

  The clown’s raised arm tore free of the cloth on either side.

  The arm reached across toward the opposite shoulder, grabbed a fistful of quilt, and yanked.

  Rip.

  Quentin howled.

  His parents rushed in. The clown’s free hand slipped back where it belonged. As his mom picked him up and soothed him, his father said, “I hope this isn’t some new thing. Please tell me he won’t wake us up every night.”

  “It’s just a phase,” his mother said as she rubbed Quentin’s back and swayed from side to side. “All babies go through phases.”

  Quentin’s head started to droop. As it flopped down, he caught a glimpse of the grinning clown.

  He’s going to get me.

  Quentin let his whole body go limp, as if he were already asleep. It was the first time he attempted an act of deception. At the same time he pretended to be asleep, he also struggled to stay awake. His mom gave his back several gentle pats, bringing him dangerously close to drifting off, then lifted him from her shoulder.

  “There we go,” she said. “He’s fast asleep.”

  She put him back in the crib. He’d done it. He’d managed to stay awake. Quentin lay still, pretending to be asleep. The idea that he could fool his parents amazed him. But he had more important things to think about right now. He opened his eyes the tiniest slit, to watch the wall.

  The clown reached up, again, and pulled at his shoulder. He was ripping himself from the quilt, one stitch at a time. The shoulder and arm came free.

  The clown grabbed his head with two hands, scrunching the material of his forehead, and pulled downward. In a moment, he’d torn his whole upper body out of the quilt.

  He flopped down and worked on his legs, like someone unlacing tall boots.

  Quentin screamed again.

  The door opened. “Oh, good heavens, Quentin, go to sleep,” his mom said.

  “We should go in,” his dad said.

  “No,” his mom said. “The books say that sometimes you just have to let them cry. It’s hard. But it’s the right thing to do.”

  “We might as well try that,” his dad said. “We have nothing to lose.”

  The door closed.

  The clown dropped to the floor as the last stitches broke. He hit with a thud that sounded heavier than it should have.

  Quentin watched the clown crawl across the floor toward the crib. It reached the leg near Quentin’s head and started to climb up toward the rails.

  “Oh, baby,” the clown whispered. Its voice was like gravel and steel.

  It climbed higher up the leg. The passage was slow on the slippery, polished wood. But the clown was making progress.

  “I’m going to hug you tight,” the clown said. “Right around your neck.”

  Quentin screamed, then looked at the door. He listened for footsteps.

  Nothing.

  No sign of rescue.

  Quentin, pushed by fear and a survival instinct, began his first complex chain of thoughts.

  I have to keep the clown from reaching me.

  How?

  He watched the clown inch up the leg of the crib.

  Heavy things are hard to lift.

  The clown needed to be too heavy to climb. But it wasn’t.

  I need to make it heavier.

  What made things heavy?

  Quentin thought about his diaper. When it was dry, it was light. When it got wet, it was heavy. He clutched his bottle and turned it upside down. The water wouldn’t come out.

  A white gloved hand grabbed the bottom of the rail. “Got your nose,” the clown said. “Not yet. But soon.”

  How did his mom open the bottle?

  “Rip it right off,” the clown said. “Ouchies!”

  Quentin shut his eyes and pictured her twisting the top.

  A second hand grabbed the rails. “Baby go bye-bye,” the clown whispered.

  It was hard. Quentin wasn’t sure how to do it. But somehow, he got the top loose.

  He tipped the bottle and poured the water on the quilty clown just as the dreadful head rose into sight above the mattress and the smile stretched so wide, it became a red slash across the clown’s entire face.

  Soaked, the clown slid back down the leg to the floor. It spouted angry words and made a few attempts to climb back up the slick surface, but then lay limply on the floor, as if exhausted.

  Look! I did it myself!

  That’s what Quentin wanted to scream. But he knew nobody would come, tonight. And even if they did, nobody would understand the burbled half-formed words. As Quentin slipped back to sleep, he had another surprise. But this one was pleasant and full of promise. He discovered he could finally say, “Yay!”

  His parents came in the morning. They stared, they talked, they made guesses to explain the inexplicable, and they failed to understand. But they took the clown away, and put it in the garbage, where it belonged.

  A WORD OR TWO ABOUT THESE STORIES

  Since writers are always being asked, “Where do you get your ideas?” I like to end each collection with some insights into my inspirations. It’s best to read this afte
r you finish the stories, since there will be some spoilers.

  Easy Targets

  Charter schools were in the news a lot when I was working on this collection, as were stories about violence in schools. This led me to think about schools as safe environments. It wasn’t hard to go from there to thinking about a school specifically designed to have no bullies, which led me to think about what would happen if there was one bully in that school. Which led, as you’ve seen, to taking the idea one step further.

  Parasites

  I really did hear that poem when I was a kid. I’ve written other stories about this sort of concept, where there are levels of things, most notably in “Bad Luck,” from The Battle of the Red Hot Pepper Weenies, where the guy who is in charge of causing bad luck discovers that he, too, can become a victim of bad luck. But I think this is one of my favorites. I like that I can put stories with a wide variety of moods into these collections. I suspect some readers might object to the idea that vampires have blood. In some stories, they don’t. In others, they do. I guess I’ll just have to ask the next vampire I meet to settle things for me.

  Frozen in Time

  One of the great luxuries given to me as a story writer is that I can explore all sorts of structures, concepts, techniques, and literary devices. Ideas that might be too risky to use for a whole novel are perfect for short stories. (More about that when I discuss “Dominant Species.”) There are certain concepts that have been trotted out over and over for stories. These are called tropes. A trope can be a cliché, but it can also be fun to play with. Getting a message from your future self is definitely a trope. But I think I managed to turn it into an amusing story. I hope you agree.

  In Warm Blood

  The sanguine idea for the ending came first. It’s a fairly basic concept—letting the hunter become the victim. Once I knew how I wanted it to end, it wasn’t hard to figure out the rest of the story. Sometimes, I’ll get an idea for an ending that is fairly hard to orchestrate. Let’s say, to use a wild, hypothetical example, I have an idea that requires my character to end up climbing a tree while holding a pickle in his mouth and a checkerboard under his arm. That’s going to be a tough story to write. If you work too hard to set up an ending, or make the characters do unlikely things, the ending will feel contrived. That’s not good. By the way, there’s been a bit of debate recently over whether dinosaurs were warm- or cold-blooded. But given that the air was hot, I could safely describe the blood as warm either way. And there’s a bit of debate about the distinction between the brontosaurus and the apatosaurus. At least if there’s a mistake about that, it’s Kenneth’s error and not mine.

  Interestingly enough, just as I was going over the final edits for this book, a new largest dinosaur was discovered. I considered changing the story so it mentioned the titanosaur, but I realized there will inevitably be other, larger discoveries. So I decided to leave things alone.

  The Duggly Uckling

  Ever since I wrote “The Princess and the Pea Brain” for The Battle of the Red Hot Pepper Weenies, I try to make sure each collection has a fractured fairy tale. The idea for this one came straight from the title. As you may know, that sort of wordplay where the opening letters of words are swapped is called a Spoonerism. Puns, Spoonerisms, and other types of wordplay are great starting points for ideas. If you are having a hard time finding an idea for a story, look at the titles of fairy tales, songs, or even paintings, and see what your mind does with the words.

  Spell Binding

  I try to write a “what if” question every day. Many of my stories come from that. In this case, the “what if” was, “What if a wizard used a spell book as a trap to defeat a rival?” Naturally, the idea could have been spun out into a wide variety of stories. It could have focused on the rival (as did “The Wizard’s Mandolin” from The Battle of the Red Hot Pepper Weenies). But this is the variation that caught my fancy.

  Strikeout of the Bleacher Weenies

  When my daughter was young, she played on various rec-league teams. There was always a handful of parents (and, sadly, even some coaches) who took things far too seriously. Whenever I thought about possible Weenies title stories, that was one concept that came to mind. But the story itself came together in bits and pieces. I knew there’d be an opening scene with some sort of sport being played. Originally, I thought about soccer, but when the word “strikeout” came to me as part of the title, I realized the story would probably have to be about baseball, at least in part. And when I saw Bill Mayer’s amazing cover art, that cemented things. The idea for the ending came next. In the original idea, the story stopped when the Bleacher Weenies got carried off for their reward. But it felt wrong to do that to a bunch of parents, even if they’d behaved pretty badly. As I was thinking about this, the idea for the last scene, and the whole thing about “losing heart,” came to mind, and I knew I could now make the penultimate (I love that word) scene as grisly as I wanted without making the story too scary or depressing. The added kicker about “sacrifice” hit me as I was doing a revision pass. (In case you are wondering, I do a lot of revision passes on these stories. Most of them have been revised at least fifteen or twenty times before I’m finished with them.)

  Camping Out

  I went camping. Once. That was enough for me. But I got a lot of ideas from that experience, including the plot for a title story, “The Curse of the Campfire Weenies.” (Side note: I wrote that story because my brilliant editor, Susan Chang, felt that a camping scene would make a great cover.) When I started out writing about the girl on the camping trip, all I knew was I liked the idea of someone waking up in a tent and discovering she was alone. When I set the character on the trail, I had no idea what would happen. As much as it’s a good idea to plan a story and to do an outline, sometimes it’s fun to just start writing and see where your imagination takes you. Just don’t forget to bring a flashlight, so you can see what’s lurking in the darkest corners of your mind.

  Dominant Species

  I read an article about the fungus that appeared to be a lot of small growths but was actually one huge life form. That led me to think about other things that are spread across the land, which led me to sand. This story is a good example of how varied the narrative voice and viewpoint can be in different stories in a collection. It’s also a great example of how short stories are the perfect way to explore things that would be difficult to pull off in a novel. Basically, I wrote a story about sand, told by an omniscient narrator, after which you read a story about sand. If I wrote a novel about sand, I suspect nobody would ever get to read it.

  Swing Round

  I’ve heard about the inside-out thing ever since I was a kid. (Yes, we had swings way back then. They were made with rocks and vines, but they worked pretty well until the mastodons chased us off the playground.) And I am fond of young scientists. (If you share my admiration for young scientists, check out the Nathan Abercrombie, Accidental Zombie books. Nathan’s friend Abigail is an awesome science genius.) This is another case where I started writing with no idea what would happen. That gets easier with practice. I don’t recommend doing this too often when you’re starting out. It’s good to have a road map. But I’ve written so many short stories, over so many years, I feel pretty comfortable hitting the road without a GPS.

  All the Tricks

  I was a magic geek when I was in elementary and middle school. (You can see a totally geeky photo of me performing if you go to the biography in the personal section of my Web page, www.davidlubar.com.) I remember going to a magic show at the high school auditorium back when I was around ten years old, and feeling pretty smug that I knew how most of the tricks were done. I really wanted to be the kid who got called onstage to help with a trick. It’s probably a good thing I wasn’t picked. I suspect at best I would have been pretty annoying and, at worst, I would have made a total fool of myself. Those memories inspired the story. As an adult, I can look at that sort of situation from the perspective of the magician. That’s
what inspired the ending.

  enDANGERed

  I wanted to write a scene where people are melting down silver so they can hunt a werewolf. (And, for anyone wondering how I came up with ninety-seven pieces, don’t forget that backgammon includes two dice and a doubling cube.) The original story started off with a very moody feel. But the story took a twist during the final scenes, and I found myself with a lighthearted ending that didn’t match the rest of the story at all. I had two choices. I could find a different ending with a moody feel, or I could keep the ending and make the rest of the story lighter. As tough as it was to give up an opening I felt was nicely crafted, I liked the ending. Moody, literary prose tends to get more respect, and is viewed as having more value, but humor is actually a lot harder to write. (This is an opinion, not a fact.)

  Just for fun, I figured I’d share a bit of the original, unedited opening. It would have been very jarring to follow something like this with a funny ending.

  My mother looked like she was going to cry when Dad melted down her favorite candlestick. I’d heard rumors and whispers for weeks, but until that moment, I hadn’t really believed any of this was real.

  “What’s going on?” I asked him.

  “It’s nothing, Sabrina.” He put a hand on my shoulder and smiled, then went back to pouring the molten metal into the molds. I would have felt better if I hadn’t felt his arm tremble.

  “You’re making silver bullets,” I said. “Why?”

  “It’s just something I have to do,” he said.

  I looked over at Mom. She was trying to be brave, too. I guess she was fighting both the sadness of her loss—she’d loved those candlesticks—and the fear of what could happen to Dad. It would be unbearable to lose him.

  Two Timers

  I started out with the idea that kids find a device that lets them travel a short distance into either the past or the future. Time travel is very tricky to write about. (Note that I used “distance,” which is a spatial measure, to talk about time in the first sentence. It is often easiest to think about time in terms of the properties of space.) When I realized I could set things up so someone traveled in both directions at once, I knew I had a solid basis for a story. As always, any given concept could have led me to all sorts of different endings. I’m not sure I should have let the bully win, and beat up the two kids. Maybe I’ll travel back in time and tell myself to change this one so something bad happens to the bully. (Maybe I’ve already done that. You’ll never know.)