by John Ritter
“Well,” he said, “here goes nut thing!” And off he went. The pull of the rig was so strong, Billee could gambol around the upper-deck promenade with long loping strides, like an astronaut bouncing on the moon.
He came leap-jogging back, laughing.
“Well, are you ready?”
CHAPTER 29
From that moment, the night took on a magical glow.
The low glimmer of light inside Fenway seemed to golden up and began pulsating everywhere Stats looked. At the moment of his own liftoff, he felt an instant kinship with every bird that had ever flown within the walls of this ancient fortress.
He would later describe the electric surge that charged through his bones as a hawkness, though he would also admit he hardly knew what that word meant. It just felt right.
His eyes focused in crystal clarity. His breath flowed high into his chest. He laid one sure hand on his bundle of sticks, gripped the tether line with the other, and up he rose.
Ten feet, twenty, thirty. Floating straight up, a boy on a cloud on a top-secret mission, he seemed to have become a human lightning rod for every unanswered dreambolt prayer sent skyward in the history of this sacred slice of land.
He could sense them all, back to the days of Tris Speaker, Babe Ruth, and Joe Cronin. Through the days of Jimmy Foxx, Ted Williams, and Bobby Doerr. And forward to the days of Johnny Damon, Roger Clemens, and Manny Ramirez. He heard their thoughts.
Yes, the whispered prayers of big-league ballplayers whistled around him as he rose.
With a fierceness and finesse he had never known, but was now so strangely his own, Stats tossed the bundle of hawk’s nest makings onto the press box rooftop, behind its half-wall facade.
Then he fastened the tether line to a small crosspiece on the shiny new flagpole atop the wall’s peak to hold the balloons in place while he dropped from the rope seat onto the roof.
Once he could walk upon the rooftop, he pulled out his eXfyle and found the illustrations of a hawk’s nest that he had saved for reference. Using the same layered weaving shown in the drawings, he constructed the best replica of a natural hawk’s home he could.
As a final touch, he added some shredded wool socks he’d cut up in his room and stuffed into his pockets. Red socks. Using the woolen shreds, he layered and cushioned the floor of the nest as if it were a royal throne. He took three pictures and stepped back into his seat. Before he unhitched the beach balls to ride them down again, Stats took a moment to gaze out across the Boston skyline, eerily unhindered by the ballpark lights.
But nothing he saw in any direction—the new Hancock Tower, the Prudential Tower, and the R2-D2 building on Huntington Avenue—compared, in beauty or grace, with the architecture of the building he stood upon.
Which was as it should be, as far as Stats was concerned, for no occupation practiced within any of those landmark structures could compare in skill or complexity or worth to the high artwork of those men who had declared somewhere in their Olympian boyhoods the intention to dedicate their lives to mastering a child’s game. And to never give up.
“Got it?” yelled Billee.
“Got it!” Stats replied. “Beam me down, Billee.”
In the next moment he was gliding his way toward Boston’s unluckiest pitcher, whose muscular arms easily reeled him in, coiling the line around two metal rails. All in all, his trip into the heights of heaven had taken less than fifteen minutes. And now he was back to the mortal realm with, he hoped, the gratitude of a rebalanced bio-system, if not a pocketful of luck.
But he was not done yet. Just as his feet touched the top of the upper deck rail, he said, “Billee, do you think you could take me down to the field?”
“You mean fly you there?” Billee sent a thoughtful glance toward first base below. Without any further hesitation, he said, “Wrap your legs through the railing and just hang tight for a minute.”
Stats did as he was instructed.
Billee freed the coil of rope and tossed it all the way down to the field-level seats.
“Don’t let go until I tell you to, bud, or we’ll have to call Logan to shoot you down.” He winked, then headed for the tunnel.
Stats wrapped his arms through the bars as well, and hung tight.
In a few minutes, Billee had reappeared below and gathered up the coil of rope.
“Hold on!” he called. “Don’t let go just yet.”
He hopped over the wall and onto the field, then spun around, wrapping his own body with the line.
“Okay, now!” he called, waving his hat from the first-base media pit.
Stats untangled himself from the upper-deck rail and let go.
Instantly Billee began flying him like a kite. The weight of the rope between the two was enough to keep Stats from floating too high—until Billee reeled him closer.
Pulling him over the Red Sox dugout and onto the field, Billee brought Stats along until he hovered directly above him. Then he let out more line, sending the flying boy some thirty feet above the grass.
Stats could feel the pulse of his heart in his stomach, in his shoulders, hands, and legs. Or was it the pulse of Fenway taking over his body and soul?
For as he floated in the night, Stats realized his heart had never felt so weightless, so normal. It was beating free and easy. Like hawk wings through the sky.
This fact might have surprised a normal boy, one who lived for the booming adrenaline rush that this sort of event would supply. But Stats felt nothing beyond an elevated calm.
And then he realized why. Fenway Park had always been a part of his heart. A normal part.
Unless a kid had grown up right outside these brick walls, unless he had been guided through the high holy gates at an early age, down the green serpentine walkways to the narrow weathered-gray wood-slat seats Stats could still recall from his first-ever baseball game, he could not hold in his heart the pulsings of this hundred-year-old park the way Stats could.
Obviously, a kid might come close. Why? Because every clumpy crabgrass ballfield in every small town across the land, with its foot-carved riverine base paths, its dented-metal Coca-Cola scoreboard, its rock-clay pitcher’s mound, had a bit of Fenway in it. Every dusty city dugout made of concrete blocks with splintered wood benches was made from particles of Fenway. Every empty city sandlot, every playground ballfield Stats had walked past in all of his long short years held a bit of Fenway, in the same way every teardrop holds a part of the sea.
That’s because Fenway was more than an exact place. It was the love of baseball itself. It was the wobbly knees of a first at bat. It was the full gut tingle, the utter exultation that shakes through a small boy’s vernal bones when, for the very first time, a ball thrown by his brother jars the pocket of his glove and stays in place.
Fenway Park is all these things to all boys, all girls, all across the globe.
“Take me over the mound, Billee.”
Slowly Stats glided over the chalk, onto the infield, and hovered above Billee, standing on the pitcher’s mound.
“Hey, watch this!” Stats yelled. Wrapping his right foot around the tether, he stuck his left leg out in front of him, high into the air.
“I’m Luis Tiant!”
“You’re the spittin’ image,” said Billee.
Stats laughed in glee. He leaned forward to ask, “Hey, can we go to the outfield? I want to play one off the Green Monster.”
Again, he was bounding through space, whizzing off to his personal Emerald City.
Approaching deep left, Stats began to call the play. “Top of the ninth, folks. Last chance for the Cardinals.”
Billee brought him to the wall.
“Get ready to bounce me off it, Billee.”
“Coming right up.”
Stats looked back toward home plate. “Long fly ball to left, folks. Oh, boy, he got it all. It’s gonna be trouble. Yastrzemski’s back. He’s looking up …”
At that point, Billee pulled down on the rope a good five feet.
“�
�� He might have a chance. He jumps!”
Billee let out the slack just as Stats reached high and leaped toward the sky, and the pack of beach balls slammed into the thirty-seven-foot wall, bouncing their way up and over it, and Stats along with them.
“Yastrzemski crashes into the scoreboard, folks …”
Atop the rim of the monstrous wall, Stats held his glove hand at full extension.
“And he makes the catch! Holy guacamole! Alfredo Carl ‘Yaz’ Pagano makes an incredible catch! And the Boston Red Sox win the 1967 World Series!”
“Woo-hoo!” shouted Billee. “Nice grab, Yaz. You haven’t lost a thing.”
They laughed and they bounced all around the park, circling the outfield, then the bases.
“Freddy Ballgame, folks, whacks another one, a massive shot, over the right-field wall. What a blast! I tell you, it looked like a spaceship zooming over Williamsburg!”
Stats had never felt so elated in all his life. He had never “run” so fast or “jumped” so high. Had never laughed so hard.
So this is baseball, he thought.
Wow, what a game.
CHAPTER 30
“Billee?” asked Stats as he sat gazing into the stars from his balloon seat, still hovering twenty feet above his friend anchored upon home plate. “If you weren’t a Major League Baseball pitcher, what would you be?”
And though Billee had been meditating for the past half hour, he responded rather quickly. “Oh, a thousand things, buddy. I could live ten lifetimes and never do all the things I’d like to do.”
“Like what?” Stats could not even dream of a dream bigger than the one Billee was living.
“One thing I always wanted to do was to just travel the earth, to vagabond around it, say, ten or fifteen times, to see all I can see. I’d head south to start with. Venezuela, Colombia, Patagonia.”
“I never would have guessed that.” But now, somehow, he could understand. If you felt that you had been “dropped” upon a foreign planet, as Billee said he did, the least you could do was to explore the place and find out what all it had to offer.
“Yep, I want to see every place I can.” Billee paused to think again. “Long-haul trucking. That’s something I’d like to try someday. Eighteen-wheeling from coast to coast. Also like to be a mountain climber. Someday I want to climb the face of El Capitan out there in Yosemite National Park.”
Stats looked down at the eXfyle he clutched in his palm. “Let me see.” He quickly had images of climbers on El Cap’s south wall and a video clip shot from halfway up.
“Whoa. Billee! It’s a million miles high.”
“It’s huge.”
“I don’t think I could ever do that.”
“Well, you know, I say this: If you decide you want to do something and you can see yourself doing it, then I believe you can. And I mean anything.”
Stats looked up from the screen, imagining he had decided to climb the sheer granite walls of El Capitan, straight up, over a mile high. In his mind, he was a pretty good climber.
“Maybe,” he said, memorizing the image. “Maybe I could, too, someday. Maybe after I learn how to ride a skateboard.”
Maybe, he thought, after my operation.
Billee sat quietly, knees bent, his legs crossed at the shins, not bothering to add anything more.
Stats appreciated the way Billee could let an idea sit there on its own and not ruin it with words. Quieting the mind, he had called it.
Then Stats remembered something. “But I thought you didn’t like heights.”
“I don’t. And that’s why. Maybe if I could climb a giant rock wall, like El Cap, I’d be okay after that.”
Again, Stats sat back and pondered. Imagine, with all Billee’s done in his life, he still thinks about the things he can’t do. And he still plans to get them done. Just to be “okay after that.”
Stats tried to remember what Mark had done with his old skateboard.
This, he promised himself, would not be his last exciting ride.
He leaned back and stared directly at Pegasus as it reared up into the sky, ready for liftoff, and he now knew for certain nothing would ever be the same again. A new era had begun.
At about 3:45 A.M., in the still morning calm, Stats peered down over his shoes to check on Billee, who sat below, still, as he put it, gathering the energy of the solstice. Stats had spent the last hour or so trying to absorb all that had happened to him on this mystical night. And why. Finally, he felt courageous enough to ask a certain question he could not seem to shake.
“Billee?” he began.
“Yeah, bud?”
“Why did you choose to be my friend?”
“What?”
“Was it because—you know, because I’m so small and everything, and you thought—”
Billee leaned back to look straight up. “Stop right there, Stat Man. Stop.” He waved his hand. “Because I see where you’re going. What, the big-league pitcher felt sorry for the little guy and blah, blah, blah? Look, not even close. For one thing, you’re an incredible kid. Okay?” He shook his finger at Stats for emphasis. “I knew that the first time I stepped up to the stand, and you were all business. You started my order and didn’t bat an eye. Even though I was this kooky celebrity, this Major League ballplayer, you saw me as a regular guy who simply wanted a hot dog and who deserved to be treated with equal respect to all the other hot-dog-wanters standing there in line.”
Now Billee lowered his gaze and spoke to the pitcher’s mound. “And as I got to know you, even though I could tell you were a boy genius, I saw you as a regular guy, too, who only wanted to make me a decent hot dog. Which I respect. I tip my hat to you, to Mark, and to Pops. You’re my kind of people. So it wasn’t so much me choosing you. I was honored that you chose me, to treat me as an equal.” He put his palms upon his knees and now seemed to be addressing the outfield, addressing Fenway Park itself. “That’s all I ever ask of anyone, but you’d be surprised at how few people actually do that.”
Stats, however, was not surprised at all. To him, the surprising thing was how he understood perfectly what Billee had just said. He wanted people to see him as normal.
“Oh. Okay. I was just wondering.”
They both retreated to silence. It was the happiest silence Stats had ever felt.
Maybe Stats could have had a conversation like this in a normal setting, with Billee on the bull pen bench, say, or at the hot dog stand. But he seriously doubted it.
It took this. It took flying in the sky over Fenway Park, over a power point, along ancient ley lines, on the summer solstice, for a kid like him and the wildest man in baseball to rise above the everyday chitchat and have the first real man-to-man talk he’d ever had.
Now, that was balance.
CHAPTER 31
In the early morning of June 21, 2012, Billee eased his car through the streets of South Boston.
Within a few minutes, they arrived at the curb in front of the sixty-five-year-old two-story building Stats called home. Stars still twinkled, but dawn was closing in fast.
“Get some sleep,” said Billee, pulling to a stop.
“You too.” Stats opened the door and stepped out.
“Ah, don’t worry. Me and the Babe, we keep the same hours.”
Stats smiled, knowing that besides being a hefty hot dog eater, Babe Ruth had also been quite a night owl and, even so, had done all right for himself. He quietly pushed the door shut and started to leave. Then he stopped himself and turned.
“Billee?” He leaned down to the window. “Thanks a lot for inviting me to come along. It was really fun.”
“You bet, bud.” He jutted his chin. “Hey. You know what I hope?”
“No, what do you hope?”
“I hope we’re friends for a long time.”
A long time? Stats wished that one moment could have lasted for infinity. He wished he could have said something spectacular, too, but everything he could think of saying was beyond words.
The everyday go-to-work world, which was just beginning to stir, would never understand what they had just gone and done. But they did.
Tonight, they had tipped their hats to the universe. And now all they had left to do was to go about their business and wait for the universe to tip back.
CHAPTER 32
At 7:05 Thursday night, Billee completed his final warm-up toss, and everyone around section 71 sat poised for a great game.
“Tonight’s the night,” said Lucy to no one in particular. “I can feel it.”
Behind her, Mr. McCord asked, “What do you feel, Lucille?”
Lucy turned and waved her rolled-up program. “Tonight, everyone hits. Everyone runs. Everyone scores.”
“I feel that way, too,” said Mrs. McCord. “But it’s more than a feeling.”
“More than a feeling?” Her husband looked around for consensus. “You mean the merry fans walk away winners tonight?”
“I mean,” said Lucy, “the merry Sox walk away winners tonight.”
Mark nudged Stats. “Hope she means Red Sox.”
Point taken. The Chicago White Sox were in town for a short two-game series, and having beaten the Boston Red Sox last night, they were riding a three-game winning streak and sitting all alone in second place in the Central Division.
But Billee moved with an air of confidence Stats had only now realized he’d been missing over his last several starts. Billee stood on the mound, looked in, and got his sign from Burly Fiske. He nodded. He pitched.
Fastball. Ninety-six miles an hour. Strike one. Everybody cheered.
They cheered again when he retired the Chicago leadoff man on four pitches, finishing the poor guy with his buckler, in at the knees.
Stats looked into the sky. There must be a hawk up there somewhere, he figured. He glanced toward the scorebooth. Nothing. Maybe they were already settled into their new home.
