by Alan Gratz
It was a day like Michael had never known and knew he would never see again. Like Sandy Koufax and his perfect game, it was a special gift in a special time and a special place, one that he shouldn’t examine too closely, one he could never duplicate. No matter how much he worked, no matter hard he tried, it was the kind of perfect day that would come only when it wanted to, when the sun smiled and the grass laughed and wind sang hm-batter-hm-batter-hm-batter-swing.
It wasn’t up to Michael anymore. He saw that now. He stepped back up on the mound, worked his fingers into the right grip, shook Carlos off until he dropped two fingers for a curve, and let the ball fly.
Ninth Inning: Provenance
Brooklyn, New York, 2002
1
The room was on fire.
That’s the way it looked through Snider Flint’s blurry eyes. He woke in a sweat to a piercing alarm, louder and harsher than his bedside alarm clock. The smoke detector. He snapped awake, feeling the full blast of heat on his face, seeing the orange flames licking up under his bedroom door, through his walls. Through his walls? Was that even possible?
He scrambled back on his bed, away from his door. Smoke collected on the ceiling in great billowing clouds, as though it were some kind of monster, alive. Snider coughed and slid off the end of his bed to get away from the black air.
“Mom?” he called, choking. “Dad!?”
The window thump-thump-thumped behind him and he jumped.
“Snider! Snider, wake up!” It was his father, standing on the porch roof just beneath Snider’s second-story window. He had his hand to the glass, trying to see in. “Snider, the house is on fire! You’ve got to crawl out the window!”
Snider stood where his father could see him, covering his mouth and nose with the sleeve of his T-shirt while he wrangled the difficult latch on the top of his casement window. It finally gave, and he hefted the heavy old window up enough to crawl through. In the distance, Snider could hear the siren of a fire engine and realized it was coming for his house.
“What happened?” Snider asked as his father helped him onto the roof. “Where’s Mom?”
“She’s already out. The Hendersons are helping her get down. Are you all right?”
Snider coughed again and nodded. Heat radiated from the house behind them, making his eyes burn. Glass tinkled and shattered.
“Come on, let’s get out of here,” his father said. Snider held his father’s hand as they inched their way barefoot down the rough shingles, the fire hissing and roaring behind them.
Snider’s dad slipped. He hit the roof with a thump, letting go of Snider to throw his arms out and catch himself. Snider tried to grab him and lost his footing too. His father flattened himself out on the roof and slid to a stop, but Snider skidded on past, out of reach. He rolled over on his stomach and clawed, kicked, dragged, but he kept sliding sickeningly down, down, down.
There were screams below—his mother, the neighbors—but they were as helpless as Snider as his feet caught on the gutter and then hammered past, his weight and speed too much for it to stop him. Half off the roof, half on, Snider grabbed for the gutter, but the flimsy metal thing ripped away from the wall and Snider went spinning, falling, into darkness.
Snider cried out and woke in a sweat to the memory of falling and fire. He shot straight up, his sheets already a tangled mess at his feet, casting around in the dark to figure out where he was.
“Snider. Snider, it’s all right. You’re all right,” a voice said. It was Snider’s uncle Dave, and Snider immediately remembered where he was. This was Dave’s little apartment above his antiques store. An electrical fire in the old wiring in Snider’s house had burned it to the ground, and Uncle Dave was sharing his place with Snider and his parents while they continued the impossible search for an affordable apartment to rent while their new house was being built. Snider was on the living room couch and Dave was beside him on the floor on an air mattress. Snider’s parents slept in Dave’s bedroom.
“Do you need anything?” Uncle Dave asked. “A glass of water?”
“No,” Snider said. He turned over and buried his face in the back of the couch, ashamed that his uncle had heard him screaming again. He hated that he didn’t have a room of his own anymore, that everything he owned was stuffed into a duffel bag at the end of the couch, that it was impossible to be alone. It wasn’t his uncle’s fault, but he still wished he was anywhere else but here.
Snider pulled the blanket back up over the cast on his broken leg and tried to sleep, praying he didn’t dream of fire again.
Dave’s two-room apartment was never smaller than when he and Snider’s parents were all getting ready to leave for work in the morning. Snider kept his blanket pulled up over his head as they came in and out of the bathroom, bustled about the kitchen, and watched the morning news where he pretended to sleep.
“Snider,” his mother said, “I want you to be ready to go to Paramus this afternoon.”
“I don’t want to go to New Jersey,” he mumbled.
“You need a whole new set of clothes.”
“Where am I going to put them? On top of the TV? Under the couch?”
“We’re all having to make sacrifices, Snider. Your uncle David most of all. You’re just going to have to get used to not living on your own terms, at least for another year.”
Snider sat up. “Another year? But the insurance people said they could have a new place built in six months.”
“That’s if we want one of those contemporary in-fill monstrosities. We’re having them rebuild the old house instead.”
“Rebuild the old house? You’ve got to be crazy!” Snider maneuvered his broken leg on the couch while his mother went around the room assembling the things she needed to take to work. “It was too small. And too old. It’s like we were living in an ancient ruin. I just thought we couldn’t afford to move.”
“Your uncle David and I grew up in that house, Snider. It meant a lot to me,” his dad said.
Dave stood in the kitchen and sipped from a mug of coffee, listening to the argument.
“So wait,” Snider said. “People are paying all kinds of money to tear down old houses like ours and build new ones, and you’re going to have them build the same old house when you could have something bigger and modern for free?”
“In-fill housing ruins neighborhoods, Snider. And besides, it’s ugly.”
“This is so lame! And you don’t care that this is going to take an entire year? I’ll have to start high school somewhere else. I’ll miss my freshman year with my friends!”
His mother sighed. “We’re in Fort Greene, Snider, not Hoboken. You’ll see your friends plenty. And we’re trying to find a place to rent in Flatbush. Now will you please be ready to go to Paramus this afternoon?”
“I’m getting all Mets jerseys.”
“You’re getting no Mets jerseys,” his mother said.
“Three Mets jerseys.”
“One Mets jersey.”
“Two Mets jerseys.”
“Two Mets jerseys, and not a single complaint when we try on dress clothes.”
“Whatever,” Snider said.
His parents left for work, and Snider hopped over to Dave’s computer to check on his fantasy baseball team and to see if any of his friends were awake and online. Nobody was up, of course. Why would they be? It was summer, and none of them had to sleep in the same room where their parents made toast. Most of them wouldn’t be online later either. They’d be out at the pool or at the ball field or the park. Snider thunked his way back over to the couch and started flipping through the cable channels, ready for another exciting day of watching ESPN News for Mets highlights.
Uncle Dave finished cleaning up from breakfast and came into the living room, where he picked up the TV remote and turned it off.
“Hey, what gives?”
“Come down and see me in the shop when you’re showered and dressed,” Dave said, leaving before Snider could argue.
&nbs
p; Snider ka-thunked his way down the narrow back staircase to Dave’s shop. The small storage area at the bottom was a cluttered mess, like a single attic with the junk of an entire neighborhood piled up to the ceiling. Among the stacks Snider saw an old bugle, a Japanese sword on a stand, and an ancient-looking game console with dials instead of joysticks, but rather than stop and look he turned sideways and crab-walked himself on his crutches through the piles of collectibles into the front of the shop, where his uncle Dave sat at a computer entering items for sale into an online auction site. Snider flopped on a stool behind the counter and waited.
Uncle Dave spared him a glance over his shoulder, then kept working.
“Pretty rough on your parents back there, weren’t you?”
Snider huffed. “Is that what this is? The part where you tell me how much my parents love me and how tough this is for them too?”
Dave swiveled in his chair. “No. This is the part where I tell you to get over it.”
“What?”
“It’s time for you to get over the fire, to get over your broken leg and your lost summer, and start pulling your weight around here.”
Snider burned with shame and anger that his uncle would bring up the fire.
“Look—”
“No, you look. Your parents are both working full-time jobs while they haggle with insurance agents, comb Flatbush for an apartment big enough to live in and cheap enough to actually pay for, meet with architects and builders, and reconstruct your lives. What have you been doing?”
“I’m fourteen. What can I do?”
“What are you good at?”
“Baseball.”
“Too bad. Your leg’s broken. What else?”
Snider shifted uncomfortably. “Video games,” he said, just to be perverse.
“Great. Maybe we can put you to work crafting shirts in an online game and sell the gold you make to other players.”
“Ha-ha.”
“Or wait,” Dave said. “I’ve got a better idea.” He stood and handed Snider a broom. “Clean out the back room.”
“Hello? Broken leg, remember?” he said, rattling his crutches.
“All right. Fine. Here,” Dave said, plunking a cardboard box in front of Snider. “You like working on the computer so much, use it to find out how much this stuff is worth.”
“Whatever,” Snider said.
Uncle Dave gave his seat at the computer to Snider and went to work in the back room. Snider rolled his eyes at the box and opened it. It was a lot of baseball junk at least, but most of it wasn’t anything to get excited about: a moldy old catcher’s mitt, a used scorebook, a silly-looking beauty guide for an all-girls baseball league.
There was also an old wooden bat, and a baseball that should have been thrown in the trash a long time ago. The baseball was made of dark brown leather, almost black, with white stitches instead of red. The seams didn’t go in a wavy pattern either, they were sewn in an X shape. The stitches were all torn up, though, and two of the leather flaps were so loose Snider could see the wound string inside the ball. One of the flaps had a little letter S scratched into it too.
Snider surfed the Net for a half an hour, found some comparable junk, typed up prices for the stuff in the box, and printed it out.
“Here,” he said. He handed the sheet to his uncle and went back upstairs to see if the afternoon Mets game was on yet.
2
The next morning Snider settled onto the stool behind the counter of Fulton Street Antiques and Collectibles wearing his new Mike Piazza Mets jersey. Uncle Dave was talking to an actual customer—something even more rare than the baseball cards in his display case—about an old lunch box.
“A Jetsons lunch box,” the customer said. “What a fabulous piece!”
“It’s a 1963 original,” Dave told him. “Hardly any scratches on it. Just a little normal wear around the edges. The sticker is the original Aladdin sticker. No rust on the thermos inside, cup and stopper in pristine condition.”
The customer turned the lunch box over in his hands. “What are you asking?”
“Eight hundred.”
Snider nearly fell off his stool, but the customer nodded like that was about what he expected. He handed the lunch box back to Uncle Dave.
“It’s great stuff,” the man said. “I don’t suppose you have a Star Trek lunch box, do you? One of the 1968 ones, with the Enterprise on one side and the picture of Kirk and Spock beaming out on the side?”
“No, I’m sorry.”
The customer smiled. “I had one of those when I was in fourth grade. I loved that thing. I remember, Friday nights I was allowed to stay up late and watch TV. I’d watch The Wild, Wild West, then flip the station to Star Trek.”
“Good stuff,” Dave said.
“I have no idea what happened to that lunch box. I’m sure my mom just threw it out. Anyway, thanks a lot.”
“You bet,” Uncle Dave said. He put the Jetsons lunchbox back on a shelf as the customer left.
“Not the right price?” Snider asked.
“Not the right lunch box,” Dave said. “Most collectors, they collect things because they have a sentimental value to them. The comic book collector whose parents never let him read comics when he was a kid, that guy who remembers watching Star Trek.” Dave smiled. “The antiques store owner who never got over selling all his Star Wars toys at a garage sale when he was fourteen. Didn’t you lose anything in the fire you can’t replace?”
“No.”
“I see. So, to what do I owe the pleasure of your visit this morning?” Dave asked.
“The TV remote has mysteriously disappeared.”
“Why not just get up and change the channel whenever you want? Oh—right. Your broken leg. Bummer. Well, since you’re here—”
Dave slapped the price sheet Snider had typed up onto the counter in front of him.
“What? You said look up what the stuff was worth, so I did.”
“Come on—this is price guide stuff. A third grader could have done this. Here, look at this baseball,” he said, pulling it out of the box. “I don’t just want to know how old this is. Who used it? How was it made? Who owned it before us, and before that, and before that? Or this bat. Whose was it? Was it used in a game? What’s this on the handle—postage stamps? Why are there postage stamps on a bat handle? Where’s your natural curiosity?”
“Well, I am curious about what happened to the TV remote.”
Uncle Dave ignored that. “Who wore this cap? Did the Knickerbockers use this ball?”
“The who?”
“The first modern baseball team.” Uncle Dave pulled each piece out of the box and laid them on the counter. “You find the provenance of something, its origin, you start to find its story. You find its story, you find its real value. Here.” Uncle Dave took a pair of cleats off a hook on the wall. “Just a crusty old pair of cleats, right? If these had belonged to your dad when he was a kid, they would have been thrown out a long time ago and they’d be rotting in some landfill. Who wants to own Michael Flint’s old shoes, right?”
Snider shrugged.
“Okay, so ordinarily, these shoes are worthless. But what if I told you they were worn by Pelé in his very last professional game with the New York Cosmos?”
“Who?”
“Pelé? The greatest soccer star in history?”
Snider shrugged. Uncle Dave sighed and slid the paper over to Snider. “Okay. How about this: You find the real value of anything in that box and I’ll give you a ten percent commission on the sale.”
Snider perked up. Ten percent of an eight-hundred-dollar lunch box was eighty bucks.
“Twenty percent,” he countered.
“Fifteen.”
“Done,” Snider said.
Uncle Dave shook his head like the thrill of the hunt should have been enough to tempt Snider, but Snider didn’t care. Fifteen percent of eight hundred dollars was . . . well, he didn’t have a calculator handy, but it was more than eig
hty bucks.
Snider started with the ball that Uncle Dave had been so crazy about, searching the Internet for any references to old X-seam balls marked with an S—or any kind of ball marked with an S. Nothing. The ball was a dead end, so Snider turned his attention to the bat.
It looked similar to a modern bat, but the handle had a smoother rise to the nub and the barrel had a smaller, fatter sweet spot. The wood was dark brown but faded in spots, and the handle had stains on it like pine tar or something. The bat maker’s logo was branded into it just below the sweet spot, the name BABE HERMAN was burned into the barrel, and the crown of the bat looked like it had been chewed on by one of the goats at the Prospect Park Zoo. But the strangest thing about the bat was the remnants of postage stamps Uncle Dave had pointed out. They were glued right to the handle, and there was a faint, illegible address printed off to the side, right on the wood of the bat, as though somebody had just dropped it into a mailbox to send it somewhere.
“Babe Herman.” Was that Babe Ruth? Snider thought he remembered “Herman” being part of Babe Ruth’s real name, but he didn’t want to ask Uncle Dave. A Babe Ruth bat could be worth a fortune! He Googled the name, and was disappointed to see it wasn’t Babe Ruth. That was George Herman “Babe” Ruth—that’s where he’d heard Herman. This was another guy named Babe Herman who played around the same time for the Brooklyn Dodgers, only for some reason they were called the Brooklyn Robins then. Best he could tell from a fan site dedicated to the Robins, Babe Herman had been a heck of a hitter but a terrible base runner and fielder, so bad he sometimes got hit on the head trying to catch fly balls in the outfield. So much for the bat being worth a fortune.
There was more on the site, but Uncle Dave came back in eating a cup of yogurt. Snider closed the browser so Dave wouldn’t see him getting too into it.
