Summerland (41 page)
Authors: Michael Chabon
In any game where the hitting is weak, of course, it will all come down to pitching, and this, according to Professor Alkabetz in his brief summary, was the story of the game. Jennifer T. pitched for the Visitors, and here the change in size seemed to work to her advantage. Though she was now only about eighteen inches high, somehow her sense of the distance to be traveled by the ball "retained a certain 'grandeur' " as Professor Alkabetz puts it, and with the help of a sympathetic umpire, a local werebear
*
named Smacklip, she was able to mow the home nine down, giving up only a cheap single in the bottom of the fourth. Ethan, who read feverishly from
How to Catch Lightning and Smoke
whenever he was on the bench, tried to mix his calls as much as he could, but since Jennifer T. only had two pitches, the fastball and the slider, he couldn't get too fancy. Mostly he just called for the heater. It was enough; and the run that she finally scored, on three errors, stood up.
Queen Filaree herself made the last out, popping up weakly to her daughter (2b) in shallow right. She threw down her bat, cursed, spat, and then uttered a strange series of coughing barks in Old Fatidic. Grimalkin John took off his glove, turned and knelt on the ground before Ethan.
"I'm bound over to you, little reuben," he said.
"Cool," Ethan said. "Only stand up, okay?"
Chickweed walked past Jennifer T. on his way toward his fellows, head down, watching his feet. As he went past her he looked up briefly, and gave a tug on his long mustache.
"Nice game," he said.
After the larger beings had been restored to their normal sizes, the queen issued a proclamation—henceforward this ball field, in honor and commemoration of its generous donors, would be known as Three Reubens Field. This went some way, in Ethan's mind, to making up for his terrible afternoon at the plate. After that the promised provisions were brought and packed into the rear of the car; and then the Visitors piled themselves, as well as they could into the car—except, of course, for Taffy, who resumed her familiar station on the roof. Except for Jennifer T., of the eight of them, only Grim the Giant had
really
driven a car—once, years before, in Trondheim, Sweden. ("Long story," he said, licking his lips in a nasty way that did not encourage questions.) Oddly enough, that other car had also been a Saab. This coincidence more than qualified him, in Ethan's opinion, to serve as driver for the group that now and hereafter styled itself, at Jennifer T.'s suggestion, the Shadowtails.
"Because it sounds to me," she explained, climbing into the backseat with Thor, Ethan, and Spider-Rose, "like we got a lot more scampering to do before we scamper across Home Plate."
"Farewell, daughter," Queen Filaree said to Spider-Rose through the rear window of the car. It took two of her subjects to hold her up. They staggered and strained under the weight of her. "Perhaps ya'll return one of these days."
"Not likely," said Spider-Rose, without looking at her mother.
"If ya do, I can't help hopin' it's not before ya done found some
sense
in that head o' yers."
Spider-Rose turned now and glared at the Queen of Dandelion Hill.
"Not likely," she said again, more carefully.
Then Grim started the engine, and glanced over at his old nemesis, Pettipaw, who shared the front passenger seat with Cinquefoil. "The better to criticize," the wererat said, "what promises to be a display of some truly horrendous driving."
"Ready, rat?" Grim the Giant said, with a grin.
"That all depends," said Pettipaw, "on whether you plan to drown us or drive us off a cliff."
Then Grim put the rattling old car in gear, and they set off into the woods, following the wide, ancient giant-built track that ran up into the Raucous Mountains. Some of the Dandelion Hill ferishers ran after them for a while, and then they fell away, whistling and calling farewell. The noise of the engine, the crunch of the sandy road under the tires, and the squeaking of Skid's old springs, combined to ensure that as the car plunged into the dark green shadows of the Great Woods, only Taffy the Sasquatch, sitting on the roof, heard the distant sound, faint but unmistakable, of a woman, disconsolate, weeping for the children she had lost.
*
Werebears, methodical and sharp-eared, able to
hear
the difference between a strike and a ball, being the race that has traditionally produced the finest umpires in the Summerlands.
BIG CHIEF CINQUEFOIL'S
Traveling Shadowtails All-Star Baseball Club made its way up into the Raucous Mountains, through Sidewinder Pass, and down into the Lost Camps of the Big River Valley. Every day brought new signs of the coming of Ragged Rock: vast rustling coverlets of crows that blotted out the sun; weresquirrels and werechipmunks carrying reports of earthquakes, of great tracts of forest turned to empires of fire, of mighty rivers that reversed their courses or dried up overnight. The moon turned first the color of apple cider, and then the next night—full now—to a deep rusty gold, like ferisher blood. And one morning they woke in their bedrolls to see the glint, on the tip of Kobold Mountain's peaked cap, of snow—snow, in the Summerlands!
Their record, when they came down from Sidewinder Pass and into the Lost Camps, was two and seven. One of those victories was a forfeit (9-0) by some hill ferishers On Account of Excessive Shyness, and the other was a blowout, 15-3, against a team of wizened old Bowling Men who were drunk on honey beer and had not played a game of baseball, by their own admission, in 216 years.
They were, at best, an uneven ball club, and chronically shorthanded. Because of her annoying habit of regarding every game as lost before it even began, Spider-Rose did a slapdash job at second, hotdogging it on one play with all kinds of pointless but pretty tumbling and diving, and then drag-assing it on the very next play so that she just barely got the ball to Cinquefoil over at first. The ferisher chief had yet to get his hitting game back, but he was steady as usual at his corner. In the outfield, there was Pettipaw in left—he was, if anything, even more of a hotdog than Spider-Rose, all one-handed catches and over-the-shoulder catches and crazy grass-churning dives toward the fence, but he did everything with such style, from hunting squirrels to rolling ragweed cigarettes one-handed, that it was impossible to imagine him playing any other way. Center field was Taffy, and even grammered down to the scale of a ferisher field she remained too lumbering and slow for the position, so that every routine fly became something of an adventure. The truth was that Sasquatches have never been passionate about baseball. In right, there was the outsider, a blinking pale ferisher or a Bowling Man drinking steadily from his flask. And playing shortstop was Grimalkin John. ("What else?" as he had said on first taking the position.) The novelty of a miniature giant never quite wore off and just having him there, glowering and gnashing his teeth gigantically, whenever one of the opposing ferishers came to the plate, messed with their minds a little bit.
As for Jennifer T., every day she could feel her arm getting stronger. Each time she threw, her fastball had more of a shimmy in it, like the wobble of a bit of metal caught between opposing magnets, so that it might veer at the last instant just a hair from its apparent trajectory as it left her hand. And she was learning, with coaching from Cinquefoil, to "take something off it," so that when Ethan put down three fingers, she could begin to experiment with throwing the change. But it was her slider that gave the other side fits. It was a hard slider that Jennifer T. threw, one that she had learned from watching big-league players throw them on TV. It broke not only downward but also a little to one side, away from the right-handed hitters. "A slurve," the announcers sometimes called it, a shadowtail kind of pitch, part slider, part curve. The Raucous Mountain ferishers had never seen anything like it.
But the most uneven feature of the Shadowtails, by far, was Ethan Feld. On the one hand, his hitting was the scandal of the team. It was funny the way such a small bump could give you such fits, but Jennifer T. had tried swinging the magical bat herself and the Knot really did throw you off, somehow. It was like how you heard sometimes about a pitcher, Dizzy Dean or somebody, whose whole career was ruined because a broken toenail grew back in a different way, or a callus on his thumb changed from round to oval. For the first five days he swung, and swung, and swung, and struck out swinging in twenty straight at bats; after that he reverted to his sad old Dog Boy ways, waiting for a walk. Then the crafty ferisher pitchers ate him up. Yet though his hitting game languished, Ethan's mastery of the craft taught by Peavine daily improved. Every game brought him face-to-face with situations—the pitchout, the swinging bunt, the slide into home—that Peavine described in
How to Catch Lightning and Smoke
. He grew accustomed to the sticky pressure of the mask against his forehead, the endless crouching and rising, the brutal treatment he got from foul-tipped balls and careless swings that smacked his mask and made his head clatter like an iron lid.
One afternoon, amid the long shadows and bright grass of a ferisher ballfield at the summit of Sidewinder Path, with the score knotted at four apiece, Ethan caught his first glimpse of Applelawn. It was just as he was rising to his feet to start the happy little around-the-horn ceremony (catcher to first base to second to shortstop to third and then home again) that his infield performed after every strikeout. The sun had been caught behind a towering stand of alders for the last few innings, but now as it moved clear of the trees something sparkled, far in the distance. It was just that—a faint metallic glint, as of a coin, a lost hubcap, a pool of water, a heat mirage. But as Ethan stood there, watching that far-off sparkle of the Farthest Territory beyond the wide green river valley, and the next batter came swaggering up to the plate, smelling of tobacco, and Jennifer T. rearranged the dirt of the pitcher's mound with a thoughtful toe for the nine hundredth time, and the shadows lengthened, and the hummingbirds made their sounds of kissing the air as they thrummed among the rhododendrons, and Cinquefoil and Pettipaw kept up their steady low chatter "
Easy-out-easy-batter-two-down-come-on-kid-you-can-get-him-guy-couldn't-hit-a-bull-in-the-butt-with-a-shovel
," and the ferisher baseball lay warm and almost animate, a living thing, in his fingers, he recalled Peavine's words: "A baseball game is nothing but a great slow contraption for getting you to pay attention to the cadence of a summer day."