Summerland (48 page)

"I hate to see the party if they
win
," Jennifer T. said. They were watching the antics from the sleeping porch of Annie Christmas's house. They had gone to bed hours ago—right around the time that people started setting cats on fire—but with all the noise and the excitement of the game tomorrow, there was no way to sleep.

"Do you think they will?" said Ethan. "Win?"

"They might."

"We aren't that great, are we?"

"Actually, I think we are kind of great," she said, after a moment. "Just that we aren't very
good
"

"If we were back on Clam, playing in a game, you know, a Mustang League game, do you think you would be as good of a pitcher as you are here in the Summerlands?"

"No," she said. She was definite. Tough on herself, was little Jennifer T. "No way. I think it's all that size-changing, all those grammers for this and that. I just don't think they have quite the same—would it be
physics?
—here as there."

"Do you think it's the kind of thing where if you
believe
you could throw as hard as Randy Johnson, then you could throw as hard as him?"

"I've tried it," she said. "No good. But you know what?"

"What?"

"I think that you would be as good of a catcher. Back home, I mean."

"Really?"

"All pitchers have a favorite catcher," she said. "I would tell Mr. Olafssen I wanted you."

"Thank you," Ethan said, or tried to say, but found that his voice was gone. The memory of home, of Mr. Olafssen and Arch Brody, of the strawberry shed behind the house, of his room, his pillow, of the smell of flannel cakes burning in the kitchen, flooded over him.

"At least you're finally keeping your eyes open," said Jennifer T.

"Where's Taffy?" Thor said. He had remained silent so far, just sitting on the railing of the sleeping porch, in his underpants, watching the people and creatures having a good time down at the Landing. "She said she was going to bed."

"I saw her walking along the river," Ethan said. "All by herself."

"La Llorona goes by the river," Jennifer T. "I think Taffy was going to see La Llorona."

The weeping woman had continued to dog them with her lamentations and howling, but so far, nobody had seen her.

Unless, of course, Taffy had seen her.

"Can you do that?" Ethan said. "Can you just walk outside and go see her?"

"I think she's been talking to her," Jennifer T. said.

"Why would she do that? What could she possibly have to say to La Llorona? I'm sorry you killed your children and have been cursed for eternity?'"

Jennifer stood up and started rummaging around in the dark corner of the sleeping porch for her clothes.

"I'm going to look for her," she said, frantically pulling on her jeans. "I'm afraid she's going to drown herself. Like La Llorona. She's been acting so
weird
"

"We'll go with you," Ethan said. "Somebody might try to tie a firecracker to your tail."

"Here I am," said Taffy. They turned. The Sasquatch was crouched in the door of the sleeping porch. She was stroking at the fur on her head with one hand, and Ethan saw that she was more mudstreaked and twig-matted than usual. In her other hand she held a large object, oblong and bumpy, with a stopper at its skinnier end.

"You know what?" Jennifer T. said. "If you keep going away like that, and making me worry about you?"

"I'm sorry," Taffy said.

"I'm going to just stop worrying about you."

"I know. I'm sorry, dear."

"What is that thing, Taf?" Ethan said. "It looks like an egg."

"This? This is an egg. A hodag's egg. Here."

She handed it to Ethan. It was cold as stone and twice as hard, and crusted with rocky little warts and carbuncles.

"Is it a bottle?" He gave it a shake but heard nothing. He tried to pull out the stopper. Taffy yanked it out of his hands.

"Whoa, there! Don't do
that
, by the Starboard Arm!" She clapped a hand over the stopper. "No, it's a not a bottle, it's a hodag's egg, I told you! A hodag is a kind of armored cow, it has spikes on its back…you used to see them all the time, great stinking herds of them, but they're mostly all gone now. Like all hodag's eggs, it's precisely nine times larger on the inside than it is on the outside, absolutely indestructible to all known substances save one, and hence extremely useful as a universal storage device, in particular for corrosives or bad medicine. And though I believe it now to be empty, I have no idea what was in it
before
. There may be fumes, boy! By the
Arm
!"

"I'm sorry!" Ethan said.

"Where did you get it?" said Thor. "Can I see it?"

"No!" Taffy said. "I don't know what I was thinking. I—I won it." Her voice changed—just a little, but noticeably. A moment ago, she had sounded almost like her old pedantic and irritable self. Now she turned hesitant, and her eyes drifted away to the street. "In a dice game."

"From who?"

"A friend of the Tall Man with the Knife in His Boot. Called himself Billy. Billy Lyons."

"And what are you going to keep in it? Perfume?"

"Perfume! I am not the one who requires perfume in this group," Taffy said, standing up. "Now, you three, go to sleep. We have a game."

"Taffy?"

"What, girl?"

"Would you sing us one of those long, really boring Sasquatch songs of yours?"

"Yeah," Ethan said. "Sing us that one you mentioned, about A Snake in Need Is Still a Snake.'"

"That would take eleven days, my dear."

"Well, then sing the
really
dull parts," Jennifer T. said.

Then they climbed back into their bedrolls, and Taffy squeezed out onto the porch with them, causing it to creak and wobble. She stroked their heads, and crooned to them, and little by little the sound of revelry died away, and Ethan heard only the slow, Sasquatch rumble of his dreams.

BREAKFAST WAS, OF ALL THINGS, FLANNEL CAKES. THEY WERE
prepared by the Tall Man with the Axe, right in the middle of the street, on a griddle the size of a pool table, with a spatula as big as a catcher's mitt. They were quite delicious, fluffy and springy at the same time, with a hint of vanilla—nearly as good as Dr. Feld's had once been. But they were enormous, and most of them went to waste because there was hardly anybody up until well after eleven, and those who were up were either still too drunk or too hungover to eat. Ethan and Jennifer T. shared one, and Thor ate two, which was quite a feat because they really were each of them big enough to sew a pair of pajamas from. Then Cinquefoil showed up, having spent the night carousing with and obtaining scouting reports on the Liars from various of the local ferishers, and he and Jennifer T. started talking about strategy for the day's game. Rodrigo rolled out of bed, looking ten years younger, and dressed in a Hawaiian shirt. The baseball talk was interesting to Ethan at first, but after a while it became more philosophical than practical—his father would have loved all this talk about "timelessness" and "infinite innings"—and at last he drifted out of the conversation.

He left the table, and went off looking for the Tall Man with the Knife in His Boot.

Ethan had heard some things about this Knife. It was said that the Man could slice a flea's whisker into thirds with this Knife, and carve his initials in the door of a bank vault, and cut the insides from a man without his even knowing they were gone.

"What you want it for?" said the Man. He was sleeping it off in a hammock under a persimmon tree, out back of Annie Christmas's house. His big Stetson was lowered over his eyes and nose and he did not bother to lift it as he spoke to Ethan. "You purposin' some form of mischief?"

"No," Ethan said. "It's just there's this Knot on the handle of my bat. I can't get it off, and it's really annoying. I thought maybe your Knife."

"You need Antoinette to cut a
bump
?" Now he lifted the hat. "On a little-bitty boy-size piece of wood?"

"It's kind of a hard bump," Ethan said.

The Man swung out of the hammock, and reached into his Boot. The Knife was neither especially long, or pointed. But she came singing from the Boot in a low voice, cutting the air, and she had a tigerish look about her. She seemed to be happy to be freed from the Boot. You could tell that she was looking forward to cutting something.

"Lay it on me," the Man said. Ethan handed him the bat. The Man held it up to the sky, sighted along it as if it were a rifle, and swung it back and forth a couple of times. "Rube, this a pretty nice bat you gots here. Where you get this?"

"I found it," Ethan said. "Its name is Splinter."

"Yeah, this a Splinter all right," he said. "Splinter of the
Old
Tree." He gripped the bat by its barrel and aimed the handle away from his body. Then he nocked Antoinette against the little ridge. "Say goodbye to your old bump, huh." The blade dug a little ways into the meat of handle, and then stopped, having cut a hairline nick in the wood. The Man set his jaw, and glared at the bump, and gripped Antoinette's handle. He pressed against it, harder and harder, until his eyes were popping out and his Stetson had begun to rattle and shimmy on top of his head like the lid of a teakettle. At last the skin of his hand, where it gripped Antoinette's handle, began to sizzle and steam, and then, with a sound like the snapping of a giant piano string, the Knife snapped off at the handle. The blade went flying off into the woods, and struck a hickory tree. Afterward the Man went around saying that when the knife hit the hickory, it up and split it into fence rails, firewood, and chips for Miss Annie's smoke oven. This may, however, have been a slight exaggeration.

"Sorry, boy," he said, handing Ethan back his bat. "Look like you jes' gonna haveta git
use
to it."

JENNIFER T. RIDEOUT STOOD FOUR FEET EIGHT INCHES TALL, AND
weighed ninety-one pounds. She featured three pitches, a fastball, a slider or nickel curve, and a change-up that was sometimes unreliable. In the Middling, where she was born and raised, her control over the locations of her pitches would have been judged better than average for a determined and talented eleven-year-old. I am sure that she could have struck me out, and she probably could have struck you out, too. But she would have struggled even against, say, a gifted young high-school player; and against a player like Buendía, in the Middling, she would not have stood a chance. In the Summerlands, as she and Ethan were both well aware, things were different. It may have been, as Jennifer T. had wondered aloud to Ethan, the strange physics of that world. Or it may have been the unexplored kinship between what some people call magic and a deep, true talent for
concentrating really hard on something
. Or perhaps it was simply the workings of all those wild grammers, layer upon layer and millennium upon millennium, that have always made the Summerlands such a congenial place for young adventurers. I can't say for sure. But the fact remained: in the Summerlands, Jennifer T.'s fastball hurtled, her slider dipped and dived like a swallow, and her change-up was as deceptively slow as old Coyote himself.

And yet that day the Big Liars of Old Cat Landing jumped all over her. They wore her out. They ate her lunch, and her supper, too. From the very first pitch the Liars appeared, as the announcers on television like to say, to have "solved" her. The Man with the Knife in His Boot led off with a slap double, stole second, took off running on a solid single by the Man with the Pole, and scored on the very next pitch, which Annie Christmas sent screaming up the first base line. It rolled into a corner of right field so deep that Buendía had to dig it out from under a rhododendron bush, where it lay next to a lost eyeball. By the top of the third, the score was Liars 7, Shadowtails 2. By the middle of the fifth, it was 12-6.

As a whole—in spite of the uneven score—Cinquefoil's team, all of them grammered up, for the first time, to the size of their shaggy center fielder, played good baseball. They fielded their positions well, and even managed to turn a smash grounder by the Man with the Big Maul, which probably should have been a hit, into a double play. And if by the fifth inning things were not even more of a disaster for the Shadowtails, there was one good reason: Rodrigo Buendía. He resumed the outfield, as a fish that has been caught and released resumes its native stream. He ranged its broad expanse with a grin on his face, flipping down his shades with a cavalier snap, chasing down flies as if each one promised to carry good news from the farthest blue reaches of sky. He saved a run in the third with a deadly strike to home, and then another in the fourth in the very same way, getting the ball back in to Ethan at the plate before the runner at third, the Woman with the Razor and Dice, had even made up her mind to slide.