Summerland (49 page)

Through all this, it was not as if Jennifer T. pitched poorly. Her slider was heavy, and she kept her fastball moving. She could feel the ball leaving her fingers charged up with verve and liveliness; in fact if she hadn't seen the Liars running free on the bases, she would have said she was pitching better today, with the possible continued existence of All Worlds at stake, than she ever had before. In the top of the sixth, Spider-Rose turned a swinging bunt into a gift triple on a bobble at short by Annie Christmas, and when Grim walked, Rodrigo Buendía brought the Shadowtails to within three with a mighty home run, to the deepest part of the outfield. It really looked as if their ringer, imported from another world for this very purpose, really was going to save the day.

In the bottom of the seventh, the Liars scored four more, on seven hits, to make the score 16-9.

That was when the Shadowtails' Player-Manager called for time. He walked very slowly from first base to the mound. Jennifer T. dreaded what she felt must be coming—Cinquefoil was going to pull her. They had no bench, of course; he would have to switch her with someone, probably Pettipaw, who had done some pitching in his distant youth as a rat-boy on the shores of the Kraken Sea. Ethan trotted out from behind home plate, thumbing through that stupid Peavine book of his, probably looking, Jennifer T. thought, under the chapter entitled "What to Say to Your Pitcher When She's Getting Her Butt Kicked by a Bunch of Liars." Grim clomped in from shortstop, and then Taffy came in from the outfield. Yep, they were going to have themselves a little wake, out there on the mound, for the death of Jennifer T.'s career as a pitcher.

"Tell me what ya think is happening," Cinquefoil said to her, in a low, calm voice. She had expected him to be angry, or at least exasperated, but he sounded so reasonable and even hopeful that she was immediately forced to battle an overwhelming desire to cry. To prevent this from happening she pulled the wool collar of her jersey up to her mouth and began to chew it. She said nothing.

"Here's the thing I been reflectin' at," Grim the Giant said. "That weren't no ordinary hoop-de-do they had themselves last night. That was sort of a kind of a Last Party Ever, seems to me. I sincerely do believe they mean to
win
this game. And then just let the whole Sad Story of Everything come to an end."

"Don't talk nonsense," Cinquefoil said. "Every good team means ta win. Don't mean they
can
. I mean ta win, too. But I guess ya don't, is that it?"

Grim looked away, embarrassed, scratching at his single long bushy eyebrow with a fingernail.

"Listen," Taffy said. It was strange to be looking her in the eye. "You've pitched a good came so far, girl. You truly have. But they just have your number. Maybe they have all of our numbers. Maybe Grim's right. Maybe it would be better if you don't win."

Grim squinted at the Sasquatch. "Did I say that?"

Taffy said, "Better if Coyote does bring the Pole down, maybe. The story of these Worlds is so tangled and tired and played out."

And at that moment she herself looked ready to give it all up, forever and ever.

Jennifer T. didn't know how she felt about the world coming to an end, exactly. She supposed that on the whole she was against it. But Cinquefoil was her manager. If he wanted her off the mound, then she had no choice but to do as he said. She reached out to hand him the ball. To her surprise, the little ferisher knocked her hand away.

"What is wrong with ya people?" Cinquefoil shouted. "We got somebody trying with all her heart ta win a baseball game here! Giant! Bigfoot!" He yanked the cap from his head and, taking advantage of the shapeshifting grammer, began to beat them about the head and shoulders with it. "Get back to your positions, and field them with every ounce o' whatever it is ya got. And if I hear any more o' that kind a talk, I'll pluck every hair from the one o' ya and stick it ta the other with a great wad o' tar!"

Chastened, Taffy and the giant trudged back to their positions. The crowd, which had turned restiess as the time-out dragged on, now began actively to jeer the Shadowtails. Cinquefoil seemed not to hear.

"You!" Cinquefoil said to Ethan, who jumped. He had been lost in a page of
How to Catch Lightning and Smoke
, and now he looked up, blushing, embarrassed to have been caught reading in the middle of a game. "This is yer pitcher! What have ya got ta say ta her?"

"Oh," Ethan said. "Just a minute." He flipped through the book, moistening his thumb with the tip of his tongue. "Right. Okay." He scanned the page, nodded, then looked at Jennifer. "Hang in there, Jennifer T.," he said. "Just bear down, and keep it close, and we'll get right back in this, okay?"

Though she knew he had just read them in a book, Ethan said the words with just the right amount of meaninglessness, and they made her feel better. She was about to say that she would hang in there, when the Hangin' Judge, proprietor of the Jersey Lily saloon, started to make his rolling, stoop-shouldered way to the mound.

"Awright," he said. "How about let's break up this little confabulation and play some baseball? Or is that too much to ask?"

At the same time, there was a scatter of footsteps behind her, and Jennifer T. turned to see Pettipaw come scurrying in from left field. He was out of breath and clearly excited.

"I just heard something from one of the riverboat boys in the stands," he said. "With these fine, fine instruments of mine." Lovingly he caressed one of his nicked little earflaps. He looked at Ethan. "Littie reuben, is it possible that a bit of your bat might have come into the possession of the Man with the Knife in His Boot?"

"I said
break it up!
" said the Hangin' Judge, shambling up to the mound, reeking atrociously of whisky, with a strange undercurrent of vanilla from having consumed seventeen of the Man with the Axe's flannel cakes.

Jennifer T. saw that Ethan did not like to have to answer Pettipaw's question.

"Yes," he said softly. "It's possible. I asked him to try to cut the Knot for me. But the Knot broke his Knife. Maybe he got a little shaving. I didn't see."

"The Man has a conjure eye," Pettipaw hissed, keeping his voice low. "Didn't you notice his blue gums? Give him a sliver of baseball power like that, even the tiniest chip, and there's no telling what he could do with it."

"Most likely he'll put a quickeye on them Liars," Cinquefoil said. "Ya can throw as hard and as smart as ya want, kid, if they can quickeye the ball, they'll hit it a ton."

Jennifer T. stared at Ethan. He was her friend, and she loved him, but at that moment she could have whittled him to a pile of very tiny shavings indeed. Him and that freaking
Knot
of his! It was bad enough he let it mess with his hitting game—now it was messing up
her
game, too.

"No sweat," she said. She took a fresh ball from Ethan, not looking him in the eye. "Let's get 'em."

Cinquefoil and Ethan returned to their positions, and Jennifer began to work over the mound with a toe. She had no idea whatever of how to pitch to a team under the force of a quickeye conjure, but she certainly wasn't going to let anybody else see that.

"Court is now in session," cried the Hangin' Judge, raising his sallow hands, with their manicured nails, over his hairless head. The spectators cheered, whistled, paid off their various bets and side bets, and then settled down to watch play resume. The Man with the Harpoon stepped in, a wicked grin peeking out from his sandy beard, his great bat tipped, in Jennifer T.'s imagination, with a jagged whale-piercing barb, ready to strike. Then, to Jennifer T.'s surprise, Ethan threw up his hands.

"Time!" he said. There was a curious look on his face, as if he had something to say to her that he wasn't sure she was going to like. She had seen him look at her this way many times; usually he was right.

With an exasperated growl, the Hangin' Judge informed the players that Time was, once again, officially Out. The crowd groaned and mocked the time-wasting Shadowtails. Ethan paid no attention. He trotted out to her, and started to talk.

"Cover your mouth," Jennifer T. said. "We don't want them reading lips."

"Oh, right," Ethan said, glancing over at the Liars' bench. He raised his mitt to his mouth, and spoke softly into it.

"I had an idea," he said. "Something I was just reading about in Peavine."

"What is it?" Jennifer T. said. She didn't like holding up the game, but she was more than willing to listen to
anything
on the subject of what the heck she was going to throw next.

"See, Peavine talks about a pitcher he caught, once, in a game way, way far away, near the Kraken Sea."

"Yeah?"

"The pitcher was a
selkie
. Like a seal, but he could sort of undo his seal skin, I guess, and turn into a man, or—"

"I know what a selkie is. I saw that movie with the seal lady."

"Well, this guy, because a selkie's a kind of a werebeast, see, he was a shadowtail. The only shadowtail pitcher Peavine ever caught. And this guy? The selkie? He could
scamper
a baseball."

Jennifer T. felt that she understood the idea immediately, on some deep level. At the same time she had absolutely no idea what Ethan was talking about.

"He could pitch the ball along a tiny little branch of the Tree, you know, make it disappear, and then at the last second, just before it crossed the plate, he could pop it back. Just like when Cutbelly got me from my house to the Tooth in like five minutes."

"A wormhole," she said. "They call it. I read about it
Eli Drinkwater: A Life in Baseball
by Happy Blackmore." Eli Drinkwater, as you know, was a great catcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates, and a noted theorist of pitching, who had been killed in a car crash before Jennifer T. was born. "You throw the ball into a wormhole, he said, and it comes out someplace totally different."

"Right!"

"But a wormhole isn't real, E. It's just, you know, a way of saying there's a lot of
movement
on your fastball."

"Maybe in the Middling," Ethan said. "Not here."

"Huh," said Jennifer T. "But, okay, what are you saying? Pettipaw should take over the pitching because he's a shadowtail? Or Thor?"

"Well, that's my part of the idea. But it's sort of trippy. But here it is." He leaned in very close, speaking through the webbing of his old stained pieplate. She could smell flannel cake on his breath, too. "
Maybe you're a shadowtail
."

"That's enough, now," the umpire shouted. "Now, play ball or I'm callin' this game a forfeit."

"What!" she said. "Get out of here!"

Ethan's face fell, and he looked very shocked. He started to say something.

"Go on!" Jennifer T. said. "Get back behind the plate where you belong!"

He nodded, then turned and walked slowly back toward home plate.

Jennifer stood there, turning the ball over and over in her fingers. A shadowtail? To be a shadowtail meant—what had her uncle Mo said? "You have to be something neither fish nor fowl, a little bit of this, a little of that. Always half in this world and half in the other to begin with." She was a little bit of a lot of different things, she supposed. Her mother was half Scotch-Irish and half German, with some Cherokee in there, too. Her father was half Suquamish and half Salishan and half junkyard dog. Everyone said she was a tomboy; that was a kind of a half and half, too. According to her Aunt Shambleau—it had not seemed to be intended as a compliment—she was half a girl and half a woman. She had grown up on Clam Island, and yet because she was a Rideout she was never fully a
part
of Clam Island, and had passed most of the days of her childhood living in a world of her own, out in the wintry gray at Hotel Beach. She had, over the years, thought of herself at one time or another as a half-breed, a mongrel, a mutt, a misfit, and an oddball. It had never occurred to her think of herself as a shadowtail, or to consider that you could find power in being caught between two worlds.

"Huh," said Jennifer T. to the baseball, turning it over and over. "How about that?"

When the Man with the Harpoon stepped in again, the grin even brighter and harder, there in his beard, than before, he had not a thought in his head. Ordinarily a batter tries to guess what the next pitch is going to be, and tries to adjust not only his swing but also his way of looking at the pitch. Since there was a quickeye on him, however, as on all his teammates, thanks to the wily conjure-man ways of the Man with the knife in His Boot, there was no need for him to guess, or to adjust anything at all. He just stood there, waggling the bat up behind his head, knowing that when the pitch left the reuben girl's hands, he would see it as plainly as if it were a yarn ball rolled across a thick rug by a weak little kitten.