Summerland (58 page)

"Wait a second," Thor said. "Who's going to be umpire?"

"Heh-heh," said a raspy voice. "That'd be me."

Ethan turned, expecting to see the foul shaggy creature, pale as a worm, who had been dancing in attendance on Coyote since their arrival at Diamond Green, and saw instead a young man, his longish hair swept back behind his ears, dressed in the pale blue shirt and dark blue trousers of an umpire.

"Padfoot!" Ethan said.

"What's up, dude-let?"

"No
way
!" Ethan yelled, turning on Coyote. "That guy works for
you
. He can't be an
umpire
"

"You have no choice in the matter, first of all," Coyote said. "And second of all, I have discovered, to my surprise, that my old friend Robin Padfoot seems to have arrived, much to my hurt and consternation, on your side of the question of his own continued existence."

"All due respect, boss, heh-heh," Padfoot said. "But I
like
the universe okay. I know, heh-heh, that makes me weak."

"I think that, torn as he is between his sworn oath to serve me, and his inexplicable fondness for his own miserable life, he can manage to be fairly impartial. So come. Let's do it."

"Play ball!" Padfoot cried.

HERE ARE THE LINEUPS, ACCORDING TO ALKABETZ, FOR THE GAME
played at Diamond Green, on the ninth day of the ninth moon of the year 1335th Woodpecker (Universal Reckoning):

For the first few innings it was a pitchers' duel. Coyote threw heat and smoke and lightning and thunder, pitches so wild yet true that you were certain they were coming at your head and yet when you looked down you saw them there, curled neat and tidy in the heel of the catcher's mitt. Some of his pitches may well have been invisible; others turned the air blue as they ripped on through. Then there were his junk pitches, screwballs and offspeed curves, sinkers and sliders and back-door curves. They were imbued with all the craft and treachery that have made Coyote's activities so interesting over the last fifty thousand years.

Jennifer T., whenever she took the mound, proceeded more deliberately, stopping frequently to confer with Ethan on pitch selection, relying mostly on her fastball, but with her change-up working well and her slider a quick shimmering silvery hook of unhittable air. One or two of Padfoot's calls were questionable, in the opinion of the Shadowtails, but there were as well a pair of Rideout pitches that he called as strikes, when Ethan was sure they had been outside and low.

Yet the Hobbledehoys, as Cinquefoil had said, were a tough team. They chipped away at Jennifer T., a hit here, a walk there, now bunting the runner over to second, now stealing third, until in the bottom of the fifth they lined everything up right—a walk, a stolen base, a fielder's choice, and a sacrifice fly—and managed to get a run across the plate. They went scoreless in the sixth and seventh, then added another run in the bottom of the eighth when Cutbelly lost a fly ball in the sun. By the top of the ninth, the score was 2-0 in favor of the Hobs. And within that zero were contained entire alphabets and inventories of zeroness; the Shadowtails were runless, hitless, and without a walk; Coyote was throwing a perfect game. Of all of the Shadowtail hitters, only Buendía had connected solidly, sending two of Coyote's pitches deep before they were run down by Jack Gobbet, the Hobs' center fielder.

Spider-Rose led off the top half of the ninth by coaxing a walk out of Coyote, who seemed to be generally unnerved by the sight of the tattered doll that he had once foisted off on Filaree. Grim followed this with a first-pitch single, simple and clean. In spite of this apparent turn for the better in the Shadowtails' fortunes, Ethan came to the plate with almost no hope in his heart of succeeding. He had struck out once—swinging. Though he tried with each swing to ignore the pain in his hand and the chafing of the Knot, it was impossible. In his second at-bat he had hit a towering foul ball to left that was chased and caught by Jack Strzyga, and that was the best he had to show for his afternoon.

Now as he came to the plate for what would likely be his last time at bat—ever—he stopped. He looked at Spider-Rose, with a lead off second base, Nubakaduba tucked under her left arm, and at Grim lurking behind the Hob first baseman. Ethan turned and looked back at his bench, at Jennifer T. in the on-deck circle, at Pettipaw, Thor and Cutbelly, Cinquefoil, at Taffy in her cage, and at Rodrigo Buendía. Taffy was on her feet, gripping the bars in her great fists and looking right at Ethan. He wondered how she felt, now, about the universe's coming to an end. At this point she probably wanted just to get it all over with. She was probably pulling for him to strike out.

Buendía pointed at Ethan. He put his hands on an imaginary bat handle and swung. Then he pointed at the sky. Ethan nodded.

"Yeah, right," he said.

"Batter up," Padfoot said.

Coyote tugged on the bill of his cap, then went into his stretch. He centered his body around the ball, in his glove, over his belly. Then he rocked back and let fly. Ethan caught a flash of the ball's seams as it came screwballing in at him. He swung, but at the last minute the pitch broke sharply away.

"Strike one!" Padfoot said.

The next pitch was another breaking ball, a curve that started away from Ethan and then dove in. He swung at it, pain lancing through his hand.

"Strike two!" Padfoot said.

Ethan stepped out, and took his left hand off the bat, and shook it. He tried once more to put the pain from his mind, but it was impossible. So he decided to try something new, something that struck him as very much in the vein of an idea Mr. Olafssen would have had. Instead of shirking the pain, he would allow himself to
feel
it. He would
use
the hurt, if he could. Maybe it would make him angry, or help to focus his thoughts. He stepped back in, and gripped the bat. He gripped it as tightly with his left hand as he could, allowing the Knot to press deeply against the tender spot on his hand. The pain shimmered through him like a ripple in a thin sheet of metal. He raised the bat over his shoulder.

"Get a hit, Ethan!" called a voice, reedy and strange, from beyond third base. Ethan looked up and saw his father, the remnant of his father, standing on the steps of the pump truck, watching the game. The Flat Man didn't raise his hand—didn't even move—but Ethan was sure it had been he who spoke. Nobody on the visitors' bench seemed to have heard or noticed, however. Nobody turned around. Ethan wondered if somehow the sound of his father's encouragement could have been simply wishing. He gazed out at Coyote. The pitch came. It was a fastball, straight down the middle. Ethan dug the handle of the bat into his outraged palm and swung. The impact of the ball on the shaft was so hard that Ethan felt the bones of his body shatter. His arms broke at the elbow, and his shoulders snapped off, and then as his momentum carried him around, his upper torso twisted entirely around on his hips, around and around like a stick of taffy, his waist corkscrewing thinner and thinner until it sheared in two and his upper body fell with a thud to the ground.

"Little dude!" cried the voice of Buendía, from somewhere back in a place where time and joy and the acrid tang of a burning cigar still existed. "Dude! Dude! Dude!"

Ethan staggered to his feet and looked up, and caught sight of the ball he had hit. It was rising into the air, over deep left-center, a seed, a liner, a frozen rope streaking skyward over Diamond Green.

The speed of a home-run shot is determined not only by the velocity of the bat at the moment of impact, but by the speed the ball is traveling toward the hitter. So it must have been the combination of Ethan's pain-driven, father-haunted, wild, desperate swing, and a truly scorching hummer thrown by the Changer of the Worlds, that produced the magnificent shot that rocketed off the bat of Ethan Feld. It rose, and rose, and rose into the sky. It kept on rising, traveling farther and farther, out toward the limitless blue beyond the outfield of Diamond Green. Then, as everyone agreed, it seemed to hang a moment, a tiny gray period, pale against the blue—and disappeared. Ethan stood there, watching the fuzzy little hole it left in the sky, trembling and faint, like one of those optic floaters (actually they are called
phosphenes
) that you catch sight of from time to time, gliding across the empty air at the corner of your eye.

"Run!" came the cry from the Shadowtail bench. "Run, Ethan, run!"

He started running then, and when he crossed home plate, to be caught up in the collective dancing embrace of his teammates, was amazed to the discover that the Shadowtails, thanks to him, now held the lead, 3-2. The celebration was cut short, however, by a sound, distant and clear as a bell. It was a familiar sound, crystalline and bright and yet at the same time alarming. It was the sound of mischief, of reckless play and impending disaster, of a backyard game of baseball carried just a couple of inches too far. It was the sound, at once unmistakable and infinitely far away, of a breaking window. Everyone, Shadowtails and Hobbledehoys, turned and stared up at the high featureless wall of sky beyond the outfield fence. The silence that fell upon the field was haunted by a tinkling that lingered in the ears.

It was Coyote, in the end, who put an end to the silence.

"Uh-oh," he said. "We're in trouble now." He stood a moment longer, gazing up at the sky, then turned, and jammed his index and pinky fingers between his lips, and whistled. Across the field, by Murmury Well, Ethan saw his father's shape raise its hand. Then it retreated into the belly of the truck.

"Game over!" called the Coyote, starting to run to Murmury Well. "Forfeit! You win!"

The Hobbledehoys began to gesticulate wildly, chasing after their manager as he ran toward the truck. They were outraged with him for forfeiting; they had played very hard and were only a run down with three more outs to their name. The Shadowtails stood uneasily at the edge of the ball field, some of them watching Coyote as he ran, others staring up at the wavering little hole that Ethan's shot had poked into the glassy seal on the Gleaming. Ethan's gaze, however, was fixed on the armored truck. The crew of graylings came tumbling out of its belly, rolling a wheeled machine that Ethan recognized as a variation on the kind of pump his father used to inflate his envelopes. Then came the Flat Man, carrying the dragon's egg. Coyote took the egg from the Flat Man and unstoppered it. There was a soft
piff
and then a curl of black vapor snaked like a vine from the opening. Coyote raised it, and took hold of a hose on the pump.

"Hey!" shouted Jennifer T. "You didn't
win
! We had a deal!"

"So I lied!" Coyote shouted back.

Then something large and dark and moving very quickly seemed to shudder up out of nowhere onto Coyote, and he stumbled backward.

"Taffy!" Ethan cried. "It's Taffy! She got out!"

Snarling, the Sasquatch wrapped her long arms around Coyote's throat. Then she snatched at his upraised hand, on whose palm there balanced the wobbling hodag egg. A black, starless hole splashed across the sky behind them. They fell over backward, but the Slipperiest One managed to slip the knot of Taffy's great furry arms, and catch the knobbly egg before it could tumble to the grass. He held it up, standing over her with a wild grin on his face. Then he tipped the egg, once, twice, and two long drizzling drops of Nothing splashed against the big leathery soles of her feet, and she bellowed in pain.

Coyote slapped the egg to the intake valve of the picofiber pump, and the Flat Man threw a switch, and instantly the pump started up,
onk-squitch-onk-squitch-onk-squitch
. The silvery hose leapt once, and then again, and then it settled back shuddering to the ground.

For a moment, for an hour, for a year, nothing happened. Then they heard another faint, familiar call, more chilling than the sound of breaking glass. It was the far-off crowing of a rooster. They felt the ground beneath their feet shudder, spasmodically, as if it were the hide of an immense animal trying to shed them like irritating flies. The air was rent with a creaking sound, like the rusted hinges of a giant door, and all about them, echoing against the hills of Applelawn and the craggy burnt brow of Shadewater Tor, came cracklings and rustlings and the groaning of ancient timbers.

"Ragged Rock," Cinquefoil said softly, sitting down in the grass. "Two out in the Bottom of the Ninth. The count is 0 and
2
."