Summerland (61 page)

When the last car drove off the ferry, a ferry worker named Big Dave Cardoon, who had graduated from high school with Albert, found him lying there, passed out drunk in the middle of the empty deck. He dragged his old classmate to his feet, and then when it developed that Albert had no ride home, stuffed Albert into his truck, and drove him back to the Rideout place. It struck him as amusing at first that Albert kept muttering "Bigfoot spat on me," over and over again, but it quickly grew annoying, and he was glad to get the poor fellow out of his car and up the sagging steps of the house.

THEY HAD JUST ROLLED OFF THE FERRY WHEN ONE OF THE
ferishers climbed from the trailer onto the roof of the car, and peeked in through the window to say that Taffy had revived, and seemed to be in pain. Ethan heard her heavy moaning, then, and saw from the way one of the dockworkers was staring at the car that other people could hear it, too.

"We better get her to a doctor," Mr. Feld said. "I'll turn the car around. We'll take her to St. Joseph's in Bellingham. God knows how we'll explain—"

"Dad," Ethan said. "Would Mom have known how to take care of her?"

"Your
mother
? Treat a
Sasquatch
?" He had slowed the car, preparing to turn it around for the long ride back to the hospital on the mainland. Now he stopped. He frowned. "You know something, Ethan? I sort of think she would have. Is there a vet on the island? There must be."

"There is," Jennifer T. said. "Her name is Margaret something. Down by the tree nursery. We took one of the dogs there when one of the other dogs bit its ear off."

"Sounds perfect," said Mr. Feld. And he turned the car around.

DR. MARGARET PEDERSEN LIVED IN A SMALL, NEAT HOUSE OF
brick and siding, behind the sign that bore her name. The house was dark, at this hour, except for the porch light. As they pulled into her gravel drive, what sounded like a hundred dogs all began yapping and howling at once. Lights came on inside. The aluminum screen door banged open. A large woman in a long housecoat stepped onto the porch and peered into the shadows.

"Yes?" she called, sounding sympathetic and annoyed at the same time, and maybe a little bit afraid. "Who is it?"

"Dr. Pedersen?" Mr. Feld said, as he climbed out of the car. "It's Bruce Feld. I live out at the old Okawa place."

"
Yes
?" This time it sounded a little more purely annoyed.

"We have a—a hurt—"

"Creature," Thor suggested.

Dr. Pedersen belted her housecoat more tightly around herself and then came across the lawn. Ethan saw the ferishers quickly tumble out the front end of the trailer and go scurrying into nearby woods, with Cinquefoil close behind, as if they could sense that Dr. Pedersen believed in fairies, and had decided it would be better not to distract her.

"Well?" said Dr. Pedersen. She looked, a little impatiently, from Mr. Feld to the three children he had apparently decided to drag out into the middle of the night. Then she looked at the tarp-covered trailer. She was a very tall, large-framed woman with a pinched mouth and wide, pale eyes. She wore her hair in a crew cut. It was the haircut, and that warm, exasperated voice, that made you want to trust her to heal a broken Sasquatch. Mr. Feld hesitated a moment longer, then pulled back the tarp in a single jerk. Taffy sat up, gasping, as if wakened suddenly from a startling dream. She and Dr. Pedersen stared at each other for a moment.

Dr. Peggy Pedersen, as they would later learn, had been awakened in the middle of the night many times in the past. As the only veterinarian on Clam Island, with her office in a trailer behind her house, she was accustomed to having people, often hysterically upset, show up at three in the morning because driving home from the bars of Clam Center they had struck or run over some dog. It was not even unheard of—after the Urgent Care Center was forced to eliminate twenty-four-hour care—for late-night visitors to show up with
humans
needing some kind of emergency help. But this was definitely her first Sasquatch. She closed her eyes, and opened them again, then glanced helplessly at Mr. Feld, with an expression on her face that seemed to invite him to tell her the whole thing was a joke. Mr. Feld nodded, very solemn. Then Dr. Pedersen looked down, and saw the ragged stumps of Taffy's legs, and all trace of doubt and late-night bafflement vanished from her face.

"Oh, poor thing," she said.

THE DAY AFTER THEIR RETURN WAS A PRACTICE DAY, AND WHEN
Ethan, Thor, and Jennifer T. showed up at Jock MacDougal they had missed only one game, another loss, 8–2 to the Bigfoot Tavern Bigfoots.

"Well," said Mr. Perry Olafssen, as they came across the parking lot toward the ball field. He put on his stern face, which was really just a variation of his disappointed face. "Well, well. Missed a game, you three. And we needed you." He said this last part to Jennifer T. "Can't do that, kids. Can't just not show up for a game. Not without calling first. Would never fly in the bigs. If you were paid, I'd have to dock you." He looked at Mr. Feld. "Not good, Bruce."

Though nothing was more important to Mr. Feld, as we know, than showing up for a game, he was too tired even to blush. For the last two nights he had worked feverishly to mold a pair of enormous prosthetic feet for Taffy out of his remarkable picofiber polymer, hoping to arrive at something that would be light andflexibleand yet stand up to all the punishment that a Sasquatch's life inflicted on her feet. When he was not working on the feet, he was visiting Taffy over at Dr. Pedersen's, in the doctor's back bedroom. He was also, Ethan had begun to suspect, visiting Dr. Pedersen, who turned out to be a lifelong Phillies fan.

"Sorry, Perry," Mr. Feld said. "Won't happen again." And indeed it did not.

When that day's practice was over, Mr. Olafssen, who had been watching Ethan through narrowed eyes, called him over.

"Funny bat," he said. "Where'd you get it?"

Ethan handed Splinter to Mr. Olafssen. He had known this moment would eventually come.

"Made it," he said, neatly leaving out the pronoun. He did not want to lie—what if people started asking him to make bats for
them?
—but he did not care to get into the whole Grim-the-Giant thing with his coach, either.

"You missed a spot." Mr. Olafssen pointed to the Knot. "Must chafe a bit."

Ethan held out the palm of his hand. The blister had long since hardened into a thick yellowish callus. He shrugged.

"I'm used to it," he said.

After practice, the children cut through the woods to see what had become of Hotel Beach. The bulldozers were gone, the earthmovers and backhoes, all the warning signs that had been thrown up by the minions of TransForm Properties. But that was not all. The birch trees had grown back, to very nearly their former stature, or else they had simply been replaced, in the flood of healing. Standing there, now, looking out at the silent white trees, Ethan could
feel
the Summerlands, nearer than ever before. He felt that he could have leapt there himself, without any help from Cutbelly or Thor.

"I wonder how they're doing?" he said, and the others knew whom he meant right away.

"It takes a hundred years to build a ferisher knoll," Thor said. "They're going to be living in tents for a long, long time."

They saw less and less of Thor after that day; he began to spend more of his time leaping from this World to the Summerlands, scampering here and there across the World of his birth, traveling often in the company of Taffy the Sasquatch. Everywhere he went he inquired after a reuben baby who had been taken by a mob of ferishers outside of Cle Ellum, Washington, eleven Middling years before. The last time Ethan saw him, he had shrunk down until he was only a few inches taller than Cinquefoil, and invisible to 98.3 percent of the general population. But that was a while ago, and who knows where in the Worlds he and Taffy may have ventured, searching for the changeling whose place Thor had taken, looking for a homewood of their own.

Even without Thor, the Roosters posted what was always afterward recalled as one of the most amazing comeback seasons in the history of Clam Island baseball. One lover of baseball cannot get a team out of the cellar, but two can turn a season around. Shortly after the return of Rideout and Feld, the Roosters started to win games. They had always placed great stock in Jennifer T., but now they very quickly, if somewhat to their surprise, learned to trust their catcher, too. Once they managed this, it was a very short step to trusting each other. They noticed that there was more to baseball than hitting the ball as hard as you could, than waving your glove in the general direction of the ball and hoping for the best. They took pitches, turned double plays, and hit the cutoff man, and instead of trying to cream it every time they got up, they just did their best to advance the runner. They played like ferishers, with careful abandon. Finally, they started to believe. They won their last twelve games in a row, and finished tied with the Shopway Angels for first place in the Mustang League.

A one-game playoff for the championship ensued. They had seen less of the Angels over the second half of the season than of the Reds and Bigfoots, and it took the Angels a while to realize that the boy behind home plate with a mask over his face and armored pads on his shins, knees, and chest was their old pal, Dog Boy.

The realization finally hit when Ethan, mask thrown off, mouth open in a hopeful O, killed an Angel rally by snagging a tricky pop fly at the backstop.

"Nice catch," said the hitter, Tommy Bluefield, who was also the Angels catcher.

"That's nothing," Ethan said. "Josh Gibson, the Negro Leagues star who was perhaps the finest catcher ever to play this great game of baseball, once got his pie plate around a ball dropped from the top of the Washington Monument."

Tommy Bluefield scratched his head.

"What happened to
him
?" he asked Jennifer T., as she came in from the mound.

"He read Peavine's book," she said. "Maybe you should, too."

"Tell him about it, J.T.," said Albert Rideout, holding out his hand for a high five. He was a regular attendee of Roosters games now, as well as of dinners at the Rideout table, and he had gone to work doing odd jobs for Ethan's father. The change in him, abrupt and apparently genuine, was universally remarked. Nobody knew the reason for it, though some whispered darkly, around the Clam Island Tavern, that he had gotten some kind of a bad scare, from some Hell's Angels up in Blaine, or from some gangsters down in Tacoma, or from some neo-Nazis out by Flathead Lake.

"Shut up, Albert," said Jennifer T.

She had not yet forgiven her father, and she was not sure that she was going to do so anytime soon. He had caused her too much embarrassment and shame over the years. He had missed too many ball games, recitals, doctor's visits, and school plays. Those which he had attended, he had too often spoilt. But he was trying, and though she doubted it would last, she was too pure a ballplayer not to give credit to the other side for trying. As she trotted past him, she slapped his outstretched hand.

"Way to pitch 'em, J.T.," he said, watching her go by.

"Okay, Dad," she said, and then felt her cheeks burning. It had been a very long time since she had called her father "Dad."

As for Ethan, he was kept busy all through the game. There was a broken double-steal in the second inning that led to a rundown between third base and home. There was a foul-tipped third strike that Ethan bobbled but caught for an out. In the fifth, Jennifer T. got a certain itchy look that Ethan recognized. She wrinkled up her nose, and her sock seemed to be bothering her. She walked two batters in a row. Ethan went out to talk to her.

"You can do it," he said.

"I know I can," said Jennifer T. "Thank you. Now get off my mound, Feld."

Ethan nodded. Peavine warns, in his book, that pitchers do not like to be visited by their catchers, no matter how badly they may need the visit.

After that, Jennifer T.'s sock seemed to be all right. She struck out the next two batters to retire the side.

In the bottom of the seventh, with the score tied, the Angels runner at third came charging home. Ethan took the throw from short. He came out from behind the plate. He planted his feet. He lowered his shoulder. He remembered that you must hold on to the ball, in the words of the great Peavine, "as if you are holding on to the love of your very truest friend." He imagined that he was holding on to the love of Jennifer T. Rideout, and to the great adventure they had just lived through together. He had been so busy in the game, until now, that he had forgotten to remember that this would be the very last game of the season. The Angels baserunner, head down, fists pumping, came at him.

Ethan took a deep breath. He smelled the tar-and-butter smell of the oil Jennifer T. had used to soften up his glove. He smelled cut grass, and Kool-Aid, and hot dogs with ketchup. He could see the green ribbon of the outfield and the long shadow of the bleachers. He heard the scrape of the oncoming cleats in the dirt of the base path. He heard his heart beating behind his chest protector. Without even looking, he could see the Angels running wild on the bases. He could see his teammates standing and jumping and yelling and staring in at home with their hands on top of their caps as if to hold them on. He could hear the ragged, hoarse cheering of his father, in his XXL Ruth's Fluff 'n' Fold Roosters jersey. He could see Jennifer T. coming halfway down the hill, glove on her hip, believing in him.