Thumb on a Diamond (3 page)

This is not an ordinary baseball story.

3
THE IDEA

SKIP…SKIP…SKIP
…skip…plop.

The skips were the sounds of a small flat stone jumping across the ocean's surface, away from the beach. The plop was the sound of that same stone sinking.

“Four skips,” I yelled to Susan. “I'm pathetic.”

“A wave must have hit it,” said Susan. She leaned over and started to search the rocky beach. She picked up four flat rocks, checked their size and weight, and dropped three back onto the beach. She stared out at the ocean, concentrating. She pulled back her arm and flipped the stone over the water.

“One…two…three…four…five…six… seven…” I counted out loud before the stone disappeared under the water's surface. “You win.”

Susan always won.

“Do you think people all over the world skip stones when there's water around?” I asked.

“Maybe people all over the world aren't as bored as we are,” suggested Susan.

“We could fish off the dock.”

“Like we did yesterday and the day before?”

“We could play a board game.”

“Every game in the village has at least three missing pieces.”

I listened to the soft waves lap onto the beach. Even the ocean was lazy and bored.

“What I really want,” said Susan, sitting on the rocky beach, “is to go someplace. I want to go to Vancouver or Toronto or Seattle or New York or Paris or even Prince Rupert. I want to see an elevator. I want to see streetlights and a real park with swings. I want that school trip your dad keeps talking about.”

“He's trying,” I said. “He's written tons of letters, and he talks to people at the school board for a few hours each week.”

“And?”

I shrugged. “There's money for sports teams and for tournaments but there isn't any money for a group of kids to just see a city.”

New Auckland has a basketball team for the high-school kids. All the villages along the coast love basketball and have good teams. Sometimes our team manages to win the league championship and go to the regional championships and even to the provincial championships in Vancouver.

None of the villages have teams for other sports.

“What if we had a sports team?” asked Susan. “Then we could become champions and the school board would have to pay for us to go to Vancouver.”

“Nobody from this village plays anything except basketball. And you have to be in high school to play on the team. Besides, the basketball season doesn't even start until next fall.”

“What about some other sport?”

“What sport?”

“Well, we've got nine kids in grades six to nine, counting the ones who commute from cabins along the coast. Football takes eleven on each side and the equipment costs a lot. You need twelve kids for soccer. Besides, soccer takes a lot of running around and Big Bette and Little Liam won't play any sport if they have to run too much.”

Big Bette is actually quite small and Little Liam is huge but the word Big sounds better in front of Bette and the word Little sounds better in front of Liam. Dad says we're using irony, which is something he's been trying to teach us at school.

“What sport?” I asked again.

“Baseball,” whispered Susan.

I laughed. “Even if we had a team,” I said, “and even if the school board was willing to pay for a team to go to the championships, we'd have to beat all the other villages. I don't think we could beat anybody. Have you ever played baseball?”

“You know I haven't. I've lived here my entire life. Do you know how to play?”

“Sort of. I know there are three outs for each team in an inning…”

“What's an inning?”

“…and I know most of the ways a person can get out and I know there are three bases plus home plate. I know something else,” I said, grinning and wiggling my eyebrows.

“What?”

“I know that there are a few bats and some gloves in the school equipment room.”

We ran to the gym. We moved mats and basketballs until we found three bats, seven gloves and a box with twelve new baseballs. The school board probably sent the same collection of sports equipment to all the schools, even the ones with no grass or fields.

We tried on gloves, found ones that sort of fit, grabbed the bats and a couple of balls and ran down to the beach.

We stood about five paces apart and started to throw the ball back and forth. Most of the time the ball would hit one of our gloves and fall out before we could squeeze the pocket closed.

“Why do we need gloves?” asked Susan. “Why don't we just use our hands?”

“I think the ball travels a lot faster when somebody hits it.”

“Let's try.”

Susan picked up one of the bats, the smallest, and held it on her shoulder. I tossed the ball toward her. She swung, far too late, and the ball rolled down the beach behind her. We tried again and again, but Susan kept missing and then dropping the bat and running to pick up the ball. When Susan threw me the ball I could usually manage to make it land in my mitt but I couldn't seem to close the mitt in time. Most of the time the ball flopped out and stopped on the beach close to my feet. Sometimes I had to chase it.

Susan looked at me and said, “We're really bad.”

“We've just never played before,” I said. “Most kids in cities practice throwing and catching and hitting. We'd probably laugh at them if we ever saw them trying to row a boat.”

“So we have to form a team but not play anybody. The other villages in our school league won't bother because none of their kids play baseball, either. We'll win the league championship by default and the school board will have to pay for us to go to Vancouver.”

“But when we get to Vancouver, there will be teams that really can play baseball.”

“We won't play them, Thumb.”

“Why not?”

“Well, we couldn't be expected to play if one or two of us happen to get sick. We'll just tour the city for a couple of days and come home.”

“Dad will never go for it.”

“Why not?”

“You're planning to cheat. Dad's the principal, and teachers and principals are not supposed to encourage kids to cheat.”

“So? We won't tell him. I mean, we'll tell him about forming a team and challenging the other villages and we'll practice, which might even be fun. But when we get to Vancouver he'll think that a couple of us got sick and he'll be happy because he just wants to get us to the city anyway.”

“We'll need to get all the kids to agree first.”

Susan thought for a moment.

“You're right,” she said. “Round them up and I'll meet you all in the gym.”

4
THE TEAM

ROBBIE WAS EASY TO FIND
because he was almost always at home. Robbie was a grade six kid with really short hair. Every Saturday morning his dad plopped a chair out on the sidewalk. Robbie came out bundled in his winter coat in cold weather or holding an umbrella if it was raining. He sat down and his dad quickly ran hair clippers over Robbie's head. It didn't take long since Robbie's hair never seemed to grow during the week.

After his weekly haircut Robbie never even wiggled around trying to stop little hairs from itching his back. Most of us figured there were no little hairs. We decided Robbie was bald and the weekly haircuts were done so that he could pretend he had hair to cut.

Robbie was not an athlete. He liked those role-playing strategy games that take hours to move miniature figures across living-room carpets littered with kitchen pots and cups that are supposed to be mountains and villages. When you walked past his house you could hear him making battle noises with his mouth. He was really good. It sounded like a real battle was taking place in his living-room.

Robbie was in his living-room, of course. I knocked and he answered the door.

“Hey, Thumb,” said Robbie excitedly. “I was just about to reenact the Battle of Goliath Swamp from the fifth book of the Cliff Holt series. Do you want to play? You can be the demonic giants if you want. They win.”

“Actually,” I said, “I was wondering if you want to take a trip down to Vancouver?”

Robbie glanced down toward the dock, half expecting to see some boat getting ready to leave.

“Right now?” he asked.

“No. On a field trip for school. It won't happen for a couple of months.”

“Well, sure. There are some terrific miniatures stores in Vancouver and kids play on special tables that are designed to look like forts and mountains and forests. But shouldn't your dad be asking my dad or something?”

“My dad doesn't know. Not yet. Susan has a plan. We're meeting in the gym in about a half hour. See you there, okay?”

“Sure.”

I waved and ran toward the beach where kids were sorting stones by color and size and then hauling them by wheelbarrow to Mr. Entwhistle's house.

Mr. Entwhistle was transforming the old Addison house into an English cottage that looked like a hobbit home. He'd taken the old door and rounded it at the top, steaming some cedar and curving it so that the top of the doorway was rounded to fit the door. He'd also molded driftwood around the two front windows and was building a chimney made from small stones and rocks mortared together. I figured the house was going to look like the third house built by one of the three little pigs.

Big Bette was sorting stones for the walls.

Big Bette was so small herself that she could probably have run through the legs of most kids her age without slowing down. Big Bette loved horses, although she'd never seen a real horse. She liked to run on all fours and pretend to be a horse. She ran like that boy in the Jungle Book cartoon, the one raised by wolves. She could really move fast.

“Susan's got a plan for getting all of us to Vancouver,” I said. “We're all going to meet in the gym.”

“When?” she asked, tossing a pinkish stone onto a pile.

“Thirty minutes. Can you tell the others?”

“Sure,” she said, dropping to all fours. “I'll just pretend I'm the Pony Express.”

She galloped off, neighing and snorting and occasionally kicking up her back legs. When she pretended to be a horse, she was always a spirited one.

We met in the gym. The kids we'd rounded up sat in the stands while Susan and I stood in front. I held a bat on my shoulder with a glove looped over it like I'd seen in some movie.

The only one of us who could be called an athlete was Nick, who was in grade seven. Nick was the best basketball player in the school. He practiced every day, whenever he wasn't on a fishing boat. Most of the time he had to practice by himself, dribbling down the court and weaving past make-believe defenders, turning to reach over invisible arms as he shot.

Susan explained her plan. I volunteered to be one of the kids who got sick.

“Heck,” I said. “If I'm sick then I can stay in the hotel room and watch a real television with real stations.” We had two televisions in New Auckland but we could only watch movies. No television signals made it over our mountains.

Robbie raised his hand.

“Yes,” said Susan, pointing at him like she was a teacher.

“Can I be sick, too? I'm really good at pretending to be sick. My dad thinks I get sick way more than I really do.”

The rest of us stared at Robbie. He did get sick a lot.

“What if we actually do play?” asked Big Bette.

“Play what?” I asked.

“Play the baseball games down in Vancouver.”

“I could tell you one thing that would happen, for sure,” I said.

“What?” asked Big Bette.

“We'd lose.”

“Why?”

“Have you ever played baseball?”

“You know I haven't. I've lived here my entire life.”

“Down in the city,” I said, “there's grass and there's space between the houses and parks where kids can catch and throw and hit baseballs for hours a day, kind of like the way you practice basketball, Nick. We can't beat any of the other teams. Never.”

“Actually,” said Susan slowly. “I stopped by my house just before we all met and I checked on the Internet. If we did play, we wouldn't have to finish any of the games. The tournament uses a rule called the mercy rule. If, after two innings, any team is losing by more than ten runs, then the game is declared over so that the team being massacred doesn't have to be totally embarrassed. Besides, it's a double knockout tournament and that means a team goes home after losing two games. So if we did play, we'd only play four innings of baseball.”

“What's an inning?” asked Robbie.

“An inning,” said Susan, “is when both teams have had a chance to bat and each team has successfully stopped the other team from batting by completing three outs,” said Susan. “I looked up the rules. In professional games, teams play nine innings. Teams play seven-inning games in this tournament.”