Wing Ding
Authors: Kevin Markey
The Super Sluggers
Kevin Markey
For Sarah and Nat,
with love
Tugboat Tooley spotted it first.
Mr. Bones scrambled out from under the long aluminum bench andâ¦
The next morning Rambletown Field starred in the daily paper.
I got an answer a couple hours later. A possibleâ¦
Later that afternoon, Stump and Slingshot showed up at myâ¦
We swung by Velcro's house on our way to theâ¦
The next afternoon Stump and Slingshot swung by my houseâ¦
The wind met us like the defensive line of theâ¦
As the visiting team, we batted first.
With men on first and second and the wind rippingâ¦
Losing a game felt about as good as getting kickedâ¦
“Mom,” I called when Mr. Bones and I came throughâ¦
Clouds drag-raced across the sky the next morning. Treetops swayedâ¦
“The game is called bucket ball, and the rules areâ¦
When we finished the Loser's Lap, Skip tried to runâ¦
Early the next morning, one day to go before theâ¦
At precisely twenty-eight minutes before nine o'clock that evening, myâ¦
All night long, the wind screamed like kids on aâ¦
Rambletown Field buzzed with activity when I arrived. A fireâ¦
“BATTER UP!” cried the ump.
T
ugboat Tooley spotted it first.
Tugboat plays catcher for the Rambletown Rounders baseball team, reigning champs of the ten-to-twelve division.
I play third base.
My name is the Great Walloper, Walloper for short. At least that's what everybody calls me, because I like to wallop the tar out of the ball. My real name, the one my parents gave me, is Banjo. Banjo H. Bishbash, to be precise. The
H
stands for Hit. People ask me about my name all the time. “So unusual,” they say.
It gets tiring.
For the record, Hit was my mom's last name before she married my dad. Banjo is my
grandfather's name and my dad's, too. Like the musical instrument. For real.
You can see why I prefer Walloper.
At the moment I wasn't worried about any of that. I was more concerned with keeping the St. Joe Jungle Cats from tying the score.
It was the top of the third inning, no outs, a fair breeze blowing straight in from center. Our pitcher, Slingshot Slocum, stood on the mound protecting a slim 2â1 lead. A St. Joe runner bounced on his toes at second base. From the way he kept glancing in my direction, I knew he was thinking about stealing third.
Crouched behind home plate, Tugboat surveyed the diamond. Nothing gets past Tugboat. Not balls, not base runners, not even the hotdog man out in the bleachers making change for a five spot. Tugboat's our field general and we rely on him.
A real general would have been nice. He would've had an army at his command. As we were about to learn, we could've used an army. Maybe the air force, too. Send in the
marines just to be safe.
Tugboat flashed a sign. One finger. That meant fastball. A fastball is not a good pitch to steal on. It gets to the plate too quickly. If Slingshot blazed the ball home and Tugboat made a good peg to me, we'd have a good shot at cutting down the runner. All I had to do was make a clean catch and apply the tag.
I shot a look toward second. I wondered if the runner could see Tugboat's signals as clearly as I could. I hoped not.
At the plate, the St. Joe hitter, batting lefty, dug into the box. He zeroed in on Slingshot like a laser beam. The umpire hunkered down behind Tugboat, one hand resting lightly on the catcher's right shoulder for balance. The ump, too, was completely focused on Slingshot.
Slingshot kicked and fired a fastball. The St. Joe batter started his swing.
That's when Tugboat sprang from behind the plate.
“Time out!” he called, flinging away his mask.
He bounced up so quickly, I thought a bee had stung him.
Tugboat's sudden leap knocked the ump backward, toppling him onto his backside behind home plate. I don't know what the ump thought. Probably how much he was going to enjoy tossing Tugboat out of the game. While all this was happening, the batter lunged at the pitch and sent the ball dribbling toward short.
“You can't call time in the middle of a pitch!” the ump barked from the dirt.
Tugboat didn't say a word. As the hitter took off for first, he just pointed to center field. We whipped our heads around to see what was bothering him. All except Stump Plumwhiff, our shortstop, that is. As I turned, I saw Stump charge the slow roller coming his way and rush a throw to our first baseman, Gilly Wishes.
Then I looked to the outfield to see what had caused Tugboat to act so strangely.
What I witnessed made my knees quake.
A huge, shimmering cloud filled the sky.
Shaped sort of like an ice-cream cone lying on its side, it stretched all the way to the horizon. Whatever it was, it was moving.
Fast.
Straight toward us.
The leading edge, where the cone came to a point, dived straight over the high wooden outfield fence. A second later a terrible noise filled my ears. The sound grew louder and louder as the spiraling black thing swirled closer and closer. It buzzed like a million vacuum cleaners sucking up everything in their path.
“What in the world is that?” I shouted.
“It's an error,” Stump said dejectedly as his throw sailed over Gilly's head and into the grandstand.
Stump and I always talk out on the diamond. Usually we stick to baseball chatter. “Two, four, six, eight, our pitcher's looking great!” Stuff like that. “Batter, batter, what's the matter? Swing, batter!”
“Forget the throw,” I said, pointing toward
the outfield. “What is that thing?”
Stump looked up and finally caught his first glimpse of the buzzing cone. His eyes were only a little bigger than stop signs as he said, “Walloper, I do believe it's a tornado!”
“I never saw a tornado that moved sideways,” I shouted back over the rising din.
In fact I had never seen a tornado at all except in movies. This didn't look like any Hollywood twister.
We call Stump “Stump” because he has an answer for everything. You can never stump him. If he doesn't know the answer, he makes one up. If Stump said this thing was a tornado, I was prepared to believe him.
“Run for your lives!” I shouted.
My teammates were way ahead of me.
Literally.
Most of them were already halfway to our low concrete dugout on the third-base side of the diamond. The St. Joe base runners chugged past us going the other way. They didn't bother
to stay inside the base paths. It looked more like a footrace than a baseball game.
Just then a remote-control helicopter fell out of the sky. It landed with a whine, smack in the middle of the diamond.
Another one plunged to the ground behind it. Then another and another.
An armor-plated green one swooped down and knocked Stump's cap off his head as he scrambled for cover. One thing you should know about Stump: he practically never takes off his cap. He wears it summer and winter, day and night. He probably wears it in the shower. The sight of his stand-up red hair was shocking.
But not nearly as shocking as what was dropping onto the field.
It wasn't helicopters at all. It was grasshoppers. Millions and millions of huge grasshoppers.
My first reaction was relief. That massive black cloud wasn't a tornado after all. My second was a severe case of the heebie-jeebies:
bugs covered every inch of the field. More poured over the fence every second. In the stands, screaming fans climbed all over each other to reach the exits.
The umpire waved his hands in the air.
“I'm calling the game,” he said. “It's canceled due to grasshoppers.”
Then he kicked up his heels and joined the mass exodus from Rambletown Field. Within a few minutes, the ballpark was completely deserted. Deserted by fans, that is. The insect population had never been higher.
From the safety of the dugout, my teammates and I watched the cloud of bugs settle on the field. It was like having a front-row ticket to one of those nature programs on the Animal Channel on TV: “When Grasshoppers Attack!”
Except that it was real.
And it was live.
And instead of in some far-off savanna in Africa or wherever, it was happening right here in Rambletown.
M
r. Bones scrambled out from under the long aluminum bench and dashed around the dugout like he wanted to be on a TV show of his own. “Dancing with the Dogs” I would've called it.
Mr. Bones is my dog. He's a short-legged, long-nosed, yellow-haired fur ball that strangers often mistake for a bandicoot. He loves to be petted and he loves to lick faces. Judging by the way he snapped at the insects flitting through the air, he does not love grasshoppers.
“Easy, boy,” I said.
I patted the bench. Wagging his tail like a flyswatter, Mr. Bones jumped up next to me.
A real flyswatter would have been nice. We
could have used it against the bugs.
On my other side, Stump slouched dejectedly, still stewing over his bad throw. My buddy had recovered his hat but not his composure.
“I can't believe I muffed that play,” he grumbled. His face was as red as the hair hidden beneath his lid. “Hanley Ramirez would have made that play. Troy Tulowitzki would have nailed it.”
Stump kept close tabs on Major League shortstops. He knew all the stats of everyone who'd ever played the position. Kind of frightening, really, the way he could rattle off their numbers.
“Forget it, will you? We have worse things to worry about right now,” Slingshot said.
“What's worse than a throwing error on a shortstop?” Stump asked. “E6 on a routine grounder! I airmailed the ball right into the stands!”
Every defensive position in baseball has a number. Six is the number for shortstop.
E
stands for error.
“
Melanoplus
is worse,” said Slingshot.
“Say what?” asked Ocho James, our powerful right fielder. His eyes did not waver from the diamond. There were more bugs out there than grains of sand on a beach. Real sand would have been nice. As far as I know, there's no such thing as a sandhopper.
“
Melanoplus sanguinipes
,” said Slingshot, shouting to make himself heard over the buzz of mashing insects. “The fabled migratory grasshopper. Otherwise known as a locust.”
Slingshot knows a lot of scientific stuff. He knows a lot of everything, as a matter of fact, but science is his favorite subject. He plucked a stray insect off his uniform sleeve and cupped it in his hands.
The ugly invader measured about one inch long. It had two short antennae, plastic-looking wings that folded along its back, and a pair of spring-loaded legs. But what really grabbed your attention was the wedge-shaped head. With its bulging black alien eyes and powerful jaw, the noggin could have come straight out of
a science-fiction movie. The jaw looked like it could do some damage.
“Nasty-looking critter,” said Kid Rabbit Winkle, our all-around infielder and top pinch hitter.
“In the summer,” said Slingshot, “they sometimes migrate in huge swarms.”
“Why?” Gabby asked, flipping open her notebook.
Gabby Hedron is my friend and classmate at Rambletown Elementary. She also covers sports for the
Rambletown Bulletin,
the local newspaper, which is why she happened to be in the dugout with the team.
“Usually to find food.”
“How do they know where to look for it?” asked Ellis “the Glove” Rodriguez, the team's crackerjack second baseman.
“I believe they follow wind currents,” Slingshot yelled. The bugs were truly deafening. “They go where it carries them and take what they can get.”
Gabby, nodding, scribbled some notes. “The wind has been blowing from the west for a couple days,” she said.
“You make them sound all carefree and whatnot, like pirates or something,” chimed in Tugboat. “Yo-ho-ho, a grasshopper's life for me.”
“Do they bite?” Billy asked nervously.
Billy Wishes is the kid brother of our first baseman, Gilly. Too young to actually play for the Rounders, he is our batboy. We love having him around. For one thing, he's always cheerful. For another, he's luckier than a six-footed rabbit. He's always finding cool stuff and winning prizes and junk like that. His good fortune has a way of rubbing off on the team. So far, though, the grasshoppers seemed immune to his charm. They continued to dive-bomb the field.
“Only wheat and grass and any other sweet, green thing they come across on their travels,” Slingshot said. He opened his hand and flicked the insect toward the on-deck circle. Or where
the circle would have been if it hadn't been buried beneath a carpet of chomping hoppers. “A single swarm can contain ten billion insects.”
Gasser Phipps tilted his head to one side and tapped it with the heel of his hand as if he were clearing water from his ear after a swim. “Did you say ten
billion
?” our fleet outfielder gasped.
“That's what I heard, too,” said Orlando “Velcro” Ramirez, the newest member of our team. He shares time in center with Gasser.
Velcro had joined the Rounders back in the freakishly cold spring, after Gasser broke his leg in a snowboarding accident. While Gasser mended, Velcro took over in center. His nickname gives a pretty good idea of how balls stick in his glove. His only problem was the green wooden fence that encircled Rambletown Field.
Throughout the snowy early season, the Rounders had been forced to practice on a frozen field. The wintry conditions gave Velcro fits. He came from Florida, where the only ice he ever saw came on sno-cones. Again and again, he lost his footing and slammed into the wall.
For a while it was touch and go as to which one would be left standing: the wall or Velcro. But that's a different story. Suffice it to say, Velcro survived. Once the field finally thawed outâwith a little help from a giant solar reflector we rigged upâhe found his footing and stopped knocking himself loopy. Most of the time, anyway. Occasionally he still flung himself at the wall like a human cannonball in order to make a spectacular catch.
“I did say ten billion,” Slingshot confirmed.
“No way!” exclaimed Gasser. “That's more than every single man, woman, and child on earth!”
“Way,” said Slingshot. “Just be glad they're so little and we're so big. Blow them up to human size and we wouldn't stand a chance.”
I snapped my attention back to the field. Was this what ten billion insects looked like? The number was too big to compute. All you could say with certainty was that there were a lot of them.
A whole lot.
And they were hungry.
And they were treating our field like an all-you-can-eat salad bar.
Those suckers already had widened the base paths by a foot and stripped a big patch of outfield down to bare dirt.
“How do you get rid of them?” I asked, shouting to make myself heard.
“You don't,” said Slingshot.
“What are you saying?” My voice rose. “They're going to stick around forever? Impossible!”
Didn't those grasshoppers know the league All-Star Game was less than a week away? And that it was going to be played at Rambletown Field? For the first time ever?
Our league put on an All-Star Game in the middle of every season. The previous year's champions always got to host it. Nine times out of ten, this meant the game took place in Hog City, home of the mighty Haymakers. Our archrivals were the biggest, meanest, hairiest
team in history. On top of being big and mean and hairy, they were good. Really, really good. Led by ace pitcher Flicker Pringle, the scariest fastballer in the league, they racked up championships like the rest of us collected baseball cards. Those guys had closets full of trophies. But last year we'd beaten them in an epic contest and won our first title.
We were the champs.
Which meant we got to put on the All-Star Game right here at our home park.
We'd been looking forward to it ever since opening day. Stump, Ducks Bunion, and I had been named to the team. We couldn't wait to play in front of a home crowd. Playing alongside us would be the best of the best, including a few Haymakers.
Having those guys as teammates instead of mortal enemies would be weird. Normally we tried to beat each other's brains out. But the All-Star Game is different. It's a celebration of baseball. You put aside your rivalries for a day
and go out and just play ball. It's an honorâ¦and a blast.
And now a bunch of rotten bugs had infested the field! If they stuck around, the game would get canceled. Just like this one had.
“Oh, they'll leave,” Slingshot assured us.
“Now you're talking,” I said with relief. “After they rest their wings for a bit, right? A few more minutes and they're out of here?”
Slingshot shook his head. “I can think of two things that would drive them away,” he said. “One is a whole lot of wind. I mean a really freakish storm, the kind that rips roofs off of barns. That would do it.”
“What's the other?” I asked.
“They run out of stuff to eat.”
We all looked at our pitcher to see if he was kidding. He returned our gaze with a stony stare. He was serious. Dead serious.
And so were the insects. They were serious about eating.