Feld never seemed to find exactly what he was looking for, and everything that he did find seemed to surprise him. Now, for the first time that Ethan could remember, he had managed to retrieve what he sought.
“Wow,” he said, gazing down at his old mitt with a tender expression. “The old pie plate.”
It was bigger than any catcher’s mitt that Ethan had ever seen before, thicker and more padded, even bulbous, a rich dark colour like the Irish beer his father drank sometimes on a rainy winter afternoon. Partly folded in on itself along the pocket, it reminded Ethan of nothing so much as a tiny, overstuffed leather armchair.
“Here you go, son,” Mr. Feld said.
As Ethan took the mitt from his father, it fell open in his outspread hands, and a baseball rolled out; and the air was suddenly filled with an odour, half salt and half wildflower, that reminded Ethan at once of the air in the Summerlands. Ethan caught the ball before it hit the ground, and stuffed into the flap pocket of his shorts.
“Try it on,” Mr. Feld said.
Ethan placed his hand into the mitt. It was clammy inside, but in a pleasant way, like the feel of cool mud between the toes on a hot summer day. Whenever Ethan put on his own glove, there was always a momentary struggle with the finger holes. His third finger would end up jammed in alongside his pinky, or his index finger would protrude painfully out the opening at the back. But when he put on his father’s old catcher’s mitt, his fingers slid into the proper slots without any trouble at all. Ethan raised his left hand and gave the mitt a few exploratory flexes, pinching his fingers towards his thumb. It was heavy, much heavier than his fielder’s glove, but somehow balanced, weighing no more on one part of his hand than on any other. Ethan felt a shiver run through him, like the one that had come over him when he had first seen Cinquefoil and the rest of the wild Boar Tooth mob of ferishers.
“How does it feel?” said Mr. Feld.
“Good,” Ethan said. “I think it feels good.”
“When we get to the field, I’ll have a talk with Mr. Olafssen, about having you start practising with the pitchers next week. In the meantime, you and I could start working on your skills a little bit. I’m sure Jennifer T. would be willing to help you, too. We can work on your crouch, start having you throw from your knees a little bit, and—” Mr. Feld stopped, and his face turned red. It was a long speech, for him, and he seemed to worry that maybe he was getting a little carried away. He patted down the tangled yarn basket of his hair. “That is, I mean—if you’d like to.”
“Sure, Dad,” Ethan said. “I really think I would.”
For the first time that Ethan could remember in what felt to him like years, Mr. Feld grinned, one of his old, enormous grins, revealing the lower incisor that was chipped from some long-ago collision at home plate.
“Great!” he said.
Ethan looked at his watch. A series of numbers was pulsing across the liquid crystal display. He must have accidentally pushed one of the mysterious buttons. He held it out to show his father, who frowned at the screen.
“It’s your heart rate,” Mr. Feld said, pushing a few of the buttons under the display. “Seems slightly elevated. Ah. Hmm. Nearly eleven. We’d better get going.”
“The game’s not until twelve-thirty,” Ethan reminded him.
“I know it,” Mr. Feld said. “But I thought we could take Victoria Jean.”
ONE WINTER MORNING about three months after the death of his wife, Mr. Feld had informed Ethan that he was quitting his job at Aileron Aeronautics, selling their house in a suburb of Colorado Springs, and moving them to an island in Puget Sound, so that he could build the airship of his dreams. He had been dreaming of airships all his life, in a way – studying them, admiring them, learning their checkered history. Airships were one of his many hobbies. But after his wife’s death he had actually dreamed of them. It was the same dream every night. Dr. Feld, smiling, her hair tied back in a cheery plaid band that matched her summer dress, stood in a green, sunny square of grass, waving to him. Although in his dream Mr. Feld could see his wife and her happy smile very plainly, she was also somehow very far away. Huge mountains and great forests lay between them. So he built an airship – assembled it quickly and easily out of the simplest of materials, inflated its trim silver envelope with the merest touch of a button – and flew north. As he rose gently into the sky, the mountains dwindled until they were a flat brown stain beneath him, and the forests became blots of pale green ink. He was flying over a map, now, an ever-shrinking AAA map of the western United States, towards a tidy, trim bit of tan in the shape of a running boar, surrounded by blue. At the westernmost tip of this little island, in a patch of green, stood his smiling, beautiful wife, waving. It was Ethan who had eventually gone to the atlas and located Clam Island. Less than a month later, the big Mayflower van full of boxes pulled into the drive between the pink house and the ruined strawberry packing shed. Since then the shining little Victoria Jean, Mr. Feld’s prototype Zeppelina, had become a familiar sight over the island, puttering her lazy way across the sky. Her creamy-white fibreglass gondola, about the size and shape of a small cabin cruiser, could fit easily in the average garage. Her long, slender envelope of silvery picofibre composite mesh could be inflated at the touch of a button, and fully deflated in ten minutes. When all the gas was out of it you could stuff the envelope like a sleeping bag into an ordinary lawn-and-leaf trash bag. The tough, flexible, strong picofibre envelope was Mr. Feld’s pride. He held seventeen U.S. patents on the envelope technology alone.
Mr. Arch Brody had arrived early at Ian “Jock” MacDougal Regional Ball Field to see to the condition of the turf, and he was the first person to hear the whuffle and hum of the Zeppelina’s small motor, a heavily modified Mitsubishi boat engine. He stood up – he had been dusting the pitcher’s rubber with his little whisk broom – and frowned at the sky. Sure enough, here came that Feld – no more or less of a fool than most off-islanders, though that wasn’t saying much – in his floating flivver. As the ship drew nearer, at a fairly good clip, Mr. Arch Brody could see that the gondola’s convertible top was down, and that the Feld boy was riding beside his father. They were headed directly towards the Tooth. Mr. Brody was not a smiling man, but he could not help himself. He had seen Mr. Feld tooling around over the island many times, making test flights in his blimp. It had never occurred to him that the crazy thing could actually be used to get someplace.
“I’ll be darned,” said Perry Olafssen, coming up behind Mr. Brody. The players and their parents had started to arrive for today’s game between the Ruth’s Fluff ‘n’ Fold Roosters and the Dick Helsing Realty Reds. The boys dropped their equipment bags and ran to the outfield to watch the Victoria Jean make her approach.
“I don’t know if I’d want to be flitting around in that thing today,” Mr. Brody said, resuming his usual gloom. “Not with this sky.”
It was true. The hundred-year spell of perfect summer weather that had made the Tooth so beloved and useful to the islanders, seemed, to the astonishment of everyone, to have mysteriously been broken. If anything the clouds were thicker over Summerland than over the rest of the island, as if years of storms were venting their pent-up resentment on the spot that had eluded them for so long. It had been raining, on and off, since yesterday, and while the rain had stopped for now, the sky hung low and threatening again. In fact Mr. Brody had arrived at Jock MacDougal that day prepared to execute a solemn duty which no Clam Island umpire, in living memory and beyond, had ever been obliged to perform: to call a baseball game on account of rain.
“I bet that thing’s what’s makin’ it rain,” said a voice behind them, muttering and dark. “God only knows what that shiny stuff on the balloon
