old man said, raising his leathery right hand. “I doesn’t have no ring finger at all. You would not believe what kind of crazy motion I could put on a baseball without no ring finger.”
“Did they send you to come get me?” Ethan said, as they approached the parking lot. He could already hear the shouting of parents, the shrill mocking voices of boys, the raspy pleading of Coach Olafssen.
“As a matter of fact, they did,” said Ringfinger Brown. “A long time ago.”
IT WAS THE strangest moment in what had so far been a fairly strange morning. When Ethan got back to the bench, nobody turned around, or even seemed to notice that he had ever left. But the very instant his butt touched the smooth pine surface of the bench, Mr. Olafssen looked over at him, and gave him a big fatal wink.
“All right, Ethan. Big Ethan. Let’s get you in the game.”
Things, it turned out, were no longer quite so rosy for the Roosters as when Ethan had left. The Angels had managed to come back with six more runs, and now the score was 11–8. But it was the top of the seventh and final inning, and Mr. Olafssen was pretty much obliged, by the laws of decency, fair play, and the Clam Island Mustang League, to play every able-bodied kid on the team for at least half an inning of every game. There were two out, two on, and no runs in, and it was going to be up to Ethan to pad the Roosters’ lead.
“Get in there, now,” Mr. Olafssen said, just the way he always did. “Get in there and take your hacks.”
Ethan, however, did not want any hacks. Usually, when he came to the plate, Ethan Feld tried to swing his bat as little as possible. He just kept the bat on his shoulder, hoping for a walk. The truth is, he was afraid of trying to accomplish anything more, at the plate, than a walk. And he was afraid of being hit by the ball. But mostly he was mortally afraid of striking out swinging. Was there any worse kind of failure than that? Striking out. It was the way you described it when you failed at anything else in life, the symbol of every other kind of thing a person could possibly get wrong. Often enough, the opposing pitching was not too good in the Mustang League. Ethan’s strategy of just standing there, waiting for four bad pitches to come across the plate before three good ones did, frequently worked. But it was a strategy that was not at all respected by the other players. Ethan’s nickname in the Mustang League, in fact, was “Dog Boy,” because of the way he was always hoping for a walk.
He trudged up to the plate, dragging his bat behind him like a caveman in the cartoons dragging his club. He hoisted the bat to his shoulder – it was still sore from when his father had stopped short to avoid hitting the little fox-monkey thing – and looked over at his father, who gave him a big thumbs-up. Then Ethan stared out at Per Davis, who had taken over the pitching for the Angels. Per looked almost sorry to see Ethan. He winced a little bit, then sighed, and went into his stretch. A moment later something troubled the air around Ethan’s hands.
“Her-ite one!” cried out the umpire, Mr. Arch Brody of Brody’s Drug. Mr. Brody prided himself on the authentic-sounding way he called the balls and strikes.
“Come on, Dog Boy,” called Kyle. “Get that bat off your shoulder.”
“Come on, Dog!” called the other boys.
Ethan let another blur colour the air between him and Per Davis.
“Her-ite TWO!” Mr. Arch Brody yelled.
Ethan heard the gravelly voice of Ringfinger Brown.
“When the time come,” the old man said, “you best be ready to swing.”
Ethan searched the crowd but could not find the old man anywhere, though the voice had sounded as if it were just at his elbow. But he saw that Jennifer T. was looking right at him.
“Breathe,” she suggested, moving her lips without speaking. Ethan realised that he had been holding his breath from the moment Mr. Olafssen had looked his way.
He stepped out, took a breath, then stepped back in, resolved at last to take a hack. Playing the odds was one thing when the count was even at 0; with two strikes on him, maybe it made more sense to swing. When Per Davis reared back to let fly, Ethan wiggled his fingers on the shaft of the bat, and worked his shoulders up and down. Then, unfortunately, just before he swung the bat he did something kind of questionable. He closed his eyes.
“Her-ite her-REE!” shouted Mr. Brody, sealing Ethan’s doom.
“That’s all right,” Jennifer T. told him as they walked out to the field. “We’ll hold ’em. At least you took a hack.”
“Yeah.”
“It was a nice-looking swing.”
“Yeah.”
“Just a little early, is all.”
“I shut my eyes,” Ethan said.
Jennifer T. stopped at first base, which was hers. She shook her head, not bothering to conceal her exasperation with Ethan, and then turned towards home plate.
“Well, try to keep them open in the field, huh?”
In the field – Coach Olafssen always stuck Ethan out in right, a region of the diamond to which boys who prefer to remain invisible have been sent since baseball was invented – the situation was, if anything, even worse. Forget about catching the ball; Ethan never seemed to see it when it was headed towards him. Even after a fly ball landed in the grass, and went skipping happily along towards the outfield fence for a triple at least, Ethan often took quite a while to find it. And then, when, finding it at last, he threw the ball in! Oy! An entire row of fathers, watching from behind the backstop, would smack their foreheads in despair. Ethan never remembered to throw to the cut-off man, who stood waiting, halfway between Ethan and home, to relay the throw to the catcher. No, he just let loose, eyes screwed tight shut: a big, wild windmill of a throw that ended up nowhere near home plate, but in the parking lot behind third base, or, once, on the hindquarters of a sleeping Labrador retriever.
Ethan wandered into right, hoping with all his heart that nothing would happen while he stood there. His hand felt sweaty and numb inside his big, stiff new fielder’s mitt. The chill wind he had felt at Hotel Beach was blowing across the ball field now, and clouds were covering the sun. The grey light made Ethan squint. It gave him a headache. An echo of the old man’s voice lingered in his mind in a way that he found quite irritating. He puzzled for a while over the question of whether there was really any difference, as far as your brain was concerned, between hearing something and remembering how something sounded. Then he worked for a while on possible theories to account for the presence on Clam Island of a rare African primate. His thoughts, in other words, were far removed from baseball. He was dimly aware of the other players chattering, pounding their gloves, teasing or encouraging each other, but he felt very far away from it all. He felt like the one balloon at a birthday party that comes loose from a lawn chair and floats off into the sky.
A baseball landed nearby, and rolled away towards the fence at the edge of the field, as if it had some place important to get to.
Later it turned out that Ethan was supposed to have caught that ball. Four runs scored, making the final total Angels 12, Roosters 11. In other words, eight losses in a row. The Angel who hit the ball that Ethan was supposed to have caught, Tommy Bluefield, was angry at Ethan, because even though his hit had brought in all three baserunners and himself, it did not count as a grand slam home run, since Ethan had committed an error. He ought to have caught the ball.
“You
