Spooner (28 page)

The talk wasn’t going the way Tinker had thought it would. For one thing, there was no sign of appreciation from Ottosson
yet that Tinker had taken the time to come over and talk. He wasn’t even sure they were having a talk; it felt like he was
confessing. He found himself wondering if he could take Calmer in a fight.

“You never know about these things,” Tinker said.

“He’s seventeen,” Calmer said. “He hasn’t finished high school. He hasn’t even read any books yet.”

Books? Yeah, he could take him.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Tinker said, “I’m all for higher education. All I’m saying is he could get injured tomorrow. He could
reach into a lawn mower and cut a tendon.” He told Calmer about a Negro boy he’d played with back at Normal who reached under
a running mower with his bare hand and after that it was nothing but fumbles.

The fire bell went quiet, and the room went quiet with it.

Calmer sat on the corner of his desk, remembering how the world outside had looked to him from the farm, when he was sixteen
and ready to leave. He’d known things, though, how to work, how to keep what he had, how engines ran, how things were put
together, how to fix them when they broke. He wondered sometimes if he should do less of the work around the house, let the
boys figure things out more for themselves.

“I just wanted to check he doesn’t have any problems at home that we should know about,” Tinker said. “Family history, things
like that. Hearing problems, trouble hitting the books, if he took a whack on the head . . .”

Calmer continued to stare, stared right through him.

“He has to claim the inside of the plate,” Tinker said. “He’s got to make the batter aware that the inside of the plate is
his. That’s the whole psychology of the game. Of life, when you think about it. Life is a contest of wills for the inside
of the plate. And all these scouts, they aren’t just looking for an arm, they’re looking for the maturity to go with it.”

“He’s seventeen,” Calmer said again.

“There’s still time,” Tinker said, and when there was no reply to that, he stood up to leave. He looked at the picture again
and smiled. “There’s an old saying,” he said, “that a picture’s worth a thousand words, and you know, if you really think
about that, it’s true.”

C
almer left school early, right after fifth period, and drove the Ford to Chicago Heights, where that afternoon the baseball
team was scheduled to play Bloom Township. It was six miles and twice that many railroad crossings, and on the way over the
muffler dropped off.

He continued on, though, ignored the noise and the looks from the street, imagining what it would be like telling Lily that
Warren was going to play baseball instead of going to college. In Lily’s family, a child who didn’t go to college might as
well go to prison.

The team was on the field warming up when Calmer arrived, the coaches hitting grounders and fly balls, the infielders turning
double plays. A pretty fair sampling of adults sat in the stands along with some students, but baseball didn’t matter in high
school the way football did.

Calmer stood off to the side at first, studying the bleachers, and immediately spotted the overweight, middle-aged man sitting
alone, smoking Pall Mall cigarettes, making notes on a small pad. He had a permanent-looking tan that he had not acquired
around here and the skin at the edges of his ears was crusted. He looked comfortable even with his back pressed into the edge
of the bleachers, using his knees to hold his notepad while he wrote. He looked like someone who would be comfortable sitting
on a pail or a train track: a man born to sit.

Calmer had no idea how to begin the conversation, if this would be another version of his talk with Coach Tinker, or something
different, or worse.

“One of them yours?” the scout said.

Calmer was sitting a few feet away. The scout pulled on the Pall Mall and the smoke went in deep and only began leaking out
as he spoke.

Calmer pointed toward Spooner. “Over there,” he said, “the pitcher.”

The scout nodded. “Well, he’s the one, all right. He’s got the live arm.”

A kid came by selling hot dogs, and the scout bought two of them and asked for a receipt. Out on the field, a boy with an
enormous head was laying a fresh chalk line up the first base side, smiling out from under the awning of his baseball cap,
pushing a one-wheeled barrow, and the line behind him was perfect and straight. Calmer thought it wouldn’t be such a bad thing
to lay chalk lines. He was catching himself at this all the time lately, picturing himself trading jobs, usually for some
kind of work that would be finished for the day when it was finished for the day, that would leave him time to rest and read.
Other jobs, other lives. It was strange how often it came up.

The boy with the chalk marker moved at a slow, even pace out into the grass of the outfield, passing within a few yards of
the place where Spooner was warming up, throwing effortlessly to a fat kid named Ken Jonny. Ken Jonny had been failing biology
last fall when Tinker sent an assistant around to see Calmer about it, pressing him to use his influence with the teacher
to get the boy a passing grade. Calmer had waited until Tinker’s assistant finished and then went to his bookshelf, picked
out
Introduction to Biology
, handed him the book without a word and showed him out the door.

Spooner seemed to be throwing a little harder now, and the scout watched him throw and set the cigarette next to him on the
bleacher and began to eat a hot dog. Then he stopped, maybe the second bite still in his mouth, and set the hot dogs aside,
on top of his notepad and, using the napkin, took out his upper plate and inspected it for some bit of hot dog bone that had
gotten between it and his gums. He blew on the plate to clean it and then used the teeth to indicate Spooner. “Any ways you
look at it, that’s damn unusual stuff,” he said. Then had one more look at his teeth and set them back in his mouth.

Calmer watched, and presently, without any appreciable difference in effort, there was a change in the sound as the ball arrived
into the catcher’s mitt. A cracking noise one time, a popping noise the next—you could almost think of firewood. And then
the ball began to rise and dive and jag sideways, as if one side were heavier than the other, and Calmer sat in the stands—a
physicist, a mathematician, a pilot, a man who knew and understood the principles of flight—trying to conceive what spin would
account for the sudden movement of the ball as it reached the plate.

The scout had taken his teeth out again and spoke as if he were reading Calmer’s mind. “That poop at the end of them pitches,”
he said, “it’s something like a knuckler, but it don’t look like a knuckler coming to the plate onaccount of the ball gets
to you so fast.”

A hundred feet beyond Spooner, the kid with the chalk marker had come to the fence and turned around and was standing in the
sunshine, smiling, looking something like an angel, waiting for someone to tell him what to do next. Calmer stretched in the
sun and then thought again of telling Lily about Spooner, and that prospect rolled in on him like low, boiling clouds over
the old trailer park, and scared the sun out of the sky.

Calmer sat with the scout most of the afternoon, stunned at what he was seeing—nobody from Bloom Township could touch Spooner’s
pitching—and at what he was thinking. Then the rain started, and then the lightning, and finally the umpire called the game.

The storm blew over trees and street signs, and there were sightings of funnel clouds all over northern Illinois and Indiana.
Calmer drove back to Shabbona Drive, oblivious of the weather.

Lily was in the kitchen, waiting for him. It was still blowing outside, and a piece of hail the size of a baby’s fist had
come through the utility room window and lay on the linoleum floor where it had landed, melting, and there were shards of
glass all over the room. It looked like a migraine headache in there.

“I thought something had happened,” she said, indicating that he was late.

He heard echoes of old abandonments in her voice, of the death of her first husband, her father, Spooner’s twin brother. All
of that wrapped up like a sandwich in waxed paper. Five ordinary words. How did she do it? He supposed you might as well ask
Picasso the same question, or Sophia Loren, or that kid with Down syndrome laying down his perfect chalk lines to mark the
field.

“I was in Chicago Heights watching Warren,” Calmer said. “He’s quite a baseball player.”

She was fixing a meat loaf for tomorrow’s dinner—it was Friday, so it would be fish sticks tonight—and at the mention of baseball,
she dove bare-handed into the bowl of raw meat and raw eggs and onions as if she’d glimpsed Coach Tinker hiding at the bottom
and meant to strangle him. Calmer waited, dripping rain on the kitchen floor, but she did not look up from her business. The
storm blew and the curtains billowed over the broken window.

“There was a fellow at the game,” Calmer said. “A baseball scout.”

Now she did look up, daring him to say another word.

“Apparently, he’s got unusual…”—he reached around for the word the scout used and found it—“poop. Quite unusual poop.” It
was a satisfying word,
poop
, and he said it and waited, and in the quiet that followed, his thoughts went to a caving expedition a long time ago in the
Black Hills, of that certain, dark stillness and sensing the presence of other living things.

He waited for the air to explode in bats.

He and Lily had arrived here at the old bat cave before, of course, and usually it was over Spooner. It was never said in
exactly these words, but Spooner was hers, not theirs. Strangely, there was no such undercurrent when it came to Margaret,
and had never been, but then, it was a different thing, worrying if Radcliffe would be a better school than Swarthmore or
Stanford, and having to figure out what to do when your kid gives everybody Christmas presents stolen from Massey’s Hardware.

“You know that I don’t think he should be playing baseball,” she said, and seemed to be talking more to the meat loaf than
to him. “How is he going to get in to a decent school?”

Calmer thought of having a Scotch but reconsidered—afraid it might be perceived as indifference. He sat down across from her
at the table. She took her hands out of the bowl, bits of onion glistening like diamonds in the ground meat. And now he was
thinking of a summer day not so long ago, the year Spooner began seventh grade and Calmer had gotten him a job mowing lawns
at the high school, and they’d walked down a hallway after lunch, Spooner stopping a few seconds here, a few seconds there,
still keeping up, and when Calmer turned to see what he was doing, the kid had opened half a dozen combination locks in the
hallway lockers, apparently as easily as untying his shoes.

“Next year he’ll be on his own,” she was saying, “and he can barely read. Did you see his report card?”

Calmer had seen the report card, D in English, but it was only a midterm card and the D had been dropped on him by Miss Ethel
Sandway, who was as crazy as a loon. Miss Sandway was an enormous woman with a master’s degree in education from Normal—what
was it about that place, anyway?—who was working even now toward a doctorate. He trembled to think of what she might be planning
to do with that.

Lily wiped her hands on her apron and took the atomizer out of her pocket and squeezed two quick hits into her tonsils. All
these years, and it still tore him to pieces to watch her fighting to breathe.

“I’ll talk to Miss Sandway,” he said, “see what the problem is.”

They had talked once before, Calmer and Miss Sandway. Miss Sandway had assigned a freshman class to memorize the poem “Trees”
by Robert Frost. Margaret was in the class and told him what she’d given them to do, and Calmer went to the woman, thinking
she’d probably been in a hurry, or preoccupied, or had a mouthful of potato chips at the time, and found himself shortly in
a pitched battle over the authorship of “Trees,” which Miss Sandway said she’d been teaching for twenty years and imagined
she could continue to teach without interference from the science department. Calmer politely held his ground, as he always
did, always would, and they walked to the school library together and looked the poem up, and seeing that the author was not
Robert Frost, Miss Sandway slammed shut the book and poked a finger in his chest. “The whole point, Ottosson,” she said, “is
the trees. He writes about the beauty of trees.”