The Youngest Hero (18 page)

This machine was just not designed for soft balls. I played with the adjustments again and got it so the tennis ball fit just
right, but when I sent it through, the ball floated from the machine and looked like anything but a pitch. I finally decided
that because the pitching wheels were made of rubber, they would work only with hardballs. I shut the machine off and went
to look for my friends.

“Where you been, man?” Chico asked as I rounded the corner. “It’s gettin dark and we need another guy.”

I took over pitching and tried to keep the ball away from the strengths of the other team of two. But I was still thinking
about the machine and didn’t pitch well. I didn’t hit well either, averaging about three hundred for an hour or so.

“Man, you’re losin it,” Chico said.

“Yeah?” I said. “You want to trade me?”

“No way, man. Still you and me all the way!”

We sat on the sidewalk.

“Hey, Chico, you think that store you showed me yesterday would have baseballs for sale?”

He shrugged. “Closed today anyway. We can look tomorrow, eh?”

I didn’t understand Elgin’s mood when he got home. The life, the excitement, the enthusiasm seemed to have gone out of him.
I tried to get him to talk, but he was quieter, more sullen than he’d been in a long time. I felt terrible that I had lied
to him, worse now that I had been caught than when I had misled him in the first place.

I tried apologizing again, more for my sake than his, but he waved me off as if I shouldn’t worry about it. “You’ll be able
to find something that will work in your machine,” I said. “I’ll be back in a while. Goin for a walk.” I told him he could
watch the football game.

I didn’t take a sweater, and if Elgin had been thinking, he’d have realized I wasn’t going outside. I took my key and slipped
downstairs, unfortunately running into Mr. Bravura. I had hoped I could just duck down to see Elgin’s handiwork. Maybe I could
encourage him somehow.

“Oh, Mrs. Woodell!” Ricardo said. “A feast fit for a king and queen! Wonderful! Wonderful!”

“Did you want some more?”

“Oh, we couldn’t eat another thing! You were most kind. I tried to wipe the plate clean, but I didn’t do too well.”

He gathered plate and silver, and though I wasn’t really ready to take them back, I accepted them and told him he was welcome.
I’m sure I was nicer to him than anyone else in the building was, but I just wanted to do the right thing because it was the
right thing. He was one greasy, tacky man, but he had needs and had suffered the way most of us in that building had.

I smiled at Elgin’s chalk work and his ceiling basket to protect the light. I ran a hand along the edge of the pitching machine
as I walked around it. If anybody could get this contraption to work, it was Elgin. I wondered if the cord in the middle of
the room distracted him and whether he could get the machine to pitch around it.

I found the switch and wondered if there would be any harm
in starting it up. I jumped when I pushed the button and the machine hummed. The container rolled and I quickly figured out
how it would work.
What fun
. I wished I had the money to buy Elgin a dozen new baseballs. How would he see old ones in this dingy place?

“I’m proud of you,” I told him upstairs.

“For what?”

“Your own personal batting cage.”

“It’s kind of good, isn’t it? It’s going to take me a long time to adjust it and all that. It wasn’t meant to pitch from that
close up.”

“You’ll figure it out, El. You’ve got one fantastic opportunity. Once you get that thing workin, you’ll be able to take batting
practice anytime you want, year-round.”

He looked up at me and smiled. “I will, won’t I?”

“It might get a little lonely, but anybody who ever did anything worth a nickel had to go through a time of training, don’t
you think? Like me with my accounting work. All that library time.”

“When I get to the big leagues,” he said, “and make millions of dollars, you won’t have to be a bookkeeper anymore. You can
live anywhere you want. You can be my bookkeeper.”

I laughed and hugged him. I didn’t know whether I wanted him trying for a big-league career or not. But now that he was thinking
about it, as he did so often, he couldn’t quit talking about it.

“You know, Momma, I will have lived again as long as I have now when that happens. I mean, I should know whether I’ll make
it by the time I’m twenty-two, but I might not be making millions yet.”

“Oh, not right away, no,” I said, teasing him. “And eleven years may be another lifetime to you, but the last eleven have
flown by pretty fast for your momma. It won’t be long before we know what life has for you. Just keep track of the basics
and—”

“I know,” he said. “And do the right things because they’re the right things.”

L
ucky’s Secondhand Shop between the transient hotel and our fastpitch diamond was a new world. Chico took it in stride. “I
got no money, man, and less I get some money, all I can do is look or steal, know what I mean?”

“Just like a base runner, Chico.”

“Say what?”

“A base runner can only look or steal.”

“You crazy, man.”

“Yeah, but you’re not gonna be stealing anything when you’re with me. I don’t steal and I don’t need trouble.”

The store had a red-bearded biker type behind the counter. On his belt he wore one of the many hunting knives for sale in
the store. Chico’s eyes grew wide when he saw it, and I knew he wouldn’t be trying to pull anything that day.

“Take yer time, boys,” Biker said. “Touch what you want, take what you want, pay for what you take.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, saluting, and we laughed. So did Biker.
Fortunately
, I thought.

Chico moved back into the military hardware area, checking out knives and canteens, belts, shoes, and boots. I was fascinated
with the uniforms and fatigues too, until I remembered what I was there for. I looked at old ball gloves, none of them any
good.
I was stopped by a cardboard box full of old, brown softballs, all twelve-inchers. I tried to remember if I had been able
to separate the pitching wheels far enough for such a large ball.

I went to the counter.

“Do you have any more baseball equipment?”

“I got some stuff in day before yesterday that’s in the back. I can’t go back there while I have customers in the store. But
you could check it out yourself. You can’t get out that way anyway, so I don’t hafta worry about you stealing nuthin.”

“I wouldn’t anyway.”

“It’s just through there. You’ll see a big green canvas bag with bats and catcher’s equipment. Looks like it’s from a Little
League team. If you wanna know the truth, I think it’s hot.”

“Any baseballs in there?”

“You know, I don’t think there is. You can look, but I went through the stuff real quick to give the guy a price, and that
was one thing that was missin. Guess he had use for those. Probably took the best bats too, but take a look. You can dump
out the whole bag, but put anything back you don’t wanna buy. I haven’t put prices on anything yet, but I know what I paid
for the lot, so we can figure something out.”

Chico started to follow me but Biker held up a hand. ‘Just one back there at a time, boys.”

I had never seen such an assortment of junk. Everything from lawn furniture to old clocks and golfing equipment was stashed
in that place, ready to be priced, I guessed. I wrestled the green bag to the floor, opened the top and lifted the bottom.
Half a dozen aluminum bats, including a long, skinny, weighted fungo bat, clattered to the floor. There was a catcher’s mitt,
a chest protector, and shin guards, along with several navy blue batting helmets. One fit perfectly.

The bats were of different lengths and widths, and though all of them felt okay, I was most interested in the fungo. I had
seen wood fungo bats before, the kind big-league coaches used to hit fly balls to their outfielders. I had never seen an aluminum
fungo. I wondered what a bat like that would do to a fastpitch tennis ball. Probably rip it in two.

Biker was right. There were no baseballs. I left the helmet on and carried the metal fungo as I looked at the other stuff
in the room. In one corner it looked as if someone had ripped off a golf course. There were several golf bags and even a wire
basket full of golf balls, each ringed with red stripes and reading “Range.” Nearly half of them had deep cuts.

I had money in my pocket, but I didn’t need a batting helmet for fastpitch. I couldn’t use a metal fungo for fastpitch. I
had my own broomstick handle bat, which would probably not work with my pitching machine, but I didn’t have baseballs for
that yet anyway. I took off the helmet and put it back in the bag. I hung on to the bat, moving into the center of the small
room where I had room to swing. What a great weight and feel.

“Findin anything back there?” Biker called out.

“Not much!” I hollered. “I’ll be right out!”

I talked myself into the fungo bat. It was about an inch and a half in diameter, perfectly straight from the handle to the
other end, with no fattening or tapering. When I found some baseballs for my machine, this would be the perfect bat.

Biker grunted when he saw it. “Never seen one of them before. What the devil is it for?”

I told him.

“But what do you want it for?”

“Just to play with.”

“What’s it worth to ya?”

“What do you mean?”

“What would you pay for it?”

“I don’t know. I’ve only got—“ I reached in my pocket for the five but Biker cut me off.

“Whoa, whoa, whoops, don’t tell the seller what you’ve got to spend. You tell me how much you’ve got, and I’ll tell you that’s
how much it is. Understand?”

I shook my head.

“This is a secondhand store, son. I know what I paid for that bag of junk and roughly how much I wanna get for it, but there
are no hard-and-fast prices. If I can get you to pay twice as much as I really need, good for me. If you can find out how
really low
I’ll go, then you’ll get a better deal. I’m not gonna go below a certain point, but your job is to get as close to that as
you can.”

“How?”

“Make me an offer and see how I react.”

“You’re not gonna react with that knife, are you?”

Biker found that hilarious. “You’re a good kid! I like you! Now come on, let’s deal on that fine bat. It’s unique. I don’t
know where you’d find another one like it. It’s in perfect condition. Lot of people come in here looking for those. I could
sell that this afternoon for three, four times what I paid for it.”

“You could?”

“Course not, but come on, kid. You gotta play the game. This is how I make my livin. You gotta tell me what’s wrong with that
thing and why it’s practically worthless. You gotta try to convince me you’d be doin me a favor by takin it off my hands without
chargin me to do it.”

I enjoyed the twinkle in his eye. Chico thought we were both crazy and said so, then went out and sat on the sidewalk, his
back up against the metal grating that would be pulled across the front window when the shop closed.

I ran my hands up and down the bat. “I don’t know what I’d do with this piece of junk,” I said.

“Yeah,” Biker said. “Like that! Good!”

“Thing looks like a mistake. S’posed to be a bat, but it’s just a straight metal rod. You’ll never find anybody who wants
this. I’ll give you a dollar for it.”

Biker roared. I could see he loved the game, especially teaching it.

“Why, I paid three times that for it, and I have to make a profit.”

“Two dollars, tops,” I said.

“I gotta lose a dollar on the deal? I’ll tell ya what, buy some-thin else and I’ll consider takin a loss on that, that whatever
it is.”

I thought a minute before it hit me. If I could get this bat for two dollars, I could get the basket of golf balls for three.
I was sure I could make them work in the machine. Swinging at a
smaller ball with a smaller bat would be great for my hitting eye. I left the bat on the counter and headed into the back
room, trying to decide what to say to lower the value on the basket of golf balls.

When I returned with it, a woman was at the counter, dickering over the price of a fancy Swiss army knife.

“That’s a forty-dollar piece of merchandise I’m gonna let you have for just thirty-five,” Biker said, winking at me when the
woman looked down in disgust.

“It’s not worth five,” the woman said, “but I can go ten.”

“Ten? Lady, I paid a lot more than that for it. I can come down to thirty-two-fifty.”

“Fifteen is my limit.”

“Well, then we got a problem. I got a limit too, and it’s twice where you are now.”

“Sorry,” the woman said, and she turned to leave.

Biker raised his eyebrows at me, as if to say he was impressed by her tactic. “Ah, ma’am,” he said, “I can meet you halfway.
Twenty-two-fifty and we got a deal.”

“No.” The woman was heading out the door.

“Twenty’s as low as I can go,” Biker called.

The woman returned. “Twenty is what I was hoping to pay.”