Wall Ball (2 page)

I
looked out the kitchen window. Fat snowflakes swirled through the gray sky.

“Rats,” I said to Mr. Bones, who responded by wagging his tail happily. One thing about Mr. Bones, he was naturally optimistic. It would take a lot more than lousy weather to make him sulk. I wish I could’ve said the same about myself.

Today was Saturday. A week from now baseball season was supposed to begin. In fact, it was supposed to have begun already. Opening day had been postponed three times. According to the latest revised team schedule hanging on the refrigerator, the Rambletown Rounders were going to play the Hog City
Haymakers in a week.

Yeah, right. And pigs were going to fly.

“Rats,” I said again. Mr. Bones wagged his tail some more.

My dad came into the kitchen. He wore a blue bathrobe over brown paisley pajamas and a pair of furry old slippers. The pajamas looked like something squirrels would use to build nests. The slippers looked worse. Like maybe actual squirrels.

“Morning, sport,” he greeted me, rubbing sleep out of his eyes. “Had any breakfast yet? How about an omelet?”

One thing you should know about my dad: he loves to cook omelets. Some people like to play golf. Some do crossword puzzles. Others collect baseball cards or dress up like Civil War soldiers for fun. One of my dad’s hobbies is cooking omelets. I have to admit, he is good at it. His omelets are the best I’ve ever tasted. And by far the biggest I’ve ever seen. The size of snow tires.

“Sure,” I said as he rummaged around in the fridge.

Dad pulled out a carton of eggs, a brick of cheddar cheese, a carton of milk, a package of ham, and an armload of sweet peppers in the colors of the flag of Bolivia: red, yellow, and green.

“So,” he asked over the sizzle of melting butter, “how’s Gasser?”

“Broken leg,” I said. “The doctor says he’ll be out for the season. If we have a season, that is.”

“Poor kid. What rotten luck.”

“He says the leg doesn’t actually hurt too much. If fact, he seems to be kind of enjoying himself at the hospital.”

“Really? What’s to like about hospitals?” my dad asked as he started dicing peppers. He chopped so fast, he would put a Marine Corps barber to shame. Bits of vegetables flew all over the place.

“Comic books,” I explained, smiling at the
memory of Gasser in the hospital. “And ice cream.”

After Gasser’s snowboarding accident the day before, the whole team had visited him in the hospital. We’d found him propped up in a mechanical bed with a big stack of comic books by his side and a bowl of ice cream in front of him. Despite the heavy cast on his leg, he had been grinning as if he’d just heard the funniest joke in the world.

“What’s so humorous about a broken leg?” asked Tugboat.

“The humerus is an upper arm bone,” said Slingshot. He wanted to be a doctor one day. “The major bones of the leg are the femur, the tibia, and the fibula.”

“The broken leg stinks,” said Gasser. “It’s the fibula. But this place isn’t half bad.”

He showed us a special button on a cord by the side of his bed. He said he could press it whenever he wanted and a nurse would appear with a snack.

By way of demonstration, he hit the button. Somewhere out in the hall, a bell sounded. Seconds later, a nurse dressed in light blue scrubs poked her head into the room.

“Everything all right?” she asked.

“May I have some ice cream?” Gasser asked politely. “Strawberry this time, please.”

“But, Mr. Phipps,” she said, “you’ve already eaten three bowls.”

“I’m still hungry though,” Gasser said. “And my leg is starting to ache a little bit.”

“Hmmm,” said the nurse. “That’s no good, is it. I’ll see what I can do.”

She turned briskly and disappeared down the hall.

I have to say, we all had been very impressed.

“It’s better than chicken pox,” Gasser gloated. “It doesn’t even itch.” He eyed the fiberglass cast that covered his leg from ankle to knee. “At least, not yet it doesn’t.”

One at a time, all the Rounders had signed
the cast and wished Gasser luck. He assured us he’d be home in a day and on the bench for every game of the coming season.

The aroma of melting cheese and frying ham began to fill the kitchen. Mr. Bones sat by my side, intently eyeing Dad as he worked at the stove. From time to time the dog’s tail wiggled and he licked his chops.

“Voilà,” said Dad. He clicked off the burner and slid his creation out of the frying pan and onto a waiting platter.

“Yum,” said my mom, arriving at the table just as breakfast did. “Your father makes the world’s best omelets.”

“Definitely the biggest,” I said.

“One Bolivian Special coming right up,” crowed Dad.

We’d learned about Bolivia in geography class. The South American country was about the size of California and Texas combined. It had once been part of the Inca empire. Spanish
was one of the official languages. There were a lot of llamas. That was about all I knew about Bolivia.

Dad said, “Red, yellow, and green peppers,
con queso.”

“And
jamon
,” I added, saying the Spanish word for “ham.”

“Delicious in any language,” my mom said, tucking into a wedge of omelet.

Dad beamed.

“Eat up,” he said. “There’s plenty.” He shuffled off to get dressed, his squirrelly slippers sweeping the floor like dust mops.

“I’ll say there’s plenty,” I said. You could have fed a crew of lumberjacks on that tire of an omelet. When it came to giant-sized breakfasts, Paul Bunyan had nothing on my dad.

Mom and I ate. Mr. Bones peered longingly up at us from beneath the table. Outside the window, snow kept coming.

I wanted to be swinging a bat, hitting fastballs and deep drives. Making double plays and
stealing bases. All that good stuff.

“I wish you boys would be more careful,” Mom said between bites. Mom could be like that. Saying things out of the blue. I guess all moms could.

“Huh?” I said. My mind was still on baseball.

“Gasser’s very lucky,” Mom said.

“What’s so lucky about a broken leg?” I asked. “Besides ice cream and comic books?”

“I mean, he could have been hurt even worse than he was, Banjie. He’s fortunate the only thing he’s missing is the baseball season.”

“If we ever have a baseball season.” I sighed.

A
fter breakfast I cleared the table and loaded the dishwasher. Juice glasses went into the top rack, plates went into the bottom rack, and scraps of food went into Mr. Bones’s dinner bowl.

He licked my face gratefully, then bounded over to chow down.

He was still eating when the phone rang. I dried my hands on my shirt and picked up the receiver.

“Hello?”

“Walloper,” said the caller eagerly. “Are you ready for some baseball?”

It was Lou “Skip-to-My-Lou” Clementine,
manager of the Rambletown Rounders baseball team.

Before I could answer, he said, “Good! I knew you would be. Today’s the day. We’re finally going to have our first practice!”

“Um, Skip,” I said, “are you near a window?”

“Sure. Why?”

“Take a look outside. There’s ten feet of snow on the ground and more falling.”

“I know it,” he said cheerfully. “What a winter!”

“Skip, how in the world can we practice baseball in all that snow?”

“We’ll figure out something,” he said. “The fact of the matter is, we’ve got no choice. The league office just called. You know we’re scheduled to take on big, mean Hog City next Saturday in the season opener! The game has already been put off more times than a secondhand coat. The league is not going to postpone it any longer. One way or another, we’re going
to play ball.”

“But Skip,” I protested, “we’ll be lumbering around out there like polar bears. Have you ever seen polar bears play baseball?”

“Well, as a matter of fact, I haven’t. I saw a regular black bear ride a unicycle one time, but I’ve never seen any kind of bear play baseball.”

“Exactly,” I said. “Because they can’t.”

“Enough about bears,” said Skip Lou. “We should be thinking about the Haymakers.”

“What’s the difference, Skip?” I asked. Our archrivals are as big as grizzlies. Some of them are just as hairy, too.

Skip said something in reply, but I missed it. I was too busy thinking about the Haymakers. It is very unusual to see a bunch of sixth graders with full beards and mustaches. But the Haymakers are anything but ordinary. They are the biggest, meanest, scruffiest collection of players I’d ever seen. And they are good.

Really good.

Of course, we were no slouches either. We
were the reigning champs, after all.

“We need to practice,” Skip said.

“No kidding,” I answered. “I feel like a beat-up old car. That’s how rusty I am.”

“I hear the Haymakers have been going at it for a month,” Skip said. “They’re so eager to win back the pennant, they went through spring training in snowshoes.”

“We’ve got a lot of catching up to do,” I said.

“One o’clock sharp,” Skip said.

“I’ll be there,” I promised.

“One other thing,” Skip said before hanging up.

“What’s that?”

“Bring a shovel. Bring two if you’ve got them.”

Later that day, I put on my Inuit parka and my ski hat and my down-filled mittens and laced up my mukluks. Then I bundled Mr. Bones into his silly doggy coat.

“You’ve got a perfectly fine, natural coat
of thick fur,” I pointed out as I zipped him up. “Why in the world you’d ever want to cover it with this plaid monstrosity, I’ll never know.”

I grabbed a snow shovel off the front porch, and we trudged across Rambletown to the ball field. It was like walking through Santa’s village. Snowdrifts buried houses up to the eaves. You expected to see reindeer zipping through the air.

“On Donner,” I called. My dog cocked his head at me as if I was crazy. “What?” I asked. “You might as well be a reindeer in that getup. No self-respecting dog would be caught playing dead in such a coat.”

To let Mr. Bones know I was just kidding, I tossed a snowball for him to chase. He caught it on the fly and ate it.

When we got to the park, the whole team was gathered on the frozen tundra of what was once a baseball diamond. Everybody, that is, except Gasser Phipps. I wondered if he’d gotten tired of ice cream yet. Just the
thought of it made me shiver. From where I was standing, the whole world looked like a big scoop of vanilla.

Mr. Bones and I greeted the guys: Slingshot. Ducks Bunion. Ocho James. Kid Rabbit. Stump. Tugboat Tooley. Gilly Wishes and his kid brother, Billy. The Glove. And, of course, Lou “Skip-to-My-Lou” Clementine.

Standing next to Skip was a tall guy in a red hat with big earflaps. I didn’t recognize him.

“Welcome back, team,” said Skip Lou, his breath puffing white in the frigid air. “It’s been a long winter. But now it’s high time for baseball. We’re going to have to dig out the field to play, of course. Before we do, I want to introduce our newest teammate.”

The tall guy in the red hat with earflaps smiled shyly.

“This here is Orlando Ramirez,” said Skip. “He can catch anything that moves, and he’s got a cannon for an arm. He’ll be patrolling center field while Gasser mends. Orlando’s
family just moved to town. He starts school with you guys on Monday.”

In addition to being coach of the Rounders, Skip Lou was the music teacher at Rambletown Elementary School. I guessed that was how he knew about Orlando and his family. Skip played clarinet like nobody’s business.

We all welcomed the new kid to Rambletown and to the Rounders.

“Where did you move from?” I asked.

“Florida,” Orlando said.

“Cool!” Billy Wishes gushed. “Like near Disney World? Orlando from Orlando?”

Billy once won a trip to Disney World for himself and his whole family. He really wanted to go back sometime. Given how lucky he was, I didn’t doubt he would.

Orlando shook his head. “Farther north,” he said. “Up around Jacksonville.”

“You ever play snow baseball in Florida?” I asked, looking across our field.

“No, I haven’t.” Orlando laughed. “I’ve never
even been sledding. I have ice-skated though.”

“In Florida?” Ducks asked, astonished.

“Sure. There’s an indoor rink near where I lived. I used to go there all the time. I love to skate.”

“That’s good,” said Ducks. “The way this winter is hanging on, we may have to change over into a hockey team.” He nodded toward the field. “Just flood it and turn the outfield into a rink.”

“I like winter,” Orlando said. “It’s…it’s…”

“Cold,” said Slingshot. “That’s what it is. Cold and stubborn. It’s like a rash that just won’t go away. Personally, I think Florida sounds awesome. I bet you played baseball year-round.”

Orlando nodded. “Even during Christmas vacation we went to the batting cages,” he said. “In shorts and T-shirts.”

“Chipper Jones is from Florida,” chimed in Stump, our resident expert on the life stories and career stats of major-league players. “All
that sunshine is a huge advantage. In Florida, players never have to shovel the diamond. So, are you any good?”

Stump never was shy about getting right to the point.

“Pretty good, I guess,” Orlando muttered.

“You have a nickname?” asked Ducks Bunion, tactfully changing the subject.

“Some people call me Or,” our new center fielder admitted.

We all considered this bit of information. Or didn’t seem like much of a nickname. It didn’t seem complete. “Or what?” you wanted to ask. “Or else?”

“I was thinking of something a little more colorful,” said Ducks, whose actual name was Thomas. He’d been called Ducks since he was a baby, because he’d waddled like a duck when he was learning to walk. “Nicknames are kind of a tradition with the Rounders. Are you cool with that?”

“I wouldn’t mind a nickname at all,” said
Orlando. “It’s just that nobody has ever been able to come up with one that stuck.”

“We’ll think of something,” Ducks promised.

We grabbed our shovels and spread out across the diamond. We cleared big patches of ground, piling snow behind the foul lines. While we worked on the diamond, two town plows showed up and began removing snow from the outfield. The huge mounds they piled up at the edge of the field looked like jagged mountains.

Mr. Bones climbed to the top of the range and slid down on his belly.

At least somebody enjoyed the snow.