Mudville Page 12

“Are we going soon?” PJ. whines.

  Peter ignores him. “Maybe Bobby Fitz would have come back, too. We never played by big-league rules where a guy can't come back after he leaves the game. Bobby just had a tweaked muscle. He still could have come back and sparked the team to a big rally. The rain prevented Moundville from turning it around.”

  “So you think the rain saved Sinister Bend?”

  “That's a weird way to put it.” Peter stands up and carries everyone's garbage to the bin. I think about the floods and realize he's right.

  “Exactly! Why would the spirits drown the whole town?” I figure I have him there. “Maybe he'd wash out the game, but why would he wash out his whole hometown?”

  “You don't know about Ptan Teca's temper. He's still just a little boy. The kind who holds his breath until he turns blue. The kind who takes his ball and goes home. The kind who tips a board game when he's losing and makes all the pieces fly around.”

  “Okay.” It figures he'd have an answer for everything.

  “Where do you want to go?” Peter asks me once we're back on the road. “The store where your dad works?”

  “Might as well go straight to the prison,” I tell him. PJ. groans, probably because the store is a lot closer than the prison. I look carefully along both sides of the street as we drive there, making sure we don't pass Sturgis on his way back downtown. We don't. Peter pulls into the parking lot of the prison and points off to the left of the truck.

  “The store is a mile back that way. Walk straight there and don't take a ride if anyone offers. Call me if you need anything.”

  “Will do. Hey, you never did tell me why it isn't raining anymore. If that stuff about Ptan Teca is true, why did he stop it from raining all of a sudden?”

  He ignores my question. “Seriously. Don't hitchhike or anything.”

  “No way. I'll call if I need a ride.” I realize only after he's driven off that I don't even have his number.

  There's a big door marked “Visitors,” so I go on in and ex-plain to a guard that I'm looking for Sturgis Nye, who's visiting Carey Nye. He looks at his registration book and nods.

  “He's still there,” he says. “You want to go in, too?”

  “You mean I can? I'm not family or anything.”

  He shrugs. “This isn't the hospital. It's prison. You don't have to be family. Sometimes nuns just come by to visit any-one who wants company.” He makes me sign a form and asks me to empty my pockets, but I don't have anything in them. We don't usually lock our doors in Moundville, so I don't even have a house key.

  The guard buzzes the door, and I go into the visiting room. They don't have glass walls, like they do in the movies. It looks more like a school cafeteria, with the same kind of collapsible tables set up around the room and posters hanging up all over, with feel-good messages like “No Physical Contact of Any Kind” and “Clean Up Your Visitation Area or Disciplinary Action Will Be Taken.”

  Sturgis is not surprised to see me. “Hey, Roy,” he says. “This is my dad.”

  “There he is,” says Carey Nye, like he's expecting me. He has a shaved head now, but I recognize him from his baseball card and the photos I saw on the Internet. I offer to shake his hand. He holds up his own handcuffed hands, apologetically, and points to the sign about physical contact.

  “I was telling him you might come,” says Sturgis. “I told him you were a big baseball fan and were excited to meet a real former major leaguer.”

  “I've read about you,” I tell Carey. “You once pitched a no-hitter.” I decide to focus on his best moment, never mind if it was in the minors.

  “Yeah, I no-hit the Charlotte team. It wasn't easy,” he says. “I think I threw about a hundred and fifty pitches. I thought my arm would fall off. I was crap for the rest of the season.”

  “It's still a pretty big achievement.”

  “Yeah,” he says. “I guess so. You know who batted for the Knights in that game?”

  “No, who?”

  “Jim Thome.”

  “No kidding?”

  “Struck him out twice,” he says.

  “Cool.”

  “He got me back,” he says with a sigh. “When he was an Indian and I was an Oriole, he hit a grand salami off of me. Catcher made me throw a junkball.” He shakes his head, remembering. “Whatever happened to Jim? Is he still with the Tribe?”

  “He's with the White Sox now. By way of the Phillies.”

  “Hard to keep track of the standings in here, let alone players.” He takes a deep breath. “Everyone thinks we have the Internet and cable TV, but it's not all that.”

  “Yeah,” I say, as if I know from experience.

  “So you're a catcher, huh? Catchers have it the worst, man. It's torture. Your knees take a killing. You get run over at the plate and banged up by bad pitches. I don't know why anyone does it.”

  “They don't call the catcher's gear the tools of ignorance for nothing,” I agree.

  “You got that right,” he says, laughing.

  “Sturgis is quite a good pitcher, too,” I tell him. “He's got a great fastball.”

  “Always knew this kid would be a good one,” says Carey. “Remember the crab apple incident?” He laughs and slaps the table, rattling his cuffs.

  “Oh yeah,” says Sturgis. I can tell that for him, it's not such a treasured memory.

  “I got called into his kindergarten because he was lobbing crab apples at kids on the playground,” says Carey. “I mean, throwing them hard. He really nailed those kids. It looked like a scene from the Godfather movies, these four kids riddled with red splotches.”

  “I don't remember it very well,” says Sturgis.

  “I told the lady those kids just picked on the wrong guy,” says Carey. “You were a mean little cuss, weren't you?”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “And then there was the rabbit. Oh, man. You're a chip off the old block, all right.”

  “Dad.” Sturgis slumps back in embarrassment.

  “My boy took down a jackrabbit at forty paces.” Carey mimics the throw, rattling the cuffs. “How old were you, Sturgis?”

  “I don't know.”

  “You were like eight or nine, since it was before I checked into this place. How many kids that age have done that?”

  “Probably not many.” Sturgis looks miserable.

  “I was pretty proud of you,” says Carey with a gleam in his eyes.

  I get a weird déjà vu feeling when he says it. I can't quite figure it out, but it's something about Carey Nye. He doesn't look too much like Sturgis, but he looks familiar. Like some-body I've known for years.

  “What made you think I'd come to the prison?” I ask Sturgis as we walk to the home and garden store.

  “I couldn't see you doing anything else,” he says.

  “So why didn't you just ask me to come?”

  “I don't know.”

  “I would have gone with you.”

  “You're that eager to meet a real big leaguer, huh?”

  “Well,” I start to explain, but I realize he's kidding me. He knows I'd go for him, not for me, and not for Carey.

  “I think it was great what you did, making my dad feel like a big shot,” he says. “Bringing up his no-hitter. That was cool. It meant a lot to him.”

  “Do you see him often?” I ask.

  “Only a couple of times since he went in,” he says. “You know, I saw him on the Fourth of July. That was the first time I even saw him since he went to jail. That was almost four years ago.”

  “So that's why you guys went to Sutton.”

  “Not so much for the fireworks, no.”

  “Did my dad go in, too?”

  “Nah, he just dropped me off. Said he had friends of his own in Sutton he could visit.”

  “I guess he does.” My dad has friends scattered around the state. “Why didn't you go before then?”

  “My grandma. She didn't want anything to do with him after a while,” he says. “She di
dn't want anything to do with the outside world anyway, but she especially didn't want any-thing to do with him.”

  “Oh yeah. You lived with your grandma.”

  “Yeah. This crummy old house in the middle of nowhere.” He boots a stone and sends it skipping down the road.

  “My dad said she couldn't take care of you anymore,” I tell him.

  “That's my fault,” he says. “I went out to the highway and threw rocks at cars. I don't know why. Just to see if I could hit any, I guess. I did hit one, and it turned out to be an off-duty cop. I ran into the marsh, thinking he wouldn't follow me, but he did. One thing led to another, and they found out how I wasn't getting proper homeschooling or whatever. They decided Grandma wasn't fit to take care of me, and that's how I ended up with you guys. It's kind of bogus.”

  “It turned out all right,” I say.

  “I guess.”

  “Hey, do you still believe all that stuff about Ptan Teca and the curse?” I ask him.

  “I don't know,” he says. “Yeah, probably a little bit.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah. At least, I don't not believe it.”

  “Why do you think it stopped raining when it did?”

  “It stopped just before the Fourth of July.”

  “So?”

  “So I bet that Ptan Teca kid was hoping there'd be a baseball game. He finally got sick of waiting for the rematch.”

  “Hard to have a game with no teams and no field.”

  “Kids don't always think about stuff like that.”

  We've finally arrived at the store, just fifteen minutes before my dad gets off his Saturday shift. We go in through the lumber entrance and find him in his orange apron, telling a couple of other guys in orange aprons what to do. He does a double take when he sees us. He says something to the two workers and comes over to us.

  “What are you guys doing here? For that matter, how did you get here?”

  On Sunday, my dad takes Sturgis to see his grandma, as usual. I camp out on the couch with Yogi, watching the Cubs play the Pirates. Mark Prior is having a good outing, and the Cubbies are winning. It's a pretty good game.

  There's a knock on the door, and when I glance through the window, I forget all about the Cubs. It's Shannon and Rita, hanging out on my front porch. I gulp and go get the door.

  “Um, what's up?”

  They both look pretty cute. I'm used to seeing them a little scuffed up, wearing shorts and T-shirts. Now they're wearing the kinds of things the mannequins wear in the store windows of the mall in Sutton. I'm usually able to set my thing for Rita aside on the baseball field, but when she shows up at my house, kind of dolled up, I feel nervous and tongue-tied.

  “We were wondering if you and Sturgis wanted to go get sodas or something,” Shannon says. She's blushing a little.

  “Sodas, huh?” I ask. “I feel like I'm in an Archie comic.”

  The girls laugh, and I loosen up a bit.

  “Sturgis is out,” I tell them. I explain how he sees his grandmother on Sundays. “I guess I could go, though, or we could wait for him to get back. You can come in, if you want.”

  They go about halfway down the walk to whisper to each other and decide what they want to do.

  “We'll come in for a few minutes,” says Rita finally.

  “It's a nice house,” says Shannon.

  “Yeah,” I say. “I've lived here my whole life. How long have you guys lived in Moundville?”

  “We moved here about eighteen months ago,” Rita says. “Cheap houses.”

  “About three years,” says Shannon. “Same reason.”

  “So how do you guys know each other?”

  “From Barrett,” says Rita. Barrett is a private school in Sutton, the girls’ equivalent to St. James. I think the two schools have box socials together or whatever private school kids do.

  I notice Rita is carrying a book and ask her if I can see it. She holds it up, and I see it's To Kill a Mockingbird.

  “I've read it like four times already,” she tells me. “It's my favorite book.”

  “Yeah?” I've never read it, but I've seen the movie with my dad. “I think the black guy in that book is named Tom Robinson, same as Steve's dad,” I tell her, which might be the dumbest thing anyone has ever said about a book.

  “Oh,” she says. “I guess it is.”

  The girls sit on the couch and make a fuss over Yogi until he gets tired of the attention and runs away.

  “He's a pretty old cat,” I explain. “He gets tuckered out fast.”

  “So,” Shannon begins, but whatever she was going to say gets lost on the way to her mouth. She looks to Rita for help.

  “What happened to Sturgis anyway?” Rita asks. “We've been wondering.”

  “Nothing. He's just visiting his…,” I trail off, realizing what they really want to know. “You mean, what happened to his face?”

  “I don't mean to be nosy.”

  “Oh, don't worry about it.” I explain about the dogfight in Sutton.

  “He had his ear ripped off by a dog?” Rita asks, looking at me with wide eyes.

  “Yeah.”

  “I'm sorry. That story sounds a little made up.”

  “Well, that's what he told me.” I remember how Sturgis told the story. Like it was something he'd seen in a movie. Or maybe read in a book, knowing him, although I bet in the book he stole it from it was a space alien instead of a wolf dog.

  Shannon leans over to say something in Rita's ear. I turn my attention back to the ball game, the score of which doesn't register. I'm too preoccupied by the girls and Rita's suggestion that Sturgis lied to me. I guess it could be made up, but what if it was? Maybe the real story wasn't as good.

  “So that's your favorite book, huh?” I ask Rita, trying to change the subject.

  “Yeah. Do you have a favorite book?”

  I am not, by habit, a big reader. I read part of The Catcher in the Rye once but quit when it became clear that the guy telling the story wasn't going to play baseball, either as catcher or as anything else. I also read The Natural because that's my favorite movie, but in the book, the hero strikes out at the end. I felt cheated. So when she asks me my favorite book, the best one I can think of is Catch You Later, which is the autobiography of Johnny Bench.

  “A baseball player wrote your favorite book,” she says flatly after I tell her that.

  I explain how Johnny Bench is probably the best catcher of all time, even better than Yogi Berra and Carlton Fisk, how he changed the image of catchers from dumb guys who didn't know better to smart guys who handle pitchers and manage the defense, and how he might have been more im-portant to the great Reds teams of the seventies than even Pete Rose. So maybe I babble a bit. What can I say? I like Johnny Bench.

  “I'm sure he's a great baseball player, but he's not really a writer. Do you read novels?” Rita asks.

  “Sure,” I tell her. “Sometimes.”

  “Suuure,” she says, rolling her eyes. I think she's just kidding me, but I can see now what Steve said about her being a book snob.

  “So do you think Sturgis will be back soon?” Shannon wonders.

  “It's hard to say,” I tell her. “Usually they're back around the seventh inning.”

  “You tell time by baseball games?”

  “Well, I don't think to look at the clock when they walk in, is all.” I realize I'm sounding dumber by the second and should quit while I'm ahead. “They could be back any minute.”

  They whisper to each other a bit.

  “I think we should go,” says Shannon.

  “Oh?”

  “We have to meet somebody.”

  “Well, I'll tell Sturgis you came by,” I tell them. “And I'll try to read a novel. I promise.”

  “We'll see you at practice tomorrow.” Rita smiles at me on her way out. Maybe she's just being nice, but I think it's kind of her way of saying, “It's okay. I like my boys dumb.”

  Sturgis and my dad get back about
forty minutes later. I follow Sturgis into the bedroom so I can tell him about the girls dropping by.

  “Yeah? They must have wanted to see you.” He's changing out of his grandma clothes into jeans and a T-shirt.

  “I don't know. I think they came to see both of us. They waited for you and everything.”

  “It's all for show.” He's finished dressing and decides to forgo shoes. Instead, he grabs a book and sacks out on the bed. “I think Shannon digs you.”

  “I like Rita,” I remind him.

  “That's why Shannon wanted to blow. She saw you chatting up Rita and wanted to split.”

  “I don't know.”

  “Yeah, neither do I,” he admits. I can see he's lost interest in the topic and wants to get back to his book.

  “Hey, that reminds me, I need to read something.” I look at his shelf of fantasy and sci-fi, a few odds and ends tucked in here and there—like that book about motorcycle maintenance.

  “Do you have a favorite book?”

  “I don't know. Lord of the Rings, I guess.”

  “You've read the whole thing? All three books?”

  “Yeah,” he says. “Like four times.”

  “I've only seen the movies.”

  “They made it into a movie?”

  “Three movies. Wait—you never heard of the Lord of the Rings movies? They're only like the biggest movies ever.”

  “No, I just don't really see a lot of movies.”

  “Come on, everybody has seen the movies. Or at least heard of them.”

  “What do you want from me? My grandma never took me to movies, is all.”

  “Sorry. I'm just surprised.”

  “So is the movie any good?”

  “There's three movies. They're pretty good.”

  “Probably not as good as the books,” he says. “My dad gave me the whole set when he went to jail. I've read them probably five times. Every winter, I start over at the beginning. Man, I love those books. I've got the whole trilogy, if you want to read it.”

  “I don't know,” I tell him. “It's pretty long, and I already know how it ends.”

  “Then don't. Your loss.” He looks really disappointed in me. He just doesn't get that I'm not looking for a great reading experience. I'm just trying to make a good impression on a girl. None of Sturgis's books look like they would impress Rita—not if her favorite book is To Kill a Mockingbird.