Mudville Read online

  I'd really planned on going to St. James Academy, even if it was never officially official, so it's hard to adjust. I can't imagine getting very good coaching from a guy who's mostly a math teacher or something and just coaches on the side. Sutton spends loads of money on football and basketball, but nothing on baseball.

  The whole mess pushes the fireworks and Rita right out of my head.

  I can't sleep that night. I'm wound up, thinking about every-thing.

  “Hey, Sturgis,” I whisper. He's a pretty sound sleeper and doesn't respond.

  I get out of bed and creep down the hall to my father's office. I turn on the desk light and fire up the computer. Yogi finds me there and jumps into my lap to help.

  I check my e-mail, but there's nothing good. Check the baseball standings and see how Detroit's doing. They're on a tear this summer, which is way out of character for them.

  Then I get an idea. I've been wondering about some-thing. I Google “Carey Nye” and get a few hundred results: player pages from baseball sites, autographed balls and jerseys on eBay, and so on. I follow the first link to a page on the official Orioles site. It's got a picture and some stats and a short biography.

  “Carey Nye was once considered a top prospect in the Orioles organization,” the page reports. “He led the AAA Rochester Red Wings in wins and strikeouts one season and once pitched a no-hit shutout. He was not as successful in the majors. In his first year as a starter, he posted three wins and nine losses. He was transferred to the bullpen, where he was effective for short stints but inconsistent.”

  Most of the other links all have the same information: a line of stats, maybe a brief description of a young pitcher who failed to live up to his promise. Nothing about his family.

  So I Google “Carey Nye” and “Sturgis” at the same time and get exactly one result. It's some guy's biker blog, where he's posted a bunch of photos from the big motorcycle rally they have every year in Sturgis, South Dakota. There's a lot of pictures, so the page kind of goes on forever. Fat guys with big beards and tattoos sitting on Harleys. That kind of thing.

  I figure the page came up because Sturgis is the name of the town. There must be other guys named Carey Nye in the world. I'm about to quit scrolling when I see his picture, though. He looks just like his baseball card, except he's wearing a denim jacket with the sleeves cut off and no shirt. With him is a kid, about four years old. His face is in the shadows, but I can tell it's Sturgis because of his long arms and legs.

  “Carey Nye of the Baltimore Orioles,” the caption says. (He wouldn't have been an Oriole by that time, though.) “Named his kid Sturgis. HOW COOL IS THAT?”

  I click back to Google and do another search on Carey Nye, wondering what happened to him. None of those biographies have what happened after he got cut by the Orioles. He just vanished off the face of the earth.

  I find the answer in an old column on the Sporting News site. The article is basically about how pro athletes don't always get away with murder. The author mostly talks about some football player who went to prison, but he mentions a few others in passing.

  “It barely made headlines even in Baltimore when former Oriole Carey Nye was convicted for murdering a man in a bar fight,” the article says, “but he was a player the fans in Baltimore would rather forget about anyway, even without a little recreational manslaughter on his résumé.”

  I feel almost guilty, nosing into Sturgis's life like that. It just didn't occur to me that his dad was in prison. I clear the browser history to cover my tracks and return to bed, my head spinning.

  I wonder if my dad knows all that. I think he must. The foster care people would have told him. How long would his dad be in prison? Did Sturgis ever see him? How did his mom die?

  I lie there, wondering, while Sturgis sleeps. He snores lightly, with an occasional whimper, like the puppy I never had.

  In the morning, I'm falling asleep in my bowl of cereal. Stur-gis has already finished a couple of bowls and is back on the couch, reading his book.

  “Want to go play catch?” I ask him after breakfast. It looks like another gorgeous rainless day is in the making.

  “Why not?” he says, setting the book down. So it's easier to get him off the couch than I thought.

  We could throw the ball around in the patch of mud we call a yard, but we decide to walk down to the old ballpark instead, just to see how it's doing.

  The ballpark is right downtown, so it's not a bad walk. There's a little business district across the streets on the first base side and right field. A hard-hit homer to dead center would land on the steps of the town hall. To the left is the old high school, which hasn't been used in my lifetime but still has offices and stuff.

  “Darn hot,” says Sturgis.

  “Yes, it is,” I say, “and humid.”

  The ballpark is a mess. You wouldn't even know it's a ballpark, except for the rotting bleachers and rusted-out backstop behind the plate, or at least where the plate used to be. The ground has mostly drained, thanks to the canals, but it's slimy, with puddles of water everywhere, and not a blade of grass. Swarms of gnats greet us with every step, and horseflies screech in our ears. The mud tries to suck off my shoes. It's disgusting.

  “Will the grass grow back on its own?” I ask Sturgis.

  “You're asking me?” He shrugs.

  “Well, you're the major-league kid.”

  “My dad was a relief pitcher, not a groundskeeper.”

  I have my catcher's mitt and Sturgis has my fielder's glove—good thing we're both right-handed—and I've got an old, beat-up ball I don't care about. I hand it off to Sturgis and walk about forty paces.

  “Show me what you got.”

  He zips it in and stings my hand.

  “You have good stuff!” It must be in his blood, I think. His dad, the big leaguer.

  “I do?”

  “Sure. Throw it again, as hard as you can.”

  He rears back and lets it rip. The ball smacks into my glove like it's been shot from a cannon, even without a proper windup. Look out, Roger Clemens.

  “You really never played baseball? You have a good arm.”

  “I used to throw tennis balls to my dog.”

  “Sammy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That was a long time ago,” I remind him.

  He shrugs. “I still throw sometimes.”

  “Throw what?”

  “Rocks. Whatever.”

  He isn't so good at catching the ball. Even if I throw it right to him, he misses half the time.

  “I usually don't have anyone to throw back at me,” he ex-plains.

  We toss the old beanbag back and forth for a time, in the hazy sunshine, until the bugs and humidity get to us. Even with the bites and the burn, it feels great.

  I half expect my dad to be making sacrifices to a rain god when we get home. Instead, he's signing the last batch of paychecks. He hands one to me and one to Sturgis.

  I try to hand the check right back to him. “Keep it.”

  “But that's for you,” he says.

  I don't mean to get dramatic over what I know is only a drop in the bucket, but I don't want the check. It doesn't feel right, knowing about our new money problems.

  Sturgis folds his own check and puts it into his pocket. He looks at us warily, hoping we didn't expect him to fork over the money.

  “Just hold on to it for me.” I give my dad the check. “I'll use it for baseball camp next year.”

  “All right.” He puts the check in his front desk drawer. “It's right here when you want it,” he says. I feel a little bit better. The money will sit in my dad's checking account, but Sturgis doesn't have to feel guilty for keeping his own hard-earned cash.

  “Oh, were you out practicing already?” my dad asks, seeing the ball and gloves.

  “Just playing catch. Sturgis here has a pretty good arm.”

  “Good, good,” he says.

  “Dad, do you think that grass will grow on its own in
the ballpark, or will we have to plant it?”

  “I imagine they'll have to seed it or sod it. Lots to do in that ballpark.” He looks kind of thoughtful, then goes back to his work.

  Dinner is chili dog pie, which is not as good as it sounds.

  “So you like to play baseball, too?” my dad asks Sturgis.

  “Sure,” he says around a mouthful of canned chili, hot dog, and Tater Tots.

  “Well, this used to be a big baseball town,” my dad says. “When I was a kid, everybody wanted to play baseball.”

  “A lot of kids still want to play baseball,” I tell my dad. “They just couldn't. They will now.”

  “You think so, huh?”

  I tell him about what the mayor said, about playing base-ball next year, and the big round of applause. People seem pretty psyched.

  “Why would anyone have to wait until next year?” asks Sturgis.

  “It's not just about baseball,” my dad explains. “It's about tradition.” He tells Sturgis the long history of baseball on the Fourth of July. Every year, Moundville and Sinister Bend would play, and every year, Moundville would lose.

  “My dad was in the last baseball game ever played in Moundville,” I tell Sturgis.

  “Did you win?” Sturgis asks.

  “Funny you should ask,” my dad says. “We didn't win, but it's the first time in about a century we didn't lose.”

  “Hey, we should watch that game after dinner,” I suggest. I sort of do it for my dad. I figure he needs a break from worrying about money, and he loves to watch that old video. He even had the whole thing dumped onto a DVD a while back.

  “I don't know.” My dad looks distracted. He's probably itching to get back to his spreadsheets.

  “I was going to watch a show at seven,” Sturgis says. I give him a friendly kick under the table. “Um, but let's watch the game instead,” he says.

  My dad grins. “I suppose.”

  Sturgis and I do the dishes while my dad finds the DVD. When we come out of the kitchen, the slightly blurry image of the ballpark the way it used to be flickers into view, deep green with sharp white lines, like I've never seen it. My dad collapses into his favorite chair, the remote control in his hand. Yogi clambers up to the arm of the chair and sits in a stately pose, looking like he ought to be in front of the New York Public Library.

  “Bobby Fitz,” my dad says with a happy sigh as the Moundville pitcher takes the mound. “Best baseball player I ever knew. He was going to be a superstar.” To prove his point, Bobby Fitz makes short work of the Sinister Bend batters in the top of the first inning.

  “So what happened to him?” Sturgis wonders. “Is he fa-mous now?”

  “Last I heard, he was selling insurance in Sutton.”

  “That's too bad.”

  “Hey, there's nothing wrong with that.” My dad sounds a little defensive. “People in Sutton need insurance, too.”

  “I didn't mean anything,” Sturgis says apologetically. “Anyway, let's watch this.” He leans forward in his chair as the Bend pitcher takes the mound.

  He's a tall, mean-looking boy with unkempt hair. He throws hard. Really hard. The ball seems to be smoking as he hurls it at the catcher.

  “Bobby was our leadoff hitter, too,” my dad points out as the first Moundville batter steps into the box. He knocks the first pitch over the pitcher's head for a base hit but is tagged out trying to stretch the single into a double. He limps off the field.

  “Pulled his hamstring.” My dad shakes his head, remembering. “What bad luck. Every year, something like that. Moundville was just flat-out cursed.”

  “I thought you didn't believe in curses,” Sturgis reminds him.

  “I don't believe in weather curses. Baseball curses are a whole nother ball of wax.”

  The Bend pitcher strikes out the next batter, and the next kid comes to the plate. He's tall and blond, his hair long enough to stick out beneath his batting helmet. He looks at the pitcher with a big toothy grin, like he's not one bit scared. The pitcher zips in three pitches and strikes him out looking at a belt-high fastball.

  “That was me,” my dad tells Sturgis, who nods.

  “I guessed,” he says. “You look exactly like Roy.”

  The Sinister Bend team proceeds to knock the new Moundville pitcher around like a tetherball, while the Bend pitcher glides through the innings. It's eleven to zero by the middle of the fourth inning.

  “Look at these clouds gathering.” My dad freezes the frame so we can appreciate them. “It's starting to drizzle, see?” He indicates the vertical lines on the screen.

  “I thought it was just the graininess of the old video,” says Sturgis.

  “Our coach had this great idea,” says my dad. “He told us to play for the rain delay. The game wouldn't be official until the end of the fourth inning. If it was rained out, we could start over with a clean slate and a healthy pitcher. He told us to work the count, foul off pitches, and dawdle as much as possible.”

  We watch the first two batters ground out, and my dad comes up to bat.

  I've counted his foul-offs every time I watch the video, but I always get a different number. We watch Dad foul off pitch after pitch. He hits balls into the stands, right down the line, everywhere but fair. The fans have to toss the balls back because they've run out. It slows the game down even more, while the rain picks up.

  You can see the pitcher getting annoyed and tired, losing speed and control of his pitches. My dad even takes a few balls, mixed in with the fouls, until he has a full count. Then comes his famous base hit. He's just trying to protect the plate, but the ball stays fair. The crowd groans, then cheers as the ball gets past the third baseman.

  We lose track of him as the camera follows the ball. The left fielder is running to field it but slips in the wet grass. The ball rolls to the fence. The center fielder bare-hands it but can't get a grip on it. The camera swoops back toward the in-field. My dad has rounded the bases and comes home with no play at the plate. He's greeted by the rest of his team with high fives and slaps to the helmet. The pitcher throws his glove to the mound in disgust.

  The umpires meet, and the screen flickers into blackness.

  “What happened next?” asks Sturgis.

  “That was that,” my dad says. “The game was called for rain and never replayed.”

  “Well, now you can have the rematch,” says Sturgis.

  “Sinister Bend is long gone, though,” I remind him.

  “Anyway, we're all old now,” says my dad. “Scattered far and wide, with bad backs and mortgage payments.” Thinking about mortgage payments gets him fretting again, and he goes back to his office to mess with budgets on the computer.

  “Hey, Sturgis, you ever have a girlfriend?” I ask him that night after the lights are out.

  “With this mug?” he asks. I didn't think of that. I barely notice anymore.

  “Hey, chicks dig scars.”

  “Yeah, right, they do.”

  “They do. I'm sure of it.”

  “What about you?” he asks. “Did you ever have a girlfriend?”

  “Not really,” I tell him. Last year, in sixth grade, I was going with this girl for a few weeks. That's what they call it at my school, just going with someone. All it meant was that we had lunch together and she passed me notes. One day, one of those notes said she was breaking up with me, and that was that. I didn't lose any sleep over it.

  “You got your eye on someone?” he asks.

  “What makes you think that?”

  “You wouldn't start talking about girls otherwise. You're trying to get the conversation around to how you like some-one.”

  “Yeah, I guess.” I tell him about Rita, and how I've seen her but not talked to her, and how she smiled but it might have been at Steve. “Do you think a black girl would rather date a black guy?”

  “Last time I looked at a calendar, it was 2000-something,” he says. “That's not an issue anymore. This Rita girl probably digs you.”


  “How do you know?”

  “’Cause look at you,” he says. “You're a jock. You're decent-looking. You're a nice guy. You're the guy a girl would dig.”

  “Well, thanks. I guess if she says no, I have you as a backup plan.”

  “You dig scars, too?”

  “Heck yeah. Rita has a bright red scar right across her head, and it makes her look like a baseball. That's why I like her.”

  He cracks up. I must be picking up my dad's gift of hu-mor.

  “She have any friends?” he wants to know. “The kind who dig scars?”

  “I'll ask her the next time I talk to her,” I tell him. “I mean, the first time I talk to her.”

  “All right,” he says. He's out like a light again, and I'm left in the darkness for a while, wondering when that will be.

  We work for the next few days, removing half-installed Rain Redirection Systems from houses. It's just Sturgis and me and my dad. My dad doesn't want to pay anyone to take down canceled orders and recover the materials, so we do it all by ourselves. That's how Sturgis and I finally get to work up on the roof. I like to imagine Rita will walk by one of those houses and see me glistening with sweat, doing a man's job, and maybe swoon right there on the sidewalk. No such luck, but thinking about it helps pass the time.

  “Well, we're done with that,” my dad says as we wrap things up late on Friday evening. “I think my rain redirection business is officially done.”

  He doesn't feel like cooking again, which really isn't like him. We pick up a bucket of chicken on the way home. I don't mind one bit. I'm a big fan of takeout.

  “What about that one?” I ask when we get home, pointing at the obsolete contraption of plastic sheeting on our own roof.

  “Oh, right.” My dad looks up at it in disgust. “We'll get it sooner or later.”

  We're barely through the door when my dad has the TV on and surfs through the channels until he finds a M*A*S*H marathon. Sturgis joins him on the couch this time, and they eat in the living room, not even using plates—just tossing their chicken bones back into the bucket and passing the little tubs of corn and potatoes back and forth.