Magic Time, page 5
“I measured your practice field out by the lumberyard. Sixty-one feet from the rubber to the plate. No wonder your arm’s big as a telephone pole.”
“You figure on telling McCracken?”
“No.”
“Don’t lie for me. Do what you have to do, it’s okay. Just wait until morning. Also, remember that cheating is making your opponent do something you don’t have to do. We both pitched from the same distance. It was just that I’m used to that distance, and it took him a while to adjust.”
“I’m not going to turn you in,” I said.
Roger picked a chunk of mud off one of the tools and threw it on the street. He began to fiddle with the combination of the safe.
“I’m not planning on blackmail.”
“I appreciate talent when I see it. I’ve been working this scam for ten years. I’ve lost an occasional game, but no one’s ever cottoned onto my edge. I must be getting careless.”
He took about an inch of bills off the top of one of the piles and handed them to me.
“You really don’t need to. Money can’t buy what I want.”
“Which is?”
“I want this girl to like me just the way I am.”
“No, money can’t do that. But it’ll buy a hell of a lot of ice cream, and pay your college tuition for a semester or two.” His face broke into that grin that could charm a bone from a hungry dog.
“It’s all a matter of distances,” Roger said from inside the Caddy. The sun was about to rise. The oranges and pinks of the sky touched the shimmering surface of the white Cadillac. “Chicago to Memphis is 537 miles. I’ll have a late breakfast at Perkins’ Cake and Steak on Elvis Presley Boulevard.”
Roger smiled again, reached his right hand up and out the window to shake my hand.
“Maybe we’ll run into each other again, Mike. Be cool. Life’s all a matter of distances. Make them work for you.”
The window purred up and the car eased away, gravel crunching under the wide tires.
2
One Road Runs Straight
SIX
My dad must have said it a thousand times. “For a lead-off batter, a walk is as good as a hit. A walk and a stolen base is as good as a double.” I can still hear those words echoing in my eight-year-old ears. It didn’t matter that I was never a power hitter, as long as I learned the strike zone, which I did.
I learned to bunt, both for a base hit, and in order to sacrifice a runner along. The hardest thing, when I was a kid, was to hit the ball on the ground up the middle. The assumption was that just making contact would earn me a certain number of base hits, and I was so fast I was almost impossible to double up on a ground ball. But, oh how hard that was to do, for every kid has fantasies of blasting the ball out of the park, of hitting a blue darter like a lightening bolt off the outfield fence.
The only time I tried to hit the ball in the air was when a sacrifice fly was called for. I never tried for home runs or extra base hits, controlling my desire to be a hero in return for making a solid contribution.
In the evenings Dad and I would practice in the back yard. Dad would lay down a towel, white as a patch of snow, up the third-base line where a perfect bunt would come to rest, good not only for a sacrifice but often a base hit. Dad would pitch to me while I practiced bunting.
“Pretend the towel is the mother and the ball is the baby, and it’s your job to reunite the two,” Dad would shout.
Other times he’d yell, “Suicide squeeze!” and drill in a high hard one that I was somehow supposed to lay down.
A hundred pitches minimum every evening, at ever-increasing speed, while I tried to get the ball down in the dirt so it would end up on the towel, while I pictured myself streaking safely across first, the runner in front of me perhaps taking an extra base when the hurried throw to first went wild.
Then there’d be another hundred pitches while I tried to rap the ball straight up the middle on the ground, controlling my urge to belt the ball about four hundred feet, because Dad’s pitches looked like white balloons floating toward me.
“Take the sure thing,” he’d say. “Don’t try to be a hero, hit the ball on the ground for a single. You’ve only got warning-track power at best, so don’t waste your life hitting routine flies to the outfield.”
Following that we’d take a break for orange juice or lemonade. Then there’d be another hundred pitches, which I practiced hitting to the right side, behind the runner, trying for a base hit, but willing to give myself up in order to advance the base runner.
“The three-four-five men are the power hitters,” Dad always said. “Let them do their job. Your only worry is to get on base or, if you can’t, at least advance the runners.”
I don’t think Dad ever expected too much of me. He never let on that he was disappointed when I didn’t perform well, even when I was downright awful. He wasn’t one of those sports fathers who got red in the face and screamed like a college basketball coach when his son made a mistake. The endless hitting and fielding practice was my idea. I imagine Dad would have been happier curled up in front of the TV after a hard day at the lumberyard; but when I came along, bat and ball in hand, to drag him out of his armchair, he never complained.
No, I’m the one who has always expected too much of myself. I think it came from recognizing early on how much Dad had sacrificed for Byron and me. I wanted to please him, maybe too much. But I try to avoid that psychological kind of thinking. I’ve seen too many young hitters lose their careers because they tried to analyze why they were hitting home runs.
Until I went away to LSU on my baseball scholarship, I don’t think Dad ever missed a single game. It’s a good thing Byron wasn’t into organized sports, I don’t know how Dad could have kept up with us. Byron discovered computers when he was in first grade, and his fate was sealed.
Dad would keep both hitting and fielding charts on me. He’d sit behind home plate and he’d chart every pitch I swung at, marking down whether it was a ball or a strike, high or low, inside or outside, a fastball, curve, slider, or change-up, marking where I hit the ball, and, if I made an out, where I should have hit the ball.
He did the same when I was playing defense, keeping records of where I was positioned on the field, where the ball was hit, how far to the right or left I went for the ball, how well I turned the double play, whether tossing to the shortstop or receiving the ball and turning the pivot, leaping like a ballet dancer over the sliding runner. Dad even offered to pay for ballet lessons if I thought they would improve my fielding. I decided not to, which I now believe was a mistake.
After every game, like bridge players, we’d sit at the kitchen table, replaying every inning, rehashing every play, looking for ways I could improve, striving for ways I could develop an edge.
I had scholarship offers from seven universities, but, ever-vigilant to the possibility that a major-league career might elude me because of injury or such caprice, I chose Louisiana State, the school that appeared to have the best business faculty as well as an A-1 baseball program.
The day I arrived, an assistant coach, a swath of black hair painted across his forehead like a crow’s wing, took me aside.
“Mike, y’all play a good second base for us, and everything else will take care of itself. We’ll find courses y’all’ll be able to pass while giving your time to playing baseball.”
“In other words, athletes don’t have to take courses that might lower their grade-point average.”
“Just trust me. Let me pick your courses,” the coach said. “I been looking at the schedule y’all set for yourself, and, well, there’s courses there that are downright difficult. Statistics, economics, political science, psychology — well, you were a bright student in high school, but you’d have to spend hours and hours studying every week, just to squeeze through. You might not be able to give enough time to baseball.”
I stuck to my guns and took the courses I wanted to take, but I was one of the only ballplayers to do so. All the scholarship players seemed to think they were going to be in the Bigs, though it was easy to see most of them didn’t stand a chance. At this moment there are four of my LSU Tiger teammates playing in Double and Triple A. Maybe two will make the Bigs. My guess is that only one will stick.
And then there’s me. I keep telling myself I’m different — one good summer and I’ll catch the eye of a big-league scout, get another chance.
I’ve always been pretty astute about my baseball abilities. More astute than any of my coaches, even my dad. It came upon me like a revelation when I was about seven years old that I had more ability at hitting, fielding, and throwing than other kids my age. It wasn’t long until I decided, that if I did each of those things perfectly, within the range of my abilities, I had a good chance to play professionally.
I had to use every ounce of ability, use it carefully, deliberately, and intelligently. If I worked harder and smarter than anyone else then I’d make it.
And that approach worked.
“You’re the most disciplined player for your age I’ve ever seen,” my hitting coach at LSU said to me during my freshman year.
And I probably was.
Until my senior year at LSU.
Ever since my freshman year in high school, I’ve analyzed how I have performed at the plate, especially how I hit when my team was ahead compared to how I hit when we were behind. I discovered things that I didn’t like one bit, things I never discussed even with my dad, and things I hoped my coaches wouldn’t notice.
Though my batting average has always been high, I have been inclined to hit when it didn’t count for much. My batting average in extra innings, allowing that all innings from the ninth on are likely to be scoreless, was abysmal. My batting average dived when we played contending teams. I was hell on wheels against small colleges, but when Stanford or Oklahoma or Texas showed up, my bat became spaghetti, and, in the field, I crumpled like a used tissue.
I just didn’t come through in the clutch. As the lead-off hitter I wasn’t expected to be a star, but even when I was playing well, I felt like a fraud. All through high school and college, I would accept congratulations for a well-played game, then go home and enter my statistics into my computer, and come up a loser again and again.
Now, I’m packing for my first venture into semi-pro baseball. I should be leaping up and down with excitement. But if everything is so damn good, how come my stomach feels like I swallowed a hand grenade? I haven’t seen my teammates in Grand Mound, and already I’m worried I won’t measure up. Maybe it has something to do with losing my mother? I’m always worried about losing what I have. I sweated and bled over exams. I know if I was promoted to the Bigs and became a starter I’d worry constantly about maintaining my position. I’d be staring over my shoulder like a shoplifter wondering what new infield phenom was about to displace me. I’m always afraid someone is going to take away everything that I have.
Worry, thy name is Mike Houle.
SEVEN
At the Cedar Rapids airport I was met by a large, hearty man named Emmett Powell. The weather was hot, the humidity very high for so early in the season. Powell was in shirtsleeves, his grey suitcoat slung casually over his arm. He might have been an athlete when he was in high school, I decided. In fact he looked a little like some of the retired baseball players you see interviewed on television before old-timers’ games. His thinning hair was combed straight back off a high, ruddy forehead; his belly swelled comfortably over his belt.
I’d looked up Grand Mound, Iowa, in Dad’s coverless Rand McNally road atlas that must have been nearly as old as me. Grand Mound was in northeastern Iowa, and it showed a population of fifteen hundred. That was it. At the library, I couldn’t find any mention of the Cornbelt League. I even called a sportswriter with the Chicago Tribune, a relative of a friend of a friend.
“There are all kinds of unaffiliated amateur and semi-pro leagues in rural areas all over America, especially in the Midwest and South. Get yourself local newspapers, usually they’re weeklies — they’ll give those amateur leagues some kind of coverage,” the sportswriter told me.
But by that time I was due to fly out of Chicago, headed, as my brother Byron said, for darkest Iowa.
Emmett Powell must have seen a picture of me, because there were several young men of college age getting off the Ozark Air Lines flight in Cedar Rapids, but he headed directly for me.
“Welcome to Iowa, Mike,” he said, pumping my hand. “I’m sure you’re gonna enjoy your summer in Grand Mound. And, no, before you ask, the town wasn’t named for a pitching mound, though a long time ago there was a town down Iowa City way called Big Inning, and it was named because of baseball.”
We moved the length of the small airport to the baggage carousel.
“You ever lived in a small town, Mike?”
“Yes and no. The town where I was raised is now connected right up to Chicago, and Baton Rouge, where I went to LSU, is smaller than Chicago, but no small town.”
“You’re in for quite an experience then. Small-town living is heaven on earth, Mike.”
I had the feeling he was about launch into a sermon describing the benefits of small-town living, as Justin Birdsong said he had done, but just then my suitcase and equipment bag came gliding along the conveyor belt.
Emmett insisted on carrying my suitcase, a very elderly one with brass-colored corners, trussed up with two black leather straps. As we were leaving the airport I noticed three people, a middle-aged couple and a dark-eyed girl of about seventeen, who seemed to be staring intently at me, as if I were a celebrity they were afraid to approach. I even got the impression they were talking about me. I remembered they had been standing next to Emmett and me in the baggage area. The girl had dark hair and dusky rose cheeks. I certainly didn’t mind if she wanted to look at me.
I checked my fly. It was not open.
“Do I look odd or something?” I asked Emmett. “Is there something wrong with the way I’m dressed?”
“Of course not,” said Emmett. “Why do you ask?”
“Those people we just passed, they were watching me, and I know it sounds odd, but I think they were talking about me.”
Emmett glanced over his shoulder, frowned slightly, “Actually it would be me they were looking at. They look familiar, although I can’t quite put a name to them — probably customers of mine.”
“That’s good,” I said. But when I glanced over my shoulder as we crossed the circular driveway toward the parking lot, they were still staring at us and pointing.
When we reached Emmett’s car, a maroon-colored, top-of-the-line Buick, I was surprised to find there were people in the back seat. In fact, Emmett’s whole family was in the car.
“This is my wife Marge, my daughter Tracy Ellen, and the dog there is Sarge — he hates to see us go anywhere and not take him along,” Emmett said.
Sarge was a docile-looking brown-and-white spaniel with ears big as pot holders, sitting between Marge, a pleasant-looking woman with pink cheeks and a ready, motherly smile, and Tracy Ellen, who was as blonde and pretty as if she had just stepped out of a 1970s television sitcom. Glancing at Tracy Ellen, I was reminded of playing baseball in Salt Lake City, against Brigham Young University, where the Mormon girls all looked like Tracy Ellen, pretty, freshly scrubbed, glazed with wholesomeness. I wondered for an instant if I might be falling into a nest of religious fanatics.
“You’ll be boarding with us this summer,” Emmett said, as he eased, the Buick out onto the highway. “In a small town like Grand Mound there’s a lot of competition to see who gets to house the new ballplayers. Competition among families with marriageable daughters gets downright fierce,” and he chuckled good-naturedly.
I watched as he stared into the rearview mirror until his eyes met those of Tracy Ellen.
“Oh, Dad,” said Tracy Ellen, exasperation in her voice. Her hair was a pale, creamy blonde and she had a few freckles across the bridge of her nose.
“Emmett, you behave yourself,” said Marge. “Don’t you frighten this boy away before we even get him to Grand Mound.”
“I just hope Mike likes cherry pie,” said Emmett, paying no attention. “One thing we do in Grand Mound is eat well, and, let me tell you, nobody bakes a better cherry pie than Tracy Ellen, unless of course it’s her mother.”
“Think you’ll be able to stand all this?” asked Tracy Ellen, echoing my thoughts.
“Just telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” said Emmett. “Tracy Ellen can’t deny she’s won the Grand Mound High School Bake-off with her killer cherry pie, every year she’s been in high school — even when she was a freshman. She bakes pie like a professional pastry chef.”
“It will be a change for me to live in a home where there are women,” I said, trying to be diplomatic. “My mom died when I was four, and my dad, younger brother, and I have been batching it ever since.”
“That’s what we heard,” said Emmett, and I wondered briefly where he had heard it. But then I supposed whoever had scouted me must have checked into my family background too.
“What can you tell me about this job I have in the mornings?” I asked. “Do you know who I’ll be working for?”
“Oh, didn’t I say? You’ll be working for me. I’m the independent insurance agent in Grand Mound. Got me a little office on Main Street, but somehow I end up doing most of my business from the house. Folks just drop by when the spirit moves them. As for your job, I don’t expect you’ll be asked to do anything a fellow who earned a BA in business management — with distinction, no less — can’t handle,” and he grinned again, letting me know that he knew almost everything there was to know about me.
I felt I should give him a quiz, like when a psychologist spits out words and the patient does free association.
“Byron,” I’d say.
And he’d reply, “Your younger brother, a senior in computer science at De Paul University, named for the poet, because your brother was born with a deformed foot that had to be in a cast for the first year of his life.”
“You figure on telling McCracken?”
“No.”
“Don’t lie for me. Do what you have to do, it’s okay. Just wait until morning. Also, remember that cheating is making your opponent do something you don’t have to do. We both pitched from the same distance. It was just that I’m used to that distance, and it took him a while to adjust.”
“I’m not going to turn you in,” I said.
Roger picked a chunk of mud off one of the tools and threw it on the street. He began to fiddle with the combination of the safe.
“I’m not planning on blackmail.”
“I appreciate talent when I see it. I’ve been working this scam for ten years. I’ve lost an occasional game, but no one’s ever cottoned onto my edge. I must be getting careless.”
He took about an inch of bills off the top of one of the piles and handed them to me.
“You really don’t need to. Money can’t buy what I want.”
“Which is?”
“I want this girl to like me just the way I am.”
“No, money can’t do that. But it’ll buy a hell of a lot of ice cream, and pay your college tuition for a semester or two.” His face broke into that grin that could charm a bone from a hungry dog.
“It’s all a matter of distances,” Roger said from inside the Caddy. The sun was about to rise. The oranges and pinks of the sky touched the shimmering surface of the white Cadillac. “Chicago to Memphis is 537 miles. I’ll have a late breakfast at Perkins’ Cake and Steak on Elvis Presley Boulevard.”
Roger smiled again, reached his right hand up and out the window to shake my hand.
“Maybe we’ll run into each other again, Mike. Be cool. Life’s all a matter of distances. Make them work for you.”
The window purred up and the car eased away, gravel crunching under the wide tires.
2
One Road Runs Straight
SIX
My dad must have said it a thousand times. “For a lead-off batter, a walk is as good as a hit. A walk and a stolen base is as good as a double.” I can still hear those words echoing in my eight-year-old ears. It didn’t matter that I was never a power hitter, as long as I learned the strike zone, which I did.
I learned to bunt, both for a base hit, and in order to sacrifice a runner along. The hardest thing, when I was a kid, was to hit the ball on the ground up the middle. The assumption was that just making contact would earn me a certain number of base hits, and I was so fast I was almost impossible to double up on a ground ball. But, oh how hard that was to do, for every kid has fantasies of blasting the ball out of the park, of hitting a blue darter like a lightening bolt off the outfield fence.
The only time I tried to hit the ball in the air was when a sacrifice fly was called for. I never tried for home runs or extra base hits, controlling my desire to be a hero in return for making a solid contribution.
In the evenings Dad and I would practice in the back yard. Dad would lay down a towel, white as a patch of snow, up the third-base line where a perfect bunt would come to rest, good not only for a sacrifice but often a base hit. Dad would pitch to me while I practiced bunting.
“Pretend the towel is the mother and the ball is the baby, and it’s your job to reunite the two,” Dad would shout.
Other times he’d yell, “Suicide squeeze!” and drill in a high hard one that I was somehow supposed to lay down.
A hundred pitches minimum every evening, at ever-increasing speed, while I tried to get the ball down in the dirt so it would end up on the towel, while I pictured myself streaking safely across first, the runner in front of me perhaps taking an extra base when the hurried throw to first went wild.
Then there’d be another hundred pitches while I tried to rap the ball straight up the middle on the ground, controlling my urge to belt the ball about four hundred feet, because Dad’s pitches looked like white balloons floating toward me.
“Take the sure thing,” he’d say. “Don’t try to be a hero, hit the ball on the ground for a single. You’ve only got warning-track power at best, so don’t waste your life hitting routine flies to the outfield.”
Following that we’d take a break for orange juice or lemonade. Then there’d be another hundred pitches, which I practiced hitting to the right side, behind the runner, trying for a base hit, but willing to give myself up in order to advance the base runner.
“The three-four-five men are the power hitters,” Dad always said. “Let them do their job. Your only worry is to get on base or, if you can’t, at least advance the runners.”
I don’t think Dad ever expected too much of me. He never let on that he was disappointed when I didn’t perform well, even when I was downright awful. He wasn’t one of those sports fathers who got red in the face and screamed like a college basketball coach when his son made a mistake. The endless hitting and fielding practice was my idea. I imagine Dad would have been happier curled up in front of the TV after a hard day at the lumberyard; but when I came along, bat and ball in hand, to drag him out of his armchair, he never complained.
No, I’m the one who has always expected too much of myself. I think it came from recognizing early on how much Dad had sacrificed for Byron and me. I wanted to please him, maybe too much. But I try to avoid that psychological kind of thinking. I’ve seen too many young hitters lose their careers because they tried to analyze why they were hitting home runs.
Until I went away to LSU on my baseball scholarship, I don’t think Dad ever missed a single game. It’s a good thing Byron wasn’t into organized sports, I don’t know how Dad could have kept up with us. Byron discovered computers when he was in first grade, and his fate was sealed.
Dad would keep both hitting and fielding charts on me. He’d sit behind home plate and he’d chart every pitch I swung at, marking down whether it was a ball or a strike, high or low, inside or outside, a fastball, curve, slider, or change-up, marking where I hit the ball, and, if I made an out, where I should have hit the ball.
He did the same when I was playing defense, keeping records of where I was positioned on the field, where the ball was hit, how far to the right or left I went for the ball, how well I turned the double play, whether tossing to the shortstop or receiving the ball and turning the pivot, leaping like a ballet dancer over the sliding runner. Dad even offered to pay for ballet lessons if I thought they would improve my fielding. I decided not to, which I now believe was a mistake.
After every game, like bridge players, we’d sit at the kitchen table, replaying every inning, rehashing every play, looking for ways I could improve, striving for ways I could develop an edge.
I had scholarship offers from seven universities, but, ever-vigilant to the possibility that a major-league career might elude me because of injury or such caprice, I chose Louisiana State, the school that appeared to have the best business faculty as well as an A-1 baseball program.
The day I arrived, an assistant coach, a swath of black hair painted across his forehead like a crow’s wing, took me aside.
“Mike, y’all play a good second base for us, and everything else will take care of itself. We’ll find courses y’all’ll be able to pass while giving your time to playing baseball.”
“In other words, athletes don’t have to take courses that might lower their grade-point average.”
“Just trust me. Let me pick your courses,” the coach said. “I been looking at the schedule y’all set for yourself, and, well, there’s courses there that are downright difficult. Statistics, economics, political science, psychology — well, you were a bright student in high school, but you’d have to spend hours and hours studying every week, just to squeeze through. You might not be able to give enough time to baseball.”
I stuck to my guns and took the courses I wanted to take, but I was one of the only ballplayers to do so. All the scholarship players seemed to think they were going to be in the Bigs, though it was easy to see most of them didn’t stand a chance. At this moment there are four of my LSU Tiger teammates playing in Double and Triple A. Maybe two will make the Bigs. My guess is that only one will stick.
And then there’s me. I keep telling myself I’m different — one good summer and I’ll catch the eye of a big-league scout, get another chance.
I’ve always been pretty astute about my baseball abilities. More astute than any of my coaches, even my dad. It came upon me like a revelation when I was about seven years old that I had more ability at hitting, fielding, and throwing than other kids my age. It wasn’t long until I decided, that if I did each of those things perfectly, within the range of my abilities, I had a good chance to play professionally.
I had to use every ounce of ability, use it carefully, deliberately, and intelligently. If I worked harder and smarter than anyone else then I’d make it.
And that approach worked.
“You’re the most disciplined player for your age I’ve ever seen,” my hitting coach at LSU said to me during my freshman year.
And I probably was.
Until my senior year at LSU.
Ever since my freshman year in high school, I’ve analyzed how I have performed at the plate, especially how I hit when my team was ahead compared to how I hit when we were behind. I discovered things that I didn’t like one bit, things I never discussed even with my dad, and things I hoped my coaches wouldn’t notice.
Though my batting average has always been high, I have been inclined to hit when it didn’t count for much. My batting average in extra innings, allowing that all innings from the ninth on are likely to be scoreless, was abysmal. My batting average dived when we played contending teams. I was hell on wheels against small colleges, but when Stanford or Oklahoma or Texas showed up, my bat became spaghetti, and, in the field, I crumpled like a used tissue.
I just didn’t come through in the clutch. As the lead-off hitter I wasn’t expected to be a star, but even when I was playing well, I felt like a fraud. All through high school and college, I would accept congratulations for a well-played game, then go home and enter my statistics into my computer, and come up a loser again and again.
Now, I’m packing for my first venture into semi-pro baseball. I should be leaping up and down with excitement. But if everything is so damn good, how come my stomach feels like I swallowed a hand grenade? I haven’t seen my teammates in Grand Mound, and already I’m worried I won’t measure up. Maybe it has something to do with losing my mother? I’m always worried about losing what I have. I sweated and bled over exams. I know if I was promoted to the Bigs and became a starter I’d worry constantly about maintaining my position. I’d be staring over my shoulder like a shoplifter wondering what new infield phenom was about to displace me. I’m always afraid someone is going to take away everything that I have.
Worry, thy name is Mike Houle.
SEVEN
At the Cedar Rapids airport I was met by a large, hearty man named Emmett Powell. The weather was hot, the humidity very high for so early in the season. Powell was in shirtsleeves, his grey suitcoat slung casually over his arm. He might have been an athlete when he was in high school, I decided. In fact he looked a little like some of the retired baseball players you see interviewed on television before old-timers’ games. His thinning hair was combed straight back off a high, ruddy forehead; his belly swelled comfortably over his belt.
I’d looked up Grand Mound, Iowa, in Dad’s coverless Rand McNally road atlas that must have been nearly as old as me. Grand Mound was in northeastern Iowa, and it showed a population of fifteen hundred. That was it. At the library, I couldn’t find any mention of the Cornbelt League. I even called a sportswriter with the Chicago Tribune, a relative of a friend of a friend.
“There are all kinds of unaffiliated amateur and semi-pro leagues in rural areas all over America, especially in the Midwest and South. Get yourself local newspapers, usually they’re weeklies — they’ll give those amateur leagues some kind of coverage,” the sportswriter told me.
But by that time I was due to fly out of Chicago, headed, as my brother Byron said, for darkest Iowa.
Emmett Powell must have seen a picture of me, because there were several young men of college age getting off the Ozark Air Lines flight in Cedar Rapids, but he headed directly for me.
“Welcome to Iowa, Mike,” he said, pumping my hand. “I’m sure you’re gonna enjoy your summer in Grand Mound. And, no, before you ask, the town wasn’t named for a pitching mound, though a long time ago there was a town down Iowa City way called Big Inning, and it was named because of baseball.”
We moved the length of the small airport to the baggage carousel.
“You ever lived in a small town, Mike?”
“Yes and no. The town where I was raised is now connected right up to Chicago, and Baton Rouge, where I went to LSU, is smaller than Chicago, but no small town.”
“You’re in for quite an experience then. Small-town living is heaven on earth, Mike.”
I had the feeling he was about launch into a sermon describing the benefits of small-town living, as Justin Birdsong said he had done, but just then my suitcase and equipment bag came gliding along the conveyor belt.
Emmett insisted on carrying my suitcase, a very elderly one with brass-colored corners, trussed up with two black leather straps. As we were leaving the airport I noticed three people, a middle-aged couple and a dark-eyed girl of about seventeen, who seemed to be staring intently at me, as if I were a celebrity they were afraid to approach. I even got the impression they were talking about me. I remembered they had been standing next to Emmett and me in the baggage area. The girl had dark hair and dusky rose cheeks. I certainly didn’t mind if she wanted to look at me.
I checked my fly. It was not open.
“Do I look odd or something?” I asked Emmett. “Is there something wrong with the way I’m dressed?”
“Of course not,” said Emmett. “Why do you ask?”
“Those people we just passed, they were watching me, and I know it sounds odd, but I think they were talking about me.”
Emmett glanced over his shoulder, frowned slightly, “Actually it would be me they were looking at. They look familiar, although I can’t quite put a name to them — probably customers of mine.”
“That’s good,” I said. But when I glanced over my shoulder as we crossed the circular driveway toward the parking lot, they were still staring at us and pointing.
When we reached Emmett’s car, a maroon-colored, top-of-the-line Buick, I was surprised to find there were people in the back seat. In fact, Emmett’s whole family was in the car.
“This is my wife Marge, my daughter Tracy Ellen, and the dog there is Sarge — he hates to see us go anywhere and not take him along,” Emmett said.
Sarge was a docile-looking brown-and-white spaniel with ears big as pot holders, sitting between Marge, a pleasant-looking woman with pink cheeks and a ready, motherly smile, and Tracy Ellen, who was as blonde and pretty as if she had just stepped out of a 1970s television sitcom. Glancing at Tracy Ellen, I was reminded of playing baseball in Salt Lake City, against Brigham Young University, where the Mormon girls all looked like Tracy Ellen, pretty, freshly scrubbed, glazed with wholesomeness. I wondered for an instant if I might be falling into a nest of religious fanatics.
“You’ll be boarding with us this summer,” Emmett said, as he eased, the Buick out onto the highway. “In a small town like Grand Mound there’s a lot of competition to see who gets to house the new ballplayers. Competition among families with marriageable daughters gets downright fierce,” and he chuckled good-naturedly.
I watched as he stared into the rearview mirror until his eyes met those of Tracy Ellen.
“Oh, Dad,” said Tracy Ellen, exasperation in her voice. Her hair was a pale, creamy blonde and she had a few freckles across the bridge of her nose.
“Emmett, you behave yourself,” said Marge. “Don’t you frighten this boy away before we even get him to Grand Mound.”
“I just hope Mike likes cherry pie,” said Emmett, paying no attention. “One thing we do in Grand Mound is eat well, and, let me tell you, nobody bakes a better cherry pie than Tracy Ellen, unless of course it’s her mother.”
“Think you’ll be able to stand all this?” asked Tracy Ellen, echoing my thoughts.
“Just telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” said Emmett. “Tracy Ellen can’t deny she’s won the Grand Mound High School Bake-off with her killer cherry pie, every year she’s been in high school — even when she was a freshman. She bakes pie like a professional pastry chef.”
“It will be a change for me to live in a home where there are women,” I said, trying to be diplomatic. “My mom died when I was four, and my dad, younger brother, and I have been batching it ever since.”
“That’s what we heard,” said Emmett, and I wondered briefly where he had heard it. But then I supposed whoever had scouted me must have checked into my family background too.
“What can you tell me about this job I have in the mornings?” I asked. “Do you know who I’ll be working for?”
“Oh, didn’t I say? You’ll be working for me. I’m the independent insurance agent in Grand Mound. Got me a little office on Main Street, but somehow I end up doing most of my business from the house. Folks just drop by when the spirit moves them. As for your job, I don’t expect you’ll be asked to do anything a fellow who earned a BA in business management — with distinction, no less — can’t handle,” and he grinned again, letting me know that he knew almost everything there was to know about me.
I felt I should give him a quiz, like when a psychologist spits out words and the patient does free association.
“Byron,” I’d say.
And he’d reply, “Your younger brother, a senior in computer science at De Paul University, named for the poet, because your brother was born with a deformed foot that had to be in a cast for the first year of his life.”
