Fenway Fever (5 page)

For the first time in his life Stats felt uneasy sitting in Fenway Park. The game had just ended. Mercifully. And that was not just because of the lopsided score, 11–3 Yanks. It was a merciful ending because of the merciless way a number of rowdy fans had turned against the hometown team during the last three innings of the romp.

They were so harsh and so enraged. And being so derogatory in front of their fiercest rivals, of all teams!

“My granny could’ve made that play!” one guy shouted at Drew Evans in right field. “And she can’t even go to her left!”

“Johnny Damon could’ve made that play!” spat another, referring to a former Sox hero with a questionable arm, who later joined the Yankees.

When a sizzler skipped past second baseman Dusty Doretta, another fan, named Lucy, who sat near Stats, squawked, “Nice form, Dusty—if you were a
matador
!”

After the number eight hitter, Burlin Fiske, struck out to end the eighth, Announcer Bouncer yelled, “Hey, Burly! At least you
went down swinging—you looked just like Don Zimmer against Pedro!”

That one was just plain cruel. Zimmer was seventy-two years old when he and former Sox ace Pedro Martinez had tangled on the field.

After the game, Stats told Mark he needed to find Billee. “Tomorrow’s an off day, and they’re leaving town, so it’s my last chance.”

“Yeah, okay, but don’t take too long. I’ll get me some fries at Jake’s and watch a little NESN.”

“I’ll meet you there.”

Before tracking down Billee, Stats decided to find Ol’ Red and ask some quick questions. After a few inquiries, he located Red Gruffin in the “irrigation pit” where all the sprinkler piping, terminals, and control valves were housed. He did not look happy.

“Uh, hello? Mr. Gruffin? Sorry to bother you.”

Ol’ Red glanced up, bit down on his unlit cigar stump, and spat out a gooey brown chunk into the muddy pit in front of him. He went back to work.

Stats took that as an invitation to leave. He stepped back slowly and turned.

“What the blazes do you want?” growled Red.

The sudden surge to his heart was something Stats did not want, or need, at this moment. He stood frozen, except for the full body shake his heart had started.

“Huh?” the old man hacked out. “You want something? If not, why the devil are you down here bothering me?”

Barely managing to turn back toward the man, Stats wondered if it would be possible to speak with frozen lips and no breath. In any case, he knew he was going to have to find out.

“Um, I’m here to see if, I mean Paolo—Mr. Williams—thought …”

“What’s that good-for-nothing foul pole Paolo got to do with this?”

Stats released a small amount of the air trapped in his lungs. “He, uh, he just told me … that you were the number one expert on … on Fenway Park in the whole city.”

He squeezed his eyes shut at that desperate attempt to flatter a fire-breathing dragon.

When he reopened them, Mr. Gruffin had turned and was daggering Stats with his own eyes.

“Well, if I am, it’s only on account of nobody else around here does their own job worth a damp diddly-squat. Here I am, supervisor, on a Sunday, hunched over, pushing a monkey wrench down in the swamp.” He spat again.

“Um, well. I can be real quick.”

“Free country.”

Stats took another step and hunkered down, not so much to be closer, but in order to let his breathless words approach an audible level.

“Okay, thanks. Um, there’s been a lot of—I mean, Billee Orbitt said—”

“Orbitt? That loony goon hasn’t got two brain cells to rub together. What’s he babbling on about now?”

Stats covered his face with his hands in frustration.

“Okay, okay! Sorry,” he blurted out. “I was just wondering if there’s been, like, any changes to the park or something that might make things out of balance. That’s all!” And that was the best he could do.

Ol’ Red appeared somewhat shocked at the outburst. He steadied himself on one knee and took a moment to respond.

“Changes? Cripes, kid, look around. Seats on top of the Green Monster, two new rows of box seats up and down the baselines, cramping the ballfield, making extra work for me and my guys.”

Stats had never considered the recent years of remodeling through a groundskeeper’s eyes. He only knew that if it weren’t for the nearby media pit next to the visitors’ dugout, his own seats would now be in row three instead of up front.

“Hold right there.” Mr. Gruffin gripped his massive pipe wrench and pulled the handle toward his chest with a grunt. Then he left it hanging in midair while he yanked a rag out of his back pocket to rub the sweat from his neck.

Still squatting, he turned to face Stats. “Outta balance, huh?” He pointed with his cigar to a pile of debris. “Sit down, kid. I’ll give you something to chew on, if that’s what you want.”

Stats made his way to the clump of construction rubble and sat, careful not to step on a soggy cigar stub, in case that was the thing he was going to have to chew on.

“Lessee, now,” Ol’ Red started. “Place was a pigsty when I hired on, back in the summer of ’86. I got in and had everything scoured up spic-and-span-like. Couldn’t believe what I saw. Here this outfit was sitting in the catbird seat, heading for the World Series, and the park looked a track-shack mess. But we cleaned her up, top to bottom, good as we could get her.”

1986,
thought Stats. The year of Game Six. A devastating year, when the Sox came within one out—one strike!—of winning the World Series, and breaking the curse, only to see it dribble away.

Some say that was the year “The Curse” officially entered the vocabulary of Red Sox Nation, though others claim they’d felt it in their bones long before then.

Stats leaned forward. “Anything special stand out to you about that year?”

“Special? Well, other than pumping the tunnels free of muddy groundwater, bleaching out the mold growing everywhere, and flooding out the rats and mice, no, nothing all that special.”

Stats entered the info into his eXfyle smartphone, instantly forming a picture in his mind of what that must have looked like. Waterfalls crashing from the upper decks. Rivers rushing down the narrow cement aisles between the rows of wood-slat seats, spilling onto a puddling field.

“That was the one per-dicament, though,” Red continued, “I couldn’t get a handle on that per-ticular year. Rodents. Still deal with ’em every year. But it got better after the ’86 World
Series, let’s put it that way. I mean, just like any other ballpark in the country, there’s gonna be rats. But, looking back, ever since ’02 when the new owners started all this remodeling, it’s been up one year, down the next. For example, 2003, they added the Green Monster seats. That crazy project ran on longer than they figured, so we never got out ahead of ’em. Same with ’06—the .406 Club and that whole mess. All through the season we kept fighting rats. Have to say, 2003 and 2006 were the worst years as far as pests go. All that remodeling.”

This
was
a
lot
to chew on, thought Stats. The worst years, as far as critter control, were both heartbreak years.

“Which years seemed like the easiest?”

“Easy? Cripes, kid, never easy.” He puzzled on it a moment. “I’d guess ’04 was probably better than most. Maybe ’07.”

Whoa.
The world championship years
. Could there really be a connection? No, he thought,
no way
. He felt pretty silly even considering the idea. He could buy Billee’s mystic theory of the park being out of whack, even bad karma. But how could the rodent population have anything to do with a ball team’s balance? Even so, he wrote it all down.

“Hey, look, kid. I gotta get back to earning a buck.”

“Sure, sorry.” Stats rose. “Thanks for your help.”

Mr. Gruffin lifted his chin and grunted again, then re-wedged the cigar stub between his teeth.

But before Stats could leave, the crusty old man plucked the stub from his mouth with a pop. “Hey, kid. What’d you say your name was?”

“I, uh, I’m Freddy, but people call me Stats.”

“Yeah, okay, Stamps. If I think of anything else, I’ll tell that nincompoop Paolo.”

“Wow, that’d be great. Thanks!”

For a grumpy old curmudgeon, Ol’ Red Gruffin didn’t seem all that bad. In fact, he might have just given Stats a big ol’ clue.

Anxious to tell Billee what he’d just learned, Stats journeyed out to the pitcher’s favorite postgame retreat, a wooden chair in the shade of the Red Sox bull pen way out in right field.

Stepping through the gate on the first-base side—one priceless perk that came with having grown up in this park—he began his trek across the sacred turf. And to Stats, it always felt like the first time, an instantaneous feeling of having stepped upon a magical green carpet, ready to transport him anywhere in the ballpark’s past.

He crossed the infield between first and second and momentarily stood back as Carlton Fisk bounded past the first-base bag in the 1975 World Series after performing an arm-slashing body-English dance to keep a game-winning twelfth-inning foul-line-hugging home run fair. With each step Stats journeyed deeper into the lush meadow of infinite ballgames—the ones that would last forever. Looking up, he saw Big Papi’s twelfth-inning walk-off homer sail over the Green Monster in Game 4
of the 2004 play-offs against the Yankees. That one never came down—and it turned The Curse around.

Beneath him, the well-seasoned Kentucky bluegrass, thick with memories, caught each footfall, softly, gently. The earth below seemed to possess its own heartbeat, strong and healthy. And the more he walked, the more the ballpark’s heart meshed with his own.

This place was his sanctuary, his safe spot, his home, where it was always summertime and the breathing was easy.

“Hey, Billee,” he called toward the lonesome figure shrouded in white. “Tough game, huh?”

“They hate to see us lose, don’t they?” the pitcher said through his cotton towel wrap.

“I guess so.”

“Any news?”

“Well, maybe.” Stats allowed Billee time to unravel the long white cloth covering his face and head before he began. “Red Gruffin told me that pretty much the only years he could remember, going back to when he got here in 1986, that he didn’t have to battle a bunch of rats and mice were 2004 and 2007.”

Billee let the towel drape down around his neck, then gripped each side. He stood up and took a few paces. A pained look clouded his face as he studied the sky. “What the heck would rats and mice have to do with anything?”

“Well, I don’t know, but it—”

Billee cut him off with a raised hand. His steel-gray eyes panned the ballpark, from the first-base seats to the center-field
nook, as if he were letting this newly proffered rodential concept and all of its ramifications sink in.

“During ’04 and ’07, huh?” he said. “And the Sox haven’t been near a World Series since.”

“Right. And check this out. The worst years for rodents were ’03 and ’06.” After a moment, he added, “Do you think there’s a connection?”

Billee spun toward him. “There’s always a connection. But what it is, I don’t know.” Pacing one way, then back the other, Billee launched into a rundown on the current team.

“Today, Sammy Jethroe said his timing at the plate has never been better, but nothing falls in. Wadell Fens has lined into three double plays with runners in scoring position. Not to mention the rotten luck Teddy Lynn and Dusty are having. Who’s next?”

Billee walked to the bull pen fence and leaned on it. “I know it’s only the middle of May, but Rico says he already sent off to his
tía
Blanca back home for some sort of pepper, rum, sheep’s fat, and cactus-apple concoction to marinate his bats in to bring back the power. Cedro Marichal sleeps with sliced green Dominican papayas wrapped around his pitching arm to help coax back his holy ghost pitch—the one no batter can see. Each day, another guy goes down. And no one knows how to break us out of it. I just wish I could do
something
. But what?”

Billee scanned the ballpark once again. “It’s not the first time, though, is it? These curses go way back. Oh, if these walls could talk.”

Hearing Billee’s befuddlement caused Stats to gaze off in equal discomfort. He was about to suggest a retreat into logic,
a sort of “cooling off” period, wherein curse talk was put on hold for a while—at least until they found out if the cactus-apple-rum marinade showed any promise. But before he could, Billee brought a finger to his lips and tilted his head, as if listening for a talking wall.

Stats froze too. It was obviously a weird notion, though not any zanier than connecting rats to curses or bats to cactus, but if these walls
were
going to speak, he didn’t want to miss a word.

The silence went on for a minute or so, a long enough time for Stats to feel fully self-conscious, if not a bit silly. He was about to say something when, from high in the sky, there came an eerie screech.

“Chee! Chee!”

A lone hawk circled above the infield, orbiting counterclockwise, as if running the bases backward.

Continuing its graceful glide, the bird screamed again, this time, it seemed to Stats, with more purpose.