My Most Excellent Year (15 page)

The carnival was like a total bust. He hated the mime, he wouldn’t go anywhere near the petting zoo, the ten-foot-high roller coaster freaked him out, and when I volunteered to pop for his ice cream cone and he thumbed it down for a Häagen-Dazs bar (for $3.99!), it turned out he didn’t like the chocolate coating after all, so I had to peel it off before he’d eat it. And that was just for starters. Because before Mrs. Jordan told us it was time to leave, I noticed one booth that we hadn’t seen before. Balloons. Ten feet ahead of us. Balloons.

Oh Mama, why did I even go there? Remembering you and me, I bought him a purple one and tied the string around his wrist so he wouldn’t lose it like
I
did—but instead he spent the next ten minutes trying to get it off, the same way people usually do when they have gum stuck to their shoes. By then I already knew it was going to turn out that way. It’s like baseball. When you’re on a losing streak, you
can always tell what’s coming next. Proof? As we were walking back across the field with Mrs. Jordan toward the bleachers and I was figuring that this whole experiment had been a bigger bust than the National Recovery Act, I decided that maybe I could teach him a history lesson he’d never forget. Even if my fingers didn’t have much of a clue yet, at least we’d be talking about
some
thing. And nobody fits that bill better than Carlton Fisk.

“You should have seen the fans,” I said, dropping to the grass and pulling him down beside me. “Holy crap, they couldn’t believe it! Want me to show you what they saw?” Figuring I’d better not wait for a “no,” I hopped up onto my feet and crouched over a make-believe home plate—just the way Fisk used to crouch over the real thing at Fenway. Then I took some pretend practice chops just to get Hucky ready, and when I was positive I had him holding his breath, I let loose with a swing that even Fisk would have been proud of. I bounced along the first-base line waving my hands like I was yelling “Stay fair! Stay fair!” to the ball—and as soon as it cleared the Green
Monster, I jumped in the air with a “Yes!” and circled the imaginary bases with a victory fist spinning around over my head. Since Nehi’s seen me do my Fisk routine 100 times before, he knew enough to be waiting for me back at the make-believe plate so he could jump all over me. That’s when I checked over my shoulder to see if Hucky had been impressed. Some impressed. While he wasn’t watching, he’d found a sharp rock that he used to cut the string off his wrist, and then just for good measure he killed the purple balloon with it. You could hear the pop in Salem.

By the time we got back to the bleachers we weren’t speaking to each other. Mrs. Jordan went up into the stands to talk to Pop, I picked up my glove and lit out to second base, and Hucky took his usual seat by the on-deck circle. For some like totally clueless reason, I thought this meant we were back on track again. Instead he made me strike out four times.

AND I STILL DON’T KNOW HOW HE DOES IT!

I love you,

T.C.

P.S. Hucky sort of reminds me of the day I first came back to school after you were gone and how I suddenly noticed the way Augie was always by himself. It wasn’t that nobody liked him, but that he always kept his distance—probably because he knew already that he lived in a whole other world from everybody else. That’s why I wonder if Hucky ever feels the same way. Did people treat him like a regular kid or just a deaf one? And why would anybody think it makes a difference?

S
TUDENT
/A
DVISER
C
ONFERENCE

Lori Mahoney/Anthony C. Keller

Dear Mama,

We have a science teacher at Laurents named Mr. Landey, and since his father is deaf he knows American Sign Language (they call it ASL). So I’ve been learning it from him every day after sixth period. I’ve already nailed the whole alphabet, even though I still get D and F mixed up (which isn’t really a problem as long as I stay away from “duck”). I also learned how to say “My name is T.C.,” “I live near the park,” and “How did you know what pitches they were going to throw me?” When I asked Hucky the last one, it took me two hours to get an answer from him—but he finally spilled out a whole mess of hand signals that I didn’t understand, so I copied them down and showed them to Mr. Landey the next afternoon. Once he’d watched me repeat them, he said, “He’s telling you that he can read lips and steal signs.”

Hucky Harper might not play well with others yet, but maybe I can get the Red Sox to hire him as a really short batboy anyway. Whatever works.

I love you,

T.C.

Dear Mama,

Alé’s thrown me a breaking curve that I don’t know how to handle. The more time I spend with her, the more I want to be with her and the less I think about kissing her. Pop says he knows why, but that I have to figure it out for myself or it won’t mean anything. (Glinda said the same thing to Dorothy at the end of
The Wizard of Oz
about the red shoes, and it pissed me off then too.) Did you and Pop like each other first? Or did you fall in love first? Or did they both happen at the same time? Or did Bucky F. Dent’s home run screw up the usual batting order?

Before the game today, I gave Hucky one of my Carlton Fisk rookie cards—worth $22.50 on eBay—and reminded him who Fisk was by jumping up and down and circling a fist over my head. (When Grid Tarbell saw me do it, he thought I was on meds that I’d forgotten to take.) Hucky’s eyes popped wide open and he asked me how to
finger-spell “F-I-S-K.” Then “C-A-R-L-T-O-N.” Then “P-U-D-G-E,” after I told him that Pudge was Fisk’s nickname. But I decided to quit before he turned the card over to read the back. If I’d had to spell “Born in Bellows Falls, Vermont,” I’d have missed my next at-bat.

Our last game of the fall is usually just before Thanksgiving, since after that it’s too cold to play baseball anymore, even in sweatshirts. Carlton Fisk must have put Hucky in a really good mood, because from his new seat in our dugout he flashed me the whole menu of pitches ahead of time so I could have my pick of the litter: Fastball, fastball, curve, fastball, slider. (I even got to decide after ball two that the next one was going over the fence. And which
part
of the fence.) But I couldn’t help wondering about Hucky. Even for a spooky little deaf kid, he has more on the ball than Augie and I did at that age—and after three weeks, I’ve finally gotten him to talk (sort of). It was a good start, but now our season was over, and chances were that I wasn’t going to be to running into him again. And what would have happened to me and Augie if one of us had moved away before we’d had a chance to play Galaxy Fighters on the ceiling?

It turned out that Pop and Mrs. Jordan were having the same conversation up in the bleachers, but with a game plan of their own. So before the last “2-4-6-8, who do we appreciate?” was even half-finished, I was holding Hucky’s hand in the parking lot while Mrs. Jordan was trying to unsqueeze her maroon Mazda SUV out of a space that said “Compact Only.” (If
I’d
pulled something like that, I’d have been grounded for two days.)

I guess I thought that the Children’s Residence Home at the Deaf Institute was going to be like in that movie
Oliver!
with kids wearing rags and sleeping on wooden mattresses and eating slop and getting
their knuckles rapped by wide men in triangle hats when they asked for more. So I wasn’t ready for the four-floor house on Beals Street with yellow pillars on the front porch and dark green shingles. It looks like something that belongs in either a garden magazine or on the History Channel. Mrs. Jordan said there were six bedrooms for eight kids and four adults. That’s almost a hotel.

Hucky was his usual leave-me-alone self in the van, and by the time we’d walked up the porch steps (also yellow) and through the front door, the way he was glaring at me gave me the feeling I was about to be arrested for trespassing. So it was Mrs. Jordan who conducted the guided tour—starting in the backyard with the swings and the hanging tire and the log cabin and the trampoline. (I SO wanted to get out of my sneaks and show off my jumping somersault, but Mrs. Jordan didn’t look like the type who’d appreciate it. Think of Luke Skywalker’s aunt Beruh. Not exactly a barrel of laughs.) She ended the first part of the itinerary with the living room and fireplace so big that you could practically imagine one of Augie’s singing Christmastime movies happening in it.

Once Hucky realized we were heading toward the stairs that led to his room, he raced up the steps ahead of us, ducked inside, and locked the door. What a shock. Not. Mrs. Jordan looked a little embarrassed while she was fishing a key out of her pocket.

“He has trouble trusting new people,” she warned me. Duh. You think?

Hucky shares his room with Mateo, a six-year-old with dark hair and eyes who looks enough like Alé to be her baby brother. (Hucky was nowhere to be found, but Mrs. Jordan tried to make me feel better by telling me he was probably hiding in the sheet cabinet
again. Like this is supposed to come off as normal.) So between Mateo and Mrs. J, I got the whole inventory:

Mrs. Jordan left us alone by promising that Hucky would come
out sooner or later, because he usually did. (If the “usually” was supposed to make me feel confident, it didn’t.) For some reason it reminded me of getting Nehi to come out from under the couch at bath time by leaving Snicker Snax on the floor—but this probably wasn’t going to work with Hucky. Not that I had to worry. Since he figured that I’d be leaving with Mrs. Jordan, he waited until he could feel the door close, and then he stuck his head out from the sheet cabinet just long enough to catch my eye and freeze in his tracks.
Busted!
Meanwhile, I was preoccupied with Mateo and an obnoxious walking-talking plastic toy called Penguin Pat that somebody really should have melted before it ever got put on the market. But I made sure that Hucky saw that I wasn’t paying any attention to him at all, which really began burning his six-year-old ass. (You know this routine, Mama. You invented it. Remember how you got me to come out of the drainpipe?)