Summerland (5 page)

"As a matter of fact, they did," said Ringfinger Brown. "A long time ago."

IT WAS THE STRANGEST MOMENT IN WHAT HAD SO FAR BEEN A
fairly strange morning. When Ethan got back to the bench, nobody turned around, or even seemed to notice that he had ever left. But the very instant his butt touched the smooth pine surface of the bench, Mr. Olafssen looked over at him, and gave him a big fatal wink.

"All right, Ethan. Big Ethan. Let's get you in the game."

Things, it turned out, were no longer quite so rosy for the Roosters as when Ethan had left. The Angels had managed to come back with six more runs, and now the score was 11–8. But it was the top of the seventh and final inning, and Mr. Olafssen was pretty much obliged, by the laws of decency, fair play, and the Clam Island Mustang League, to play every able-bodied kid on the team for at least half an inning of every game. There were two out, two on, and no runs in, and it was going to be up to Ethan to pad the Roosters' lead.

"Get in there, now," Mr. Olafssen said, just the way he always did. "Get in there and take your hacks."

Ethan, however, did not want any hacks. Usually, when he came to the plate, Ethan Feld tried to swing his bat as little as possible. He just kept the bat on his shoulder, hoping for a walk. The truth is, he was afraid of trying to accomplish anything more, at the plate, than a walk. And he was afraid of being hit by the ball. But mostly he was mortally afraid of striking out swinging. Was there any worse kind of failure than that?
Striking out
. It was the way you described it when you failed at anything else in life, the symbol of every other kind of thing a person could possibly get wrong. Often enough, the opposing pitching was not too good in the Mustang League. Ethan's strategy of just standing there, waiting for four bad pitches to come across the plate before three good ones did, frequently worked. But it was a strategy that was not at all respected by the other players. Ethan's nickname in the Mustang League, in fact, was "Dog Boy," because of the way he was always hoping for a walk.

He trudged up to the plate, dragging his bat behind him like a caveman in the cartoons dragging his club. He hoisted the bat to his shoulder—it was still sore from when his father had stopped short to avoid hitting the little fox-monkey thing—and looked over at his father, who gave him a big thumbs-up. Then Ethan stared out at Per Davis, who had taken over the pitching for the Angels. Per looked almost sorry to see Ethan. He winced a little bit, then sighed, and went into his stretch. A moment later something troubled the air around Ethan's hands.

"Her-ite one!" cried out the umpire, Mr. Arch Brody of Brody's Drug. Mr. Brody prided himself on the authentic-sounding way he called the balls and strikes.

"Come on, Dog Boy," called Kyle. "Get that bat off your shoulder."

"Come on, Dog!" called the other boys.

Ethan let another blur color the air between him and Per Davis.

"Her-ite TWO!" Mr. Arch Brody yelled.

Ethan heard the gravelly voice of Ringfinger Brown.

"When the time come," the old man said, "you best be ready to swing."

Ethan searched the crowd but could not find the old man anywhere, though the voice had sounded as if it were just at his elbow. But he saw that Jennifer T. was looking right at him.

"Breathe," she suggested, moving her lips without speaking. Ethan realized that he had been holding his breath from the moment Mr. Olafssen had looked his way.

He stepped out, took a breath, then stepped back in, resolved at last to take a hack. Playing the odds was one thing when the count was even at 0; with two strikes on him, maybe it made more sense to swing. When Per Davis reared back to let fly, Ethan wiggled his fingers on the shaft of the bat, and worked his shoulders up and down. Then, unfortunately, just before he swung the bat he did something kind of questionable. He closed his eyes.

"Her-ite her-REE!" shouted Mr. Brody, sealing Ethan's doom.

"That's all right," Jennifer T. told him as they walked out to the field. "We'll hold 'em. At least you took a hack."

"Yeah."

"It was a nice-looking swing."

"Yeah."

"Just a little early, is all."

"I shut my eyes," Ethan said.

Jennifer T. stopped at first base, which was hers. She shook her head, not bothering to conceal her exasperation with Ethan, and then turned toward home plate.

"Well, try to keep them open in the field, huh?"

In the field—Coach Olafssen always stuck Ethan out in right, a region of the diamond to which boys who prefer to remain invisible have been sent since baseball was invented—the situation was, if anything, even worse. Forget about catching the ball; Ethan never seemed to
see
it when it was headed toward him. Even after a fly ball landed in the grass, and went skipping happily along toward the outfield fence for a triple at least, Ethan often took quite a while to find it. And then, when, finding it at last, he threw the ball in! Oy! An entire row of fathers, watching from behind the backstop, would smack their foreheads in despair. Ethan never remembered to throw to the cut-off man, who stood waiting, halfway between Ethan and home, to relay the throw to the catcher. No, he just let loose, eyes screwed tight shut: a big, wild windmill of a throw that ended up nowhere near home plate, but in the parking lot behind third base, or, once, on the hindquarters of a sleeping Labrador retriever.

Ethan wandered into right, hoping with all his heart that nothing would happen while he stood there. His hand felt sweaty and numb inside his big, stiff new fielder's mitt. The chill wind he had felt at Hotel Beach was blowing across the ball field now, and clouds were covering the sun. The gray light made Ethan squint. It gave him a headache. An echo of the old man's voice lingered in his mind in a way that he found quite irritating. He puzzled for a while over the question of whether there was really any difference, as far as your brain was concerned, between hearing something and remembering how something sounded. Then he worked for a while on possible theories to account for the presence on Clam Island of a rare African primate. His thoughts, in other words, were far removed from baseball. He was dimly aware of the other players chattering, pounding their gloves, teasing or encouraging each other, but he felt very far away from it all. He felt like the one balloon at a birthday party that comes loose from a lawn chair and floats off into the sky.

A baseball landed nearby, and rolled away toward the fence at the edge of the field, as if it had someplace important to get to.

Later it turned out that Ethan was supposed to have caught that ball. Four runs scored, making the final total Angels 12, Roosters 11. In other words, eight losses in a row. The Angel who hit the ball that Ethan was supposed to have caught, Tommy Bluefield, was angry at Ethan, because even though his hit had brought in all three baserunners and himself, it did not count as a grand slam home run, since Ethan had committed an error. He ought to have caught the ball.

"You stink," Tommy Bluefield told him.

The magnitude of Ethan's failure, the shame that he had brought down on himself, ought to have been the focus of everyone's thoughts, just then, as Ethan dragged his sorry self off the field to the bleachers, where his father was waiting with the crumpled flower of his smile. His teammates ought to have lined up on either side of him and beaten him with their mitts as he was made to run a gauntlet. They ought to have ripped the patch from his uniform shoulder, broken his bat, and uninvited him to come have post-game pizza in Clam Center with everybody else. Instead they seemed quickly to lose interest in the shameful saga of Ethan Feld, and to turn their wondering faces to the sky. On Jock MacDougal Field, at the Tooth, where every summer for as long as white men could remember there had been an endless supply of blue sky and sunshine, it had started to rain.

*
"The
Darndest
Way of Getting from Here to There"—slogan, Feld Airship, Inc.

CHAPTER 2

A Hot Prospect

THE NEXT MORNING ETHAN
awoke from dreams of freakish versions of baseball where there were seven bases, two pitchers, and outfields beyond outfields reaching into infinity, to find the little red fox-monkey sitting on his chest. Its thick fur was neatly combed and braided, and the braids on its head were tied with bright blue ribbons. And it was smoking a pipe. Ethan opened his mouth to scream but no sound emerged. The creature weighed heavily on his chest, like a sack of nails. Whoever had bathed it and tied its hair in bows had also doused it in rosewater, but underneath the perfume it stank like a fox, a rank smell of meat and mud. Its snout quivered with intelligence and its gleaming black eyes peered curiously at Ethan. It looked a little dubious about what it saw. Ethan opened and closed his mouth, gasping like a fish on a dock, trying to cry out for his father.

"Calm, piglet," said the fox-monkey. "Breathe." Its voice was small and raspy. It sounded like an old recording, coming through a gramophone bell. "Yes, yes," it went on, soothingly. "Just take a breath and never be afraid of old Mr. C., for he isn't going to hurt not the tiniest hair of your poor hairless piglet self."

"What—?" Ethan managed. "What—?"

"My name is Cutbelly. I am a werefox. I am seven hundred and sixty-five years old. I have been sent to offer you everlasting fame and a fantastic destiny." He scratched with a black fingernail at an itch in the dazzling white fur of his chest. "Go ahead," he said. He pointed at Ethan with the stem of his pipe. "Take a few deep breaths."

"Sitting…" Ethan tried. "On…my…chest."

"Oh! Ha-ha!" The werefox tumbled backward off of Ethan, exposing him to the startling sight of its private parts and furry behind. For Cutbelly was quite naked. This had not struck Ethan as odd when he was under the impression that he (Cutbelly was definitely a he) was an animal, but now Ethan sort of wished that Cutbelly would at least wear some pants. After completing his back flip, Cutbelly landed on his long bony back paws. The feet were much foxier than the quick black hands. "My apologies."

Ethan sat up and tried to catch his breath. He looked at the clock on his nightstand: 7:23. His father might walk in at any moment and find him talking to this smelly red-brown thing. His eyes strayed to the door of his bedroom, and Cutbelly noticed.

"Not to worry about your pa," he said. "The Neighbors worked me a sleeping grammer. Your pa would not hear the crack of Ragged Rock."

"Ragged Rock? Where is that?"

"It isn't a place," Cutbelly said, relighting his pipe. It had been worked from a piece of bone. Ethan thought:
Human bone
. On the bowl was carved the bearded likeness of Abraham Lincoln, of all things. "It's a
time
. A day, to be precise. A day to wake anybody who might be sleeping, including the dead themselves. But not your pa. No, even come Ragged Rock he will sleep, until you return safely from speaking with the Neighbors, and I tuck your little piglet self snug back into your bed."