The Youngest Hero (20 page)

Elgin looked so terrible, I shrieked, “What happened to you?”

He shushed me and I was certain someone in the basement had attacked him. “Tell me!” I said.

“Upstairs,” he said, leading me to the elevator. As the doors shut, I examined his head under the light. “What in the world?”

“It’s just not working yet, Momma. It’s my own fault. I’ll get it right. Just don’t worry about me. My basket didn’t work
either, and I broke the light.”

“Oh, no!”

“I’m sure it just needs a new bulb. I hope.”

“I hope so too, Elgin, because we’ve got no more extra money for this thing.”

“This thing was your idea, Momma.”

“Don’t get smart with me or you won’t see it again.”

“I wasn’t being smart! I just don’t want you acting like this is some crazy idea of mine that you have to pay for.”

“Did the ball hit you?” I said. “Were you trying to bat before you knew where the thing would throw the ball?”

“Not exactly.”

“Not exactly, what? Did the ball hit you or what?”

“A ball hit me.”

A minute after we were in our apartment and before Elgin could even explain, I heard a knock at the door. It was a tiny black
girl with pigtails.

“’Scuse me, ma’am, but Mistuh Brava say he wanna see you right now. Say you know where to meet im.”

“Thank you, honey,” I said. I shut the door and turned to Elgin. “What would he have found in the basement?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“Yes, I do. I want no surprises.”

“I haven’t got time to explain.”

“You comin with me?”

“I’d better not, Momma. You’ll do better cooling him off without me there.”

“True enough,” I said, and I ran down all six flights to the basement door. I had forgotten to get the key from Elgin, so
I had to knock. It seemed strange, as if I were asking to be bawled out.

Mr. Bravura was huffing and puffing when he reached the door. “I gave you a key,” he said. “Why do you knock?”

“I forgot it, I’m sorry,” I said. “It sounded like an emergency.”

“An emergency is right! This will not do! Look at this mess!”

“I know about the light,” I said, following him down the stairs. “Elgin told me.”

He shone a flashlight into the big room. “And what did he tell you about the golf balls?”

“Golf balls?”

“I am telling you something, Mrs. Woodell. You know I think the world of you and the boy, I really do. I have tried to treat
you with more than courtesy.”

“I know.”

“In fact, I think you are most charming and beautiful, and you have been wonderful to me.”

“I know. Forgive us.”

“Forgiveness is not what this is about, ma’am.”

“Mr. Bravura—”

“Call me Ricardo, but for now, don’t call me anything and let me finish. I want this place repaired, the light replaced,
and the cord plugged in somewhere else. There is a socket in the smaller room, but you will need a heavy-duty extension cord,
which I don’t have. I want the glass swept up, and I don’t ever want balls left on the floor when the boy leaves the basement.”

“That’s certainly fair, but he injured himself or I’m sure he would have cleaned up the—”

“If that is too much to ask, then I must ask for the key back.”

“It’s not too much to ask.”

“Good, because we’re talking about my job here. You know that my wife is ill and in bed all day. I get my room free plus my
small salary, which puts food on our table and gives us medicine for her. I cannot be without this job. We would be homeless
and she would die.”

“I understand.”

“I don’t think you do. You have a good job and can pay your rent and buy fancy equipment for your boy.”

I nearly laughed but thought better of countering Mr. Bravura, who had by now worked himself into an unattractive lather in
the faint light from the basement stairs.

“I wonder if you know what it means to be desperate, to have a life-and-death need to keep a job. I know for certain that
if the owner of this building saw this, I would be out. Out! No severance pay. No warning. No notice. Out, gone, finished,
over and done with.”

I thought of what a dive the rest of the building was. It stank. It was moldy, greasy, filthy. What owner in his right mind
would even come in there? And then to the basement? And would he really expect the basement to be spotless when the rest of
the place was such a rat hole?

“Ricardo,” I said, “accept our apology. We’ll get this cleaned up right away and you’ll never have to worry about it again.
I’ll talk to the boy about what you’ve said, and I know he’ll be careful to follow your orders, because he thinks so highly
of you.”

That quieted him for a moment.

“Well, I like him too,” he said. “But this, this will just not do.”

I had figured out a few things. First, ice hurts before it helps. My forehead throbbed. I took off my pants and shirt and
looked at my back and legs in the mirror. Several red spots would become bruises, I knew. I looked like the victim of a stoning.
I was standing before the mirror with a washcloth full of ice on my forehead when my mother returned.

“Guess I should have told you about the golf balls, huh?”

“That would’ve been nice. You can imagine what he said.”

“He throwing us out?”

“No, he’s not, no thanks to you.”

She told me everything Mr. Bravura said.

“I’m sorry, Momma,” I said, and I told her how it had all happened.

“How is your head?” she said finally.

“It’s all right, and why are you smiling?”

“I’m not,” she said, but then burst into laughter. “I’m sorry, El, but that musta been a sight! I wish I could’ve seen that!”

“I’m sure glad you care about me so much,” I said, but I couldn’t help laughing too.

Over the weekend, I worked on the light fixture, which needed only a new bulb, and the machine. I added a few pieces to help
balance the trough to make up for the weight of the golf balls, but I wasn’t ready to try the machine yet. I was able to pick
up a used extension cord for fifty cents (after hard bargaining at the secondhand store), so there would be nothing hanging
down in the middle of the room except the lightbulb. I made a smaller cover for it that would be harder to hit, and I knew
I could adjust the machine so it wouldn’t pitch the ball at the light or even bounce off the wall and hit the light. The only
way to hit the light after that would be if I hit it with a batted ball. At this point, I couldn’t imagine getting the bat
around fast enough to do anything more than just bunt a ball.

Most important, I was doing odd jobs for my mother and for Mr. Bravura, saving a little each day so I could afford some large
sheets of canvas. I would hang those from the ceiling on the back wall behind the pitching machine. If a pitch got past me—as
I knew most would—and banged off the far wall, that was fine. But I wanted it to hit something flexible at the other end so
it wouldn’t keep bouncing around and hit me. That way, if I hit a ball, it would hit the canvas and drop near the machine.
If I missed a ball, it would bounce off the wall behind me and fly to the other end where it also would hit the canvas and
drop.

My only problem was that the canvas sheets I found at the secondhand store, cheap as they were, were white. I was making this
the most difficult batting practice area I could.

I was not going to slow down the machine. I had no idea how fast it could throw the golf balls, but I knew from having watched
it when I got nailed so many times that it was faster than anything I had ever seen. No pitcher and no pitching machine threw
the ball so fast that it looked like a white streak.

If I could get it to throw strikes, with a white canvas background, while I was swinging a skinny but heavy aluminum bat,
well, that would be some kind of training. I hoped it would make live pitching with a bigger ball, and hitting with a bigger
bat, look slower and easier. I didn’t know if anything like that had ever been tried before, but it seemed to make sense.

I washed the golf balls until they gleamed white. I was grateful for their colored stripes; without them I would never have
been able to see the balls against that background.

My last purchase was the batting helmet that had fit me so perfectly in the secondhand store. My new friend, the man behind
the counter, showed me how to cut down the foam rubber around the ears as I got older and bigger. “That should fit you for
three or four more years, if you do it right. If you have any questions or problems with it, just bring it in here when it
needs cuttin, and I’ll do it with my bowie.” He patted the blade at his hip, and I decided that was something I would want
to see: a man who knew what he was doing, adjusting sports equipment with a hunting knife.

By the time I had rearranged the room, hung the canvas, and made all the repairs, I was back in the swing of things at school
and had only a few hours after homework every night to make final adjustments. I kept making excuses to my friends who played
fastpitch, but the fact was, I was not getting good enough competition there. I didn’t want to tell them that, but it was
true. The game was still fun and challenging, but I was hitting about seven hundred. And after a lot of dry swinging with
the heavy fungo, the broom handle seemed like a toy. I could smash that fastpitch ball.

Every afternoon I played an hour of fastpitch, went home for supper, did my homework, and tinkered with the machine in the
basement. I finally got it to where it would fire the golf balls, one every few seconds, right into my strike zone. By adjusting
the wheels, I could make it curve in or out or up or down, but of course I had to have it throw all the balls one way before
adjusting it to throw them another way.

I had not yet stepped into the box against the steel monster. I was waiting for final adjustments and lots of time. That would
come at Christmas break when I would have almost three weeks to take my cuts or, I hoped not, my lumps.

T
he Chicago snow came as what the local TV newspeople called a lake-effect dump during the first week of December. They predicted
minor flurries followed by Indian summer days that would clear the white stuff, but the city was frozen nearly to a halt till
March.

One day the sun would melt the drifts to slush, making people on the side streets hope for plows to clear them with the same
enthusiasm that streets in the Loop and the expressways were cleared. But as evening fell, so would more snow, and everything
reverted to the way it was. Soon even those sunny days became rare. Little flags on long metal rods were attached to fire
hydrants so they could be found in the snow. People took to attaching the same to their car antennae so other motorists could
see them at corners over the five- and six-foot piles and drifts.

I found it depressing. Walking was treacherous. The wait for the buses seemed interminable. The shipping charge for Elgin’s
pitching machine had eaten most of my coat money, so I chose a pair of cheap boots and a shawl to wear between my sweater
and my old coat.

I kind of liked the snow. I had never seen it before, and I liked running and jumping in it, climbing the piles, making snowmen
with my friends. There was no fastpitch in this weather. Our “field” had to be flat from the pitcher and outfielders on one
side of the street to the hitter on the other. But snowdrifts and parked cars blocked ours. I had found one of my rubber-coated
baseballs and adjusted the pitching machine to see what it would do with the ball. I changed only the distance between the
two pitching wheels. I didn’t want to mess with the trajectory, because it had taken me too long to adjust it for the golf
balls. Though I was interested in the baseball, I wasn’t about to adjust the whole machine for one ball I would have to retrieve
and toss back into the container every time.

Mostly I was curious to know if the machine only seemed superfast because it had been throwing golf balls, or if it was malfunctioning.
I wasn’t sure I would know, except to compare it to what I remembered seeing at batting ranges.

One night after dinner I fired up the machine and fed the ball into the pitching wheels. Even though the ball hit the floor
about three feet in front of the wall, instead of right in the strike zone as the golf balls had been doing, the machine put
the same spin on it. The baseball flashed toward the wall, spinning and sweeping to the right. When it hit the floor and then
the wall, it bounced high toward the light and blasted into the canvas at the far end, dropping to the floor.