"Oh," Ethan said. "Just a minute." He flipped through the book, moistening his thumb with the tip of his tongue. "Right. Okay." He scanned the page, nodded, then looked at Jennifer. "Hang in there, Jennifer T.," he said. "Just bear down, and keep it close, and we'll get right back in this, okay?"
Though she knew he had just read them in a book, Ethan said the words with just the right amount of meaninglessness, and they made her feel better. She was about to say that she would hang in there, when the Hangin' Judge, proprietor of the Jersey Lily saloon, started to make his rolling, stoop-shouldered way to the mound.
"Awright," he said. "How about let's break up this little confabulation and play some baseball? Or is that too much to ask?"
At the same time, there was a scatter of footsteps behind her, and Jennifer T. turned to see Pettipaw come scurrying in from left field. He was out of breath and clearly excited.
"I just heard something from one of the riverboat boys in the stands," he said. "With these fine, fine instruments of mine." Lovingly he caressed one of his nicked little earflaps. He looked at Ethan. "Littie reuben, is it possible that a bit of your bat might have come into the possession of the Man with the Knife in His Boot?"
"I said break it up!" said the Hangin' Judge, shambling up to the mound, reeking atrociously of whisky, with a strange undercurrent of vanilla from having consumed seventeen of the Man with the Axe's flannel cakes.
Jennifer T. saw that Ethan did not like to have to answer Pettipaw's question.
"Yes," he said softly. "It's possible. I asked him to try to cut the Knot for me. But the Knot broke his Knife. Maybe he got a little shaving. I didn't see."
"The Man has a conjure eye," Pettipaw hissed, keeping his voice low. "Didn't you notice his blue gums? Give him a sliver of baseball power like that, even the tiniest chip, and there's no telling what he could do with it."
"Most likely he'll put a quickeye on them Liars," Cinquefoil said. "Ya can throw as hard and as smart as ya want, kid, if they can quickeye the ball, they'll hit it a ton."
Jennifer T. stared at Ethan. He was her friend, and she loved him, but at that moment she could have whittled him to a pile of very tiny shavings indeed. Him and that freaking Knot of his! It was bad enough he let it mess with his hitting game—now it was messing up her game, too.
"No sweat," she said. She took a fresh ball from Ethan, not looking him in the eye. "Let's get 'em."
Cinquefoil and Ethan returned to their positions, and Jennifer began to work over the mound with a toe. She had no idea whatever of how to pitch to a team under the force of a quickeye conjure, but she certainly wasn't going to let anybody else see that.
"Court is now in session," cried the Hangin' Judge, raising his sallow hands, with their manicured nails, over his hairless head. The spectators cheered, whistled, paid off their various bets and side bets, and then settled down to watch play resume. The Man with the Harpoon stepped in, a wicked grin peeking out from his sandy beard, his great bat tipped, in Jennifer T.'s imagination, with a jagged whale-piercing barb, ready to strike. Then, to Jennifer T.'s surprise, Ethan threw up his hands.
"Time!" he said. There was a curious look on his face, as if he had something to say to her that he wasn't sure she was going to like. She had seen him look at her this way many times; usually he was right.
With an exasperated growl, the Hangin' Judge informed the players that Time was, once again, officially Out. The crowd groaned and mocked the time-wasting Shadowtails. Ethan paid no attention. He trotted out to her, and started to talk.
"Cover your mouth," Jennifer T. said. "We don't want them reading lips."
"Oh, right," Ethan said, glancing over at the Liars' bench. He raised his mitt to his mouth, and spoke softly into it.
"I had an idea," he said. "Something I was just reading about in Peavine."
"What is it?" Jennifer T. said. She didn't like holding up the game, but she was more than willing to listen to anything on the subject of what the heck she was going to throw next.
"See, Peavine talks about a pitcher he caught, once, in a game way, way far away, near the Kraken Sea."
"Yeah?"
"The pitcher was a selkie. Like a seal, but he could sort of undo his seal skin, I guess, and turn into a man, or—"
"I know what a selkie is. I saw that movie with the seal lady."
"Well, this guy, because a selkie's a kind of a werebeast, see, he was a shadowtail. The only shadowtail pitcher Peavine ever caught. And this guy? The selkie? He could scamper a baseball."
Jennifer T. felt that she understood the idea immediately, on some deep level. At the same time she had absolutely no idea what Ethan was talking about.
"He could pitch the ball along a tiny little branch of the Tree, you know, make it disappear, and then at the last second, just before it crossed the plate, he could pop it back. Just like when Cutbelly got me from my house to the Tooth in like five minutes."
"A wormhole," she said. "They call it. I read about it Eli Drinkwater: A Life in Baseball by Happy Blackmore." Eli Drinkwater, as you know, was a great catcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates, and a noted theorist of pitching, who had been killed in a car crash before Jennifer T. was born. "You throw the ball into a wormhole, he said, and it comes out someplace totally different."
"Right!"
"But a wormhole isn't real, E. It's just, you know, a way of saying there's a lot of movement on your fastball."
"Maybe in the Middling," Ethan said. "Not here."
"Huh," said Jennifer T. "But, okay, what are you saying? Pettipaw should take over the pitching because he's a shadowtail? Or Thor?"
"Well, that's my part of the idea. But it's sort of trippy. But here it is." He leaned in very close, speaking through the webbing of his old stained pieplate. She could smell flannel cake on his breath, too. "Maybe you're a shadowtail."
"That's enough, now," the umpire shouted. "Now, play ball or I'm callin' this game a forfeit."
"What!" she said. "Get out of here!"
Ethan's face fell, and he looked very shocked. He started to say something.
"Go on!" Jennifer T. said. "Get back behind the plate where you belong!"
He nodded, then turned and walked slowly back toward home plate.
Jennifer stood there, turning the ball over and over in her fingers. A shadowtail? To be a shadowtail meant—what had her uncle Mo said? "You have to be something neither fish nor fowl, a little bit of this, a little of that. Always half in this world and half in the other to begin with." She was a little bit of a lot of different things, she supposed. Her mother was half Scotch-Irish and half German, with some Cherokee in there, too. Her father was half Suquamish and half Salishan and half junkyard dog. Everyone said she was a tomboy; that was a kind of a half and half, too. According to her Aunt Shambleau—it had not seemed to be intended as a compliment—she was half a girl and half a woman. She had grown up on Clam Island, and yet because she was a Rideout she was never fully a part of Clam Island, and had passed most of the days of her childhood living in a world of her own, out in the wintry gray at Hotel Beach. She had, over the years, thought of herself at one time or another as a half-breed, a mongrel, a mutt, a misfit, and an oddball. It had never occurred to her think of herself as a shadowtail, or to consider that you could find power in being caught between two worlds.
"Huh," said Jennifer T. to the baseball, turning it over and over. "How about that?"
When the Man with the Harpoon stepped in again, the grin even brighter and harder, there in his beard, than before, he had not a thought in his head. Ordinarily a batter tries to guess what the next pitch is going to be, and tries to adjust not only his swing but also his way of looking at the pitch. Since there was a quickeye on him, however, as on all his teammates, thanks to the wily conjure-man ways of the Man with the knife in His Boot, there was no need for him to guess, or to adjust anything at all. He just stood there, waggling the bat up behind his head, knowing that when the pitch left the reuben girl's hands, he
would see it as plainly as if it were a yarn ball rolled across a thick rug by a weak little kitten.
The girl looked in to the reuben boy, shook her head, shook it again—and then nodded. She had her pitch; well, so did the Man with the Harpoon. He had her pitch all nice and wrapped up in a neat little conjure-man package.
The girl settled the glove against her belt, the hand with the ball tucked deep inside it. Then she raised glove, ball and bare hand up over her head, and held them there. For an instant some wild idea seemed to flit across her face, and the Man with the Harpoon felt a momentary doubt about the conjure man's work. Then she brought her glove down again. The hand with the ball whipped free, coiled back behind her head, and then uncoiled with a smooth, corkscrew motion, and the ball sprang from her fingers. The conjure held; he saw it all. The ball rolled across the air toward him, fat and floating as a bumblebee. The stitches advanced, one slow tick at a time, steady as the second hand on his old brass pocket watch.
And then it disappeared, vanished completely, in a curl of steam that looked to the Man with the Harpoon like a puff of breath on a frosty morning. Baffled—spooked—he lashed out with the bat at the empty air. Then, to the utter and undying astonishment of the Man with the Harpoon, there was a thick smack as the ball hit the webbing of the catcher's mitt.
"Strike ONE!" howled the umpire.
Ethan looked down at the ball in his mitt, then grinned, and held it up. Even from the mound Jennifer T. could see that it was still covered in the frost of its crossing.
The crowd hooted and whistled in delight.
"I think you better have a look at that ball, ump," said the Man with the Harpoon.
"Quit your whinin'," the Hangin' Judge said. "And git back in that box."
She struck him out, looking, on two more pitches, and then struck out the side, and struck them out again in the eighth and ninth—nine strikeouts in a row. And she needed only twenty-eight pitches to do it—one more than the minimum. Her only mistake came in the bottom of the ninth when, pitching to the Man with the Knife in His Boot, she caught sight of his weird bluish-gray conjure-man gums, and it unnerved her a little. The next pitch that she sent spinning out through a tiny hole in the worlds vanished with a puff of steam, never to reappear in the Summerlands again.
The Hangin' Judge only hesitated a moment before making the call.
"Ball one!" he said.
As for the Shadowtails—they were as good as Ethan's word. She held the Liars close, and her team came back for five runs in the eighth (one of them batted in by Jennifer T. herself), and then three more in their half of the ninth, defeating the Big Liars of Old Cat Landing, and winning, in the process, the right to pass across the Big River. It's all there in Alkabetz's Universal Baseball Encyclopedia.
You can look it up.
CHAPTER 22
The Bottom-Cat
EXCEPT FOR THE MAN WITH the Knife in his Boot, who took the overturning of his conjure rather hard and slunk off downriver, to raise hell and console himself at dice and cards, the Liars, to their credit, quickly put the defeat behind them. In fact, at Annie Christmas's insistence, they set about doing what they could to help the Shadowtails complete the final leg of their long pilgrimage. The Tall Man with the Harpoon and the Tall Man with the Pole set about framing a vessel that would hold all nine of the Shadowtails and Skidbladnir, too, though she had long since run through her supply of prunejack. They sent the Tall Man with the Axe up into hills to fell the trees for the great raft, and then reduce the logs to rails and planking. The Tall Man with the Big Maul and the Tall Man with the Hammer drove the nails, and the Man with the Harpoon lashed the timbers with complicated knots into which he wove old nautical grammers for fine weather and smooth seas. Annie Christmas forged the oarlocks in her smithy, swinging a six-pound hammer, sewed the sail from stout canvas, and baked eighteen of her signature funeral pies (raisins and molasses). The Tall Woman with the Razor and Dice went out hunting hogs, armed only with her great Razor, and returned from the hills with ham, bacon, and fatback; she claimed that when the hogs saw her coming they were so afraid that they had slaughtered and smoked themselves. As for the Tall Man with the Rattlesnake Necktie, they did not see very much of him until the morning, two days after the game, when the raft was loaded, the winds favorable, and the Shadowtails ready to shove off.
He appeared just as Ethan was carrying his equipment bag toward the gangway. The rest of the team were all aboard, and the Man with the Pole was giving Rodrigo and Taffy, the two broadest backs, some last-minute instructions about poling. Ethan was late because he had stopped by to see if he could obtain one last flannel cake from the Man with the Axe; it was rolled up now in a sheet of waxed paper, like a scrap of carpet, and tucked between the handles of his bag.
"Hey, kid," said the Man with the Rattlesnake Necktie. He was leaning against a piling of the dock, picking his teeth with tip of his Bowie knife, one boot crossed over the other at the ankle.
"Oh, hey," Ethan said.
Of all the Big Liars, the Man with the Rattlesnake Necktie was the only one that made Ethan feel nervous. It was partly that dead-eyed Rattler, of course, endlessly coiling and knotting itself around the Man's throat. Even though he didn't have a conjure eye, or anything, there was just something about him that unsettled Ethan. It might have been that of all the Liars, his was the lie—of fire-snorting broncos and thousand-mile cattle drives and duels in the dusty streets of Tombstone and Abilene—that had lingered the longest in the Middling. The sparkling residue of it seemed to flash, at certain moments, from his eyes, and to wink from the golden bicuspid in his jaw.
Ethan stopped, and looked at the Man, because it appeared that he had something he wanted to say. But the Man just went on picking big horseteeth and looking down at Ethan the way you might watch a sparrow peck at a bit of tasty cookie that you dropped, sort of disgusted and resentful at the same time. His face was long and bony, his eyes pale, his cheeks raw.
"Ever ride a cat?" he said at last in his bowstring twang.
Ethan didn't know how to answer this. That is, he knew, of course, that in fact he had never ridden a cat. But he felt there must be some part of it he wasn't understanding.
"Mah bride rode a cat once," the Man said.
"Uh-huh," Ethan said, wondering if perhaps the old Cowboy weren't a little bit fetched. "That's nice."
"Rode it all the way down the Rio Grande."
"Rio Grande," Ethan said. "Right. In Texas."
"Said yuh have tuh grapple 'em. Jes' reach right in and noodle the suckers."
"I have to be going now," Ethan said.
"Jes' thought yuh should know," the Man said.
"What did he say?" said Jennifer T. when Ethan had come aboard the raft.
"Nothing," Ethan said. "Something about his bride sticking noodles into a cat."
"He shot his bride, you know," Pettipaw said, tugging on a whisker. "So they say."
"That doesn't surprise me at all," Ethan said.
Then they called out their last farewells to the people of Old Cat Landing and the surrounding Territories who had come down to the docks to see them off. Among them, sitting on the hood of his Cadillac and waving a white handkerchief, was Ringfinger Brown.
"Not me," he had said, when Ethan and Jennifer T. begged him to come with him. "Until the world ends, if it do end, I'm proceedin' on the old assumptions. I gots scoutin' to do. 'Sides, a scout suppose' to be there in the beginnin' of things. He like Moses—one of mine, by the way. He out there in the bushes, pokin' around for seeds of greatness. Ain't get to be there when the promise land get found or the championship get won."
Now Ethan and Jennifer T. stood leaning on the split-log railing of the raft, waving goodbye to the old scout as he and all the others receded, and Buendía and Taffy reached their long poles into the deep mud of the river, and the thick brown soupy water splashed up against the fresh-cut planks of the raft. They could see that he was calling something to them, but they were already
too far away to catch the words.
"What's he saying, Pettipaw?" Jennifer T. said.
The rat-man leapt up onto the rail and thrust his head toward the shore, cupping a hand to his ear. His tail quivered with the strain of listening.
"He's saying, 'Sometimes you just got to take time to bring them along a little bit,'" Pettipaw said.
It was the last time either Ethan or Jennifer T. ever saw the old scout, in any world.
AFTER AN HOUR, THE RIVER WAS TOO DEEP FOR THE POLES. THEY hoisted the sail that Annie Christmas had sewed them, and at once, as if summoned by the eldritch knots of the Tall Man with the Harpoon, a breeze sprang up behind them and pushed them toward the opposite shore. They were sailing toward the heart, the axil point, the very center of the Tree of Worlds. No one could say for sure just how wide the river was. Some claimed that it grew narrower the closer you were to death when you crossed it, and some that it narrowed with the nobility of your intentions, but after they had been on it for most of a day they began to see a ribbon of green on the horizon.
"Land ho!" Thor called. Ethan and Jennifer T. were sitting on the edge of the raft, with their feet in the water, ruining one of Annie Christmas's funeral pies with their hands, and licking their fingers, but Thor was perched on Skid's hood. Taffy lay sprawled atop the roof of the car, moaning softly, worn out from poling the raft all morning, racked with seasickness, and arguing with Grim the Giant about whether or not you could actually be seasick on a river. He kept after her until finally she reached out and took a swipe at him with one of her hairy paws, almost knocking him into the water. Rodrigo Buendía lay on the planks, on his back, smoking a fat Rey del Mundo. As for Spider-Rose, unlike Taffy, her long years of imprisonment had left her feeling uncomfortable in wide-open spaces. She sat in the car, with her doll, staring fixedly out the windshield at the land of all her unhopeable hopes.
"It ain't going to work," she kept murmuring to Nubakaduba. "No way is it going to work."