A blast of water drills his chest and he falls forward, landing on his feet, then twisting and falling backward into a perfect crucifixion pose. Petey hoses him relentlessly.
God, those were the days for Willie. Days when his body was his friend; it would do anything he asked of it. Days when just being Willie Weaver made things happen; when Petey Shropshire and Max Craig and Eddie Single would have sold their souls to play on the same team with him, or walk into Jackie’s café by his side. Days when he felt so fast and strong and confident that nothing could touch him.
CHAPTER 2
On the Monday before the Crazy Horse Electric game, late in the evening, Willie and his dad take a ride. With the full moon peeking over the high eastern bluffs, Big Will backs the 700cc Honda Shadow out of the garage, coasts it down the driveway to the street, waits for Willie to slide on behind and hits the starter button. Willie hooks his thumbs in his dad’s belt loops and leans back against the sissy bar, thinking how he loves the deep purr of the engine—how the power of the bike excites him. They tighten the chin straps on their helmets and Big Will eases the bike quietly down the neighborhood street to the stop sign and out the four-lane arterial toward the bluffs. At the 76 station near the edge of town, Will stops for gas and they leave the helmets—worn this far for Sandy Weaver’s benefit should she happen to have been watching them leave—with the proprietor, who asks Willie if Samson Floral is going to clean up on Crazy Horse Electric on Friday.
Big Will eases the bike up to sixty as they cruise along the base of the bluffs, hidden in the long shadow from the light of the moon, then drops down a gear moving into the winding turns that will weave them the seven ribboned miles to the top. Willie leans into the turns with his dad—and with the bike—and they take each one faster than the last; shoulders closer to the highway whipping by. Moving into the tighter turns near the summit, Willie imagines they are a human wave, flowing easily from side to side in perfect synch. This would be dangerous with anybody but his dad, whom Willie sees as immortal. “Go with it,” Big Will said the first time out, more than four years ago, not long after Missy’s death. “Just do what the bike does.”
Willie does go with it; the Shadow has taught him balance.
At the top of the bluff, on the freshly paved two-lane highway, the Shadow leaps forward as Big Will opens her up. Winding curves allow one kind of thrill, but only velocity makes it right on the straightaway. The moon rests on the horizon—as if taking a quick breather before climbing on into the night—casting the rugged high-plains scrubland in a bluish glow. The warm night wind whips through Willie’s long hair, gently massaging his scalp, and at this speed he is able to close his eyes and picture the two of them from afar, cutting across the giant face of the full summer moon, tires lightly kissing the pavement; shadow dancing. His dad opens it up all the way now, and Willie leans back hard against the sissy bar, lost in the raw speed, suppressing his impulse to scream out his joy at the top of his lungs. He laughs to himself instead and shakes his head in the wind, wishing his dad could understand how close he feels when they do this.
Several quick miles into the ride along the top of the bluffs, Big Will takes a left, cuts the speed and moves the bike slowly along the narrow dirt road leading to Corbut Creek, where the two have spent hundreds of hours quietly fishing. He pulls up near their favorite hole and switches off the key, automatically cutting the light and engine. They sit, eyes adjusting to the shadowy moonlight, before Willie pulls a flashlight from the saddlebags and they move cautiously toward the bank. The moon reflects brightly off the surface of the fishing hole and Big Will motions Willie around the edge to put it at their back. They sit in the grass and Willie switches on the light, probing it deep into the water, where eventually a fish appears, then another, seeming bewildered. It would be easy to take them out; create chaos in their environment and take advantage of their confusion; but if Big Will stands for anything, it’s a fair fight.
“God, look at ’em, Dad,” Willie says. “I was beginning to think they’d gone South for the summer. Last two times out I been skunked.”
Big Will nods, takes the light from Willie and shines it under a deep rock. A huge trout appears for an instant, then slides back into the watery darkness. “He’s the one I want,” he says, cutting the flashlight and leaning back on laced fingers in the grass.
“Why doesn’t Mom fish with us anymore, I wonder?” Willie asks, half to himself and half to his dad; knowing if she did still fish with them and if she knew there was one that size in the creek, she’d get him, come hell or high water.
Big Will hardens, then sighs. “Guess she got tired of catching all the big ones and making you and me look like a couple of rookies.”
Willie knows there’s more to it than that; has to be. Mom liked fishing too much. It’s one more thing somehow mysteriously connected to the day Missy died. He gathers tinder and some small sticks for a fire.
“This Crazy Horse game,” Big Will says, setting a match to the tinder, “what do you think?”
“I’m excited. A little nervous maybe, but not bad. Mostly just excited.”
“That’s good. Pay real close attention to how you feel. Don’t turn your attention away a minute from now till the time it’s over.”
“What do you mean?”
“For a month before we went to the Rose Bowl,” Big Will says, “I knew it would be my game. The regular season was over and all we had to do was stay sharp until New Year’s Day. I knew that was it for me. I was too small to go to the pro’s and in a month I’d be out of the game for good. I dreaded it being over so much that I focused on every drill; every play called, every cut, every reception. I wanted to remember each second of my time left in football, because I didn’t know if I’d ever be that good at anything again.”
Willie watches his dad staring soft-eyed into the fire, running his glory days over in his head. He hears lots of Rose Bowl stories.
Big Will nods slowly. “I knew it was my game; not only that we were going to win, but that I owned it. Every day I watched it come twenty-four hours closer and I played it a different way. By game day, nothing Michigan threw at us could have surprised me.”
He snaps to, glancing over to Willie, who stares back, captive.
“The point is,” Big Will goes on, “that I don’t just remember the game, I remember everything that led up to it, and in my memory the anticipation is as good as the outcome, maybe better. This won’t be the end of your athletic career like the Rose Bowl was mine, but it’s big enough to be worth remembering.”
He touches Willie’s knee. “Pay attention to everything,” he says. “This could be your game.”
Willie doesn’t always understand everything his dad says to him, but he always listens hard because Big Will isn’t a babbler; when he says something—anything—he’s serious; and often the meaning comes later for Willie.
“What if it isn’t?” Willie asks. “My game, I mean.”
Big Will shrugs. “Then it isn’t. But it won’t be because you weren’t ready.”
They douse the fire with creek water, kick it around until the last spark is out and take the Shadow back home.
Late Wednesday afternoon, Big Will warms him up. Crouched against the six-foot wood fence in the back yard and working his twenty-year-old catcher’s mitt like the mouth of a large hand puppet, he gently primes his son. “Go right after the Whitworth kid,” he says. “He’s the best they’ve got. First time up, you blow him over with fastballs. Stay in the corners; nothing too sweet.”
Willie nods and moves into an exaggerated stretch, bringing his arm straight over the top almost in slow motion. The ball pops like a rifle shot in his dad’s glove just like it does in Johnny’s, no matter what speed the pitch. Willie and his dad have spent thousands of hours here in the backyard working on Willie’s stuff; adjusting his delivery and talking about how life works. Three years ago Big Will built the regulation pitcher’s mound and sunk a brand-new rubber home plate exactly
sixty feet six inches away, and since then Willie has pitched inning after endless inning right here.
“Did you guys plan Missy?” Willie asks.
“What?”
“Did you plan to have her, or was she an accident?”
“You got your head in this game or what?”
“I got my head in it,” Willie says. “It’s just that sometimes when important things happen, I think about other important things.”
It’s been four years since Missy’s death and Willie has discovered that sometimes, no matter how painful it is to anyone, he just has to talk about her; as if she might disappear from the family history if he didn’t. They throw in silence for a while, and finally Big Will says, “What made you ask a question like that?”
“Actually, Johnny asked me that back when Mom was pregnant. Said it was strange to plan your kids twelve years apart. Thought maybe you and Mom got on a roll and forgot where you put your doodads.”
“Our doodads?”
“Yeah. You know, whatever you use to keep from having babies.”
“Ah, our doodads. I vote ‘yes’ on the school levy so we can have a few extras in the curriculum, like sex education, and my kid’s calling contraceptive devices ‘doodads.’” He fires a hard one back, but Willie catches it in the webbing and is saved the stinging hand his dad intends.
Willie leans forward, glove behind his back, squinting as if for a sign, goes into the stretch, stops and says, “Well, did you?”
“Did I what?”
“Get hot and forget your doodads. Johnny said he figured probably you guys got caught out at the drive-in or something and you let your magic whanger do your thinking for you.” Willie loves those safe times when he can bait his dad.
“Johnny’s going to get a soap lunch the next time I see him,” Big Will says. “Now get your head into this game.”
They throw awhile longer until Willie’s arm feels warm and loose, then head into the house, where his dad rubs it down with heat balm. The arm is ready. Willie’s ready. It’s still two days to the game, but Willie’s wishing it were now, forgetting for the moment his dad’s advice to relish the anticipation. He’d gladly take Sal Whitworth on today. Instead he goes to the kitchen, makes up a couple quarts of lemonade and they sit in the shade and relax.
“Actually,” Big Will says, “we were in a motel in Seattle, as near as I can figure. Our ‘doodads’ were in a drawer in Coho. If you tell Johnny Rivers that, you won’t see sunrise.”
Willie crosses his heart solemnly and raises his right hand. “You know your lurid secrets are always safe with me, Dad. Gimme five bucks.”
Willie sways gently in the hammock and his mind runs back to Missy, like it does sometimes. It isn’t so crazy anymore; not like it was right after, when he tried with all his might to force it out of his head because it was just so awful to think about. Finally his mom told him to just let it be there; let it come in when it wants to, and finally he learned to do that and then things were better. He wishes he were sure his mom could follow her own advice.
Three days after Willie’s twelfth birthday, on a hot summer afternoon just before he was supposed to go to practice, his baby sister stopped breathing. Willie had gone into her room to show her off to Johnny and she was blue. He ran into the living room screaming for his mother, couldn’t find her anywhere, then ran back to Missy’s room and shook her. She looked less blue and he thought for a brief second she was okay, but the pasty color still wasn’t right, so he ran back out, frantically searching for Eastern Montana’s Mother of the year, whose baby was dying; screaming through the house and out into the yard. His mom was standing on the sidewalk across the street talking to Mrs. Burke, and Willie babbled Missy’s name and that something was wrong, awful wrong, she was sick or maybe knocked out but that couldn’t be because she was still in her crib, and his mother flew across the street and almost got hit by a car and Willie stood out by the sidewalk on their side of the street, down from the steps, under the flowering crab-apple tree that never put out any crab apples and hardly any flowers either and he heard frantic movement inside and his mother yelling. He watched her helplessly through the open door, dialing the phone, then dialing again like maybe she couldn’t get the number right, and then she burst out of the house with Missy like a rag in her arms and threw her into the front seat of the car and was gone.
That was the last time Willie saw his sister. She was six months old. The doctor called it SIDS. Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.
A chink appeared that day in the Weaver family coat-of-arms; left things just a little off. They all assured each other it was no one’s fault, even went to therapy for a little while over in Helena, trying to find something to do with the ugly specter of guilt that knifed into Willie’s gut on its own whim, with no notice; and into his mother’s gut, too. Big Will held the family together with his powerful, stoic presence, and finally time began to dull the sharp, searing edge.
But Willie could see the Weaver universe had shifted, if almost imperceptibly, like when the sound is a tiny bit off the picture. For the first time there was something Big Will couldn’t take head on, something he had to turn his back on, and there seemed no way to get it back on course, really.
CHAPTER 3
By the bottom of the seventh inning, the Crazy Horse Electric game belongs to Willie Weaver; it is his to win or lose. Samson Floral is ahead 1–0 on Willie’s triple in the fifth, a hard drive to deep left field that scored Petey Shropshire after his second walk of the day. Crouched into his normal batting position, Petey has the strike zone of a growth-stunted Munchkin, and though he rarely hits over .200, he gets on base a lot.
Willie has had a great day on the mound so far. No batter has reached second base and only twice has he pitched to more than three hitters in an inning. His one scare came from Sal Whitworth, who tagged a pitch that got away from Willie in the bottom of the first inning, sending the ball over the left-field fence just inches outside the foul line.
Johnny’s mouth, which Coach Ivy credits with being worth a run a game, is working overtime. Back in the bottom of the fifth, he called time and hustled over to the dugout to get an extra pair of socks he’d left on the bench, walked back to the plate stuffing them inside his mitt, calling loudly out to Willie, “Sorry, big boy. Didn’t mean to break your concentration, but I got to have more padding. You’re hot today, Willie boy. Hot. You hear me? Batter up! C’mon, batter. Step right up and take your medicine. We’ll have you outta here in time for the early movie. Batter up! Let’s get these boys outta their misery and home to their mommas. C’mon now, batter up…” and on and on.
The top of the ninth is quiet for Samson Floral, and Willie goes into the last inning with a one-run lead, facing the second, third and fourth men in their batting order. Sal Whitworth bats fourth; clean-up. Between the dugout and the mound, Sal catches Willie by the arm. There’s a hint of a sneer, but he says, “Throwin’ good today.”
Willie says, “Thanks.”
“I’m catching on, though,” Sal says. “Next good-lookin’ pitch is outta here.”
Willie won’t be intimidated. “You’ll get one,” he says. “Count on it.”
After striking out the first batter on three pitches, Willie makes his first mistake of the game. He throws a high, inside, medium fastball to back the batter off the plate some, but instead of backing down, the batter edges into it and takes the ball on his elbow, then walks to first. Willie curses himself for not throwing it harder; making the hitter pay for a freebee. That brings up Sal Whitworth for the last time and Willie knows he’s flat dangerous with a runner on. Willie lets what Sal said between innings creep into his head and for the first time in the Crazy Horse Electric game he feels the slightest bit rattled.
The entire Crazy Horse team stands in the dugout screaming at him: “…rubber arm…only good for eight…Crazy Horse always finds a way…’hon, big Sal…”
Willie calls time and steps off the mound. Sal smiles and steps back, t
oo. Johnny throws off his mask and walks out to the mound at the same time Coach Ivy moves toward them from the dugout. Johnny’s there first, his mouth on automatic. “Let’s get rid of this guy and go home,” he says. “My dad’s planning a big celebration. Signing me with the Yankees if we win. C’mon, Willie, just blow him over and let’s get out of here…”
Willie nods. “Shouldn’t have hit that first batter…”
Coach Ivy hears him as he approaches. “Don’t worry about the runner, Willie. Throw like you’ve been throwing and he’ll die where he stands. Just concentrate on the hitter. No pick-offs. Give him all the lead he wants. Key to this game is standing right there at home plate looking at you. How’s the arm? You’re throwing like a champ. Feeling okay?”
Willie feels his arm. It’s a little sore, maybe a hair tired. He can’t tell for sure. Is this all going up in smoke in the next few pitches? Has he gone this far just to serve up the pitch that Sal Whitworth will blast into North Dakota? Willie looks past Johnny and Coach Ivy over to the stands where his dad stands in his Washington Husky football jersey, arms folded, a tight grimace on his lips. He nods at Willie: Time to go to the well. Willie can hear Big Will’s voice over the crowd, over Johnny; because Big Will’s voice is in his head. “Always go at the big guys with your best stuff, son. That’s how you show ’em respect.” Willie’s aware this game is almost as important to his dad as it is to him; he can’t let him down. He looks at Coach Ivy. “Arm’s fine,” he says.
Johnny slaps him on the butt with his mitt and says, “I’ll rattle him a little,” then trots back to the plate; Coach Ivy heads back to the dugout. Willie looks over to his dad again; nothing has changed.