He fools Sal with his first pitch; takes a little off it and has him reaching for Strike One. Sal nods his head, staring fiercely back at the mound, digging his cleats in deeper. The second pitch is a screamer, low and inside, which Sal takes for a ball. Then a hard fastball right down the pipe; Sal fouls it off, way, way back and out of play.
“Next one’s outta here,” Sal calls from the plate, and Willie smiles and nods.
Johnny’s mouth is off on its own. “Hey, big Sal. Heard they’re trading you soon. They’re gettin’ Aunt Jemima. Makes a better batter…Sure you wanna stay out here an’ play with the big boys?…’Hon, batter, your shoe’s untied. Your momma’s callin’ wants you home before Mr. Dream Weaver embarrasses you so bad your family has to move…How you ever gonna get a girlfriend after what’s about to happen…”
Sal steps out of the box, turns around and tells Johnny to shut the hell up. Johnny shrugs. “’Hon, Big Willie. Pitch ’er right in here. Got ’im on the run.”
Sal looks to the ump, who calls batter up, and he steps back in.
Then Johnny finds Sal’s weak spot. “’Hon, Big Willie…got a bet with Sal here that he can’t hit you. He put up his sister. I put up fifty cents. Ain’t cool bettin’ your sister on one swing of the bat. Not for fifty cents.”
The umpire’s arms shoot out to call time. “Now that’s enough…” but before he can finish, Sal whirls around, flips Johnny’s mask up, pops him three lightning-quick open-handed blows to the side of the face and pushes him on his butt. Johnny is up like a flash and Willie charges in from the mound, but the ump steps in front of Johnny and Coach Ivy cuts Willie off.
The ump grabs Johnny’s chest protector and pulls him up close. “I’d call that about even,” he says. “Now you get down behind the plate and keep your mouth shut! One more word and you’re headed for the showers.”
Johnny says, “Yes, sir,” and looks around him at Willie, who’s back on the mound. Johnny smiles.
The next pitch is a statement of adolescent friendship as Willie fires a high, inside fastball right at Sal’s head. Most hitters would hit the dirt, but Sal is hot and he only jerks his head back as the ball streaks by inches from his chin. The ump flips his mask up and starts to say something, but Willie puts both hands in the air and yells, “Got away from me, ump. Honest. That was an accident.”
Willie looks over to his dad, who shakes his head and shoots him a disgusted look and Willie knows he shouldn’t have thrown that last one. He nods at Big Will and steps up on the mound, starts into his wind-up; Sal steps out of the box. He adjusts his helmet, bangs his cleats with the bat; gives Willie time to sweat. When he stands back in, Willie steps off the mound; it works both ways. He bends down to pick up some dirt, rubs it around on his hands, dusts them off and steps back up.
Willie starts into the stretch and Sal digs in. The runner on first takes a big lead off the bag, but Willie focuses completely on Sal, who’s a picture of coiled determination. Willie rears back and kicks high, his arm a sling, but in the middle of his delivery he knows something is wrong; the ball slips just slightly in his fingers; he falls a hair off balance; can’t pull it back. The pitch is fast and hard, but it doesn’t dance, and when Sal Whitworth sees it coming, he knows it’s sweet.
Sal puts everything into a powerful, level swing as Willie falls off balance, catching himself twisting toward first base, out of fielding position. He hears the crack of the bat and the ball screams straight back toward the third-base side of the mound.
Then Willie Weaver etches the Crazy Horse Electric game in the mind of every citizen and ball player and coach—maybe every dog and cat—in Coho, Montana. From his unbalanced position, he pivots around on his left leg, turning his back to the plate, and backhands the ball out of the air. He fields a white-hot, nuclear line drive on pure instinct, robbing Sal Whitworth of a sure triple and Crazy Horse Electric of their fourth straight Eastern Montana American Legion championship. The base runner streaks toward second, his brain several steps behind events. Willie looks into his glove and smiles, waits a split second for his first baseman to catch up, then flips him the ball for the third out.
The crowd sits in stunned silence while the required synapses take place, letting them know what they’ve just seen really happened, then erupts. The Crazy Horse Electric game is history and Willie Weaver is a minor legend.
CHAPTER 4
Willie walks into his English class on the first day of school, scans the room for a suitably obscure seat. He spots Jenny Blackburn off to one side and about halfway back, and plops his books on the desk top behind her.
“Baseball hero,” she says. “How you doing?”
“Football hero,” Willie corrects her. “New season, new image. Where you been? I’ve tried to call you for the last two weeks. You guys go on vacation?”
Jenny nods. “We went to visit my aunt in Minot. God, I think my parents take me there every year to make the first day of school look good. She watches that religious channel on TV—Trinity Network, I think they call it—the one with the blond lady who has to carry her eyelashes around in a wheelbarrow.”
“Sounds like fun.”
“My aunt makes me watch it with her. ‘Jenny, honey, come in here and sit with your auntie awhile. We never talk.’ So I go in and we still don’t talk; we watch this lady cry and wail and praise the Lord and gush to Efram Zimbalist Jr. and Roosevelt Greer and Tommy Lasorda. I’ll bet if the real Jesus ever saw those people carrying on that way, he’d pull on his steel-toed holy boots and come down here and kick somebody’s butt.” She laughs. “One day I got sick of it and told my aunt those couldn’t be real tears because there was no snot. When people cry for real, there’s snot.”
Willie laughs. “What’d she say?”
“She didn’t say anything. She had a ‘spell.’ Light-headedness, forearm over the forehead, calling for my father in this bullshit tremolo voice that kept my uncle on his knees for forty years before he got lucky and croaked.”
Jenny goes back into what Willie imagines is a perfect imitation of her aunt. “‘Cecil, what have you done with this daughter of yours? How did you allow her to get so hateful? The devil’s in this girl.’ So my dad pretends to chew me out because it is not worth it to get on her bad side, and we end up going to church on a Thursday night—a Thursday night—to get the devil out of me.”
“Get him out?”
Jenny smiles. “Wouldn’t go.”
Willie’s engrossed for more reasons than are obvious, having quit worrying about preserving their friendship. He’s in love. “So how is Thursday church?” he asks.
“Wretched,” Jenny says. “While normal folks sit home watching ‘Cheers’ and ‘Hill Street Blues,’ these people man the front lines against wave after wave of rock singers and poets and commie bleeding-heart liberals and ‘secular humanists,’ whoever they are.” Jenny’s expression changes to anger. “God, they’re awful. All they really ever talk about are fear and revenge. If God was really like that, he’d be a jerk.”
The loud bang of books dropped flat on the desk top across the aisle startles them. They jerk up to see Johnny Rivers sliding into his seat. “Mornin’, sports fans,” Johnny says, “ready to spend the next hour of your life committing the intimate details of your summer vacation to print?”
Jenny says, “We’re juniors now, Rivers. They don’t care what we did on our summer vacation.”
“Ah, juniors,” Johnny says. “A year of understudy before our time to step up and take control; bring this place to its knees. I hate it. It’s limbo. I’d rather be a frosh. At least frosh have something to fight for. Their lives.”
The bell rings as Mrs. Chambers walks into the room, followed closely by Petey, loaded down with books and papers. “Teacher’s young slave comes bearing gifts,” Willie says. Petey drops the books on her desk and heads for a seat. After a high-school career being locked in coat closets and stuffed butt-first into wastebaskets set high on book lockers, Petey stays pretty close to
adults who will protect him.
Mrs. Chambers passes out twenty-nine copies of Bless the Beasts and the Children, saying, “I bought these out of my pocket. You each owe me a dollar and seventy-five cents. If you were to read this book and turn in a Pulitzer Prizewinning book report, and you did not pay me my dollar and seventy-five cents, the highest grade you could possibly receive would be an F.” She goes on to explain that the book is about a group of misfits who seem discarded and uncared for and who have to pull together to fend for themselves and find meaning in their lives, much like the members of this class will have to do for the rest of their miserable existences, should they choose to ignore this wonderful but fleeting opportunity to acquire literacy.
“To show that somewhere deep inside me there’s a feeling, caring person,” she goes on, “I’m going to give you the rest of the period to read. I expect you all to finish the first three chapters by class time tomorrow. If you don’t, you will find that somewhere deep inside me there’s a troll.”
Most students open their books and begin reading, save a few in the back two rows who are “not into readin’, man.” Those people fold their arms and stare at their shoes.
And Johnny. Johnny doesn’t begin right away either. He stares at the cover of the book, moving his lips, closing his eyes, smiling, frowning, hitting himself gently on the forehead with the palm of his hand.
“What are you doing?” Willie whispers.
“Shhh. I’ve almost got it.”
“Got what?”
Johnny shakes his head quickly and closes his eyes. Then he smiles with a quick, hard nod, opens the book and starts to read.
With about five minutes left in the period, he raises his hand.
“Mr. Rivers?”
Johnny stifles a smile and says, “I’ve been working on this idea for a book, and I was wondering if I could give just a short explanation of the plot and see if you or the rest of the class think it’s got a chance.”
“You’ve been thinking about writing a book, Mr. Rivers?”
“I know it sounds dumb,” Johnny says, “and I’m embarrassed to talk about it, but I’ve been thinking about it all summer.”
Here it comes, Willie thinks. I don’t know what it is, but here it comes. Johnny Rivers has not spent his summer thinking about writing a book.
“It doesn’t sound dumb at all, Mr. Rivers. All writers have to start somewhere. Go ahead.”
“Well,” Johnny starts out, “it’s about this really poor family with five kids, maybe six, I haven’t decided. The father works, but he only makes minimum wage and it’s really tough making ends meet.”
“Uh-oh,” Petey says.
“What’s that, Peter?”
“You better watch out,” Petey says. “He’s never even read a book, much less thought about writing one.”
Mrs. Chambers looks back to Johnny, who quickly continues. “Anyway,” he says, “one night in the middle of the winter, the mother goes through all the cupboards and the refrigerator, but there’s just no food left. She sends one of the kids to the cellar, but all he comes back with is a partial armload of beets. The mother breaks into tears, because she just can’t stand the idea of her family going hungry. Then the oldest boy remembers that there is a nest of birds up in the rafters—wrens, I think—and he crawls up and captures the mother wren and pops her noggin.” Johnny makes a tight fist as if squeezing the cap off a plastic bottle.
“Ick!” Three girls in the front row feign offense.
“Sorry,” Johnny says earnestly, “this is a story about survival.” He continues. “He brings the bird down and plucks it and gives it to his mom, who, though she feels bad for the wren, is grateful to have something to put on the table.”
Now Petey is sure. “Stop him, Mrs. Chambers. This isn’t a book. If it was a book, they’d just be birds, not ‘wrens.’”
Johnny quickly breaks in before Mrs. Chambers can question him. “I don’t know what he’s talking about,” he says. “Just lemme finish. Anyway, the bird and the vegetables are cooked and set out on the table, but the father doesn’t come home. The family waits and waits, but he just doesn’t appear. Fearing the bird will dry out and the dinner will spoil, the mother puts it in the refrigerator; and they wait.”
“Be just a little less detailed,” Mrs. Chambers says. “The bell is about to ring.”
“Be a lot less detailed,” Petey mumbles.
Johnny nods. “Okay. So, to make a long story short, the father doesn’t come home till after midnight, but nobody eats because this is a close-knit religious family and they hang together. When the father washes up and is finally seated, Mom gets the bird out of the refrigerator, carves it with a small knife and distributes it equally to all the family members. Just as the kids are about to dig in, the father stops them, realizing that in their hunger they’ve forgotten to say grace. So they join hands around the table, bow their heads and the father speaks.” Johnny looks up at Mrs. Chambers and smiles. “You know what he says?”
Petey says, “Oh, God. Somebody lock me in the coat closet.”
“This doesn’t sound like a story plot at all,” Mrs. Chambers says. “Mr. Rivers, what exactly is this about?”
“You know what he says?” Johnny asks, getting more excited by the second. “He says, ‘Dear Lord, bless the beets and the chilled wren.’” He squeals and pounds his head against his desk. “Get it? Bless the beets and the chilled wren. Bless the Beasts and the Children. Get it? God, that’s great! I must be precocious. I made that up myself. Just now.”
The rest of the class is groaning. “On our baseball team we get him for this,” Petey says. “We pants him or hose him down or something.”
“I don’t doubt it a bit,” Mrs. Chambers says, smiling. “If this weren’t a free country, Mr. Rivers would be in an internment camp in a very cold place for a very long time.”
“Bless the beets and the chilled wren,” Johnny says, and bangs his forehead on the desk again. “That’s great.”
The bell rings. “That’s all for today, class. Everyone but Mr. Rivers is excused.”
Dinner was late tonight because football practice ran longer than usual. Willie and Jenny have taken the new highway to the top of the bluffs on their ten-speeds and now pedal single file along the ridge top, looking down over Coho in the late summer sunset. Willie’s stomach is jittery; he plans to make the change in their relationship if he can, but doesn’t have a clue how to pull it off. Girls have always liked him, but Jenny’s special.
They turn onto the Corbut Creek road, and Willie leads her to his fishing hole.
“You think Johnny has some kind of brain disease?” Jenny asks, as she leans her bike against a large tree and plops down in the grass beside Willie.
“No question about it, I think. I just hope it’s terminal. And quick. Until today, there was a finite number of those things. Now that he’s found out he can make them up, no one is safe.”
Jenny peers into the dark water. “This is your fishing hole, huh? You pull a lot of big ones out of here?”
“Not lately, but it’s been pretty good over the last few years. Dad and I came up the other night and checked it out with a flashlight. There’s still lots of fish, they’re just getting smart. They’re lucky my mom retired. She was the best fisherman I ever saw. She could pull rainbow trout out of a sump.”
“Why’d she quit?”
Willie wants to talk about them—Jenny and him—not about his mother the retired angler; but he senses bad timing. “I don’t know,” he says. “It’s funny, I never thought about it before the other night, but I think it had something to do with my baby sister dying. I don’t think she’s been fishing since that day.”
Jenny is quiet. She remembers how Willie took himself away for several months after his sister died from SIDS; how she tried everything she knew to get through to him, but he was just gone. Absent from the world. She wants to ask about that, but doesn’t. She’s sixteen and the mystery of death is magnetic to he
r, and Missy’s death is the only one, so far, that’s been close to her in any way. Willie knows more of the mystery, but Jenny has a strong sense of privacy.
They stare into the dark fishing hole and finally Willie says, “When somebody’s still blue, you can save them.”
“What?”
“Missy was blue when I saw her first. Remember in Lifesaving class this summer? They said when somebody’s still blue, it means they haven’t been not breathing for very long. If I’d known how to do CPR, I could have saved Missy. She was blue. Missy could still be alive and my mother could still be fishing.”
Jenny moves over close and lays a hand on Willie’s knee. “You were only twelve…”
Willie nods. “I know. I just wish they told you things when you need them. It seems like they always tell you things when it’s too late.”
From the side, Jenny puts her arms around his shoulders and nuzzles into his neck. “You been thinking about that all this time?”
“Not all the time. I’ve only known that a few months; and I don’t really think about it when I’m busy. But sometimes when my mom doesn’t know I’m watching, she looks so sad I can hardly stand it. That’s when I think about it.”
Jenny holds him tighter. All the tense, unspoken messages dissipate like fog in the hot sun, and Willie knows he doesn’t have to tell Jenny how he feels. He’s opened a door, and she’s waltzed right in. “You want to go with me?” she says.
“Huh?”
“Go with me. You know, dances, holding hands, stuff like that.”
Willie doesn’t hesitate. “Yeah, I do. I do wanna go with you.”
She kisses him on the cheek. “Okay,” she says, “but you gotta give me something.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. A VCR. A car maybe.”
Willie pushes her away to get a better look. “How about my American Legion Championship ring?”
“That would do for now. Till you can save up some money.” She kisses him again, this time lightly on the mouth. “Let’s get going. I’ve got to be home before dark.”