Fenway Fever (16 page)

At the very moment of that thought, Stats suddenly dropped a good ten feet before Billee managed to stop his fall.

“What are you
doing
?” Stats screamed, his voice cracking. “Trying to kill me?”

“Sorry. I slipped. Won’t happen again. But I had the rope the whole time, so no worries. I was looking up, and there was a big wet spot down here, so …”

Stats squeezed his eyes even tighter. Great, he thought. Nice image. One more slip like that, and there’ll be
two
big wet spots down there.

“Well, be careful.”

“I got you, bud.”

Finally Stats rose up near enough that he could almost touch the edge of the grandstand roof. Almost.

“I can’t reach it.”

“Can you stretch?”

“Can you fly? Look, I’m only four-foot-six, and
that’s
on my tiptoes. I’m at least a foot away.”

“Okay, okay.” Billee took a moment before he spoke again. “All right, Stat Man, listen. I’m going to lower you down.”

Finally
. Mission unaccomplished, and he did not care. Yes, he truly wanted to lure the hawks back, he truly wanted to restore balance to Fenway Park. But this might be the dumbest thing he had ever done in his life, eclipsing even the time he rode down Beacon Street on a bike with no brakes. But at least on the bike he could drag his feet. From here he could touch nothing but nothing.

Stats began to descend. Then stopped. “What’s the matter?” he asked.

“That’s far enough. Now you can start to rock back and forth until you swing up high enough to grab the catwalk. From there I think you can toss the sticks onto the roof.”

“Are you nuts?”

Billee gave a one-legged stomp, jerking his head forward. “Why do people keep asking me that? No, I think this’ll work.”

“Then why don’t
you
come up and try it?”

“Believe me, bud. If I could, I would. Just give me your best shot.”

So he shot. He swung out a little, back a little. Out, then
back. Each time Stats passed through the middle of his arc, his stomach flipped.

“You’re almost there,” called Billee. “One more big kick.”

Stats gave it all he had. It was now or never. As he swung toward the press box area, he kicked his feet out for an extra lunge.

They touched! His feet actually kissed the metal catwalk below the windows. Then he swooped back the other way and lost virtually all of his momentum, except for that stupid twirl.

“It’s no use,” he said. “I can’t get close enough, and even if I did, I’m not strong enough to grab on and pull myself up. Billee, you have to do this.”

This time Billee did not respond, but Stats noticed right away he was sliding down toward ground zero. When his toes touched concrete, his knees collapsed.

Billee had to catch him and steady him up.

“Okay, buddy. No worries. We’ll figure something out.”

At just hearing the tone in Billee’s voice, Stats felt crushed. He had promised his hero something and had let him down. He looked back up at the target spot. It did not seem all that high from down here.

Could he try it again? Could he somehow figure out a better approach?

“What about this, Billee? What if you lift me back up, and I swing back and forth from just underneath the lip? I bet I could swing the bundle onto the roof from there.”

Billee tilted his head back. “I don’t think that’s gonna work either.”

Stats had never heard Billee sound so defeated.

“Look, Stat Man, I’m sorry I got you into all this.”

“No, it’s okay.”

“Believe me, if I could do it myself, I would. It’s just that I can’t go up there either. I’m, uh, I’m nervous about heights.”

What?

“How can
you
be nervous about anything? Last year you shut out the Yankees in Yankee Stadium!”

Then, in that same instant, Stats recalled how Billee had gone so slowly and carefully up the ladder onto Stats’s roof to see the batting cage.

Now he felt even worse. So Billee Orbitt was afraid of heights. How could anyone have guessed that?

Deciding he could not bear to let his friend down, Stats said, “Billee, I want to try one last time. Come on, let’s hit it with our best shot.”

Billee grinned at the line.

“No, really,” said Stats.

“Think so, huh?” Billee peered up at the challenge. “Okay, look, I do have another idea. Sort of a backup deal I thought of at the last minute.”

He winked at Stats, who smiled. He should’ve known he could always count on Billee to have a backup plan.

Billee waved. “Follow me.”

They returned to the electric cart at the upper-deck tunnel mouth. Billee tugged on an old frazzled tarp and pulled it off the cargo area. Underneath were four huge metal cylinders and a shiny roll of silver duct tape.

“What’s in the tanks?” asked Stats.

“Helium.”

“Where’d they come from?”

“Paolo was filling balloons when I saw him this afternoon. You know, for the show Saturday night.”

“So what’s your plan?”

Billee snapped open a toolbox built into the side of the cart under the bed. He pulled out an uninflated beach ball.

“What do we do?” asked Stats. “Float the sticks up there with helium balloons?” He was beginning to like this.

“That’s what I was thinking.” Billee knelt down and pulled out an armload of deflated beach balls. “Paolo’s got a ton of these.”

Now Stats finally knew what happened to all of those beach balls the crowds slapped around before the security guys confiscated them.

Then Billee looked him in the eye. “But I’ve actually got an even better idea.”

It took a while for Stats to google up the information he needed to determine whether the four tanks held enough helium to lift a person into the air.

The answer was yes and no. It seemed as if there was enough helium to float someone off the ground, but not just anyone. The guy could weigh no more than thirty-three kilos.

“How much is that in American?” asked Billee.

Stats had only a moment to get himself out of one more loony situation. All he had to do was answer, “Oh, it’s about forty pounds.”

Instead, he spoke from his heart.

“It’s, like, seventy-two pounds.”

Billee nodded. He smacked his lips open, took in a breath, and let it right out. He did not even bother to ask his next question out loud. He simply looked at Stats and raised both eyebrows.

“Um,” said Stats, “I weigh about sixty-five pounds.”

Billee nodded again. He began to fill the plastic balls.

As Billee worked, Stats folded himself into the driver’s seat of the cart and silently watched the constellation Pegasus, which had appeared over the rooftops along the third base line. After a while, he realized the flying horse was joining them as the lead star, Enif, which was Arab for “the horse’s nose,” slowly but surely began heading east across the center of the sky dome.

“Pegasus,” Stats announced finally, without even looking at Billee. “Coming this way.”

Billee stopped what he was doing to gaze west. “I wonder when it’ll sit right smack-dab above us?”

“Don’t know. I’ll look it up.”

Stats searched his favorite star site for the Boston sky data. “Well, this table’s not that precise. Let me zero in.” He quickly entered the exact longitude and latitude coordinates for Fenway Park in relation to when Enif would top the diamond dome.

Whoa.
He could hardly believe his result.

“Hey, Billee. I got the exact time for the moment Pegasus is right over Fenway.”

“Good, read it off.”

“You’re not going to believe this.” He looked up to catch Billee’s eyes.

Billee lifted his chin, then he raised his eyebrows in a silent question.

Stats replied, “Four-oh-six.”

Magical numbers to any baseball aficionado, let alone a Red Sox fan, they represented the batting average of one Ted
Williams, who in 1941 became the first man since 1930, and the last man ever, to hit over .400 in a single season.

Billee hooted as he spun the helium valve wide open, restarting his task with a grin. “Believe in magic, bud?”

“I do now.”

It took twenty-seven beach balls of assorted sizes, colors, and designs to empty the tanks. Working together, Stats and Billee bundled the various balls into duct-taped groups of four. Then they tied all seven bundles together into one huge bouquet anchored to the top rail of the upper-deck walkway.

After undoing the anchor rope and wrapping it around his waist, Billee decided to take the flying beach balls out for a spin.

“Well,” he said, “here goes nut thing!” And off he went. The pull of the rig was so strong, Billee could gambol around the upper-deck promenade with long loping strides, like an astronaut bouncing on the moon.

He came leap-jogging back, laughing.

“Well, are you ready?”

From that moment, the night took on a magical glow.

The low glimmer of light inside Fenway seemed to golden up and began pulsating everywhere Stats looked. At the moment of his own liftoff, he felt an instant kinship with every bird that had ever flown within the walls of this ancient fortress.

He would later describe the electric surge that charged through his bones as a hawkness, though he would also admit he hardly knew what that word meant. It just felt right.

His eyes focused in crystal clarity. His breath flowed high into his chest. He laid one sure hand on his bundle of sticks, gripped the tether line with the other, and up he rose.

Ten feet, twenty, thirty. Floating straight up, a boy on a cloud on a top-secret mission, he seemed to have become a human lightning rod for every unanswered dreambolt prayer sent skyward in the history of this sacred slice of land.

He could sense them all, back to the days of Tris Speaker,
Babe Ruth, and Joe Cronin. Through the days of Jimmy Foxx, Ted Williams, and Bobby Doerr. And forward to the days of Johnny Damon, Roger Clemens, and Manny Ramirez. He heard their thoughts.

Yes, the whispered prayers of big-league ballplayers whistled around him as he rose.

With a fierceness and finesse he had never known, but was now so strangely his own, Stats tossed the bundle of hawk’s nest makings onto the press box rooftop, behind its half-wall facade.

Then he fastened the tether line to a small crosspiece on the shiny new flagpole atop the wall’s peak to hold the balloons in place while he dropped from the rope seat onto the roof.

Once he could walk upon the rooftop, he pulled out his eXfyle and found the illustrations of a hawk’s nest that he had saved for reference. Using the same layered weaving shown in the drawings, he constructed the best replica of a natural hawk’s home he could.

As a final touch, he added some shredded wool socks he’d cut up in his room and stuffed into his pockets. Red socks. Using the woolen shreds, he layered and cushioned the floor of the nest as if it were a royal throne. He took three pictures and stepped back into his seat. Before he unhitched the beach balls to ride them down again, Stats took a moment to gaze out across the Boston skyline, eerily unhindered by the ballpark lights.

But nothing he saw in any direction—the new Hancock
Tower, the Prudential Tower, and the R2-D2 building on Huntington Avenue—compared, in beauty or grace, with the architecture of the building he stood upon.

Which was as it should be, as far as Stats was concerned, for no occupation practiced within any of those landmark structures could compare in skill or complexity or worth to the high artwork of those men who had declared somewhere in their Olympian boyhoods the intention to dedicate their lives to mastering a child’s game. And to never give up.

“Got it?” yelled Billee.

“Got it!” Stats replied. “Beam me down, Billee.”

In the next moment he was gliding his way toward Boston’s unluckiest pitcher, whose muscular arms easily reeled him in, coiling the line around two metal rails. All in all, his trip into the heights of heaven had taken less than fifteen minutes. And now he was back to the mortal realm with, he hoped, the gratitude of a rebalanced bio-system, if not a pocketful of luck.