The Wednesday Wars (22 page)

She was right. He wouldn't.

I hung up the phone and went back to the classroom.

Mrs. Baker was reading in her Shakespeare book when I came back. "Oh," she said when she saw me. She looked up at the clock. "Oh," she said again.

Meryl Lee came back into the room. She stood at the door when she saw me. "Aren't you—" and then she stopped. Because apparently I wasn't.

One by one, everyone came back from lunch recess. One by one, they looked at me and knew what had happened. And what was there to say?

I sat down at my desk, as humiliated as President Johnson would have been if he had lost to Bobby Kennedy. My heart beat against my chest. I was surprised that no one else could hear it.

I suppose there may have been a more miserable hour sometime in my life, but I couldn't think of what it might have been.

Until 1:55, when everyone had left for Temple Beth-El or Saint Adelbert's, and Mrs. Baker said, "Mr. Hoodhood, I think I could get you there for some of the game."

The sweetest words e'er spoken. I almost cried.

I took the two tickets out of my shirt pocket and held them up. "Have you ever been to a Yankee game, Mrs. Baker?"

"Never intentionally," she said. "Call your mother and see if it's all right."

Which I did, except she wasn't home. So I called my sister at high school. "You're calling me at school for that? Why should I care what time you'll be back?" she said, which I figured was good enough.

And that was how Mrs. Baker and I found ourselves on the Long Island Expressway driving toward New York City, me looking at my watch every three minutes or so, and Mrs. Baker moving along at a steady forty-five miles per hour in a sixty-mile-per-hour zone.

"You can go up to sixty-five without getting a ticket," I pointed out.

"I tend not to want to see how far I can break the law before I'm caught."

"You drove a lot faster than this to the hospital."

"Much faster. But I was going to the hospital. Today I am driving to a baseball game."

"On Opening Day, it's just as important," I said. "And I just saw you roll your eyes."

"I never roll my eyes," said Mrs. Baker. "But if I did roll my eyes, that would have been an appropriate time to do so."

The whole way, she never passed forty-five. She fussed at the Whitestone Bridge toll to get the right change. And she fussed at the parking lot, because she wanted to find a space with no cars on either side, which there weren't any of within three miles, and that was about how far away we parked. And we didn't run to Yankee Stadium in seven-minute miles, let me tell you.

So it was the bottom of the third inning by the time that Mrs. Baker and I reached our box seats, which were on the first-base line, right next to the Yankee dugout. You could make out every pinstripe on every uniform, we were that close. Mr. Hupfer got up and let me sit in front with Danny and Doug, and he sat behind us with Mrs. Baker and Mr. Swieteck, and Danny never asked about Mrs. Baker being there, even though I knew he wanted to. But I didn't care anymore because it was April, and it was Opening Day at Yankee Stadium, and the California Angels were out in the field, and the Yankees were up at bat.

The game was everything it was supposed to be. Horace Clarke turned a double play off his heel and Joe Pepitone caught a pop fly over his shoulder. Frank Fernandez had hit the only home run in the second inning, so we'd missed it—which was a big deal since it won the game. And Mel Stottlemyre threw a four-hit shutout. Mickey Mantle had two singles, so Danny and I couldn't boo him like we wanted to. And when Horace Clarke came out of the dugout for the seventh-inning stretch, he tossed three balls to us, and we almost had another one off a Mickey Mantle foul ball except it hit the bar along the box seats and skipped over us. And Mr. Hupfer and Mr. Swieteck bought us all—even Mrs. Baker—hot dogs with sauerkraut and more hot dogs with sauerkraut and Cokes in bottles with the ice still frozen to them and pretzels as big as both your hands together and then another hot dog with sauerkraut for each of us. And we shouted and hollered when the bum ump made a lousy call on Joe Pepitone that made him strike out and everybody, even Mrs. Baker, stood and cheered when Mel Stottlemyre retired ten batters in a row.

It was just swell.

But what happened afterward—that was just swell, too.

Joe Pepitone and Horace Clarke yelled up to our box at the end of the game! "Hey Danny, Holling, Doug," they called. Just like that. "Hey Danny, Holling, Doug." There wasn't a kid within earshot that didn't wish that they were us.

"Hey!" we called back.

"You want to come down on the field?" asked Horace Clarke, which we didn't need to answer, because we were already climbing over the railing.

That was when Joe Pepitone saw Mrs. Baker.

"You're that dame that got us to come out to that school last December," he said.

Let me tell you, I wasn't sure Mrs. Baker had ever been called "that dame" before, and I was sure she wasn't all that happy about it now.

Mrs. Baker crossed her arms over her chest—even though I had coached her against that. "Yes," she said. "Though it was my brother-in-law who contacted you." She said it in this frozen voice that would have quieted any seventh-grade class in half a second.

But Joe Pepitone didn't notice. He took a step closer. "Aren't you that dame that ran in Melbourne? The women's four-by-one hundred. You anchored, right?"

I was really sure that Mrs. Baker had never been called "that dame" twice in two sentences that came one after the other.

"Yes," she said.

"I saw that race. You were in fifth place when you got the baton, and you almost made it all up in the last hundred. You came in something like three-tenths of a second behind."

"Two-tenths," said Mrs. Baker.

"Hey, Horace," said Joe Pepitone, "do you know who this is? Get Houk over here and see if he remembers that dame we saw anchor the four-by-one hundred relay in Melbourne. And get Cox over here, too."

And that was why when the photographers came to take pictures after the game, they found most of the Yankees around that dame with the legs that almost made up five places in the Melbourne Olympic Games in just one hundred meters. And after she ran the race with them again five times over, she asked the Yankees to show us around the Stadium and they did! Really. Joe and Horace took us up in the bleachers and to the sky-high seats and then down beneath to the locker rooms (which Mrs. Baker did not go in) and around to the offices and then through the dugout and back onto the field. The people who were still up in the stands saw me and Danny pitch to Joe Pepitone, with Jake Gibbs catching. And I don't think Mrs. Baker rolled her eyes once.

And afterward, I ran around all the bases, from home to first to second to third and back to home. And then I ran to the outfield and sprinted from right to left and then back again. And all the while the green grass and the yellow diamond dust were in my nose, and the sun lowering over Yankee Stadium shone down on me, Holling Hoodhood, playing center field for the New York Yankees and waiting for the crack of the bat.

When you have the chance to run the outfield of Yankee Stadium and you're not exactly sure if you'll ever have another chance, you have to take things as they come.

I ran back to pitch my last pitches. The sun was getting low by the time Joe Pepitone had smacked them out, and Mrs. Baker stood at home plate, surveying the place like she was considering buying it. "What is all that scaffolding up there for?" she asked.

Maybe she
was
considering buying it.

"Repairs," said Joe. "Lots of places in the Stadium need repairs. They're waiting on the boss finding an architect."

"An architect?" said Mrs. Baker.

"Someone classical, the boss says. Real classical."

"I'd like to meet him," said Mrs. Baker.

"If you can hit my fastball," said Mel Stottlemyre, "I'll take you up to meet him."

Mrs. Baker looked at me and rolled her eyes. "Get me a bat, Mr. Hoodhood," she said.

It turned out that Mr. Hupfer drove me and Danny home that night. Mrs. Baker stayed to meet the boss.

Mrs. Baker's picture was in the
Home Town Chronicle
two days later, standing next to Danny and Doug and me, and all of us surrounded by smiling Yankee players. I wore Joe Pepitone's jacket to school, and Danny wore his hat, and Doug wore Horace Clarke's hat. Three sixth graders asked for my autograph on a baseball, which I gave them.

Coach Quatrini, however, did not ask for an autograph. He kept his promise, and the next cross-country practice was about as hard as two practices put together. And since he believed in democracy, he said, he figured that everyone should have the same cross-country practice, and so all seven of the varsity runners ran like Brutus and Cassius were after them with long and pointy knives.

The eighth graders loved me after that. They threw all of my clothes in the showers, and I walked home leaving puddles at every step.

So when spring break finally came, it dropped as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath. Spring break! Were there any two words ever put together that make a more beautiful sound?

Spring break. Let me tell you, the days were warm and green. Danny, Mai Thi, Meryl Lee, and I met at Woolworth's in the afternoons. We ordered Cokes and hamburgers for as long as our allowances held out.

Spring break. The high school was out, too, and so my sister was always in a happy, happy mood. She had a new friend named Chit—that really was his name—and he drove a yellow VW bug with bright pink and orange flower decals. He was mostly legs and arms and hair, and he came over every afternoon and would go down into the basement with my sister and they would listen to her transistor radio and then come upstairs singing about yellow submarines very loudly and laughing like it was the funniest thing in the world. Afterward, Chit would fold himself into his yellow bug and my sister would go driving around with him.

Spring break. Warm and green days. You know they aren't going to last, but when you start in on them, they're like a week of summer plunked down as a gift in the middle of junior high school. They mean the smell of dust and grass on a baseball diamond, the first fresh sea breezes that come all the way inland from Long Island Sound, all the maples decked out in green-gold leaves. They mean checking the tennis rackets to see if winter has warped them while they hung in the garage, and watching the first rabbit running across the lawn, and neighbors putting the first "Free Kittens" signs up on their stoops.

That's spring break. You come back to school thinking that it's no longer just the end of winter; it's almost the beginning of summer, and you figure that you can hang on until the end of June, because the warm breezes are coming in the window like quiet happiness.

Coach Quatrini had made us swear on the lives of our firstborn children that we would run hard during spring break. He promised he would find out if we missed one day—just one day!—and that we would pay dearly.

So when we got back to school, he began the first practice with this announcement: Every runner on the varsity team was going to have to better my tryout time with the rats by thirty-five seconds. No exceptions.

And no rats to help.

Let me tell you, the eighth graders were not happy. Once we got started on our run, there was a whole lot of spitting to the side, timed with the wind, which I had to keep watch for. And I kept well to the back of the pack, since we ran through neighborhoods where there were kids from school who knew me and I didn't want to find myself in front of their houses with my shorts pulled down to my ankles.

I was glad that Doug Swieteck's brother wasn't a varsity runner. Who knew what would have happened then?

It was when we were all back from the run that first day and standing around the gym doors trying not to die that Coach Quatrini gave his second announcement: There was going to be a Long Island Junior High School Cross-Country Meet this spring, just to work up excitement for the fall season.

"It's this Saturday, so you're all going to have to get up early and miss your cartoons," he said. "I feel really badly about that. So badly, I could cry. Boo-hoo. Be here by seven. Bus leaves at seven oh-one. We run at Salisbury Park. Three miles at race pace. Winner gets a hundred-dollar savings bond. Not that I expect any of you ladies to win."

Toads, beetles, bats.

That night at supper, I mentioned the race.

"That will be nice," said my mother.

"Just swell," I said.

"Who's the coach?" said my father.

"Coach Quatrini," I said.

My father considered this a moment. "What's his first name?"

I shook my head. "Everyone just calls him Coach Quatrini."

My father shrugged and went back to eating.

"How far do you have to run?" said my sister.

I told her.

"You'll die," she said.

"I won't die."

"You'll get run over and crushed."

"It's almost happened before," I said. "With a bus."

She smirked at me. "Holling Hoodhood, the local town hero. Do you want a parade?"

"How long is it until you go to college?" I said.

She smirked again. "Not soon enough."

"She's not going to college," said my father.

Silence, since that is one of those lines that gets everyone's attention.

"What?" said my sister.

"You're not going to college," said my father again. "You've got a good job, and you're not going anywhere."

A long pause.

"Did you know that Roy White is batting .429?" I said.

"I am going to Columbia University," said my sister.

My father pressed his fork onto his plate and crushed a lima bean. "Columbia?" he said. "Columbia. Let me think a moment. Isn't that the school that's on strike to protest the war, so there aren't any classes?"

"It's the school where students are striking against the war and against racism."

"The whole world is going crazy," my father said, "and no place is crazier than college. You'll stay at your job and be safe."