Waiting for Teddy Williams (20 page)

“Jesus, Bill, people in New York and Boston slave fifty weeks a year to come up here and spend two weeks looking at the scenery,” Teddy said. “Relax and enjoy the view.”

“I can remember back when they had Burma-Shave signs all along the roadways,” Bill said. “It made touring the countryside interesting.”

They cut across Vermont from White River to Rutland, where they stopped at a McDonald's. Soon afterward they crossed into New York State, where they stopped to eat again. By noon Bill had consumed six Big Macs, washed down with twelve cups of coffee.

Now they were driving on a secondary road southwest of Albany. The countryside looked like Vermont without mountains and with billboards, which should have made Bill happy but didn't seem to. Teddy drove ten miles under the 55-mph speed limit. When they went around a curve and E.A. leaned against him, Teddy's arms and legs were as hard as ironwood.

Ahead they saw a dark shape in the road. It was a turtle, a snapper, weighing fifty or sixty pounds, and as big around as a bushel basket. The snapper did not appear to be injured; it had simply decided to rest on the solid white line. Teddy stopped in the middle of the road. On one side of the highway lay a swamp with stumps jutting out of the water. On the other side a lane led off into a sandpit. As Teddy and E.A. and Bill got out and walked up to the turtle, a Gray Line bus barreled up behind Patsy Cline and hit its whooshing air brakes. The bus stopped inches from the bumper and continued to blast its horn.

The snapper shifted around to look at them. It was as big as any turtle E.A. had ever seen. He figured the animal liked the heat coming up off the macadam. A tractor-trailer crested a rise ahead. It, too, slowed down and stopped. The words
CHRISTIAN LINE INC. VIDALIA, GEORGIA
were stenciled on its side.

“Here,” Teddy said to the turtle. “Move along.”

Bill began telling about various ways to catch and cook turtles. The Christian trucker rolled down his window and hollered at the animal to get out of the road or he'd run it over. E.A. noticed that the turtle had algae between its legs and shell and mossy green pond scum on its ridged back and tail. It gave off a primeval stench of mud and rotting vegetation. Its eyes were dark and undaunted.

The driver got out of the bus. He was a tired-looking older man wearing a gray suit and a blue necktie. “What's the holdup?” he called. “I've got a busload of church ladies here to get down to Cooperstown.”

“We got a situation on our hands is the holdup,” Teddy said. “We'll deal with it.”

Teddy maneuvered around behind the turtle, which turned with him, like a man and a snapping turtle doing a dance. Teddy reached for its tail, and the turtle whirled around faster than E.A. had ever seen an animal move. It shot out its head and neck and, had Teddy not been quick himself, would have taken off all five fingers of his throwing hand. “Whoa!” Teddy shouted.

“I got a pistol in my glove box,” the born-again trucker offered.

Cars were queuing up behind the eighteen-wheeler and the bus.

Teddy squatted down in front of the turtle. He stared at it and the turtle looked back at him.

The Christian driver, a fat man in a Braves T-shirt, was getting down out of his cab, holding a gun.

“You shoot this turtle, Bubba,” Teddy said, patting a bulge in his back pocket, “and I'll shoot you. I won't think any more about it than taking a piss.”

“I have to take one myself,” Bill said. “It's all that coffee.”

“Over there in the swamp,” Teddy told him. He feinted with his left hand, trying to distract the turtle and then grab its tail. The turtle swiveled its shell around like a tank turret. Then it laid an egg. It was white and about the size of a golf ball.

“I God,” said the trucker.

A burly church lady in a purple blouse climbed down from the bus. The nametag on her blouse said
DORIS HAKLEY, TOUR GUIDE
.

“Sir, sir,” she said. “We have a schedule to maintain.”

“Maintain your water,” Teddy said.

“I can't much longer,” Bill whined.

“Ethan,” Teddy said. “See that stick jutting up from the water over yonder? Fetch it here, will you?”

E.A. brought the stick, which was about four feet long and as big around as his thumb. Teddy held it out to the turtle. Fast as a Doberman pinscher, the reptile bit it cleanly in two. Then it deposited another egg in the road.

Teddy opened Patsy's back door and got his thirty-eight-inch Louisville Slugger out of his bat bag.

“Oh,” cried the woman in the purple blouse. “I'm going to report you to the SPCA if you harm that animal. I'll use my cell phone.”

Teddy extended the handle of the bat toward the snapper. The turtle grabbed it. Holding the big end of the bat, Teddy dragged the turtle, its back claws grooving the hot macadam, toward Patsy. Its tracks in the tar surface looked as if a great, prehistoric beast had crossed the road. The church woman dropped her cell phone on the pavement. Teddy told E.A. to get his bat bag and hold it open. He lifted the turtle, still clinging to the Louisville Slugger, and deposited it inside the bag, where it finally let go of the bat. Then he tied off the mouth of the bag and put it in the back seat, while E.A. buried the turtle eggs in the sandpit.

Horns honked and air horns blatted in congratulatory unison. Some of the church ladies on the bus cheered.

Teddy picked up the smashed cell phone. “I believe this belongs to you, madam,” he said, handing it to the tour guide and tipping his cap.

“Oh!”

She was looking past Teddy at Bill. Everyone on the bus was looking at Bill, standing on the shoulder of the highway and loosing an arcing yellow stream down into the swamp.

“I told you I was all coffeed up,” Bill said, still going. “I don't know what everyone's gawking at.”

 

Cooperstown was situated on a north-south-lying lake that E.A. was fairly sure had been made by the Great Wisconsin Ice Sheet. The museum was larger than he'd thought it would be. First they walked around the circular room where the Hall of Famers each had a plaque listing his statistics. There were all the greats—Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner, Babe Ruth, Christy Mathewson, and the rest. Carlton Fisk had been inducted in 2000. At the entrance of the Hall was a life-size wooden sculpture of Ted Williams and another of Babe Ruth, made of basswood, by a French Canadian carver from Rhode Island. Bill tapped Ted's statue with his knuckle. “I don't know why anybody would make all this work for them self,” he said.

Upstairs they watched videos of famous moments in Series games, toured the Negro League room, examined the home uniforms of each team, enshrined in glass cases, and paused over famous bats, balls, spikes, and photographs of major-league ball parks past and present.

“Is that the way
you'd
throw out a runner?” E.A. asked Teddy as they watched a video clip of Johnny Bench gunning the ball down to second to nail a base runner attempting to steal.

“That's one way to do it,” Teddy said.

“Teddy?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Say you hadn't—say you'd gone right into baseball out of high school. Could you have wound up here?”

Teddy stepped out of the way of a contingent of Cub Scouts. He lit a cigarette in front of a
PLEASE DO NOT SMOKE
sign. “No,” he said. “I doubt I ever could have gotten to the majors, you want the truth. The thing is, I'll never know. Look, Ethan. Say you try and don't make the grade. That's nothing to be ashamed of. Only a few ever do. You can live with trying and not making the grade. But you'll
know
. It's the not knowing that eats at you.”

“Sir,” a museum attendant said. “There's no smoking in the Baseball Hall of Fame.”

Teddy dropped his cigarette on the tiled floor and ground it under the heel of his work boot, and a few minutes later they left for home.

 

“You were clocked at sixty-five,” the New York constable said, but he was lying through his teeth. E.A. had checked the speedometer. Teddy had been driving exactly forty-three miles an hour.

The cop had sneaked up behind them with his lights off, then switched on his blue flashers. Later Bill admitted that he'd thought a spaceship was taxiing in for a landing behind them.

“You fellas set tight,” the constable said. “I'm going back to the cruiser.”

“What are we going to do?” E.A. said. He was terrified that Teddy would have to go back to prison.

Teddy shrugged. “We'll be okay,” he said. “This asshole's going to ask for a fifty-dollar bill to let us off the hook.”

The constable shone his flashlight in their faces. “Where you boys been? What's your business in New York at this hour?”

“We took the boy to Cooperstown for the day,” Teddy said.

“Well, you were clocked at sixty-five. You can pay the fine here, seventy-five dollars, or we can take a little ride up the road, pay a visit to the JP.”

“I was going forty-five,” Teddy said.

“JP don't like to be rousted out in the middle of the night,” the constable said. “He might make that fine two hundred and a free overnight stay at the county motel. The one with bars on the windows.” He flashed the light full in E.A.'s face. “You ever been in jail, boy?”

From the back came a thumping, scrabbling sound. The constable jumped. “What's that?” He stepped back from the window and put his hand on his holster.

“Something you'd like to see, officer,” Bill said. “A specimen of early life here on earth.”

“A what? What you got back there?”

“His name's Jolting Joe, we've got him in a sack. He likes to ride that way,” Bill said.

“Good Christ!” the constable said, shining his light in the back. “You get out of the vehicle, mister,” he said to Teddy, “and keep your hands where I can see them. I want to see who's in that sack.”

Teddy got out. E.A. got out, too, though the constable hadn't told him to. When the constable opened the back door, the bat bag appeared to be moving across the floor of its own volition. The policeman played his light on the bag. “You,” he said to Teddy. “Open up that sack and let him out of there.”

Teddy loosened the drawstrings. The officer leaned forward, tugging at the chin strap of his hat.

“Joe don't seem to want to come out very bad,” Teddy said.

As the officer bent over to look inside, the turtle's head and neck shot out of the sack. The constable leaped back, striking his head on Patsy's metal door frame. Immediately Teddy said to the stunned man, “Here, officer. Let me help you back to your car.”

Teddy assisted him to the cruiser and eased him in behind the wheel. He reached inside and snapped off the flashers. The turtle, for her part, had lurched out of Patsy and was lumbering toward a depression beside the road filled with cattails.

“Is the cop going to be all right?” E.A. said a minute later as they continued on east at a moderate speed.

“He's going to have a major-league headache,” Teddy said.

In the headlights E.A. saw a concrete bridge. “Won't he come after us?”

“Not right away,” Teddy said. He held up the keys from the cruiser's ignition and, as they crossed the bridge, pitched them far out into the darkness.

Just beyond the bridge their lights picked up a large green sign with white letters:
WELCOME TO VERMONT
.

“Thank the Jesus,” Bill said.

“Amen,” Teddy said, and all three of them began to laugh.

J
UDGE CHARLIE KINNESON'S
private chambers behind the courtroom looked out over the baseball diamond on the west, the Lower Kingdom River and U.S. Route 5 on the south, and the Green Mountain Rebel factory on the southeast. On the walls were reproductions of the famous Orvis trout, leaping out of a boggy green stream with a dark fly in the corner of its jaw; a Frederic Remington painting of two Canadian voyageurs and a wolfish-looking dog in a canoe; and a Montana butte by Charlie Russell. There was a color photograph of Carlton Fisk waving his '75 home run fair and snapshots of Charlie's wife, Athena, and their twin daughters. On the judge's desk, atop a stack of old
Outdoor Life
magazines, sat a small bronze reproduction of Remington's sculpture of a mustachioed cowboy aboard a bucking bronc. In the floor-to-ceiling bookcases between the windows, wedged in with legal tomes and bound reports from each session of the Vermont legislature back to 1848, were scores of books on the American West.

Judge Charlie liked to say that if he'd known,
really known
, what was out in Montana and Wyoming when he was young and right out of law school, he'd never have set foot back in Kingdom County. But the fact was, Charlie Kinneson loved the Kingdom and was as much a part of it as the Kingdom was of him, and today of all days, E.A. was glad that Charlie had not lit out for the frontier years ago. Deputy Warden Kinneson, in his auxiliary capacity as truant officer, had hauled him and Gypsy up in front of the judge for “flagrant habitual truancy over the past eight years.” Charlie had put off hearing the case for as long as he could. Now the deputy was petitioning him to order E.A. to attend school and, if Gypsy balked, to remove him from her custody. Because the case involved a minor, Charlie had decided to hear it in his private chambers rather than in the open courtroom. So here they were, a week after E.A.'s trip to Cooperstown with Teddy and Bill.

Ethan and Gypsy sat on an old leather couch also occupied by Charlie's elderly springer spaniel. Charlie sat in a Morris chair by the west window. The deputy, at Charlie's suggestion, sat behind the judge's desk. The judge wore his black steel-capped shoes and blue umpire's shirt because he had an American Legion ball game to officiate later that afternoon in Memphremagog. In his hand he held a manila folder.

“Now, Ethan,” Charlie said with a broad smile, “Deputy Warden Kinneson, my estimable cousin and Kingdom County's favorite game warden, truant officer, and dogcatcher—did I get all your titles, cousin?—is alleging that Gypsy doesn't raise you properly at home.”