Wall Ball (3 page)

A
fter the plows drove off, we started warm-up drills. In that cold, warming up was harder than a cement bed. We tried doing jumping jacks, but our bulky winter jackets and heavy boots made it almost impossible to get off the ground. Running the bases wasn’t much better. It was hard to get any traction. We’d cleared away a lot of snow, but a hard-packed layer of it still coated the diamond. Running on it felt like a bad dream where something is chasing you, but no matter how hard you pump your legs you can’t gain any speed. If we ever had to wear our full winter outfits in an actual game, we could forget about stealing any bases. Slow as we were going, we
wouldn’t even be able to borrow them.

“Good enough,” Skip Lou said after about fifteen minutes. “Let’s try some fielding drills. Everybody take your positions. The play will be at first base.”

He stood at home plate and hit baseballs for us to catch. He hit one after another. Pop-ups, grounders, line drives, high bouncers, Texas leaguers, cans of corn. We bumbled around like a bunch of clumsy snowmen trying to catch them. Most got past us. When someone did make a stop, the throw to first was usually terrible. It was hard to throw accurately with a mitten on your hand. You couldn’t get any feel for the ball.

“Not bad, not bad at all,” Skip Lou called encouragingly as Stump muffed a grounder, then picked up the ball and fired it about a mile over Gilly’s head at first.

Skip smacked a long fly ball toward center field.

Orlando Ramirez set off after it. On the tamped-down layer of snow left behind by the
plows, he ran like a newborn colt, loose and skittery, every step a learning experience. His legs slipped in all directions. Gradually, he found his balance and gained some footing. Once he did, his legs started pumping up and down like pistons, and he gathered a head of steam.

“The kid’s got wheels,” Slingshot said approvingly as Orlando shot across the outfield. “I’ll bet he really flies on grass.”

Orlando raced under the ball and made a fantastic catch. Then he tried to stop running. He dug in his heels, but it didn’t take. The hardened crust of snow was too slippery. He kept right on going, slip-sliding away at breakneck speed.

“Look out!” I yelled from third base. “Look out for the wall!”

The whole team held its breath.

Mr. Bones came over and stood beside me. That short-legged, long-nosed, yellow-haired fur ball liked to be petted and liked to lick faces.
He did not like to see people barrel into walls. He hid his face behind my knees.

Sha-bam!

Orlando smashed into the boards like a runaway train. Jarred loose by the massive collision, chunks of snow and ice crashed down from atop the wall and exploded on the frozen ground like bombs.

“Orlando!” I shouted.

Our new center fielder lay in a heap at the base of the outfield wall.

I sprinted toward him. At least I tried to sprint. With my winter coat and boots weighing me down, it felt as if I was wallowing in quicksand. The whole team struggled along behind me.

By the time we reached Orlando, he was sitting up. The ball was still in his glove. Somehow he had managed to hold on to it. He looked woozy. You could practically see stars dancing around his head, like in a cartoon.

“Yowch,” he said.

“Are you all right?” I panted, crouching down next to him.

“I’m dizzy,” Orlando complained. “I feel like I just ran into a wall.”

I frowned.

“You did just run into a wall,” I pointed out.

“Now why in the world would I do something like that?” he asked.

He was woozier than I thought.

Mr. Bones wiggled over and licked Orlando’s face. He covered his cheeks and chin and nose and mouth with slobbery kisses.

“Pffft,” said Orlando. He scratched Mr. Bones behind his ears.

Mr. Bones wagged his tail and licked faster.

Orlando slowly got to his feet. He brushed snow off his pants and coat. He looked as wobbly as a house of cards.

“Hold on there, Sport,” said Skip Lou. “Let me take a look at you.”

Skip took Orlando’s hands and peered into his eyes. Orlando looked back at him.

“Do this for me, will you?” Skip asked, letting go of Orlando.

He spread his arms wide and touched first his left index finger, then his right to his nose. Without hesitating, the center fielder did the same.

“I feel fine, Coach,” he said.

Skip nodded. “You look okay too,” he said.

Suddenly, Stump pounded his fist into his big fielder’s mitt.

“I’ve got it,” he shouted as though the shortstop was about to make a catch.

We all looked at him. There was nothing to catch.

“What have you got?” we asked.

“Dizzy!” he said triumphantly.

“Why are you dizzy?” our pitcher, Slingshot Slocum, asked. “You didn’t run into anything. Orlando did.”

“No,” shouted Stump. “Dizzy. It can be Orlando’s nickname! Because he knocked himself dizzy. Plus, it’s a great baseball name.
There’s a Hall of Famer named Dizzy Dean.”

We all thought about it for a minute. Upon reflection, it didn’t seem like such a good nickname. The poor guy had run smack into a hard wooden fence at about sixty miles an hour. Calling him Dizzy added insult to injury. It wasn’t much better than calling somebody Fat Lip or Shiner or Bloody Nose. Plus, “dizzy” kind of meant “scatterbrained.”

Orlando didn’t strike me as dizzy. He just seemed as if he didn’t have any brakes.

He hung his head. Obviously he didn’t like the sound of Dizzy.

“No offense, Stump,” I said, “but I think we can do better. It’s not like Orlando’s always dizzy or anything. He seems pretty sane to me. Running into walls is kind of nuts, I guess, but that’s more the field’s fault than his.”

All the guys murmured in agreement.

“Not to mention,” said Ocho, “Dizzy Dean was a pitcher. He was a strike-out artist for the St. Louis Cardinals. He once whiffed Joe DiMaggio four times in a single game.
Orlando’s not a pitcher.”

“Hmmm,” said Stump. “You have got a point there, Ocho.”

Orlando smiled with relief. He assured us he felt fine. We all started walking slowly across the frozen field, picking our way between snowdrifts.

“How about Crash?” suggested Kid Rabbit Winkle.

“Splinter?” asked Ducks. “On account of that wooden fence is full of splinters.”

“Train Wreck?”

“Ice Foot?”

“Battering Ram?”

“The Human Eel!” blurted the Glove as we reached the edge of the infield. He smiled as if he’d just won a pie-eating contest.

“The Human Eel?” I asked. “What in the world does that mean?”

“It means he’s slippery,” the Glove crowed. “Just like an eel! Get it? Because he slipped all over the outfield?”

We all stopped walking.

Orlando frowned. His shoulders slumped. You could tell he was thinking about what it would be like to go through life being called the Human Eel. How your friends and family would shudder every time you got your name in the paper or anything. How strangers would be scared of you. People who weren’t afraid would just think you were weird. When you got right down to it, not a lot of people liked eels. Eels were kind of gross.

It was Tugboat who broke the silence this time.

“Nope,” he said. “It’s the field that’s slippery, not Orlando. Besides, he’s skinny, but he’s not that skinny. A person would have to be super-skinny to go by the name of the Human Eel.”

“And superslimy,” added Billy Wishes.

Again, Orlando breathed a sigh of relief.

We started to take our positions in the field, but Skip Lou waved us off.

“That’s enough for today,” he said. “We’ve already got one center fielder in the hospital.
We don’t need to send another one there.”

He was right. We didn’t need that at all. What we needed were dry clothes and steaming mugs of hot chocolate.

“Let’s try again tomorrow,” Skip said. “Same time, same place. Meantime, pray for a heat wave.”

On that cheerful note, practice ended.

T
he next day was balmy. Almost tropical. The temperature got all the way up to freezing, and it didn’t snow more than a foot or so.

Mr. Bones and I bundled into our winter gear. I grabbed my bat and my mitt and my shovel. We headed over to the ballpark. Today we were going to practice hitting. Hopefully, it would go better than yesterday’s fielding.

Orlando was digging out the bases with the rest of the guys when Mr. Bones and I arrived. The town plows were again doing their best to make the outfield playable.

Mr. Bones ran right over and licked Orlando’s face.

“How’s the old bean, Orlando?” I asked.
Meaning his noggin. Calabash. Pumpkin.

You know, his head.

“Rock solid,” he said. “Never better.”

“Glad to hear it,” I told him. “The wall looks pretty good too. I see it’s still standing where you tried to knock it down.”

I patted him on the shoulder to let him know I was just kidding.

Orlando smiled.

We cleared the field of the fresh snow.

“Spring is in the air,” said Lou “Skip-to-My-Lou” Clementine.

“Sure it is,” said Slingshot as he walked out to the mound. “It is somewhere. Just not here. Australia, maybe.”

“Only six days until we take on those Hog City Haymakers,” said Skip. “Cold and snowy or warm and sunny, it doesn’t matter. In less than a week we finally play baseball.”

Tugboat pulled his catcher’s mask over his ski hat and crouched down behind home plate. Slingshot tossed him a few easy ones. Tugboat caught them and fired them back.

“Batter up,” called Skip Lou.

That was me.

Billy Wishes handed me my favorite bat. A big, long, heavy Louisville Slugger. I rubbed the batboy’s head for luck and stepped up to the plate.

“Nice and easy, Slingshot,” said Skip.

The pitcher nodded and threw me a fat one right down the middle.

I gave it a clout. The bat buzzed in my hands like a swarm of angry bees.

“Yowza!” I bleated as the ball sailed foul and buried itself in a snowdrift down the left field line. I wasn’t used to hitting in cold weather. It stung.

I called time-out and pulled a pair of puffy winter mittens over my thin batting gloves. Then I stepped up to the plate again. Slingshot tossed me another cream pie.

This time I really clobbered it. The bat still buzzed, but the mittens softened the pain from a furious sting to more of a fuzzy vibration. The ball soared into the outfield.

Deep center.

Orlando locked onto its flight and gave chase. Ten feet in front of the sturdy wooden fence, his path crossed that of the ball. He took wing and snapped it up in his glove midair like a bat devouring a mosquito.

Amazing catch! Highlight material. It should have been on SportsCenter.

Orlando landed on his feet.

He did not fall down.

But he didn’t stop either.

He couldn’t.

“Uh-oh,” I said, hoping lightning wouldn’t strike twice.

I held my breath. I closed my eyes.

Sha-bam!

Lightning struck twice. Rather, Orlando did. He slammed into the wall like a football player trying to barrel into the end zone.

The wall made like the Pittsburgh Steelers defense. It didn’t budge an inch.

When the reverberations finally died down and the frozen earth stopped trembling, we ran
out to check on Orlando. He lay on the ground not more than three feet from where he’d crashed the day before. Mr. Bones got there first. He licked Orlando’s face. He wagged his tail and licked some more.

“Pfft!” said Orlando.

He sat up and scratched Mr. Bones behind his ears.

“Orlando,” I said, puffing onto the scene. “We held ten bake sales and six car washes to raise the money to get this wall built. If you knock it down, we’ll never get another. Are you all right?”

“I’ve taken bigger lumps falling out of bed,” he said.

He got up and opened his glove. Nesting inside like a big, round egg was the ball.

If Orlando didn’t knock himself goofy, he was going to be a really great center fielder.

Slowly, we all started walking back across the field.

“How about Two Time?” suggested Tugboat. “On account of this is the second time
he ran into the wall.”

“Greased Pig,” said Ducks. “Because he skitters all over the place like a greased pig at a country fair.”

“Banana Peel.”

“Wallbanger.”

“Wrecking Ball.”

“Superstar,” said Billy Wishes. “On account of he makes super catches, then he sees stars when he runs into the wall.”

We all stopped walking.

“Not bad,” said the Glove. “Not bad at all.”

Everyone agreed that Superstar had a certain ring to it.

But somehow it still wasn’t quite right.

“A player can be a superstar,” said Ocho. “And Orlando definitely can run and catch with the best of them. But can Superstar really be a nickname?”

“It’s like I told you,” Orlando said glumly. “No one has ever been able to pin a good one on me.”

“Don’t worry,” we promised. “We’ll come up
with a winner if it’s the last thing we do.”

One by one, we slapped Orlando on the back.

“Take it easy,” we warned before scattering across the hard-frozen field to our own positions.

Ducks stepped up to the plate. Slingshot lobbed one easy pitch after another right over the middle of the plate. Ducks swung as if the ball was a piñata and if he smacked it hard enough it would split open and spill candy. He didn’t manage to shatter any of Slingshot’s batting practice tosses, but he did turn them around in a hurry. He lasered shots all over the field.

Then it was Gilly’s turn. He too teed off on one fat pitch after another.

We all hit the ball pretty well. It was good to see the winter layoff hadn’t damaged our swings.

Fielding was another story. All practice long, we struggled to catch the ball. We tripped and
slipped and stumbled. None of us had much success staying upright. But no one had a harder time than Orlando. The kid from Florida ran down every long ball to center. And he plowed into the wall after every catch. He never dropped a single fly. But by the end of practice the wall looked like French toast. Battered.

And so was Orlando.

“That’s enough,” called Skip Lou after Orlando’s tenth crash of the afternoon. “Let’s call it a day.”

Skip looked glum.

We all looked glum.

We were glum. Especially Orlando.

The season opener was fast approaching. If we didn’t get better in a hurry, those Haymakers would lick us like a Popsicle. After a month of practicing in snowshoes, they knew how to get around on a treacherous field.

Orlando looked at his feet. His boots were about as useful for baseball as a pair of flip-flops.

Real flip-flops would have been nice. They would have meant the beach and hot sun and sand between your toes.

“Maybe I should try snowshoes like the Haymakers,” he said. “These sure aren’t working.”

Snowshoes would have been nice. A dogsled team would have been better. We definitely needed to try something new. We couldn’t afford to give the Haymakers any advantage. Those guys were so good, they could show up barefoot wielding broomsticks for bats and oven mitts instead of baseball gloves and still crush nine teams out of ten.

“Maybe you should just lay off a little bit,” suggested Skip. “Don’t try to catch every single ball hit to center field. If the ball is sailing toward the wall, pull up and play it on a carom.”

Orlando turned as pale as the belly of a fish.

“But Skip,” he gasped, horrified. “I’m a center fielder. I catch flies. It’s what I do.”

“I like your moxie, kid,” said Skip. “It’s your health that worries me.”

“Not to mention the health of the wall,” added Ducks with a grin.

With that, practice broke up. Vacation ended with it. In the morning, we went back to school. To tell the truth, I wasn’t sorry about that at all. Between the weather, Gilly’s accident, and our lousy performances on the ball field—if you could call a snowy wasteland a ball field—it had been the worst spring break on record.

Mr. Bones and I said so long to the guys and trudged home, into the teeth of a biting north wind.