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Authors: Rich Wallace

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BOOK: War and Watermelon
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We head up the Boulevard toward home. The buildings are dark now except for Lovey's, Chicken Delite, and the Limerick Tavern on the corner.
We don't say much on the way home. But I'm thinking.
So far so good, I suppose.
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 7
What They're Saying
By Brody Winslow
 
Dylan asks, “How many roads?”
My dad sees a headband on a coward.
The Youngbloods tell me, “Fear's the way we die.”
My brother sees misuse of power.
My dad mentions King and Kennedy and Yogi.
Sly sings he's no better “and neither are you.”
My brother says it's time to make a difference.
The Archies describe the loveliness of loving you.
My mom says she'll drive to Toronto.
The Beatles hint of Paul so we'll grieve for him.
My brother could be a walrus, too.
The cheerers chant rah rah; we believe 'em.
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 8:
Like a John Tunis Novel
M
e and Ryan can't even sit down, pacing back and forth in the family room. The Mets are clinging to a one-run lead over the Cubs, who've started slumping just as the Mets have caught fire. If the Mets can hold on to this one, they'll be inches away from first place.
First place! This is the Mets we're talking about.
Top of the ninth. One out. Shea Stadium is rocking. I stuff a handful of pretzels into my mouth.
“It's late!” Mom yells from the top of the stairs.
“This is the greatest baseball game ever!” Ryan calls back.
“Brody needs to get to bed!”
I roll my eyes and shake my head. “Two more minutes!” I yell, hoping she'll close her door and go to sleep. Koosman is two outs away from finishing this thing.
He gets his thirteenth strikeout. Ryan throws out five quick punches, gritting his teeth. “Dig it!” he says.
“Unreal.”
“It's almost ten o'clock!” Mom yells.
I can't even look. I walk out to the kitchen and open the refrigerator. There's a pitcher of watery lemonade, a few slices of leftover bacon from this morning on a paper plate, and a half-eaten chicken breast. Plus all the stuff in jars, like olives and pickles and mustard.
“It's over!” Ryan yells. I sprint the eight feet to the family room, where Ryan is dancing around, punching at the air again.
“I am stoked!” he says. “Seaver's pitching tomorrow night and I'm off. We're going!”
“We're going?”
“You better believe we are. What time do you get done with football?”
“About five thirty.”
“I'll pick you up at the field. You can change in the car.”
“We're really going?”
“We're going!”
I can hear Dad walking down the stairs. “Where are you going?” he asks.
Ryan is kneeling on the couch now, bouncing up and down. “Shea Stadium. Tomorrow night. I can use the car, right?”
Dad tightens his mouth. Mom is right behind him, tying her bathrobe. “You want to take
another
trip?” she asks.
“Just into the city,” Ryan replies. “We'd never make it in time on the bus. By the time he gets home from practice and gets changed . . .”
“Can't you go on a Saturday?” she asks. “I'll make sandwiches.”
“Mom, this game is huge. The Cubs
.
The Mets are a game and a half back and Seaver's pitching. It's like a John Tunis novel come to life.”
She purses her lips and turns to Dad, but she doesn't ask his opinion this time. “Brody has school the next morning.”
“It's my birthday!” Ryan says. “And we'll be home by nine thirty. Ten at the absolute latest. He can sleep in the car on the way home.”
“What about his homework?”
I almost never bring homework home. “I'll get it done between classes or at lunchtime,” I say. “Please, Mom. This is the biggest sporting event of my life. You know how bad the Mets have always been. The Yankees and the Giants stink, too.”
“This is history!” Ryan says. “The worst team in sports is becoming the best.”
Mom and Dad look at each other.
“Haven't you had enough ‘history' lately?” Dad asks.
“I brought him back safe from Woodstock,” Ryan says. “And this is a lot closer to home.”
Mom folds her arms. “Brody is already up too late tonight. By tomorrow night he'd be a wreck.”
“No way, Mom,” I say. “I'm up past midnight every night.”
“Since when?”
“I don't know. A while.”
“You can't sleep?”
“I can sleep; I just don't. I listen to the radio.”
Ryan laughs. “Sugar, Sugar.”
“What?” Mom looks at him like he's speaking Italian.
“Mom,” he says, “the man is getting in touch with his emotions.”
“The
man
is only twelve.”
“He's an
old
twelve. I promise, Jenny will look out for him.”
“And Skippy will, too, I suppose?”
“Can't hurt.”
Dad clears his throat again and looks directly at me. “Do you
want
to go, Jehosaphat, or are you being dragged along again so Ryan can justify another trip?”
“I definitely want to go, Dad. I've never been to Shea,
remember
?” He's threatened to take me several times, but it never happens. I can detect a trace of guilt in his eyes. Maybe he feels bad about yelling at Ryan the other night, too.
“Okay,” he says, not even waiting for Mom to chime in. He points at Ryan. “Straight in and straight out. If you're going to be one
second
later than ten o'clock, you find a pay phone and call us.”
“You got it,” Ryan says.
“I'll make sandwiches anyway,” Mom says softly. She gives me a hard look. “You bring a jacket. It can get cold very quickly this time of year.”
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 9:
Everyday People
C
oach gathers us after the wind sprints for a pep talk. Everybody's gasping for breath except me. I can't even stand still, stepping from foot to foot and wishing he would finish. Ryan, Skippy, and Jenny are already waiting in the parking lot.
“So don't be getting big heads just because you've won a couple of games,” Coach is saying. He picks at a side tooth with his thumbnail. “Over-confidence is a killer. You go into a game thinking you're a big deal and you'll come out with a loss, feeling like a bunch of crapheads. . . . So we'll see you on the field tomorrow, ready to work.”
I sprint across the field and up the hill into the parking lot, then climb into the backseat next to Skippy. There's a Mets pennant on the seat.
Ryan reaches over and holds out a hand for me to slap. “Brody boy! You ready for this?”
“You kidding? I couldn't think of anything else all day.”
I turn and watch the other players walking slowly off the field. Tony's by himself.
We drive up to the Boulevard and turn right.
“Which way you going?” I ask.
“Skippy forgot his wallet,” Ryan says. “So we gotta stop there.”
Skippy lives on the other side of town, so that'll cost us some time. But we ought to get to Shea in about forty minutes. It's around quarter to six now. Game time is 7:05.
We pass Corpus Christi and I see Patty and Janet on the steps.
Waiting for somebody?
I wonder.
I pull my jersey and shoulder pads over my head, then untie my sneakers. My T-shirt is soaked, but there's a fresh one and a pair of dungarees in a paper Shop-Rite bag, plus a sweatshirt with a hood.
Jenny looks back and smiles. “I won't watch,” she says.
So I yank off the football pants and the cup and put the dungarees on in a hurry.
“Whoa,” Skippy says. “Those socks stink.”
I peel one off and smell it. It's wet and ripe, but there aren't any fresh ones in the bag. So I ball them up, stick them inside my helmet, and put my bare feet back in my sneakers.
“You think we'll get good tickets?” I ask.
“Sure,” Ryan answers. “We'll probably be in the upper deck, but all the seats at Shea are good. It'll be packed, I can tell you that much.”
Ryan keeps the station wagon running while we wait in front of Skippy's house. Something else must be going on in there, because he's gone for fifteen minutes.
“Look what Jenny got me for my birthday,” Ryan says, handing a record album over the seat.
It's
Stand!
Sly and the Family Stone.
“Cool,” I say. I've been hearing some of this on the radio lately, like “Everyday People.”
Skippy finally comes back with a cigarette between his lips and a can of soda. “What a hassle,” he says, frowning toward his house.
“Your old man home?” Ryan asks.
“Home and wasted,” he says. “Wanted me to wash his car. Tonight. Can you believe that?”
“What'd you say?” Jenny asks.
“I said to wash his own stupid car. I'll do it tomorrow.”
It's way after six by the time we get on Route 80, heading toward the George Washington Bridge. Traffic is heavy. “We'll make it,” Ryan says. “We can catch the first inning on the radio if we have to.”
“So, Brody,” Jenny says, leaning partway over the seat, “you hear about tomorrow night?”
“No.”
Jenny always treats me like I'm an equal, like I'm part of the gang. She's the kind of girlfriend I'd want to have if I ever got one.
“We're going to a war protest,” she says.
“In town?”
“In
our
town? You kidding?” She laughs. “Up in Syracuse. At my cousin's college.”
“Oh. You off again tomorrow, Ryan?”
Ryan shakes his head. “I'm off for real tonight. Tomorrow I'm calling in sick.”
“Again?”
He fake-coughs. “You get a lot of bronchitis in that stupid freezer.”
“It's gonna be so great,” Jenny says. “Very peaceful. A bunch of people are just getting together in front of the student center and reading the names of the war dead and holding candles. It's basically a vigil to get the military recruiters off the campus. We'll be there until sunrise.”
“With big signs,” Skippy says.
“Small signs,” Jenny says. “Just making a point about nonviolence. And screwing the government.”
“You using the car again, Ryan?”
“Nope. We're catching a ride with Jenny's other cousin from Jersey City.”
“Dad know?”
“Dad doesn't need to know. But I will tell you this: I'm taking action.”
“We're taking big-time action,” Skippy says.
“Peaceful action,” Jenny repeats.
“Maybe you,” Skippy says. “I'm gonna make enough noise to get this war ended.”
We've reached Englewood, but the road ahead looks very congested. We've been listening to WMCA, so Ryan switches the channel, looking for a traffic report.
He finds the Mets pregame, and we listen to that for a few minutes, barely moving forward. It's Tom Seaver versus Ferguson Jenkins tonight, two of the best pitchers in the league. The Cubs have lost five straight, and the Mets have won three in a row and nineteen of their last twenty-five.
People in other cars are holding up Mets pennants and beeping their horns when we hold up ours. But we're at a standstill now, and we're still a couple of miles from the bridge.
Ryan finally finds a traffic report. There's at least one accident ahead of us, and one lane of the bridge is closed, but it turns out that this is mostly Mets traffic. Everybody in New Jersey decided they couldn't possibly miss this game.
There's not much we can do. We're not near an exit, so we just wait it out. Ryan shuts off the engine.
“You bring me some food?” I ask.
Jenny hands me a small paper bag with two peanut butter sandwiches and a can of lemon soda. There's no can opener, though. I drank a lot of water toward the end of practice, so I'll be okay. I eat the sandwiches.
Through three innings, Seaver has a perfect game going, so I can just imagine what it'd be like to actually be there. Donn Clendenon hits a two-run homer in the bottom of the third, giving the Mets a 4–0 lead.
We've inched forward about sixty feet since the game started. A few cars have cut across the grass median and headed back the other way, but there are cop cars over there now.
“This is ridiculous,” Skippy says, lighting another cigarette.
Ryan smiles. “What's Yogi Berra say? ‘It's déjà vu all over again.' But hey, we made it to Woodstock.”
“Woodstock went all night,” Skippy replies.
“That it did.”
The perfect game gets busted in the fourth, but Seaver himself hits a leadoff double in the bottom of the inning and later scores.
Ryan turns off the engine again. People have gotten out of some of the cars around us and are drinking beers. Everybody has the game on full volume, so we get out, too. Skippy bums a beer from somebody. We lean against the car and enjoy our second major traffic jam of the summer, laughing and cheering after almost every pitch. Everything's going right for the Mets.
By the time Jerry Grote hits an RBI double in the seventh, the Mets seem to have it on ice. A cop waves us across the median, and suddenly we're going 55 again, heading for home.
BOOK: War and Watermelon
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