Story #10: "The Knuckleball Artist" (Chapter 4)

Years pass in What Cheer. Reginald lives in the Sleepmobile and makes another deal with The Boil, this time to coach his son's Little League team.

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Twenty-one years passed in What Cheer, Iowa, the same as the number on the back of Reginald’s worn-through Yankees pajamas.

Things change very slowly in Iowa. Minimum wage hadn’t budged a penny. Fourteen-year-olds could still be licensed to drive tractors up and down Main Street. There had been chatter about painting over the question mark on the What Cheer water tower, but even the old-timers came around to the idea the troublemakers might be onto something.

Reginald saw it: There were scuffs on the Cougars’ showroom floor, and his custodian broom bristles were worn thinner than stalks in a winter corn field. They didn’t start mowing the Little League field until later in the spring, what with gas prices and the economy.

Our old knuckleballer had grown older, greyer, and shorter. He stooped, and every year, folks said he looked more like a question mark.

“We used to be exactly the same height, but now he’s down a good three inches, mostly from sleeping in his car,” The Boil told customers if Reginald accidentally mopped within earshot. Reginald avoided his boss on the showroom floor like a boy in a bumper car.

The Sleepmobile was worse for wear, too. A pebble-sized crack in the front windshield had worked its way toward the registration sticker, skipped clear over the window frame, into the rear-view, and on to the passenger window. Springs sprung. The refrigerator Reginald built into the glove compartment clicked all night and kept him awake.

Saddest of all, the Beatles tape had long since jammed up. As for the hand brake and reverse bump-starting the car in the snow, well, we’ll come to them.

On a cheerfully overcast Iowa spring morning, The Boil, now Reg’s boss of two decades, asked Reg as a “personal favor” to lug a complete set of dumbbells up to his attic workout room. "One to a hundred, Bigs," he said, from the teeny-weeny "for the little lady" one-pounders to the "just set them over there" hundreds.

“Personal favor” left it unclear whether Reginald would be paid for the morning’s work, but after he’d huffed and puffed every pair of weights up the stairwell, The Boil said, “It’s clearly been a while, but you’re getting a great workout, Bigs.” Well, that tidied up the mystery with a red bow.

And honest to goodness, the poor guy: every development that morning was worse than the last. The gardeners were blocking the parking spaces by the front gate, so Reginald had to park with the handbrake half a block up on an incline. Left unattended, the Sleepmobile could drift a good thirty, forty feet an hour, stacking up cars behind it like buckets on a grain elevator.

And finally, a thirteen-year-old in the security gate monitor made Reginald buzz in every round trip. The kid’s glasses were so dirty he could weld with them.

“Please lean in closer.”

“Please don’t step through the gardening dirt.”

“Please step exactly in your previous footprints.”

“Please hop.”

By the time Reginald made the last trip up with the hundreds, his arms were so tired he pushed the attic door open with his forehead.

The Boil watched all this from the elliptical.

“Last trip, Big Leagues?” The Boil checked the right side of his face in the mirror, then the left. Reginald stood there with slumping shoulders and decided you can have form that is too perfect.

“Good workout, right? You needed it. Just saying.”

The Boil wiped under his armpits with the towel.

“A special day is coming up. Do you remember which one?” The Boil dismounted from the elliptical with a sprightly hop and tossed his sweaty towel to Reginald. He caught it with a clack between the 100-pounders.

“Clean yourself up, Reg. You’re dripping. Have a seat… Not there.”

Reginald wiped his face as instructed, which was tricky holding a towel between two dumbbells. He carried the towel over to the hamper and tried to drop it through the round hole of the laundry basket, but the second he let go of the towel, the yips snuck up on him, his drop went wide, and caught on the edge, just a cornhole shy of flopping in.

It was a parade of indignities, large and small.

The Boil swiveled from the hips to the right and left.

“On 4:59 on July 31, your loan note comes due. Twenty-one years to the minute. Don’t make me spell it out.”

The Boil allowed a very brief silence. He stared at his teeth in the mirror and tapped the sparkliest one with his fingernail.

“Okay, make me spell it out. The Sleepmobile will be mine on July 31^st, all $336,722.97 of it.”

If it wasn’t for The Boil reminding him all the time, Reginald couldn’t remember a thing about that contract.

“But I’ve got a deal for you, Bigs. Best deal ever. You almost can’t lose. You ready?”

Reginald was not.

“Win the Little League championship coaching the kid’s team, and the Sleepmobile is yours, free and clear.”

To emphasize his point, The Boil stomped on the rubber puzzle-shaped gym flooring, and Reginald’s towel dropped in from the lip of the hamper hole.

Reginald barely noticed.

“You’re saying all I have to do is win the Little League championship for your kid’s team and the Última Última is mine free and clear?”

“I coached the boys to 18-0 last season. Coach of the Year. What a team! I won the Cup, Bigs. I could barely get the trophy into my car. How hard could this be?”

The Boil gave Reginald his Yankee Stadium smile.

“Oh, and you also have to give the kid a ride to and from his Little League games.”

“What kid?”

“The kid.”

“Your kid?”

“If you ask his mother,” The Boil forced out a chuckle. “Spend some quality time with him.”

The thought about quality time threw him, and he lost track of his pushups. He gave himself the benefit of the doubt and skipped ahead to sixty.

It was a lot to process. Reginald got lost in the view outside the attic window. He saw the faded blue-green of the Sleepmobile drifting gently backwards down the street.

The Boil’s kid scrambled after it on his hands and feet, bear crawling, circling front to side to back and around again, tracking something beneath the slow-rolling Sleepmobile. A wild pile of brown curls flopped from side to side from where his glasses pinned them down tighter than baling wire. The kid poked a baseball bat under the car from time to time, like he was stealing honey from a beehive.

The Boil came over to look.

“Yup. That’s the kid. All 4’ 6” of him. His name is Phineas, Bigs.”

Reginald was hypnotized. Every time the kid went to the side of the Beetle, the baseball popped out in front. When he bear-pawed his way back to the front, the ball would hit pebbles and whatnot and disappear back under the car.

When the kid finally got a hold of it, he fumbled the ball celebrating, and back it went, rolling under the car, yard by yard down to the intersection. The Última Última left a thin trail of rust drips from where the 100-pounders had dented the floor.

“The kid needs to play per Little League rules. No matter what he pulls out of his rule book, let’s be clear you need to play him... Also, I reserve the right to make the deal easier for you at any point.”

“Easier?”

The Boil gracefully arched and rotated and rose from his push up into a one-armed handstand. It happened so quickly Reginald couldn’t keep track of what he was looking at. Then, very slowly, The Boil opened up into a fingers-wide, spread-eagle weather vane. Reginald had to look out the window again to restrain himself from knocking him over with a poke.

“Yup. Easier. I know you better than you know yourself, Bigs. But if you want to make it harder, then you can make it harder. Fair is fair.”

Somehow Reginald knew it was all too good to be true. He was probably being tricked, but for all that, there was, at last, hope for the Última Última. It was a lottery ticket. He pictured taping the title to the car onto the dashboard like a birth certificate. That very thought made him grin his private, just-for-himself kind of grin.

“Deal, then,” said Reginald.

He went to shake The Boil’s hand which is no small feat when another man is upside-down and, on top of that, keeps moving his hand away from you because he doesn’t want to catch the yips.

“I love seeing a man try so hard, Bigs. Love it, love it, love it. Maybe you’ll do it, Mr. Big Leagues. It’s beyond me why easier is harder for you and harder is easier for me.”

By the time Reginald got back out to the street, the Sleepmobile had rolled all the way down the hill and was feet from the intersection. The kid stood up from time to time, groaned in exasperation, and stretched his back out like he was ninety. He made a small why-oh-why drama of pulling at his pile of curly hair and looking to the heavens.

At the last moment, without a foot to spare at the stop sign, the kid raced around to the driver’s side, reached through the window and rather cleverly turned the steering wheel towards the curb. The Sleepmobile bumped up against it and stopped.

The baseball emerged from under the car, but this time the kid was ready. He stood like a nutcracker in the middle of the four-way intersection with his feet angled together something like a less than sign and trapped the ball. Reginald was almost certain he saw the kid plié.

Chuffed with himself, the kid set off kicking the ball back up the road with the instep of his non-dominant foot. Dribble by left-footed dribble, he rose up the hill, past the Sleepmobile, said “why hello there” to Reginald without looking up, and disappeared into his driveway, hopping up and over the gardener’s dirt pile.

What a sight.

This story, and you may be well ahead of me, is a story about the two of them: Reginald and Phineas. If I do them justice, you’ll end up liking them both and then some.

I hope I’m not giving the entire plot away, but by the end, there’s going to be a grudging affection between the two of them, maybe even more than that, but, my goodness, the road getting there is going to be bumpy.

That evening, Reginald lay in the Sleepmobile’s back seat bedroom and opened his heart.

He wagged his head back and forth like a dog come in from the rain. He couldn’t believe how lucky he was. Maybe he was being tricked… but then again maybe he wasn’t.

Even the words “free and clear.” Unbelievable. He had a shot – they had a shot. He reached into the front seat kitchen and rubbed the leather wrap around the steering wheel. After twenty-one years, it had worn velvet soft to the touch.

He pushed open the lever on the back seat bedroom window and felt a warm breeze on his face. He pushed his nose out like an old dog taking in spring.

“Soon we can go anywhere, U.U. I’ll finally get you a battery, and I’ll fix your cassette player like I always promised. I’ll get you washed at a real car wash. Maybe we even go to Puebla and see the old factory.”

It was almost too much to say out loud, but he did. “You know you’ve been my best friend, U.U. Thick and thin. There’s no denying that.”

Stars sparkled over the Little League field, and a crescent moon hung over the state flag.

“Mexico, U.U. We’ll park by the ocean. You can honk morning and night.”

Reginald sang-hummed himself to sleep on the Sleepmobile king-size. He brimmed over with hope. He dreamed he was in a Little League church choir surrounded by twelve-year-olds in baseball caps and uniforms.

Many times, I’ve been alone and many times I’ve cried…

Then the whole bunch of them started singing so loudly they woke him up.

Reginald sighed, looked up at the stars through the rear window, and began to hum.

Anyway, you'll never know… the many ways I’ve tried…

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