Story #10: "The Knuckleball Artist" (Chapter 20)

The pharmacist, an umpire in a dust cloud, the Final Sunset Nursing Home, Superior Iowa Wines, and a lit firecracker in the palm of your hand.

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CHAPTER 20

THE DAFFODILS

In May, the clouds cleared, and right on schedule, out popped Angry Myrtle’s Daffodil Warning. She erupted in her pew mid-sermon, raised her index finger, and threatened the congregation with the end of spring. “Mark my words! The last of the daffodils! Gone! Gone!” she cried. Then down she went, same as every year. The stress of prophecy kept her in bed for a week.

The only thing more predictable than Myrtle’s Daffodil Warning was the last pitch of the last out of the Little League season, every year a nail-biter. The suspense was the talk of the hardware store. Even Homer, the pharmacist, by and large, a practical fellow, said he felt a big moment coming three games out.

“I’m closing early for the Big Game, Myrtle. Good to see you up and about.”

“Homer.” When she felt disagreeable, Myrtle used people’s first names, then stopped cold.

That didn’t stop Homer.

“You know, I have a hunch.” Like everyone in What Cheer, he laid it on a little thick with superstitions around Myrtle.

“Homer.”

And that was that.

But our big game was still three games out. The Cougars were a whirlwind in every direction. Their changes in fortune would have given a smaller town whiplash.

With Phineas calling the shots, the Cougars clawed their way out of coach-inflicted losses and started winning effortlessly.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit, baseball can drag a tad. So I won’t step you through the wins and losses, but imagine scoreboards spinning like odometers and clouds of dirt clearing to reveal umpires calling “safe!” or even “out!”

By mid-May, the Cougars had a record of 10-8. Win one of the final three games, and Reginald owned The Sleepmobile outright and his $391,442.81 debt to The Boil would be forgiven. After twenty-one years, a winning season of some sort appeared to be at hand for Reginald.

Somehow it left him glum, not that he didn’t try to raise his own spirits. He sat in his passenger seat, pictured the whole thing.

In a few short days, his players would line up to thank him.

“We’re sure going to miss you, Coach. Mostly we’ll miss Phineas, but you meant the world to us, too.”

He imagined the town gathering at the highway turnoff, right down to the Final Sunset nurses pushing the old-timers’ wheelchairs. The mean checkout girl would hand him the keys to the city. (This part he always said out loud.)

“In case you’re ever in these parts again, Reg, and want to visit the little people.”

“I’m sorry. I have to go.”

With that, he’d take one last look at the town of What Cheer and putter off to Mexico. He pictured the title to The Sleepmobile flapping on his dashboard.

None of it made him happy.

Reginald stared at the last daffodils along the first-base line. He imagined it all — the praise and goodbyes — but the thought of winning left a lump in his throat for all the wrong reasons.

The thing was, with Phineas whispering all the instructions, play by play, and out by out, he no longer drafted the game’s lineup card, flashed signs, or lumbered out to the mound with the bad news.

It wasn’t Reginald making the calls for preposterous double steals or putting seven outfielders in right. It was Phineas firing off a flurry of instructions. Reginald refilled the cooler and secured the lid all the way like he was told.

With Phineas in charge, Reginald could barely keep up. He waited for his instructions more confused than a prom queen in a spelling bee. Eventually, Reginald had such difficulty tracking what he was supposed to do and Phineas became so overcome with insights, the arrangement reached its breaking point.

In the bottom of the third, Reginald bumped backwards into the water cooler. The lid came off. Ice was everywhere. The broom was useless, he thought, and somehow the word useless was the last straw.

He couldn’t even make it as a Little League waterboy.

“Go ahead and coach without me.” He tried to say it casually as he swept up the ice with his foot.

Phineas looked up from scouring his Official Little League Rule Book.

“I don’t understand.”

Fact was, he really didn’t understand, because he thought it had been going so well between the two of them.

“Pretend you’re relaying messages, Phineas. Say I’m telling you what to say. I’ll be out in the car.”

“What will you do out in the car?”

6’4” Reginald slumped into a question mark, and his arms dangled at his sides.

“You’re still giving me knuckleball lessons, right?”

Reginald nodded like a basset hound.

“Sorry, Coach, but I need to get back to the game…” Phineas let out a blood-curdling, “Zone defense, boys!”

Phineas, in full command, grew even more formidable. He hollered at umpires, tore pages from the rule book, and shouted things like, “Well, I guess we won’t be needing these!”

But the moment the volunteer umpires bumped into him their chest protectors and threatened to eject him, Phineas explained—getting up from the dirt—that he was only doing what Reginald out in the parking lot asked him to do.

“Don’t kill his messenger!”

But when Phineas tugged the cork-shaped head off the Superior Iowa Wines mascot and trampled the third-base line daffodils, that was it. All three umpires came out to the Sleepmobile and demanded Reginald to put a stop to it.

“Reginald, we’re volunteers. We’re going to have to eject him.”

By way of apology, they raised their arms helplessly. What Cheer was too small a town for ejections.

Reginald closed the driver’s window on them and rested his forehead on the steering wheel. He was hard to hear, mumbling through the glass.

“Something, something, something… Tantrums are part of baseball,” Reginald muttered. “Something, something, something… future coaches need role models, too.”

“Please, Reg. We don’t want to have to eject you from the parking lot. This is your home.”

Everyone just felt terrible.

Somewhere in the distance, you could hear Phineas yelling for joy. “It worked! I can’t believe it worked.”

And right up to the final three games, everything worked for Phineas.

“You’ve got the thing,” Coach said, dropping the kid off after a long, quiet ride home.

“The thing?”

“The thing.” He couldn’t have delivered happier news more sadly. “You’re a winner, son.”

“You think so?”

Phineas sounded very young all the sudden.

“Numbers never lie, but please don’t tell your dad I failed as your waterboy.”

Phineas took a moment to look at the last daffodil in his driveway.

“You know, he’s not who you think, my dad.” He looked away from Reginald. Reginald put the car in gear, but right before he drove off, Phineas went on. “He said he always knew his bet with you would cost him a fortune. He said he’d always been jealous you made it to the majors and he didn’t.”

“He said that?”

Phineas was standing outside the car, looking back in with his donut of curly hair squeezed under his baseball cap.

“Oh, yeah. Then he said he was glad he had a son that was two foot two and couldn’t see. You don’t have to say everything out loud, you know.”

Phineas sounded very old all the sudden.

The boy stared at Reginald through his smeared welder glasses. For once, Reginald could make out the kid’s goldfish eyes through the lenses. They were not happy goldfish eyes.

Then, almost in harmony, they said, “See you Saturday, 6AM, for knuckleball practice, right?”

That May, it was the only time Reginald nearly smiled.

When he got home, Reginald parked in the furthest spot in the Little League parking lot, all the way out by the Poison Ivy and the Baseball Graveyard.

After a long silence sitting in the crackling of her cooling engine, he opened his heart up to The Sleepmobile.

“I used to hold the ball in my hand, Ú.Ú. It was like holding a lit firecracker. The whole world waited to see what direction I’d throw it.” The Yankee slumped even further in the driver’s seat. “Every way I spun the ball in my hand was its own happy future.” He stared at his palm and shook his head.

Reginald didn’t have fancy words for it, but winning never used to feel like this. You had to be at least some help to the team. You can’t not play to make things better.

The Sleepmobile’s map lights suddenly went dark on him.

He covered his head with a blanket. He felt terrible about going on in front of her. She had her own problems, and he couldn’t even fix them. May had been terrible. Her heater stopped working. Her driver’s side window hadn’t budged since the umpires’ visit.

Then it fell apart for Phineas, too, right at the high point.

His teammates were picking him up and carrying him on their shoulders after they won. He was happier than a honey bee with the boys looking up at him like that.

But a middle-schooler’s heart can play tricks.

Just as the guys were whirling him around as fast as they could and knocking over the last of the daffodils, he thought he saw his dad clapping in the stands.

He wished they had slowed down faster, long enough to know for sure.

But by the time they touched him down, he didn’t even need to look. The stands would be empty.

Phineas lost his mojo.

The Cougars were thrashed the next two games. They were now 10-10, with only a final game to pull it off.

Between Phineas, Reginald, and The Sleepmobile, it was hard to know which of them felt worse.

“Nobody listens! The daffodils are here and gone,” Myrtle cried. “Here and gone!”

She was alone in her house, bolt upright in bed, wagging her index finger at the heavens.

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