Story #10: "The Knuckleball Artist" (Chapter 11)

Reginald's beer, a pine tree air freshener, a funny-bone fake-chuckle, a twelve-thousand dollar electric bike, a title, a baby wrench, drumsticks, a deer in a pickup, and All Who Wander.

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Reginald was woken up by a hard rap of knuckles on the Sleepmobile Front Porch window. The sleepy-eyed former Yankee folded back his “All That Wander Are Not Lost, But I Sure Am” sunshade and saw Bobby “The Boil” Boyle peering into his home. His old teammate was “having a good old gander” as New Yorkers think Iowans like to say.

Reginald had to wipe the steam off the windows with the sleeve of his Yankee pajamas to get a good look at his drop-in visitor.

“I can’t stay for coffee, but thought I’d drop by for, let’s call it, a chat.” The Boil was tightening a chin strap on a bike helmet that was so streamlined it could take flight.

Reginald was speechless, but spotting a pile of clothes in the passenger seat laundry room, he hurried to shove them out of sight. It got worse. Under his crumpled clothing he’d left six empty bottles of his special beer—those same bottles of beer I keep promising we’ll “come to later.” And we will. You can be sure of that. Reginald liked his special beer morning, noon, and night.

“Oh, Reginald, Reginald, Reginald,” The Boil said, looking at the beer bottles, pursing his lips and shaking his head. He was always delighted to be disappointed with Reginald. The Boil disappeared from the cleared fog porthole of the windshield.

“Come around to the side of the house. Let’s talk.”

“Give me a minute. I’ll be right there.”

The Boil grunted. For the first time, Reginald heard a rhythmic “click-clicking” coming from behind the car door.

Wiping the sleep from his eyes, Reginald struggled back and forth over the front seats to the laundry to get dressed and greet his boss at the front door.

The Boil wasn’y showing up on Reginald’s doorstep first thing on a Saturday morning to say hello and “greet the dawn,” something Iowans most certainly do say.

After the Cougars’ seventh straight victory, The Boil caught wind of his kid’s undefeated team record on the showroom floor. His kid might have mentioned something or other during TV dinner, blah-blah-blah, but his employees didn’t exactly keep him in the loop.

When Reginald finally rolled down the driver’s window, our knuckleball pitcher felt like he’d been pulled over by the Iowa State Police. His one-time friend, turned heartless boss, turned merciless loan shark was fussing with his twelve-thousand-dollar electric road bike, and placing and replacing miniature bicycle tools on the roof of the Sleepmobile.

The Boil fussed with the price tag he hadn’t removed for a year, but no matter how he tried to twist it towards Reginald, the price flipped back to face the wrong direction.

“Looks like things are going well for you, Reginald. 7-0! Well, how about that? Starting to dream about the title?”

The Boil sounded like he was interviewing a player after the big game.

“The title to the championship?” Reginald blinked.

The Boil let out a funny-bone fake-chuckle, spun two baby bicycle wrenches in the air, and caught them again like one of those long-haired drummers.

“That’s a good one, Bigs. Hadn’t thought of that.”

He most definitely had.

Click. Click. Click.

“I was more thinking about the title to the Sleepmobile.”

“I’m taking it one game at a time, Boil. It’s really all about the team.”

He also sounded like he was being interviewed for a sports channel. Even with a morning frog still in his throat, Reginald surprised himself with his own confidence. The undefeated Little League record was bringing back something long-lost in his voice.

The Boil heard it, too, raised an eyebrow.

Single click.

Anyway, all that “one-game-at-a-time” business was nonsense.

Reginald was “one hundred percent corn ethanol gasoline” waiting for The Boil to hand over the Sleepmobile title. He pictured a town ceremony as The Boil took it out of a picture frame so Reginald could hang it from the rear-view mirror. It would spin there with the dead pine tree air freshener when he drove away from What Cheer and into the sunset. That air freshener had been hanging there since the he saved up for the car wash.

“Funny thing is, I bet you still think you’re winning the bet, but really everything is going exactly as I expected, Bigs.” He looked up and grinned like when they’d been best friends for decades.

Reginald got psyched out easily. Something terrible was about to happen. His eyes grew bigger than a player about to be traded to the Seattle Mariners.

Click, click, click, click, click...

“You know your son is the star of our team.” The words just tumbled out. He had no idea where that observation came from.

If you’d seen The Boil’s face, you’d think every clock in Iowa just lost a second.

“He packs the place. You should come see him. Just once, I mean. It would... He… Yeah,” he said to not put too fine a point on it.

“You hear that sound, Bigs? That’s state-of-the-art electronic gear shifting, and that’s what the two of us are going to do together: we’re going to gear shift.”

The Boil let out another funny-bone fake-chuckle. Then, out of nowhere, “Remind me… were you in the Bigs long enough to have your own baseball card?”

This was the second time baseball cards had come up in twenty-one years, twice now in the last few days.

“You know I didn’t, Bobby. Neither of us did.”

Click.

The former best friends locked eyes through the driver’s window for longer than they had since Reginald’s surprise call-up to the Yankees twenty-one years before.

That had been a moment. The were in the Wilkes-Barre AAA locker room when Reginald told his friend he’d been called up. He felt terrible. He was on the brink of tears. Reginald, that is.

“Don’t be mad, Bobby, but I’m off to the Yankees. They called me up.”

“Not in the order we agreed to, Reg.”

How it all came back to Reginald. They were called up to the big leagues in the wrong order.

"I’ll go first, and after a season or so, then I’ll root for you to come along after,” The Boil said. The Boil was so much better a player he insisted Reginald shake on it.

It wasn’t a full minute after he shared the news that day, and The Boil was obviously so upset about it, that Reginald changed the subject to the last Volkswagen being made in Mexico. He read something about it at the barber shop. But talking to Bobby, he’d needed something, anything to say, and he kept charging along. Suddenly, he was buying it. He said he’d be $100 short on purchasing the vehicle.

Maybe he always saw it coming.

The Boil fake-grinned and offered to loan him the last $100. Reginald, feeling terrible about the mess they were both in with the call up, agreed to the contract terms on the soapy shower wall. He was so focused on not hurting The Boil’s feelings, he didn’t truly read them.

And now here they were, twenty-one years later. One guy for a single strike in the Bigs, the other who never made it at all.

Click.

Outside the car window, The Boil tried to get the upper hand again by twirling one of his tiny drumsticks. Reginald needed to say something, anything, but probably not what he did:

“Sometimes I think it should have been you, too, Bobby. Better for both of us.”

“You don’t need to say that, Bigs. It didn’t go to exactly the right guy.”

As I’ve pointed out, Reginald was not good at logic problems, and this one shot straight over his head.

Neither said anything for an awkward amount of time.

Finally, The Boil leaned his full body over the handlebars to the tire like he was looking over the edge of a stadium upper deck.

“Now, here’s why I stopped by: You remember the part of our deal where I said, “I get to make the rules easier for you at any point, and you can make them harder?’”

Reginald slowly nodded his head back and forth like a windshield wiper.

The Boil leaned his ear sideways against the tire like a doctor and tap-tapped it with his fingernail.

“Here’s the change in the rules. I’m going to make it so easy for you now, you can’t possibly fail. So, so easy. Forget about going undefeated. Now all you have to do…”

Click-click.

The Boil looked up at him.

Reginald remembered standing in the locker room shower, holding a tiny towel and struggling to read a contract.

“All you have to do, Bigs… is hang on to your winning record. Nothing to it.”

Something definitely terrible had just happened. Reginald had no idea what.

“You look like a deer on the interstate, Bigs. A minute ago you needed to get the team to 21 and 0. Now you only need to win four more games. What’s so confusing?”

Reginald was no longer a deer on the highway. He was a deer in the back of a pickup truck.

When The Boil was satisfied that Reginald was speechless, he gave the roof of the Sleepmobile a big “gosh-darn-I’ll-buy-the-car” bang and let out one last, funny-bone fake-chuckle.

The Sleepmobile honked loud enough to make them both jump, but the surprise nearly knocked The Boil off his twelve-thousand dollar bicycle.

The girl could catch you off guard like that sometimes.

Reginald didn’t look up again, but he heard the gravelly skidding at the bottom of the parking lot. He could just make out The Boil yelling up the hill.

“Easier is harder for you! I know you better than you know yourself, Bigs!”

Easier was, in fact, harder for him. He’d never really noticed that, and things had grown very, very hard.

Later that morning, at a far more appropriate hour for unexpected house calls, Phineas showed up tap-tapping at the driver’s window. Reginald hadn’t seen the kid struggling to push his bike up the hill. Now he stood at the driver’s window holding a glove and a ball. He had a bat tucked under his chin. The kid was dressed for a game.

“I’m here, and you are here.” His bike started to topple. Phineas struggled with the kickstand.

Reginald had been pushing this kid’s knuckleball business off for over a month. It was too much. Reginald was still in a terrible state about “whatever had happened but he wasn’t sure what.”

He’d never felt so low and defeated, which was a high bar.

“It’s never going to happen, kid. Not for me and not for you. Knuckleball practices are cancelled. Forever, kid. Not for us.”

He looked away, spread out his “All That Wander Are Not Lost, But I Sure Am” sunshade and disappeared. For a long time, he heard Phineas shifting in the gravel. Reginald wished the kid would just go, or maybe just stay.

Eventually, the knocking stopped. He was pretty sure he heard a kickstand.

Reginald peeked out a hole in the sunshade. Phineas struggled to push his bike down the hill.

It was all too much.

Reginald lay back down in his bed and pulled his big knees all the way up to his chest. For years he’d been able to get comfortable like that, but now it wasn’t working. The Sleepmobile was getting tighter and tighter these days. Everything in his world was about to pop.

Our one-pitch Yankee turned face down towards the floor and stared at the parking lot gravel through the rust holes.

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