Story #10: "The Knuckleball Artist" (Chapter 7)

A pet store aquarium. A grocery store lobster tank. A beach in Mexico. A lily-pad frog. Beach balls in a hurricane. Popcorn in the wind, and breeze over a field of wheat.

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CHAPTER 7

A YANKEE

Pinball’s back porch door slammed shut.

“Why is there nobody here, Phineas? Where is your team?”

“I have no idea. I have to pee.”

“Of course, you’re a kid that has to pee all the time.”

“Of course, you’re a coach that has to pee all the time,” Phineas snapped at him over his shoulder as he left to scout a spot, changing directions like he was steering a sailboat.

Reginald returned from the car with a painter’s bucket brimming with dirty yellow, grass-stained baseballs. He hadn’t touched a baseball since setting his Yankee baseball on the mound twenty-one years before. The balls jostled in the bucket when he set it down. The past was stirring, and it was game time: he needed to pick up a baseball. As simple tasks go, this one was towards the top of the list.

Looking into the bucket made Reginald think of fish tanks. He loved fish tanks. He thought of pet store aquariums and sticking his arm in to rearrange sunken pirate ships and scuba men blowing bubbles. When you’re on a tight budget on a Saturday night, watching pet store goldfish is cheaper than going to the movies.

Reginald stuck his hand right into the baseball bucket and caught a green and yellow tropical baseball fish. He held it up in the air.

He looked up for the Sleepmobile as if to show her what was happening. She was parked staring right at him. It wouldn’t have surprised him in the slightest if her headlights flashed. He couldn’t have been more proud of himself for touching a baseball.

With that, an entire future opened up. He imagined putting down his broom in the Cougars Volkswagen showroom, staring straight at The Boil, quitting in front of the entire town who would all happen to be there. He’d tell The Boil to get the Última Última’s brakes fixed, and snappy, Boil.

“We’re off to a beach in Mexico.”

He’d wait until closing time so The Boil would watch him drive off into the sunset, leaving a floating trail of popcorn in the air as he held a bag out the driver’s window.

A smile spread across Reginald’s face like a breeze over a wheat field. The surprise Little League coach turned towards the Sleepmobile so he could show her something about himself she’d never seen. She was so shocked that her emergency brake slipped, and she began to drift backwards in the parking lot.

Flush with the simple joy that he could pick up a five-ounce baseball, he looked back into the bucket at all the pretty yellow and blue fish in there.

Over at the tree line, the kid was hopping around in the middle of a championship bout with his zipper.

Reginald angled towards the Sleepmobile so he could show her something about himself she’d only seen in her own hood ornament.

He flicked and rotated the ball easily in his long, nutcracker fingers, then over his flat palm, and onto the back of his hand like he was flipping a flapjack. He rolled it around like quarters across his knuckles. It was effortless. It was smooth. It was like being scared to hold a baby and fifteen seconds later you’re so comfortable with that little bundle you’re tossing it up and down in the air.

Phineas had settled into a spot. He was still pumping up and down on his toes, but his shoulders had dropped a foot. Whatever had been electrocuting him let up.

And the more that scuffed old baseball skipped around his dominant right hand, the more his confidence grew and the brighter he smiled at the slowly drifting Sleepmobile.

Reginald scraped his fingers hard over the laces, dug his nails into the flesh of the ball. The ball moved faster and faster now, then the ball didn’t wiggle any more than the top of fresh jam, only his hand was moving around the ball now, then it wasn’t clear at all what was happening because the whole business was blurrier than an electric sewing machine.

In Double AA at Stillwater, he used to roll the ball out to the ends of his fingertips like a water-balloon ice cream cone, then snap it back in until he clawed it into a knuckleball grip, then onto his fingernails like a diamond into a golden setting. In and out, slow as a baby’s sigh, then as lightning fast as the double chin on a lily pad frog.

It rushed back to him.

The Boil used to call it The Cone, back before The Boil was The Boil. At Stillwater, he’d been his bunkmate. Coaches said there had never been a better catcher and pitcher on the field at the same time. Funny the things you think you’d never forget.

Reginald moved a foot forward and stepped onto the pitching rubber. He peered towards home plate where no catcher crouched waiting for him.

Caught up in it and seeing the kid was still facing the other way, he bent over like he was squinting for the sign. He held the ball behind his back so still you couldn’t take your eyes off it.

In the old days, the moment a batter saw Reginald gripping that ball behind his back, they forgot how to blink. Because once he started swirling The Cone behind his back, those hitters were in more trouble than a three-pound hog at a 4-H fair.

Reginald struck batters out before The Boil even flashed the pitch. They fell like corn through a grain elevator. They could have brought Reginald up to the Bigs just to have him swirl the ball behind his back and sell tickets to see it.

“We’re meteors, Reg. We’re bound for the Bigs. Of course, I’ll be going first, but I’ll save you a bunk, Reg.” Then, because he was basically The Boil even then, he couldn’t help adding, “If you make it to the Bigs, that is.”

The memory stopped the ball dead cold in Reginald’s hand, and he stood up straight again. Because in the end, he was the one who made it first, and then The Boil didn’t, and then The Boil never would.

Reginald’s own knees nearly were kicked out from under him by fright. The Boil’s kid was standing right below him staring up. Reginald was so shocked by those welders trained on him, he almost toppled over like a two-legged barstool.

About a foot of free belt dangled from the kid’s over-cinched buckle, but for once the kid shut his trap. Reginald looked at The Boil’s kid and his greasy glasses, and for a moment he was curious to see through those welders and check if he looked like his father.

“Twenty-one years, kid.”

“Till you throw it to me?”

The kid turned and walked over to home plate and crouched down to catch the ball in his tiny glove.

And as Reginald reached down into the pet store aquarium to pull out another pretty yellow-green fish, the bucket suddenly turned into the grocery store’s lobster tank.

The same What Cheer lobsters had been in the grocery store tank for twenty-one years and three renovations. Nobody in the state of Iowa even knew how to boil lobsters, but being generally kind-hearted and not having salt water within a thousand miles of the grocery store, the bag boys removed the rubber bands on their claws.

Looking at the bucket now, a shiver raced through Reginald’s hand as he reached down through all those claws to pull out a ball, and it ran up the length of his arm like ice water.

“Wakey, wakey,” Phineas said somewhere a thousand miles away, but it was too late. Reginald had fallen into a Yipper lobster tank.

He looked towards the parking lot for help, but the Sleepmobile had drifted backwards, over the hill, and almost out of view. She stared at Reginald with her cracked headlights, then her front trunk popped open. She was tearing up and coming very close to dripping oil.

The dirty, old baseball he now held was smaller in his hand than he remembered, and much smaller than the baseballs in his dreams. Dream baseballs started as peas and if he so much as peeked at one, it inflated to the size of a beach ball, and that was when you only tried to hold them. When you tried to throw one of them with pork-sausage fingers, they didn’t go anywhere further forward than directly behind you.

In Reginald’s recurring baseball nightmare, Yankee stadium was emptier than a night game 27th inning.

There was never a catcher at home plate, but then there would be a catcher, and he’d see the catcher was actually sitting in the upper deck or the press box where he’d accidentally throw it.

That catcher would always turn out to be The Boil. He’d be wearing a giant knuckleball-sized catcher’s mitt the size of a garbage can lid.

In the dreams, when he went to pitch, his baseball blew up in his hand and grew faster than a clown filling a birthday balloon. He felt like he was trying to throw the balloon standing in a river. Then he’d drop it, and he couldn’t find the balloon in the water because it had turned into a roadside pumpkin.

Then he’d hear The Boil call out from the cheap seats,“You’re losing your grip, Yipper!”

And if hearing the word Yipper didn’t snap you out of a daydream of a nightmare, I’m not sure what would.

Although possibly, The Boil’s kid wearing welder’s glasses and calling out in a higher version of the same voice.

“I’m over here, Mom.” Phineas was throwing his glove up in the air over his head and trying, unsuccessfully, to catch it.

“Alright kid, crouch.”

The first pitch Reginald threw went to the kid’s right and stopped cold three feet in front of him. The ball couldn’t have arrived more slowly if it had been delivered by the U.S. Postal Service. Phineas made zero effort to get it.

“Get it, Phineas.”

“You get it. I can’t find it.”

It was a foot in front of him.

Reginald’s pitching hand started trembling. He pulled a second ball out of the lobster bucket. This one left his fingertips like a beach ball in a hurricane, landing somewhere in a zip code on the outskirts of Cedar Rapids.

He could hear The Boil in his head.

“You’re losing your grip, Reginald,” the Yipper said.

Reginald stared into his bucket of ancient lobsters. He could feel a lobster rubber band tightening around his pitching hand.

“Over here, coach! Over here!” Phineas was waving like he was drowning.

It was too much.

Reginald went and sat in the stands. He couldn’t even bring himself to get near the Sleepmobile, even if she’d already drifted almost to the end of the driveway. He’d lose her soon. He should live in a lobster tank.

He covered his face with his hands.

Who was he kidding?

It was over. There was no hiding in the Última either. The Boil was right. He was always right. He’d never be able to do it.

You can’t coach a Little League team if you can’t throw the ball, and if you can’t coach, then you can’t win a Championship. And if you can’t win a Championship...

Reginald was never so good at these sorts of logic puzzles, but this one he had a handle on.

As if things weren’t bad enough already, a screen door slammed out in right and two beers cracked open. Pinball was out on his porch again, rocking away. His chair squeaked. It was so quiet Reginald heard him sipping out of both sides of his mouth.

He heard the kid come over and stare at him. The washed-up knuckleballer moved his head from his hands to his arms and tried to hide there, but he couldn’t get any further down without a towel to put over his head.

For reasons that weren’t clear to either of them, Phineas threw his baseball glove twenty feet in the air over his head, then tried to catch it. Reginald heard it hitting the ground probably within kicking distance.

“Who would like to speak first?” the kid asked finally. “And what I just said doesn’t count. We’re starting now. I mean now. I mean now.”

Still Reginald didn’t say anything.

The kid didn’t either for a long minute. The rocking chair stopped out in right.

“I’m about to throw my glove in the air. It might hit you. That is a final warning.”

“My arm’s a little tight,” Reginald muttered. I’m not even sure Phineas could make out what he was saying, and you might have sworn it wasn’t possible, but Reginald managed to burrow in further.

An even longer silence followed.

Then, in a new, softer voice that Reginald hadn’t heard before, the kid said, “May I point out that you are a Yankee?”

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