The Knuckleball Artist

An Americana tall tale of a washed-up Yankee, a misfit Little Leaguer, a notoriously long red light, the town of What Cheer, Iowa, and the world's last Volkswagen Beetle.

CHAPTER 1

A BEE PULLING OUT HER LANDING GEAR

Everyone called Reginald “The Yipper” Perry’s Volkswagen Beetle “The Sleepmobile,” but Reg called it by its given name, the “Última Última Edición,” or Ú.Ú. when it was just the two of them.

She was the world’s last Beetle, rolled off the assembly line in Puebla, Mexico, on June 3rd of 2003. The Última Última was burped out of the car wash and onto the factory parking lot on a Friday at 4:59 PM. One last factory worker, who’d clearly been drinking, ran out tearfully to spin the radio antenna on. Afterwards, thousands of workers lined up to kiss the Beetle’s hood ornament goodbye. It was a birth then a funeral.

*

Earlier that same afternoon, Reginald had placed a call from the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre AAA RailRiders clubhouse to order the Última Última from a dealership in his hometown of What Cheer, Iowa. A friendly Midwestern voice chirped that the last Beetle made in North America, or frankly anywhere, was now his.

Well, almost his. Reginald was $100 short, but his hometown dealership gave him twenty-four hours because “we know you’re good for it, Reg.” Sure enough, first thing in the morning, he made up the difference on a loan from Bobby “The Boil” Boyle.

It was the same afternoon Reginald was called up to the Yankees. He was riding high that day. He barely paid attention to The Boil’s loan terms. The Boil had sketched them with his finger onto the steamy tile wall of the team showers.

The Deal proved to be a Life Blunder.

It had all moved too fast for Reginald, too much arithmetic under pressure. Things like “interest rates” and “minimum payments” and “prepayment penalties” were not his strong suit, and what with the steam, and trying to protect his modesty with such a small towel, well, let’s just say Reginald was no mental math champion.

But what could possibly go wrong? He was Bronx-bound.

Flush with a career trajectory to the Yankees, and an agent saying something-or-other earlier about signing bonuses after such-and-such number of batters faced, Reginald scribbled his name below the shampoo fine print of the shower wall.

*

Reginald had a gift, and that’s what put him on a bus from Wilkes-Barre to Yankee Stadium.

Reginald could throw a knuckleball.

His knuckler danced right and left and up and over until batters looked weaker in the knees than if they’d waited three innings in a stadium men’s room. No one knew where his pitches were going to go. Reginald himself didn’t know where his pitches were going to go. Bats flew, umpires ducked, fans ducked. Entire sections were abandoned by hot dog vendors.

But batter after batter that knuckleball arrived in the catcher’s mitt with the soft thunk of a revolving door. You can’t imagine the silence that fell when he pitched. You could hear his pitches not spinning, which is exactly what the knuckleball does when a pitcher can calm his mind down enough to throw it.

The Wilkes-Barre play-by-play announcers said making contact with a Reginald Perry knuckleball was trying to catch a bee between your pinkie fingers. Reginald didn’t even have a fastball or a change-up or anything else. He was a one-pitch wonder on a bus to the big city. “We’ll sure miss you, Reg,” the boys all promised at the Greyhound bus terminal.

*

Things didn’t work out in the Bronx.

Let’s start with everything that happened after the first pitch at Yankee Stadium and get it out of the way. Afterwards, we’ll go backwards like Reginald wished he could living out of the backseat of the Sleepmobile for the next twenty-one years.

After that, we’ll talk about pitch number one.

The second pitch that Reginald threw at 5:00 PM sharp landed in the visitor’s bullpen.

The third went into the press box.

The fourth left the stadium and not courtesy of a baseball bat.

His pitches were ruled so wild and so far from the direction of home plate that they needed an umpire huddle on how to treat them.

“I’m not sure we can consider them pitches, per se,” said the third-base umpire who had damn near been struck with one.

“No, per se, I don’t think we can,” said another. The four of them broke out of their huddle with an agreement to treat those pitches as “throws to first” or “checks on a runner,” or possibly “requests to get a new baseball.”

But that generous decision was tested. Ten minutes into Reginald’s very brief stint in the major leagues, the umpires rethought everything so they could get out of there before midnight. They decided to treat the pitches as out-and-out bad sportsmanship. Reginald was threatened with ejection, but even that didn’t work.

Eventually, one of the umpires called for the Yankees’ manager to come out to the mound. “The kid’s got the yips. The whole thing is bad for baseball,” the ump tried to keep his voice down.

“What if they catch it in the stands? We’ve got fifty-five thousand, four-hundred and eighteen fans in here this afternoon. The yips are like wildfire I’m telling you, coach.”

“Wildfire,” the other umps nodded and mumbled after him.

The old manager who’d seen everything could hardly argue. He thanked Reginald for his service with the Yankees, which was awkward given he had only technically thrown a single pitch.

The manager dropped a baseball into his hand.

“I’m sorry, son, but keep this baseball. It was your first pitch. I had the boys pull it to the side. Go ahead and keep the uniform, too. 21 is a nice number. Likely we’ll have to retire it now anyway because of, well... Anyway, kid, no need to mix it up with the team laundry.”

Reginald took the ball, technically the only pitch he’d ever thrown, slumped his 6’ 4” shoulders to just shy of six feet, and walked off the mound to wild applause, and believe me, in the Bronx, it was not the nice kind.

*

Now, if you don’t know what the yips are, then you’ve never had them, but once I tell you what they are, your chances of getting them are ten times greater than they were at the start of this story.

If there was a textbook definition for the yips, it would be “the sudden and inexplicable loss of the ability to throw a baseball accurately or complete the simplest, sports-related task.”

All the king’s horses and all the king’s men cannot cure you of the yips.

Not that they don’t try.

Every player who’s ever got the yips has tried all the locker room snake oil: burning your glove, jumping into the stadium fountain, wearing women’s underwear. It is all rubbish, as useless as trying to stop the hiccups by drinking water backwards and upside down.

But it was the first pitch that haunted Reginald Perry.

It was the pitch he threw a minute earlier at Yankee Stadium at 4:59 PM on June 3rd, 2003, the precise moment the Sleepmobile burped into the parking lot from the factory car wash.

Because there was baseball before that knuckleball, and there was baseball after. Reginald Perry’s first pitch was a bee pulling out her landing gear and dropping inside a tulip.

It was the Greatest Pitch Thrown in the History of Baseball.

Reginald knew it the moment it left his fingertips. He was just as much a spectator as everybody else. After the ball hit the catcher’s mitt for a strike, he closed his eyes and let a big grin roll across his face like the wave rippling through the bleachers.

He felt the warm lights coming off the Yankee scoreboard.

For a glorious moment before his world fell apart, it was perfect. Everything was perfect. Life was perfect.

*

But when Reginald “The Yipper” Perry opened his eyes, he spotted a familiar face in the stands. He was sitting behind home plate wearing a RailRiders baseball cap and sneering straight at him.

It was The Boil.

At exactly 5:00 PM on June 3rd, 2003, the yips entered his heart quick and quiet.

“You can’t,” the yips whispered right into the man’s rookie heart.

“You’re right. I can’t,” he whispered back.

CHAPTER 2

WHAT CHEER, IOWA

There was no place left for Reginald after the disastrous game, but “home is where they have to take you in.” This was stitched clearly on one of his mother’s tea towels.

So, Reginald caught the B Train from Yankee Stadium down to the Port Authority Bus Terminal on 42nd, slumped onto a Greyhound bus, and carried his unspeakable tragedy back to Iowa.

Other than the right rear wheel that started whistling in West Virginia, the bus was silent as a tomb. Even the driver barely acknowledged him, maybe an irritated grunt in his general direction when the right rear went cold flat in Indiana.

When they arrived in What Cheer, Iowa, the Greyhound bus with three wheels screeched to a surprise stop at the base of the town’s tallest hill. A gravel road led up to his old Little League field, the same field where he’d thrown his first knuckleball. The driver wrangled an old-fashioned lever-contraption to force the door open. Something mechanical hissed, and the Greyhound kneeled at a sad tilt.

Reginald walked up the hill to the old field, set his scuffed brown suitcase down on the pitching mound, and placed his 0-1 count Yankee baseball on the pitching rubber.

For a long time, he stared at that baseball like this was the end of the road. He was 19 and washed up. He vowed to never touch another baseball again. Then Reginald slumped his gangly 6’ 4” height past the town water tower where some Mischief Night pranksters spray-painted a question mark after “What Cheer.”

The whole walk back on the old county road his suitcase dangled from his long fingertips. In front of his home, he stopped briefly on the lawn, bucked up, and reminded himself “home is where they have to take you in at least for a week or so anyway.”

He stepped in through the back screen door. His father was sitting in front of a TV dinner. He didn’t get up from the living room chair when Reginald came in.

“One week, Reg,” his dad called out, then changed channels until he found a ballgame out of St. Louis.

“Tops.”

Tears brimmed in both of their eyes – for entirely different reasons.

What neither of them knew was that Reginald’s first-pitch Yankee baseball stirred in the middle of the night, plopped off the pitcher’s rubber, and, propelled by the regulation 10” height of the pitcher’s mound, wiggled, then rolled gently, gently, gently down the slope of the mound, veering this way and that, gathering steam, its red stitching laying down knuckleball railroad track, course correcting from pebbles and poor field maintenance, and, at last, made its way to dead center of home plate where it stopped cold.

Sixty feet, six inches.

From the odd angle, you couldn’t make out a face, but a silhouette stood an umpire’s distance behind home plate holding a pair of bolt cutters.

A second silhouette, this one a three-legged dog, pogoed over to retrieve the baseball. Together, the two wandered off down the first base line, leaving an odd number of footprints beneath a sliver of Iowa moon.

CHAPTER 3

THE SLEEPMOBILE

More than three weeks passed in What Cheer. Having been politely evicted from his home, Reginald now slept under the eaves of the concession stand at the Little League field. He couldn’t take possession of the Volkswagen from the local VW dealership because apparently the antenna had been screwed in at an odd angle by a distraught factory worker.

“While the Última Última is the last car of its kind, it’s still a vehicle burped out of a factory at 4:59 on a Friday afternoon,” the owner of Cougar’s car dealership explained. “That’s never a work week’s mechanical high-water, Reg.” It also turned out, as the factory in Puebla, Mexico had now been shuttered for a month, the car no longer had a factory warranty.

“I can’t let you take it home until we can find you a replacement antenna. You’ll thank me.”

He finally picked it up six weeks later. He’d never forget the moment: he was standing on the showroom floor and staring at the front license plate. “2003.” It didn’t have a rear license plate, but if he brought it up, it would be another six weeks. The salesman was scratching his head in front of the pegboard trying to find the right set of keys for the Última.

That was when The Boil called and asked him how his car was.

“How’s my car?”

“I’m in Iowa. I don’t see how I could possibly be the right person to ask about your car, Boil.”

But he did see. Reginald knew immediately he was about to have his vehicle repossessed by a locker room loan shark. There must have been more to that contract. He should have paid closer attention.

“The Beetle’s mine, Reg. Deals being what they are. You need to pay the Piper, so to speak.”

Another long pause.

“I’m the piper, Reg.”

“You lent me a $100, Boil. The Última Última will never be yours,” Reg shot back, struggling to remember the exact payment terms. An overweight kid was cheerfully scooping an overflowing bag of popcorn out of a glass popcorn machine shaped like a circus wagon. He would never be that happy again.

“Where are you right now, Reg?” The Boil went on.

“Cougar’s Car Dealership.”

“Well I hate to break it to you, but at 26.5% interest, penalties for early payment, and $142.07 a month processing fee, I’m afraid you’ll need to overnight me the title,” The Boil sighed cruelly.

Reginald didn’t know what to say. The Boil didn’t wait for Reginald to pick up the thread.

“Here’s what is going to happen: I am going to move to What Cheer, buy Cougar’s Car Dealership from whatever farmer owns it, and you will work for me until your debt is paid. You will pay your own salary from the interest you owe me.”

Emotion surged. Reginald struggled to open the driver’s door with the thumb-presser button so he could have this unpleasant conversation in private, but the car door was locked, and the salesman had dropped the keys behind the filing cabinet under the pegboard.

Reginald started out at a restrained whisper, but it wouldn’t last.

“Never, Boil. Not if I have to sell everything I own to keep it, not if I have to sleep in the backseat until I’m forty and store my winter clothes under the passenger seat...”

You know what? Restraint was pointless. He began shouting.

“… and hang my toiletries from the rear-view mirror and build a refrigerator out of the glove compartment.”

Reginald was clearing out the showroom. The salesman crawled out backwards from where he’d dropped the keys behind the filing cabinet.

“The Última Última is mine, Bobby. It’s all I got.”

Reg said the last part quietly, and something balled up in his throat, something worryingly warm and long forgotten, and he shouldn’t have kept repeating himself, but he did.

He said it’s all I got so many times you’d think it would start raining. The salesman fumbled to open the door and shoved Reginald into the front seat of the Beetle to make the commotion go away.

Curiously, through all this, even in his grief, the 6’ 4” Reginald would never forget that first time in the driver’s seat of his vintage Volkswagen Bug. The roof was much lower than he’d imagined – the crazy thoughts and memories that pop up even in sorrow. The memories took him back.

He remembered being ten and reading Popular Mechanics in a barber shop chair. There she was: a picture of a Beetle stuffed with people. The boy’s jaw dropped like a cartoon.

“Did they really fit 30 people in here, Mr. Johnson?”

“Straight out of the Guinness Book of World Records. They wouldn’t lie, son.”

Reginald fell in love. What a memory.

It didn’t last.

He was brought back to the dealership by The Boil prattling on with heartless enthusiasm.

On the passenger seat, they’d dropped a small perfectly wrapped present. The best present wrapper at the dealership had tied it with a blue-green ribbon the color of the Última.

“For Reg. Glad we could find the antenna. It’s a road that’s winding and long. You were our favorite pitcher.”

Reginald opened the package to find a cassette tape of “Let It Be.” He’d never heard of these Beatles, and their name was spelled wrong, which was almost one problem too many in a day already at capacity, but the color matched the blue-green hood perfectly.

“Or listen to me, Bigs. There’s another option. You can leave the car on the showroom floor, hand those keys back to the salesman, and the Última Última will be mine. I will even give you an even $100 for it. Your debt will be paid in full. Or…”

He dragged out the silence like a game show host...

“You can work for me at Cougar’s, make $7.25 an hour, and live in a sleepmobile for the rest of your life.”

The Boil didn’t say anything after that. It was possible even he thought he’d made his point.

As for Reginald, the name “Sleepmobile” struck like a lightning-bolt: the second his one-time best friend said it, sad decades stretched out before him, straighter than the I-80 Iowa Interstate plowing through winter corn fields.

Reginald stared over the sparkling blue-green hood. The car antenna was still tiling at a curious angle.

In the end, Reginald had no choice. He had to work for The Boil to pay back the $100. What was intended that August of 2003 to be a part-time job “for a few weekends” turned into full-time, twenty-one years of employment.

Nothing in the entire state of Iowa changed during that entire time, not even the state minimum wage, and you can look that up for yourself. And for twenty-one years, on paydays, The Boil crayoned the full MSRP onto the front windshield where there was no way the wipers could reach. Reginald was up to $312,452.26.

But the Última Última still left Reginald with a scrap of dignity. She was mostly his, and on sleepless nights in the gravel Little League parking lot, Reginald would lie in the backseat with his long knees tucked in and his toes poking out of the rear pop-out vent windows. He’d stare at the tiny grid of holes in the torn fabric ceiling.

He’d comfort himself singing “Long and Winding Road,” his favorite song from the cassette tape. Even after it got gobbled up and jammed inside the player, he remembered the tune and words, and when Reginald got particularly in the dumps, the tune always came to him.

Reginald didn’t have a singing voice you could call public, but he did have a private one. More of a whisper really.

The long and winding road that leads to your door…

And when he sat in the back there and sang, it was like an orchestra quietly played with him somehow.

If he’d been drinking his favorite beer – a beer we’ll come to – Reginald would cross his eyes slightly and let the fabric roof holes line up and overlap. The exact moment the geometric fabric dots popped into 3D, he could escape for a minute and be grateful for the comfort of his one blessing:

Bobby “The Boil” Boyle, his one-time best friend, minor leagues roommate, and horrible boss, never made it to the Bigs.

“You did, and he didn’t,” he’d remind himself.

As bad as things turned out, that thought always made him nod his head and grin a little bit: a tiny-bit-guilty, only-for-yourself kind of grin. With a grin like that, it’s blue-sky mystery that twenty-one years passed and Reginald never made a single friend in What Cheer, Iowa.

Other than that one week with Cheryl – who we’ll also come to.

As for The Boil, he was a man of his word, and, oh brother, did he let you know it. He showed up to purchase Cougar’s Car Dealership the following week, far earlier than Reginald expected. He wore a plaster cast on his pitching arm. Shoulder to thumb.

It turned out, The Boil had his own personal disaster that August.

He’d been explaining the “pre-payment penalty accounting” to some big lug of a left-fielder out of Memphis who turned out to be surprisingly good at arithmetic – certainly for somebody at 284 pounds with a crew cut.

That left-fielder took a long look at the fine print below the soap dispenser, stood up terrifyingly straight, towered over The Boil, and was not happy. The Boil later explained it, “I must have slipped somehow, Mom.”

The fall broke his pitching arm forever.

“No,” Reginald would sneak in between song verses, “The Boil never made it to the Bigs.

CHAPTER 4

PHINEAS

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 June 3rd, 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 June 3rd, 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.

“Go undefeated 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 every game for your kid’s team and the Última Última is mine free and clear?”

“I coached the boys to 21-0 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…

CHAPTER 5

THE NOTORIOUSLY LONG RED LIGHT

In the morning, dawn broke from behind the left outfield wall and sparkled off the shower toiletries hanging from Reginald’s rearview mirror. The sun’s angle lit a scribble of white car dealership crayon on the windshield, just out of reach of the wipers.

Reginald covered himself with a towel, stepped out of the Sleepmobile’s master bedroom onto the backyard parking lot gravel. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes, leaned in towards the windshield, and read the crayon note.

The letters were getting smaller and smaller because they’d started out too ambitious. Reginald leaned in closer.

The letters were now so small Reginald bumped his nose against the glass.

Reginald couldn’t help it. He had to count: “late” was underlined seven times before running into the windshield rubber.

*

Half the joy of living in What Cheer was watching Reginald start his car. The whole town knew about Reginald bump-starting the Última. There were legends about his missing car battery: some said space was cleared for a high-school trophy, others thought he was making room for a clothing iron.

The truth was simpler: space was precious, and Reginald had gone and removed it. If you could reverse bump-start a car, he reasoned, why have a battery at all?

Forward bump-starting never worked for reasons that escaped him, but he discovered he could bump-start the car in reverse, but believe you me, Iowa is no “Picnic in the Rockies” for do-it-yourself reverse-bump-starts.

And so it was, the night before the first team practice. At 2AM, Reginald found a spot at the top of an Iowa incline that wound down and around and backwards to Phineas’ driveway.

Even a good hundred yards away, Reginald could see the kid sitting on the curb watching him, and just as he gathered enough reverse speed to fire the engine, a Yipper-level wave of self-doubt hit, and he missed the timing. The Sleepmobile sputtered so weakly, it sounded like an apology, but it didn’t fire.

“Oh, come on, Ú.Ú.” he pleaded.

Ú.Ú. sputtered again, barely apologizing this time, and drifted down the street towards the kid’s driveway at the speed of a backwards Amish tractor.

“You’re late,” the kid called out to him as he rolled down the incline and past. He tapped an imaginary watch.

“I’m not.”

He wasn’t.

“You will be.”

“Kid, get in. I need your weight.”

He didn’t move a hair. There was a long pause, and Reginald added, “Please.”

Mistake.

Every teacher on the planet, even the substitutes, knows you shouldn’t use the word “please” with a middle-schooler.

Phineas got up like he was lifting cement bags, let his neck go slack, and looked to the sky. He wobbled sideways, his toes scraped, and he made an unidentifiable moaning sound. Clearly, he couldn’t catch up to a backwards Amish tractor.

When it became clear it was going to be too much for him, he waved goodbye to Reginald like he was watching a cruise ship sail away.

“Forget it,” Reginald barked at him, steering carefully not to hit anything coming up the one-way street.

Phineas walked back to the curb at a perfectly normal speed and sat down bored. The engine caught three quarters of a mile away.

When Reginald pulled up, the kid poked his curly head in through the passenger window.

“You’re late.”

*

On the way to the field, Reginald just missed getting through What Cheer’s notoriously long red light, the only thing in the county that had ever slowed down the fifteen-year-old tractor drivers.

Reginald took in the little brat. He’d never seen a shorter bat or a tinier glove. For that matter, he’d never seen such skinny little fingers. Well, once. And the glasses on him—so greasy and smeared that Reginald couldn’t hold back:

“Do you have to grease those glasses or is that how they came?”

“Do you have to grease those glasses or is that how they came?” Phineas repeated, then stared straight at him, studying him, the rude little brat.

Still, kid or no kid, Reginald couldn’t help himself. He held up five fingers in front of him. “How many fingers?”

“Oh! Ha-ha, ha-ha. You’re so funny. Let me know when you’re done.” Phineas yawned excruciatingly loudly and pretended to fall asleep against the passenger door with a thud. His nap lasted about three seconds.

The two could hardly take their eyes off each other. Starting with the obvious, Phineas was overpoweringly unathletic. Reginald tried to imagine what that pile of curly hair would look like when it wasn’t pinned under a baseball cap. At the moment, he looked like he was wearing a hairy donut, and for an adult coach he came recklessly close to pointing this out.

And for all that, when humility seemed a given, the kid tried to stare him down with his blinking, or at least, given the poor visibility, that was what he appeared to be doing.

Phineas took in Reginald with the same intensity. Reginald was one of those people you could never get close enough to get a satisfying look at. Spotting him walking in town was conversation enough for an entire weekend. It was hard to say which of them was better at staring rudely.

Of course, Reginald knew exactly what the kid was thinking. Nothing about the sideways, curious-bird angle of his head was new to him. It was Reginald’s turn to look away.

Phineas broke the silence with a surprise announcement.

“It’s an official emergency. I need to pee.”

He raced out the door into the middle of the intersection. Reginald watched the kid scurry around like he was late for a game of hide-and-seek.

“Oh, come on, kid,” Reginald muttered.

*

Reginald shook his head. It always got worse for Reginald when someone was in the passenger seat. The Boil told customers “the saddest thing in his life is the perfect condition of that passenger seat. The new car smell almost brings me to tears. Come on over, Reg,” he’d tell customers with a chuckle.

This kid was the first person in that seat since Cheryl, his only girlfriend in twenty-one years, and that was a decade ago.

Everyone in the passenger seat had the same expression. He could read their minds. He’d seen and heard it all. Look at his height! The bags under his eyes! Those fingers! Kids at Cougar’s Volkswagen dealership dared each other to make Reginald scoop the popcorn on Saturday mornings.

“Did you see those, daddy-longlegs knuckleball-fingers?”

“Whatever you do, don’t touch his hands,” the checkout cashiers whispered across registers so he could still hear. “Don’t make eye contact,” they’d mouth enthusiastically. “Put the change straight in the bag. You’ll see, he won’t say anything.” They were polite Midwesterners.

Phineas had finally spotted a place to pee. He was hopping over to it like he was in the state fair sack race.

Cheryl, at one point What Cheer’s prettiest cashier for over three decades, had been the one to spell it out for him. “Your fingers are like those machines that trick you into trying to pick up a stuffed animal you don’t even want, and you wouldn’t marry in the first place.”

She delivered this helpful observation while sitting in the Sleepmobile’s living room. She’d been putting on mascara in the rearview mirror.

“Don’t look at me with the sad-dog eyes, Reginald. We’re through.”

Reginald pleaded his case from the Sleepmobile bedroom doorway between the front seats. “You know I’d never give you the yips, Cheryl. I don’t even think it’s something I can do.”

Long silence.

“You’re really leaving me?”

“The whole thing was an April Fool’s gone horribly wrong.”

He didn’t ask.

“Stop looking at me with your whatever-kind-of dog-you-are eyes.”

He still couldn’t take his eyes off her, not even as common courtesy. She caught him looking straight at her in the rearview like he had promised not to on the first date. She shrieked silently, dropped her mascara bottle—mostly on purpose—and scrambled out holding the wand.

“They’re basset eyes!” she yelled at him. “And stop parking on the hill near my house.”

Her words cut deep. For a month he couldn’t look at himself in the mirror and had to hum himself to sleep with a Long and Winding Road.

She hadn’t needed to spell it out so directly.

Phineas crashed back into the car like he’d stumbled off the Titanic. “Whoa-ho-ho-ho-ho,” he said. “That was a rainstorm.”

The town’s notorious red light finally changed and snapped Reginald out of the memories. When he stepped on the gas to get out of there, Phineas bobbled his baseball and for three blocks he clanged against the seat belt tensioner, struggling to grab the ball off the floor. He looked like a kid juggling upside-down.

Partly to get him back for the “you’re late” comment, but mostly for dredging up memories about Cheryl, Reginald tapped the brakes and jerked the car every time the baseball got near the kid’s fingertips.

When they reached the stop sign at the road leading up to the Little League field, Phineas pinned the ball between his two feet and lifted it up to his hands like a frog.

Then he slowly rolled down the passenger window, yawned at full volume, and tossed the baseball out the car window.

CHAPTER 6

PINBALL & TRIPOD

Reginald and Phineas stood at home plate and looked out at the beaten up What Cheer Little League field.

“Well,” Phineas said, with a sigh so deep his baseball glove fell off. “It’s not Yankee Stadium.”

Reginald wasn’t so sure. When he felt down, he’d often sit in the stands staring at the field until the automatic field lights timed off. When things got particularly difficult, he stood on the pitching mound and looked at the empty backstop. When he grew outright desperate, he sat on home plate, looked out at the left-field scoreboard and tried to remember the past differently. So, the kid was wrong. It might not have been the Bronx, but it was certainly Yankee Stadium.

Other than the goose droppings that greased the base paths slicker than a roller rink, the field was in the general ballpark of Midwestern Sad. A wobbly wheel on the baseline chalk machine left the batter’s box looking like an Etch A Sketch. A center-field septic vent just poked up below the surface of the outfield hay. Half of What Cheer drove tractors to the game, but not one of them had the extra gas money to take a courtesy spin. To be honest, What Cheer’s people, mood, and economy were all hanging in there by a thread.

Every year on the eve of the season opener, somebody cut the bottom out of the backstop fencing with wire cutters. Any ball that skidded between a catcher’s legs shot right through the chain link hole, and headed out to the parking lot. Eventually, the Little League Board took a vote and decided to leave the slot open.

“Hullabaloo or no hullabaloo,” they agreed, “the catchers are going to need to focus and hunker down.”

The middle-schoolers called the field the “Pinball Machine.” The kids said it was almost the best part of Little League.

Almost.

Out in right, just over the fence, a broken-down house stood smack in the home run zone. A crazy, white-haired old man parked himself in a rocking chair on the broken-down back porch and watched the games. He sat in a vintage, beer-stained undershirt and dirty boxers, and as if that wasn’t enough to get a 6^th grader’s attention, he drank two beers from opposite sides of his mouth at the same time.

Pinball – the whole town called him Pinball – had the kind of messed-up hair you only get, how did they put it, “standing tall in a tornado.”

His birth name was Arthur Something-or-Other, and before he became so incredibly angry, he’d been a decades-long volunteer umpire, the most upright umpire the League had ever seen. Insofar as anyone took the time to rank umpires, he was far-and-away the “best.”

But his two decades as an upright umpire landed harder than a crop duster in fog. From 2003 on, it was nothing but small claims court and tough sledding between Pinball and the League Officials.

They called him Pinball because every time a ball slipped through the hole in the backstop, he shot up from his porch chair like a “firecracker gone off while napping.” Beer foam exploded around him like champagne over a racecar driver, and he’d cry out “Pinball” as loud and angry as a guy who had lost every fight of his life.

The kids agreed this, too, was also almost the best part of Little League.

Pinball crashed the crop duster at exactly 4:59 PM on June 3rd, the moment the Sleepmobile was burped out of the factory car wash. The baseball rule in question had something-or-other to do with players leaving the base paths and automatic outs. Pinball’s call ended the Championship Game, but not even the winning team agreed with it. What Cheer 2003 population 667 to Pinball 1.

The dispute ended up in a well-attended small claims court. “I get it, Arthur. You’ve been the best umpire we’ve ever seen, just or unjust, that’s my verdict. Also: you can never step onto the field again.” All the same, the judge felt Midwestern Terrible. “You can still come to the Banquet and pick up your Home Plate.”

Pinball did not attend the 2003 banquet to receive that year’s “Best Umpire Home Plate.”

Instead, he bought three things after leaving the courthouse: a three-legged greyhound runt, wire-cutters tough enough to tear apart backstop wire, and the run-down house behind the outfield fence in right.

You could argue each of those purchases backfired because every season, backstop by backstop, and game by game, he only got angrier and angrier. Eventually, he stopped petting the dog. He’d become an active volcano, and when a runner left the base paths like they had in the bottom of the 6th in the Championship game, he cried out in two-fisted rage.

“Rule 5.09(b) 2!”

“Pinball used to be able to see the future,” Phineas explained in what he assumed was a whisper, but a screen door momentarily slammed on a back porch out in right. He lowered his voice slightly in what he continued to assume was a whisper.

“He called balls and strikes before they even reached the plate, and he’d get them right, too. Kids tested him. He once threw out a bleacher full of visiting team parents before they even showed up.

*

There were two back-to-back cracks of beer cans.

Reginald couldn’t help looking over, then wished he hadn’t. Pinball sat in his back porch rocking chair, sipping his beers and scowling straight at him.

Phineas paid him no mind, and for reasons Reginald couldn’t make sense of, Phineas went and removed home plate and carried it out to the center-field septic vent. The kid looked like he was carrying a four-hundred-pound manhole cover. Whatever he was doing, he’d done it before.

“He’s hungry. I must feed the beast,” Phineas called back, wheezing.

“Who’s hungry?”

“You’ll see.” Phineas stopped and turned. “Just admit you want to see.”

Reginald tried to say no, but it came out wrong:

“Yes,” he said.

“Now say go when I say go,” Phineas instructed.

He began to lean forward in anticipation like an Olympic hurdler. Reginald couldn’t help but say go, too, and Phineas shot off like he’d heard a starting gun. He proceeded to kick a baseball from the pitcher’s mound and dribble it with his non-dominant foot clear around Reginald then on towards the hole in the backstop fence.

“Are you ready?” Phineas yelled back over his shoulder.

Reginald tried not to, but he nodded yes. With the challenge of dribbling, the kid couldn’t take his eyes off his left foot to see, but somehow he knew the answer.

Phineas took a shot on goal with the baseball. It slipped straight under the fence and out into the parking lot towards the Sleepmobile.

This time, both Reginald and Phineas circled around towards the right field wall.

Pinball erupted and yelled out “Pinball,” beer spraying everywhere.

No news there.

But the second he cried “Pinball,” Tripod, Pinball’s three-legged greyhound, shot out through a doggie door in the middle of the “O” Pinball cut through the Cougars Volkswagen Dealership fence advertisement. He shot out of that “O” like a pinball kick hole, tore around the field like he was hitting pop bumpers, drop target bullseyes, and flippers.

With only three legs, Tripod couldn’t shoot out very fast, and he listed as you might imagine, but that old greyhound could still clear a goose-slicked field of Little Leaguers and their parents faster than you can say “Game Over.”

“And that’s not even the best part,” the players said.

The best part was that after players and parents were run out onto the gravel parking lot, Tripod retrieved all the baseball paraphernalia he could sink his teeth into. It didn’t matter what: bats, abandoned catcher’s mitts, batting gloves, batting donuts, even baseballs.

Then Tripod would drag the game’s quarry back through the “O” in Cougars.

Reginald was no exception to the general terror of Tripod, and our old Yankee hightailed it off the field to the safety of the dugout.

For reasons we’ll all need to speculate privately, Tripod didn’t leave Phineas quaking. The boy didn’t leave the field. Instead, he headed back out to center field where Tripod was straining mightily to drag the home plate manhole cover back to the doggy door.

Phineas picked up home plate for him and carried it towards the hole in Cougars and pushed it through the “O” himself. Dog and boy weren’t up to “pats and paws,” but Tripod limped around the boy with a faded memory of “throw the ball for me.” Or maybe no memory of that at all. Only Pinball really knew.

Phineas extended one of his legs in the air and shook it sideways like a dog finishing off a pee.

“See, Tripod, I have three legs, too.”

Tripod tilted his head in total confusion. There was no question this was a dog that could count to three, possibly to four.

Hunkered down by the juice cooler, Reginald heard Phineas laughing somewhere out in right. When he decided it was safe to look up, the kid was pretending to dribble an invisible ball back towards the indentation from home plate.

“Come out, come out wherever you are, Coach.”

Reginald emerged from behind the dugout fencing.

“He’s practically a puppy,” Phineas said, without looking back at Reginald.

“In the history of dogs no puppy ever got that angry .”

Phineas pointed out towards right. “Keep watching him.”

On his re-entry into the “O” – and this happened every last time – Tripod got stuck in the doggie flap.

It’s beyond me, but he could tuck a 38” baseball bat through it – which you’d think would be the tricky part for a three-legged dog – but he could never get that third back leg through. There was a trick to it he couldn’t remember, and every time he forgot, Pinball got extremely frustrated and had to prompt him.

“Tilt,” he shot up and yelled out, beer spilling all over his boxers.

But that was all the hint Tripod needed.

The three-legged greyhound angled down onto his non-dominant front left leg, tilted something like a Greyhound bus, then pogo-sticked through the "O” in Cougar’s. Don’t even try to imagine this.

Take it from the Little Leaguers: this was definitely the best part.

Pinball disappeared for a moment behind the fence. Moments later, Pinball mounted the home plate on the wall of his porch like a Banquet plate. The wall was crowded with two decades of trophies, one for every drained pinball.

You’d think there wouldn’t be room after all this time, but old Arthur Something-or-Other cleared a fresh angry spot on the nailed-up gun racks. You could hear him grunt. It was about as happy as the old guy ever got.

“That back porch wall is What Cheer’s only museum,” Phineas said.

Reginald looked at the field, then the kid, and the man, then the home plate, and the “O” in Cougars. It was dizzying, and he was struck with a sudden, overwhelming dread that his entire season was going to end up in that museum. He wanted to stretch the privacy sun blinds over Ú.Ú’s car windows and crawl into the Sleepmobile bedroom.

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, “Coach, you’re a Yankee.”

CHAPTER 8

THE POISON IVY BASEBALL GRAVEYARD

Reginald’s head was so far buried between his knees, he could have licked his shoelaces. In a surprise development, Phineas was doing his middle-school best to encourage his coach.

“Why don’t you throw the ball underhand? Wouldn’t that solve the problem? You won’t really be playing baseball, so you should be fine.”

Somewhere on the porch out in right field, two beers cracked open.

The kid made an interesting point. Everybody knows throwing underhand isn’t baseball, not unless you’re playing softball, and softball doesn’t count. Every boy who’s ever thrown a hardball thinks they know this.

Reginald extended his hand without looking up and wiggled his fingers for the ball to be placed in his palm. This continued longer than he would have liked. It was interrupting the clear signals he was sending of complete despair.

“Use your words,” the little brat said.

“I’m not going to use my words.”

The kid placed the ball onto his palm.

Despite himself, Reginald needed to test out the it’s-not-baseball-if-it’s-underhand theory. Without looking up, Reginald underhanded the ball so hard and so high there was time to stretch and sing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”

Reginald’s throw carried out to the pitching mound where it came to a hard stop on the pitching rubber. Sure enough, when it wasn’t baseball, he could throw, and if you can throw, even if it’s underhand, you can keep your coaching job.

From the moment Reginald buried his head between his knees, the Sleepmobile had been drifting down the gravel parking lot entrance road. But with the successful underhand throw, the Sleepmobile’s emergency brake caught, and she came to a dramatic, quarter-a-mile-per-hour skid inches short of drifting into traffic like an iceberg.

The skid took something out of her. Two of her hubcaps popped free, rolled like frisbees towards the treeline and wobbled into the Poison Ivy. Somewhere they clattered together.

That might have been it for them.

The Yankee burrowed back between his knees so he could dab his eyes with his shoelaces.

“You’re welcome. Your pitching problem is solved. That was easy,” Phineas headed to the mound and stumbled on the verge of grass to the infield. “Also, there are no practices on Sunday morning. Nobody is coming. Let’s begin my knuckleball lessons.”

Reginald owed him that.

“Alright, let’s see this knuckleball.” Reginald crouched down at home plate like he was getting into bed in the back of the Sleepmobile. “Whatever you’ve got.”

Phineas’s windup wasn’t pretty. He looked like he was taking off three sweaters at the same time. The first pitch landed in the dugout. The second clanged against the foul pole. Phineas sprayed the next thirty-seven pitches around the baseball field like a runaway lawn sprinkler.

Reg stretched his back. This was worse than sleeping in the back of a 2003 Volkswagen Beetle.

Phineas looked into the bucket, but he’d had enough. Phineas toppled the last ball out of the lobster tank, hurled his glove into the outfield like his three sweaters had finally come free. He began sprinting around the field kicking shots on goal like he was on a timer. Reginald had to duck like he was being attacked by a pitching machine.

The last baseball kicked off the home plate indentation at an impossible angle. As tall as he was, Reginald couldn’t quite reach the ball. If baseball gloves had fingernails, then those fingernails sent the ball ricocheting under Pinball’s wire-fence ball gutter.

Uh-oh…

Reginald and Phineas froze and stared smack at each other. Even if you are forty years old and you’re only coaching a twelve-year-old baseball player, it is impossible not to stare at someone when you’re both thinking the same thing at the same time.

Bonus pinball round and free game for the umpire… wait for it… thunder after lightning…

Other than two bored crows on the roof of small claims court, the only thing you could hear in the entire state of Iowa was that baseball ping-ponging its way through the parking lot.

One-one hundred… two-one hundred…

Ping pong, ping pong…

This was the furthest a baseball had traveled the entire morning.

At five-one hundred, the ball gave up the ghost and clanged against a hubcap.

*

Reginald and Phineas couldn’t help it: Their heads turned in slow motion to the right field wall.

Pinball sat there staring back at the two of them, sipping his two beers from opposite corners of his mouth. He looked like an angry walrus.

They both felt like they were in the principal’s office.

“Go get it, kid,” Reginald said under his breath.

“You poked it under. You get it,” Phineas said, not quite as far under his breath.

Reginald was so quiet, Phineas got the message. He sighed like a teenage girl who’d been grounded until college, and for the forty-seventh time that morning, he threw his glove straight up in the air. Neither of them had any difficulty throwing vertically.

Possibly overdoing it, Phineas walked smack into the fencing behind the plate like a blind man driving a bumper car. Out of the corner of his eye, Reginald saw Tripod peeking out from the bottom of the “O” in Cougars.

At last, Phineas broke free of the chain fence and tumbled out towards the parking lot and down the hill like he was running against a gale. Could he ever just walk from one place to another? Was he running in slow motion?

When Phineas reached the tree line, he cried out like a grandmother. “Oh, dear! I can’t find the ball! Oh, dear!!”

It took everything Reginald had not to turn to Pinball to see if he thought this kid was as outrageous as he did.

*

By the time Phineas returned to the field empty-handed. Reginald had almost finished collecting baseballs and tossing them into his bucket.

“It went into the Poison Ivy Baseball Graveyard. I’m not going in there. Nobody goes in there. It’s where broken bats go to die. Busted gloves. You definitely should be careful not to go over there. We’ll never see you again.”

The words hit Reginald like a brush-back fastball.

Out in right, the porch chair creaking ground to a halt.

The “O” in Cougars banged shut.

Oops.

Too strong.

If the kid’s welding glasses hadn’t been so greasy, and Reginald hadn’t turned away so quickly, he would have seen Phineas blinking like a barnyard owl.

When Reginald banged the last angry little baseball measle into his bucket, it bounced right back out.

That was his last straw.

Imitating the kid, he kicked that ball so hard it shot in a line-drive out to left field and punched a hole through the dot in the “I” of the Misfit Tailoring fence advertisement.

When Reginald got down to the car, Phineas was already waiting for him, sitting straight up and wearing his seatbelt. He looked ready to behave for the rest of his life. That might have made things worse. Reginald threw his bucket of baseballs in the back of the car and they spilled all over the dining room.

While Reginald was reverse bump-starting the car, Phineas made a peace offering. “What if you start calling me Lance? Everybody at school does. I’m Lance the Boil.”

“I’m not calling you Lance the Boil. No more talking for the rest of the season.”

Phineas bit his lip.

*

Watching all of this from his right field porch, Pinball tossed his empty beer cans somewhere behind his rocking chair. For the first time in over two decades, Pinball dropped his hand and wiggled his fingers for Tripod to come over for a scratch. Clearly, there was more to him than Rule 5.09(b)(2).

After the Sleepmobile disappeared behind the town’s steepest drainage culvert, the old volunteer umpire whispered “pinball” to Tripod.

Tripod pogo-sticked out of the “O” in Cougars, disappeared past the tree line, made his way through the Poison Ivy, and retrieved the ball from the Baseball Graveyard. The three-legged greyhound pogo-sticked back through the “O” in Cougars.

Neither the angry man nor the three-legged dog noticed that Pinball didn’t even need to say, ‘Tilt.’

CHAPTER 9

THE ENGLISH BULLDOG AND A DEPRESSED BASSET HOUND

On the drive back from the field, the kid in the passenger seat stayed silent for a good thirty seconds. This was interrupted with a burst of clanging against the seat belt tensioner. Phineas was lifting his hips to dig something out of a back pocket. He dug around in there searching for something like a veterinarian trying to deliver a lamb.

Eventually, he removed a tattered copy of the “Little League Baseball Official Regulations, Playing Rules, and Policies.” For the benefit of no one in particular, he proceeded to give a monologue, by memory, on “Mandatory Play Rules,” peeking at the pamphlet from time to time to check his lines.

“The rules are quite clear. ‘Each child athlete must wear the team uniform in a presentable manner and participate in a minimum of two defensive innings.”

Phineas forgot the next section and had to look: “Bats shall be provided. Gloves shall not.” He raised his index finger high in the air for emphasis on the gloves part.

“Why are you telling me this?” Reginald refused to look the kid’s direction and made a point of being distracted finding his turn-off.

“I’m not telling you anything. This has nothing to do with you. I’m memorizing the rules, but, and this is a big fat butt, you are going to need to pay attention to the workarounds if you are forced to play me..”

“Stop saying ‘you.’”

Phineas shot back an “oh-my-god-you’re-impossible” eye roll, like a parent that had had just about enough of the children’s behavior.

“Fine. If one has thirteen or more players, each must have an at-bat, and one must also play six consecutive defensive outs... But – and this is another big, fat butt…

“Do you have a switch?” Reginald couldn’t help but look over.

“I’m not talking. I’m memorizing. You stop talking.” Phineas had never been so outraged in his entire twelve years.

Reginald vowed not to say another word until the kid was out of the vehicle. This went to plan until the Sleepmobile reached What Cheer’s Notoriously Slow Red Light. Phineas took off his seat belt and the warning alarm went off.

“Put your seatbelt on, Phineas. What are you, four?”

“May one speak? Or may one not speak?”

“Stop talking.” Reginald shook his head.

Phineas lifted his hips skyward to retrieve something, this time a cell phone from a front pocket. He began to text someone, pecking around the screen like his finger was on a miniature trampoline.

“And send.”

A moment later, Reginald’s phone trembled in the coffee cup holder and flashed an incoming message.

Reginald could barely make it ten seconds before he cracked and picked up his phone.

You stop talking 🤫 

They both shook their heads like trained seals. They were raising impossible children.

Without wasting another moment, Phineas dove back in the rule book. He no longer read aloud. Now, he silently read the rule book, first upside down, then sideways, then upside-down and closed. Finally he shook it out by the cover like there might be forgotten dollar bills tucked somewhere between the pages.

Somehow, and you have to give Reginald extra credit for this, he realized this performance might be a roundabout apology for the comment about Reginald’s disastrous baseball career, but if it was an apology, it was the strangest roundabout apology Reginald had ever received.

Phineas picked up stabbing at his screen like a silent woodpecker. It was going so slowly it looked like he’d only just learned the alphabet. Finally, the kid announced triumphantly, “and send” to no one in particular.

Reginald began to hold his breath for something to focus on while he waited for the notoriously slow red light to turn, but it was a lost cause: he couldn’t resist the temptation to read the text.

One’s ace in the hole for coaching terrible players is that if a game is shortened for any reason like, say,  ☔️, teams may not be penalized for failing to meet the minimum play requirements, so blah-blah-blah. ➡️ Me.

“What is that?” Reginald pointed at the purple dot. His eyes weren’t what they used to be.

“A purple umbrella. In other words, when it’s raining, you don’t need to play me.”

Reginald frowned. Things tended to come at him fast.

Another text:

I will keep track of when it is time for one to put me in. “One” is a team, and all “one” of us is trying to win at the end of the day.

The light finally changed.

“I’m just trying not to lose the Última,” he muttered and hit the gas. The Sleepmobile lurched. Reginald caught his reflection in the side-view mirror. He’d forgotten to turn it back after shaving that morning. He stared at himself. Cheryl was right – he looked like a depressed Basset Hound.

The car grew quiet. Reginald’s funk spread to the passenger seat. The kid stuffed his rule book back into his pants without a fuss. He took off his welding glasses, turned away from Reginald, and stared out his own window.

“Anyway, pray for rain. I always do.” It wasn’t clear if Phineas was speaking to himself or Reginald. When he looked over, Reginald noticed the side-view mirror wasn’t turned back on that side either. The kid looked like a depressed English Bulldog with his eyes closed tightly.

Well, the eyes closed was worrying. Only one other person had ever burst into tears in the Sleepmobile, and he was in the driver’s seat.

As they approached Phineas’s street, the kid pressed his glasses back onto his face and turned to Reginald. He was working up the nerve for something.

“I have thrown knuckleballs. Lots of them. You can’t always do everything in front of people.”

The depressed English Bulldog and the depressed Basset Hound looked at each other and then back out their windows again.

Reginald began texting Phineas back. With his long knuckleballer fingers, he looked like he was tickling the screen, but his hand paused right before hitting send. He tossed the phone on the dashboard in frustration. Whatever it was, he decided not to send it. Then he used a moderately strong bad word that made the kid’s welders jump up and down on his nose.

On every turn for the rest of the drive, the phone with the unsent text message see-sawed from one side of the dashboard to the other. It took some real effort to ignore the clatter.

But it was Phineas’ turn to burn with curiosity, and as he was getting out, he grabbed Reginald’s phone and hit send faster than Reginald could catch him.

Reginald watched the walk up his driveway and stop to read the text.

You couldn’t hit the side of a barn door with a tractor 🤣

The kid didn’t turn back to the car, and when he reached his front door, Reginald started whispering to himself. He used a stronger bad word.

“Please turn around, kid. Say something.”

Well, the kid didn’t, and the former Yankee who knew a thing or two about regret added that to a deep pile of them. He should have never written it.

The rest of the ride home in the Sleepmobile was an automotive disaster of engine sputtering and lurches. Her stick shift knob came off, which was happening more and more often, and her dashboard lights that had been dimming for a decade suddenly went as dark as What Cheer’s highway billboard.

*

When Reginald got back to his parking spot at the Little League field, he paced in circles around the car. He couldn’t decide if his text officially counted as “mean” if he hadn’t hit send himself.

When pacing the car didn’t work, he slumped over to the tree line and stared into the Poison Ivy. Twenty-one years he’d been staring at that Poison Ivy on evening walks, and until earlier he’d never known it was protecting a Baseball Graveyard.

Eventually, Reginald came to the firm conclusion that “it was definitely, 100 percent not mean. Maybe it was even kind – because the kid sure deserved to hear something back after the graveyard comment. Why, Reginald? Because he did, Reginald.”

He arrived at this conclusion thirty-seven times in a row and walked back to the car each time, but then he remembered the kid’s depressed English Bulldog face, and it was right back to the Baseball Graveyard and rethinking the whole thing from square one.

Two hours later, tossing and turning in the Sleepmobile Master Bedroom, when he thought he’d finally-finally gotten to the other side of the whole business, the phone rumbled in the coffee cup holder.

Whether “one” listens to me or not I’ll tell one when it’s the right time to put me in it’s a free country imho. 🇺🇸

Reginald didn’t text him back. He tossed the phone into the Sleepmobile’s Dashboard Conservatory. He flipped the other direction and slammed up and down into the back seat like an Orca.

The phone vibrated in the Conservatory. He grabbed at it:

The coach last year said I had a feel for not playing, but a big, big fat butt I am a better coach than the previous coach. At least I read the rule book. But also a better coach, imho. Muchacho.

He scrambled for the phone, stared at the screen, and texted back. The coach last year was The Boil.

Goodnight, Phineas

This was possibly another roundabout apology, but even I’m at a loss. There was dead silence on the other end.

Against every instinct in his bony 6’ 4” body, Reginald was disappointed he didn’t get a goodnight back from his 4’ 6” player, but he finally resolved the evening’s big question, this time in the opposite direction: maybe he shouldn’t have added the emoji. Maybe as the coach he should have been the “taller one.”

Well, this seemed to do it until he was woken by the phone rattling one last time on the dashboard.

I have thrown a knuckleball. Lots of them. Just because nobody came out of the house that day to see doesn’t mean I didn’t throw them.

Reginald stared at the text and something tugged at him. He was at a loss, because, truthfully, Reginald was always kind of at a loss.

Then out of the blue, well, not entirely out of the blue, Reginald remembered walking off the mound, through the showers, and straight out of Yankee Stadium in his uniform. He ended up at the far end of the subway platform with his shoulders sagging and his glove dangling from his hand.

It was the wrong place to stand. Twenty-one years later, he could still hear that Bronx Cheer of all Bronx Cheers.

That night in New York City, nobody came out of the “House that Ruth Built” to find him on the platform. For a minute or two, he’d hoped the old manager might have come down to say goodnight and see him off to Iowa.

It was on the tip of Reginald’s tongue why this was all coming up suddenly. At that very second in the back of the Sleepmobile, The Sleepmobile’s ceiling dots popped into 3D. It had been weeks.

Reginald breathed a deep sigh and vowed to do better at whatever it was he was supposed to do better at. He fell into a slumber.

For a good twenty-one minutes afterwards, the Sleepmobile’s dashboard lights glowed ever so faintly - and then, mostly, never again.

CHAPTER 10

SIX DEFENSIVE OUTS AND ONE AT BAT

The following Tuesday Reginald met the full team at practice, and he didn’t know what hit him. The size of them! He lined up his Cougars on the third base line and told them to sing the national anthem. He needed to catch his breath and take a minute to stare. Not counting Phineas, who looked like a missing tooth in the middle of these boy-beasts, every one of them could have starred in a shaving cream commercial.

From the moment he’d accepted the bet with The Boil to save the Sleepmobile, Reginald imagined he’d be coaching a ragtag band of misfits: a pitcher that sucks his thumb, twins that bat at the same time, the slugger who sleeps below the overpass in a red dress. He took it for granted it would be nearly impossible to win with whatever team The Boil tricked him into coaching. But this! This was too good to be true.

And of course it was too good to be true.

An internal voice, no louder than the volume of a yip, observed that these were the teams that lost the last game of the season like clockwork. If you know the slightest thing about real life, then you know that no amount of corked bats, stolen signs, or mean fathers in the bleachers could save these furniture movers from a tomboy with a 12-6 curveball. In the final game, it’s always the misfits that end up jumping up and down on home plate.

In the meantime, so much went right over the next three weeks, Reginald’s chances of winning the championship and hanging on to the Sleepmobile were “astro-stellar,” according to Phineas. Other than gentle course corrections on all the trash-talking of the opposing team’s parents, Reginald didn’t even need to coach them. They were baseball robots.

*

All great players are the same, they say. It’s the terrible players that are terrible in their own ways. If there was a nagging question mark on Reginald winning the Championship, it was the firm Little League requirement to play Phineas for six defensive outs and a single at bat.

Putting Phineas in the game kept it close. Even in the barren, dandelion plains of Little League right field, a player like Phineas can do a lot of damage over the span of six defensive outs.

Phineas pleaded with Reginald not to send him out.

“Please don’t put me in. It could still rain. They could call it in the sixth.”

“A rule is a rule, kid. You’re playing. When we start losing, I’ll rethink everything, including all this trash-talking.”

*

To put it Iowa Polite, the problem was that Phineas tried.

No matter how much he promised not to try when he stepped up to the plate or stumbled bravely onto the field, when a baseball left a bat he couldn’t help chasing it. The smallest Texas League popup in his direction cleared the bases.

“Phineas, you run around right field like you’re chasing pigeons.”

At the plate, he had the opposite problem. He couldn’t bring himself to swing the bat.

“Don’t even worry about hitting it, Phineas. Close your eyes and swing. Accidents happen.”

But no matter how much he nodded like a dashboard bobblehead, the bat remained glued to his shoulder. Phineas watched helplessly as pitch after pitch blew past him. He might as well have been trackside at the Iowa Speedway.

And still the Cougars won.

By the time the Cougars hit 5-0, the word was out, and weeknights half the town showed up to see Phineas. They were as split down the middle as an Iowa caucus. The right half of the town rooted. The wrong half mocked. A handful always switched sides between innings. Iowans are just like that.

Whatever camp they were in, they all yelled out the same thing when the ball was in play. All the way down to the sporting goods store you could hear cries of “catch it” and the crying through laughter.

“Catch it! Catch it!”

Plop.

“It’s right in front of you! It’s in front of you!” they howled.

*

And yet…

It amazed Reginald that not a single at-bat went by when the kid didn’t step up to the plate like Babe Ruth and point out to the scoreboard in left. In his mysterious way, he always had a “game face” when he jogged out of the dugout.

In Game 7, the other team’s coach – a mom, no surprise – called for him to be deliberately hit-by-pitch so he could get on base at least once that season.

Well, Phineas slow-walked that HBP with his arms held up so high in the air you’d think he’d hit a walk off grand slam. Half of the town cheered for him. The right half, anyway.

For all the unfolding disaster, none of it stopped Phineas from jogging off the field and waving to the opposing team’s parents cheering him on.

“No autographs today, my friends.”

His brave face didn’t last in the shadows of the dugout. Between innings Phineas always ended up hiding his head under a towel with the same coach-player back-and-forth.

“You need to stop trying, Phineas.”

“I tried not to try!”

“There’s no trying in baseball!”

When the sniffling subsided and Phineas stopped blowing his nose through the towel over his head, it always ended the same.

“I need to pee.”

By Game 6, Reginald started to piece the peeing together. Under pressure, the kid couldn’t hold his water.

“Alright. Go pee, but hurry we still need to get through another three outs in right.”

Phineas would wander out to the Poison Ivy and Baseball Graveyard to pee. Looking at him out there at the tree line, Reginald decided it was a small consolation The Boil never came to his son’s games or saw the kid peeing with a towel over his head.

So you can imagine the drive back to the house with Reginald and little Babe Ruth was mostly quiet.

Mostly.

“Alright, kid. It’s safe. You can take the towel off now,” the kid’s Little League coach said.

CHAPTER 11

EASIER IS HARDER

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’t 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 a last place team.

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.

CHAPTER 12

AN ACCIDENTAL FEEL FOR COACHING

For the next two games, neither Phineas nor Reginald brought up the canceled knuckleball lessons, but the car rides got very quiet, and the long stops at the town’s notoriously slow stop light seemed to last forever.

Every ride, there and back, Reginald grumbled under his breath that Phineas was humming “too loud and rudely,” and Reginald tapped his long fingers on the steering wheel “in a very annoying way" according to Phineas.

I’m no great student of human nature, but the disaster unfolding in the front seat somehow connected to the disaster unfolding on the field, and you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to understand The Boil “making things easier” had lead to catastrophe for Reginald.

The Cougars promptly lost “It’s Three Now, Count ‘Em,” then they forfeited a rainout for reasons too complicated to get into — other than the fact it was “100 and a half percent the coach’s fault.”

And after every one of these dramatic conclusions, Phineas went to turn the broken car radio off, and made the same observation.

“Your radio is broken.”

(Now, it did so happen to be broken, but not in the way Reginald thought. We’ll come to the radio after we get to Reginald’s special beer.)

Fact was, with the “easier is harder” curse, Reginald could barely think in the dugout. The yips wrapped around him like a boa constrictor. They took over his coaching. The walk to the mound became an agony. He had sluggers bunt, forgot his own signals, and after “Can’t Score Number Four,” the muffler blew on the Sleepmobile. The whole town heard The Yipper coming and going now. Kids cheered him from the sidewalk.

After “That’s Great! Five Straight!” Phineas started up with coaching advice.

Every time the kid got up to go to the juice cooler, Reginald felt it coming on. With “Oh, No, Six in a Row” Reginald cracked.

“Alright, that’s enough, Phineas. Sit over there and don’t move.” He was pointing to the far end of the dugout.

At the time, the kid was struggling to lift the lid off of the giant dugout cooler so he could pour the last of the juice into his cup.

“Fine, I won’t help you. I’ll quietly tell you what to do… but only afterwards.”

The orange top came off and spilled all over him. He pretended not to notice and continued.

“Do as I say, not as you did.”

“Nope” became the mantra from the end of the dugout where Reginald had banished him.

“Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope.” He sang this to the tune of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” He conducted the song with the hand that wasn’t holding his juice.

By the time they’d lost that six in a row, Phineas started mumbling and throwing cups on the dugout floor. He was like a frustrated big-league manager, prattling on about pacing the bullpen, the late-inning suicide squeeze, and catcher framing, not to mention the “easy stuff, Dr. Baseball,” like calling hit-and-runs, and tag-up signals.

As fast as he drank juice and ran off to pee, the texts poured in:

Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope 🎶🎶 ⚾️

Even when Reginald put him in the field for his six mandatory defensive outs, Phineas still spent half the time texting the coach from the outfield on what Reginald had just done wrong, including batting him during the wrong inning. Nothing is worse than getting in an argument with someone who’s “totally wrong” and then turns out to be “accidentally right.”

The other fact was Phineas actually might have been right about everything.

“Might have been right.” Reginald muttered to himself. He was sitting alone in the bleachers after the automatic field lights turned off.

“I didn’t say ‘yes, he was right.’”

Although Phineas was the worst baseball player he’d ever set eyes on, Reginald had to admit the kid had a sort of “accidental feel” for coaching baseball.

He was an encyclopedia of strategies and forgotten rules. “To be crystal clear,” Reginald consoled himself, “the kid’s softer skills like ‘teamwork’ and ‘player motivation’ would be considered well below average.”

When he dropped Phineas off at the house after “Excruciating Loss Number Seven,” The Boil waved from the attic workout room pantomiming driving the Sleepmobile with the wind in his hair.

Even from the bottom of the driveway, The Boil’s perfect white teeth sparkled in a disagreeable way. You can have teeth that are too white.

Phineas got out of the car, and smacked his palm into his forehead so pretend-hard he spun his head around.

Yes, the kid’s knuckleball lessons were definitely canceled, and nothing could have been easier than restarting them. Unless, of course, when easier is harder for you.

CHAPTER 13

MEXICO

The night after losing the eighth consecutive game, this one by a score of 26-1, Reginald couldn’t fall asleep, so he sat down in front of the Volkswagen hood ornament. He sat cross-legged with his chin in his hands.

“Show me the pitch, Ú.Ú.”

She did. In the hood ornament he saw himself standing on the pitching mound in Yankee Stadium. He watched the knuckleball float from his fingers. It was like he shot a three-pointer with a child’s balloon. It slid up a NASCAR wall and shot down a straightaway. It ping-ponged to the left, skipping-stoned to the right, cartwheeled backwards, shimmied up high and shrugged down low. It landed in the catcher’s mitt as soft as a thumb pressing down a stamp.

Strike.

0-1.

The only strike he would ever throw.

“Thanks, Ú.Ú.”

He looked away. He thought it might cheer him up, but it didn’t. It was just some dumb baseball that happened to go backwards and twenty-seven other directions. You couldn’t argue about it: he’d thrown the greatest pitch in the history of baseball, but if you’ve ever been miserable, you know that helpful facts only make things worse.

Reginald sat out in the bleachers until the automatic lights switched off. Stars sparkled in the sky. A crescent moon appeared exactly over the Iowa flagpole. The whole universe was trying its best. Reginald pretended not to notice. Instead, he retreated into the Sleepmobile master bedroom and wrangled the rear window lever so his toes could get some air.

After a long while, Reginald whispered to the Última Última.

“It’s not looking good, Ú.Ú. I’ve hidden something from myself, and I can’t find it.”

After that cheerful announcement, he tried to turn over and bang the side of his face smack into the car seat pillow. He needed the Última Última to know how upset he was, but his Yankee pajamas snagged on the seatbelt, and he got stuck. His torn old uniform bunched up, and his number 21 slid all the way around to the front. Well, he sure didn’t want to wake up in the night and see that number staring right at him.

“This might be the end of the road for us, Ú.Ú. He’s rich. He’ll give you car washes, maybe even a warm garage.”

There was no way The Boil was doing this. Nobody was fooling anybody.

He didn’t like to show weakness in front of the Última, but generally speaking he didn’t have the least control over himself. He had to get it out. Maybe a tiny bit he wanted the Última Última to feel bad, too, so he wouldn’t be all alone with everything.

As he was falling asleep that night, his earworm, depression go-to song came to him. He fell asleep hearing the whole world singing the “Long and Winding Road.”

“The wild and windy night,” the world sang, and Reginald hummed along. He made a little orchestra ‘bump-pa’ sound right where it went, but it came out so sad it was almost tragic. The universe continued on, “that the rain washed away has left a pool of tears…

He did not sleep soundly. He went from one dream to the next that night.

In the first one, the Última Última was parked in a beach parking lot that stretched as far as the horizon. A giant billboard well out past the surfers read “MEXICO.” As far as you could see, the cars were Volkswagen Beetles, They were parked with their headlights facing the sea. He saw the year they arrived at the beach on their front license plates. On the back license plates each of the Volkswagen Beetles had a different year.

The ocean parking lot was what we like to call “beautiful” in Iowa.

We like our colors in rainbow order, and the Volkswagens were lined up just right. Red ones, then yellow, then greenish-blue, but the Última Última was different. She was the only one that had a bent radio antenna, and she had a missing rear plate. He got down on his knees behind the car to inspect more closely.

A tiny note where the rear plate should have been located said, “The Motor Vehicle Board of the State of Iowa is on its way to fix this.” It was signed by “The Governor.”

Then, like I said, it was a busy night for dreams.

Reginald took a walk from the beach parking lot to the concession stand and really needed to pee. Then he thought maybe he wasn’t dreaming but needed to go pee for real. Then he decided he didn’t need to pee for real, and it was okay.

That’s when he walked through the door of Yankee Stadium and remembered he was pitching in ten seconds because he could see the stadium out through the men’s room janitor’s closet, and everyone was waiting for him in there.

When he showed up at the pitcher’s mound, a short, little manager was flashing the team signs from the dugout. He was pacing up and down flashing signs like he was wiping a swarm of invisible bugs off his arms and face.

Reginald couldn’t understand any of the signs. Even in his own dreams, he was always the last to get it. For some reason, the manager started banging his palm into his forehead and throwing juice containers into the on-deck circle.

It was Phineas.

He wasn’t wearing glasses anymore. He was older, and very tall now, and his eyes were normal size for once, but his hair was yellow and puffed up bigger than ever. He looked like a proud lion. He was trying to tell Reginald something, but Reginald didn’t know what, so he made the official sign for “take me out I can’t do it,” which only made the kid swat at his bugs harder.

Then, all of the sudden, in the dream there was a campground near third base, and his air mattress went flat in the tent, and the ground was like a rock, and it was pouring rain outside the visiting team bullpen.

He had been dreaming. When he sat up, it was dawn, and it was raining hard. Turns out he did need to pee. Through the steamy vent window, he saw puddles had formed on the third-base line.

When he stood by the car in his soaking wet Yankees uniform, he saw both of Ú.Ú.’s rear tires blown, which explained the flat air mattress. After fumbling in the Sleepmobile front garage, it turned out her spare was flat, too, and, well, the day was not shaping up as cheerful as a quote on a tea towel.

Reginald pulled the last of his savings out from the passenger seat “carpet safe” and headed into town to get the tires patched. The whole time he had to push two flat tires along at the same time, chasing one to the right, then the other to the left the whole way. Believe you me, it was an earful.

Late that afternoon, when he was rolling the tires back from Cougars Volkswagen Car Dealership, Reginald stopped short, smack in the middle of his corn field shortcut. Both tires flopped over.

Reginald couldn’t see over the top of the corn or even front or back because the farm was on a hill. You couldn’t get any further into Iowa.

That’s when the dream about Ú.Ú and the parking lot hit him like a thunderbolt. Ú.Ú, his Última Última of twenty-one years, wasn’t well.

First it had been the dashboard lights, then the muffler, then the stick shift knob, now the tires. The holes in the floor were big enough to deliver a cow.

Reginald sat down on a tire in his soaking wet uniform. Mud leaked in through his blown sneakers.

It was the memory of the rainbow of all the Volkswagen Beetles lined up that shook him, and how all the Beetles next to the Sleepmobile were faded green-blue, too, and how beautiful and sad it made him with all of them looking out at the sea with their headlights on.

But it was the note from The Governor at the Motor Vehicles Board of the State of Iowa that made him well up. The Última had a front plate with 2003, the year she burped off the line in Puebla, but the whole time she’d never had a rear plate. Every year, Cougars promised the rear plate was on its way. Reginald couldn’t put something into words, but it made something tight in his chest.

When he got back to the Sleepmobile that night, her roof lights wouldn’t turn on, and the glove compartment refrigerator light was blown. Reginald put his baseball glove on for comfort.

He went out to sit in the stands for a long while. Eventually, he walked out to the mound, stared in at home plate and waited for the sign. The twenty-one lost years of his life got the better of him. His glove dangled so low, it hit rock bottom. The rest of it from there is his personal business.

Out in right, a porch screen door made an accidental little creak, and Pinball snuck quietly back into the house.

CHAPTER 14

HINTS

On the morning of the Cougar’s inevitable Game 12 defeat, Reginald was woken by a low, thump-thumping in the front seat and an unpleasant draft coming from the Sleepmobile’s driver-side kitchen window. He struggled to remove his toes from the backseat vent, tuck his knees in, swivel, untuck his knees, and pivot his full 6’4” frame into a seated position. All this morning origami was not getting easier with age.

On the floor of the driver’s seat, someone had littered half a dozen fresh, white baseballs. Seven baseballs, actually, to put a finer point on it. Something was scribbled on each of them.

They were not numbered, but together they were saying something. Reginald cleared the sleep from his eyes and tried to order them left to right below the windshield. Getting this right was like deciding on a batting order, something else he’d been struggling with.

He rowed them up as best he could.

Reginald had to read them a few times to make sure he understood, but when the penny dropped, he was so moved that The Boil was almost friendly again, that he bit into his throwing knuckles.

All was forgiven! For the first time in twenty-one years, it never mattered who got to the big leagues first just like he never thought it did in the first place. Reginald had what we call in Iowa, “a good soul, that one.”

The sentences were too wonderful. They were like having Magic 8 Baseballs. Then he gave each one a good luck shake, closed his eyes, and rolled them around on the dashboard to see what other wonderful things The Boil might be telling him.

Reginald scrambled the balls up on the dashboard like he was playing a game of “Go Fish” by himself and losing his temper. He pulled a pen out of the glove compartment refrigerator, crossed out the message on each of them and angrily scribbled the same thing on every one of them.

When he got to the very last one, he thought of a tea towel and remembered he was “raised right,” so he took a deep breath.

*

He arrived early to The Boil’s house so he’d have time to throw the baseballs onto his old teammate’s lawn. Even throwing underhanded, the first one was such a poor throw it rolled under the rhododendrons. The Boil was never going to find that one.

When Phineas came out of the house exactly on time, he picked the balls up like a mother collecting children’s toys from the lawn, including the one that had rolled under the rhododendrons. It took a minute under there before he popped out again feet first.

“Oh, dear,” Phineas said, reading the ball. He pursed his lips and shook his head.

“No need to litter. After we lose today, I’ll let The Boil know you quit. But, and this is a fat, big butt, today is an important game. It’s our last chance to get our hopes up.”

*

On the way to the field, Reginald just missed the green at the notoriously long red light. If there was one thing everybody agreed on in What Cheer it was if there was a car with a conversation nobody wanted to have, that red light stopped cars cold like a teacher putting kids in time-out.

“You know you could ask for help,” Phineas observed. He locked his big, glassy eyes on Reginald. They were more smeared than ever.

“Help who? Help how?” Reginald shot back. That was not a word he liked.

“You. The team. Help! H.E.L.P.” Phineas waved his hands in the air like he was drowning. “I’m over here! I’m over here!”

Satisfied he’d said something important, Phineas leaned out the window with his face into the wind like a dog who was finished barking.

Reginald liked the word “help” even less when someone was spelling it out for him.

“Roll your window down, you little brat.”

“Nope.”

“Don’t sass me. Roll it down. Now.”

If you were a parent you would have called how Reginald was talking to Phineas “yelling at my kid” — unless you were the parent doing the yelling, in that case, “mind your own business, mister. I’ll talk to my kid how I want.”

Phineas made a deep groan and dropped his passenger seat all the way back, slamming it with a thud. Reginald threw the baseballs out into traffic, one by one, each baseball angrier and further than the last. With the last one, he came notably close to throwing overhand.

The baseballs slow-rolled to the far lane then disappeared under a pickup truck with a tough-guy driver.

While all this was going on, and even though he was having quite the parental tantrum with the baseballs, you couldn’t say the coaching offer hadn’t gotten his attention.

When he’d ejected all but the seventh baseball, he had a mouse-squeak of hope.

Reginald looked up at the dotted roof fabric, pursed his lips and shook his head back-and-forth. He didn’t know if it was even possible to ask what he was about to ask. Things had now arrived at the impossible. He got lost in this unpleasant daydream.

Phineas woke him.

“Is it over? Is it safe to roll my window up?”

Phineas snapped his seat into the forward position. He banged into place a tad too upright, and he made of small show of flapping his arms like he was only saved by his seatbelt harness. Reginald wasn’t having any of it.

Reginald pointed at the floor under the Sleepmobile refrigerator. “Give me that pen.”

Phineas handed it to Reginald, who scribbled furiously.

And, I’m telling you, Reginald came oh-so-close to writing the word “help.”

He rolled the ball in a big circle, then scribbled on the other side,

“Hints?” Phineas pondered out loud. Then he took the pen, rotated the ball for a clean spot and began to scribble.

Phineas held his hand out offering the ball back. They were playing catch.

The two looked back and forth at each other making faces as if they were playing charades and weren’t allowed to speak.

Reginald finally spoke softly. It wasn’t clear if he was talking to the kid or himself.

“You can’t even catch the ball coming back to the mound. Why do you think you’re going to throw a knuckleball?”

Phineas answered out loud, but he was getting frustrated. If Reginald was speaking more softly, Phineas was getting louder.

“Because I already have, and nobody saw.”

The notoriously long light was never going to turn green.

“Kid, I can’t even remember how to throw a knuckleball anymore.”

“You don’t need to throw it. You need to teach it. Tell me stories about it. Maybe that would remind me how I did it. Tell me about the bee and the tulip.”

Reginald banged his hands really hard on the steering wheel, but in a private way. It was impossible the light still hadn’t turned green.

Phineas changed the subject.

“You know, you wouldn’t believe what he hides in his biggest trophy.”

“Who? Your dad?” Reginald answered his own question.

“Never mind. It doesn’t matter.”

“What’s in your dad’s trophy? Something about me?”

“Nothing. Something. Yes. It’s about the two of you. I said never mind.”

They were distracted by the pickup in the far lane giving up waiting and running the light.

It ran over six baseballs, lifting the truck up and down like it was driving through boulders on the Big Sioux. After number six, the pickup smashed down with a horrible thunk. The tough-guy, pickup driver yelped “like a little girl,” but Reginald and Phineas didn’t say a word. It was the funniest thing that happened in What Cheer, Iowa, possibly ever, and neither of them would have any part of it.

Phineas snatched the seventh baseball from Reginald. He took a very long time scribbling before he handed it over.

Phineas looked away from him and out the window. Reginald read the ball.

Reginald didn’t know what to say, but he stared at it for what felt like twenty-one years. Then the crossed out “in” made him angry for some reason, and he threw the baseball past Phineas and out the window. Phineas didn’t turn around, but Reginald saw the kid take his glasses off for some reason.

Phineas muttered. “And you don’t believe in me either, but you’re both wrong. And if you don’t help me, I’m not helping you. Strike three. You’re out.” He made a quick thumbs-up “you’re out” sign with the same hand holding his glasses.

It was as serious as Phineas got, which turned out to be very serious indeed.

The town’s notoriously long light had gotten about as far as it could with the two of them and finally changed.

CHAPTER 15

THE MERCY RULE

April, the “What Cheer Rains” blew down from Chicago, bringing a calendar of rainouts with them. Life that April went flat, even with your “May Flowers” and all the rest.

No one needs a chuckle more than a dirt-rich farmer, but a whole month they’d been counting on got washed away. The steeple leak that Ben was going to fix back in August flooded out the “Annual High Fructose Lutheran Pancake Festival.” And Crazy Frank still dragged his Christmas tree down to the firehouse for the bonfire. He always said, “dry as a firecracker,” and maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t, but that year the Christmas lights wouldn’t spark on account of the mud.

Maury tried to win the “Tricycle 1K” drunk and backwards like every other year. Sure enough, he skidded into one of the old mining craters. If she could get a good grasp on their arm, Mary’d tell them what she’d told Maury. “You do it forwards this year, or I’m not coming.” She came.

Indoors wasn’t better—worse maybe.

“Captain Carbon,” got the third graders so riled up about clouds and animals, the kids shut down the Flea Circus, and “Fifth Wednesday in April,” when you hit one, and that year What Cheer hit one, the boys in the Auctioneer Club showed up at the bowling alley. The three of them ran up the bids slower than tractor out on 22.

And it wasn’t just the boys either. Set your watches, the Glee Club girls sang at the old Opera House, but listening was more of a have-to than a get-to, not to put too fine a point on it.

“Well, that wasn’t exactly prom night in a hayloft,” Mary said.

“If anyone would know,” said Maury.

Late April, the town got a jolt at the diner. For all the flags springing up on his lawn in January, it turned out Marty was a Democrat, and how do you like that? Both parties finally found something to agree on: any Democrat with a flag on his lawn wasn’t “Iowa American.” They shook on it, had a chuckle, the chuckles turned to drinking, and everyone drove home from the coffee caucus on the far side of sober.

“It won’t hold,” the waitress said, “They’re Cubs and Cardinals.” She said “Cubs and Cardinals” more times than anyone really needed to hear. You never had your coffee refilled faster once she got going on that one.

*

April 1^st, over at the Little League parking lot, the moisture got so thick inside the Sleepmobile, Reginald had to blast that Mexican heater day and night. Some April Fool’s joker, and he knew exactly which one, tucked a bouquet of “Volkswagen Sunflowers” under the windshield wipers. “Happy Birthday! These are for the Sleepmobile garden. Ha-ha. Just kidding.”

Friday the 13^th, Reginald thought he’d dodged a bullet, but by 11:59PM, those flowers got themselves wound so far around looking for the sun they tore the rubber off the wipers. Tax Day, someone stole half of them while he was at work. Earth Day, the dashboard was nothing but seeds and celery. Arbor Day, Reginald was snacking on those sunflower seeds when a blast of What Cheer sprinkled them all over the car seats. Thank the Almighty, the month was over.

As for Phineas, April couldn’t have been more of a disappointment. With the non-stop rain, he had every reason to believe he wouldn’t need to play, but the clouds cleared like clockwork for game day. As poorly as the Cougars were getting on with Phineas out in right, coach and player were both sticklers on the Rule Book.

Unless the game was called early on account of rain, a Little League coach still had to find an inning and play every boy, and a girl if you happened to have one. One thing the two of them taught me that year was seasons come and go, but the Rule Book matters, and we’ll come to that.

And coming to that, I’ll be straight with you.

I can’t remember what the Cougars record was in April. Maybe it was 7-11, possibly 4-13. I’m not a mathematician. But I can tell you, that when The Boil lowered the bar from “you have to go undefeated, Bigs” to “you only need a winning season,” things went off the rails. Losses racked up like an odometer on a ride to Sioux City.

But the boys still had a shot, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation staring out at the old Little League field.

*

On April 30^th, right on schedule for game day, the skies cleared, and the score was tied in the bottom of the 3^{rd. .} There was a distressing level of hope, not a state of affairs Reginald handled particularly well.

He still hadn’t put the kid in for his “one at bat and six defensive outs.” Reginald paced the length of the dugout swamp stepping around his grown players who were shooting up faster than spring corn. By May 1st, they were as big as sanitation workers and talked about as much.

So in the third, with the bases empty and two outs, the Cougars were in the field. Reginald made his way over to the kid. The kid was holding the rule book with one hand and tilting the ten-gallon cooler sideways with his chin so he could drain the last of the juice into a water bottle.

“Help me out here, kid. I’m officially begging.” He tried to say begging sort of funny so it wouldn’t be official he was begging.

“Is this or isn’t this the wrong time to put you in?”

“Did you think of it?” Phineas looked up from his chin. “Then it is automatically the wrong time.”

“Help me out, kid. Really, help me out... Just… hints.”

“Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope.”

*

Unfortunately, Reginald had a stroke of genius.

He turned away from Phineas and trotted cheerfully towards the home plate umpire. The ump scribbled something on the lineup card. Phineas saw the Cougars catcher hit the deck faster than a teller in a bank robbery.

The P.A. announced a defensive substitution. Reginald had taken out Billy “Burly” Bearson, who happened to be the Cougar’s best pitcher, and substituted Phineas “The Lance" Boyle.

The concession stand’s popcorn machine sputtered to a kernel, something probably metal stopped clanging on the state flagpole, and a gavel clicked politely from over at the courthouse.

Back in the dugout, Reginald greeted Phineas like a friendly neighbor. His idea still seemed like a good one at this point.

“All you have to do is raise your hand, and I’ll know you agree to giving me hints. Then I’ll get you back in right.”

But instead of his usual sass, Phineas looked panicked. While he searched high and low for his lost glove, a rainbow’s worth of colorful language broke the silence and groans and gasps erupted from the Cougars stands. Reginald saw a player drop kick his glove over the scoreboard. Suddenly, he didn’t like the direction this was going, but pressed on.

“One hint. One so small you’re not even helping. Just one.”

“No,” Phineas snapped at him.

Phineas found his glove in the deep end of the swamp under the bench, where courtesy of his teammates, he hadn’t put it himself. Then he stumbled over the lip of the dugout onto the playing field and headed down his plank to the mound.

Phineas struggled mightily, but he did it in earnest, but the pitching was, well, poor. Either the shortstop and second baseman were wandering around the infield grass like they were on an Easter egg hunt, or the balls ran out of steam on the way to plate. It was bowling at a birthday party out there, where somebody’s mom has to straddle her way down the alley to give the ball a nudge.

“Come on kid, come on,” Reginald muttered to himself, sloshing back and forth in the dugout. “Raise your hand.”

When Phineas had finally walked the bases full, Reginald made a sprightly half-jog to the mound.

Thinking he was being taken out of the game, Phineas went to hand him the ball, but Reginald wasn’t having any of it.

“Raise your hand. Like this.” Reginald showed him the smallest little hand raise, something like the new kid on the first day of school.

No response.

Reginald took the ball back.

“Do you have the rule book on you, coach? Phineas asked. The way he said “coach” was not a nice way to say coach.

“How bad does the score have to be before they invoke the Mercy Rule?” the kid continued.

“Approaching fast.”

Phineas snatched the ball right back from Reginald. Reginald startled. Things were going sideways. Reginald had accidentally lit his own fuse.

“You know you’re going to coach this miserable team, kid.”

“You know you’re going to teach me how to throw a knuckleball.”

Their wheels were spinning in a rut on a dead-end street in the middle of nowhere. From the upper decks, it’s easy to see a lose-lose was a missed opportunity.

“You’re absolutely sure you don’t want to raise your hand?” Honestly, Reginald couldn’t believe it.

Phineas looked straight at him. Something forgotten that Reginald wished stayed forgotten kept him from turning away.

Phineas kept staring.

“I threw them the whole afternoon, but nobody saw.”

“If you ask me, that might be a good thing.” Reginald took a deep breath.

“Maybe yes, but maybe no,” Phineas said. “But someone could have come out and watched after being asked eighteen times, but someone didn’t.”

When Reginald didn’t say anything, Phineas took a long pause, then blurted: “It’s not even remotely who you think, by the way. But obviously that person would have been nice.”

Reginald was sure something important was being shared, but ever since the Wilkes-Barre car loan in, Reginald was never gifted at connecting dots, or logic, or even adding two and two.

“Alright, then give me that.” Reginald took the ball from the kid as a let’s start from the beginning.

This time he came at it with common sense and good faith.

“Help me coach this miserable team, kid. More than hints. I need you to get us a couple of wins and that’s it, then you’re done.”

“A single knuckleball and we’re done.” Phineas kept staring at him with through those welders, but the kid didn’t see what he wanted. “Or even a few tries, but real tries, not blah-blah-blah tries.”

Unfortunately, Reginald had a second stroke of genius.

Reginald abandoned good faith and went with a new tack, what the “child spankers” call “Reading the Old Testament to the Boy.”

Reginald curled out one of his long knuckleball fingers like an insect.

“You know, kid,” Reginald said confidentially, “All I would need to do is touch you with my pitching hand. You’d get the yips as bad as I ever had ‘em. We might even be neighbors.” Reginald made a point of staring out at the parking lot.

“A lot worse probably because you’re shorter.” Reginald turned back to him.

Phineas took off his glove and held his hand out like he was daring a dog to bite him.

The kid wasn’t scared of any of the right things, and it was a move Reginald hadn’t counted on. For whatever reason, he could not negotiate successfully with this family. He slowly curled his insect finger back in.

Reginald handed the kid the ball back and turned away. “Congratulations, kid. The Cougars have a new starting pitcher for the rest of the season. Let your dad take the Última. I was going to lose anyway. All six innings. Pitch until the Mercy Rule.”

“You can’t give anybody yips. You have to give them to yourself.”

“Go get ‘em, son. You wave when you’re ready to coach this team. You got this.”

CHAPTER 16

PHINEAS THROWS A NO-PITCHER

Reginald wasn’t exactly a master of threats, but he was pretty sure “stay out here, kid, and pitch or raise your hand and coach” was in the ballpark of a good one. He was sure—he thought he was sure, he sure hoped he was sure—that by the time he returned to the dugout, the kid would have his hand raised higher than a girl who hadn’t been called on since report cards went out.

“You’ve got this, kid. Looking real strong out there.” Reginald still hadn’t turned, but he gave two quick coaching claps like he was trying to turn on a living room lamp.

Now, if you’ve followed the game of baseball, you’ve seen pitchers go into windups so ridiculous the laws of high school physics can’t keep up, and the moment Reginald gave those two little claps, Phineas went into a doozy.

It started off in extreme slow motion to give his coach time to turn around and witness it. Then, at the exact moment when he should have sent the ball on its way, Phineas pretended it was glued so tightly to his hand he couldn’t let go. Faster and faster, that ball began to windmill him around like a Ferris wheel that slipped its axle.

Stepping down into the dugout, Reginald saw the kid circling third base out of the corner of his eye.

You better believe those same farmers who hadn’t had a chuckle since the American Flag Caucus at the diner, saw the rains clear at least over in the Lutheran Liquor & Lottery bleachers. When Reginald looked at the stands, it made him wince. As laughter went, you might say it was more “at” than “with.”

Phineas got himself so dizzy from watching his arm spinning in circles, he fell smack down on the pitching mound like a spun quarter.

“Come on kid, stop it with all this.” Reginald called out from the dugout. “Just raise your hand where I can see it, and we’re done.”

Phineas did not raise his hand.

He lay on the pitching mound with his eyes closed and his tiny glove at his side. When he did finally get up, he looked at his coach for the last time that inning. His glasses were crooked on his face, but instead of his usual shenanigans, he stared at Reginald like they were the last two people in the world.

Reginald wished something awful the kid would say “nope, nope, nope” or take a bow, or straighten his glasses, but he didn’t do any of that.

He said no.

*

After that, the real protest began. Phineas turned around and launched, and I mean launched, the ball towards the outfield. The baseball went a good ten feet in the direction of shortstop.

The kid’s next throw sailed out to right. The next went through the concession stand window. The next into the parking lot. The throws weren’t getting any closer to the direction of home plate, but every throw was a good ten feet further than the last one. Phineas was walking runners around the bases like they were spinning on a May pole. He gave up run eleven with a shot that clanged off the Iowa State Flagpole. Reginald had no doubt where all this was headed. The kid was aiming to hit the fifteen-run Little League Mercy Rule.

And every time Phineas went into a Ferris wheel, the madder he got, and the further the ball went. As wild pitches go, he was astonishingly accurate. First, it was the zero in 13-0, then Cheerless Charity’s outfield advertisement. Mid-cartwheel, Lutheran Liquor’s mascot took a pitch to his paper mache head, and even the Cougars moms, who generally kept a low profile weeknights, went caterwauling.

But by now, the kid wasn’t looking in the dugout or listening to the uproar in the stands. He was throwing a baseball to a friend he didn’t have, on an overcast day, in a deserted schoolyard.

“Come on, kid. Raise your hand. Raise your hand,” Reginald was whispering to himself, and then he was yelling to himself, but he could hardly be heard over the howling.

Everyone knows team mascots can be more than a little mean, and maybe everyone in the ballpark misheard him, but it caught like wildfire. Probably because it was muffled by the baseball-sized hole in his ear, but it sure sounded like, “He’s going to throw a no-pitcher!”

“No-pitcher! No-pitcher! No-pitcher!”

*

“No-pitcher, no-pitcher” was too much for Reginald. He was overwhelmed by memories of his disastrous debut at Yankee Stadium. He remembered his very last pitch all the way into the radio announcer’s booth. That’s when he knew his one-strike career was over.

He lowered his head and slow-walked to the mound that same way the old Yankee manager did when he pulled Reginald. Reginald barely had time to think it, but he still thought it: it’s no fun being on the other side of this, either. Twenty-one years, and that was a thought that never occurred to him.

Now, I’m not saying Reginald wanted to lose the bet with Phineas exactly, but by the time he got to the mound, he knew he didn’t want to win it either. Reginald gave up wanting the kid to coach the team. He’d have to figure out something else.

“Kid,” Reginald said. There was more to what he wanted to say somehow, but “kid” was as far as he got.

When no more was coming, Phineas threw the ball so far and so hard it bounced off a truck on IA-22.

“No-pitcher! No pitcher!’ Everyone else had pretty much wrapped up, but the Cougars moms were still going strong, partly because the Luther Liquor & Lottery mascot had gone over to the bleachers to make a big show of conducting them.

At the mound, the umpire interrupted the huddle so he could hand Phineas another ball. Phineas grabbed it before Reginald could stop him.

“Give me that ball, son. I’m taking you out. You’re going to hurt someone.”

Phineas took off his glasses and wiped his face suddenly in the crook of his arm, and turned even further away from his coach.

“I’m not done.”

It was a mutter.

In the history of baseball, there was only one other time a pitcher was more done than Phineas was done, and Reginald was there. He could still hear the Yankee Stadium cheers and they were not the nice kind.

Then, instead of handing the ball over, the kid dropped it to his feet and began dribbling the ball towards home plate with the instep of his non-dominant left foot.

“Stop it, Phineas,” and by this point Reginald would have done anything to stop it.

The kid yelled back over his shoulder. He sounded older now, and not in a good way.

“I’m not done.”

And he was not done.

CHAPTER 17

SPARKLING, SALTWATER CLEAN

Phineas kicked the baseball in zigzags down the pitching mound, towards home plate, away from home plate, then course-correcting. He couldn’t have gotten any more frustrated. The moment he reached home plate, the left-handed batter—who’d been waiting for some time for a pitch to hit—stepped aside, bewildered, and let Phineas through.

But Phineas was not aiming at the catcher’s mitt. To everyone’s surprise, he made a sharp break towards the backstop, and dribbled toward the notorious opening at the bottom of the backstop’s chain fence.

He was headed towards Pinball’s Slot.

The penny dropped for everyone at the same time. He was going to kick the ball under the fence and trigger one of Pinball’s eruptions. There were gasps, of course, but afterwards the stands grew quieter than a game of badminton.

Reginald stood on the mound with his arms draped helplessly. He had never felt like less of a coach, less of an anything really.

Phineas’ first shot on goal hooked wide to the left. Heads on both bleachers flapped sideways towards the “O” in Cougars. Then they flapped back towards the hole in the backstop where the boy was going to drain it any second.

His second shot sailed over the top, banged into the chain link, and dropped dead cold. Out in right, Pinball stood up from his rocking chair, and primed to blow.

On the third attempt, this time with a running kick, the baseball shot beneath the fence and disappeared into the parking lot.

*

Pinball erupted all right.

“Pinball!” he cried. The old coot’s beer spilled everywhere. He thrust his shaking fists into the air and glared at the sky like he was raging at the Almighty.

It wasn’t a second later that Tripod shot out of the “O” in Cougars like he’d heard a racetrack starting gun. It was a tsunami of sixth-graders. The three-legged greyhound cleared that field of players, in groups, then one by one where he had to. Moms and dads charged off for safety, hurtling fences and so forth.

And when the runners finally cleared all three bases, Pinball cried out in a second rage, “Rule 5.09(b)(2).” His whole life, only two people would ever understand the poor guy.

Pinball shook his fist at the little stadium, then out towards the Iowa state flag, then the water tower, and last of all in the direction of small claims court where he’d been robbed so politely of his umpiring responsibilities.

If you’re a believer, you better believe the Almighty was listening.

*

Reginald watched Phineas from a hiding spot behind the water cooler.

Tripod circled the boy in a frenzy, barking furiously. Phineas ignored him outright. This was the second time now the boy hadn’t the good sense to run away from him. As you can imagine, Tripod was beside himself.

The kid left home plate and threw his glove into the pitching mound dirt and headed out towards right.

When Phineas was ten yards or so from first base, he suddenly stopped short, took off his glasses, and cleaned them with his jersey for some reason. Then the kid turned back and looked at Reginald. Probably because he couldn’t see without his glasses, he stumbled over first base.

He kicked that base with all he’d got, getting it back for tripping him and for everything else, too, but he stubbed his big toe something awful. He limped off in the direction of the “O” in Cougars with more fits and starts than the three-legged dog hopping around him. The two of them were moving slower than a Veteran’s Day parade.

Reginald felt something awful, but all he could do was pick up Phineas’ glove from the mound and call after him. “Phineas! Phineas!” He sounded like the last line of a sad movie.

Phineas was getting dangerously close to the “O” in Cougars. Tripod raced in front of the kid and barked with junkyard fury. It was his “O.” After that, Tripod tried a low growl and that didn’t work either. Eventually, he had to hop aside to let the boy past, giving him a “pat-pat-I’m-warning-you” dab with his paw. It was more cat than dog, but it’s beyond my Midwestern skills to describe it.

Phineas didn’t pay the dog any mind and popped right through the hole.

In confusion, Tripod tilted his head so far to the one-legged side he got himself stuck in the fence trying to catch the boy.

*

When Phineas emerged out the other side of the fence, Pinball stood waiting for him with his crazy hair and his dirty underwear t-shirt. The town’s once-beloved umpire of twenty-one seasons was still holding a beer in each hand.

Phineas had never seen him up close. Nobody else had either, really, not since he’d raged out of small claims court from the injustice of it all.

Pinball stared right back at this young kid with his smudged welder’s glasses—glasses that had very, very recently been washed sparkling, saltwater clean. Phineas held his glasses up in the air, looked through them closely, and then back at Pinball.

The kid had brown eyes. There was a long pause while the two stared at each other, then the old umpire suddenly said a single word.

“Oh.”

As the starting point for his first conversation in twenty-one years, it wasn’t a huge step, but the angry old man knew right away why the kid never washed his glasses. Reginald himself learn in about a half hour, but we’ll come to that.

The old guy put his beers down and stuck his hand out.

“Give them to me,” Pinball hollered at the boy in one of his rages, shaking.

Phineas shook, too.

“Give what?”

The old umpire didn’t wait for the kid to figure it out. He grabbed Phineas’ glasses right off his face. Pinball tore half his dirty, yellow-stained shirt out of his oversized pants, wiped the kid’s welders hard, and handed them back. His undershirt was so dirty and greasy itself, the kid’s glasses were more smeared than when they started out.

Phineas put them back on, looked around in every direction to check his vision, then paused.

“Better.”

Oddly enough, he sounded serious. Reginald might have even heard the kid say “thank you,” but from the pitcher’s mound, all Reginald could see was the kid headed out the umpire’s broken gate.

After that, and right on schedule, Pinball shook with frustration and hollered out the usual cue.

“Tilt!”

And right on schedule, it reminded Tripod to lift his front-right leg. Tripod tilted through the far side of The “O” in Cougars, and hopped through.

Afterwards, and maybe Reginald caught it wrong, but he was pretty sure he heard Phineas say, “Here, boy.”

It was the saddest “here, boy” in the history of boys.

*

Later on, in the parking lot of Lutheran Liquors & Lottery, Phineas’ shot on goal was ruled a “wild kick” by a committee of What Cheer volunteer umpires. The Mercy Rule was invoked three and two, and the home plate umpire ruled the Cougars out with the flourish of a called third strike.

The Cougars fell to a record of, well, I can’t even remember what their record was, but none of that’s important.

I should have mentioned earlier sports aren’t really my thing.

The thing is, Reginald had one less shot at a winning record, hope was running out, and it didn’t look like Phineas would be doing the favor of coaching the Cougars any time soon.

*

That night, Reginald was woken by one of the Sleepmobile’s hubcaps falling off the car and clatteing off in the parking lot gravel. The Sleepmobile gave a little jolt, and Reginald heard a second hubcap slip its axle. The old Yankee struggled up and wiped the windshield glass with his pajamas. Both hubcaps were off and rolling down the parking lot in the direction of The Poison Ivy. Before he could bring himself to watch them disappear into it, Reginald dove back under his blanket.

Then the third popped off and, soon enough, the fourth. They wobbled off to The Baseball Graveyard.

It was a tough April.

CHAPTER 18

THE CATCHER

Phineas vanished behind Pinball’s house, and Reginald bolted to the Sleepmobile to head after him. He knew the route the kid would have to take to get back home, and he’d find him there.

Reginald’s decisive win in The Great Battle of the Pitcher’s Mound with Phineas—where he’d clearly been victorious, or possibly victorious, or lost completely—now struck him as less of a perfect outcome with every four-way stop sign.

And then he just missed the green light at What Cheer’s Notoriously Long Red Light. Phineas must have been well out ahead of him now.

Sitting at the stoplight, waves of worries started rolling in. He was 6’4”. The kid was 4’6”. He should have pulled him from the game once he started throwing towards the courthouse. He should have done… anything besides what he actually did.

Reginald got so caught up worrying what he hadn’t done and what he had, that he absentmindedly stuffed his hand into Phineas’ tiny baseball glove. Eventually, he got his long fingers in. The glove wasn’t big enough to chase down a ping pong ball. No wonder the kid couldn’t catch anything.

When What Cheer’s Notoriously Long Red Light finally changed, Reginald couldn’t get the glove off his fingers. He had to grip the steering wheel with a baby lobster claw.

The further he followed the kid’s route, calling out for him, the bigger the waves. He couldn’t put his finger on the feeling.

And then he could.

Panic.

*

Reginald drove through the kid’s neighborhood at the speed of a street sweeper. He called out the window for Phineas like he’d lost a puppy.

“Phineas! I’m sorry!”

As he rounded the corner at Bitter Cherry Drive, the first in a bunch of makeshift obstacles appeared. It was like chasing a retreating army of items grabbed from lawns: a toppled tricycle, skateboards stacked like a campfire, at Cracked Chestnut Lane, there were five hula hoops laid out like Olympic rings.

He drove past them.

“Phineas!” Finally, Reginald texted him. He felt rotten, like the kid might never pick up a baseball again, or leave his house, or his bedroom.

Phineas, come out wherever you are. You don’t have to pitch anymore.

Silence. Crickets from the kid.

It was clear to both of them he wouldn’t have to pitch again.

He typed and untyped about twelve different things, but nothing was right. But the moment he scratched his nose with his baby lobster claw, he had a brainstorm.

Here, kitty, kitty, kitty. 🐱

It took two minutes, but the kid responded.

What are you up to so far? The tricycle?

No, the hula hoops.

At Twilight Ash Circle, Phineas appeared suddenly in front of the car. He was dragging a splash pool with a rubber ducky out into the street.

Reginald pulled up to the side of him and rolled his window down with his baby lobster claw.

“Do you want to get in? I have your glove.”

“Nope.”

Phineas walked by the side of the Sleepmobile like the two were out for a neighborhood stroll. Phineas carrying a Barbie doll with a dislocated pitching arm. Neither spoke until Coal Garden Terrace.

Reginald was just so bad at this.

“I have thrown them, you know. Knuckleballs.”

Reginald kept driving at his side. A car honked to get around them.

“For a whole afternoon. I don’t know how I did it, but then something happened, then it stopped, and now I can’t even pick a ball up. You’ve seen me. I can’t do anything.”

The kid was telling him something important. Reginald didn’t know what to say, but he understood to keep the car speed constant.

“But I’m not making it up. I did throw them.”

They passed Wilting Willow.

“I threw hundreds of them. Nobody saw. First it was with a wiffleball, then I got a real baseball, then a softball, then a basketball. I couldn’t stop. They were dancing. And I didn’t know who to tell, and the one person who I asked to see didn’t come out and see.”

Reginald was pretty sure he knew who, but it felt helpful to ask.

“Do you mean your dad?” He almost said “The Boil.”

“Yes, of course, my dad. He asked me if I thought I was some big knuckleball artist, too. He said if there is anybody in the world you don’t want to grow up to be it’s The Knuckleball Artist... the two unluckiest losers to ever play baseball.”

“Why two? What two?”

“The Knuckleball Artist and The Boil,” Phineas answered.

Reginald couldn’t keep up. Phineas pressed on.

“Sometimes, I wouldn’t mind being either of them. Most of the time, though, I would absolutely mind, just in case you’re wondering.”

There were times in his life when a woman’s intuition would have been a huge help for Reginald.

The kid stopped short and stared at him through his glasses. Either Reginald stopped the Sleepmobile, or she stopped herself. He simply had no idea what to say to the kid, so he went practical.

“Give me your welders. They’re so dirty I can’t see.”

Today was the day everybody wanted to help Phineas with his glasses.

The kid handed them over, and—of course—as these things go with misfits in general, they have nice little faces, particularly when they are sad, or they’ve been through a public humiliation, or they’re talking about their horrible parents.

“Don’t,” Phineas said.

“Don’t what?”

“Clean them.”

“Somebody’s got to. They’re scaring me.”

Reginald reached into the backseat and pulled his prized Yankee pajamas from under the Sleepmobile master bedroom pillow. Phineas just stood there.

It was a challenge holding them with a baby lobster claw, but Reginald got there. Phineas fumbled with the Barbie’s dislocated arm.

Reginald strove for perfection cleaning the lenses. He hummed, because he didn’t know what to say next. So, he wiped all the way from the pajama leg bottoms to the belt buckle loops. Cleaning the kid’s glasses was the one helpful thing he could do for the kid, but the more he wiped, the more he felt there was something he needed to say.

He stopped humming, and when he did, it came out as a blurt, as things often did with Reginald.

“Kid, I’ll never be able to teach you to throw a knuckleball. I don’t have it.”

“But you do have it.”

“Do you know how many guys throw a knuckleball in the majors now?”

“Exactly one. Uno.”

Reginald stopped wiping the glasses abruptly. This happened to be the correct answer. He also really couldn’t clean the glasses anymore. They sparkled.

“Kid, I can’t do it. You’re never going to learn to throw a knuckleball from me... Remember, I mean.”

He handed the glasses back. “Put them on. Let me see.”

To be extra polite, Reginald added, “Phineas.” The kid’s name was like a new word for him.

Phineas stared back at him. Without all the grime, the lenses magnified the boy’s eyes. They were large, telescopic large.

Whatever the kid had been fighting inside, he gave up. His shoulders slumped.

Reginald understood the glasses. It was clear as day: The kid didn’t want the world to see him with telescopically large eyes.

“I look like a goldfish.”

Reginald regretted every time he’d ever called his glasses welders. Hard truth is where jokes go to die.

“It doesn’t have to be in a game, Coach Perry.”

Phineas? Coach Perry? It was like everybody suddenly remembered each other’s name.

“I just need to throw one somebody saw. It was the best thing I ever did, not like there’s some long list.”

“You get old enough, you don’t even need a witness… but a witness would be better.... No, I change my mind. It has to be at Yankee Stadium,” Reginald said softly.

“Mine could be in a backyard,” Phineas countered. They were either getting competitive or lost in conversations with themselves.

“I would take mine at the bottom of the ninth in Game 7. The grass would be electric green. The scoreboard would be flashing. Everything would be perfect.”

Reginald stared out towards the next intersection. He might have been stalling for time.

“And your dad would have to be there.”

Now Phineas didn’t know what to say.

“Mine wouldn’t even need to be a strike.” The kid took off his glasses, There was the boy with the puppy eyes again.

Reginald looked away, then played his last card. Mostly, he was talking to himself now.

“You know what, kid? You’re right. I’d only need to lean over and pick the ball up off the ground. Wouldn’t even need to throw it. Just know I was about to throw a strike.”

Reginald’s mind—feelings you could call them—caught up with his thoughts. “Maybe I wouldn’t need your dad to be there.”

Phineas had his own last card to play. He fumbled to wrench Barbie’s dislocated arm into her body, but it wouldn’t go. He was stalling for time.

“Well, I would need him to be there, but it would be best if you were the one catching it, so I’d have a backup witness.”

*

Reginald stretched out his lobster claw hand so that Phineas could help him take the tiny glove off. The kid removed it easily.

“So, that’s a yes? You’ll try to teach me?”

“It wasn’t a yes.”

“It was a yes.” Phineas looked like a smiling goldfish.

Reginald shook his head in disbelief. He could not negotiate with this family.

Reginald took the Barbie doll from Phineas. He effortlessly snapped her pitching arm back in to her relocated shoulder. He turned her pitching hand this way and that.

“Practice is Saturday morning, first thing, kid. And you’re coaching the Cougars and not just hints either. We’d better have a winning record… Coach Phineas.”

“Yes… Mr. Perry. I mean Coach Perry.”

I think we’re all aware that there was drama in the moment.

*

Kneeling down and staring into the Sleepmobile hood ornament that night, Reginald thought he’d see himself throwing the Greatest Pitch in the History of Baseball, no different than he’d seen nightly for the last twenty-one years.

But instead it was Phineas he saw in the hood ornament.

The kid stood on the mound at Yankee Stadium with his hand in a tiny glove. He shook off sign after sign, waiting to throw a ping pong ball. The lights were hot and bright. The grass was electric green, powered by an extension cable that ran down from the outfield scoreboard. There wasn’t a Yankee or a Yankee fan in sight.

There wasn’t even a catcher…

But, no, that wasn’t true…

There did seem to be a catcher…

He was the catcher.

What could it all possibly mean? But he finally put it together. Kneeling down in front of the Sleepmobile bumper and looking into the hood ornament, it turned out he was a catcher.

And there was only one pitch he’d ever know how to call for.

Crouched there in front of the hood, Reginald wiggled all five of his skinny fingers and fluttered them around. It was the universal call for a knuckler. He’d never done anything easier in his whole life. He felt the Sleepmobile’s headlights glowing on his face.

Then it was as if the stadium itself took a breath.

The kid straightened up tall.

His glove grew.

The ping pong ball swelled to the size of a baseball.

Phineas checked an imaginary runner at first base, then went into an Iowa windmill of a windup.

That knuckleball floated towards the plate from whatever direction dreams come.

CHAPTER 19

THE BEE AND THE TULIP

Reginald set up a small lawn chair behind home plate and angled it toward the sun. It was 6 AM. It was Saturday. What was he doing out here with this kid? Why was the kid wearing his game uniform? How could he possibly teach him to throw a knuckleball?

“Go stand on the mound facing home plate and close your eyes.”

Reginald walked over and cracked a Special Beer as quietly as he could, so the kid wouldn’t hear it spray.

He handed him the ball. “Make a knuckleball grip.”

Phineas’ grip might have been a distant cousin twice removed of a knuckleball grip. Reginald corrected the kid’s hand, and Phineas began to giggle. There was no hiding the fact he was happy to be up at 6 AM learning to throw a knuckleball.

“You’re tickling me. Can you do it without making it tickle?”

Phineas started to wriggle uncontrollably like he was receiving shock therapy.

“Stop that,” Reginald ordered, and Phineas stood stock still.

Satisfied with one hundred percent obedience, Reginald guided the kid’s fingernails into the hard flesh of the baseball and corrected the angle of his wrist. When he’d finished fixing the grip, he went back to his lawn chair and his Special Beer. The Iowa State Flag pole clanged.

“Now stand on one leg like a stork.” He’d seen this somewhere, but he was stalling for time. It wasn’t pretty watching him try to balance, but Phineas remained upright like a terrified tightrope walker.

“And no talking,” Reginald stretched out in his lawn chair and relaxed in the sun. The kid’s obedience was as pleasant as being up early and greeting the day.

Twenty minutes passed, and the kid still stood there, wobbling the entire time like a drunken stork, with the ball perched in his fingertips. There’s something deeply athletic about almost, but not quite, toppling over for twenty straight minutes.

Instead, our stork stood there with a knuckleball grip grinning. Reginald smiled despite himself. He made the mistake of picking up a baseball from the batter’s box and making a Snow Cone, shooting it back and forth, palm to tips, tips to palm, lightning fast, in his spider-long fingers.

It was all very, very pleasant, a “springish summery.”

As you’ve guessed, this was not going to last.

Somewhere out in right, he heard a back door slam. Two more beers cracked open. Pinball must have been on his porch. Reginald could hear Tripod behind the fence, pogo-ing around in three-four time. Reginald hummed Take Me Out to the Ballgame to the rhythm.

Phineas forgot himself and started singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”

🎵 if I don’t win it’s a shame… yes, it’s one, two, three strikes I’m out at the old ball game… 🎵

“No singing! There’s no singing in baseball!” Reginald scolded him, and, well, that felt good. He hadn’t felt like more of a coach the entire time he’d spent with his Little League team.

“Zipping, zipping, zipped,” he cheeped back.

It was possible there might have been humming coming from Pinball’s back porch, but if there was, it zipped, too.

“There,” he thought. Reginald let the baseball settle deep into his palm in a knuckleball grip, tight as a diamond in her setting, locked in, almost too good to be true.

He was on the edge of feeling that if he got up right that minute, he’d throw a perfect knuckleball. Then a horrible memory came at him, like a comebacker to the mound. Waves of cheers at Yankee Stadium—and not the good kind, the Bronx kind.

Reginald tossed the ball in his hand onto the infield like a hot potato. He should never have picked it up.

No, there was no baseball left in him.

*

They were approaching twenty-one minutes of this when Reginald finally spoke. He had Exercise #2, and it would chew up the clock.

“If you want to throw a knuckleball, then you need to learn its history.”

This really wasn’t true.

“Not only can't pitchers control it, hitters can't hit it, catchers can't catch it, coaches can't coach it and most pitchers can't learn it. The perfect pitch.”

“And?” the kid said.

“And…,” Reginald let that hang in the air until it felt important. “Who said that?”

“Jim Bouton,” the kid answered. Reginald unfolded his legs and sat up straight in his lawn chair.

It was impossible the kid would know this. Reginald pressed on to get the upper hand.

“What team?”

The second it came out of his mouth, Reginald wished he hadn’t asked.

The kid wobbled so terribly, he had to stork hop to get back into position.

“Four teams. The Pilots, the Braves, the Astros, and….”

Phineas wobbled like a top now, and after twenty-one minutes of nearly crashing over, his toe finally touched the ground.

“… the Yankees.”

A baby dust cloud stirred from where his toe hit the ground and slowly drifted off.

“I need to pee, coach.”

Reginald ignored him.

“How about this one: "Throwing a knuckleball for a strike is like throwing a butterfly with hiccups across the street into your neighbor's mailbox.’”

“I really need to pee.”

The kid raced off the mound, untying his uniform belt as he ran and disappeared out of sight.

Reginald yelled after him. “Not near the concession stand.”

A little voice peeped back. “It was Willie Stargell.”

There was no way he’d made it down to the Poison Ivy by the Baseball Graveyard.

And Willie Stargell also happened to be the correct answer. Reginald stood up from his chair, folded and unfolded it for some reason.

Two more beers cracked out in right. An ornery old man’s throat cleared, and when Reginald looked over two greyhound eyes looked back at him through the “O” in Cougars, before disappearing out of sight again.

“Zipping and zipped,” Phineas announced, as if he was in boot camp. You could hear the kid hopping foot to foot in 3/4 time.

Then it turned out Phineas had his own question. “The way to catch a knuckleball is to wait until it stops rolling and then pick it up.”

Reginald wasn’t sure his player should be quizzing him.

Phineas raced back onto the field as fast as he had left it, paused for Reginald to reset his knuckleball grip, and resumed the eyes-closed stork pose.

“Bob Uecker,” Reginald answered at last.

Reginald began to pace in a circle around the mound. When he spoke again, it was in a new voice, as if in conversation with himself. He started off in a whisper.

“The grip is hard, wind is hard, temperature is hard. It’s hard to repeat the mechanics. You need to throw the ball with no spin, and your entire body down to the little wires in your you-know-whats want to put spin on a ball when you throw one and...”

This went on for some time. By the time he peaked, he was practically yelling at an umpire.

Phineas interrupted him.

“You.”

Reginald looked over at the kid with his big, sad eyes. His arms hung limply.

The kid stared back at him.

Reginald couldn’t believe he was saying, but it had been bottled up so long, he couldn’t stop.

“You have no control over anything. The crowd is watching. The pressure. The booing.”

The two stared at each other.

“That’s what. Is that what…” Phineas began but cut himself short.

This whole morning was not what Reginald had planned, but the eye contact was surprisingly helpful. Out of nowhere, he had Exercise #3.

A brainstorm.

“Put down your leg. Shake it out.”

Phineas shook it out like a dog that had wet himself.

Reginald walked over behind home plate and looked out at Phineas on the mound. “You’ve been telling me over and over about your miracle knuckleballs. Show me your best one.”

Phineas had no idea what to say, but his face said it for him. How could he throw a knuckleball? He couldn’t have made the problem any clearer.

“No, I mean guide the ball through the air like the knuckleball when you threw it. Just carry it from your release point to my mitt. Show me your little miracle.”

“It wasn’t a little miracle. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. There were tons of miracles.”

It was less outrage, than pleading.

Now, it was only for a flash, but for that flash, Reginald believed him, and Phineas knew it.

As hard as this is going to be to believe, sometimes Reginald could see the kid in himself.

Reginald descended into a catcher’s crouch.

“Then show me the best one, Phineas...”

Phineas went into something that resembled a pitcher’s wind-up, then began to trace the ball’s path through the air, hopping up and down erratically. Flight in twenty-seven different directions eventually knocked his smeared glasses off, but he pressed on. His face was wistful, then aggressive. He stumbled and skittered, skipped and soared. He worked the baseball angle by swoop towards home plate. There were times that baseball seemed to drag the boy along on the tips of his toes.

Now, that pitch wouldn’t have meant much to you or me, but the former Yankee’s jaw dropped. He had to reach to the dirt to steady himself.

Twenty feet from home plate, Phineas began describing the course of the knuckleball out loud.

“They were like shooting a three-pointer with a child’s balloon.”

Reginald lost his balance and fell into the dirt.

“The baseball slid up the NASCAR wall, then shot down the straightaway. It ping-ponged to the left, skipped like a stone to the right, cartwheeled through the air. It shimmied high and shrugged low.”

Phineas approached in a whirl like a sugar plum fairy. When he reached home plate he gave out a deep sigh, pushed the ball firmly into Reginald’s mitt like a thumb pressing a stamp onto an envelope.”

Reginald dropped the ball, his glove fell off, and he knocked over his Special Beer. He covered his face with his hands. He couldn’t believe what he’d seen.

Out of nowhere, he remembered the explosion of fifty-five thousand, four-hundred and eighteen fans cheering for him.

“That’s the pitch you threw? Are you sure?” Reginald asked, turning back to him. Reginald traced the path of the ball through the air himself, repeating the whole thing, checking the kid’s face for every NASCAR straightaway and shimmy high and shrug low.

Phineas nodded. He looked heartbroken.

“Exactly the pitch. I think about it all the time. I can’t forget it, and nobody saw it, and nobody believes me.”

*

But Reginald had seen it.

He took off his baseball cap and ran his long, skinny fingers through his thinning hair. He looked at the Iowa State flag pole. He looked out to the “O” in Cougars.

Yup, he’d seen it alright.

He knew the straightaway, the child’s balloon, the skipping stone. He knew the moments when the ball would swoop and when it would soar. He’d seen that sugar plum fairy dance. So had the fifty-five thousand, four-hundred and eighteen fans that were cheering for him, and by cheering, I mean the best kind, the kind you only hear at Yankee Stadium.

And why was this?

It was because Phineas traced the exact same path of the last pitch Reginald ever threw for a strike.

It was the Knuckleball Artist’s masterpiece. It was a bee pulling up his landing gear and dropping inside of a tulip. It was the pitch in the Sleepmobile’s hood ornament.

It was the greatest pitch thrown in the history of baseball.

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 who 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.

CHAPTER 21

PINSTRIPES

Saturday morning knuckleball sessions were not going well, and a year of Saturday morning practices was not going to fix the problem. Neither wanted to be the first to say it, but there’s only so long you can keep hunting through unmowed outfield grass chasing down wild pitches.

Reginald’s instructions couldn’t have been simpler: stay relaxed, fingernails lightly into the “horseshoe” above the seams, no wrist flick or spin. Push the ball with your fingers—smooth and steady. Stay relaxed. Stay relaxed. Relaxed, like you’re throwing the ball at the bottom of a pool. Then nothing but the last task: watch the ball float and whiffle.

Hard to believe, but out of all the instructions, it was the “stay relaxed” that gave them both fits. They both wanted it in the way that never worked. The two could talk about it all day, but it hardly mattered. Their discussions were a masterclass in the art of something you forgot how to do, and eventually there was nothing left to say. Between the two of them giving lessons, everyone in What Cheer could have learned to throw a knuckleball.

It came to a head. Reginald was trying to retrieve a baseball with his arm down the spout in the center field septic tank, when he saw Phineas slumping towards the dugout. The kid looked like a twelve-year-old question mark with his head hung low and his back curled over. His arms hung limp and his glove dangled from a single finger.

In short, Phineas had given up.

*

When Reginald stepped down into the dugout, Phineas stared out at the field with a mitt covering his face like a hockey mask. He held his glasses in his hands and smeared dirt into them with his thumbs.

Reginald sat beside his player. They looked at the field, both slumped, and—really—what was there to say? There’s a point when not having anything to say even runs out of things to say. The frustrated twelve-year-old overhanded his glasses onto the field and turned to Reginald. His face was still completely covered by his baseball glove.

“Yeah,” said the player.

“Yeah,” said the coach.

I’m not entirely sure what they were agreeing to, but at this point the two of them spoke each other’s language. Reginald let out a deep sigh, pulled his own glove over his face, and the two of them stared at each other through the cracks between the leather fingers.

Out in right, Pinball’s porch door creaked, then slammed. The old man emerged from his house, with his wild, white hair and his dirty underwear shirt. He was holding two six-packs. Tripod poked his head out from the flap of the “O” in Cougars and rested his chin on the bottom of the “O.” He put his third paw over his eyes. The coach, the player, the old man, and the three-legged greyhound took turns staring at each other in defeat.

This field of dreams didn’t want any part of them.

Pinball lifted up both his six-packs at the defeated coach and player. Phineas wished he hadn’t thrown his glasses onto the field so he could see better.

“What is he doing?” Phineas asked through his mitt.

“The man’s a mystery, but he might be toasting us for reaching the bottom.”

Moments later there was a crack of beer for the old man’s right hand, then a second crack of beer for the old man’s left.

The two cracks gave Reginald an idea that shot him up so straight the jolt knocked the mitt off his face.

“Don’t move. I’m going to the car,” Reginald announced.

“Should I leave my mitt on?”

*

When Reginald came back, he carried a giant trash bag and had a spring in his step. He walked straight over to home plate, reached into the bag, and pulled out a six-pack of beer. Now, this is the Special Beer I’ve been promising we’d get to.

Reginald set the beer on home plate. Then he walked out and set a second six-pack on the pitcher’s mound. Phineas’ mitt fell off his face onto the dugout floor.

“I have one last idea,” Reginald said. “This comes with a twist, kid, but come out here and drink a Special Beer first. That’s your six-pack.”

The idea of the beer fumes alone overpowered him. Phineas staggered across the infield like he’d gotten lost in a desert. When he finally arrived at the pitching mound, he shrugged like he was looking at a police officer through a driver’s side window.

“I apologize, officer. Never again. May I go?”

Reginald watched quietly. He sipped his own Special Beer.

The boy hiccuped.

“You’re not drunk, kid.”

“Then why’m I tho increthibly drunk?” he slurred.

Phineas opened a second beer for his left hand and raised a toast out to Pinball in right.

Reginald watched patiently.

“Tell me when I’m—hiccup—standing on the mound.” Phineas started to list sideways and spin off like a fighter plane.

“Alright, Phineas, let’s wrap it up. There’s no beer in the beer. It’s Special Beer. It’s near beer. I don’t drink beer that has beer in it.”

Hiccup.

“Alright, here’s how it is going to go, kid.”

Hiccup.

“We’re going to try to throw the knuckleball back and forth to each other until one of us succeeds.”

Phineas struggled to point accusingly at Reginald like he realized he’d been tricked, but his index finger wandered around with the confusion of a compass needle.

“We should have tried drinking weeks ago,” Phineas said.

“I haven’t gotten to the idea yet.”

There was a long, how-do-I-break-this-to-you pause. Reginald looked at his own beer, swirled it, and drank it to the bottom in one go.

“One of us throws a knuckleball, or we wet ourselves trying. No pressure.”

Phineas looked towards his spot out by the Poison Ivy.

“Pressure.”

“Or we’re done with it. We’re giving up. Together.”

“Two guys who live in their cars?”

“Two guys who live in their cars.”

Phineas considered the prospects.

“Two guys who pee in their cars.”

The matter was settled over a chuckle and a giggle. Six-four and four-six toasted each other.

Reginald threw Phineas the trash bag.

“There are some fresh clothes in there. Go change. They’re going to be a little large.” Phineas looked at Reginald out of his smeared glasses. They had twisted sideways on his face from all the near beer.

On his way back to the field, you’d think the kid was in a sack race at the county fair. The change of clothes was definitely large. He’d gotten so tangled in the oversized fabric he’d accidentally put a leg through a hole in the knee.

And—with all the fuss—he hadn’t noticed what he was wearing.

It was only when Phineas leaned over and peered in for the sign, that the boy realized he was wearing Yankee pinstripes. He looked like he’d received an electric shock. He hoisted a giant flap of uniform cloth over his shoulder and saw he was wearing an upside-down 21.

Phineas looked at Reginald and looked back at his pinstripes. He tugged the uniform every which way to see it all.

“They fit, right?”

“They fit. You’re a pitch away from being a Yankee.”

The kid wearing his own uniform brought it all back: how he’d walked out to the mound from the bullpen in left. The memory gripped him so hard, Reginald had to turn away from his player.

He reached down to open a third beer and drank it in a gulp. It did not wash away the walnut in his throat.

It all came back to him. Funny the things you forget, then come back at you like a high hard one: the public address system, announcers in their booth, a little girl who wanted an autograph.

Randy Johnson was the starting pitcher that day, and when Reginald got to the mound, it was “The Big Unit” who handed him the baseball.

“Don’t blow the save. I’m taller than you, kid,” he’d said. “But mostly good luck.”

And with that, the six-foot-seven Randy Johnson left the mound to a well-earned standing ovation.

Under stadium lights so bright you could have seen them from the Empire State Building, Reginald rubbed up a baseball to settle himself. He had so many butterflies in his stomach he’d hopped.

His manager and the Big Unit looked out at him from the dugout. Guys he only knew from baseball cards were leaning against the railing to see the AAA Wilkes-Barre Knuckleball Artist, a rookie they’d heard so much about.

He looked in at the plate. The umpire settled behind the catcher and gave him the go-ahead.

He checked his runner on first.

Reginald took another sip to steady himself.

There was a final thought before the pitch that changed his life: He was major league baseball’s newest player. He was a Yankee, like all the Yankees before him, great and small. He had a record of 0-0, with no balls and no strikes, and a clean slate for the rest of his life.

And he was The Knuckleball Artist.

Reginald interrupted himself. He shook his head and turned back to the mound.

Now a four-foot-six kid in the middle of Iowa, wearing the number 21, stared back at him from the mound. He was a memory that came from the future, a memory that had been waiting for him on a Little League field a thousand miles from the Bronx.

It was him out there on the mound. Number 21, rubbing up a baseball, trying to see through his smeared glasses and staring in for the sign.

*

Reginald crouched down, fluttered his fingers and called for a knuckleball.

The kid’s pitch was so wild it knocked the reverie completely out of him. While he headed to the backstop, Reginald felt his first, gentle, “how much time do I think I have” twinge from all the Special Beers.

Then it was nothing but wild pitch after wild pitch, an Iowa hailstorm of them. Coach and player stood, threw the ball, wiggled, then picked them up, over and over. Four beers in, there was some concern the one sprinkler might set off the other.

Out in right, Pinball was two six-packs deep—one in the left hand, one in the right—but his porch chair had started to rock with some urgency, all the more surprising because generally speaking, this was a fellow who could outlast a doubleheader rain delay.

Reginald began to hold forth. Philosophy seemed to settle his mind.

“You know, the knuckleball was a pitch of love, Phineas. It wasn’t something you tried to do. It’s something you got to do. You can’t control the ball, it controls you.”

Reginald was retrieving a ball that had slipped out past the concession stand, when he turned and asked the kid, “What knuckleballer said that?”

A trick question.

“How about ‘all of them?’” Phineas yawned and gave an over-the-top seventh-inning stretch that took him right up to nature’s edge.

“Correct,” Reginald continued. “Holding steady on the tap?”

“Hmm. Hmm,” he answered, which was probably a yes.

A few pitches later, the sad sermon started to build again.

“You know, my whole life is trying to control my whole life… Did you know that I live in a Volkswagen with no battery, I talk to my car, and I stare at a hood ornament?”

This felt rhetorical, so Phineas didn’t answer. He squinted.

“It’s not a pitch. A fastball is a pitch. A curve ball is a pitch. A slider. They’re all pitches. But a knuckleball? It’s a planned accident. You step on the accelerator, let go of the wheel and let it happen.”

Phineas felt he needed to add something.

“But you’re driving very slowly.”

Reginald countered. “In a packed parking lot.”

“With your eyes closed.”

That seemed to settle the matter. A last sip of beer five and they threw their cans towards the dugout at the same time. Quite a driving range was building up over there.

“You know, on a good day, Phineas, you let it drive around and you don’t run into anything. The ball just steers around cars, and you let it and watch. It is a miracle.”

“I do know, you know,” said Phineas. For all of the skipping and bouncing around, he’d never sounded so grown up in all his twelve years.

At the hour and fifteen mark they were both in distress and well past philosophy. They retrieved baseballs like they were walking on hot sand. They threw like they were drinking sour milk. For an outsider, it wasn’t quite clear what the gloves were for.

When the porch chair suddenly stopped creaking out in right and a screen door slammed angrily, it was clear the two of them weren’t going to be fighting for third place.

Then, right before the biggest, meanest, greyest Iowa storm cloud appeared on the horizon, Reginald looked at the baseball in his hand, rubbed it against his shirt like an apple, and said, “I just had the craziest thought. Maybe I don’t even care if I could throw one again.”

The next part wasn’t for anyone but him and the baseball.

“But I’d sure like to see…”

He mumbled something, then “throw one.”

Far off lightning lit up What Cheer’s modest stadium.

It was like the kid heard him.

“I think maybe you were supposed to be a coach. I’m not saying a good one, because you lose all of your games, but lots of coaches lose all their games. It doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be one.”

“Losing isn’t everything,” the old Yankee said.

“Losing isn’t everything,” repeated his Little Leaguer.

And the moment the kid said it, after his sixth and final beer, the heavens parted and the rains began to pour. Lightning lit up the state of Iowa.

The boy was checking an imaginary runner at the time, snapping his knee up and going into his windup, when oh, my how the thunder did roll.

Phineas had a complete and utter loss of control.

His spring had sprung.

The knuckleball didn’t matter to him anymore.

And the moment it didn’t need to, the baseball herself took over. It fluttered down, skidded over, fastened its seatbelt, and held its arms up for a roller coaster photograph.

Then it landed softer than a diaper on a baby’s bottom.

Was it ever raining now.

Reginald got so lost in the wiggle and the waggle and the wiffle and the waffle of the kid’s knuckleball that his own heavens parted.

There was a second crack of lightning, this one in the parking lot.

It took out the Sleepmobile antenna like a lightning rod, knocking it clear off the hood of the car.

Coach and player stood there in the pouring rain.

“We’re Tinkler and Sprinkler,” Phineas giggled, and then he couldn’t get a grip after that. He got so caught up in middle-school giggling, he threw another knuckleball.

Then another.

And Reginald threw knuckleballs right back to him.

“That’s the best one yet,” they kept saying.

“No, that one was.”

It was like they were arguing with each other.

That afternoon, neither of them could throw anything but knuckleballs. It didn’t matter what grip, what temperature, what angle of elbow. None of the instructions mattered. They couldn’t not throw them. They played catch with butterflies. One popped up to throw. The other dropped into a catcher’s crouch, like two unattended children bouncing each other off a seesaw.

Tinkler threw it high. Sprinkler caught it low.

Sprinkler threw them behind his back, Tinkler caught them under his knee.

There was joy in Mudville. Not once did the ball hit the ground.

You can’t get the truth out of anyone anymore, but Pinball certainly could have told you about that day, not that you’d dare to ask him.

And then, at last, there was nothing left for Tinkler and Sprinkler to prove. The coach nodded at his player.

“Let’s stop here.”

“I agree.”

The two headed back to the car.

“You’ve earned your stripes, 21.”

“So, you definitely saw, then?” Phineas asked. It was a real question.

Reginald gave the kid a pat on the back.

“I saw.”

*

After he dropped Phineas at his driveway, Reginald let go of the steering wheel and didn’t touch it again the entire ride home. Back at the field, The Sleepmobile still had almost a full tank of gas, and neither wanted to stop.

That night, she circled and spun through the Little League parking lot like a runaway bumper car.

Reginald held his hands out the Sleepmobile living room windows and laughed. It was a real laugh, a laugh he’d been saving up for some time, one of those “it’s gonna be okay laughs,” and he let The Sleepmobile drive wherever she wanted to go, and for the first time in twenty-one years, he let her take him there.

Just before dawn, Reginald fell sound asleep against the car window, and she rounded the bases one final time. She parked in her favorite spot and ran out of gas with a tiny hiccup.

Speaking for The Sleepmobile, in twenty-one years, the old girl had never been happier.

CHAPTER 22

THE NOTORIOUSLY LONG RED LIGHT

It was the big day, and all of What Cheer was off to the Championship Little League game. Cougars Volkswagen was playing Misfit Tailoring for seats at the banquet table—the one that looked out at all the classmates that lost.

There wasn’t a second car in a single driveway. Even the parking lot over at Final Sunset Nursing Home was a ghost town.

On the drive into town, birds had settled on the friendlier scarecrows, and the farmers left house keys poking out from flower pots. “I don’t want burglars breaking all the windows.” This had never happened in What Cheer, but during one of the kids’ big games up in Cedar Rapids, burglars did this very thing.

“Well, that’s no surprise for the big city,” the mothers agreed.

The mothers, a more forgiving bunch, set out milk and cookies on the kitchen tables, with tea towels “folded up all nice.” You never knew when a Game Day Burglar might need a glass of milk or a little tea towel wisdom to tip them over to salvation.

“Bless their souls, let them finish the cookies off,” the mothers would say. “Anyway, we have nothing to steal, and we’re running late.”

Downtown was no different. A sign in the big window at the grocery store read “Back by 7 (if we don’t go into extras).”

At the courthouse, the small claims judge gave a good-luck tap with his gavel before locking up. His grandson—mostly a good kid, just going through a rough patch—had been named team captain.

“Awful proud how that whole mess turned out,” the judge told himself, locking up. “Good thing I was on duty.”

*

As for Reginald and Phineas, it was their last ride in The Sleepmobile together. And not just their last ride together—if the Cougars lost, it’d be Reginald’s last ride in the Sleepmobile. That’s “period full stop and no exaggeration” last ride. The Sleepmobile would be The Boil’s.

At the edge of town, Reginald wished he hadn’t seen it, but he did. Cougars’ Volkswagen had hung a banner over the President’s reserved parking spot. “Welcome Home, Sleepmobile!” There was a picture of The Boil beneath it like he was running for the President of the 4th of July.

She must have seen it, too. Reginald patted the old girl’s dashboard as they sputtered past.

Phineas started to say something. Then Reginald started to say something. Then they both got stuck.

It was awful quiet in the car for pre-game.

*

From time to time, Phineas took a quick peek inside the baseball glove he’d folded on his lap. The boy’s uniform was trim and white, but his welders were as grimy as ever. Reginald drummed on his steering wheel, but no matter how much he fussed with the radio, there was nothing on but static.

Then they missed the Notoriously Long Red Light. Reginald gave up and put the hand brake on. This was a battle he’d surrendered long ago. Clearly, the Notoriously Long Red Light wanted something worked out before the big game.

At last, Phineas broke the silence.

“Do you have a baseball card?”

“Nope.”

There were probably better questions as ice-breakers.

“You can’t really be a big leaguer unless you have a card.” Phineas stared out the window for a bit, then turned to his coach. “You really wouldn’t be official, right? How would you ever prove it to anyone if you didn’t even have a card?”

“I guess you couldn’t.”

Phineas turned to him.

“You’re sure you don’t have a card?”

Reginald shook his head.

Phineas gave him a thumbs-up like he was checking a box in his head.

“I collect baseball cards. Mostly for the gum. If you buy the old, unopened packs the gum is super hard and cracks the way I like it. It’s like eating fossils.” Phineas laughed, kind of. Then he went quiet.

“Do you know what I mean?” Phineas looked in his glove again.

“Gum is gum, I suppose,” Reginald said.

“I don’t mean the gum. I mean being a real baseball player without a card. If you had one, you’d definitely be a Yankee. You could show everyone.”

This time Reginald didn’t answer.

Phineas took a wrapped package from his glove and handed over a pack of baseball cards. It was sealed with a tiny bit of Christmas present tape.

“There are a lot of them out there. It wasn’t like my dad had to buy a thousand packs of baseball cards to find it.”

“Find the Yankee. Careful with the gum.”

*

Now, before you get your hopes up, let me be perfectly clear: Reginald Perry did not have a baseball card.

He almost did, which is the worst kind of didn’t. They took the Yankees Team Photo the evening of Reginald’s disaster, but by that time, Reginald was staring out the window on a Greyhound bus to What Cheer.

The next year, Topps executives held a meeting about a “Yipper Card.” In the knuckleballer’s favor was the Greatest Pitch Ever Thrown in the History of Baseball. On the flipside, he hadn’t recorded a single out, so he didn’t have any stats. Flipside won.

Reginald opened the pack to look at the cards. Albert Pujols, Ichiro, Manny Ramirez. Barry Bonds.

“Not them. Find the Yankee.”

And then, there it was.

On the front of the baseball card was a picture of a very tall pitcher at Yankee Stadium in full, knee-up windup. At the top of the card was an old time American banner that said, “Great Yankee Moments of 2003.” It looked an awful lot like the “Welcome Home, Sleepmobile” at Cougars’ Volkswagen.

“Careful you don’t crack the gum.”

It was Randy Johnson’s card. Reginald didn’t understand why he was being given a baseball card of the legendary pitcher, but to be Midwestern polite, he said, “Thanks. I love Randy Johnson. The ‘Big Unit.’”

“Yup. That’s correct. Six-foot-seven and a quarter.”

“He had a whole conversation at me once,” Reginald said.

“No, coach. You’re not seeing it.”

He wasn’t. He couldn’t see anything. A huge crowd. Bright lights. His old manager in the dugout. A player looking under a dugout bench for a misplaced glove.

“No matter how I look, kid. It’s still gonna be Randy Johnson.”

“Yup, but nope. Try harder.”

Reginald tried the other side. Randy Johnson had so many stats, his career barely fit on the back.

“There’s about a million of these cards, coach. A million.”

Phineas pronounced it like a five-year-old who just learned the word infinity.

“Great Yankee Moments of 2003,” Reginald read the card out loud, hoping maybe that would help.

Most of the time with gifts, unless you’ve picked it out for yourself, the whole thing is a minefield.

Reginald shook Randy Johnson like a Polaroid photo so something might show up eventually.

The Notoriously Long Red Light was still red.

*

Maybe a handful of times in life, you buy someone a gift, and you know it is perfect at the shop — but then you’re driving home, and you start worrying maybe it isn’t. By the time you’re in the driveway, you’re sure the whole business was too risky in the first place. What could you possibly have been thinking? Right when they’re opening it up, you are getting ready to take it back and apologize.

But the moment they open your gift, you know it was perfect, just like you thought in the first place. It was so perfect you would have paid a hundred times whatever you happened to pay, just to see your special person open that present again.

You used to believe in money, but now you only believe in faces.

Phineas saw the exact moment Reginald got it, because Reginald brought the card all the way to his nose and squinted with one eye.

Deep in the background of the Randy Johnson card, there was the thinnest sliver of the Yankee bullpen. And in that bullpen, stood a pitcher—must have been six-foot-four. He was getting ready to enter the game.

It might have been a printer’s squiggle on that pitcher’s back, or it might have been the number 21, but it sure looked like the number 21.

“Reginald “The Yipper” Perry,” Phineas said. “The Yipper.”

Phineas said “Yipper” the way you say something no one else is allowed to say, but you are, and they couldn’t possibly be hurt by it.

“The Yipper,” Reginald agreed, nodding.

“It’s right before Your Pitch.”

“Yup. Reginald ‘The Yipper’ Perry,” Reginald said. Then he said it again. He turned the card over in his long fingers. “The Yipper.”

Funny thing was, somehow he was mostly okay with “The Yipper” now. Reginald had gotten down to life’s nuts and bolts. He swapped out the Yipper part and popped in his true middle name.

“Reginald Gaylord Perry,” he said. “My father said I was named to live on the mound like Gaylord.”

“Doesn’t matter what you’re named. Your number is the most important. You’re Number 21. The card isn’t worth even a dollar. There’s a million of them. You’re in every baseball card store in the world. You’re in Japan.”

To be fair, Reginald was kind of a dot in the photo, and it might not even have been him. He was small enough that you could get into a reasonable argument about it.

Except that it was him.

“I mean, it’s nothing, but I’ve always known the guy who swept up at the dealership and lived in The Sleepmobile was a major league dot. I stole the pack from my dad, by the way. He hid it in his Wilkes-Barre trophy.”

Phineas cracked the gum exactly in half with a snap that startled both of them.

Reginald took his half of the gum, spun the card around in his long fingers, first super fast, then super slow. Then he set it carefully inside The Sleepmobile’s Glove Compartment Refrigerator. He didn’t say “thank you” or anything appropriately polite. He didn’t even look at the boy.

Perfect gifts can be like that.

Then, suddenly and with some oomph to it, Reginald popped the hand brake and ran What Cheer’s Notoriously Long Red Light.

“Game Day,” Reginald said.

“Game Day,” Phineas laughed. “Chew your gum. It’s good luck.”

CHAPTER 23

4:59 PM, JUNE 3rd, 2024

In a pre-game prayer circle assembled around the Iowa state flag pole, the Cougars lined up by batting average, and, well, the size of them! They were Canadian lumberjacks. Stand them up toe-to-head and they’d grown an extra player since they’d fallen out of first place.

Coming so close to prom night, they were all a little shy to kick off the pre-game prayer. So it was decided that it fell to the player with the worst batting average. All eyes turned to Phineas, who was batting .000.

“We don’t have all day. Go, loser. Start.”

The team captain said this softly so the Almighty wouldn’t hear.

Phineas cleared his throat. The awesome responsibility made him want to giggle. Since everyone’s eyes were tightly shut, he danced a quick hokey pokey for the Almighty.

He began.

“Heavenly Father, we know you’ve had your hands full with the Misfits this season, but if it’s not too big a miracle, can you just be a fan?”

The lumberjacks had no idea what all that was about.

After that, the prayers cycled up through the batting order.

“I’m sorry about Saturday, if you were there, and I know you can be everywhere sometimes, I sure hope you weren’t in the back of the pickup.”

“Our record surpasses all understanding. Look at them over there, Father.”

“Please bat Brother Phineas at the bottom of the order.”

“You better be listening, Phineas. If he doesn’t do it, then I will,” the biggest, meanest lumberjack said.

The whole team crossed themselves for the guaranteed win and stared up at the Iowa State flag to pray for the State Capitol.

Amens and high fives.

The Almighty had his work cut out.

*

But the Almighty didn’t hear a word of it. He was sitting quietly on the bench in Misfit Tailoring’s dugout.

Because there were a lot of different religions on the Misfits—as is often the case on shorter teams: the fewer inches, the greater the denominations.

Their coach had them “Pray the Hoosiers.” That’s what he called it.

All the hands shot up.

“I can start,” said the boy who slept under the underpass. “Forget about the crowds, the size of the school, their fancy uniforms, and remember what got you here.”

“We don't care what the scoreboard says at the end of the game—in our book, we're gonna be winners,” said the fat twins with the candy-stuffed waist belts.

Brother Philip in the red dress called out, “How far is it from the free throw line to the basket?”

Little Abhishek responded, “I believe you'll find it's the exact same measurements as our gym back in Hickory.”

Together they sang, “Fifteen feet.”

And that was that. Anyone who’d seen a single baseball movie could tell you Cougars Volkswagen didn’t stand a chance against Misfit Tailoring.

And Amen to that.

“Play ball,” said the Lord.

*

This is where my memory gets a bit dim. As these things do, for the first five innings or so, the game see-sawed back and forth, mostly on account of the usual miracles and mischief: somebody spiked the wrong water cooler. The heart of the Misfits’ lineup squatted so far down their strike zones were the height of coiled-up caterpillars.

Big Dottie’s father finally showed up at the game sober. She hit the go-ahead homer and gave everyone the finger to stick it to them. It broke your heart in the best way.

Top of the sixth, “Too Tall,” the asthmatic boy who always swung with his eyes closed, well he finally made contact. The whole thing was “goosebump beautiful,” as they say in Iowa.

*

In the bottom of the sixth, the outfield clock approached 4:59 PM on June 3^rd, 2024, twenty-one years to the minute from The Greatest Pitch in the History of Baseball.

There were two outs.

The count was “O” and two.

The best pitcher in the history of What Cheer stood on the mound for the Cougars. He was the meanest, cheatingest, ugliest thirteen-year-old lumberjack ever to throw a hundred-mile-an hour Little League fastball.

As for Coach Phineas, he hadn’t had a wrong move in him the entire game. There was no Misfit Amen big enough to take it away from him.

He couldn’t take it watching from the bench, so the whole game, Reginald had sat in the driver’s seat of The Sleepmobile. He couldn’t make out the scoreboard from his angle after the second inning, so he had to listen to the cheering from one set of stands to the other and back again.

Reginald heard a Cougar parent cry out, somewhat prematurely, “We’ve won.”

So the season and The Sleepmobile’s twenty-one-year fate hung in the balance of a single strike. A single pitch. If you’ve ever had to throw a single pitch, then you know it is the toughest kind to throw.

Reginald rubbed the worn leather stitching on the steering wheel. It had been a long road together for the two of them.

But something wasn’t right, and he knew it down to the bottom of his baseball heart.

“This might be goodbye, Ú.Ú., and if it is I’m sorry, but I need to do what I’m about to do.” Maybe he was expecting her to answer somehow, but she held her tongue. Reginald patted her dashboard—slowly, then slower still. He said his own small prayer, a good Iowa man’s prayer, and he got his big long legs out of the old car, as awkward as ever.

When he stepped down into the dugout, there was only Phineas.

The boy turned and looked at Reginald.

The count was three and two.

“You’re going to see it, coach! The Sleepmobile is yours. I’m winning it for you,” the boy said.

Reginald nodded in an “I hate to break it to you” way. He stepped up on the dugout stairs and looked out at the town of What Cheer, Iowa. Both bleachers turned to watch The Yipper in the dugout.

He looked back at them.

Somebody called out, “The Yipper!”

Out in right behind the wall, Pinball got up slowly from his chair. He went to the wall of his porch museum, reached all the way up to the top for one particular baseball, looked at it, then threw it out onto the field as angry as ever.

Pinball had a good arm.

It skidded past the second baseman, landed on the pitching rubber, looked like it was going to come to a rest there—but then didn’t. It gathered steam again, rolled down the other side of the mound, continued into the dugout, on down the concrete steps, and settled directly below Reginald’s dominant right foot, where he pinned it to a complete stop.

Reginald knew what ball it was before he even picked it up, but he took the moment to look all the same.

On one side it read “Official Major League Baseball.” It was signed by the 2003 commissioner Allan “Bud” Selig.

It was the ball he’d thrown for the Greatest Pitch in the History of Baseball, the same ball he’d set on the mound the night he arrived on the Greyhound bus from the Yankees and said goodbye to baseball. It had been thrown exactly once.

The former Yankee spun the ball in his hand until he found the imprint of four fingernail grooves. He matched his fingernails to the grooves. They were a perfect fit.

Reginald took a long moment, snow-coning the ball in and out of his long fingers, before letting it come to a stop in a perfect knuckleball grip. And then he knew, even if he knew all along.

It was the game or it was the boy.

*

“Phineas,” Reginald said, still staring at the ball. “You’re pitching.”

“No, I’m not,” Phineas responded. He looked beyond terrified. “I’ve already been in, and I’m the coach.”

“I’m the general manager. You’re fired.”

The kid started searching for his misplaced glove. Reginald stopped him.

“Give me your hand, son.”

Reginald took Phineas’ hand and set the grip of the ball, guiding his fingernails to the grooves where he’d held the ball before that miraculous first pitch.

“You’re our closer, son,” Reginald said quietly.

“I can’t,” Phineas said.

“Then go out there and don’t. You’re my closer.”

It was so quiet you could hear the cotton candy.

There was silence in the stands as Phineas headed to the mound. When he stumbled on the grass verge on the third-base line, the Misfits bench gasped. Phineas had never seemed shorter, partly because Reginald had patted his curly hair down in a brief display of go-get-’em affection, but mostly because the boy was anxious and slouching, like any ordinary 4’ 6” sixth grader would be with his own team throwing their mitts on the ground. In the Misfits’ dugout they were hopping up and down like they were at a County Fair sack race.

Phineas ignored them all. A big sigh shuddered through him. For a moment, he was going to take a bow, but not this time, and not doing that felt different.

Instead, he removed his grimy glasses and cleaned them very slowly, holding them to the sun. When he was done, he tucked his shirt tail back in and cinched his belt as tight as he could get it.

Somewhere Pinball cracked two beers.

Phineas took his place at the pitching rubber and looked out at the stands with his goldfish eyes. He wiped his mouth with his shoulder and rotated his neck. He rubbed up the baseball. He took his sweet time. He looked at the stands, and the feeling grew.

Reginald called out from some faraway place a million miles from the pitcher’s mound, “You’ve got this.”

Phineas slotted his fingernails into the grooves of the ball thrown for the Greatest Pitch in the History of Baseball.

And for reasons I will never be able to explain, when the boy closed his eyes, he heard Yankee Stadium.

He was announced by a booming public address system. A great rolling wave circled the stadium. The hot lights of the scoreboards lit the perfect infield. The baseline chalk was fresh. The stadium was one—every fan was a Yankee fan.

At full roar.

When Phineas reopened his eyes, Yankee Stadium was gone. The boy stood on a beat-up Little League field in What Cheer, Iowa, in a town that hadn’t paid its outfield mower bill in twenty-one years.

You could hear a scoop of ice cream slipping off its cone.

But Phineas had never felt more confident in his life.

The world was easy. Not having friends was easy. Baseball was easy. Even his father was easy now, and the harder he dug his nails into the ancient grooves of that major league baseball, the simpler and clearer his life became. He was afloat on the River of Mastery.

Phineas’ windup was motion of balletic grace. He crisply snapped up his short left leg. His pitching arm strained back and deep, the arrow drawn, his face grimacing with the exertion of a 4’ 6” kid’s equivalent of a 100-mph fastball.

He knew exactly who he was—in front of the only world he’d ever known.

He was Phineas.

“Come on, kid. Come on. Come on. Come on,” Reginald whispered to himself.

Reginald heard his old manager Yankee whisper.

“I’ve seen everything I’m ever going to see, but I haven’t seen this.”

*

Of course, it wasn’t a hundred-mile-an-hour fastball he threw. It wasn’t a curve ball or a slider or a changeup. It wasn’t a splitter or a forkball or a screwball. It was, as the 6’ 4” coach would momentarily witness, the Greatest Pitch in the History of Little League Baseball.

That young man let it slip from his fingers like he was shooting a three-pointer with a child’s balloon. It slid up the NASCAR wall and shot down the straightaway. It ping-ponged to the left, skipped like a stone to the right, cartwheeled through the air, shimmied high and shrugged low. The batter’s caterpillar knees toppled. The umpire threw himself to the dirt from terror, but the catcher let that little bee drop into its tulip.

Dust drifted out of the catcher’s mitt like a puff of pollen.

It was 4:59 PM on June 3^rd, 2024, twenty one years to the second since Reginald Perry had thrown his own Greatest Pitch in the History of Baseball.

Reginald looked on from the dugout steps. He was leaning over onto one knee. The one-time Yankee couldn’t have moved any less, but if you were right up close, you would have seen the tiniest squint and shake of his head.

The kid had done it, and the only world that mattered in the boy’s whole world had seen it. What Cheer, Iowa knew.

“Yes,” the coach whispered to himself.

*

“No,” came a response from behind him.

When Reginald turned, The Boil was standing at the door of the dugout, holding the overhead bar.

The two adversaries stared at each other for what felt like twenty-one years.

It was Reginald “The Yipper” Perry who broke the silence. For once, Reginald thought of the right thing to say.

“Out of my dugout, Triple-A. No minor leaguers in here.”

It turns out being mean to the right person can be more than a bit satisfying.

The Boil did a pull-up on the doorway bar.

“Sure, Yipper.” The Boil smirked at him, which wasn’t at all what Reginald expected.

“Change in the deal now, effective immediately, Yipper.”

“What are you talking about?”

“What’s our deal, Yipper?” The Boil said.

“I don’t remember.” Reginald was getting awfully confused again. Somewhere a million miles away, they were cheering for the boy out on the field.

“Our deal,” The Boil said, pulling himself up again. “Our deal was I can always make the deal easier for you.”

Reginald wished the Boil would stop doing pull ups. Something was terrible. Why was something terrible? Everything had just been rotten from the start.

“All you have to do now is lose the game to win our bet, Bigs.” The Boil dismounted and stuck the landing with a laugh. “I’m betting you can’t even lose when you need to.”

From Reginald’s face, anyone could see he didn’t know if he could either. Somehow, he could never just shine. It had always been like that with The Boil.

Out of the corner of his eye Phineas was taking a bow.

“The Big Yipper! The Little Yipper!” What Cheer cried. There was the best kind of laughter.

But Reginald didn’t hear it.

And The Boil didn’t hear it.

“Your Sleepmobile’s gone, friend. Time to get you out of that old car. Fix your life up, Yipper.” The Boil dusted his hands off. “Come on over here, Bigs. How many pull-ups do you still got in you?”

The Boil did not wait to find out. “You’ve got this,” he said.

Out in the parking lot, one of the Sleepmobile’s tires went as soft as a gum bubble.

CHAPTER 24

THE BOIL

2003.

June 3rd.

4:59 PM.

The Bronx.

Pitching mound.

Reginald Perry, the Yankee rookie from the Wilkes-Barre AAA RailRiders, had just thrown the Greatest Pitch in the History of Baseball.

Funny the things you don’t remember even at the center of them. The stadium erupted after that pitch. Scoreboard bulbs popped. The veteran umpire fell in the dirt from terror right after Reginald’s pitch dropped into the NASCAR straightaway. The Yankees’ old manager trotted to home plate to save the pitch as a souvenir for the kid.

Reginald didn’t remember any of that.

He didn’t hear the skipper ask the umpire if he was okay. He didn’t see the Yankee manager juggling the ball like a schoolboy who’d caught a big league foul. He didn’t remember the old guy dropping it and leaving a dirt scuff.

What he did remember was that everyone rose up behind the home plate fence to cheer for him.

Everyone except one man. The man had a team jacket and a Wilkes-Barre RailRiders baseball cap pulled down low over his eyes.

It was his best friend, The Boil, the guy who was “going to get called up to the Bigs first” and “sorry Reg, but you’ll follow after, maybe.”

But nothing had gone to The Boil’s plan. It was Reginald and his dancing knuckleball that were being celebrated in Yankee Stadium.

Reginald waved hello from the mound, but The Boil was clapping so slowly at this point, it took the air out of the stadium. And, seeing how The Boil was his only friend, a RailRider iron spiked through his heart with every slowing clap.

For reasons beyond me, all Reginald wanted to do was apologize for making it to the Bigs first.

There is a moment when you know the Yips have got you, and that was the moment. By the time The Boil quit slow clapping for him, Reginald Perry knew he’d never throw a strike again.

The last clap made him The Yipper.

*

Far away in Pueblo, Mexico, someone else felt it, too.

At that very moment, 4:59 PM, The Sleepmobile, the last Volkswagen Beetle ever made, burped off the assembly line’s car wash and out into the parking lot.

The game was playing on her radio at the time. It was the Dodgers and the Yankees.

She heard the pitch. The Shimmy High and the Shrug Low. The Bee and the Tulip. She’d already heard she was bought sight unseen by a rookie Yankee. Without a doubt, the pitcher on the radio was her future owner, and somehow she knew that the two of them would spend a life together in a Little League parking lot.

And even with all the factory workers crying and kissing her hood ornament goodbye, it was all too much for her. Her AM radio went out.

This pitcher was her rookie.

*

2024.

June 3rd.

4:59 PM.

What Cheer.

Pitching mound.

Looking out from the dugout, on the other side of a pitching miracle, Reginald knew what was at stake for the boy.

When the deal for ownership of the Sleepmobile started, Reginald’s bar was sky-high: he had to go undefeated coaching the Cougars. And when they did start winning, The Boil made the deal easier. All Reginald had to do was have a winning season. Then the wheels came off. By the time The Boil said all The Yipper had to do was lose, easiest became hardest of all.

Which left Reginald with a bit of a conundrum. He was like a farmer trying to get his tractor back to the barn without messing up all the nice straight rows.

To win, Reginald would have to vote against the boy. The Boil would have to vote for him. And there was no way Reginald was ever going to vote against the boy, so in a roundabout way, they were all on the same side.

All of What Cheer stood for Phineas. The volunteer umpire finally got himself back up from the dirt, and the Misfits manager made sure the old man was alright, but the kid wouldn’t remember any of that.

What he would remember was his dad standing behind the fence at home plate clapping for him, and not a slow clap either, a big slap-up banger that could sting your palms or take a finger out.

Even after everyone else in the Cougars’ stands picked up their drinks and settled down again, his dad was still standing up rooting for him. He’d never seen his dad so happy.

“That’s my boy! That’s my boy! A winner!”

Not knowing anything about his dad’s side of the deal, joy filled his twelve-year-old heart to the brim. His dad had seen his knuckleball, just like he’d always said he could throw it. The kid felt 6’4”. He was in the Cooperstown of the Heart.

He spun the ball in his hand and looked at his little miracle. It had a scuff where the Misfits’ manager tried to juggle the ball and dropped it.

But the moment he rubbed his thumb over that spot, he felt a cold breeze blowing in from center, and somewhere behind him, he heard the Iowa state flag pole clanking.

The yips struck.

It was like his dad was saying from deep inside some place where only family can get to: “What if you can’t do it again? What else you got for me?”

Even a coach as fine as Reginald Perry can’t get in far enough to help you there. It’s family business, and when you’re Iowan, you know to stay out of it.

The son looked back at the Cougars’ stands and saw his father sit down. His father was still clapping and calling the whole way.

“That’s my boy!”

All Phineas wanted to do was apologize to him.

Go figure.

*

You don’t need to be a die-hard movie sports fan to guess that the next pitch was wild and not ordinary wild. It ended up in the concession stand popcorn machine. Funny thing is, that was the least of the wild pitches he would throw from there, because things only got worse in a hurry.

The 1-1 was so far off course, no one could track it with their phones.

2-1 shot through the bottom of the sixth inning on the scoreboard and kicked out of the “O” in Cougars like a pinball.

3-1 landed behind the boy with a sad plunk and a little mushroom cloud.

He’d walked the first of them.

After 16 pitches, and walking his next two batters, Phineas walked a run in to tie the game.

It got dicier. With the go-ahead runner at third, and the count 3-0, the town of What Cheer was a pitch away from the end of the season.

Finally, Reginald flashed a time-out to the umpire and slow-walked out to the mound.

The kid and his coach stared at each other without too much to say, then kind of looked around and took in the scenery. Eventually, they handed the ball back and forth. There was confusion because neither could remember who was coaching that inning and who could yank who out of the game. Bottom line, Reginald wanted the boy in there so the kid wouldn’t spend his life living in his car. Maybe Phineas wanted out for the very same reason.

“You got it son! That’s my boy! Don’t dare take him out, coach!” Listening to The Boil yell, you couldn’t tell if he was laughing or crying. There sure were some strange sounds coming out of him.

The little 4’6” was one bad pitch from winning him The Sleepmobile.

He’d wanted that car for twenty-one years, if only to sell it for scrap metal.

*

That’s when Pinball piped up for the first time, and he was particularly riled up about it, too. If this was coming from a place of love, it was on the outskirts of town.

“Rule 5.09 (2)(b).”

Whatever that was about, it wasn’t helping.

But if you were paying attention, you might have seen the town’s small claims court judge squirming a bit. Maybe nobody in What Cheer knew Rule 5.09 (2)(b) better than the two of them. Long ago, they’d tried to hash it out by the gavel. To that day it still kept the judge up midnight to three thinking about it. Every old judge has a handful of blown calls, even in small claims.

Over at the concession stand, maybe the last kernel popped and maybe it hadn’t, but the waiting was something painful.

With the boy deliberately smearing his glasses again, Reginald got confused. Nothing was harder for him than waterworks.

So, he sure had a conundrum, practically asked himself in his own head, “What would The Sleepmobile do?” It panged him to be asking her with all the rest going on, but she was family for Reg, and his thoughts went to her because they had nowhere else to go. His mom’s old tea towel was quite clear on this. “Family is where you go where they have to take you in.”

Honk is too strong for what the old girl did. Tooted, maybe.

“Ba-da-da-da-da. Beep-beep.”

And that sure turned heads, whatever was going on in the parking lot. Even after she did it a second time, nobody understood.

It was the Misfits who recognized baseball’s oldest fanfare and put two and two together. They were so excited when little Abhishek got it, they roared out “Charge!” for Phineas, and, I suppose, accidentally for the Cougars.

“Ba-da-da-da-da. Beep-beep.”

“Charge!”

Everyone got distracted with it for a bit before she tuckered out.

*

Meanwhile, Reginald headed over to the Cougars’ stands. The laugh-crying was getting worse.

“Don’t you take my kid out, Reg,” The Boil shouted, slapping at his thighs and wiping his laugh-tears. The Boil needed one last bad pitch to win the deal.

Reginald needed the same pitch but a good one so he wouldn’t see the kid fail. So did Phineas because his whole world was watching. You’ve never seen two men and a boy rooting harder for the same thing for completely different reasons.

“Get on down here, Boil,” Reginald commanded. “Now.”

Sometimes you can catch a bully off guard, and they’ll listen.

The two long-ago friends from the Wilkes-Barre RailRiders were eye-to-eye, except Reginald was still several eyes taller than The Boil.

“You remember our deal, Boil?”

“Yup. I get to make it easier on you, because the easier it is for you, the harder it is for you, which still tickles me.”

Reginald looked back at the mound where the boy was staring over.

“But there was more to it, Boil.”

For the first time in twenty-one years, it was The Boil struggling to remember. Something was sure on the tip of his tongue, though.

“I get to make it harder,” Reginald reminded him. “You were on one-armed pushup number seventy-two at the time.”

“Rule 5.09(2)(b),” Pinball interrupted from out in right.

He was splashing his double-fisted beers everywhere like he was starting to boil over. The small claims court judge had to look away from Pinball. Twenty-one years of regret over the whole business were rushing back at him.

The Boil and Reginald didn’t hear any of it.

“The new rules are this, Boil: I’m betting on the Cougars to win. Even with your kid wilder than a safari park, I think he’s got it in him.”

This was a bit of a fib. He was definitely not sure that the kid had it in him.

“Oh, and I quit the dealership, and while I’m at it, you’re fired.”

This felt good but didn’t make any sense.

Oddly enough, even with Reginald’s surprise rule change, the three of them were once again still voting for the same thing.

As for The Sleepmobile, she had one last “Charge!” in her that she gave all she had.

Reginald looked up and down at his nemesis of twenty-one years. He took him in, maybe understood him for the first time, and he didn’t like what he saw one bit, but maybe felt a little sorry for him, too.

“No man who’d bet against his own son was ever called a Yankee,” Reginald said. “That’s the real reason you didn’t make it.”

Reginald shook his head and went back to the mound.

*

“No pressure, but I just bet your dad The Sleepmobile and $401,230.54 that you’re going to win this.”

“You didn’t.”

“I did. There’s not enough room in the parking lot for the two of us. This is my parking lot.”

The thought got ahead of even Reginald, and they both took a moment and considered it.

*

One more wild pitch, and Phineas would force in the winning run. The old man was beside himself.

“Five point zero nine, subsection B, number two, dammit!”

It was the word “dammit.”

That’s strong for small town Iowa, but it worked.

The kid was struck sideways by something happier than hearing the knock of a “Free Game” on your last quarter.

The kid reached into his back pocket, fumbled out his worn rule book, opened it up and flipped through it before he found 5.09 (2)(b).

The whole town watched him and was wishing he’d read it out loud.

He didn’t.

But he did close his eyes and smile and stand on that mound as tall as a 4’6” knuckleball artist can.

Somewhere a million miles away, maybe he heard his dad, or his coach, or a Volkswagen Beetle tooting for him, or maybe he didn’t, but none of it mattered.

Because he was on the mound at Yankee Stadium, holding a pocket-sized, torn-up rule book. It was standing room only, and every last fan under those heavenly hot lights was a Yankee fan.

“Rule 5.09(b)(2), Reginald Perry,” the boy said, mostly to himself. “Go on, Coach. Please go back to the dugout. I’m okay.”

Reginald had no idea about rule whatever-it-was. As you know, he couldn’t keep track of anything with numbers, but he decided to let go and let the kid take it from here. When he walked back to the dugout steps, he started smiling.

How do you like that? He’d let go.

The boy was about to pitch it wherever it ended up, which, if you’ve been paying the slightest bit of attention, is the Art of the Knuckleball.

As for Phineas standing there ready for his moment: well, the boy never knew his dad wasn’t really rooting for him that day, and you’ll never be welcome in the good state of Iowa if you ever let that spill.

CHAPTER 25

MYRTLE TRIED TO TELL THEM

The bases were loaded, of course.

The count was 3-0. Phineas had thrown nineteen wild pitches in a row, each more spectacular than the last. One more and the Misfits’ winning run would score.

The home plate ump, What Cheer’s small claims court judge, called time to let the town get itself squared away and give his knees a break.

The nurses at the Final Sunset old folks home trued up the wheelchairs on the left field foul line, lining them up straighter than a 4th of July parade.

On the right field line, the defeated middle-schoolers rowed up: Sleepy Drugs Pharmacy, the Buttercup Pancakes, Lutheran Liquor & Lottery. They gathered like team photos, the tall top of the order in back. Left fielders and second basemen in the middle. The ones batting last up front on one knee, There was some shoving and “accidental kicking” just shy of intervention.

The grocery store cashiers took turns poking their mean little heads out of the concession stand window. Pretty though, for the time being.

Crazy Frank with his June Christmas tree was there. He’d dragged his tree out of the house. “Six months of Noel, boys. One spark and there’s nothing left but that angel there.”

Mary and Maury were there. Maury was gearing up to circle the basepaths backwards. He was already chuckling thinking about it, which put Mary in a growing funk. Every time he said, “No matter who wins the game,” she’d say, “Is that right, Maury?” It wasn’t really a question. But forty years together, the two of them spoke their own language.

Homer the Pharmacist fell into longer and longer silences trying to explain the rules of baseball to the 5th grade science teacher, the one with the big city political notions. This conversation was also just shy of intervention.

Marty the Democrat with the Flag on His Lawn was up on the roof of WHAT CHEER?????? water tower with the spray-painted question marks. He watched through binoculars, his fingers stained red, white and blue. The man liked to live on the edge.

Myrtle, the Daffodil Prophet, stayed home, sitting bolt upright under a quilt. She’d laid her one-armed Barbies around her like a crop circle. “Told them who’d win since March, but not a living soul will listen,” she said, stacking up their little pink arms.

Every last one of them knew the boy would not throw a strike.

*

The boy knew the boy would not throw a strike.

*

But Phineas sure took a long time about not throwing one, flicking through that torn-up rule book, left and right.

Then all of a sudden, oh, what a grin peered out from under that donut of curly hair. It was the grin of a clean-up hitter mid walk-off home run.

The flagpole stopped clanging. Somewhere the town’s Notoriously Long Red Stop Light held its breath, and—depending what direction you were coming from—got stuck on a green.

Phineas finally stuffed the rule book back in his pocket, tipped his hat to the “home and away” crowds, and stared up at the Iowa state flagpole. You’d have thought he was retiring from baseball.

With that, Phineas put his mitt back on and turned towards home plate. The small claims court judge who’d been calling balls and strikes since the day that he banned Pinball from the field gave the “play ball” sign. Then he hunkered down as “square and fair” towards the pitching mound as he could, what with his bad knees from all the volunteering at home plate.

Phineas rubbed up his “2003 Bud Selig Major League Baseball,” then looked in for the sign from the catcher.

The Cougars’ catcher called for a fastball.

Phineas shook him off.

The curve ball.

Phineas shook him off.

Slider.

Phineas said, “Oh, please.”

It was turning into an argument.

Finally, when all but one of the known and unknown pitches of yesterday, today, and tomorrow were exhausted, the Cougars’ catcher threw his tulip catcher into the dugout. “Well, I definitely won’t be needing this.”

He fluttered the fingers of both hands between his legs and flashed the sign for a knuckleball.

It was the one pitch the Cougars didn’t want their Little Yipper to throw.

The season was over.

*

But the boy shook off the pitch.

He was not going to throw a knuckleball.

Myrtle tried to tell them.

CHAPTER 26

THE LEGENDARY 5.09(b)(2)

After the oohs and aahs, Reginald looked on at Phineas shaking off pitch after pitch — then thankfully getting settled on one he wanted.

The boy went into his wind-up.

Maybe it was more of a pitcher’s grimace, but at the barbershop, Al still stops trimming and takes a moment to remember: it was the nicest grimace ever to light up a young face in What Cheer, Iowa.

Curly-haired kid.

Short.

The pitch was what the small claims judge—volunteering at the plate that night—now calls the Legendary 5.09(b)(2).

*

The 5.09(b)(2) surpassed all understanding from the first moment.

Mid-windup, Phineas’ leg stopped short at its peak and froze up like a seized combine piston. The boy held the baseball in his outstretched arm, wrinkled his nose, and dropped it like a rotten banana peel.

The ball puffed harmlessly into the mound dirt right smack on its Yankee Stadium scuff mark.

But just as the “Bud Selig 2003 Major League Baseball” was about to shiver to a stop, Phineas kicked it towards home plate with the instep of his non-dominant left foot.

“Oh, no! I’m kicking it. Oh, dear!” Phineas cried out helplessly to the heavens.

Little Abhishek flapped his bat back and forth over home plate like an electrocuted pinball flipper.

Now just because Reginald had been freed from all the winning and losing nonsense, it didn’t mean he didn’t lean in and scratch his head.

But when he did stop scratching, a vision practically stepped out of a cornfield.

Reginald found himself looking out from the home dugout at Yankee Stadium.

*

The former Yankee watched Number 21 dribble the ball through the infield grass. His young soccer player was wearing pinstripes.

Fifty-five thousand, four-hundred and eighteen fans and not one of them made a peep. You could hear hot dog vendors making change.

“Oh, dear! Oh, dear!” the boy cried, overdramatically, even for the occasion.

Reginald watched the boy pulling his hair out for the benefit of Fifty-five thousand, four-hundred and eighteen fans. The Yankees fans were so gobsmacked they leaned forward like they were shooting off the ski jump over at Seven Oaks Recreation in Boone.

Somewhere up in the television booth, the play-by-play announcer repeated the boy. “Oh, dear.”

“Oh, dear, is right!” said the color man.

Phineas’ baseball did not go in a straight line. Balls never did when Phineas kicked them, not with his non-dominant left foot, anyway. So it was quite the back-and-forth journey.

Eventually, the Bud Selig 2003 Major League Baseball slid up a grassy NASCAR wall, then shot down the pitcher’s lane straightaway. It ping-ponged to the left off old What Cheer mine gravel no one had swept up for weeks, skipped like a stone to the right off the first base lime chalk line, cartwheeled off a misplaced stack of aluminum bats the kids had been warned about. It shimmied high off a sixteen-pound batting donut and shrugged low after putting a solid dent into the Everlast Pitching Machine, a contraption that hadn’t burped out a ball for twenty-one years.

*

Other than Abhishek flailing away at his Louisville Slugger Pinball Flipper, everyone in the Bronx and What Cheer knew where that ball was headed.

That baseball was headed for Pinball’s Slot.

After the shimmy high and the shrug low, Phineas had one last soccer kick left in him, and he took his time about it.

He switched over to his dominant southpaw kicking leg, curled and uncurled his toes inside his shoe to relax them, then closed his eyes and took his shot on goal.

You could hear that boy’s toe knuckles crack from What Cheer, Iowa to her sister city of the Bronx, New York.

*

From Reginald’s point of view back in Yankee Stadium, a surprise hole popped open underneath a backstop car insurance advertisement. It was like that hole had been waiting to tear open for twenty-one years.

Reginald saw his soccer player take off his smeared glasses, get down on his hands and knees like a golfer, and get ready to puff on that ball to push it through, if need be.

Just before it passed into Pinball’s Slot, What Cheer saw that baseball pull itself up on the highest pebble for one last pump of clean-and-jerk energy. The whole stadium went up on its toes. The Bud Selig 2003 Major League Baseball passed under the wire at the speed of an exhausted hitchhiker and rolled off toward the Sleepmobile in the parking lot.

There was a great stillness in What Cheer.

And in the Yankee Stadium dugout, Reginald could have sworn he heard his old manager whisper to him.

He might have even felt a pat on his back.

“Exactly like ‘03, son. Never forget it. That little bee of yours pulling out its landing gear and dropping into a tulip like that.”

No, it was definitely a pat on the back.

*

Back in What Cheer, the town took its eyes off the bee and the tulip and those heads rotated over to Pinball’s fence the speed of a weathervane.

It was like watching an Iowa tornado rolling in over the Nebraska state line.

There was such a long pause before the Pinball Explosion that murmurs started to grow that maybe the old man wasn’t home.

*

Well, he was home.

The tornado started with the warning creak of a rocking chair. By then, it was long past time to run for cover.

“PINBALL!”

The angry old volunteer umpire shot up rigid and raged like he’d never raged before. The man crushed the unopened beer cans in his hands and sprayed those two beers like a Roman fountain. He hit the summit of Mount Cardiac.

Terror swept through the field like an electric current. Everyone in What Cheer knew what came next, and their eyes shot dropped down to the “O” in Cougars.

Pinball stood there with his arms up in a Biblical “Y,” waiting for it, waiting for it, waiting for it.

Tripod, the terrifying three-legged greyhound, would shoot out of the “O” in Cougars at any second.

Any second.

Any second.

And then that Iowa tornado spun into What Cheer.

The flap in the “O” in Cougars began to wiggle, and it began to waggle, then the most terrifying, ferocious, mean, unforgiving, brown little wet nose you’ve ever seen poked out from the blackest of black darkness behind the flap of the “O” in Cougars.

Well, the town couldn’t clear out of there fast enough.

Parents grabbed their youngest. Siblings raced towards the fastest tractor in the parking lot.

It was a decathlon. There were high vaults over the fencing and human javelins through the little concession takeaway window. Eight lumberjack Cougars hurtled the left center scoreboard wall faster than an Olympics photo finish.

And off they all went.

Out went Mary. Out went Myrtle. Out went the Liquor, Pancakes and Pharmacy kids.

Crazy Frank dropped his six-month Christmas tree.

The old folks from Final Sunset stood up and charged out of their wheelchairs and into the three-wheeled Greyhound. That bus took off like it had been hijacked.

In the Misfits dugout, there was nothing left but a crunched-up lineup card and an asthma inhaler.

Cracker Jack everywhere.

*

In the end, not a player was left on the field or in the parking lot. There was no one and nothing to record what happened next.

Well—there was—but we’re coming to him.

Yes, indeed.

We’re coming to him.

CHAPTER 27

A SMALL CLAIMS COURT JUDGE

After all the hullabaloo and Cracker Jack, Reginald returned from Yankee Stadium and slow-walked out to the mound.

Phineas dug into his back pocket and handed his coach his tattered rule book.

The kid was practically tickling himself. He was giddy.

“5.09(2)(b)!”

Reginald had barely started reading from section 5.09, when Pinball fired up on all cylinders out in right.

“When a runner abandons their position and the base paths, they shall…”

He sounded like Moses out there.

Reginald picked up where Pinball left off, no further along understanding any of this, but he read out loud where Phineas was stabbing away like a woodpecker.

“… be ruled out…” Reginald continued.

“Now… right there… Subsection 2,” Phineas chimed in. “Read that.”

Reginald: “unless there is a mitigating circumstance…”

Phineas couldn’t wait for Reginald to sort it out. He butted in. “Like, say, for example, a three-legged greyhound happened to run out onto the field.”

Meanwhile, Pinball was unstoppable. “Rule 5.09(2)(b)!” He was angrier than ever, but also a little relieved somebody else understood him for the first time in twenty-one years.

Phineas gave Pinball a thumbs up, and, for a moment, you almost thought Pinball might give him a thumbs up back, but you kind of needed to know him.

*

I knew him.

But we’re coming to that.

*

Pinball slammed the back porch screen door twice, once with his left, then once with his right and headed back into the house.

He yelled out ‘Game Over,’ a breakthrough in his pinball vocabulary, and you could hear him repeating it several times from deep inside the house. He’d been waiting a long time to spit that one out.

His refrigerator door slammed twice.

Phineas wasn’t done.

He snatched the rule book back. “There’s more, Coach. In very small print, so small you probably can’t even see it…”

Pinball cried out from somewhere even deeper in his house.

“But no dog ever ran out onto the field that day…”

“Right there, Coach,” Phineas said. “B. That’s the ‘b’ part.”

Reginald tried to tease it apart out loud: “What did happen… was a dog’s nose peeked out from the “O” in Cougars to watch the game...”

“Yes, the town’s biggest three-legged baseball fan,” Phineas added. The boy was still shaking from the miracle. “It’s not my fault that all the runners…”

Reginald: “That everyone was terrified of a three-legged greyhound. But why… I’m still not…”

Pinball, raging: “They ran from their bases for no reason! All three of them are out. Out.”

“The dog stayed, dammit.” You could hear him kick his rocking chair. He was back on the porch. “That’s what I told the judge at the time.”

Reginald: “How many runners are on the bases?”

Pinball and Phineas: “Three!”

Reginald: “So, they’re all out because they had no reason to leave the basepaths? What? Who’s on first?”

Phineas, with exasperation: “Yes!”

Reginald: “Oh, I get it. So, we won? Or we lost?”

Pinball went back inside and slammed the kitchen window down as far as it would go. It took him two tries.

“Tripod had an unassisted, three-legged triple play,” Phineas said. He was so happy for the dog, he could barely get it out. You’d think it was the boy’s unassisted triple play.

Behind the “O” in Cougars, there was the sweetest little bark.

Wouldn’t scare a kitten.

*

It was now safe enough for the small claims court judge to come out from hiding in the chalk machine storage closet.

He hadn’t raced off like the rest of What Cheer. The small claims court judge—and volunteer umpire of exactly twenty-one years to the minute since he’d banned Pinball from the field—walked out to the mound to interrupt the big conversation.

“Let me explain it to you, Reg. You won,” the small claims court judge said. “We all know about the car. She’s yours. And she’s under the $500 small claims limit, so end of the day, in What Cheer, I get the say-so.”

After that, nobody said anything. Iowans know how to let a big conversation settle. We’re not big city, and not planning on it anytime soon. A quick visit, in and out—maybe catch a game—that’s best case.”

*

Afterward, Phineas, Reginald, and the small claims court judge wandered around the field collecting abandoned gloves, bats, hats, and a pair of cleats. They stacked them by the “O” in Cougars.

Once they’d packed the whole pile down with a batting donut, they saw Tripod’s terrifying, wet, brown button nose still peeking out at them from under the flap.

As usual, he’d gotten stuck.

“Tilt,” cried out Pinball from his living room, though he barked it out a bit calmer than he’d been up to now.

With that small reminder, Tripod, the three-legged greyhound, freed himself from his stuck position and hopped the rest of the way through the “O” in Cougars. He looked at the boy and the two men already heading off to the parking lot.

When they were a safe distance away, Tripod began barking something ferocious, mostly to keep himself company, fetched his baseball trophies, and poked them one-by-one through the “O” in Cougars.

Afterwards, you’d see Pinball out walking him from time to time.

*

Well, we’ve come to it.

It would always start out civil enough, but the small claims court judge would have quite a few barber’s chair dustups after that game. The whole “who won and who lost that game that year” business.

The judge would try to make his case for the Cougars winning the game and the wisdom of Rule 5.09(2)(b), but nobody would listen. He’d bend ears till folks ran for cover when they saw Al giving him a trim.

Fair was fair, whether anyone agreed or not, and the small claims judge ended up banning himself from the field. He was, mostly, a just and reasonable man.

I like to think.

And it’s high time I fessed up.

I’m the one carrying that heavy, heavy gavel down at the courthouse, none other than What Cheer’s involuntary ump and small claims court judge.

Never even been much a fan of the game, but somebody had to fill in for Pinball after I banned him from what I call The International What Cheer Little Yipper Baseball Field and Reginald Perry Parking Lot.

Unofficially speaking.

CHAPTER 28

COOPERSTOWN

After the game, while it was still light out, Reginald and Phineas sat cross-legged in front of the hood of The Sleepmobile. For a long time, the two took turns reading Rule 5.09(2)(b) and sipping the last of Reginald’s Special Beers.

When it was too dark to read, but still bright enough to stare into The Sleepmobile’s hood ornament, they took turns looking in. Secretly, Phineas was hoping Reginald would see a Yankee rookie throwing the Greatest Pitch in the History of Baseball, and just as secretly, Reginald was hoping Phineas would see a Little Leaguer from What Cheer throwing the Other Greatest Pitch in the History of Baseball.

Instead, The Sleepmobile showed them a coach and a player on a Saturday morning jumping up and down like they were trying to knock each other off a see-saw because they’d suddenly remembered how to throw a knuckleball.

Playing catch.

If you ask a dad—or the right kind of coach, say—playing catch is still the best part of baseball.

*

Eventually, the field lights on the timer turned off, and there was only orange and red in the Iowa sunset. Reginald needed to get the boy home.

When Phineas got into The Sleepmobile, she started to slip backwards down the hill the way she did. Reginald went to reverse bump start her, the way he did, but this time she only fussed and sputtered, the gravel crunching under the car.

Reginald looked in the rearview mirror and the Poison Ivy at the bottom of the hill was coming right at them. He pumped at the foot brake and tugged at the handbrake, but maybe a little too hard, because the handbrake popped clear out of the floor like one of Reginald’s lobster claws.

The old Volkswagen Beetle gathered some speed, not a lot, and continued clumping and banging over her hissing tires all the way into the Poison Ivy. Every time you thought she’d had enough, and you looked through the rust hole in the floor, she picked up speed again.

Clearly, she had a destination.

The old girl bumped her back through the Poison Ivy, then past the tree line, and at last deep into the Baseball Graveyard. Towards the end, a branch caught on her crooked antenna and pulled it smack out of the spot the Tearful Factory Worker forced it on years before.

She came to a stop under a great, mossy oak tree scattered about with acorns.

*

It was very quiet in the car.

Phineas was about to say, “I’ll go play catch with myself for awhile,” so he could have something to say, but he didn’t. Then he was going to say, “I can walk home by myself.” He didn’t say that either. In the end, he asked, “What did you call her sometimes?” That question came out of nowhere, and stranger still is he was asking a question he knew the answer to.

“Called her Ú.Ú. The Última Última. She was a 2003.”

After that, everyone ran out of things to say, until Phineas said it was getting steamy, and he’d head back up to the field.

The boy forced his door open through the ferns and mossy sticks, headed towards the tree line, hopped through the Poison Ivy like a snake pit, then started jogging midway. Before you knew it, he was back to walking again. The whole business went on like this all the way up the parking lot hill.

The boy couldn’t make up his mind about how to get from here to there.

*

Reginald wasn’t a man of many words, as you know, at least not when he needed them most, but he rose to the occasion in other ways. He grabbed The Sleepmobile’s leather stick shift good and tight, shook it left and right for a bit.

That led to him noticing dried-up sunflower seats in the dashboard vents. He’d meant to clean them. He looked around the car where there used to be a Sleepmobile Kitchen, and Foyer and Master Bedroom.

Now there was a torn passenger seat and springs poking through yellow foam in the rear seat. He tried to shut the broken glove compartment where there used to be the Sleepmobile refrigerator.

The whole thing was sadder than visiting a yard you used to play in. On top of that, it was getting much darker which didn’t help his spirits.

Phineas was up top of the parking lot hill. He was throwing the ball as high up in the air as he could, playing catch with himself.

*

Reginald stretched his long legs to get out of the car, stumbling a bit like always. He folded up his Yankee uniform pajamas on the front hood, made a perfect triangle out of them, with the “2” on the one side and the “1” on the other.

He popped the hood and gently placed the pajamas in her battery compartment.

A second time, he tried to think of a few words, but in the end, he only shut the hood and shined her ornament for a bit with his sleeve.

“I should have polished that more,” he said out loud.

It was one of those thoughts that hits you sideways when you’re talking to yourself, pushes you right up against whatever it is you get pushed up against. He shook his head a few times for the benefit of himself.

Reginald started out of the Baseball Graveyard carrying nothing but the beat-up suitcase he brought back to What Cheer twenty-one years before. It was still dangling from his long fingers, and the man still slumped. You couldn’t deny it.

His slouching still left him well shy of 6’4”. Just like they always said in town, with his hunched head and his dangling suitcase, Reginald Perry had always been something of a human question mark.

*

It was when he stepped past the tree line and into the Poison Ivy that he heard the static.

It was a radio.

The Sleepmobile’s radio.

She was scanning the dial, in and out of AM stations, Iowa news, a hymn, somebody losing his wits on talk radio.

That radio hadn’t worked a single minute since he drove her off the Cougars Volkswagen parking lot, probably on account of the crooked antenna and the Tearful Factory Worker.

Reginald stood there, knee-deep in the Poison Ivy by the quiet woods, and listened to his car.

Eventually, she settled on a station.

*

It was a ballgame.

Reception came in and out like it did on some of the longer stretches on the ride in from Des Moines, the kind where you need to pull over in the breakdown lane so you don’t miss the third out.

In and out, the radio went with balls and strikes. Somebody was playing somebody.

Then he heard it.

Took him a minute.

Well, John, here’s the kid from Wilkes-Barre coming in, the one we’ve been hearing so much about… Barely had time to put his uniform on... Iowa kid… Didn’t get to the park until the third inning they’re telling me…

Reginald set his suitcase down in the Ivy.

Tall fellow, Charley… but don’t look for lights out with this one. He’s a knuckleballer...

Randy had a pretty great outing. He’s saying something to the kid. Iowa must be feeling some nerves, first appearance in the Bigs…

Reginald put an arm across his chest and his palm on his chin, like every fan who’d ever waited to hear if his team was going to pull through.

Taking the ball from coach now… getting set… looking in for the sign, bases empty, two outs.

And he’s into his windup…

After that, there was a very long pause with nothing but the sound of static in the Baseball Graveyard and the big mossy oak brushing about.

Then that static faded so soft for a second you could hear the baseball hit the catcher’s mitt.

It was the Pitch.

He had just thrown The Pitch.

*

Reginald’s heart was racing as fast as it had the day he threw it. It was pin drop quiet, and there was a very long wait, but still the umpire hadn’t called ball or strike.

Finally, there was some clanging and crashing about in the radio booth. The play-by-play announcer and the color man must have been crawling out from underneath the desk.

The two of them whispered like they were in a church.

“Charley,” John said. “I’ve never seen anything like it… ”

“That baseball slid up a NASCAR wall, John….”

“Ping-ponged to the left… Shimmied high and shrugged low...”

This, by the way, was an awful lot of poetry for such a stocky former catcher and first baseman.

The two had worked themselves out of whispering and well north of church volume.

But the umpire still hadn’t called ball or strike.

Reginald might have been the only man in the world who cared one way or the other about the call itself, but it was Reginald’s Strike, and it meant something big to hear it said out loud.

The pause was so long, his heart started to race, wondering if he’d got it wrong, and maybe he really wasn’t a Yankee somehow because he’d never even thrown a strike.

He waited.

“You know what that was, Charley? Cause I’ll tell you what that was.”

“What was it, John?”

“That was a bee letting down its landing gear and dropping into a tulip.”

You’ll find this hard to believe, but Reginald had never heard about a bee and a tulip. He laughed so hard he had to wipe his eyes.

Finally, the umpire remembered to call the pitch a strike.

And that was all the ballpark needed. Yankee Stadium erupted so loud for a minute, you couldn’t hear the radio static.

“Listen to this crowd, Charley. I think we’re all Yankees fans right now.”

Reginald stood in the Poison Ivy and nodded, his chin still on his palm. He understood. He was a Yankees fan, too.

After that, The Sleepmobile’s radio grew quiet. Reginald spent some time standing there, couldn’t decide whether to go or stay.

Then, right as Reginald started to turn away, The Sleepmobile’s headlights came on.

She lit up the Baseball Graveyard like a night game.

Everywhere in the twigs and dirt and ferns of the Baseball Graveyard, you could see beat-up, waterlogged baseballs and unstrung leather mitts and cracked bats. Team hats. Baseball cards in the trees. Stretch socks. Jerseys with numbers one to ninety-nine. Batting gloves and bent home plates.

If it had ever meant something to a Little Leaguer in the town of What Cheer, Iowa, then it had found its way back there.

Reginald stood a long time staring into The Sleepmobile’s headlights. Then, probably from standing so long and having time to properly think about it for once, he found his words.

“Sweet dreams, Ú.Ú.” he said.

Then she faded out, the old girl.

Our Yankee took his cap off. He was an Iowa boy. He didn’t need somebody to nudge him and tell him when you’re supposed to take your hat off.

*

It was nearly dark by the time he walked out. The moon was coming up over the field, shining off the Iowa state flagpole, a crescent moon like he liked them. He could make out the edges of the What Cheer? water tower.

Up top the hill, a silhouette of a boy, a cap, a bat and a ball was playing catch with itself— throwing the ball up in the air, dropping it, calling out the play-by-play on a big leaguer, coincidentally named Phineas.

Could have been any boy, really. Quite a few girls, too, if you asked Dottie.

Reginald looked down into the Ivy, then up at his Iowa moon.

Stood up straight after that, all 6’4” of him – I can’t remember if I mentioned Reginald was a very tall man.

And the one-strike Yankee knuckleballer who’d thrown the Greatest Pitch in the History of Baseball stepped out of the Poison Ivy and headed up the hill.

The man had shaken off his question mark.