Summerland Page 6

  "The first and last duty of the lover of the game of baseball," Peavine's book began,

  whether in the stands or on the field, is the same as that of the lover of life itself: to pay attention to it. When it comes to the position of catcher, as all but fools and shortstops will freely acknowledge, this solemn requirement is doubled.

  Peavine, Ethan learned, was a ferisher from a region of the Summerlands that, as Peavine put it, "brushed up to" Troy, New York. He had learned the fundamentals of his position during the summers of 1880, '81, and '82 by secretly observing the play of a catcher for the Troy Trojans, a human ("reuben," was Peavine's term) named William "Buck" Ewing. "These summers spent at the shoulder of the cool and elegant Buck," Peavine wrote, "as fine a reuben as I have ever encountered, in the dusty green bowl of Trojan Field, remain among the happiest memories of all my long, long life." When an outbreak of the gray crinkles devastated Peavine's native mob, he had wandered west and taken up the mask, mitt, and chest protector for a mob of ferishers living at a place called Snake Island "an easy leap from Coeur d'Alene, Idaho." It was here, playing for the Snake Island Wapatos amid the cottonwoods and wildflower glades of the seventy-two-team Flathead League, that he had first begun, in his words, "to grasp the fundamental truth: a baseball game is nothing but a great slow contraption for getting you to pay attention to the cadence of a summer day."

  "Eth?"

  There was a knock at the door to Ethan's bedroom. He slid the book under his pillow and sat up as his father opened the door and poked his head into the room.

  "Breakfast is…" He frowned, looking puzzled. "Ready."

  Ethan saw that he had neglected to dispose of the magnifying glass. He was clutching it in his left hand, with absolutely nothing around him that he might plausibly have been using it to examine. Lamely Ethan held it up to the window next to his bed.

  "Spider," he said. "Really tiny one."

  "A spider!" said his father. "Let me see." He came over to the bed and Ethan passed him the magnifying glass. "Where?"

  Ethan pointed; his father leaned in. A circle of empty air wavered in the watery lens. Then, to Ethan's surprise, a face emerged, grinning a yellow-toothed grin. A gray face, with a gray mosquitostinger of a nose, equipped with a twitching black set of wings. Ethan's tongue seemed to swell in his mouth; he could not utter a sound. He watched in horror as the creature winked at him, waiting for his father's cry of alarm.

  "I don't see any spider," Mr. Feld said mildly. He stood up again and the horrible grin vanished; there was nothing at the window but misty Clam Island morning.

  "The wind must have blown it away," Ethan said.

  He climbed out of bed, pulled on a pair of underpants under the extra-large Hellboy T-shirt he slept in, and followed his father out to the kitchen, to confront the weekly sadness of flannel cakes.

  His father set a tall stack in front of him and then sat down with a stack of his own. They were enormous things, Mr. Feld's flannel cakes, each nearly the size of the plate itself, and there were invariably five or six of them that Ethan was expected to eat. During the week Ethan fixed his own breakfast—cold cereal, or an English muffin spread with peanut butter. This was necessary because Mr. Feld stayed up till all hours in his workshop. This in turn was because the nighttime was when Mr. Feld felt the most inventive. Or so he said. Sometimes Ethan suspected that his father simply didn't like to see the light of day. When Ethan got ready for school or, now that school was out, for a morning walk in the woods or a bike ride over to Thor's or Jennifer T.'s, Mr. Feld was usually asleep. But on Saturday mornings, no matter how late he had worked, Mr. Feld always woke up, or stayed up, as the case might be, to cook a pancake breakfast for him and Ethan. Pancakes—she called them flannel cakes—had been a specialty of Dr. Feld's, and the Saturday breakfast was a Feld family tradition. Unfortunately, Mr. Feld was a terrible cook, and his own flannel cakes never failed to live up to their rather unappetizing name.

  "Well," Mr. Feld said, tipping the bottle of maple syrup onto his stack. "Let's see how I did this week."

  "Did you remember the baking powder?" Ethan said, with a shudder. He was still feeling unnerved by the memory of the ugly gray face, with the pointed nose and wicked grin, swimming in the lens of the magnifying glass. "The eggs?"

  His father nodded, allowing a large puddle of syrup to form. One of the unspoken but necessary ground rules for eating Mr. Feld's flannel cakes was that you could use as much syrup as you needed to help you get them down.

  "And the vanilla?" Ethan said, pouring his own syrup. He preferred Karo; he had seen a movie once of men in fur hats driving long, sharp steel taps into the tender hearts of Canadian maples, and ever since then had felt too sorry for the trees to eat maple syrup.

  Mr. Feld nodded again. He cut himself a fat wedge, pale yellow pinstriped with dark brown, and popped it, looking optimistic, into his mouth. Ethan quickly did the same. They chewed, watching each other carefully. Then they both stared down at their plates.

  "If only she had written down the recipe," Mr. Feld said at last.

  They ate in silence broken only by the clink of their forks, by the hum of the electric clock over the stove and by the steady liquid muttering of their old refrigerator. To Ethan it was like the tedious sound track of their lives. He and his father lived in this little house, alone, his father working sixteen hours a day and more perfecting the Zeppelina, the personal family dirigible that was someday going to revolutionize transportation, while Ethan tried not to disturb him, not to disturb anyone, not to disturb the world. Entire days went by without either of them exchanging more than a few words. They had few friends on the island. Nobody came to visit, and they received no invitations. And then, on Saturday mornings, this wordless attempt to maintain a tradition whose purpose, whose point, and whose animating spirit—Ethan's mother—seemed to be lost forever.

  After a few minutes the humming of the clock began to drive Ethan out of his mind. The silence lay upon him like a dense pile of flannel cakes, gummed with syrup. He pushed back in his chair and sprang to his feet.

  "Dad?" Ethan said, when they were most of the way through the ordeal. "Hey, Dad?"

  His father was half dozing, chewing and chewing on a mouthful of pancakes with one eye shut. His thick black hair stood up in wild coils from his head, and his eyelids were purple with lack of sleep.

  Mr. Feld sat up, and took a long swallow of coffee. He winced. He disliked the taste of the coffee he brewed almost as much as he hated his pancakes.

  "What, son?" he said.

  "Do you think I would ever make a good catcher?"

  Mr. Feld stared at him, wide awake now, unable to conceal his disbelief. "You mean…you mean a baseball catcher?"

  "Like Buck Ewing."

  "Buck Ewing?" Mr. Feld said. "That's going back a ways." But he smiled. "Well, Ethan, I think it's a very intriguing idea."

  "I was just sort of thinking…maybe it's time for us—for me—to try something different."

  "You mean, like waffles?" Mr. Feld pushed his plate away, sticking out his tongue, and smoothed down his wild hair. "Come," he said. "I think I may have an old catcher's mitt, out in the workshop."

  THE PINK HOUSE ON THE HILL HAD ONCE BELONGED TO A FAMILY named Okawa. They had dug clams, kept chickens, and raised strawberries on a good-sized patch that ran alongside the Clam Island Highway for nearly a quarter of a mile in the direction of Clam Center. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Okawas were put onto a school bus with the three or four other Japanese families living on Clam Island at the time. They were taken to the mainland, to a government internment camp outside of Spokane. The Okawa farm was sold to the Jungermans, who had neglected it. In the end it was the island itself, and not the Okawas—they never returned—that claimed the property. The strawberry patch was still there, badly overgrown, a thick black and green tangle of shadow and thorn in which, during the summer, you could sometimes catch, like a hidden gem, the glimpse of a bright strawberry.

/>   When Ethan and his father had arrived on Clam Island, they had chosen this house, knowing nothing about its sad history, mostly because Ethan's dad had been so taken with the glass and cinderblock hulk of the old Okawa Farm strawberry packing shed. It had wide, tall doors, a high ceiling of aluminum and glass, and ample space for all of Mr. Feld's tools and equipment and for the various components of his airships, not to mention his large collection of cardboard boxes.

  "It's got to be in one of these," said Mr. Feld. "I know I would never have thrown it away."

  Ethan stood beside his father, watching him root around in a box that had long ago held twelve bottles of Gilbey's gin. It was not one of the boxes left over from their move to Clam Island, which were all stamped MAYFLOWER, with a picture of the Pilgrims' ship. There were plenty of those still standing around, in stacks, up at the house, corners crisp, sealed with neat strips of tape. Ethan tried never to notice them. They reminded him, painfully, of how excited he had been at the time of the move; how glad to be leaving Colorado Springs, even though it meant leaving his mother behind forever. He had been charmed, at first, by the sight of the little pink house, and it was enchanting to imagine the marvelous blimp that was going to be born in the hulking old packing shed. He and his father had rebuilt the shed almost entirely themselves, that first summer, with some occasional help from Jennifer T.'s father, Albert. For a while the change of light, and the feeling of activity, of real work to be accomplished, had given Ethan reason to believe that everything was going to be all right again.

  It was Albert Rideout who had told Ethan, one afternoon, about the Okawas. The son, Albert said, had been one of the best shortstops in the history of Clam Island, graceful and tall, surefooted and quick-handed. To improve his balance he would run up and down the narrow lanes between the rows of strawberry plants, as fast as he could, without crushing a single red berry or stepping on a single green shoot. After the Okawas were interned, the son was so eager to prove how loyal he and his family were to the United States that he had enlisted in the Army. He was killed, fighting against Germany, in France. It was just a story Albert Rideout was telling, as they put a final coat of paint of the cement floor of the workshop, punctuating it with his dry little laugh that was almost a cough. But from that moment on, especially when Ethan looked out at the ruins of the strawberry patch, the sky over the old Okawa Farm had seemed to hang lower, heavier, and grayer than it had on their arrival. That was when the silence had begun to gather and thicken in the house.

  "It's really a softball mitt," Mr. Feld was saying. "I played a little catcher in college, on an intramural team…hello!" From the box he was digging around in, he had already pulled the eyepiece of a microscope, a peanut can filled with Canadian coins, and a small cellophane packet full of flaky gray dust and bearing the alarming label SHAVED FISH. Like the others in the workshop, this box was tattered and dented, and had been taped and retaped many times. Sometimes Mr. Feld said that these boxes contained his entire life up to the time of his marriage; other times he said it was all a lot of junk. No matter how many times he went to rummage in them, Mr. Feld never seemed to find exactly what he was looking for, and everything that he did find seemed to surprise him. Now, for the first time that Ethan could remember, he had managed to retrieve what he sought.

  "Wow," he said, gazing down at his old mitt with a tender expression. "The old pie plate."

  It was bigger than any catcher's mitt that Ethan had ever seen before, thicker and more padded, even bulbous, a rich dark color like the Irish beer his father drank sometimes on a rainy winter afternoon. Partly folded in on itself along the pocket, it reminded Ethan of nothing so much as a tiny, overstuffed leather armchair.

  "Here you go, son," Mr. Feld said.

  As Ethan took the mitt from his father, it fell open in his outspread hands, and a baseball rolled out; and the air was suddenly filled with an odor, half salt and half wildflower, that reminded Ethan at once of the air in the Summerlands. Ethan caught the ball before it hit the ground, and stuffed into the flap pocket of his shorts.

  "Try it on," Mr. Feld said.

  Ethan placed his hand into the mitt. It was clammy inside, but in a pleasant way, like the feel of cool mud between the toes on a hot summer day. Whenever Ethan put on his own glove, there was always a momentary struggle with the finger holes. His third finger would end up jammed in alongside his pinky, or his index finger would protrude painfully out the opening at the back. But when he put on his father's old catcher's mitt, his fingers slid into the proper slots without any trouble at all. Ethan raised his left hand and gave the mitt a few exploratory flexes, pinching his fingers toward his thumb. It was heavy, much heavier than his fielder's glove, but somehow balanced, weighing no more on one part of his hand than on any other. Ethan felt a shiver run through him, like the one that had come over him when he had first seen Cinquefoil and the rest of the wild Boar Tooth mob of ferishers.

  "How does it feel?" said Mr. Feld.

  "Good," Ethan said. "I think it feels good."

  "When we get to the field, I'll have a talk with Mr. Olafssen, about having you start practicing with the pitchers next week. In the meantime, you and I could start working on your skills a little bit. I'm sure Jennifer T. would be willing to help you, too. We can work on your crouch, start having you throw from your knees a little bit, and—" Mr. Feld stopped, and his face turned red. It was a long speech, for him, and he seemed to worry that maybe he was getting a little carried away. He patted down the tangled yarn basket of his hair. "That is, I mean—if you'd like to."

  "Sure, Dad," Ethan said. "I really think I would."

  For the first time that Ethan could remember in what felt to him like years, Mr. Feld grinned, one of his old, enormous grins, revealing the lower incisor that was chipped from some long-ago collision at home plate.

  "Great!" he said.

  Ethan looked at his watch. A series of numbers was pulsing across the liquid crystal display. He must have accidentally pushed one of the mysterious buttons. He held it out to show his father, who frowned at the screen.

  "It's your heart rate," Mr. Feld said, pushing a few of the buttons under the display. "Seems slightly elevated. Ah. Hmm. Nearly eleven. We'd better get going."

  "The game's not until twelve-thirty," Ethan reminded him.

  "I know it," Mr. Feld said. "But I thought we could take Victoria Jean."

  ONE WINTER MORNING ABOUT THREE MONTHS AFTER THE DEATH OF his wife, Mr. Feld had informed Ethan that he was quitting his job at Aileron Aeronautics, selling their house in a suburb of Colorado Springs, and moving them to an island in Puget Sound, so that he could build the airship of his dreams. He had been dreaming of airships all his life, in a way—studying them, admiring them, learning their checkered history. Airships were one of his many hobbies. But after his wife's death he had actually dreamed of them. It was the same dream every night. Dr. Feld, smiling, her hair tied back in a cheery plaid band that matched her summer dress, stood in a green, sunny square of grass, waving to him. Although in his dream Mr. Feld could see his wife and her happy smile very plainly, she was also somehow very far away. Huge mountains and great forests lay between them. So he built an airship—assembled it quickly and easily out of the simplest of materials, inflated its trim silver envelope with the merest touch of a button—and flew north. As he rose gently into the sky, the mountains dwindled until they were a flat brown stain beneath him, and the forests became blots of pale green ink. He was flying over a map, now, an ever-shrinking AAA map of the western United States, toward a tidy, trim bit of tan in the shape of a running boar, surrounded by blue. At the westernmost tip of this little island, in a patch of green, stood his smiling, beautiful wife, waving. It was Ethan who had eventually gone to the atlas and located Clam Island. Less than a month later, the big Mayflower van full of boxes pulled into the drive between the pink house and the ruined strawberry packing shed. Since then the shining little Victoria Jean, Mr. Feld's prototype Zeppelina, had become
a familiar sight over the island, puttering her lazy way across the sky. Her creamy-white fiberglass gondola, about the size and shape of a small cabin cruiser, could fit easily in the average garage. Her long, slender envelope of silvery picofiber composite mesh could be inflated at the touch of a button, and fully deflated in ten minutes. When all the gas was out of it you could stuff the envelope like a sleeping bag into an ordinary lawn-and-leaf trash bag. The tough, flexible, strong picofiber envelope was Mr. Feld's pride. He held seventeen U.S. patents on the envelope technology alone.

  Mr. Arch Brody had arrived early at Ian "Jock" MacDougal Regional Ball Field to see to the condition of the turf, and he was the first person to hear the whuffle and hum of the Zeppelina's small motor, a heavily modified Mitsubishi boat engine. He stood up—he had been dusting the pitcher's rubber with his little whisk broom—and frowned at the sky. Sure enough, here came that Feld—no more or less of a fool than most off-islanders, though that wasn't saying much—in his floating flivver. As the ship drew nearer, at a fairly good clip, Mr. Arch Brody could see that the gondola's convertible top was down, and that the Feld boy was riding beside his father. They were headed directly toward the Tooth. Mr. Brody was not a smiling man, but he could not help himself. He had seen Mr. Feld tooling around over the island many times, making test flights in his blimp. It had never occurred to him that the crazy thing could actually be used to get someplace.

  "I'll be darned," said Perry Olafssen, coming up behind Mr. Brody. The players and their parents had started to arrive for today's game between the Ruth's Fluff 'n' Fold Roosters and the Dick Helsing Realty Reds. The boys dropped their equipment bags and ran to the outfield to watch the Victoria Jean make her approach.