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“Oh, hey. Heh-heh. How’s it going? My name is Rob. Rob Padfoot? My company is called Brain + Storm Aerostatics, we’re into developing alternative and emerging dirigible technologies?”
Wow, Ethan thought. This was exactly the kind of person his father had been waiting to have show up. A guy with long hair and a briefcase. Somebody with money and enthusiasm who was also a little bit of a nut. It seemed to Ethan that in the past he had even heard his father use the phrase “alternative and emerging dirigible technologies”.
“Yes,” Dr. Feld repeated, looking a little impatient.
“Oh, well, I heard about your little prototype, there. Sweet. And I’ve read your papers on picofibre-envelope sheathing. So I thought I’d come up here and see if I could, heh-heh, catch a glimpse of the fabled beast, you know? And then, like,I’m driving around this gorgeous island and I look up in the sky and… and…”
“Look, Mr. Padfoot, I’m sorry, but I’m talking to my son right now.”
“Oh, uh, OK. Sure.” An expression of confusion crossed Rob Padfoot’s face. Ethan saw that his hair wasn’t blond at all but actually white. Ethan had read in books about young people whose hair went white. He wondered what unspeakable tragedy Rob Padfoot might have undergone to leach the colour from his hair. “Hey, but, heh, listen, let me give you my card. Call me, or e-mail. When you have the time.”
Ethan’s father took the card and stuck it in his pocket without looking at it. For an instant Rob Padfoot looked incredibly angry, almost as if he wanted to hit Mr. Feld. Then it was gone, and Ethan wasn’t sure if he had seen it at all.
“Dad?” he said, as Padfoot went slouching off, swinging his briefcase at his side.
“Forget it,” Mr. Feld said. He crouched down in the gravel beside the picnic table. “Now, come on. We have to find Jennifer T. I have a pretty good idea that you might know where she went.”
Ethan sat for a moment, then climbed out from under the table into the steady grey rain.
“Yeah,” he said. “Actually I sort of probably do.”
JENNIFER T. RIDEOUT had spent more time amid the ruins of the Summerland Hotel than any other child of her generation. It was a thirty-seven-minute hike, through woods, fields and the parking lot of the county dump, from the Rideout place to the beach. There was no road you could take to get you there; there had never been a road to the hotel. That was something she had always liked about the place. In the old days, her uncle Mo had told her, everything came to the hotel by steamship: food, linens, fine ladies and gentlemen, mail, musicians, fireworks on the Fourth of July. Though nowadays it was a popular spot for teenagers in the summer, on grey winter afternoons Hotel Beach could be pretty forlorn. As if in payment for the miracle of its summer sunshine, in the winter it was tormented by rain and fog, hailstorms, icy rain. Green stuff grew all over everything, this weird cross between algae and fungus and slime that settled like snow over the piles of drift and anything else that was made out of wood. On a damp, chilly winter afternoon she often found herself to be the only human being on the whole Tooth.
Another thing she liked, besides the solitude, were the stories. A boy from up by Kiwanis Beach wandered into one of the abandoned beach cabins at dusk and came out stark raving mad, having seen something he could never afterwards describe. Ghosts of the hotel dead, ghostly orchestras playing, phantoms doing the Lindy Hop in the light of the full moon. Sometimes people felt someone touching their cheek, pinching their arm, even giving them a kick in the seat of the pants. Girls had their skirts lifted, or found their hair tied in intractable knots. Jennifer T. didn’t necessarily believe these legends. But they gave Hotel Beach an atmosphere that she enjoyed. Jennifer T. Rideout believed in magic, maybe even more than Ethan did – otherwise she could not have been a part of this story. But she also believed that she had been born a hundred years too late to get even the faintest taste of it. Long ago there had been animals that talked, and strange little Indians who haunted the birch wood, while other Indians lived in villages on the bottom of the Sound. Now that world had all but vanished. Except on the ball field of Summerland, that is, and here at Hotel Beach.
So when Albert made an ass of himself in front of her team-mates, that was where she ran. But she saw, as soon as she got there, that something terrible had happened, and that all of the magic of the place was gone.
The clearing along the beach was crowded with bulldozers and earthmovers. They were carefully parked in three rows of three, next to a foreman’s trailer. She wondered how they could possibly have gotten there – by helicopter? Affixed to the side of the trailer was a large white sign that said TRANSFORM PROPERTIES and under this KEEP OUT. There were signs that said KEEP OUT everywhere, actually, as well as KEEP OFF, NO TRESPASSING, PRIVATE PROPERTY, and NO GATHERING MUSHROOMS. The cabins – there had been seven of them, in a shade of faded blue – were all gone. Now there were just seven rectangular dents in the ground. The tumbled remains of the great fieldstone porch of the hotel, the fortress, galleon and prison house of a million children’s games, had been packed up and carted off – somehow or other – leaving not a stone. And, God, they had cut down so many of the trees! The slim pale trunks of a hundred birch trees lay stacked in an orderly pile, like the contents of a giant box of pencils. The ends of each log had been flagged with strips of red plastic, ready to follow the porch and the cabins and the last ghosts of the Summerland Hotel into oblivion. With so many trees gone, you could see clear through to the dull grey glint of Tooth Inlet.
Jennifer T. sat down on the big driftwood log that was her favourite perch. The desire to cry was like a balloon being slowly inflated inside her, pressing outward on her throat and lungs. She resisted it. She didn’t want to cry. She didn’t enjoy crying. But then whenever she closed her eyes she would see Albert running around, waving his arms, spitting when he talked, cursing, with his zipper undone.
She heard a scrape, someone’s laboured breathing, a rattle of leaves, and then Ethan Feld emerged from the trees that still screened Hotel Beach from the ball field.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.” She was very glad she wasn’t crying. If there was one person she did not want feeling sorry for her, it was Ethan Feld.” What’s going on? Did the police come?”
“I don’t know. My dad said—Oh, my God.”
Ethan was looking now the devastation of Hotel Beach. He stared at the bulldozers and backhoes, the neat depressions where the cabins had stood. And then for some reason he gazed up at the sky. Jennifer T. looked, too. Here and there ragged flags of blue still flew, holding out against the surge of black clouds.
“It’s raining at Summerland in June,” Jennifer T. said. “What’s that about?”
“Yeah,” Ethan said. “Weird.” He seemed to want to say something else. “Yeah. A lot of… weird stuff… is happening.”
He sat down beside her on the driftwood log. His spikes still looked almost brand-new. Hers, like all the furnishings of her life, were stained, scarred, scratched, their laces tattered.
“So I hate my dad,” said Jennifer T.
“Yeah,” Ethan. She could feel Ethan trying to think of something to add to this, and not finding anything. He just sat there playing with the strap of his big ugly watch, while the rain came down on them, pattering around them, digging little pits in the sand. “Well, he was always, I don’t know, nice to me and my dad.”
That was when the balloon of sadness inside Jennifer T. finally popped. Because of course while she did hate her father, she also, somehow, managed to love him. She knew that, when he was in the mood, he could be surprisingly nice, but she had always assumed she was alone in that knowledge. She tried to cry very quietly, hoping that Ethan didn’t notice. Ethan reached into his uniform pocket and took out one of those miniature packages of Kleenex that he carried around because of his allergies. He was allergic to pecans, eggplant, dogs, tomatoes, and spelt. She wasn’t really sure what spelt was.
The plastic crinkled as he took out a tissue and passed it to her.
“Can I ask you a question?” he said.
“About Albert?”
“No.”
“OK, then.”
“Do you believe in, well, in the, uh, the ‘little people’? You know.”
“ ‘The little people’, ” Jennifer T. said. It was not the question she had been expecting. “You mean… you mean like elves? Brownies?”
Ethan nodded.
“Not really,” she said, though as we know this was not strictly true. She believed there had been elves, over in Switzerland or Sweden or wherever it was, and a tribe of foot-high Indians living in the trees of Clam Island. Once upon a time. “Do you?”
“Yeah,” Ethan said. “I’ve seen them.”
“You’ve seen elves.”
“No, I haven’t seen any elves. But I saw a pixie when I was like, two. And I’ve seen fer… some other ones. They live right around here.”
Jennifer T. moved a little bit away from him on their log, to get a better look at his face. He seemed to be perfectly serious. The chill wind blowing in from the west again raised gooseflesh on her damp arms, and she caught the faint echo of the whistling she had heard before, coming from somewhere off beyond the trees.
“I’m sceptical,” she said at last.
“You can believe the boy,” said a voice behind them. Jennifer T. jumped up from the log and spun around to find a small, stout black man standing there. He wore a suit of dark purple velvet, with a ruffled shirt, and the cuff links in his shirt-cuffs were shaped like tiny baseballs. His ponytail was white and his beard was white and there was a kind of white fuzz on the rims of his ears. “You do believe him. You know he ain’t lying to you.”
There was something familiar about the man’s smooth, dark face, his wide green eyes, the missing third finger of his right hand. She recognised him, in spite of the passage of many, many years, from a grainy, washed-out photograph in the pages of one of her favourite books, Only the Ball Was White, a history of the old Negro leagues.
“Chiron ‘Ringfinger’ Brown,” she said.
“Jennifer Theodora Rideout.”
“Your middle name is Theodora?” Ethan said.
“Shut up,” said Jennifer T.
“I thought you said it didn’t stand for anything.”
“Are you really him?”
Mr. Brown nodded.
“But aren’t you, like, a hundred years old by now?”
“This here body is one hundred and nine,” he said, in an offhand way. He was eyeing her carefully, with a strange look in his eye. “Jennifer T. Rideout,” he said, frowning, giving his head a shake.” I must be gettin’ old.” He took a little notebook from his breast pocket and wrote in it for a moment. “I don’t know how,” he said. “But somehow or other I done missed you, girl. You ever pitch?”
Jennifer T. shook her head. Her father had been a pitcher; he claimed to have been scouted by the Kansas City Royals, and blamed all his problems in life on the sudden and surprising failure of his right arm when he was nineteen years old. He was always threatening to show her “how to really ‘bring it’” one of these days. She supposed she ought to welcome his attempts to share with her the game she loved most in the world. But she didn’t; she hated them. She especially hated when he used baseball lingo like “bring it”.
“I don’t want to be a pitcher,” she declared.
“Well, you sure look like a pitcher to me.”
“Missed her for what?” Ethan said. “I mean, uh, well, who are you, anyway? Like, OK, I know you were in the Negro Leagues, or whatever.…”
“Most career victories in the history of the Negro Leagues,” Jennifer T. said. “One book I have said it was three forty-two. Another one says three sixty.”
“It was three hundred an’ seventy-eight, matter of fact,” said Mr. Brown. “But to answer your question, Mr. Feld, for the last forty-odd years I’ve been travellin’ up and down the coast. You know. Lookin’ for talent. Lookin’ for somebody who got the gif’. Idaho. Nevada.” He eyed Ethan. “Colorado, too.” He took something from his hip pocket. It was an old baseball, stained and scuffed. “Here,” he said, handing it to Jennifer T., “you try throwin’ with this little pill sometime, see how it go.” Jennifer T. took the ball from him. It felt warm from his pocket, hard as a meteorite and yellow as an old man’s teeth. “I done used it to strike out Mr. Joseph DiMaggio three times, in a exhibition game at old Seals Stadium, down in Frisco, away back in 1934.”
“You mean you’re a scout?” Ethan said. “Who do you scout for?”
“Right now I’m workin’ for those little folks you met, Mr. Feld. The Boar Tooth mob. Only I don’t scout ballplayers. Or at least, not only.”
“What do you scout?” Jennifer T. said.
“Heroes,” Mr. Brown said. He reached into his breast pocket again and took out his wallet. He handed Ethan and Jennifer T. each a business card.
PELION SCOUTING
MR. CHIRON BROWN, OWNER-OPERATOR
champions found – recruited – trained for over seven eons
“A hero scout,” Ethan said. It was the second time the word hero had passed through his mind in the last hour. It did not sound as strange to him as it had at first.
“Or,” Jennifer T. said, “you could just be some kind of weird guy following us around.”
But she knew as she said it that there was no mistaking this man, from the intent, wide, slightly popeyed gaze to the fabled missing finger on the pitching hand. He really was Ringfinger Brown, ace pitcher of the long-vanished Homestead Greys.
“Mr. Brown,” Ethan said. “Do you know what they’re doing here? What it is they’re building?”
“What they buildin’?” As if for the first time, Ringfinger Brown turned to study the devastation of Hotel Beach. His bulging eyes were filmed over with age or tears or the sting of the cold west wind. He sighed, scratching idly at the back of his head with the four fingers of his right hand. “They buildin’ theirself the end of the world.”
Ethan said something then, in a soft voice, almost an undertone, that Jennifer T. didn’t understand. He said, “Ragged Rock.”
“That’s right,” Mr. Brown said. “One at a time, cutting apart all them magic places where the Tree done growed back onto itself.”
“And you really scouted me?” Ethan stood up and began backing towards the woods. “When I lived in Colorado Springs?”
“Before that, even.”
“And the ferishers put all those dreams into my dad’s head, about the airships and my mom?”
“That’s right.”
Jennifer T. heard voices coming through the trees, and recognised one of them, at least, as that of Mr. Feld.
“Because of me?” Ethan said.” What do I have to do with the end of the world?”
“Maybe nothin’,” Mr. Brown said. “That is, if my conjure eye” – here he touched a trembling old finger to the lower lid of his left eye – “done finally gone bad on me.” The milky film that was covering the eye, like the clouds of a planet, seemed momentarily to clear as he looked at Ethan. Then he turned towards the sound of men approaching. “Or maybe, if I still know my bidness, you goin’ to be the one to help put off that dark day for just a little bit longer.”
Jennifer T. was not following the conversation too well, but before she had a chance to ask them what in the name of Satchel Paige they were talking about, Mr. Feld emerged from the trees, along with Coach Olafssen, Mr. Brody, and a sheriff’s deputy named Branley who had arrested her father three times that she knew about.
“Ethan? Jennifer T.? Are you all right?” Mr. Feld slipped on a slick pile of leaves as he approached them, and lost his footing. Deputy Branley caught him and hauled him to his feet. “What are you kids doing?”
“Nothing,” Ethan said. “We were just standing around talking to—” Ethan raised a hand as if to introduce Ringfinger Brown to the men. But Ringfinger Brown was not there anymore; he had vanished completely. Jennifer T. wondered if such a very old man could possibly have gotten himself hidden behind one of the earthmovers so quickly, and if so, why he should want to run and hide. Hiding didn’t seem in character for him, somehow.
“Huh,” said Ethan. His face went blank. “To each other.”
“Come on.” Mr. Feld put an arm around Ethan’s shoulders, and then draped the other across Jennifer T.’s. “Let’s go home.”
As she pressed into the warmth of Mr. Feld’s embrace, a shudder racked Jennifer T.’s entire body, and she realised for the first time that she was soaked to the skin and freezing. Mr. Feld started to lead them back towards the ball field, but then he stopped. He looked at the heavy equipment, the stacked corpses of the trees, the empty, torn-up patch of earth on which, a hundred years ago, there had once stood a great hotel with tall pointed towers.
“What the hell are they doing here?” he said.
“They’re putting out the last little candles, one by one,” Ethan said, and even he looked surprised as the words came out of his mouth.
4 The Middling (#ulink_f30feca1-9ae5-5d94-b131-68b9ff5ea1b6)
AN UNEXPECTED RESULT of Ethan Feld’s determination to become a catcher was the discovery, by Jennifer T. Rideout, of a native gift for pitching. The two friends met, on the morning after the loss to the Reds, at the ball field behind Clam Island Middle School, which was closer to either of their houses than Jock MacDougal Field. Ethan brought his father’s old mitt and, in the pocket of his hooded sweatshirt, Peavine’s book on catching. Jennifer T. brought an infielder’s glove that she had turned up someplace, and the baseball that Ringfinger Brown had given her. When Jennifer T. rocked back and let it fly, it came whistling and fizzing towards Ethan’s mitt as if it were powered by steam.
“Ouch!” cried Ethan, the first time the ancient baseball slapped against the heel of his mitt, sending a crackle all the way up his arm to his shoulder. It hurt so much that he did not at first notice that he had held on to the ball. “Hey. You can throw.”
“Huh,” said Jennifer T., looking at her left hand with new interest.
“That was a fastball.”
“Was it?”
“I’m pretty sure.”
She nodded. “Cool.” She waved her glove at him and he half rose, and arced the ball back to her. His throw was a little high but close enough. She caught it, fingered the ball, then concealed it once more inside her glove.
“So, catcher,” she said. “Call the pitch.”
“Can you throw the slider?”
“I’d like to see if I can,” said Jennifer T. “I know how to put my fingers. I saw it on Tom Seaver’s Total Baseball Video.” She checked an imaginary runner on first, then turned back to Ethan. He put two fingers down, extending them in an inverted V towards the ground. He was calling for the slider. Jennifer T. nodded, her black ponytail flickering behind her. Her wide, dark eyes were unblinking, and she narrowed them in concentration. She reared back again, her right leg lifting and flexing in a high jabbing kick, then stepped down onto her right foot, bringing her whole body forwards and lifting her back leg until it stuck straight out behind her and hung there, wavering. Ethan saw the snap of her hand on the hinge of her wrist. Her fingers blossomed outward and the ball flew towards him in a long, straight line. At the very last second it broke abruptly downward, and he just barely got his glove down and under it in time. By the time you got your bat, if you had been the batter, to the spot at which you hoped your bat would meet it, the ball would have long since dropped away.
“Nasty,” Ethan said. He had a sudden protective feeling towards Jennifer T., an urge to encourage and reassure her. This was not because she was a girl, or his friend, or the child of a scattered and troubled family with a father who was in jail yet again, but because he was a catcher, and she was his pitcher, and it was his job to ease her along. “The bottom fell right out of it.”
“You caught it real nice,” said Jennifer T. “And you had your eyes open all the way.”
