“I hear you saved a man’s life yesterday,” she said as she signed the slip.
“Who told you that?”
“A little birdie. Tweet-tweet-tweet. Word gets around, Charlie.”
I took the slip. “It really wasn’t me, it was the guy’s dog. I heard her howling.” I was getting tired of telling people this, because nobody believed me. Which was strange. I thought everyone liked stories about hero dogs. “I just called 911.”
“Whatever you say. Now run along to class.”
“Can I show you something first?”
“Only if it’s a speedy something.”
I took out my phone and showed her the picture I’d snapped of Mr. Bowditch’s TV. “That’s an antenna on top, right?”
“Rabbit ears, we called them,” Mrs. Silvius said. Her smile was very similar to the one Mr. Bowditch had worn when he was looking at the pictures of Radar with her monkey. “We used to put tinfoil on the tips of ours because it was supposed to improve the reception. But look at the television, Charlie! My goodness! Does it actually work?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t try it.”
“The first TV we ever had looked like this. A table-model Zenith. It was so heavy my father strained his back carrying it up the steps to the apartment we lived in back then. We watched that thing by the hour! Annie Oakley, Wild Bill Hickok, Captain Kangaroo, Crusader Rabbit… gosh, until we got headaches! And once it wouldn’t work, the picture just rolled and rolled, so my dad called a TV repairman who came with a suitcase full of tubes.”
“Tubes?”
“Vacuum tubes. They glowed orange, like old-fashioned lightbulbs. He replaced the one that had gone bad and it worked fine again.” She looked at the picture on my phone once more. “Surely the tubes for this one would have burned out long ago.”
“Mr. Bowditch probably bought more on eBay or Craigslist,” I said. “You can buy anything on the Internet. If you can afford it, that is.” Only I didn’t think Mr. Bowditch did Internet.
Mrs. Silvius handed my phone back. “Go along, Charlie. Physics awaits you.”
5
Coach Harkness was on me that afternoon at practice like white on rice. Or, more accurately, like flies on shit. Because shit was how I played. During the three-cone footwork drill I kept moving the wrong way, and once I tried to move both ways at once and ended up on my ass, which caused much hilarity. During the double-play drill I got caught off my position at first and the ball from the second baseman went whizzing past where I should have been and ended up bouncing off the gym wall. When Coach hit me a dribbler up the line, I charged the ball okay, but didn’t get my glove down and the ball—just a bunny, rolling at walking speed—went through my legs. But bunting was the final straw for Coach Harkness. I kept popping it up to the pitcher instead of laying one down along the third-base line.
Coach erupted from his lawn chair and stalked to the plate with his belly swinging and his whistle bouncing between his not inconsiderable breasts. “Jesus Christ, Reade! You look like an old lady! Stop punching at the ball! Just get the bat down and let the ball hit it. How many times do I have to tell you?” He grabbed the bat, elbowed me aside, and faced Randy Morgan, that day’s tryout pitcher. “Throw! And put some goddam hair on it!”
Randy threw as hard as he could. Coach bent and laid down a perfect bunt. It trickled along the third-base line, just fair. Steve Dombrowski charged it, tried for a barehand pickup, and lost the handle.
Coach turned to me. “There! That’s how it’s done! I don’t know what’s on your mind, but get rid of it!”
What was on my mind was Radar, back at Mr. Bowditch’s house, waiting for me to come. Twelve hours for me, maybe three and a half days for her. She wouldn’t know why she had been left alone, and a dog couldn’t play with the squeaky monkey if there was no one there to throw it. Was she trying not to make a mess in the house, or—with the dog door bolted—had she already done it somewhere? If so, she might not understand that it wasn’t her fault. Plus that scraggy lawn and the sagging picket fence—those things were on my mind, too.
Coach Harkness handed me the bat. “Now lay one down and do it right.”
Randy didn’t try to drill it in there, just threw a batting-practice pitch to get me off the hook. I squared around… and popped it up. Randy didn’t even have to get off the practice mound to glove it.
“That’s it,” Coach said. “Give me five.” Meaning five laps around the gym.