Back in front of the Springtime Café and Ice Cream Parlor, after the game was set, Roger led us around to the trunk of the Caddy. Byron and I were on our tiptoes trying to stare over and around him. The trunk was almost as austere as the car interior.
It contained a black valise, very old, almost triangular, with heavy brass latches, and a canvas duffel bag with a pair of worn black baseball cleats tied around its drawstring.
A few garden tools were cast diagonally across the trunk: a rake, a hoe, a small spoon-nosed shovel, all spotless. Built into the depression where the spare wheel would ordinarily have been was a small, black safe, anchored in concrete.
‘We’re going to need some money to finance this operation,’ Roger said, and smiled slowly, lines appearing in the deeply tanned skin around his eyes. ‘I’ll have to ask you gentlemen to turn your backs while I operate on Black Betsy here. I’d be obliged if you kept the secret of her existence among the three of us.’
Though it wasn’t worded as one, Byron and I both recognized that the final statement was a command. We stared up and down the street and studied the windows of the Springtime Café while Roger turned the dial on the safe. It made little buzzy sounds like a bicycle lock.
‘You can turn around now,’ he said finally.
The safe was stuffed with money; from what I could see, mostly hundreds.
The deal Roger proposed was that each of the eight players to back him up was to receive twenty dollars for the game. Byron and I were to be paid extra for distributing posters to the downtown area, and over a thousand handbills to homes in nearby bedroom communities, and on car windshields.
And we were to be paid for selling tickets right up until game time. Roger also suggested that we arrange to sell hot dogs, soda, and popcorn, since I’d told him no one ever bothered to do that at the local baseball grounds.
He peeled off a few bills from a collar-sized roll, advancing us enough to buy and rent what supplies we needed, and to hire people for the concessions. In return, we were to split the profits with him. For the next few days Byron and I felt like real businessmen, going around town hiring women three times our age to work for us Sunday afternoon.
I suspect it was that experience – Roger letting me see how easy it was to set up a business operation if you had the capital – that decided me on a career in business.
Roger let us know he needed a place to stay. Our only hotel had closed up years before, not long after a Ramada Inn opened in a shopping center a few miles down the highway. I was quick to volunteer our home.
The past few years, since Byron no longer required a babysitter, Dad, Byron, and I had lived harmoniously in what Dad referred to as controlled chaos. We struggled along, sharing the household chores, often on Saturday morning, so that by Friday night we had to push our way into the house, every dish and piece of clothing we owned in need of washing.
‘If he can stand it, I guess we can,’ was how Dad answered my suggestion that Roger move into the spare bedroom until the challenge game.
‘If you want to check him out first I can arrange it,’ I said.
‘I’ve got to start trusting your judgment some time, Son. If this Roger friend of yours steals any of our valuable art work or silverware, you have to pay for it.’
Our art work and silverware came from Kmart.
But Dad was happy to have company, and when Roger arrived carrying only his black valise, Dad was at the door to greet him. Roger accepted a beer and they talked baseball for an hour before Dad headed for bed.
‘I need to ask you another favor,’ Roger said to me the next morning. ‘I need a place to work out. A private place. I don’t want McCracken or any of his spies to see me pitch before game time.’
‘There’s an abandoned ball field behind the factory where Dad works,’ I said. ‘They used to have a team in one of the commercial leagues, but they dropped out about five years ago. It’s pretty overgrown with weeds, but since all you need is the mound and home plate, I think that can be made playable with an hour’s work. And I bet McCracken doesn’t even know it exists.’
A few minutes with the tools from Roger’s trunk cleared away the weeds, and we embedded a new length of two-by-four in the mound to replace one that was squishy and rotten. We dug a small depression and inset two pieces of wood side by side to form a crude plate, after Roger produced a well-worn tape from his duffel bag. I held one end of the tape on the rubber while he measured to the spot where home plate should be.
Roger then dug out his glove and a ball. He gave me the glove and tossed a few practice pitches while I crouched behind the newly installed plate. I guess I was expecting Nolan Ryan. After about fifteen pitches I said, with that terrible candor the young consider honesty, ‘You’re not very good.’
‘You haven’t seen me with an enemy batter at the plate,’ he replied. ‘I may not look like much, and I’m no Roger Clemens, but I change speeds and keep the hitters off balance: that’s a pitcher’s most important function. If they can’t time your pitch, even if you’re slow as water finding its own level, they can’t hit you. Besides, that ain’t a catcher’s glove, and I wouldn’t want to hurt your hand.’
‘Yeah, right,’ I said under my breath.
Preparations for the big day kept Byron and me running all week. Tuesday night, my dad, Roger, Byron, and I scouted McCracken Construction during a league game in a neighboring town. McCracken was a stocky, barrel-chested man with dirty blond hair. He pitched a three-hitter. Roger made notes on McCracken, and on the batters he would face.
After the game we discussed strategy.
I had a difficult time tracking down enough players from my high-school team. Several were working shift for the summer and weren’t certain they would be available. Some were on vacation. We ended up with a third-string catcher, and I had to recruit Byron to play right field. He was not a total loss as a ball player, but he would rather have charted the game on his computer than play.
‘I’m gonna have you lead off,’ Roger said to me.
I alternated between batting second and seventh most of my high-school career. I showed Roger the statistics I kept on our team’s season.
‘I prefer being the lead-off man,’ I said. ‘How did you know?’
‘I know more than you think,’ said Roger, flashing his disarming grin.
‘Look at these stats,’ I said. ‘I steal successfully nine out of ten tries. But my high-school coach doesn’t play a base-stealing game.’
‘And you have a high on-base percentage,’ said Roger. ‘You walk a lot. Walks are important. You need patience to walk. I need your help here, because I’m going to put my batters up in the order of their patience.’
‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘McCracken has great control. I went over his stats in back issues of the local paper. They don’t always print box scores but the ones I could find show McCracken only walks 2.1 batters per game and averages 6.4 strikeouts.’
‘You don’t miss a trick, do you?’ said Roger. ‘But it’s a strategy, trust me.’ And he smiled once again, his teeth glinting like porcelain.
We had another practice Friday evening. I’m afraid we didn’t look very good. Byron reported that someone from McCracken’s team was sitting in a pickup truck about three blocks down the street, studying us through binoculars, hoping to get a glimpse of Roger in action.
Roger did not pitch. Our regular pitcher, Dusty Swan, who I had