The Noise of Summer
Chapter 2: Positions
At 2:00 Stan drove Mabel, Dipper, and Wendy—it was a slow day, and Soos said she could go along as assistant coach—to the middle-school athletic field. It had two baseball diamonds, scaled down for 11-13-year-olds, and Stan had reserved one for the Mystics tryouts for position. All of the other players seemed to have already arrived.
"Seriously?" Dipper asked as he climbed out of the Stanleymobile into 92-degree heat and blazing sunshine and surveyed the random group that passed for a team.
The kids milling around and goofing on the field included Grenda—that wasn't too bad, she was intimidating and strong, anyway—and Gorney—Dipper had thought he was only about eight, but either he was older than he looked or he was lying about his height. At the moment, Grenda was standing with her right arm crooked in a show-your-muscle pose, and Gorney was doing chin-ups on it.
Dipper saw Mabel's first crush of the previous summer standing near first base—Mabel had rigged the questionnaire she gave him—but Dipper didn't know his name. He was talking to a kid named Nicolas, who was about twelve and whom Dipper suspected of being related to Tambry, because they looked a little alike except for their hair. Nicolas had black hair and no purple highlights. Dipper and Mabel occasionally ran into him at the mall.
Doing pushups on the infield was Grunt, one of the tough kids that Grunkle Stan had tried hard to scare during the previous year's Summerween—he wore a headband over his bushy brown hair, along with a perpetual scowl, and looked a bit like a male version of Grenda.
Already decked out in a new-looking pine-tree cap was Ricky Chuzzley, whose little brother Charlie had been terrorized when Stan's hot-air balloon nearly nailed him and their mom. He was trying without success to do a handstand on the outfield grass past second base. Finally, two sort of puny kids that Dipper didn't recognize stood on home plate and the pitcher's mound, tossing a battered brown-stained baseball back and forth, barehanded.
Stan held a clipboard and yelled, "Mystics! Form up over here! Let me get you signed up on the list." He looked odd in the pine-tree trucker hat, but all the kids trotted over eagerly. Stan recognized most of them and jotted their names down, but he asked the two puny boys who they were. They turned out to be Chester O'Faley and Petey McLuser. Dipper rolled his eyes. Those names are omens if I ever heard one!
The tough kid, brown-haired and heavy-built, with a prominent gap in his teeth, said his name was Grunt.
"Grunt what?" Stan asked.
"None of your business!"
Stan frowned, then laughed. "I like your attitude, kid!"
The boy who had been puzzled by Mabel's date questionnaire said he was Barry Zinzer. Mabel immediately went to stand beside him, telling him, "You have a first and last name! I have a first and last name! How weird is that?"
Dipper muttered to Wendy, "She tries too hard."
"I know, right?"
"Wait a minute," Dipper said, counting. "Hey, there are ten of us! I'm off the hook!"
"Nope, Fishbait," Stan said. "Here, hand these out and have everybody sign one and return it to you." He gave Dipper a sheaf of forms and a handful of cheap ballpoint pens.
"What are these?" Dipper asked.
"Waiver of liability," Stan said. "You an' Mabel, too, sign one each. Chop-chop! Hey, don't read 'em, sign 'em!"
Everyone did, except for Wendy, who wrote "No Way" instead of her name. Dipper gathered the forms up and brought them back to Stan, grumbling, "I don't see why you need me when you have nine other players here."
Stan didn't even look at him as he took the papers. "It's simple. We gotta have an extra man to send in in case there's an injury or the pitcher gets tired. Okay, you guys—and ladies—"
Grenda laughed girlishly. "Oh, Mr. Pines! You have such nice manners!"
"Yeah, can it," Stan told her. "Now hold up your hands—wait until I tell you why, Gorney! How many of you have ever played Little Guys League baseball before? Hold up your hands if you have. Nobody? Not one of you? Jeeze Louise. OK, how many of you have played some kinda softball or baseball, even at school or just in the backyard? Everybody. Well, that's somethin'."
"How many of us have never successfully hit a ball?" Dipper asked, raising his hand.
Grunt hee-hawed at that and slapped Dipper on the back so hard that Dipper fell face-down in the grass. "I like this guy!" Grunt yelled. "He's a joker. That's gonna be your name, guy. Joker!"
"Yeah, he's great for morale," Stan growled, clipping the waivers to his clipboard.
Mabel helped Dipper to his feet and dusted him off. "You're OK," she told him.
"Get me to a hospital," he wheezed.
Grunt laughed again, but mercifully did not clap him on the back that time.
"OK, guys, important information!" Stan went on to explain the set-up: Games were either seven innings or ninety minutes long, whichever came first. If the time ran out, the game was official as long as five full innings had been played. If fewer than five had been played, whichever team was ahead was the unofficial winner. If it was a tie, as Stan said, "It's just a wash, like it never happened."
He went on with other points: In this age division, leading off base was allowed. "So's stealin'," Stan said. "If ya get somethin' worth more than a hundred bucks, stow it in the trunk of my car, and I'll fence it for ya for a twenty-five percent piece of the action. If it's just a base, good for you."
They went on to tryouts. First came batting: Wendy took the mound and threw easy pitches to the catcher, Dipper, who fumbled only about one out of every five. As it turned out, the team was lucky enough to have a couple who were very good with a bat. Grenda blasted two out of six clear over the four-foot-tall fence two hundred feet from home plate, got two solid, sizzling line drives to left field, and popped one easy-out fly, narrowly missing just one pitch.
Grunt got a home run on the first pitch, but Stan stopped him. "Ya can't punch the ball, kid. Against the rules. Ya gotta use a bat."
"Wussy stuff," Grunt complained, but even with a bat he hit all six pitches, though he didn't get another homer. After the six pitches, he said, "Hey, I can switch hit. Wanna see me?"
Stan did, and batting left-handed, Grunt hit six more in a row, the longest a long fly into the outfield and right up against the fence.
Barry got four hits, Gorney three, and the others were at one and two each. Then it was Mabel's turn. "Don't go easy on me!" Mabel yelled to Wendy, pounding the bat on the plate.
Wendy shot her a pretty fast one, Mabel swung, and—crack!—connected for a high fly ball that went over the fence but shaded foul by about two feet. She swung on the next pitch a little early, popped it back in a foul, and Dipper backed up three steps and to his complete surprise caught it. The next pitch was a skipping grounder—also foul, outside the first-base line—and the last three were all fouls, too, but uncatchable.
"Catch for me, Mabes," Wendy said. "Your turn, Dipper!"
Sighing, Dipper gave Mabel the catcher's mitt, mask, and chest protector. "Don't worry, Broseph," Mabel advised cheerfully. "Just keep your eye on the ball."
Well—he tried. The first pitch sailed right past him because he couldn't decide when to swing. "Come on," Mabel said. "You could've got a piece of that one."
"I've never hit a ball in my life," Dipper admitted. "I don't know how to judge when to swing!"
"This time I'll tell you when," Mabel said helpfully. She tossed the baseball back to Wendy.
"Here we go," Wendy said, winding up and pitching an easy one that headed right over the plate.
"Now!" Mabel said, and Dipper swung. The bat just grazed the ball enough to foul it straight back into Mabel's mitt. "Sorry, Dip. I timed it wrong. Let's do it again."
Wendy caught the ball and said, "'Kay, Dipper, try to keep your shoulders level and bring the bat right around even with them. You'll get the hang of this." She pitched again.
"Now!" Mabel said.
This time—wonder of wonders—he smacked the ball. It went past Wendy at knee level, then hit the ground and hopped over the second-to-third baseline. "Hey," Dipper said, feeling a silly grin spread all across his face.
"You got one," Wendy said as Gorney trotted out to retrieve the ball for her. "Congrats, man!"
"Not too shabby," Mabel told him. "Though it was fairly shabby."
"Don't call it this time," Dipper said in a voice low enough for only Mabel to hear. "Let me see if I can do it myself."
"Okay."
The fourth pitch was level and true, and Dipper swung on it, a little too early. He popped a foul over to the left. "Gotta hold about one beat," Wendy advised.
The fifth one he hit, but he had swung too high, and he hammered it straight into the ground a foot in front of home plate. "Choke up on the bat a little," Mabel advised.
"OK. Uh—how do I do that?"
Mabel told him, and he raised his grip a little. The sixth time was the charm. He got a nice clean hit and made a line drive—although in a game the other team's shortstop probably would have nailed it, because it didn't have a lot of power behind it.
Grunkle Stan called them all around. "OK, OK, let's take some turns pitchin'."
Grenda was by far the best. She pitched to Wendy, who had an uncanny ability to nail nearly anything in the strike zone. Grunt demanded, "Why can't she be on our team?"
"'Cause I'm too old, dude," Wendy told him.
"Who's to know?"
Wendy shrugged. "My older brother's coachin' one of the other teams. He prob'ly would."
Dipper knew he'd never make it as a pitcher. He had a hard time keeping his throws in the strike zone. Or close to the strike zone. But he wound up not being the catcher, either—Grunt was a lot better at that.
Then Wendy shagged flies for the others to catch. Dipper caught one or two, but he had a bad tendency to misjudge high fly balls and would run too far forward, then have to backpedal—never successfully—to try to snag them.
The others did pretty fair. Mabel showed a surprising ability to head off line drives, no matter how hard they were hit, and to take them right in her fielder's glove with a smack like a crack of thunder that sometimes knocked her a step backward.
Dipper more or less tied with Gorney as the least talented all-around, so they would alternate at right field, with the spare one being the utility player, ready to step in if needed.
For an hour and a half, they worked up a sweat in the hot sun. Then Stan called a rest, and they gathered in the shade of a spreading maple tree, where Stan had lugged a cooler filled with bottles of lemonade and water.
Everybody grabbed one, and they sat on the grass and took a rest at about 3:30. Then, a few minutes before 4:00, an extended green van pulled into the parking lot, and Wendy shaded her eyes and asked, "Is that my brother driving?"
"Yeah," Stan told her, looking around. "His team's gonna practice with ours for an hour or so."
Dipper stood up as the red-haired coach stepped from the driver's seat and his players poured out of the van.
The last one . . . loomed out of the van.
"Oh, my gosh!" Dipper said, blinking.
One of the players for the Greenwoods Sequoyahs—well, he—or she—or maybe it—simply wasn't human.
—To be continued...
