"Blubber-stinking clumsy son of a dungheap!" muttered the Sasquatch, rising shakily to her feet.
"HA HA HA!" Mooseknuckle John doubled over with laughter. "IS SHE ALL RIGHT, TAFFY? IS TAFFY NOT HURT?"
He clumped over toward the cage and bent down to look inside, an expression on his ugly face of amused but genuine concern.
"IS SHE ALL RIGHT, MY ITTLE BIT OF SASSYQUATCHY FURRY-WURRY? IS SHE, PRETTY LITTLE TAFFY LITTLE BIGFOOT?" He stood up again, to his full height, and gazed down at Ethan, Jennifer T., and Thor. His face was serious now. "COME," he said to Ethan. "TIME FOR ME TO DRILL A MOUSEHOLE IN THAT MITT OF YOURN."
CHAPTER 9
A Game of Catch
OUTSIDE, IN THE MELLOW glow and soft air of a Summerlands afternoon, they assembled on the Gigantic ball field to settle the wager between Ethan Feld and the Mooseknuckle John. The infield had been hastily raked and the outfield was patchy and weedy. It was on this very spot, the giant claimed, that Peavine's barnstorming ferishers had played a series of eighty-one games against him and his seventeen brothers (forming two squads, the Gnashers and the Thumpers, of nine giants apiece), in a great yard built from the bones of leviathans and other elder beasts, that could accommodate ten thousand stomping, whoop-ing beastmen and wood-haints and fair folk. According to the Universal Rules—the details were all in How to Catch Lightning and Smoke—powerful grammers had been worked to grow the ferishers until they were of a size with the home nines. The dimensions of the field were appropriately vast. From the pitcher's mound to home plate, Ethan reckoned now, it must be about a thousand feet.
"GIANTS WON THAT SERIES, TOO," Mooseknuckle John said, as he trudged off to take his place. "FORTY-ONE TO FORTY. DON'T BELIEVE ALL YOU READ IN THAT BOOK OF FERISHER LIES."
Ethan looked inquiringly at Cinquefoil, who shook his head.
"It went down hard with the Johns, that loss," the ferisher said.
"Stay focused, Ethan," Jennifer T. said. "Just bear down."
"And keep your eye on the ball," Thor offered.
Jennifer T. gave Thor a look. They were both sitting on what was left of the ruined bleachers of once-mighty Eighteen Johns Field.
"What was wrong with what I said?" Thor said.
" 'Keep your eye on the ball,'" said Jennifer T. She spat.
As Ethan stepped, cautiously, onto the field, he was aware of a burning sensation in his legs. It quickly spread upward, through his hips, up the side of his body, and down his shoulders to the tips of his arm. It was a muscular kind of burn such as you get when you hold your arms over your head for too long. At the same time there was a bizarre crackling, as if the bones of his skull were starring, like a windshield hit by a pebble. His stomach lurched, and his heart swelled and flopped in his chest, and he had a strange taste in his mouth of the interior parts of his face, as you do when somebody punches you in the nose. The wind rushed in his ears, and the trees all around him shrank, and the earth fell away, until Skidbladnir lay at his heels like a toy.
"Whoo-hoo!" shouted Jennifer T. her voice thin and chirpy. "Look at Big Ethan Feld!"
Ethan could feel the enormous grin on his face. He was a giant! He could have lifted up his friends and tucked them into the muff pocket of his sweatshirt!
The thought of his pocket reminded him of Peavine's book, and he reached in, hoping it had grown with him, or else reading it was going to be like trying to prize open a stubborn pistachio. There it was, grown now to a still small, just-legible size, about as big as a king-size bed.
The giant had taken his place on the mound, and stared in, flatfooted, hands dangling at his sides, at Ethan, and Ethan saw that Mooseknuckle John still looked very, very big indeed. The shape-shifting grammer seemed to have increased Ethan's size proportionately. So it was going to be like catching an adult—a hard-throwing and hungry adult.
"Ready?" the giant called, his voice no longer quite so thunderous to Ethan's ears.
Ethan consulted Peavine. On page 18 there was a series of illustrations of the catcher's proper stance and glove positioning. They were tough to make out without a magnifying glass, but he remembered them well enough, and found himself assuming his position with surprising ease. As he pounded the heel of his glove, he felt a surprising surge of confidence in his ability. They had left behind, far behind, the world in which a kid who had picked up a catcher's mitt for the first time in his life two days earlier could never possibly hope to accomplish what Ethan was now trying to do. There were, for example, no hundred-foot, flame-throwing, albino giants back there in the Middling. Other rules were in force here, in this world, in the Summerlands. Perhaps being a catcher was something he would simply be able, magically, to do. Back there in the Middling, his father's softball mitt was only an old hunk of sewn hide and knotted thongs. Here, perhaps—he was aware of the warmth of his hand inside it—it was a magic glove, like that one the god Thor wore in the Viking myths, so that he could catch the smoke and lightning of his magic hammer, Mjolnir. Perhaps nothing would be required of Ethan at all, really, but to keep his eyes open and stick out his mitt and wait for the ball to find it three times in a row.
And if not? Then he and his friends would be tossed like lobsters into a giant black kettle and boiled up with onions and turnips. (Lobster was another food Ethan had never been able to bring himself to eat. He was certain that a lobster felt agonizing pain as it was tossed into a bubbling pot.) And then his father would languish in the grip of Coyote. And maybe someday the painful news would come to him, far away in some frozen corner of the Winterlands, of Ethan's final disaster on a baseball diamond. Quickly he slipped on the dark glasses for a glimpse of his father. Mr. Feld was now sitting up against the wall behind him, his head slumped forward, tapping his foot. Singing to himself, it appeared. Of course there was no way for Ethan to hear the song, but he was certain that it must be "Kiss Him Goodbye" by Steam. The song had gotten lodged like a small stone in Mr. Feld's brain sometime around 1973 and had yet to work itself loose. Whenever he was tense, nervous, or troubled Mr. Feld could go through hundreds of choruses of
Na na na na
Na na na na
Hey hey hey
Goodbye
There was a sound like bricks tumbling in a clothes dryer; the giant was clearing his throat. Ethan whipped off the glasses, racked with the ache of seeing his father and of imagining his ragged lonely voice whispering "Goodbye" over and over in that dark, faraway room. Ethan put the dark glasses away.
Mooseknuckle John seemed to be waiting for some kind of signal to begin. Ethan, swallowing hard, pounded his right hand into his mitt, and finally, slowly, nodded. The giant nodded back. Then, tossing his great shaggy blond head, he staggered backward, with a crazy style that reminded Ethan somehow of Albert Rideout. Furiously he cranked his windmill arms. Then there was a sizzling sound, like cold water dashed onto a hot skillet, and then Ethan's left hand seemed to explode. He could feel it taking leave of his wrist. His palm collapsed in on itself, his fingers flew off and shot out in all directions, and the old leather mitt itself caught fire and flared up in a sudden blaze that stank of burning hair. The pain shot up his arm, jagged as lightning, to his shoulder, where it forked and shot down along his rib cage, shattering each rib like an icicle, and straight up to the top of his skull, which cracked in several places and dropped in steaming pieces to the ground at his feet.
A thousand years later, lying at the bottom of a deep dark well of pain, Ethan seemed to hear the tiny voice of Jennifer T. Rideout, someone he vaguely recalled having once known, back in the days when his body still included a functioning head.
"Way to go, Feld!" she said inexplicably.
Ethan opened his eyes. All of his body parts seemed somehow to have reattached themselves, and the tide of pain was subsiding. He turned the mitt and peered into the webbing. There, hissing like a fresh-fallen asteroid, lay the ball.
"I caught it," he said to himself and his friends and everyone in the Lodge of Worlds.
Cinqu
efoil pointed to the ball that Ethan held up to the clouds.
"See that, ya great pale pile!" he squeaked across the infield to Mooseknuckle John.
The giant ignored him; Ethan tossed the ball back, a little wide, pulling the giant off the mound.
"Just do what ya did again," Cinquefoil advised, stepping away from the plate, and Thor and Jennifer T. both chimed in with the same sentiment, as if that would be the easiest thing in the world. Only Ethan knew how close he had just come to shattering like a boy made of ice under the impact of the pitch. He didn't know if he could stand a second one, let alone a third. Though having your body explode all at once was slightly preferable, if you had to choose, to having your vital juices sucked out of your head.
A little more shakily, he settled down into the rocking, alert crouch prescribed by the great Peavine in his book. The palm of his left hand was still throbbing. Again Mooseknuckle John hesitated before going into his windup, studying Ethan across the distance that separated them as if for some information that might help him to drill a deeper, cleaner hole in his hand. Again, less steadily this time, Ethan nodded, and again Mooseknuckle John reared back, tumbling backward on one leg as if about to fall over, then lurched forward, landing on his front foot with a thunderous whomp.
This time the sound was like a basket of frozen potatoes being lowered into bubbling hot fat, and then the next instant every single molecule in Ethan's body began to vibrate furiously, as if he were a bell that had just been struck, and his poor left arm was the clapper. The molecules vibrated so swiftly that they finally vanished with a hiss of steam, and in their place, where once there had been a boy named Ethan Feld, there was only a shimmering red cloud of pure, screaming pain.
For some reason this horrible transformation seemed to please a number of disembodied entities in the immediate vicinity of the cloud of pain.
"Yes!"
Gradually the cloud condensed, the vibrations slowed, and like a tuning fork falling silent the blur of pain was stilled. Ethan opened his eyes. There in the mitt lay the second of the giant's fastballs.
"One more," Cinquefoil said. His manner was less exuberant this time. He seemed to be able to tell how close to failure Ethan had just come. "One more and it's on our way to yer father."
"I can't do it," Ethan said. "Chief, there's just no way. That giant is throwing some serious cheese."
"Ya can do it," Cinquefoil said. "And ya will do it."
"I can do it," Ethan said, and it sounded as hollow as a lie can possibly sound.
This time the pain lingered, growing deeper and angrier. His left hand seemed to be buzzing, loud enough for him to hear it. And, staring out across the green distance at the giant, Ethan knew in his heart that he would never, not in a million years, be able to catch another of Mooseknuckle John's fastballs. What would he do? He fished How to Catch Lightning and Smoke out of his sweatshirt pocket and desperately paged through it, hoping his eye would light on some secret technique for catching the pitches of giants. But of course Peavine had never caught a giant's pitches, only those of his own ferisher teammates, swollen by magic, like himself, to six hundred times normal size. How wrong the Sasquatch had been—catching a giant was different from catching ordinary pitches. What had she said? You just put down the sign and call for the pitch. That was laughable. How could he think—but this was odd. Just as he recalled the advice of Taffy the Sasquatch, his scrabbling fingers happened to turn to a page in How to Catch Lightning and Smoke that diagrammed the various finger-signs that a catcher could use to call for a particular pitch from his pitcher.
Ethan squinted, and blinked, and squinted some more.
"Time out!" he cried. The giant nodded.
Ethan stepped back from the plate and studied the diagram. There was one finger for the fastball, two for the breaking ball, and three for the change-up, a pitch that looked just like a fastball coming out of the pitcher's hand, but which traveled far more slowly, fooling the batter into swinging at it too soon.
"Remember," wrote Peavine,
the pitch is the pigment, the pitching arm the brush, and the pitcher himself is the mind and hand of the artist, directing the movements of paintbrush and color; but you, the catcher, are the artist's eye that clearly sees what must be painted. You are in charge of the pitching game; you call for the pitch. Do not be swayed by the passions of your battery-mate, in particular if he is a fireballer; above all, don't let that rascal shake you off.
"Thanks, Peavine," Ethan said.
"What are you going to do?" Jennifer T. called up to him.
"I'm going to call for the change-up," Ethan said.
He took his position once more, squatting on his haunches. Mooseknuckle John climbed up onto the hill again and looked in at Ethan, as he had twice before without Ethan's understanding why. This time, however, instead of merely nodding, Ethan held out the first three fingers of his right hand, pointed them at the ground, and waggled them back and forth.
Mooseknuckle John stood perfectly still. His mouth hung open as if he couldn't believe what he was seeing. Then he smiled a sour smile and gave his great head a firm shake. He started to rear back. Ethan jammed his fingers downward, stabbing again and again at the air with them. The giant stopped again, and again shook off the sign. He wanted to throw a fastball; the potatoes and the parsnips were waiting. Ethan held his breath, and flexed his hand a few times, and then put down the sign for the change-up one more time.
"Don't you shake me off," he called out to Mooseknuckle John, and his voice sounded surprisingly large and authoritative. "What are you, a rookie?"
The giant started to say something. Then he closed his mouth and reared back one last time. His arm swung out from his side and his hand turned over and the ball came tumbling and screaming across the sky toward Ethan's mitt. It landed with a sharp meaty crack, and Ethan clapped his bare hand around it; Mooseknuckle John had thrown the change-up.
"It worked," Ethan said, once he had stepped off the field again and the grammer had drained him like sand from the top of an hourglass, down to his usual size. "He didn't shake me off."
"He couldn't," said Cinquefoil. He took Peavine's book, opened to the page on pitch calling, and pointed with a finger at the bottom of the page.
There was a footnote to the passage that Ethan had been reading. It said:
*N.B. In the Middling these ancient Signs have not the eldritch power that they once possessed.
"It's powerful stuff," he said. "Putting down the Signs."
THE TANTRUMS OF GIANTS, ARE, OF COURSE, QUITE LITERALLY THE stuff of legend. How many of the world's volcanoes, maelstroms, and boiling geysers, how many of its hurricane winds and earthquakes, have been attributed to the ill-tempered fumings and poor sportsmanship of giants! In the days before the giant-killers flourished, when the waycrosses of the Middling were thick with Homo giganticus, terrible and sad were the lengths to which humans would go to appease the wrath of a massive, hungry neighbor in the hills. Their fattest calves, their juiciest hogs, even, as you must know, their own sons and daughters, were offered up to still the eruptions and blusterings of a giant in the grip of a rage. When Mooseknuckle John realized that some scrap of a little reuben he-puppy had somehow managed not only to hold on to a pair of his nastiest fastballs, but then, at the last moment, to work the powerful magic of the Signs on him, obliging him to bring to the plate only a skiddering slow change-up, he was, to say the least, exceedingly irritated.
First he stood, with a foot on either side of the mound, knees bent, arms flung out to either side of him, fists raised to the sky. He threw back his head, opened his throat, and roared. It was not the roar of a lion or a bear, but a horribly human-sounding roar, at once low and screeching. It was so loud that it made the air over his head tremble in a high, shivering blue column, and shook the needles from the trees, and opened several long jagged cracks in the stone walls of his lodge. The wind from his lungs set Skid's envelope trembling and shuddering like a sail. Then, as th
e children and the ferisher threw themselves to the frozen ground and covered their ears, the giant left off roaring and began to leap and caper about the field, cursing and stomping, kicking up great clots of dust and turf. In the process he injured several toes, which only made him angrier. At last he flung himself headlong across the outfield on his belly, and began like an enormous toddler to kick and beat with his fists. The ground shook as if it were about to split open. The children were thrown against one another; a portion of the lodge fell in with a sound like a crate full of bottles rolling down iron stairs.
He sputtered and raged; he snorted and choked on his own saliva. He threatened punishments and uttered oaths so heinous and foul that even to summarize them here in the mildest of terms would curl the very pages of the book you are holding and make your hands and fingertips hum as if they were swarming with bees. But there was nothing that Mooseknuckle John could say, no curse he could utter or horrible punishment impose, because he and Ethan had struck a bargain, and in the two remaining eldritch worlds, as here in the Middling once upon a time, the stuff of a sworn bargain is a metal less yielding than iron. He was bound, in the end, to send the party on its way, and to give them, what was more, a helpful shove in the right direction.
And in the end, as is so often the case with tantrums, this one ended up costing the giant even more than he had originally bargained to lose. For while Ethan and Thor rode out the ranting winds and trembling earth of the gigantic fit huddled, terrified, under the behemoth-bone planks of the bleachers, Jennifer T. struck out across the grass toward the giant's lodge. She was intent on freeing herself from a hard ball of pity that had lodged in her chest and would not go away.