Early the next morning, one day to go before the All-Star Game, the team met again at Rambletown Field. In place of bats and gloves, we packed rakes, shovels, hammers, and nails. Gabby showed up too, her camera, as always, at the ready.
Skip Lou met us with a smile. As he had the day before, he carried buckets—two of them this time. We wouldn’t be using them for target practice. They were full of green paint.
Mr. Bones gave them a quick sniff, then tore across the outfield and through the opening where the wall had collapsed, making a bee-line straight for the locust trees.
“Stay out of trouble!” I called after him.
“Guys,” said Skip Lou, “let’s make this place shine!”
He divided us into crews and handed out assignments: one team to raise and paint the wall, another to rake smooth the bare dirt of our once lush field.
Stump, Slingshot, Velcro, the Glove, and I grabbed rakes and got to work breaking up clods of dirt and removing knotted clumps of roots and other bits of vegetation left behind by the grasshoppers. The guys avoided eye contact with Stump. I waited for him to turn his back for a second, then shot a quick glance at Slingshot. He nodded.
Excellent!
The little arts and crafts project at his house had gone off without a hitch the night before. With Stump nearby, we dared not discuss our secret.
Soon a steady chorus of hammer blows provided a rhythmic beat to our work, and we found ourselves in a race with the wall builders to see who would finish first. The guys in the outfield might have won, except we had a secret weapon: Stump. Say what you will about the yips, Stump’s flapping elbow served him as well at yard work as it had at kite fighting. He pumped like a piston, driving his rake across the dirt with short, powerful chops.
Following Stump’s lead, we made quick work of the dusty job. First the outfield, then the foul territories, finally the infield. Just as we finished, the hammering stopped and a cheer rose from right and center field: the wall was back in place.
Only one question remained: now what?
I mean, what good was a new wall when all it enclosed was a dirt patch? A neatly raked and leveled dirt patch, for sure, but dirt all the same. Fit for beach volleyball maybe, but not baseball. You can’t play baseball without a green carpet underfoot. And grass doesn’t grow in a day.
My eyes darted to Skip’s paint buckets. Surely he didn’t mean to paint the field?!
As I contemplated the possibility, a Rambletown Fire Department tanker, lights flashing, wheeled onto the diamond at the head of a convoy of flatbed trucks. The vehicles swept past us and stopped near second base. A guy wearing an orange safety vest hopped down from the leading flatbed. Like the other trucks, it was piled high with what looked like big tubes of dirt.
“What in the world?” I asked nobody in particular. “Dirt we don’t need. Dirt we have in spades.”
The driver met Skip in the first-base coach’s box, and the two men shook hands. I recognized him as the foreman of the tree-clearing crew Skip had spoken to the day before.
“All set?” he asked. Then, nodding in our direction: “Howdy, fellas.”
“I think so,” Skip said. “Really appreciate what you’re doing, Pepper.”
“Not a problem. We’re as excited about the game as anyone. About time this town put on an All-Star Game again!”
Skip nodded and the man he called Pepper strode off toward the trucks.
“Holy cow,” Stump gushed, his eyes wide. “Is that…is it really…”
“Yep,” said Skip. “My old teammate Pepper McGraw. Pretty good shortstop in his day.”
“Only the greatest!” corrected Stump, who knew baseball history like most people know their own names. “No offense, Walloper, but that guy could hit! He once blasted three homers in a single game.”
“Actually, it was four.” Skip smiled. “And as I recall, he did it more than once.”
“He could play defense, too,” Gabby said. “My dad tells me stories about some of the catches he made.” She took a picture of the legendary ballplayer.
“Still loves Rambletown baseball,” Skip said. “He and the boys over at public works have waited a long time for another All-Star Game. They even roped in some buddies at the fire department to make sure it happens. Good bunch of guys.”
We watched as a couple of firefighters screwed a hose to a nozzle embedded in the side of their truck. They cranked a valve, and water instantly gushed from the hose. They began spraying the field.
Gabby fired away.
“Should we tell them it’s not smoke?” asked Ocho, who had drifted in from the outfield with the rest of the team. “It’s only a cloud of dust stirred up by the wind? No fire here. By the way, Walloper, Mr. Bones is totally scoping those grasshoppers. He’s parked under the trees like a guard dog.”
“Turf,” said Skip.
“Turf?” I cried. “You mean that horrible plastic stuff?” I shuddered. I’d almost rather play on a painted field. At least paint wouldn’t give you carpet burns when you slid, the way artificial turf did. “Why do they need water for fake grass?”
“Watch.”
Starting in left field and working toward right, the firefighters hosed down every inch of Rambletown Field. Pepper McGraw and his gang let the water soak in, then sprang into action. Moving like clockwork, they unloaded the flatbed trucks, dropping big dirt bundles every ten feet or so around the field. Then they unrolled the bundles like rugs, revealing the lushest, thickest, greenest strips of grass—real growing grass—I’d ever seen.
“Turf,” repeated Skip, his eyes gleaming. “Honest to goodness, one-hundred-percent natural, field-grown grass. What are you waiting for, guys? Go help lay it. We’ve got a ball field to get ready and an All-Star Game to play!”
We didn’t need to be asked twice.
By lunchtime we had that ball yard looking as good as new. Better, even. The wall stood straight once again and sported a fresh coat of green paint. Springy natural grass blanketed the field, a thousand strips of it fitted seamlessly together like one big jigsaw puzzle.
“Awesome job, guys!” Gabby said. “It looks great.” Suddenly she frowned. “In fact, it looks almost too good. It makes me mad that you have to share it with Flicker Pringle and some of those other Haymakers.” She spit out the team name like it put a bad taste in her mouth.
“It’s the All-Star Game, Gabby,” I said. “For one day, we put aside our rivalry.”
“I know.” She sighed. “I just can’t get used to the idea of you and those guys actually playing on the same team.”
“Don’t worry,” I assured her. “Once the game is over and the regular season starts again, we’ll still want to beat them.”
“You better!” she said.
Before the city crew left, Pepper McGraw shook all our hands and thanked us for helping. When he got to Stump, he drew the shortstop aside and whispered something in his ear.
Stump nodded seriously.
Pepper said something more; then, with a wave, he climbed up into his truck and drove away at the head of a column.
The firefighters stuck around to give the turf a good watering before they, too, called it a day. Two rode in the cab and two more stood on the truck’s gleaming silver back bumper.
“See you in the morning, Rounders!” cried one of the bumper riders as the tanker rolled off the diamond. “We’ll be leading the parade!”
The only thing left to do was lay chalk stripes down the lines, and the field would be perfect.
“We’ll wait until morning for that,” Skip said. “The wind will only carry it away if we do it now.”
“What about the locusts?” I asked, warily eyeing the trees just outside the fence. “How do we keep them off the new field for the next twenty-four hours?”
“As long as the wind keeps blowing out toward center, we don’t have anything to worry about,” Skip answered. “The grasshoppers aren’t strong enough to buck the breeze. They can only go where it carries them, and ever since they rode it here in the first place, it’s been blowing hard to the east.”
I nodded. Made sense. Then I crossed my fingers that the weather wouldn’t pitch a changeup.