“HENCEFORWARD,” the lummox intoned, “we shall be conducting business quite differently.”
Standing in front of the new owner’s desk, with the Curse of the Bambino perched on the shoulder of his Red Sox warm-up jacket, Spence tried to recall whether he had ever heard anyone say “henceforward” before. He didn’t think so.
Maynard Flynn Junior looked past the manager and his macaw and out his office window, down on the ball diamond below. What was it that writer had called it? “A lyric little bandbox of a ball park.” The lummox smiled slightly, thinking, Not for much longer.
Spence sighed. Already, with spring training still months away, the lummox had let Boston’s four-time Cy Young Award-winning free-agent pitcher slip through his fingers. He’d sold the Sox’s twenty-game-winning sinkerball pitcher to Baltimore and traded their American League MVP left-fielder and beloved shortstop to Los Angeles for two utility players and an undisclosed but undoubtedly colossal amount of cash. The only reason the big lummox had not been able to dump Spence’s five-time All-Star catcher, Sally Salvadore, was that his contract still had a year to run. But he’d more than made up for that unfortunate constraint by doubling the price of every seat at Fenway Park, whose ticket prices already, under the old man’s tenure, had been jacked up to half again the amount at any other ball park in the majors.
In fact, Spence believed that the reason he had been summoned to this audience with Maynard Flynn Junior was to be fired, for good this time. He’d told the macaw as much just before they went up to the skybox office. What’s more, with the dispersing of the great team that he and the old man had put together over the years, and along with it Spence’s hopes of ever getting to a Series again, much less winning one, he no longer wanted to do the only thing he’d ever wanted to do all his adult life and had done so well for more than twenty years. He no longer wanted to manage the Boston Red Sox. Or so Spence told himself. After the fly ball that should have brought the championship to Boston had gotten into the sun and smacked his outfielder in the forehead—there had been talk in the front office of trying to hook up the player with the government witness-protection program to keep the more extremist members of the Red Sox Nation from lynching him—Spence’s heart had pretty much gone out of the game.
Spence regarded the lummox. He was a good-size boy, give him that—six one, six one and a half maybe—with limp blond hair and wet-looking, protuberant eyes of a washed-out shade and something of a potbelly, even though Maynard Junior had worked out at a karate club downtown for years, attempting to exorcise the memory of a boyhood trauma.
Spence had been on hand to witness that event. It was young Maynard’s first Little League tryout, to which the old man had literally dragged him over his mama’s shrieking protests. He’d talked Spence into helping coach the kid’s team, to give the lummox an advantage. At eight he was not really a lummox, just a scared little boy who at the tryout actually soiled himself out of stark fear of the ball. Worse, the old man had made him stay on and complete the practice. It was the one thing Maynard Senior had done that Spence deemed utterly unforgivable. In the manager’s opinion, it accounted for much of the boy’s subsequent behavior, including his recent decision to eviscerate the superb team his father had left him.
“Time to go fishing, Curse,” Spence had said to the macaw just before entering the lummox’s office. He was looking forward to it.
As the new owner smirked out at him from behind his departed father’s huge desk, Spence remembered how the old man had sat there and pounded his fist on the green felt blotter and gone up one side of him and down the other and damned the Red Sox and the fans and the umpires and other owners, and he thought what a sad spectacle his out-of-place son, the professional graduate student of literature, made behind that same desk. Spence looked down at the canvas-covered playing field. A dusting of new snow lay on the tarp, and little white drifts had whisked up against the many odd nooks and crannies around the field. Spence remembered how Maynard Senior had loved to introduce his many threats with the phrase “By the time the snow flies in Beantown.”
“By the time the snow flies in Beantown, Spence, you’ll be history. I guarantee it.”
Spence missed the old man.
The lummox put the tips of his fingers together like a church steeple. Spence suspected that much as he wanted to say “You’re fired,” he didn’t have the guts. He was actually squirming in his chair. Spence was afraid that the boy might go in his pants again. Suddenly the winningest active manager in baseball realized that the final indignity of his big-league career might well be having to broach the subject of his own dismissal because the lummox didn’t have the sand to do it.
“Look here,” Spence said. “You want to give me the boot, go ahead. It won’t hurt my feelings none. It won’t be the first time I’ve been sent down the line.”
The lummox reached for his hand-strengthening flexer, which he began to work quite sadistically. He said, “I am not, as you so elegantly put it, going to send you down the line. I want you to be around this coming season to see what happens.”
Spence wondered what more could happen now that half of his team had been sold off or all but given away.
“Or, more precisely, what doesn't happen,” the lummox said. “First, you will have a new general manager. I fired Henry earlier today.”
Spence was speechless. Henry O’Leary was perhaps the finest general manager and front-office man in baseballdom. Also a longtime drinking bud of Spence’s and the old man’s.
“But I have an able replacement waiting in the wings,” Maynard said, squeezing the very daylights out of the flexer.
“Who’s that?”
“Moi,” the boy said, standing up and coming around the desk and punching Spence in the arm with the knuckles of his index and middle finger. “Maynard Flynn II. New owner and general manager of the Boston Red Sox.”