“I EVER TELL YOU folks about my all-time favorite baseball con?” Stan was saying. “When I con old George Steinbrenner out of his lemonzene?”
It was early in the evening. E.A. would be leaving for Boston the next morning, and Stan and Louisianne were departing that night in Stan’s old pink limousine for a fair in upstate New York. The Paiges and Gypsy and Teddy and Gran and Bill and E.A. were gathered around Gran’s kitchen table for a celebratory dinner of out-of-season venison and trout, woodchuck, Bill’s dandelion wine, and a store-bought white cake on which Gypsy had inscribed, with chocolate frosting:
Congrats to Ethan Allen,
a Member of the Boston Red Sox
“If it hadn’t been for Steinbrenner,” Gran said, “Bucky Dent never would have put on pinstripes, and I’d be going dancing tonight instead of confined to a wheelchair.”
Gypsy cut her eyes at E.A. and he grinned.
“Steinbrenner a bad one, all right,” Stan agreed. “Mr. Moneybags. What wrong with baseball today, you ast me. For years it be my dream to con that man. Finally it come to me how.
“It spring training, back seven, eight years ago. Every morning, old George come to the ball park in a long, black lemonzene. That automobile most as long as a city block. You want the truth, I had my eye on it for a long while. So I go down by the entrance of the park with a big old valise in my hand, got the word dirt wrote on it in red letters. And when George go by I hold up that valise, make sure he get a good look at it. About the third morning, that lemonzene stop. Driver says, ‘What you got in the suitcase, brother?’ I say, ‘Dirt.’ ‘Dirt?’ ‘That right. Dirt on all the big players on Mr. Steinbrenner team, the World Champion New York Yankees.’
“‘Mr. Steinbrenner ain’t interested,’ the driver say and pull through the gate. But ten, fifteen minutes later he come back and ast to see inside that valise. I open it up a crack, pull out a file on the New York manager, all full of made-up lies. ‘Got one on every player,’ I say, and stick the file back in the grip. ‘How much you want for this stuff?’ the driver say. I say, ‘Man, I don’t sell, but this what I tell, don’t fret, ’cause I want to bet.’ ‘What that jive suppose to mean?’ ‘Mean this,’ I say. ‘Mean I bet Mr. Steinbrenner all the dirt in this little traveling bag ‘gainst his nice black lemonzene I can strike out the three top hitters in they Yankee lineup.’
“Well, sir,” Stan continued, “that big old bodyguard driver start to laugh. Then he tell me Mr. Steinbrenner don’t never bet or gamble. So I say fine and get ready to go ’bout my business, me. But the driver call out, hey, he might bet me, gentleman agreement, if Mr. S authorize him. He tell me come back with the suitcase next morning, seven sharp. Before any fans or press get there.”
Stan took a big bite of the store-bought cake. Louisianne was tossing a baseball from hand to hand. Abruptly the ball vanished and she looked at her father, waiting for him to tell the rest. Teddy had been staring out the window at Devil Dan, who was surveying his property line where it cut close to Gran’s barn. Now he, too, shifted his gaze to Stan. Everyone, even Bill, was listening.
“So what happened?” E.A. said.
“Well, next morning I show up, go out on the mound with no warm-up. Slam bam, thank you, Stan—three Yankees up, three Yankees down. Nine pitches, nine strikes. Old George, he so disgusted he throw the lemonzene keys at my head and away I go.”
“Wow!” Gypsy said. “That’s the con of all cons.”
“He furious at his players for striking out,” Stan chortled. “Fine them a thousand apiece. Me, I have the lemon painted pink, and there it sits.” Stan gestured with his fork at the battered, cotton-candy-colored limo in Gran’s dooryard. It was hitched to a silver camper trailer with CAJUN STAN THE BASEBALL MAN painted on the side in rainbow colors, both camper and limo displaying Louisiana plates.
“That the best con of my life,” Stan said. “Worth going to prison for all them other cons.”
“No,” Teddy said, watching Dan fold up his transit in the dusk.
“No?”
“No,” Teddy said. “Nothing’s worth that.”
Teddy looked at Gypsy. Then he did something E.A. had never heard him do before. He spoke directly to her, by name. “Is it, Gypsy?”
Gypsy shrugged. “I wouldn’t know,” she said, and hurriedly got up and began to clear the table. If E.A. hadn’t known her better, he’d have sworn she was fighting off tears.
In the awkward silence that followed, Gran wheeled herself back into her bedroom off the kitchen and Bill went out to his trailer behind the barn. Then Stan said, “Louisianne and I going to get over to that New York State fair, con some would-be baseball players out of they money, we gots to get a move on it. You ready, girl?”
Louisianne nodded. Two minutes later they were gone, having departed almost as suddenly and unaccountably as they had appeared.
Gran’s place felt lonely after the Paiges pulled out of the dooryard, the single red taillight on Stan’s camper winking out of sight as they passed Devil Dan’s and turned toward the railroad crossing. Standing with his father on the stoop in the mountain twilight, E.A. missed them sharply, especially Louisianne.
Teddy lit a cigarette. Then he turned to E.A. “All right, Ethan.”
“All right what?”
“It’s time.”
“To leave for Boston? I thought we were going in the morning.”
“We are.”
Teddy took a drag on his Lucky. “Tell your ma I need to make a call from her phone, will you?” he said. “It’s time to settle up with old Davis.”
Teddy and E.A. entered Dan’s machinery shed, E.A. holding Gypsy’s Battery Beam. Five minutes earlier, Devil Dan and R.P. had left the junkyard towing Dan’s huge Bucyrus Erie crane on a flatbed. They had just received an urgent call from the Memphremagog state police barracks dispatcher (as the caller identified himself), telling Dan there had been a wreck on I-91 just south of the Canadian border. Two cars had plunged over a one-hundred-foot bank into the Kingdom River, the dispatcher said, and Dan and his Hook had to get there “immediately if not sooner.”
The Blade loomed up in E.A.’s deer-jacking light. It was even bigger than he’d thought. Teddy climbed up into the cab and did something under the dash. Suddenly the engine began to rumble.
Ethan bounded up the steps and stood next to Teddy, in the leather driver’s seat behind the controls. As Teddy eased the Blade out of the shed, E.A. was amazed by how high off the ground they were. The engine throbbed the way airplane engines in the movies do. The cab smelled like the inside of a brand-new car, like the deputy’s new truck when he picked up E.A. and Gypsy to interrogate them. It smelled like the leather of a baseball glove and the Windex Gran made Gypsy use on the kitchen windows so she could spy on E.A. working out at Fenway.
E.A. and Teddy started along the Canada Post Road, the headlights of the earthmover illuminating a wide swatch of forest as they headed up Allen Mountain. They passed Gran’s maple sugar orchard, passed the lane leading to E.A. and Gypsy’s special place and the fork to Warden’s Bog. Wild Woodsflower Gulf fell away to their right. Then they were on top of the mountain, parked beside Long Tom.
It was a warm night, the moon full and bright. Far below, Lake Memphremagog shimmered in the moonglow, which reflected off the cliffs above the water. Except for the light of a single motorboat two or three miles to the north, Memphremagog seemed as empty as it had been that day in 1770 when the Colonel first laid eyes on it and claimed every last drop of water, including the four-fifths of the lake that lay in Canada, for the Republic of Vermont.
“Hop out,” Teddy said. “I’ll be with you directly.”
Ethan got down, and the Blade began moving along the concrete base of Long Tom.
“Teddy!” E.A. yelled. But his father was already emerging from the cab, jumping lightly onto the ground as the sixty-ton dozer unhurriedly nosed over the edge of the cliff. A third of the way down, it bounced blade-first off the face of the escarpment. Halfway to the lake it crashed into a projecting ledge. The cab sheared off and continued to fall separately, like a detached space capsule. The dozer hit the face of the cliff once more, dislodging a thunderous avalanche of boulders. Then it struck the surface of the lake, sending a geyser fifty feet high and disappearing into three hundred feet of dark and icy water.