As his dreaming dog of a dad slept in, Ted walked alone down to the gray panthers at Benny’s kiosk. He had an idea. He had a vague shadow of a plan. He would try to keep his promise. As he left home, he picked up the delivered New York Times and turned to the sports pages to see if the Sox had lost. They had. He carried the paper with him, and when he got near the old men, he tossed it in the trash. Here came the first of the gray wave, Tango Sam. “Ted, you look tremendous, so handsome, do you feel handsome? You must feel handsome. Loan me fifty.”
Ted saw the top of Benny’s head move just above the stacked papers. “Where’s Marty?”
“Sox lost,” Ivan said.
“QED.”
“Ipse hoc propter hoc.”
“Sine qua non.”
“Not really. That’s inaccurate.”
“You’re inaccurate.”
“Guys! Guys, listen, guys, I was thinking about the whole Sox thing, how a loss takes it out of him.”
“This is what we’re debating.”
“There is no debate.”
“Right, right,” Ted cut off this next riff. “So I was thinking, why do the Sox ever have to lose?”
“’Cause they suck and they’re from Boston, that’s why.”
“’Cause they call a hero a submarine, and a liquor store a Packy.”
“Boston is not a hub.”
“’Cause it’s the way of the world.”
“It is the Way, the Tao.”
“What Papa Hemingway calls a ‘good thing.’”
“What the gods want.”
“What God wants.”
“Fuckin’ monotheist.”
“Fuckin’ polytheist.”
“No, I’m a Hindjew.”
“Gentlemen, please let me explain.” Ted finally saw a rare spot of dead air in which to jump. “Benny, you got any back issues?”
“Some, sure.”
“He’s half a hoarder, Benny is.”
“It’s a sickness.”
“A psychological malady.”
“Something happened in Benny’s toilet training.”
“What didn’t happen in Benny’s toilet training?”
Ted jumped in again. “If you can find box scores from when the Sox won or the Yankees lost and pull those pages, the double pages, on days when the Sox actually do lose, we can replace those reports with the bogus, old wins that we stash away now.”
The old men fell silent. A first. Tango Sam broke the silence. “You mean you want us to lie?”
“Well, not lie exactly. Well, yes, lie. Lie for the better good.”
“We did it once as an experiment, but to make it a way of life, a modus operandi, is another matter.”
“What would Immanuel Kant do?”
“Probably tell you to suck his German schmeckel.”
“I couldn’t. ‘I Kant, Immanuel,’ I would say.”
“Rollo May, though.”
“What about the television?”
“The boob tube.”
“The television caveat.”
Ted was prepared for the television caveat. “Have you seen those VCRs?” The old men murmured words like video and Casio and RCA, getting anything technological after 1950 about 80 percent wrong. Ted continued, “They use them to tape games, then go over games with players, to see if they can see anything, a tendency, or whatever. They have, like, five VCRs at the stadium and I took one, I doubt they’ll notice, along with a bunch of tapes that I can slip in when Boston is losing or the Yankees are winning. I have, like, ten tapes of Sox wins from this year. A couple of them beating the Yankees.”
They fell unnaturally silent, the hive mind buzzing.
“I know it sounds crazy, but it breaks my heart to see him every time the Sox lose.”
Ivan spoke first: “I’m appalled at your mendacity, but moved by your empathy.”
“It seems doomed to failure.”
“Like Carter’s whole administration.”
“Naysayer.”
“Republican.”
“Pansy.”
“Ted is in the lead. Ted has the reins.”
The hive went quiet again. A silent vote was being held among them. Tango Sam did a two-step. Schtikker spoke for the hive: “It seems, young Theodore, that we are in like the proverbial Flynn.”