I know that maybe you can’t see that right now but they will.”
He considered telling her that he was already all right but only said, “Thank you,” and then slipped the document back into its envelope and took it to the Duboises’. When Rhonda answered his knock, he handed it to her. “This is for Renee,” he said, and left so that she wouldn’t think it was something he needed to talk about. Which it wasn’t.
The team kept winning after they went on the road—their longest trip of the season, seventeen days in Illinois and up into Wisconsin. It was fortunate that they were leaving town when they did, since the rains came back to Perabo City the day they departed, a hard storm that began as large, spare drops plopping against the windows of the bus as it pulled out of the lot and then buffeted the bus as it picked up speed on Highway 17. It followed them nearly all the way to Peoria, the sun appearing only half an hour before they pulled into the lot at the Bradley Inn near the university where the minor league team played its games.
After weeks of dressing in the dark and mildew-stinking locker room at the shuttered high school, the visitors’ clubhouse at Bradley was something to behold: recently painted, brightly lit, carpeted, the lockers wide and with wooden doors that the maintenance staff had recently refinished, the wood gleaming.
“Shit,” said Vila. “Did we die on the way here and end up in heaven?”
Glen Perkins lay on the carpet in the middle of the room and swept his arms and legs over it as if he were making a snow angel, sighing, “Ahhhh.” When he stood, there was indeed the faint outline of a winged, robed figure in the carpet pile.
“I have a good feeling about the game today,” Rausch said, pointing to the image. For the entire three days they were in Peoria, they trod around it so that, by the time they left—a three-game sweep, including another complete-game shutout by Sandford, number fifteen for him—the faint image was still there. After they had all showered following that last game, Mraz stepped onto the edge of the image.
“What are you doin’, man?” Vila shouted, yanking him away.
“Just didn’t want the mojo left for the next team,” Mraz said.
“Man,” Vila said, “you call down the sacred, you don’t send it back. You better light a candle or something when we get to Rockford or we don’t know what’ll happen.”
“I ain’t Catholic,” Mraz said.
“It don’t matter,” Vila said.
Then, as the bus cruised into Rockford, and they passed a Catholic church—Our Redeemer—Mraz yelled out, “Bussy. Bussy. You gotta stop.”
The bus driver caught Edward Everett’s eye in the rearview mirror and he gave him a nod. The driver pulled to the curb and Mraz hopped off. The first door he tried at the church was locked but the second was open. He was back out in five minutes. “I lit two, man,” he said. “Just to be on the safe side.”
In Rockford, they dropped the first game, four–three. If Edward Everett were more superstitious, he would have said that Mraz should have lit five candles. Even the numbers Edward Everett entered into his game log revealed that: five times at bat for Mraz, no hits, no runs, no RBIs, three strikeouts, two errors. Twice, Mraz had come to bat with a runner on third and fewer than two outs, and twice he struck out, the second time watching a flat fastball cross the middle of the plate. “I froze,” he said when he slumped back to the dugout. “I was thinking, ‘Swing,’ but I couldn’t.” Sitting beside him, Tanner made a show of moving away from him on the bench. But the team was loose: everyone laughed and the next day Mraz batted in the seventh with runners on second and third, the team down three–one, and laced a triple in the alley, two runs scoring to tie the game, and then came in with what proved to be the winning run on a passed ball, setting up a rubber game the next day, which the team won eight–four, Sandford starting and good enough to get through seven, his sixteenth win against three losses.
Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, was pleased: “Effective management of Sandford,” he wrote in an email. “Likelihood he reach 20 W? Sent from my BlackBerry.” 20 W. Twenty wins; the notion had never occurred to Edward Everett. How many years had