That night The Doo and the kid went out to celebrate Dusen’s one hundred and ninety-eighth win. When I saw our newest chick the next day, he was very badly hungover, but he bore that as calmly as he bore having Dave Sisler chuck at his head. I was starting to think we had a real big leaguer on our hands, and wouldn’t be needing Hubie Rattner after all. Or anybody else.
“You and Danny are getting pretty tight, I guess,” I says.
“Tight,” he agrees, rubbing his temples. “Me and The Doo are tight. He says Billy’s his good luck charm.”
“Does he, now?”
“Yuh. He says if we stick together, he’ll win twenty-five and they’ll have to give him the Cy Young.”
“That right?”
“Yessir, that’s right. Granny?”
“What?”
He was giving me that wide blue stare of his: twenty-twenty vision that saw everything and understood practically nothing. By then I knew he could hardly read, and the only movie he’d ever seen was Bambi. He said he went with the other kids from Ottershow or Outershow-whatever-and I assumed it was his school. I was both right and wrong about that, but it ain’t really the point. The point is that he knew how to play baseball-instinctively, I’d say-but otherwise he was a blackboard with nothing written on it.
“What’s a Cy Young?”
That’s how he was, you see.
We went over to Baltimore for three before going back home. Typical spring baseball in that town, which isn’t quite south or north; cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey the first day, hotter than hell the second, a fine drizzle like liquid ice the third.