Catch and throw. Catch and throw.
“That’s a strong arm you’ve got, Samuel.” He is not given to praise. The warmth of his words makes me feel tall and powerful.
“Like Christy Mathewsons?”
“Could be.”
Grandma has kept the food warm. “Only damn fools stay out tossing a ball after dark,” she informs us. During supper she looks at me with mock sternness. But I detect a glint of something else in her eye as she asks, “Why are you grinning like that?”
That must have been one of the times when Andy claimed I laughed out loud in my sleep.
In my dreams Grandpa read aloud to me again. It could have been any of the nights I was growing up. His voice nasal but firm, his horn-rimmed bifocals in place, reading from Huckleberry Finn or A Connecticut Yankee or Life on the Mississippi—always Mark Twain, his favorite. By the age of ten my mind was filled with jumping frogs and buried treasure and riverboats. By the time I reached high school Grandpa had read nearly all of Twain’s works to me. And by then I’d decided I wanted to be the kind of journalist Twain had been. I’d travel about, composing humorous accounts and satirical sketches that flowed marvelously from my own experience. In the process, of course, becoming wise, rich, and beloved.
It hadn’t worked out that way. In J school, at Berkeley, my thesis on Twain’s formative years as a reporter won honors. Then I hit the real world and in the next decade encountered precious little in the way of Twainesque romance or riches. I became a second-banana reporter for the Chronicle, a major daily newspaper. And there I remained, stuck on an unwanted crime-and-disaster beat. Juicy features went to others while I punched out depressing police-blotter stuff on the green-glowing terminal I detested. The rewrite people duly snuffed individual style—not that I showed a hell of a lot. I was scooped routinely by electronic media. Worst of all, reporters with less experience were promoted over me. I couldn’t see that they possessed superior talent. It all hurt. The dream faded.
None of which was Grandpa’s fault. Never one to go halfway in important matters, he’d even given me Twain’s name. Born James Fowler, Jr., I became Samuel Clemens Fowler on my first birthday. Grandpa made the change some six months after my mother, his daughter, was killed, her car demolished by that of a drunk GI just home from Korea.
My father disappeared with the insurance settlement. He never returned. For the next twenty years—the rest of their lives—my grandparents acted as if he hadn’t existed. Grandpa had always wanted a boy to raise. And to name for Twain. When I entered college he offered me the chance to change it back.
I hadn’t wanted to.
Something was shaking me. I opened my eyes. “Wake up, Sam.” Through a blur I saw somebody with red hair smiling at me. “You’re makin’ pretty good chin music.”
Chin music? I lay in a soft bed, gray light streaming around me. Slowly, picking through jumbled images, I raised my head. “You’re Andy, right?”
He grinned. “Big as life and twice as natural.”
“Where are we?”
“Rochester.”
“Rochester?” I sat up groggily, trying to focus. Grandma and Grandpa had been alive again. It was hard to let that go. “Not Cleveland?”
“We played there,” Andy said. “Warmed the Forest Citys.”
“Yeah?” Who or what was that?
“Then we went to Buffalo and whipped the Niagras,” he said. “You slept the whole time.”
Buffalo, I thought, where Twain had set up housekeeping after his marriage. . . .
Andy was watching me. “Everything hunky?”
I pushed back flannel sheets and swung my legs out. My headache was gone, but I felt badly out of sync, weighed down by a fuzzy sensation. It was something like jet lag. But worse.
I looked around. Nearby stood a tall maple wardrobe and a dressing table with a constellation of mirrors. Across the room was a cathedral-shaped cabinet holding an assortment of doors and drawers. Beside it perched a brass spittoon.
“This a hotel?”
Andy nodded. “Congress House, next to the depot. We pulled in last night about nine.”
“Where’s the bathroom?” I descended to the floor. My balance seemed okay. “Gotta piss six quarts.”
“Which d’you want first?” he asked, grinning. “We can bring you a tub—or maybe they got a special room like the highfalutin places—but you ain’t fixin’ to pee in your bathwater, are you?”
I felt like a tourist. “Where’s the John?”
“The joe?” He laughed and produced a chamber pot from the large cabinet. “Ain’t no commodes in Frisco?”
I used the pot self-consciously. “Andy, what year did you say this is?”
“Eighteen sixty-nine.”
Twain was alive, I thought.
“What’s the matter with you, Sam? What year you think? You gone and done a Rip van Winkle?” He laughed hugely, enjoying himself. “Slept through whole years—like you slept through days and nights lately?”
I couldn’t help smiling. “Guess I’m a little mixed up.”
“Maybe you got amnesia. I’ve heard as how folks bump their beans and lose track of their past.” He looked at me challengingly. “Can you recite yours?”
I considered it—and saw no end of complications. “It doesn’t really seem . . . connected to me now.”
His face sobered. “Why, I believe that’s a prime sign!”
“Anyway, thanks for taking care of me.”
“You saved my job,” he said emphatically. “Acey’s a veteran and Harry needs him, but Harry thought I was too small; I’m only on the nine ’cause Sweaze wouldn’t sign without me—see, we’ve played together since we were kids in Newark. If Champion’d wanted to teach a lesson by letting one of us go, I’d surely be that one.” He took my hand and shook it warmly. “You made yourself a true pal, Sam.”
There was no hint of self-consciousness in his smile
