As for Amy, it was none of his business now, which meant he shouldn’t have cared about what she was doing or not doing with herself, but Ferguson did care, he could never fully bring himself not to care, and as the months went on, he felt more and more relieved by her decision not to join the Weathermen in Chicago. Their old friends from Columbia had gone insane. The intractable power of the great Oblivious One had thwarted their idealistic impulses and crushed their ability to think rationally anymore, and through a long series of wrong assumptions and wrong conclusions and wrong decisions based on those wrong assumptions and wrong conclusions, they had worked themselves into a corner where they were left with no choice but to believe that an army of one or two hundred middle-class ex-students with no followers and no support anywhere in the country could lead a revolution that would bring down the American government. That government was destroying its young by shipping off the poorest and least educated ones to fight in the war that was supposedly ending but wasn’t ending while the privileged young were destroying themselves. Eight and a half months after Amy walked out of the Chicago convention, her old friend from Columbia SDS, Ted Gold, along with his fellow Weathermen Diana Oughton and Terry Robbins, were blown up and killed in a townhouse on West Eleventh Street in New York when one of them connected the wrong wire to a pipe bomb they were building in the basement. Oughton’s body was so thoroughly obliterated that the sole means of identifying her came from the print on a severed finger found in the rubble. There was nothing left of Robbins. His skin and bones had dematerialized in the fire caused by the detonation of the gas mains, and his death was confirmed only after the Weathermen sent out word that he had been there with the two others.
FERGUSON DROVE UP to Rochester in the old Impala on July first, but his job at the Times-Union wouldn’t be starting until August fourth. Five weeks to acclimate himself to his new surroundings, to hunt for an apartment and transfer his money to a local bank, to hang out with Bobby and Margaret, to wait for his new classification from the draft board, to see Kennedy’s promise fulfilled as he watched a pair of American astronauts walk on the surface of the moon, to carry on with the project he had started in New York of translating the poems of François Villon, and to get New York out of his system. The largest, least expensive apartment he could find was in a run-down neighborhood called South Wedge, a cluster of blocks on the east side of town not far from the Genesee River. McManus’s beloved Mount Hope was just a few steps away, as were the University of Rochester and a large grassy terrain called Highland Park, where the annual lilac festival was held every spring. Prices were low in that part of the world, and for eighty-seven dollars a month he took possession of the entire top floor of a three-story wooden house on Crawford Street. The house itself wasn’t much to look at, with its cracked ceilings and rickety staircase, its overclogged storm gutters and yellow paint peeling on the façade, but Ferguson had three furnished rooms and a kitchen all to himself, and the light that poured through the windows in the afternoon was so much better for his mental health than the darkness of West 107th Street that he was willing to overlook the house’s flaws. The owners lived in the apartment on the ground floor, and even though Mr. and Mrs. Crowley’s weakness for vodka often led them to bicker at night, they were never less than cordial with Ferguson, which was also true of Mrs. Crowley’s unmarried younger brother, Charlie Vincent, the World War II vet who occupied the middle apartment and lived on monthly disability payments, an agreeable sort who seemed to do little else but smoke, cough, and watch television, along with suffering through an occasional bad night when he would call out in his sleep, shouting Stuart! Stuart! at the top of his voice, so loud and so panicked that Ferguson could hear him through the floorboards upstairs, but who could blame Charlie for reliving his past from time to time when his guard was down, and how not to pity the teenage boy who had been sent off to fight in the Pacific twenty-six years ago and had come home to Rochester with a head full of nightmares?
As it turned out, Bobby and Margaret had to leave town before there was a chance to do much hanging out together. Ferguson had one dinner with them, he managed to see Bobby play in one game for the Red Wings, but the team was on the road when he arrived on July first, and four days after Bobby returned to Rochester on the tenth, the Orioles catcher broke his hand in a collision with a New York Yankee at home plate. After batting.327 in his first three weeks of Triple-A, Bobby was called up to join the roster of first-place Baltimore, and if he could hold his own against American League pitching, it was unlikely he would ever work in the minors again. Impossible not to feel happy for him, impossible not to exult in his promotion — and yet, hard as it was for Ferguson to admit to himself, impossible not to feel glad they were moving away.
It had nothing to do with Bobby. Bobby was still the same old Bobby, an older, more experienced, more reflective Bobby, but still the bighearted boy who was incapable of thinking a bad thought about anyone, Ferguson’s most constant and loving friend, the one who loved him more than anyone else ever had, including Amy, especially including Amy, and how alive Bobby was on the night of their one dinner in Rochester at the Crescent Beach Hotel, hugging Margaret every fourteen seconds and talking about the old days in Montclair, the glory days of their sophomore year when Ferguson’s hand was still intact and they were on the team together, the youngest starters on that conference-winning 16-and-2 team, the team that had pulled off the play. Of course Bobby had to talk about the play because he never tired of talking about it, and when Ferguson asked him to tell the story again for Margaret’s benefit, Bobby smiled, kissed his wife on the cheek, and launched into his account of that May afternoon six years ago. This is how it was, he said. We’re down one — nothing to Bloomfield in the last inning. One man out and two men on, Archie at third and Caleb at second, Caleb Williams, Rhonda’s older brother, and then Fortunato comes up and Coach Martino signals for the bunt, two taps to the brim of his cap and then he takes off the cap and scratches his head, that was the signal, the only time he ever gave it, not just a bunt for a suicide squeeze to bring in one run but a double suicide squeeze to bring in two. No one in history had ever thought of that play, but Sal Martino invented it because he was a baseball genius. A tough play to execute because you need to have a fast runner on second, but Caleb was extra fast, the fastest runner on the team, and so the pitch comes in and Fortunato lays down a good bunt, a slow little dribbler to the right of the mound. By the time the pitcher gets to it, Archie is already crossing the plate to tie the score. Figuring there’s nothing else to do, the pitcher throws to first, and Fortunato is out by three or four steps. But what the pitcher doesn’t realize is that Caleb started running at the same time Archie did, just as he was going into his windup, and by the time the first baseman catches the ball, Caleb is three-quarters of the way home. Everyone on Bloomfield is shouting to the first baseman, Throw the ball! Throw the ball!, so he throws the ball home, but the throw is late, a hard throw right into the catcher’s glove, but it’s a couple of seconds too late, and Caleb slides in with the winning run. A cloud of dust, and Caleb is jumping to his feet with his arms in the air. Victory out of loss, a big win from a squiggly little nothing of a teeny-tiny bunt. I’ve never seen anything like it. I’ve played in hundreds of games since then, but that was the best and most exciting thing I’ve ever seen on a baseball field, my number one all-time moment. Two runs, boys and girls, and the ball didn’t travel more than thirty feet.