Here he knew exactly how good he was.
The batter suddenly backed out of the box, and the pitcher relaxed. Seemed the batter didn't like something there in the dirt, because he was raking the ground with his cleats. He dug himself a little hole, fanned the bat around his head, swiveled his hips, and faced the pitcher. The pitch, the swing, the crack... another foul.
God, Sparky loved baseball. How could a game that moved so slowly produce such tension? It might be another two, three minutes before the next pitch, and the suspense was getting unbearable.
So was his hunger. There was no more candy in his pocket. And three long innings until the feast.
The Plain People wouldn't call it anything so vain as a feast, but that's what it was. Sparky would walk past tons of the sort of delicacies they'd had at the recent wrap party to get to one plateful of Amish food.
There would be sweating glass pitchers full of tart pink lemonade, with lemons and cherries still floating in it. Sweet cider. Fresh-squeezed orange juice. Something made with beans and ham hocks. Roast beef sliced thin. Ears of fresh golden corn. Cupcakes and rows and rows of pies: cherry, lemon, mince, pumpkin. Shoofly pie, a treat made in heaven but served only by the Amish.
And Sparky's favorite, the muffins. Blueberry muffins and corn muffins, that you could twist apart in your fist and see the steam rising from the golden centers and slather with butter scraped from a wooden churn.
Life didn't get any better.
If you play baseball long enough, you develop a computer in your head. Each play adds to the programming, until you reach the point where you hardly have to think about it at all. Your eyes see, and your arms and legs react.
The crack of the bat activated Sparky's computer. It was a bloop single into the hole, coming right at Sparky. The first and second basemen started toward it, saw it was impossible, headed back to their bags as Sparky charged the ball. No hope of catching it; play it on the bounce. He saw the catcher standing on the third-base line, the pitcher heading toward the plate to back him up, the shortstop moving toward the mound to cut off the throw. His eye went back to the ball—Jesus! He was too close in. The ball hit the ground and bounced as he moved his glove down. It hit the heel of his glove, hit him in the chest, and bounced... and there it was, hanging in the air right in front of him, as if time was suspended. He bare-handed it and in one motion pegged it toward the shortstop. He saw the third-base coach waving the runner toward home. He'd been told Sparky didn't have the arm to get the ball to the catcher.
It was a good call, but something had happened to Sparky's arm. The shortstop started to jump for it, might have caught it, but then ducked and let it go over his head... and it reached the catcher right on the numbers. The runner was so surprised he tried to stop and his feet went out from under him. The catcher ambled over and tagged him out. The fans went wild.
Sparky jogged toward the dugout, arms loose, eyes on the ground, showing both coolness and humility. There was no way he'd ever tell anyone he'd been throwing to the shortstop. Everything had worked out all right, so who needed to know?
He accepted the high-fives and pats on the ass as only his due, then sat on the bench to wait his turn at bat. His feet were killing him.
For the first time he noticed that there was a strip of skin visible between the top of his socks and the bottom of his pants.
Well, that accounted for it. His legs were longer, and so were his arms. Charging the ball, taking an inch or two more ground with each stride, he'd come up on it too fast. Then throwing, he'd made more distance than he ever had before. The long legs almost caused a disaster. The arm had compensated for it. Neat. But he was going to have to make some adjustments, watch himself more closely.
He looked up when the umpire called time-out. His father was striding across the infield. Sparky saw him look up, vaguely, as if only now aware that something was going on here, that he might be interrupting it. He smiled, and waved to the players, clutching a rolled-up newspad in his other hand.
John Valentine skipped lightly down the three steps into the dugout, smiling broadly at Sparky, who smiled back as well as he could. Valentine motioned for Jeff, the second baseman, to slide over a bit, then seated himself with his hip touching Sparky's.
"Baseball, eh?" he said. "Looks like fun. I had a hell of a time tracking you down out here."
"I don't tell anyone where I'm going," Sparky explained. Valentine seemed not to have heard him, held out the newspad, and pointed to the first installment of Hildy Johnson's series about Sparky.
"Have you seen this?"
Sparky studied it, trying to give himself a little time. Valentine thumbed the pager down in the corner, came to the part he was interested in, and pointed to a paragraph.
"Where does this bitch get off writing this stuff about me?" he said.
Sparky only then realized how furious his father was. He glanced up in the stands at Hildy, no more than thirty feet away, decided this wasn't the time to introduce them.
"It says this is an authorized article," Valentine plowed on. "You've been granting this woman interviews?"
"She's been around," Sparky allowed. "We've granted her access."
"If she has access," Valentine grated, "we need to control the access. There's no need to let her in on family secrets, and if she's going to make up lies like this, there's no need to have her around at all."
"I didn't tell her anything," Sparky said. "Not about you."
Valentine put his arm around his son, patted his shoulder.
"Of course not," he said, smiling. "I never thought you did."
"We'll look bad if we just cancel at this point," Sparky said. "The pad's been hawking this series for a week now. I thought it'd be good publicity."
Valentine considered that, began nodding slowly.
"Besides," Sparky pointed out, "it's not a review. People have printed nasty things about you before. You know how it is."
"Maybe you're right," Valentine said.
"You said it yourself. You're not an easy man to like." Sparky knew his father took pride in this, attributed it to his artistic perfectionism. It was even partly true.
Valentine laughed, and squeezed his son's shoulder.
"You're right. Nothing to get upset about. I guess I'm just on edge, with the theater so close to completion." He tossed the newspad down on the dirt dugout floor, where it mingled with a hundred old pink wads of bubble gum and puddles of spilled cola. "That's not what I came out here for, anyway. A few things have come up we're going to have to go over together."
"About the theater?'
"That's right. If we hurry we can make it back before they shut down for the day."
"But I've got a game going—"
"It really can't wait, Kenneth." He looked around him, taking in the players and the green grass and the mothers and fathers in the grandstand behind the backstop. "I'm sure this is a lot of fun," he said, clearly not thinking anything of the sort, "but isn't it all a bit... childish? I mean, Kenneth, I really hate to spoil it for you, but in another month you'll be too big to play with these boys."
Sparky felt his face grow warm. Jeff and some of the other boys were carefully studying the field.
The hell of it was, it was true. An inch this week, a few more inches the next, in no time he'd be a man.
He already was a man, inside. He'd been an impostor here from the beginning. Though they didn't partake of the modern world, the Amish were aware of it. They understood that arcane biological science had kept Sparky preadolescent for twenty years. They knew he would outlive them. They were one of many groups who, for one reason or another, kept to the Biblical threescore and ten—actually, more like fivescore for most of them, with reasonable care—refusing all long-life treatments.