How Oscar Indigo Broke the Universe (And Put It Back Together Again) Read online

  Dedication

  For Phil Stamps, Miss Temple,

  Ethel Beatrice Warfield Teague, and everybody

  who ever hit a walk-off backyard homer

  Contents

  Dedication

  Prologue

  OscarAde

  Earlier That Morning

  Eleanor Ethel Ellington

  Mothballs

  The World Atomic Clock

  And Now, We Return to the Game

  We Are the Champions

  Bottomless Menace

  Mr. Llimb and Mr. Skerritt

  Rogue Wave

  Mr. Veeder

  The Twelve-Year-Old Who Struck Out Babe Ruth

  Little Big Man

  There Must Be Some Mistake

  You’re Starting Tonight

  You Haven’t Heard the Last of This

  The Mt. Etna Mountaineers

  This Explains a Lot

  Mangoes

  Mr. Rossini

  Game Three of the Series

  Oscar at the Bat

  Rossini’s

  Acknowledgments

  Back Ad

  About the Author

  Books by David Teague

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  What is there to say about a guy with a batting average of .000 and nothing to show for four years on the team but a total of six errors and a shelf full of participation trophies?

  Hold on to your box seat. You’re about to find out.

  Oscar Indigo’s smile blazed as perpetually as the twin suns of Kepler-47, his enthusiasm could’ve powered a midsize Philadelphia suburb, and his determination matched that of the universally admired honeybee. Oscar refused to consider failure an option, even when it cast a longer shadow across his life than Yankee Stadium casts across the Bronx.

  Oscar never quit.

  Even when the fate of the universe hung in the balance. . . .

  July 5, 8:59 p.m.

  OscarAde

  On a warm evening in early July, Oscar and his teammates—Dusty Hanrahan, Bobby Farouk, Carl “Carlissimo” Fong, Axel Machado, Steve Brinkley, Kevin Truax, Kamran Singh, Layton Brooks, and Lourdes Mangubat—gathered around their coach, Ron Hansen.

  It was the bottom of the ninth in the first game of their three-game championship series against the West Mt. Etna Yankees. This game was the biggest contest in the history of Oscar’s Slugger League team, the East Mt. Etna Wildcats, perennial punch line of Marlborough County, Pennsylvania. The summer sun had set. Bats chased moths through the glittering white beams of the stadium lights, and the aroma of popcorn wafted across the Mt. Etna diamond.

  Coach Ron said, “Wildcats, I know our season didn’t turn out like we expected. None of us is prepared for the situation we now face.” The coach gazed in wide-eyed bafflement at his black baseball shoes. “I don’t know what happened. I don’t know what to say.” He shook his head at the enormous riddle he found himself contemplating. “But we’re only behind by one run, and if we score just twice, we’ll defeat the West Mt. Etna Select Elite Pro-Development Yankees to take the lead in the Slugger League Championship Series!” He smiled distractedly at his team and said, “Which has never happened before in the history of the Wildcats?” Over the years, Coach Ron had gotten so used to losing, he couldn’t quite wrap his mind around the thought that now the Wildcats might win.

  The team members stared at one another, shuffled their feet, and wondered if their coach was ever going to learn how to give a decent pep talk.

  Then Coach Ron’s glance fell upon Oscar, who was sitting on the bench, where he’d sat all game, every game, since April. Due to the aforementioned microscopic batting average and high error count.

  Oscar couldn’t help it. A spark of hope blazed in his chest. Was the coach going to put him in, even though he hadn’t played for months? Maybe, Oscar thought, Coach Ron could finally see that down deep inside him there was an unstoppable combination of positive attitude and undiscovered talent that would make him the perfect guy to win the game, despite all evidence to the contrary. Silently, Oscar pleaded, Put me in, Coach.

  “Oscar!” said Coach Ron.

  “Yes?” said Oscar.

  “Tell us one of your inspirational stories!” ordered the coach.

  “Sure, Coach,” sighed Oscar. His hopes of playing blew away in the summer breeze like so much infield dust, and his spirits wavered. But he recovered quickly and launched into one of the many rousing baseball tales he knew by heart.

  “In game six of the 1975 World Series,” began Oscar, “Carlton Fisk of the Boston Red Sox came to bat in the bottom of the twelfth. The game was tied. Carlton swatted a pitch high down the left-field line. It looked like a home run! A win for the Sox! But no! As the ball dropped, it drifted foul. Boston saw its chance slipping away. That’s when Carlton started jumping up and down. That’s when Carlton started waving at the ball to stay in play. Hope radiated from inside Carlton. And the ball swerved one eighth of an inch right and bounced off the foul pole into fair territory! A home run! Boston Red Sox 7, Cincinnati Reds 6.”

  “Perfect. Thanks, Oscar,” said the Coach. “Now. Who’s up? Bobby Farouk? Bobby, march yourself out there and go all Carlton Fisk on the West Mt. Etna Yankees!”

  Bobby made his way to the plate. Truthfully, Bobby was a little uncoordinated. When Bobby swung at the ball, he looked like he was trying to swat a particularly pesky horsefly with his bat, but his unorthodox style tended to distract pitchers, and he got a surprising number of hits.

  Unfortunately, today’s pitcher happened to be Taser Tompkins, four-time Slugger League All-Star, who wasn’t fazed by anything. Taser let his first pitch fly, and Bobby swung his bat, but he only managed to graze the top of Taser’s curve ball, dribbling a slow roller in front of the plate, which the catcher, Bifferato “Bif” Stroganoff, scooped up and threw to first before Bobby could take three steps.

  “Way to go, Bobby!” cried Oscar. “You almost got a hit!”

  “Thanks, Oscar,” said Bobby on the way back to the dugout, even though he hadn’t really come close.

  Steve Brinkley clattered across the dugout. Steve actually had a very special talent, which Oscar had spotted after a hundred innings of watching him from the bench. Steve was spectacularly nearsighted. He could barely see past the end of his own eyelashes. So when he batted, he stood so close to the plate, squinting at pitches, that he was nearly inside the strike zone. Which meant he was a magnet for beanballs.

  “Just don’t swing at anything, Steve,” Oscar whispered as Steve passed by, “and try to get yourself hit by a pitch.”

  And for good luck, he handed Steve a cup of OscarAde.

  OscarAde, you ask? This unusual drink was one of Oscar’s biggest contributions to the Wildcats, the symbol of his overwhelming love for baseball. OscarAde was a secret recipe that called for a half pound of Gatorade powder, six gallons of water from the infield irrigation hose, and one drop of Oscar’s dad’s Old Spice aftershave. The final ingredient may explain why Oscar kept the recipe secret.

  Some people thought drinking it brought good fortune. Other people had trouble choking it down. And many people held both of these opinions about OscarAde at the same time. For instance, Steve.

  So Steve knocked back the OscarAde in one gulp while holding his nose. “Thanks, Oscar,” he gasped.

  “You’re welcome, Steve,” said Oscar.

  At bat, Steve took Oscar’s advice and stood close to the plate, and on the first pitch, he took a fastball to th
e elbow.

  “Take your base!” cried the ump.

  Steve did.

  “Way to go!” called Oscar, pumping his fist in triumph.

  Steve pumped his fist right back. Maybe to see if his arm still worked after the 77-mile-per-hour pitch caromed off his funny bone before grazing his ankle and skittering under the backstop. Or maybe to say thanks for the advice. Whatever it was, while Steve was busy gesticulating at Oscar, he absentmindedly took his foot off the bag. Taser fired the ball to the first baseman and picked him off.

  Two outs. Not looking good for the Wildcats.

  Kamran Singh, the left fielder, four and a half feet high and weighing as much as a heavy breakfast, leaped up and said in outrage, “What kind of universe is this, anyway? We did everything right! We did everything we’re supposed to! We came to warm-ups early and did our stretches, and I took all my library books back on time! And the West Mt. Etna Yankees are jerks! Taser Tompkins’s mom parked her Range Rover in the handicapped space. Robocop Roberts’s mom booed us during batting practice. And now they’re gonna win?”

  “It’s OK, Kamran!” said Oscar. “We’ve got this. I know it. Everything will work out fine.”

  And then, as if to prove Oscar’s point, Axel Machado managed to swat a single to left. One runner on base.

  The Wildcats all cheered, and over their delighted voices, the coach called, “Mangubat! You’re up!”

  The team sighed in relief. For if anybody was going to win this game, it was the Wildcats’ newest player, Lourdes Mangubat, who’d arrived from Texas at the beginning of the season. Just aspiring to be half as good as Lourdes had made the rest of the Wildcats three times better. You can do the math, but however you calculate it, they owed their season’s success to her. When Lourdes batted, opposing pitchers shook in their spikes. She looked like a statue in the Philadelphia Museum of Art: Artemis, Greek goddess of the hunt, stalking mythical creatures who didn’t stand a chance. Even a three-time all-star like Taser Tompkins barely had a prayer against her.

  Lourdes rarely talked to the other Wildcats, except to holler “mine” when a pop fly came her way or to participate in the team cheer, which, by the way, Oscar had made up: East Mt. Etna, East Mt. Etna, East Mt. Etna, Wow! Ain’t nobody gonna keep the Wildcats down! Try as he might, he’d never quite come up with a perfect rhyme to end it.

  Some folks said Lourdes rarely spoke because she’d been born in the Philippines and her English wasn’t great.

  Others said maybe she felt like she was too good to talk to regular people.

  Oscar thought she was probably just busy thinking about baseball.

  He silently handed Lourdes her helmet, her bat, and a cup of OscarAde for good luck.

  In coming years, when he looked back on this moment, he could never be sure what happened next.

  Somehow, the OscarAde slipped. It plummeted to the steps and splattered all over. Lourdes’s spikes slid across the slick cement. Her elbow clonked Oscar on the head. But that didn’t matter. His head was hard. What mattered was Lourdes’s foot, specifically, her pinky toe, which she’d jammed against one of the dugout pillars.

  Lourdes crumpled to the floor in pain.

  “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” cried Oscar.

  Lourdes managed to pull herself to a sitting position. And she actually said something: “Ouch.”

  “Ice, Oscar, ice!” cried the coach as he ripped Lourdes’s shoe off.

  Now, after all the years he’d spent in the dugout fetching things for people who actually played, Oscar also happened to be an ace at ice. He calmly scooped a handful out of the cooler, wrapped it in a compression bandage, and gave it to Coach Ron to apply to Lourdes’s toe. But despite their valiant efforts at first aid, the toe was already the size of a Chilean grape.

  “I can’t believe I did this!” cried Oscar as the toe continued ballooning, now approaching California plum size. “We were about to win!”

  “The score is 0–1,” Bobby Farouk reminded him.

  “But Lourdes was coming to bat, and she always smacks a homer when the game is on the line, and Axel is on first, so things were fine until I spilled the—”

  Mr. Farouk, the umpire, who was also Bobby’s granddad, stuck his head into the dugout. “You planning to send a batter out here, Coach?” he demanded.

  “Right. Sure, Mr. Umpire,” said Coach Ron. “Just give us one second.”

  “I’ll give you exactly fifteen seconds,” harrumphed the ump. “And then you forfeit.”

  “Lourdes?” said Coach Ron hopefully.

  Lourdes tried to stand. She turned green, tears appeared at the corners of her eyes, a squeak escaped from somewhere deep inside her, and she sat back down, shaking her head.

  Oscar saw Coach Ron gaze up the dugout, and he saw Coach Ron gaze down the dugout. He saw the coach check his lineup card. He saw the coach’s eyes fall on him. Oscar, who was busy icing the lump on his head where Lourdes’s elbow had whacked him, quickly hid the ice pack behind his back.

  The coach checked his roster one more time.

  Unfortunately for the Wildcats, the date was July 5.

  Three Wildcats were still not back from celebrating the Fourth of July at the Jersey Shore.

  Oscar Indigo was the only substitute on Coach Ron’s list.

  And the rules of Slugger League baseball plainly stated that if the coach wanted to keep his team eligible, he’d have to use Oscar to fill Lourdes Mangubat’s spot.

  “Grab a bat, Oscar.” Coach Ron sighed. “You’re going in.”

  Both hope and fear flared inside Oscar. He was going into the game. Maybe he’d smack a homer. Maybe he’d win the whole thing! Or, on the other hand, if history was any guide, he’d probably just—

  “Try your best,” advised the coach glumly. “That’s all anybody can ask.” He did his darnedest to sound encouraging, but he couldn’t hide the gloom in his voice, and the faces of Oscar’s teammates reflected similar emotions. No doubt they were remembering all the times over the years when Oscar had walked to the plate with enthusiasm, hope, and a bat nearly as tall as himself, and struck out.

  On the mound, Taser emitted a scornful chortle. He set his feet. He peered down at his catcher, Bif Stroganoff, and then as he returned his attention to Oscar, a mocking grin spread across his face. He wound up and let go a blazing fastball.

  Oscar swung. He missed by ten feet.

  “Steeerike one!” cried the ump.

  “Not good,” Oscar murmured to himself. He called time to collect his thoughts. An optimistic smile played across his face, a little higher on the left than on the right, as he visualized swatting a home run.

  Unfortunately, it really made Taser mad when losers like Oscar stood at the plate smiling hopeful smiles, acting like somewhere, in their wildest dreams, they imagined they might in a million years get a hit off him. He despised dinky, thin people who thought they mattered in the world, because they didn’t. Cold ferocity beamed from Taser’s eyes.

  “Uh-oh,” said Bif from behind Oscar. “Watch out, little dude. He’s mad.”

  Taser came set on the mound. The world waited the way the world always waits when a pitcher goes into his motion.

  Taser delivered.

  With the speed of a comet, the pitch sizzled through the air. Right toward the middle of the plate. The outfield lights seemed to flare, dazzling Oscar’s eyes. His high hopes abandoned him, and he was left with nothing but a shaky feeling under his ribs. The crowd noise became a pulsating hiss, and the eyes of the opposing players gleamed accusingly, as if they all knew he knew he didn’t belong in the batter’s box, clutching a bat, with the season’s most important game on the line.

  The ball seemed to travel so fast, it started scrambling light particles and gravity waves as it came, so by the time it arrived, Oscar could hardly see it. But his brain was screaming—You have to get a hit! You have to get a hit! Desperately, he swiped at the ball. He spun three times and fell.

  As he collided with the groun
d, he heard:

  “Steeeeee-rike two!”

  “Oscar,” cried Coach Ron, “calm down, fella!”

  In his head, Oscar began to hear the voices of Vern Handler and Suzy Armando of CSPN—his favorite announcers—commenting on the game as if it were nationally televised. He often whiled away time in the dugout dreaming up things they might say about the Wildcats, and now they appeared in his imagination to narrate his on-field exploits:

  Oscar Indigo seems a bit overwhelmed by the competition, Suzy.

  That’s a polite way to put it, Vern.

  Oscar climbed to his feet and squinted at the stands to make sure Vern and Suzy weren’t really there with their microphones, speaking into the cameras. Nope. Just the moms and dads of Mt. Etna. Vern and Suzy were only in his brain.

  Oscar tapped his bat against his beat-up shoes like the pros do on TV, and he stepped into the batter’s box to swing again.

  As he turned to face Taser, he reached into his uniform pocket for a fraction of a second, brushing a hidden, smooth, rounded object with his fingertips. No, he quickly told himself, better not. Hastily, he pulled his hand out and settled in to bat.

  Oscar noticed Lourdes Mangubat watching from the dugout as she balanced on her good foot. He was surprised by her expression. She looked like she thought he had a chance.

  Suzy and Vern didn’t sound so sure.

  I wonder if Oscar does indeed have a chance, Vern.

  I’d like to think so, Suzy. He seems like a nice kid. But—

  Taser’s next pitch came scorching through the night. Some kind of curveball, traveling so fast it seemed to bend cosmic laws nobody had discovered yet, dropping from shoulder level to knee height in the blink of an eye. The ball appeared to vanish as it flew past, but there was no mistaking the smack it made in Bif Stroganoff’s mitt, or the sound of Mr. Farouk, the umpire, calling.

  “Ball one,” declared the ump.

  Taser had missed the strike zone. Yes! thought Oscar. He wasn’t dead yet.

  “Sit that little wimp down so we can go get ice cream!” screeched a voice from the seats behind Oscar.

  Taser shot the kind of glance into the stands that you shoot your mother when you’ve got things under control and don’t need her input. He toed the rubber for his fourth pitch. He and Bif exchanged signals.