THE WORKING COPY OF THE HISTORY OF STRANGE

PROLOGUE

In the beginning….

Duff Lewis Damphouse was born at Elliot Community Hospital in Keene, New Hampshire on October 1, 1967, the same day the Boston Red Sox clinched the American League Pennant. Duff was named after his maternal grandfather, Duff McGuinness, whom he loved very much, and his paternal grandfather, Lewis Damphouse, whom he never met. Young Duff was born a Red Sox fan, not only because of his fortuitous date of birth, but because the names his parents unwittingly bestowed upon him aligned Duff forever with the man who had played leftfield for the Red Sox in the years leading up to World War I. 

George Edward “Duffy” Lewis was part of a Boston outfield that won three World Series Championships together, a trio of ballplayers—Duffy Lewis, Tris Speaker, and Harry Hooper—who together are still considered by some baseball historians to be the greatest outfield ever assembled. 

What’s in a name? More than one might think. 

What’s in a date?  More than Duff could know.

Duff Lewis Damphouse became an orphan the day after his eleventh birthday and his life changed dramatically, but not for the obvious reasons.  Our story begins a few weeks after Duff’s eighth birthday, when both his parents were still alive. 

FADE IN:

If you will.

And picture with me now a stuffed brown bear atop a black-and-white television…

CHAPTER ONE ~ GAME SIX

Coop’s golden eyes focused on the boy.

The bear was perched atop the twelve-inch set, its arms intertwined with the rabbit-ear antennae, its body wedged inside the UHF ring. Duff slid the animal’s upper left paw between the UHF ring and the foil-tipped right antenna until he found the sweet spot and the picture cleared and he was finally able to make out Fenway Park. The horizontal hold had gone all wonky and the picture had been snowy through the game’s first three batters, and it took a while, but Duff and Coop set things right. Patience. It takes patience, Duff thought. Patience. Something his mother had been trying to instill in him. Patience. She had been teaching him to make French toast. Low and slow. Patience. With his math homework. And patience, mostly, with his speech therapy. Duff’s lisp was improving. Not because of his patience, he knew, but because of his mother’s. In a way, her patience had become his.

He could see the action now, because of his patience, but the real test, he knew, would come when he moved away. He held his breath and eased his hand off Coop as if he were setting down an overfull glass of water and backed away from the television as slowly as he could as Cincinnati Reds catcher Johnny Bench swung at strike two. Everything held; the picture remained blissfully clear. After three days of rainouts, Duff’s Boston Red Sox and the Cincinnati Reds were finally playing Game Six of the 1975 World Series. 

Duff settled back onto the separated section of his family’s sectional couch that served as his bed and the only place to sit in his temporary bedroom, which is what he did then, just a few feet from the television. He leaned in as Red Sox pitcher Luis Tiant lowered his hands in little staccato stops, the ball in his mitt which he shook near his gut before resting it for a second at his beltline. Tiant kicked his leg and delivered the pitch, Bench swung and missed—“And he strikes out!” the announcer said—and Duff pumped his fist as Tiant bounded off the mound. 

“Yeth!” Duff said, and he covered his mouth with his hand and listened to be sure his father hadn’t heard him. Duff avoided ess words when he thought his father might be listening. 

Frank Damphouse was in the habit of correcting his son by repeating what he’d said with an exaggerated lisp. Duff was in no mood to be mocked. The last time he had checked, his father had been playing his guitar, but as he edged in close to the TV and risked upsetting the picture by lowering the volume he could hear his parents talking—arguing—his father’s voice clipped, his mother’s weak, as always, audible only because Duff recognized its pitch.

He held his finger to his lips as if to silence Coop who wore a Red Sox jersey on the back of which Duff’s mother had sewn the digits one and seven, Cecil Cooper’s number, seventeen. Coop, the Red Sox first baseman and designated hitter, was Duff’s favorite player, and Sheila Damphouse had given the bear to Duff for his eighth birthday just twenty days earlier. The red numbers were fraying at the edges and already pulling away from the jersey and Duff meant to ask her to fix them, to sew them on again. He wasn’t gentle with the bear. He slept with it at night, lugged it around during the day, and propped it up on the television when the Red Sox were on. At first, he put him on the TV for good luck, but he kept doing it because Coop held the antennae in place. 

The real Cecil Cooper was set to lead off for the Red Sox and Duff introduced him in a whisper, quietly mimicking Fenway Park Public Address Announcer Sherm Feller. Duff preferred announcing lineups to reciting the “Sister Sally Susan sitting on a thistle,” exercises his speech therapist insisted he practice at home. He whispered box scores, too, read aloud the backs of baseball cards, repeated what the announcers said on the radio and the television. Anything baseball-related was a far more effective way of taming his lazy tongue, Duff thought, than reciting some slithering sentence about “sewing shirts for seven seasick sailors.” The thought of a seasick sailor seemed silly to Duff, and, for that matter, he didn’t know what a thistle was and wasn’t curious enough to ask. But he knew his ballplayers. He knew all the players.

“Ladies-th and gentlemen, boyth and girlsth, batting firthst for the Bothton Red Thsockth, number theventeen, firtht bathmen, Thethil Cooper. Firthst bathe, Cooper.”

Duff missed the family’s color television. The bigger set got good reception but was now in his father’s bedroom. It had been there for the last two months, ever since Duff’s mother got sick and took over Duff’s bedroom. She needed privacy, Duff’s father had explained at the time, and Duff’s father needed sleep—Goddammit—and Duff would be just fine in the little living-room nook, his father had said, which they had enclosed with some boxes, his dresser, a shower rod between the two, and an old sheet for a door. They put the short piece of the velvet sectional in there for Duff to sit on and to sleep on, and the coffee table to hold the television. 

“You might as well have the TV,” his father had said at the time. “It’ll keep you out of trouble.”

Duff missed the big set, though. He missed watching I Love Lucy re-runs and gameshows and sitcoms with his mother, who also joined him most nights for Red Sox games when they were televised. Mostly he missed watching whatever was on while she made supper. He missed her poking her head under the kitchen cabinets over the extended counter whenever Duff laughed at something. She would ask him to tell her what she’d missed. He missed making her laugh when he told her.

“Loothy and Ethel are at thith chocolate factory and they are thuppothed to wrap chocolatth but itht too fatht tho they thtuff em in their clothe’th and their mouth’th.”

NBC came back after the commercial break, and Cecil Cooper swung at the first pitch. Strike one. Duff crossed his fingers. 

His devotion to Cecil Cooper, who was far from a star in 1975 (he would become one later when he wore a different uniform) dated back to April 11, 1974, when Duff was just six, and his namesake—his maternal grandfather, Duff McGuinness—took him and his mother to Opening Day at Fenway Park in Boston. It was Duff’s first and only trip to Fenway. They arrived at the ballpark about an hour before the game and watched the players warming up. Grandpa McGuinness lifted Duff up and held him in his arms right behind the Red Sox dugout where together they watched the Red Sox players as they played catch and stretched. It was a day game, but it was overcast, and the lights were on at Fenway. 

Duff fell in love with the sleek first baseman the moment he laid eyes on him. Cooper and infielder Mario Guerrero stretched their muscles on the glowing green grass. Their faces shone like jewels under their red caps. The hats were entirely new to Duff, more colorful than the Red Sox’ regular blue hats. These had dark blue visors and backs, but bright red front panels with a blue “B.” Their uniforms were brighter, too, with pull-on white jerseys with red sleeves beneath, and white pants with a red and blue stretch waist. 

Duff asked Grandpa McGuinness about the hair on Cecil Cooper’s face, and his grandfather said he had porkchop sideburns, which Duff thought was hysterical. Guerrero on the other hand had a pencil-thin moustache that Grandpa McGuinness, in a comical Russian accent, called a Boris Badenov moustache, after the bad guy on Bullwinkle. It had been the greatest day of Duff’s life.

Cooper swung and missed at the second pitch. Strike two. Duff squeezed his crossed fingers tighter, crossed his arms to boot, and leaned in close. 

Duff and his mother and his grandfather had planned to go to Fenway again later that season—a last-minute jaunt—but they never made it. Duff McGuinness died in a head-on collision on Route 2 in Leominster while enroute to Keene to pick them up. It was September 7, 1974:  Duff would always remember the date. The Red Sox went on to lose that day and Duff watched a little of the game on television while his mother and father argued and the light in the family’s Washington Street apartment changed from bright yellow to amber and everything felt like it was underwater. 

His mother talked to him about his grandfather’s death. She wasn’t religious, but she was spiritual, she told Duff. She said she believed in the soul. She said there is a body and a soul and when the body is no longer inhabitable the soul moves on.

“Inhabitable?” Duff asked. She used big words and encouraged Duff to ask her when he didn’t understand, and he usually did.

“Able to be lived in,” his mother said from the edge of his bed.

“Move on?” Duff asked. 

“What, my love?”

“You thaid ‘when the thoul moves-th on.’ What do’th move on mean?”

“I don’t know, my love. No one knows. Some people think we just go to sleep, but I think we move on, we keep going. Because if we sleep, we dream, right? We dream of things we haven’t figured out. We dream of things that aren’t settled. So how can death be sleep? When we die, everything is settled. I think. Don’t you?”

“I don’t know,” Duff said.

“Some people believe in heaven and hell, Duff. All glory and wonder in heaven, all fire and damnation in hell. But that just doesn’t make sense to me. You’d get used to either one.”

“Oh.”

“Grandpa McGuinness loved you, Duff. With all his heart.”

“With all hith thoul?”

“Yes, my love. With all his soul.” 

The Sox won the day after Grandpa McGuinness died, and the day after that. And with those two victories, they played their way back into a tie for first place, but… Duff knew they were done. He could feel it. Even at six years old—almost seven—he knew the season was over. The Red Sox had been in first place for most of the 1974 season and hopes had run high.

Among the items recovered from Duff McGuinness’s Nova after the crash—items later given to Sheila Damphouse—was a Red Sox pennant the elder Duff had obviously meant to give to his grandson. The pennant featured the red-paneled hat that Duff had loved so much on Opening Day. The pennant identified the Red Sox as 1974 American League Eastern Division Champions. Someone had jumped the gun and printed the celebratory pennants, probably in August when the Sox had built a lead that seemed insurmountable. They’d jinxed it, whoever had printed those pennants. Duff hated them for that, whoever they were. He blamed them for his grandfather’s death.

Cecil Cooper hit the next pitch and Duff shot to his feet, all his crosses undone, but the ball landed harmlessly in the glove of Reds centerfielder Caesar Geronimo. One out.  Duff was disappointed, but sat back down on his section of the living room sectional and said what Grandpa McGuinness had taught him to say: “Itth okay, Coop. We’ll get ‘em nextht time.” 

Sheila Damphouse, nee McGuinness, blamed her husband for her father’s death. Duff heard the arguments.

“What do you want me to do?” his father had taken to saying. “I can’t bring him back.”

It’s all he said, over and over again, but Duff wished he would say more. Just tell her you love her, he thought, just tell her he’s in a better place, like she said. Tell her her father had moved on and say you are sorry. And mean it when you say it. Just make up with her, Duff wanted to tell him, but he knew he couldn’t. It seemed so simple, but he knew it wasn’t. Like the words his mother taught him. Adults had bigger words when smaller words would do just fine, and when those words failed, they couldn’t find the obvious ones. They got lost searching for bigger words with finer definitions when the plain and simple would do just fine.

Frank Damphouse had always hated baseball, hadn’t cared for his father-in-law, and had seemed put out whenever Sheila mentioned her father wanted to come over or wanted to get together. On that September day in 1974, Sheila had wanted to drive to Boston to meet her father. He’d been given the tickets just the day before. She wanted to meet him at the Alewife T-Station, which was close to his house, where they could all park and then take the train to the game, but Frank had insisted he needed the car—for some dubious reason lost to time—and Grandpa McGuinness would have to come get them if he wanted to take them to the game.

Duff McGuinness was a third-shift bus driver in Boston who should have been sleeping, not driving 100 miles to turn around and drive 100 more. Sheila never forgave her husband for his selfishness. At first Duff didn’t understand how his father could be responsible for something that happened in Leominster when he’d been right there in Keene, New Hampshire, but he knew somehow his mother was right. She was usually right. 

Denny Doyle was up next. 

After the 1974 season ended, Duff cut the Red Sox hat out of the pennant his grandfather had meant to give to him and tacked it up on the wall above his bed. When his father moved his mother into his room late the following season and moved Duff into the living room nook, the little remnant of the felt pinup disappeared along with the yearbook photos of Carl Yastrzemski and Carlton Fisk that Duff had also tacked up on the wall, and baseball cards of Cecil Cooper from 1974 and Luis Tiant from 1975. Those disappeared, too. He missed the cards and the pictures, but mostly he missed that little felt promise, the colorful cap, the championship season that should have been, that would have been had Duff McGuinness not died. Duff Damphouse was sure of it.

Denny Doyle grounded out to Tony Perez at first base with the pitcher covering, but with two outs, left fielder Carl Yastrzemski lined a single to right and Duff heard his father’s voice.

“Duffy Lewis. Your mother wants to talk to you.”

Duff pretended not to hear. 

Carlton Fisk was up next. He took the first pitch for a ball, and then Frank Damphouse’s chiseled head was wedged between the boxes and the sheet that served as Duff’s door, the veins in his head visible, his face red. He breathed as if he had been working out, but Duff knew he’d just been talking to his mother and playing his guitar, his amp turned up high enough to be heard throughout the apartment as he practiced the same broken chords over and over again. 

“Now,” he said.

“One minute?” Duff said.

“Now, Duff.” 

“But Carlton Fisk is up,” Duff whined, his lisp on full display. Carlton FiTHk iTH up, he said.

“I don’t care if the Pope him-THELF ITH up,” Frank mocked. “Go talk to you mother.”

Duff slowly got to his feet; his eyes glued to the game. 

“So help me God, Duff, I will take that TV away.”

Carlton Fisk took a pitch—ball one—but Duff’s battle was lost.

The chemical smell of spray disinfectants burned Duff’s eyes but failed to trick his nose as he inhaled little pockets of warm, sickly air as he entered his bedroom. There was a single, dull lamp next to his bed—her bed—which cast a waxy pall over his mother’s face. On the side table was a glass of water and another glass of something pink. There was a writing tablet there and a red pen, some loose documents, and a paperback book, Jonathon Livingston Seagull. From the other room, Duff could hear cheers. Carlton Fisk had done something. He’d done something good. Duff heard his father strumming his electric guitar, torturing the same series of chords again.

“Hi, Honey,” Duff’s mother said in a tiny whisper.

“The Red Thoxth are on,” Duff said.

“Sit down, Duff.”

“But it’th the World Therie’th,” he said.

“I know. I won’t keep you long.”

Duff plunked himself down on the kitchen chair they’d put next to the bed. The old chair had a duct tape repair that gave out when you sat and made a farting noise, which usually made Duff giggle.

“Woops,” his mother said, rallying to get a rise out of Duff. “Who tooted?”

“Mom,” Duff whined.

She was sick. That was all Duff’s father had told him. And Duff’s mother, usually so forthcoming with big words and adult ideas, didn’t share more. She told Duff she was getting better, but he could tell she was getting worse. Don’t worry about me, she said,worry about your schoolwork, work on your esses, help your father around the house. I’ll be up and at it in no time. But it was more than just the smell. Her spirit hung heavy in that room. There was a density about her illness that weighed everything down.   

Sheila Damphouse reached for her water, but she could barely raise her arm. 

“Could you?”

Duff stood up and helped her take a drink through a straw, then put the glass back and stayed on his feet, eager to go. 

“I need you to listen to me,” she said.

“Mom,” Duff whined. 

“Please, Duff. Sit, my love. Please.”

Duff did as he was told, but he sat slowly so the chair wouldn’t fart again, and he strained to hear the announcers’ voices. Dick Stockton. Joe Garagiola. Tony Kubek.

“I want you to promise me something, Duffy Lew.”

His mother called him Duffy Lew. It was a term of endearment. His father often called him Duffy Lewis, but that usually meant trouble—that he’d better perk up and pay attention. He was Duff, after Grandpa Duff McGuinness; Lewis, after Grandpa Lewis Damphouse, who had died long before Duff was born. Frank Damphouse’s entire family was long gone. Duff McGuinness, Duff’s namesake, had been his been his last remaining grandparent and when he died, Sheila’s family was gone, too, and Duff was left with his mother and father.

A roar came from the television and Duff jumped to his feet. He heard his father say “Shit!” and punch the strings on his guitar—he was far away and behind a closed door, but Duff could see him growing angrier—almost as if the crowd noise from his TV had caused his father to mess up, but he knew he’d done that himself. He knew his father wasn’t reacting to the ballgame.

“Please, Duff,” Sheila Damphouse said, raising her voice as much as she could. “You won’t miss much. I promise.”

“But it’th the World Theriesth,” Duff insisted. 

I can’t get these innings back, he wanted to tell her. I’ll never have the chance to see this again. Who was up after Fisk? Fred Lynn, right? Fred Lynn had done something, too. Something even bigger. Duff sat down again but he was nearly hyperventilating.

“Breathe, Duff. Please. Breathe. And listen.”

“I am,” Duff whined, raising his voice.

“Really listen,” his mother scolded. 

“I’m liTHening,” Duff said, realizing he was not. Near tears now, torn and a little ashamed, he tried to listen to her and not to the television and the distant, competing sound of his father fighting with his electric guitar.

Sheila let a moment of this room noise, the lack of silence, pass. She let Duff’s breathing settle. The sound of cheering arose again from the TV, Frank’s guitar chord hit a snag, but he didn’t curse this time, not loudly enough to be heard, and then Duff could hear commercials. Whatever had happened in the game, he had missed it. 

“I want you to know it’s okay, Duff,” Sheila said.

“What?”

“What you’re doing right now. It’s okay. I forgive you.”

“What am I doing?” Duff thought it was a riddle.

“Just listen.”

“Okay.”

Sheila Damphouse turned her eyes on Duff. Dead on.

“Don’t emulate your father.”

Duff didn’t recognize the word emulate,which he turned over in his head. Usually when his mother used a word he didn’t know, he asked her what it meant, and she told him. It was a game they played. But he wanted to get back to the ball game. They would show a replay of what happened when they came back from commercials, and he didn’t want to miss it—he didn’t want to detour for a vocabulary lesson, even though it wasn’t an ess word, and it would have been easy for him to repeat. He decided emulate was likely just another way to say disobey. Duff knew adults were prone to using fancy words when simpler words would do just as well. He had also learned from his mother that definitions of words sometimes made themselves known contextually. What else could she have meant? Don’t disobey your father. That’s what Duff decided his mother had said. It seemed obvious.

“I won’t.”

“Find the man you want to be, Duff,” she said quietly, emphatically.

“Okay,” Duff said. He was in the room, but he wasn’t present.

“Duff,” she scolded again. Trying to pull him back, to keep him present.

“Find the man I want to be,” he repeated.

“Yes.”

“Don’t emulate Dad. Find the man I want to be.”

“I love you, Duff,” his mother said, reaching for his hand.

“You, too, Mom,” he said, giving his hand over, ready to spring, feeling like things were winding down.

“You’re a good boy. And you’ll be a good man.”

“Okay.”

“Find the man you want to be.”

“Okay, Mom.”

She let go of his hand and dismissed him with a flicker of her fingertips. 

“Go watch your game,” she said, and Duff shot to his feet, but the commercials were still on, and he remembered his bear.

“Mom?”

“Yes?”

“Can you sTHew the numberTH back on Coop?”

“What, honey?”

“You didn’t do a very good job. You weren’t very meticuloutTH,” he said, hoping to impress her by using one of the more recent words she’d taught him.

“No?” she said.

“You usually are. You’re usually very meticulousssth,” he said. He was so close to defeating his lisp, so close he could hear it, his tongue behind his teeth, but slightly higher, a little tighter. SSssth.

“Maybe tomorrow, Duff.”

“Thankth, Mom. Game’th on!” he said, and he flew out of the room.

He glanced toward his father’s room and noticed light from the color television bleeding out from under the door and he could hear Vinny Barbarino’s voice on Welcome Back, Kotter, which Duff liked, too—and so did his mother—but he could also hear his father still fighting with his guitar over the noise of his TV. He was playing the same riff, and the sound of him saying “shit” again rose above it all. He ramped the word up—“shhhh-it!”—and hit the body of his guitar and started in again. Don’t emulate your father, Duff thought. Maybe it meant not to be mean to him. Like meticulous. He could have said his mother wasn’t careful when she sewed the numbers on Coop, and she would have understood. So many words that serve the exact same purpose.

The Red Sox were leading three to nothing when Duff got back to his TV. He was happy about this, but it felt hollow, too. The announcers said Fred Lynn had hit a three-run homerun. Duff settled in, careful not to upset Coop who remained perfectly set, keeping the picture clear. Tiant seemed to have control of the game as the innings went by, putting the Reds down in order in the second and giving up only a single to Pete Rose in the third and then one to Tony Perez in the fourth. The Red Sox weren’t having any luck either, going down in order in the second, then loading the bases in the third, but Rico Petrocelli struck out to end that threat, and after Dwight Evans doubled to open the fourth and Rick Burleson walked, Tiant, Cecil Cooper, and Denny Doyle all grounded out to end that threat.

The wheels came off in the top of the fifth when Tiant gave up a walk and a single and then Ken Griffey hit the ball high and deep to centerfield and Fred Lynn dove for it, but missed, and slammed into the base of the wall where he slumped to the ground like a discarded rag doll. As Dwight Evans retrieved the ball and Griffey coasted into third base with a triple, Fenway Park grew silent, and the umpires stopped the game to allow the Red Sox trainer to sprint out to check on the star outfielder. The trainer was joined by Red Sox Manager Darrell Johnson. 

Duff leaned in and watched for signs of life. Fred Lynn lay motionless. The outfielder had had one of the greatest rookie seasons in the history of baseball and had endeared himself to Red Sox fans everywhere. If they lost him to an injury now—as they had lost their other great rookie, Jim Rice, in early September—the Red Sox would be in big trouble. But at that moment, Duff and every other Red Sox fan on the planet just wanted to know if he was still alive. 

Lynn stirred, finally, and the fans cheered. When he got up and walked around a bit, they cheered louder, and when the manager and trainer headed back to the dugout and Lynn stayed in the game, the crowd roared.

The next batter, Joe Morgan, popped out, but Johnny Bench lined the ball off the left field wall, scoring Ken Griffey and tying the game. Something had changed. 

“Shoot!” Duff said when Johnny Bench hit the single. Then he looked around to make sure no one was in earshot, and he said “Shhhh-it” like his father.

Then the light in the nook changed and his father poked his head in around the curtain and told Duff to wrap it up.

“It’s late, Duff. Time for bed. Did you brush your teeth?”

“I will.”

“Now. It’s a school night.”

“But the game…” Duff started to say but his father's mood turned dark, and he cut Duff off.

“Now.”

Duff brushed his teeth in the apartment’s one bathroom, wondering if he had the right toothbrush. There were three there. His father’s, his mother’s, and his. But he couldn’t remember from week to week, month to month, what color his toothbrush was. And the one he was using was so flat from someone chewing on it and he pictured his father walking around, toothbrush in mouth, talking, chewing, brushing, gesturing. All three brushes were flat now. They hadn’t been switched out in a long time, probably not since his father had moved his mother to his bedroom.

Duff stayed up. 

He turned his TV off until he heard his father’s bedroom door close, then he turned it back on and dialed the volume all the way down. He let the picture come back and he only had to adjust Coop the slightest bit. He hadn’t missed much. The game was still tied at three. But, in the top of the seventh, the Reds scored twice on a pair of singles, then a double by George Foster and after the Red Sox went down in order in the bottom of the seventh inning, the Reds added another run in the top of the eighth on a homerun by Caesar Geronimo, chasing Tiant from the game, and things looked bleak.

Duff’s eyelids were getting heavy and so was his heart. The season was winding down.

But in the bottom of the eighth, the Red Sox showed some life. Fred Lynn singled to open the inning and Rico Petrocelli drew a walk and suddenly the crowd and Duff were back in the game and there was hope. But the Reds brought in one of their elite relievers—Rawley Eastwick—who struck out Dwight Evans and then got Rick Burleson to line out to left. The pitcher was due up next, but Sox manager Darrel Johnson sent up Bernie Carbo instead.

Carbo had only been up once in the series so far, in game three, when he hit a pinch-hit homerun, but this night even eight-year-old Duff recognized that Carbo was overmatched. Duff leaned in and turned the volume up just loud enough to hear. The curly-haired outfielder worked the count to two balls and two strikes and fouled off a pitch that even the announcers said looked like he missed. His nose to the TV, Duff watched Carbo step out of the batter’s box and adjust his helmet. The announcers talked about how he’d done his job by staying alive. Then Carbo stepped back in, Eastwick threw a fastball, and Carbo connected.

“Deep center field, way back, way back, we’re tied up!” Joe Garagiola said, and Duff fell to his knees. He was so happy that he cried. Tears poured down his face and his heart pounded in his chest. Just when it looked like all was lost, the Red Sox had tied it up.

Coop was up next, and Duff was riveted. But Cecil Cooper wasn’t up to the task—he hadn’t had a good series—and he struck out swinging. As the Reds ran in from the field, the fans in the stands were still going crazy, and Duff’s emotions were running high. 

He got up and squeezed past the TV, careful not to upset Coop, and ventured out into the dark apartment. Blue light still poured out from under his father’s door. His TV was on, but Duff could hear his father snoring and the muffled sound of voices from the television. The door to his bedroom—his mother’s room—was closed, but Duff opened it, quietly, and went in.

He got close to the bed where he could see his mother’s face in the moonlight. 

“We tied it up,” he whispered. “We were down by three, but we tied it up in the eighth. Like Grampa alway-thaid. Like he ssthaid. Never give up.”

His mother was sound asleep.

For the rest of that night, Duff’s heart never stopped pounding. He wished he had more room in the nook to get up and walk around, to pace, to get into a crouch with Carlton Fisk, to run home with Denny Doyle—“Out at the plate!”—to swing the bat with Carl Yastrzemski and Bernie Carbo, Rico Petrocelli and Carlton Fisk, to pitch with Dick Drago and Rick Wise. 

He whispered the players’ names as they came up to bat, working hard on his lisp, putting his tongue on the roof of his mouth—his thick, lazy tongue. His speech therapists said it was a lazy tongue; his father said it was thick.  

In Duff’s mind, he ran to the wall with Dwight Evans as he leapt to make an incredible catch and then threw the ball back into the infield to double up the runner on first: Evans to Yaz, Yaz to Burleson. Duff was right there with the players, feigning their movements, doing his best. He hung in with the Red Sox and they hung in for him. And then, in the top of the twelfth, as Duff stayed on his feet to ward off sleep—his eyes gritty, his eyelids heavy—he whispered:

“Now batting, number twenty-sstheven, Carlton Fisssk. Catcher,  Fissthk.”

Fisk took a pitch, ball one. He then swung at the next pitch and drove the ball high and deep to left field and Dick Stockton, one of the Red Sox regular announcers who was part of the national broadcast team for a few of the World Series games, said, “There it goes, a long drive, if it stays fair…”

Somehow Duff got hung up on the if. 

“Homerun!” Stockton said.

Duff couldn’t see the ball on his little television. He leaned in close. He wanted to make sure they were right. What if they were wrong? If it stays fair… homerun! But if it doesn’t. That pause. If it doesn’t, then, loud strike. It’s just a loud strike, as Grandpa McGuinness used to say. But Fisk ran around the bases and fans came onto the field and the team celebrated at home plate, and still Duff did not trust they had gotten it right. Would the Reds protest? Would they call the players back onto the field?

Then they showed a replay of Fisk jumping up and down in slow motion, willing the ball to stay fair as he bounded toward first base and they said it was like Fisk was a little boy, and finally they showed a replay of the homerun itself and the outfielder watching the ball and they commented that it came very close to hitting the foul pole and Joe Garagiola said, “It did hit it!” and that was good enough for Duff.

He jumped up and down and whacked his knee on the coffee table, which upset Coop who fell out of place, knocking out the reception, and the horizontal hold went crazy, the screen went snowy, and it was glorious. 

Duff shut off his TV and grabbed Coop. He heard people hooting and hollering on Washington Street outside the closed living room window in his apartment. Fans were celebrating everywhere. Without the light from the television, Duff had to wait momentarily for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, then he carried the bear into his bedroom and propped it up on his mother’s bedside table, careful not to upset her beverages, and sat gently in the chair, which only made a little farting noise, SBD he would have said—silent but deadly—but not loud enough to disturb his mother. 

“We won. We won. We won,” he whispered. 

He hoped he might whisper loud enough to elicit a grunt of approval, but he heard only the whir of the little electric alarm clock. 

“Coop didn’t get a hit,” he said, “but it wath a good game. A great game, Mom. I’ll tell you about it tomorrow. I’ll tell you all about it.”

He left Coop so she might keep her promise and fix him in the morning. He’d need to be ready for Game Seven. For good luck. And good reception.