A Quality of Light by Richard Wagamese Page B

clean and reached for another sandwich.
    “Cool,” he said. “Ready?”
    “Ready? I’ve been ready since you phoned me!”
    “Okay, then. Here it comes!”
    He opened the plastic bag and placed two books face-down on the plank. In my mind he’d discovered a strange and wonderful device that maybe could alter gravity, or some magnetic force that attracted horsehide to wood, or a magical glove that caught anything. Mere books were a let-down.
    “That’s it? We’re going to
read
about baseball?”
    “That’s exactly what we’re going to do. Look,” he said and turned the first book over. The title spread in huge red letters across the cover with the figure of a man swinging a bat at a ball.
Baseball in Words and Pictures.
“This is going to unlock all the doors. It tells everything about everything about baseball. Look.”
    We spent the next half hour or so paging slowly through that book, casually munching sandwiches, sloshing lemonade and lifting our eyebrows towards each other in emphasis at certain images. For the first time we saw diagrams of proper throwing technique, how to perform a hook slide, the correct positioning of feet for infielders, the dip and kneel required for blocking ground balls with the body, how to lean while running to scoop grounders, how to take a proper leadoff once you’d reached base, the best way to grip the bat, how to swing and the elements required to lay a bunt down along either foul line.
    “Wow,” I said finally. “Baseball’s like a world.”
    “Yeah,” he said. “And a world’s gotta have rules. Science. As long as there’s science to it, how dumb can it be?”
    “There’s math too. Look at all the measurements.”
    “Science and math. I figure, since we’re good at both of them and Ralphie and Lenny and those guys are such clods, we study this book, practice this stuff, we can’t help but be better than them. Am I right?”
    It seemed right. Studying was second nature to us both and the practice part was just the discipline my parents had taught me. “Yeah. That’s right. Study and practice. Let’s do it!”
    “Okay, but first. Look at this!”
    He turned the second book over slowly, reverently almost. It had a pale green cover with a photo of a man swinging a bat. His swing had twisted him around so that his ankles were crossed and the bat came to rest far over his shoulder. It gave the impression of great power. The word
Boston
was splayed across the front of his gray jersey. The title read
The Science of Hitting, by Ted Williams.”
    “Wow,” I said. “The
Science
of Hitting.”
    “Yeah. And this guy was the best! He batted for a four hundred average when most guys fight to hit two fifty.”
    “What’s that mean?”
    “It means he hit the ball more often in the same amount of chances as everyone else. In here he says it’s the hardest thing in the world to do. To hit a pitched baseball.”
    “Why?”
    “Because you gotta hit one round thing with another round thing.”
    “It says science, Johnny.”
    “That’s right. This book shows you everything about hitting. We study this and we’re gonna be like Ted Williams.”
    And we disappeared into the diagrams and explanations of that book. The answer to baseball, apparently, was baseball itself. We looked into another world that afternoon. A world filled with wonder and possibility. A world as full of precise laws and rules as our own. Laws and rules that could be studied, mastered and conquered. We saw it as a world that could be navigated with those two books as our maps and charts, and a world that was far more than some simple game for simple minds. The mathematics and the science coupled with the resounding echoes ofthose schoolyard catcalls, were the enticement to try, and somewhere in our young boy minds was the belief that this game could make us more, lift us above and beyond the fields and concrete around our lives and on into the realm of magic. Science was reality, the explainable