Madness In Maggody by Madness in Maggody Read Free Book Online Page B

needs, a coach, uniforms, cheerleaders, miniskirts, equipment, and heaven knows what else. You know what we got, Estelle? We got eight players." She stuck eight fingers under Estelle's nose to emphasize her point. "We got no coach, no uniforms, no smarmy high-school girls in miniskirts, no equipment, no nothing. We don't have diddly squat."
    "I can't argue that one," Estelle said with a morose sigh. "We may have to call those little children and tell them they can't play after all."
    "I am not a quitter, Estelle Oppers. Jim Bob is going to be called to explain hisself on Judgment Day just like everybody else, but when he lifts up his squinty yellow eyes, he's going to find Rubella Belinda Hanks standing before him."
    "Holding a baseball bat," Estelle added, taken with the image. "Looking at him hard enough to split his britches."
    "You can be beside me," Ruby Bee said in a spurt of generosity. "And you know what? When his britches split, it turns out his drawers are red and white striped, and everybody sees it and starts laughing to beat the band. Can you picture the look on his face then?"
    That rocked them back and forth until both of them had tears rolling down their cheeks and Estelle nearly wet her pants but managed to hold it. The near-miss sobered her up enough for an idea to pop into her head.
    "Stop, Ruby Bee," she said. "An idea just popped into my head. It was exactly like when a light bulb goes on over a character's head in a cartoon."
    Ruby Bee wiped her eyes on the hem of her apron and tried to look impressed with all this upcoming illumination. "So what is it, Estelle?"
    "It has to do with Arly. We can call—"
    "Don't waste your breath. Arly made it real plain that she wasn't going to have one thing to do with any baseball team. She'll have a fit if we so much as throw out a hint in her direction. She may be fond of making jokes and saying smart-alecky things, but there's something about her that I can't rightly put my finger on but I try my best to avoid."
    "We're not throwing a single hint in her direction, or not yet, anyways. Remember Hammet, Robin Buchanon's bush colt that stayed with Arly after Robin was killed? How old do you reckon he was at the time?"
    "Lordy, Estelle, he was such a wild creature that I didn't want to get close enough to look. He was runty, that's for sure. Runty and filthy and smelly. And blessed with his ma's nasty language. Did I tell you what he had the audacity to say right to my face?"
    "More than once. Now what we need to do is find out where Hammet's pa lives. Why don't you pour me a glass of beer and scoot the pretzels down this way. This is one fine idea, if I say so myself."
    And she always did, Ruby Bee thought as she pushed the pretzel basket down the smooth expanse of the bar.
     
    *****
     
    Alex had taken Jackie outside to play catch, which was somewhat interesting in that Alex couldn't catch a cold, much less a ball. Neither could Jackie, for that matter, but he was a docile sort and trudged along rather than argue.
    Ivy was reading a book that would have caused the good folks at Organic Gardening to faint in their compost piles. "Organophosphate," she read aloud with difficulty. "Tetraethyl pyrophosphate." She repeated the words until they had a pleasant rhythm to them and seemed to roll off her tongue.
    Alex wouldn't hear them, because once he understood what they meant, he'd be as panicky and upset as a bronco with a burr in its tail. Alex preferred ladybugs and praying mantises to control the insects that savaged the gardens every summer. He planted marigolds to fight the slugs. He constructed quaint scarecrows when a shotgun would have been much more effective.
    Alex was in harmony with his environment, Ivy told herself as she put aside the book. He genuinely liked the rabbits that gnawed the lettuce, the groundhogs that wallowed in the squash, the deer that nibbled everything they could reach over the fence, or everything in sight when they'd knocked the fence