He picked up the chalk and wiped a clean space on the board. “Cancellation scoring,” he said. “Ringer is three, closest shoe within six inches is one. Game is twenty-one. I’ll call it. Nobody argues with the man holding the chalk.”
Rudy laughed. “Let the boy pitch from the short line, Emmett. I’m not a monster.”
“From forty, same as you,” Gideon said. It was the first thing he had said to his grandpa all afternoon. Rudy’s eyebrows went up. Then he shrugged and said, “Suit yourself, bud.”
Gideon went to the shed and came back with the coffee can. He took out two of my grandpa’s shoes and left the other two in the can by my chair.
Rudy pitched first. His first shoe was a ringer. Of course it was. His second landed a few inches short.
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Gideon stood at the stake with his weight on his left foot, took his one short step, and let the shoe go.
It turned over once, opened up, and caught the stake with a clang that made the people in the lawn chairs look over.
A ringer on top of Rudy’s ringer. They canceled out. His second shoe landed closer than Rudy’s second.
“One for Gideon,” Emmett said, and chalked it.
Rudy laughed it off. “Lucky,” he said. But I saw him look at the stake a beat longer than he needed to.
Rudy scored the next frame with a ringer. Gideon scored the frame after that with one of his own. Then Gideon threw two ringers in one frame, and Rudy threw one, and Emmett said, “Three for Gideon,” in a voice that carried.
People started coming over. Aunts with paper plates. Cousins with cans of pop.
My wife came down from the house with a dish towel still over her shoulder and stood beside me and took my arm.
The first time Gideon took the lead, the lawn chairs went quiet. The second time, Emmett laughed out loud and had to steady himself on his cane.
Rudy quit talking somewhere around twelve to five. He started taking longer at the line. He rubbed his shoes on his pant leg and squinted at the stake.
He was still good. He threw a ringer almost every frame. But Gideon was throwing them too.
My boy did not say a word the whole game. He did not celebrate. He did not look at the crowd.
He picked up his shoes, limped back to his line, set his weight on his left foot, and pitched.
At eighteen to nine, Rudy threw a shoe that landed leaning on the stake and called it a ringer. Emmett walked down with his cane and looked at it and said, “That’s a leaner, Rudy, and you know it.” Rudy did not argue.
Then Gideon stepped up, and with his last shoe of the frame, he threw a clean ringer that rang off the stake like a church bell.
Emmett chalked three more points and set the chalk down.
“Twenty-one to nine,” he said. “Game.”