I should probably start by explaining I don't really HATE Calvin Schiraldi, but I always thought Bill Buckner got a raw deal. He got stuck being the goat since his mistake was the most evocative image. Ah well, Schiraldi was not alone either.....for those of you wondering Calvin who? You may want to check out some of the other stories.
Stephen King's most recent work "The Girl who loved Tom Gordon" should be in stores as I'm writing this. When I first heard of King's book (quite a while ago), I came up with the idea for the following parody, but I never got around to writing it. I inevitably was inspired by some reference to King in alt.fan.dave_barry. As such there are a few in-jokes aimed at the newsgroup, but I don't think it detracts from the story in any way. (Because it was never that good to begin with) I didn't spend a lot of time on this, I just took King's prologue and replaced a few nouns, so if my writing style seems to have improved, it's only an illusion.
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Sigfile Follies and the Spiders from Mars presents:
The Girl who hated Calvin Schiraldi
(Pregame)
The world had claws and it could scratch you with them any time it wanted.
It never scratched you in good places either, like the middle of your back
where you could never reach, or your left nut while you were in the middle
of a meeting and couldn't possibly distract the 20 people listening to
your recommendations. Trisha McSimpson discovered this when she was
nine years old. At ten o'clock on a morning in early November she was
sitting in the back seat of her mother's Hillman Minx, wearing her blue
Red Sox batting practice jersey (the one with 31 SCHIRALDI on the back)
and playing with Mota, her doll. At ten thirty she was lost in the woods.
By eleven she was trying not to be terrified, trying not to let herself
think, This is serious, this is very serious. Trying not to think that
sometimes when people got lost in the woods they got seriously hurt.
Sometimes they had to eat their own....but no, she still had a half
a box of teddy grahams.
All because I needed to pee, she thought...all because of a can of
luke-warm Royal Crown Cola. Mom and Pete were fighting again, gosh
what a surprise that was, and that was why she had dropped behind
without saying anything. That was why she had stepped off the trail
and behind a high stand of bushes, well, that and she had to pee.
She was tired of listening to them argue. If he wants to go back to
Boston and live with Dad so much, why don't you just let him? I'd
drive him myself if I had a license, as it is I'll settle for
whacking him into little pieces with a hatchet and mailing him in
small incremen....where had that idea come from? Too many of those
Richard Bachman horror stories her mom would say. Well let her
say that then, I'll show her.... Hmmm peeing in the woods wasn't such
a great idea, she didn't get the nice whizz on leaves sound that her
brother could so easily, and often produce. She had hoped the crackling
of urine would drown out the droning from mom and Pete, but all it had
done was get the inside of her leg wet.
The divorce had happened a year ago, and their mother had gotten
custody. Pete had protested the move from suburban Boston to southern
Maine bitterly and at length. Part of it really was wanting to be with
Dad, but the real reason was that he didn't want to grow up a geek
living in his mother's basement.
In Boston he'd run the Amtrack Glee club like it was his own private
kingdom; he'd had friends -- nerds, yeah, but they went around in a
group and the bad kids didn't pick on them.
In Maine there was no Amtrack Glee club and he'd only made a
single friend, Eddie Glassburn. Then in January, when the ice cream
sales froze over, the I-C-TREATS store closed and Eddie moved away.
That made Pete a loner, anyone's game. Worse, a lot of kids laughed
at him. He had picked up a nickname which he hated: "you there, kid
in the red shirt".
On most of the weekends when she and Pete didn't go down to Boston to
be with their father, their mother took them on outings. Trisha didn't
care where they went on Saturdays, and would have been perfectly happy
with a steady diet of Corn Broom Festivals and Punkin Chunkins, but
Mom wanted the trips to be instructive, too -- hence the Atlantic City
Boardwalk and the Times Square Peep-A-Thon which she mistakenly
assumed involved marshmallow treats.
This week's outing was to an unincorporated township in the northern
part of the state. The Chucklehooter Trail wound through the area on
its way to Canada. Sitting at the kitchen table the night before,
Mom had shown them photos from a brochure. Most of the pictures showed
happy hikers either striding along a forest trail or standing at
scenic lookouts, shading their eyes and peering across great wooded
valleys at the time-eroded but still formidable peaks of the central
White Mountains. Now that she was actually in the forest however,
all she could see were some rusty tin cans, badger doots and
a squirrel who was furtively eyeing her box of teddy grahams.
Realization dawned in Trisha's keen young mind, "Rusty Tin Can and
the badger doots" would be a great name for a band.
Mom had closed the brochure and turned it over. On the back was a
map. She tapped a snaky blue line. "This is Route 101," she said.
"We'll park the car here, in this parking lot." She tapped a little
blue square marked "Connecticut Avenue".
"Uh, mom this isn't the brochure, this is my McDonalds Game p...."
Pete started to explain, but mom cut him off with a "Be quiet, kid in the
red shirt." Pete started to cry, if only the deputy was here, he'd
know what to do. Mom traced one finger along the top from Kentucky
to Marvin Gardens . "This is the Chucklehooter Trail between Route 101
and Highway 17 in New Brunswick, Canada. It's only a few miles, and
rated Moderate. Well...this one little section in the middle is marked
Moderate-to-Difficult, but the electric fences should keep the velociraptors
at bay.
As they climbed into the car, Pete and mother were arguing over
the leaves scattered across the front yard. Pete insisted he had
raked them all the previous day, but mother pointed out that leaves
don't just get picked up in the wind and scattered across lawns.
Pete tried to explain, but mother called him "Kid in the red shirt"
again and he started to cry.
Trisha simply sat in the back seat with Mota on her lap (her
Dad liked to call her Manny-manny-bo-banny-banana-fana-fo-fanny-fee-fi,
mo-anny, manny) and her knapsack beside her, listening to them argue and
wondering if she herself might cry, or actually go crazy. Could your
family fighting all the time drive you crazy? She wished she could
look that one up in a legal database. Could you be held accountable
if this caused you to shoplift a box of teddy grahams from the 7-11?
To escape them, Trisha opened the door to her favorite fantasy. She
took off her Red Sox cap and looked at the signature written across
the brim in broad black felt-tip strokes; this helped get her in the
mood. It was Calvin Schiraldi's signature. Pete liked Roger Clemens,
and their Mom was partial to Spike Owen, but Calvin Schiraldi was
Trisha's and her Dad's favorite Red Sox player. Calvin Schiraldi was
the Red Sox closer...or at least he _WAS_. All until that fateful
night in October when he faced Ray Knight in the 7th inning....
Now, as her mother and her brother fought in the front seat -- about
the outing, about the Glee Club, about their dislocated life
-- Trisha looked at the signed cap, she was sure her
dad had somehow gotten her in 1986, just before the season started,
and thought this:
I'm in Jerusalem's Lot, just walking across the playground to RC's
house on an ordinary day. And there's this guy standing at the hotdog
wagon. He's wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt and he's got a gold
chain around his neck -- he's got his back to me but I can see the
chain winking in the sun. Then he turns around and I see...oh I can't
believe it but it's true, it's really him, it's Calvin Schiraldi, why
he's in Salem's Lot is a mystery but it's him, all right, and oh God
his eyes, how I wish I could poke him in the eyes.... he smiles and
says he's a little lost, he wonders if I know a town called Gaspe,
and how to get there, and oh God, oh my God I'm shaking, because
no one knows he's here. For all they know he's supposed to be in Canada.
I say, he says, then I say and then he says: thinking about how they
might talk while the fighting in the front seat of the Hillman Minx drew
steadily farther away. Trisha was still looking fixedly at the
signature on the visor of her baseball cap when Mom turned into the
parking area, still far away (Trisha is off in her own world was how
her father put it), unaware that there were claws hidden in the
ordinary texture of things digging into her sides like red stitch marks
on rounded white skin. She was in Salem's Lot, not on Route 101. She was
in her back yard, not at an entry-point to the Chucklehooter Trail. She
was with Calvin Schiraldi, Number 31, and he had offered to buy her
a hotdog in exchange for directions to the Gaspe Peninsula. No one
had seen him open the back yard gate, no one had heard the squeak
as it flexed back on its hinges. He didn't notice the freshly
turned earth where mom was going to plant a garden, or the rake
that Pete had left leaning against the side of the house. He wouldn't
hear the subaudible swing of the wooden handle or the dull thud as
red stitchmarks needled into the flesh white orb under the baseball cap.
No one would question that a pile of leaves would suddenly be scattered
across their back yard in the fall. No one would ask about the baseball
cap.
Soon 1986 would be a distant memory.
Oh, bliss.
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