Twelfth Angel Read Online Free Page A

bandstand, Bill said, “They tell me this old town gave you quite a coming-home celebration.” Immediately he made a wry face, pounded on his steering wheel and said angrily. “I’m sorry, John!”
    I didn’t reply. Bill turned right after passing the Baptist church, drove over a small covered bridge and by the time we had passed the old town cemetery, with its leaning thin headstones of slate, I knew where he was taking me. Within minutes we had pulled into a paved parking lot whose far side was guarded by a chain-link fence at least twelve feet tall, on which hung a long blue-and-gold wooden sign proclaiming, in Old English lettering, that we were at BOLAND LITTLE LEAGUE PARK … as if I needed a sign to tell me.
    I could feel my heart pounding as I followed Bill through the opening on the right-field side of the park between the end of the wire fencing and wooden outfield wall, which curved in a gentle arc from the foul line in right to a deeper point in center to the foul line in left. The number 202, in vivid yellow, was freshly painted at the very edge of the fence in both right and left field, indicating the footage down the foul lines. I remembered hitting a home run over the fence in dead center field, during my last year of Little League, and onthe following day my uncle had measured where the drive had cleared the fence—247 feet!
    When Bill and I arrived in center field, he stopped, extended his hand to me and said warmly, “John, now you are really home.”
    I inhaled deeply and turned slowly to my right until I had completed a full 360-degree circle. Then I turned and did the same thing in the opposite direction before I said, almost in a whisper, “Amazing, truly amazing. The park looks exactly as it did thirty years ago! Lots of fresh paint, new wood, neat fencing and a much better parking lot, but it’s still our old field! Look, Billy, they still have those small billboard-type ads plastered along the outfield fence in right and center … and some of those companies were advertising back when we were playing. And then in left field the wall is just painted green—no ads—exactly like the left-field wall in Boston’s Fenway Park that we’ve always called the ‘Green Monster.’ ”
    I pointed up at the scoreboard high above our heads in center field and actually smiled. “Remember how our dads had to climb that ladder alongside the scoreboard platform and post the score, inning by inning? The parents would draw for that duty before the game, and the person whose name was drawn, the ‘loser’ he was called, was given the numbers on wooden squares, and he would climb that ladder after each inning and hang the proper number of runs scored.”
    “They’re still doing it, John.”
    I walked slowly toward the infield until I was standingat my old position, shortstop. Bill stepped back on the grass to the left of where second base would be and we stared at each other. Suddenly and impulsively I slapped my hands together, crouched as if to field a hard-hit ground ball, swept it up in my hands and tossed the invisible ball to Bill, who had moved over and was standing on “second base.” He reached up as if to take my throw, turned and threw toward where first base would be. Double play! I applauded.
    Arm in arm we walked slowly toward the pitcher’s mound. “Look at the grandstands,” I said with a sigh. “They haven’t changed them a bit! Twenty or so rows high, from behind third base all around the wire backstop behind home plate to just behind first base. Wow!”
    Bill nodded. “Seating capacity hasn’t changed. Those grandstands hold slightly under a thousand fans. Not bad for a town of only five thousand. Let’s go have a seat,” he said, pointing to the dugout behind third base.
    “Now those are different,” I said. “We just had benches, but these are real concrete dugouts, sunk into the ground with steps up to the playing field and a roof overhead. Big-league stuff!”
    We