Babe Ruth's Piano 6
Continued from last week, again.
Jim was down there for a good long while. They had eased him into the waters, and he twisted half back to look at the guys remaining on the shore. They had also donned their rubber suits, but had yet to put on their oxygen tanks and rope harness. Jim gave a little wave to the cameras and then another look back at Bill and Lansing. Two new guys came from around the van to man a winch, and let out rope as Jim walked out into the pond, the water rising up around his rubber dive suit. "It feels weird, man, like I'm swimming in a plastic bag or something," was the last thing he said before going down.
After about three minutes down there there were frantic tugs on the line, and the two men started winching like two large, cold pistons. Lansing could imagine them on one of those old fashioned railway carts, the kind you had to pump up and down like a seesaw to get moving. A few men behind the cameras poked their heads out of the van they men had all arrived in that morning, with cups of coffee and a laptop, around which they were all huddled. The men gave The Man a thumbs-up.
Jim came spluttering out of the water, even though his mask and suit seemed intact, and himself dry as a bone underneath it all. He flopped on to land, shortly followed by a greasy set of antlers, with a couple pieces of pond grass sticking to them. The Man strode over and stood over Jim, lying there in the muck he'd brought up, wrapped around his feet. "So... what's this?" He pointed down at the antlers, looking at Jim. All the cameramen but one zoomed in on Jim for a closeup, the remaining guy focused in on Lansing and Bill.
"It's a set of antlers. Valuable to certain indigenous peoples of the northern reaches of North America and Greenland." Jim looked about ready to pass out. For all that nervous energy he just didn't have the stamina for longer range exercise. Lansing noted it.
"Ah ha." The Man made as if it pick up the antlers, but stopped. He motioned to his van, and one of the two guys who picked Lansing up for this whole television show came out and hoisted the rack up and twirled it this way and that, trying to get a good handhold on the water-slick surfaces without getting too much pond gunk on himself, or The Man. Lansing was toying with nicknaming the bigger guy Bobby, after Bobby Doerr, because he was the strong, silent, dependable type. And he also wanted an excuse to name the other guy Pesky, after Johnny Pesky, Doerr's infield-mate at shortstop, because he figured the little guy for a pesky sort of fella, and he was too small to retaliate.
Bobby shook the antlers around a little bit, and finally shook his head at The Man, who looked back down at Jim. "No, Jim, I'm afraid these aren't antlers. They're just branches from some tree. They are worth no points." After the early morning warm-up, The Man was hitting his television announcer stride by leaning heavily on those quantitative words.
Jim looked crestfallen. His suit, now out of the water and slightly deflated, helped the appearance.
The Man bent down over Jim. "You have three more minutes for your remaining two dives."
"What?" Jim started a little. Bill and Lansing looked at each other.
"You heard me. One minute fifty-five seconds." The Man stepped purposefully back a few paces, towards the palette with the two remaining oxygen tanks.
Well, after that there was no lolly-gagging. Jim rushed back to his feet and half-crawled back to the pond, the rope tangling around his feet as he submerged, face first. But it was over for him. He never recovered from the antlers that weren't antlers, and he managed a few rocks and one really long piece of pond weed – the longest most of them had ever seen in one continuous piece, they agreed, even The Man, but it was deemed worthless in the scope of the television show. He collapsed at the edge of the water, and the two men working the winch were sent in to pull him out and sit him on the back of the van while Bill lifted the oxygen tank up on his own shoulders. Apparently they were going to skip lunch for the favour of the lady.
Bill was much more determined, striding off into the water at The Man's signal without a wave, without a word. Lansing figured they'd tape the voiceovers later, perhaps that's why the Bobby and Pesky were hovering around Jim at the back of the van.
Bill brought up nothing his first time, a bit of a shocker, as Lansing figured he'd be the one to watch now. But nothing. All Lansing had to do to compete with that was bring up a bit of long pond grass like Jim and he'd have that beat.
His second dive was much better. He brought up a shopping cart. And the third, well, the third he made a big mistake, probably. The Man had shouted at him, as he disappeared again, without a word, into the briny not-so-deep (and not so briny, come to think of it), "one minute forty-six seconds!" And with all that time, Bill took a minute to return to the surface with a slightly dazed look on his face and what looked like a handful of piano strings in his hand.
The Man brightened considerably as Bill emerged, holding out his hand as if he were operating his new bionic hands and he wasn't quite sure what he was supposed to do to get them to turn and open. The Man, throwing caution to the wind and his very expensive looking loafers to the waters and shoreside muck of the unnamed pond ran over to Bill and plucked the wires from his hands.
"Ahhhhhh! Wires! Piano wires!" Lansing hmph'd to himself, he was right, they were piano wires. He suddenly tried to look more thoughtful, as he imagined looking thoughtful while thinking you were right that a few strands of wire in a man's hand as he emerged from a pond were piano wire might come across as a slightly unbalanced kind of thoughtful look. Which wasn't an angle he wanted played on him, when the teasers spots went out. The Man raised the wires up in one fist and shook them at the cameras. He looked what Zeus might looked like, had he decided to trade in his robes for an Italian suit and his lightning bolts for a bunch of wire.
Bill seemed too shocked to speak, and The Man asking him questions got no where. He and the pond grass he'd accumulated just wobbled over to the back of the van to join Jim, who was now fully toweled off and staring down at his hands, which were still.
"Lansing," said The Man, when he'd handed the wires over to Bobby and Pesky to place in the back of the van, "it's now down to you. Lansing has zero points, and it's safe to say he's going home. Bill has..." The Man looked over at the van, where the man with the clipboard sat, "one hundred and twenty points. You must beat one hundred and twenty points to win. The heart of the beautiful woman."
"Whom we've not seen yet?" said Lansing.
"Yes. That one." The Man gestured towards the palette and the remaining oxygen tank. "Don. Your. Tank."
Lansing couldn't feel the coldness of the water inside his suit as he felt the rubber buckle and crinkle as the water pushed in on him. Down in the water he could himself sh-lurping slowly, yet majestically out of and into the muck at the bottom of the pond, which was more welcoming down at the bottom of the pond than it was along the shore. There was a string of soft brown-green balls under the water. When he approached the first one he could feel a certain degree of heat from it, even inside his gloves, and as he picked it up wires sucked at the bottom of the pond from either side, one leading back to the shore, the other leading on in the direction of the next ball of light. The crew had apparently dropped lights earlier, and it looked like they had a path laid out for them.
Lansing followed the path and listened to his breathing, which was loud and close, much closer than had he been breathing freely in the open air above. He felt vaguely like he was at the dentist's office.
Midway down the path of lights, he found it.
What Bill had brought up was part of the guts of the reasonably small upright piano sitting as you might expect it to in the middle of a living room. Only underwater.
A good portion of the wood had rotted away, which is why Bill tried to yank it up by the piano strings, Lansing figured. He crouched down in the muck and looked underneath the keyboard. He was growing acutely aware of the time. Or perhaps not acutely, because he didn't have the faintest idea how much time had passed, but he knew it was a bit and getting on towards three minutes.
Underneath the keyboard were metal pipes, which were connected to foot pedals, just visible, shining in the lights leading back to the shore.
Well, Lansing didn't get all of it, he got most of it — metal pipes and keys coming along pretty easily, but a lot of wood was rooted to the spot by weeds and the mud. And he saw it on Bill's face from around the back door of the van when he came up with an armful of piano, a good solid chunk of the structure of it. The Man and his lackeys whirled around the piano remnants like dervishes, and Lansing took it, from all the attention, that he could forget about going back in for more, as he'd apparently won. He started taking off his suit and joined his fellow contestants by the van. They looked on as the men loaded the sopping former piano on to one of the van's and spirited it away down a little road to a small cottage further down into the trees and up a gentle hill from their launch spot.
Somewhere in the distance Lansing thought he heard a helicopter.
The house was deserted when they arrived and the sun was slowly going down in the western skies, turning the trees a dark blue and the sky bruised purple. Bobby and Pesky were just as confused as any of them as the van pulled into the house's driveway and the lights were all quiet and the doors remained steadfastly shut.
Eventually, as the light gave out Bobby and Pesky offered the guys a lift to the airport, where they could sort out rides from there. Sure, they were disappointed not to meet the lady, but then there probably wasn't ever any lady, after all. Bill headed back to the woods of Maine, Jim took the first flight out to Saint Louis, and Kim, who they found sitting on the steps of the mansion when they arrived back, got picked up the Massachusetts State Police for hitchhiking on the Mass Pike back out to I-495, where he planned to get a ride up to Nashua. Lansing, not in any rush to get back to Indianapolis and Jessica decided to take the infield boys up on the offer of a lift out to Los Angeles with them in the van, which they'd assumed ownership in lieu of pay. And they missed driving out into the sunset by three or four hours, in the end, considering the stop for a quick toilet break and another stop to try and bail Kim out of trouble by offering him a lift up to Nashua themselves.
They heard the stories a few weeks down the line. John Henry Williams, the owner of the Boston Red Sox was denying reports that Babe Ruth's Piano had been dug up, as was George Steinbrenner, both men denying they were bankrolling the supposed recovery. Most of the players on the Sox denied it, though Kevin Millar originally accepted responsibility for it, only to deny it a few weeks later with a red face on an WEEI broadcast, claiming he didn't realise they meant the Babe's piano.
Most of the national media jumped on the story, throwing the press rooms at Fenway Park into a frenzy of arms and microphones to get statements from players, umpires, executives, and the fans milling around outside. The Players Union attempted to give a statement, but got the venue wrong and wound up speaking to a sixth grade class from Charlton, Massachusetts, on a field trip at the New England Aquarium.
Lansing and Bobby and Pesky were sat around the outside patio of The Cheesecake Factory one sultry evening in early March, eating through a few piles of strawberry and blueberry cheesecake under the warm Santa Monica skies.
The waiter, who'd been around them like a puppy dog all evening, fetching them more and more cheesecake because they couldn't help but order more when presented with the question of "did they need anything else?" slipped a rather thick envelope on the table, and bounced off around another waiter, past some people waiting on the edge of the deck, and into the factory's door.
Lansing slid it off the table, and opened it. Inside was one piece of paper and a wad of folded bills. And it read: "THANK YOU, PEACE AT LAST, THE BAVARIAN ILLUMINATI." Lansing folded the letter a few times while Bobby and Pesky went through the cash, counting it discreetly in an utterly indiscreet manner under the table, and Lansing tipped his head back and and leaned in his chair to look up at the pink sky and it looked like they were trapped in the middle of a giant, dirty ball of cotton candy.
To be continued... Summer 2004?
disclaimer:
So ends the series, until the Red Sox take up the axe again in just under 20 days now.
Have the Bavarian Illuminati unearthed (un-watered?) the Babe's Piano? Is the curse over?
'Lorrainery' appears next week.