Free Maniac Magee by Jerry Spinelli

pretty soon the two of them were tossing a ball back and forth. And then they were outside, where the throws could be longer; where you could play pepper on the outfield grass of the Legion field, the old man pitching, the kid tapping grounders; where you could shag fungoes, the old man popping high fliers, the kid chasing them down.
    And now the stories were mixed with instruction: the grizzled, rickety coot showing the kid how to spray liners to the opposite field; how to get a jump on a long fly even before the batter hits it; how to throw the curveball. Stiff, crooked fingers that grappled clumsily with Krimpet wrappers curled naturally around the shape of a baseball. With a ball in his hand, the park handyman became a professor.
    As to the art of pitching, of course, the old man could show and tell, but he could no longer do. Except for one pitch, the only one left in his repertoire from the old days. He called it the “stopball,” and it nearly drove Maniac goofy.
    The old man claimed he’d discovered the stopball one day down in the Texas League and that he was long gone from baseball when he perfected it. Unlike most pitches, the stopball involved no element of surprise. On the contrary, the old man would always announce it.
    “Okay,” he’d call in from the mound, “here she comes. Now keep your eye on her, ‘cause she’s gonna float on up there, and just about the time she’s over the plate, she’s gonna
stop.
Now, nobody else ever hit it, so don’t you go getting’ upset if you don’t neither. It’s no shame to whiff on the stopball.” And then he’d throw it.
    Well, of course, Maniac knew that most if not all of that was blarney, and, just to make sure, he watched the ball extra carefully. There sure didn’t seem to be anything unusual about it, not at first, anyway; but as the ball came closer, it did somehow seem to get more and more peculiar; and by the time it reached the plate, it might just as well have stopped, because Maniac never knew if he was swinging at the old man’s pitch or at his speech. Whatever, in weeks of trying, he never hit out of the infield.
    It was October. The trees rimming the outfield were flaunting their colors. The kid and the geezer base-balled their lunchtimes away, and the after-dinner-times and weekends.
    And every night, as the old man left for his room at the Y, he would grouse, “You oughta go to school.” And one night, the kid said back, “I do.”
    And that’s how the old man found out what the kid was doing with his mornings.
    He had noticed the books before, rows and piles of them that kept growing; but their being books, he didn’t think much of it. Now, the kid tells him, “You know the money you give me” — each morning he gave the kid fifty cents or a dollar to get himself some Krimpets — “well, I take it up to the library. Right inside the door they have these books they’re selling, cases of them, old books they don’t want anymore. They only cost five or ten cents apiece.” He pointed to the piles. “I buy them.”
    He showed them to the old man. Ancient, back-broken math books, flaking travel books, warped spellers, mangled mysteries, biographies, music books, astronomy books, cookbooks.
    “What’s the matter?” said the old man. “Can’t you make up your mind what kind you want?”
    The kid laughed. “I want them all.” He threw his hands out. “I’m learning everything!”
    He opened one of the books. “Look … geometry … triangles … okay, isosceles triangles. These two legs, they look equal to you?”
    The old man squinted. He nodded.
    “Okay, but can you
prove
it?”
    The old man studied the triangle for a full minute. “If I had a ruler maybe —”
    “No ruler.”
    The old man sighed. “Guess I
give
up.”
    So the kid proved it — absolutely, dead-center proved it.
    Two days later, while playing pepper in the Legion infield, the old man said to the kid, “So why don’t you go ahead and teach me how to