Free Maniac Magee by Jerry Spinelli Page A

read?”

27
    T he story he told now was not about baseball. It was about parents who were drunk a lot and always leaving him on his own; about being put in classes where they just cut paper and played games all day; about a teacher who whispered to a principal, just outside the classroom door, “This bunch will never learn to read a stop sign.” Right then and there, as if to make the teacher right, he stopped trying.
    “The part I didn’t tell about Bluefield, I was only fifteen. I ran away.”
    The kid and the old man climbed into the pickup. They made three stops. First, they stopped by the park office at the zoo, where Grayson told the Superintendent he just wanted to work part-time for a while, in the afternoons. Fine, said the Superintendent, just so you don’t expect to get paid full-time.
    Then they went to the library book-sale racks and bought about twenty old picture books, such as
The Story of Babar
and
Mike Mulligan’s Steam Shovel
and
The Little Engine That Could.
    Then they went to Woolworth’s for a small portable blackboard and a piece of chalk.
    Within three days, Grayson had the alphabet down pat. The shapes, the sounds.
    After a week, he could read ten one-syllable words. But he was reading them from memory. It took another couple of weeks before he began to get the hang of sounding out words he had never seen before.
    The old man showed an early knack for consonants. Sometimes he got
m
and
n
mixed up, but the only one that gave him trouble day in and day out was
c.
It reminded him of a bronc some cowboy dared him to ride in his Texas League days. He would saddle up that
c,
climb aboard and grip the pommel for dear life, and ol’
c,
more often than not, it would throw him. Whenever that happened, he’d just climb right back on and ride ‘er some more. Pretty soon
c
saw who was boss and gave up the fight. But even at their orneriest, consonants were fun.
    Vowels were something else. He didn’t like them, and they didn’t like him. There were only five of them, but they seemed to be everywhere. Why, you could go through twenty words without bumping into some of the shyer consonants, but it seemed as if you couldn’t tiptoe past a syllable without waking up a vowel. Consonants, you knew pretty much where they stood, but you could never trust a vowel. To the old pitcher, they were like his own best knuckleball come back to haunt him. In, out, up, down — not even the pitcher, much much less the batter, knew which way it would break. He kept swinging and missing.
    But the kid was a good manager, and tough. He would never let him slink back to the showers, but kept sending him back up to the plate. The kid used different words, but in his ears the old Minor Leaguer heard: “Keep your eye on it… Hold your swing … Watch it all the way in … Don’t be anxious … Just make contact.”
    And soon enough, that’s what he was doing, nailing those vowels on the button, riding them from consonant to consonant, syllable to syllable, word to word.
    One day the kid wrote on the blackboard:
    I see the ball.
    And the old man studied it awhile and said, slowly, gingerly: “I… see … the … ball.”
    Maniac whooped, “You’re reading!”
    “I’m reading!” yipped the old man. His smile was so wide he’d have had to break it into sections to fit it through a doorway.

28
    T he first book Grayson read cover to cover was
The Little Engine That Could.
It took almost an hour and was the climax to a long evening of effort. At the end, the old man was sweating and exhausted.
    The kid’s reaction surprised him. He didn’t jump and yippee like he did after the first sentence. He just stayed in the far corner, seated on a stuffed and lumpy equipment bag. He had kept his distance all during the reading, letting Grayson know there would be no cheating, he had to do it on his own. Now he was just staring at Grayson, a small smile coming over his face. And now he was making a fist and clenching it toward