DADDY’S GIRL
by Charles D. Eckert

* * * *

“Grandma Jo?”

“Yes, child?”

“Are elves and faeries really real?”

Alida Jo Worling smiled as she tucked the faded summer quilt around her granddaughter and chucked the little girl’s chin. Janet was such a bright, inquisitive youngster, and so much like her father in many ways. Besides, Alida remembered asking her own grand-mother a very similar question, oh, so long ago. Things truly do stay the same, Alida Jo thought, in spite of the changes life brings. It was comforting.

Wasn’t it?

“Of course,” Alida said, for that was what she had been told.

“No,” said Janet, “I mean, really and truly.”

Alida nodded and said: “Yes, dear.”

“Then where are they?”

“All around.”

“Here? Now?”

“No, child,” Alida laughed, quietly. “Although they do live among us, we seldom — if ever — see them. Just as we rarely notice the tiny animals in the woods when we go walking, they usually don’t want to be found.”

“Why not?”

“Never thought to ask.”

“I wish they would come out and play, sometimes,” said Janet.

She’s lonely, Alida thought. Poor baby. With a tramp of a mother, who ran off, and a foolish young father who — like his father before him, first at Kwajalein then, finally, at Inchon — volunteered to go fight in some jungle half-way round the world, why wouldn’t the child feel alone? Grandma certainly understood. But, try as she might, Alida could not take the place of children her grand-daughter’s age, no matter how much love there was to give. Young couples with children were scarce in this area of town, for some complicated reason having to do with the schools. It seemed the neighborhood contained only a few elderly people, like herself, living out the remainder of their lives in the gingerbread houses of another time.

There was nothing to be done about any of it.

Alida had enjoyed all the old stories so much as a child that she had not considered the possibility Janet might take them too seriously. Yet Alida had grown up in a more simple era. Kids were exposed to such awful things, anymore. So, when she heard her grand-daughter wanting to conjure playmates out of the cold realm of the Brothers Grimm, it disturbed her on a level she hadn’t felt in years.

Children will believe the people they love and trust, Grandma mused, in as much as their knowledge of the world is new and untested. They want to believe us. It’s important to them.

But a child’s trust is such a fragile thing.

“I know,” Alida said, bending down and kissing Janet’s forehead. “But what do we need with any old elves or faeries when we have each other? Love you, Janet.”

“I love you, too, Grandma,” the girl said, sitting up in bed and giving Alida the best hug any grandmother could want.

“Besides,” Alida went on, “you can’t have faeries and elves without trolls and goblins.”

“You can’t?”

“Oh, no. And they can be very unpleasant creatures.”

“How come?”

“Humans see the world in the light, by the sun. Goblins see the world in the dark, by the moon. That makes them think, feel, and act differently from us. In fact, we wouldn’t enjoy their idea of fun at all.”

“But—”

“I think I know what your next question will be,” Alida said. “But before you ask, I want you to promise me you’ll go right to sleep after I answer. Promise?”

“I promise.”

“By the way,” Alida Jo Worling said, “the answer will be our secret, just between you and me. Have you got that?”

“Yeah,” Janet said, giggling. “I’ve got it.”

“I’ve got it!” Jimmy yelled.

An off-white ball, scuffed and grass-stained, dropped noiselessly out of the sun as the laboring ten-year-old ran and stretched to snag it. The spheroid thunked solidly into the Wilson fielder’s glove. Nearly botching the change-over, the boy managed to cock his arm and throw to second base with a practiced follow-through.

“Safe!” the umpire said.

“Good job, Jimmy,” his mother called. “Nice throw!”

He waved to her and again took up his position in center field, joyfully thumping a diminutive fist into the well-oiled deep pocket of his mitt.

Janet Worling watched her son shading his eyes against the early evening dusk. As she tucked the tail of her T-shirt (“One Tough Mother”) into the waistband of her Levis, she knocked her cleats against the base of the wire backstop, dislodging a few bits of moist turf. Coaching, she had discovered, was a totally unappreciated, thankless job, subject to ardent second-guessing by every parent in the stands. But it was fun, she admitted, wiping perspiration from her forehead and replacing her cap. It was also work. Who said a woman couldn’t coach a baseball team? True, she hadn’t known much at the beginning. But Janet had learned. She worked hard. It seemed she had to work hard, or harder, at nearly everything.

“This is WICR Radio News, at six ...”

Over the drone of voices, the crunch of ice in portable coolers, the snick of aluminum pop-tops and the incidental yawp of a family dog, confounding and mellifluous aromas of the last straggling days of summer drifted through the woodlands at the edge of the city and across the cleared expanses of the park.

It was a fragrance of memory.

Janet would never forget Grandma Jo’s old two-storey white frame house on Mercier Avenue, with its gables and grill-work, antiques and featherbeds, the varnished oak banister that dared her to slide, and the deliriously forever smells of cinnamon apples and clean linen. Those summers were spent with lavender soap in the claw-foot tub and bedtime stories of faeries, elves, and goblins leaving their children on doorsteps to be raised by humans, then coming back for them, years later, in the dark of a moonless night, when everything went bump and slither. Anything was possible.

If only life flowed as refreshingly as the twilight breezes, Janet thought. Dear Lord, wouldn’t it be wonderful?

Yet reality naturally limits choice. A single mother did what had to be done. Jimmy depended on the strength Janet had had to learn to develop. How could he count on her if she were unable to depend on herself? Job, school, her son and baseball. Janet Worling did it all because there was no one else who could, or ever would, devil a doubt.

The sides retired and her team came up to bat.

It had not been easy, any of it. The feminists never really made that part of it clear. Perhaps their stalwart intelligentsia, with an odd sense of collective myopia, glibly overlooked one or two salient points to avoid confronting a reality which takes no prisoners. Or maybe not. Whatever the reasons, sometimes it was not much fun being an adult. If it weren’t for Jimmy, or even this dusty diamond, it might all be —

“Come on, batter!”

“Aw, she can’t hit!”

Stephanie Aikens stuffed two auburn pigtails under her cap, donned a safety helmet, then stepped awkwardly into the batter’s box. Janet had worked diligently with the youngster. She remembered what it had been like for her: to be left out just for being female. Janet was determined it would not happen to this little girl.

“Strike one!” said the umpire.

The boys on the bench had not wanted Stephanie on the team, or anywhere near it, for that matter. And they didn’t like her, now. When Stephanie first appeared at practice it was as though Ilse Koch had been caught weaseling through the doors of the local synagogue. It had taken every persuasive ploy in the coach’s repertoire, including a well-timed threat, not only to get the girl on the team but to stave off what came close to open rebellion.

Male prejudice. It starts young. You have to stop it young.

“Strike two!”

The opposing team razzed Stephanie unmercifully. When a few members of Janet Worling’s team joined in, Janet put a short order stop to it — at least on her own bench — and marveled at the ferocious invective she’d heard. Raw emotions drilled for the open like moles through soil. The boys reeked with a sweaty-male-child-smell which hung, moist and cloying, in the early evening air.

Those pre-pubescent little chauvinists, the coach thought.

And as if to confirm that conclusion Tony Alcado, the opposing pitcher, mumbled a snide, sibilant comment befitting his runty personality.

But Stephanie grinned.

Alcado shook off the first two signals from his catcher and nodded acceptance of the third. He wound up and streaked in a curve ball that caught the inside corner of home plate. Stephanie swung a clean hard cut at it and connected with the fat of the bat.

CRACK!

The ball flew off in a bullet-fast line drive, straight back at the pitcher, and caromed from the side of Alcado’s head as he missed his attempt to block it with his glove. He dropped like a trophy deer.

For a moment, no one moved. Then both benches cleared. Fast. Everyone surged out to the pitcher’s mound and encircled the rag-doll form of a young boy who appeared comatose.

The umpire was a paramedic, thank God, and knew what to do. He and another para, who happened to be in the bleachers, scrounged a flat board, immobilized the boy’s head with a leather belt, and carried him off the field. The Volunteer Fire Department then drove Tony Alcado and his parents to County General, with blue lights flashing and dancing shadows fleeing down the winding road.

As order was restored, Janet looked around for Stephanie. A pressing urge to comfort a devastated child overwhelmed her. And the coach found her player standing casually on first base, as if that were the only place in the world to be.

“Are you all right?” said Janet.

“Sure,” Stephanie said. “That was neat, huh?”

“No,” the coach said, “it isn’t ‘neat.’ “

“What do you mean?”

“Tony’s hurt and we don’t know how badly.”

“He deserved it,” said Stephanie, shrugging. “They all do.”  .

“You can’t be serious.”

“Sometimes I don’t understand you,” the girl laughed impishly, sporting her best why-do-grownups-think-kids-are-so-dumb look; then with a sisterly wink said: “Boys.”

“I don’t believe what I’m hearing.”

“They shouldn’t pick on me,” Stephanie said.

“Of course not,” Janet admitted, her feelings torn and roiling, “but that doesn’t give you any right to laugh at someone’s pain. Injury isn’t funny.”

Stephanie turned sullen.

That was better than nothing, Janet decided, as she watched the child scuffing the toe-tips of her cleats into the dust on either side of the bag, a methodical shifting motion from one leg to the other. If Janet hadn’t known otherwise, she would have thought Stephanie was bragging about what she’d done, almost as though the girl had purposely —

“Play Ball!”

There was nothing for it. Janet went back to the bench and saw her next three batters ground out, just as she’d known they would. Her team took the field again. As she watched her defense deploy, Janet realized how much Stephanie’s attitude had shaken her. She didn’t like to admit it, but it had. And it wasn’t simply typical childish petulance. No, there was something else beneath it, a strange thing, inflexible and cold. The coach knew it. She had felt it.

Yet the accident was Murphy’s Law.

The boys took it as given: if you played a sport, you risked injury. Period. They refused to wring their hands over getting hurt. But they didn’t laugh at it, either. Its random teeth could extend to any one of them, at any time. And that was no subject for jokes.

One, two, three outs and her team was back in the dugout.

“Stephanie, come here.”

“Yeah, coach?”

“You sit out the next inning.”

“Why?” the girl whined.

“Because I said so,” Janet Worling told her, hating herself for lapsing into that adult’s catch-all which she had resented as a child. The fact that Janet wasn’t sure why she’d said it bothered her as much as succumbing to it. But she’d been doing that, lately.

“That’s not fair,” Stephanie blubbered.

“Sue me,” said the coach, snapping at the girl in exasperation. “Sit.”

How do kids pout so instinctively?

Janet pondered this, scanning the narrow aisle separating bench and backstop, as Stephanie trudged to an empty spot along the rough-hewn planking and unceremoniously deposited herself. Whether it was genes or evolution, maybe some bench time would do the child good because, God knew, Janet hadn’t many options left. She wondered if she had given Grandma Jo as much upset when she was Stephanie’s age. Human memory is selective, she knew. Her own recollections could play her false. However, she did remember that Grandma had sat her in a corner, once or twice, and it turned out to be just what she’d needed.

Stephanie needed the same thing.

But Janet couldn’t keep her out the entire game. This wasn’t the Majors. The team simply did not have enough depth. Somehow, the coach knew, Stephanie was more than aware of the implications. Children were certainly more sophisticated, today, than had been Janet. Even so, how could a nine-year-old be that experienced?

Janet glanced over to the bench and noticed Stephanie staring at her. The child’s face took on an odd expression which seemed to alter the familiar features of the girl. Her cheekbones jutting or more pronounced, the shape of the eyes had shifted impossibly, and the youngster’s nostrils flared to full-fathomed holes plunging endlessly into the tiny head. The effect fled with one startled blink, while Janet quivered mi-nutely in the trail of something grey and frigid —

“You’re out!” barked the umpire.

Shifting her attention to the action on the field, Janet saw Don Risen dusting himself off and walking back to retrieve his glove. They had caught him in the hot box between second and third. As he dropped his safely helmet, Don couldn’t meet the eyes of his coach.

“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t think then-left fielder could throw it that far.”

“Okay,” Janet said, nodding for him to take a seat. “Next time, you’ll know.”

“Right.”

A blood-red sun floated, barely visible, over the cars in the lot. Still, both teams held each other scoreless. Janet sent Stephanie back in, this time at right field, and soon the bottom of the sixth drew to a close. Yet even during the frantic activity of retiring sides, Janet couldn’t block out the image of Tony Alcado. She recalled the pathetic manikin, sprawled senseless over the loam of the pitcher’s mound, and it twisted through her like a pulled strand of barbed wire.

That dwarfish snip of a girl didn’t care, the coach thought. The very idea of it is awful. What are her parents teaching her? Come to that, who are Stephanie’s parents ?

Janet couldn’t remember ever meeting them, whoever they were. But she decided to correct that oversight at the earliest and deliver a few choice syllables where they might be some benefit. At least, she had to try.

The top of the seventh arrived, the last inning.

Tommy Olsen hit a high pop-up which was calmly fielded by the opposing shortstop. Jimmy the Hotshot got a base-on-balls but was thrown out trying to steal third base after Bob Neal singled to left field.

What can you do ? Janet mused. Sometimes he was just like his father.

Stephanie strode up to the plate.

Janet Worling was shocked by the rude, unconscionable behavior of the crowd. Every animal sound possible blended into a cacophony of grating disharmony, a strident jumble of boos, hisses, catcalls, and throaty rumbles, which spread from one end of the park to the other. And although Stephanie didn’t pay any attention to it, Janet was appalled. The child’s dismissal of a hostile mob was either uncommon courage or glacial indifference. Coach Worl-ing wasn’t sure. It didn’t seem to make any difference, either way.

The first pitch was high, outside. Ball one.

She’s still angry with me, Janet realized, for scolding her and planting her tush on the bench.

The coach knew it by sight, but the mother in Janet would have seen it in the dark. Why do adults bother, in words or actions, telling children: “It’s for your own good”? Because it usually is. Yet what child would believe that?

The second pitch was low. Ball two.

Stephanie paused, dusting her hands, balancing her Louisville Slugger, adjusting her stance in the box. During this display, she glanced repeatedly at her coach. The adult’s cheek pressed against the wire backstop, fingers entwined in the mesh. It was a habit of nerves and weeks of concern and worry.

Janet peered through the steel and saw something bestial, utterly bestial — vertical-irised piss-yellow eyes, lips thinned and stretched in invisibility above a mandrill’s smile of prominent canines which looked dry and discolored, protruding brow ridges, taut, pallid skin — momentarily superimposed on the smooth innocent face; then nothing. The third pitch came right down the pipe and Stephanie swung.

CRACK!

The foul-tipped ball struck with eldritch accuracy.

Janet fell away, a wire-mesh pattern engraved on her cheek, before she knew why. Her left eye swelled immediately, as she noticed how the ground felt against the flat of her back. The first stars of evening dotted the sky. The park was stone silent.

“Now, what was your question?” said Grandma Jo.

Janet thought for a moment, then spoke: “You said the faeries and goblins don’t want to be found.”

“That’s right.”

“Are they afraid?”

“Maybe so.”

“Is that why they’re so mean?”

Grandma Jo sat down on the edge of her granddaughter’s bed. “I don’t think they were always mean,” she said. “But how would you feel if your kind was dwindling due to the onslaught of humans crowding onto the land you once called home? If you were an intelligent creature, you would be able to see and understand what was going on. If you had powers, yet could not reverse the approaching hordes, would you be content to remain a cute, benign forest dweller? It’s likely you’d become resentful, angry, malignant and determined. And if so, would you use your powers to help you and your kind, and likewise to hinder the invader? Would you alter your true form and infiltrate whenever possible? Could you teach your children to feel no remorse for any mischief or pain they could inflict on ‘the enemy’?

Would you go so far as to punish compassion?” “Mmmmmmmmmmmmm.” “Or would you just go to sleep like my little Janet. . . ?”

Janet Worling slowly picked herself up off the dirt floor of the dugout. At first, she couldn’t understand why the individual members of her team — even her own son, Jimmy — remained seated while they watched her progress. No one made any move to help her. Yet, as she met their nearly uniform expressions, Janet saw that she now shared a bond with her boys, a rite of passage, an initiation, a special something which had been previously denied her.

Had they always known ?

Yes, the answer came back in soundless eloquence, with the pain of earned knowledge, from young male faces with very old eyes. Now, do you understand?

Janet Worling did, at last.

And I’m sorry, Grandma Jo, Janet thought. / heard you when you tucked me in, late at night, but I didn’t listen.

Ignoring the pain and looking beyond her tears, Coach Worling turned towards a true Goblinchild, with auburn pigtails, who stood near home plate and was quietly chuckling behind a feral grin.

“I hope her parents come for her soon.” Janet said.

Would there be no moon, tonight?