Mudville Read Online Free PDF Page B

what happened. I still take good care of them, though, and look at them once in a while.
    “I thought you might want to see my baseball cards,” I say to Sturgis, setting the boxes out on the bed.
    He looks at me for a moment, twisting his lip the way he does sometimes.
    “Sure, I can look at them if you want,” he finally says.
    Sometimes I sort the cards by teams, sometimes alphabetically, and sometimes by year. These days I have them sorted by position. I like catchers the best, so I start with those. Mike Piazza. Ivan Rodriguez. Jorge Posada. A. J. Pierzynski. Bengie Molina. A Joe Mauer rookie card. I even have a Yogi Berra card from the 1960s that my dad gave me for Christmas. He gave me Yogi's book and planted that card in the middle as a surprise. Sturgis nods at each of them, but I might have been showing him a stamp collection for all he cares.
    “Do you want to see my card?” he asks.
    “You have cards, too?”
    “Just one,” he says. “Let me get it.” He rummages in his bag and comes up with a battered book about motorcycle maintenance. He opens it and removes a card wrapped in tissue paper. He hands me the card.
    It's ten years old, for a pitcher named Carey Nye of the Baltimore Orioles. He's a gloomy-looking guy, tall and lanky like Randy Johnson, with long hair and a mustache. I'm not sure I ever heard of him. His stats aren't that impressive. Then I remember Sturgis's comment from last night.
    “Is this your dad?”
    “It's a real collector's item, right?” He laughs and takes the card back, folding it into the square of paper and putting it in the book.
    “Well, thanks for showing me,” I tell him, trying not to sound either sarcastic or patronizing, and failing on both counts.
    I suddenly feel like I've caught both ends of a double-header, with a marathon in the middle. It's only 8:00, but I brush my teeth, get undressed, and drop into bed. Sturgis is still up, reading by the overhead lamp, as I fade off to sleep. When I wake up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, the light's still on. Sturgis is sound asleep, cuddling a homeowner's guide to landscape construction.
    “You know,” I tell Sturgis as we scrape around in the mud that Friday. We're done digging the ditch, which now runs across two of the property lines in an
L.
Frank wasn't happy with the job we'd done; the line of the ditch was ragged, its width and depth irregular. So now we're scraping it, evening out the sides, getting it ready for the concrete lining. “It's not just that it's killing my back and shoulders. It's not just the muddy wetness of it either. It's the mind-numbing boringness of it all.”
    Sturgis is working at his usual clip, a few paces away.
    “I don't know how anyone does it,” I say. “I mean, it's one thing to dig mud nine or ten hours a day for a whole week, but how about doing that day in, day out for months or even years? In the
rain,
no less? It's really something.”
    He's not listening to me, but I've found that complaining helps pass the time, so I do it anyway.
    The guys order pizza for lunch. Sturgis and I have beeneating our lunch on the roof every day, enjoying the view. We figure it'll be pretty messy carrying pizza up the ladder, so we eat in the tent.
    There's this guy, Peter, who joins us at our table. I've noticed him before. He's the shortest guy I've ever seen doing construction, like maybe five foot two. He's also got some-thing messed up with one of his hands. There's no proper fingers on it, just little stubs. I've seen him holding nails while he pounds them in, using power tools, whatever. He handles the pizza just as easily as we do, too.
    “You're the boss's son, right?”
    “Yeah.” I guess word gets around.
    “My son could work, too. Peter Junior. He's your age but strong as an ox. Do you think you could talk to your father?”
    “I don't know,” I tell him honestly. “I think there are laws and stuff. You can have family work for you, but you can't hire other