Caledonia Cowboys: A Baseball Fantasy

By B. G. Gunter

Joshua Foster, a forty-year-old African American high school chemistry teacher and part-time baseball coach, was invited to visit a cousin in Africa. His ninety-nine-year-old uncle, also a chemist, had developed a compound that had strange and unknown powers when coming in contact with leather and wood. Jesse, Josh's seventeen-year-old son, and Billy, his sixteen-year-old nephew, were the pitcher and catcher respectively on their newly formed team at Caledonia High. They were picked to finish last in their conference.

The boys demonstrated to their coaches what could be done if the compounds could be used in a real game. Josh refused to allow it until the championship game, and then only because members of the opposing team had flattened the tires on all the vehicles for transporting players and equipment to the playoff game, almost forcing a forfeiture of the game.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 19, 2016
• ISBN: 9781514476192

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Copyright © 2016 by B. G. Gunter.

ISBN:      Softcover      978-1-5144-7620-8

                eBook           978-1-5144-7619-2

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 03/18/2016

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CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

MAJOR CHARACTERS

Joshua (Josh) Foster---CTHS Chemistry Teacher, Head Baseball Coach

Maxwell (Max) Hargrave---CTHS Biology Teacher, Assistant Baseball Coach

Jesse Owens Foster---the Fosters' 17-year-old Son, Pitcher on the baseball team

William (Billy) Hargrave---The Hargraves' 16-year-old Son, Catcher on the Baseball Team

Lenny Richards---First Baseman on the Baseball Team

Debrah (Deb) Foster---Joshua Foster's wife, Associate Editor, the Caledonia Tribune

Colleen Hargrave---Max Hargraves' wife, CTHS Computer and Typing Teacher

Marlene Hargrave---the Hargraves' 13-year-old Daughter

Sarah Foster---the Foster's 13-year-old Daughter

Nathaniel Wilkerson---High School Principal, the Fosters' Backyard Neighbor

Emily Wilkerson---the Wilkersons' 17-year-old Daughter, CTHS Head Cheerleader

Dorothea Wilkerson---Wife of Nathaniel Wilkerson

P R O L O G U E

Jesse struck a pose like he had seen major league pitchers do on television so many times: bent over, ball hidden behind him in right hand, left hand propped on right knee, eyes staring straight ahead at the catcher, waiting for the signal (although he already knew what he was going to throw). He hoped he looked confident, formidable, and dangerous.

Truthfully, however, Jesse's insides were a jangled mass of nerves. To say he was anxious was a colossal understatement--he was beyond being nervous, he was seriously unwound. The source of this anxiety was the team they were playing today, and especially the batter at the plate. The team was Cairo Central, easily the best and most feared team in their conference. The batter, he was told, was none other than Beauregard Bo Ridley. He suspected, and rightly so, that that was supposed to make him scared. It did. Bo Ridley, home run king of the entire state, and even while still in high school, already had been drafted by the Chicago Cubs. It didn't help much to know, though Billy kept reminding him anyway, that he was also the strike-out king of the state.

Adding to the tension was the astonishing fact that his own team, Caledonia, (a pre-season pick to finish last in the conference this year, as it had been for the last five years) had to win this game in order to play for the state championship. They had come so far this year, and were aching to go all the way.

Unfortunately for Jesse, the best batter on the other team was at the plate. Actually, he was the best batter in the conference, probably even the best in the entire state. He was big (6'1") and muscular, legs like tree trunks. Additionally, he had accounted for his team's only run today with a long sacrifice fly his first time at bat. He had predicted he would do this last night in a confrontation with the whole of Jesse's team at the pizza parlor. At this moment runners were on first and second, and both were fast. Talk about pressure!, he thought. Jesse straightened up and stepped off the mound, motioning for the catcher to come and talk.

C H A P T E R 1

Joshua Foster stood at the end of a long line of waiting passengers at the International Airport in Amsterdam. He had finally been able to relax, having flown all over Africa inspecting factories, meeting new people, boarding ever-smaller planes, sometimes suffering through strange noises that made him marvel that the planes could even lift off the ground and, once airborne, land in the proper way. And then the interminable layovers at strange places, where it seemed the only thing the small number of personnel really wanted was someone to talk to about faraway places---in other words, where they (the passengers) came from and where they were going. Actually, at times they seemed to be delighted to have any passengers at all.

Joshua was exhausted to the point of even dozing-while-standing, but it was an understandable tiredness, and a good feeling: He was going home. He had been away for almost six months now, having taken a one-year sabbatical from his teaching job to work for his great-uncle in South Africa, who had founded and built one of the largest chemical firms in this part of the world. During the five months he had worked for Uncle Art, he had traveled more miles, met more people new to him (many of them relatives he had never seen or heard of before), flew on more air trips, assisted in more chemistry experiments, worked more hours, and enjoyed it all more than in any like period in his forty three years.

His current fatigue was because of less than efficient flights to Amsterdam: from Capetown to Johannesburg, from there to some place in Nairobi, on to Cairo, and from Cairo to Amsterdam. The problem was both the scheduled flights and the airports themselves: the stopovers were not long enough to find places to sleep, and the airport benches were decidedly uncomfortable. Thus, he had had just a few hours sleep in almost thirty six hours, and even that was fitful.

At the moment he found himself, even while standing, having the little 'sleep-wake' dreams that one has when he is unable to sleep yet cannot stay awake. Just now he woke from one in which he was riding an elephant that turned out to be an airplane, though not a very good one. He had earlier experienced a common conundrum in one of these dreams: Why is it that, as an African-American, the people I meet in Africa think of me only as American, and in America, the land of my birth, so many see me only as African?

From Cairo to Amsterdam, from Amsterdam to London, and from London to Washington, his benefactor had reserved for him the best seats to be gotten on each flight. His agent must have taken considerable care in booking them--each flight was a 747, and his seat in each was 'in the bubble'. Josh had slept from Cairo to Amsterdam, and he planned also to sleep from Amsterdam to London, and from London to Washington. Perhaps by then he would be caught up.

Later, on the final leg of the journey---Washington to St. Louis--he was alert for the first time and, for the most part, simply looked out his window, peering intensely at the terrain below.

You seem pensive, Mr. Foster. Can I help you? Can I get you a drink? A snack? A uniformed flight attendant was sitting in the empty seat beside him, apparently for the moment having caught up in her work.

I guess I am... he paused... perhaps a little. I have a big decision to make, and I've been thinking about it for some time. You see, Debrah... he glanced at her name tag, if you've a few minutes to listen, perhaps I can tell you about it and get it clearer in my own mind as well.

She glanced at her watch. Well, we've got about thirty five minutes before landing, so I guess I've got about twenty five to listen. Shoot!

He began. "Well, as you can see, I'm African-American, and I'm forty years old. I teach chemistry and coach baseball --the latter volunteer and part time--at the high school in one of the small towns virtually right below us---in southern Illinois. I love both of these jobs immensely. My wife and I have been settled there for almost all our years since graduate school, and we have two beautiful children---a seventeen-year-old boy who tells everybody that he's half-black and half-white, half Jewish and half Christian, and that he loves everybody and everybody loves him. As you can imagine, that last assertion is sometimes questionable. Our girl is a model thirteen-year-old who looks like a slightly cream-colored version of her mother. My