Dead Ball (9 page)

“Maybe he’s got friends,” Harvey said, winding through leafy streets. He pulled his cell phone out and speed-dialed Jerry Bellaggio’s number. “Excuse me,” he said to Cooley.

“Jerry, it’s Blissberg. One more thing for you. A rogue white supremacist group called Izan Nation, based in Virginia as of six or eight years ago. Thanks.” He turned to Cooley, who was slumping noticeably in his seat. “As I was saying, Moss, maybe he’s got friends.”

“You want to know something, Bagel Boy? I’d feel a lot better if I knew you were carrying that hardware you were referring to last night.”

“It’s right here.” Harvey patted his Detective’s Special. “How’s your mood now?”

Cooley smiled, gold bicuspid catching a bit of the afternoon sun through the windshield. “Improving.”

“So’s mine,” Harvey said.

I
T WAS TWO HOURS
before game time against the Orioles, and the Jewels players were enjoying the asylum from the real world that is baseball in general and the clubhouse in particular.

“What do you think?” Moss whispered to Harvey at his cubicle.

Harvey took another look at the glossy photograph of Cherry Ann Smoler in his hand, shielding it from the view of Cooley’s clubhouse neighbors. She was wearing only a spangled thong and appeared to be fornicating with a brass pole on the stage of a strip club. She eyed the camera lasciviously under blond bangs, lips parted, her mind elsewhere. The name “Ivette” was printed at the bottom of the photo, but the handwritten inscription read: “To M.C. with love, C.A.S.”

“You’d go for some of that, wouldn’t you?”

Sexual vulgarity was the coin of the clubhouse realm. During his playing days—and, to be honest, after them as well—Harvey had enjoyed his fair share of uncensored exchanges about the vagaries of the female body. Under the circumstances, however, he found Moss’s comment inappropriate.

“She’s your girlfriend, Moss. Not something on the dessert cart.”

“Forget it, Bagel Boy.” Moss smirked, snatching the photo from Harvey’s hand and sliding it facedown on the top shelf of his cubicle beneath some folded undershirts.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Harvey said. “She’s a fox, but I don’t think you should have that photo in your locker.”

“But she’s my good luck charm,” Moss said, turning his attention to his sanitary hose. He worked them on with womanly care, smoothing the wrinkles out of the toe before unrolling the sock up his calf. Most ballplayers were slaves to rituals of preparation; suiting up for games had a religious quality to it. The cubicles were shrines to personal grooming, with their neat rows of deodorants and powders, vitamin jars and cans of protein supplements, hairbrushes and blow-dryers.

Harvey wandered off toward the office of Jewels manager Terry Cavanaugh. It was time to make his presence felt as the team’s motivational coach.

The Jewels clubhouse, renovated and enlarged with the rest of the ballpark, no longer resembled the seeping grotto of Harvey’s one year with the team. Now it combined the attributes of an inner-city health spa with those of a Store 24. The effect had been accomplished with wall-to-wall carpeting, harsh fluorescent lighting, and two large refrigerated cases containing soft drinks, fruit juices, and mineral water, quart containers of half-and-half, even a plastic tub filled with baby carrots floating in ice water. Although it was only an hour before game time, one long counter was already covered with chafing dishes of rice, beans, spare ribs, and fried chicken. Another counter was devoted to coffee, condiments, and commercial-size boxes of David sunflower seed packets, Bazooka bubble gum, Twizzlers, and Total cereal. Considering that after the game, win or lose, another spread would be awaiting the players, it was no wonder that baseball players had the biggest asses in professional sports.

Jewels players in various states of undress, most of them wearing plastic shower clogs, kept coming by to lift the lids off the chafing dishes to check on, and sample, their contents. Other players stretched their hamstrings in the middle of the floor or slid new bats out of the Louisville Slugger boxes over their cubicles and took a few slow-motion swings. A few disappeared down a hallway to the team’s new fitness room filled with Cybex equipment and free weights. Still others sat at a table in the dining area, signing balls, or reading and answering mail. A few sat on a sectional sofa beneath a TV, tuned to ESPN, bolted high on the wall. The great variety of body types was a testament to baseball’s democratic nature: Height, weight, strength, and speed did not get you to the majors as fast as some quirky genius—learned as easily in a cornfield as a city lot, as easily by a slow, squat kid as a scrawny one—for throwing a nasty little curve, or putting the fat of the bat on it, or making perfect throws from the shortstop hole, or, like Harvey in his prime, vacuuming up everything hit in your direction.

As game time approached, the chatter subsided. Some men sat meditatively on their folding chairs, staring into their cubicles. Despite the competing strains of hip-hop and salsa pouring out of ghetto blasters in opposite corners of the clubhouse, Harvey was aware of an underlying silence he remembered all too well: the sound of ballplayers taking refuge from their vulnerable public lives, taking advantage of the last few moments before battle.

When Harvey poked his head into the manager’s office, Cavanaugh was striking the classic Baseball Manager in Repose pose: stocking feet on his desk, Diet Pepsi in one hand, the lineup card before him. Harvey remembered Terry as a utility infielder from the Florida panhandle who played primarily in the National League and later worked his way up the managerial ladder in the minor leagues. His last job before making it to the majors was managing the Jewels Triple A farm club, the Evansville Emeralds.

“Excuse me, Terry.”

Cavanaugh raised his tired eyes over the frames of his dime store reading glasses. He still had a youthful mop of sandy hair, but the weathered face beneath it gave his hair the air of a toupee.

“Reporting for duty as your motivational instructor.” Harvey flung two fingers off his forehead.

Cavanaugh pulled his legs off the desk and pointed Harvey into the chair across the desk. Harvey pushed the door shut behind him and sat. It was a windowless office, a cinderblock bunker of a room whose salient feature was a gray array of metal file cabinets. On Cavanaugh’s desk was a copy of the current issue of
Sports Illustrated
with Moss on the cover and the headline “Cool Stays Hot.”

“At ease, Coach.” Cavanaugh turned his head to fire a sizzling stream of tobacco juice into a metal wastebasket near his feet.

“So,” Harvey said, “are there players in particular you’d like me to motivate?”

“Not that I can think of,” Cavanaugh said, tipping some Pepsi down his throat.

“Or would you prefer that I motivate en masse?”

“I don’t think it really matters either way.”

“Then how would you like me to proceed?”

“As far as I’m concerned, you don’t have to motivate anybody.”

“No?”

“The way I look at it, all that matters is that everybody
knows
you’re the motivational coach. It doesn’t matter if you do anything. Everyone will think you’re motivating someone else. Just the fact that you’ve been hired to motivate them will suggest to them they are not sufficiently motivated, and that in itself will be a motivating factor.”

“What should I do in the event I get the sudden urge to motivate?”

“I’d avoid sudden urges to motivate, Harvey. Look, let’s cut the bullshit. I know why you’re here. Felix told me this morning.”

“Oh.” It would be nice if Felix kept him abreast of the expanding circle of cognoscenti.

Cavanaugh sent another stream of blackened saliva into the wastebasket. Harvey wondered whose job it was to empty it at the end of the week. The manager picked up the lineup card and scowled at it. “If you were me, what would you do with Cubberly?”

Funny how all roads so far seemed to lead to Cubberly. “Meaning?”

“He’s not hitting. His on-base percentage is still decent, since he draws a lot of walks despite his problems with the high pitch, and I hate to juggle a good lineup unnecessarily. But he’s hurting Cooley.”

“You mean, on the base paths?”

“And at the plate.”

“Is something eating him?” Harvey asked.

“Personal problems?”

“Yeah.” Harvey nodded, waiting for Cavanaugh to take the bait.

The manager pressed his lips together thoughtfully and looked off. “Well, his wife and kid are back in Cincinnati. Sometimes that gets to a guy, living alone. But my view’s always been that the slump gods are irrational.” He picked up a pencil and gnawed on the eraser. “I could bat Verona in the two spot,” he said, mostly to himself.

“Cubberly got something against Moss?” Harvey asked.

Cavanaugh looked at Harvey. “What?”

“Something against Moss?”

“Cubberly?”

“Yeah.”

“Interesting you say that.”

“How come?” Harvey said, bracing himself for a revelation.

“Well, Moss has always been a bit aloof, from blacks and whites. And Latinos, for that matter. It’s his nature. As I recall, you were a bit like that yourself, Harvey.”

“And without the talent.”

Cavanaugh smiled. “See, with the year Moss is having, that exacerbates how he rubs some guys the wrong way. Now that he’s having a career year, what used to be just keeping his distance now strikes some people as a superiority complex.”

“Is Cubberly one of those people?”

“Are we talking now about the lawn jockey?”

“We are.”

“Say it
is
someone on the team,” Cavanaugh said. “What’s the motive?”

“Maybe somebody’s got a mean streak that’s a hell of a lot stronger than his team spirit.”

“Maybe you’ve got a paranoid streak.”

“Terry, since I’ve been out of baseball I’ve seen people do far worse for far less rational reasons than making sure some record doesn’t fall into a black man’s hands.”

“I would caution you against stirring things up on the team,” Cavanaugh said. “There’s a pennant I’m still trying to get my hands on. I’ve got mouths to feed at home. I didn’t claw my way back to the majors to see my team’s chances destroyed by suspicion and allegation.”

“It’s hardly my intention.” For all of Cavanaugh’s apparent reasonableness, he was getting Harvey’s back up—not that he wasn’t born with his back already in the upright position.

“I wonder how Monkman would do in the two spot,” the manager mused, squinting at the lineup card. “I think that’s too much beef high in the order.”

“I’ll stay out of your way, Terry, but I need to count on you to maintain my cover.”

“You’ve got my word there, Harvey.”

Drawn by an irresistible impulse, Harvey left the manager’s office and wandered by Cubberly’s cubicle, where the outfielder, fully suited up, was cramming a stick of Wrigley’s Spearmint gum into his mouth. He was a rangy, big-boned farm boy with a high waist that accentuated the length of his powerful legs. His face, though, looked as if he had borrowed it from a different man. It was bland and doughy and freckled, as forgettable as an eleven-year-old boy’s.

“Just wanted to introduce myself, Andy. Harvey Blissberg. I played center here for a year back when you were probably in junior high.”

“Sure,” Cubberly said, kneading his wad of Wrigley’s between his molars. “How’s it going?”

“Pretty good, pretty good.” Harvey had no illusions that Cubberly had recognized his name. Most players today couldn’t identify Maury Wills, Brooks Robinson, or Roberto Clemente, let alone a Harvey Blissberg. They lived in some eternal, overpaid present.

“I heard you were here to motivate this bunch of losers,” Cubberly said, a light drawl emerging. According to the program, he hailed from Clawson, South Carolina.

“That’s right,” Harvey said and picked up a bat that was leaning against a clubhouse pillar. “I’m here to fill all your motivational needs.”

“Okay,” Cubberly said, out of irony’s range.

“It’s tricky,” Harvey said, speaking to Cubberly’s back. “Motivating implies a criticism—you know, that they haven’t been doing something right. People are so thin-skinned.”

Cubberly lifted both hands to his cap and reset it with a minute gesture, like a waiter at a swanky restaurant placing a hot entree before an important customer and giving the plate that little extra turn, as if fastening it to the tablecloth. “I ain’t thin-skinned about nothin’.”

Then he raised his arm to take his glove off the top shelf of his cubicle. The glove was a scuffed and weathered open-webbed Wilson, spotted with stains and creased and creviced with crow’s feet. Harvey, thinking how human leather was, almost missed the tattoo on Cubberly’s upper right arm that his reach had revealed.

“Hey, let me have a look at that,” Harvey said, lifting the sleeve of Cubberly’s uniform with his finger.

The tattoo was the word
IZAN
intersected by a lightning bolt. “
Nazi
backward, huh?”

“A crazy phase I went through,” Cubberly said. “I’ve seen the light.”

“What light is that?”

“Live and let live. That’s the light. As the Reverend King said, ‘Let freedom ring.’ ”

“You’ve come a long way.”

“Life’s a journey,” Cubberly said. “Nice meeting you.” He pivoted and walked off toward the clubhouse door.

As Harvey watched Cubberly go, third-base coach Campy Strulowitz, wearing nothing but a jock strap and shower clogs, came up and clapped him on the back. He was as old as baseball itself. His pale, hairless body was pleated with folds of skin, and his long Polish face had become exaggerated with age.

“Hum babe, Harv babe, hum-a-now,” he jabbered, throwing his arms around Harvey and holding him close for a moment. It was like being embraced by a very large plucked chicken.

“Jesus, Campy, you look great,” Harvey said, holding him by the shoulders at arm’s length. Strulowitz’s face had spent most of the last seventy years in the sun. It was as though someone had held him by the feet and dipped his head in a vat of mahogany stain.

“I look like shit, and you know it,” Campy said, pulling at the loose skin on his left tricep. “Look at this—I’m falling off the bone.”