Graves' Retreat (4 page)

    Les was scarcely across the threshold when he noticed the banner strung across the lobby of the bank. It read:
are we going to beat DES MOINES? YOU BET!

    Edmonds put a big hand on his shoulder. “Does that make you proud, son?”

    Les knew how to answer. “Yes, indeed it does, sir!” he said, sounding like a drummer extolling the virtues of some miracle elixir. “Indeed it does!”

    Edmonds patted him again. “That’s how I like my answers, Les. Short and enthusiastic.” He turned sharply to Byron Fuller. “Isn’t that right, Byron?”

    Byron snapped to attention the way he’d learned in military school. “That’s
exactly
how you like them, sir. Short and enthusiastic.” Edmonds nodded to both of them and then strode back to his office.

    Byron said, “I’ve got to admit something to you, Les.”

    “What’s that-sir?”

    Byron smiled. “It’s just the two of us now. You don’t have to call me ‘sir.’ Anyway, that’s Clinton’s idea, not mine.” He leaned closer. “I’ve been sort of jealous of you.”

    “You have?” For a terrible moment, Les wondered if Byron had discovered the truth about him and Susan.

    “Yes.”

    “But-why? I mean you’re intelligent, you’re well educated, you come from one of the best and oldest families in town and-”

    “But I’m not a pitcher.”

    Les laughed out loud in relief. Baseball. That was all. “Oh, God, Byron-that’s nothing.”

    “Well, if you would have heard Susan last night when she got back-”

    “She wouldn’t be any different about a track and field star or a football star.”

    "I’m not so sure. You seem to have caught her fancy. When we were growing up together, she used to taunt me about how much I liked sports. She’d never even go to a baseball game until-” He paused to think. “As a matter of fact, the first game she went to was this year. To see you pitch.”

    “Well, why don’t you try out for the team yourself?”

    Byron shrugged. “That’s the problem. I'm tall, reasonably well-built, and I’ve certainly got the enthusiasm.”

    “Then what’s stopping you?”

    Now it was Byron’s turn to laugh. “I’m missing only one thing, my friend.”

    “What’s that?”

    “Manual dexterity. I’m the world’s clumsiest man.”

    And with that, Byron went to his office and Les to his teller station and the afternoon began.

    Kids with freckles and kids with chocolate smeared over their faces and kids with bright pieces of straw between their front teeth lined the fence along the bottom of the bleachers watching another scrimmage game between the municipal team’s first and second teams.

    Behind them sat the adults. Word had spread quickly through the town that Cedar Rapids would play Sterling. Local citizens considered baseball second in sacred duty only to churchgoing. So the stands were filled. Rich men in fine-cut coats and silk ties sat side by side with workingmen in denim shirts and pants who, in turn, sat next to farmers from the periphery of the city. They sat in the last of the sunlight on sanded wooden boards smoking cigars and cigarettes and pipes and drinking three-cent glasses of sarsaparilla and champagne cider and birch beer. Most of the women drank a local favorite called the Spafizz. It cost a nickel. A few people let balloons go up against the blue sky. In six days, July 4, the game would be played and not even another war between the states would be as important as the forthcoming event.

    Les Graves was on the mound.

    By now, nearly six o’clock, he had faced ten batters. Four had struck out. Two had grounded out. One had walked. And two had flown out.

    The eleventh batter now stepped to the plate.

    Les, who had studied photographs of all the great pitchers, had spent two previous summers learning the vagaries of overhand pitching. At first he had considered overhand sort of feminine, but gradually he saw that you had more control and could throw more kinds of pitches.

    He snapped one across the plate.

    “Strike!” called the umpire.

    The boys along the fence broke into a unison chant: “Les! Les! Us!”

    The next pitch was also a strike.

    This time the adults joined the kids in hollering Les’ name.

    Les smacked the ball into his glove several times before letting the next one go. His memories of the Chicago training camp were beginning to fade. He was older, he reasoned, and more experienced and what he’d done there, he would not repeat here.

    As if to make his self-confidence conclusive, the ball sailed across the plate with speed so blinding that all the batter could do was jump back from the white flash so that he would not be injured.

    The crowd roared.

    Overwhelmed by the moment, Les looked in the direction of the little boys and waved his glove at them.

    Yes, by God, he was going to take Sterling on and he was going to beat Sterling.

    The rest of the game went quickly. Batters up, batters down. Five more strikeouts before it was all over.

    Les joined his teammates in pouring beers from tin buckets brought from a nearby tavern.

    The players sat on the grass, impending blue dusk splashed beautifully across the sky, and listened to Harding, the manager, talk as he paced up and down the length of them, beer foam on his upper lip.

    “I don’t have to tell you what the Sterling team has always said about us, do I?”

    Everybody agreed that nobody here need be reminded of the various insults, both explicit and implicit, that Sterling had made about Cedar Rapids.

    A hick town with hick players.

    Overgrown schoolboys.

    Not worth bothering with.

    “And those are the things I want you to keep in mind as we get ready over the next six days,” Harding said, walking back and forth. “They’re going to come here on a fancy train car and they’re going to make a big proposition out of the fact that one of their pitchers may be bought next year by the Cleveland Spiders and that two of their outfielders played for the Buffalo Bisons. And you know what?”

    “What?” came a ragged chorus.

    “We’re not going to be impressed, that’s what. And you know why?”

    “Why?” came a fuller chorus.

    “Because we’re a better team. And there are some very good reasons for that.” He paused to take a big swig of beer which seemed to bloat his already beered belly even as the men looked at him. “One, we hustle more. Two, we’ve got something to prove. Three, each and every one of us does his job. And four-” He splashed his mug in the direction of Les. “And four, we’ve got Les Graves!”

    And then they were all waving their beers in Les’s direction and yelling and hollering and screaming and acting exactly the way they gave their kids hell for acting.

    Like goofuses.

    Like crackerheads.

    Like loons.

    And having themselves a great time of it.

    

    

    Thirty minutes later, pleasantly drunk, the men began to drift away to their homes.

    Harding came up to Les and said, “Talk to you a minute?”

    “Sure.”

    “Why don’t we walk the bases. Nobody else needs to hear this.”

    "Fine.”

    So they walked the bases and smelled flowers and watched the moon come up and heard mothers calling children in from the night.

    Harding said, “I’m just a fireman.”

    “Well, that’s all right. I’m just a bank clerk.”

    “And Cedar Rapids ain’t no goddamn Sterling and I’ll be the first to admit it. We haven’t got steam-driven trolley cars yet and we don’t have telephones in a fourth of the homes.”

    Les was just drunk enough that he wondered if he was hearing Harding right. “You ashamed of us?”

    Right there at second base Harding stopped and said (shouted really), "Hell, no, I ain’t ashamed of us. I’m second-generation Cedar Rapids and damn proud of it.”

    "Then why-”

    “Because that’s what a lot of people in this town’ve got in the backs of their minds. That we’re not as big and not as good. Well, I’ve got news for them.”

    Now Les, too, was caught up in Harding’s angry spirit. He whirled around and threw beer up in the air and let it come down over his face, only a bit of it splashing into his mouth.

    Then he caught sight of Harding, who was standing with his hands on his hips and staring at Les. Harding had lost his own enthusiasm. “What’s the matter?” Les said.

    “I got something I need to say.”

    “Then say it.”

    “I’m half afraid to.”

    “Why’s that?”

    “Because I don’t want to plant no doubts in your mind that ain’t already there. If you follow me.”

    “I guess I do.”

    Harding cleared his throat and leaned back and gazed up at the starry sky. “It sure is a purty place we live in, Graves. Purty, purty, purty.”

    Well, Les thought, at least he’s still drunk, which means there’s at least half a chance he’ll regain his good mood.

    Then Harding’s head snapped down and he said, “There’s going to be a lot of pressure on you.”

    Les felt his stomach begin to tighten. “I know,” he said.

    “People are going to treat this like the most important event since the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.”

    “Clinton Edmonds sure is going to, anyway.”

    “Well, Clinton won’t be alone.”

    “So I gather.”

    “And that’s just it.”

    “What’s it?”

    “It don’t matter.”

    "What doesn’t matter?”

    “Don’t correct my English, smart boy.”

    "All right. What don’t matter?”

    “The game.”

    “The game,” Les said, “don’t matter?”

    “No, it don’t.”

    “But you just said-”

    “I was sayin’ what they think. Not what I think.” He leaned forward and half glared at Les. “You ever tried to imagine eternity.”

    “Well, sure, I’ve tried-”

    “Like yelling down a long wind-”

    “Yes, something like that-”

    “Well, in the scheme of things, that’s about how important this game is.”

    “So it isn’t important?”

    “It’s important that you don’t think it’s important.”

    “Huh?”

    "The more important you think it is, the more pressure you’re going to feel.”

    Les began to get Harding’s point.

    “So if you don’t think it’s important-”

    “Then I won’t get all tensed up-”

    “And lose the game or nothin’.”

    By now they had completed the bases and stood on home plate. “If you follow me,” Harding said.

    Les thought back to something Harding had said earlier. About not wanting to plant a seed of doubt where there hadn't been any.

    But even by bringing up the subject of pressure, Harding only made Les remember all the more what had happened at the Detroit training camp-

    Harding threw his arm around him and said, “I sure hope I didn’t do it.”

    “Do what?”

    “Plant no seed of doubt.”

    Les didn’t want to hurt his feelings or scare him. He just said, in a half whisper really, “No, you didn’t plant any seed of doubt.”

    And Harding burst out laughing again and said, “There you go again, smart boy, correctin’ my English.”

    

    

    Neely leaned against the bar and looked around at the pitiable assortment of humanity.

    This was mostly a worker’s tavern and now at eight-thirty it was rolling toward that time of night when drunken wage earners did just what the entrepreneurs wanted them to do-fought among themselves. Neely was always mindful of Cromwell’s ironic remark about defeating the Irish: “Just give them enough whiskey and they’ll kill each other.”

    The tavern was a tribute to cheap pine, a long slab of which formed the bar behind which ran a mirror that had been cracked many times by hurled mugs and was presently held together by long strips of tape. It put you in mind of a badly wounded soldier. You could not say much more for the rest of the place, it being largely comprised of odors-cigar and cigarette smoke, urine from the outhouses, and sweat from the day’s work. The biggest amenity was a fat Bohemian piano player with a farmer’s red face and almost no skill at all on the keys. There were wobbly pine tables where some played cards but more spent time in pointless talk about baseball, and a few argued politics. There was a pool table which seemed to attract the serious attention of the few sober souls in the place.

    And there were the women.

    There was something about working-class girls that had always troubled Neely. He felt paternal toward them-wanted to say wash the rouge off your face and wear modest clothes and get yourself back to your pa’s place-but his paternalism was a burden because he had learned a long time ago that he was not going to change the world.

    Like T.Z., Neely had grown up in a poor German section of Chicago, where half the infants died before six months and where the cops were crooked and where a brutal army of thugs owned by a man named Allan Pinkerton broke the skull and spirit of any man who dared speak up for better living and working conditions.

    There had been a time when Neely considered himself a radical- he remembered what the radical T. Lizius, publisher of a Chicago anarchist newspaper, said about Alfred Nobel’s discovery of dynamite: “In giving dynamite to the downtrodden millions of the globe, science has done its best work. The dear stuff can be carried around in the pocket without danger, while it is a formidable weapon against any force of militia, police or detectives that may want to stifle the cry for justice that goes forth from the plundered slaves”-but that was before the Halstead street riots, where Neely had seen the pointlessness of being a radical (just as he had come to see the pointlessness of believing in the God of his youth). An army with rifles had opened fire on a mob of unarmed railroad workers, who had only been asking that the railroad (the impossibly rich railroad) not roll back wages any more.