The Legend of Mickey Tussler (34 page)

Finster nodded in the direction of Murph's voice, then set himself deep in the box. He was trying hard not to smile, certain that he was in the catbird seat, sitting on a fat fastball. There was no way the pitcher wanted to go 3-0. And he knew it. What a glorious spot. It was every little boy's dream—to be up in the big spot, game on the line. He closed his eyes for a moment and remembered.

He was so lost in the fantasy that he never even saw the pitcher release the ball. As it traveled toward the plate, Finster caught sight of the white flash at the last second and shivered with pleasure. He swung from his heels, whirling the bat through the hitting zone like a sword. The ball broke a good three inches off the plate and skipped with one hop into the catcher's glove. The bat caught nothing but air, leaving Finster in a crumpled heap next to home plate.

“Finster, goddammit!” Murph roared from the top step. “What the hell kind of swing is that on two and oh? Jesus Christ! What did we just say?” Finster stepped out and tried to regroup, arching his neck back and rolling his shoulders. He rolled his eyes in disgust.

“Remember now, Finny,” Murph screamed. “No help here. Wait for your pitch!”

His zealousness slightly dulled, Finster watched as another fastball in the dirt made the count 3-1. He breathed a little easier now. He licked his lips in anticipation, mindful that the pitcher had crippled himself once again and would have to deal something right down the chute. This was it. With Murph screaming something about “zoning up,” he dug in and watched dutifully as the Sidewinders' hurler came set, raised his leg, and fired. The ball's trajectory was perfect—a flat fastball heading right for the heart of the plate. His eyes widened. Bathed in sweat, and with a rush of adrenaline coursing through his body, his hands hitched and his front foot rose in simultaneous choreography. Everything was in sync. As he began to move the bat head through the hitting zone, the flight of the ball betrayed him, rising up and away, missing the mark completely.

“Ball four! Take your base.” Finster flung the bat away with gnawing ambivalence and trotted to first base while the crowd screamed wildly as Pee Wee crossed home plate with the Brewers' first run of the game.

Boxcar was next. His walk from the on-deck circle to the batter's box was greeted with more screaming and thunderous applause. Mickey notwithstanding, the veteran catcher remained the crowd favorite. So many times in the past they'd watched as the brawny warrior put the entire team on his back and carried them. Now here he was again, with another opportunity to pull them from the brink of disaster.

The Sidewinders' pitcher was rattled. Boxcar's was the last face he wanted to see; it was a nightmarish visage, complete with square jaw and furrowed brow seemingly chiseled out of stone. The man was all business—a baseball machine. But the pitcher had no place to put him. There was only one chance—he had to outthink him. He had missed with four of the last five balls. Boxcar was smart. He would be taking the first one. If the pitcher could slip a fastball by him to start, then he could go to the breaking ball, perhaps get him out in front and induce a double play to kill the rally. That was his last thought as he unleashed a four-seam bullet right down Broadway.

The one pitch was all Boxcar would see. It seemed that the pitcher's ruminations, as calculated and deliberate as they were, somehow echoed in Boxcar's mind.
He's gonna try and get ahead,
he told himself.
First-ball fastball.

Boxcar strode into the pitch and plastered the ball. With the crack of the bat, everything seemed to grind to a series of slowmotion frames. The pitcher winced, then hung his head. Boxcar glanced to the heavens, laid his bat down quietly, and admired the flight of his handiwork. All around the ballpark, eyes widened and mouths hung open vacantly, void of sound. Murph removed his cap and jumped up on the dugout's top step for a better look, the imp of expectation leaping from his heart. Each fan was also pushed into motion, springing from his seat as the little white sphere rose high in the sky like a midsummer sun. The ball soared higher and higher, a prodigious blast that seemed to scrape the clouds before touching down somewhere beyond the light stanchions in center field.

Then, Borchert Field erupted into a mêleé. Waves of ardent fans spilled over the railings and rushed onto the field to join their team in the riotous celebration at home plate—a head-rubbing, backpatting fracas that lasted long after the game had ended, fueled in part by news of the Rangers' loss, which placed the Brewers just one game behind the leaders with six left to play.

Several days had passed since the last telephone conversation between Molly and Murph. Looking out his bedroom window, he thought about what he had told her and remembered her pointed reaction. There wasn't much he could do. She would have to decide for herself if she wanted to change her life. Slowly, helplessly, he dropped his eyes from the tops of the distant pines, down, way down, until they came to rest upon a tiny patch of ground at the foot of his lamppost.

From the morning shadows up the road, a large, steady figure emerged and passed into the lamplight in front of his house, then turned its boots up the narrow gravel walkway and onto his front porch. Murph watched from the window as the figure stood silently in front of the door, its hurried breath clouding the unseasonably cool air, until it finally formed a tight fist and dealt the paneled wood a series of short, hard blows.

“Boxcar, what brings you around so early?” Murph asked, wrinkling his nose at the morning chill. “Everything okay?”

“Everything's fine,” Boxcar answered, stepping inside. “Is it a good time?”

“Sure.” Murph pointed to the kitchen. “I was just about to pour myself a cup of joe and have some breakfast. I'll set another place.”

Boxcar pulled a chair out, sat, and stretched his legs. “Mickey up yet?” he asked quietly.

“Nope. Still sleeping. We didn't hit the hay until late last night.”

“He feeling okay?”

“Sure. I mean, I guess he is.” Murph took out a glass plate with an assortment of confections. “You like doughnuts?” he asked, sliding the plate in front of Boxcar.

“Love 'em,” the ravenous catcher said, groping for one of the white-powdered circles.

Murph filled Boxcar's cup, then his own. He sat across from his catcher, vaguely disquieted by the unexpected visit. “So what's wrong, Box? I've known you a long time. You ain't exactly the visiting kind.”

Boxcar sat uneasily on his chair, squeezing an invisible ball in his right hand while the distant sounds of waking birds punctuated the morning air. “Nothing's wrong Murph,” Boxcar said, rolling the edges of a napkin between his fingers. “I was just doing a lot of thinking last night.”

A brisk wind coming through the window over the sink slipped up Murph's back and made him shudder. He looked at Boxcar with a long, penetrating stare, clasping and unclasping his hands nervously.

“Don't bullshit me, Box,” he said, raising his eyebrows. “If nothing's wrong, then why are you here?”

Boxcar felt a knocking in his gut. He dismissed it as just the coffee and the heaviness of the doughnut expanding in his stomach. He stood up and moved away from his chair, trying to escape from the tightening of his middle. Then, blushing a little, he looked at Murph sitting there unchanged.

“Look, Murph, I don't want to make waves or anything. I don't. But I think we have a chance—a
real
chance to win this thing.”

“Yeah, I think we do too,” Murph said, smiling. “I guess now would be the appropriate time to thank you for yesterday. You were clutch, as always.”

“That's not what I'm looking for. The thing of it is, I don't know how many more shots I'm gonna get, Murph. Look at me. Failing knees. Graying temples. It takes me almost a whole goddamned hour every morning just to straighten up. I ain't getting any younger.”

Murph scratched his head and folded his arms tightly to his chest. “What are you trying to say, Box?” Murph asked with a palpable abruptness. “Quit beating the devil around the stump and just spit it out.”

The sky outside grew overcast and a vast, discouraging light poured down onto the dirt road and gravel walkway and into the kitchen.

“It's Mickey, Murph. I don't know. The kid's been through a lot, ya know? Maybe this is all just too much to handle. I mean, he's done okay since he's been back. But you saw him out there. He wasn't himself. I'm not suggesting we cut him loose or anything like that. Shit, I love the kid. We all do. But maybe we need to rethink just how much a part of these next six games he should be.”

Had this been the week before, even a few days before, Murph would have been inclined to agree. The kid really seemed to be struggling and was of no use to them on the field. But now—now it all felt different. There was something there. He could feel it. And it wasn't just a romantic delusion, colored by his personal feelings for both the boy and Molly.

“That kid, Boxcar, is the main reason why we're even able to have this conversation. He's our heart and soul. Look at how this place has changed since he's been here. All he has to do is show up and the whole place is ignited. The fans, our guys, the whole godforsaken town, for Christ sakes. Now you can't sit there and tell me that you don't know that.”

Boxcar shook his head ambivalently. “I know all of that, Murph,” he pleaded. “But that excitement you're talking about—that energy— all that only works to our benefit
if
Mickey succeeds. That's the rush.”

Murph fiddled with the top button on his shirt. Anxiety arrived in one sudden thrust. “What are you saying here, Box?”

Boxcar's eyes dilated with trepidation. “Just think how devastating it would be, for all of us, if Mickey started one of these pivotal games and went into the tank. Emotionally? Psychologically? It would be a fucking disaster. We would never recover.”

Murph scowled. All of a sudden he was a man with two minds. With one, he was right there. Focused on the moment. With the other, he was someplace else. Only when Boxcar moved closer to him and apologized for questioning his plan did Murph become one again.

“Listen, Box. None of us knows for sure what the future holds. Immediate or otherwise. God knows, I'm living proof of that. But every baseball man must live and die by a credo. You know, a philosophy by which he makes those impossible decisions. It's the only way. For me, it's always been simple. Not the results, naturally. But the decision. You dance with the girl you brought to the prom. It's the only way. That's it, Box. That's me. Understand? All of you, together, are what make us who we are.
All
of you. That includes Mickey. He is our guy. The spark in our engine. The wind in our sail. So, win or lose, for better or worse, we do this thing together— with him. Same way we've been doing all year.”

Boxcar sat quietly, digesting the morsels of wisdom. For an instant, some filament, light and ethereal, spun itself out between his soul and Murph's, so that both of their lives, at that moment, were kindred, a part of each other, and the contention and angst about them vanished.

“I hear ya, Murph. I do. I just wish there was something we could do to help him relax a little.”

“What exactly do you mean by relax?”

“You know, he seems a little jumpy. On edge. He's not himself at all. Do you know the other day he tore the door off Llamas's locker, just because Jimmy took a few peanuts from his bag. Said he was saving them for the squirrels. I thought he was gonna throttle him. It was a little scary. That ain't like him, Murph.”

Murph sat as inanimate as the dish towels hanging on a bar just below the sink. “I know he's not right, Box. Shit, who can blame him? But he's still the best we got.”

“Well, isn't there something we can do? Something we can give him, to soften the trouble he's going through?”

The catcher's words chased Murph's thoughts back to Molly. “I think I have just the thing. As it turns out, I was working on just that very thing before you got here.”

Murph's initial impulse was to pick up the phone and call her again. He was thinking that news of Mickey's successful return to the team would lift her moribund spirits and spur her to some sort of action. He could still feel the charm of the previous day—the improbable success that had transported the team and an entire crowd of doubters into the stratosphere. He wanted her to know—for Mickey's sake, and selfishly, his own. The bitter residue of rejection, however, from their last conversation directed his sensibility to a safer means.

What was to be? he wondered, running his tongue gently across the preglued flap of the envelope. He saw the entire universe only through his eyes and concluded that it was all disordered. Unhappy marriages. Unscrupulous people free to spread their cancer with apparent impunity. The diabolical preying upon the weak and hardworking Joes. Where was the sense in it all? He wasn't young anymore, his vision colored by nice thoughts and childlike dreams. Those days were gone, having fallen victim to the disillusionment of too many bad days. All he could do now was talk to the baseball angels, or whoever or whatever it was that decided the fates of people like himself, and hope for the best.