The Natural (14 page)

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Authors: Bernard Malamud

BOOK: The Natural
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She drew back but he had caught her arm and tugged her to him.
“Don't.”
“You got to live, Memo.”
He trapped her lips, tasting of lemon drops, kissing hard. Happening to open his eyes, he saw her staring at him in the middle of the kiss. Shutting them, he dived deep down again. Then she caught his passion, opened her mouth for his tongue and went limp around the knees.
They swayed together and he turned his hand and slipped it through the top of her dress into her loose brassiere, cupping her warm small breast in his palm.
Her legs stiffened. She pushed at him, sobbing, “Don't touch it.”
He was slow to react.
She wailed, “Don't, please don't.”
He pulled his hand out, angrily disappointed.
She was crying now, rubbing her hand across her bosom.
“Did I hurt you?”
“Yes.”
“How the hell did I do that? I was nice with it.”
“It's sick,” she wept.
He felt like he had had an icy shave and haircut. “Who says so?”
“It hurts. I know.”
She could be lying, only her eyes were crisscrossed with fear and her arms goosefleshed.
“Did you go to a doctor?”
“I don't like them.”
“You ought to go.”
Memo ran off the bridge. He followed her to the car. She sat at the wheel and started the motor. Figuring she would calm down quicker this way he let her.
She backed the car onto the road and drove off. The moon sank into an enormous cloud-sea. Memo sped along the asphalt and turned at a fork down a hard dirt road.
“Put on the lights.”
“I like it dark.” Her white arms were stiff on the wheel.
He knew she didn't but figured she was still nervous.
Dripping dark cloud spray, the moon bobbed up and flooded the road ahead with bright light. Memo pressed her foot on the gas.
A thundering wind beat across his skull. Let her, he thought. Whatever she has got on her mind, let her get it off, especially if it is still Bump.
He thought about what she had said on the bridge about never being happy again and wondered what it meant. In a way he was tired of her—she was too complicated—but in a different way he desired her more than ever. He could not decide what to say or do next. Maybe wait, but he didn't want to any more. Yet what else was there to do?
The white moonlight shot through a stretch of woods ahead. He found himself wishing he could go back somewhere, go home, wherever that was. As he was thinking this, he looked up and saw in the moonlight a boy coming out of the
woods, followed by his dog. Squinting through the windshield, he was unable to tell if the kid was an illusion thrown forth by the trees or someone really alive. After fifteen seconds he was still there. Roy yelled to Memo to slow down in case he wanted to cross the road. Instead, the car shot forward so fast the woods blurred, the trees racing along like shadows in weak light, then skipping into black and white, finally all black and the moon was gone.
“Lights!”
She sat there stiffly so he reached over and switched them on.
As the road flared up, Memo screamed and tugged at the wheel. He felt a thud and his heart sickened. It was a full minute before he realized they hadn't stopped.
“For Christ sake, stop—we hit somebody.”
“No.” Her face was bloodless.
He reached for the brake.
“Don't, it was just something on the road.”
“I heard somebody groan.”
“That was yourself.”
He couldn't remember that he had.
“I want to go back and see.”
“If you do, the cops will get us.”
“What cops?”
“They have been after us since we started. I've been doing ninety.”
He looked back and saw a black car with dimmed headlights speeding after them.
“Turn at the next bend,” he ordered her, “and I will take over.”
 
They were nearer to the Sound than he had suspected, and when a white pea-souper crawled in off the water Roy headed into it. Though the Mercedes showed no lights the whiteness of it was enough to keep it in the sedan's eye, so he welcomed
the fog and within it easily ditched those who chased them.
On the way back he attempted to find the road along the woods to see if they had hit somebody. Memo had little patience with him. She was sure, despite Roy's insistence of an outside groan, that they had hit a rock or log in the road. If they went back the cops might be laying for them and they'd be arrested, which would cause no end of trouble.
He said he was going back anyway.
Roy had the feeling that the sedan was still at his shoulder —he could see it wasn't—as he tried to locate the bridge and then the road along the woods. He wasn't convinced they had not hit somebody and if he could do anything for the kid, even this late, he wanted to. So he turned the lights on bright, illuminating the swirling fog, and as they went by the fog-shrouded woods—he couldn't be sure it was the right woods—he searched the road intently for signs of a body or its blood but found nothing. Memo dozed off but was awakened when Roy, paying no heed to what lay ahead, ran off a low embankment, crashing the car into a tree. Though shaken up, neither of them was much hurt. Roy had a black eye and Memo bruised her sick breast. The car was a wreck.
 
Helping Memo out of a cab that same morning before dawn, Roy glanced into the hotel lobby just as Pop Fisher bounced up out of a couch and came charging at them like a runaway trolley. Memo said to run, so they raced down the street and ducked into the hotel by the side entrance, but they were barely to the stairs when Pop, who had doubled back on his tracks, came at them smoking with anger.
Memo sobbed she had taken all she could tonight and ran up the stairs. Roy had hoped to have another chance at a kiss but when Pop flew at him like a batty, loose-feathered fowl, killing the stillness of the place with his shrill crowing, he figured it best to keep him away from Memo.
He turned to Pop, who then got a closeup of Roy's rainbow
eye and all but blew apart. He called him everything from a dadblamed sonovagun to a blankety blank Judas traitor for breaking training, hurting his eye, and blowing in at almost 5 A.M. on the day of an important twin bill with the Phils.
“You damn near drove me wild,” he shouted. “I just about had heart failure when Red told me you weren't in your room at midnight.”
He then and there fined Roy two hundred and fifty dollars, but reduced it to an even hundred when Roy sarcastically mentioned how much the Knights were paying him.
“And nothing is wrong with my eye,” he said. “It don't hurt but a little and I can see out of it as clear as day, but if you want me to get some sleep before the game don't stand there jawing my head off.”
Pop was quickly pacified. “I admit you are entitled to a good time on your Day but you have no idea of all that I have suffered in those hours I was waiting up for you. All kinds of terrible things ran through my mind. I don't hafta tell you it don't take much to kill off a man nowadays.”
Roy laughed. “Nothing is going to kill me before my time. I am the type that will die a natural death.”
Seeing the affectionate smile this raised up on Pop's puss, he felt sorry for the old man and said, “Even with one eye I will wow them for you today.”
“I know you will, son,” Pop almost purred. “You're the one I'm depending on to get us up there. We're hot now and I figure, barring any serious accidents, that we will catch up with the Pirates in less than two weeks. Then once we are first we should stay there till we take the flag. My God, when I think of that my legs get dizzy. I guess you know what that would mean to me after all of these years. Sometimes I feel I have been waiting for it my whole life. So take care of yourself. When all is said and done, you ain't a kid any more. At your age the body will often act up, so be wise and avoid any trouble.”
“I am young in my mind and healthy in my body,” Roy said. “You don't have to worry about me.”
“Only be careful,” Pop said.
Roy said good night but couldn't move because Pop had gripped his elbow. Leading him to the corner, he whispered to Roy not to have too much to do with Memo.
Roy stiffened.
“Don't get me wrong, son, she's not a bad girl—”
Roy glared.
Pop gulped. “I am the one who is really bad. It was me who introduced her to Bump.” He looked sick. “I hoped she would straighten him out and sorta hold him in the team—but—well, you know how these things are. Bump was not the marrying kind and she sorta—well, you know what I mean.”
“So what?” said Roy.
“Nothing,” he answered brokenly. “Only I was wrong for encouraging them to get together with maybe in the back of my mind the idea of how they would do so—without getting married, that is—and I have suffered from it since.”
Roy said nothing and Pop wouldn't look him in the eye. “What I started to say,” he went on, “is that although she is not really a bad person, yet she is unlucky and always has been and I think that there is some kind of whammy in her that carries her luck to other people. That's why I would like you to watch out and not get too tied up with her.”
“You're a lousy uncle.”
“I am considering you.”
“I will consider myself.”
“Don't mistake me, son. She was my sister's girl and I do love her, but she is always dissatisfied and will snarl you up in her trouble in a way that will weaken your strength if you don't watch out.”
“You might as well know that I love her.”
Pop listened gloomily. “Does she feel the same to you?”
“Not yet but I think she will.”
“Well, you are on your own.” He looked so forlorn that Roy said, “Don't worry yourself about her. I will change her luck too.”
“You might at that.” Pop took out his billfold and extracted a pink paper that he handed to Roy.
Roy inspected it through his good eye. It was a check for two thousand dollars, made out to him. “What's it for?”
“The balance of your salary for the time you missed before you got here. I figure that you are entitled to at least the minimum pay for the year.”
“Did the Judge send it?”
“That worm? He wouldn't send you his bad breath. It's my personal check.” Pop was blushing.
Roy handed it back. “I am making out okay. If the Judge wants to raise my pay, all right, but I don't want your personal money.”
“My boy, if you knew what you mean to me—”
“Don't say it.” Roy's throat was thick with sentiment. “Wait till I get you the pennant.”
He turned to go and bumped into Max Mercy at his elbow. Max's sleepy popeyes goggled when he saw Roy's shiner. He sped back into the lobby.
“That slob is up to no good,” Roy said.
“He was sleeping on the couch next to where I was waiting for you to come home. He heard Red tell me you hadn't showed up. Kept a camera with him back there.”
“He better not take a picture of my eye,” Roy said.
 
He beat it up the back stairs with Max on his tail. Though the columnist carried a camera and a pocketful of flashbulbs he ran faster than Roy had expected, so to ditch him he shot through the second-floor door and sped down the corridor. Seeing over his shoulder that Max was still after him he ducked through a pair of open glass doors into an enormous black ballroom, strewn with chairs, potted palms, and music
stands from a dance last night. The lingering odor of perfume mixed with cigarette smoke reminded him of the smell of Memo's hair and haunted him even now. He thought of hiding behind something but that would make him a ridiculous sitting duck for a chance shot of Max's, so since his good eye had become accustomed to the dark he nimbly picked his way among the obstacles, hoping the four-eyed monstrosity behind him would break his camera or maybe a leg. But Max seemed to smell his way around in the dark and hung tight. Reaching the glass doors at the other end of the ballroom, Roy sidestepped out just as a bulb lit in a wavering flash that would leave Max with a snapshot of nothing but a deserted ballroom. The columnist stuck like glue to Roy's shadow, spiraling after him up the stairs and through the long empty ninth-floor corridor (broad and soft-carpeted so that their footsteps were silent) which stretched ahead, it seemed to Roy, like an endless highway.
He felt he had been running for ages, then this blurred black forest slid past him, and as he slowed down, each black tree followed a white, and then all the trees were lit in somber light till the moon burst forth through the leaves and the woods glowed. Out of it appeared this boy and his dog, and Roy in his heart whispered him a confidential message: watch out when you cross the road, kid, but he had spoken too late, for the boy lay brokenboned and bleeding in a puddle of light, with no one to care for him or whisper a benediction upon his lost youth. A groan rose in Roy's throat (he holding a flashlight over the remains) for not having forced Memo to stop and go back to undo some of the harm. A sudden dark glare flashed over his head, eerily catapulting his shadow forward, and erasing in its incandescence the boy in the road. Roy felt a burning pain in his gut, yet simultaneously remembered there had been no sign of blood on the bumper or fender, and Memo said she had screamed because she saw in the mirror that they were being chased by cops. The black
sedan that trailed them had not stopped either, which it would have done if there were cops in it and somebody was dying in the road. So Memo must've been right—either it was a rock, or maybe the kid's hound, probably not even that, for it did not appear there ever was any kid in those woods, except in his mind.

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