The Natural (12 page)

“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 fogshrouded 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.

Ahead was his door. Max was panting after him. As Roy shoved the key into the lock, poking his eye close to do the job quick, Max from fifteen feet away aimed the camera and snapped the shutter. The flashbulb burst in the reflector. The door slammed. Max swore blue bloody murder as Roy, inside, howled with laughing.

He had a whopping good time at the ball game. Doc Casey had squeezed the swelling of his eye down and painted out the black with a flesh-tone color, and Roy led the attack against the Phils that sank them twice that afternoon, sweeping the series for the Knights and raising them into second place, only three games behind the Pirates. Pop was hilarious. The fans went wild. The newspapers called the Knights “the wonder team of the age” and said they were headed for the pennant.

On his way to Memo’s after the game, Roy met her, wearing her summer furpiece, coming along the fourth-floor hall.

“I thought I would drop around and see how you are, Memo.”

She continued her slightly swaying walk to the elevator.

“I am all right,” she said.

He paused. “See the doctor yet?”

Memo blushed and said quickly, “He says it’s neuritis — nothing serious.”

She pressed the elevator button.

“Nothing serious?”

“That’s what he said.” She was looking up the elevator shaft and he sensed she had not been to the doctor. He guessed her breast was not sick. He guessed she had said that to get him to slow down. Though he did not care for her technique, he controlled his anger and asked her to go to the movies.

“Sorry. Gus is picking me up.”

Back in his room he felt restless. He thought he’d be better off without her but the thought only made him bitter. Red Blow called him to go to the pictures but Roy said he had a headache. Later he went out by himself. That night he dreamed of her all night long. The sick breast had turned green yet he was anxious to have a feel of it.

The next day, against the Braves, Roy got exactly no hits. The Knights won, but against the Dodgers in Brooklyn on Tuesday he went hitless once more and they lost. Since he had never before gone without a hit more than six times in a row there was talk now of a slump. That made him uneasy but he tried not to think of it, concerning himself with Memo and continuing his search through the papers for news of a hit-and-run accident on Long Island. Finding no mention of one he blamed the whole thing on his imagination and thought he’d better forget it. And he told himself not to worry about the slump — it happened to the very best — but after a third day without even a bingle he couldn’t help but worry.

As his hitlessness persisted everyone was astonished. It didn’t seem possible this could happen to a miracle man like Roy. Enemy pitchers were the last to believe the news. They pitched him warily, fearing an eruption of his wrath, but before long they saw the worry in his eyes and would no longer yield those free and easy walks of yore. They straightened out their curves and whizzed them over the gut of the plate, counting on him either to top a slow roller to the infield or strike himself out. True, he was the same majestic-looking figure up there, well back in the box, legs spread wide, and with Wonderboy gleaming in the sun, raised over his shoulder (he had lowered it from his head). He swung with such power you could see a circle of dust lift off the ground as the bat passed over it, yet all it amounted to was breeze. It made many a pitcher feel like a pretty tough hombre to see Roy drag himself away from the plate and with lowered head enter the dugout.

“What’s the matter with me?” he thought with irritation. He didn’t feel himself (wondered if he could possibly be sick). He felt blunt and dull — all thumbs, muscles, and joints, Charley horse all over. He missed the sensation of the sock — the moment the stomach galloped just before the wood hit the ball, and the satisfying sting that sped through his arms and shoulders as he belted one. Though there was plenty of fielding to do — the Knights’ pitchers were getting to be loose with the hits — he missed the special exercise of running the bases, whirling round them with the speed of a race horse as nine frantic men tried to cut him down. Most of all he missed the gloating that blew up his lungs when he crossed the plate and they ran up another tally opposite his name in the record book. A whole apparatus of physical and mental pleasures was on the kibosh and without them he felt like the Hobbs he thought he had left behind dead and buried.

“What am I doing that’s wrong?” he asked himself. No one on the bench or in the clubhouse had offered any advice or information on the subject or even so much as mentioned slump. Not even Pop, also worried, but hoping it would fade as suddenly as it had appeared. Roy realized that he was overanxious and pressing — either hitting impatiently in front of the ball or swinging too late — so that Wonderboy only got little bites of it or went hungry. Thinking he was maybe overstriding and getting his feet too far apart so that he could not pivot freely, he shifted his stride but that didn’t help. He tried a new stance and attempted, by counting to himself, to alter his timing. It did no good. To save his eyesight he cut out all reading and going to the pictures. At bat his expression was so dark and foreboding it gave the opposing pitchers the shakes, but still they had his number.

He spent hours fretting whether to ask for help or wait it out. Some day the slump was bound to go, but when? Not that he was ashamed to ask for help but once you had come this far you felt you had learned the game and could afford to give out with the advice instead of being forced to ask for it. He was, as they say, established and it was like breaking up the establishment to go around panhandling an earful. Like making a new beginning and he was sick up to here of new beginnings. But as he continued to whiff he felt a little panicky. In the end he sought Out Red Blow, drew him out to center field and asked in an embarrassed voice, “Red, what is the matter with me that I am not hitting them?” He gazed over the right field wall as he asked the question.

Red squirted tobacco juice into the grass.

“Well,” he said, rubbing his freckled nose, “what’s worrying your mind?”

Roy was slow to reply. “I am worrying that I am missing so many and can’t get back in the groove.”

“I mean besides that. You haven’t knocked up a dame maybe?”

“No.”

“Any financial worries about money?”

“Not right now.”

“Are you doing something you don’t like to do?”

“Such as what?”

“Once we had a guy here whose wife made him empty the garbage pail in the barrel every night and believe it or not it began to depress him. After that he fanned the breeze a whole month until one night he told her to take the damn garbage out herself, and the next day he hit again.”

“No, nothing like that.”

Red smiled. “Thought I’d get a laugh out of you, Roy. A good belly laugh has more than once broke up a slump.”

“I would be glad to laugh but I don’t feel much like it. I hate to say it but I feel more like crying.”

Red was sympathetic. “I have seen lots of slumps in my time, Roy, and if I could tell you why they come I could make a fortune, buy a saloon and retire. All I know about them is you have to relax to beat ‘em. I know how you feel now and I realize that every game we lose hurts us, but if you can take it easy and get rid of the nervousness that is for some reason in your system, you will soon snap into your form. From there on in you will hit like a house on fire.”

“I might be dead by then,” Roy said gloomily.

Red removed his cap and with the hand that held it scratched his head.

“All I can say is that you have got to figure this out for yourself, Roy.”

Pop’s advice was more practical. Roy visited the manager in his office after the next (fruitless) game. Pop was sitting at his roll top desk, compiling player averages in a looseleaf notebook. On the desk were a pair of sneakers, a picture of Ma Fisher, and an old clipping from the Sporting News saying how sensational the Knights were going. Pop closed the average book but not before Roy had seen a large red zero for the day’s work opposite his name. The Knights had dropped back to third place, only a game higher than the Cardinals, and Pop’s athlete’s foot on his hands was acting up.

“What do I have to do to get out of this?” Roy asked moodily.

Pop looked at him over his half-moon specs.

“Nobody can tell you exactly, son, but I’d say right off stop climbing up after those bad balls.”

Roy shook his head. “I don’t think that’s it. I can tell when they’re bad but the reason I reach for them sometimes is that the pitchers don’t throw me any good ones, which hasn’t been so lately. Lately, they’re almost all good but not for me.”

“Danged if I know just what to tell you,” Pop said, scratching at his reddened fingers. He too felt a little frightened. But he recommended bunting and trying to beat them out. He said Roy had a fast pair of legs and getting on base, in which ever way, might act to restore his confidence.

But Roy, who was not much of a bunter — never had his heart in letting the ball hit the bat and roll, when he could just as well lash out and send the same pitch over the fence — could not master the art of it overnight. He looked foolish trying to bunt, and soon gave it up.

Pop then recommended hitting at fast straight ones thrown by different pitchers for thirty minutes every morning, and to do this till he had got his timing back, because it was timing that was lost in a slump. Roy practiced diligently and got so he could connect, yet he couldn’t seem to touch the same pitches during the game.

Then Pop advised him to drop all batting practice and to bat cold. That didn’t help either.

“How is your eye that got hurt?” Pop asked.

“Doc tested it, he says I see perfect.”

Pop looked grimly at Wonderboy. “Don’t you think you ought to try another stick for a change? Sometimes that will end up a slump.”

Roy wouldn’t hear of it. “Wonderboy made all of my records with me and I am staying with him. Whatever is wrong is wrong with me and not my bat.”

Pop looked miserable but didn’t argue.

Only rarely he saw Memo. She was not around much, never at the games, though she had begun to come quite often a while back. Roy had the morbid feeling she couldn’t stand him while he was in this slump. He knew that other people’s worries bothered her and that she liked to be where everybody was merry. Maybe she thought the slump proved he was not as good a player as Bump. Whatever it was, she found excuses not to see him and he got only an occasional glimpse of her here and there in the building. One morning when he ran into her in the hotel grill room, Memo reddened and said she was sorry to read he was having a tough time.

Roy just nodded but she went on to say that Bump used to ease his nerves when he wasn’t hitting by consulting a fortuneteller named Lola who lived in Jersey City.

“What for?” Roy asked.

“She used to tell him things that gave him a lift, like the time she said he was going to be left money by someone, and he felt so good it raised him clean out of his slump.”

“Did he get the dough that she said?”

“Yes. Around Christmas his father died and left him a garage and a new Pontiac. Bump cleared nine thousand cash when he sold the property.”

Roy thought it over afterwards. He had little faith that any fortuneteller could help him out of his trouble but the failure of each remedy he tried sank him deeper into the dumps and he was how clutching for any straw. Borrowing a car, he hunted up Lola in Jersey City, locating her in a two-story shack near the river. She was a fat woman of fifty, and wore black felt slippers broken at the seams, and a kitchen towel wrapped around her head.

“Step right inside the parlor,” she said, holding aside the beaded curtain leading into a dark and smelly room, “and I will be with you in a jiffy, just as soon as I get rid of this loud mouth on the back porch.”

Feeling ill at ease and foolish, Roy waited for her.

Lola finally came in with a Spanish shawl twisted around her. She lit up the crystal ball, passed her gnarled hands over it and peered nearsightedly into the glass. After watching for a minute she told Roy he would soon meet and fall in love with a darkhaired lady.

“Anything else?” he said impatiently.

Lola looked. A blank expression came over her face and she slowly shook her head. “Funny,” she said, “there ain’t a thing more.”

“Nothing about me getting out of a slump in baseball?”

“Nothing. The future has closed down on me.”

Roy stood up. “The trouble with what you said is that I am already in love with a swell-looking redhead.”

Because of the shortness of the sitting Lola charged him a buck instead of the usual two.

After his visit to her, though Roy was as a rule not superstitious, he tried one or two things he had heard about to see how they would work. He put his socks on inside out, ran a red thread through his underpants, spat between two fingers when he met a black cat, and daily searched the stands for some crosseyed whammy who might be hexing him. He also ate less meat, though he was always hungry, and he arranged for a physical check-up. The doctor told him he was in good shape except for some high blood pressure that was caused by worrying and would diminish as soon as he relaxed. He practiced different grips on Wonderboy before his bureau mirror and sewed miraculous medals and evil-eye amulets of fish, goats, clenched fists, open scissors, and hunchbacks all over the inside of his clothes.

Little of this escaped the other Knights. While the going was good they had abandoned this sort of thing, but now that they were on the skids they felt the need of some extra assistance. So Dave Olson renewed his feud with the lady in the brown-feathered hat, Emil Lajong spun his protective backflips, and Flores revived the business with the birds. Clothes were put on from down up, gloves were arranged to point south when the players left the field to go to bat, and everybody, including Dizzy, owned at least one rabbit’s foot. Despite these precautions the boys were once more afflicted by bonehead plays—failing to step on base on a simple force, walking off the field with two out as the winning run scored from first, attempting to stretch singles into triples, and fearing to leave first when the ball was good for at least two. And they were not ashamed to blame it all on Roy.

It didn’t take the fans very long to grow disgusted with their antics. Some of them agreed it was Roy’s fault, for jinxing himself and the team on his Day by promising the impossible out of his big mouth. Others, including a group of sportswriters, claimed the big boy had all the while been living on borrowed time, a large bag of wind burst by the law of averages. Sadie, dabbing at her eyes with the edge of her petticoat, kept her gong in storage, and Gloria disgustedly swore off men. And Otto Zipp had reappeared like a bad dream with his loud voice and pesky tooter venomously hooting Roy into oblivion. A few of the fans were ashamed that Otto was picking on somebody obviously down, but the majority approved his sentiments. The old-timers began once again to heave vegetables and oddments around, and following the dwarf’s lead they heckled the players, especially Roy, calling him everything from a coward to a son of a bitch. Since Roy had always had rabbit ears, every taunt and barb hit its mark. He changed color and muttered at his tormentors. Once in a spasm of weakness he went slowly after a fly ball (lately he had to push himself to catch shots he had palmed with ease before), compelling Flores to rush into his territory to take it. The meatheads rose to a man and hissed. Roy shook his fist at their stupid faces. They booed. He thumbed his nose. “You’ll get yours,” they howled in chorus.