The Natural (5 page)

Now there was a loud cackle of laughter in the trainer’s room. The voice Roy didn’t like — the frightening thought dawned on him that the voice
knew
what he was hiding — it changed the subject and wanted to know from Bump if there was any truth to the rumor about him and Pop’s niece.

“Naw,” Bump said, and cagily asked, “What rumor?”

“That you and Memo are getting hitched.”

Bump laughed. “She must’ve started that one herself.”

“Then you deny it?”

The door was shoved open and Bump waltzed out in his shorts, as husky, broadbacked, and big-shouldered as Roy had thought, followed by the trainer and a slightly popeyed gent dressed in an expensive striped suit, whose appearance gave Roy a shooting pain in the pit of the stomach — Max Mercy.

Ashamed to be recognized, to have his past revealed like an egg spattered on the floor, Roy turned away, tucking his jersey into his pants.

But Bump paraded over with his hairy arm outstretched. “Hiya, Buster, you the latest victim they have trapped?”

Roy felt an irritable urge to pitch his fist at the loudmouth, but he nodded and shook hands.

“Welcome to the lousiest team in the world, barring none,” Bump said. “And this is ol’ Doc Casey, the trainer, who has got nobody but cripples on his hands except me. And the bawkshaw with the eyes is Max Mercy, the famous sports colyumist. Most newspaper guys are your pals and know when to keep their traps shut, but to Max a private life is a personal insult. Before you are here a week he will tell the public how much of your salary you send to your grandma and bow good is your sex life.”

Max, whose mustache and sideboards were graying, laughed hollowly. He said to Roy, “Didn’t catch the name.”

“Roy Hobbs,” he said stiffly, but no one seemed to think it mattered very much.

The game was over and the players hoofed through the tunnel into the locker room. They tore out of their uniforms and piled into the showers. Some stayed in only long enough to wet their skins. Wiping themselves dry, they tumbled into street clothes. Their speed, however, did them no good, for Red, after courteously asking Mercy to leave, posted himself and Earl Wilson, the third base coach, at the door and they let nobody else out. The players waited nervously, except Bump, who slapped backs and advised everybody to cheer up. A few of the boys were working the strategy of staying in the showers so long they hoped Pop would grow sick and tired and leave. But Pop, a self-sustaining torch in the shut managerial office, outwaited them, and when he got the quiet knock from Red that the lobsters were in the pot, yanked open the door and strode sulphurously forth. The team shriveled.

Pop stepped up on a chair where for once, a bald, bristling figure, he towered over them. Waving his bandaged hands he began to berate them but immediately stopped, choked by his rage into silence.

“If he coughs now,” Bump boomed, “he will bust into dust.”

Pop glared at him, his head glowing like a red sun. He savagely burst out that not a single blasted one of them here was a true ballplayer. They were sick monkeys, broken-down mules, pigeon-chested toads, slimy horned worms, but not real, honest-to-god baseball players.

“How’s about flatfooted fish?” Bump wisecracked. “Get it, boys, fish — Fisher,” and he fell into a deep gargle of laughter at his wit, but the semi-frozen players in the room did not react.

“How’s he get away with it?” Roy asked the ghost standing next to him. The pale player whispered out of the corner of his mouth that Bump was presently the leading hitter in the league.

Pop ignored Bump and continued to give the team the rough side of his tongue. “What beats me is that I have spent thousands of dollars for the best players I could lay my hands on. I hired two of the finest coaches in the game. I sweat myself sick trying to direct you, and all you can deliver is those goddamn goose eggs.” His voice rose. “Do you dimwits realize that we have been skunked for the last forty-five innings in a row?”

“Not Bumpsy,” the big voice said, “I am terrific.”

“You now hold the record of the most consecutive games lost in the whole league history, the most strikeouts, the most errors —”

“Not Bumpsy —”

“— the most foolishness and colossal stupidities. In plain words, you all stink. I am tempted to take pity on those poor dopes who spend a buck and a half to watch you play and trade the whole lousy lot of you away.”

Bump dropped down on his knees and raised his clasped hands. “Me first, Lawdy, me first.”

“— and start from scratch to build up a team that will know how to play together and has guts and will fight the other guy to death before they drop seventeen games in the cellar.”

The players in the locker room were worn Out but Bump was singing, “Many brave hearts are asleep in the deep.”

“Beware,” he croaked low in his throat, “bewaaare —”

Pop shook a furious finger at him that looked as if it would fly off and strike him in the face. “As for you, Bump Baily, high and mighty though you are, some day you’ll pay for your sassifras. Remember that lightning cuts down the tallest trees too.”

Bump didn’t like warnings of retribution. His face turned surly.

“Lightning, maybe, but no burnt out old fuse.”

Pop tottered. “Practice at eight in the morning,” he said brokenly. But for Red he would have tumbled off the chair. In his office behind the slammed and smoking door they could hear him sobbing, “Sometimes I could cut my own throat.”

It took the Knights a while to grow bones and crawl out after Bump. But when everybody had gone, including the coaches and Dizzy, Roy remained behind. His face was flaming hot, his clothes soaked in sweat and shame, as if the old man’s accusations had been leveled at his head.

When Pop came out in his street clothes, a yellowed Panama and a loud sport jacket, he was startled to see Roy sitting there in the gloom and asked what he was waiting for.

“No place to go,” Roy said.

“Whyn’t you get a room?”

“Ain’t got what it takes.”

Pop looked at him. “Scotty paid you your bonus cash, didn’t he?”

“Two hundred, but I had debts.”

“You shoulda drawn an advance on your first two weeks’ pay from the office when you came in today. It’s too late now, they quit at five, so I will write you out my personal check for twenty-five dollars and you can pay me back when you get the money.”

Pop balanced his checkbook on his knee. “You married?”

“No.”

“Whyn’t you ask around among the married players to see who has got a spare room? That way you’d have a more regular life. Either that, or in a respectable boarding house. Some of the boys who have their homes Out of town prefer to stay at a moderate-priced hotel, which I myself have done since my wife passed away, but a boarding house is more homelike and cheaper. Anyway,” Pop advised, “tonight you better come along with me to the hotel and tomorrow you can find a place to suit your needs.”

Roy remarked he wasn’t particularly crazy about hotels.

They left the ball park, got into a cab and drove downtown. The sky over the Hudson was orange. Once Pop broke out of his reverie to point out Grant’s Tomb.

At the Midtown Hotel, Pop spoke to the desk clerk and he assigned Roy a room on the ninth floor, facing toward the Empire State Building. Pop went up with him and pumped the mattress.

“Not bad,” he said.

After the bellhop had left he said he hoped Roy wasn’t the shenanigan type.

“What kind?” Roy asked.

“There are all sorts of nuts in this game and I remember one of my players — seems to me it was close to twenty years ago — who used to walk out on the fifteenth floor ledge and scare fits out of people in the other rooms. One day when he was walking out there he fell and broke his leg and only the darndest luck kept him from rolling right overboard. It was beginning to rain and he pulled himself around from window to window, begging for help, and everybody went into stitches at his acting but kept their windows closed. He finally rolled off and hit bottom.”

Roy had unpacked his valise and was washing up.

“Lemme tell you one practical piece of advice, son,” Pop went on. “You’re starting way late — I was finished after fifteen years as an active player one year after the age you’re coming in, but if you want to get along the best way, behave and give the game all you have got, and when you can’t do that, quit. We don’t need any more goldbrickers or fourfiushers or practical jokers around. One Bump Baily is too much for any team.”

He left the room, looking wretched.

The phone jangled and after a minute Roy got around to lifting it.

“What’s the matter?” Red Blow barked. “Don’t you answer your telephone?”

“I like it to ring a little, gives ‘em a chance to change their mind.”

“Who?”

“Anybody.”

Red paused. “Pop asked me to show you around. When are you eating?”

“I am hungry now.”

“Meet me in the lobby, half past six.”

As Roy hung up there was a loud dum-diddy-um-dum on the door and Bump Baily in a red-flowered Hollywood shirt breezed in.

“Hiya, buster. Saw you pull in with the old geezer and tracked you down. I would like for you to do me a favor.”

“Roy is the name.”

“Roy is fine. Listen, I got my room on the fourth floor, which is a damn sight classier than this mouse trap. I would like you to borrow it and I will borrow this for tonight.”

“What’s the pitch?”

“I am having a lady friend visit me and there are too many nosy people on my floor.”

Roy considered and said okay. He unconsciously wet his lips.

Bump slapped him between the shoulders. “Stick around, buster, you will get yours.”

Roy knew he would never like the guy.

Bump told him his room number and they exchanged keys, then Roy put a few things into his valise and went downstairs.

Coming along the fourth floor hall he saw a door half open and figured this was it. As he pulled the knob he froze, for there with her back to him stood a slim, redheaded girl in black panties and brassiere. She was combing her hair before a mirror on the wall as the light streamed in around her through the billowy curtains. When she saw him in the mirror she let out a scream. He stepped back as if he had been kicked in the face. Then the door slammed and he had a splitting headache.

Bump’s room was next door so Roy went in and lay down on the bed, amid four purple walls traced through with leaves flying among white baskets of fruit, some loaded high and some spilled over. He lay there till the pain in his brain eased.

At 6:30 he went down and met Red, in a droopy linen suit, and they had steaks in a nearby chophouse. Roy had two and plenty of mashed potatoes. Afterwards they walked up Fifth Avenue. He felt better after the meal.

“Want to see the Village?” Red said.

“What’s in it?”

Red picked his teeth. “Beats me. Whatever they got I can’t find it. How about a picture?”

Roy was agreeable so they dropped into a movie. It was a picture about a city guy who came to the country, where he had a satisfying love affair with a girl he met. Roy enjoyed it. As they walked back to the hotel the night was soft and summery. He thought about the black-brassiered girl in the next room.

Red talked about the Knights. “They are not a bad bunch of players, but they aren’t playing together and it’s mostly Bump’s fault. He is for Bump and not for the team. Fowler, Schultz, Hinkle, and Hill are all good pitchers and could maybe be fifteen or twenty game winners if they got some support in the clutches, which they don’t, and whatever Bump gives them in hitting he takes away with his lousy fielding.”

“How’s that?”

“He’s just so damn lazy. Pop has thrown many a fine and suspension at him, but after that he will go into a slump on purpose and we don’t win a one. If I was Pop I’da had his ass long ago, but Pop thinks a hitter like him could be a bell cow and lead the rest ahead, so he keeps hoping he will reform. If we could get the team rolling we’d be out of the cellar in no time.”

They were approaching the hotel and Roy counted with his eyes up to the fourth floor and watched the curtains in the windows.

“I read Scotty’s report on you,” Red said. “He says you are a terrific hitter. How come you didn’t start playing when you were younger?”

“I did but I flopped.” Roy was evasive.

Red cringed. “Don’t say that word around here.”

“What word?”

“Flopped — at least not anywhere near Pop. He starts to cry when he hears it.”

“What for?”

“Didn’t you ever hear about Fisher’s Flop?”

“Seems to me I did but I am not sure.”

Red told him the story. “About forty years ago Pop was the third sacker for the old Sox when they got into their first World Series after twenty years. They sure wanted to take the flag that year but so did the Athletics, who they were playing, and it was a rough contest all the way into the seventh game. That one was played at Philly and from the first inning the score stood at 3–3, until the Athletics drove the tie-breaker across in the last of the eighth. In the ninth the Sox’s power was due up but they started out bad. The leadoffer hit a blooper to short, the second struck out, and the third was Pop. It was up to him. He let one go for a strike, then he slammed a low, inside pitch for a tremendous knock.

“The ball sailed out to deep center,” Red said, “where the center fielder came in too fast and it rolled through him to the fence and looked good for an inside-the-park homer, or at least a triple. Meanwhile, Pop, who is of course a young guy at this time, was ripping around the bags, and the crowd was howling for him to score and tie up the game, when in some crazy way as he was heading for home, his legs got tangled under him and he fell flat on his stomach, the living bejesus knocked out of him. By the time he was up again the ball was in the catcher’s glove and he ran up the baseline after Pop. In the rundown that followed, the third baseman tagged him on the behind and the game was over.”

Red spat into the street. Roy tried to say something but couldn’t.

“That night Fisher’s Flop, or as they mostly call it, ‘Fisher’s Famous Flop,’ was in every newspaper in the country and was talked about by everybody. Naturally Pop felt like hell. I understand that Ma Fisher had the phone out and hid him up in the attic. He stayed there two weeks, till the roof caught fire and he had to come out or burn. After that they went to Florida for a vacation but it didn’t help much. His picture was known to all and wherever he went they yelled after him, ‘Flippity-flop, flippity-flop.’ It was at this time that Pop lost his hair. After a while people no longer recognized him, except on the ball field, yet though the kidding died down, Pop was a marked man.”