The Pacific and Other Stories (24 page)

Mantle looked sharply at the catcher. “I was
not
.”

“Sure you were. Everyone knows it.”

“A hayseed?”

“Yeah. Ask any baseball fan in America.”

“With the hat, and the sideburns and everything?” Mantle asked.

“That’s right,” Berra said, thinking of straw hat and rural aspect.

“I was not!”

“Yes you were,” said Berra, bobbing his head up and down in confirmation. “You’ve got it written all over you.”

Mickey thought this was a dream. “How come no one ever told me?”

“Because it’s so
obvious.
”

“It is?”

“Yeah.”

“How?”

“In the way you dress, the way you talk, the way you look. Your accent. Your face. It’s part of why you’re such a hero. I’m Italian. People look at me differently. It’s a different attitude.”

“Wait a minute,” said Mickey, “wait a minute.” He turned to the pitcher. “Hey, Billy,” he shouted. “Billy. Do I strike you as a hayseed? Do I look and talk like one?”

The pitcher said, “Yeah.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah.”

“How come you never told me?”

“Why should I?” the pitcher shouted back. “Who am I, your girlfriend?”

Mickey stared off into space.

“Mick, get the kid,” Berra said. “Bring him out onto the field. We’ll put the guys in position; it’ll be the thrill of his life. Look at ’im. There’s no one with him. If you’re alone, you’re all by yourself.”

“Yeah, but he doesn’t know anything about baseball. He calls the ball an object and the bat an axe. He says that he doesn’t know how, but that God will provide.”

“Get him anyway.”

“You believe him?”

“I’ll get the guys,” Berra announced.

A
S
M
ICKEY
M
ANTLE
lifted Roger over the fence, the Yankees loped out onto the field. Maintenance workers looked up. What was this? The whole team, in an empty stadium, set up for a game?

“How much do you weigh?” Mickey asked Roger after he set him down and they were walking—Roger’s black costume flowing with the breeze—because the airborne Roger had seemed to Mickey to have had no weight.

“Thirteen and three-quarter
shvoigles
,” Roger answered.

“How many pounds is that?”

“I don’t know. There are eight
beyngaluchs
in a
shvoigle
.”

“Did you ever play baseball?”

“Until a little while ago, I never heard of it.”

“Well, here on the field, awaiting your direction, are the New York Yankees.”

“You know,” said Roger, almost at the plate, “God shifts an untold number of birds twice a year from the top of the earth to the middle, and from the middle back to the top—geese, herons,
fingelehs
, robins, chickens, starlings, woodpeckers,
kibniks, stvittles
, albatrosses, sprites, doves. …”

Mickey awaited what was next.

“If He takes the trouble to shift a goose from the North Pole to Havana, He could easily have set me in proper motion to end up here, and He did. Here are the Yenkiss, all spread out, as He intended, and here am I. Hand me the axe.”

Mickey gave him the bat. When it came into his hands, the sun, purely by coincidence, hit it in a peculiar way, and it appeared to glow. Roger held it almost at arm’s length, like an upraised sword, and stunned the Yankees as he swayed back and forth and twirled around, for the bat seemed to them—as it seemed to him—to be a staff with a power beyond that of the maker or the wood. That he would dance so, in front of them, as if unaware of their presence, or not caring, they found extraordinary. He was, in fact, momentarily unaware of them, because his thoughts had been seized, and flowed in
only one direction, where the staff pointed, up. The only thing in his heart at that moment was love, and the only thing before his eyes a verse from the book of Ruth: “May the Lord deal kindly with you, as you have dealt with the dead.” What the Yankees did not know was that this boy who knew nothing about baseball had come into their midst to test an ancient compact that of late had been broken. The Yankees did not know that their stadium had been turned into a court of justice in which the prosecutor was an odd little boy and the defendant was the creator of the universe. In Christian theology—and the Yankees were Christians—this is inconceivable. God does not appear in the dock. He does not dispute with those over whom He holds absolute sway. In Jewish theology, however, He does.

When he finished, Roger looked about and realized that everyone was staring at him in absolute silence, and that now he had to do something big. Praying internally nonstop, he stepped into the position in which he had seen Mantle, and tapped the plate with the bat.

“What do you call the object that is thrown toward you?” he asked of anyone. At a distance, he had not seen that it was a ball.

“Ball,” said Berra, leaving out the article, dropping his mask, and crouching into position.

Roger looked at Berra’s segmented armor and said, “You must be
trayf
.” Then he turned to the pitcher and said, “Throw ball!”

“Hit it above the clock,” Mantle said matter-of-factly. After all, they had discussed this already.

Roger nodded, but Wylie, one of the coaches, who was mean and small of soul, mockingly said, “No, first knock off the hand.”

“Which one?” Roger asked.

“The minute hand,” Wylie answered, delighted. The clock read 10:20.

“Okay,” said Roger, choking up naturally on Mickey Mantle’s heavy bat.

Martin began to wind up for an easy pitch—he didn’t want to hit a small Hasidic boy—but Roger stopped him, and turned to Mantle. “Mickey,” he said, “when I knock off the minute hand it will fall to the seats below. It’s pointed and it must weigh many
shvoigles
. The sign on the left,” he said, meaning the sign to the left of the scoreboard, “says
‘Anyone interfering with play subject to arrest.’
Does that mean me?”

“No,” half a dozen people said in unison. This broke the spell. Now they realized that he wasn’t even going to connect with the ball, and they began to think of ways—such as biting their lips—not to laugh at him so as not to devastate his pride, although they knew Wylie would.

“Hey Mickey,” someone said, “after the kid finishes, let him keep the bat.”

“Okay,” Mickey said. It was a good idea. The kid wouldn’t feel so bad.

Roger pointed at the minute hand. This was so much what like Babe Ruth used to do, uncannily so, that even though they thought he was imitating (which, never having heard of Babe Ruth, he was not), they were troubled. They assumed that the strikeout would take quite a few pitches, with Martin kindly throwing a ball or two, and they shifted from foot to foot.

Martin wound up relaxedly. He was hardly going to throw fast or fancy. He leaned back and threw.

If you had seen it in slow motion, you would have seen a baseball traveling like a planet in orbit, precisely and languorously, though behind its sharpness the rest of the world would have been a blur. Then you would have seen the bat moving back ever-so-slightly, like the hammer-cock of a Colt .45. And you would have seen Roger’s left foot elevate minutely above the ground. Then you would have seen the bat itself making an arc as certain and as powerful as a comet’s, and you would have seen the flow of his muscle and the light in his eyes, and the astronomical powers fed from the billowing fringes and folds of black cloth into the almost-glowing staff. You would have seen, in Roger’s face and eyes, a battlefield look, an expression that comes only when impossible outcomes are guaranteed. And then you would have seen the impact—so tremendous that the ball shattered into a hundred thousand minute particles filling the air with a cloud of dust that disappeared on the wind.

The Yankees had never seen anything like it. No one had.

“What happened?” someone asked.

Berra flipped up the mask. “The ball was pulverized. I saw it. I’ve seen the skin come off a ball, but I never saw a. …”

“Was that a trick ball?” Coach Wylie yelled to Martin.

“It was the ball that Mickey hit into center,” Martin answered.

No one spoke.

“I’m sorry,” said Roger. “I guess I hit it too hard. Next time, I’ll hit it more gently.”

“He hit it too hard,” Mickey said to himself, dazed.

The coach got a ball, inspected it, bounced it against the plate, and threw it out to Martin. “Try this one.”

Now no one breathed except Roger. The pitch was thrown. The same astronomical conjunctions occurred. The bat connected explosively with the ball but, this time, just under the limit beyond which the ball would have been destroyed. Leather was stretched as far as it would stretch, thread too. It traveled in a straight line, leaving behind it a brief trail of orange flame and then a hardly perceptible line of white smoke.

Mouths dropped open and bodies froze as the ball slammed into the minute hand of the clock that said
World’s Most Honored Watch
and blew it from its axle so that it windmilled through the air, corkscrewing, eventually, into the ground in front of the wall that had written on it the challenging notation,
407 Ft.
The field of Yankee Stadium, with the Yankees standing upon it, was still.

Even Roger stared at the javelin- or propellerlike minute hand stuck perpendicularly in the ground. A seagull dipped down to examine the broken clock, and then, taken by a gust of wind, rose like a rocket and disappeared into the clouds.

“T
HAT DIDN
’
T HAPPEN
,” Wylie said. “It was a trick. I’ve seen it a million times.”

“Seen what a million times, Wylie?”

“They put an explosive charge in the clock, and somebody watching with a telescope pushes a button, which sends a radio signal to the detonator, which explodes the hands off the clock. It’s the oldest trick in the world.”

“And you’ve seen it?” Mantle asked.

“I saw it in the minors in North Carolina. I saw it in Florida. I saw it all over. You know, they do it.”

“I hit the object, truthfully,” Roger stated.

“I’ll bet you did, kid. Let’s see you do it again.”

“He can’t, the hand’s down already.”

“Now that the charge is gone,” said Wylie, “let’s see you knock off the other one.” He had to believe his own theory.

Roger tapped the bat against the plate. He had a grim, insulted look. “Throw ball,” he said to Martin, who was already on the mound.

Before the pitch, Wylie shouted, “Don’t go so easy on him this time!”

Martin shot back, “What’s the difference? It’s how he hits.”

“Anybody can hit a slow pitch. That’s just giving it to him.”

“Throw ball!” yelled a peeved Roger.

“You say, ‘play ball,’ or, ‘pitch it in,’” Mantle told him.

“Pitch it in!” Roger shouted.

Martin wound up, and the ball came in toward the plate fast but straight.

Now that the motions were familiar, Roger was unconcerned about missing, and looked forward to the sharp crack of the bat. He worried only about hitting the ball gently enough not to pulverize it. Once again, he connected. Once again, the ball smoked toward the clock and struck it, this time breaking the hour hand off at the base. It fell, bumped against the scoreboard, and landed flat on the bleachers.

The Yankees were awed, but wanted reassurance nonetheless. Knowing that there was no wind, and that the field was dead silent, Mantle almost whispered, “Kid, can you put a hole in the clock?”

“Sure,” said Roger. “Where?”

“At the two o’clock position.”

“Pitch it in!”

The ball came in, and left like a recoilless rifle shell. A crunch sounded shortly after a hole appeared near the two.

“Get Stengel,” Mantle commanded, his voice almost shaking (Mickey Mantle’s voice never shook, at least not in Yankee Stadium). “I think the kid’s just about to hit the ball out of the park.”

In no time at all, Stengel emerged from the dugout. He had already been on his way, having been told by a choking assistant manager that Babe Ruth was back, reincarnated as a kid who was fresh and could do things the Babe had never done. Stengel believed this to be an elaborate joke, and he didn’t have time for jokes. “What’s going on here?” he asked belligerently. “Why’re
you guys on the field? It’s not enough that Kansas City is going to completely run over you, you want to be tired, too?”

Mantle shook his head. “Casey, this kid is going to hit the ball out of the stadium,” he said, and then laughed like a deranged person. “Really, he is!”

Stengel focused on Roger for the first time. He tried to speak, but the sight of Roger, so small and slight, in black Hasidic robes, a
shtreimel
, and
payess
, made him unable to. Then he said, “All right. You got me. Now let’s get back to work, okay?”

“I’m serious,” said Mantle, a little angry and a bit trembly.

“Have you been drinking, Mickey?”

“He destroyed the clock,” a Yankee said. “He did. Look.”

Stengel looked up at the blasted clock. “Who did that?” he asked.

“He did,” Mantle said.

“It’s a trick,” Wylie shouted. “I saw it in the minors.”

“Okay, jerks,” Stengel said, never known for being unimpulsive. He paraded back and forth for a moment or two, thinking. “If that kid can hit a ball out of this park … gimme a break, will ya … if he can do that, and he’s gotta do it more than once [the businessman in Stengel could be cautious, too], I’ll sign him for a million dollars a year and I’ll double your salaries, every single one of you.”

The Yankees were ecstatic with the prospect.

“But,” Stengel went on, “if he can’t—in fifty pitches—I won’t sign him for anything, and I’ll cut your salaries in half for a year.” Stengel loved this. Unlike his current season, it was win-win.

“All of us, Mr. Stengel?” asked an outfielder who had just risen from the farm team and had a baby to feed.

Now Stengel nearly glowed. “No, you’ve got a choice here. Everyone who thinks the kid can hit it out, get behind the third-base line. Everyone who doesn’t, get behind the first-base line. If you’re behind the first-base line, your salary stays the same, no matter what. If you’re behind the third-base line, it’s double or half. Ha!” He was sure that not one member of the team would walk north beyond the third-base line. He had brilliantly transformed their joke on him into a joke on them.