The Twilight Zone: Complete Stories (6 page)

The reporters made a beeline for the door and within a moment had filled up the room.

“You may quote me, gentlemen,” Beasley repeated when the room was quiet once again. “The mighty Casey will be back in the lineup within forty-eight hours.” He threw another questioning look at Stillman. “Forty-eight hours?”

“About,” Stillman answered quietly.

Questions shot around the room like bolts of lightning and for the next few moments McGarry, Beasley and Casey were inundated by notebooks and cigarette smoke. Then the room started to empty.

Mouth McGarry took a position close to the desk, stuck a cigar in his mouth, lit it, took a deep drag and held it out away from his body, gently flicking ashes on the floor.

“Gentlemen,” he announced, “As manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, I want to tell you, and since I was the man who discovered Casey—”

The reporters rapidly left the room followed by the commissioner and his secretary, followed by Casey and Stillman.

“It behooves me to tell you gentlemen,” Mouth continued, wetting his lips over the word “behooves” and wondering to himself where he got the word. “It behooves me to make mention of the fact that the Brooklyn Dodgers are the team to beat. We got the speed, the stamina,” he recollected now the Pat O’Brien speech in a Knute Rockne picture, “the vim, the vigor, the vitality—”

He was unaware of the door slamming shut and unaware that Bertram Beasley was the only other man in the room. “And with this kind of stuff,” he continued, in the Knute Rockne voice, “the National League pennant and the World Series and—”

“McGarry,” Beasley yelled at him.

Mouth started as if suddenly waking from a dream.

Beasley rose from the couch. “Why don’t you drop dead?” He walked out of the room, leaving Mouth all by himself, wondering how Pat O’Brien wound up that speech in the locker room during the halftime of that vital Army-Notre Dame game.

How either McGarry or Bertram Beasley got through the next twenty-odd hours was a point of conjecture with both of them.

Mouth emptied his bottle of nerve pills and spent a sleepless night pacing his hotel room floor. Beasley could recall only brief moments of consciousness between swoons which occurred every time the phone rang.

The following night the team was dressing in the locker room.

They were playing the first of a five-game series against the New York Giants and McGarry had already devised nine different batteries, then torn them all up. He now sat on a bench surveying his absolutely silent ballplayers. There was not a sound. At intervals each pair of eyes would turn toward the phone on the wall. Beasley had already phoned Dr. Stillman’s residence seven times that evening and received no answer. He was on the phone now, talking to the long-distance operator in New Jersey.

“Yeah,” Beasley said into the phone. “Yeah, well thank you very much, operator.”

Mouth and the rest of the players waited expectantly.

“Well?” Mouth asked. “How is he?”

Beasley shook his head. “I don’t know. The operator still can’t get an answer.”

Monk, the big catcher, rose from the bench. “Maybe he’s right in the middle of the operation,” he suggested.

Mouth whirled around at him, glaring. “So he’s in the middle of the operation! Whatsa matter, he can’t use one hand to pick up a phone?”

He looked up at the clock on the wall then jutted his jaw fiercely, his eyes scanning the bench. “We can’t wait no longer,” he announced. “I got to turn in a battery. Corrigan,” he said pointing toward one of the players, “you’ll pitch tonight. And now the rest of you guys!” He stuck his hands in his back pockets and paced back and forth in front of them in a rather stylized imitation of Pat O’Brien.

“All right, you guys,” he said grimly. “All right, you guys!” He stopped pacing and pointed toward the door. “That’s the enemy out there,” he said, his voice quivering a little. “That’s the New York Giants.” He spoke the words as if they were synonymous with a social disease. “And while we’re out there playing tonight”—again his voice quivered—“there’s a big fellah named Casey lying on a table, struggling to stay alive.”

Tears shone in Monk’s eyes as the big catcher got a mental picture of a courageous kid lying on a hospital table. Guppy Ransack, the third baseman, sniffed and then honked into a handkerchief as a little knot of sentiment tightened up his throat. Bertram Beasley let out a sob as he thought about what the attendance record was, six weeks B.C.—before Casey—and did some more projecting on what it would be without Casey. Mouth McGarry walked back and forth before the line of players.

“I know,” he said, his voice tight and strained. “I know that his last words before that knife went into his chest were—‘Go up there, Dodgers, and win one for the big guy!’”

The last words of this speech were choked by the tears that rolled down McGarry’s face and the sob that caught in his own chest.

The street door to the locker room opened and Dr. Stillman came in, followed by Casey. But all the players were watching Mouth McGarry, who had now moved into his big finale scene.

“I want to tell you something, guys! From now on”—he sniffed loudly—“from now on there’s gonna be a ghost in that dugout. Every time you pick up a bat, look over to where Casey used to sit—because he’s gonna be there in spirit rooting for us, cheering for us, yelling, ‘Go Dodgers, go!’”—McGarry turned and looked at Casey, who was smiling at him. Mouth nodded perfunctorily. “Well there, Casey,” he said and turned back to the team. “Now I’m gonna tell you something else about that big guy. This fellah has a heart. Not a real heart, maybe, but this fellah that’s lying’ there with a hole in his chest—”

Mouth’s lower jaw dropped seven inches, as he turned very slowly to look at Casey. He had no chance to say anything, however, because the team had pushed him aside as they rushed toward the hero, shaking his hand, pounding him on the back, pulling, grabbing, shouting at him. Mouth spent a moment recovering and then screamed, “All right, knock it off! Let’s have quiet! Quiet! QUIET!” He pulled players away from Casey and finally stood in front of the big pitcher. “Well?” he asked.

Stillman smiled. “Go ahead, Casey. Tell him.”

It was then that everyone in the room noticed Casey’s face. He was smiling. It was a big smile. A broad smile. An enveloping smile. It went across his face and up and down. It shone in his eyes. “Listen, Mr. McGarry,” he said proudly. He pointed a thumb at his chest and Mouth put his ear there. He could hear the steady tick, tick, tick.

Mouth stepped back and shouted excitedly. “You got a heart!”

There was a chorus of delighted exclamation and comment from all the players and Beasley, poised for a faint, decided against it.

“And look at that smile,” Stillman said over the shouting. “That’s the one thing I couldn’t get him to do before—smile!”

Casey threw his arm around the old man. “It’s wonderful. It’s just wonderful. Now I feel—I feel—like—togetherness!”

The team roared their approval and Bertram Beasley mounted a rubbing table, cupping his hands like a megaphone, and shouted, “All right, Dodgers, out on the field. Let’s go, team. Casey starts tonight. The new Casey!”

The team thundered out on to the field, pushing Mouth McGarry out of the way and blotting out the first part of the speech which had begun, “All right, you guys, with vim, vigor and vital—” He never got to finish the speech because Monk, Resnick and a utility infielder had carried him with their momentum out the door and up to the dugout.

When Casey’s name was announced as the starter for the Dodgers that night the crowd let out a roar that dwarfed any thunder ever heard in or around the environs of New York City And when Casey stepped out on the field and headed toward the mound, fifty-seven thousand eight hundred and thirty-three people stood up and applauded as one, and it was only the second baseman who, as he carried the ball over to the pitcher, noticed that there were tears in Casey’s eyes and an expression on his face that made him pause. True, he’d never seen any expression on Casey’s face before, but this one made him stop and look over his shoulder as he went back to his base.

The umpire shouted, “Play ball,” and the Dodgers began the running stream of chatter that always prefaced the first pitch. Monk, behind the plate, made a signal and then held up his glove as a target. Start with a fast ball he thought. Let them know what they’re up against, jar them a little bit. Confuse them. Unnerve them. That was the way Monk planned his strategy behind the plate. Not that much strategy was needed when Casey was on the mound, but it was always good to show the big guns first. Casey nodded, went into his windup and threw. Twelve seconds later a woman in a third-floor apartment three blocks away had her bedroom window smashed by a baseball that had traveled in the neighborhood of seven hundred feet out of Tebbet’s Field.

Meanwhile, back at the field, the crowd just sat there silently as the leadoff batter of the New York Giants ambled around the base path heading home to the outstretched hands of several fellow Giants greeting him after his leadoff home run.

Mouth McGarry at this moment felt that he would never again suffer a stab of depression such as the one that now intruded into his head. He would recall later that his premonition was quite erroneous. He would feel stabs of depressions in innings number two, three and four that would make that first stab of depression seem like the after effect of a Miltown tablet. That’s how bad it got forty-five minutes later, when Casey had allowed nine hits, had walked six men, and thrown two wild pitches, and had muffed a pop fly to the mound, which, McGarry roared to the bench around him, “could have been caught by a palsied Civil War veteran who lost an arm at Gettysburg.”

In the seventh inning Mouth McGarry took his fifth walk over to the mound and this time didn’t return to the bench till he’d motioned to the bullpen for Casey’s relief—a very eager kid, albeit a nervous one, who chewed tobacco going to the mound and got violently sick as he crossed the third-base line because he swallowed a piece. Coughing hard, he arrived at the mound and took the ball from Mouth McGarry. Casey solemnly shoved his mitt into his hip pocket and took the long walk back toward the showers.

At ten minutes to midnight the locker room had been emptied. All the players save Casey had gone back to the hotel. Bertram Beasley had left earlier—on a stretcher in the sixth inning. In the locker room were a baseball manager who produced odd grunts from deep within his throat and kept shaking his head back and forth and a kindly white-haired old man who built robots. Casey came out of the shower, wrapped in a towel. He smiled gently at Mouth and then went over to his locker where he proceeded to dress.

“Well?” Mouth shouted at him. “Well? One minute he’s three Lefty Groves, the next minute he’s the cousin to every New York Giant who ever lived. He’s a tanker. He’s a nothing. All right—you wanna tell me, Casey? You wanna explain? You might start by telling me how one man can throw nine pitched balls and give up four singles, two doubles, a triple and two home runs!”

The question remained unanswered. Stillman looked toward Casey and said very softly, “Shall I tell him?”

Casey nodded apologetically.

Stillman turned toward McGarry “Casey has a heart,” he said quietly.

Mouth fumed. “So? Casey has a heart! So I know he’s gotta heart! So this ain’t news, prof! Tell me something that is!”

“The thing is,” Casey said in his first speech over three sentences since McGarry had met him. “The thing is, Mr. McGarry, I just couldn’t strike out those poor fellahs. I didn’t have it in me to do that—to hurt their feelings. I felt—I felt compassion!” He looked toward Stillman as if for confirmation.

Stillman nodded. “That’s what he’s got, Mr. McGarry. Compassion. See how he smiles?”

Casey grinned obediently and most happily, and Stillman returned his smile. “You see, Mr. McGarry,” Stillman continued. “You give a person a heart—particularly someone like Casey, who hasn’t been around long enough to understand things like competitiveness or drive or ego. Well,” he shrugged, “that’s what happens.’’

Mouth sat down on the bench, unscrewed the bottle of pills and found it was empty. He threw the bottle over his shoulder. “That’s what happens to
him
,” he said. “Shall I tell you what happens to me? I go back to being a manager of nine gleeps so old that I gotta rub them down with formaldehyde and revive them in between innings.” He suddenly had a thought and looked up at Casey. “Casey,” he asked, Don’t you feel any of that compassion for the Brooklyn Dodgers?”