Underworld (87 page)

“That's right. You got it,” Manx says, hearing himself adopt a high pitch that's meant to be cheerful and optimistic.

But the man's not looking at the baseball. He's looking at Manx.

“And I'm supposed to stand here.”

Manx begins to understand, close range, that this guy's a bus driver or sewer worker or bricklayer.

“And listen to this bullcrap.”

The man is chewing and talking.

“I think you better haul ass out of here, buddy, before I call a cop.”

Manx puts the ball back in his pocket.

“They put son of a bitches like you behind bars is where you belong.”

Talking like that in front of his own kid.

The kid is hungry, he's going through the lettuce like a lawn mower.

They're standing there eating, both of them, looking at Manx, and the son resembles the father to such a degree, stocky and full-faced, that Manx wants to warn him against growing up.

Think they own the earth.

It takes him an hour, scouting the lines, doing three circuits of the stadium, talking to this and that person, getting a feel for the individual,
seeing how it goes, and it's not going well, giving himself another five minutes by the clock on the wall at the southwest end, and then five more minutes, telling himself if he doesn't spot someone in five minutes, with a wholesome kid in tow, he will give up and go home, and then one more minute, and then one more, prowling the lines, making approaches that don't pan out, and about an hour later he is talking to a man and his son who are squatted down outside the bleacher section near the end of a very long line, camped out with a sleeping bag for the kid and a duffle coat for the man, and Manx is working his way into the names.

“Which I'm saying, in all honesty.”

“Wait a minute. You're saying this baseball you claim to have in your possession.”

“Right right right. But I don't know the player's name, y'understand, which I'm being honest with you.”

“You mean Bobby Thomson?”

“That's the one. All right. I feel better now.”

See, Manx believes he can be straight-up with this man. Expose his own shortcomings. He's not a fan and shouldn't pretend to be. And at the same time, only deeper, he thinks this is a strategy that can work, it's a scheme, a plot—show the man your weakness and he will swallow your story whole.

“I'm of the attitude where if you're doing a little business, you put all your cards on the table. And I'll tell you what I think. That tomorrow a wholesale rabble show themselves at the clubhouse entrance. Carrying a baseball, every one of them, and saying I got the ace.”

“When in fact, according to your claim,” the man says.

“When in fact the ace is in the hole,” Manx says, and he reaches into his pocket and takes out the ball.

The man smiles. The man is on his haunches against the wall and Manx is in a squat himself, holding the ball slightly atremble for comic effect, staring hard at the man, showing the man a fake intensity, which they both know is fake, just for effect, and the man holds out his hand for the ball, amused but skeptical, meaning in other words that he'll play along for now.

But Manx doesn't give him the ball.

The boy is sitting up in the sleeping bag, trying to stay awake.

“Now see this tar spot,” Manx says. And he shows the man and he shows the boy. “I think I ought to rub it off, being it has no business here.”

And he wets his thumb with a flourish and tries to remove a scant trace of tar, because Cotter must have bounced the ball in the street, but he only succeeds in smudging the area and has to wonder why he is doctoring the ball at all.

“By the way,” the fellow says, maybe to distract Manx from his embarrassment. “My name's Charlie.”

“You call me Manx. And the boy. What's your name, son?”

“Tell him.”

“No,” the kid says.

“We got us a rascal here,” Manx says. “How old's this rascally son of a gun?”

“Eight,” the man says.

“Eight. Imagine being eight. Imagine going to the first game of the World Series and seeing all these famous players. Something he'll remember for the rest of his life.”

“His name's Chuckie.”

Manx looks at Chuckie. Kid rather be home sleeping in a soft warm bed with dog drawings on the wall. That's okay. What we're talking about here is not the present but the future. Pop's looking to build a memory for the boy.

“Being eight. Yankee Stadium. The most famous ballpark in the country.”

Manx puts the ball in the man's hand.

“But if a dozen people show up with baseballs at the clubhouse entrance,” Charlie says, “how do I convince anyone? How do I convince myself this is the Bobby Thomson ball? Or anyone else?”

Manx is in his crapshooter's squat.

“Let me put it this way,” he says, and he does not shy from the question because he's been waiting for it ever since he walked across the bridge from Harlem. “Do they believe you or me? Who do they believe? Put yourself in their place, friends of yours, people in the office. Then look at me and look at you. Who they gonna believe?”

Manx knows the logic in this argument is about six times removed
from the question of the ball's actual history. But he thinks he can count on this fellow to see the underlying subject, the turn of mind.

“And I can believe it, personally, myself,” he says, “because my own boy give me the goods on this baseball. And no way on earth he's gonna lie to the old man about a thing like this. He lie all right. Lie about school. Miss school, tell a lie. Miss a visit to the dentist.”

“But this is baseball,” Charlie says helpfully.

“Exactly right. But I have to admit I wasn't convinced at first. Like you. Like anyone. I was first gave over to doubt. But then I heard the boy.”

“And you felt you knew.”

“I felt exactly. I knew. Because I heard it in his voice.”

“And saw it as well.”

“Saw it right there. Wouldn't lie about this. Good boy when it counts.”

“And baseball. This counts.”

Manx takes heart from the man's cooperation because he doesn't want to suffer another bringdown. But at the same time he doesn't want to think of Charlie as a sucker, a rube in a duffle coat, falling for an easy line. The line is true in this case but what's the difference? Manx has told amazing lies that were a lot easier falling from his lips than anything he could say about this little spheroid fact.

The man is studying the ball.

Manx decides to shut his mouth for fifteen seconds. Let the occasion take a solemn turn. Give the customer a chance to fall in love with the product.

“Well, I see there's a green, a little sort of green paint smudge near the seam here, between the seam and the trademark,” Charlie says, “and I know for a fact because someone said so on the radio that the ball struck a pillar when it went in the stands. And the pillars are green, I also know for a fact, at the Polo Grounds.”

Manx does a little squat-jump. He is elated to hear this. It's as though he himself has to be convinced, as though the man's remark is the confirmation he needs to see Cotter as an honest boy, transformed from a back-talking kid who jumps turnstiles into an honest upright dutiful boy, at last.

The man raises his eyes from the ball and looks at Manx. It's a look that says, I want to believe. And Manx can't think of a thing to say, for the life of him, the actual life, that would bring the man across the line and clinch the deal completely.

Charlie takes up the task himself, says some fairly convincing things, this time to his son, about the company that makes the ball and the name of the league president that's stamped on the ball and other matters and details, all of them checking out okay, it seems, and the boy is sleepy and cold and unimpressed and Manx looks around for a vendor with hot chocolate because it never hurts to be considerate.

“Vendors scarce tonight.”

“He had some soup.”

“I was a vendor I be out here in force. Put the wife and kids to work.”

“He had hot soup in a thermos. He's all right.”

But Chuckie says, “I don't think I'm so all right.”

“Just stay awake. I want you awake for this.”

Manx understands this is for his benefit more than the kid's. The man and the kid just going through the motions. Kid's not even doing that. Kid stopped listening to the man somewhere around the diaper stage.

Chuckie slithers into the bag with that mutinous look kids get once they understand they're not property.

“I want you to remember everything that happens here tonight,” Charlie says.

But the boy is already down under, even his head vanished in the flannel.

“You're a father, you must know,” Charlie says.

“I wrote the book.”

“What a danger-laden thing it is, in all respects, trying to raise a child.”

“Take forever to grow up on the one hand. But it goes so fast on the other.”

“I've only got the one.”

“You're looking at four.”

“Four,” Charlie says, and in his look there is admiration, sympathy
and some wonder as well, and something else Manx can't quite identify—maybe just the sense of different lives, a thing that has nothing directly to do with the number of kids.

There's a fire going in an oil drum and Manx goes to the curb, grabs the rusty can and drags it over to the line of waiting fans, fire and all. He feels the metal burn his hand as an afterthought, burn like hell in a picture book, but the fans are impressed by the gesture, big smiles abounding, it is the kind of thing that rightly marks a night like this, and Charlie seems delighted.

But not just different lives. Completely other ways of thinking and doing. And Manx isn't sure if they're supposed to be sad about this. He's ready to do whatever's called for.

“What kind of seats you expecting you get?”

“Bleachers. Love to get reserved seats but they're long gone. Everything's gone but bleachers and standing room and I know Chuckie'll never forgive me if I force him to watch a ball game standing up.”

“After he spends a night sleeping on the sidewalk? Who can blame him?”

Charlie smiles again, throwing a wayward slap at Manx's kneecap. Then he hands Manx the ball but only because he's reaching into his coat for something. Turns out to be a flask, sweet little silvery thing with a cap on a chain like those army canteens, only flat, small, expensive, that you can pocket easy, a pick-me-up on a down day.

“Now what have we here?” says Manx.

“Give you one guess.”

“Could say orange juice.”

“Too soon for breakfast.”

“Could say spicy tea from old India.”

“Too late for teatime,” Charlie says.

They're having a pretty good time, the one on his haunches against the wall, the other in his crapshooter's squat, with the lump in the flannel bag gone totally still, either pouty-stiff or sleep-stiff.

Charlie says, “Do the honors,” and he hands the flask to Manx, who tosses the ball back to Charlie, and this small blurry exchange has an odd depth, it's a sign of some kind, a deal that's completely outside the transaction in progress, and it brings Manx up a little higher.

He unscrews the cap and lets it dangle and he takes a connoisseur's sniff of the action in the jug.

“Do believe this is what they call spirits.”

“Irish whiskey,” Charlie says.

“Do love the Irish, don't we?”

“Many lasting contributions,” Charlie says.

“Well said, my man.”

They share a complicit grin. And Manx raises the flask and tilts his head and knocks back a not too sizable shot, for courtesy sake, and gives the thing back to Charles.

He calls him Charles now, for the social aspect, gentlemen drinkers at the club.

And he waits for Charles to drink. A moment of stinging truth. Manx has put his mouth to the rim of the flask and now he waits for Charles to do the same.

A brief, deep and knowledgeable suspense.

Doesn't even wipe off the rim. Just tips the flask and drinks, too deep, and comes up teary-eyed and gasping but happy too. Both men happy, having a princely time.

“Went down the wrong pipe,” says Charlie, forcing out the words.

“Happens to the best.”

“Occupational hazard,” says the gasping man.

Hands over the flask. Manx takes a klondike swig and keenly feels the effect, oh yes, as the Irish aerates a number of crucial passages in his head and chest.

They pass the flask a while.

“One of mine's a girl,” Manx says. “Rosie. Best ever daughter you could find.”

“How old?”

“How old,” he says.

He feels a drifty look come into his eyes.

“Maybe twice yours. Yours eight, right? Imagine being eight.”

They pass the flask.

“I'll be honest,” Charlie says. “You were honest with me. Least I can do is tell you what I'm thinking.”

All up and down the line there are people crouched in sleep or in drowsy bundled waiting, out of conversation now, heads slumped, some cigarettes going, most people asleep in blankets or thick parkas or just nodding off, squinch-eyed, and a cough and a moan and a radio playing Latin music but not too loud, and shaking awake and nodding off and a cop on a horse over by the barricade, and Manx shifts position slightly to observe the stillness of the tall brown animal, a dead-still quality that is not like men when they are motionless, or dogs for that matter, or fish in a bowl, and not peaceful or unperturbed but immobile in its own way, great and strong, shining at the flanks.

“I'll be honest,” Charlie says, “because what's the point of all this if we're not honest?”

“Go, man.”

“I don't know if you're telling me the truth. But the ball looks like a ball they'd be using in a National League game in the year 1951. That's one mark in your favor, relatively minor, because there's balls and there's balls.”