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I had a difficult time tracking down enough players from my high-school team. Several were working shift for the summer and weren’t certain they would be available. Some were on vacation. We ended up with a third-string catcher, and I had to recruit Byron to play right field. He was not a total loss as a ball player, but he would rather have charted the game on his computer than play.
‘I’m gonna have you lead off,’ Roger said to me.
I alternated between batting second and seventh most of my high-school career. I showed Roger the statistics I kept on our team’s season.
‘I prefer being the lead-off man,’ I said. ‘How did you know?’
‘I know more than you think,’ said Roger, flashing his disarming grin.
‘Look at these stats,’ I said. ‘I steal successfully nine out of ten tries. But my high-school coach doesn’t play a base-stealing game.’
‘And you have a high on-base percentage,’ said Roger. ‘You walk a lot. Walks are important. You need patience to walk. I need your help here, because I’m going to put my batters up in the order of their patience.’
‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘McCracken has great control. I went over his stats in back issues of the local paper. They don’t always print box scores but the ones I could find show McCracken only walks 2.1 batters per game and averages 6.4 strikeouts.’
‘You don’t miss a trick, do you?’ said Roger. ‘But it’s a strategy, trust me.’ And he smiled once again, his teeth glinting like porcelain.
We had another practice Friday evening. I’m afraid we didn’t look very good. Byron reported that someone from McCracken’s team was sitting in a pickup truck about three blocks down the street, studying us through binoculars, hoping to get a glimpse of Roger in action.
Roger did not pitch. Our regular pitcher, Dusty Swan, who I had recruited to play third base because our regular third-base man was in California, threw batting practice.
‘I want you guys to lay back and wait for the fastball,’ Roger told us. ‘McCracken’s got a killer curve, a mean slider, a big-league change-up you can break your back on. But his fastball’s nothing. He uses it to set up his other pitches. If we can keep from swinging at anything outside the strike zone, he’ll give up lots of walks. Then he’ll have to throw the fastball and, when he does, we’ll hammer it.’
Though Roger’s strategy went against McCracken’s statistics, it was Roger’s game, and Roger’s money was bet on it.
All that week, in the afternoons, Roger Cash worked out at the abandoned ball field behind the lumberyard. Sometimes I acted as his catcher, but more often he employed Walt Swan, a brother to Dusty. He paid Walt five dollars cash after every workout.
In the evenings, accompanied by his trusty road atlas, he played the mileage game in every bar in the area. Dad heard at work that Roger was picking up several hundred dollars in winnings each night.
‘It’s also a way for me to become known real quickly,’ Roger said. ‘It will help assure a good turnout for the game on Sunday.’
By the end of his third evening in town he had a very pretty brunette on his arm. She had a pleasant laugh, a crooked smile, and pale brown, almond-shaped eyes. She was a cocktail waitress at Hot Mama’s on the outskirts of town. Her name was Jacqueline, and she spent the rest of the nights that week in Roger’s room, except the night before the big game.
‘Do you have any objection, Gil,’ Roger asked my dad our first night at supper, ‘to my having occasional female company in my room?’
Dad looked up from his chicken-fried steak.
‘You can bring a goat to your room as far as I’m concerned,’ he said, ‘as long as you’re quiet.’
FOUR (#u9afc7937-e2db-503b-becf-7193880db645)
It was during that week before the challenge game, that I found out a lot about distances myself. Like myself, most of my friends were just discovering girls. Most of our discoveries involved talk. We talked about the mystery of them, we talked about them individually and collectively, often in a disparaging manner learned from older boys at the Springtime Café or the Main Street Pool Hall.
Byron had gone to the movies a number of times with a green-eyed girl named Janice, who wore no lipstick or make-up because her family belonged to a fanatical religious group that thought the end of the world was imminent, and that everyone should be in a natural state when the end came.
‘I asked her why she wears clothes,’ Byron said, after his fourth and final date, ‘and she said, “Modesty. The Lord expects modesty from all His creations.”’
It was on that date he discovered the only reason her parents let her go out with him was that he seemed a likely candidate for conversion. That evening, when they arrived back at her house after the show – her father drove them to the movie and picked them up at the Springtime Café afterward – their preacher, Pastor Valentine, and eight members of the congregation were camped in Janice’s living room, which, Byron said, was decorated like a church.
Pastor Valentine conducted an impromptu service, and every- one prayed loud and long for Byron’s wandering soul. They said many unkind things about the Catholic Church in general and the Pope in particular, having wrongly assumed, I suppose because of our last name being French, that Byron was a practicing Roman Catholic. We had never attended any church, and Dad said our family had had no religious affiliation for at least three generations. ‘I have no intention of breaking with tradition,’ Byron said.
Meanwhile I was in love for the first time. Or, more accurately, I had let being in love move from my imagination to real life. Her name was Julie Dorn, and I had become enamored of her just at the end of the school year. She was a farm girl, almost my height and fifteen pounds heavier. She was clean-up hitter for the high-school girls’ softball team, and I liked her because she wasn’t a giggler, and always looked me in the eye when we talked. She drove a four-ton grain truck to school.
I was attracted to her straightforwardness, her toughness. Julie tolerated my interest in her, but made it plain she would prefer a more masculine beau, probably one of the broad-shouldered farm boys who knew how to deliver calves and had bronzed arms the size of fence posts. She often teased me about my ignorance of farms and was slightly contemptuous of what she saw as my lack of physical strength. Also, she wasn’t impressed by my baseball playing, even though I was often the star of the team both offensively and defensively. She preferred to watch the boys she was attracted to grunt like dinosaurs on the football field. To add to my woes, I didn’t drive yet. Julie had been driving farm equipment since she was ten years old.
I called on her about once a week, walking the three miles of narrow pavement that passed her family’s farm. She would entertain me in the dark parlor, or we would walk in the sweet dusk, watching fireflies rising, sparkling, dissolving in our path. We even kissed a few times. But Julie never let me forget that my interest in her was much greater than her interest in me.
A couple of days after Roger Cash appeared in town, I walked out to the Dorn farm, arriving at mid-afternoon on a high-skied, blazing day. The farm house was tall and sad-looking, badly in need of paint. I knocked at the side door; like farmers everywhere the Dorns did not use their front door. One of Julie’s aunts answered, wiping perspiration from her forehead with the back of her hand.
‘Julie and her sister are coiling hay in the north pasture,’ she said.
1 could not see into the house because of the thick screen on the door, but from the dark interior came the smell of pork roast, the fumes mouth-watering, almost tangible.
I walked through a grove of trees, enjoying the temporary coolness in the midst of the fiery day. I picked a bluebell, split the bell, and rooted out the teardrop of honey inside.
In a half-swathed field of red clover, Julie and a younger sister were at work with pitchforks, layering the hay into coils, which, when finished, resembled giant beehives.
‘You townies don’t know how good you’ve got it,’ Julie said, driving the tines of her fork into the earth, stilling the vibrating handle, then leaning on it as if it were a tree.
She was flushed and perspiring. Her copper-colored hair spilled over her forehead and was flecked with clover seeds. She wore jeans and a short-sleeved blouse the color of cowslips. The back and underarms of the blouse were soaked dark. She wasn’t wearing a bra. I realized that even after my three-mile walk I was still cool. I was wearing a white open-necked shirt and khaki shorts. Even though my hair was lightened by the sun, I had not tanned much. Julie’s arms and face were sunblackened, her hair bleached golden in spots.
‘Can I help?’ I asked, hoping to win favor.
‘Sure,’ Julie said, smiling too knowingly, as if there was some private joke. ‘Beat it,’ she said to her sister. The younger girl stabbed her fork into the ground and raced off, happy to be relieved of an unpleasant job.
I have probably never worked as hard as I did in the next fifteen minutes – and accomplished less. I might as well have been trying to coil water with that pitchfork. Julie offered no advice. As I worked, I babbled on about my new friend, Roger Cash, and the upcoming baseball game, mileages, distances, posters, concessions, while accumulating a pitiful pile of clover that bore no resemblance to the waist-high beehives Julie and her sister had created, the hay swirled in circular patterns, the swaths interlocked, impervious to wind, resistant to rain.
While I worked Julie sat in the shade of a dark green coil, smoking, a crockery water jug bathed in condensation beside her.
I finally gave up, red-faced and disheveled.
‘It’s not as easy as it looks,’ I said.
Julie grinned with what I hoped was tolerance rather than contempt. ‘You people in town live so far away,’ she said, her tone still not definable.
‘It’s only three miles,’ I said stupidly.
Julie took a final drag on her cigarette and crushed it out on the earth beside her. She looked at me with a close-lipped smile.
‘At least you tried,’ she said, and leaned over so her head rested on my shoulder.
We kissed, both our faces damp from the heat of the day. The smell of freshly cut clover was overpowering. Julie slid closer to me, crossed one of my bare legs with one of her denim ones. She radiated heat. Her breasts burned against my chest as we embraced, only two thin layers of cloth separating us.
Her tongue was deep in my mouth, her large right hand hard to my left shoulder. Before I realized it she was forcing me down on my back, pushing me deep into the sweet clover. I didn’t mind that she was stronger; there was nothing I could do about it. It even excited me. I ran my free hand down the thigh of her jeans, let it find its way between her legs.
We stopped kissing and gasped for breath.
‘I bet I could take you,’ Julie said into my neck, and I knew by her tone that she meant in physical strength.
‘You probably could,’ I said, gasping for air. ‘What does it matter? You work hard, have all your life. I don’t.’
Suddenly, Julie forced my head deep into the hay. All the sexuality of the previous moment was gone. This was a contest. Julie’s hands were on my shoulders, her right leg between my thighs; she held my back down flat on the stubbly earth.
I had no experience roughhousing with girls.
My worst fear, almost certainly a truth, was that Julie would care about being able to out-wrestle me. How hard should I defend myself? If I concentrated on one of her arms, got a solid lock on it … but Julie was sitting on my chest. My shoulders were pinned to the earth, and my head partially covered with clover, the tiny red seeds filling my eyes and mouth, spilling down my neck.
I bucked ineffectually a few times.
‘Okay, you’ve proved your point,’ I said.
Julie scrambled to her feet. I stood and brushed the clover seeds from my face and shirt front. I wanted to reverse time. I wanted the scent, the taste of Julie; I wanted to be inside her mouth, to feel the heat of her breasts burning against me.
But what I read in her eyes was that I was never to be forgiven for my weakness. I was walking toward her with the idea of taking her in my arms anyway, in spite of the coldness in her eyes, when her kid sister reappeared.
‘We’ve got to get back to work,’ said Julie.
‘I’ll come by again,’ I said. Julie didn’t reply.
But as I walked slowly back toward town, swinging my shirt in my right hand, the sun burning my back, I knew I wouldn’t.
FIVE (#u9afc7937-e2db-503b-becf-7193880db645)
Saturday night, Roger went to bed about ten o’clock. Alone.
‘Got to rest the old soupbone,’ he said, as he headed up the stairs, flexing his huge pitching arm.
I went to bed shortly after, but I couldn’t sleep. My mind was too full of the game the next day, my thoughts as much on the operation of the concessions as on baseball.
Eventually I dozed fitfully, but late in the night I woke with a start, surprised to hear the stairs creaking. I stretched out my arm and let the moonlight slanting through the window touch the face of my watch. Three A.M.I went to the window. I heard keys jingle in the darkness, watched as Roger opened the trunk of the Caddy and stealthily extracted the garden tools, hoisted them to his shoulder, and set off down the fragrant, moonstruck street.
About four-fifteen, just as the first blue-orange tinge appeared on the horizon, Roger returned, replaced the tools, and re-entered the house.
By game time we had sold 511 tickets. I left a woman named Margie Smood at the ticket table to sell to latecomers until the fifth inning. The concessions were booming, and the air was alive with the smell of frying onions, hot dogs, and popcorn. There was no fence around the local ball field, so, at Roger’s suggestion, Byron and I constructed a funnel-like gate, made of pickets joined by flame-orange surveyor’s tape. People were generally honest; only a few school kids and a handful of adults skirted the ticket line.
Our players were all nervous as we warmed up along first base. One thing I’d neglected to tell Roger was that our high-school team had never been able to afford uniforms – although the football team had trucks full of equipment – so we wore whatever we could scrounge: anything from jeans, T-shirts, and sneakers to a full Detroit Tigers uniform worn by Lindy Travis, who was a cousin several times removed of Detroit pitcher Virgil Trucks.
Along third, McCracken Construction, in black uniforms with gold numbers on their chests and their names in gold letters on their backs, snapped balls back and forth with authority. Baseballs smacking into gloves sounded like balloons breaking.
‘Where are the gate receipts?’ Roger asked me.
‘In a box under the ticket table. You don’t need to worry. Margie Smood’s honest.’
‘Go get them. Just leave her enough to change a twenty.’
‘But …’
‘I’ve got to get down some more bets.’
‘What if we lose?’
‘Never in doubt, Mike. Never in doubt.’
While six members of the Franklin Pierce High School Music Makers Marching Band, in beautiful red uniforms with gold buttons and epaulets, were assassinating the national anthem, Roger carried the money around to a conference with McCracken and his teammates.
The mayor, a small man with white hair and a rodent face, wearing an American Legion beret, was seated in the front row, directly behind home plate, and he had apparently agreed to hold the bets. By game time there were bags and boxes, envelopes and cartons piled at his feet. As near as I could estimate, Roger must have had upwards of ten thousand dollars riding on the game, perhaps as much as twenty thousand, most of it covered by McCracken and his team.
Roger and McCracken talked animatedly for several minutes. Finally McCracken went to his equipment bag and counted out more money; he also signed something that Roger proffered. Roger dug into the back pocket of his uniform and produced the keys to his Caddy. He held them up, let the sun play on them, then dropped them in a box with the money and the paper McCracken had signed. The box was deposited at the feet of the mayor.
McCracken appeared uncomfortable as he warmed up on the mound. One of the concessions Roger offered, even though we were playing on our home field, was to allow McCracken Construction to be home team.
McCracken pawed the dirt and stalked around the rubber. After the umpire called ‘Play Ball!’ his first three pitches were low, one bouncing right on the plate. The fourth pitch McCracken threw was a fastball, right down the heart of the plate, for a strike. I was tempted to hammer it, but held back, telling myself, a walk is as good as a single. McCracken was in trouble, I wasn’t, and he walked me with another low pitch. He walked Lindy Travis on five pitches. He walked Gussy Pulvermacher on four. As I moved to third I watched Roger whispering to our clean-up hitter, Dave Urbanski, his heavy right arm clamped on Dave’s shoulder.
The first pitch was low. The second broke in the dirt. McCracken kicked furiously at the mound. I could almost see Dave Urbanski’s confidence building as he waited. The fastball came. He drove it into the gap in left-centre for a stand-up double. Three of us scored, as Roger, leaping wildly in the third-base coach’s box, waved us in with a windmilling motion.
McCracken was rattled now. It didn’t help that the crowd was solidly behind us. Here was a high-school team coming off a two-and-nineteen season, going against a crack amateur team who were state finalists.
Our next batter walked on four pitches. Then McCracken settled in with his fastball and struck out the sixth batter, and Byron, who was seventh. The catcher hammered the first pitch about five hundred feet, nearly to the back yards of the closest housing complex. Fortunately for McCracken, the ball was foul. He reverted to his off-speed pitches and walked the catcher.
Roger Cash stepped into the batter’s box. He had confided to me that if he kept a record, his lifetime batting average would be below .100. But he looked formidable in his snow-white uniform with CASH in maroon letters and the large numbers 00 in the middle of his back. The front of his uniform had only crossed baseball bats on it. He held the bat straight up and down and waggled it purposefully.
‘Throw your fastball and I’ll put it in somebody’s back yard,’ yelled Roger, and curled his lip at McCracken.
The first pitch was a curve in the dirt, followed by a change-up low, another curve at the ankles, and something that may have been a screwball that hit two feet in front of the plate. Roger trotted to first. A fourth run scored, and the bases were still loaded.
On the first pitch to me McCracken came right down the middle with his fastball. I got part of it with the end of the bat, a dying quail just beyond the second-base man’s reach. Runs five and six scored. Lindy Travis ended the inning.
McCracken’s team tried to get all six runs back in the bottom of the first. They went out one-two-three.
I bounced around at second base, feeling as though I had insects crawling all over my body I wanted the ball to be hit to me. I dreaded the ball being hit to me.
McCracken walked the first batter in the second inning, but that was it. His curve started snapping over the plate at the last second, pitches that had been breaking into the dirt now crossed the plate as strikes at the knees.
We led 6–0 after three innings. But McCracken Construction got a run in the fourth, one in the fifth when Byron dropped a fly ball with two out, and two in the sixth with a single and a long home run by McCracken himself.
I managed to hit another Texas League single, but grounded into an inning-ending double play in the sixth.
McCracken and his team were at last catching on that Roger was little more than a journeyman pitcher with a lot of guile. He had a screwball that floated up to the plate like a powder puff, only to break in on the batter’s hands at the last instant, usually resulting in a polite pop-up to the pitcher or shortstop. His fastball was nothing, and, knowing that, he usually threw it out of the strike zone. But his change-up was a beauty, like carrying the ball to the plate. Roger’s pitching motion never changed an iota; a hitter would be finished his swing and on his way to the bench, shaking his head, by the time the ball reached the catcher.
The seventh went scoreless.
We got a run in the eighth on a double and a single, but McCracken’s team got two in the bottom, aided again by Byron’s misjudgment of a fly ball.
It was obvious that Roger was tired. His face was streaked with sweat and grime, he took off his cap after almost every pitch. To compound matters, we went out on four pitches in the top of the ninth, allowing Roger only about two minutes’ rest.
With our team leading 7–6, the first batter in the last of the ninth hit a clean single up the middle. The next sacrificed him to second. (I managed to cover first on the sacrifice – my greatest fear was that I would botch that play.) The third batter swung very late on a change-up and sent the ball like a bullet just to the inside of first. Lindy Travis lunged for the ball and, by accident, it ended up in his glove. He threw from a sitting position to Roger, covering the base, for the second out. The base runner advanced to third.
McCracken was at the plate. As he dug in he sent a steady stream of words toward the mound. Though I couldn’t hear, I knew he was baiting Roger. Well, if we lost, there would at least be enough profits from the concessions to pay my employees off and buy Roger a bus ticket for somewhere not too far away. All I hoped was that the ball wouldn’t be hit to me.
