father
PROLOGUE
THE TRIUMPH OF DEATH
He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eye that’s halfway hopeful.
It’s a school day, sure, but he’s nowhere near the classroom. He wants to be here instead, standing in the shadow of this old rust-hulk of a structure, and it’s hard to blame him—this metropolis of steel and concrete and flaky paint and cropped grass and enormous Chesterfield packs aslant on the scoreboards, a couple of cigarettes jutting from each.
Longing on a large scale is what makes history. This is just a kid with a local yearning but he is part of an assembling crowd, anonymous thousands off the buses and trains, people in narrow columns tramping over the swing bridge above the river, and even if they are not a migration or a revolution, some vast shaking of the soul, they bring with them the body heat of a great city and their own small reveries and desperations, the unseen something that haunts the day—men in fedoras and sailors on shore leave, the stray tumble of their thoughts, going to a game.
The sky is low and gray, the roily gray of sliding surf.
He stands at the curbstone with the others. He is the youngest, at fourteen, and you know he’s flat broke by the edgy leaning look he hangs on his body. He has never done this before and he doesn’t know any of the others and only two or three of them seem to know each other but they can’t do this thing singly or in pairs so they have found one another by means of slidy looks that detect the fellow foolhard and here they stand, black kids and white kids up from the subways or off the local Harlem streets, lean shadows, bandidos, fifteen in all, and according to topical legend maybe four will get through for every one that’s caught.
They are waiting nervously for the ticket holders to clear the turnstiles, the last loose cluster of fans, the stragglers and loiterers. They watch the late-arriving taxis from downtown and the brilliantined men stepping dapper to the windows, policy bankers and supper club swells and Broadway hotshots, high aura’d, picking lint off their mohair sleeves. They stand at the curb and watch without seeming to look, wearing the sourish air of corner hangabouts. All the hubbub has died down, the pregame babble and swirl, vendors working the jammed sidewalks waving scorecards and pennants and calling out in ancient singsong, scraggy men hustling buttons and caps, all dispersed now, gone to their roomlets in the beaten streets.
They are at the curbstone, waiting. Their eyes are going grim, sending out less light. Somebody takes his hands out of his pockets. They are waiting and then they go, one of them goes, a mick who shouts Geronimo.
There are four turnstiles just beyond the pair of ticket booths. The youngest boy is also the scrawniest, Cotter Martin by name, scrawny tall in a polo shirt and dungarees and trying not to feel doom-struck—he’s located near the tail of the rush, running and shouting with the others. You shout because it makes you brave or you want to announce your recklessness. They have made their faces into scream masks, tight-eyed, with stretchable mouths, and they are running hard, trying to funnel themselves through the lanes between the booths, and they bump hips and elbows and keep the shout going. The faces of the ticket sellers hang behind the windows like onions on strings.
Cotter sees the first jumpers go over the bars. Two of them jostle in the air and come down twisted and asprawl. A ticket taker puts a headlock on one of them and his cap comes loose and skims down his back and he reaches for it with a blind swipe and at the same time—everything’s at the same time—he eyes the other hurdlers to keep from getting stepped on. They are running and hurdling. It’s a witless form of flight with bodies packed in close and the gate-crashing becoming real. They are jumping too soon or too late and hitting the posts and radial bars, doing cartoon climbs up each other’s back, and what kind of stupes must they look like to people at the hot dog stand on the other side of the turnstiles, what kind of awful screwups—a line of mostly men beginning to glance this way, jaws working at the sweaty meat and grease bubbles flurrying on their tongues, the gent at the far end going dead-still except for a hand that produces automatic movement, swabbing on mustard with a brush.
The shout of the motley boys comes banging off the deep concrete.
Cotter thinks he sees a path to the turnstile on the right. He drains himself of everything he does not need to make the jump. Some are still jumping, some are thinking about it, some need a haircut, some have girlfriends in woolly sweaters and the rest have landed in the ruck and are trying to get up and scatter. A couple of stadium cops are rumbling down the ramp. Cotter sheds these elements as they appear, sheds a thousand waves of information hitting on his skin. His gaze is trained on the iron bars projected from the post. He picks up speed and seems to lose his gangliness, the slouchy funk of hormones and unbelonging and all the stammering things that seal his adolescence. He is just a running boy, a half-seen figure from the streets, but the way running reveals some clue to being, the way a runner bares himself to consciousness, this is how the dark-skinned kid seems to open to the world, how the bloodrush of a dozen strides brings him into eloquence.
Then he leaves his feet and is in the air, feeling sleek and unmussed and sort of businesslike, flying in from Kansas City with a briefcase full of bank drafts. His head is tucked, his left leg is clearing the bars. And in one prolonged and aloof and discontinuous instant he sees precisely where he’ll land and which way he’ll run and even though he knows they will be after him the second he touches ground, even though he’ll be in danger for the next several hours—watching left and right—there is less fear in him now.
He comes down lightly and goes easy-gaiting past the ticket taker groping for his fallen cap and he knows absolutely—knows it all the way, deep as knowing goes, he feels the knowledge start to hammer in his runner’s heart—that he is uncatchable.
Here comes a cop in municipal bulk with a gun and cuffs and a flashlight and a billy club all jigging on his belt and a summons pad wadded in his pocket. Cotter gives him a juke step that sends him nearly to his knees and the hot dog eaters bend from the waist to watch the kid veer away in soft acceleration, showing the cop a little finger-wag bye-bye.
He surprises himself this way every so often, doing some gaudy thing that whistles up out of unsuspected whim.
He runs up a shadowed ramp and into a crossweave of girders and pillars and spilling light. He hears the crescendoing last chords of the national anthem and sees the great open horseshoe of the grandstand and that unfolding vision of the grass that always seems to mean he has stepped outside his life—the rubbed shine that sweeps and bends from the raked dirt of the infield out to the high green fences. It is the excitement of a revealed thing. He runs at quarter speed craning to see the rows of seats, looking for an inconspicuous wedge behind a pillar. He cuts into an aisle in section 35 and walks down into the heat and smell of the massed fans, he walks into the smoke that hangs from the underside of the second deck, he hears the talk, he enters the deep buzz, he hears the warm-up pitches crack into the catcher’s mitt, a series of reports that carry a comet’s tail of secondary sound.
Then you lose him in the crowd.
In the radio booth they’re talking about the crowd. Looks like thirty-five thousand and how do you figure it. When you think about the textured histories of the teams and the faith and passion of the fans and the way these forces are entwined citywide, and when you think about the game itself, live-or-die, the third game in a three-game playoff, and you say the names Giants and Dodgers, and you calculate the way the players hate each other openly, and you recall the kind of year this has turned out to be, the pennant race that has brought the city to a strangulated rapture, an end-shudder requiring a German loanword to put across the mingling of pleasure and dread and suspense, and when you think about the blood loyalty, this is what they’re saying in the booth—the love-of-team that runs across the boroughs and through the snuggled suburbs and out into the apple counties and the raw north, then how do you explain twenty thousand empty seats?
The engineer says, All day it looks like rain. It affects the mood. People say the hell with it.
The producer is hanging a blanket across the booth to separate the crew from the guys who’ve just arrived from KMOX in St. Louis. Have to double up since there’s nowhere else to put them.
He says to the engineer, Don’t forget. There wasn’t any advance sale.
And the engineer says, Plus the Giants lost big yesterday and this is a serious thing because a crushing defeat puts a gloom on the neighborhoods. Believe me, I know this where I live. It’s demoralizing for people. It’s like they’re dying in the tens of thousands.
Russ Hodges, who broadcasts the games for WMCA, he is the voice of the Giants—Russ has an overworked larynx and the makings of a major cold and he shouldn’t be lighting up a cigarette but here he goes, saying, That’s all well and good but I’m not sure there really is a logical explanation. When you deal with crowds, nothing’s predictable.
Russ is going jowly now but there are elements of the uncomplicated boy in his eyes and smile and in the hair that looks bowl-cut and the shapeless suit that might belong to almost anyone. Can you do games, can you do play-by-play almost every day through a deep summer and not be located in some version of the past?
He looks out at the field with its cramped corners and the over-compensating spaces of the deep alleys and dead center. The big square Longines clock that juts up from the clubhouse. Strokes of color all around, a frescoing of hats and faces and the green grandstand and tawny base paths. Russ feels lucky to be here. Day of days and he’s doing the game and it’s happening at the Polo Grounds—a name he loves, a precious echo of things and times before the century went to war. He thinks everybody who’s here ought to feel lucky because something big’s in the works, something’s building. Okay, maybe just his temperature. But he finds himself thinking of the time his father took him to see Dempsey fight Willard in Toledo and what a thing that was, what a measure of the awesome, the Fourth of July and a hundred and ten degrees and a crowd of shirtsleeved men in straw hats, many wearing handkerchiefs spread beneath their hats and down to their shoulders, making them look like play-Arabs, and the greatness of the beating big Jess took in that white hot ring, the way the sweat and blood came misting off his face every time Dempsey hit him.
When you see a thing like that, a thing that becomes a newsreel, you begin to feel you are a carrier of some solemn scrap of history.
In the second inning Thomson hits a slider on a line over third.
Lockman swings into an arc as he races toward second, looking out at left field.
Pafko moves to the wall to play the carom.
People stand in both decks in left, leaning out from the rows up front, and some of them are tossing paper over the edge, torn-up scorecards and bits of matchbook covers, there are crushed paper cups, little waxy napkins they got with their hot dogs, there are germ-bearing tissues many days old that were matted at the bottoms of deep pockets, all coming down around Pafko.
Thomson is loping along, he is striding nicely around first, leaning into his run.
Pafko throws smartly to Cox.
Thomson moves head-down toward second, coasting in, and then sees Lockman standing on the bag looking at him semi-spellbound, the trace of a query hanging on his lips.
Days of iron skies and all the mike time of the past week, the sore throat, the coughing, Russ is feverish and bedraggled—train trips and nerves and no sleep and he describes the play in his familiar homey ramble, the grits-and-tater voice that’s a little scratchy today.
Cox peers out from under his cap and snaps the ball sidearm to Robinson.
Look at Mays meanwhile strolling to the plate dragging the barrel of his bat on the ground.
Robinson takes the throw and makes a spin move toward Thomson, who is standing shyly maybe five feet from second.
People like to see the paper fall at Pafko’s feet, maybe drift across his shoulder or cling to his cap. The wall is nearly seventeen feet high so he is well out of range of the longest leaning touch and they have to be content to bathe him in their paper.
Look at Durocher on the dugout steps, manager of the Giants, hard-rock Leo, the gashouse scrapper, a face straight from the Gallic Wars, and he says into his fist, Holy fuggin shit almighty.
Near the Giants’ dugout four men are watching from Leo’s own choice box when Robinson slaps the tag on Thomson. They are three-quarters show biz, Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason and Toots Shor, drinking buddies from way back, and they’re accompanied by a well-dressed man with a bulldog mug, one J. Edgar Hoover. What’s the nation’s number one G-man doing with these crumbums? Well, Edgar is sitting in the aisle seat and he seems to be doing just fine, smiling at the rude banter that rolls nonstop from crooner to jokesmith to saloonkeeper and back. He would rather be at the racetrack but is cheerful enough in this kind of company whatever the venue. He likes to be around movie idols and celebrity athletes, around gossip-meisters such as Walter Winchell, who is also at the game today, sitting with the Dodger brass. Fame and secrecy are the high and low ends of the same fascination, the static crackle of some libidinous thing in the world, and Edgar responds to people who have access to this energy. He wants to be their dearly devoted friend provided their hidden lives are in his private files, all the rumors collected and indexed, the shadow facts made real.
Gleason says, I told you chumps, it’s all Dodgers today. I feel it in my Brooklyn bones.
What bones?
says Frank. They’re rotted out by booze.
Thomson’s whole body sags, it loses vigor and resistance, and Robinson calls time and walks the ball to the mound in the pigeontoed gait that makes his path seem crooked.
The Giants’ll have to hire that midget if they want to win, what’s-his-name, because their only hope is some freak of nature,
Gleason says. An earthquake or a midget. And since this ain’t California, you better pray for an elf in flannels.
Frank says, Fun-nee.
The subject makes Edgar nervous. He is sensitive about his height even though he is safely in the middle range. He has added weight in recent years and when he sees himself in the mirror getting dressed, thick-bodied and Buddha-headed, it is a short round man that looks back at him. And this is something the yammerheads in the press have reported to be true, as if a man can wish his phantom torment into public print. And today it’s a fact that taller-than-average agents are not likely to be assigned to headquarters. And it’s a further fact that the midget his pal Gleason is talking about, the three-foot seven-inch sportif who came to bat one time for the St. Louis Browns some six weeks ago in a stunt that was also an act, Edgar believes, of political subversion—this fellow is called Eddie Gaedel and if Gleason recalls the name he will flash-pair Eddie with Edgar and then the short-man jokes will begin to fly like the storied shit that hits the fan. Gleason got his start doing insult comedy and never really stopped—does it for free, does it for fun and leaves shattered lives behind.
Toots Shor says, Don’t be a shlump all your life, Gleason. It’s only one-zip. The Giants didn’t come from thirteen and a half games back just to blow it on the last day. This is the miracle year. Nobody has a vocabulary for what happened this year.
The slab face and meatcutter’s hands. You look at Toots and see a speakeasy vet, dense of body, with slicked-back hair and a set of chinky eyes that summon up a warning in a hurry. This is an ex-bouncer who throws innocent people out of his club when he is drinking.
He says, Mays is the man.
And Frank says, This is Willie’s day. He’s due to bust loose. Leo told me on the phone.
Gleason does a passable clipped Britisher saying, You’re not actually telling me that this fellow stepping up to the wicket is going to do something extraordinary.
Edgar, who hates the English, falls forward laughing even as Jackie takes a breathless bite of his hot dog and begins to cough and choke, sending quidbits of meat and bread in many directions, pellets and smithereens, spitball flybys.
But it is the unseeable life-forms that dismay Edgar most and he faces away from Gleason and holds his breath. He wants to hurry to a lavatory, a zinc-lined room with a bar of untouched oval soap, a torrent of hot water and a swansdown towel that has never been used by anyone else. But of course there is nothing of the kind nearby. Just more germs, an all-pervading medium of pathogens, microbes, floating colonies of spirochetes that fuse and separate and elongate and spiral and engulf, whole trainloads of matter that people cough forth, rudimentary and deadly.
The crowd, the constant noise, the breath and hum, a basso rumble building now and then, the genderness of what they share in their experience of the game, how a man will scratch his wrist or shape a line of swearwords. And the lapping of applause that dies down quickly and is never enough. They are waiting to be carried on the sound of rally chant and rhythmic handclap, the set forms and repetitions. This is the power they keep in reserve for the right time. It is the thing that will make something happen, change the structure of the game and get them leaping to their feet, flying up together in a free thunder that shakes the place crazy.
Sinatra saying, Jack, I thought I told you to stay in the car until you’re all done eating.
Mays takes a mellow cut but gets under the ball, sending a routine fly into the low October day. The sound of the ash bat making contact with the ball reaches Cotter Martin in the left-field stands, where he sits in a bony-shouldered hunch. He is watching Willie instead of the ball, seeing him sort of shrug-run around first and then scoop his glove off the turf and jog out to his position.
The arc lights come on, catching Cotter by surprise, causing a shift in the way he feels, in the freshness of his escapade, the airy flash of doing it and not getting caught. The day is different now, grave and threatened, rain-hurried, and he watches Mays standing in center field looking banty in all that space, completely kid-size, and he wonders how the guy can make those throws he makes, whirl and sling, with power. He likes looking at the field under lights even if he has to worry about rain and even if it’s only afternoon and the full effect is not the same as in a night game when the field and the players seem completely separate from the night around them. He has been to one night game in his life, coming down from the bluff with his oldest brother and walking into a bowl of painted light. He thought there was an unknown energy flaring down out of the light towers, some intenser working of the earth, and it isolated the players and the grass and the chalk-rolled lines from anything he’d ever seen or imagined. They had the glow of first-time things.
The way the runner skid-brakes when he makes the turn at first.
The empty seats were Cotter’s first surprise, well before the lights. On his prowl through the stands he kept seeing blank seats, too many to be explained by people buying a beer or taking a leak, and he found a spot between a couple of guys in suits and it’s all he can do to accept his good luck, the ease of an actual seat, without worrying why there’s so many.
The man to his left says, How about some peanuts hey?
Peanut vendor’s coming through again, a coin-catching wiz about eighteen, black and rangy. People know him from games past and innings gone and they quicken up and dig for change. They’re calling out for peanuts, hey, here, bag, and tossing coins with thumb flicks and discus arcs and the vendor’s hands seem to inhale the flying metal. He is magnet-skinned, circus-catching dimes on the wing and then sailing peanut bags into people’s chests. It’s a thrill-a-minute show but Cotter feels an obscure danger here. The guy is making him visible, shaming him in his prowler’s den. Isn’t it strange how their common color jumps the space between them? Nobody saw Cotter until the vendor appeared, black rays phasing from his hands. One popular Negro and crowd pleaser. One shifty kid trying not to be noticed.
The man says, What do you say?
Cotter raises a hand no.
Care for a bag? Come on.
Cotter leans away, the hand going to his midsection to mean he’s already eaten or peanuts give him cramps or his mother told him not to fill up on trashy food that will ruin his dinner.
The man says, Who’s your team then?
Giants.
What a year hey?
This weather, I don’t know, it’s bad to be trailing.
The man looks at the sky. He’s about forty, close-shaved and Bryl-creemed but with a casual quality, a free-and-easy manner that Cotter links to small-town life in the movies.
Only down a run. They’ll come back. The kind of year it’s been, it can’t end with a little weather. How about a soda?
Men passing in and out of the toilets, men zipping their flies as they turn from the trough and other men approaching the long receptacle, thinking where they want to stand and next to whom and not next to whom, and the old ballpark’s reek and mold are consolidated here, generational tides of beer and shit and cigarettes and peanut shells and disinfectants and pisses in the untold millions, and they are thinking in the ordinary way that helps a person glide through a life, thinking thoughts unconnected to events, the dusty hum of who you are, men shouldering through the traffic in the men’s room as the game goes on, the coming and going, the lifting out of dicks and the meditative pissing.
Man to his left shifts in the seat and speaks to Cotter from off his shoulder, using a crafty whisper. What about school? Having a private holiday?
Letting a grin slide across his face.
Cotter says, Same as you,
and gets a gunshot laugh.
I’d a broken out of prison to see this game. Matter of fact they’re broadcasting to prisoners. They put radios in cell blocks in the city jails.
I was here early,
Cotter says. I could have gone to school in the morning and then cut out. But I wanted to see everything.
A real fan. Music to my ears.
See the people showing up. The players going in the players’ entrance.
My name’s Bill Waterson by the way. And I’d a gladly gone AWOL from the office but I didn’t actually have to. Got my own little business. Construction firm.
Cotter tries to think of something to say.
We’re the people that build the houses that are fun to live in.
Peanut vendor’s on his way up the aisle and headed over to the next section when he spots Cotter and drops a knowing smile. The kid thinks here comes trouble. This gatemouth is out to expose him in some withering way. Their glances briefly meet as the vendor moves up the stairs. In full stride and double-quick he dips his hand for a bag of peanuts and zings it nonchalant to Cotter, who makes the grab in a one-hand blur that matches the hazy outline of the toss. And it is one sweetheart of a moment, making Cotter crack the smile of the week and sending a wave of goodwill through the area.
Guess you got one after all,
says Bill Waterson.
Cotter unrolls the pleated top of the brown bag and extends it to Bill. They sit there shelling the peanuts and rubbing off the tissuey brown skin with a rolling motion of thumb and index finger and eating the oily salty flesh and dropping the husks on the ground without ever taking their eyes off the game.
Bill says, Next time you hear someone say they’re in seventh heaven, think of this.
All we need is some runs.
He pushes the bag at Bill once more.
They’ll score. It’s coming. Don’t worry. We’ll make you happy you skipped school.
Look at Robinson at the edge of the outfield grass watching the hitter step in and thinking idly, Another one of Leo’s country-boy krauts.
Now there’s a law of manly conduct,
Bill says. And it states that since you’re sharing your peanuts with me, I’m duty-bound to buy us both some soda pop.
That sounds fair enough.
Good. It’s settled then.
Turning in his seat and flinging up an arm. A couple of sportsmen taking their ease.
Stanky the pug sitting in the dugout.
Mays trying to get a jingle out of his head, his bluesy face slightly puffed, some catchy tune he’s been hearing on the radio lately.
The batboy comes down the steps a little daydreamy, sliding Dark’s black bat into the rack.
The game turns inward in the middle innings. They fall into waiting, into some unshaped anxiety that stiffens the shoulder muscles and sends them to the watercooler to drink and spit.
Across the field Branca is up in the Dodger bullpen, a large man with pointy elfin ears, tight-armed and throwing easily, just getting loose.
Mays thinking helplessly, Push-pull click-click, change blades that quick.
In the stands Special Agent Rafferty is walking down the stairs to the box-seat area behind the home team dugout. He is a thickset man with a mass of reddish hair—a shock of red hair, people like to say—and he is moving with the straight-ahead look of someone who doesn’t want to be distracted. He is moving briskly but not urgently, headed toward the box occupied by the Director.
Gleason has two sudsy cups planted at his feet and there’s a hot dog he has forgotten about that’s bulging out at each end of his squeezed fist. He is talking to six people at once and they are laughing and asking questions, season box holders, old-line fans with their spindly wives. They see he is half swacked and they admire the clarity of his wit, the fine edge of insult and derision. They want to be offended and Jackie’s happy to do it, bypassing his own boozy state to do a detailed imitation of a drunk. He goes heavy-lidded and growly, making sport of one man’s ragmop toupee, ridiculing a second for the elbow patches on his tweed jacket. The women enjoy it enormously and they want more. They watch Gleason, they look at Sinatra for his reaction to Gleason, they watch the game, they listen to Jackie do running lines from his TV show, they watch the mustard slide down his thumb and feel too shy to tell him.
When Rafferty reaches Mr. Hoover’s aisle seat he does not stand over the Director and lean down to address him. He makes it a point to crouch in the aisle. His hand is set casually near his mouth so that no one else can make out what he is saying. Hoover listens for a moment. He says something to his companions. Then he and Rafferty walk up the stairs and find an isolated spot midway down a long ramp, where the special agent recites the details of his message.
It seems the Soviet Union has conducted an atomic test at a secret location somewhere inside its own borders. They have exploded a bomb in plain unpretending language. And our detection devices indicate this is clearly what it is—it is a bomb, a weapon, it is an instrument of conflict, it produces heat and blast and shock. It is not some peaceful use of atomic energy with home-heating applications. It is a red bomb that spouts a great white cloud like some thunder god of ancient Eurasia.
Edgar fixes today’s date in his mind. October 3, 1951. He registers the date. He stamps the date.
He knows this is not completely unexpected. It is their second atomic explosion. But the news is hard, it works into him, makes him think of the spies who passed the secrets, the prospect of warheads being sent to communist forces in Korea. He feels them moving ever closer, catching up, overtaking. It works into him, changes him physically as he stands there, drawing the skin tighter across his face, sealing his gaze.
Rafferty is standing on the part of the ramp that is downhill from Mr. Hoover.
Yes, Edgar fixes the date. He thinks of Pearl Harbor, just under ten years ago, he was in New York that day as well, and the news seemed to shimmer in the air, everything in photoflash, plain objects hot and charged.
The crowd noise breaks above them, a chambered voice rolling through the hollows in the underbody of the stadium.
Now this, he thinks. The sun’s own heat that swallows cities.
Gleason isn’t even supposed to be here. There’s a rehearsal going on right now at a midtown studio and that’s where he’s supposed to be, preparing a skit called The Honeymooners,
to be shown for the first time in exactly two days. This is material that’s close to Jackie’s heart, involving a bus driver named Ralph Kramden who lives with his wife Alice in a shabby Brooklyn flat. Gleason sees nothing strange about missing a rehearsal to entertain fans in the stands. But it’s making Sinatra uneasy, all these people lapping at their seat backs. He is used to ritual distances. He wants to encounter people in circumstances laid out beforehand. Frank doesn’t have his dago secret service with him today. And even with Jackie on one flank and Toots on the other—a couple of porkos who function as natural barriers—people keep pressing in, showing a sense of mission. He sees them decide one by one that they must speak to him. The rigid grins floating near. And the way they use him as a reference for everything that happens. Somebody makes a nice play, they look at Frank to see how he reacts. The beer vendor trips on a step, they look at Frank to see if he has noticed.
He leans over and says, Jack, it’s a great boot being here but you think you can put a towel over your face so these people can go back to watching the game?
People want Gleason to do familiar lines of dialogue from the show. They’re calling out the lines they want him to do.
Then Frank says, Where the hell is Hoover by the way? We need him to keep these women off our beautiful bodies.
The catcher works up out of his squat, dirt impacted in the creases that run across the back of his ruddled neck. He lifts his mask so he can spit. He is padded and bumpered, lips rough and scored and sun-flaked. This is the freest thing he does, spitting in public. His saliva bunches and wobbles when it hits the dirt, going sandy brown.
Russ Hodges is over on the TV side for the middle innings, talking less, guided by the action on the monitor. Between innings the statistician offers him part of a chicken sandwich he has brought along for lunch.
He says to Russ, What’s the wistful look today?
I didn’t know I had a look. Any look. I don’t feel capable of a look. Maybe hollow-eyed.
Pensive,
says the statman.
And it’s true and he knows it, Russ is wistful and drifting and this is so damn odd, the mood he’s been in all day, a tilting back, an old creaky easing back, as of a gray-haired man in a rocker.
This is chicken with what?
I’m guessing mayonnaise.
It’s funny, you know,
Russ says, but I think it was Charlotte put the look in my face.
The lady or the city?
Definitely the city. I spent years in a studio doing re-creations of big league games. The telegraph bug clacking in the background and blabbermouth Hodges inventing ninety-nine percent of the action. And I’ll tell you something scout’s honor. I know this sounds farfetched but I used to sit there and dream of doing real baseball from a booth in the Polo Grounds in New York.
Real baseball.
The thing that happens in the sun.
Somebody hands you a piece of paper filled with letters and numbers and you have to make a ball game out of it. You create the weather, flesh out the players, you make them sweat and grouse and hitch up their pants, and it is remarkable, thinks Russ, how much earthly disturbance, how much summer and dust the mind can manage to order up from a single Latin letter lying flat.
That’s not a bush curve Maglie’s throwing,
he says into the mike.
When he was doing ghost games he liked to take the action into the stands, inventing a kid chasing a foul ball, a carrot-topped boy with a cowlick (shameless, ain’t I) who retrieves the ball and holds it aloft, this five-ounce sphere of cork, rubber, yarn, horsehide and spiral stitching, a souvenir baseball, a priceless thing somehow, a thing that seems to recapitulate the whole history of the game every time it is thrown or hit or touched.
He puts the last bite of sandwich in his mouth and licks his thumb and remembers where he is, far from the windowless room with the telegraph operator and the Morse-coded messages.
Over on the radio side the producer’s saying, See that thing in the paper last week about Einstein?
Engineer says, What Einstein?
Albert, with the hair. Some reporter asked him to figure out the mathematics of the pennant race. You know, one team wins so many of their remaining games, the other teams wins this number or that number. What are the myriad possibilities? Who’s got the edge?
The hell does he know?
Apparently not much. He picked the Dodgers to eliminate the Giants last Friday.
The engineer talks through the blanket to his counterpart from KMOX. The novelty of the blanket has these men talking to each other in prison slang. When they switch to black dialect the producer gets them to stop but after a while they’re at it again, doing a couple of reefer Negroes in the fumy murmurs of some cellar room. Not loud enough to be picked up on mike of course. An ambient noise like random dugout buzz—a patter, a texture, an extension of the game.
Down in the field boxes they want Gleason to say, You’re a dan-dan-dandy crowd.
Russ makes his way back to the radio side after the Giants go down in their half of the sixth still trailing by a run. He’s glad he doesn’t have a thermometer because he might be tempted to use it and that would be demoralizing. It’s a mild day, glory be, and the rain’s holding off.
Producer says, Going to the wire, Russ.
I hope I don’t close down. My larynx feels like it’s in a vise.
This is radio, buddy. Can’t close down. Think of what’s out there. They are hugging their little portables.
You’re not making me feel any better.
They are goddamn crouched over the wireless. You’re like Murrow from London.
Thank you, Al.
Save the voice.
I am trying mightily.
This game is everywhere. Dow Jones tickers are rapping out the score with the stock averages. Every bar in town, I guarantee. They’re smuggling radios into boardrooms. At Schrafft’s I hear they’re breaking into the Muzak to give the score.
All those nice ladies with their matched sweater sets and genteel sandwiches.
Save the voice,
Al says.
Do they have tea with honey on the menu?
They’re eating and drinking baseball. The track announcer at Belmont’s doing updates between races. They got it in taxicabs and barbershops and doctors’ offices.
They’re all waiting on the pitcher, he’s a faceful of boding, upper body drawn forward, glove hand dangled at the knee. He’s reading and reading the sign. He’s reading the sign. Hitter fidgeting in the box. This son of a buck can bring it.
The shortstop moves his feet to break the trance of waiting.
It’s the rule of confrontation, faithfully maintained, written across the face of every slackwit pitcher since there were teams named the Superbas and the Bridegrooms. The difference comes when the ball is hit. Then nothing is the same. The men are moving, coming out of their crouches, and everything submits to the pebble-skip of the ball, to rotations and backspins and airstreams. There are drag coefficients. There are trailing vortices. There are things that apply unrepeatably, muscle memory and pumping blood and jots of dust, the narrative that lives in the spaces of the official play-by-play.
And the crowd is also in this lost space, the crowd made over in that one-thousandth of a second when the bat and the baseball are in contact. A rustle of murmurs and curses, people breathing soft moans, their faces changing as the play unrolls across the grassy scan. John Edgar Hoover stands among them. He is watching from the wide aisle at the head of the ramp. He has told Rafferty he will remain at the game. No purpose served by his leaving. The White House will make the announcement in less than an hour. Edgar hates Harry Truman, he would like to see him writhing on a parquet floor, felled by chest pains, but he can hardly fault the President’s timing. By announcing first, we prevent the Soviets from putting their own sweet spin on the event. And we ease public anxiety to some degree. People will understand that we’ve maintained control of the news if not of the bomb. This is no small subject of concern. Edgar looks at the faces around him, open and hopeful. He wants to feel a compatriot’s nearness and affinity. All these people formed by language and climate and popular songs and breakfast foods and the jokes they tell and the cars they drive have never had anything in common so much as this, that they are sitting in the furrow of destruction. He tries to feel a belonging, an opening of his old stop-cocked soul. But there is some bitter condition he has never been able to name and when he encounters a threat from outside, from the moral wane that is everywhere in effect, he finds it is a balance to this state, a restoring force. His ulcer kicks up of course. But there is that side of him, that part of him that depends on the strength of the enemy.
Look at the man in the bleachers who’s pacing the aisles, a neighborhood crazy, he waves his arms and mumbles, short, chunky, bushy-haired—could be one of the Ritz Brothers or a lost member of the Three Stooges, the Fourth Stooge, called Flippo or Dummy or Shaky or Jakey, and he’s distracting the people nearby, they’re yelling at him to siddown, goway, meshuggener, and he paces and worries, he shakes his head and moans as if he knows something’s coming, or came, or went—he’s receptive to things that escape the shrewdest fan.
It is a stone-faced Director who returns to his seat for the seventh-inning stretch. He says nothing of course. Gleason is shouting down a vendor, trying to order beers. People on their feet, shaking off the tension and fret. A man slowly wiping his glasses. A staring man. A man flexing the stiffness out of his limbs.
Get me a brandy and soda,
Toots says.
Jackie tells him, Don’t be a clamhead all your life.
Treat the man nice,
Frank says. "He’s come a long way for a Jew who drinks. He’s best buddies with world leaders you never even heard of. They all roll into his joint sooner or later and knock back a brandy with Toots. Except maybe Mahatma Gandhi. And him they shot."
Gleason flares his brows and goggles his eyes and shoots out his arms in a nitwit gesture of revelation.
That’s the name I couldn’t think of. The midget that pinch-hits.
People around them, hearing part of this and reacting mainly to inflection and gesture—they’ve seen Jackie physically building the remark and they knock together laughing even before he has finished the line.
Edgar is also laughing despite the return of the midget business. He admires the rough assurance of these men. It seems to flush from their pores. They have a size to them, a natural stamina that mocks his own bible-school indoctrination even as it draws him to the noise. He’s a self-perfected American who must respect the saga of the knockabout boy emerging from a tenement culture, from backstreets slant with danger. It makes for gusty egos, it makes for appetites. The pussy bandits Jackie and Frank have a showy sort of ease around women. And it’s true about Toots, he knows everybody worth knowing and can drink even Gleason into the carpeting. And when he clamps a sympathetic paw on your shoulder you feel he is some provident force come to guide you out of old despond.
Frank says, This is our inning.
And Toots says, Better be. Because these shit-heel Dodgers are making me nervous.
Jackie is passing beers along the row.
Frank says, Seems to me we’ve all made our true loyalties known. Shown our hearts’ desire. We got a couple of old-timey Giant fans. And this porpoise with a haircut from Brooklyn. But what about our friend the G-man. Is it G for Giants? Fess up, Jedgar. Who’s your team?
J. Edgar. Frank calls him Jedgar sometimes and the Director likes the name although he never lets on—it is medieval and princely and wily-dark.
A faint smile creeps across Hoover’s face.
I don’t have a rooting interest. Whoever wins,
he says softly. That’s my team.
He is thinking of something else entirely. The way our allies one by one will receive the news of the Soviet bomb. The thought is grimly cheering. Over the years he has found it necessary to form joint ventures with the intelligence heads of a number of countries and he wants them all to die a little.
Look at the four of them. Each with a hanky neatly tucked in his breast pocket. Each holding his beer away from his body, leaning forward to tease the high scud from the rim of the cup. Gleason with a flower in his lapel, a damp aster snatched from a vase at Toots’ place. People are still after him to do lines from the show.
They want him to say, Harty har-har.
The plate umpire stands mask in hand, nearly blimpish in his outfitting. He is keeping the numbers, counting the pitcher’s warm-up tosses. This is the small dogged conscience of the game. Even in repose he shows a history thick with embranglement, dust-stomping men turning figures in the steep sun. You can see it in his face, chin thrust out, a glower working under his brow. When the number reaches eight he aims a spurt from his chaw and prepares to take his whisk-broom to the rubber slab.
In the stands Bill Waterson takes off his jacket and dangles it lengthwise by the collar. It is rippled and mauled and seems to strike him as a living body he might want to lecture sternly. After a pause he folds it over twice and drops it on his seat. Cotter is sitting again, surrounded by mostly vertical people. Bill looms above him, a sizable guy, a one-time athlete by the look of him, getting thick in the middle, his shirt wet under the arms. Lucky seventh. Cotter needs a measly run to keep him from despairing—the cheapest eked-out unearned run ever pushed across. Or he’s ready to give up. You know that thing that happens when you give up before the end and then your team comes back to perform acts of valor and you feel a queasy shame stealing over you like pond slick.
Bill says down to him, I take my seventh-inning stretch seriously. I not only stand. I damn well make it a point to stretch.
I’ve been noticing,
says Cotter.
Because it’s a custom that’s been handed down. It’s part of something. It’s our own little traditional thing. You stand, you stretch—it’s a privilege in a way.
Bill has some fun doing various stylized stretches, the bodybuilder, the pet cat, and he tries to get Cotter to do a drowsy kid in a classroom.
Did you ever tell me your name?
Cotter.
That’s the thing about baseball, Cotter. You do what they did before you. That’s the connection you make. There’s a whole long line. A man takes his kid to a game and thirty years later this is what they talk about when the poor old mutt’s wasting away in the hospital.
Bill scoops his jacket off the seat and puts it on his lap when he sits down. Seconds later he is standing again, he and Cotter watching Pafko chase down a double. A soft roar goes up, bushy and dense, and the fans send more paper sailing to the base of the wall. Old shopping lists and ticket stubs and wads of fisted newsprint come falling around Pafko in the faded afternoon. Farther out in left field they are dropping paper on the Dodger bullpen, on the working figure of Labine and the working figure of Branca and the two men who are catching them and the men sitting under the canted roof that juts from the wall, the gum-chewing men with nothing to say.
Branca wears the number thirteen blazoned on his back.
Told you,
Bill says. What did I tell you? I told you. We’re coming back.
We still have to score the run,
Cotter says.
They take their seats and watch the hitter steer a look right up the line at Durocher dummying through the signs from the coach’s box at third. Then Bill is on his feet again, rolling up his sleeves and shouting encouragement to the players, common words of spark and heart.
Cotter likes this man’s singleness of purpose, his insistence on faith and trust. It’s the only force available against the power of doubt. He figures he’s in the middle of getting himself befriended. It’s a feeling that comes from Bill’s easy voice and his sociable sweaty gymnasium bulk and the way he listens when Cotter speaks and the way he can make Cotter believe this is a long and close association they share—boon companions goes the saying. He feels a little strange, it’s an unfamiliar thing, talking to Bill, but there’s a sense of something protective and enclosing that will help him absorb the loss if it should come to that.
Lockman squares around to bunt.
There’s a man in the upper deck leafing through a copy of the current issue of Life. There’s a man on 12th Street in Brooklyn who has attached a tape machine to his radio so he can record the voice of Russ Hodges broadcasting the game. The man doesn’t know why he’s doing this. It is just an impulse, a fancy, it is like hearing the game twice, it is like being young and being old, and this will turn out to be the only known recording of Russ’ famous account of the final moments of the game. The game and its extensions. The woman cooking cabbage. The man who wishes he could be done with drink. They are the game’s remoter soul. Connected by the pulsing voice on the radio, joined to the word-of-mouth that passes the score along the street and to the fans who call the special phone number and the crowd at the ballpark that becomes the picture on television, people the size of minute rice, and the game as rumor and conjecture and inner history. There’s a sixteen-year-old in the Bronx who takes his radio up to the roof of his building so he can listen alone, a Dodger fan slouched in the gloaming, and he hears the account of the misplayed bunt and the fly ball that scores the tying run and he looks out over the rooftops, the tar beaches with their clotheslines and pigeon coops and splatted condoms, and he gets the cold creeps. The game doesn’t change the way you sleep or wash your face or chew your food. It changes nothing but your life.
The producer says, At last, at least, a run.
Russ is frazzled, brother, he is raw and rumpled and uncombed. When the teams go to the top of the eighth he reports that they have played one hundred and fifty-four regular season games and two playoff games and seven full innings of the third play-off game and here they are tied in a knot, absolutely deadlocked, they are stalemated, folks, so light up a Chesterfield and stay right here.
The next half inning seems to take a week. Cotter sees the Dodgers put men on first and third. He watches Maglie bounce a curve in the dirt. He sees Cox bang a shot past third. A hollow clamor begins to rise from the crowd, men calling from the deep reaches, an animal awe and desolation.
In the booth Russ sees the crowd begin to lose its coherence, people sitting scattered on the hard steps, a priest with a passel of boys filing up the aisle, paper rolling and skittering in the wind. He hears the announcer from St. Louis on the other side of the blanket, it is Harry Caray and he sounds like his usual chipper self and Russ thinks of the Japanese term for ritual disembowelment and figures he and Harry ought to switch names about now.
Light washing from the sky, Dodgers scoring runs, a man dancing down the aisle, a goateed black in a Bing Crosby shirt. Everything is changing shape, becoming something else.
Cotter can barely get out the words.
What good does it do to tie the score if you’re going to turn around and let them walk all over you?
Bill says, They’re going into that dugout and I guarantee you they’re not giving up. There’s no quit in this team. Don’t pull a long face on me, Cotter. We’re buddies in bad times—gotta stick together.
Cotter feels a mood coming on, a complicated self-pity, the strength going out of his arms and a voice commencing in his head that reproaches him for caring. And the awful part is that he wallows in it. He knows how to find the twisty compensation in this business of losing, being a loser, drawing it out, expanding it, making it sickly sweet, being someone carefully chosen for the role.
The score is 4–1.
It should have rained in the third or fourth inning. Great rain drenching down. It should have thundered and lightning’d.
Bill says, I’m still a believer. What about you?
The pitcher takes off his cap and rubs his forearm across his hairline. Big Newk. Then he blows in the cap. Then he shakes the cap and puts it back on.
Shor looks at Gleason.
Still making with the mouth. Leave the people alone already. They came here to see a game.
What game? It’s a lambasting. We ought to go home.
We’re not going home,
Toots says.
Jackie says, We can beat the crowd, clamhead.
Frank says, Let’s take a vote.
Toots says, You’re tubercular in the face. Sit back and watch the game. Because nobody goes until I go and I ain’t going.
Jackie waves down a vendor and orders beer all around. Nothing happens in the home half of the eighth. People are moving toward the exit ramps. It is Erskine and Branca in the bullpen now with the odd paper shaving dropped from the upper deck. Dodgers go down in the top of the ninth and this is when you sense a helpless scattering, it is tastable in the air, audible in the lone-wolf calls from high in the stands. Nothing you’ve put into this is recoverable and you don’t know whether you want to leave at once or stay forever, living under a blanket in the wind.
Engineer says, Nice season, boys. Let’s do it again sometime.
The closeness in the booth, all this crammed maleness is making Russ a little edgy. He lights another cigarette and for the first time all day he does not reproach himself for it. He hears the solitary wailing, he hears his statistician reciting numbers in fake French. It is all part of the same thing, the feeling of some collapsible fact that’s folded up and put away, and the school gloom that traces back for decades—the last laden day of summer vacation when the range of play tapers to a screwturn. This is the day he has never shaken off, the final Sunday before the first Monday of school. It carried some queer deep shadow out to the western edge of the afternoon.
He wants to go home and watch his daughter ride her bike down a leafy street.
Dark reaches for a pitch and hits a seeing-eye bouncer that ticks off the end of the first baseman’s glove.
A head pops up over the blanket, it’s the engineer from KMOX and he starts telling a joke about the fastest lover in Mexico—een May-heeko. An amazing chap named Speedy Gonzalez.
Russ is thinking base hit all the way but glances routinely at the clubhouse sign in straightaway center to see if the first E in CHESTERFIELD lights up, indicating error.
Robinson retrieves the ball in short right.
So this guy’s on his honeymoon in Acapulco and he’s heard all the stories about the incredible cunning of Speedy Gonzalez and he’s frankly worried, he’s a highly nervous type and so on the first night, the night of nights, he’s in bed with his wife and he’s got his middle finger plugged up her snatch to keep Speedy Gonzalez from sneaking in there when he’s not looking.
Mueller stands in, taking the first pitch low.
In the Dodger dugout a coach picks up the phone and calls the bullpen for the eighteenth time to find out who’s throwing good and who ain’t.
Mueller sees a fastball belt-high and pokes a single to right.
So then he’s dying for a smoke and he reaches over for a second to get his cigarettes and matches.
Russ describes Dark going into third standing up. He sees Thomson standing in the dugout with his arms raised and his hands held backwards gripping the edge of the roof. He describes people standing in the aisles and others moving down toward the field.
Irvin dropping the weighted bat.
So then he lights up quick and reaches back to the bed finger-first.
Maglie’s already in the clubhouse sitting in his skivvies in that postgame state of disrepair and pit stink that might pass for some shambles of the inner man, slugging beer from the bottle.
Irvin stands in.
Russ describes Newcombe taking a deep breath and stretching his arms over his head. He describes Newcombe looking in for the sign.
And Speedy Gonzalez says, Sen-yor-or, you got your finger up my a-ass.
Russ hears most of this and wishes he hadn’t. He does a small joke of his own, half standing to drape the mike with his suit coat as if to keep the smallest syllable of raunchy talk from reaching his audience. Decent people out there.
Fastball high and away.
The crowd noise is uncertain. They don’t know if this is a rally in the works or just another drag-tail finish that draws out the pain. It’s a high rackety noise that makes Russ think of restive waiting in a train station.
Irvin tries to pull it, overeager, and Russ hears the soul of the crowd repeat the sorry arc of the baseball, a moaned vowel falling softly to earth. First baseman puts it away.
Decent people out there. Russ wants to believe they are still assembled in some recognizable manner, the kindred unit at the radio, old lines and ties and propinquities.
Lockman stands in, the towhead from Caroline.
How his family used to gather around the gramophone and listen to grand opera, the trilled r’s of old Europe. These thoughts fade and return. They are not distractions. He is alert to every movement on the field.
A couple of swabbies move down to the rail near third base.
How the records were blank on one side and so brittle they would crack if you looked at them cross-eyed. That was the going joke.
He is hunched over the mike. The field seems to open outward into nouns and verbs. All he has to do is talk.
Saying, Carl Erskine and fireballer Ralph Branca still throwing in the bullpen.
Pitch.
Lockman fouls it back into the netting.
Now the rhythmic applause starts, tentative at first, then spreading densely through the stands. This is how the crowd enters the game. The repeated three-beat has the force of some abject faith, a desperate kind of will toward magic and accident.
Lockman stands in once more, wagging the yellow bat.
How his mother used to make him gargle with warm water and salt when he complained of a sore throat.
Lockman hits the second pitch on a low line over third. Russ hears Harry Caray shouting into the mike on the other side of the blanket. Then they are both shouting and the ball is slicing toward the line and landing fair and sending up a spew of dirt and forcing Pafko into the corner once again.
Men running, the sprint from first to third, the man who scores coming in backwards so he can check the action on the base paths. All the Giants
