King of the Mound: My Summer With Satchel Paige (10 page)

Mr. Churchill was standing by the door of the office when Nick arrived, a big smile on his face as he looked at a line of people that had already formed in front of the ticket booth.

“Standing room only today,” he said as he gleefully rubbed his hands together. “I can feel it.” He glanced at Nick. “You think you can match what you did with the programs last time?”

“I’ll try,” Nick said.

Nick got the programs from the office and then returned to his previous position near home plate. By the time the team finished batting practice, the stands were already full and he’d sold most of his thick stack. Nick had occasionally glanced at the bull pen next to the home bench, where Satch was warming up, and he’d noticed that Satch seemed more serious than usual today—he wasn’t joking with the other players or focusing on anything other than Quincy Trouppe’s mitt.

As Satch walked out to the mound at the top of the first inning, a buzz ran through the ballpark. Nick squatted next to the railing, as close to the field as he could get, the programs once again forgotten by his side as the leadoff batter settled into a crouch. The first strike was a blur of a fastball
on the outside corner. The second strike was a curveball that broke so sharply that the batter ducked out of the way before the ball nicked the inside corner of the plate. And the third strike was another outside fastball, which the overmatched batter swung through before turning around and trudging back toward the dugout.

And that was how the first three innings went. Satch wasn’t showboating or joking or messing around—he was throwing pure gas so accurately that Quincy never had to move his mitt more than an inch or two. Nick watched the show, totally mesmerized. There was an art and a rhythm to the way Satch pitched: The ball moved up and down, inside and outside, and just when a batter seemed to think he’d figured out the pattern and guessed a pitch, Satch would adapt. The first eight men struck out on just thirty pitches—with only two foul balls—and as the ninth man walked toward the plate like a condemned prisoner, the crowd rose to its feet.

“Come on, Satch!” Nick heard himself yelling. “One more!”

Satch started off with another fastball on the outside corner. The batter swung, almost apologetically, but somehow the bat managed to find leather and with a sickly
crack
the ball sliced toward right field. Nick and everyone else gasped as they tracked its flight, trying to figure out if it would be fair or foul. And then it landed, right next to the line, and the umpire’s voice rang around the park: “Foul ball!”

The batter couldn’t have touched the next two pitches if he’d been swinging a barn door, and as the third strike slapped into Quincy’s glove, the crowd roared. Satch was
already walking off the field, and he tipped his cap as he took his seat on the bench.

“Unbelievable,” a man sitting next to Nick yelled. “I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t seen it with my own two eyes!”

The next innings felt like a carnival, and Nick sold his last program in the bottom of the eighth with Bismarck leading 12–0. He was terrified of losing the money he had collected before the end of the game, so he went back to the little office, where he found Mr. Churchill sitting at his desk, a cigar sticking out of the side of his mouth.

“Aren’t you supposed to be managing?” Nick asked.

Mr. Churchill smiled. “I’d say they seem to be managing just fine without me.” He cocked his head to the side. “Listen to that. You hear it?”

Nick listened for a long moment. “The crowd?”

“That’s the sound of satisfied customers. We offered them a deal today that they couldn’t lose. . . . Either they got to see baseball for free or they got to see something great. And Satch sure gave them something great. Now these people are going to go home and tell all their friends about what happened here today, and we’ll be sold out for the rest of the season. That’s an absolute guarantee. Because nobody wants to miss the chance to see something special.”

Nick just nodded. After a short pause he reached into his pocket, pulled out all of the dimes and nickels he had gotten from selling the programs, and put them in a big pile on the desk. His pants felt ten pounds lighter when he was done. Mr. Churchill looked at the pile and smiled.

“You keep this up and you’re going to have to come to my lot and start selling cars,” he said. He picked out one of the nickels
and slid it across the desk. “Go buy yourself a pop. My treat.”

“Thank you,” Nick said as he returned the nickel to his pocket.

Mr. Churchill flicked his head at the door. “You better go fast or you’ll miss the end of the game.”

Nick bought a Coke from the booth beneath the bleachers and then went up into the stands. A good portion of the crowd had left after Satch had come out of the game in the seventh inning, leaving lots of empty seats, and he chose a spot near third base. The Coke was so cold that it had little flecks of ice stuck to the glass bottle, and Nick relished the fizz on his tongue and the quick rush of sweetness. The last time he’d had a soda was at Christmas, when the hospital gave them out as a special treat.

Barney Morris pitched the top of the ninth. He had a good fastball—although obviously not as good as Satch’s—and he would mix in a knuckleball to keep the hitters confused. Nick loved the unpredictability of the knuckleball and had tried to throw it back when he was pitching, but his hands hadn’t been big enough yet for the grip. He glanced down at his fingers, wondering if that was still true, and missed the final pitch—another swinging strikeout, the seventeenth of the game for the opposing team’s overmatched batters.

As the crowd flooded toward the exits, Nick allowed himself to be carried by the tide. He dropped the empty Coke bottle into a crate near the gate and then stood motionless for a moment, wondering if he should go back to Mr. Churchill’s office for another assignment. Just then someone bumped into
him from behind, and Nick stumbled forward. He tried to catch himself, but his bad leg buckled and he rolled into the dirt.

“Sorry,” a voice said.

Nick pushed himself to his feet before looking to see who had knocked into him. And then he froze—it was Tom and Nate, his old friends from school. They were staring at him, their mouths hanging open.

“Hey,” Nick said. His voice sounded high in his ear.

“Hey,” Tom said as Nate continued to stare. “We thought you were still at the hospital.”

“I got out yesterday,” Nick said. He didn’t mean to lie, but he also didn’t want to admit that he had been in Bismarck for almost a week.

“Are you . . . better?” Tom asked.

Nick hesitated. “Yeah.”

“My mom said you almost died,” Nate said, the words coming in a rush. “She said the doctor told her that you had the highest fever he’d ever seen.”

“I don’t know,” Nick said. “I don’t remember much about being sick.”

In the awkward pause that followed, Nick decided that he had been right about not wanting to see his old friends—it was just too weird. Life in Bismarck had kept moving along, and now he was just a stranger whose name they happened to know. Nick was about to say good-bye when a familiar face emerged from the gate of the stadium: Emma. She smiled when she noticed him and walked over to their little group.

“That was amazing,” she said. “I don’t think Babe Ruth could have hit Satch today.”

Tom and Nate turned their wide-eyed stares to her as if she were some strange alien that had swooped down from the sky—they probably weren’t used to hearing a girl talk about baseball.

“Yeah,” Nick said after an awkward moment. “He was great.”

Emma’s hand touched his arm. “My mom wants to know if you and your dad want to come over for dinner sometime.”

“Maybe,” Nick said. “I’ll have to ask him.”

“Okay.” There was another awkward pause. “Well, I’ll see you back home.”

Emma turned and headed back down the lane toward the house. Tom and Nate watched her walk until she was out of earshot, and then both of their heads whipped toward Nick.

“Why were you talking to her?” Nate asked.

“She’s my new neighbor,” Nick said.

Tom raised an eyebrow. “You never used to talk to girls.”

“She’s nice. And she likes baseball.”

“Is she your girlfriend or something?”

“No!” Nick said. “She’s just my neighbor.”

Nate elbowed Tom, a grin on his face. “Maybe that’s really why he went to the hospital. He caught cooties from a girl.”

“Well, that part’s true,” Nick said. “It was the worst case of the cooties they’d ever seen. They had to give me shots and everything.”

Tom and Nate both laughed, and Nick felt a sudden rush of relief. Maybe everything wasn’t so different after all.

“So when are you going to start pitching again?” Tom asked.

Nick felt the smile disappear from his face. “I don’t know. I figured I’d have to wait until next season.”

“No way,” Nate said. “Remember when Alex broke his leg? He got to join a team in the middle of the summer.”

“I forgot about that.”

“We need a good pitcher,” Tom said. “So . . .”

“Sure,” Nick said. “I’ll think about it.” But that was another lie—no matter what Satch had told him, Nick knew he couldn’t pitch, not if his bad leg couldn’t even hold him up when a kid bumped into him from behind.

Nick wasn’t sure whether Mr. Churchill had meant what he said about letting him travel with the team, but two days later when his father returned from practice, he pulled the duffel out from under his bed and tossed it on the cot.

“Pack,” he said. “We leave tonight.”

Nick tried to keep from glowing as he grabbed some clothes. He had always imagined that barnstorming would be a grand adventure—traveling from town to town to play local teams in front of crowds who rarely saw strangers. He had just finished packing when the sound of a car horn echoed from the street, and his father grabbed the duffel and walked outside. Nick followed, making sure to close the cabin door tightly. A blue Plymouth Sedan and green Chrysler Airflow were parked in front of the house. Mr. Churchill and the white players were stuffed into the Plymouth—it was so full that it looked like a door might pop off—and Satch and the five
other black players were in the Chrysler. Bags were lashed to the roofs of both cars with thick cords.

“Hop on in,” Mr. Churchill shouted. “The road calls!”

Red Haley opened the back door of the Chrysler, and Nick and his father squeezed inside. Satch turned around and grinned from the front seat.

“Next stop Fargo,” he said.

From the moment Nick got in that car seat, his life felt like a blur. The team played nine games in seven days in eight towns. They headed east to Fargo and then south from Watertown to Sioux Falls to Sioux City to Norfolk to Fremont to Grand Island to Hastings. The towns and games quickly blended together, and Nick wouldn’t have remembered any details except that Mr. Churchill told him to record every statistic that he could find.

And so Nick knew that by the time they rolled into McPherson, a town near the center of Kansas, they had traveled 987 miles while compiling an unbeaten record of 9–0. Satch accounted for six of those wins, giving up only four runs—three on a fluke double that Moose Johnson lost in the sun—and striking out forty-five batters. The team’s bats were also hot, and they collectively hit .322 with six home runs and fifty-two runs scored. In fact, they were so impressive that by the end of the game in Sioux City, the home crowd had been cheering for every Satch strikeout or diving play made by Red Haley.

But Nick kept some unofficial statistics too, and by those measures the crowds were getting a little bit nastier with every mile they drove south. People were yelling names from the stands at Satch and the other black players—names Nick had never heard—but
he knew they must be bad because once when he turned around on the bench to look at the person who was shouting, his father had put a firm hand on his shoulder.

“Don’t give that idiot the satisfaction,” he said.

They pulled into McPherson late on a Friday night—the game in Hastings had taken more than three hours because Bismarck put men on base in every inning. Nick was sitting in the back of the Chrysler with most of the black players, and as they pulled up in front of a ramshackle hotel in the center of town, he noticed that a group of men across the street were staring at them.

“Those people don’t look very friendly,” Nick said.

Red Haley glanced over at them and shrugged. “Life on the road, kid,” he said. “You should see how they treat us in Cuba. Satch near got killed one night out in the country.”

Satch glanced up from untying the rope that held down the trunk’s flap. “That’s no joke. Those people were lighting up a bonfire to roast old Satch about the time I slipped out of town.”

“What did you do?” Nick asked.

“It was a language problem,” Red said.

Satch laughed. “Yeah. See, they speak Spanish down there, and I don’t know more than ten words. But I always like to play along when people talk to me. So one night we lost, and after the game a guy came up and was talking in Spanish, fast as a typewriter. I figured he was telling me how well I pitched, so I just kept nodding my head.”