The Southpaw (42 page)

Friday night we went to an open-air concert. Actually it was my idea, for Holly is not 1 of them girls you can simply lug off to the nearest movie, and she said she was happy to see that life in the big-time was drilling a little culture in me. I suppose I must of told her that going to concerts was practically a habit, though to tell you the truth I only went once before—1 time with Red and Rosemary. I said I not only went to concerts but read about 14 books a week. I did not tell her they was these quarter murders, for I knowed she would think them trash, which they was. But I begun to understand—along with 1,000,000 other things I was beginning to understand—that time was running out with her and me and that I had best begin to show that I had more in my head then just baseball.

We heard that Boston beat St. Louis on the way back to the hotel, and the cushion was 2 again, and Saturday she sat back behind home plate and seen a wonderful job turned in by a wonderful ballplayer name of Sad Sam Yale, no runs for Chicago on 4 scattered hits, only 1 man reaching second, and we took it 6-0, and the cushion was 21/2, Boston rained out in Boston.

It was your old Sad Sam that day, not Sam of 4 years ago or 6 years ago but a full 10 years back, all speed and wicked curves and the screw to boot, all control, all brains, and the sad, sad face and the limber arm, and he made it look easy, and you would of thought it was easy except that you seen from his face between innings that it was not easy, that it was harder work then most men done of an afternoon, and he spoke never a word all day, for he was breathing hard and needed the wind, and he wrapped it up in the ninth with 2 strikeouts and a weak pop to the box. He took the pop with his bare hand and laid the ball in his glove and folded it over and stuck the works in his pocket and broke for the clubhouse like a fellow in an office might pull down the top of his desk at quitting time and break for the streetcar, a great job by 1 of the greatest that ever pulled on a pair of baseball shoes. Maybe his last great job. I don’t know. We will see what the spring brings.

Afterwards, in the hotel, she asked me 500 questions, why did Sam do this and Red do that, why did Sid do this and George do that, and I told her, explaining the game of baseball backwards and forwards, and she said it was marvelous how 1 head could know so much about so little. That was when the brawl begun. “So little?” said I. “Do you call it little? Ask Red Traphagen if it is all so little that a man with a Harvard education cannot bring the price of a man with a good hopping curve.”

“Is that how you have learned to measure things?” said she. “Do you now measure a man by the size of his pay?”

“I measure people like everybody else measures them,” I said. “This is a rich man’s world, and the richer the better. I will draw down 8,500

this year plus a Series share if we make it, second-place money if we do not. I will hit the club for 15,000 at contract time in the spring. I believe it all adds up to slightly more then I could get pumping gas for Tom Swallow.”

“I am not asking you to pump gas,” said she.

“Then what are you asking?” said I.

“Nothing,” she said. “You are no property of mine and I have no right to ask nothing.”

“Damn right,” I said. “Damn right. I am nobody’s property.”

“You are the property of the New York Mammoths,” she said.

“Like hell I am,” I said. But then I thought about it and realized she was right.

“Are you not, Henry? Are you not a little island in the Moors empire?”

“At 8,500 a summer,” I said. “For 8,500 I can belong to somebody a little. I will hit them for 15,000 next year. Who would not belong to somebody at prices like that?”

“I,” she said.

“So who is asking
you
?” I said.

“You,” she said.

Well, that was true, too, for I had asked her Friday at the concert if she would marry me, and she said we would talk about it. And now we was talking about it. “Okay,” said I. “Go ahead. Go ahead and marry some gas pumper. I am sure they are the salt of the earth.”

“Henry,” said she, “you are a stupid goon. Could you try for 5 minutes to listen to somebody that loves you? Not somebody that cheers for you, and not somebody that simply pays you your salary, but somebody that has lived next door to you off and on for a number of years and does not really care if you are a New York Mammoth or a Perkinsville Scarlet.” She was awful mad and at the same time extremely pretty, though I did not particularly care for her calling me “a stupid goon.” “It is not a matter of me marrying either you or a gas pumper. It is a matter of marrying a man. I do not much care what he does, so long as he is a man. You are 21,” she said, “and under the law you are a man, and your height and weight is that of a man. In the bed you are a man,” and she smiled a little. “But you are losing your manhood faster then hell. Pretty soon in bed will be the
only
place you are a man. But that is not manhood. Dogs and bulls and tomcats do the same. Yes, you are losing your manhood and becoming simply an island in the empire of Moors.”

“Crap,” said I.

“I suspected it,” she said. “And then I knowed for sure a week or so ago. I really did. I seen you on the TV. I seen you throw that spitball at the man from Boston. And your Pop seen it clear up in Perkinsville, and he said only a few words. He said, “I am sorry to see Henry stoop to do a thing like that,” and he cried a few tears right there in the midst of all the people in the Arcade Department Store.

“Is it worth it, Henry? Suppose you killed that man? Where is my Henry Wiggen that I remember could never even swing his fist at a man? Where is my Henry that used to go down in his old Coward Crouch rather then lay a hand on his worst enemy?”

“Things are tight,” I said. “Terrible tight. Every pitch is cash, Holly. Big cash. Not only my cash but the cash of all the boys. It is a brick house for Coker Roguski’s folks and a new start in life for Hams Carroll’s little girl. This is for keeps. This ain’t playground baseball.”

“That reminds me of something,” she said. “I run across it and stuck it in my purse.” She went over and got her purse off the hook and fished around. “It is a statement by Leo Durocher in the “Times.” I suppose you probably know Durocher personally.”

“Just to say “Hello” to,” I said. “He is a great hustler. He was a great ballplayer’s ballplayer in his time.”

“Durocher says the following,” she said.

“What’re we out for, except to win? This is professional, not ama-teur. If I’m losing, I’ll be bleeding in my heart; inside, I’ll be dying.

I’ll congratulate you, but did I like losing? Hell, no. Look, I’m playing third base. My mother’s on second. The ball’s hit out to short center. As she goes by me on the way to third, I’ll accidentally trip her up. I’ll help her up, brush her off, tell her I’m sorry. But she doesn’t get to third. That’s just an exaggeration. But it’s an illustra-tion of what I mean. I want to win all the time. If we’re spitting at a crack in the wall in this office for pennies, I want to beat you at it.

Anybody can finish second.”

I laughed. “That is pretty good,” I said.

“Save it for future consideration,” she said, and she give me the hunk of paper and I stuck it in my pants. “I will quit the club first thing in the morning,” I said, joking.

“No, you will not,” she said. “You will go on playing baseball till your feet trip over your beard. It is a grand game. I love to see it, and I love to hear you talk about it. It is a beautiful game, clean and graceful and honest. But I will be damned if I will sit back and watch you turn into some sort of a low life halfway between a sour creature like Sad Sam Yale and a shark like Dutch Schnell.

“You are a lefthander, Henry. You always was. And the world needs all the lefthanders it can get, for it is a righthanded world. You are a southpaw in a starboarded atmosphere. Do you understand?”

“Sure I understand,” said I. “I am not such a stupid goon as you might think.”

“Exactly,” she said. Then she begun to cry a little, and she fought against it, and when she had control over herself she spoke further. “I hold your hand,” she said, “and your hand is hard, solid like a board.

That is all right, for it must be hard against the need of your job. On a job such as yours your hand grows hard to protect itself. But you have not yet growed calluses on your heart. It is not yet hard against the need of your job. It must never become hard like your hand. It must stay soft.

“In most places of the world hardness is a mark of credit. I do not believe that. I believe the best hand is the soft hand, the best heart is the soft heart, the best man is the soft man. I want my old soft Henry back, Henry the Coward Navigator.” And then she busted out crying all over the place. 

Chapter 34

She seen a beauty on Sunday. I beat Chicago, the first game I won since the tail end of the western trip in St. Louis 17 days before, and Boston took a doubleheader, and the cushion was 2. She went home on Monday, and Knuckles and Hams beat St. Louis on Tuesday and Wednesday, and the winning streak stood at 6, though St. Louis snapped it on getaway day, blasting Sam from the box, and we moved out for Friday and the weekend in Washington, Boston hot but a 21/2 cushion between us.

We had time on our side, and the 21/2 looked big. It looked a good deal fatter then it looked on Labor Day, even fatter then the 31/2 after the first game of the Boston series on the third of September.

It was 21/2 almost all the month, a little 1 way, a little the other, and the later it got the better it looked. We was ready to settle for 21/2. We would of loved 4 and we would of been in heaven with 5, but it was 21/2 most of the way and we got used to 21/2.

You have got to hand it to Boston. They clung to our tail, refusing to be shook, hanging on, hanging, hanging, knowing that with every passing day their chances took a downwards dip, yet clinging, fighting, tore through the middle with friction and illness (at 1 time there was 6 Boston players with a cold in their head because the weather was miserable up there all through September) yet never saying “Die,” but seeing things through to the bitter finish, and you have got to admire them for that.

The west went west for good and the east settled down for the last 10 days, and we worried, for worry was a habit by now, and we fretted and snapped, and Dutch rode us, first pleading then scolding then pleading again, and I counted the days and the hours until it would be over and settled 1 way or the other, and sometimes I hardly cared which.

I beat Washington Friday night. That was number 25 for me. I was the first and only pitcher in the league that won 25, the first Mammoth that done so since Sam Yale turned the trick in 45. Outside of Sam I was the only Mammoth in history that won 25. The nearest anyone else ever come was Egg Barnard in 1920, with 24 wins, and Peter Rosegrant in 1916, also 24, Peter now a turnstile turner in the grandstand section back of the plate. Boston beat Brooklyn, and it was still 21/2.

It turned hot in Washington, like summer again, and World Series seats went on sale at the Stadium. The front office seemed to figure that the 21/2 would be good forever, and most folks figured the same, I suppose. According to a pole that was took at the time 66% of the people considered the Mammoths would win, 26% thought otherwise, 8% had no opinion.

Keith Crane went after his second win on Saturday. He had not won a ball game since Labor Day, his first and only big-time win, and he needed relief in the sixth, first putting the winning runs on base, and Boston beat Brooklyn again and the cushion was 11/2.

But even then nothing broke, nothing flared. There was only a quiet amongst the boys, a silence and a quiet, and for fear of breaking silence you did not speak except when spoke to, and the safest thing to do was find yourself a corner in the lobby and slouch down and pull it in after, and that is what I done.

I sat in the lobby until half past 1 that night, and then I went up, and even then I could not sleep. Bruce sat by the window and said he knowed now we would lose for sure, and I did not answer. I got up and wrapped my sheet about me and went down the hall to Pisses room, and I laid on the empty bed with the pillow under my back, and I could not sleep on account of the heat and on account of my back and on account of the noises from Pisses sinuses, and I went back and dressed and laid in the park near the reflecting pool, and I slept a bit and was woke by the sun.

Lindon pitched the first game of the Sunday doubleheader. He had not worked since St. Louis when he froze and throwed to the wrong base and lost his own ball game. Dutch had no faith in him ever after, but he was trying to work out his rotation so as to aim with his lefthanders against Boston the last 3 days, and he gambled on Lindon, and he lost the gamble. Lindon was as wild as his wildest day back in Q. C., and Boston beat Brooklyn in the first of 2 at Boston, and the cushion was
one half
a game.

There was actually a period of nearly an hour that afternoon when in a manner of speaking Boston led the league. Dutch had no choice in the nightcap but throw Sam with only 2 days rest, and 2 was not enough and he fell apart in the fifth from simple weariness. We trailed 4-1 when he left the game, Boston leading Brooklyn at the time until Brooklyn busted loose with a big sixth inning and sewed it up, and a little while later—in the top of the eighth—the Mammoths come to life.

I will never forget that half inning. We played a desperate kind of baseball, Gene opening with a ground ball deep to short that he beat by an eyebrow, moving as fast as I ever seen him do before, Perry then pinch-running for Gene and going clear to third on a very shallow single by Red that Teddy Cogswell almost took over his shoulder going away. God, what a difference a couple inches can make!

Dutch took a long time deciding on a pinch-hitter for Horse, and finally he settled on Swanee, and he sent Coker down to pinch-run for Red. Swanee was a good choice, having been through fire many a time before, an old war horse without a nerve in his body. He finally worked himself a pass and loaded the bases, and Bruce rushed down from the bullpen to pinch-run for Swanee, and Red hustled down to the pen and kept Knuckles warm, and everything looked crazy, nobody where they ought to be, Red in the bullpen, Knuckles warming for relief, Dutch throwing his strongest card at every turn of events, the boys playing now with their back to the wall as tight and close as ever it was or ever it could be, and knowing it, every 1 of them, knowing it was now or never because if once we fell behind we would be behind forever, no Series melon, no rich and happy winter, nothing only drag home your unhappy ass and explain to the folks and the friends how come you was tops on paper and second in the standings.