The Natural Read online

  Eddie woke with a jump and stared out the window.

  “Oh oh, trouble, we never stop here.”

  He looked again and called Roy.

  “What do you make out of that?”

  About a hundred yards ahead, where two dirt roads crossed, a moth-eaten model-T Ford was parked on the farther side of the road from town, and a fat old man wearing a broadbrimmed black hat and cowboy boots, who they could see was carrying a squat doctor’s satchel, climbed down from it. To the conductor, who had impatiently swung off the train with a lit red lamp, he flourished a yellow telegram. They argued a minute, then the conductor, snapping open his watch, beckoned him along and they boarded the train. When they passed through Eddie’s car the conductor’s face was sizzling with irritation but the doctor was unruffled. Before disappearing through the door, the conductor called to Eddie, “Half hour.”

  “Half hour,” Eddie yodeled and he got out the stool and set it outside the car so that anyone who wanted to stretch, could.

  Only about a dozen passengers got off the train, including Harriet Bird, still hanging on to her precious hat box, the Whammer, and Max Mercy, all as thick as thieves. Roy hunted up the bassoon case just if the train should decide to take off without him, and when he had located Sam they both got off.

  “Well, I’ll be jiggered.” Sam pointed down about a block beyond where the locomotive had halted. There, sprawled out at the outskirts of the city, a carnival was on. It was made up of try-your-skill booths, kiddie rides, a freak show and a gigantic Ferris wheel that looked like a stopped clock. Though there was still plenty of daylight, the carnival was lit up by twisted ropes of blinking bulbs, and many banners streamed in the breeze as the calliope played.

  “Come on,” said Roy, and they went along with the people from the train who were going toward the tents.

  Once they had got there and fooled around a while, Sam stopped to have a crushed cocoanut drink which he privately spiked with a shot from a new bottle, while Roy wandered over to a place where you could throw three baseballs for a dime at three wooden pins, shaped like pint-size milk bottles and set in pyramids of one on top of two, on small raised platforms about twenty feet back from the counter. He changed the fifty-cent piece Sam had slipped him on leaving the train, and this pretty girl in yellow, a little hefty but with a sweet face and nice ways, who with her peanut of a father was waiting on trade, handed him three balls. Lobbing one of them, Roy easily knocked off the pyramid and won himself a naked kewpie doll. Enjoying the game, he laid down another dime, again clattering the pins to the floor in a single shot and now collecting an alarm clock. With the other three dimes he won a brand-new boxed baseball, a washboard, and baby potty, which he traded in for a six-inch harmonica. A few kids came over to watch and Sam, wandering by, indulgently changed another half into dimes for Roy. And Roy won a fine leather cigar case for Sam, a “God Bless America” banner, a flashlight, can of coffee, and a two-pound box of sweets. To the kids’ delight, Sam, after a slight hesitation, flipped Roy another half dollar, but this time the little man behind the counter nudged his daughter and she asked Roy if he would now take a kiss for every three pins he tumbled.

  Roy glanced at her breasts and she blushed. He got embarrassed too. “What do you say, Sam, it’s your four bits?”

  Sam bowed low to the girl. “Ma’am,” he said, “now you see how dang foolish it is to be a young feller.”

  The girl laughed and Roy began to throw for kisses, flushing each pyramid in a shot or two while the girl counted aloud the kisses she owed him.

  Some of the people from the train passed by and stayed to watch when they learned from the mocking kids what Roy was throwing for.

  The girl, pretending to be unconcerned, tolled off the third and fourth kisses.

  As Roy fingered the ball for the last throw the Whammer came by holding over his shoulder a Louisville Slugger that he had won for himself in the batting cage down a way. Harriet, her pretty face flushed, had a kewpie doll, and Max Mercy carried a box of cigars. The Whammer had discarded his sun glasses and all but strutted over his performance and the prizes he had won.

  Roy raised his arm to throw for the fifth kiss and a clean sweep when the Whammer called out to him in a loud voice, “Pitch it here, busher, and I will knock it into the moon.”

  Roy shot for the last kiss and missed. He missed with the second and third balls. The crowd oohed its disappointment.

  “Only four,” said the girl in yellow as if she mourned the fifth.

  Angered at what had happened, Sam hoarsely piped, “I got ten dollars that says he can strike you out with three pitched balls, Wambold.”

  The Whammer looked at Sam with contempt.

  “What d’ye say, Max?” he said.

  Mercy shrugged.

  “Oh, I love contests of skill,” Harriet said excitedly. Roy’s face went pale.

  “What’s the matter, hayfoot, you scared?” the Whammer taunted.

  “Not of you,” Roy said.

  “Let’s go across the tracks where nobody’ll get hurt,” Mercy suggested.

  “Nobody but the busher and his bazooka. What’s in it, busher?”

  “None of your business.” Roy picked up the bassoon case.

  The crowd moved in a body across the tracks, the kids circling around to get a good view, and the engineer and fireman watching from their cab window.

  Sam cornered one of the kids who lived nearby and sent him home for a fielder’s glove and his friend’s catcher’s mitt. While they were waiting, for protection he buttoned underneath his coat the washboard Roy had won. Max drew a batter’s box alongside a piece of slate. He said he would call the throws and they would count as one of the three pitches only if they were over or if the Whammer swung and missed.

  When the boy returned with the gloves, the sun was going down, and though the sky was aflame with light all the way to the snowy mountain peak, it was chilly on the ground.

  Breaking the seal, Sam squeezed the baseball box and the pill shot up like a greased egg. He tossed it to Mercy, who inspected the hide and stitches, then rubbed the shine off and flipped it to Roy.

  “Better throw a couple of warm-ups.”

  “My arm is loose,” said Roy.

  “It’s your funeral.”

  Placing his bassoon case out of the way in the grass, Roy shed his coat. One of the boys came forth to hold it.

  “Be careful you don’t spill the pockets,” Roy told him.

  Sam came forward with the catcher’s glove on. It was too small for his big hand but he said it would do all right.

  “Sam, I wish you hadn’t bet that money on me,” Roy said.

  “I won’t take it if we win, kiddo, but just let it stand if we lose,” Sam said, embarrassed.

  “We came by it too hard.”

  “Just let it stand so.”

  He cautioned Roy to keep his pitches inside, for the Whammer was known to gobble them on the outside corner.

  Sam returned to the plate and crouched behind the batter, his knees spread wide because of the washboard. Roy drew on his glove and palmed the ball behind it. Mercy, rubbing his hands to warm them, edged back about six feet behind Sam.

  The onlookers retreated to the other side of the tracks, except Harriet, who stood without fear of fouls up close. Her eyes shone at the sight of the two men facing one another.

  Mercy called, “Batter up.”

  The Whammer crowded the left side of the plate, gripping the heavy bat low on the neck, his hands jammed together and legs plunked evenly apart. He hadn’t bothered to take off his coat. His eye on Roy said it spied a left-handed monkey.

  “Throw it, Rube, it won’t get no lighter.”

  Though he stood about sixty feet away, he loomed up gigantic to Roy, with the wood held like a caveman’s ax on his shoulder. His rocklike frame was motionless, his face impassive, unsmiling, dark.

  Roy’s heart skipped a beat. He turned to gaze at the mountain.

  Sam whacked t
he leather with his fist. “Come on, kiddo, wham it down his whammy.”

  The Whammer out of the corner of his mouth told the drunk to keep his mouth shut.

  “Burn it across his button.”

  “Close your trap,” Mercy said.

  “Cut his throat with it.”

  “If he tries to dust me, so help me I will smash his skull,” the Whammer threatened.

  Roy stretched loosely, rocked back on his left leg, twirling the right a little like a dancer, then strode forward and threw with such force his knuckles all but scraped the ground on the follow-through.

  At thirty-three the Whammer still enjoyed exceptional eyesight. He saw the ball spin off Roy’s fingertips and it reminded him of a white pigeon he had kept as a boy, that he would send into flight by flipping it into the air. The ball flew at him and he was conscious of its bird-form and white flapping wings, until it suddenly disappeared from view. He heard a noise like the bang of a firecracker at his feet and Sam had the ball in his mitt. Unable to believe his ears he heard Mercy intone a reluctant strike.

  Sam flung off the glove and was wringing his hand.

  “Hurt you, Sam?” Roy called.

  “No, it’s this dang glove.”

  Though he did not show it, the pitch had bothered the Whammer no end. Not just the speed of it but the sensation of surprise and strangeness that went with it—him batting here on the railroad tracks, the crazy carnival, the drunk catching and a clown pitching, and that queer dame Harriet, who had five minutes ago been patting him on the back for his skill in the batting cage, now eyeing him coldly for letting one pitch go by.

  He noticed Max had moved farther back.

  “How the hell you expect to call them out there?”

  “He looks wild to me.” Max moved in.

  “Your knees are knockin’,” Sam tittered.

  “Mind your business, rednose,” Max said.

  “You better watch your talk, mister,” Roy called to Mercy.

  “Pitch it, greenhorn,” warned the Whammer.

  Sam crouched with his glove on. “Do it again, Roy. Give him something simular.”

  “Do it again,” mimicked the Whammer. To the crowd, maybe to Harriet, he held up a vaunting finger showing there were other pitches to come.

  Roy pumped, reared and flung.

  The ball appeared to the batter to be a slow spinning planet looming toward the earth. For a long light-year he waited for this globe to whirl into the orbit of his swing so he could bust it to smithereens that would settle with dust and dead leaves into some distant cosmos. At last the unseeing eye, maybe a fortuneteller’s lit crystal ball—anyway, a curious combination of circles—drifted within range of his weapon, or so he thought, because he lunged at it ferociously, twisting round like a top. He landed on both knees as the world floated by over his head and hit with a whup into the cave of Sam’s glove.

  “Hey, Max,” Sam said, as he chased the ball after it had bounced out of the glove, “how do they pernounce Whammer if you leave out the W?”

  “Strike,” Mercy called long after a cheer (was it a jeer?) had burst from the crowd.

  “What’s he throwing,” the Whammer howled, “spitters?”

  “In the pig’s poop.” Sam thrust the ball at him. “It’s drier than your granddaddy’s scalp.”

  “I’m warning him not to try any dirty business.”

  Yet the Whammer felt oddly relieved. He liked to have his back crowding the wall, when there was a single pitch to worry about and a single pitch to hit. Then the sweat began to leak out of his pores as he stared at the hard, lanky figure of the pitiless pitcher, moving, despite his years and a few waste motions, like a veteran undertaker of the diamond, and he experienced a moment of depression.

  Sam must have sensed it, because he discovered an unexpected pity in his heart and even for a split second hoped the idol would not be tumbled. But only for a second, for the Whammer had regained confidence in his known talent and experience and was taunting the greenhorn to throw.

  Someone in the crowd hooted and the Whammer raised aloft two fat fingers and pointed where he would murder the ball, where the gleaming rails converged on the horizon and beyond was invisible.

  Roy raised his leg. He smelled the Whammer’s blood and wanted it, and through him the worm’s he had with him, for the way he had insulted Sam.

  The third ball slithered at the batter like a meteor, the flame swallowing itself. He lifted his club to crush it into a universe of sparks but the heavy wood dragged, and though he willed to destroy the sound he heard a gong bong and realized with sadness that the ball he had expected to hit had long since been part of the past; and though Max could not cough the fatal word out of his throat, the Whammer understood he was, in the truest sense of it, out.

  The crowd was silent as the violet evening fell on their shoulders.

  For a night game, the Whammer harshly shouted, it was customary to turn on lights. Dropping the bat, he trotted off to the train, an old man.

  The ball had caught Sam smack in the washboard and lifted him off his feet. He lay on the ground, extended on his back. Roy pushed everybody aside to get him air. Unbuttoning Sam’s coat, he removed the dented washboard.

  “Never meant to hurt you, Sam.”

  “Just knocked the wind outa me,” Sam gasped. “Feel better now.” He was pulled to his feet and stood steady.

  The train whistle wailed, the echo banging far out against the black mountain.

  Then the doctor in the broadbrimmed black hat appeared, flustered and morose, the conductor trying to pacify him, and Eddie hopping along behind.

  The doctor waved the crumpled yellow paper around. “Got a telegram says somebody on this train took sick. Anybody out here?”

  Roy tugged at Sam’s sleeve.

  “Ixnay.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Not me,” said Roy.

  The doctor stomped off. He climbed into his Ford, whipped it up and drove away.

  The conductor popped open his watch. “Be a good hour late into the city.”

  “All aboard,” he called.

  “Aboard,” Eddie echoed, carrying the bassoon case.

  The buxom girl in yellow broke through the crowd and threw her arms around Roy’s neck. He ducked but she hit him quick with her pucker four times upon the right eye, yet he could see with the other that Harriet Bird (certainly a snappy goddess) had her gaze fastened on him.

  They sat, after dinner, in Eddie’s dimmed and empty Pullman, Roy floating through drifts of clouds on his triumph as Harriet went on about the recent tourney, she put it, and the unreal forest outside swung forward like a gate shutting. The odd way she saw things interested him, yet he was aware of the tormented trees fronting the snaky lake they were passing, trees bent and clawing, plucked white by icy blasts from the black water, their bony branches twisting in many a broken direction.

  Harriet’s face was flushed, her eyes gleaming with new insights. Occasionally she stopped and giggled at herself for the breathless volume of words that flowed forth, to his growing astonishment, but after a pause was on her galloping way again—a girl on horseback—reviewing the inspiring sight (she said it was) of David jawboning the Goliath-Whammer, or was it Sir Percy lancing Sir Maldemer, or the first son (with a rock in his paw) ranged against the primitive papa?

  Roy gulped. “My father? Well, maybe I did want to skull him sometimes. After my grandma died, the old man dumped me in one orphan home after the other, wherever he happened to be working—when he did—though he did used to take me out of there summers and teach me how to toss a ball.”

  No, that wasn’t what she meant, Harriet said. Had he ever read Homer?

  Try as he would he could only think of four bases and not a book. His head spun at her allusions. He found her lingo strange with all the college stuff and hoped she would stop it because he wanted to talk about baseball.

  Then she took a breather. “My friends say I have a fantastic imagination.�
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  He quickly remarked he wouldn’t say that. “But the only thing I had on my mind when I was throwing out there was that Sam had bet this ten spot we couldn’t afford to lose out on, so I had to make him whiff.”

  “To whiff—oh, Roy, how droll,” and she laughed again.

  He grinned, carried away by the memory of how he had done it, the hero, who with three pitched balls had nailed the best the American League had to offer. What didn’t that say about the future? He felt himself falling into sentiment in his thoughts and tried to steady himself but couldn’t before he had come forth with a pronouncement: “You have to have the right stuff to play good ball and I have it. I bet some day I’ll break every record in the book for throwing and hitting.”

  Harriet appeared startled then gasped, hiding it like a cough behind her tense fist, and vigorously applauded, her bracelets bouncing on her wrists. “Bravo, Roy, how wonderful.”

  “What I mean,” he insisted, “is I feel that I have got it in me—that I am due for something very big. I have to do it. I mean,” he said modestly, “that’s of course when I get in the game.”

  Her mouth opened. “You mean you’re not—” She seemed, to his surprise, disappointed, almost on the verge of crying.

  “No,” he said, ashamed. “Sam’s taking me for a tryout.”

  Her eyes grew vacant as she stared out the window. Then she asked, “But Walter—he is a successful professional player, isn’t he?”

  “The Whammer?” Roy nodded.