The Natural Read online

  That afternoon the Knights began a series with the second-place Phils. Instead of falling into a swoon when they learned there was to be no further hypnosis, the team played its best ball in weeks. Against superior pitching, in the sixth they bunched three singles for a run, and though Schultz had already given up five hits to the Phils, they were scattered and came to nothing. The Phils couldn’t score till the top of the eighth, when with two out Schultz weakened, walking one man and handing the next a good enough throw to hit for a sharp single, so that there were now men on first and third. Up came Rogers, the Phils’ slugger, and hit a fast curve for what looked like no more than a long fly ball, a routine catch, to left center. Now it happened that Bump was nearer to the ball than Flores, who was shifted to the right, but he was feeling horny in the sun and casting about in his mind for who to invite to his bed tonight, when he looked up and noticed this ball coming. He still had time to get under it but then saw Flores going for it like a galloping horse, and the anguished look on the Mexican’s face, his black eyes popping, neck like a thick rope, and mouth haunted, fascinated Bump so, he decided to let him have it if he wanted it that bad. At the last minute he tried to take it away from the Mex, risking a head-on collision, but the wind whipped the ball closer to the wall than he had bargained for, so Bump fell back to cover Flores in case he misplayed it.

  The ball fell between them, good for a double, and scoring two of the Phils. Pop tore at what was left of his gray hair but couldn’t grip it with his oily, bandaged fingers so he pulled at his ears till they were lit like red lamps. Luckily the next Phil smothered the fire by rolling to first, which kept the score at 2-1. When Bump returned to the dugout Pop cursed him from the cradle to the grave and for once Bump had no sassy answers. When it came his time to go out on deck, Pop snarled for him to stay where he was. Flores found a ripe one and landed on first but Pop stuck to his guns and looked down the line past Bump. His eye lit on Roy at the far end of the bench, and he called his name to go out there and hit. Bump turned purple. He grabbed a bat and headed for Roy but half the team jumped on him. Roy just sat there without moving and it looked to everyone like he wouldn’t get up. The umpire roared in for a batter to come out, and after a while, as the players fidgeted and Pop fumed, Roy sighed and picked up Wonderboy. He slowly walked up the steps.

  “Knock the cover off of it,” Pop yelled.

  “Attention, please,” the P.A. man announced. “Roy Hobbs, number forty-five, batting for Baily.”

  A groan rose from the stands and turned into a roar of protest.

  Otto Zipp jumped up and down on his seat, shaking his furious little fist at home plate.

  “Throw him to the dogs,” he shouted, and filled the air with his piercing curses.

  Glancing at the wives’ box, Roy saw that Memo had her head turned away. He set his jaw and advanced to the plate. His impulse was to knock the dirt out of his cleats but he refrained because he did not want to harm his bat in any way. Waiting for the pitcher to get set, Roy wiped his palms on his pants and twitched his cap. He lifted Wonderboy and waited rocklike for the throw.

  He couldn’t tell the color of the pitch that came at him. All he could think of was that he was sick to death of waiting, and tongue-out thirsty to begin. The ball was now a dew drop staring him in the eye so he stepped back and swung from the toes.

  Wonderboy flashed in the sun. It caught the sphere where it was biggest. A noise like a twenty-one gun salute cracked the sky. There was a straining, ripping sound and a few drops of rain spattered to the ground. The ball screamed toward the pitcher and seemed suddenly to dive down at his feet. He grabbed it to throw to first and realized to his horror that he held only the cover. The rest of it, unraveling cotton thread as it rode, was headed into the outfield.

  Roy was rounding first when the ball plummeted like a dead bird into center field. Attempting to retrieve and throw, the Philly fielder got tangled in thread. The second baseman rushed up, bit the cord and heaved the ball to the catcher but Roy had passed third and made home, standing. The umpire called him safe and immediately a rhubarb boiled. The Phils’ manager and his players charged out of the dugout and were joined by the nine men on the field. At the same time, Pop, shouting in defense of the ump, rushed forth with all the Knights but Bump. The umpire, caught between both teams, had a troublesome time of it and was shoved this way and that. He tossed out two men on each side but by then came to the decision that the hit was a ground rules double. Flores had scored and the game was tied up. Roy was ordered back to second, and Pop announced he was finishing the game under protest. Somebody then shouted it was raining cats and dogs. The stands emptied like a yawn and the players piled into the dugouts. By the time Roy got in from second he was wading in water ankle deep. Pop sent him into the clubhouse for a change of uniform but he could have saved himself the trouble because it rained steadily for three days. The game was recorded as a 2-2 tie, to be replayed later in the season.

  In the locker room Pop asked Roy to explain why he thought the cover had come off the ball.

  “That’s what you said to do, wasn’t it?”

  “That’s right,” said Pop, scratching his bean.

  The next day he told Roy he was withdrawing his release and would hereafter use him as a pinch hitter and substitute fielder.

  The rain had washed out the Phils’ series but the Knights were starting another with the seventh-place Redbirds. In batting practice, Roy, who was exciting some curiosity for his freak hit of yesterday, looked tremendous but so did Bump. For the first time in a long while Roy went out to left field to limber up. Bump was out there too and Earl swatted fungos to both.

  As they were changing into clean uniforms before the start of the game, Bump warned Roy in front of everybody, “Stay out of my way, busher, or you will get your head bashed.”

  Roy squirted spit on the floor.

  When Pop later handed the batting order to Stuffy Briggs, the plate umpire, it had Bump’s name scribbled on it as usual in the fourth slot, but Pop had already warned him that if he didn’t hustle his behind when a ball was hit out to his field, he would rest it a long time on the bench.

  Bump made no reply but it was obvious that he took Pop’s words to heart, because he was a bang-up fielder that day. He accepted eight chances, twice chasing into center field to take them from Flores. He caught them to his left and right, dove for and came up with a breathtaking shoestringer, and running as if on fire, speared a fantastic catch over his shoulder. Still not satisfied, he pounded like a bull after his ninth try, again in Flores’ territory, a smoking ball that sailed up high, headed for the wall. As Bump ran for it he could feel fear leaking through his stomach, and his legs unwillingly slowed down, but then he had this vision of himself as the league’s best outfielder, acknowledged so by fans and players alike, even Pop, whom he’d be nothing less than forever respectful to, and in love with and married to Memo. Thinking this way he ran harder, though Zipp’s geese honked madly at his back, and with a magnificent twisting jump, he trapped the ball in his iron fingers. Yet the wall continued to advance, and though the redheaded lady of his choice was on her feet shrieking, Bump bumped it with a skull-breaking bang, and the wall embraced his broken body.

  Though Bump was on the critical list in the hospital, many newspapers continued to speculate about that ball whose cover Roy had knocked off. It was explained as everything from an optical illusion (neither the ball nor the cover was ever found, the remnant caught by the catcher disappeared, and it was thought some fan had snatched the cover) to a feat of prodigious strength. Baseball records and newspaper files were combed but no one could find any evidence that it had happened before, although some of the older scribes swore it had. Then it leaked out that Pop had ordered Roy to skin the ball and Roy had obliged, but no one took that very seriously. One of the sportswriters suggested that a hard downward chop could shear off the outer covering. He had tried it in his cellar and had split the horsehide. Another pointed out that s
uch a blow would have produced an infield grounder, therefore maybe a tremendous upward slash? The first man proved that would have uncorked a sure pop fly whereas the ball, as everyone knew, had sailed straight out over the pitcher’s head. So it had probably resulted from a very very forceful sock. But many a hitter had plastered the ball forcefully before, still another argued, and his idea was that it was defective to begin with, a fact the company that manufactured the ball vigorously denied. Max Mercy had his own theory. He wrote in his column, “My Eye in the Knot Hole” (the year he’d done the Broadway stint for his paper his eye was in the key hole), that Roy’s bat was a suspicious one and hinted it might be filled with something a helluva lot stronger than wood. Red Blow publicly denied this. He said the bat had been examined by league authorities and was found to be less than forty-two inches long, less than two and three-quarters inches thick at its fattest part, and in weight less than two pounds, which made it a legal weapon. Mercy then demanded that the wood be X-rayed but Roy turned thumbs down on that proposition and kept Wonderboy hidden away when the sports columnist was nosing around in the clubhouse.

  On the day after the accident Pop soberly gave Roy the nod to play in Bump’s place. As Roy trotted out to left, Otto Zipp was in his usual seat but looking worn and aged. His face, tilted to the warming rays of the sun, was like a pancake with a cherry nose, and tears were streaming through slits where the eyes would be. He seemed to be waiting for his pre-game kiss on the brow but Roy passed without looking at him.

  The long rain had turned the grass green and Roy romped in it like a happy calf in its pasture. The Redbirds, probing his armor, belted the ball to him whenever they could, which was often, because Hill was not too happy on the mound, but Roy took everything they aimed at him. He seemed to know the soft, hard, and bumpy places in the field and just how high a ball would bounce on them. From the flags on the stadium roof he noted the way the wind would blow the ball, and he was quick at fishing it out of the tricky undercurrents on the ground. Not sun, shadow, nor smoke-haze bothered him, and when a ball was knocked against the wall he estimated the angle of rebound and speared it as if its course had been plotted on a chart. He was good at gauging slices and knew when to charge the pill to save time on the throw. Once he put his head down and ran ahead of a shot going into the concrete. Though the crowd rose with a thunderous warning, he caught it with his back to the wall and did a little jig to show he was alive. Everyone laughed in relief, and they liked his long-legged loping and that he resembled an acrobat the way he tumbled and came up with the ball in his glove. For his performance that day there was much whistling and applause, except where he would have liked to hear it, an empty seat in the wives’ box.

  His batting was no less successful. He stood at the plate lean and loose, right-handed with an open stance, knees relaxed and shoulders squared. The bat he held in a curious position, lifted slightly above his head as if prepared to beat a rattlesnake to death, but it didn’t harm his smooth stride into the pitch, nor the easy way he met the ball and slashed it out with a flick of the wrists. The pitchers tried something different every time he came up, sliders, sinkers, knucklers, but he swung and connected, spraying them to all fields. He was, Red Blow said to Pop, a natural, though somewhat less than perfect because he sometimes hit at bad ones, which caused Pop to frown.

  “I mistrust a bad ball hitter.”

  “There are all kinds of hitters,” Red answered. “Some are bucket foots, and some go for bad throws but none of them bother me as long as they naturally connect with anything that gets in their way.”

  Pop spat up over the dugout steps. “They sometimes make some harmful mistakes.”

  “Who don’t?” Red asked.

  Pop then muttered something about this bad ball hitter he knew who had reached for a lemon and cracked his spine.

  But the only thing Roy cracked that day was the record for the number of triples hit in a major league debut and also the one for chances accepted in the outfield. Everybody agreed that in him the Knights had uncovered something special. One reporter wrote, “He can catch everything in creation,” and Roy just about proved it. It happened that a woman who lived on the sixth floor of an apartment house overlooking the stadium was cleaning out her bird cage, near the end of the game, which the Knights took handily, when her canary flew out of the window and darted down across the field. Roy, who was waiting for the last out, saw something coming at him in the low rays of the sun, and leaping high, bagged it in his glove.

  He got rid of the bloody mess in the clubhouse can.

  When Bump died Memo went wild with grief. Bump, Bump, she wailed, pounding on the wall. Pop, who hovered over her at first, found her in bed clutching strands of red hair. Her cheeks were scratched where the tears rolled down. He was frightened and urged her to have the doctor but her piercing screams drove him away. She wept for days. Clad in black pajamas she lay across the white bed like a broken candle still lit. In her mind she planted kisses all over the corpse and when she kissed his mouthless mouth blew back the breath of life, her womb stirring at the image of his restoration. Yet she saw down a dark corridor that he was laid out dead, gripping in his fingers the glowing ball he had caught, and that there were too many locked doors to go through to return. She stopped trying to think of him alive and thought of him dead. Then she really hit the wall.

  She could not stop weeping, as if the faucet were broken. Or she were a fountain they had forgotten to turn off. There was no end to her tears. They flowed on as if she had never wept before. Wherever she turned she cried, the world was wet. Her thoughts dripped on flowers, dark, stained ones in night fields. She moved among them, tasting their many darknesses, could not tell them from the rocks on the ground. His shade was there. She saw it drifting before her and recognized it by the broken places. Bump, oh Bump, but her voice was drowned in water. She heard a gurgle and the bubbles breaking and felt the tears go searing down a hurt face (hers) and though she wanted always to be with him she was (here) weeping.

  After unnumbered days she dragged herself out of bed, disturbed by all the space, her bare feet with lacquered nails, her shaky presence among changeless things. She sought in the hollow closet souvenirs of him, an autographed baseball “to my Honey from her Bump” (tears), a cigarette lighter shaped like a bat, click-open-light. She blew it out and searching further found an old kewpie doll he had won for her and a pressed, yellowed gardenia, but couldn’t with her wept-out nose detect the faintest odor; also a pair of purple shorts she herself had laundered and placed in the drawer among her soft (and useless) underthings. Going through her scrapbook, only rarely could she find menus (Sardi’s, Toots Shor, and once the Diamond Horseshoe) or movie ticket stubs (Palace, Paramount, Capitol) and other such things of them both that one could paste in, but most were pictures she had clipped from the sports pages, showing Bump at bat, on the basepaths, and crossing the plate. She idly turned the pages, sighed deeply and put the book away, then picked up the old picture album, and here was her sadeyed mother, and the torn up, patched together one was of Daddy grinning, who with a grin had (forever) exited dancing with his dancing partner, and here she was herself, a little girl weeping, as if nothing ever changed … The heartbreak was always present—he had not been truly hers when he died (she tried not to think whose, in many cities, he had been) so that she now mourned someone who even before his death had made her a mourner. That was the thorn in her grief.

  When the July stifle drove her out of her room she appeared in the hotel lobby in black, her hair turned a lighter, golden shade as though some of the fire had burned out of it, and Roy was moved by her appearance. He had imagined how she would look when he saw her again but both the black and red, though predictable, surprised him. They told him with thunderclap quickness what he wanted to be sure of, that she, despite green eyes brimming for Bump, was the one for him, the ever desirable only. Occasionally he reflected what if the red were black and ditto the other way? Here, for example, was this
blackhaired dame in red and what about it? He could take her or leave her, though there was a time in his life when a red dress would excite his fancy, but with Memo, flaming above and dark below, there was no choice—he was chosen so why not admit it though it brought pain? He had tried lately to forget her but had a long memory for what he wanted so there was only this to do, wait till she came in out of the rain.

  Sometimes it was tough to, even for one used to waiting. Once a hungry desire sent him down to knock at her door but she shut it in his face although he was standing there with his hat in his embarrassed hands. He thought of asking Pop to put in a good word for him—how long was life anyhow? —but something told him to wait. And from other cities, when the team was on the road, he sent her cards, candies, little presents, which were all stuffed in his mailbox when he returned. It took the heart out of him. Yet each morning when she came out of the elevator he would look up at her as she walked by on her high heels, although she never seemed to see him. Then one day she shed black and put on white but still looked as if she were wearing black, so he waited. Only, now, when he looked at her she sometimes glanced at him. He watched her dislike of him fade to something neutral which he slowly became confident he could beat.

  “One thing I hafta tell you not to do, son,” Pop said to Roy in the hotel lobby one rainy morning not long after Bump’s funeral, “and that is to blame yourself about what happened to Bump. He had a tough break but it wasn’t your fault.”

  “What do you mean my fault?”

  Pop looked up. “All I mean to say was he did it himself.”

  “Never thought anything but.”

  “Some have said maybe it wouldn’t happen if you didn’t join the team, and maybe so, but I believe such things are outside of yours and my control and I wouldn’t want you to worry that you had caused it in any way.”