The Natural Page 9

  “I won’t because I didn’t. Bump didn’t have to go to the wall for that shot, did he? We were ahead in runs and the bases were clear. He could’ve taken it when it came off the wall without losing a thing, couldn’t he?”

  Pop scratched his baldy. “I guess so.”

  “Who are the people who said I did it?”

  “Well, nobody exactly. My niece said you coulda wanted it to happen but that don’t mean a thing. She was hysterical then.”

  Roy felt uneasy. Had he arranged Bump’s run into the wall? No. Had he wished the guy would drop dead? Only once, after the night with Memo. But he had never consciously hoped he would crack up against the wall. That was none of his doing and he told Pop to tell it to Memo. But Pop was embarrassed now and said to drop the whole thing, it was a lot of foolishness.

  Though Roy denied wishing Bump’s fate on him or having been in any way involved in it, he continued to be unwillingly concerned with him even after his death. He was conscious that he was filling Bump’s shoes, not only because he batted in the clean-up slot and fielded in the sun field (often watched his shadow fly across the very spot Bump had dived into) and became, in no time to speak of, one of the leading hitters in the league and at present certainly the most sensational, but also because the crowds made no attempt to separate his identity from Bump’s. To his annoyance, when he made a hot catch, the kind Bump in all his glory would have left alone, he could hear through the curtain of applause, “Nice work, Bumpsy, ‘at’s grabbin’ th’ old apple,” or “Leave it to Bump, he will be where they drop.” It was goddamn stupid. The same fans who a month ago were hissing Bump for short legging on the other fielders now praised his name so high Roy felt like painting up a sandwich sign to wear out on the field, that said, ROY HOBBS PLAYING.

  Even Otto Zipp made no effort to distinguish him from his predecessor and used the honker to applaud his doings, though there were some who said the dwarf sounded half-hearted in his honking. And Roy also shared the limelight with Bump on the sports page, where the writers were constantly comparing them for everything under the sun. One of them went so far as to keep a tally of their batting averages—Roy’s total after his first, second, and third weeks of play, as compared with Bump’s at the beginning of the season. One paper even printed pictures showing the living and dead facing each other with bats held high, as white arrows pointed at various places in their anatomies to show how much alike their measurements and stances were.

  All this irritated Roy no end until he happened to notice Memo walk into the lobby one night with a paper turned to the sports page. From having read the same paper he knew she had seen a column about Bump and him as batsmen, so he decided there might be some percentage to all these comparisons. He came to feel more kindly to the memory of Bump and thought he was not such a bad egg after all, even if he did go in for too many screwball gags. Thinking back on him, he could sort of understand why Memo had been interested in him, and he felt that, though he was superior to Bump as an athlete, they were both money players, both showmen in the game. He figured it was through these resemblances that Memo would gradually get used to him and then come over all the way, although once she did, it would have to be for Hobbsie himself and not for some ghost by another name.

  So he blazed away for her with his golden bat. It was not really golden, it was white, but in the sun it sometimes flashed gold and some of the opposing pitchers complained it shone in their eyes. Stuffy Briggs told Roy to put it away and use some other club but he stood on his rights and wouldn’t. There was a hot rhubarb about that until Roy promised to rub some of the shine off Wonderboy. This he did with a hambone, and though the pitchers shut up, the bat still shone a dull gold. It brought him some wondrous averages in hits, runs, RBI’s and total bases, and for the period of his few weeks in the game he led the league in homers and triples. (He was quoted in an interview as saying his singles were “mistakes.” And he never bunted. “There is no percentage in bunts.” Pop shook his head over that, but Red chuckled and said it was true for a wonderful hitter like Roy.) He also destroyed many short-term records, calling down on his performance tons of newspaper comment. However, his accomplishments were not entirely satisfying to him. He was gnawed by a nagging impatience—so much more to do, so much of the world to win for himself. He felt he had nothing of value yet to show for what he was accomplishing, and in his dreams he still sped over endless miles of monotonous rail toward something he desperately wanted. Memo, he sighed.

  Pop couldn’t believe his amazed eyes. “Beginner’s luck,” he muttered. Many a rookie had he seen come out blasting them in the breeze only to blow out in it with his tail between his legs. “The boy’s having hisself a shower of luck. Usually they end up with a loud bust, so let’s wait and see,” he cautioned. Yet Roy continued on as before, by his own efforts winning many a ball game. The team too were doubtful he could go on like this, and doubtful of their doubt. They often discussed him when he wasn’t around, compared him to Bump, and argued whether he was for the team or for himself. Olson said he was for the team. Cal Baker insisted no. When asked for a reason he could give none except to say, “Those big guys are always for themselves. They are not for the little guy. If he was for us why don’t he come around more? Why does he hang out so much by himself?” “Yeah,” answered Olson, “but we’re outa the cellar now and who done that—the wind? That’s what counts, not if he sits around chewin’ his ass with us.” Most of them agreed with Olson. Even if Roy wasn’t actively interested in them he was a slick ballplayer and his example was having a good effect on them. In the course of three weeks they had achieved a coordination of fielding, hitting and pitching (Fowler and Schultz were whipping the opposition, and Hinkle and Hill, with an assist here and there from McGee, were at least breaking even) such as they had not for seasons known. Like a rusty locomotive pulling out of the roundhouse for the first time in years, they ground down the tracks, puffing, wheezing, belching smoke and shooting sparks. And before long they had dislodged the Reds, who had been living on the floor above them since the season started. When, near the end of July, they caught up with the Cubs and, twelve games behind the league-leading Pirates, took possession of sixth place, Pop rubbed his unbelieving eyes. The players thought now that the team is on its way up he will change his crabby ways and give us a smile once in a while, but Pop surprised them by growing sad, then actually melancholy at the thought that but for his keeping Roy out of the line-up for three weeks they might now be in first division.

  A new day dawned on Knights Field. Looking down upon the crowds from his office in the curious tower he inhabited that rose on a slight tilt above the main entrance of the ball park, Judge Goodwill Banner was at first made uneasy by what he saw, for every rise in attendance would make it more difficult for him to get Pop to give up the managerial reins, a feat he hoped to accomplish by next season. However, the sound of the merry, clicking turnstiles was more than he could resist, so, although reluctantly, he put on extra help to sweep the stands and ramps and dust off seats that hadn’t been sat in for years but were now almost always occupied.

  The original Knights “fans,” those who had come to see them suffer, were snowed under by this new breed here to cheer the boys on. Vegetables were abolished, even at the umps, and the crowd assisted the boys by working on the nerves of the visiting team with whammy words, catcalls, wisecracks, the kind of sustained jockeying that exhausted the rival pitchers and sometimes drove them out of the game. Now the old faithful were spouting steam—the Hungarian cook outcrowed a flock of healthy roosters, Gloria, the vestibule lady, acquired a better type customer, and Sadie Sutter gave up Dave Olson and now beat her hectic gong for the man of the hour. “Oh, you Roy,” she screeched in her yolky cackle, “embracez moy,” and the stands went wild with laughter. Victory was sweet, except for Otto Zipp, who no longer attended the games. Someone who met him waddling out of a subway station in Canarsie asked how come, but the dwarf only waved a pudgy palm in disgust. Nobody
could guess what he meant by that and his honker lay dusty and silent on a shelf in the attic.

  Even the weather was better, more temperate after the insulting early heat, with just enough rain to keep the grass a bright green and yet not pile up future double headers. Pop soon got into the spirit of winning, lowered the boom on his dismal thoughts, and showed he had a lighter side. He unwound the oily rags on his fingers and flushed them down the bowl. His hands healed and so did his heart, for even during the tensest struggle he looked a picture of contentment. And he was patient now, extraordinarily so, giving people the impression he had never been otherwise. Let a man bobble a hot one, opening the gate for a worrisome run, and he no longer jumped down his throat but wagged his head in silent sympathy. And sometimes he patted the offender on the surprised back. Formerly his strident yell was everywhere, on the field, in the dugout, clubhouse, players’ duffel bags, also in their dreams, but now you never heard it because he no longer raised his voice, not even to Dizzy’s cat when it wet on his shoes. Nobody teased him or played jokes on him any more and every tactic he ordered on the field was acted on, usually successfully. He was in the driver’s seat. His muscles eased, the apoplexy went out of his system, and for his star fielder a love-light shone in his eyes.

  As Roy’s fame grew, Bump was gradually forgotten. The fans no longer confused talent with genius. When they cheered, they cheered for Roy Hobbs alone. People wondered about him, wanted news of his life and career. Reporters kept after him for information and Max Mercy, who for some reason felt he ought to know a lot more about Roy than he did, worked a sharp pickax over his shadow but gathered no usable nugget. All that was known was that Roy had first played ball on an orphan asylum team, that his father was a restless itinerant worker and his mother rumored to have been a burlesque actress. Stingy with facts, Roy wouldn’t confirm a thing. Mercy sent a questionnaire to one thousand country papers in the West but there were no towns or cities that claimed the hero as their own.

  It came about that Roy discovered Memo at one of the home games, though not, as formerly, sitting in the wives’ box. Happening to meet her later in the hotel elevator, where they were pressed close together because of the crowd, he got off at her floor. Taking her arm he said, “Memo, I don’t know what more I can do to show you how sorry I am about that time and tell you how I feel in my heart for you now.”

  But Memo stared at him through a veil of tears and said, “I’m strictly a dead man’s girl.”

  He figured she had to be made to forget. If she would go out with him he would give her a good time at the night clubs and musical shows. But to do that and buy her some decent presents a guy needed cash, and on the meager three thousand he got he had beans—barely enough to pay his hotel bill. He considered selling his name for endorsements and approached a sporting goods concern but they paid him only fifty dollars. Elsewhere he got a suit and a pair of shoes but no cash. An agent he consulted advised him that the companies were suspicious he might be a flash in the pan. “Lay low now,” he advised. “By the end of the season, if you keep on like you’re going, they’ll be ready to talk turkey, then we’ll put the heat on.”

  The newspaper boys supplied him with the cue for what to do next. They pointed out how he filled up Knights Field; and on the road, as soon as the Knights blew into town the game was a sellout and the customers weren’t exactly coming to see a strip-tease. One of the columnists (not Mercy) wrote an open letter to the Judge, saying it was a crying shame that a man as good as Roy should get a rock-bottom salary when he was playing better ball than some of the so-called stars who drew up to a hundred grand. Roy was being gypped, the columnist wrote, and he called on the Judge to burn up his old contract and write a decent one instead. Why, even Bump had earned thirty-five thousand. That decided Roy. He figured for himself a flat forty-five thousand for the rest of the season, plus a guarantee of a percentage of the gate. He thought that if he got this sort of arrangement and really piled in the dough, it would do him no harm with Memo.

  So one day after a long double header, both ends of which the Knights finally took, Roy climbed the slippery stairs up the tower to the Judge’s office. The Judge’s male secretary said he was busy but Roy sat down to wait so they soon let him in. The huge office was half dark, though lit on the double-windowed street side (the Judge counted the customers going in and from the opposite window he counted them in the stands) by the greenish evening sky. The Judge, a massive rumpled figure in a large chair before an empty mahogany desk, was wearing a black fedora with a round pot crown and smoking, under grizzled eyebrows, a fat, black King Oscar I. This always looked to be the same size in the rare newspaper photographs of the Judge, and many people maintained it was the same picture of him all the time, because it was a known fact that the Judge never left the tower and no photographer ever got in. Roy noted a shellacked half of stuffed shark, mounted on pine board on the faded green wall, and a framed motto piece that read:

  “Be it ever so humble, there is no place like home”

  “Nihil nisi bonum”

  “All is not gold that glitters”

  “The dog is turned to his vomit again”

  The floor of the office was, of course, slanted—because of the way the tower, an addition to the stadium structure, had settled—and to level it the Judge had a rug made a quarter of an inch thick on one side and a good inch on the other, but the few visitors to the place noticed they were not standing strictly on keel so they quickly sat down, which was what Roy did too. He had heard that the door on the opposite side of the room led up to the Judge’s apartment. Pop said that though the Judge was a sluggish man with a buck it was a lavish place, and the bathroom had a television set and a sunken bathtub inlaid with mother of pearl. It was also rumored that he kept in there two enormous medicine cabinets loaded with laxatives and cathartics.

  The Judge looked Roy over, struck a match under the top of his desk and drew a flame into his dead King Oscar. He blew out a smelly cloud of yellow smoke that hid his face a full minute.

  “Nice of you to come,” he rumbled. “To what good cause may I attribute this pleasant surprise?”

  “I guess you know, Judge,” said Roy, trying to make himself comfortable.

  The Judge rumbled in his belly.

  “I’m reminded of a case that came before me once. ‘What do you plead?’ I asked the defendant. ‘I leave it to you, Judge, take your choice,’ he responded. I did and sent him to the penitentiary for twenty years.”

  The Judge coughed and cackled over that. Roy regarded him closely. Everybody had warned him he was a slick trader, especially Pop who had poured out a hot earful about his partner. “He will peel the skin off of your behind without you knowing it if you don’t watch out.” That was what had happened to him, he said, and he went on to tell Roy that not long after the Judge had bought into the club—after working up Charlie Gulch, Pop’s old-time partner, against him and getting him to sell out—he had taken advantage of some financial troubles Pop was having with his two brothers who owned a paint factory, and also because of his own sickness that kept him in a hospital under expensive medical care all winter long, and the Judge put the squeeze on him to get ten per cent of his stock for a pittance, which had then looked like a life saver because Pop was overdrawn at the bank and they wouldn’t lend him another cent on his share of the Knights. Later, when he realized how much of a say in things he had lost to the Judge he kicked himself all over the lot, for the Judge, as Red Blow had told Roy, drummed up all sorts of player deals to turn a buck, and though Pop fought him on these, he showed on paper that they were losing money at the gate and this was the only way to cover their losses and keep the team going, so Pop had to give in on most of them although he had fought the Judge to a standstill when he wanted to sell Bump and would do the same if he tried it with Roy. It beat Pop where Goodie Banner, as he called him, had got the money to operate with in the first place. He had known him years ago as an impoverished shyster but once he got
on the bench his fortunes improved. Yet his salary was only twelve thousand a year for the three years he had served so he must have had backing to buy into the club and later—the dratted nerve of the worm—to offer to buy Pop out altogether. He said he wouldn’t exactly call the Judge a thief but he wouldn’t exactly call him honest either. For instance, the Judge had once casually asked Pop if he wanted to go in for any sideline activities over what they had already contracted for, meaning concessions and the like. Pop said no, he was only interested in the game end of it, so the Judge drew up an agreement offering Pop five per cent of all receipts from enterprises initiated by himself, and he began to rent the place to miniature auto races, meetings, conventions, and dog races, making all sorts of money for himself, while things necessary to the team were being neglected. “When triple talk is invented,” Pop said bitterly, “he will own the copyright.”

  It was dark in the office but the Judge made no attempt to switch on the lights. He sat there motionless, a lumpy figure aglow around the edges against the darkening sky.

  Roy thought he better get down to brass tacks. “Well, Judge,” he said, shifting in his chair, “I thought you might be expecting me to drop in and see you. You know what I am doing to the ball both here and on the road. The papers have been writing that you might be considering a new contract for me.”

  The Judge blew at the ash of his cigar.

  Roy grew restless. “I figure forty-five thousand is a fair price for my work. That’s only ten grand more than Bump was getting—and you can subtract off the three thousand in my contract now.” This last was an afterthought and he had decided to leave out the percentage of the gate till next year.

  The Judge rumbled, Roy couldn’t tell if it was in his throat or belly.