At the Old Ballgame (10 page)

Most ballplayers have a dislike for one or more cities on the circuit. The Crab's pet aversion was the St. Clair grounds. There, the huge double-decked grandstand, with its lower floor on a level with the infield itself and not forty feet from the foul lines, brought players and spectators into closer contact than was good for either. Back of the heavy screening and paralleling a well-worn path between the home plate and the dugout assigned to the home club, stretched “Sure Thing Row” where men who wagered money in downtown poolrooms before the game congregated like birds of prey to await the outcome.

“Sure Thing Row” ran to checked suits, diamonds and stacks of half dollars, the latter held lightly in one hand and riffled with the thumb and forefinger of the other. It broke no law of the land; it knew its rights and exercised every one of them.

“The Row” maintained a proprietary interest in the Crab. He was theirs by right of discovery. In him they recognized not only the strongest link in the Wolf defense but likewise the weakest. He was an unconscious instrument to be used or not as the odds might require. Now that the Crab was married, the problem was simplified.

It was in the third game of the series that Rube Ferguson, sitting beside Brick McGovern in the dugout while the Wolves were at bat, reported to his leader what was going on.

“The ace-in-the-hole boys are after the Crab. When he went up to bat just now they were whispering stuff to him about his wife—get me, Brick? They're handing him the laugh about the Smile Girl. He'll blow up before the inning's over.”

McGovern nodded. His gnarled and sun-scorched hands opened and shut helplessly. “I know,” he groaned, “I know—they used to hand it to me like that and if it hadn't been for my wife and kids I'd have done murder twenty times. There's no law against insulting a ballplayer. That goes with the price of admission. They'll not break the Crab's nerve but they'll get him thrown out. Ah!”

The gray-clad figures in the Wolf dugout sprang to their feet. The high-pitched yelp of the timber wolf pierced the clamor, followed by cries of “tear 'em, puppy!”

The Crab had lashed a terrific drive along the right field foul line and was rounding first base in full stride.

McGovern tore for the coaching box with both arms raised, palms outward. Walker in right field had knocked the drive down. He had one of the best arms in the league.

“None out,” yelled the Wolf leader, “two bags—play it safe! Back—go back!”

But the Crab had eyes or ears for no one. He was running wild, bent only on showing “Sure Thing Row” he was its master. Blind with rage and excitement he bore down on third base. The ball zipped into the hands of the waiting fielder in plenty of time. The Crab must have known he was out, but he arose from a cloud of dust, wildly denunciatory, and frantic under the jibes of the bleachers and the fox-faced gentry back of the screen.

In the old belligerent way, he stalked after Tim Cahill and grabbled the umpire by the arm.

“You—you—” he foamed.

McGovern dashed out on the diamond but the mischief was already done. Cahill knew his business and he stood for no breach of discipline. Freeing himself from the Crab's clutch, he jerked a thumb in the direction of the clubhouse in center field.

“You're through for the day,” he snapped, “off the field or I'll nick you for a ten-spot. Beat it!”

McGovern pulled his infielder away and shoved him in the direction indicated. “Don't' be a fool, Bill,” he advised, “you were out a mile.”

The target for a storm of derisive hoots, the Crab made his way sullenly along the fence and into the clubhouse shadows. Not until he had vanished from sight did the last sibilant hiss die out.

McGovern walked back to the Wolves' pit and shot a quick glance at the Smile Girl sitting in her usual place just back of third. All around her, men were laughing at the Crab's discomfiture. She was smiling bravely but even at that distance he was certain that her chin was quivering.

“Sure Thing Row” settled back contentedly and winked. The Crab and his bludgeon had been eliminated from the crucial game of the series.

The Wolves lost by one run
.

On the last day of June, just before the club left for another long swing around the circle, Rube Ferguson encountered little Patterson in front of the clubhouse. He drew the midget aside and handed him a twenty-dollar bill.

“Much obliged,” acknowledged Pee-wee, “what's the idea?”

“The Crab's wife has left him.”

“No!”

“Yes. She's been gone three days. She told my wife he came home and beefed because she was sewing something, and she said she could stand his crabbing about everything else but
that
.”

The second baseman looked incredulous.

“Seems like somebody's got their signals crossed, don't it? Why should that get her goat particularly? What was she sewing?”

The Rube shrugged. “What do women always sew? The money's yours.”

The little infielder's eyes hardened. “I'm clean,” he admitted. “I haven't got a red—but you put that twenty back in your pocket or I'll beat you to death.”

Ferguson nodded his comprehension. “I feel that way about it, too. There's something likable about the Crab but I've never found out what it is. Will he be better or worse now?”

“Does a Crab every change?” asked Pee-wee.

During the next few weeks it seemed as though Patterson's question could admit of but one answer. The Crab drew if anything a little closer into his shell. He was more morose, more savage in the clubhouse and on the diamond. He snarled his refusals when they offered him the usual hand of poker up in Boots Parnell's hotel room. When they left the clubhouse in the afternoons, he disappeared and they did not see him until the next morning. They forbore to question him. The ballplayer's code of ethics does not include the discussion of domestic averages. While he continued to hit and field as he was doing, he was entitled to behave off the diamond in any way he saw fit.

Not until August when the club was in third place and going like a whirlwind, did the Crab give any indication that he missed the slim little figure in the pink dress who used to blow him kisses from the grandstand.

Then, so gradually that they had difficulty in comprehending the process, something under the Crab's shell began to disintegrate.

It was his hitting—that infallible barometer to a ballplayer's condition, that fell off first. Not that the Crab didn't connect just as frequently as ever, but his swings lacked the old driving power. Outfielders who used to back against the fence when he came up, now moved forward and had no trouble getting under the ball. From fourth place in the batting order he was dropped to sixth and then seventh without result. His huge shoulders seemed devitalized.

Next it was his fielding. He fumbled ground balls that ordinarily would have given him no trouble. He was slow on his feet and erratic in his throwing.

Jiggs Peterson, guardian of the right field pasture, called still another deficiency to the attention of the entire club one afternoon when, in a tight game with the Saints, a runner slid safely into third despite a perfect throw from deep right.

“I had that guy nailed by twenty feet,” he complained to the Crab, “and you let him slide into the bag. What's the idea of taking the ball in back of the sack?”

The Crab's only reply was a mumbled, “You peg 'em right and I'll get 'em.”

“Jiggs had called the turn,” whispered Pee-wee, “the Crab is pulling away from the runner's spikes right along. I don't understand it.”

“Nor I,” Ferguson responded, “there was a time when he would have broken Jiggs in two for trying to call him like that.”

The next day the Crab, seated beside his manager in the dugout, turned suddenly to McGovern.

“Brick—I can't find her—it's August and I can't find her.”

McGovern masked his surprise. The Crab's eyes were bloodshot, the lines on his weather-beaten face sunk to unnatural depths. Several times McGovern opened his mouth but the right words did not occur to him.

“I can't find her,” reiterated the Crab dully. “I lost her, and I can't find her.”

McGovern scraped in the soft dirt with his cleats. He spoke as one man to another. “I'm sorry, Bill, I didn't know just how you felt about it.”

The Crab contemplated the palm of a wornout glove. The muscles of his face twitched.

“I thought it was doll clothes she was sewing, Brick—she's such a kid. Honest to God I thought it was doll's clothes. I never knew different until I read her note. Now you know why I
got
to find her.”

The pilot of the four-time pennant winners was again bereft of speech. He nodded slowly.

“She left no address,” continued the third baseman. “She thought I was crabbing at her because—” his voice cracked sharply.

The Wolves came trooping noisily in from across the diamond. Their sorrel-topped pilot threw an arm carelessly around the Crab's shoulders.

“The Smile Girl couldn't hold a grudge against anyone,” he whispered, “you'll hear from her one of these days. Why, man, any one could see she was nuts about you!”

The Crab's fingers closed on his leader's arm with a grip that made McGovern wince.

“You think so, Brick—on the level?”

“On the level, Bill.”

That afternoon the Crab got two hits, the first he had negotiated in a week, but as the fifteenth of August approached, he slumped again, and McGovern benched him and made three unsuccessful attempts to bolster up the one weak spot in his infield. But good third basemen are not lying around loose in the middle of August. The Crab at his worst was better than the newcomers and McGovern put him back in the fray. Two of three major league scouts who had been attracted by the Crab's hitting and who had lingered in the hope that he would emerge from his slump, packed their grips and went elsewhere. The third man was a product of the school of McGraw. He studied the Crab through half-closed eyelids and—stayed.

With seven weeks of the season still unplayed, the Wolves returned from a southern trip in second place. The fine lines of worry between McGovern's eyes deepened. He caught himself watching the apathetic figure of the Crab and praying that the third baseman would regain just a little of his old fighting spirit.

And then one afternoon just before the umpire called the Wolves and Tigers together for the opening game of the week, Rube Ferguson, idol of the right field bleachers, tossed a number of neatly folded newspapers into the pit.

“Compliments of ‘Pebble Pop,' champion groundkeeper of the world,” he told them, “pipe the write-up they gave the old boy.”

The Crab opened his paper listlessly, glanced over the tribute to the veteran caretaker, and permitted the pages to slip to the concrete floor of the dugout. He was in the act of thrusting the paper aside with his cleats, when his eye caught a single word in blackface type up near the top of the column on the reverse side of the sporting page. It was his own name. Hypnotically, he picked up the page and capitals burned themselves into his brain.

A sharp ejaculation caused McGovern to look up. The Crab's teeth were chattering.

“What's wrong?”

“N-n-nothing,” stammered the Crab. The paper rustled from his nerveless hands. He straightened up, looked around wildly and then walked up and out of the pit—straight as a chalk line to the exit back of first base. With the entire team watching him, open-mouthed, the Crab wrenched savagely at the gate. A special officer drew the bolt, and the third baseman disappeared into the crowd, uniform and all.

Pee-wee Patterson broke the silence.

“I knew it was coming. He's cuckoo. Somebody better follow him.”

But Brick McGovern was scanning the paper that the third baseman had dropped.

“Cuckoo, nothing,” he exclaimed, “the Crab has found his wife!”

They all saw it then—two lines of agate type that began: “
Crowley
—“

The paper was eight days old.

A sorrel-topped Irishman with a fighting face, but rather too generous about the middle for perfect condition, plodded up the steps of St. Joseph's Hospital at dusk. One hand grasped a bouquet of pink roses.

“Ah, yes,” said the little woman in the office, “second floor of the Annex—Room 41.”

McGovern located the room and tapped gently on the white door.

“Come in,” chirped a voice.

The pilot of the Wolves turned the knob dubiously and peered into the room.

The Smile Girl was sitting up in bed. Her eyes were bright with the look that comes to a woman who has borne her mate his first man-child. She beckoned to McGovern and then held a pink finger to her lips.

“S-sh!” she whispered, “look!”

In an armchair facing the window and away from the door, McGovern made out a familiar figure, still in uniform. It was rocking gently back and forth, cleats tapping on the linoleum-covered floor, and as it rocked it sang most unmusically to a rose-colored bundle held awkwardly over one shoulder: