Authors: Peter Abrahams
“Congratulations, Figgy,” he said. “And continued success in your new endeavors.”
He released Figgy’s damp hand.
“That’s really nice of you, Gil,” Figgy said. He lowered his voice: “Don’t think I’ve forgotten that money.”
That’s what he’d picked to feel ashamed about. “Money?” said Gil.
Figgy lowered his voice some more. “That money I owe you.”
Gil laughed, a new laugh that went nicely with his new smile. “Forget it. What’s fifty bucks between amigos? Buy a little something for old Bridgid out there. Be a sport.”
Then he turned and walked out, past Garrity who was hovering over Bridgid, still crying at her desk, and down to the street. Out. Free.
He got into the 325i, started it, drove a few blocks before the scraping sound bothered him. He stopped in the middle of the street, walked around to the back of the car. There was a big dent behind the left-rear wheel, and the tailpipe was dragging. He bent down and tore it off. The muffler came with it. Then he overcame an impulse to tear the whole car apart right there, piece by piece; and drove to Cleats.
Gil ordered a draft with a shot of Jose Cuervo Gold on the side.
“Your son enjoy the game?” Leon said, setting the drinks on the bar.
Gil looked at him.
“Richie. That’s his name, isn’t it?”
“How did you know that?”
“You’ve mentioned it a few times,” said Leon, his voice rising a little in surprise.
Ease up, Gil said to himself. Leon was a pal, right? He smiled at Leon, hoping it was his old smile, not the new one, but unsure. “Yeah, he enjoyed it. What kid wouldn’t?”
“Opening Day,” said Leon. “Some game.”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe you were right about Rayburn.”
“I was?”
“Hard to argue with a poke like that.” Leon drew someone a pint.
The
Globe
sports section lay on the bar. Gil picked it up and started reading. He read about the grand slam, hunted up all the details of the game, studied the box score, then all the box scores; downed the beer and the shot, ordered another round. Feeling pretty good now, and, yes, even optimistic. Of course he’d been right about Rayburn. He knew the game, knew the team, knew the man. He checked his red-and-black tie in the mirror behind the bar. Nice.
Then he came to a sidebar on Bobby Rayburn—“Paying Early Dividends”—that included the breakdown of his contract. Gil went over them—$2.5 million signing bonus, $5.05 million the first year, $5.45 million the next, $5.85 million the year after that, $6.05 million in the option year, the separate $1 million deferred-payment fund. The reporter estimated Rayburn’s endorsement income at $750,000 a year. Well, why not? One swing of the bat. He was going to take them all the way, as Gil had foreseen. He tore out the article, folded it, and put it in his wallet.
A few minutes later he took it out to read again the part about the deferred payments. They began in 2007, $50,000 a year for as long as he lived. That was the part Gil liked best of all: Rayburn knew right now where his money was coming from in 2007. Gil didn’t know where his money was coming from next week. He examined his face in the mirror for signs of optimism. It was dark and swollen, as though gorged with blood.
He had one more round. His pants were almost dry.
“Guess who stopped in last night?” Leon said.
“Figgy.”
“Yeah, Figgy was here. With that girlfriend of his. Drinking champagne. But that’s not who I meant.”
“Who did you mean?”
“Ball players. They usually go to Bluebeard’s. Maybe they’re going to start coming here—I know they liked the buffalo wings. I brought them two helpings each.”
“What ball players?”
“Primo. Sanchez. Zamora. Couple of others.”
“Where’d they sit?”
Leon pointed to a table in the back alcove, under the autographed Louisville Sluggers of Aaron and Mays, crossed like a device on a medieval shield.
“What were they talking about?”
Leon shrugged. “They spoke Spanish.” He thought. “Is there some guy called Onsay in baseball?”
“Not that I’ve heard of.”
“They kept joking about him.”
“What do you mean?”
“Primo’d say
Onsay
, and the others would crack up.”
“Got the encyclopedia?”
Leon pulled the
Baseball Encyclopedia
from under the bar. There was no one between Manuel Dominguez “Curly” Onis, who’d gone to the plate once for the 1935 Brooklyn Dodgers and singled, and Edward Joseph Onslow, who’d hit .232 in 207 at bats spread over four years between 1912 and 1927.
Gil returned to Curly Onis’s meager line. “What’s
The Crying Game?
” he said.
“Some movie.”
“About baseball?”
“I don’t think so,” Leon replied. He ran his finger down the page. “Maybe Onsay’s a rookie.”
“I’d have heard of him,” Gil said. He had a hit of tequila, drained his beer, and was considering another round or two, just to sit at the bar, poring over the small print, when Leon said:
“Day off?”
“Naw.” That ruined it. Gil closed the book and asked for his bill.
“That’s okay,” Leon said.
“What’s okay?”
“This one’s on the house.”
Meaning that Leon knew what Figgy’d been celebrating.
Gil drove north, out of the city, into the mountains. At first the car smelled of the ammonia soap he’d scrubbed it with in the middle of the night; later, with the heat on, he detected pissy smells. Everything was brown, except for the artificial snow on the trails of the ski resorts. Gil listened to the ball game, heard them lose three-zip, with Rayburn going 0 for 4. Meant nothing. After, on the JOC, a caller wondered about Rayburn’s rib cage and Bernie said the story had been blown out of proportion, Rayburn was fine, and Burrows had handled it fine.
“Bullshit,” Gil said; and then, at the top of his lungs, all alone in the car, “Bullshit.” Burrows had jeopardized Rayburn’s career and the team’s entire season, and the media were covering it up. The rib cage was obviously killing Rayburn—why else would he have been short with him in front of the dugout? He called the JOC to blast Bernie, but couldn’t get through.
Gil left the interstate, followed secondary roads. From time to time he stopped for a drink, the last one in a crummy sports bar—nothing like Cleats—in a crummy town.
It was dark, and Gil hadn’t eaten. Sitting at the bar, he drank a beer and a shot while he looked at the menu. Then he ordered another beer and another shot.
“And something to eat?”
Gil shook his head.
Sometime later, he found that this bar too had a copy of the
Baseball Encyclopedia
. Gil, hunched alone in the far corner of the bar, lost himself in it.
Much later, he looked up Onsay again. Then Boucicaut. And Claymore. And himself. Renard, Gilbert Marcel. None of them were there. He left at closing time, walking out to
a cold and silent street. Main Street, he saw, in his old hometown.
T
he night was black and full of stars, the air cold and quiet, Gil’s breathing and footsteps the only sound. He walked down Main Street to the last arc light, past darkened shops, some boarded up, and took a left on Spring. Drunk, yes, but he’d been drunk in his old hometown before, long ago, as a teenager, when the town was bigger and being drunk on a cold black night like this meant feeling huge and light and full of possibility, almost as though you could take flight into that twinkling sky. Now he felt nothing except the woods, invisible in the night, but cinched tight all around the town. The town had stayed the same, even shrunk, but the trees had grown.
Gil came to the path at the end of Spring Street. A wooden sign arched overhead. The lettering, once gilt, was barely readable:
AMVETS MEMORIAL FIELD, 1951
. Ahead loomed the high shadow of the announcing booth, the baser shadow of the concession stand, and the chain-link perimeter fence, glinting here and there with starlight. Gil climbed it, and dropped down to the cold wet grass on the other side.
He made his way to home plate, rubbed it with the toe of his city shoe: a tasseled loafer, actually. Tasseled loafers had been on a list recommended by Cincinnati. The crushed-stone base paths seemed luminous to Gil, a hollow diamond in the darkness. He walked to first, or where first would be had the bags been in place, slowly; rounded it, stumbling just a little, and continued on to second and third, even slower now, barely dragging one foot in front of the
other by the time he reached home. There was no internal soundtrack of cheering and yelling, or any of that shit: he’d seen all those stupid movies. All he heard was his own breath, sibilant between his lips, rasping in his throat.
“No appealing,” he said aloud, and stamped on the plate, dead center: safe. Then, picking up his pace, he crossed to the home-team dugout, a simple cement-block bunker with a flat roof, and sat on the concrete bench. He stared out at the pitching mound, a pale, negligible hump.
Later, feeling the cold, he pulled his suit jacket around him and curled up on the bench, facing the dugout wall, hands between his knees. He closed his eyes, or they closed themselves; he fell asleep, or he passed out.
Richard Renard left St. Jeanne d’Arc Hospital the morning of the deciding game of the Series. Didn’t sign himself out or consult anyone: simply waited until after rounds and rose from his bed on the ward. He put on some clothes from his locker, then sat on the bed and rested for a while. After that, not wanting to risk being spotted on the elevator, he took the stairs to ground level, resting on every landing, and a few times in between.
He found his car in the parking lot out back, unlocked it, got in, rested. Then he drove a hundred and fifty miles to the ballpark. Game time was 1:00
P.M
. The dashboard clock read 12:57 when he arrived. He rested for three minutes, then tried to leave the car. That involved twisting his torso, raising the door handle, climbing out. The twisting and raising went fine, but not the climbing. He had never before realized the role legs played in getting out of a car. He’d never had to: all his life, he’d had powerful legs. Now they couldn’t even lift him off the car seat.
Richard Renard sat in his car outside the ballpark. He rolled down the window, he had the strength for that, and listened to the sounds of the game: cheering, shouting, crack of bat on ball, thump of ball in mitt; a thump slightly deeper in tone indicating when his son was on the mound, or so he imagined. He thought of honking the horn for help, but at first
couldn’t bring himself to do it. By the time he’d convinced himself otherwise, the physical capability was gone. The ball game and its thumping, cracking sounds began to distance themselves from him, slipping farther and farther away.
Gil was thirsty. His arm ached. Those were distractions he had to ignore. Two more distractions were the crowd, on its feet and roaring, and the runners on second and third, dancing off the bags. Tunnel vision, his father said: a pitcher needs tunnel vision. Gil peered down the tunnel at Bouchard, the Yankee cleanup hitter poised at the plate, big as a man. Bottom of the ninth, two out, two on, and up one to nothing, on Gil’s home run in the top of the inning.
First pitch a ball way outside, almost getting by Boucicaut. Boucicaut came out for a talk.
“Maybe we should walk him,” Gil said.
“Fuck that,” said Boucicaut. “If you want to put him on, at least hit him in the head.”
Boucicaut spat right through his mask and returned to his position. He called for the curve. Gil, wincing even before the pain, threw it in the dirt. The runner on third came halfway down the line. Boucicaut bluffed him back.
Boucicaut crouched, gave the sign. Fastball. Bouchard watched it go by. It looked good to Gil. “Ball three,” said the umpire.
Three and oh. Bouchard would be taking all the way, right? Boucicaut signaled another fastball. Gil wound up and threw, a medium-speed fastball, right down the pipe; and realized as he let go that Bouchard wasn’t taking.
Bouchard uncoiled and got it all, a low screamer right at Claymore between second and third. The ball hit him in the chest, making him cry out and knocking him down, then fell motionless on the base path beside him. Claymore, on his back and in tears, picked it up and brushed the leg of the base runner from second as he raced by. The second-base ump stabbed his fist in the air. Game over: the last out of the championship season.
They jumped up and down. They hugged each other
and shouted their heads off. They all got trophies and a handshake from a man in a seersucker suit, and Gil got a special one for being MVP: a brass-plated baseball mounted on a hardwood stand. No one left the field for half an hour or so. That’s when they found Gil’s father’s body, cold and gray, slumped in the front seat of his old Chevy on Spring Street.
Gil, wearing his stand-up red-and-black tie and the shirt and suit so recently unwrapped from dry-cleaner’s plastic, awoke on the dugout bench, shivering. It was still night, but the moon had risen; frost silvered the grass all the way to the outfield fence. Stiff with cold, Gil rose and puked in the corner of the dugout. Nothing but liquid, foul and bitter: what his stomach had done to all the beer and shots. He hadn’t eaten since … he tried to remember when and couldn’t.
Gil climbed the fence, not so easily this time, and got back in his car. He drove back to Main, heater on full blast, and turned up Hill, following it to the northern edge of town where the cemetery separated the last dwelling from the woods. Like many reps with snowy territories, Gil carried a folding shovel in his trunk. He took it now and entered the cemetery.
The town might have been smaller, but the cemetery, like the woods, had grown. The gravestone of Renard, R. G., which had been in the farthest row, with nothing but empty field between it and the trees, now had other stones all around it. Familiar town names: Pease, Laporte, Spofford, Cleary, Bouchard. Gil read them in the moonlight. It took him some time to locate Renard, R. G.
The lawyer who’d executed the will had sold the Chevy to pay for the stone: marble-faced and round-topped, a little nicer than some of those around it, but not very big. There was room for no more than the carved name and the dates of birth and death, bracketing an interval that might have represented the average life expectancy in some sub-Saharan country. Gil pushed it over easily.