The Great American Novel (12 page)

STUFF OUR LEAGUE!

“Mike, it would blacken forever the name of baseball.”

STUFF BASEBALL!

Here General Oakhart rose in anger—“It is a man who has lost his sense of values entirely, who could write those two words on a blackboard! Put that boy in jail, and, I promise you, you will have another Sacco and Vanzetti on your hands. You will make a martyr of Gamesh, and in the process ruin the very thing we all love.”

HATE! wrote Mike, HATE! And on and on, filling the board with the four-letter word, then rubbing it clean with his rag, then filling it to the edges, again and again.

On and on and on.

Fortunately the crazed Masterson got nowhere with the D.A.—General Oakhart saw to that, as did the owners of the Greenbacks and the Tycoons. All they needed was Gil Gamesh tried for attempted murder in Tri-City, for baseball to be killed for good in that town. Sooner or later, Gamesh would be forgotten, and the Patriot League would return to normal …

Wishful thinking. Gamesh, behind the wheel of his Packard, and still in his baseball togs, disappeared from sight only minutes after leaving the postgame investigation in the General's office. To the reporters who clung to the running board, begging him to make a statement about his banishment, about Oakhart, about baseball, about anything, he had but five words to say, one of which could not even be printed in the papers: “I'll be back, you ———!” and the Packard roared away. But the next morning, on a back road near Binghamton, New York, the car was found overturned and burned out—and no rookie sensation to be seen anywhere. Either the charred body had been snatched by ghoulish fans, or he had walked away from the wreck intact.

GIL KILLED? the headlines asked, even as the stories came in from people claiming to have seen Gamesh riding the rails in Indiana, selling apples in Oklahoma City, or waiting in a soup line in L.A. A sign appeared in a saloon in Orlando, Florida, that read GIL TENDING BAR HERE, and hanging beside it in the window was a white uniform with a green numeral, 19—purportedly Gil's very own baseball suit. For a day and a night the place did a bang-up business, and then the sallow, sullen, skinny boy who called himself Gil Gamesh took off with the contents of the register. Within the month, every bar in the South had one of those signs printed up and one of those uniforms, with 19 sewed on it, hanging up beside it in the window for a gag. Outside opera houses, kids scrawled, GIL SINGING GRAND OPERA HERE TONIGHT. On trolley cars it was GIL TAKING TICKETS INSIDE. On barn doors, on school buildings, in rest rooms around the nation, the broken-hearted and the raffish wrote, I'LL BE BACK, G.G. His name, his initials, his number were everywhere.

Adolf Hitler, Franklin Roosevelt, Gil Gamesh. In the winter of '33–'34, men and women and even little children, worried for the future of America, were talking about one or another, if not all three. What was the world coming to? What catastrophe would befall our country next?

The second deplorable exception to the honorable record of the Patriot League was followed by the third in the summer of 1934, when it was discovered that the keystone combination that had played so flawlessly behind Gamesh the year before had been receiving free sex from Tattoo Street prostitutes all season long, in exchange for bobbling grounders, giving up on liners, and throwing wide of the first-base bag. Olaf and Foresti, both married men with children, and one of the smoothest double-play duos in the business, were caught one night in a hotel room performing what at first glance looked like a trapeze act with four floozies—caught by the Old Philosopher himself—and the whole sordid story was there for all to read in the morning papers. They hadn't even taken money from the gamblers, money that at least could have bought shoes for their kiddies; no, they took their payoff in raw sex, which was of use to nobody in the world but their own selfish selves. How low could you get! By comparison the corrupt Black Sox of 1919 fame looked like choirboys. Inevitably the Greenbacks became known as “the Whore House Gang” and fell from third on the Fourth of July to last in the league by Labor Day.

And whom did the fans blame? The whoremongers themselves? Oh no, it was the General's fault. Banishing Gil Gamesh, he had broken the morale of Olaf and Foresti! Apparently he was supposed to go ask their forgiveness, instead of doing as he did, and sending the profligates to the showers for life.

And that wasn't the end of it: panic-stricken, the Greenback owners instantly put the franchise on the market, and sold it for a song to the only buyer they could find—a fat little Jew with an accent you could cut with a knife. And, to hear the fans tell it, that was General Oakhart's fault too!

And Mike the Mouth? He went from bad to worse and eventually took to traveling the league with a blackboard on his back, setting himself up at the entrance to the bleachers to plead his hopeless cause with the fans. Kids either teased him, or looked on in awe at the ghostly ump, powdered white from the dozen sticks of chalk that he would grind to dust in a single day. Most adults ignored him, either fearing or pitying the madman, but those who remembered Gil Gamesh—and they were legion, particularly in the bleachers—told the once-great umpire to go jump in a lake, and worse.

BUT I COULD NOT CALL WHAT I DID NOT SEE!

“You couldn't a-seed it anyway, you blind bat!”

NONSENSE! I WAS TWENTY-TWENTY IN BOTH EYES ALL MY LIFE! I HAD THE BEST VISION IN BASEBALL!

“You had it in for the kid, Masterson—you persecuted him to death right from the start!”

TO THE CONTRARY, HE PERSECUTED ME!

“You desoived it!”

HOW DARE YOU! WHY DID I OF ALL UMPIRES DESERVE SUCH INSULT AND ABUSE?

“Because you wuz a lousy ump, Mike. You wuz a busher all your life.”

WHERE IS YOUR EVIDENCE FOR THAT SLANDEROUS REMARK?

“Common knowledge is my evidence. The whole world knows. Even my little boy, who don't know nothin', knows that. Hey, Johnny, come here—who is the worst ump who ever lived? Tell this creep.”

“Mike the Mouth! Mike the Mouth!”

NONSENSE! SLANDER! LIES! I DEMAND JUSTICE, ONCE AND FOR ALL!

“Well, you're gettin' it, slow but sure. See ya, Mouth.”

*   *   *

When General Oakhart was advised in January of '43 that the Mundy brothers had reached an agreement with the War Department to lease their ball park to the government as an embarkation camp, he knew right off that it was not an overflow of patriotic emotion that had drawn those boys into the deal. They were getting out while the getting was good—while the getting was
phenomenal.
After all, if the fortunes of the Patriot League had been on the wane ever since the expulsion of Gamesh, they surely couldn't be expected to improve with a world war on. In the year since Pearl Harbor, the draft had cut deep into the player rosters, and by the time the '43 season began, the quality of major league baseball was bound to be at its all-time low. With untried youngsters and decrepit old-timers struggling through nine innings on the diamond, attendance would fall even further than it had in the previous decade, with the result that two or even three P. League teams might just have to shut down for the duration. And with that, who was to say whether the whole enterprise might not collapse?… So, it was to guard against this disastrous contingency (and convert it into a bonanza) that the Mundy brothers had leased their beautiful old ball park to the federal government to the tune of fifty thousand dollars a month, twelve months a year.

The Mundy brothers had inherited the Port Ruppert franchise from their illustrious dad, the legendary Glorious Mundy, without inheriting any of that titan's profound reverence for the game. Right down to the old man's ninety-second year, sportswriters who in his opinion hadn't sufficient love and loyalty for the sport were wise to keep their distance, for Glorious Mundy was known on occasion to take a swing at a man for treating baseball as less than the national religion. He was a big man, with bushy black eyebrows that the cartoonists adored, and he could just glare you into agreement, if not downright obedience. When he died, they buried him according to his own instructions in deep center field, four hundred eighty-five feet from home plate, beneath a simple headstone whose inscription gave silent testimony to the humility of a man whose eyebrows alone would have earned him the reputation of a giant.

GLORIOUS MUNDY

1839–1931

He had something to do with

changing Luke Gofannon from

a pitcher into a center-fielder

It was clear from the outset that to his heirs baseball was a business, to be run like the Mundy confectionary plant, the Mundy peanut plantations, the Mundy cattle ranches, and the Mundy citrus farms, all of which had been their domain while Glorious was living and devoting himself entirely in his later years to the baseball team. The very morning after their father had died of old age in his box behind first, the two sons began to sell off, one after another, the great stars of the championship teams of the late twenties—for straight cash, like so many slaves, to the highest bidder. The Depression, don't you know … they were feeling the pinch, don't you know … between excursions with their socialite wives to Palm Beach and Biarritz!

In 1932, when they took one hundred thousand dollars from the Terra Incognita Rustlers for the greatest Mundy of them all, Luke “the Loner” Gofannon, a tide of anger and resentment swept through Port Ruppert that culminated in a march all the way down Broad Street by thousands of school-kids wearing black armbands that had been issued to them at City Hall. The parade was led by Boss Stuvwxyz (and organized by his henchmen), but somewhere around Choco-Chew Street (named for the Mundy candy bar), somebody remembered to give Stuvwxyz his cut, and so he was not present when the police broke up the rally just before it reached the ball park.

Luke the Loner—gone! The iron man who came up in 1916 as a kid pitcher, and then played over two thousand games in center field for the Ruppert club, scored close to fifteen hundred runs for them, and owned a lifetime batting average of .372—the fella who
was
the Mundys to three generations of Rupe-it rootas! Unlike Cobb or Ruth, Luke was a silent, colorless man as far as personality went, but that did not make him less of a hero to his fans. They argued that actually he could beat you more ways than Ruth, because he could run and steal as well as hit the long one; and he could beat you more ways than Cobb, because he could hit the long one as well as drive you crazy on the base paths and race around that center-field pasture as though it weren't any bigger than a shoebox. Oh, he was fast! And what a sight at bat! In his prime, they'd give him a hand just for striking out, that's how beautiful he was, and how revered. Luke kept a book on every pitcher in the business and he studied it religiously at night before putting out his light at 9
P.M.
And as he said—on one of the few occasions in his career that he said anything—he loved the game so much, he'd have played without pay. Surprising thing was that the Mundy brothers didn't take him up on that, instead of selling his carcass for a mere hundred grand.

In their defense, the Mundy boys claimed that they were only getting the best possible price for players who hadn't more than another good season or two left in their bones anyway; they were clearing out dead wood, said they, to make way for a new Golden Era. Well, as it turned out, not a single one of the seven former Mundy greats for whom old Glorious's heirs collected a cool half a million ever did amount to much once they left Port Ruppert, but whether it was due to advancing age, as the Mundy brothers maintained, or to the shock of being turned out of the park to which they had brought such fame and glory, is a matter of opinion.

Luke the Loner didn't even make it through one whole season as a Rustler. By August of '32 he already had broken the league record for strike-outs—strike-outs they weren't applauding him for either—and he who was reputed never to have thrown to a wrong base in his life, had the infielders scratching their heads because of his bizarre pegs from center. It seemed that shy, silent Luke, whom everybody had thought didn't need much company outside of his thirty-eight-ounce bat, “the Magic Wand,” was just lost out there in the arid southwest, hopelessly homesick for the seaside park where he had played two thousand games in the Ruppert scarlet and white. Inevitably, the fans began to ride him—“Hey, Strike-out King! Hey, Hundred Thousand Dollar Dodo!” As the season wore on they called him just about everything under the sun—and the sun itself is no joke in Wyoming—and though he plugged along like the great iron man that he was, his average finally slipped to an even .100. “A thousand bucks a point, Gofannon—not bad for two hours a day!” He was on his way to the plate—in danger of slipping to a two-figure batting average—when the Rustler manager, believing that enough suffering was enough, and that the time had come to cut everybody's losses, stepped to the foot of the dugout, and called in a voice more compassionate than any Luke had heard all year, “What do you say, old-timer, come on out and take a rest,” and a pinch-hitter was sent up in his place.

A week later he was back in New Jersey on his cranberry farm. The legislature of the state, in special session, voted him New Jersey license plate 372 in commemoration of his lifetime batting average. People would look for that license plate coming along the road down there in Jersey, and they'd just applaud when it came by. And Luke would tip his hat. And that's how he died that winter. To acknowledge the cheers from an oncoming school bus—boys and girls hanging from every window, screaming, “It's him! It's Luke!”—the sweetest, shyest ballplayer who ever hit a homer, momentarily took his famous hands from the wheel and his famous eyes from the road, and shot off the slick highway into the Raritan River. That so modest a man should die because of his fame was only one of the dozens of tragic ironies that the sportswriters pointed up in the mishap that took Luke's life at the age of thirty-six.