The Great American Novel (19 page)

“Oh, son, what are we going to do with you, and this unquenchable thirst for fame and glory?”

“Trade me! Trade me away from these freaks and these oddballs! Daddy, they ain't even got a home park that's their own—what kind of major league ball club is that?”

“You mean for the great Roland Agni to be playing with?”

“For
anybody
to be playin' with—but me especially! Daddy, I am leading the league in batting in my rookie year! There's been nobody like me since Joe DiMaggio, and he was twenty-two!”

“And yet you're 4F. Doesn't that mean anything to you at all?”

“No! No! Nothin' means
nothin'
anymore!”

*   *   *

“Batting in ninth position and pitching for the Ruppert Mundys…”

The Mundy council of elders: starters Tuminikar, Buchis, Volos, and Demeter; relievers Pollux, Mertzeger, and the tiny Mexican right-hander, Chico Mecoatl—every last one of them flabby in the middle, arthritic in the shoulder, bald on the top. “The hairless wonders,” said Jolly Cholly Tuminikar, who had discovered the fine art of self-effacement following the tragedy that destroyed his confidence and his career, “and a good thing too. Ain't a one of us could raise his arm to comb his hairs if he had any. Why, if I go three innings on a windy day, I got to use my other hand the next morning to wipe myself. Don't print that, Smitty, but it's the truth.” Yes, has-beens, might-have-beens, should-have-beens, would-have-beens, never-weres and never-will-bes, Tuminikar and his venerable cohorts managed nonetheless to somehow get the ball the sixty feet and six inches to the plate, which was all the rule book required of them. The ball, to be sure, occasionally arrived on a bounce, or moved so slowly and with so little English on it that the patrons back of home plate would pretend to be reading General Oakhart's signature off the horsehide all the while the pitch was in transit. “What time you say she's due in?” they'd ask, holding up their pocket watches, and on and on, comically, in that vein. There was even one of them, Chico Mecoatl, who on occasion tossed the ball in
underhand.
“How about if he fungoes 'em, Chico, then you won't have to throw at all!” the sadistic hecklers called, heedless of the pain that caused Chico to resort sometimes to a style of pitching that had not been the custom now in baseball since the days of the buffalo and the Indian.

The fans who needled the wretched Mexican were not so plentiful actually as their vociferousness might make it appear. Most people seemed to find it eerie, rather than amusing or irritating, to watch him work in relief. Invariably it was dusk when Chico, the last bald man in the bullpen, would trudge across the darkening field to pitch for the Mundys, already brutally beaten with an inning or two of punishment still to come. By this hour, the hometown fans, filled to the gills on all the slugging they'd seen, would have begun to leave their seats, tugging their collars up against the cool breeze and smiling when they peered for a final time out at the scoreboard to what looked now like the score of a football game. Two, three touchdowns for the home team; a field goal for the visitors, if that … So, they would converge upon the exits, a swarm of big two-fisted creatures as drowsy with contentment as the babe whose face has dropped in bloated bliss from the sugary nipple. Ah, victory. Ah, triumph. How it does mellow the bearded sex! What are the consolations of philosophy or the affirmations of religion beside an afternoon's rich meal of doubles, triples, and home runs?… But then came Chico out to the mound, and made that little yelp of his as he tossed his single warm-up pitch in the general direction of Hothead's mitt, that little bleat of pain that passed from between his lips whenever he had to raise his arm above his waist to throw the ball. The fans, clustered now in the dark apertures that opened on to the ramps leading down to the city streets, would swing around upon hearing Chico's bleat, one head craning above the other, to try to catch a glimpse of the pitcher with the sorest arm in the game. For there was no one who had a motion quite like Chico's: in order to release the ball with a minimal amount of suffering, he did not so much throw it as push it, with a wiggling sort of straight-arm motion. It looked as though he might be trying to pass his hand through a hoop of flames without getting it burned—and it sounded as though he wasn't quite able to make it. “Eeeep!” he would cry, and there would be the ball, floating softly through the dusk at its own sweet pace, and then the solid retort of the bat, and all the base runners scampering for home.

Probably the fans themselves could not have explained what exactly it was that held them there sometimes five and ten minutes on end watching Chico suffer so. It was not pity—Chico could quit and go back to Mexico if he wanted, and do down there whatever it was Mexicans did. Nor was it affection; he was, after all, a spic, closer even to a nigger than the Frenchman, Astarte. Nor was it amusement, for after three hours of watching the Mundys on what even for them was an off day, you didn't have the strength to laugh anymore. It would seem rather that they were transfixed, perhaps for the first time in their lives, by the strangeness of things, the wondrous strangeness of things, by all that is beyond the pale and just does not seem to belong in this otherwise cozy and familiar world of ours. With the sun all but down and the far corners of the stadium vanishing, that noise he made might have originated in the swaying jungle foliage or in some dark pocket of the moon for the sense of fear and wonder that it awakened in men who only a moment earlier had been anticipating their slippers and their favorite chair, a bottle of beer and the lovely memories they would have forever after of all those runners they'd seen galloping around third that afternoon. “Hear it?” a father whispered to his young son. “Uh-huh,” said the little boy, shifting on his little stick legs. “Hear that? It can give you the goose bumps. Chico Mecoatl—you can tell your grandchildren you heard him make that noise.
Hear
it?” “Oh, Poppy, let's go.”

So home they went (home, to their homes!), leaving Chico, who hardly ever got anybody out anymore, to fill the bases two times over, and the relentless home team to clear them two times over, before, mercifully, the sun set, the field disappeared, and the disaster being played out now for the sake of no one, was called on account of darkness.

3

IN THE WILDERNESS

 

 

 

3

Containing a description of how it is to have your home away from home instead of having it
at
home like everybody else. Mister Fairsmith informs the team of the moral and spiritual benefits that can accrue from wretchedness. With predictable cynicism, Big John elucidates the advantages of homelessness. Frenchy forgets where he is. An insinuating incident in which a man dressed like a woman takes the field against the Mundys. A lively digression on the Negro Patriot League, the famous owner of the league, and a brief description of some fans, containing a scene which will surprise many who believe Branch Rickey the first major league owner courageous enough to invite colored players into organized baseball. The Mundys arouse the maternal instinct in three Kakoola spinsters and succumb to their wiles with no fight at all. Big John and Nickname visit the pink-'n-blue-light district, wherein Nickname gets what he is looking for, thus concluding the visit to Kakoola, in which city the Mundys will suffer more than the humiliation of their manliness before the downfall is complete. The Mundys are followed on a swing around the league and the particular manner in which they are intimidated in each of the league cities is described, including the train ride in and out of Port Ruppert, which, though short, may draw tears from some eyes. A victory for the Mundys in Asylum turns into another defeat, containing, for the curious, a somewhat detailed account of baseball as it is played by the mad. In this chapter the fortunate reader who has never felt himself a stranger in his own land, may pick up some idea of what it is like.

 

S
WINGING AROUND THE LEAGUE
for the first time in 1943, the Mundys were honored on the day of their arrival in each of the six P. League cities with a parade down the main commercial thoroughfare and a pregame ceremony welcoming them to the ball park. Because of war shortages, the vehicle which picked them up at the train station was, as often as not, borrowed for the hour from the municipal sanitation department. The twenty-five Mundys, having changed into their gray “away” uniforms on the train, and carrying their street clothes in suitcases or paper bags, would climb aboard to be driven from the station down the boulevard to their hotel, while over the loudspeaker fixed to the truck came the voice and guitar of Gene Autry doing his rendition of “Home on the Range.” The record had been selected by General Oakhart's secretary, not only because the words to the song seemed to her appropriate to the occasion, but because it was reputed to be President Roosevelt's very own favorite, and would thus strengthen the idea that the fate of the Mundys and of the republic were inextricably bound together. Weary to death of the whole sordid affair, General Oakhart consented, for all that he would have been happier with something time-honored and to the point like “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”

Though it had been hoped that people in the streets would join in singing, most of the pedestrians did not even seem to realize what was going on when a city garbage truck drove past bearing the team that had finished last in the league the previous year. Of course, the tots out shopping with their mothers grew excited at the sound of approaching music, expecting, in their innocence, that they were about to see Santa or the Easter bunny; but excitement quickly faded and in some instances even turned to fear when the truck appeared, jammed full of men, most of them old and bald, waving their baseball caps around in the air, and singing, each in his own fashion—

Oh, give me a home where the buffalo roam,

Where the deer and the antelope play,

Where seldom is heard a discouraging word,

And the skies are not cloudy all day.

Judging from the racket they made, it couldn't be said that the Mundys were unwilling to give it the old college try, at least at the outset. Obviously a refuse van (as Mister Fairsmith preferred to call it) was not their idea of splendor anymore than it is yours or mine; still, scrubbed clean, more or less, and tricked up with red, white, and blue bunting, it was not really as bad as Hothead could make it sound when he started in, as per usual, being outraged. “Why, it looks to me like they are carting us off to the city dump! It looks to me as if they are about to flush us down the bowl!” cried Hot. “It looks to me like a violation of the worst sort there is of our inalienable human rights such as are guaranteed in the Declaration of Independence to all men
including Ruppert Mundys!
”

Yet, as the Mundys knew better than anyone in the game, there was a war on, and you had to make do with the makeshift for a while. It just did not help to complain. And hopefully, said Jolly Cholly T., hopefully the more they sacrificed, the sooner the war would be over and they would be home—and not home on the range either, but back in New Jersey, where they had been beloved and where they belonged.

Around the league the city officials were of course free to welcome the Mundys with a speech of their own composition; invariably, however, they chose to follow to the letter the text that had been composed for the pregame ceremony by General Oakhart's office, which also supplied the papier-mâché “key to the city” that was awarded at home plate to Mister Fairsmith, in behalf of the local fans. “Welcome Ruppert Mundys,” the speech began, “welcome to ———, your home away from home!” Here the word “PAUSE” appeared in the prepared speech, capitalized and tucked between parentheses. Though the officials always correctly inserted the name of their fair city in the blank provided, they repeatedly read into the microphone at home plate the parenthetical direction intended to allow time for the fans to rise to their feet to applaud, if they should be so inclined. Fortunately nobody in the ball park ever seemed to notice this error; either they took the word for an electronic vibration coming over the p.a. system, or they weren't paying that much attention to the dronings of the nameless functionary in a double-breasted suit and pointed black shoes who had been dispatched by the mayor to take his place at the ceremonies. All the fans cared about was the ball game, and seeing the Mundys clobbered by the hometown boys. The Mundys, on the other hand, had become so accustomed to the ritual, that when, midway through the first road trip, a Kakoola city official neglected to make “PAUSE” the twelfth word in his welcoming speech, a contingent of disgruntled Mundys, led by Hot Ptah, accused the city of Kakoola of deliberately treating them as inferiors because they happened to be a homeless team. In point of fact, by actually pausing in his speech rather than just saying “PAUSE,” Bridge and Tunnel Commissioner Vincent J. Efghi (brother to Boss Efghi, the mayor), had managed to evoke a ripple of applause from the crowd; nothing thunderous, mind you, but at least a response somewhat more sympathetic than the Mundys had received in those cities where the address was delivered by the local ward heeler, parenthetical instructions and all.