The Great American Novel (20 page)

After the game that day, with Hot and his disciples still riled up, Mister Fairsmith decided to hold a meeting in the Mundy locker room, and give the team their first sermon of the season on the subject of suffering; for the first time since they had hit the road, he attempted to instruct them in the Larger Meaning of the experience that had befallen them, and to place their travail within the context of human history and divine intention. He began by reminding them that even as they were playing their baseball games on the road, American boys were bleeding to death in jungles halfway around the globe, and being blown to bits in the vast, uninhabited skies. He told them of the agony of those who had been crushed beneath the boot heel of the enemy, those millions upon millions who had lost not just a home in the world, but all freedom, all dignity, all hope. He told them of the volcanic eruptions that had drowned entire cities in rivers of fire in ancient times, and described to them earthquakes that had opened up beneath the world, delivering everything and everyone there was, like so much mail, into the churning bowels of the earth; then he reminded them of the sufferings of Our Lord. By comparison to such misery as mankind had known since the beginnings of time, what did it matter if the Bridge and Tunnel Commissioner of bridgeless and tunnelless Kakoola had neglected to read even
half
the welcoming speech to the Mundys? Solemn as he could be—and as he daily grew more venerable, that was very solemn indeed—Mister Fairsmith asked what was to become of them in the long hot months ahead, if they could not bear up beneath the tiny burden that they had had to shoulder thus far? What if they should have to partake of such sufferings as was the daily bread of the wretched of the wretched of the earth? “Gentlemen, if it is the Lord's will,” he told them, “that you should wander homeless through this league, then I say leave off disputing with the Lord, and instead seize the opportunity He has thrust upon you to be strong, to be steadfast—to be saved.”

“Horse
shit!
” snorted Hothead, after Mister Fairsmith had passed from the locker room in meaningful silence.

“Ah, forget it, Gimp,” said Big John Baal. “It is only a word they left out of that speech there, you know. I mean it ain't exactly a sawbuck, or even two bits. If it was dough, that would
mean
somethin'. But a word, why it don't mean a thing that I could ever see. A whole speech is just a bunch of words from beginning to end, you know, that didn't fool nobody yet what's got half a brain in his head. Ain't that right, Damur?” he said, tossing his jock in the face of the fourteen-year-old whose guardian and protector he'd become. “A nose by any other name would smell as much sweat, ain't that so,
niño?
You fellers care too much about what folks say. Don't listen is my advice.”

“You don't get it, Baal,” snarled Hot. “You never do. Sure it starts with only a word. But how it ends is with them doin' whatever they damn well please, and kicking all your dreams down the drain.”

“Hot,” said John, leering suggestively, “maybe you is dreamin' about the wrong sort of things.”

“Is justice the wrong thing? Is gettin' your rights like last licks the wrong thing?”

“Aww,” said Big John, “it's only a game, for Christ's sake. I'm tellin' ya: it don't
mean
nothin'.”

“To you nothin' means nothin'.”

“Worryin' over shit like ‘justice' don't, I'll tell you that much. I just do like I want anyway.”

“Justice ain't shit!” Hot told him. “What they are doin' to us ain't
fair!
”

“Well, like Ulysses S. tole you boys, that's
good
for you that it ain't fair. That's gonna make champs out of you, if not in this here season, then in the next. Wait'll next year, boys! Haw! Haw!” Here he took a slug out of the liniment bottle that sat at the bottom of his locker. “You want me to tell you boys somethin'? This bein' homeless is just about the best thing that has ever happened to you, if you only had the sense to know it. What do you care that you don't have a home and the hometown fans that go with it? What the hell is hometown fans but a bunch of dodos who all live in the same place and think that if we win that's good for 'em and if we lose it ain't? And then we ain't none of us from that there town to begin with—why, it could just as easy say PORT SHITHOLE across your uniform as the name of the place you only happen to be in by accident anyway. Ain't that so? Why, I even used to pretend like that's what it did say, years ago, instead of RUPPERT. I'd look down at my shirt and I'd say to myself, ‘Hey, Jawn, ain't you lucky to be playin' for PORT SHITHOLE and the glory of the SHITHOLE fans. Boy, Jawn, you sure do want to do your best and try real hard so you can bring honor to the SHITHOLE name.' You damn fools,” he said, “
you
ain't from Rupe-it! You never was and you never would be, not if you played there a million years. You are just a bunch of baseball players whose asses got bought up by one place instead of the other. Come on, use your damn heads, boys—you were visitors there just like you are visitors here. You are makin' there be a difference where there ain't.”

The Mundys went off to the shower in a silence that bespoke much confusion. First there had been Hothead to tell them that the word dropped from the welcoming speech was only the overture to the slights, insults, and humiliations that were to be visited upon them in the months to come. Then there was Mister Fairsmith to warn them that slights and insults weren't the half of it—they were shortly to begin to partake of the suffering that was the daily bread not just of the wretched of the earth, but of the
wretched
of the wretched. And now Big John informing them that the Rupe-it rootas, for whom they had all begun to long with a feeling more intense than any was even willing to admit, had been some sort of mirage or delusion. Of course, that the son of Spit and the grandson of Base should speak with such contempt for their old hometown hardly came as a surprise to any of his teammates; having been raised in the sordid netherworld of Nicaraguan baseball, he no more knew the meaning of “loyalty” than of “justice” or “pride” or “fair play.” Still, on the heels of Hothead's warning and Mister Fairsmith's apocalyptic prophecy, it was not reassuring to be told that the place to which you longed to return had never been “yours” to begin with.

“Well,” cried Mike Rama, over the noise of the shower, “if we ain't never been from Rupe-it, then the Reapers ain't from Kakoola, either. Or the Rustlers from Terra Inc. Or the Blues from Independence. Or nobody from nowhere!”

“Right!” cried Nickname. “They's as worse off as we is!”

“Only then how come,” said old Kid Heket, toweling himself down, “how come the Kakoolas is here in Kakoola and we ain't there in Rupe-it, or goin' back there all season long? How come instead of headin' back to Jersey, we are off to Independence and then all around the league to here again, and so on and so forth for a hundred and fifty-four games?”

“But what's the difference, Wayne,” said Nickname, who was continually torn between parroting Big John, whose blasphemous nature had a strong hold upon a fourteen-year-old away from home for the first time in his life, and siding as any rookie would with the rest of the players
against
the Mundy renegade—“so what if we ain't goin' back there? It's more fun this way anyway. Stayin' in all them hotels, eatin' hamburgers whenever you want—winkin' at them girls in the lobby! And all them waitresses in them tight white un-ee-forms—wheee!”

“Nickname my lad, soon you will discover that it ain't ‘fun' either way,” said the old-timer, “it's only less confusin', that's all, wakin' up and knowin' where you are instead of where you ain't.”

So, not much happier than when they went off to the shower, they returned to the locker room, there to be confronted by Frenchy, standing fully dressed before his locker, though not in his baggy brown suit and beret. No, the Frenchman was off in never-never land again. Half a dozen times already this season, one or another of the Mundys had come upon Frenchy making faces at himself in the washroom mirror, a grown man in need of a shave doing what little kids do when they want to look like something out of Charlie Chan—jutting his upper teeth out over his lower lip and holding back the flesh at the corner of either eye with an index finger. “Hey!” his teammate would shout, to wake him out of the trance he was in. “Hey, number one son!” and, caught in the traitorous act, Frenchy would run to hide in a toilet stall. What a character! Them foreigners!

But now it was not funny faces he was making in the mirror; no, nothing funny about this at all. There was Frenchy, dressed in the creamy white flannel uniform that none of them had worn all year, the Mundy home uniform, with the faint red chalk stripe and RUPPERT scrawled in scarlet across the chest, the final “t” ending in a flourish nearly as grand as John Hancock's. And what was so sad about it was how splendid he looked. The Mundys were stunned—so accustomed had they become to seeing one another in the drab gray “away” uniforms, they had nearly forgotten how stylish they used to be. No wonder they were beloved by the Rupe-it rootas, even in the worst of times. Just look how they'd looked only the season before!

“Hey, whatcha doin', Frenchman,” asked Jolly Cholly, “kel sort of joke is this anyway, chair ol' pal? Ain't today been rough enough? Aw Christ, somebody, what's the French for knock it off?”

“Geem,” replied Frenchy, whose English was incomprehensible to his teammates, except occasionally to Chico, who would pass on to Big John, the other Spanish-speaking Mundy, what he believed to be the general drift of Frenchy's zees and zoes—“geem zee wan, ooh zee was zow, zen ah geem zee, ah zee ull!” And he began to beat his skull against the door of his locker.

As best anyone could figure, coming back into the empty locker room from the shower, Frenchy had momentarily forgotten where he was, and begun to dress as though for the second game of a doubleheader back in Ruppert … “Crazy Canadian Frog,” said Big John, “he still thinks it's on account of him not catchin' that pop-up that they give us the old heave-ho. Hey, Ass-start, don't lose your head over it,” chuckled Big John while Cholly and Bud Parusha struggled to keep the shortstop from destroying himself, “look what they done to my daddy. And he didn't go around beatin' his brains out. Hell, he just figured it all out—and then passed it on to me. The wisdom of the ages, Ass-start: it's all shit. You jerk-offs take it too serious.”

Here there was a noise at the clubhouse door, the timid peck of a tender knuckle, and then the quivering voice of a little lady inquiring as to whether the Mundys were “decent” …

But before narrating what next took place in Kakoola on May 5, 1943—a day that seems in retrospect to stand as the dividing line between the Mundy past and the Mundy future, between the Patriot League as it once had been and the Patriot League as it was to become in the two seasons before its dissolution—it is necessary to point out that Frank Mazuma, the innovative owner of the Reapers, had declared that afternoon “Ladies Day,” hoping thus to beef up the skimpy crowd that would otherwise turn out to see the two lowliest P. League teams falling all over each other in their effort to lose. Play, in fact, had been interrupted in the top of the fifth when it was discovered that one of the ladies who had been admitted free of charge was in actuality a man. In a close-fitting dress of flamboyant design, all dolled up in a blond Hollywood wig, and swinging a gaudy handbag and hips, she had given herself away by making a brilliant one-handed stab on a near-miss home run lifted foul into the left-field seats by Big John, who, being perfectly sober, had swung late. At first the crowd got a bang out of the remarkable feat performed by the sexy gal, and stamped and hollered like a crowd at the burlesque show; then, in the next instant, realizing that no woman, no matter how proudly pronged her chest, could ever make a catch like that bare-handed, they began to converge upon the blond bombshell, piercing wolf whistles mixed with obscene threats. When police whistles joined in, the blond rushed down to the edge of the stands and with her dress parachuting up to her pink garters, leaped to the grass. Quickly she disposed of Rudra, the Kakoola left-fielder, with a stiff-arm block that sent him sprawling, and started for second. The Mundys, convinced by now that this was some sort of “half-time” entertainment cooked up by Frank Mazuma, had to join in laughing with the crowd when she sidestepped the charging Kakoola keystone combination (who wound up in one another's arms) and made for the pitcher's mound in those high-heeled, toeless shoes. Big John was still at the plate with his 0 and 2 count when the blond, swinging her purse at the Kakoola pitcher's head, drove him from the hill with his arms around his ears. Then, the purse still in her right hand, and the foul ball she had caught still in her left, she reared back—whew-whew! those garters again!—and threw the Mundy power hitter the biggest damn curve he'd seen in a decade. Christ, did John get a boot out of that! “A big-titted slit in a little-bitty dress, and she just struck me out! Haw! Haw! With stuff like that, just think what the rest of her looks like!” Next the blond broke for the Mundy dugout, throwing the boys big kisses as she headed their way. Oh brother. The visiting players were shrugging and grinning at one another and so hardly took seriously the cops charging after her, shouting, “Mundys, stop her! She ain't no lady! Stop her, boys—she's under arrest for pretending to be what she ain't!” Even when the police yanked their pistols from their holsters and drew a bead on the blond's behind, the Mundys just shook their heads, and, pretending to be stroking their whiskers, hid their titters behind their hands. Then
smack!
The blond had planted a kisseroo on Mister Fairsmith's mouth—and was down through the dugout and gone. They could hear her heels ringing on the concrete runway to the clubhouse. “Stop!” cried the cops, dashing right on after her. Then
bang!
Oh my God. They had opened fire on her fanny.