The Great American Novel (24 page)

And then the long, long train ride back to the East, “the eastern swing” as it was called by the four western clubs, and by the Mundys too, though always self-consciously, for they were hardly a western club in anybody's eyes, including their own. But then strictly speaking they weren't an eastern club anymore either, even if on those eastward journeys, when they turned their watches ahead, the rapid sweep of the minute hand around the dial encouraged them to imagine the present over and done with, and the future, the return to Ruppert, upon them.

Independence, Virginia, where tourists surge through cobbled streets, and taxi drivers wear buckled shoes and powdered wigs, and in the restaurants the prices are listed in shillings and pence; where busloads of schoolkids line up next to the pillory in the town square to have their photo taken being punished, and a town crier appears in the streets at nine every night to shut the place down in accordance with the famous “Blue Laws” after which the baseball team is named. Talk about a place where they make a grown man feel welcome, and you are not talking about Independence, Virginia …

And then the worst of it, the coastal journey north from Independence to Tri-City, passing through Port Ruppert on the way …

Port Ruppert? Looked more like the Maginot Line. Soldiers everywhere. Two of them, fine-looking young fellows in gleaming boots and wearing pistols, hopped aboard the engine as it slowed in the railroad yard, awaiting clearance to enter the station. Guards in steel helmets and bearing arms stood some fifty feet apart all the way along the tracks, while still other soldiers, in shirt sleeves and blowing on whistles, directed empty flatcars into the roundhouse and back out onto the broad network of tracks. Where were the hobos who used to squat on their haunches cooking a potato at the track's edge, the bums who used to smile their toothless smiles up at the Mundys when they returned from the road? Where were the old signalmen who used to raise their lanterns in salute, and, win or loss, call out, “Welcome home, boys! You done okay!” Where, where were their hundred thousand loyal fans?

“Haven't you heard?” the Mundys chided themselves, “there's a war on.”

With a gush from the train (and a sigh from the Mundys), they glided the last hundred yards into the station. “Rupe-it! Station Rupe-it!” the conductor called, and though many disembarked, nobody who played for the team of that name left his seat.

Rupe-it. Oh, how could something so silly as the way they pronounced those two syllables give you the gooseflesh? Two little syllables, Rupe and It, how could they give you the chills?

Hey, listen! They were announcing the arrival of their train in
four
different languages. Listen! English, French, Russian—and
Chinese!
In Rupe-it! And catch them faces? And all them uniforms! Why, you did not think there could
be
so many shades of khaki! Or kinds of hats! Or belts! Or salutes! Or shades of skin, for that matter! Why, there was a bunch of soldier boys wearing
earrings,
for Christ sake! Where the hell are they from—and how come they're on our side, anyway? Damn, who they gonna scare, dressin' up like that! Hey, am I seem' things or is that there big coon talkin' to that other coon in French? Hey, Ass-Start, is them niggers parlayvooin' French? Wee-wee? Hey, Frenchy's cousins is in town, haw haw! Hey—ain't those things Chinks? Yeah? And I thought they was supposed to walk in them little steps! I'll be darned—I never seen so many of 'em at the same time before. Kinda like a dream, ain't it? Hey—lookee there at them beards on
them
boys! Now where you figger those fellers hail from? Eskimos? In this heat? They would be leakin' at the seams, they would be dead. Zanzeebar? Never heard of 'em. And now what do you think them tiny little guys is? Some kind of wop looks like to me, only smaller. And now dang if that ain't some other kind of Chink altogether—over there! Unless it's their Navy! Christ, the Chinee Navy! I didn't even know they had one. And in Rupe-it!

Now the two soldiers who had leaped aboard in the yard came through each car checking the papers of all the service personnel. Because of the crowding the Mundys were huddled together now, three to a seat, in the last car of the train. “You fellas all flat-footed?” the soldier quipped, looking around at the bald pates of the pitching staff. He smiled. “Or are you enemy spies?”

“We are ballplayers, Corporal,” said Jolly Cholly. “We are the Ruppert Mundys.”

“I'll be darned,” the young corporal retorted.

“We are on our way to play four games against the Tycoons up in Tri-City.”

“I don't believe it,” said the corporal. “The Mundys!”

“Right you are,” said Jolly Cholly.

“And you know what I took you for?” said the corporal.

“What's that?”

“All squished up there, looking out the windows with them looks on your faces? I took you for a bunch of war-torn immigrants, just off the boat. I took you for somebody we just saved.”

“Nope,” said Jolly Cholly, “we ain't off no boat. We're from here. Matter of fact,” he added, peering out the window, “probably the only folks in sight that is.”

“I'll be darned,” said the corporal. “Do you know, when I was just a little boy—”

But no sooner had he begun to reminisce, than the train was moving. “Uh-oh. See ya!” the corporal called, and in a flash he was gone. And so was Rupe-it.

*   *   *

Ballplayers' ballplayers
—that was the phrase most commonly used to describe the Tycoon teams that in the first four decades of the twentieth century won eighteen pennants, eight World Series, and never once finished out of the first division. “Play,” though, is hardly the word to describe what they were about down on the field. Leaving the heroics to others, without ferocity or even exertion, they concentrated on doing only what was required of them to win, neither more nor less: no whooping, no hollering, no guesswork, no gambling, no elation, no despair, nothing extreme or eccentric. Rather, efficiency, intelligence, proportion—four runs for the pitcher who needed the security, two for the pitcher who liked the pressure, one in the ninth for him who rose only to the challenge. You rarely heard of the Tycoons breaking out, as teams will on occasion, with fifteen or twenty hits, or winning by ten or eleven runs; just as rarely did you hear of them committing three errors in a game, or leaving a dozen men stranded on base, or falling, either individually or as a team, into a slump that a day's rest couldn't cure. Though they may not always have been the most gifted or spectacular players in the league considered one at a time, together they performed like nine men hatched from the same perfect egg.

Of course the fans who hated them—and they were legion, particularly out in the West—labeled them “robots,” “zombies,” and even “snobs” because of their emotionless, machinelike manner. Out-of-town fans would jeer at them, insult and abuse them, do everything they could think of to try to rattle them—and watched with awe and envy the quietly flawless, tactful, economical, virtually invisible way in which the Tycoons displayed their superiority year in and year out.

Afterwards it was not always clear how exactly they had done it. “Where was we when it happened?” was a line made famous by a Rustler who did not even know his team had been soundly beaten until he looked up at the end of the ninth and read the sad news off the scoreboard. “They ain't human,” the other players complained, “they ain't all there,” but out of their uniforms and in street clothes, the Tycoons turned out to be fellows more or less resembling themselves, if a little better dressed and smoother in conversation. “But they ain't that
good!
” the fans would cry, after the Tycoons had come through to sweep a four-game series—and yet there never did appear to be anybody that was better. “They
steal
them games! They take 'em while nobody's lookin'!” “It's that park of theirs, that's what kills us—that sunfield and all them shadows!” “The way they does it, they can win all they want, and I still ain't got no use for 'em! I wouldn't be a Tycoon fan if you paid me!” But the even-tempered Tycoons couldn't have cared less.

By '43, the Tycoons had lost just about every last member of the '41 and '42 pennant-winning teams to the Army, but to take their place for the duration, the Tri-City owner, Mrs. Angela Trust, had been able to coax out of retirement the world championship Tycoon team that in the '31 World Series against Connie Mack's A's had beaten Lefty Grove, Waite Hoyt, and Rube Walberg on three successive afternoons. To see those wonderful old-timers back in Tycoon uniforms, wearing the numerals each had made famous during the great baseball era that preceded the Depression, did much to assure baseball fans that the great days they dimly remembered really had been, and would be again, once the enemies of democracy were destroyed; the effect upon the visiting Mundys, however, was not so salutary. After having traveled on that train through a Port Ruppert station aswarm with foreigners of every color and stripe, after having been taken for strangers in the city whose name they bore, it was really more than the Mundys could bear, to hear the loudspeaker announce the names of the players against whom they were supposed to compete that afternoon. “Pinch me, I'm dreamin' again,” said Kid Heket. “Why not raise up the dead,” cried Hothead, “so we can play a series against the Hall of Fame!” “It must be a joke,” the pitchers agreed. Only it wasn't. Funny perhaps to others—as so much was that year—but, alas, no joke for the Ruppert team. “For Tri-City, batting first, No. 12, Johnny Leshy, third base. Batting second, No. 11, Lou Polevik, left field. Batting third, No. 1, Tommy Heimdall, right field. Batting fourth, No. 14, Iron Mike Mazda, first base. Batting fifth, No. 6, Vic Bragi, center field. Batting sixth, No. 2, Babe Rustem, shortstop. Batting seventh, No. 19, Tony Izanagi, second base. Batting eighth and catching for Tri-City, No. 4, Al Bongo…”

By the time the announcer had gotten to the Tycoons' starting pitcher, the Mundys would have passed from bewilderment through disbelief to giddiness—all on the long hard road to resignation. “Oh yeah, and who's the pitcher? Who is pitching the series against us—the Four Horsemen, I suppose.”

They supposed right. They were to face the four Tycoon starters who had performed in rotation with such regularity and such success for over a decade, that eventually the sportswriter Smitty humorously suggested in “An Open Letter to the United States Congress” that they ought to call the days of the week after Sal Tuisto, Smoky Woden, Phil Thor, and Herman Frigg. By '42, Tuisto owned Tri-City's most popular seafood house, Woden was the baseball coach at the nearby Ivy League college, Thor was a bowling alley impresario, and Frigg a Ford dealer; nonetheless, despite all those years that had elapsed since the four had been big leaguers, against the Mundys in the first series played between the two clubs in Tycoon Park that year, each threw the second no-hitter of his career—four consecutive hitless games, a record of course for four pitchers on the same team … But then that was only the beginning of the records broken in that series, which itself broke the record for breaking records.
*

*   *   *

One sunny Saturday morning early in August, the Ruppert Mundys boarded a bus belonging to the mental institution and journeyed from their hotel in downtown Asylum out into the green Ohio countryside to the world-famous hospital for the insane, there to play yet another “away” game—a three-inning exhibition match against a team composed entirely of patients. The August visit to the hospital by a P. League team in town for a series against the Keepers was an annual event of great moment at the institution, and one that was believed to be of considerable therapeutic value to the inmates, particularly the sports-minded among them. Not only was it their chance to make contact, if only for an hour or so, with the real world they had left behind, but it was believed that even so brief a visit by famous big league ballplayers went a long way to assuage the awful sense such people have that they are odious and contemptible to the rest of humankind. Of course the P. League players (who like all ballplayers despised any exhibition games during the course of the regular season) happened to find playing against the Lunatics, as they called them, a most odious business indeed; but as the General simply would not hear of abandoning a practice that brought public attention to the humane and compassionate side of a league that many still associated with violence and scandal, the tradition was maintained year after year, much to the delight of the insane, and the disgust of the ballplayers themselves.

The chief psychiatrist at the hospital was a Dr. Traum, a heavyset gentleman with a dark chin beard, and a pronounced European accent. Until his arrival in America in the thirties, he had never even heard of baseball, but in that Asylum was the site of a major league ball park, as well as a psychiatric hospital, it was not long before the doctor became something of a student of the game. After all, one whose professional life involved ruminating upon the extremes of human behavior, had certainly to sit up and take notice when a local fan decided to make his home atop a flagpole until the Keepers snapped a losing streak, or when an Asylum man beat his wife to death with a hammer for calling the Keepers “bums” just like himself. If the doctor did not, strictly speaking, become an ardent Keeper fan, he did make it his business to read thoroughly in the literature of the national pastime, with the result that over the years more than one P. League manager had to compliment the bearded Berliner on his use of the hit-and-run, and the uncanny ability he displayed at stealing signals during their annual exhibition game.

Despite the managerial skill that Dr. Traum had developed over the years through his studies, his team proved no match for the Mundys that morning. By August of 1943, the Mundys weren't about to sit back and take it on the chin from a German-born baseball manager and a team of madmen; they had been defeated and disgraced and disgraced and defeated up and down the league since the season had begun back in April, and it was as though on the morning they got out to the insane asylum grounds, all the wrath that had been seething in them for months now burst forth, and nothing, but nothing, could have prevented them from grinding the Lunatics into dust once the possibility for victory presented itself. Suddenly, those '43 flops started looking and sounding like the scrappy, hustling, undefeatable Ruppert teams of Luke Gofannon's day—and this despite the fact that it took nearly an hour to complete a single inning, what with numerous delays and interruptions caused by the Lunatics' style of play. Hardly a moment passed that something did not occur to offend the professional dignity of a big leaguer, and yet, through it all, the Mundys on both offense and defense managed to seize hold of every Lunatic mistake and convert it to their advantage. Admittedly, the big right-hander who started for the institution team was fast and savvy enough to hold the Mundy power in check, but playing just the sort of heads-up, razzle-dazzle baseball that used to characterize the Mundy teams of yore, they were able in their first at bat to put together a scratch hit by Astarte, a bunt by Nickname, a base on balls to Big John, and two Lunatic errors, to score three runs—their biggest inning of the year, and the first Mundy runs to cross the plate in sixty consecutive innings, which was not a record only because they had gone sixty-seven innings without scoring earlier in the season.