The Great American Novel (47 page)

“General Oakhart,” said the ghost, gravely.

“I am he. But who may I ask are you?”

“Just who Angela says I am.”

“I don't believe it. You don't look like the Gil Gamesh I knew. You don't
sound
like that Gil Gamesh, either.”

“Nor do I feel like that Gil Gamesh any longer. Nonetheless, that is the Gil Gamesh I am doomed to remain forever. I can never hope to unburden myself of his foolishness, his treachery, or his despair. My hair is gone. My arm is gone. My looks are gone. So what. I am what I have been. Can I now become what I would be? It seems once again, General, that my future is in your hands.”

“What future? Who are you, man? Do you live in this dump?”

“This dump and worse dumps. This dump and palaces. I've driven dynamite over the Rockies in a broken-down Ford. I've fought gun duels in the Everglades with the F.B.I. Prison in Poland. Sturgeon with Stalin. Cocktails with Molotov.”

“Mrs. Trust, only listen to this impostor—just
look
at him! This is not Gil Gamesh!”

“If you like, General,” said the ghost, “I will recount to you in detail the substance of my meetings with you and Mike the Mouth in the summer of '33. ‘Gil,' he said, ‘somebody in this world has got to run the game. Otherwise, you see, it wouldn't be baseball, it would be chaos. We would be right back where we were in the Ice Ages…'”

“If you are Gamesh, where did you learn to speak like a radio announcer, instead of a roughneck off the streets!”

“Where else?” said Gamesh. “Night school.”

“And how do you come to
look
like this?”

“Rage, hatred, suffering—you name it.”

“And you live here, is that the idea? Is this your hideout, or some such nonsense?”

“It is my
yafka,
yes.”

“Meaning what! Speak English!”

“I hide here, General, from time to time. It also happens to be the house where I was born. A fitting place to be reborn. General, there is no need for you to doubt my identity. I am Gil Gamesh, an agent of the Communist Party, just returned from six years in Moscow, four of them at the International Lenin School from which I received the equivalent of a Ph.D. in espionage and sabotage. My mission is to complete the destruction of the Patriot League of Professional Baseball Clubs.”

“Madness!” cried General Oakhart to Mrs. Trust. “Sheer madness, all of it!”

“I agree, General,” replied Gamesh. “I have indeed been a mad, enraged creature. All my life I found my strength in rancorous resentment, but only after my banishment from baseball did I plunge headlong into a barbarous world of violence and vengeance, and dedicate myself wholly to destroying what had destroyed me. Only listen to my story, General, and perhaps it will explain even to your satisfaction how I come to look as I do…”

After he had been banished, he said, he had made his way west, robbing and raping as he went, teaming up along the way with other vengeful men. In those years they were not hard to come by. There was no Germany or Japan to hate then—only one's own, one's native land. Whom did he meet in those Depression years who had not been abused, humiliated, cheated, thwarted, and wrecked (to hear the victim tell it) by America? Was there a man in a bar between Port Ruppert and Seattle without a score to settle, without reparations due him, without hatred boiling in his heart? While busting miners' heads for a copper company in Nevada, he met a man named “Bill Smith”—a Commie in scab's clothing. It was the Communists who sent him to night school to learn the three Rs; Russian they taught him on their own. They gave him books to read. They gave him fraudulent birth certificates. They gave him dynamite. They gave him guns. They told him America was on its last legs—brave revolutionary leaders like Gil Gamesh would deal the deathblow to their homeland. They told him a new day was dawning for mankind, and he pretended to be happy to hear the news. But what did he care about mankind? That was just another highfalutin' name for the sons of bitches who screwed you out of what was yours. Mankind? That was for “Bill Smith” and “Bob White” and “Jim Adams,” and the hundreds of others with names out of grade school primers, Yids most of them, who kept him awake at night with fervent speeches about “the new day that was dawning.” Only it wasn't dawn that interested Gil Gamesh, it was night.

“In 1938 I was called to Moscow, the highest honor that can be accorded a struggling young Communist agent. I was enrolled in the International Lenin School for Subversion, Hatred, Infiltration, and Terror, known popularly as SHIT.”

“You expect me to believe that that is the name of a school in Moscow, Mr. Gamesh?” asked the skeptical General.

“General, they are nothing if not contemptuous of human decency and dignity. Irreverence and blasphemy are their business, and they know how to practice it, too. Let me go on, please. As a student at SHIT I attended classes fourteen hours a day, seven days a week. To school in the dark, home in the dark, and once a week in winter, out of bed again to perfect the 4
A.M.
arrest on somebody down the hall. Summers off in the country, in slave labor camps, administering beatings and conducting interrogations while the regular torturers are on vacation—occasionally driving a prisoner insane or tormenting an intractable suspect into a confession, but by and large the usual student stuff, cleaning up after suicides, seeing that the bread is stale and there's nothing nourishing in the soup, and so on. And the talk, General. The unending lectures. The study groups. And then the murders, of course. Three roommates murdered in their beds during my senior year. My freshman year at SHIT there were eighty-seven of us, handpicked from around the globe. We graduated a class of twenty-four. Sixteen strangled, nineteen poisoned, five run over, eleven shot, three knifed, one electrocuted by a high-voltage toilet seat, and thirteen ‘suicides'—out of windows, off rooftops, and down the stairwell. I pushed two of them myself to pass ‘Defenestration.' General Stalin spoke at our graduation. I was class valedictorian. When Stalin shook my hand, he said, ‘The final conflict will be between the Communists and the ex-Communists.' The idea startled me. I had thought the final conflict would be between the Communists and the Wall Street Dogs. Only in the next year did I understand Uncle Joe's curious remark, or warning, to the SHIT valedictorian of '42. The higher I rose in espionage circles the more disillusioned I became. Oh, I could stomach the brutality easily enough—it didn't take more than two minutes, if that, to get over missing a murdered friend, and of course a murdered enemy was so much gravy. Then to be graduated directly from SHIT to one of the highest planning positions in Sabotage in the Kremlin restored me to just the sort of power and prestige that I had known so briefly and that I had imagined I had lost forever. No, for that monster of vengeance, Gil Gamesh, Communism was like a dream come true, it was an evil man's paradise, except for one small thing. No baseball.

“Yes, after all those years away, I began missing the hell out of baseball. It wasn't so bad during the winter, but when spring finally came I found myself turning to the back pages of
Pravda
looking for the scores. I'd walk by a vacant lot, hear some kids screaming, and expect to see a gang of boys shagging flies—instead they would be playing ‘Purge,' running around arresting each other and dragging the girls into the bushes for mock trials. World Series time was the worst. I understood then what it meant to have betrayed my country. You see, it was the first time in my life that I realized that it
was
my country, that a country, that
anything,
could really be mine. God knows, I wasn't a Russian. Nor was I ever a Babylonian, really, in anything other than name. Least of all was I a member of mankind. No, it wasn't for humanity, or the working class, that my heart ever bled, but only for
me,
Number 19. Or so I thought, until I looked out of my window on Red Square one night last October and saw that while I had been eighteen hours at my desk, planning the destruction of the Patriot League, three feet of snow had fallen on Moscow. And I thought: what the hell am I doing in snow-covered Russia, when in Mother America it is crisp, bright fall? The Cardinals, the Tycoons, and the Yanks are playing in the World Series, even as I sit here!
Who's pitching? What's the score?
And then I did a stupid, reckless thing—I fear still that one day it will cost me my life. At 3
A.M.
I walked down the corridor into the shortwave radio room of Soviet Military Intelligence, where I knew there was a man on duty monitoring the opening game, and I sat there until dawn, listening to Spud Chandler pitch a three-hitter against the Tycoons. When Keller grand-slammed Woden I let out a cheer. That's right, Angela, still the Greenback in my heart—still the crosstown rival, even in Moscow! Fortunately the radioman was asleep. Though was he? Who knows? I left before Etten hit his in the eighth, but Keller's was enough. I knew then that I wasn't any longer just Gil Gamesh looking out for himself, I wasn't just Number 19 in this world and no more—I knew then that down beneath the dreams of glory and vengeance, beneath the contempt, the isolation, the loneliness and the hatred, I happened to be an American.

“Of course it was pretty late in the day to be making such a discovery. I was due to return to America in only one week, my mission to personally initiate and oversee our next, and, hopefully, our final assault upon your league, General. As I have said, planning the infiltration and the destruction of the Patriot League has been my primary task ever since my graduation from SHIT. It was with a program such as this in mind that the Party had latched on to me back in '34, though of course it was not until I had proved myself as an underground agent in twenty-two states that I was called to my training in Moscow. In that time the Politburo handed down a different directive on baseball each season. Not only was the program uncoordinated and haphazard, but it became a dangerous battleground for party factions. That is what invariably happens when there is no firm theoretical grasp of the issues. Nine comrades who opposed the destruction of baseball were tried and sentenced to death in 1940 for Incurable Right-Wing Deviationism, and the following year, directly after the All-Star game, nine who
favored
the destruction of baseball were tried and sentenced for the same crime. The fact of the matter is that nobody in all of Russia had the slightest understanding of the political and cultural significance of baseball and its relationship to the capitalist mystique, until I arrived on the scene. It is no secret that my senior honors paper entitled ‘The Exploitation of Regional Pride by the Profit-Mongers of Professional Sport' provided the theoretical foundation for the revised plan of attack that eventually resulted in the expulsion of the Mundys from Port Ruppert. Stalin himself, you should know, tended to side at the outset with the faction, now jailed, who were for the expulsion of the Tycoons from Tri-City. Or so he led us to believe. I realize now that he was only testing my strength and my staying power. I am sure he understood from the beginning that any attempt to dislodge the Tycoons would inevitably result in failure, and even worse, exposure of the entire conspiracy against the league. Furthermore, ironic as General Stalin can be at the expense of Mrs. Trust, he is a shrewd judge of character, and a careful student of the reports filed by Colonel Chichikov. He knows just how tough and wily a foe International Communism is up against in the person of Angela Whittling Trust.”

“Colonel Chichikov?” said General Oakhart. “And just who is this Colonel Chichikov, if I may ask?”

“Colonel Chichikov of the General Staff. You know him under the alias Frank Mazuma.”

“Oh this
is
preposterous! You're telling me now that Frank Mazuma, the owner of the Kakoola Reapers, is a member of the General Staff of the Red Army?”

“Was at one time, yes. Since 1928, Colonel Chichikov has been one of Russia's most valuable agents in America.”

“But in 1928 the man was a well-known bootlegger!”

“Among other things, General, among other things. It is Colonel Chichikov who through his American experiences has provided Stalin with the witticisms he has been dining out on for years. Chichikov's definition of capitalism, for example, is one of Stalin's favorites: ‘From each according to his stupidity, to each according to his greed.'”

“Please, Mrs. Trust, how much more of this hallucinatory, psychopathic rot must I stand here and listen to!”

“As much as it takes,” said Mrs. Trust, “to make you face the facts! To make you see that the greatest conspiracy in the nation's history is taking place right under your nose! Of
course
Colonel Chichikov is operating within our midst. Who with eyes in his skull and a brain in his head could have watched the antics of our Mr. Mazuma just this last season and concluded otherwise?
I
have been calling that man a Communist for years, General—now here is Gil Gamesh, fresh from six years in Moscow, four of them a student at SHIT, to tell you that in actuality Mazuma is none other than Colonel Chichikov of the General Staff, and you
still
refuse to believe! What will it take, General, to rouse you from this mindless sloth to do your duty as an American, as a soldier, and as President of the Patriot League? General Oakhart, fail to heed this warning, sir, and you will go down in history with Benedict Arnold, your name like his will be a synonym for treason and betrayal for as long as decent patriots draw breath! For the sake of God, for the sake of America, attend to what this man is telling you. He has been there—he knows!”

“True,” said Gamesh, nodding sadly. “I have seen the future, General, and it stinks.”

“Gil, tell him who else is an officer in the Russian armed forces. Tell him the name of the man you met in Moscow in 1941.”