The Natural (15 page)

He said this was tile shame in his life, that his fate, somehow, had always been the same (on the train going nowhere) — defeat in sight of his goal.

“Always?”

“Always the same.”

“Always with a woman?”

He laughed harshly. “I sure met some honeys in my time. They burned me good.”

“Why do you pick that type?”

‘It’s like I say — they picked me. It’s the breaks.”

“You could say no, couldn’t you?”

“Not to that type dame I always fell for — they weren’t like you.”

She smiled.

“I mean you are a different kind.”

“Does that finish me?”

“No,” he said seriously.

“I won’t ever hurt you, Roy.”

“No.”

“Don’t ever hurt me.”

“No.”

“What beats me,” he said with a trembling voice, “is why did it always have to happen to me? What did I do to deserve it?”

“Being stopped before you started?”

He nodded.

“Perhaps it was because you were a good person?”

“How’s that?”

“Experience makes good people better.” She was staring at the lake.

“How does it do that?”

“Through their suffering.”

“I had enough of that,” he said in disgust.

“We have two lives, Roy, the life we learn with and the life we live with after that. Suffering is what brings us toward happiness.”

“I had it up to here.” He ran a finger across his windpipe.

“Had what?”

“What I suffered — and I don’t want any more.”

“It teaches us to want the right things.”

“All it taught me is to stay away from it. I am sick of all I have suffered.”

She shrank away a little.

He shut his eyes.

Afterwards, sighing, she began to rub his brow, and then his lips.

“And is that the mystery about you, Roy?”

“What mystery?”

“I don’t know. Everyone seems to think there is one.”

“I told you everything.”

“Then there really isn’t?”

“Nope.”

Her cool fingers touched his eyelids. It was unaccountably sweet to him.

“You broke my jinx,” he muttered.

“I’m thirty-three,” she said, looking at the moonlit water.

He whistled but said, “I am no spring chicken either, honey.”

“Iris.”

“Iris, honey.”

“That won’t come between us?”

“What?”

“My age?”

“No.”

“Nothing?”

“If you are not married?”

“No.”

“Divorced?”

“No.”

“A widow?”

“No,” said Iris.

He opened his eyes. “How come with all your sex appeal that you never got hitched?”

She gazed away.

Roy suddenly sat up and bounced to his feet. “Jesus, will you look at that water. What are we waiting for?” He tore at his tie.

Iris was saying that she had, however, brought a child into the world, a girl now grown, but Roy seemed not to hear, he was so busy getting out of his clothes. In no time to speak of he stood before her stripped to his shorts.

“Get undressed.”

The thought of standing naked before him frightened her. She told herself not to be — she was no longer a child about the naked body. But she couldn’t bring herself to remove her clothes in front of him so she went back to the car and undressed there. He waited impatiently, then before he expected her, she stepped out without a thing on and ran in the moonlight straight into the water, through the shallow part, and dived where it was deep.

Hopping high through the cold water, Roy plunged in after her. He dived neatly, kicked hard underwater and came up almost under her. Iris fell back out of his reach and swam away. He pursued her with less skill than she had but more strength. At first he damn near froze but as he swam his blood warmed. She would not stop and before long the white birches near the beach looked to be the size of match sticks.

Though they were only a dozen strokes apart she wouldn’t let him gain, and after another fifty tiring yards he wondered how long this would go on. He called to her but she didn’t answer and wouldn’t stop. He was beginning to be winded and considered quitting, only he didn’t want to give up. Then just about when his lungs were frying in live coals, she stopped swimming. As she trod water, the light on the surface hid all but her head from him.

He caught up with her at last and attempted to get his arms around her waist. “Give us a kiss, honey.”

She was repelled and shoved him away.

He saw she meant it, realized he had made a mistake, and felt terrible.

Roy turned tail, kicking himself down into the dark water. As he sank lower it got darker and colder but he kept going down. Before long the water turned murky yet there was no bottom he could feel with his hands. Though his legs and arms were numb he continued to work his way down, filled with icy apprehensions and weird thoughts.

Iris couldn’t believe it when he did not quickly rise. Before long she felt frightened. She looked everywhere but he was still under water. A sense of abandonment gripped her. She remembered standing up in the crowd that night, and said to herself that she had really stood up because he was a man whose life she wanted to share… a man who had suffered. She thought distractedly of a home, children, and him coming home every night to supper. But he had already left her…

…At last in the murk he touched the liquid mud at the bottom. He dimly thought he ought to feel proud to have done that but his mind was crammed with old memories flitting back and forth like ghostly sardines, and there wasn’t a one of them that roused his pride or gave him any comfort.

So he forced himself, though sleepily, to somersault up and begin the slow task of climbing through all the iron bars of the currents… too slow, too tasteless, and he wondered was it worth it.

Opening his bloodshot eyes he was surprised how far down the moonlight had filtered. It dripped down like oil in the black water, and then, unexpectedly, there came into his sight this pair of golden arms searching, and a golden head with a frantic face. Even her hair sought him.

He felt relieved no end.

I am a lucky bastard.

He was climbing a long, slow ladder, broad at the base and narrowing on top, and she, trailing clusters of white bubbles, was weaving her way to him. She had golden breasts and when he looked to see, tile hair between her legs was golden too.

With a watery howl bubbling from his blistered lungs he shot past her inverted eyes and bobbed up on the surface, inhaling the soothing coolness of the whole sky.

She rose beside him, gasping, her hair plastered to her naked skull, and kissed him full on the lips. He tore off his shorts and held her tight. She stayed in his arms.

“Why did you do it?” she wept.

“To see if I could touch the bottom.”

They swam in together, taking their time. As they dragged themselves out of the water, she said, “Go make a fire, otherwise we will have nothing to dry ourselves with.”

He covered her shoulders with his shirt and went hunting for wood. Under the trees he collected an armload of branches. Near the dunes he located some heavy boxwood. Then he came back to where she was sitting and began to build a fire. He set an even row of birch sticks down flat and with his knife shaved up a thick branch till he had a pile of dry shavings. These he lit with the only match he had. When they were burning he added some dry birch pieces he had cut up. He split the boxwood against a rock and when the fire was crackling added that, hunk by hunk, to the flames. Before long he had a roaring blaze going. The fire reddened the water and the lacy birches.

It reddened her naked body. Her thighs and rump were broad but her waist was narrow and virginal. Her breasts were hard, shapely. From above her hips she looked like a girl but the lower half of her looked like a woman.

Watching her, he thought he would wait for the fire to die down, when she was warm and dry and felt not rushed.

She was sitting close to the fire with her hair pulled over her head so the inside would dry first. She was thinking why did he go down? Did he touch the bottom of the lake out of pride, because he wants to make records, or did he do it in disappointment, because I wouldn’t let him kiss me?

Roy was rubbing his hands before the fire. She looked up and said in a tremulous voice, “Roy, I have a confession to you. I was never married, but I am the mother of a grown girl.”

He said he had heard her the first time.

She brushed her hair back with her fingers. “I don’t often talk about it, but I want to tell you I made a mistake long ago and had a hard time afterwards. Anyway, the child meant everything to me and made me happy. I gave her a good upbringing and now she is grown and on her own, and I am free to think of myself and young enough to want to.”

That was the end of it because Roy asked no questions.

He watched the fire. The flames sank low. When they had just about been sucked into the ashes he crept toward her and took her in his arms. Her breasts beat like hearts against him.

“You are really the first,” she whispered.

He smiled, never so relaxed in sex.

But while he was in the middle of loving her she spoke: “I forgot to tell you I am a grandmother.”

He stopped. Holy Jesus.

Then she remembered something else and tried, in fright, to raise herself.

“Roy, are you—”

But he shoved her back and went on from where he had left off.

After a hilarious celebration in the dining car (which they roused to uproar by tossing baked potatoes and ketchup bottles around) and later in the Pullman, where a wild bunch led by Roy stripped the pajamas off players already sound asleep in their berths, peeled Red Blow out of his long underwear, and totally demolished the pants of a new summer suit of Pop’s, who was anyway not sold on premature celebrations, Roy slept restlessly. In his sleep he knew he was restless and blamed it (in his sleep) on all he had eaten. The Knights had come out of Sportsman’s Park after trouncing the Cards in a double header and making it an even dozen in a row without a loss, and the whole club had gone gay on the train, including, mildly, Pop himself, considerably thawed out now that the team had leapfrogged over the backs of the Dodgers and Cards into third place. They were again hot on the heels of the Phils and not too distant from the Pirates, with a whole month to go before the end of the season, and about sixty per cent of their remaining games on home grounds. Roy was of course in fine fettle, the acknowledged King of Klouters, whose sensational hitting, pulverizing every kind of pitching, more than made up for his slump. Yet no matter how many bangs he collected, he was ravenously hungry for more and all he could eat besides. The Knights had boarded the train at dinner time but he had stopped off at the station to devour half a dozen franks smothered in sauerkraut and he guzzled down six bottles of pop before his meal on the train, which consisted of two oversize sirloins, at least a dozen rolls, four orders of mashed, and three (some said five) slabs of apple pie. Still that didn’t do the trick, for while they were all at cards that evening, he sneaked off the train as it was being hosed and oiled and hustled up another three wieners, and later secretly arranged with the steward for a midnight snack of a long T-bone with trimmings, although that did not keep him from waking several times during the night with pangs of hunger.

When the diner opened in the morning he put away an enormous breakfast and afterwards escaped those who were up, and found himself some privacy in a half-empty coach near the engine, where nobody bothered him because he was not too recognizable in gabardine, behind dark glasses. For a while he stared at the scattered outskirts of the city they were passing through, but in reality he was wondering whether to read the fat letter from Iris Lemon he had been carrying around in his suit pocket. Roy recalled the night on the lake shore, the long swim, the fire and after. The memory of all was not unpleasant, but what for the love of mud had made her take him for a sucker who would be interested in a grandmother? He found that still terrifying to think of, and although she was a nice enough girl, it had changed her in his mind from Iris more to lemon. To do her justice he concentrated on her good looks and the pleasures of her body but when her kid’s kid came to mind, despite grandma’s age of only thirty-three, that was asking too much and spoiled the appetizing part of her. It was simple enough to him: if he got serious with her it could only lead to one thing — him being a grandfather. God save him from that for he personally felt as young and frisky as a colt. That was what he told himself as the train sped east, and though he had a slight bellyache he fell into a sound sleep and dreamed how on frosty mornings when he was a kid the white grass stood up prickly stiff and the frozen air deep-cleaned his insides.

He awoke with Memo on his mind. To his wonder she turned up in his room in Boston the next night. It was after supper and he was sitting in a rocker near the window reading about himself in the paper when she knocked. He opened the door and she could have thrown him with a breath, so great was his surprise (and sadness) at seeing her. Memo laughingly said she had been visiting a girl friend’s summer place on the Cape, and on her way back to New York had heard the boys were in town so she stopped off to say hello, and here she was. Her face and arms were tanned and she looked better than she had in a long while. He felt too that she had changed somehow in the weeks he hadn’t seen her. That made him uneasy, as if any change in her would automatically be to his hurt. He searched her face but could not uncover anything new so explained it as the five pounds she said she had put on since he had seen her last.

He felt he still held it against her for giving him very little support at a time when he could use a lot, and also for turning Pop down when he had invited her to join them on the Western trip. Yet here, alone with her in his room, she so close and inevitably desirable — this struck him with the force of an unforgettable truth: the one he had had and always wanted — he thought it wouldn’t do to put on a sourpuss and make complaints. True, there was something about her, like all the food he had lately been eating, that left him, after the having of it, unsatisfied, sometimes even with a greater hunger than before. Yet she was a truly beautiful doll with a form like Miss America, and despite the bumps and bruises he had taken, he was sure that once he got an armiock on her things would go better.

His face must have shown more than he intended, because she turned moodily to the window and said, “Roy, don’t bawl me out for not seeing you for a while. There are some things I just can’t take and one of them is being with people who are blue. I had too much of that in my life with my mother and it really makes me desperate.” More tenderly she said, “That’s why I had to stand off to the side, though I didn’t like to, and wait till you had worked out of it, which I knew you would do. Now here I am the first chance I got and that is the way it used to be between Bump and me.”

Roy said soberly, “When are you going to find out that I ain’t Bump, Memo?”

“Don’t be mad,” she said, lifting her face to him. “All I meant to say is that I treat all my friends the same.” She was close and warm-breathed. He caught her in his arms and she snuggled tight, and let him feel the “sick” breast without complaining. But when he tried to edge her to the bed, she broke for air and said no.

“Why not?” he demanded.

“I’m not well,” said Memo.

He was suspicious. “What’s wrong?”

Memo laughed. “Sometimes you are very innocent, Roy. When a girl says she is not well, does she have to draw you a map?”

Then he understood and was embarrassed for being so dimwitted. He did not insist on any more necking and thought it a good sign that she had talked to him so intimately.

The Knights took their three in Boston and the next day won a twi-night double header in Ebbets Field, making it seventeen straight wins on the comeback climb. Before Roy ended his slump they had fallen into fifth place, twelve games behind, then they slowly rose to third, and after this twin bill with Brooklyn, were within two of the Phils, who had been nip and tucking it all season with the Cards and Dodgers. The Pirates, though beaten three in a row by the Knights on their Western swing (the first Knight wins over them this season) were still in first place, two games ahead of the Phils in a tight National League race.

When the Knights returned to their home grounds for a three-game set with the cellar-dwelling Reds, the city awakened in a stampede. The fans, recovered from their stunned surprise at the brilliant progress of the team, turned out in droves. They piled into the stands with foolish smiles, for most of them had sworn off the Knights during the time of Roy’s slump. Now for blocks around the field, the neighborhood was in an uproar as hordes fought their way out of subways, trolleys and buses, and along the packed streets to ticket windows that had been boarded up (to Judge Banner’s heartfelt regret) from early that morning, while grunting lines of red-faced cops, reinforced by sweating mounties, tried to shove everybody back where they had come from. After many amused years at the expense of the laughingstock Knights, a scorching pennant fever blew through the city. Everywhere people were bent close to their radios or stretching their necks in bars to have a look at the miracle boys (so named by sportswriters from all over the U.S. who now crammed into the once deserted press boxes) whose every move aroused their fanatic supporters to a frenzy of excitement which whirled out of them in concentric rings around the figure of Roy Hobbs, hero and undeniable man of destiny. He, it was said by everyone, would lead the Knights to it.

The fans dearly loved Roy but Roy did not love the fans. He hadn’t forgotten the dirty treatment they had dished out during the time of his trouble. Often he felt he would like to ram their cheers down their throats. Instead he took it out on the ball, pounding it to a pulp, as if the best way to get even with the fans, the pitchers who had mocked him, and the statisticians who had recorded (forever) the kind and quantity of his failures, was to smash every conceivable record. He was like a hunter stalking a bear, a whale, or maybe the sight of a single fleeing star the way he went after that ball. He gave it no rest (Wonderboy, after its long famine, chopping, chewing, devouring) and was not satisfied unless he lifted it (one eye cocked as he swung) over the roof and spinning toward the horizon. Often, for no accountable reason, he hated the pill, which represented more of himself than he was willing to give away for nothing to whoever found it one dull day in a dirty lot. Sometimes as he watched the ball soar, it seemed to him all circles, and he was mystified at his devotion to hacking at it, for he had never really liked the sight of a circle. They got you nowhere but back to the place you were to begin with, yet here he stood banging them like smoke rings out of Wonderboy and everybody cheered like crazy. The more they cheered the colder he got to them. He couldn’t stop hitting and every hit made him hungry for the next (a doctor said he had no tapeworm but ate like that because he worked so hard), yet he craved no cheers from the slobs in the stands. Only once he momentarily forgave them — when reaching for a fly, he almost cracked into the wall and they gasped their fright and shrieked warnings. After he caught the ball he doffed his cap and they rocked the rafters with their thunder.

The press, generally snotty to him during his slump, also changed its tune. To a man (except one) they showered him with praise, whooped him on, and in their columns unofficially accoladed him Rookie of the Year (although they agreed he resembled nothing so much as an old hand, a toughened veteran of baseball wars) and Most Valuable Player, and years before it was time talked of nominating him for a per. manent niche in the Cooperstown Hall of Fame. He belonged, they wrote, with the other immortals, a giant in performance, who resembled the burly boys of the eighties and nineties more than the streamlined kids of today. He was a throwback to a time of true heroes, not of the brittle, razzle dazzle boys that had sprung up around the jack rabbit ball — a natural not seen in a dog’s age, and weren’t they the lucky ones he had appeared here and now to work his wonders before them? More than one writer held his aching head when he speculated on all Roy might have accomplished had he come into the game at twenty.

The exception was of course Mercy, who continued to concern himself with Roy’s past rather than his accomplishments. He spent hours in the morgue, trying to dredge up possible clues to possible crimes (What’s he hiding from me?), wrote for information to prison wardens, sheriffs, county truant officers, heads of orphan asylums, and semipro managers in many cities in the West and Northwest, and by offering rewards, spurred all sorts of research on Roy by small-town sportswriters. His efforts proved fruitless until one day, to his surprise, he got a letter from a man who block printed on a sheet of notebook paper that for two hundred bucks he might be tempted to tell a thing or two about the new champ. Max hastily promised the dough and got his first break. Here was an old sideshow freak who swore that Roy had worked as a clown in a small traveling carnival. For proof he sent a poster showing the clown’s face — in his white and red warpaint — bursting through a paper hoop. Roy was recognizable as the snubnose Bobo, who despite the painted laugh on his pan, seemed sadeyed and unhappy. Certain the picture would create a sensation, Max had it printed on the first page above the legend, “Roy Hobbs, Clown Prince of Baseball,” but most of those who bought the paper refused to believe it was Roy and those who did, didn’t give a hoot.

Roy was burned about the picture and vowed to kick the blabbermouth in the teeth. But he didn’t exactly do that, for when they met the next evening, in the Midtown lobby, Max made a handsome apology. He said he had to hand it to Roy for beating everybody else in the game ten different ways, and he was sorry about the picture. Roy nodded but didn’t show up on time at the chophouse down the block, where he was awaited by Pop, Red, and Max — to Pop’s uneasiness, because Roy was prompt for his meals these days.

The waiter, a heavyset German with a schmaltzy accent and handlebar mustaches, approached for their orders. He started the meal by spilling soup on Max’s back, then serving him a steak that looked like the charcoal it had been broiled on. When Max loudly complained he brought him, after fifteen minutes, another, a bleeding beauty, but this the waiter snatched from under the columnist’s knife because he had already collected Pop’s and Red’s finished plates and wanted the third. Max let out a yawp, the frightened waiter dropped the dishes on his lap, and while stooping to collect the pieces, lurched against the table and spilled Max’s beer all over his pants.

Pop sprang up and took an angry swipe at the man but Red hauled him down. Meanwhile the waiter was trying to wipe Max’s pants with a wet towel and Max was swearing bloody murder at him. This got the waiter sore. Seizing the columnist by his coat collar he shook him and said he would teach him to talk like a “shentleman und nod a slob.” He laid Max across his knee, and as the customers in the chophouse looked on in disbelief, smacked his rear with a heavy hand. Max managed to twist himself free. Slapping frantically at the German’s face, he knocked off his mustache. In a minute everybody in the place was shrieking with laughter, and even Pop had to smile though he said to Red he was not at all surprised it had turned out to be Roy.