Kid Comes Back (8 page)

He was a thin, bespectacled boy with the infantry combat badge on his chest and plenty of service ribbons also. He leaned against the window, talking interminably with the harassed clerk inside, while the line lengthened and men started cracking jokes. After twenty minutes the jokes became sour. Someone back of Roy suggested they take up a collection for the bird. But he remained, leaning against the window, shaking his head.

Time passed. Men behind Roy rolled up their sleeves and cursed the chap at the window in loud tones. He paid no attention. Officers appeared behind the counter, checking the man’s service record, referring to long lists of figures. Endlessly it went on, as the remarks from the long line to the rear grew hotter and hotter. Then there were sudden cheers.

A finance colonel came round outside and took the recalcitrant soldier into his private office to straighten things out. Roy stepped up. He was handed a check for $89.60 and fifty dollars in cash. The rest of his mustering-out pay was to be sent home. It amounted to almost a thousand dollars.

Now it was nearly five. Group eighteen dash thirty assembled outside the Finance Building in the rain, and were marched to a church several blocks away. An organ was playing as they came in. When the church was full, and everyone was seated on the wooden benches, a chaplain rose and said a short prayer. Then a lieutenant-colonel gave them their last army talk. He was there to say good-by as a representative of the Armed Services, to ask them to be good citizens as they had been good soldiers, and to thank them on behalf of their commander-in-chief. Next came those wonderful, those blessed words: “You will now step forward when your name is called to receive your honorable discharges.”

For the last time he heard his name called. “Sergeant Roy Tucker, six four one eight five three four.”

Roy stood, stepped forward, and saluted. He grasped the hand of the chaplain, who handed him his discharge in a large manila envelope. Then they filed out, moved despite themselves by the ceremony. The rain had stopped. The sun was shining in the west. He stood in the muddy street, unable to believe that he was really out of the Army at last.

R
OY SPENT TWO MONTHS
with his grandmother on the farm at home. The Dodgers were hopelessly in the ruck of the pennant race, with no chance whatever of being a contender. Roy had written Jack MacManus, owner of the club, that he would report in Brooklyn later in the summer. So for some weeks he merely lay around, content to be out of the Army and doing nothing, far from orders and commands and reveille at 5:45
A.M.
every morning. He slept, he rested and lay in the sunshine. Occasionally he tested his leg. The stiffness in his hip seemed to be lessening, and only when he made quick starts and stops did the pain return. Finally he felt like visiting Ebbets Field.

It didn’t take long to discover that whereas he was only a sergeant with a number in the Army, he was something special in Brooklyn. A bright-eyed kid, one of a gang lined up at the bleacher windows, spotted him, and immediately he was surrounded by half a hundred autograph seekers asking half a hundred questions simultaneously. Old Jake, the attendant at the player’s gate, saw him coming and greeted him with an enormous grin, and his journey to the dugout was a triumphal procession. Every ten feet someone stopped him to shake hands; everywhere were smiling faces. Now he was back with his gang again.

It was good to see these old friends, to realize by their expression how glad they were to have him back once more. They made this plain, all of them, by the way their faces lighted with pleasure at his approach, by their firm handshakes and those heartening slaps on his back. It was good to be out there on the field, to hear again the sounds of the game he loved; the slap-slap, slap-slap of ball and glove, the shouts and cries from the stands, the familiar voices of the players in the field. He could scarcely believe he was in that accustomed spot, in the spike-scarred dugout, looking once more over the green turf.

“Boy, it’s hard to believe. No fooling, I can’t really believe I’m back!”

“Hello there, Spike! Glad to see you, Mr. Mac. Yessir, I’m sure anxious to get into that monkey suit again. Hello there, Al. Hi, Razzle! Say, this is great, Raz. Hello, Charlie, old boy.”

It was grand to see the old gang, what was left. For many had gone. Bob Russell was on Guam with the Navy; Jocko Klein was in Germany; Alan Whitehouse was playing baseball for the Army on the coast; Harry Street was back in the States after receiving injuries with the 4th Marines at Tarawa; and Bones Hathaway was still in England.

It was good to see the men he knew; Swanny and Fat Stuff and Razzle. But it wasn’t the Dodgers he remembered, this sixth-place ballclub. It seemed like a different outfit.

No wonder there was a new furrow in the forehead of Spike Russell, the manager. Swanny had been moved in from right field and stationed at third. Many of the pitchers, all the catchers, and the whole outfield were newcomers. Kids they were, kids who hadn’t even begun to shave. He said as much to Charlie Draper, the coach, who sat as usual with one spiked shoe on the bench, his hand on his knee.

“They’ll go,” remarked Charlie. “You watch; they’ll vanish fast enough when you and Bob Russell and the varsity come back. Then we got us this guy Young.”

“Young? Who is he?”

“Who is he? Haven’t you heard about Lester Young? The rookie Mac paid almost twenty-five thousand dollars for, practically sight unseen, too?”

“Must be good.”

“Good!” The coach ejected tobacco juice onto the grass twelve feet from the dugout’s rim. “Roy, he ain’t good. He’s Superman.”

Roy was interested. It was the first time he had ever heard Draper talk like this. Usually the coach was noncommittal about young ballplayers, for he had been around far too long to go out on a limb for a rookie, even the best of them. A great many things could happen in their development, he always said. So Roy sat up. “What position does he play, Charlie?”

“Dunno. Nobody knows. Why, that bird can play anywhere on a ballclub, and do anything. Roy, it looks as if we got ourselves another Babe Ruth. He hits the ball a country mile, he’s a better than average fielder, fast as Man O’War, and they say he can pitch, too.”

Roy sat back, thinking: Hope they don’t put him in the outfield, what with me, and Swanny back from third again, and one or two boys like Alan Whitehouse and Paul Roth coming from the service. Then there’s those two boys from Montreal. He sat there half-listening to the voices about him, to the shoptalk and chatter which was once so familiar that he really never heard it. Now it was almost foreign; it rang in his ears.

“Look at Steve up there,” said someone along the bench. Roy didn’t know the speaker. “He’s got power, sure; and he’s loose as ashes at the plate, but he won’t lay off that low curve. See there... see that!”

“I know. It’ll run him right out of this-here league.”

“Know what? I told him that last night. I says to him: ‘Kid, unless you lay off that low ball, you ain’t gonna get anywhere but Birmingham.’ I told him.”

“Yeah. He thinks the only kind of a hit that goes in the batting average is a homer. Well, he won’t be round next year when the boys come back.”

Then a familiar figure sauntered across from the batting cage around the plate. Roy could hardly believe his eyes. For the man looked like Casey, the sports reporter, but this was a thinner, fitter Casey, tanned and lean. Here come the questions, Roy thought. However, he knew better how to parry questions, and he was sincerely interested in the change that had come over the newspaperman.

Casey, with his reporter’s eye, spotted Roy on the bench immediately, and came up, hand out, genuinely glad to see him again. They exchanged greetings, and it appeared that Casey had been overseas as a war correspondent. To Roy, war correspondents were merely sportswriters in uniform. But Casey had seen service. He had been with the 4th Marines at Iwo Jima, had gone back to enter Manila with the 37th Division, had flown over Tokyo more than once. Roy’s respect for him increased. The change in his appearance was quite understandable.

Presently their conversation shifted from battles to baseball.

“Looks like you’re in good condition, Roy.”

“To you, yes, Jim. To a ballplayer, no.”

“Why not? What’s the matter?”

“Why, Jim, far as baseball is concerned I’m just a baby again. I mean I feel as though I was a rookie once more and had to fight for a job. I’ve got to train and train hard to get my wind and legs in some sort of decent shape. That takes time, y’know.” Then someone yelled at him from above. Jack MacManus wanted to see him in the office. He went up to find the genial owner in a cordial and responsive mood. Asking casually about his condition, the boss explained that all returned servicemen on the club were given a physical examination by a specialist. After some more conversation, he took up the telephone and made a date for Roy to see the doctor the next morning.

The following day Roy sat in the waiting room of the doctor’s office in the hospital, reading Casey’s column. The sportswriter had wasted no time the previous afternoon.

“Roy Tucker, ace center fielder of the Brooks, is home after four years in the Army, of which 22 months were spent abroad in Africa, Corsica and France. When drafted, back in ’41, Roy was sent to Fort Riley to play on the ballteam there, but the usually good-natured farm boy made such a fuss they had to send him into combat duty overseas. He told them he didn’t come into the Army to play baseball, and meant it, too. Finally they sent him across late in ’42 as a sergeant in the 12th Airforce, where he had fifty-six missions over Europe, was brought down, captured, and escaped shortly before D-Day. The Kid from Tomkinsville refused to talk about his Army experiences, although he returned with the Silver Star and other decorations. He looks in first-class shape and is ready to rejoin the club.”

Yeah? Says he! How does he know?

“The doctor will see you now.”

Tossing the paper aside quickly, he went inside. The man at the desk wore a long, white coat. He was thin, bald, with blue eyes and a warming smile. Best of all, he was not interested in baseball or the Dodgers, and asked no questions about the players. His conversation and his actions were crisp and businesslike. Apparently he cared for his job and nothing else.

Roy yanked off his clothes, feeling confidence in the man. Without a word the doctor pointed to the table. Roy climbed up, and the doctor went right to his weak spot. Feeling along his hip and leg, he found the tenderness immediately, punching here and there, bringing little exclamations of pain from Roy’s lips, just as the French doctor had done. Then he took a tape measure from his pocket and, stretching out both legs, measured them carefully several times.

“H’m... h’m... h’m.” Nothing more.

Taking hold of the left leg, he lifted it with infinite care from the table. To Roy’s amazement, the leg when extended upward would only rise a few inches before that pain began shooting up his hip. Then the doctor tried to move it outward. Again it hurt. Next he told him to stand and bend over to the floor. Once more Roy was astonished to discover how tight and stiff he was, how the looseness and suppleness had vanished from his back. This man knew his job.

“Get dressed now. I’m sending you downstairs to X ray for examinations.”

Roy must have been half an hour on that table. They X-rayed him from every position and every angle. His hip, his back, his leg, his calf were taken, then re-taken. On his return upstairs, the doctor was busy and he had to wait. Finally he was ushered into the office, where the man sat in his swivel chair, tapping a ruler against his desk. He looked curiously at him.

“You’re a professional baseball player, I understand.”

“Yessir. Just out of service.”

“H’m.” Then for twenty minutes he asked Roy questions about his fall in France, about the crash of the plane, the angle at which it fell, the position he had been in, the tossing about that ensued. He took notes of everything, writing down each answer carefully. At last he swung round abruptly.

“Mr. Tucker...” He scratched his head.

Roy reflected that this was the first time he had been addressed that way for many years.

“Mr. Tucker, I haven’t, of course, seen your X rays yet. But I believe they’ll show that you threw your sacroiliac out of place in that plane crash in France, and that this has been causing pressure on your sciatic nerve. The sciatic nerve? That runs all the way down your leg from your hip, here. You evidently have a badly inflamed nerve condition in that left hip. You see, unconsciously you’ve been favoring your left side, which is why, as I suspected when I saw you walk in, your left leg is almost an inch shorter than your right.”

“Shorter! Than my right one?”

“Yes, you see in the past year you’ve been continually favoring that side, and as a result your leg has actually shrunk nearly one inch. It’s a common thing, very common. Don’t worry. Now I believe, though as I say I have yet to see the plates, that we ought to give you an Ober.”

“An Ober! What’s that?”

He laughed, a friendly, reassuring laugh. “It’s an operation named after a surgeon in Boston who invented it. We cut the muscles from here” — he placed his left hand on the top of Roy’s left hip — “to here.” The hand went diagonally across the hip. “That’s done to release them, so you can swing out your leg. It was locked, you may have noticed, on the table. When do you think... it would be convenient?”

Boy! Well, if it’s gotta come, it’s gotta come. “Tomorrow.”

The doctor laughed once more. “Not tomorrow. I’m afraid I’m busy all this week. How about next Thursday?”

I
T WAS NEARING
the season’s end. This you instantly knew by the lack of pressure among the players, by the rows of empty seats in the boxes, by the turf, scarred and worn in the September sunshine. The batting cage was up around home plate, and the hitters were out there swinging freely at Fat Stuff’s deliveries.

The batters rolled up to the plate, took their raps, one, two, three, and strolled slowly back to the dugout, thrusting their clubs into the batrack, pausing for a drink from the cooler before slumping upon the bench. Only one player on the field was nervous. Not because it was Roy Tucker Day in Flatbush, nor because the bleachers were jammed with yammering kids, and large signs hung from the balcony in center field saying: