The Great American Novel (11 page)

“You sound tired, Mike.”

“I'll oop survive,” he said, closing his eyes and swaying.

But the General had to wonder. He might have been looking at a raw young ump up from the minors, worried sick about making a mistake his first game in the Big Time, instead of Mike the Mouth, on the way to his two millionth major league decision.

He had to rap Mike on the shoulder now to rouse him. “I have every confidence in you, Mike. I always have. I always will. I know you won't let the league down. You won't now, will you, Michael?”

“Oop.”

“Good!”

What a year Gil went on to have (and Mike with him)! Coming into the last game of the year, the rookie had not only tied the record for the most wins in a single season (41), but had broken the record for the most strike-outs (349) set by Rube Waddell in 1904, the record for the most shutouts (16) set by Grover Alexander in 1916, and had only to give up less than six runs to come in below the earned run average of 1.01 set by Dutch Leonard the year he was born. As for Patriot League records, he had thrown more complete games than any other pitcher in the league's history, had allowed the fewest walks, the fewest hits, and gotten the most strike-outs per nine innings. Any wonder then, that after the rookie's late September no-hitter against Independence (his fortieth victory as against the one 9–0 loss), Mike the Mouth fell into some sort of insentient fit in the dressing room from which he could not be roused for nearly twenty-four hours. He stared like a blind man, he drooled like a fool. “Stunned,” said the doctor, and threw cold water at him. Following the second no-hitter—which came four days after the first—Mike was able to make it just inside the dressing room with his dignity intact, before he began the howling that did not completely subside for the better part of two days and two nights. He did not eat, sleep, or drink: just raised his lips to the ceiling and hourly bayed to the other wolves. “Something definitely the matter here,” said the doctor. “When the season's over, you better have him checked.”

The Greenbacks went into the final day of the year only half a game out in front of the Tycoons; whichever Tri-City team should win the game, would win the flag. And Gamesh, by winning his forty-second, would have won more games in a season than any other pitcher in history. And of course there was the chance that the nineteen-year-old kid would pitch his third consecutive no-hitter …

Well, what happened was more incredible even than that. The first twenty-six Tycoons he faced went down on strikes: seventy-eight strikes in a row. There had not even been a foul tip—either the strike was called, or in desperation they swung at the ozone. Then, two out in the ninth and two strikes on the batter (thus was it ever, with Gilbert Gamesh) the left-hander fired into the catcher's mitt what seemed not only to the sixty-two thousand three hundred and forty-two ecstatic fans packed into Greenback Stadium, but to the helpless batter himself—who turned from the plate without a whimper and started back to his home in Wilkes-Barre, Pa.—the last pitch of the '33 Patriot League season. Strike-out number twenty-seven. Victory number forty-two. Consecutive no-hitter number three. The most perfect game ever pitched in the major leagues, or conceived of by the mind of man. The Greenbacks had won the pennant, and how! Bring on the Senators and the Giants!

Or so it had seemed, until Mike the Mouth Masterson got word through to the two managers that the final out did not count, because at the moment of the pitch,
his back had been turned to the plate.

In order for the game to be resumed, tens of thousands of spectators who had poured out onto the field when little Joe Iviri, the Tycoon hitter, had turned away in defeat, had now to be forced back up through the gates into the stands; wisely, General Oakhart had arranged beforehand for the Tri-City mounted constabulary to be at the ready, under the stands, in the event of just such an uprising as this, and so it was that a hundred whinnying horses, drawn up like a cavalry company and charging into the manswarm for a full fifteen minutes, drove the enraged fans from the field. But not even policemen with drawn pistols could force them to take their seats. With arms upraised they roared at Mike the Mouth as though he were their Fuehrer, only it was not devotion they were promising him.

General Oakhart himself took the microphone and attemped to address the raging mob. “This is General Douglas D. Oakhart, President of the Patriot League. Due to circumstances beyond his control, umpire-in-chief Mike Masterson was unable to make a call on the last pitch because his back was turned to the plate at that moment.”

“KILL THE MOUTH! MURDER THE BUM!”

“According to rule 9.4, section e, of the Official—”

“BANISH THE BLIND BASTARD! CUT OFF HIS WHATSIS!”

“—game shall be resumed prior to that pitch. Thank you.”

“BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”

In the end it was necessary for the General to step out onto the field of play (as once he had stepped onto the field of battle), followed behind by the Tri-City Symphony Orchestra; by his order, the musicians (more terrified than any army he had ever seen, French, British, American, or Hun) assembled for the second time that day in center field, and with two down in the ninth, and two strikes on the batter, proceeded to play the National Anthem again.

“‘O say can you seed,'” sang the General.

Through his teeth, he addressed Mike Masterson, who stood beside him at home plate, with his cap over his chest protector. “What happened?”

Mike said, “I—I saw him.”

Agitated as he was, he nonetheless remained at rigid attention, smartly saluting the broad stripes and bright stars. “Who? When?”

“The one,” said Mike.

“The one
what?
”

“Who I've been looking for. There! Headed for the exit back of the Tycoon dugout. I recognized him by his ears and the set of his chin,” and a sob rose in his throat. “Him. The kidnapper. The masked man who killed my little girl.”

“Mike!” snapped the General. “Mike, you were seeing things! You were imagining it!”

“It was
him!
”

“Mike, that was thirty-five years ago. You could not recognize a man after all that time, not by his ears, for God's sake!”

“Why not?” Mike wept. “I've seen him every night, in my sleep, since 12 September 1898.”

“‘O say does that Star-Spangled Banner yet wave/O'er the land of the free, and the home—'”

“Play ball!” the fans were shouting, “Play the God damn game!”

It had worked. The General had turned sixty-two thousand savages back into baseball fans with the playing of the National Anthem! Now—if only he could step in behind the plate and call the last pitch! Or bring the field umpire in to take Mike's place on balls and strikes! But the first was beyond what he was empowered to do under the Rules and the Regulations; and the second would forever east doubt upon the twenty-six strike-outs already recorded in the history books by Gamesh, and on the forty-one victories before that. Indeed, the field umpire had wisely pretended that he had not seen the last Gamesh pitch either, so as not to compromise the greatest umpire in the game by rendering the call himself. What could the General do then but depart the field?

On the pitcher's mound, Gil Gamesh had pulled his cap so low on his brow that he was in shadows to his chin. He had not even removed it for “The Star-Spangled Banner”—as thousands began to realize with a deepening sense of uneasiness and alarm. He had been there on the field since the last pitch thrown to Iviri—except for the ten minutes when he had been above it, bobbing on a sea of uplifted arms, rolling in the embrace of ten thousand fans. And when the last pack of celebrants had fled before the flying hooves, they had deposited him back on the mound, from whence they had plucked him—and run for their lives. And so there he stood, immobile, his eyes and mouth invisible to one and all. What was he thinking? What was going through Gil's mind?

Scrappy little Joe Iviri, a little pecking hitter, and the best lead-off man in the country at that time, came up out of the Tycoon dugout, sporting a little grin as though he had just been raised from the dead, and from the stands came an angry Vesuvian roar.

Down in the Greenback dugout, the Old Philosopher considered going out to the mound to peek under the boy's cap and see what was up. But what could he do about anything anyway? “Whatever happens,” he philosophized, “it's going to happen anyway, especially with a prima donna like that one.”

“Play!”

Iviri stepped in, twitching his little behind.

Gamesh pitched.

It was a curve that would have shamed a ten-year-old boy—or girl, for that matter. While it hung in the clear September light, deciding whether to break a little or not, there was time enough for the catcher to gasp, “Holy aloha!”

And then the baseball was ricocheting around in the tricky right-field corner, to which it had been dispatched at the same height at which it had been struck. A stand-up triple for Iviri.

From the silence in Greenback Stadium, you would have thought that winter had come and the field lay under three feet of snow. You would have thought that the ballplayers were all down home watching haircuts at the barber shop, or boasting over a beer to the boys in the local saloon. And all sixty-two thousand fans might have been in hibernation with the bears.

Pineapple Tawhaki moved in a daze out to the mound to hand a new ball to Gamesh. Immediately after the game, at the investigation conducted in General Oakhart's office, Tawhaki—weeping profusely—maintained that when he had come out to the mound after the triple was hit, Gamesh had hissed at him, “Stay down! Stay low! On your knees, Pineapple, if you know what's good for you!” “So,” said Pineapple in his own defense, “I do what he say, sir. That all. I figger Gil want to throw drop-drop. Okay to me. Gil pitch, Pineapple catch. I stay down. Wait for drop-drop. That all, sir, that all in world!” Nonetheless, General Oakhart suspended the Hawaiian for two years—as an “accomplice” to the heinous crime—hoping that he might disappear for good in the interim. Which he did—only instead of heading home to pick pineapples, he wound up a derelict on Tattoo Street, the Skid Row of Tri-City. Well, better he destroy himself with drink, than by his presence on a Patriot League diamond keep alive in the nation's memory what came to be characterized by the General as “the second deplorable exception to the Patriot League's honorable record.”

It was clear from the moment the ball left Gil's hand that it wasn't any drop-drop he'd had in mind to throw. Tawhaki stayed low—even as the pitch took off like something the Wright Brothers had invented. The batter testified at the hearing that it was still picking up speed when it passed him, and scientists interviewed by reporters later that day estimated that at the moment it struck Mike Masterson in the throat, Gamesh's rising fastball was probably traveling between one hundred and twenty and one hundred and thirty miles per hour. In his vain attempt to turn from the ball, Mike had caught it just between the face mask and the chest protector, a perfect pitch, if you believed, as the General did, that Masterson's blue bow tie was the bull's-eye for which Gamesh had been aiming.

The calamity-sized black headline MOUTH DEAD; GIL BANISHED proved to be premature. To be sure, even before the sun went down, the Patriot League President, with the Commissioner's approval, had expelled the record-breaking rookie sensation from the game of baseball forever. But the indestructible ump rallied from his coma in the early hours of the morning, and though he did not live to tell the tale—he was a mute thereafter—at least he lived.

The fans never forgave the General for banishing their hero. To hear them tell it, a boy destined to be the greatest pitcher of all time had been expelled from the game just for throwing a wild pitch. Rattled by a senile old umpire who had been catching a few Zs back of home plate, the great rookie throws
one bad one,
and that's it, for life! Oh no, it ain't Oakhart's favorite ump who's to blame for standin' in the way of the damn thing—it's Gil!

Nor did the General's favorite ump forgive him either. The very day they had unswathed the bandages and released him from the hospital, Mike Masterson was down at the league office, demanding what he called “justice.” Despite the rule forbidding it, he was wearing his blue uniform off the field—in the big pockets once heavy with P. League baseballs, he carried an old rag and a box of chalk; and when he entered the office, there was a blackboard and an easel strapped to his back. Poor Mike had lost not only his voice. He wanted Gamesh to be indicted and tried by the Tri-City D.A.'s office for attempted murder.

“Mike, I must say that it comes as a profound shock to me that a man of your great wisdom should wish to take vengeance in that way.”

STUFF MY WISDOM (wrote Mike the Mouth on the blackboard he had set before the General's desk) I WANT THAT BOY BEHIND BARS!

“But this is not like you at all. Besides, the boy has been punished plenty.”

SAYS WHO?

“Now use your head, man. He is a brilliant young pitcher—and he will never pitch again.”

AND I CAN'T TALK AGAIN! OR EVEN WHISPER! I CAN'T CALL A STRIKE! I CAN'T CALL A BALL! I HAVE BEEN SILENCED FOREVER AT SEVENTY-ONE!

“And will seeing him in jail give you your voice back, at seventy-one?”

NO! NOTHING WILL! IT WON'T BRING MY MARY JANE BACK EITHER! IT WON'T MAKE UP FOR THE SCAR ON MY FOREHEAD OR THE GLASS STILL FLOATING IN MY BACK! IT WON'T MAKE UP (here he had to stop to wipe the board clean with his rag, so that he would have room to proceed) FOR THE ABUSE I HAVE TAKEN DAY IN AND DAY OUT FOR FIFTY YEARS!

“Then what on earth is the use of it?”

JUSTICE!

“Mike, listen to reason—what kind of justice is it that will destroy the reputation of our league?”