The Great American Novel (23 page)

The picture she handed Nickname was of a little tot dressed exactly as he was, and sitting up in a crib, though one not so large as his own.

“He's real cute,” said Nickname, handing the photo back through the bars.

“Sure, he is,” she said softly, looking at the photo, “but do I get a chance to enjoy him? It seems like half the naval training station was here just on Sunday alone.”

“If you're a grandmother,” asked Nickname, “how come—if you don't mind my askin'—how come you look so young?”

“I
used
to think it was because I was lucky. Now I'm starting to wonder. Look, look at these legs.” She lifted her dress a ways. “Look at these thighs. I used to think they were some kind of blessing. Here, put your hand out here. Feel this.” She placed her buttocks against the bars of the crib. “Feel how nice and firm that is. And look at my face—not a wrinkle anywhere. Not a gray hair on my head. And that isn't from the beauty parlor either. That's natural. I just do not age. Know what Estelle calls me? ‘The Eternal Mom.' ‘How can you quit, Mary?' she says to me, ‘How can you go off and work in a factory, looking the way you do, and with your touch. With your patience. Why, I just won't have it.' Where's my loyalty, she asks me. Oh, I like that. Where's my loyalty to the wonderful people who come here to spit pea soup in my face? And what about the boys going off to war—how can I be so unpatriotic? So I stay, Nickname. Don't ask me why. Cleaning the mess out of the diaper of just about everybody and anybody who has fifteen bucks in his pocket and is out looking for a good time. Oh, there are nights when I've got applesauce running out of my ears, nights when they practically drown me in the tub—and I haven't even talked about the throwin' up. Oh, there's just nothing that's out-and-out disgusting, that they don't do it. Sometimes I say to myself, ‘Face it, honey, you are just a mother at heart. Because if you weren't you would have been out of this life long ago.'”

When the trouble began down in the street, Nickname's “mother” motioned him over to the window to take a look. “Well,” she said, in her unruffled way, “looks like your buddy is going to get it now.”

Nickname crawled over the side of the crib and padded to her side. On the front walk, within the glow of the carriage lamp that had been turned up on the lawn, Big John was talking heatedly to two men in white uniforms who appeared to have stepped from a laundry truck parked at the curb; across the side of the truck it said,

C. OF C. DIAPER SERVICE KAKOOLA

“Who are those guys?” Nickname asked.

“Oh,” said Mary, with her soft laugh, “don't be fooled by the name. Those two don't happen to take any crap.”

The three men entered the house. “Hey, Nickname!” Big John called up the stairs. “Come on! Put your jock on,
niño!
We're gettin' out of this clipjoint!”

“Whattaya say now, fella, this ain't a barroom,” cautioned one of the diapermen. “It's a comfortable middle-class home in a nice neighborhood where people know how to behave themselves. If they know what's good for 'em, anyway.”

“It's a racket, is what it is!” John said to the diaperman. “Fifteen bucks and he don't even got a piece of hamburger meat! You probably cut the pablum with water!”

“You're
supposed
to cut pablum with water, wiseguy. Now just quiet down, how about it? Maybe there are people tryin' to sleep around here, you know?”

Nickname by now had made his way to the head of the stairs. “Hi, Jawn … What's up?”

“Let's git,
niño.
”

“How come?” asked Nickname, nervously.

“How come? On accounta what they get around here for
‘Alouette,'
that's how come!”

“What's an al-oo-etta?”

“It is a French song, that's all it is, keed—and it'll cost you two dollars and fifty cents! Know what they get for ‘Happy Birthday'? Four dollars weekdays and five on Sundays! For ‘Happy Birthday to You'!”

“Well,” said Nickname, watching the two diapermen closing in on his protector, “it ain't my birthday anyhow—I already had it for this year.”

“It ain't the birthday, damn it—it's the principle! You know what you can get for four bucks down by the lake? I hate to tell you. You know what you can get for two-fifty? You don't get no French song—you get Frenched itself! Come on, tweak your mom on the tittie, and let's get out of here!”

Nickname shrugged. “I guess we're goin' now,” he said to Mary.

“Suits me. I been up since four. That'll be fifteen.”

Nickname looked down the stairway to Big John. “Jawn? It'll be fifteen.”

“Yeah, well, you tell her it'll be five, what with it bein' not even nine in the night.”

“Sorry, Mac,” said Mary. “Fifteen.”

Big John said, “Five, slit,” and reaching into his pocket for some change, added, “but here's two bits for yourself, for givin' us a glimpse of your can. Haw! Haw!”

One of the diapermen was beneath Big John, pinned to the floor of the playpen—an alphabet block stuffed in his mouth—and the other was preparing to bring the fire truck down on the first baseman's head, when the sirens came screaming into the street. “The cops!” cried the diaperman who could still speak, and he ran for the kitchen door—and there was a Kakoola policeman pointing a pistol.

“Pimp bastard,” said the officer, and fired into the air.

Immediately, from the windows of the little white houses, men began to leap out onto the lawns, men in diapers and Doctor Dentons, some still holding bottles and clutching blankets in their hands. Nickname and Big John, charging out through the front door, found themselves on the front lawn beside a man in combat boots and a crew cut, clinging to a teddy bear; apparently he had been in another bedroom of the same house. “The Japs or the cops,” he screamed, “which is it?”

“Haw! Haw!”

Now a squad car turned up off the street and came right at them there on the lawn, siren howling and searchlight a blinding white. The man with the teddy bear (a sergeant in the U.S. Marines according to the story in the morning paper about the raid on “the pink-'n-blue district”) broke for the backyard.
Zing,
and he fell over into a forsythia bush, his teddy bear still in his arms.

They came out with their hands in the air after that; some were in tears and tried to hide their faces with their upraised arms. “Cry babies,” mumbled a cop, and he beat them around the ankles with his nightstick as they stepped up into the police van one by one.

Meanwhile, they had begun to empty the houses of the “mothers.” Storybooks in hand, they filed out, women more or less resembling Mary, wearing aprons and cotton dresses, and all, it would seem, very much in possession of themselves. They were lined up in the crossbeams of the squad cars and frisked by a policewoman; standing together in the street, they looked as though they might have been called together to give the neighborhood endorsement for 20 Mule Team Borax, rather than to be charged with a crime of vice.

When the policewoman reached into Mary's apron pocket and withdrew a handful of diaper pins, she exploded—“You and your diapers and your diaper pins and your diaper service! Filth! You live in filth! You're a disgrace to your sex!”

“Lay off,” said the cop who was covering the “mothers” with a submachine gun.

“Shit and puke and piss! Just get a whiff of them!”

“Lay off, Sarge,” said the armed policeman.

But she couldn't. “You perverts make a person sick, you stink so bad!” And she spat in Mary's face, to show her contempt.

The “mothers” stood in the middle of Euphrates Drive listening with expressionless faces to the insults of the policewoman. A few like Mary had to laugh to themselves, however, for nothing the policewoman said could begin to approach the contempt that they felt for their own lives.

Nor did the “mothers” show any emotion when the diapermen, many of them badly beaten and covered with blood, were driven past them with nightsticks, and pushed on their faces into the police van. Only when the body of the dead customer with the teddy bear was carried to the ambulance—diapered down below, and above now too, where they had covered the fatal wound in his head—only then did one of them speak. It was the woman who had fed him that night. “He was just a boy,” she said—to which a policeman replied, “Yeah, and so is Hitler.”

“I wouldn't doubt it,” the “mother” answered, and for her cheekiness was removed from the line and taken by two policemen into the back of a squad car. “What do you want to hear, officers,” she asked as they led her away, “the Three Bears or—”

“Shut her up!” shouted the policewoman, and they did.

The van for the “mothers” was over an hour in arriving; it grew cold out in the street, and though the abuse from the policewoman grew more and more vile, the “mothers” never once complained.

*   *   *

Now because of the proximity of “the hog factory” to the ball park, playing against the Butchers in the Pork Capital of the World had never been considered a particularly savory experience by Patriot League players, and it was a long-standing joke among them that they would rather be back home cleaning out cesspools for a living than have to call Aceldama their home on a sultry August day. Of course, one full season at Butcher Field and a newcomer was generally as accustomed to the aromas wafting in from the abattoir as to the odors of the hot dogs cooking on the grill back of third. Only the visiting teams kept up their complaining year in and year out, and not so much because of the smell, as the sounds. Visiting rookies would invariably give a start at the noise that came from a pig having his throat slit just the other side of the left-field wall, and when a thousand of the terrified beasts started in screaming at the same time, it was not unheard of for a youngster in pursuit of a fly ball to fall cowering to his knees.

In '43, the Mundys had to come through Aceldama to play not just eleven, but twenty-two games, and from the record they made there that year, it would not appear that playing twice as many times in Butcher Field as each of the other six clubs did much to accustom them to the nearby slaughterhouse and processing plant. “Lose to this mess of misfits,” the Butcher manager, Round Ron Spam, had warned his team when the Mundys—fresh from their disasters in Kakoola—came to town to open their first four-game series of the year, “and it is worse than a loss. It is a disgrace. And it will cost you fifty bucks apiece. And I don't want just victory either—I want carnage.” Subsequently the Bloodthirsty Butchers, as they came to be called that year, went on to defeat the Mundys twenty-two consecutive times, yet another of the records compiled against (or by) the roaming Ruppert team. The headlines of the Aceldama
Terminator
told the story succinctly enough:

MUNDYS MAULED

MUNDYS MALLETTED

MUNDYS MUZZLED

MUNDYS MURDERED

MUNDYS MOCKED

MUNDYS MINED

MUNDYS MOWED DOWN

MUNDYS MESMERIZED

MUNDYS MORGUED

MUNDYS MANGLED

MUNDYS MASHED

MUNDYS MUTILATED

MUNDYS MANHANDLED

MUNDYS MAUSOLEUMED

MUNDYS MACK-TRUCKED

MUNDYS MELTED

MUNDYS MAROONED

MUNDYS MUMMIFIED

MUNDYS MORTIFIED

MUNDYS MASSACRED

MUNDYS MANACLED

—and, after the final game of the season between the two clubs, in which “the meat end,” so-called, of the Aceldama batting order hit five consecutive home runs in the bottom of the eighth—

MUNDYS MERCY-KILLED

From Aceldama, which was the third stop on the western swing after Asylum and Kakoola, the Mundys traveled overnight to the oldest Pony Express station in the Wild West and the furthest western outpost in any of the major leagues, Terra Incognita, Wyoming, there to play against the least hospitable crowd they had to put up with anywhere. No wonder Luke Gofannon had collapsed and called it quits in the middle of his first season as a Rustler. After twenty years as the hero of Rupe-it rootas—loving, tender, loyal, impassioned Rupe-it rootas!—how could he take those Terra Inc. fans in their bandannas and their undershirts, staring silently down at him in that open oven of a ball park? To be sure, in Luke's case, their silence had been punctuated with derisive insults and chilling coyote calls from the distant bleachers, but what nearly drove you nuts out there wasn't the noises, no matter how brutish, but that otherworldly quiet, that emptiness, and that
staring:
the miners, the farmers, the ranchers, the cowhands, the drifters, even the Indians packed into their little roped-off corner of the left-field stands, silent and staring. Or maybe the word is
glaring.
As though there was nothing more horrible to behold than these Mundys, a bunch of ballplayers who came from, of all places,
nowhere.

Then there was this matter of the late, great Gofannon—fans out there hadn't forgotten yet the fast one that had been put over on them back in '32. Oh, you could see it plain as day in the set of the jaw of those Indians: a time would come when they would take their vengeance on these white men who had sold them a lemon for a hundred thousand dollars. As though Hothead, or Bud, or the Deacon had made a single nickel off that deal! As though these poor homeless bastards had anything to do with what had happened to the people of Terra Incognita ten long years ago! No, it was not pleasant being a Ruppert Mundy in the far western reaches of America. If the white ball emerging out of the acre of white undershirts in deep center wasn't enough to terrify a batsman who was a stranger to these parts, there were those cold, contemptuous, vengeful eyes looking him over from the seats down both foul lines. How they drew a bead on you with those eyes! Why, you had only to scoop up a handful of dust before stepping into the box, for those eyes to tell you, in no uncertain terms, “That there dirt ain't yours—it's ours. Put it back where you got it, pardner.” And if you were a Ruppert Mundy and the year was 1943, you put it back all right, and pronto.