The Great American Novel (25 page)

When Roland Agni, of all people, took a called third strike to end their half of the inning, the Mundys rushed off the bench like a team that smelled World Series loot. “We was due!” yelped Nickname, taking the peg from Hothead and sweeping his glove over the bag—“Nobody gonna stop us now, babe! We was due! We was
over
due!” Then he winged the ball over to where Deacon Demeter stood on the mound, grinning. “Three big ones for you, Deke!” Old Deacon, the fifty-year-old iron-man starter of the Mundy staff, already a twenty-game loser with two months of the season still to go, shot a string of tobacco juice over his left shoulder to ward off evil spirits, stroked the rabbit's foot that hung on a chain around his neck, closed his eyes to mumble something ending with “Amen,” and then stepped up on the rubber to face the first patient. Deacon was a preacher back home, as gentle and kindly a man as you would ever want to bring your problems to, but up on the hill he was all competitor, and had been for thirty years now. “When the game begins,” he used to say back in his heyday, “charity ends.” And so it was that when he saw the first Lunatic batter digging in as though he owned the batter's box, the Deke decided to take Hothead's advice and stick the first pitch in his ear, just to show the little nut who was boss. The Deacon had taken enough insults that year for a fifty-year-old man of the cloth!

Not only did the Deke's pitch cause the batter to go flying back from the plate to save his skin, but next thing everyone knew the lead-off man was running for the big brick building with the iron bars on its windows. Two of his teammates caught him down the right-field line and with the help of the Lunatic bullpen staff managed to drag him back to home plate. But once there they couldn't get him to take hold of the bat; every time they put it into his hands, he let it fall through to the ground. By the time the game was resumed, with a 1 and 0 count on a new lead-off hitter, one not quite so cocky as the fellow who'd stepped up to bat some ten minutes earlier, there was no doubt in anyone's mind that the Deke was in charge. As it turned out, twice in the inning Mike Rama had to go sailing up into the wall to haul in a long line drive, but as the wall was padded, Mike came away unscathed, and the Deacon was back on the bench with his three-run lead intact.

“We're on our way!” cried Nickname. “We are on our God damn way!”

Hothead too was dancing with excitement; cupping his hands to his mouth, he shouted across to the opposition, “Just watch you bastards go to pieces now!”

And so they did. The Deke's pitching and Mike's fielding seemed to have shaken the confidence of the big Lunatic right-hander whose fastball had reined in the Mundys in the first. To the chagrin of his teammates, he simply would not begin to pitch in the second until the umpire stopped staring at him.

“Oh, come on,” said the Lunatic catcher, “he's not staring at
you.
Throw the ball.”

“I tell you, he's right behind you and he is too staring. Look you, I see you there behind that mask. What is it you want from me? What is it you think you're looking at, anyway?”

The male nurse, in white half-sleeve shirt and white trousers, who was acting as the plate umpire, called out to the mound, “Play ball now. Enough of that.”

“Not until you come out from there.”

“Oh, pitch, for Christ sake,” said the catcher.

“Not until that person stops staring.”

Here Dr. Traum came off the Lunatic bench and started for the field, while down in the Lunatic bullpen a left-hander got up and began to throw. Out on the mound, with his hands clasped behind his back and rocking gently to and fro on his spikes, the doctor conferred with the pitcher. Formal European that he was, he wore, along with his regulation baseball shoes, a dark three-piece business suit, a stiff collar, and a tie.

“What do you think the ol' doc's tellin' that boy?” Bud Parusha asked Jolly Cholly.

“Oh, the usual,” the old-timer said. “He's just calmin' him down. He's just askin' if he got any good duck shootin' last season.”

It was five full minutes before the conference between the doctor and the pitcher came to an end with the doctor asking the pitcher to hand over the ball. When the pitcher vehemently refused, it was necessary for the doctor to snatch the ball out of his hand; but when he motioned down to the bullpen for the left-hander, the pitcher suddenly reached out and snatched the ball back. Here the doctor turned back to the bullpen and this time motioned for the left-hander
and
a right-hander. Out of the bullpen came two men dressed like the plate umpire in white half-sleeve shirts and white trousers. While they took the long walk to the mound, the doctor made several unsuccessful attempts to talk the pitcher into relinquishing the ball. Finally the two men arrived on the mound and before the pitcher knew what had happened, they had unfurled a straitjacket and wrapped it around him.

“Guess he wanted to stay in,” said Jolly Cholly, as the pitcher kicked out at the doctor with his feet.

The hundred Lunatic fans who had gathered to watch the game from the benches back of the foul screen behind home plate, and who looked in their street clothes as sane as any baseball crowd, rose to applaud the pitcher as he left the field, but when he opened his mouth to acknowledge the ovation, the two men assisting him in his departure slipped a gag over his mouth.

Next the shortstop began to act up. In the first inning it was he who had gotten the Lunatics out of trouble with a diving stab of a Bud Parusha liner and a quick underhand toss that had doubled Wayne Heket off third. But now in the top of the second, though he continued to gobble up everything hit to the left of the diamond, as soon as he got his hands on the ball he proceeded to stuff it into his back pocket. Then, assuming a posture of utter nonchalance, he would start whistling between his teeth and scratching himself, as though waiting for the action to
begin.
In that it was already very much underway, the rest of the Lunatic infield would begin screaming at him to take the ball out of his pocket and make the throw to first. “What?” he responded, with an innocent smile. “The ball!” they cried. “Yes, what about it?” “Throw it!” “But I don't have it.” “You
do!”
they would scream, converging upon him from all points of the infield, “You do too!” “Hey, leave me alone,” the shortstop cried, as they grabbed and pulled at his trousers. “Hey, cut that out—get your hands
out
of there!” And when at last the ball was extracted from where he himself had secreted it, no one could have been more surprised. “Hey, the
ball.
Now who put that there? Well, what's everybody looking at
me
for? Look, this must be some guy's idea of a joke … Well, Christ,
I
didn't do it.”

Once the Mundys caught on, they were quick to capitalize on this unexpected weakness in the Lunatic defense, pushing two more runs across in the second on two consecutive ground balls to short—both beaten out for hits while the shortstop grappled with the other infielders—a sacrifice by Mike Rama, and a fly to short center that was caught by the fielder who then just stood there holding it in his glove, while Hothead, who was the runner on second, tagged up and hobbled to third, and then, wooden leg and all, broke for home, where he scored with a head-first slide, the only kind he could negotiate. As it turned out, the slide wasn't even necessary, for the center-fielder was standing in the precise spot where he had made the catch—and the ball was still in his glove.

With the bases cleared, Dr. Traum asked for time and walked out to center. He put a hand on the shoulder of the mute and motionless fielder and talked to him in a quiet voice. He talked to him steadily for fifteen minutes, their faces only inches apart. Then he stepped aside, and the center-fielder took the ball from the pocket of his glove and threw a perfect strike to the catcher, on his knees at the plate some two hundred feet away.

“Wow,” said Bud Parusha, with ungrudging admiration, “now, that fella has a arm on him.”

“Hothead,” said Cholly, mildly chiding the catcher, “he woulda had you by a country mile, you know, if only he'd a throwed it.”

But Hot, riding high, hollered out, “Woulda don't count, Charles—it's dudda what counts, and I dud it!”

Meanwhile Kid Heket, who before this morning had not been awake for two consecutive innings in over a month, continued to stand with one foot up on the bench, his elbow on his knee and his chin cupped contemplatively in his palm. He had been studying the opposition like this since the game had gotten underway, “You know somethin',” he said, gesturing toward the field, “those fellas ain't thinkin'. No sir, they just ain't usin' their heads.”

“We got 'em on the run, Wayne!” cried Nickname. “They don't know
what
hit 'em! Damn, ain't nobody gonna stop us from here on out!”

Deacon was hit hard in the last of the second, but fortunately for the Mundys, in the first two instances the batsman refused to relinquish the bat and move off home plate, and so each was thrown out on what would have been a base hit, right-fielder Parusha to first-baseman Baal; and the last hitter, who drove a tremendous line drive up the alley in left center, ran directly from home to third and was tagged out sitting on the bag with what he took to be a triple, and what would have been one too, had he only run around the bases and gotten to third in the prescribed way.

The quarrel between the Lunatic catcher and the relief pitcher began over what to throw Big John Baal, the lead-off hitter in the top of the third.

“Uh-uh,” said the Lunatic pitcher, shaking off the first signal given by his catcher, while in the box, Big John took special pleasure in swishing the bat around menacingly.

“Nope,” said the pitcher to the second signal.

His response to the third was an emphatic, “N-O!”

And to the fourth, he said, stamping one foot, “Definitely
not!
”

When he shook off a fifth signal as well, with a caustic, “Are you kidding? Throw him that and it's bye-bye ballgame,” the catcher yanked off his mask and cried:

“And I suppose that's what I want, according to you! To lose! To go down in defeat! Oh, sure,” the catcher whined, “what I'm doing, you see, is deliberately telling you to throw him the wrong pitch so I can have the wonderful pleasure of being on the losing team again. Oh brother!” His sarcasm spent, he donned his mask, knelt down behind the plate, and tried yet once more.

This time the pitcher had to cross his arms over his chest and look to the heavens for solace. “God give me strength,” he sighed.

“In other words,” the catcher screamed, “I'm wrong
again.
But then in your eyes I'm
always
wrong. Well, isn't that true? Admit it! Whatever signal I give is
bound
to be wrong. Why? Because
I'm
giving it! I'm daring to give
you
a signal! I'm daring to tell
you
how to pitch! I could kneel here signaling for the rest of my days, and you'd just stand there shaking them off and asking God to give you strength,
because I'm so wrong and so stupid and so hopeless and would rather lose than win!
”

When the relief pitcher, a rather self-possessed fellow from the look of it, though perhaps a touch perverse in his own way, refused to argue, the Lunatic catcher once again assumed his squat behind the plate, and proceeded to offer a seventh signal, an eighth, a ninth, a tenth, each and every one of which the pitcher rejected with a mild, if unmistakably disdainful, remark.

On the sixteenth signal, the pitcher just had to laugh. “Well, that one really takes the cake, doesn't it? That really took brains. Come over here a minute,” he said to his infielders. “All right,” he called back down to the catcher, “go ahead, show them your new brainstorm.” To the four players up on the mound with him, the pitcher whispered, “Catch this,” and pointed to the signal that the catcher, in his mortification, was continuing to flash from between his legs.

“Hey,” said the Lunatic third-baseman, “that ain't even a finger, is it?”

“No,” said the pitcher, “as a matter of fact, it isn't.”

“I mean, it ain't got no nail on it, does it?”

“Indeed it has not.”

“Why, I'll be darned,” said the shortstop, “it's, it's his thingamajig.”

“Precisely,” said the pitcher.

“But what the hell is that supposed to mean?” asked the first-baseman.

The pitcher had to smile again. “What do you think? Hey, Doc,” he called to the Lunatic bench, “I'm afraid my battery-mate has misunderstood what's meant by an exhibition game. He's flashing me the signal to meet him later in the shower, if you know what I mean.”

The catcher was in tears now. “He made me do it,” he said, covering himself with his big glove, and in his shame, dropping all the way to his knees, “everything else I showed him wasn't
good
enough for him—no, he teases me, he taunts me—”

By now the two “coaches” (as they were euphemistically called), who had removed the starting pitcher from the game, descended upon the catcher. With the aid of a fielder's glove, one of them gingerly lifted the catcher's member and placed it back inside his uniform before the opposing players could see what the signal had been, while the other relieved him of his catching equipment. “He provoked me,” the catcher said, “he always provokes me—”

The Lunatic fans were on their feet again, applauding, when their catcher was led away from the plate and up to the big brick building, along the path taken earlier by the starting pitcher. “—He won't let me alone, ever. I don't want to do it. I never wanted to do it. I
wouldn't
do it. But then he starts up teasing me and taunting me—”