The Last Western (14 page)

“We could borrow some money and make it 350,000,” said Essinger, “but you’d have to wait till the end of the season.”

“If you had all the money in the whole world, Mr. Essinger, it wouldn’t do any good. I tell you the truth, I don’t know why the pitch does what it does.”

“I told you it would go like this,” said Andrews, the shortstop.

“You make our position difficult,” said Essinger. “If you won’t accept our offer, then we have to ask you to stop throwing the pitch altogether.”

“I can’t do that!” Willie shouted.

“You’ll have to,” said Essinger. “For the good of the club. Look at the dissension you’re causing. Unity is the first word in our club motto.”

“A house divided against itself,” said Andrews, “why—” He could not remember the rest of the quotation.

“The people in my neighborhood, my kids even, laugh at me,” said Phillips, a Golden Glove infielder. “They say, ‘You get paid for nothing. Who needs a glove with him around?’”

“And then articles like this,” said Essinger, “articles which say we have illusions and delusions. Do you think it’s fun going around having people say you have delusions?”

Peters, the oldest player on the club said, “Look, son, it isn’t as if you had to give the pitch up. No, nothing like that. Just mix in a few straight ones.”

“So they can hit it?” asked Willie astonished.

“That’s it. To make a game of it.”

“But the idea is to get them out,” said Willie.

“Not the way you’re doing it, not all the time,” said Peters. “What sport is there in that?”

“What does Mr. Grayson think?” said Willie, perplexed and still near tears.

The players snickered.

“What does he know?” Essinger said.

“He’s the manager,” said Willie.

“He couldn’t manage a box of matches,” said Andrews.

“With the directions printed on the cover,” said Phillips.

“No one on this club has listened to him in three years,” said Essinger. “Him and his Ezee Good Words.”

“Then it seems club unity is a little weak already,” said Willie, surprised by his own argument.

“If you think sarcasm will help, you’re badly mistaken, boy,” said Essinger.

“I did not mean to be sarcastic, Mr. Essinger,” Willie replied. “But I want to get the matter straight in my mind.”

“You better get it straight fast,” said Essinger. “We’re opening at home Tuesday night and you’re pitching. If I were you, I’d have it straight by then.”

After they left, Willie tried to think things out.

He wished he could talk with Clio, but Clio, talking on the phone with Martha in the next room, had his own enormous worry.

He wished he could go out and walk in the streets, but the hotel lobby was jammed with people, people who wanted to stare at him, take his picture, touch him, question him.

In the corridor outside, the players talked among themselves, their voices sometimes rising in anger.

He thought it would cheer him to call home, not to discuss his troubles but just to chat with his mother and Cool Dawn. But the operator said the circuits were out of order, that he should try the call later.

He opened the window and crawled out on the fire escape. He climbed to the top of the hotel and sat down on a parapet and looked out at the old city of Boston.

He could see the red and white lights of the ships swinging in the harbor, the harbor, he remembered, where Englishmen dressed as Indians threw tea in the ocean and set America going. He tried to think of the many things that had happened here in the long ago.

But it was no use.

The loneliness came over his heart like the fog that came rolling in from the sea. He had never felt so alone before.

He went back to the room and wrote to Carolyn on a postcard that showed a picture of the house of the famous American philosopher of the unremembered times, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

I love you. That what I alwas wanted to tell you.

I didn’t know how and was afrade you wd laugh.

Did you know even back in the school I loved you?

Only never knew how to say it. Anyway, I love U.

Dear one, with trew heart.

The ball parks
or stadiums where the Hawks played their road games were stunning creations, by far the most magnificent structures ever built in American cities.

They were more beautiful and graceful than cathedrals.

They were more stately than insurance company buildings.

They were more comfortable than schools and far more habitable than most of the housing in the country.

The cities competed with one another in building bigger and more luxurious ball parks.

They were all enclosed now, like the old Houston Astrodome, and conditioned with the only pure air in the city.

Their playing fields could be converted to ice rinks for hockey, plastic courts for basketball or shiny Road-Pak, as it was called, for jet auto racing.

Sometimes conventions of one kind or another were held in the stadiums. They were so comfortable and had such pure air that people delighted to visit them for any reason.

Often, especially in the winter months, the people of the tenements would break into the playdomes to try to find a warm place to sleep.

This had become a common crime in the United States. It was called dome-passing and was punishable by a fine and 100 days imprisonment in one of the new underground prisons. The President of the United States had recently called dome-passing one of the most disgusting of all crimes because it directly invaded the right of every American citizen to enjoy sports in peace and freedom.

The ball parks of Cleveland, St. Louis, Chicago, Boston, Kansas City and Washington had all been spectacular, but none of those parks prepared Willie and Clio for the Regent Complex of New York City.

The Regent Complex, a many-sided affair of glass and steel and alumibronze, was the largest structure in New York City.

It occupied what had once been Central Park in Manhattan.

It soared 294 stories into the air and was the tallest building in the country.

It was so vast and overpowering to the eye that it appeared to be not only the hub of the city but the reason for its existence, as in a sense it was.

The Complex housed some 3,000 business offices, representing the nation’s leading industries.

Many foreign governments had their embassies and consulates there.

The United Nations occupied a part of the 126th floor.

The stadium dome, set on top of the complex, covered the largest ball park in the world with a seating capacity of 150,000.

Three hundred gigantic elevators whisked the fans to the Park at the Top of the World, as it was called, where they were then borne by a system of conveyor belts—like the old escalators—to the bleachers, or to private box seats, or to one of the elegant restaurants ringing the top of the dome.

The night the Hawks opened their season, the stands were filled to capacity. Every table in every restaurant was taken.

The size of the park, the magnificence of the setting, the vast crowd had a numbing effect on Willie and Clio.

Warming up, they were unnaturally calm as if tranquilized or half awake.

Only an hour before, boarding the monorail that brought them to the park, they had been nervous, filled with anxiety, each lost in his own worries.

But here it seemed impossible to worry.

Nothing seemed important but the game, and even the game seemed a remote happening that did not really involve them.

But when they had warmed up and worked up a sweat, their ordinary feelings returned, their concerns and their fears.

Now Willie saw the stone faces of Essinger and Phillips and the other players as they watched him from the dugout.

He had not told Clio of his encounter with the players in Boston—Clio’s worries were already too great.

Clio shaded his eyes against the powerful floodlights of the stadium and peered at the distant restaurants and faintly luminous offices at the top of the park.

“If he’s anywhere, he’s here,” he said to Willie. “He wouldn’t miss his home opening.”

Willie, looking at the enormous crowd, said, “We’d never find him anyway.”

In the dugout they asked Mr. Grayson where Robert ‘Bob’ Regent usually sat at the park.

“He’s apt to be anywhere,” said Mr. Grayson. “Anywhere in the stands or in his office.”

“His office is here?” said Clio.

“There,” said Mr. Grayson, pointing to a row of oblong panels, lit by red and blue lights, at the very top of the dome, above the center field fence.

“How can we get there?” Clio asked. “Maybe he’s up there right now.”

“You wouldn’t go to the office,” said Mr. Grayson quickly.

“Why not?”

“No one goes to the office unless summoned.”

“How do we get there?”

“Don’t go,” Mr. Grayson pleaded. He reached into his red, white and blue jacket and opened the Vest Pocket Ezee Bible. “Listen:
When ye see the abomination of desolation
… .”

“How do we get there?” shouted Clio angrily.

“The M elevator on this level,” Mr. Grayson said with a sigh. “But, boys, please… .”

The boys didn’t wait to hear what Mr. Grayson had to say. They raced into the clubhouse and down the corridor to the M elevator.

Inside the elevator there were eight numbered push buttons; the ninth was a plain bar, like a military decoration, of red, white and blue.

“That’s it,” said Clio.

Willie pushed it.

In a moment they were standing in a dark thickly carpeted room that was absolutely bare, without window or doorway, with only a little light coming from an aperture at the top of one wall.

“There has to be a door someplace,” Clio said, plunging off to the left.

“Look over there,” Willie said, pointing to the opposite wall.

As their eyes adjusted to the darkness, the boys saw quite faintly at first, and then more clearly, a blue glow radiating from the wall and outlining a panel of darker blue numbers and buttons.

The boys studied the panel trying to decipher the figures written on the tiny luminous circles and squares.

Suddenly a voice sounded in their midst, so close and so unexpectedly they both jumped.

“The last one on the left, boys.”

“Who was that?” Willie whispered.

Clio pushed the last button on the left.

Behind them there was a whirling sound. A panel of the opposite wall ascended with a soft buzz, then snapped to a stop.

As the boys turned at this sight, a figure appeared in the space opened by the panel, an indistinct figure swaying a little in the blue glow.

In the same voice they had heard before, the figure said, “Clio, you first.”

“Who are you?” Willie said with a shaking voice.

“
You
ask me that?” the figure asked sadly and Willie thought he caught the tone of Robert ‘Bob’ Regent’s voice.

The boys strained to see the face before them.

“Come, Clio,” the voice said.

“I’m coming with him,” Willie protested.

“This is between Clio and myself,” said the figure.

Both boys now guessed, though they could not be sure, that this was indeed Robert ‘Bob’ Regent.

“It’s all right,” said Clio. “Just wait for me.”

Willie waited—a minute, five minutes, fifteen minutes—waited in darkness, his blood pounding in his veins, fear pounding and pulsing in his veins.

At one point he thought of storming the panel, convinced that Clio was in danger.

But there was no sound from beyond the wall, and he told himself to be calm.

He waited.

At last the panel lifted again, again revealing that eerie blue radiance.

Through that curious light came Clio, walking stiffly, head down.

“Clio,” Willie whispered.

Clio didn’t answer.

“What is it, Clio?”

Clio, head lowered so that his face was invisible, said nothing. The elevator door closed noiselessly and he was gone.

Willie turned about and there in the haze of blue stood the figure, ghostly, almost a shadow, gesturing with one arm in a curious and sinister way.

“Now, Willie, we shall have our talk,” said the sad voice.

Willie went forward, under the panel, into a larger space, a wide curving space, glassed on either side.

On one side Willie could see the bright flag of the playing field, the fantastic crowd, noiseless from this space, and unreal, looking not like people but painted images of people, man-made things like the mechanical birds that darted through the night air.

On the other side the green lights of the city shone mournfully through a dripping mist.

The office was full of dim, oddly shaped furniture, grotesque designs that seemed to float in the uncertain gleam of the stadium on the one side and the smoky green haze of the city on the other.

It was still difficult to make out the face of the figure that had moved now behind a desk.

“You
are
Mr. Regent?” Willie asked.

“Sit down.”

“Where has Clio gone?”

“We are not here to discuss Clio, but you.”

“You must first tell me if you are Robert Regent.”

There was a pause now, and Willie thought he saw the man put his hand to his face.

“Willie,” the man said, “Willie—I thought you were my friend.”

“You are Mr. Regent!”

“Does it matter who I am? Does it matter where I am? Does loyalty to your owner depend on place or time?”

“What can that mean, Mr. Regent?”

“
Bob.
”

“Bob.”

“You have forgotten New Orleans?” Robert ‘Bob’ Regent said in the saddest of tones. “Our friendship means nothing?”

Willie, more bewildered now than before, blurted, “What does our friendship have to do with it—with Clio or—with my, my other worries?”

“That I should have offered my friendship so easily,” sighed Robert ‘Bob’ Regent. “To someone who doesn’t care.”

“I don’t understand,” said Willie. “Not anything you say.”

Slowly the figure rose from the desk and went to the windows overlooking the ball field.

Willie approached from the other side of the desk.