The Natural (21 page)

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Authors: Bernard Malamud

BOOK: The Natural
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“Just me.”
“I don't remember.” He helped himself to a forkful of food. “No.”
“Didn't she love you?”
“She didn't love anybody.”
Memo said, “Let's try some new combinations with the buffet. Sometimes when you eat things that you didn't know could mix together but they do, you satisfy your appetite all at once. Now let's mix this lobster meat with hidden treats of anchovies, and here we will lay it on this tasty pumpernickel and spread Greek salad over it, then smear this other slice of bread with nice sharp cheese and put it on top of the rest.”
“All it needs now is a shovel of manure and a forest will grow out of it.”
“Now don't be dirty, Roy.”
“It looks like it could blow a man apart.”
“All the food is very fresh.”
After making the sandwich she went to the ladies' room. He felt depressed. Now why the hell did she have to go and ask him questions about his old lady? Thinking about her, he chewed on the sandwich. With the help of three bottles of lemon pop he downed it but had to guzzle three more of lime to get rid of the artificial lemon taste. He felt a little drunk and snickered because it was a food and pop drunk.
He had the odd feeling he was down on his hands and knees searching for something that he couldn't find.
Flores stood at the table.
“If you tell them to go home,” he hissed, “they weel.”
Roy stared. “Tell who?”
“The players. They are afraid to stay here but they don't go because you stay.”
“Go ahead and tell them to go.”
“You tell them,” Flores urged. “They weel leesten to your word.”
“Right,” said Roy.
Memo returned and Flores left him. Roy struggled to his feet, broke into a sweat, and sat down again. Fowler grabbed Memo and they whirled around. Roy didn't like them pressed so close together.
His face was damp. He reached into his pocket for a handkerchief and felt Iris' letter. For a second he thought he had found what he was looking for. More clearly than ever he remembered her pretty face and the brown eyes you could look into and see yourself as something more satisfying than you were, and he remembered telling her everything, the first time he had ever told anybody about it, and the relieved feeling he had afterward, and the long swim and Iris swimming down in the moonlit water searching for him, and the fire on the beach, she naked, and finally him banging her. For some reason this was the only thing he was ashamed of, though it couldn't be said she hadn't asked for it.
Fat girls write fat letters, he thought, and then he saw the little chef looking at him and was astonished at how hungry he felt.
Roy pushed himself up and headed for the table. The chef shined up a fast plate and with delight lifted the serving fork.
“I've had a snootful,” Roy said.
The chef tittered. “It's all fresh food.”
Roy looked into his button eyes. They were small pig's eyes. “Who says so?”
“It's the best there is.”
“It stinks.” He turned and walked stiffly to the door. Memo saw him. She waved gaily and kept on dancing.
He dragged his belly through the hall. When the elevator came it dropped him down in the lobby. He went along the corridor into the grill room. Carefully sitting down at the table, he ordered six hamburgers and two tall glasses of milk —clean food to kill the pangs of hunger.
The waiter told the cook the order, who got six red meat patties out of the refrigerator and pressed them on the grill. They softly sputtered. He thought he oughtn't to eat any more, but then he thought I am hungry. No, I am not hungry, I am hungry, whatever that means … What must I do not to be hungry? He considered fasting but he hadn't fasted since he was a kid. Besides, it made him hungry. He tried hard to recapture how it felt when he was hungry after a day of fishing and was sizzling lake bass over an open fire and boiling coffee in a tin can. All around his head were the sharp-pointed stars.
He was about to lift himself out of the chair but remembered his date with Memo and stayed put. There was time to kill before that so he might as well have a bite.
A hand whacked him across the shoulders.
It was Red Blow … Roy slowly sat down.
“Looked for a minute like you were gonna murder me,” said Red.
“I thought it was somebody else.”
“Who, for instance?”
Roy thought. “I am not sure. Maybe the Mex.”
“Flores?”
“Sometimes he gets on my nerves.”
“He is really a nice guy.”
“I guess so.”
Red sat down. “Don't eat too much crap. We have a big day comin' up.”
“I am just taking a bite.”
“Better get to bed and have plenty of sleep.”
“Yes.”
Red looked glum. “Can't sleep myself. Don't know what's the matter with me.” He yawned and twitched his shoulders. “You all right?”
“Fine and dandy. Have a hamburger.”
“Not for me, thanks. Guess I will go for a little walk. Best thing when you can't sleep.”
Roy nodded.
“Take care of yourself, feller. Tomorrow's our day. Pop'll dance a jig after tomorrow. You'll be his hero.”
Roy didn't answer.
Red smiled a little sadly. “I'm gonna be sorry when it's over.”
The waiter brought the six hamburgers. Red looked at them absently. “It's all up to you.” He got up and left.
Through the window Roy watched him go down the street.
“I'll be the hero.”
The hamburgers looked like six dead birds. He took up the first one and gobbled it down. It was warm but dry. No more dead birds, he thought … not without ketchup. He poured a blop on three of the birds. Then he shuffled them up with the other two so as not to know which three had the ketchup and which two hadn't. Eating them, he could not tell the difference except that they all tasted like dead birds. They were not satisfying but the milk was. He made a mental note to drink more milk.
He paid and left. The elevator went up like a greased shot. As it stopped he felt a ripping pain on the floor of the stomach. The wax-faced elevator man watched him with big eyes. He stared at the old scarecrow, then stumbled out. He stood alone in the hall, trying to figure it out. Something
was happening that he didn't understand. He roused himself to do battle, wishing for Wonderboy, but no enemy was visible. He rested and the pain left him.
The party was quiet. Flores had disappeared. The lights were dimmed and there was some preliminary sex work going on. Olson had his blonde backed into a corner. A group near the piano were passing a secret bottle around. In the center of the darkened room one of the girls held her dress over her pink panties and was doing bumps and grinds. A. silent circle watched her.
Roy buttonholed Fowler. “Stay off the rotgut, kid.”
“Stay away from the stuffin's, big shot.”
Roy swiped at him but Fowler was gone. He wiped his sweaty face with his sleeve and searched for Memo to tell her it was time. He couldn't find her in the fog that had blown up, so he left the party and reeled down the stairs to the fourth floor. Feeling for her buzzer, he found the key left in the lock and softly turned it.
She was lying naked in bed, chewing a turkey drumstick as she looked at the pictures in a large scrapbook. Not till he was quite close did she see him. She let out a scream.
“You frightened me, Roy.” Memo shut the scrapbook.
He had caught a glimpse of Bump's face. I'll take care of that bastard. He unzipped his fly.
Her green eyes closely watched him, her belly heaving above the red flame.
Undressing caused him great distress. Inside him they were tearing up a street. The sweat dripped from his face … Yet there was music, the sweetest piping he had ever heard. Dropping his pants he approached for the piping fulfillment.
She drew her legs back. Her expression puzzled him. It was not—the lights were wavering, blinking on and off. A thundering locomotive roared through the mountain. As it burst out of the rock with a whistle howl he felt on the verge of an extraordinary insight, but a bolt of shuddering lightning came
at him from some unknown place. He threw up his arms for protection and it socked him, yowling, in the shattered gut. He lived a pain he could not believe existed. Agonized at the extent of it, Roy thudded to his knees as a picture he had long carried in his mind broke into pieces. He keeled over.
The raft with the singing green-eyed siren guarding the forbidden flame gave off into the rotting flood a scuttering one-eyed rat. In the distance though quite near, a toilet flushed, and though the hero braced himself against it, a rush of dirty water got a good grip and sucked him under.
J
udge Banner had a money-saving contract with a small maternity hospital near Knights Field (it was there Bump had died) to treat all player emergencies, so that was where they had rushed Roy. The flustered obstetrician on duty decided to deliver the hero of his appendix. However, he fought them deliriously and his strength was too much for the surgeon, anesthetist, attendant, and two mild maternity nurses. They subdued him with a hypo only to uncover a scar snaking down his belly. Investigation showed he had no appendix —it had long ago been removed along with some other stuff. (All were surprised at his scarred and battered body.) The doctors considered cutting out the gall bladder or maybe part of the stomach but nobody wanted to be responsible for the effect of the operation upon the Knights and the general public. (The city was aghast. Crowds gathered outside the hospital, waiting for bulletins. The Japanese government issued an Edict of Sorrow.) So they used the stomach pump instead and dredged up unbelievable quantities of bilge. The patient moaned along with the ladies in labor on the floor, but the doctors adopted a policy of watchful waiting and held off anything drastic.
His belly racked his mind. Icy streams coursed through the fiery desert. He chattered and steamed, rarely conscious, tormented by his dreams. In them he waxed to gigantic heights then abruptly fell miles to be a little Roy dwarf (Hey, mister, you're stepping on my feet). He was caught in roaring gales amid loose, glaring lights, so bright they smothered the eyeballs.
Iris' sad head topped Memo's dancing body, with Memo's vice versa upon the shimmying rest of Iris, a confused fusion that dizzied him. He hungered in nightmare for quantities of exotic food—wondrous fowl stuffed with fruit, and the multitudinous roe of tropical fish. When he bent his toothy head to devour, every last morsel vanished. So they served him a prime hunk of beef and he found it enormously delicious only to discover it was himself he was chewing. His thunderous roars sent nurses running from all directions. They were powerless before his flailing fists.
In delirium he hopped out of bed and hunted through the corridors in a nightgown—frightening the newly delivered mothers—for a mop or broom that he snatched back to his aseptic chamber and practiced vicious cuts with before the dresser mirror … They found him on the floor … At dawn he warily rose and ferreted a plumber's plunger out of the utility closet but this time he was caught by three attendants and dragged back to bed. They strapped him down and there he lay a prisoner, as the frightened Knights dropped the third of three hot potatoes to the scarred and embittered last-place Reds. Since the resurgent Pirates had scattered the brains of the Phils, three in a bloody row, the season ended in a dead heat. A single playoff game in Knights Field was arranged for Monday next, the day before the World Series.
 
Late that afternoon the fever abated. He returned, unstrapped, to consciousness and recognized a harried Memo at his bedside. From her he learned what had happened to the team, and groaned in anguish. When she left, with a hankie pressed to her reddened nostrils, he discovered his troubles had only just begun. The specialist in the case, a tall stoop-shouldered man with a white mustache and sad eyes, who absently hefted a heavy gold watch as he spoke, gave Roy a bill of particulars. He began almost merrily by telling him there wasn't much doubt he would participate in the Monday playoff (Roy
just about leaped out of the bed but the doctor held him back with a gesture). He could play, yes, though he'd not feel at his best, nor would he be able to extend himself so far as he would like, but he would certainly be present and in the game, which, as the doctor understood it, was the big thing for both Roy and his public. (Interest in the matter was so great, he said, that he had permitted release of this news to the press.) Public clamor had compelled his reluctant yielding, though it was his considered opinion that, ideally, Roy ought to rest a good deal longer before getting back to his—ah—normal activities. But someone had explained to him that baseball players were in a way like soldiers, and since he knew that the body's response to duty sometimes achieved many of the good results of prolonged care and medication, he had agreed to let him play.
However, all good news has its counterpart of bad, he almost sadly said, and to prove the point let it come out that it would be best for Roy to say goodbye forever to baseball—if he hoped to stay alive. His blood pressure—at times amazingly high—complicated by an athlete's heart—could conceivably cause his sudden death if he were to attempt to play next season, whereas if he worked at something light and relaxing, one might say he could go on for years, as many had. The doctor slipped the gold watch into his vest pocket, and nodding to the patient, departed. Roy felt that this giant hand holding a club had broken through the clouds and with a single blow crushed his skull.
The hours that followed were the most terrifying of his life (more so than fifteen years ago). He lived in the thought of death, would not move, speak, take food or receive visitors. Yet all the while he fanatically fought the doctor's revelation, wrestled it every waking second, though something in him said the old boy with the white mustache was right. He felt he had for years suspected something wrong, and this was it. Too much pressure in the pipes—blew your conk off. (He
saw it blown sky high.) He was through—finished. Only he couldn't—just couldn't believe it. Me. I. Roy Hobbs forever out of the game? Inconceivable. He thought of the fantastic hundreds of records he had broken in so short a time, which had made him a hero to the people, and he thought of the thousands—tens of thousands—that he had pledged himself to break. A moan escaped him.
Still a doubt existed. Maybe white mustache was wrong? They could misjudge them too. Maybe there was a mite less wind behind the ball than he thought, and it would hit the ground at his feet rather than land in the glove. Mistakes could happen in everything. Wouldn't be the first time a sawbones was wrong.
Maybe he was a hundred per cent dead wrong
.
The next evening, amid a procession of fathers leaving the hospital at baby-feeding time, he sneaked out of the building. A cab got him to Knights Field, and Happy Pellers, the astonished groundskeeper, let him in. A phone call brought Dizzy to the scene. Roy changed into uniform (he almost wept to behold Wonderboy so forlorn in the locker) and Happy donned catcher's gear. Dizzy prepared to pitch. It was just to practice, Roy said, so he would have his eye and timing alert for the playoff Monday. Happy switched on the night floods to make things clearer. Dizzy practiced a few pitches and then with Roy standing at the plate, served one over the middle. As he swung, Roy felt a jet of steam blow through the center of his skull. They gathered him up, bundled him into a cab, and got him back to the hospital, where nobody had missed him.
 
It was a storm on and Roy out in it. Not exactly true, it was Sam Simpson who was lost and Roy outsearching him. He tracked up and down the hills, leaving his white tracks, till he come to this shack with the white on the roof.
Anybody in here? he calls.
Nope.
You don't know my friend Sam?
Nope.
He wept and try to go away.
Come on in, kiddo, I was only foolin'.
Roy dry his eyes and went in. Sam was settin' at the table under the open bulb, his collar and tie off, playing solitaire with all spades.
Roy sit by the fire till Sam finish. Sam looked up wearing his half-moon specs, glinting moonlight.
Well, son, said Sam, lightin' up on his cigar.
I swear I didn't do it, Sam.
Didn't do what?
Didn't do nothin'.
Who said you did?
Roy wouldn't answer, shut tight as a clam.
Sam stayed awhile, then he say to Roy, Take my advice, kiddo.
Yes, Sam.
Don't do it.
No, said Roy, I won't. He rose and stood headbent before Sam's chair.
Let's go back home, Sam, let's now.
Sam peered out the window.
I would like to, kiddo, honest, but we can't go out there now. Heck, it's snowin' baseballs.
 
When he came to, Roy made the specialist promise to tell no one about his condition just in case he had the slightest chance of improving enough to play for maybe another season. The specialist frankly said he didn't see that chance, but he was willing to keep mum because he believed in the principle of freedom of action. So he told no one and neither did Roy—not even Memo. (No one had even mentioned the subject of
his playing in the Series but Roy had already privately decided to take his chances in that.)
But mostly his thoughts were dismal. That frightened feeling: bust before beginning. On the merry-go-round again about his failure to complete his mission in the game. About this he suffered most. He lay for hours staring at the window. Often the glass looked wet though it wasn't raining. A man who had been walking in bright sunshine limped away into a mist. This broke the heart … When the feeling passed, if it ever did, there was the necessity of making new choices. Since it was already the end of the season, he had about four months in which to cash in on testimonials, endorsements, ghost-written articles, personal appearances, and such like. But what after that, when spring training time came and he disappeared into the backwoods? He recalled a sickening procession of jobs—as cook, well-driller, mechanic, logger, bean-picker, and for whatever odd change, semipro ballplayer. He dared not think further.
And the loneliness too, from job to job, never some place in particular for any decent length of time because of the dissatisfaction that grew, after a short while, out of anything he did … But supposing he could collect around twenty-five G's—could that amount, to begin with, satisfy a girl like Memo if she married him? He tried to think of ways of investing twenty-five thousand—maybe in a restaurant or tavern—to build it up to fifty, and then somehow to double that. His mind skipped from money to Memo, the only one who came to see him every day. He remembered the excitement he felt for her in that strapless yellow dress the night of the party. And bad as he felt now he couldn't help but think how desirable she had looked, waiting for him naked in bed.
Such thoughts occupied him much of the time as he sat in the armchair, thumbing through old magazines, or resting in bed. He sometimes considered suicide but the thought was too oppressive to stay long in his mind. He dozed a good deal and
usually woke feeling lonely. (Except for Red, once, nobody from the team had come to see him, though small knots of fans still gathered in the street and argued whether he would really be in Monday's game.) Saturday night he awoke from an after supper nap more gloomy than ever, so he reached under his pillow for Iris' letter. But just then Memo came into the room with an armful of flowers so he gladly let it lay where it was.
Despite how attractive she usually managed to keep herself (he could appreciate that in spite of a momentary return of the nausea) she appeared worn out now, with bluish shadows under her eyes. And he noticed, as she stuffed the flowers and red autumn leaves into the vase, that she was wearing the same black dress she had worn all week, a thing she never did before, and that her hair was lusterless and not well kept. She had days ago sorrowed it was her fault that this had happened to the team. How stupid not to have waited just a day or two more. (Pop, she wept, had called her filthy names.) She had despaired every minute—really despaired—up to the time she heard he was going to be in the playoff. At least she did not have it on her conscience that he would be out of that, so she felt better now. Not better enough, he worried, or she wouldn't be so lost and lonely-looking.
After she had arranged the flowers, Memo stood mutely at the open window, gazing down into the darkening street. When he least expected it, she sobbed out in a voice full of misery, “Oh, Roy, I can't stand it any longer, I can't.”
He sat up. “What's wrong?”
Her voice was choked. “I can't go on with my life as it is.” Memo dropped into the armchair and began to weep. In a minute everything around her was wet.
Tossing aside the blanket he swung his legs out of bed. She looked up, attempting to smile. “Don't get up, hon. I'll be all right.”
Roy sat uneasily at the edge of the bed. He never knew what to do when they cried.
“It's just that I'm fed up,” she wept. “Fed up. Pop is terrible to me and I don't want to go on living off him, even if he is my uncle. I have to get a job or something, or go somewhere.”
“What did that bastard shrimp say to you?”
She found a handkerchief in her purse and blew her nose.
“It isn't his words,” she said sadly. “Words can't kill. It's that I'm sick of this kind of life. I want to get away.”
Then she let go again and looked like a little lost bird beating around in a cage. He was moved, and hovered over her like an old maid aunt trying to stop a leak.
“Don't cry, Memo. Just say the word and I will take care of you.” In a cracked voice he said, “Just marry me.”
She sobbed for the longest time. So long he grew jumpy with doubts about their future relations, but then she stopped crying and said in a damp voice, “Would you have me, Roy?”

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