The Natural (6 page)

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Authors: Bernard Malamud

BOOK: The Natural
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“But, Sam—”
“You got to. Bend lower.”
Roy bent lower and Sam stretched his withered neck and kissed him on the chin.
“Do like I say.”
“Yes, Sam.”
A tear splashed on Sam's nose.
Sam had something more in his eyes to say but though he tried, agitated, couldn't say it. Then the trainmen came in with a stretcher and they lifted the catcher and handed him down the steps, and overhead the stars were bright but he knew he was dead.
 
Roy trailed the anonymous crowd out of Northwest Station and clung to the shadowy part of the wall till he had the courage to call a cab.
“Do you go to the Stevens Hotel?” he asked, and the driver without a word shot off before he could rightly be seated, passed a red light and scuttled a cripple across the deserted street. They drove for miles in a shadow-infested, street-lamped jungle.
He had once seen some stereopticon pictures of Chicago and it was a boxed-up ant heap of stone and crumbling wood buildings in a many-miled spreading checkerboard of streets without much open space to speak of except the railroads, stockyards, and the shore of a windy lake. In the Loop, the offices went up high and the streets were jampacked with people, and he wondered how so many of them could live together in any one place. Suppose there was a fire or something and they all ran out of their houses to see—how could
they help but trample all over themselves? And Sam had warned him against strangers, because there were so many bums, sharpers, and gangsters around, people you were dirt to, who didn't know you and didn't want to, and for a dime they would slit your throat and leave you dying in the streets.
“Why did I come here?” he muttered and felt sick for home.
The cab swung into Michigan Avenue, which gave a view of the lake and a white-lit building spiring into the sky, then before he knew it he was standing flatfooted (Christ, the size of it) in front of the hotel, an enormous four-sectioned fortress. He hadn't the nerve to go through the whirling doors but had to because this bellhop grabbed his things—he wrested the bassoon case loose—and led him across the thick-carpeted lobby to a desk where he signed a card and had to count out five of the wallet's pulpy dollars for a room he would give up as soon as he found a house to board in.
But his cubbyhole on the seventeenth floor was neat and private, so after he had stored everything in the closet he lost his nervousness. Unlatching the window brought in the lake breeze. He stared down at the lit sprawl of Chicago, standing higher than he ever had in his life except for a night or two on a mountain. Gazing down upon the city, he felt as if bolts in his knees, wrists, and neck had loosened and he had spread up in height. Here, so high in the world, with the earth laid out in small squares so far below, he knew he would go in tomorrow and wow them with his fast one, and they would know him for the splendid pitcher he was.
The telephone rang. He was at first scared to answer it. In a strange place, so far from everybody he knew, it couldn't possibly be for him.
It rang again. He picked up the phone and listened.
“Hello, Roy? This is Harriet.”
He wasn't sure he had got it right. “Excuse me?”
“Harriet Bird, silly.”
“Oh, Harriet.” He had completely forgotten her.
“Come down to my room,” she giggled, “and let me say welcome to the city.”
“You mean now?”
“Right away.” She gave him the room number.
“Sure.” He meant to ask her how she knew he was here but she had hung up.
Then he was elated. So that's how they did it in the city. He combed his hair and got out his bassoon case. In the elevator a drunk tried to take it away from him but Roy was too strong for him.
He walked—it seemed ages because he was impatient—through a long corridor till he found her number and knocked.
“Come on in.”
Opening the door, he was astonished at the enormous room. Through the white-curtained window the sight of the endless dark lake sent a shiver down his spine.
Then he saw her standing shyly in the far corner of the room, naked under the gossamer thing she wore, held up on her risen nipples and the puffed wedge of hair beneath her white belly. A great weight went off his mind.
As he shut the door she reached into the hat box which lay open next to a vase of white roses on the table and fitted the black feathered hat on her head. A thick veil fell to her breasts. In her hand she held a squat, shining pistol.
He was greatly confused and thought she was kidding but a grating lump formed in his throat and his blood shed ice. He cried out in a gruff voice, “What's wrong here?”
She said sweetly, “Roy, will you be the best there ever was in the game?”
“That's right.”
She pulled the trigger (thrum of bull fiddle). The bullet cut a silver line across the water. He sought with his bare
hands to catch it, but it eluded him and, to his horror, bounced into his gut. A twisted dagger of smoke drifted up from the gun barrel. Fallen on one knee he groped for the bullet, sickened as it moved, and fell over as the forest flew upward, and she, making muted noises of triumph and despair, danced on her toes around the stricken hero.
I
shoulda been a farmer,” Pop Fisher said bitterly.”I shoulda farmed since the day I was born. I like cows, sheep, and those hornless goats—I am partial to nanny goats, my daddy wore a beard—I like to feed animals and milk 'em. I like fixing things, weeding poison oak out of the pasture, and seeing to the watering of the crops. I like to be by myself on a farm. I like to stand out in the fields, tending the vegetables, the corn, the winter wheat—greenest looking stuff you ever saw. When Ma was alive she kept urging me to leave baseball and take up farming, and I always meant to but after she died I had no heart for it.” Pop's voice all but broke and Red Blow shifted nervously on the bench but Pop didn't cry. He took out his handkerchief, flipped it, and blew his nose.”I have that green thumb,” he said huskily,”and I shoulda farmed instead of playing wet nurse to a last place, dead-to-the-neck ball team.”
They were sitting in the New York Knights' dugout, scanning the dusty field, the listless game and half-empty stands.
“Tough,” said Red. He kept his eye on the pitcher.
Removing his cap, Pop rubbed his bald head with his bandaged fingers. “It's been a blasted dry season. No rains at all. The grass is worn scabby in the outfield and the infield is cracking. My heart feels as dry as dirt for the little I have to show for all my years in the game.”
He got up, stooped at the fountain and spat the warm, rusty water into the dust. “When the hell they going to fix
this thing so we can have a decent drink of water? Did you speak to that bastard partner I have, like I said to?”
“Says he's working on it.”
“Working on it,” Pop grunted. “He's so tight that if he was any tighter he'd be too stiff to move. It was one of the darkest days of my life when that snake crawled into this club. He's done me out of more dough than I can count.”
“Kid's weakening again,” Red said. “He passed two.”
Pop watched Fowler for a minute but let him stay. “If those boy scouts could bring in a coupla runs once in a while I'd change pitchers, but they couldn't bring their own grandmother in from across the street. What a butchering we took from the Pirates in the first game and here we are six runs behind in this. It's Memorial Day, all right, but not for the soldiers.”
“Should've had some runs. Bump had four for four in the first, and two hits before he got himself chucked out of this.”
Pop's face burned. “Don't mention that ape man to me—getting hisself bounced out of the game the only time we had runners on the bases when he come up.”
“I'd've thrown him out too if I was the ump and he slid dry ice down my pants.”
“I'd like to stuff him with ice. I never saw such a disgusting screwball for practical jokes.”
Pop scratched violently under his loosely bandaged fingers. “And to top it off I have to go catch athlete's foot on my hands. Now ain't that one for the books? Everybody I have ever heard of have got it on their feet but I have to go and get it on both of my hands and be itchy and bandaged in this goshdarn hot weather. No wonder I am always asking myself is life worth the living of it.”
“Tough,” Red said. “He's passed Feeber, bases loaded.”
Pop fumed. “My best pitcher and he blows up every time I put him against a first place team. Yank him.”
The coach, a lean and freckled man, got nimbly up on the
dugout steps and signaled to the bullpen in right field. He sauntered out to the mound just as somebody in street clothes came up the stairs of the tunnel leading from the clubhouse and asked the player at the end of the bench, “Who's Fisher?” The player jerked his thumb toward the opposite side of the dugout, and the man, dragging a large, beat-up valise and a bassoon case, treaded his way to Pop.
When Pop saw him coming he exclaimed, “Oh, my eight-foot uncle, what have we got here, the Salvation Army band?”
The man set his things on the floor and sat down on a concrete step, facing Pop. He beheld an old geezer of sixty-five with watery blue eyes, a thin red neck and a bitter mouth, who looked like a lost banana in the overgrown baseball suit he wore, especially his skinny legs in loose blue-and-white stockings.
And Pop saw a tall, husky, dark-bearded fellow with old eyes but not bad features. His face was strong-boned, if a trifle meaty, and his mouth seemed pleasant though its expression was grim. For his bulk he looked lithe, and he appeared calmer than he felt, for although he was sitting here on this step he was still in motion. He was traveling (on the train that never stopped). His self, his mind, raced on and he felt he hadn't stopped going wherever he was going because he hadn't yet arrived. Where hadn't he arrived? Here. But now it was time to calm down, ease up on the old scooter, sit still and be quiet, though the inside of him was still streaming through towns and cities, across forests and fields, over long years.
“The only music I make,” he answered Pop, patting the bassoon case, “is with my bat.” Searching through the pockets of his frayed and baggy suit, worn to threads at the knees and elbows, he located a folded letter that he reached over to the manager. “I'm your new left fielder, Roy Hobbs.”
“My what!” Pop exploded.
“It says in the letter.”
Red, who had returned from the mound, took the letter, unfolded it, and handed it to Pop. He read it in a single swoop then shook his head in disbelief.
“Scotty Carson sent you?”
“That's right.”
“He must be daffy.”
Roy wet his dry lips.
Pop shot him a shrewd look. “You're thirty-five if you're a day.”
“Thirty-four, but I'm good for ten years.”
“Thirty-four—Holy Jupiter, mister, you belong in an old man's home, not baseball.”
The players along the bench were looking at him. Roy licked his lips.
“Where'd he pick you up?” Pop asked.
“I was with the Oomoo Oilers.”
“In what league?”
“They're semipros.”
“Ever been in organized baseball?”
“I only recently got back in the game.”
“What do you mean got back?”
“Used to play in high school.”
Pop snorted. “Well, it's a helluva mess.” He slapped the letter with the back of his fingers. “Scotty signed him and the Judge okayed it. Neither of them consulted me. They can't do that,” he said to Red. “That thief in the tower might have sixty per cent of the stock but I have it in writing that I am to manage this team and approve all player deals
as long as I live
.”
“I got a contract,” said Roy.
“Lemme see it.”
Roy pulled a blue-backed paper out of his inside coat pocket.
Pop scanned it. “Where in blazes did he get the figure of three thousand dollars?”
“It was for a five thousand minimum but the Judge said I already missed one-third of the season.”
Pop burst into scornful laughter. “Sure, but that entitles you to about thirty-three hundred. Just like that godawful deadbeat. He'd skin his dead father if he could get into the grave.”
He returned the contract to Roy. “It's illegal.”
“Scotty's your chief scout?” Roy asked.
“That's right.”
“He signed me to a contract with an open figure and the Judge filled it in. I asked about that and Scotty said he had the authority to sign me.”
“He has,” Red said to Pop. “You said so yourself if he found anybody decent.”
“That's right, that's what I said, but who needs a fielder old enough to be my son? I got a left fielder,” he said to Roy, “a darn good one when he feels like it and ain't playing practical jokes on everybody.”
Roy stood up. “If you don't want me, Merry Christmas.”
“Wait a second,” said Red. He fingered Pop up close to the fountain and spoke to him privately.
Pop calmed down. “I'm sorry, son,” he apologized to Roy when he returned to the bench, “but you came across me at a bad time. Also thirty-four years for a rookie is starting with one foot in the grave. But like Red says, if our best scout sent you, you musta showed him something. Go on in the clubhouse and have Dizzy fit you up with a monkey suit. Then report back here and I will locate you a place on this bench with the rest of my All-Stars.” He threw the players a withering look and they quickly turned away.
“Listen, mister,” Roy said, “I know my way out of this jungle if you can't use me. I don't want any second pickings.”
“Do as he told you,” Red said.
Roy rose, got his valise and bassoon case together, and
headed into the tunnel. His heart was thumping like a noisy barrel.
“I shoulda bought a farm,” Pop muttered.
 
The pitcher in the shower had left the door wide open so the locker room was clouded with steam when Roy came in. Unable to find anybody he yelled into the shower room where was the prop man, and the one in the shower yelled back in the equipment room and close the door it was drafty. When the steam had thinned out and Roy could see his way around he located the manager's office, so labeled in black letters on the door, but not the equipment room. In the diagonally opposite corner were the trainer's quarters, and here the door was ajar and gave forth an oil of wintergreen smell that crawled up his nose. He could see the trainer, in a gray sweatshirt with KNIGHTS stenciled across his chest, working on a man mountain on the rubbing table. Catching sight of Roy, the trainer called out in an Irish brogue who was he looking for?
“Prop man,” Roy said.
“That's Dizzy—down the hall.” The trainer made with his eyes to the left so Roy opened the door there and went down the hall. He located a sign, “Equipment,” and through the window under it saw the prop man in a baseball jersey sitting on a uniform trunk with his back to the wall. He was reading the sports page of the
Mirror
.
Roy rapped on the ledge and Dizzy, a former utility pitcher, hastily put the paper down. “Caught me at an interesting moment,” he grinned. “I was reading about this catcher that got beaned in Boston yesterday. Broke the side of his skull.”
“The name's Roy Hobbs, new hand here. Fisher told me to get outfitted.”
“New man—fielder, eh?”
Roy nodded.
“Yeah, we been one man short on the roster for two weeks.
One of our guys went and got himself hit on the head with a fly ball and both of his legs are now paralyzed.”
Roy winked.
“Honest to God. And just before that our regular third baseman stepped on a bat and rolled down the dugout steps. Snapped his spine in two places.” Dizzy grimaced. “We sure been enjoying an unlucky season.”
He came forth with a tape measure and took Roy's measurements, then he went back and collected a pile of stuff from the shelves.
“Try this for size.” He handed him a blue cap with a white K stitched on the front of it.
Roy tried it. “Too small.”
“You sure got some size noggin there.”
“Seven and a half.” Roy looked at him.
“Just a social remark. No offense meant or intended.” He gave Roy a size that fitted.
“How's it look?” Roy asked.
“A dream but why the tears?”
“I have a cold.” He turned away.
Dizzy asked him to sign for the stuff—Judge Banner insisted. He helped Roy carry it to his locker.
“Keep anything you like inside of here but for goodness' sakes no booze. Pop throws fits if any of the players drink.”
Roy stood the bassoon case in upright. “Got a lock for the door?”
“Nobody locks their doors here. Before the game you deposit your valuables in that trunk there and I will lock them up.”
“Okay, skip it.”
Dizzy excused himself to get back to his paper and Roy began to undress.
The locker room was tomblike quiet. The pitcher who had been in the showers—his footsteps were still wet on the floor
—had dressed rapidly and vanished. As he put his things away,
Roy found himself looking around every so often to make sure he was here. He was, all right, yet in all his imagining of how it would be when he finally hit the majors, he had not expected to feel so down in the dumps. It was different than he had thought it would be. So different he almost felt like walking out, jumping back on a train, and going wherever people went when they were running out on something. Maybe for a long rest in one of those towns he had lived in as a kid. Like the place where he had that shaggy mutt that used to scamper through the woods, drawing him after it to the deepest, stillest part, till the silence was so pure you could crack it if you threw a rock. Roy remained lost in the silence till the dog's yapping woke him, though as he came out of it, it was not barking he heard but the sound of voices through the trainer's half-open door.

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