The Pacific and Other Stories (27 page)

There was a delay, during which an argument in the Yankee dugout was overshadowed by the inevitable Kansas City conference with Zelinka, which was very animated.

The announcers commented on the pressure, and set the scene for their audience across the nation. “It’s been a really hot day in New York. The first subways, windows open, are rolling past, taking home those lucky enough to have gotten off work early. A shadow has just begun to move across the field, and although it’s an ice-cream day in the stadium, you can smell hot dogs and hamburgers cooking in the restaurants beyond the fence. The question remains, ladies and gentlemen, who will hit for Morgan? Mantle’s not moving from first. It was a strange thing to see him bunt.”

Then, over the radio, in every town and minuscule junction in America, from Caribou to the Everglades, Norfolk to San Francisco, came the following question: “Reeves? Who’s Reeves?”

T
HE SOUND OF PAPER
being shuffled was heard across the nation as Red and Mel pulled out the back pages of the roster.

“Roger Reeves,” said Mel. “A rookie out of Georgia. His first day in the majors. This is unbelievable, Red.”

“It sure is, Mel. I’ve never seen it … in all my life. Reeves has never played before a crowd this large, never faced a pitcher like Zelinka. The Yankees … well, something’s come over the Yankees.”

Mel had been reading. “He’s only eighteen years old,” he said, astonished. “He played for half a season. On a team called the Milledgeville Crab Legs. That has since been disbanded.”

Red hushed down into his portentous voice. “All I can say, Mel, is that I’ll bet this boy is seven feet tall and weights two hundred and fifty pounds.”

“Southern boys are short, Red.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean they’re short and light. Look at you.”

“A lotta colored boys are Southern boys, and they’re big, Mel.”

“Yeah, Red, but this is a white boy.”

“How do you know?”

“Because there he is.”

Roger walked onto the field, with the crowd primed for the most generous cheer of their lives, but the cheer was drowned in shock.

He was not even five and a half feet tall, he was so gangly that it seemed he could not have weighed much more than a hundred pounds, and his quaquaversal gait and quaquaversal eyes made him look like someone who might indeed have been on a team called the Milledgeville Crab Legs. As a physical specimen, he was easier to associate with a hospital than a major-league baseball team. Even from far away you could see how thick his glasses were, how white and delicate his hands. The baseball cap capped his head like a mixing bowl, but did not stem the wild flow of
payess
.

“You know he’s from the South,” Mel said, “because he’s got those Johnny Reb sideburns. But he’s so small. Why is that, Red? Why are people in the South so small?”

“They aren’t.”

“Yes they are. What is it, nutrition? The Civil War?”

“They aren’t.”

“Yes they are. Look at Reeves.”

“I think Reeves will acquit himself well,” Red offered, “no matter what the impression you have of him.” As far away as the docks of Galveston, they could tell over the radio that Red would have killed Mel but for the fact that a baseball game intervened. It was strange, in that both were from Alabama.

Roger took his position and raised his head to look at the huge stadium, now completely silent and still, with tens of thousands of people looking back at him. He looked left, and there was Zelinka, three times his size, smiling with contempt. Even the rather large Orthodox Jewish contingent in the right-field stands was quiet. They knew in their bones that Roger Reeves of the Milledgeville Crab Legs was one of them, and their overwhelming emotion was fear that he would be the reason for the defeat of this otherwise invincible gentile team (they were somewhat behind the times), and that this might result in a pogrom.

Zelinka decided to drive a fastball right down the middle, square in the
center of the batting picture. He had done this many a time before to rookies, who always had swung after the ball was in the catcher’s mitt. When pitched without complication, his fastball was so fast that no inexperienced player would ever be able to connect with it. And given Reeves’s size and weight, even if he did it was possible that the force of the ball would push the bat back, rather than vice versa. In the few cases of this that Zelinka had seen, the batter was shocked to find himself, absent his own volition, back in the ready position. The only drawback was that such balls veered up or down, and sometimes bounced off the catcher and rolled into play without anyone realizing that the batter hadn’t hit them. It didn’t matter. Zelinka wanted to make every pitch to Reeves a rifle shot. He was enraged that they would put such a batter up against him, and wanted to make the ball smoke on its way in.

The stadium was like an ocean of angry rabbis. The whole world at that moment seemed to depend on Roger, and he had no confidence that he could hit a baseball, much less one thrown by an enraged major-league pitcher, much less send it out of the stadium and thus make in the world of baseball an explosion like that of a hydrogen bomb. Roger could not even see the ball. He had no illusions. What was he? Nothing. He was, as gentile and nonobservant Jewish children of the era called each other in derision, a “spastic.” True, he could run, and his reflexes were live wires, but, from hitting? Jews couldn’t hit, never could. Their job in the mystery of things was to take on the kidney a baseball thrown by a tall Irishman or a giant Pole like Zelinka—people who were not afraid to punch, or jump off a waterfall, or ride a bicycle on a rope stretched between the Woolworth and Municipal buildings.

It didn’t matter. Not only that, but what no one ever knew or could know was that, after the pitch, Roger always closed his eyes. It was then that he felt the arms, fluttering and feathered, golden and shiny, reach from behind him and slowly, viscously, take hold of his hands on the bat. The joy that this brought him, knowing that it was not he that held the bat, but an angel, made him float. No one ever looked at a batter’s feet at the swing, but had anyone peered stereoscopically at the photographs of record, he would have seen that Roger’s feet were held a quarter of an inch off the ground. He
floated, and was happy. An angel supported him in his arms and gently held the bat, and, with eyes closed, Roger would swing with the angel.

He felt that, even were he betrayed, even were he to be abandoned, even were he to be humiliated in front of fifty thousand gentiles, it would be enough that he had had so intimate a discovery of so unpredictable a God. It would be enough that he had been promised, even were the promise not kept. It would be enough that in the House of Ruth, he had been clasped by an angel’s wings and raised from the ground.

“The pitch!” Mel and Red said to the nation simultaneously.

Even with eyes closed, Roger could see the ball coming in, as white as the foam of a tidal wave, moving like a cannon shell, a piston, or a comet, with a power that made the air around it roar. Then this ball slowed most graciously into an almost rhythmical stillness. It glowed, pulsed, and seemed to grow to the size of the moon, and then dutifully stopped one foot in front of home plate, with glistenings, luminous rings, showers of ice, pinwheels of diamonds, and leaping sparks spinning from it. “Hit me!” it shouted, in the visible language of stopped and floating baseballs. “Hit me!”

Feathers pressed in unison against the limitlessly powerful wing, and the bat moved like a jet as the wings grew taut to slow it lest the ball be hit too hard, and when the two connected, the ball fled like a cat on fire. It went just slowly enough so that everyone in the stadium could track the flame, and track it they did, up at the angle of a useless fly, but so far up that its trajectory seemed aimed at the huge daylight moon loitering impudently above the Bronx.

Fifty thousand people dared not breathe. Their heads lifted and their eyes opened to the maximum as the ball flew from the stadium, clearing the flagpole by
six hundred feet
, headed perhaps to Africa or Rio de Janeiro, over Orchard Beach. And as everyone followed it, Roger began to walk quietly toward first.

As the Yankee runs came in, the crowd grew hysterical on account of the frail unknown Yankee who brought up the rear and ran from third to home with uncanny spastic grace to win the game for the Yankees by one run, the only one of its kind in history. In the stands the gentiles shook the pillars of the world with their shouts, and the Jews prayed silently, thankful to have been spared.

•   •   •

S
OMEONE BROUGHT
C
HAMPAGNE
to the locker room, and it was spilled wastefully over everyone. They picked up Roger and, dancing between the benches, carried him from place to place. One of the team held the bat and kissed it; then he elevated it above his head and marched around in triumph. They chanted in unison: “Ro-ger! Ro-ger! Ro-ger!”

Roger squiggled out of their grip and slid to the floor. “No!” he said, retrieving the airborne bat. “No!”

“No?” they asked.

“No,” he said, pausing to regain his breath. He held the bat out in front of him on display. “This is the bat of God,” he told them.

“The bat of God,” they repeated in awe.

“No!” he said again.

“It isn’t?” they asked.

“It is.”

“Is it,” they asked, “or isn’t it?”

“It is,” he confirmed, “but you may not worship it.”

“Why not?” Berra asked. “God! It’s the bat of God!”

“Yes,” said Roger, “but you can’t. If you worship it, you are worshipping only a thing that He made. He didn’t even make it, He caused it to be made.”

“So?”

“He made everything, so if you worship only one of those things, or any of them, or all of them, you are worshipping your own choice, and thus you are worshipping yourselves, which you must not do.”

“What the hell are we supposed to do with the bat of God?” Mantle asked.

“Treat it,” Roger said, remembering a song he had heard on the radio, “like a lady.”

As the Yankees tried to assimilate this, everything was frozen, and amid the stillness, the doors of the locker room began to stretch inward with wavelike changes of pressure against them in advance of the sports press, which no force in the world could stop.

“Quick, Roger,” Mantle said, “jump in the laundry cart.”

Roger flew into a wheeled canvas hamper, and the Yankees covered him with towels. Then the doors burst open and what seemed like a thousand men with tickets in the brims of their gray hats flooded in like the tides of Fundy.

“Roger! Where’s Roger Reeves!” they screamed.

“Who?” the Yankees asked.

The great crush of press was driven into a kind of seizure, which the Yankees much enjoyed. “Roger Reeves! He’s a legend! He hit a ball. …”

“Yes?” Mantle asked.

“He hit a ball …” the reporter repeated, sweeping his left arm across an imaginary horizon, “out of the … out of the. …”

“He went home for the weekend,” Berra said. “He wants to spend the weekend with the former Crab Legs.”

“In Milledgeville?” they asked.

“Yup,” Berra said.

The wave that had burst in now evacuated with a sucking sound of withdrawn air, and the rest was silence. Roger popped up from the towels like a chick breaking out of an egg, and said, “I’ve got to get back to the hotel; I’m way behind in Mishnah.”

“If this is a dream,” Berra said, “then let it be your wishbone.”

R
OGER REFUSED
to play away games, not only because of the difficulty in getting kosher food (which, like kosher food itself, was surmountable), but because he wanted to hit balls out of Yankee Stadium each time he was up at bat. He suggested, and Stengeleh agreed, that this might be good for the Yankees. The whole country was already in a fever, the press had ravaged Milledgeville and come up with not even one former Crab Leg, and the greater the mystery the more people wanted to know. There was no Roger Reeves in Milledgeville. Never had been. No one knew him. Who was he? Was he a robot? Had Roger Reeves shown up in public, anywhere, he would have been torn apart by gushing hands, but Roger Reveshze was free to walk about, entirely ignored.

As the fervor built, the Yankees played at Detroit and Roger rested for
a Thursday game against Chicago. Every seat in Yankee Stadium was sold, and scalpers were disposing of tickets for a premium of one thousand percent. The front pages of the tabloids for that entire week would be devoted to Roger:
Who Is Yankee Miracle Boy?; Reeves to Field Thursday; Never Again?; Stengel Says, “Watch!”; Reeves Unknown in Milledgeville;
and so on. Pictures of his face, many times enlarged, like photographs of the moon, appeared in the newspapers. Television ran slow- and stop-motion films of him again and again. Industries were born putting his name on mugs and cards, though not his image, for which they needed his permission, and would have paid dearly had they been able to receive it. The president was asked about him at his news conference, prompting the normally good-natured general to snap, “How the hell do I know? He’s not a secret program. He doesn’t work for the government. Why are you asking me?”

Such fame, even pseudonymously, might have worked upon anyone other than someone who had received as the answer to his prayer the embrace of an angel. This coursed through Roger’s veins like life itself. It put the world in a very clear light, even literally, illuminating in the texts Roger studied, for example, each Hebrew letter as if it were caught from every angle by miniature suns shining on it like spotlights. This gave the letters depth, and never had the texts themselves seemed so profound, brilliant, and beautiful. He was astounded to discover that these readings, which normally were only words, were now accompanied by music. The letters and words on the page, formerly black and black-gray, now shone like bright sun on burnished brass.

Though Roger had not seen the angel, he had felt its embrace and sensed a coolly burning orb. He guessed that this would be surrounded by souls of similar perfection gliding gracefully and unseen throughout their days.