We're All in This Together (23 page)

But by then, Lillian was tugging Eckstein from his seat and they were going through the side door, and up the stairs, to the
dark closet where the movies came from.

Steam crawled out of a cracked manhole cover in the middle of the street. Eckstein fogged a corner of the window and wrote
an E.

The waitress came over. Lillian ordered a steak, a potato, and strawberry pie. Eckstein asked for coffee. The waitress moved
away.

"It was an accident," said Eckstein. "And you knew what you were doing—"

"It's all your fault. I was just sweet on you, and I get this." She blinked several times, and rubbed at the corners of her
eyes.

It had been his first time, that night in the projection room. "Don't do it inside me," she told him. There was hardly space
for them both in the tiny room. "Don't do what?" asked Eckstein. A moment later he groaned, and spent himself.

The ecstatic moment was cut off by Lillian's frantic shoving. Eckstein tumbled backward into a shelf of movie reels. She said
he was an idiot. Eckstein said he hadn't been thinking, that was all. And it was the only time they had ever done it; she
barely let him kiss her since. One desperate evening, willing to do anything for another taste, he offered to marry her, pregnant
or not. "That's a laugh," Lillian had said. "My family'd love you, a ballplayer with a Jew name."

"I ain't a Jew," said Eckstein, "I'm German."

"Sure." Lillian gave him a sneer. "Sure."

Then he blurted that he loved her, purely loved her. Lillian's eyes had widened, gathering him up, and Eckstein felt her looking
deep inside him. His throat caught. Her eyes narrowed. "You're a monster," Lillian finally said very quietly.

"I'm gonna get fat and lose my job," Lillian said, and began to cry.

The waitress brought the food. Lillian's face was streaked with tears. She looked at her plate with disdain, shoved it away.
"Did I ask for gravy? And what about napkins? Don't I look like someone who needs a napkin?"

He escorted Lillian home, to the apartment she shared with three other girls in a women's boardinghouse on Mermaid Avenue.

"The part in that movie, where the guy, the hobo—where the vampires looked at him, and then he looked like a pork chop, I
didn't think that was funny," said Eckstein, hoping to start a conversation.

"Stupid," she said, but nothing else. They went the remaining four blocks in silence.

"After you're done work tomorrow, I'll get it taken care of," said Eckstein. Lillian blurted a sob, and struck him weakly
with her purse.

"Bring a change of clothes," said Eckstein, because he had heard it was something that a girl should do in a situation like
this one.

That night, Eckstein felt so terrible he told his roommate, Bobby Pelky, the Wonders third baseman. Once it was out, though,
Eckstein immediately regretted having spoken. Saying the words aloud made it worse. He was guilty; the truth was as bright
as a lamp.

Pelky didn't see the problem. He was from the South, Alabama or someplace, and sometimes he dictated letters for his mother
to Eckstein. "She got a brother or some people? A cousin? Someone could kill you?"

"No," he said, "I don't think she has any people."

"So, then," said Pelky. "You're peachy." In his letters to his mother Pelky always promised that he was keeping his shoulder
in on the spitters and curves, and to let him know right away if that farmer Garrison from up the road was causing her anymore
trouble, asking her out to the county fair again.
That old clodsplitter better
mind his manners,
Pelky had dictated once.
I will shoot his dog and
that is just for starters.

Now Eckstein tried to change the subject. "I saw the new picture at the Odeon, the vampire one."

Pelky sat in the window and lit a match. He was wiry, sneaky fast, a slick fielder who was so unhurried in his movements that
it sometimes looked as if he might drift off to sleep somewhere between catching the ball and throwing it over to first. His
swing was long, though, and sometimes he had trouble with the inside pitch.

"But you've got some pity for her." It wasn't a question.

"I got twenty bucks."

"That's not enough." The flame went down to Pelky's fingers and he pinched it off. "You need forty, maybe fifty."

Eckstein shrugged.

"You know where to go?" Pelky went to his nightstand, found his wallet, and took out three or four dollars.

"Yeah," said Eckstein. "Sure, I heard."

"Okay, Eck. We'll canvass the boys for the rest. It's shouldn't be a problem." The third baseman dropped the bills on Eckstein's
table and went back to the window. He lit up another match.

"You know we took up a collection last year, for the dwarf, the Kraut dwarf. Not for a broad, though, for a doc. The Kraut
dwarf caught a dose. From some whore. Or so he said. I'd like to see that whore."

Eckstein tried to force a chuckle, but he could only manage a cough, and his eyes stung. His quickly blew his nose.

Beyond the open window, over the third baseman's shoulder, the lights of the midway spun and flickered and raced. There were
singing drunks somewhere below, and calliope music, and laughter. "Can you imagine if that big roller coaster came down?"
asked Pelky. "Just fell right in on itself, like a bunch of sticks? The people who were on the roller coaster sure would scream,
wouldn't they?"

Eckstein sagged in his bed. He reached out from beneath the covers, touched the bills with a finger, and then withdrew his
hand.

"Yeah. I bet they would give a holler."

The man in the window blew out his match. "Come on, Eck," he said, "cheer up. Let's write a note to my mammy."

Game 2

In the third inning, as Woodpecker was camping under a high fly ball, the heckler threw a bottle. "Stone-hands-nigger!" The
bottle struck Woodpecker in the side of the head, and he crumpled to the ground. Before anyone thought to stop him, the heckler
was already up the grandstand, and scuttling down the exit ramp.

A couple of the guys on the team propped Woodpecker up and helped him from the field. Eckstein was shocked to see the blood
on the left fielder's temple, staining the rim of his cap, and dripping down to the collar of his pinstriped uniform. Woodpecker's
eyes were glazed and dumb with pain; when they met Eckstein's gaze there was nothing between the two of them, they were strangers.

In a few minutes, after the new left fielder warmed up, the game resumed.

Eckstein had hoped playing would take his mind off Lillian and what they were going to do—to
undo.
But the thoughts were impossible to stop: he imagined Lillian, obscenely sprawled on a table, crying and screaming, blood
splashing from all directions; and when he finally forced the image out, his mind jumped to Gooch's death in
Black Mansion.
Except that instead of Gooch, it was Eckstein who was sliding down the wall; and the vampires lifted their capes above him,
blocking out the light.

On one of the last nights, after the tuberculosis had wormed into her brain, Eckstein's mother told him, "I should have got
you taken care of. Now look at me." By that time, his father had been gone for three years, and hadn't sent money in two,
and it was just the mother and the son in the fifth-floor room. He didn't listen to her, and stared at the wall, and mostly
she didn't say much. It was in this bare room that his thoughts finally came to settle, and to fix on the brown stain on the
wall above his mother's bed.

By the seventh-inning stretch, along with going hitless in three at-bats, the second baseman had committed two errors.

"You're garbage today," said Wheelock. "Nobody throw out Eckstein. He's garbage but nobody throw him out. You hear me? No
matter how damn much Eckstein looks like a damn piece of trash sitting in a dugout full of baseball players, nobody throw
him out. If I find that little son-of-a-bitch in my clubhouse trash can I just might not be accountable."

Eckstein spat on the ground, but didn't say anything.

During the seventh-inning stretch, for the Vaudeville Intermission, Jenny Two Heads and the Backwards Man raced across the
outfield on pogo sticks. The organist played a crazed version of "Sugarfoot Stomp," accompanied by the Purple Girl on recorder,
and Three Ton Timmy on trumpet. A nun in the crowd threw a hot dog at the Purple Girl; the Purple Girl danced out of the way,
flashing her gams at the crowd. Three Ton Timmy wailed on his trumpet, the size of a harmonica in his giant mitts, and his
jowls bounced around like the saddlebags on a horse at full gallop.

The Backwards Man fell over again in a heap, pretzeled around his pogo stick, the small eyes in his dainty head rolling wildly
while the crowd howled. Jenny Two Heads took a bow; the head that was awake licked the ear of the bald head that was asleep,
but the bald head did not respond. The crowd cheered and rippled. A milk truck transported Three Ton Timmy out the service
gate in right field. The Purple Girl blushed green at the catcalls that fell down and around her.

In his last at-bat, Eckstein got hit in the hip by a pitch. "Fuck you, you goddamn busher," he said to the Hoboken pitcher
as he hobbled to first.

Final score: Hoboken Gentlemen 9, Coney Island Wonders 1.

In the clubhouse Pelky asked each player for a donation, dollar minimum. To the shortchangers, he said, "Don't you Jew around
with me now, boy," and he warned them with a little smile, and they would fork over the rest. Even the manager, Wheelock—after
a headshake in Eckstein's direction—gave two dollars.

For his own part, Eckstein sat and bit his nails. Then he fled to the showers and stayed beneath the hot spray until his skin
felt as though it were shrinking around his bones.

When he returned, Pelky was standing over Woodpecker.

His head wrapped with a bag of ice, Woodpecker lay stretched out on a bench. The flesh around his right eye was swollen and
meaty looking. A shard of red wood, cut from the locker room bench, pointed from his mouth.

"This all you got, spade?" Pelky held up a dime. He was grinning his little grin. Everyone was watching.

The black-skinned man turned his head away and stared at the wall.

"Well, then. What are we going to do, Woody?"

"I get you the rest tomorrow."

Pelky dropped his fist into his teammate's soft belly. Woodpecker gasped and curled up. The standing man slapped the toothpick
from his mouth. A couple of guys shifted uncomfortably, but nobody spoke.

"Okay," said Pelky, "bring it tomorrow. But you just better make it five, old boy. How's that sound?"

Woodpecker didn't say anything.

"I guess it better sound pretty good, or you know I'll have your balls, don't you, nigger?" Pelky nodded to himself. "And
that's just for starters."

Towel around his waist, Eckstein had frozen up. It was a small dirty room, humid from the showers. The men sat on stools in
front of their lockers. They were mostly naked, their bodies pale suits, faces and arms brown from the sun. Woodpecker, also
naked, was a black smudge in the middle of them, chest rising and falling, and the ice pack in a turban around his head. Pelky
yawned and the silence broke. He turned away from the prone figure on the bench and went to take donations from the last couple
of guys on the team.

The miasma of the locker room—sweat, mildew, liniment, and tobacco—filled Eckstein's nose, and he felt like vomiting.

When the second baseman was dressing, Pelky came over and pressed a wad of bills into his hand. "That's thirty, not counting
the spade's five." Pelky threw his arm around Eckstein's shoulder and pulled him into a huddle. "It's a little short, but
I don't guess they're the kind to turn down a decent amount of dough."

It took a few seconds for Eckstein to find his voice. "Thanks. I owe you."

"Well," said Pelky. "You know how soft I am."

He went to the movies, hoping to find a mistake. Once, in a cowboy picture, he saw the fender of a Ford sticking out from
around the back of a building. The movies were full of mistakes, and usually such carelessness merely irritated the second
baseman—except tonight Eckstein wanted proof that it was all make-believe, that
Black
Mansion
wasn't true . . .

. . . The hobo's eyes swelled as the monsters closed around him. Tiptoeing forward, nearer, nearer still, the vampires' capes
followed across the floor, oozing and curling like living animals. White-faced, black tongues licking their black lips, they
did not bare their teeth, but the shape of them—tiny swords beneath the flesh—was visible at the skin of their tight, ghastly
cheeks. The viewpoint shifted and suddenly the screen showed things the way the vampires saw them: Gooch became a man-sized
pork chop, stuck inside a tramp's patched suit, and wearing a tramp's battered old bowler.

Several people laughed; one man down the row from Eckstein cackled and pounded the seatback in front of him.

Gooch moaned. "Lord, lord," he said, "Lord, lo—" Capes and shadows enveloped his body.

Eckstein bolted up, jostling past the cackling man at the end of the row. It was the heckler. He threw a couple of pieces
at popcorn at the ballplayer. "Watch the knees, shitbird."

In the lavatory, Eckstein finally did vomit. It was mostly coffee, but he recognized a fragment of that morning's bacon, floating
at the top of the murky expulsion—and then he dry-heaved some more.

When he felt better, he stood and washed his hands, splashed water on his face. When he pissed, the crackling of the ice in
the urinal made Eckstein shiver.

He went outside to walk around until the theater closed and Lillian got off.

The weekend crowd was thick and boisterous. Children chased each other. Tinkling piano keys echoed from the dance hall. Two
vagrants wrestled feebly with each other, arm-locked and lurching while passersby stepped around them. A man pulled a giggling
girl into an alley. Eckstein unbuttoned his shirt a couple of buttons, and pushed his hat back on his head in a way that felt
good. He let the flow of the crowd carry him to the end of the boardwalk. There were colored lights and touts hollering out
the latest attractions. Eckstein bought a bottle of pop. The vendor recognized him. "Is it a slump?" the man asked. "No,"
said Eckstein, "just giving Hoboken a break. We'll put the wood to em tomorrow, I believe." He tipped his hat to the vendor,
and the vendor tipped his red-striped paper cap in return. Eckstein found a baseball tossing game. He fired one ball after
another through the dangling hoops, while the operator smoked a cheroot. "Get outta here, ringer," said the operator. "No
prize for you."