We're All in This Together (24 page)

A while later he wandered back to the avenue and found Woodpecker sealed on a curb, carving toothpicks from a chunk of driftwood
across his lap. Before Eckstein could slip away, the outfielder looked up and grinned and waved his teammate over. Eckstein
felt a burn of embarrassment in his cheeks.

At his feet, Woodpecker had built a little pile of new toothpicks. He flicked at the gray chunk of wood with his pocketknife,
popped loose another fragment, arid gave a grunt of satisfaction. "Good wood," he said.

"I bet," said Eckstein.

"I got that five dollars," said Woodpecker.

"No, it's okay. I don't need it," said Eckstein. "I'm sorry about Pelky, he was just trying to help me out and—well, he got
too hot."

"It don't matter," said Woodpecker. He took out a bill and pressed it into Eckstein's shirt pocket.

The sounds of the boardwalk were distant and faint. Reflecting off the night clouds, the big wheel splashed green and white,
green and white, green and white.

Lillian would be closing up soon.

"Thanks," said Eckstein. "But I guess I oughta scoot."

"You see that movie?" asked Woodpecker.

"Yeah," said Eckstein, "Scared the heck out of me."

"Looked real didn't they, them vampires?"

"Hell," said Eckstein.

"That's right," said Woodpecker, "that's right." With an air of contemplation, the black-skinned man slowly rolled his toothpick
back and forth in his mouth—but said nothing more.

Lillian avoided Eckstein's eyes as they left the theater. He slouched along beside her. Frequently pretending to scratch an
itch at his nose, he dabbed at his eyes, which were teary. Away from the boardwalk, the houses on Surf Avenue narrowed, the
slats peeled and grew scabby, the lawns wilted; mounds of garbage lay in the gutters and the air was rotten with the smell
of fish. The howling of two fighting dogs startled him. "Dammit," he cursed, and Lillian did not scold him.

When they reached the alleyway Eckstein recognized it by the infamous street sign: a broken scrap of crating nailed to a twisted
lamppost, and painted in chipped black letters: WRETCH LANE.

Lillian hiccuped, and began to sob. "Someday I'm going to have beautiful babies," she said. Her voice rose and broke with
the hiccups. "You'll just be a used-up ballplayer in some jerkwater town."

There was an empty bottle lying in the street. Eckstein went and picked it up, then flung it as far as he could, over the
rooftops on the opposite side of the road.

She stopped crying, and he held her purse while she applied fresh makeup, using her compact and the light of the moon.

He offered her his hand and she took it. Their palms suctioned with damp.

At the end of the alleyway they emerged into a small courtyard littered with trash. A twisted unicycle was propped up against
one wall. There was an animal cage pushed up against another wall, big enough to hold a lion. Something very large lay in
it, unmoving or dead. The courtyard gave way to a darkened, sagging house; the shutters were battened; a porch leaned before
it, giving access to two doors, one black, one red.

"It's the red door we want," said Eckstein.

He knocked hesitantly while Lillian waited at the bottom of the stairs, holding her elbows. Eckstein's eyes had dried out
very suddenly. He found himself blinking rapidly, shifting from one foot to another.

After a minute, the second baseman heard steps, a slinking, one
twoshhh,
one-two-shhh.
His hands clenched.

The door opened. "You come for a screw?" asked the Purple Girl sleepily. "It's after hours. It's extra now." Her skin looked
bruised in the moonlight. For some reason she held a broom, which had been dragging behind her, which accounted for the
shhh-noise.

Eckstein couldn't speak. He blinked and looked at the broom.

The Purple Girl followed his gaze. "Sometimes, I just feel like sweeping," she said. "I can start sweeping at almost any time."

She took the broom and brushed it over Eckstein's shoes. The Purple Girl wore a white nightgown and her skin peered blackly
through the material. Eckstein felt a fearful stirring of arousal.

"We need the surgeon," he said, abruptly finding his voice.

The Purple Girl looked out over his shoulder, spotted Lillian, and wrinkled her nose. "Follow me," she said. She turned and
swept away down the hall.

They followed the Purple Girl down a splintered hallway. At the foot of the hall a naked bulb hung above an open basement
door. The Purple Girl nodded down a set of wooden stairs, then swept away. Lillian clenched Eckstein's hand. They went down
the stairs.

"You'll have to wait till he's done munchin," said Jenny Two Heads' wakeful head. The two-headed freak was standing beside
the table in the middle of a dim, dirt-floored room. Sitting in a chair that was turned away from the table, his body facing
the wall, the Backwards Man opened and closed his mouth obediently as Jenny fed him, spooning soup to his lips.

From somewhere above their heads came the sound of the Purple Girl sweeping,
shhh-shhh-shhh,
like an admonition.

But the Backwards Man had no use for admonitions. "Munch, munch," he said, in his tiny voice that was like air whistling through
a cracked window. His hands rubbed his thighs happily, while his head ate soup behind his back.

"Excuse my brother. He can't feed hisself properly," said Jenny. Her sleeping head, the bald one, lolled at her shoulder,
sickeningly.

"Munch, munch, munch," sang the Backwards Man.

Eckstein and Lillian stood without speaking, their hands squeezed numb together.

When the feeding was done, Jenny Two Heads took the Backwards Man upstairs.

She returned with a large dusty jar and a lamp. She set them on the floor beside the table, and nodded to Lillian. "You get
your ass up there." To Eckstein, she added, "And you gimme the money."

Lillian went to the table and climbed awkwardly onto it. She began to cry again.

Eckstein gave the freak the money.

"Wad it worth it?" Jenny cackled and stuffed the bills between her breasts.

He squatted, hoping that it would be easier to breathe at floor level. It wasn't, though, and he stood back up, the room turning
dizzy.

Eckstein noticed something move inside the jar. He wiped a hand across the film of dust. A knot of thick white worms, like
ropes of taffy, squirmed at the bottom of the glass.

"What are those for?" he asked.

"They eat it," said Jenny Two Heads. "That's they job."

He took a place by the table and held Lillian's hand. The freak flipped up Lillian's dress, and with a savage swipe, tore
away the girl's underwear. "You won't want em after this, honey," she said.

Jenny set the lamp on the table between Lillian's legs. From a drawer she took out a pince-nez and two instruments—a battered
spoon and a rubber nozzle.

She fixed her spectacle and set the probe down close by. Jenny leaned over with the spoon and studied the girl's genitals.
"Wider," the freak growled and slapped the girl's heavy pale thigh.

Lillian moaned and stretched herself open.

Eckstein thought of a baseball, clean and white, soaring into a high, bright night, soaring farther than any other baseball
before it. He thought of it still rising, of the droplets of dewy air sliding over it, and of its long, grand descent,
plunk
into Sheepshead Bay, down, down, sinking down, and settling gracefully into the silt, between stands of waving seaweed. For
a moment, Eckstein was far beyond the basement, beyond the city, beyond himself. He was all movement and ease. Eckstein was
perfect then, the way he had always been perfect when the plane of the ball met the plane of the bat and made a third plane,
the one that cut through the sky and lifted the second basemen to sanctuary. He was in control then, and safe, and no trouble
to anyone at all. He was a hit.

With a snort, Jenny Two Heads straightened. The bald head suddenly lifted, its eyes opened, and it burped. Just as abruptly,
the head shut its eyes and fell back, and cracked on her shoulder.

Shhh-shhh-shhh,
came the sound of the Purple Girl's broom.

"Your lucky day, sugar."

"What do you mean?" Lillian curled on the table, clutching her knees.

"Your works ain't no good. Your works don't work. Rotten fruit. They ain't no babies ever comin from there. Fuck all you want
and there won't never be any."

Lillian let go of the second basemen's hand.

"Munch, munch, munch," echoed the distant song of the Backwards Man from somewhere above.

"All right," said Jenny. "Fine." She plucked the money from between her breast. "You can have half back, but that's all. We
don't do charity around here."

When they got outside Lillian ran away from him, stumbling through the courtyard and down Wretch Lane.

The massive thing in the cage called pitifully to Eckstein as he passed. "Please don't let them make me eat any more. They
won't let me stop. They keep feeding me. Please. I'm not hungry. I haven't been hungry in years. Please. Make them stop. Make
them stop."

Game 3

The first pitch came to him in black and white, and the slump was over; Eckstein saw the white ball as a black spot and the
colored world around it as a blank mat. He swung and the ball rocketed off the barrel of the lumber club, straight up the
middle of the diamond. It ricocheted off the ankle of the Hoboken pitcher and squirted into foul territory. By the time the
third baseman tracked it down, Eckstein had trotted into second.

In his next at-bat the kid drove the ball on a flat arc, hissing through the air, and not stopping until it boomed off the
scoreboard. He dug into second with another double. Eckstein stood on the base and ground his teeth.

"You knocked that one," said Gordy Wheelock when Eckstein returned to the dugout. "That was a frozen rope."

"Stick it up your ass," said Eckstein.

His third time up, Eckstein was able to see the fear in the Hoboken pitcher's face. The pitcher's cheeks glistened with sweat;
he bit his lip and took off his cap, brushed his hand through his hair. Eckstein watched the man fiddle and waited patiently.
When the pitcher finally did throw, the kid hit the baseball up and away, over the scoreboard.

The Wonders were winning 7 to 1 by the seventh-inning stretch and the kid had batted in all the runs but one.

On the bench, Woodpecker offered Eckstein a pick. "Good wood," he said. "Real piney."

The second baseman grunted no.

Woodpecker looked Eckstein over and shook his head. "You aren't exactly here, are you?"

"No." Eckstein shook his head. He thought of the worms in the jar, hungrily squirming over each other. Maybe his mother had
been lucky after all—maybe there were worse things even than Eckstein. "No, I don't guess I am."

There was no race in the outfield today. Instead, the cart with Three Ton Timmy unloaded the giant freak in right field. He
sat there like a small mountain. The Purple Girl, the Backwards Man, and Jenny Two Heads ran circles around him. Three Ton
Timmy roared and made histrionic grabs at them, as if he wanted to devour them. The organist played "The Moten Swing."

With one out in the ninth, a Hoboken batter hit a high fly into shallow left field. Woodpecker got a bead on it, tracking
the ball into foul territory, heading for the grandstand. He stumbled against the wall, straining to catch the ball as it
fell about two rows back. At that moment a hand reached from the crowd and plucked Woodpecker's cap from his head.

"Got your hat, nigger!" The heckler jumped up and down in the aisle of the grandstand, waving the cap.

Woodpecker stood by the wall, but made no move.

Eckstein bolted. "Come on, you bastards," he yelled at the rest of the Wonders infield. Pelky and several of the others looked
around at each other, shrugged, and started to jog after him.

The heckler swatted the cap across Woodpecker's face. "Down boy! Sit boy!"

Eckstein reached the wall and vaulted over it.

The heckler turned, dropped the hat, and bolted up the grandstand stairs.

Four more Wonders pushed past Woodpecker, pouring over the wall. The black man watched them go. A spectator handed him back
his hat.

"Thank you, sir," said Woodpecker.

Eckstein caught the heckler just in front of the exit. He jumped onto the man's back and rode him to the cement floor. The
heckler wailed. "Nigger lover! Nigger lover!"

But Eckstein's fist stopped the man's mouth. The first blow split his lip, and the second made something in the heckler's
face snap. The heckler crumpled to the ground. Eckstein grabbed the man by his hair and slammed his head against the ground.
Blood spurted onto the cement. Twice more he banged the man's face off the floor.

Eckstein looked at his bloody right fist. There was a yellow chip of tooth embedded in his knuckle. The heckler was moaning
and making sucking noises, trying to find air. "Well," said Eckstein, half to himself and half to the heckler, "well, you
asked for it."