But eight years later, in January 1965, that perennially dissatisfied, neversay-die ex-Bulldog batboy, Everett, undertook a second dial-a-prayer project on his ill-fated father’s behalf. Trying the same lucky downtown phone booth he’d used to contact the miracle-producing Doc Franken, he piled in his hard-earned bag-boy quarters, dialed Oklahoma, and, mirabile dictu, conjured up the white cracker drawl of the infamous G. Q. Durham as easily as Abraham used to conjure down the ineffable drawl of God.
Unlike Abraham, Everett didn’t just listen when he got G.Q. on the line. He’d written out a veritable soliloquy beforehand, rehearsed it in front of Irwin, Pete and me, and even allowed us to critique and embellish it. And in finished form, as delivered by Everett, the spiel was a tailor-made purple-prosed phone-filibustering masterpiece. It began with the triple admission that (1) Papa was too old for the minors, (2) he had too many kids to leave the Crown Z money, and (3) he’d apparently lost all desire to throw a baseball outside his backyard. But from there it went on to say that although Durham was unquestionably the Junk Genius—the greatest wrecked-ballplayer-rebuilder who ever lived—it was our very own Papa who, right here in downtown Camas, had brought Durham’s philosophy to new and epiphanic heights by taking a thumb made of half his own damned toe for chrissake, and twisting it into a tool that had perfected the Kamikaze—the most devastating diving fastball that four visiting baseball experts had ever seen. (He neglected to mention that these “visiting experts” were us four brothers.) True, Papa threw his killer pitch only at night, and only as a kind of contemplative exercise. But since it was G.Q.’s peculiar genius that had inspired this paragon, Everett felt we owed him an invitation to come see it for himself. Not to arrange any sort of tryout or comeback, mind you, but just to drop by the next time his scouting duties brought him out our way, quaff a few ice-cold tubes of the amber liquid, and partake of the purely artistic joy of watching the crowning achievement of his own career fly, like an epileptic beam of light, through the soulful squalor of a mill-town backyard night …
–V–
Irwin’s first memory is as complicated as Irwin himself is simple. It’s of a hot dry evening in what he later learned was Kincaid, Oklahoma, of a sinking red sun hanging over an endless green expanse he later learned was a minor league outfield, of being set down, wearing nothing but diapers, at the edge of that expanse, and of crawling as fast as he could, way out into it. Lying down on his side in order to better study the infinitude and chlorophyllitude of it all, he heard Mama’s dry, distant, incomprehensible voice drift over him (yeah, out in left field as usual), snorted happily as he turned to crawl still further off, but found his path barred by two big black shoes and a pair of tree-sized, blue-stockinged legs. Thinking he’d discovered his daddy, he snorted again, grabbed the stockings, used them to pull himself up to a standing position, peered up the legs—and sure enough, there was his father’s gray-and-blue uniform. But it had somehow been bloated (the heat? the round red sun?) into something so moon-shaped and -sized that he couldn’t see past the belly, couldn’t find the face, so he leaned back still further to peer still higher—and fell flat on his head and back. It didn’t hurt much, thanks to the grass, but by the time he’d regained an up-down orientation and turned to relocate the shoes, the stockings and legs and entire beach-ball body had blopped down onto the grass beside him. Goo-sound-that-precedes-the-word “Papa!” Irwin cried, crawling right up onto the belly. But as he salamander-walked up over the summit and caught sight of the face, he froze: it wasn’t Papa! It was the most tiny-eyed, multi-chinned, lobster-red, bloated human visage he’d ever seen. Even before the lips zipped open and the mouthful of brown teeth flanged out, Irwin’s infant mind knew that he was in serious trouble. When a horrid, henlike cackling began to quake the belly beneath him and a stream of swampy fluid phoooted sideways out the snaggled teeth, he realized this trouble might prove fatal. He therefore did the only sensible thing: diving face-first onto the grass, he gathered his hands and knees together and started sprint-crawling off into the infinite greenness for all he was worth …
It was while tearing along, listening to the plaintive cries of his mother (Dont worry, he won’t hurtcha!), the hooting of distant ballplayers, and the cack-’n’-hack of the blubberman blollopping along after his diapered behind that Irwin felt the pure instant of despair that nailed the episode to his memory for life. As this despair decreed, the creature soon caught him in its fat red claws, reared up on its hind legs, let out another cackle, and—bye-bye, Mama! bye-bye, red sun and green world!—lifted his tender infant abdomen up to the putrid-toothed mouth. But when, instead of ripping him open, the monster only gave his belly a wet, snorffling kiss that stained him brown and sent a blissfully cool shiver shooting from pate to toes, Irwin’s despair was transmuted on the spot into the infant version of one of the world’s most ruthlessly optimistic philosophies.
Flopping onto his back, the moonman grabbed Irwin’s tiny fat hands in his huge, even fatter ones, stood him up on the lunar belly, hollered Play ball!, and Irwin began stomping round and round the bounding surface, gaping joyously down into a hobbling chaos of brown and red teeth and chins, soaking cackle-vibrations in through the soles of his bare feet, and roaring with a delight so loud and contagious that soon the fat man and spectators and an entire Two A ball team were infected with it too. All right that’s enough! came his mother’s tiny and for some reason stricken wail as Irwin flopped down on his pet monster’s gut, squeal-begged for more, and down or up the kisses rained, onto his ears, his neck, his arms, legs, belly (Stop them, Hugh! Please! Stop him!)—rough, wet, wildly aimed dog, bear and walrus kisses tattooing him with stains that would later be scrubbed away mercilessly as sins (You’ve got to stop them!), but which now covered him, after a squirmy eternity of heat (which eternity, he later learned, was only the length of an afternoon’s ballgame), with wave after wave of cool, ecstatic shivers …
And on Groundhog Day 1965, we had just gathered for our third consecutive Mama-less supper when someone rang the front doorbell, and Everett gasped “Elder Babcock!” so convincingly that Papa had clenched his fists and reddened before he caught Everett’s expression, and laughed. Then Irwin ran to the front door, swung it wide open, and there stood a shabby, tavern-odored, red-eyed, corpulent old stranger he figured must be some lost wino or panhandler. But when the old guy let out the kind of wheezy tenor cackle that by then reminded us TV-news-watching Northerners of nothing so much as the KKK, and when that cackle sent a cool, ecstatic, embarrassingly nonsequacious shiver shooting up Irwin’s legs and back, his body instantly knew who he was seeing, though his mind and tongue were still groping for a name. “G. Q. Durham!” he finally gasped.
“Hot damn!” the old man cried. “This is great! This is good! Look at the size o’ this son of a Hubert!”
–VI–
Hiding in the old toolshed, unable to see a thing, but so close to the pitching shed that we could hear even grunts and head-scratching, Everett and I heard Durham say, “You’re gonna have trouble fieldin’ bunts on that retread foot there, Hubert.”
“The hell I am,” Papa told him. “All that mattress ever does is bunt, and I never field a one.” And with that he fired his twentieth or so Kamikaze, which must have taken another wicked down-snap, since for the twentieth or so time G.Q. spat, then whispered, “Sheeee-it.”
“How long,” Durham asked, “in terms of innings, an’ how often in terms of days, do you think you could do what I’ve been watchin’ you do here?”
“I throw fifty to seventy hard pitches every other night,” Papa said. “But it’s got nothing to do with innings. There’s no hitters, Gale.”
“So we’re talkin’ relief,” Durham mused, ignoring him. “We’re talkin’ stopper. I like that, Hubert. It suits your serene, stubborn goddamned nature.”
“We’re talkin’ backyard hobby, is all we’re talking,” Papa said. But after the hiss and thud of another pitch and another appreciative “Hot damn!” Pa
pa laughed like a happy kid. Hobby or not, he liked throwing in front of a fan.
“Know what’s gonna happen when they see the action on that thing?”
“When who sees it, Gale?”
“The folks upstairs. Enemy coaches, mean-minded hitters, malicious ol’ umps. Know what they’re gonna think?”
“I’m through facing hitters,” Papa said. “We’ve been over this, what, ninety times now? But go ahead. If I was upstairs, what would they think?”
“That you’ve overcome your number one flaw.”
There was a silence. Then, in a lowered voice, Papa said, “Laura?”
If the Bull hadn’t let out one of his harebrained cackles, Everett’s snort would have given us away for sure. “Hubert!” the old man chided. “Shame! I meant spit, you nimnam!”
“Spit?” Papa sounded confused. “I never threw spit, Gale. You know that.”
G.Q. phooted out a weighty-sounding hocker. “Whaddya think I meant by ‘flaw’?”
While Everett struggled not to snort again, Papa said, “So you think the other team’d suspect me?”
“Action like that, they’d be fools not to.”
“Good thing I’m retired, then.”
“Why’s that, Hubert?”
“I am usin’ spit.”
There was a several-second lull, during which Durham must have been gathering all the outrage and energy he had in him, because at the end of it he gasped, “You wouldn’t! You’re not! You can’t!”
“I would, I can, and I am,” Papa answered.
“My Lord, Hubert! Where’s your moral fiber and all that type o’ crapola?”
“What’s immoral about a backyard spitter, Gale? Who’s gonna complain? The mattress? The garage wall? The neighbors?”
“Them ain’t the fibers I mean!” Durham retorted. “The gall of a man, the shiftlessness of a man, the two-facedness of a man who’d let one o’ the all-time additives experts stand here thinkin’ he was seein’ sheer, bare-balled genius—that’s the lack that wounds and troubles me.”
“Oh,” Papa said. “Well. For that I do apologize. The genius you’ve been watching, like my thumb and foot, has been ever so slightly doctored.”
“Hot damn!” Durham roared, and a chill shot through me. Nobody could hot-damn as blissfully as G.Q. “This is good! This is fine! I’d of sworn on my life them balls was as dry as my own, if ya don’t mind stoopin’ to catch a sad ol’ man’s meaning.”
Papa’s gleeful snort showed he’d no qualms about making the stoop.
“Where the hell’re you gettin’ it, dammit? An’ what’re you usin’, Hubert? How’re ya workin’ it in?”
“Trade secrets,” Papa said—and I could just picture his demure smile.
“Well I’m damned!” Durham said.
“That we’ve always suspected.”
“The so-called master bows to his student,” said the Bull. And from the grunt and groan that followed, Everett and I deduced that, so far as his gut would allow it, that was exactly what Durham proceeded to do.
When they came inside for a beer afterwards (or in Gale’s case, for four beers afterwards) and all six of us kids surrounded them, demanding the old man’s expert opinion, I think his response surprised even Papa. “Soon as Hubert gives me the word,” he said, “I’ll be on the horn, seein’ but what I can’t arrange a little tryout with the Twins.”
Standing right beside Durham’s ear, Irwin roared, “You mean the Minnesota Twins?”
“No!” Gale said with a wince. “I mean your little sisters.”
While Irwin and the twins cracked up, Papa grabbed Durham’s shoulder and squeezed it hard. “Damn!” the old man shouted, trying to wrest his hand away. “A whole family o’ bullies! Pick on somebody your own size!”
“Then you do the same,” Papa said, trying to nod, subtly, toward Irwin and the twins.
But G.Q. didn’t get it. “What the hell are you ravin’ about?” he asked.
Papa let go of his shoulder, sighed, and spelled it out. “No more comeback talk, Gale. You’ll get the kids all excited.”
“Then it’s even Steven,” G.Q. retorted, “’cause whaddya think your pitchin’ just did to me?”
“Cut it out!” Papa snapped.
“Ah ha!” Durham cried. “Now I see the true problem. He dudn’t like the Twins. Okay. All right. I admit they aren’t much to write home about these days. So how ’bout this. It’ll have to be a secret, ’cause it’s one o’ these Benedict Arnold-type deals, but Smokey Alston an’ me go a good ways back. So what say I get you a shot with the Dodgers?”
“Forget it, Gale,” Papa said—as Everett’s disbelieving ears nearly popped off the sides of his head (and later that summer Alston’s Dodgers and Durham’s ex-Senator Twins won their respective pennants).
“Okay,” Durham replied. “I hear ya. No Twins. No Dodgers. Fine. How about a go (sorry there, Everett) with the despicable damned Yankees down in St. Petersburg for chrissake?”
“You’re worse than all my kids put together, Gale.”
“Well,” Durham said, still playing dumb. “It’s true the Yanks, thank God, ain’t what they was since they fired ol’ Casey. But hey! How about Stengel? Would a tryout with the mangled young Mets be grim and lowly enough to make our humble Hubert happy?”
“A tryout,” Papa answered, “as you very well know, just isn’t the point.”
“Refresh my brains, then,” G.Q. said. “What is the godforsaken point?”
“That not even the Mets are interested in a thirty-five-year-old gimp with a plastic toe on his foot and a real toe on his pitching hand.”
“Now you listen to me!” Durham barked. “The Twins, Dodgers, Yanks, Mets an’ anyone else in their right baseball minds is interested in any man, woman, chicken, fish or Space Man who pitches the way you’re pitchin’.”
“The way I’m pitching,” Papa said, “is completely illegal.”
But G.Q. only looked disgusted. “What is a man? Eighty, ninety percent water? An’ when does he play ball? In summertime—Sweat Capital of the Year! So how is an ump ever gonna monitor what’s runnin’ nonstop out every pore o’ everybody in the place? The truth is, you couldn’t throw a bone-dry legal pitch if you wanted to, Hubert.”
This argument completely convinced six-sevenths of Durham’s audience. But Papa didn’t even appear to hear it. G.Q. tried again:
“I checked them balls an’ found nuthin’. I watched you an’ saw nuthin’. An’ if the likes of me can’t see it, Hubert, the likes of umpires sure as hell won’t. The spit that’s gone ’fore it reaches an ump is what we in the trade call incidental percipitation. An’ I say, if it’s incidental, it’s legal.”
I felt like applauding, this time. But Papa just sighed.
“Oh, all right,” G.Q. growled. “Think small, then, dammit. With the majors, mind you, age is no problem. In the minors it gets sticky. But if I explain that gettin’ you is gettin’ both the best minor league reliever an’ the second-best pitching coach in the land, two for the shape o’one, some PCL team ought to go for it. So pick your climate, Hubert! Albuquerque? Hawaii? Salt Lake?”
But Papa kept droning no, no no. He said Gale had gotten all carried away by a damned spitball. He said it’d been nine years since he’d faced a real hitter, he’d just been made a foreman at the mill, he had seven people depending on his paycheck, and he was too old to go knocking around with a bunch of ass- and dream-chasing teenagers anyhow. He’d learned that much from living with his own. One good year, the Bull countered, even in the minors, and a quality baseball man like Papa could “crawl out of that shithole mill” and into a job as a pitching coach or scout that’d brighten the rest of his days.
“I appreciate the thought, the praise, your time and trouble, and all the rest of it,” Papa said. “But there are other things too. My kids, for instance. The scholarships the older ones are fighting for now are worth more than a year’s minor league salary. So they can’t move. But I can’t leave ’em a
lone here either. We’ve got troubles here, to tell the truth, Gale. Laura and me aren’t doing that great lately, and if I … well, it’s too thick for explaining. But I’m needed here.”
“Then it’s clear as beer,” said the Bull. “You try out with Portland. Won’t have to move an inch if it’s the Tugs.”
“Tell you what,” Papa said. “Promise me they’ll match my Crown Z pay and keep me till I’m sixty-five, and okay, fine. I’ll try the Tugs.”
“Keeeeerist!” Durham exploded. “Where’s your sense of adventure?”
“This family,” Papa said, “is all the adventure I can stand right now.”
“Then stand ’em less for chrissake! Where’s your sense of baseball adventure?”
“You just saw it,” Papa said calmly, “out in that shed.”
“But why, why, why? Why jail it up out there?”
“Because I’m baseball ancient, Gale. I’ve had my adventures. And if I don’t pay some bills the next few years I’m gonna screw up the adventures of my kids.”
“So you admit it,” the old man said bitterly.
“Admit what?”
“You’ve betrayed the game,” Durham said. “You’ve sold out.”
Papa’s face blackened. “To that mill? Me? You’re dead wrong there, Gale!”
“Then what is a sellout?” G.Q. fired back. “Explain this love for your paycheck and retirement benefits some other way. And explain the whole damned rest o’ this ensemble while you’re at it. What is this St. Hubert Savior of Kids crap? What’s this mill foreman, middle American, PTA an’ NRA an’ Three A Car Club member shit? Dwight D. Christ! Votin’ the straight Republican ticket now, are we, Hubert? Ain’t drank none neither, I s’pose, sance we jined the charch?”
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