by Ron Carlson
So I went out alone and stayed in the old Hotel Barnard, where a lot of the writers stay. It was lonely out there in Ohio, and I thought about it. It was the end of a full season in which I had not played ball, and here I was in a hotel full of writers, which I had become, instead of over at the Hilton with my club.
I was closing down the bar the night before the Series opener when Billy Day walked in. I couldn’t believe my eyes.
“I thought I’d find you here,” he said.
“Billy,” I said, waving the barman to bring down a couple of lagers. “I’m a writer now. This is where the writers stay. You’re out after curfew.”
He gestured back at the empty room. “Who’s gonna write me up, you?” He smiled his terrific smile and I realized as much as I had avoided him for eight months, I missed him. I missed that smile.
“No,” I said. “I don’t think so.” Our beers came and I asked him, “What’s up?”
“It’s been a rough season.”
“Not from what I read. The Pirates won the pennant.”
“Jesus,” he said. “What is that, sarcasm? You gonna start talking like a writer too?”
“Billy, you’ve pulled some stunts.”
He slid his beer from one hand to the other on the varnished bar of the Hotel Barnard. And then started to nod. “Yeah,” he said. “I guess I did. You know, I didn’t see it at first. It just kind of grew.”
“And now you know.”
“Yeah, now I know all about it. I know what I can do.”
“So what brings you out on a night to the Hotel Barnard?” I pointed at his full glass of beer. “It’s not the beer.”
“You,” he said, and he turned to me again and smiled. “You always knew what to do. I don’t mean on the field. There was no rookie better. But I mean, what should I do? This is the Series.”
“Yeah, it’s the Series. If I were you, I’d play ball.”
“You know what I mean. Ketchum wants me to use it all. He doesn’t care if they tear down the stadium.”
“And you?”
“I don’t know. All my life, I played to win. It seems wrong not to do something that can help your team. But the people don’t like it.”
I looked at the clouds crossing the face of Sunny Billy Day, and I knew I was seeing something no man had ever seen there before: second thoughts.
“These new umps may not let you get away with anything.”
“Kid,” he said to me, touching my shoulder with his fist, his smile as wide and bright as the sun through a pop-up, “I’ve been missing you. But I thought you knew me better than that. I’ve lived my life knowing one thing: everybody lets me get away with everything. The only thing I ever lost, I lost to you. Polly. And I didn’t even think about it until she was gone. How is she?”
“I’d get her back for you if I could,” I said, lifting my glass in a toast to my old friend Billy Day. “Polly,” I told him, “is headed for Tahiti.”
Billy was right about the umps. They looked good, in fact, when they took the field and stood with their arms behind their backs along the first-base line, they looked like the Supreme Court. The people of Cleveland were ready for something too, because I noted in the article I wrote for the Dispatch that the squadron of umpires received a louder ovation when they took the field than the home team did. Everybody knew that without an iron heel from the umps, the Indians might as well take the winter off.
Okay, so it was baseball for several innings. Ohio in October smells sweet and old, and for a while I think we were all transported through the beautiful fall day, the stadium bathing in the yellow light and then pitching steeply into the sepia shadow of the upper decks. See: I was learning to write like the other guys.
Sunny Billy Day hadn’t been a factor, really, walking twice and grounding a base hit into left. It was just baseball, the score two to one Cleveland in the top of the eighth. Now, I want to explain what happened carefully. There were seventy-four thousand people there and in the days since the Series I’ve heard almost that many versions. The thirty major papers disagreed in detail and the videotapes haven’t got it all because of the angle and sequence. So let me go slow here. After all, it would be the last play of Sunny Billy Day.
I wasn’t in the press box. The truth is that the season had been a little hard on me in terms of making friends with my fellow reporters. I’d had a hundred suppers in half-lit lounges and I don’t think it came as a surprise that I didn’t really care for the way they talked—not just about baseball, for which they had a curious but abiding disdain. And I’m not one of these guys who think you have to have played a sport—or really done anything—to be able to write about it well. Look at me—I was good in the field, but I can’t write half as good as any of the guys I travel with. But sportswriters, when they are together at the end of the day, a group of them having drinks waiting for their Reuben sandwiches to arrive, are a fairly superior and hard-bitten bunch. You don’t want to wander into one of these hotel lounges any summer evening if you want to hear anything about the joy of the sport. These guys don’t celebrate baseball, and really, like me, they don’t analyze it very well. But they have feelings about it; I never met a man who didn’t. That’s why it’s called the major leagues.
Anyway, I don’t want to get going on writers and all that stuff. And don’t get me wrong. Some of them—hell, most of them—are nice guys and quick about the check or asking how’s it going, but it was October and it was all getting to me. I could see myself in two years, flipping my ash into somebody’s coffee cup offering a weary expert’s opinion. So I wanted to sit where someone might actually cheer or spill a little beer when they stood up on a third strike or a home run. Journalists are professionals, anyone will tell you this, and they don’t spill their beer. I ended up ten rows behind third in a seat I paid for myself, and it turned out to be a lucky break given what was going to happen.
With one out in the top of the eighth, Billy Day doubled to right. It was a low fastball and he sliced it into the corner.
On the first pitch to Red Sorrows, Coach Ketchum had Billy steal. He’s one run down with one out in the eighth, a runner in scoring position, and a fair hitter at the plate, and Ketchum flashes the steal sign—it’s crazy. It means one thing: he’s trading on Billy’s magic all the way. When I saw Ketchum pinch his nose and then go to the bill of his cap, which has been the Pirate’s steal sign for four years, I thought: Ketchum’s going to use Billy any way he can. The pitch is a high strike which Sorrows fouls straight back against the screen, so now everybody knows. Billy walks back to second. I have trouble believing what I see next. Again Ketchum goes to his nose and his cap: steal. The Cleveland hurler, the old veteran Blade Medina, stretches and whirls to throw to second with Billy caught halfway down and throws the ball into center field. He must have been excited. Billy pulls into third standing.
Okay, I thought, Ketchum, you got what you wanted, now stop screwing around. In fact, I must have whispered that or said it aloud, because the guy next to me says to my face, “What’d I do?” These new fans. They don’t want to fight you anymore, they want to know how they’ve offended you. Too much college for this country. I told him I was speaking to someone else, and he let it go, until I felt a tap on my shoulder and he’d bought me a beer. What did I tell you? But I didn’t mind. A minute later I would need it.
Sorrow goes down swinging. Two outs.
It was then I got a funny feeling, on top of all the other funny feelings I’d been having in the strangest summer of my life, and it was a feeling about Ketchum, and I came to know as I sipped my beer and watched my old coach walk over to Billy on the bag at third that he was going to try to steal home. Coach Ketchum was the king of the fair shake, a guy known from Candlestick to Fenway as a square shooter, and as he patted Billy on the rump and walked back to the coach’s box, I saw his grin. I was ten rows up and the bill of his cap was down, but I saw it clearly—the grin of a deranged miser about to make another two bucks.
&nb
sp; Billy had never stolen home in his career.
Blade Medina was a tall guy and as he launched into his windup, kicking his long leg toward third, Billy took off. Billy Day was stealing home; you could feel every mouth in the stadium open. Blade Medina certainly opened his. Then he simply cocked and threw to the catcher, who tagged Billy out before he could decide to slide.
Ketchum was on them before the big Tongan umpire could put his thumb away. For a big guy he had a funny out call, flicking his thumb as if shooting a marble. I have to hand it to Billy. He was headed for the dugout. But Ketchum got him by the shirt and dragged back out to the plate and made him speak to the umpire. You knew it was going to happen again—and in the World Series—because all the Indians just stood where they were on the field. And sure enough after a moment of Ketchum pushing Billy from the back, as if he was some big puppet in a baseball suit, and Billy speaking softly to the umpire, the large official stepped out in front of the plate and swept his hand out flat in the air as if calming the waters: “Safe!” he said. He said it quietly in his deep voice. Well, it was quiet in Cleveland, do you see? I sat there like everyone else looking at the bottom of my plastic glass of beer and wishing it wasn’t so. Seventy-four thousand people sitting in a circle feeling sour in their hearts, not to mention all the sad multitudes watching the televised broadcast.
Then my old coach Ketchum made it worse by hauling Billy over to touch the plate; Billy hadn’t even stepped on home base yet. Just typing this makes me feel the ugliness all over again.
But then the real stuff started to happen, and, as I said, there were no good reports of this next part because of everybody looking at their shoes, programs, or their knuckles the way people in a restaurant read the menu real hard when a couple is arguing at the next table. But I saw it, and it redeemed Sunny Billy Day forever to me, and it gave me something that has allowed me, made me really, get out my cleats again and become a baseball player. I’m not so bad a writer that I would call it courage, but it was definitely some big kick in the ass.
What happened was, halfway back to the dugout, Billy turned around. His head was down in what I called shame in my report to the Pittsburgh Dispatch, and he turned around and went back to home plate. Ketchum was back at third, smug as a jewel thief, and he caught the action too late to do anything about it. Billy took the ump by the sleeve and I saw Billy take off his cap and shake his head and point at the plate. We all knew what he was saying, everybody. The ballpark was back, everyone standing now, watching, and we all saw the big Tongan nod and smile that big smile at Ketchum, and then raise his fist and flick his thumb.
Oh god, the cheer. The cheer went up my spine like a chiropractor. There was joy in Ohio and it went out in waves around the world. I wrote that too. Not joy at the out; joy at order restored. It was the greatest noise I’ve ever heard. I hope Billy recognized the sound.
Because what happened next, as the Cleveland Indians ran off the field like kids, and Ketchum’s mouth dropped open like the old man he would become in two minutes, surprised everyone, even me.
When the Pirates took the field (and they ran out joyfully too—it was baseball again), there was something wrong. The Pirates pitcher threw his eight warm-up pitches and one of the Cleveland players stepped into the box. That is when the Irishman umping first came skittering onto the field wheeling his arms, stopping play before it had begun, and seventy-four thousand people looked over to where I’d been staring for five minutes: first base. There was no one at first base. Sunny Billy Day had not taken the field.
I wish to this day I’d been closer to the field because I would have hopped the rail and run through the dugout to the clubhouse and found what the batboy said he found: Billy’s uniform hung in his locker, still swinging on the hanger. I asked him later if he got a glimpse of a woman in a yellow dress, but he couldn’t recall.
And now, this spring, I’m out again. I’d almost forgotten during my long season in the stands how much fun it was to play baseball. I still have a little trouble at the plate and I ride my heartbeat like a cowboy on a bad bull, but I want to play, and if I remember that and hum to myself a little while I’m in the box, it helps. The new manager is a good guy and if I can keep above .200, he’ll start me.
Oh, the Indians won the series, but it went six games and wasn’t as one-sided as you might think after such an event. Ketchum stayed in the dugout the whole time, under heavy sedation, though I never mentioned that in my stories. And I never mentioned the postcards I got later from the far island of Pago Pago. I still get them. Sometimes I’ll carry one in my pocket when I go to the plate. It’s a blue-and-green place mainly, and looks like a great place for a lucky guy and a woman who looks good in summer clothing.
Sunny Billy Day was a guy with a gift. You could see it a mile away. Things came his way. Me, I’m going to have to make my own breaks, but, hey, it’s spring again and it feels like life is opening up. I’m a lot less nervous at the plate these days, and I have learned to type.
THE TABLECLOTH OF TURIN
A man, anywhere from forty to sixty, comes onto the stage. He wears glasses, a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, wool slacks, and shined black shoes. Under his arm he carries a folded tablecloth. It is very large. He is also carrying a folding desk lamp, a pointer, and a packet of other small gear. The man, Leonard Christofferson, pins the tablecloth to the backdrop, sets up the desk lamp to illuminate the tablecloth, lifts the pointer, and steps toward the audience.
This is the seventy-first public appearance of the famed Tablecloth of Turin. My name is Leonard Christofferson, and the tablecloth and I have been traveling for almost three months now. I am an insurance investigator by trade from Ann Arbor, Michigan, but I’ve pretty much let that all go. After all, it is my tablecloth, and it is my wish to share it and show it to as many folks as I can.
In the last three months, I’ve met with a lot of skepticism about the authenticity of the cloth, but most people—when they hear the story and see the evidence—come to know as well as I do that this is the tablecloth of the Last Supper, the very cloth depicted in so many famous paintings, including Leonardo da Vinci’s, the very tablecloth over which Christ broke that bread and poured that wine.
I want to say right here: as an insurance investigator, I had many years experience with and exposure to frauds, some of them silly, some of them so well constructed as to seem genuine. We had homicides made to look like drunk driving and a bad curve; we had grand larcenies perpetrated by nephews, nieces, wives, and sons, all in cahoots with the “victim”; we had an insured Learjet go down to the bottom of Lake Michigan which upon salvage turned out to be a junked boxcar, the jet having been sold in Mexico. In my experience as a detective, I learned slowly over the years to trust nothing, nobody. It’s a terrible profession, picking through death cars and the ashes of every dry cleaner’s that burns up. The owner stands there hating you and you don’t trust him, a guy you never met before in your life. The twelve years I worked for Specific Claims in Ann Arbor were hard years on me, and they destroyed my faith in the human race.
And when I went to Italy with the Art Guild and I found, well, I was offered, this piece of white cloth, I saw my chance to turn my life around. I do not now speak nor have I ever spoken Italian, but I could see from the ardor in the man’s eyes that he too had recovered his faith and he wanted me to take care of this sacred emblem in a way that he, working in his brother’s restaurant, could never do. I paid him, left the Art Guild Renaissance trip early, flew back to Ann Arbor, and quit my job, and I have been sharing my good fortune ever since.
Enough about me. Let me show you my tablecloth.
As you can see, it’s a large one: six foot five by twenty-three feet. We have had it all chemically analyzed and I want to share our findings with you tonight. The cloth itself is one piece, constructed of rough linen, approximately fourteen threads per inch, woven on a hand loom in about, we estimate, twenty-nine A.D. X-rays have revealed thirteen place settings, most
of them three-piece settings of an iron clay material, which means there were over forty dishes on the table and possibly fifty, depending on how many carafes of wine were out.
This is where Christ sat. We know this not only from historical and artistic record, but also from the fact that this one space, this seat of honor, is unmarked. Under the spectrometer all the other places have revealed breadcrumbs, spilled wine, palm prints (the oil of the human hand), in one place elbow prints (someone, possibly James the Lesser, had his sleeves rolled up), but Christ’s place is clean. He not only was a careful eater, he probably didn’t have that much to eat, knowing what he knew.
Examination has also revealed some shocking new evidence: the apostles didn’t all sit on one side of the table. Three of the places, including the place where Judas Iscariot sat, were opposite Jesus. So: sorry, Leonardo, thanks for giving us all their faces, but the truth has three backs to the camera. We suspect that Judas sat opposite Jesus for the reasons that science has supplied. In fact, science, the ultimate detective, has unraveled the whole story of the Last Supper from this humble tablecloth.
Listen: it was a nervous dinner. We know this from the number of wineglass rings in the cloth itself. The men were picking up their glasses and setting them down more frequently than simply for drinking. They were playing with their glasses as if they were chess pieces.
These people would have been nervous for a number of reasons. None of the thirteen men in that room (with the possible exception of Jesus, who somehow knew the host) had ever eaten there before. Imagine it, you go to a new city, find a man carrying a pitcher of water down the street as Jesus had instructed you, and ask him to have you to Passover Dinner. It’s an upstairs room with a limited view. Your host, whoever he is, doesn’t eat with you. It is a strange setup. So, you’re nervous. You sit there. You’d tap your glass too, maybe as many as seventy times, like Andrew, who sat here, did.