Boonville

by Anderson, Robert Mailer

  “Both you tinsel dicks shut up,” Big Jack said, holding the two men at bay by expanding his chest. “I can’t concentrate with all this yappin’. You’re on deck, Bo. Grab a stick before I do.”

  “When you least expect it, expect it!” Bo warned Hank, before leaving the dugout to take his licks.

  Big Jack returned to his concentrating, staring intently at the crotch of a woman in the stands whose dress had climbed up past her thighs. He sipped his beer, squinting at the hint of pink beneath the tunnel of fabric. But Hank wouldn’t let the argument rest. He made a show of not being afraid of Bo, declaring loudly that he would fight anybody, anytime, anywhere, and his history proved it.

  “Sit down, Suzy,” Big Jack said. “Before I make you prove it for the last time.”

  Hank mumbled something about being a team player. He took a seat next to John as one of the Kurtses, returned to the dugout after sliding hard to break up a double play and taking a chunk out of his leg. Blood seeped through his pin-stripes. Not wanting to drink, John handed Kurts his beer, reminding himself that he had business to take care of later. Kurts splashed some on his leg and sat down to enjoy the rest.

  “What’d I miss?” Kurts asked. “Sounded like Hank was gonna get his ass kicked.”

  Big Jack walked in front of them, choosing a bat by proximity, swinging it with one hand while he finished his can of suds with the other. John noticed a ring of stitches around Big Jack’s thumb, the skin above the scar a shade paler than the flesh below it. Big Jack swatted his empty into the screen, dousing the bench with a spray of foam.

  “Hey!” Hank whined, cringing from the beer.

  “It’s embarrassing,” Big Jack said. “You look like Murdered Row.”

  John self-consciously raised a hand to his eye, Hank to his nose, while Kurts continued poking at his festering leg. Hank pretended as if he didn’t hear Big Jack’s slight. Kurts looked up from his wound when he realized he had been included in the indignity.

  “You look like a two-hundred-pound bag of shit,” Kurts called after Big Jack.

  Big Jack turned to see who had insulted him.

  “Don’t worry,” Kurts added. “We won’t tell Tammy Lee you was lookin’ up her pussy.”

  Big Jack flushed, continuing toward the plate without comment, not checking to see if Tammy Lee had fixed her dress.

  It reminded John of why he didn’t play sports anymore, he’d had enough of dugouts and locker rooms, the nonstop flow of sexist and racist talk. “The hours involved in athletics are the same ones that obliterate common sense,” Grandma had told him. “There is no such thing as a thinking man’s game.” She was right, athletes were better off obedient, answering to the memory of repetition: ten thousand ground balls to the left, ten thousand ground balls to the right. Batting practice, base running, shagging flies. What’s the meaning of life? Reaching your physical peak before the age of thirty, and then being disposed of. No wonder sports heroes were drug addicts and wife beaters.

  John had bowed out of sports in high school after his best friend, who was black, was repeatedly called “nigger” by his own teammates. Not to his face, but when he was out on the field. “That nigger sure can play! Look at that nigger go!” John complained and was told by his coach he was disrupting team morale. His father felt the same way, not approving of John’s choice of pals, making it clear he would face the music alone if he created any problems by “popping off.” John wanted to make a stand, but his friend told him not to worry, it was part of the game. If that was true, the green fields and thrill of victory weren’t enough. John didn’t want to play.

  “You ruined it for everybody, Kurts!” Hank moaned. “Don’t you know some girls sit like this.” He held out two fingers like a pair of closed legs. “And some girls sit like this,” he crossed his fingers. “But girls who sit like this,” he spread them. “Get this,” he extended his middle finger. “Like that.” He snapped.

  Kurts stared at Hank. The inning was over; Big Jack had lined out and the Spotted Owl Eaters were gathering their gloves and heading for the field. But as long as Kurts kept his eye on Hank, the center fielder wasn’t going to move. Instead, Hank bent over to retie his cleats. Hank was one of the players who took pride in his apparel. His uniform and cleats were spotless, until Bo kicked dirt on them in passing. But Hank did nothing in response, not wanting to give anybody a reason to start a pecking party.

  “Who asked you to play on this team, anyway?” Kurts finally asked.

  Hank didn’t answer.

  “If you don’t get a hit today,” Kurts told him, rising from the bench. “I’m kicking your ass. And taking your cleats.”

  Kurts followed the rest of the team to the field. John took his place in right, feeling the gaze of his own fans; Billy Chuck was watching him from the on-deck circle, Cal was talking to Daryl and a couple others who nodded when Daryl pointed in John’s direction. John felt like a spy with a blown cover. Although Hap, the Kurtses, and Sarah seemed to accept him, he was a stranger in a strange land. And he had seen how they dealt with one of their own; Hank would be beaten and left cleatless in the streets of Boonville by the end of the game. Maybe John should take a hint and hightail it over the fence, back to Miami. But it occurred to him that he had already defected. These were his countrymen.

  “I was on this team before Kurts,” Hank complained from center field. “He touches my cleats and I’m pressing charges.”

  Night began to spread. The lights shined brighter on the men playing a boy’s game on a boy’s field. Crickets chirped. Insects shrieked at a frequency above the hum of the lights, only audible if you could separate the two sounds. The smell of burning wood drifted on cold air. The women in the stands made trips to their cars, returning with jackets for their children, thermoses of steaming liquid, flasks to be passed beneath their afghans and blankets. They watched, they waited, they endured.

  John wanted the game to be over so he could blockade himself in his cabin and wait for Sarah. The thought of her blue eyes and manic enthusiasm excited him. He didn’t know what the women in the bleachers had to look forward to, doing dishes, clipping coupons, being mounted? Tuna Helper? It seemed to John if they weathered the softball game, they shouldn’t have to see their husbands for another week.

  A foul ball curved down the right field line and out of play, bouncing off a parked car. The gofer was on it in a flash, climbing underneath a truck to recover it.

  “Catch this one, Dorkface!” the gofer yelled, throwing the ball to John. It dribbled to a stop in front of him, not possessing as much spunk as the kid.

  John lobbed it back to Big Jack. But before returning to his position, he noticed the boy’s shirt, a pullover with the number 82 emblazoned in red. John didn’t know whether the number corresponded to a player on a professional team or the year it had been purchased.

  “Don’t look down,” John told the boy. “If you can tell me the number on your shirt, I’ll give you twenty bucks.”

  The child realized the offer was serious and that twenty dollars meant a lot of Jolly Ranchers. He bit his lower lip, rolled his eyes downward trying to sneak a peak at the numeral that could put him in Candyland. All but defeated, he gave it his best shot.

  “Four!” he answered.

  “Sorry,” John said, making the sound of a buzzer. “Thanks for playing.”

  The child checked his chest to see if John hadn’t been lying. Finding the eight and two, he pulled a face, feeling John had somehow changed the number, gypping him out of a mouthful of cavities. His mother called his name from the stands. The boy stood trying to comprehend the turn of events before leaving, the moral finally dawning on him.

  “I can change my shirt,” he said, before dashing off for maternal protection. “But you’ll always suck!”

  The insult echoed in John’s ears as he repositioned himself. He remembered how his father used to attend his Pony League games, sitting in the bleachers with a bottle of schnapps. John used to pitch and his fath
er had a string of insults waiting for him after every toss, “That fast ball couldn’t puff a lip at ten paces! You couldn’t throw a strike with the Teamsters behind you!” The premise was John would become a pressure player. The outcome was his father was banned from the stadium. He argued with the cop who escorted him off the grounds, “Don’t tell me how to raise my kid! I don’t come to your house and tell you to quit fondling your daughter!”

  Another reason John stopped playing sports, the fans. He couldn’t think of anything more pathetic than a grown man sitting in the stands with some undereducated twenty-eight-year-old’s name sewn onto his back. When the time came, he would play pickle and pepper with his own kids, but he would make sure they knew the difference between the big picture and Little League, the division between church and sport, stressing an identity that extended beyond a team’s insignia. Something only Grandma had encouraged him to explore.

  Three up, three down.

  John found himself holding a Bombat, and waiting his turn to swing it. Hap told him this was the last game of the season. The winner decided the league champion. They weren’t in the running, in third place behind their opponents Stafford Logging and The Boys of Summer, a group of teenage upstarts who the Mexican team called “Menudo Atletico.” The Spotted Owl Eaters were going to finish ahead of the Mexican team Los Diablos, and the hippie team, The Dharma Bleacher Bums, who were led by a six-foot-ten first baseman who played in a tie-dyed sarong. It was a point of honor not to lose to the hippies. Consequently, they were winless. But The Spotted Owl Eaters could play spoilers by winning this game against Stafford Logging, because a loss by Stafford Logging would drop them into second place. So, Hap was talking strategy.

  “If I get on,” Hap told John, “I’d appreciate you not hittin’ more than a single. These days, I run bases like I juggle women, one at a time.”

  John replied he would probably hit into a double play. Hap said, whatever he did, not to do that. At his age, sliding was a last resort.

  “Of course, if push comes to shove,” Hap said. “It’s spikes high.”

  John watched him head for the plate, the only wooden bat in the team’s arsenal resting on his shoulder. He could barely read the autograph etched into the lumber, faded from countless collisions with a cushioned piece of cork: Joe Medwick.

  “You got a final on this one?” said a large man with a friendly face, through the fence protecting the spectators from the playing field. He had a full beard and wore a tweed coat, wire-rimmed glasses, suspenders, and a gray fedora. In his hands he held a notebook and pen, poised for scribbling.

  “We’re still playing,” John informed him.

  “You want to make one up?” the man asked. “Nobody gives a shit anyway. The only people who care are playing the game.”

  John didn’t want to predict the outcome. “That’s why you play them,” he said. The man smiled. John could tell he had played his fair share. The man had the look of an athlete who had hung up his jock decades ago to pursue a career.

  “They play them,” he told John, “because if they didn’t, they would have to confront the fact that their communities have been destroyed, plundered by corporate giants who have stripped them of their jobs, natural resources, personal freedom, and left them behind with inadequate health care, faulty public schools, and a chain of fast food restaurants, all while they were out chasing a ball and giving each other high-fives. They play them because they’re too dumb to realize the result is always the same.”

  “Are you blaming the decline of Western civilization on the national pastime?” John asked.

  “That’s right,” the man said. “Apathy.”

  Hap took a pitch inside. The ball rolled away from the catcher and behind the umpire, who seemed oblivious to its location. The catcher walked around the umpire to retrieve it, instead of the umpire moving out of the way. John noticed the umpire’s mask was strapped on over the bald head of a man wearing all white, and that he was calling pitches by leaning an ear toward home plate.

  “The umpire’s blind,” John said, identifying Blindman.

  “What else is new?” the man asked. “You’re the Squirrel Lady’s grandson, right? How would you like to write an article for our local paper on an outsider’s perspective of the Anderson Valley?”

  “I’m not an outsider, I live here,” John said, but how could he live somewhere they let a blind guy umpire softball? Even if he was calling a good game. “I don’t think my perspective would win me any friends.”

  “A newspaper has no friends,” the man stated. “How about covering a missing persons? Reports say you were the last one to see a certain Tony Balostrasi, a native of San Francisco who told his roommate he wanted to taste the food at the Boonville Hotel, missed work and his mother’s birthday party, and hasn’t been heard from in a week.”

  “I don’t know him,” John said, not wanting to concern himself with the whereabouts of Balostrasi who was probably off selling his stolen dope. He would turn up to treat his roommate to an expensive dinner and his mother would get a VCR and an apology for missing her celebration. But then John remembered Balostrasi’s gun. He remembered he was supposed to help harvest Sarah’s marijuana.

  “You’re up,” the man said. “If you change your mind, we might be able to pay you something in the low two figures.”

  “I’ll think about it,” John said. “Right now, I’ve got to take one for the team.”

  “I understand,” the man replied. “The toy department of life.”

  John entered the batter’s box. Aside from his domestic problems, there were two outs and somebody was on second. Daryl stared in at him from short, Billy Chuck in center. Cal delivered the pitch from the mound. His teammates were cheering. The ball came in unbelievably high, at a slant above his shoulders, and landed six inches behind the plate. Blindman called it strike one.

  “Next time you’ll say hello,” he snipped, from behind his mask.

  “I thought that was you, Blindman,” John said. “How are your sinuses?”

  The next pitch hit the dirt a foot to the right of the rug. Blindman called it strike two. The Spotted Owl Eaters objected from the dugout, realizing the fix was on. John told himself to swing at the next offering, regardless of its location.

  “This is a hitter’s league, Squirrel Boy, you can’t beg your way onto the base path,” Blindman informed him. “Ask your Itie friend from San Francisco, he had the right idea. My offer still stands if you want to do business.”

  John didn’t have time to reply, another pitch was approaching and he started his swing, weight shifting, hips flying open. Way out in front. He drilled it foul down the third base line. Strike three. End of inning.

  “Good contact,” Hap said, tossing John his glove so he wouldn’t have to go back to the bench. “Blindman needs to have his ears checked, those first two were balls.”

  As the innings progressed, John felt more at ease in the field, but increasingly nervous about his postgame plans. Something told him the newspaperman was trying to link him to Balostrasi’s crimes. What crimes? he didn’t know. But if something illegal had happened on the night of his arrival, a blackout wasn’t much of an alibi. Especially if you were caught later engaging in similar activities. “Ask your Itie friend?” Why were people so quick to connect him with Balostrasi? Because they had exchanged a few words and were from out of town? Ask him what? Call it paranoia, but John had the feeling he should back out of Sarah’s scheme. Maybe call a lawyer.

  In spite of his fearfulness, the game began to take on a pleasant rhythm. He had always enjoyed playing at night, cheating the darkness of its rightful domain. He made a couple of plays from right, cutting down a runner trying to stretch a single, making a diving catch of a Daryl line drive. He could see Daryl’s displeasure, adding the snag to a Scoreboard in his head, the only place John might be considered to have a lead. John also gained some respect at the plate, driving a double to left-center and a single up the middle, both on first pitch
es. He wasn’t going to give Blindman a chance to squeeze him or renew the conversation about contraband.

  By the seventh inning, the Spotted Owl Eaters had the lead, 6-5. The first two of their batters had failed to get aboard, each trying to tie the game with a swing of the bat and falling twenty feet short. The opposing bench turned their caps inside out, trying to seduce a rally. Billy Chuck wore his with the bill extended upright like a dorsal fin in the “rally shark” position. Daryl crouched confidently in the batter’s box. An old desire crept into John’s heart: Win. But a bad-hop ground ball found its way through the infield. The next batter hit a double, advancing Daryl to third. Cal drew a walk to load the bases. John could feel the game slipping away as Billy Chuck stepped to the plate.

  John began to worry, not so much about the game, but about what he would do after it was over: avoid Blindman and Daryl, that was for certain. His plan had fallen apart. It was getting late and Sarah would be coming over whether he was going to help her harvest or not. He hadn’t decided, trying to recall his first night in town so he could confidently deny allegations of being Balostrasi’s accomplice, thereby deflecting suspicion of conspiring with Sarah. But the things he couldn’t remember kept hiding behind the things he couldn’t forget.

  Billy Chuck watched Hap’s first offering hit the heart of the plate for a strike. The base runners retreated to their bases, readying themselves to sprint with the release of the next pitch. John focused on Billy Chuck’s face, trying intently to remember his first night in Boonville. What had happened before he awoke on grandma’s porch? Half-images of heaving came to mind, Sarah’s monologue, shots of tequila, shouting out eternal alliances. Hap hurled one inside. John recalled a mob, country music, hands guiding his to a steering wheel. Billy Chuck lifted a shallow pop-fly to left, both Kurtses converging at full speed. The night had been cold. Runners raced around the bases, the Kurtses charging the ball. He had cursed Grandma, saw her ghost in his empty glass, crashed her car into signposts while singing songs of liberation. “I got it! I got it!” He had tried to throw himself into an abyss, only to have his fall cushioned by people who had jumped in ahead of him. The Kurtses collided, arms and legs flailing in a confused tangle, the ball landing safely at the feet of their fallen bodies. John blinked at the familiarity. It was déjà vu all over again.