Dead Ball

by R. D. Rosen

  The underlinings continued into the next, and final, chapter of the book, which concerned in large measure the dilemma faced by the Confederacy in the last half of the war: whether to conscript and arm slaves to shore up the South’s faltering prospects. The debate raged in southern newspapers and legislatures. McPherson quoted editors of the day: “ ‘We are forced by the necessity of our condition,’ they declared, ‘to take a step which is revolting to every sentiment of pride, and to every principle that governed our institutions before the war.’ The enemy was ‘stealing our slaves and converting them into soldiers. … It is better for us to use the negroes for our defense than that the Yankees should use them against us.’ ” Conscripting slaves also raised troubling questions about having to promise blacks emancipation in exchange for their fighting. “It was true, admitted the Jackson Mississippian, that ‘such a step would revolutionize our whole industrial system’ and perhaps lead to universal emancipation, ‘a dire calamity to both the negro and the white race.’ But if we lose the war we lose slavery anyway, for Yankee success is death to the institution… so that it is a question of necessity—a question of a choice of evils. … We must… save ourselves from the rapacious North, WHATEVER THE COST.’ ” A deeper contradiction was pointed out by the Charleston Mercury: “ ‘If slaves will make good soldiers our whole theory of slavery is wrong.’ ”

  Harvey lowered the book, thinking of Moss’s comment on Cubberly in the car: “I grew up around a million like him. He was probably so poor he was afraid he might wake up black one day.” Outside it was dark now. The chorus of crickets poured in through the screen window. Harvey was almost surprised to find himself in Providence, and in the present.

  To alter the human heart was the world’s hardest work. Campy Strulowitz could add twenty points to Harvey’s batting average more easily than a man could learn to see things differently, even for a few minutes. Now Harvey wondered if Andy Cubberly, long after Appomattox, wasn’t somehow still fighting the Civil War by other means.

  Harvey was back in Marshall’s skybox by the seventh inning, in time to see Moss’s third hit of the game, a single through the shortstop hole. The Jewels put Baltimore away with three in that inning for an 8—2 victory. An hour later, after Moss had finally extricated himself from the clubhouse tangle of reporters, microphones, and cameras, Harvey whisked him to the players’ parking lot and into one of the rented Subarus.

  FROM THE SHADOWS OF the narrow alley that ran like a dingy fissure between two warehouses across from the players’ parking lot, he watched Cooley and the detective emerge from the stadium and walk to an unassuming silver Subaru. Maybe he had overshot with the jockey. He would have liked to have kept it just between Cooley and himself, a step at a time, until he got the message—all he’d wanted to do with the jockey was make the needed impression, cut through the clutter of hate mail without bringing the law into it, it was so goddamn hard to hit the right tone. Like writing condolence letters, he thought, chuckling at the analogy.

  Anyway, one private detective didn’t exactly qualify as the law, a Jew no less.

  He pulled on his second Seagram’s miniature, keeping just enough alcohol in his bloodstream to take the edge off his alarm. He had come too far to lose it now. Goddamn Ed, going off and dying without a word, his death the first link in the improbable chain of circumstance that now threatened to hang around his own neck. He wanted the chain around Cooley’s.

  The important thing was to compartmentalize, that was the key, he’d done it all along and now he just had to keep doing it. At work he had to seem absolutely unchanged, no one could suspect, no one could know. Jesus, what would life be like if you couldn’t compartmentalize? All the bad endlessly flowing into the good and spoiling it? Just like the mixing of the races. Good fences make good neighbors. He sucked on the Seagram’s. Good and bad had to be kept apart, within and without, if it was all in one box you couldn’t make any sense of it. Jesus forgave you for your sins, let you wash them away, not put them in a goddamn box where someone could find them. And after everything he did for Ed’s wife.

  The guard was letting the Subaru out of the lot now, the Jew driving and Cooley in the passenger seat with a hat mashed down on his head. He had to laugh, since he too was wearing a hat, a thrift shop fedora, he felt like Glenn Ford or George Raft or somebody in an old thriller. The Subaru turned out of the lot and drove off. He had to laugh at the fact they were in a Subaru instead of Cooley’s Range Rover. He had to laugh at all their wasted effort and motion. This was his power now, to be able to see all the unnecessary elaborations of the fear he had planted.

  Like he was going to follow Cooley. Like he wasn’t watching him all the time anyway.

  11

  HARVEY WAS DRIVING MOSS out to his Cranston development to get his things before they headed over to the house in Exeter. He took the left fork on I-95 to 95 South. To make sure he had no tail, Harvey got off at the first exit and back on.

  “Is that necessary?” Moss asked when they rejoined the traffic.

  “Listen, I may not have a forty-seven-game hitting streak, but I know how to shake a tail.”

  Moss pulled his hat down lower on his head. “You’re the man,” he muttered.

  “I want to put this in just the right way, Moss: There are two people in this car who’d rather not be doing this. You and me. But since we have to spend some quality time together, let’s just make the best of it.”

  “You got some suggestions?”

  “How do you feel about gin rummy?”

  “Don’t press your luck.”

  “We could stay up late and tell each other ghost stories.”

  Moss snorted. “It beats becoming one yourself.”

  “Take it easy. I haven’t lost a ballplayer yet.”

  “That’s a big load off my mind.”

  They drove on in silence for a while, Harvey working over Cubberly in his mind. If he wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, it was unlikely he would have authored the wordiest death threat in history. Then again, the outfielder had a handful of semi-scholarly books suggesting he still had a hair across his ass about the War between the States. Harvey decided not to bother Moss with his thoughts about the contradictions of Cubberley’s personality. In any case, the odds still weighed heavily against Moss breaking DiMaggio’s record. The odds were still in favor of the jockey being nothing but a harmless eruption.

  Moss, as if reading Harvey’s mind, suddenly asked him what he thought the chances were of getting to fifty-six straight games.

  “Hell if I know, Moss.”

  “It gets less likely, doesn’t it, the longer it goes on?”

  “I’m no statistician, but it’s been proven mathematically that there’s no such thing as momentum. The fact you’ve hit in forty-seven straight doesn’t work for or against you. Every game you’re starting over.”

  “I could do it, then.”

  “Of course, in baseball you’re at the mercy of so many variables.” Harvey was driving through Cranston. “You’ll let me know when to turn, right?”

  “I won’t let you down.”

  “It’s not like you’re shooting day after day at a stationary basketball hoop that’s always ten feet off the ground. Every pitcher you face is different. The hoop moves to a different place on every pitch.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I have no idea. I think I’m saying drink plenty of milk, get lots of rest, and lay off the liquor.”

  “And no pokey on the night before a game.”

  “Not with me, anyway,” Harvey said.

  He drove around the development once, looking for suspicious cars, before turning into Cooley’s white Mediterranean-style mini-mansion with its little comma of a circular driveway. The lot wasn’t big, with woods creeping up within ten feet of the garage, so whoever had left him the lawn jockey’s head had probably parked elsewhere and come on foot.

  The decor was that of a man with far more money than ideas how to spend it.
Each room had two or three large objects in it and nothing else: a giant flat-screen television and a BarcaLounger… a stationary bicycle, old-fashioned jukebox… a sectional sofa, glass coffee table, and CD rack. There wasn’t a rug or carpet in the place. The house looked like an appliance store in the last stages of a liquidation sale. Cooley kept mumbling as Harvey followed him up to his bedroom, “Man hits in forty-seven straight and has to leave his own home… has to leave his own fuckin’ home.”

  Harvey pulled the bedroom blinds shut and watched as Cooley took clothes from his immense walk-in closet and carefully laid them in a giant rolling suitcase he put on the king-size bed. He remembered a Sports Illustrated article in the 1970s about Pittsburgh Steeler running back Frenchy Fuqua that showed him in his walk-in, suits in every shade, like a decorator’s color wheel. Cooley’s palette ran more conservatively to blues and earth tones. In the corner of the bedroom was a wicker hamper overflowing with dirty clothes. On the bed lay a copy of Pro magazine, a quarterly circulated only to professional athletes, who received it free. Its tiny target audience of about 25,000, most of them millionaires, would find in the current issue tips on investment planning and how to buy extremely expensive watches, as well as an article titled “The Cure for the Common Choke: A Sure-Fire Remedy for Over-Thinking.”

  Next to the bed was a laptop computer and a tall stack of paperback books. Harvey had tilted his head to read the titles, mostly thrillers, when he was distracted by an object that Cooley had taken off his bureau and placed facedown on top of some silk shirts. Harvey picked it up, turned it over, had to look twice before he understood what it was.

  The old black-and-white photo in a simple frame made from willow twigs showed a young black man, his hands bound in front of him, swinging by the neck from a rope tied to a thick tree branch. The man wore only remnants of his clothes, and on closer inspection Harvey could see that his body was riddled with wounds. The front of one thigh had been filleted open, revealing muscle. Judging from the scrap of clapboard house in the background, it looked like the lynching had taken place in a residential neighborhood. A crowd had gathered, and the photograph’s foreground was swimming with white faces—men, women, and even children. Some of them were gazing up at the lynching victim, some of them looked off, and a few white faces were looking right at the camera. Two men, one in a well-creased hat, smiled guiltily right at the lens.

  Above them, his head wrenched back on its elongated neck, twisted skyward, as if looking for God, the black youth dangled, so recently a member of the living.

  “It’s a postcard,” Moss said, coming out of the bathroom with his Dopp kit and seeing Harvey. “That’s what white folks liked to do. They’d lynch a black man, take a few snapshots for souvenirs or send ’em to their friends and relatives. Sometimes you had a huge crowd in suits and hats, looked like an old-time baseball crowd, except they weren’t watching any game. You gotta love those guys in the foreground, don’t you? They’re just having the time of their lives.”

  Moss swept a few vitamin and supplement bottles off his bureau top into his arms and dropped them in the suitcase. “I’ll tell you an interesting story about that one. The story goes that that dead man there told the mob just before they murdered him to please make sure his wife and young son were sent a copy of the photograph he knew they were about to take of him, so they’d know what happened to him. Seeing as some of the lynchers actually knew the man—he’d done some yard work for a couple of them—they obliged him and made sure his family received the picture you hold in your hands there. I always think about him sliced up and ready to have his neck snapped, and he looks at that redneck photographer and probably says, ‘Mister, jes’ please make sho’ you send one of them pitchers to my wife and my boy. Any one of these men here knows where they is.’ I just know he said, ‘Please.’ ” Cooley blinked.

  Harvey looked at the image in his hand, a terrible message hurled across time.

  Moss grabbed it out of Harvey’s hands. “That one there happened in nineteen-thirty-three. You know who the Scottsboro Boys were, don’t you?”

  “They were a bunch of black teenagers falsely accused of raping two white women on a train. One of the landmark events in American racist history.”

  “Nineteen-thirty-one,” Moss said. “They were convicted again and again in kangaroo trials before all-white juries and spent many, many years in prison, mostly under death sentences, often near the execution chamber where they could hear other men die. At one of the trials the attorney general of the state of Alabama referred to the defendant in court as ‘that thing.’ In his presence. The Communist Party’s defense of them put the Communist Party on the map in this country, although the hero, the boys’ defense attorney for many of the trials, was a Jewish lawyer from New York hired by the Commies who wasn’t a Commie himself by a long shot. Samuel Leibowitz. Anyway, charges against four of them were finally dropped in ’thirty-seven, more than six years after they were arrested. Another four were finally paroled in the mid-forties. The last one escaped in ’forty-eight.”

  “Moss, I’m impressed.” Harvey had read Marshall Levy’s copy of the Sports Illustrated piece on Cooley during the game, and nothing in it—the youngest of six children of a steelworker and school librarian, the scholarships, the reputation for hard work and aloofness—nothing had suggested this.

  “Don’t patronize me. I grew up in the state that put those innocent black boys behind bars and slowly sucked the life out of them. It’s in my blood, Bagel Boy.”

  “I’ve been around ballplayers my whole life, and I’ve never heard one of them show any real interest in American history. They barely show interest in baseball history. There was nothing in Sports Illustrated about your historical interests.”

  “You think I’m going to talk to the Chihuahuas about this shit?” Cooley said, packing three pairs of expensive slip-ons. “Now, this picture here?” He held it up to Harvey again. “In thirty-three, two years after their arrest, a judge—an Alabama judge—set aside the second conviction of one of the Scottsboro Boys, Haywood Patterson, and ordered a third trial. This riled up a lot of the good white folks, a black ‘rapist’ ”—he set the word off in verbal quotation marks—“escaping the chair for the second time, and in their frustration they started lynching other blacks left and right all over the South during the summer and fall of ’thirty-three. This one took place not too far from Scottsboro itself.”

  The bedroom window blinds were swept by the headlights of a car and Harvey moved quickly to the window and peered out between slats at an SUV that turned into a driveway across the street.

  “This picture goes where I go,” Cooley said. “Just in case I slip up and forget who I am. I don’t need a fuckin’ lawn jockey to remind me of that.”

  Harvey left Cooley to finish up his packing and went downstairs to check the first floor and yard for any unusual noise or activity. All was quiet on the Cranston front. He settled into the BarcaLounger, turned on the reading lamp, and began going through Cooley’s hate mail.

  “You cock suckin coon you make me sick”; “stupid fuckin’ nigger kinky-haired Cooney”; “How many spears can a spearchucker chuck? Who the fuck cares? Just watch your nigger ass if your ever in Memphis”; “First you jigaboos take over basketball and football, now we got niggers even in hockey and a half-breed nigger stinking up in golf why dont you get out of baseball before you get hurt and I mean hurt”; “your lower than whale shit you piece of turd. What is it like to look at yourself every day and see that you are the color of shit?”; “What do you expect from someone who never had parents a crow just shit on a rock and the sun hatched you”; “You are one uppity junglebunny I saw you innerveiwed on ESPN and you obviously think you are smarter then the rest of us when you are another big lipped coon, may you rot in hell with that other coon, Martin Luther Coon”; “You are good reason to bring slavry back”; “You are a mother fucker because I am sure you fucked your own mother.”

  Moss Cooley’s hitting
streak had reopened a poorly healed wound, and it was oozing the same old primordial racist sludge, unchanged since the beginning of time, seeping out of cities and towns across the country. It was as though the words didn’t really belong to the individuals who wrote them, but to a flaw in human nature itself. How else could you explain the fact that most of these disgraceful letters were proudly signed and came in envelopes with return addresses—Covina, California; Junction, Texas; Indianola, Iowa; Gastonia, North Carolina; Hudson, Ohio; New Kinsington, Pennsylvania; Springfield, Illinois; Broomfield, Colorado; Newport, Rhode Island?

  Cooley came down the stairs with his bag, an emigrant in his own house.

  “You good to go?” Harvey asked, stacking the hate mail and putting the rubber band around it.

  “Do it to it.”

  Suddenly there was a sound just outside the house, a repetitious beat moving closer. Before he could even think about it Harvey had his .38 out of his belt. “What’s that?” he whispered to Cooley.

  “Shit, man, what’s what? What’re you talkin’ about?”

  “That.” The regular beat was getting closer, approaching the door.

  Cooley listened for a moment, then stood. “Shit—that’s Kevin dribbling his basketball back home from the lighted courts. He lives two doors down.”

  The doorbell rang, a two-note chime.

  “I’ll get it,” Harvey said. He was at the front door now, back pressed against the wall next to it. “Who’s there?”

  “It’s Kevin. From down the street. Is Mr. Cooley home?”

  “Are you alone, Kevin?”

  “Yeah, but I can come back another time.”

  “No, it’s all right, Kev,” Cooley said, advancing out of the shadows. “Give me a second to turn off the alarm system.”