The Natural

by Bernard Malamud

  And Pop saw a tall, husky, dark-bearded fellow with old eyes but not bad features. His face was strong-boned, if a trifle meaty, and his mouth seemed pleasant though its expression was grim. For his bulk he looked lithe, and he appeared calmer than he felt, for although he was sitting here on this step he was still in motion. He was traveling (on the train that never stopped). His self, his mind, raced on and he felt he hadn’t stopped going wherever he was going because he hadn’t yet arrived. Where hadn’t he arrived? Here. But now it was time to calm down, ease up on the old scooter, sit still and be quiet, though the inside of him was still streaming through towns and cities, across forests and fields, over long years.

  “The only music I make,” he answered Pop, patting the bassoon case, “is with my bat.” Searching through the pockets of his frayed and baggy suit, worn to threads at the knees and elbows, he located a folded letter that he reached over to the manager. “I’m your new left fielder, Roy Hobbs.”

  “My what!” Pop exploded.

  “It says in the letter.”

  Red, who had returned from the mound, took the letter, unfolded it, and handed it to Pop. He read it in a single swoop then shook his head in disbelief.

  “Scotty Carson sent you?”

  “That’s right.”

  “He must be daffy.”

  Roy wet his dry lips.

  Pop shot him a shrewd look. “You’re thirty-five if you’re a day.”

  “Thirty-four, but I’m good for ten years.”

  “Thirty-four—Holy Jupiter, mister, you belong in an old man’s home, not baseball.”

  The players along the bench were looking at him. Roy licked his lips.

  “Where’d he pick you up?” Pop asked.

  “I was with the Oomoo Oilers.”

  “In what league?”

  “They’re semipros.”

  “Ever been in organized baseball?”

  “I only recently got back in the game.”

  “What do you mean got back?”

  “Used to play in high school.”

  Pop snorted. “Well, it’s a helluva mess.” He slapped the letter with the back of his fingers. “Scotty signed him and the Judge okayed it. Neither of them consulted me. They can’t do that,” he said to Red. “That thief in the tower might have sixty per cent of the stock but I have it in writing that I am to manage this team and approve all player deals as long as I live.”

  “I got a contract,” said Roy.

  “Lemme see it.”

  Roy pulled a blue-backed paper out of his inside coat pocket.

  Pop scanned it. “Where in blazes did he get the figure of three thousand dollars?”

  “It was for a five thousand minimum but the Judge said I already missed one-third of the season.”

  Pop burst into scornful laughter. “Sure, but that entitles you to about thirty-three hundred. Just like that godawful deadbeat. He’d skin his dead father if he could get into the grave.”

  He returned the contract to Roy. “It’s illegal.”

  “Scotty’s your chief scout?” Roy asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “He signed me to a contract with an open figure and the Judge filled it in. I asked about that and Scotty said he had the authority to sign me.”

  “He has,” Red said to Pop. “You said so yourself if he found anybody decent.”

  “That’s right, that’s what I said, but who needs a fielder old enough to be my son? I got a left fielder,” he said to Roy, “a darn good one when he feels like it and ain’t playing practical jokes on everybody.”

  Roy stood up. “If you don’t want me, Merry Christmas.”

  “Wait a second,” said Red. He fingered Pop up close to the fountain and spoke to him privately.

  Pop calmed down. “I’m sorry, son,” he apologized to Roy when he returned to the bench, “but you came across me at a bad time. Also thirty-four years for a rookie is starting with one foot in the grave. But like Red says, if our best scout sent you, you musta showed him something. Go on in the clubhouse and have Dizzy fit you up with a monkey suit. Then report back here and I will locate you a place on this bench with the rest of my All-Stars.” He threw the players a withering look and they quickly turned away.

  “Listen, mister,” Roy said, “I know my way out of this jungle if you can’t use me. I don’t want any second pickings.”

  “Do as he told you,” Red said.

  Roy rose, got his valise and bassoon case together, and headed into the tunnel. His heart was thumping like a noisy barrel.

  “I shoulda bought a farm,” Pop muttered.

  The pitcher in the shower had left the door wide open so the locker room was clouded with steam when Roy came in. Unable to find anybody he yelled into the shower room where was the prop man, and the one in the shower yelled back in the equipment room and close the door it was drafty. When the steam had thinned out and Roy could see his way around he located the manager’s office, so labeled in black letters on the door, but not the equipment room. In the diagonally opposite corner were the trainer’s quarters, and here the door was ajar and gave forth an oil of wintergreen smell that crawled up his nose. He could see the trainer, in a gray sweatshirt with KNIGHTS stenciled across his chest, working on a man mountain on the rubbing table. Catching sight of Roy, the trainer called out in an Irish brogue who was he looking for?

  “Prop man,” Roy said.

  “That’s Dizzy—down the hall.” The trainer made with his eyes to the left so Roy opened the door there and went down the hall. He located a sign, “Equipment,” and through the window under it saw the prop man in a baseball jersey sitting on a uniform trunk with his back to the wall. He was reading the sports page of the Mirror.

  Roy rapped on the ledge and Dizzy, a former utility pitcher, hastily put the paper down. “Caught me at an interesting moment,” he grinned. “I was reading about this catcher that got beaned in Boston yesterday. Broke the side of his skull.”

  “The name’s Roy Hobbs, new hand here. Fisher told me to get outfitted.”

  “New man—fielder, eh?”

  Roy nodded.

  “Yeah, we been one man short on the roster for two weeks. One of our guys went and got himself hit on the head with a fly ball and both of his legs are now paralyzed.”

  Roy winked.

  “Honest to God. And just before that our regular third baseman stepped on a bat and rolled down the dugout steps. Snapped his spine in two places.” Dizzy grimaced. “We sure been enjoying an unlucky season.”

  He came forth with a tape measure and took Roy’s measurements, then he went back and collected a pile of stuff from the shelves.

  “Try this for size.” He handed him a blue cap with a white K stitched on the front of it.

  Roy tried it. “Too small.”

  “You sure got some size noggin there.”

  “Seven and a half.” Roy looked at him.

  “Just a social remark. No offense meant or intended.” He gave Roy a size that fitted.

  “How’s it look?” Roy asked.

  “A dream but why the tears?”

  “I have a cold.” He turned away.

  Dizzy asked him to sign for the stuff—Judge Banner insisted. He helped Roy carry it to his locker.

  “Keep anything you like inside of here but for goodness’ sakes no booze. Pop throws fits if any of the players drink.”

  Roy stood the bassoon case in upright. “Got a lock for the door?”

  “Nobody locks their doors here. Before the game you deposit your valuables in that trunk there and I will lock them up.”

  “Okay, skip it.”

  Dizzy excused himself to get back to his paper and Roy began to undress.

  The locker room was tomblike quiet. The pitcher who had been in the showers—his footsteps were still wet on the floor

  —had dressed rapidly and vanished. As he put his things away, Roy found himself looking around every so often to make sure he was here. He was, all right, yet i
n all his imagining of how it would be when he finally hit the majors, he had not expected to feel so down in the dumps. It was different than he had thought it would be. So different he almost felt like walking out, jumping back on a train, and going wherever people went when they were running out on something. Maybe for a long rest in one of those towns he had lived in as a kid. Like the place where he had that shaggy mutt that used to scamper through the woods, drawing him after it to the deepest, stillest part, till the silence was so pure you could crack it if you threw a rock. Roy remained lost in the silence till the dog’s yapping woke him, though as he came out of it, it was not barking he heard but the sound of voices through the trainer’s half-open door.

  He listened closely because he had the weird impression that he knew all the voices in there, and as he sorted them he recognized first the trainer’s brogue and then a big voice that he did not so much recall, as remember having heard throughout his life—a strong, rawboned voice, familiar from his boyhood and some of the jobs he had worked at later, and the different places he had bummed around in, slop joints, third-rate hotels, prize fight gyms and such; the big voice of a heavy, bull-necked, strong-muscled guy, the kind of gorilla he had more than once fought half to death for no reason he could think of. Oh, the Whammer, he thought, and quickly ducked but straightened up when he remembered the Whammer was almost fifty and long since retired out of the game. But what made him most uneasy was a third voice, higher than the other two, a greedy, penetrating, ass-kissing voice he had definitely heard before. He strained his ears to hear it again but the big voice was talking about this gag he had pulled on Pop Fisher, in particular, spraying white pepper in Pop’s handkerchief, which made him sneeze and constantly blow his beak. That commenced an epidemic of base stealing, to Pop’s fury, because the signal to steal that day was for him to raise his handkerchief to his schnozzle.

  At the end of the story there was a guffaw and a yelp of laughter, then the trainer remarked something and this other voice, one that stood on stilts, commented that Bump certainly got a kick out of his jokes, and Bump, he must have been, said Pop wouldn’t agree to his release, so if he was going to be stuck in this swamp he would at least have a little fun.

  He laughed loudly and said, “Here’s one for your colyum, kid. We were in Cincy in April and had a free day on our hands because this exhibition game was called off, so in the Plaza lobby that morning we get to bulling about players and records, and you know Pop and this line of his about how lousy the modern player is compared to those mustached freaks he played with in the time of King Tut. He was saying that the average fielder nowadays could maybe hit the kangaroo ball we got—he was looking at me—but you couldn’t count on him to catch a high fly. ‘How high?’ I ask him, innocent, and he points up and says, ‘Any decent height. They either lose them in the sun or misjudge them in the wind.’ So I say, ‘Could you catch the real high ones, Pop?’ And he pipes up, ‘As high as they went up I could catch them.’ He thinks a minute and says, ‘I bet I could catch a ball that is dropped from the top of the Empire State Building.’ ‘No,’ I says, like I was surprised, and ‘Yes,’ he says. So I say, ‘We have nothing on for today, and although there isn’t any Empire State Building in Cincinnati, yet I do have this friend of mine at the airport who owns a Piper Cub. I will give him a National League baseball and he will drop it at the height of the building if you will catch it.’ ‘Done,’ he says, as perky as a turkey, so I call up this guy I know and arrange it and off we go across the bridge to the Kentucky side of the river, where there is plenty of room to move around in. Well, sir, soon this yellow plane comes over and circles a couple of times till he has the right height, and then he lets go with something that I didn’t tell Pop, but which the boys are onto, is a grapefruit so that if it hits him it will not crack his skull open and kill him. Down the thing comes like a cannonball and Pop, in his black two-piece bathing suit, in case he has to go a little in the water, and wearing a mitt the size of a basket, circles under it like a dizzy duck, holding the sun out of his eyes as he gets a line on where it is coming down. Faster it falls, getting bigger by the second, then Pop, who is now set for the catch, suddenly lets out a howl, ‘My Christ, the moon is falling on me,’ and the next second, bong—the grapefruit busts him on the conk and we have all we can do to keep him from drowning in the juice.”

  Now there was a loud cackle of laughter in the trainer’s room. The voice Roy didn’t like—the frightening thought dawned on him that the voice knew what he was hiding—it changed the subject and wanted to know from Bump if there was any truth to the rumor about him and Pop’s niece.

  “Naw,” Bump said, and cagily asked, “What rumor?”

  “That you and Memo are getting hitched.”

  Bump laughed. “She must’ve started that one herself.”

  “Then you deny it?”

  The door was shoved open and Bump waltzed out in his shorts, as husky, broadbacked, and big-shouldered as Roy had thought, followed by the trainer and a slightly popeyed gent dressed in an expensive striped suit, whose appearance gave Roy a shooting pain in the pit of the stomach—Max Mercy.

  Ashamed to be recognized, to have his past revealed like an egg spattered on the floor, Roy turned away, tucking his jersey into his pants.

  But Bump paraded over with his hairy arm outstretched. “Hiya, Buster, you the latest victim they have trapped?”

  Roy felt an irritable urge to pitch his fist at the loudmouth, but he nodded and shook hands.

  “Welcome to the lousiest team in the world, barring none,” Bump said. “And this is ol’ Doc Casey, the trainer, who has got nobody but cripples on his hands except me. And the hawkshaw with the eyes is Max Mercy, the famous sports colyumist. Most newspaper guys are your pals and know when to keep their traps shut, but to Max a private life is a personal insult. Before you are here a week he will tell the public how much of your salary you send to your grandma and how good is your sex life.”

  Max, whose mustache and sideboards were graying, laughed hollowly. He said to Roy, “Didn’t catch the name.”

  “Roy Hobbs,” he said stiffly, but no one seemed to think it mattered very much.

  The game was over and the players hoofed through the tunnel into the locker room. They tore out of their uniforms and piled into the showers. Some stayed in only long enough to wet their skins. Wiping themselves dry, they tumbled into street clothes. Their speed, however, did them no good, for Red, after courteously asking Mercy to leave, posted himself and Earl Wilson, the third base coach, at the door and they let nobody else out. The players waited nervously, except Bump, who slapped backs and advised everybody to cheer up. A few of the boys were working the strategy of staying in the showers so long they hoped Pop would grow sick and tired and leave. But Pop, a self-sustaining torch in the shut managerial office, outwaited them, and when he got the quiet knock from Red that the lobsters were in the pot, yanked open the door and strode sulphurously forth. The team shriveled.

  Pop stepped up on a chair where for once, a bald, bristling figure, he towered over them. Waving his bandaged hands he began to berate them but immediately stopped, choked by his rage into silence.

  “If he coughs now,” Bump boomed, “he will bust into dust.”

  Pop glared at him, his head glowing like a red sun. He savagely burst out that not a single blasted one of them here was a true ballplayer. They were sick monkeys, broken-down mules, pigeon-chested toads, slimy horned worms, but not real, honest-to-god baseball players.

  “How’s about flatfooted fish?” Bump wisecracked. “Get it, boys, fish—Fisher,” and he fell into a deep gargle of laughter at his wit, but the semi-frozen players in the room did not react.

  “How’s he get away with it?” Roy asked the ghost standing next to him. The pale player whispered out of the corner of his mouth that Bump was presently the leading hitter in the league.

  Pop ignored Bump and continued to give the team the rough side of his tongue. “What beats me is that I
have spent thousands of dollars for the best players I could lay my hands on. I hired two of the finest coaches in the game. I sweat myself sick trying to direct you, and all you can deliver is those goddamn goose eggs.” His voice rose. “Do you dimwits realize that we have been skunked for the last forty-five innings in a row?”

  “Not Bumpsy,” the big voice said, “I am terrific.”

  “You now hold the record of the most consecutive games lost in the whole league history, the most strikeouts, the most errors—”

  “Not Bumpsy—”

  “—the most foolishness and colossal stupidities. In plain words, you all stink. I am tempted to take pity on those poor dopes who spend a buck and a half to watch you play and trade the whole lousy lot of you away.”

  Bump dropped down on his knees and raised his clasped hands. “Me first, Lawdy, me first.”

  “—and start from scratch to build up a team that will know how to play together and has guts and will fight the other guy to death before they drop seventeen games in the cellar.”

  The players in the locker room were worn out but Bump was singing, “Many brave hearts are asleep in the deep.”

  “Beware,” he croaked low in his throat, “bewaaare—”

  Pop shook a furious finger at him that looked as if it would fly off and strike him in the face. “As for you, Bump Baily, high and mighty though you are, some day you’ll pay for your sassifras. Remember that lightning cuts down the tallest trees too.”

  Bump didn’t like warnings of retribution. His face turned surly.

  “Lightning, maybe, but no burnt out old fuse.”

  Pop tottered. “Practice at eight in the morning,” he said brokenly. But for Red he would have tumbled off the chair. In his office behind the slammed and smoking door they could hear him sobbing, “Sometimes I could cut my own throat.”

  It took the Knights a while to grow bones and crawl out after Bump. But when everybody had gone, including the coaches and Dizzy, Roy remained behind. His face was flaming hot, his clothes soaked in sweat and shame, as if the old man’s accusations had been leveled at his head.