The Great American Novel

by Philip Roth

  To Hot’s credit, it should be said that he had as good a throwing arm as any catcher in the league in ’43, and he could drill the ball up against the left-field fence when you needed a run driven in; however, having that leg made out of wood caused him to lurch like something on a pogo stick when he came charging after a bunt, and he was not exactly death on fly balls popped back to the screen behind home plate. His doubles and triples were plentiful, only he was never able to get farther than first on them; and his singles, of course, were outs, the right-fielder, or the center-fielder, or the left-fielder to the first-baseman. (If you’re scoring, that’s 9 to 3, 8 to 3, or 7 to 3.)

  Now obviously, in peacetime a one-legged catcher, like a one-armed outfielder (such as the Mundys had roaming right), would have been at the most a curiosity somewhere down in the dingiest town in the minors—precisely where Hot had played during the many years that the nations of the world lived in harmony. But it is one of life’s grisly ironies that what is a catastrophe for most of mankind, invariably works to the advantage of a few who live on the fringes of the human community. On the other hand, it is a grisly irony to live on the fringes of the human community.

  * * *

  “Batting fifth and playing left field, No. 13, MIKE RAMA. RAMA.”

  Even before the Mundys had to play day in and day out on the other fellow’s terrain, Mike “the Ghost” Rama (TL, BL, 6′l″, 183 lbs.) had his troubles with the outfield wall. Just so long as there was one of them behind him, whether it was in Mundy Park or on the road, sooner or later the Ghost went crashing up against it in do-or-die pursuit of a well-tagged ball. In ’41, his rookie year, he had on five different occasions to be removed on a stretcher from the field in Port Ruppert. The fans, of course, were deeply moved by a brilliant youngster so dedicated to victory as to be utterly heedless of his own welfare. It rent their hearts to hear the konk resound throughout the ball park when Mike’s head made contact with the stadium wall—was he dead this time? and, damn it, had he dropped the ball? But miraculously neither was the case. The umpire who rushed to the outfield to call the play (before calling the hospital) invariably found the baseball lodged snugly in the pocket of the unconscious left-fielder’s glove. “Out!” he would shout, and without irony, for he was describing only the status of the batter. Hurray, cried the fans—whereupon the bullpen catcher and the batboy would come dashing onto the field to lift the crumpled hero from the grass on to the stretcher, and thence to the ambulance that could already be heard wailing across Port Ruppert to the stadium. And how that sound sobered and saddened the crowd …

  Once the solemnity of the moment had passed the fans did have to wonder if perhaps Mike wasn’t a little short on brainpower to be knocking himself out like this every couple of weeks; for it wasn’t as though he misjudged the proximity of the wall in his effort to catch the ball, but rather that he seemed completely to forget that such things as walls even existed. He just could not seem to get the idea of a barrier into his head, even after bringing the two into forceful conjunction. Why they came to call him the Ghost was because he appeared to think—if that is the word for it—that what was impenetrable to the rest of us would be as nothing to him: either he did not believe that walls were really walls, or flesh only flesh, or he just was never going to get over having been born and raised in Texas. For down there, where he had been a great high school star, it seemed they did not bother to fence the field in … just laid out the bases and let the boys roam like the longhorns.

  In Mike’s rookie year, Mister Fairsmith would make it his business to be at the hospital first thing in the morning to fetch the Mundy left-fielder once the doctors had put the pieces back together and proclaimed him ready to have another go at life. They would drive directly from the hospital to Mundy Park, where the two would walk out across the manicured diamond on to the outfield grass. With only the groundskeepers looking up from their rakes to watch the oddly touching scene, Mister Fairsmith would lead the rookie all the way from the left-field corner to Glorious Mundy’s headstone in furthest center, and then back again. They might walk to and fro like this for half an hour at a stretch, Mike, under Mister Fairsmith’s direction, running the tips of his fingers along the wall so as to prove to himself that it was no figment of anybody’s imagination.

  “Michael,” Mister Fairsmith would say, “can you tell me what is going on in your mind when you act like this? Do you have any idea?”

  “Sure. Nothin’. I’m thankin’ about catchin’ the ball, that’s all. I ain’t havin’ no sex thoughts or nothin’, Mister Fairsmith, I swear.”

  “Michael, I am cognizant of the fact that there were no walls surrounding the ball fields in the part of the world where you grew up, but surely, lad, you had walls in your house when you were a boy down there. Or am I mistaken?”

  “Oh sure we had walls. We wuz poor, but we wuzn’t that poor.”

  “And did you, as a child, go running into the walls in your house?”

  “Nope, nope. But then a’ course I wasn’t chasin’ nothin’ then.”

  “Son, you are going to be held together by clothesline and baling wire before you are even twenty-one, if you do not change your ways. Keep this up and your next fly ball may be your last.”

  “Gee, I sure hope not, Mister Fairsmith. I live for baseball. I eat, drink, and sleep baseball. It’s just about the only thang I ever thank about, is baseball. I see pop flies in my dreams. I can’t even sleep sometimes, imaginin’ all the different kinds of line drives there are to catch. Baseball is my whole life, I swear.”

  “And your death too, lad, if you don’t start in this minute thinking about the reality of the wall.”

  But nothing anyone could say was able to implant in Mike Rama a healthy respect for the immovable and the unyielding. To the contrary, as some men are drawn to wine and some to women, so Mike Rama was drawn to that left-field wall. If he could be said to have had a temptress, that was it. “Why, I’ll tell you what I think,” said Johnny Baal to Smitty, “if that there wall had titties on it, Mike ’ud marry her.”

  * * *

  “Batting sixth and playing third base, No. 2, WAYNE HEKET. HEKET.”

  Kid Heket (TR, BR, 6′, 172 lbs.), the oldest Mundy of them all, the oldest major leaguer of them all, a rookie in 1909 and a utility infielder and pinch-runner thereafter, he had become a regular only after the Mundy brothers had sold everybody of value on the great championship team, and just about everything else that was any good in the dugout “exceptin’,” as the Kid told it, “me and the water cooler.” Of course he was no longer “so fleet afeet,” as he’d been in his pinch-running days, but then, as the aging third-sacker asked, “Who is?” Were his reflexes gone, would he say? “I sure would,” replied the Kid. And his eyesight? “Dim durin’ the day, practically nil at night. Nope, don’t see very good at all no more.” His strength? He sighed: “Oh, gone with the wind, Smitty. Call me broken down and I won’t argue.” Why did he stay on in baseball then? “What else is there? This here is just about all that I am fit to do now, and, as you see, I ain’t fit for it.”

  Fortunately, playing for the wartime Mundys was not really as taxing physically as a job on a farm or a factory might have been for a man of fifty-two. And, during the winter months the Kid could just sit around down home resting up in the barber shop, enjoying the smell of the witch hazel, the warmth of the stove, and the pictures in the old magazines. During the season itself, in order to conserve what little energy he had, he just played as close as he could to the third-base line, hoping in this way to cut down the extra-base hits, but otherwise granting to the opposition whatever they could poke between him and the shortstop. “The way I see it now, if a feller hits it to my left, he got hisself a single and more power to him. If a’ course the Frenchman wants to try and get it, well, that’s his business and I don’t propose to interfere. His ways is his ways and mine is mine. As I gets older I find myself gettin’ more philosophical. I got to ask myself, you see, who am I
to say what should be a base hit and what shouldn’t, a feller with but four years of schoolin’ in his whole life. No, some old folks may do otherwise, but I don’t propose to set Wayne Heket up as some kind of judge of others at this late stage of the game.” By which he meant the game of life, clearly, for even if it was only the bottom of the first, he paid no mind to what was hit between third and short. “At my age you just got to cut down, no question about it. You just got to give up somethin’, so I give up goin’ to my left. Let’s be honest, Smitty, my runnin’ days is over, and there ain’t no sense in actin’ like they ain’t.”

  When the Mundys came to bat, the Kid always made it his business to catch a quick nap—no sooner did his seat hit the bench but he was out like a light. “That’s what I credit my long baseball life to, you know. Them naps. So long as I can catch me some shuteye in that dugout there, there is no doubt that I am a better man for it back on the playing field. A’ course, as you can imagine, nobody cherishes more than me them times that we get a little rally goin’, and I can really slip off into dreamland. There is no doubt about it—and I tole Mister Fairsmith, right out, too—if we was a better hittin’ team, I would be gettin’ more sleep. The worst for me is when the fellers start swingin’ at them first pitches. What in hell’s the hurry, I ask ’em, where’s the fire anyhoo? Sometimes my stiff ol’ bones has barely stopped throbbin’ with pain, when they are shakin’ my shoulder, tellin’ me it’s time to go back on out to the field. Best of all was the other day in Aceldama. It was top of the eighth and I was near to droppin’, let me tell you. I was up first, struck out lookin’—or not lookin’, I suppose—come back to the bench, expectin’ that of the old forty winks I’d be gettin’ myself maybe four, if I was lucky. Well, what happens, but that whole darn bunch of hitless wonders catches fire and we don’t go out until they have batted all the way around to me. What a snooze I had! Like a top! Unfortunately, the Butchers, they come back with seven in their half of the inning to beat us—but if I had not had that good long nap while we was up, I tell you, I might not have made it all the way through them seven runs of theirs on my feet. As it was, I dozed off a couple times in the field, but then I usually does, when we is changin’ pitchers. Tell you the truth, I thought they had scored only four and we was still ahead by one. I didn’t find out till the next mornin’ when I seen it in the paper down in the lobby that we lost. Must be then that I was out on my feet for three of them runs—not that it makes much difference. You been around as long as me, you seen one run, you seen ’em all. That afternoon, when I run into some of the Butchers on the streetcar goin’ out to the ball park, I asked them how come they didn’t wake me up in the eighth yesterday when they was roundin’ third. You don’t find that kind of consideration every day, you know, especially from the other team, which is usually tryin’ to hair-ass you, one way or another. I joked ’em—I said, ‘What ever got in to you boys, bein’ so quiet and all comin’ round the bag? Don’t want to rouse the sleepin’ beast or somethin’?’ And you know what they tole me? I couldn’t believe it. They tole me they come whoopin’ round that bag, each and ever one of ’em, squawkin’ their heads off like a bunch of crows, and I didn’t budge one inch. Well, that’ll give you a idea of just how tired a feller can get bein’ in baseball all his life. Maybe that is what it is like bein’ in anything all your life, but I can only speak for myself, you know. And I’m just shot. Why, if this here terrible war goes on too long, and I keep playin’ in the regular line-up like this, why, I wouldn’t be surprised if one afternoon I will just drop off, you know, and that’s that. The other fellers’ll come runnin’ back in to the bench when the innin’ is over and it’s our turn to bat, but not me. I’ll just be left stooped over out there, with my hands on my knees and a jaw full of tobacco juice, waitin’ for the next pitch, only I’ll be dead. Well, I only hope it don’t happen while the game is in progress, ’cause if the other team finds out, they sure as hell will start droppin’ them bunts in down the third-base line. Now, even alive I ain’t hardly the man with a bunt I was back before the First World War. But with me dead with rigor mortis, and Hothead havin’ only one leg, they could just about bunt us crazy, don’t you think? If they was smart, that is.”

  * * *

  “Batting seventh and playing right field, No. 17, BUD PARUSHA. PARUSHA.”

  Bud Parusha (TR, BR, 6’3”, 215 lbs.) was the youngest of the Parusha brothers, two of whom, Angelo and Tony, were all-star outfielders for the Tri-City Tycoons, and until they entered the service boasted the two strongest throwing arms in the majors. A throwing arm no less powerful and accurate was said to belong to the third brother, who surely would have been a Tycoon outfielder too, if it weren’t that the throwing arm was the only arm he’d been born with. It was as though Mother Nature—or, to be realistic about it, Mother Parusha—having lavished such gifts upon Angelo and Tony, had run out of steam by the time she got to Bud, and when it came to finishing him off, could not deliver up anything whatsoever, not even a stump, where the mate to the throwing arm should have been. Consequently, when Angelo and Tony went off to the majors, Bud was left to work as best he could as a waiter in his father’s restaurant in Bayonne. Then came the war. Angelo and Tony were commissioned and placed in charge of the hand grenade training program for the entire United States Marine Corps, and Bud found himself elevated to the big leagues, not up to the Tycoons of course—they were the P. League champs after all—but across the Jersey marshes, to the team that seemed rapidly to be becoming a haven for the handicapped. Bud moved in with Hothead Ptah, whose averages in the minors he had followed for years in the back pages of The Sporting News, and rumor had it that the two would shortly he joined by a one-eyed pitcher from the Blues, a Jewish fellow called Seymour Clops, nicknamed inevitably, “Sy.” “What about a sword-swallower and a tattooed man, while they’re at it!” cried Hothead, who did not at all cotton to the idea of being a freak in a freakshow. “And what about dwarfs! There must be some of them around! Oh, I just can’t wait to get up some morning and look over and find I am rooming with a left-handed dwarf, all curled up and sleepin’ in my mitt. And a Jew on top of it!” The dwarf, of course, when he came, would be right-handed and a Christian, the pitcher O.K. Ockatur.

  For those who never saw Bud Parusha in action during the war years—and after him, Pete Gray, the one-armed outfielder who played for the St. Louis Browns—it will be necessary to explain in some little detail, how, and to what degree, he was able to overcome his handicap on the field.

  First off, to catch an ordinary fly ball was no more problem for Bud than for any fielder of major league caliber; however, in that he wore his glove on the end of his throwing arm, it did require an unorthodox maneuver for him to return the ball to the infield. Unlike Gray of the Brownies, who had a stump of a left arm under which he could tuck his glove while he extracted the ball from the pocket, Bud (with no left arm at all) had to use his mouth. He was lucky to have a large one—“that old law of compensation,” said the sports announcers—and a strong bite which he had further developed over the years by five minutes of chewing on a tennis ball before going to sleep each night. After fielding a ball, he was able instantly to remove it from his glove with his teeth, and hold it clamped between them while he shook the glove from his hand; then he extracted the ball from his mouth with his bare right hand, and hurled it with Parusha-like speed and accuracy to the infield. All this he accomplished in one fluid, unbroken motion and with such efficiency and even grace, that you would have thought that this was the way the outfield was supposed to be played.

  In the beginning the fans did not know quite what to make of Bud’s singular fielding technique and there were those who laughed at the man in the Mundy outfield who looked from a distance to be giving birth to something through the orifice in his head. There were even those in the bleachers—there always are—who like children popping out of closets would shout “Boo!”, hoping in that way to startle Bud and cause him to swallow the baseball. U
nfortunately there were occasions when in his anxiety not to drop the ball out of his mouth while flinging off his glove, he would take it too far back between his molars, and find himself unable to extricate it unassisted. It happened infrequently, but always in the same tense situation: with the bases loaded. And each time with the same disastrous result: an inside-the-mouth grand-slam home run. Roland Agni would race over from center and Nickname would tear out from second to try to save the day, but not even those two together, performing the play as they had practiced it—Agni kneeling on Bud’s chest, forcing open his jaws like a fellow about to stick his head into the mouth of a crocodile, and young Damur, with those quick hands of his, yanking and jiggling at the ball for all he was worth—were able to prevent the four runs from scoring.