Bang The Drum Slowly

by Mark Harris

  “Then he begun to cry, and it was pitiful, and he cussed out Bradley Lord some more, and he cussed out the Grayhound Bus Company and the City of Jacksonville and the whole State of Florida and the game of baseball and QC and all the cities in the 4-State Mountain League, cussing and crying all the while. Dutch said he never seen him quite so bad before, and he sent Bradley Lord out for Doc Solomon and for Mike Mulrooney, Mike being over working with the rooks.

  “After a little bit he stopped. He was sobbing and shaking, but he seemed better, and he rose and went over to the fountain and took a drink and come back rather wobbly and sat on the bench in front of the lockers. He seemed deep in thought, and then he rose and went very deliberate to the water again, and he filled his mouth and shot a stream across at Red, and it caught Red square in the face, and Red wiped it away.

  “2 men come in for the empty crate of milk, and Bruce begun to give them hell and call them all sorts of foul names, “nigger” and such, and some of the boys made him quieten down and chased the men out of there so as not to cause any more disturbance than was necessary, and then Bruce begun a torrent, running down the colored people and milk companies and Bradley Lord. He dove for the bottles and would of upset the crate but me and Lindon pulled him off. He got hold of one bottle, however, and looked around for someone to fire it at, but by this time the clubhouse was cleared out and there was nobody left but me, for all the boys was eating their lunch on the grass outside. Bruce smashed the bottle on the floor, and I finally got him under a shower, and he shivered and shook and vomited something awful. Doc Solomon come then and said leave him vomit. I said there was little else you could do, for you can not give a man an order not to vomit. Doc Solomon left, and Bruce shook and shivered and vomited, and between times he laced into Doc Solomon, calling him a Jew and what not else.

  “He was at the heights when all of a sudden in walked Mike Mulrooney, and it was Mike that calmed him down, handing out the sweet talk and saying what a great ballplayer Bruce was. He went right in there under the shower and turned it off and crouched down on the wet floor with Bruce, and they talked about the good times they had back in QC. Soon Bruce come out just as calm as if he was sober, and Mike talked to him some more and held his hand and patted his shoulder.

  “Then Dutch yelled “Back to work!” and I went.

  “That night I seen Bruce at the hotel, and he was as nice and polite as ever, and quiet, and when he spoke he spoke soft, and you could hardly believe it was the same man. From that day onwards he settled down and done his work, like he was told, and you never heard so much as a peep from him the season through.”

  CHAPTER 4

  ON THE main drag in Bainbridge quite a few people give him a wave, and we slowed, and they said, “All fixed up?” and he said “Yes,” and we moved on through town. The roster lists him from Bainbridge, but actually he lives in Mill on the road to Climax, which got its name on account of an old mill there that long ago broke down. You can see it from his window, and every so often you might see somebody come along needing a board and cut across to the mill and rip one off. This been going on for years and years until one day there won’t be any mill left a-tall. One night I said, “That is one mill that ain’t milling around much any more,” and Bruce’s father said, “Yes, Arthur, and that is an old joke, too.” Bruce clumb all over that mill as a kid and still knows all the places for your feet. He goes up the top of it in about 15 seconds flat, and down again as fast, and he knows 100 secret little corners where they hid money and tobacco and letters from girls and other things they weren’t supposed to own, and we went on through Bainbridge and down the road to Mill.

  We got there before I realized it. I was looking for a town. He give me the impression they lived in a town, and then it wasn’t a town a-tall but only a house off the road, white, with the sun hot on it, and his folks on the porch swatting flies, not knowing he was expected. On the nail by the door they keep these fly swatters. When you come out of doors you grab one. You get to do it automatic, like grabbing a bat when your swipes come, and then when you go back in you loop it over the nail again.

  They didn’t much stir when we pulled up, only sat and waited, and he jumped on the porch, never mind the steps, and kissed them and said, “This here is Henry, call him Arthur,” and his father went in the house and dragged out 2 more chairs and 2 more swatters, and we all sat. All their business is done on the porch. After awhile the girl brung out 2 more glasses and laid them on the rail, and she said, “Howdy, Mr. Bruce, are you all better now?” and he never turned around but said “Yes.” He might turn around for a white person sometime, but hardly ever for a colored one, and she poured water in the glasses. They wobbled a little, but they never fell, not then or ever all the time I was there, just sat balanced on the rail.

  Such business as they do they do it slow, first a little sip of water and then a word or 2, and then no answer for a time until a word or 2 from someone else. It gets very restful, just sitting looking at the road and drinking water until when the water was gone his mother shouted back over her shoulder “Gem!” and the girl come out pretty soon again with more water.

  “We were worried,” his father said. One of his suspenders was always hanging loose, and I kept getting these terrific urges to get up and pull the hidget tight. Then everybody pulled on water awhile.

  “I was in good hands,” Bruce said. He balanced his hat on the rail, and curled up his tie and laid it on top of the hat. His mother took a sip of water and reached for the tie and uncurled it and smoothed it out and laid it straight on the rail. She was quite fat, with these extremely enormous breasts. When she was young she was quite thin and pretty. In their old photos she was thin and her husband heavy, but when times become easy for them she put on and he shed. She died last summer and never knew the truth, heart failure, 100 pounds over her weight, which maybe was what killed her, plus the excitement of the race.

  “I bet it was cold up there,” she said.

  Everybody thought these various matters over, and then all of a sudden they all stood up and picked up their chair and went back in and hung their swatter up and shoved in at the table and ate. Do not ask me how they knew it was time, but they always did. Night after night I listened for some sign or signal, thinking maybe there was a certain shadow fell a certain place, or a certain car went by, or a certain train whistle, but I could never figure it. I just ate, and it was good, too much of the same too many nights in a row maybe, but very good, and after we ate we picked up our chair again and grabbed a swatter and went back out of doors.

  “Not too damn cold,” he said.

  We sat awhile and swatted awhile, and it begun growing dark, and every now and then a car come past and stopped and said, “We seen where Bruce is home,” and they said, “He sure is,” and told me who was in the car. “That was Wilkies,” “That was Johnsons,” and Gem come out with 4 glasses and laid them on the rail and poured, all in the dark, and she gathered up the swatters because you couldn’t see what you were swatting at any more anyhow, and right about then a car always drawed up and sat and waited for her. The same car brung her back in the morning, and she got out and took the glasses off the rail and went around the house and in, 7 days a week, every goddam day. The glasses were all wet with dew in the morning.

  “What was wrong?” his father said.

  “Nothing,” he said. He only sent them postcards, picture but no message, all different views of Rochester, Minnesota, but only 3 words, “Pearson, Mill, Georgia,” and the rest only a white space. Sometimes he picked up a card and studied the picture, squinting close and looking for something in it that nobody else could find, like maybe a man might sit studying moving pictures of a particular ball game and trying to figure out what he threw wrong to a particular hitter, and wishing he could back up the film and have another try.

  “There was a kid I played with with his hair parted in the middle,” he said.

  She told him the kid’s name and where he was now an
d what doing, and he told it to me though I was sitting there and heard it myself and couldn’t of cared less, and soon they begun yawning, and one of them would say, “It is about time to hunker down,” and then another would yawn and say it, and later another, and then his mother dragged her chair in and made me up the bed in the guest room and afterwards come back in her robe and slippers and said through the screen, “It is about time to hunker down,” and then we all got up and dragged our chair in, Bruce last, leaning his chair against the door, not locking it, only keeping it from rattling.

  There was a table by my bed that every night I laid out on it 2 pages typewrote by the doctors in Rochester, the first page headed “Until the doctor comes,” the second “Instructions for the physician.” On the back I wrote down the numbers of the doctors in Bainbridge. In the morning I always stuck it back in my pants.

  I never slept much the first night, only laid waiting. He kept his light on a long time, though what he done there I have no idea because he don’t read and don’t listen to the radio much. In the hotel he likes to sit in the dark and look down in the street at the traffic or across the way at lights in another hotel, and he likes to watch the flashing signs. Sometimes he spits and gets up on his elbow and watches how it floats, if it incurves or outcurves, and whatever way it hooks he turns and tells me, and probably 9,000 times I told him, “Who gives a good goddam how your spit hooks?”

  About 2 days later Holly sent down my contract in the mail. His was there when we got there, $7,540 or 7,860 or 7,695, always some crazy amount like that every year which give him the idea the club sat around all winter figuring out exactly what he was worth, boiling it down to the penny, and he signed it and stuck it back out in the box. You always see in the paper what contracts are back and signed, and somewhere amongst them you might find his name. Or then again you might not. There are writers that don’t even know he is with the club, and ballplayers on other clubs the same that call everybody by their name but Bruce because if they once knew it they keep forgetting, shouting at him maybe for a stray ball, “Hey, catcher.” There was never much to keep them remembering. He been up there a long time, yet nobody ever really knows him. I doubt that anybody even keeps a book on him. Between times they forget, and then sometimes I suppose they wish they did, for he will bounce a pitch off a fence now and then, if it was the kind of a pitch he was looking for. He decides ahead of time what kind of a pitch is coming, and if it comes it is his meat. If it don’t he is lost. He cannot guess a pitcher, cannot remember what that same pitcher threw him the last time. He cannot hit to the opposite field, only to left, and will stand up there driving pitches to left no matter if a 100-mile tornado is blowing in, or at least he would if Dutch ever left him try. But Dutch will never use him with a wind in from left.

  I opened it and looked at it and wrote a little note across the top saying I was taught in school where slavery went out when Lincoln was shot, and I stuck it back in the box, never signing it, and the letter carrier picked it up on his way back to town, saying, “My lands, Wiggen, you sure answer your mail prompt.”

  Waiting for the mail was a big operation. It took the 4 of us, beginning after breakfast until he angled in beside the box so as not to have to reach across, and some days he got out and gassed with us, and some days not, saying “I am running late today,” though I don’t believe he ever did because he never come more than 5 minutes one way or the other. You could tell time by him if you ever cared what time it was, which you never cared because it never made much of a much down there if it was 6 o’clock or half past 2. And if he did come up and gas did he bring the mail up with him? No, he did not. He left it in the box, like that was as far as his duty went, and when he left he said, “There is mail,” and Bruce went down for it, twirling the swatter around on his finger. I never seen such a man with a fly swatter. His eye was awful quick, and he never went after a fly but once, never dizzied it first and polished it off second but always nailed it square the first try, even the tricky ones that me and his mother and his father all give up on before it wandered over Bruce’s way, and he brung the mail back up and passed it around, and they opened it and read it and laid it on the rail, shuffling it back and forth until they all read everybody else’s, and then they talked about it, the bills, church notices, ads, and the letters from their relations until I knew every piece of their business from the taxes they owed to what his sister Helen was planning to wear over Easter in Seattle, Washington, and after the mail was hashed over we always took off, me and Bruce, and I think that was what he liked the best.

  For a place where there was really nothing to do we sure kept busy, and the time went. We clumb around in the mill a lot. It was dark and cool, and it stirred up a lot of old remembrances, and he talked in there, stringing together whole long sentences, which he usually never does, running off regular histories of the boys that hung in the mill with him so long ago, what they looked like, where they went, who they married, and we sat high up on these various boards slung across from place to place, and now and then he bit off a chew and said “Arthur?” and when he said it like that, with a question mark after it, I knew what was coming, and I said, “Do not ask me questions that I cannot answer.” But he asked them all the same, saying, “Arthur, tell me why in hell I clumb to the top of the mill a million times and never fell down and killed myself, and why I never drowneded in the river, and why I never died in the war, and why I was never plastered by a truck but come clean through it all and now get this disease?” I said I did not know, which I did not and still don’t. I said why does one airplane go down or one ship, or why does some poor cluck go tramping down the street and get struck by lightning. “Lightning I could understand,” he said. “Arthur?”

  “Ask them little,” I said.

  “How do you play Tegwar?” he said.

  I told him.

  “Arthur,” said he, “if I tell you something do not laugh.”

  “I am not libel to laugh for some time,” I said. “My wife has not answered the telephone in 3 days, I owe 40 quarts of blood to the United States Bureau of Internal Revenue, and I am libel to never play baseball again rather than play for slave wages.”

  “I been handed a shit deal,” he said. “I am doomeded.”

  “I am falling off this board laughing,” said I.

  “But the world is all rosy,” he said. “It never looked better. The bad things never looked so little, and the good never looked so big. Food tastes better. Things do not matter too much any more. Like you take I used to wash my car all the time. I used to worry about it. Sometimes I laid in bed at night thinking about my dirty car and could not sleep.”

  “It sure needs it,” I said. I kept trying to bring him back into living again. He stood a chance of living a long time yet, not too long but long enough, and I tried to keep him thinking of things yet ahead.

  We visited around. He knew some boys that he once played ball with down at the crate and box plant in Bainbridge, and he hung there once or twice a week when they were on their lunch, and he knew people up and down the main drag. Everybody always asked him 2 things, how did he come out in Minnesota and where would the Mammoths finish. It was a Mammoth town, Mammoth pennants in the sporting-good stores, Ugly Jones gloves, Sid Goldman bats, and these little plastic statues of various Mammoths that some crook sold all over the country that none of us ever got a penny for, plus Sam’s book, called “Sam Yale—Mammoth,” and Dutch’s, “Dutch Schnell—Mammoth,” both wrote by Krazy Kress, plus my own, “The Southpaw,” wrote by yours truly and nobody else, $3.50 or 35¢ in the quarter book (39¢ in Canada).

  And we must of sat in 45 barnyards talking about crops and hogs, crops and hogs, crops and hogs, until I probably knew more about the situation in south Georgia than the United States Bureau of Internal Revenue knows nor ever will, Bruce not talking much but only listening, though then not really listening neither but only looking and nodding and smiling, liking the sound of their voice without caring what they
said.

  In church the same. He begun going to church. His mother thought I was a great influence on him. “In days gone by,” she said, “I could not of dragged him by the hair,” but now he went, slouching in the seat like he sat slouched against the barnyard fences, not listening but only liking the sounds. He was very fond of this preacher, Reverend Robinson, the first person except me and Holly to know the truth. Bruce wished to tell him, so we done so, and I liked him quite well though I never been very regular at church, in fact never went a-tall, and he liked the singing, too, and always hummed the songs a couple days after, maybe through Wednesday.

  We played golf at the Bainbridge Country Club, 9 holes, and I probably stunk up the joint pretty bad. They did not have very good left-hand clubs, and then I’m not too goddam interested in golf anyway but only done it for him. I’ll shoot 78 keeping my own score, but he is very good. He does anything good when there is no pressure on, and there was none, for we just played for the kicks, maybe 4 or 5 times, and we started hunting the same number but never got there, turned back. I do not hunt. I never fired off a gun in my life and was just as glad, nor never fish neither, or at least never done so before but went with him down by the river and spent the whole first afternoon taking off the winding reel and putting it back for the left hand while he sat on the bank and caught weeds. Several times a man come along and said, “No fishing here,” and Bruce said, “I am not fishing, only weeding,” which I thought was pretty quick for Bruce except I soon seen it was his father’s joke, and probably his father’s before that, back and back. They was always from Georgia. He caught quite a few, and I caught some myself, the only fish I ever caught and probably ever will. Golf, fishing, hunting, these were never my dish of meat.