Infield
I have a flash of Skidmore, playing first base, whose father had played first base before him. He's stretching to take a throw from me at shortstop, and the throw goes over his head, mainly because it's thrown too high but also because he stretched out real fancy before he knew where the ball was going, then couldn't get up to reach the ball, which turned out to be high and not in need of one of his goddamned fancy first baseman's stretches.
I can still feel the pop in the glove when a grounder is snagged, the jerk in the shoulder from an overhand baseball throw, hard, from deep short and on the run, the rhythm of the footwork, the whip of the arm crossing the body in the follow-through. These were great feelings, yet there was pain in it too, for me anyway. Later I learned there was pain in almost all good feelings.
"What kind of throw was that?" Skidmore's making a scene, yelling at me to get the heat off himself.
The runner rounds first, tears for second. Skidmore's standing next to the bag, his arms out. "Seriously, what kind of throw was that?"
The right fielder sees that Skidmore won't be chasing the ball, gets it himself, and manages to stop the runner from scoring. Skidmore comes to the middle of the field, still looking at me. He's fourteen. This is Pony League, and in those days we played in Levi's with T-shirts colored to differentiate the teams.
"I need an explanation for what kind of goddamned throw that was just now," he says.
I stand out at deep shortstop staring at him.
"Let's have it. What kind of throw was that?"
He's brilliant, and can be very funny. His movements are gawky with a rough adolescence. For some reason I even liked him back then, but he had a terrible mean streak that used to rise up out of him like a second personality—lying, evil, angry, driven.
In adult life, I've accused him of this in letters. I forget when, but it's been just a couple of years ago he wrote me that none of that in the old days was meanness at all. He said it was all irony and I just failed to catch it.
But it was Cliff Webb and Junior Guthrie who got me thinking about baseball, plus the fact that this was opening day for the Cubs up at Wrigley. Like Skidmore, Cliff was an old baseball pal of mine when we were all growing up in this town, and he and I had run into each other in a bar the night before, after all these years.
On this particular morning I had decided to make a tour of our rental properties, to catalogue the repairs that were needed. My wife had been nagging me to get this done for two months—it was tax time. And of course on the day I finally got to it, because of Cliff, I had a headache, so I'd gone to the IGA to get some Extra Strength Anacin, even though it was too late (in order to avoid a hangover, you have to have the presence of mind to take the aspirin at the time you have no presence of mind—one of those little Zen perplexities).
Incredibly, on the way back to my car on my aspirin run I encountered Junior Guthrie, another old baseball crony, now with a big beer belly, meandering around out in the IGA parking lot wearing a yellow American Legion bowling shirt and a Chicago Cubs cap.
"Hey, pal, can you jump me?" he was saying. Amazingly, something about the eyes, the old Junior was still down in there somewhere. "Wha'd'ya say? Can you jump me?"
I had the headache and really didn't want to.
"Sure," I said. "You have cables?"
"Pal, you got a car like mine, you carry jumper cables. Over here." He was already heading back to his car, gesturing to me. The gravelly asphalt lot was depressing in my condition. I spotted his rusted-out tan and brown Cordoba, the vinyl roof fried off by the sun, because it was the only car in the lot with the hood up. I drove around to him and popped my hood, then let him hook us up while I chased the aspirin with coffee from home, then switched on the radio to see if I could catch Paul Harvey.
I think I was staying in the car for fear Junior'd recognize me and I'd get blasted with another round of nostalgia, this while the effects of the first round were still with me. Suddenly I noticed that there was a little raisin of a woman sitting behind the wheel of his car, looking over at me. She had small, brown, nervous eyes, like a squirrel. He'd shout directions to her.
"Okay, crank her." "Okay, shut her off." "Okay, give her a try." "Okay, stop pumpin' her." "Okay, pump her." "Okay, goddamn it, lay off pumpin' her, lay off it."
She huddled behind the wheel following directions. He was shouting through the crack that appears between the motor and the hood when the hood's open.
Watching Junior was difficult for me. I remembered clearly an eleven-year-old second baseman with big white teeth and floppy hair. I remembered his almost ponylike run and unending hubbah-hubbah chatter. The optimism of a child. This is what it had come to?
Finally he looked toward me and said, "Okay, don't rev her. Let her be. Needs to store it up a minute." He enjoyed my obedience.
Then, too quickly, he said, "Okay, now rev her," and then he said to the woman, "PUMP that son of a bitch, Mama—that's it. Okay, hit it!"
He had the distributor completely loosened and no air filter over the carb. When she'd hit the starter to turn it over, he'd go halfway into the dying thing's gaping mouth and wrench back and forth on the distributor like it was a whale's wisdom tooth and he was the dentist. His feet were clear off the ground. He had a stub of a cigar all chewed and sweated on, which he would light between rounds.
"Ain't gettin' no good contact," he said to me, "—yur battery's one of them goddamned sidewinders, never can get no contact from 'em. I'll find somebody else, she'll fire right up."
Translated, this meant his car troubles were my fault.
"Get this goddamned thing goin', I'll take it to the junk yard, head back to Kentucky, get me another one. Got this one down there, cost me one-fifty. Put sixty thousand miles on her. Guy I play softball with—out at Cabot—he's from Kentucky, told me about it. Lot of stolen cars down there, he says. Stop pumpin' her so much, Mama, like I goddamned told ya."
"I wasn't pumpin' her!" the woman crackled back at him.
"What?" He hurried around to her window. "Wha'd'ya say?" She sank down in her seat like he was going to belt her. "You was pumpin' her, honey. I know that much."
Her face was real wrinkled, resembled the cracked vinyl of the Cordoba's dashboard. She was dirty, desperate looking, bent down in that old seat like she was ashamed. For all I know I might have gone to school with her, too, but she was beyond recognition now.
"Okay, crank her up," he says to her, back in front of the car, and she tries, the motor making a terrible grinding noise. Never jump somebody when you've got a headache. I was not optimistic that the car would ever start again.
"Goddamned starter's the problem. Get this thing started, I'll head over to the parts shop—there's a parts shop around here somewhere—head over there and get me another starter. And some starter fluid. If she's gonna start, she'll start with starter fluid. NOW, MAMA! HIT IT! That's it—PUMP the son of a bitch. Hold it, you're floodin' her. Damn. Flooded."
He comes around to my window, bends down so our noses, or rather my nose and the end of his cigar, are eight inches apart. "That there's my girlfriend," he says so she can't hear. "She loves me—hard to figure, I know. You'd think my brother could buy me a car. I gave him a kidney and he ain't rejected it yet. Doc says most of 'em are rejected by now, but not mine. Never paid me nothin', some brother."
I got out of my running car and went with him up beside the front end. I watched him climb in and out of the motor.
"Now wait," I said. "You gave your brother a kidney?"
"Damn straight," he says. He pulls up his dirty bowling shirt and there's the scar. It starts just above the tip of his pelvis on the right, and heads northeast most of the way to the opposite shoulder. Half of an X, right up his body, pink and angry looking like my hernia scar, only two feet longer, I swear, and heading across tender territory, the white and light-blue flabby sticking-out human frog abdomen. "Yeah, worked all his life and he never knew he had a bad heart, eighteen hours a day
without givin' it a thought."
I was trying to remember Junior Guthrie's brother. Couldn't.
"Then they tell him his heart's givin' out and he gets all these bypasses, and then his kidney gives out 'cause of his heart gave out, and he gets a kidney from me, two hundred bucks a week on drugs to keep him from rejecting it, you know that new stuff they got now? Well, my brother's fadin' fast after all this help he's gettin' from doctors, but the kidney's cooking along like nothin' ever happened, shit."
Again he dives down into the motor, his feet kicking in the air. Over his shoulder, he yells above the grinding of the car, "Doc says if he dies they'll get it back for me."
His whole body is pivoting on his beer belly, which is pressed down over the fender into the area where the containers for windshield-wiper fluid and coolant used to be.
"Hit it, honey, that's it," he says to the woman, and wrenches the distributor for all it's worth. And, incredibly, the car starts. "Yup, my brother's in the garbage business and the trucks is always breakin' down. We got a couple of 'em on their ass in the garage all the time, all spread out all over everywhere gettin' rebuilt. Don't tell me about distributors, I tell 'em, it's just the timing's off and the chain has to come around, and you gotta hit it just right. Good work, Mama," he says, as I climb back in my car.
He unhooks the cables and thanks me, latches down my hood with appreciated reverence for my car, and comes around to my window again.
"This is a fine automobile."
He is bending down, squinting at me, smiling. He turns his head and spits a piece of his cigar.
"I know you, right?"
"I don't think so," I said. "You a Cub fan?"
"What?"
"I see your cap—you gonna watch the Cubs this afternoon? First day of the season."
"Nah. This here's my brother's hat. You're Carl Landen, am I right? Took me a second because of the beard. Makes you look like a salesman. Good to see you. I'm Junior Guthrie."
"Junior," I said. "Good to see you."
"Hey, honey, this is Carl Landen, guy I played baseball with when I was a kid. His dad was the doctor that died, remember I told ya? Long time ago?" He looked back at me, smiling, but neither of us could think of a thing to say.
"Well," I said finally, "you take care."
"You knew it, didn't you?" He was asking hopefully, as if trying in a friendly way to find out if he'd not changed so much after all.
As I backed out, I saw he had a ball glove in the back window of the car.
"I wasn't sure, Junior. You know how that goes. You take care."
The rest of the morning I toured the rentals, head hurting and kind of cranky except I was by myself so maybe also a little lonesome—I think I was lonesome for my boy. I wanted to talk baseball with him. He was over at school sitting in a desk, bored stiff, age eleven. I mooched three fingers' worth of whiskey from the cleaning ladies at one of our places around noon. Under the sink I found a glass left by the last tenants and washed it with some of the cleaning ladies' Spic and Span. They must have thought they had a pretty cool boss, to tip one with them out there on the job.
I planned this to be the house I hit around noon, because it was partially furnished from inventory. It had TV and cable so I could pick up WGN (if the cable hadn't been disconnected yet—tenants had moved out the day before). There was a cot in the house, and a lamp, again, left behind by a former tenant—it was shiny black and shaped like the head of a horse, red shade.
The headache hadn't given out with the first hit of aspirin, and I'd taken more around ten-thirty, but still no give. So about noon, after I belted down the cleaning ladies' whiskey and they were gone, I stretched out on the cot, the TV droning with a soap opera. I think I still had the headache, but I couldn't feel it.
Lying out on that cot in our rental, I started thinking about my dad and baseball and Skidmore and all those kids I knew like Junior and Cliff who grew up, and all the things I learned. It was the same stuff my boy was going through now.
From the upstairs windows, the back bedroom, at my childhood home across town (my mom still lives there), I remember looking down into the yard one night. There wasn't a moon; the light from the stars lit the yard only a little. Near the doghouse, on a long chain, was my springer spaniel, Tad. He was lying down, but his head was up, on guard. He was watching the undergrowth. He would look deep into the black shade of the lilacs. His chain would clink in the dark. He was guarding his very best friend, my father, who was stretched out on the picnic table nearby, watching the stars.
From my lighted room, through the window screen and down into the dark, I could barely see him. He didn't move. I was listening to the Cardinal game on the radio—Harry Caray, Jack Buck, Joe Garagiola. Vinegar Bend Mizell was on the mound, high-kicking lefty. Infield of Stan Musial, Don Blasingame, Alvin Dark, Eddie Kasko. Outfield, Wally Moon in left, maybe Curt Flood, but I forget center field really, Joe Cunningham in right for sure. Behind the plate, Hal Smith. They were playing the Pirates. 1957. This was when I was eleven.
"Who's winning?" Dad asked me. He could see me clearly.
"Cards. Cunningham stole home again."
"Great." His voice was barely audible.
"What're you doing?" I asked him. His father had died that winter. He'd missed a last chance to see his father alive in the previous fall. Dad had gone out west on a quick trip to hunt pheasants and had neglected swinging through the old Nebraska hometown to see his folks. He was having a hard time getting over it.
"Looking at the stars. You start to get a sense of the dimension after a while. Come here," he said.
I went out and sat next to him on the table. He pointed out a dim formation overhead that, if you looked away from it just a bit, you could see was really a kite-shaped cluster of seven stars.
"Pleiades," he said. "Look real close and you can tell some of them are farther away than the others. You can catch the depth of it. Go get the binoculars." I got them but we didn't use them long. I knew, I thought I knew, what was on my dad's mind.
"What was it Grandpa said, in the hospital?" I asked him.
He sighed. "He said, 'Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.' Then he took a deep breath, and he died."
He was quiet a minute or so. "The Bishop out in Lincoln, he says they're going to name Grandpa a Knight of St. Benedict. It's a great honor, recognizing him as a holy man. The Pope has to do it."
"You think Grandpa's looking down on us right now?"
He didn't answer for a while, looking up, breathing quietly. It wasn't a question to answer, really, but just to think about. In those days the rural Illinois sky sparkled deep and black.
"I wouldn't know," Dad said finally.
That summer I saw my first professional ballgame, in the old Busch Stadium on Grand Avenue in St. Louis. My father, his good friend and partner in medical practice Bob Swift, and I stayed in a nearby hotel called the Fairgrounds, and drove across town to the zoo that Sunday morning.
On the way, we went to mass in the St. Louis Cathedral, unfinished in a hundred years of work, scaffolding high in the vaulted ceiling where the man who made the mosaics labored day after day, the altar candles far below. As we drove around the city, I remember that I would sit in the back seat of the car, and up in front Dad and Bob would be talking about patients, or investments, or other things that often seemed too convoluted to keep paying attention to. So mostly I absorbed the warm, sunny streets of St. Louis.
We ate lunch near the stadium, in a bar, sitting toward the back. Right now I can summon the smell of beer and that primitive air conditioning, see the reflection of the front windows and the gleam of traffic off the dark linoleum, taste the ham sandwich with ketchup and pickle relish eaten too fast, the anticipation of the ball park in less than an hour.
But when we came through the gates of the old Busch Stadium—formerly called Sportsman's Park and still called that by most of the fans—when we came up the walkway to find our seats, we popped into a strange, finished, green w
orld like I'd never seen before. Every angle, every hue was planned, coordinated—the game was urbane and civilized, not like the pasture-type game, dry and weedy, we played at home. The afternoon air was heating up. People who behaved randomly and at odds outside acted in concert at the ball park, standing together and cheering or laughing when Cards manager Freddie Hutchinson kicked the dirt or someone stumbled rounding first. The crowd had a rousing, a great comforting, somehow knowing, collective voice.
Bob Swift had interned at Barnes Hospital in St. Louis, and knew all there was to know about the ball park. Hand on my shoulder, he pointed out, against the back screen, Harry Caray, in slicked-back hair and black-and-white checked pants, conducting the dugout show for radio, interviewing Larry Jackson, last night's winning pitcher. The big batting cage loomed over the plate, and the venerable old catcher Walker Cooper, wad of tobacco in his jowl, was cracking line drives.
At home, I pictured the ballplayers as kids. At the ball park, I was amazed by the dark shadow of beard on the face of Blasingame, "the Blazer," as he was called. He was littler than I thought. Moon's eyebrows were astonishing, Kasko wore glasses, Cunningham was bald. Those were men out there.
The first time I saw Musial at the plate, his unusual stance (often described on the radio) amazed me. Perhaps I had pictured Babe Ruth or the drawing I had of Casey at the Bat, or the action photo I had of Ted Williams hitting the long ball with a big arching swing, a vicious, Y-chromosome rip. In reality, Musial's stance seemed soft, relaxed, almost like dance. The front foot was pointed forward, toward the pitcher, the rear foot back toward the catcher. The front knee bent inward, graceful; the bat was held too high and way too far back. The head was out over the plate and tilted a little. His stance communicated artistry, individuality, himself. By then he was getting to be a grand old man of baseball, his late thirties. During the game, when he blasted a home run, the crack of the bat communicated immediately that the park would never hold it. The enormous swelling roar of the crowd conveyed not only happiness but respect. The ball bounced on the roof of the upper deck in right field, up where the light tower was. The scoreboard Budweiser eagle flapped its wings and a little red Cardinal made of neon darted around the stadium. The stroke itself had been a level, easy, sweeping movement, not a wild-ass swing like you'd get from Kaline, Clemente, Frank Robinson. Not the tight, big-armed body turn of Yogi Berra. Somewhere along the way Musial broke the cadence of a sprint and settled into the relaxed stride of the home-run hitter in his parade lap, the crowd standing, amazed and happy.
Silent Retreats Page 9