The Natural

by Бернард Маламуд

  When he entered the club car, after making sure Roy was elsewhere Sam headed for the bar, already in a fluid state for the train was moving through wet territory, but then he changed his mind and sat down to size up the congregation over a newspaper and spot who looked particularly amiable. The headlines caught his eye at the same time as they did this short, somewhat popeyed gent’s sitting next to him, who had just been greedily questioning the husky, massive-shouldered man on his right, who was wearing sun glasses. Popeyes nudged the big one and they all three stared at Sam’s paper.

  WEST COAST OLYMPIC ATHLETE SHOT FOLLOWS 24 HOURS AFTER SLAYING OF ALL-AMERICAN FOOTBALL ACE

  The article went on to relate that both of these men had been shot under mysterious circumstances with silver bullets from a.22 caliber pistol by an unknown woman that police were on the hunt for.

  “That makes the second sucker,” the short man said.

  “But why with silver bullets, Max?”

  “Beats me. Maybe she set out after a ghost but couldn’t find him.”

  The other fingered his tie knot. “Why do you suppose she goes around pickin’ on atheletes for?”

  “Not only athletes but also the cream of the crop. She’s knocked off a crack football boy, and now an Olympic runner. Better watch out, Whammer, she may be heading for a baseball player for the third victim.” Max chuckled.

  Sam looked up and almost hopped out of his seat as he recognized them both.

  Hiding his hesitation, he touched the short one on the arm. “Excuse me, mister, but ain’t you Max Mercy, the sportswriter? I know your face from your photo in the articles you write.”

  But the sportswriter, who wore a comical mustache and dressed in stripes that crisscrossed three ways — suit, shirt, and tie — a nervous man with voracious eyes, also had a sharp sense of smell and despite Sam’s shower and toothbrushing nosed Out an alcoholic fragrance that slowed his usual speedy response in acknowledging the spread of his fame.

  “That’s right,” he finally said.

  “Well, I’m happy to have the chance to say a few words to you. You’re maybe a little after my time, but I am Sam Simpson — Bub Simpson, that is — who played for the St. Louis Browns in the seasons of 1919 to 1921.”

  Sam spoke with a grin though his insides were afry at the mention of his professional baseball career.

  “Believe I’ve heard the name,” Mercy said nervously. After a minute he nodded toward the man Sam knew all along as the leading hitter of the American League, three times winner of the Most Valuable Player award, and announced, “This is Walter (the Whammer) Wambold.” It had been in the papers that he was a holdout for $75,000 and was coming East to squeeze it out of his boss.

  “Howdy,” Sam said. “You sure look different in street clothes.”

  The Whammer, whose yellow hair was slicked flat, with tie and socks to match, grunted.

  Sam’s ears reddened. He laughed embarrassedly and then remarked sideways to Mercy that he was traveling with a slambang young pitcher who’d soon be laying them low in the big leagues. “Spoke to you because I thought you might want to know about him.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Roy Hobbs.”

  “Where’d he play?”

  “Well, he’s not exactly been in organized baseball.”

  “Where’d he learn to pitch?”

  “His daddy taught him years ago — he was once a semipro — and I have been polishin’ him up.”

  “Where’s he been pitching?”

  “Well, like I said, he’s young, but he certainly mowed them down in the Northwest High School League last year. Thought you might of heard of his eight no-hitters.”

  “Class D is as far down as I go,” Mercy laughed. He lit one of the cigars Sam had been looking at in his breast pocket.

  “I’m personally taking him to Clarence Mulligan of the Cubs for a tryout. They will probably pay me a few grand for uncovering the coming pitcher of the century but the condition is — and Roy is backing me on this because he is more devoted to me than a son — that I am to go back as a regular scout, like I was in 1925.”

  Roy popped his head into the car and searched around for the girl with the black hat box (Miss Harriet Bird, Eddie had gratuitously told him, making a black fluttering of wings), and seeing her seated near the card tables restlessly thumbing through a magazine, popped out.

  “That’s him,” said Sam. “Wait’ll I bring him back.” He got up and chased after Roy.

  “Who’s the gabber?” said the Whammer.

  “Guy named Simpson who once caught for the Brownies. Funny thing, last night I was doing a Sunday piece on drunks in baseball and I had occasion to look up his record. He was in the game three years, batted.340, 260, and.198, but his catching was terrific — not one error listed.”

  “Get rid of him, he jaws too much.”

  “Sh, here he comes.”

  Sam returned with Roy in tow, gazing uncomfortably ahead.

  “Max,” said Sam, “this is Roy Hobbs that I mentioned to you. Say hello to Max Mercy, the syndicated sportswriter, kiddo.”

  “Hello,” Roy nodded.

  “This is the Whammer,” Max said.

  Roy extended his hand but the Whammer looked through him with no expression whatsoever. Seeing he had his eye hooked on Harriet, Roy conceived a Strong dislike for the guy.

  The Whammer got up. “Come on, Max, I wanna play cards.”

  Max rose. “Well, hang onto the water wagon, Bub,” he said to Sam.

  Sam turned red.

  Roy shot the sportswriter a dirty look.

  “Keep up with the no-hitters, kid,” Max laughed.

  Roy didn’t answer. He took the Whammer’s chair and Sam sat where he was, brooding.

  “What’ll it be?” they heard Mercy ask as he shuffled the cards. They had joined two men at one of the card tables.

  The Whammer, who looked to Sam like an overgrown side of beef wrapped in gabardine, said, “Hearts.” He stared at Harriet until she looked up from her magazine, and after a moment of doubt, smiled.

  The Whammer fingered his necktie knot. As he scooped up the cards his diamond ring glinted in the sunlight.

  “Goddamned millionaire,” Sam thought.

  “The hell with her,” thought Roy.

  “I dealt rummy,” Max said, and though no one had called him, Sam promptly looked around.

  Toward late afternoon the Whammer, droning on about his deeds on the playing field, got very chummy with Harriet Bird and before long had slipped his fat fingers around the back of her chair so Roy left the club car and sat in the sleeper, looking out of the window, across the aisle from where Eddie slept sitting up. Gosh, the size of the forest. He thought they had left it for good yesterday and here it still was. As he watched, the trees flowed together and so did the hills and clouds. He felt a kind of sadness, because he had lost the feeling of a particular place. Yesterday he had come from somewhere, a place he knew was there, but today it had thinned away in space — how vast he could not have guessed — and he felt like he would never see it again.

  The forest stayed with them, climbing hills like an army, shooting down like waterfalls. As the train skirted close in, the trees leveled out and he could see within the woodland the only place he had been truly intimate with in his wanderings, a green world shot through with weird light and strange bird cries, muffled in silence that made the privacy so complete his inmost self had no shame of anything he thought there, and it eased the body-shaking beat of his ambitions. Then he thought of here and now and for the thousandth time wondered why they had come so far and for what. Did Sam really know what he was doing? Sometimes Roy had his doubts. Sometimes he wanted to turn around and go back home, where he could at least predict what tomorrow would be like. Remembering the white rose in his pants pocket, he decided to get rid of it. But then the pine trees flowed away from the train and slowly swerved behind blue hills; all at once there was this beaten gold, snow-capped mountain in t
he distance, and on the plain several miles from its base lay a small city gleaming in the rays of the declining sun. Approaching it, the long train slowly pulled to a stop.

  Eddie woke with a jump and stared out the window.

  “Oh oh, trouble, we never stop here.”

  He looked again and called Roy.

  “What do you make out of that?”

  About a hundred yards ahead, where two dirt roads crossed, a moth-eaten model-T Ford was parked on the farther side of the road from town, and a fat old man wearing a broadbrimmed black hat and cowboy boots, who they could see was carrying a squat doctor’s satchel, climbed down from it. To the conductor, who had impatiently swung off the train with a lit red lamp, he flourished a yellow telegram. They argued a minute, then the conductor, snapping open his watch, beckoned him along and they boarded the train. When they passed through Eddie’s car the conductor’s face was sizzling with irritation but the doctor was unruffled. Before disappearing through the door, the conductor called to Eddie, “Half hour.”

  “Half hour,” Eddie yodeled and he got out the stool and set it outside the car so that anyone who wanted to stretch, could.

  Only about a dozen passengers got off the train, including Harriet Bird, still hanging on to her precious hat box, the Whammer, and Max Mercy, all as thick as thieves. Roy hunted up the bassoon case just if the train should decide to take off without him, and when he had located Sam they both got off.

  “Well, I’ll be jiggered.” Sam pointed down about a block beyond where the locomotive had halted. There, sprawled out at the outskirts of the city, a carnival was on. It was made up of try-your-skill booths, kiddie rides, a freak show and a gigantic Ferris wheel that looked like a stopped clock. Though there was still plenty of daylight, the carnival was lit up by twisted ropes of blinking bulbs, and many banners streamed in the breeze as the calliope played.

  “Come on,” said Roy, and they went along with the people from the train who were going toward the tents.

  Once they had got there and fooled around a while, Sam stopped to have a crushed cocoanut drink which he privately spiked with a shot from a new bottle, while Roy wandered over to a place where you could throw three baseballs for a dime at three wooden pins, shaped like pint-size milk bottles and set in pyramids of one on top of two, on small raised platforms about twenty feet back from the counter. He changed the fifty-cent piece Sam had slipped him on leaving the train, and this pretty girl in yellow, a little hefty but with a sweet face and nice ways, who with her peanut of a father was waiting on trade, handed him three balls. Lobbing one of them, Roy easily knocked off the pyramid and won himself a naked kewpie doll. Enjoying the game, he laid down another dime, again clattering the pins to the floor in a single shot and now collecting an alarm clock. With the other three dimes he won a brand-new boxed baseball, a washboard, and baby potty, which he traded in for a six-inch harmonica. A few kids came over to watch and Sam, wandering by, indulgently changed another half into dimes for Roy. And Roy won a fine leather cigar case for Sam, a ‘God Bless America” banner, a flashlight, can of coffee, and a two-pound box of sweets. To the kids’ delight, Sam, after a slight hesitation, flipped Roy another half dollar, but this time the little man behind the counter nudged his daughter and she asked Roy if he would now take a kiss for every three pins he tumbled.

  Roy glanced at her breasts and she blushed. He got embarrassed too. “What do you say, Sam, it’s your four bits?”

  Sam bowed low to the girl. “Ma’am,” he said, “now you see how dang foolish it is to be a young feller.”

  The girl laughed and Roy began to throw for kisses, flushing each pyramid in a shot or two while the girl counted aloud the kisses she owed him.

  Some of the people from the train passed by and stayed to watch when they learned from the mocking kids what Roy was throwing for.

  The girl, pretending to be unconcerned, tolled off the third and fourth kisses.

  As Roy fingered the ball for the last throw the Whammer came by holding over his shoulder a Louisville Slugger that he had won for himself in the batting cage down a way. Harriet, her pretty face flushed, had a kewpie doll, and Max Mercy carried a box of cigars. The Whammer had discarded his sun glasses and all but strutted over his performance and the prizes he had won.

  Roy raised his arm to throw for the fifth kiss and a clean sweep when the Whammer called out to him in a loud voice, “Pitch it here, busher, and I will knock it into the moon.”

  Roy shot for the last kiss and missed. He missed with the second and third balls. The crowd oohed its disappointment.

  “Only four,” said the girl in yellow as if she mourned the fifth.

  Angered at what had happened, Sam hoarsely piped, “I got ten dollars that says he can strike you out with three pitched balls, Wambold.”

  The Whammer looked at Sam with contempt.

  “What d’ye say, Max?” he said.

  Mercy shrugged.

  “Oh, I love contests of skill,” Harriet said excitedly. Roy’s face went pale.

  “What’s the matter, hayfoot, you scared?” the Whammer taunted.

  “Not of you,” Roy said.

  “Let’s go across the tracks where nobody’ll get hurt,” Mercy suggested.

  “Nobody but the busher and his bazooka. What’s in it, busher?”

  “None of your business.” Roy picked up the bassoon case. The crowd moved in a body across the tracks, the kids circling around to get a good view, and the engineer and fireman watching from their cab window.

  Sam cornered one of the kids who lived nearby and sent him home for a fielder’s glove and his friend’s catcher’s mitt. While they were waiting, for protection he buttoned underneath his coat the washboard Roy had won. Max drew a batter’s box alongside a piece of slate. He said he would call the throws and they would count as one of the three pitches only if they were over or if the Whammer swung and missed.

  When the boy returned with the gloves, the sun was going down, and though the sky was aflame with light all the way to the snowy mountain peak, it was chilly on the ground.

  Breaking the seal, Sam squeezed the baseball box and the pill shot up like a greased egg. He tossed it to Mercy, who inspected the hide and stitches, then rubbed the shine off and flipped it to Roy.

  “Better throw a couple of warm-ups.”

  “My arm is loose,” said Roy.

  “It’s your funeral.”

  Placing his bassoon case out of the way in the grass, Roy shed his coat. One of the boys came forth to hold it.

  “Be careful you don’t spill the pockets,” Roy told him.

  Sam came forward with the catcher’s glove on. It was too small for his big hand but he said it would do all right.

  “Sam, I wish you hadn’t bet that money on me,” Roy said.

  “I won’t take it if we win, kiddo, but just let it stand if we lose,” Sam said, embarrassed.

  “We came by it too hard.”

  “Just let it stand so.”

  He cautioned Roy to keep his pitches inside, for the Whammer was known to gobble them on the outside corner.

  Sam returned to the plate and crouched behind the batter, his knees spread wide because of the washboard. Roy drew on his glove and palmed the ball behind it. Mercy, rubbing his hands to warm them, edged back about six feet behind Sam.

  The onlookers retreated to the other side of the tracks, except Harriet, who stood without fear of fouls up close. Her eyes shone at the sight of the two men facing one another.

  Mercy called, “Batter up.”

  The Whammer crowded the left side of the plate, gripping the heavy bat low on the neck, his hands jammed together and legs plunked evenly apart. He hadn’t bothered to take off his coat. His eye on Roy said it spied a left-handed monkey.

  “Throw it, Rube, it won’t get no lighter.”

  Though he stood about sixty feet away, he loomed up gigantic to Roy, with the wood held like a caveman’s ax on his shoulder. His rocklike frame was motionless,
his face impassive, unsmiling, dark.

  Roy’s heart skipped a beat. He turned to gaze at the mountain.

  Sam whacked the leather with his fist. “Come on, kiddo, wham it down his whammy.”

  The Whammer out of the corner of his mouth told the drunk to keep his mouth shut.

  “Burn it across his button.”

  “Close your trap,” Mercy said.

  “Cut his throat with it.”

  “If he tries to dust me, so help me I will smash his skull,” the Whammer threatened.

  Roy stretched loosely, rocked back on his left leg, twirling the right a little like a dancer, then strode forward and threw with such force his knuckles all but scraped the ground on the follow-through.

  At thirty-three the Whammer still enjoyed exceptional eyesight. He saw the ball spin off Roy’s fingertips and it reminded him of a white pigeon he had kept as a boy, that he would send into flight by flipping it into the air. The ball flew at him and he was conscious of its bird-form and white flapping wings, until it suddenly disappeared from view. He heard a noise like the bang of a firecracker at his feet and Sam had the ball in his mitt. Unable to believe his ears he heard Mercy intone a reluctant strike.

  Sam flung off the glove and was wringing his hand.

  “Hurt you, Sam?” Roy called.

  “No, it’s this dang glove.”

  Though he did not show it, the pitch had bothered the Whammer no end. Not just the speed of it but the sensation of surprise and strangeness that went with it — him batting here on the railroad tracks, the crazy carnival, the drunk catching and a clown pitching, and that queer dame Harriet, who had five minutes ago been patting him on the back for his skill in the batting cage, now eyeing him coldly for letting one pitch go by.

  He noticed Max had moved farther back.

  “How the hell you expect to call them out there?”