The Natural

by Бернард Маламуд

  When he was told, to his amazement, that the Mercedes Benz was his too, he could only say, “This is the happiest day of my life.” Getting in, he drove around the park to the frenzied waving and whistling of the fans and whirring of movie cameras. The gleaming white job was light to the touch of hand and foot and he felt he could float off in it over the stadium wall. But he stopped before Memo’s box and asked if she would go with him for a jaunt after the game, to which she, lowering her eyes, replied she was agreeable.

  Memo said she longed to see the ocean so they drove over the bridge and down into Long Island toward Jones Beach, stopping when she was hungry, for charcoal-broiled steaks at a roadside tavern. Afterwards it was night, lit up by a full moon swimming in lemon juice, but at intervals eclipsed by rain clouds that gathered in dark blots and shuttered the yellow light off the fields and tree tops.

  She spoke little, once remarking it looked like rain.

  He didn’t answer. Though he had started off riding high (he had paid back the patrons of his Day by walloping a homer that drove in the winning run) he now felt somewhat heavy hearted. For the past two weeks he had been seeing Memo most every day but had made little headway. There were times when he thought yes, I am on my way up in her affections, but no sooner did he think that when something she did or said, or didn’t do or didn’t say, made him think no, I am not. It was a confusing proposition to want a girl you’d already had and couldn’t get because you had; a situation common in his life, of having first and then wanting what he had had, as if he hadn’t had it but just heard about it, and it had, in the hearing, aroused his appetite. He even wished he had not had her that night, and wondered — say he hadn’t — whether he would be in the least interested in her today.

  In another sense it wasn’t a bad evening. He was with her, at least, and they were traveling together, relaxed, to the ocean. He didn’t exactly know where it was and though he liked the water, tonight he did not much care if they never came to it. He felt contentment in moving. It rested him by cutting down the inside motion — that which got him nowhere, which was where he was and she was not, or where his ambitions were and he was chasing after. Sometimes he wished he had no ambitions — often wondered where they had come from in his life, because he remembered how satisfied he had been as a youngster, and that with the little he had had — a dog, a stick, an aloneness he loved (which did not bleed him like his later loneliness), and he wished he could have lived longer in his boyhood. This was an old thought with him.

  Hoping for a better fate in the future he stepped on the gas and was at once seized by an uneasy fear they were being followed. Since the mirror showed nobody behind them, he wondered at his suspicions and then recalled a black sedan that had been on their tail, he thought, all the way down from the city, only they had lost it a while back in turning off the highway. Yet he continued to watch in the mirror, though it showed only the lifeless moonlit road.

  Memo said Jones Beach was too far and told him to stop the next time they came to a brook or pond where she could take off her shoes and go wading in the water. When he spied a small stream running along the edge of a wooded section between two towns, he slowed down. They parked across the shoulder of the asphalt and got out but as they crossed this wooden bridge to the grassy side of the stream, they were confronted by a sign: DANGER. POLLUTED WATER. NO SWIMMING. Roy was all for getting into the car to find another place, but Memo said no, they could watch the water from the bridge. She lit a cigarette, all in light, her hair and green summer dress, and her naked legs and even the slave bracelet around her left ankle gleaming in the light of the moon. Smoking, she watched the water flowing under the bridge, its movement reflected on her face.

  After a while, seeing how silent she was, Roy said, “I bet I got enough today to furnish a house.”

  Memo said, “Bump was coming up for a Day just before he died.”

  He felt anger rise in his heart and asked coldly, “Well, Memo, what did he have that I haven’t got?” He stood to his full height, strong and handsome.

  Without looking at him she spoke Bump’s name thoughtfully, then shook her head to snap out of it, as if it didn’t pay to be thoughtful about Bump. “Oh,” she answered, “he was carefree and full of life. He did the craziest things and always kept everybody in stitches. Even when he played ball, there was something carefree and playful about it. Maybe he went all the way after a fly ball or maybe he didn’t, but once he made up his mind to catch it, it was exciting how he ran and exciting how he caught it. He made you think you had been wishing for a thing to happen for a long time and then he made it happen. And the same with his hitting. When you catch one, Roy, or go up to hit, everybody knows beforehand that it will land up in your glove, or be a hit. You work at it so — sometimes you even look desperate — but to him it was a playful game and so was his life. Nobody could ever tell what would happen next with Bump, and that was the wonderful thing of it.”

  Roy thought this is how she sees him now that he is dead. She forgets how hopping sore she was at him after that time in bed with me.

  But Bump was dead, he thought, dead and buried in his new box, an inescapable six feet under, so he subtly changed the subject to Gus.

  “Gus?” Memo said. At first her face was expressionless. “Oh, he’s just like a daddy to me.”

  He asked her in what way but she laughed and said, “That was a funny business you did with him in the Pot of Fire. How did you do all those tricks?”

  “Easy. They had a magic act all laid out to go on. I walked into the guy’s dressing room and when they saw who I was they let me use his stuff just for the laughs.”

  “Who showed you how to use it?”

  “Nobody. I have done some different things in my time, Memo.”

  “Such as what other ones?”

  “You name it, I did it.”

  “What you did to Max was a scream.”

  A black cloud rolled like a slow wave across the moon. “It’s so strange,” she murmured, looking at the moving water.

  “What is?”

  For a time she didn’t speak, then she sighed and said she meant her life. “It’s been strange ever since I can remember except for a year or two — mostly the part with Bump. That was the good part only it didn’t last very long, not much of the good part ever did. When I was little my daddy walked out on us and I don’t ever remember being happy again till the time I got to go to Hollywood when I was nineteen.”

  He waited.

  “I won a beauty contest where they picked a winner from each state and she was sent to Hollywood to be a starlet. For a few weeks I felt like the Queen of the May, then they took a screen test and though I had the looks and figure my test did not come out so good in acting and they practically told me to go home. I couldn’t stand the thought of that so I stayed there for three more years, doing night club work and going to an acting school besides, hoping that I would some day be a good enough actress but it didn’t take. I knew what I was supposed to do but I couldn’t make myself, in my thoughts, into somebody else. You’re supposed to forget who you are but I couldn’t. Then I came east and had some more bad times after my mother died, till I met Bump.”

  He thought she would cry but she didn’t.

  Memo watched the pebbles in the flowing water. “After Bump I realized I could never be happy any more.”

  “How do you know that?” Roy asked slowly.

  “Oh, I know. I can tell from the way I feel. Sometimes in the morning I never want to wake up.”

  He felt a dreary emptiness at her words.

  “What about yourself?” she asked, wanting to change the subject.

  “What about me?” he said gloomily.

  “Max says you are sort of a mystery.”

  “Max is a jerk. My past life is nobody’s business.”

  “What was it like?”

  “Like yours, for years I took it on the chin.” He sounded as if he had caught a cold, took out his handkerchief and b
lew his nose.

  “What happened?”

  He wanted to tell her everything, match her story and go her a couple better but couldn’t bring himself to. It wasn’t, he thought, that he was afraid to tell her what had happened to him that first time (though the thought of doing that raised a hot blush on his pan, for he had never told anybody about it yet), but about the miserable years after that, when everything, everything he tried somehow went to pot as if that was its destiny in the first place, a thing he couldn’t understand.

  “What happened?” she asked again.

  “The hell with it,” he said. “I told you about myself.”

  He watched the water.

  “I have knocked around a lot and been hard hurt in plenty of ways,” he said huskily. “There were times I thought I would never get anywhere and it made me eat my guts, but all that is gone now. I know I have the stuff and will get there.”

  “Get where?”

  “Where I am going. Where I will be the champ and have what goes with it.”

  She drew back but he had caught her arm and tugged her to him.

  “Don’t.”

  “You got to live, Memo.”

  He trapped her lips, tasting of lemon drops, kissing hard. Happening to open his eyes, he saw her staring at him in the middle of the kiss. Shutting them, he dived deep down again. Then she caught his passion, opened her mouth for his tongue and went limp around the knees.

  They swayed together and he turned his hand and slipped it through the top of her dress into her loose brassiere, cupping her warm small breast in his palm.

  Her legs stiffened. She pushed at him, sobbing, “Don’t touch it.”

  He was slow to react.

  She wailed, “Don’t, please don’t.”

  He pulled his hand out, angrily disappointed.

  She was crying now, rubbing her hand across her bosom.

  “Did I hurt you?”

  “Yes.”

  “How the hell did I do that? I was nice with it.”

  “It’s sick,” she wept.

  He felt like he had had an icy shave and haircut. “Who says so?”

  “It hurts. I know.”

  She could be lying, only her eyes were crisscrossed with fear and her arms goosefleshed.

  “Did you go to a doctor?”

  “I don’t like them.”

  “You ought to go.”

  Memo ran off the bridge. He followed her to the car. She sat at the wheel and started the motor. Figuring she would calm down quicker this way he let her.

  She backed the car onto the road and drove off. The moon sank into an enormous cloud-sea. Memo sped along the asphalt and turned at a fork down a hard dirt road.

  “Put on the lights.”

  “I like it dark.” Her white arms were stiff on the wheel.

  He knew she didn’t but figured she was still nervous.

  Dripping dark cloud spray, the moon bobbed up and flooded the road ahead with bright light. Memo pressed her foot on the gas.

  A thundering wind beat across his skull. Let her, he thought. Whatever she has got on her mind, let her get it off, especially if it is still Bump.

  He thought about what she had said on the bridge about never being happy again and wondered what it meant. In a way he was tired of her — she was too complicated — but in a different way he desired her more than ever. He could not decide what to say or do next. Maybe wait, but he didn’t want to any more. Yet what else was there to do?

  The white moonlight shot through a stretch of woods ahead. He found himself wishing he could go back somewhere, go home, wherever that was. As he was thinking this, he looked up and saw in the moonlight a boy coming out of the woods, followed by his dog. Squinting through the windshield, he was unable to tell if the kid was an illusion thrown forth by the trees or someone really alive. After fifteen seconds he was still there. Roy yelled to Memo to slow down in case he wanted to cross the road. Instead, the car shot forward so fast the woods blurred, the trees racing along like shadows in weak light, then skipping into black and white, finally all black and the moon was gone.

  “Lights!”

  She sat there stiffly so he reached over and switched them on.

  As the road flared up, Memo screamed and tugged at the wheel. He felt a thud and his heart sickened. It was a full minute before he realized they hadn’t stopped.

  “For Christ sake, stop — we hit somebody.”

  “No.” Her face was bloodless.

  He reached for the brake.

  “Don’t, it was just something on the road.”

  “I heard somebody groan.”

  “That was yourself.”

  He couldn’t remember that he had.

  “I want to go back and see.”

  “If you do, the cops will get us.”

  “What cops?”

  “They have been after us since we started. I’ve been doing ninety.”

  He looked back and saw a black car with dimmed headlights speeding after them.

  “Turn at the next bend,” he ordered her, “and I will take over.”

  They were nearer to the Sound than he had suspected, and when a white pea-souper crawled in off the water Roy headed into it. Though the Mercedes showed no lights the whiteness of it was enough to keep it in the sedan’s eye, so he welcomed the fog and within it easily ditched those who chased them. On the way back he attempted to find the road along the woods to see if they had hit somebody. Memo had little patience with him. She was sure, despite Roy’s insistence of an outside groan, that they had hit a rock or log in the road. If they went back the cops might be laying for them and they’d be arrested, which would cause no end of trouble.

  He said he was going back anyway.

  Roy had the feeling that the sedan was still at his shoulder — he could see it wasn’t — as he tried to locate the bridge and then the road along the woods. He wasn’t convinced they had not hit somebody and if he could do anything for the kid, even this late, he wanted to. So he turned the lights on bright, illuminating the swirling fog, and as they went by the fogshrouded woods — he couldn’t be sure it was the right woods — he searched the road intently for signs of a body or its blood but found nothing. Memo dozed off but was awakened when Roy, paying no heed to what lay ahead, ran off a low embankment, crashing the car into a tree. Though shaken up, neither of them was much hurt. Roy had a black eye and Memo bruised her sick breast. The car was a wreck.

  Helping Memo out of a cab that same morning before dawn, Roy glanced into the hotel lobby just as Pop Fisher bounced up out of a couch and came charging at them like a runaway trolley. Memo said to run, so they raced down the street and ducked into the hotel by the side entrance, but they were barely to the stairs when Pop, who had doubled back on his tracks, came at them smoking with anger.

  Memo sobbed she had taken all she could tonight and ran up the stairs. Roy had hoped to have another chance at a kiss but when Pop flew at him like a batty, loose-feathered fowl, killing the stillness of the place with his shrill crowing, he figured it best to keep him away from Memo.

  He turned to Pop, who then got a closeup of Roy’s rainbow eye and all but blew apart. He called him everything from a dadblamed sonovagun to a blankety blank Judas traitor for breaking training, hurting his eye, and blowing in at almost 5 A.M. on the day of an important twin bill with the Phils.

  “You damn near drove me wild,” he shouted. “I just about had heart failure when Red told me you weren’t in your room at midnight.”

  He then and there fined Roy two hundred and fifty dollars, but reduced it to an even hundred when Roy sarcastically mentioned how much the Knights were paying him.

  “And nothing is wrong with my eye,” he said. “It don’t hurt but a little and I can see out of it as clear as day, but if you want me to get some sleep before the game don’t stand there jawing my head off.”

  Pop was quickly pacified. “I admit you are entitled to a good time on your Day but you have no idea of all tha
t I have suffered in those hours I was waiting up for you. All kinds of terrible things ran through my mind. I don’t hafta tell you it don’t take much to kill off a man nowadays.”

  Roy laughed. “Nothing is going to kill me before my time. I am the type that will die a natural death.”

  Seeing the affectionate smile this raised up on Pop’s puss, he felt sorry for the old man and said, “Even with one eye I will wow them for you today.”

  “I know you will, son,” Pop almost purred. “You’re the one I’m depending on to get us up there. We’re hot now and I figure, barring any serious accidents, that we will catch up with the Pirates in less than two weeks. Then once we are first we should stay there till we take the flag. My God, when I think of that my legs get dizzy. I guess you know what that would mean to me after all of these years. Sometimes I feel I have been waiting for it my whole life. So take care of yourself. When all is said and done, you ain’t a kid any more. At your age the body will often act up, so be wise and avoid any trouble.”

  “I am young in my mind and healthy in my body,” Roy said. “You don’t have to worry about me.”

  “Only be careful,” Pop said.

  Roy said good night but couldn’t move because Pop had gripped his elbow. Leading him to the corner, he whispered to Roy not to have too much to do with Memo.

  Roy stiffened.

  “Don’t get me wrong, son, she’s not a bad girl —”

  Roy glared.

  Pop gulped. “I am the one who is really bad. It was me who introduced her to Bump.” He looked sick. “I hoped she would straighten him out and sorta hold him in the team — but — well, you know how these things are. Bump was not the marrying kind and she sorta — well, you know what I mean.”

  “So what?” said Roy.

  “Nothing,” he answered brokenly. “Only I was wrong for encouraging them to get together with maybe in the back of my mind the idea of how they would do so—without getting married, that is — and I have suffered from it since.”