The Legend of Mickey Tussler

by Nappi, Frank;

  “Aspirin tablets. The boy throws aspirin tablets!”

  He strutted around the clubhouse making all sorts of vainglorious remarks about how he wouldn’t be with the rest of them for too long. He also sat by himself, ate by himself, and on road trips insisted on having the room closest to the ice machine, to feed his narcissistic compunction to ice every night, sometimes three and four times, to “keep the swelling down” in his golden arm. Most of the guys turned a deaf ear to the glib commentary and self-indulgent idiosyncrasies. They figured it would all run its course. But Boxcar had little tolerance for Lefty’s shenanigans. He always kept a watchful eye.

  Lefty’s third start for the team was an absolute gem. His fastball was hopping, his breaking ball was rolling off the table, and he was painting the black of the plate with a dizzying assortment of offspeed pitches. He was locked in. Each of the first twenty-one batters just shook his head in frustration as he made his way back to the dugout. Lefty had them baffled. And he was getting stronger with every pitch. Shivers of excitement swept through the crowd as talk of a perfect game found its way to everyone’s lips.

  In the Brewer’s half of the seventh, however, things got a little dicey. James Borelli, their fleet-footed center fielder and target of the dubious moniker “Jimmy Llamas,” was drilled right between the shoulder blades by Grady Harper, the Spartans big right-hander. Harper shrugged and claimed the ball just got away, but everyone knew better. Two innings before, Jimmy Llamas had run down a ball labeled for the left-center-field gap. The catch was legit, and a brilliant defensive play by all accounts. But Jimmy’s theatrics, including a flamboyant basket catch and an inflammatory hand gesture, had really irked the Spartans. There was no intent on Jimmy’s part at all. That wasn’t his way. He was just a goofball. His forehead slanted quickly back to his hair, which, in a prematurely moribund stage, revealed a host of unusual imperfections on his skull. His eyes were slow and heavy and lay most often expressionless beneath bushy eyebrows of dark brown. But it was his lips—two crimson slabs of liver, full and distended—that gave him the unusual nickname. That, and his nervous penchant for squirting saliva through the gap between his two front teeth every few seconds. When they first christened him, Jimmy was less than pleased.

  “Hey, what’s the deal with the llama thing?” he asked defensively. “You guys riding me?”

  Woody was quick to quell the anxiety. “Relax, Borelli. It’s a good thing. Really.” He smirked a little, then struggled for an explanation. “Uh, the way you fire that ball from center field. Yeah. That’s it. It just shoots out of your hand. Like those goddamned llamas at the town fair that are always spitting at the crowd. Man, you can’t get away from that shit. It’s like lightning. So is your arm, Borelli. That’s all.” Woody paused for a moment, trying to measure Jimmy’s blank expression.

  “So that’s it,” Woody continued. “Isn’t that right, Lefty?”

  Lefty was seated at his locker in front of his favorite pinup of Rita Hayworth, rubbing some liniment over his biceps. “Yeah, yeah. Right, Woody. Whatever you say.”

  Jimmy’s face softened. He liked that. He wasn’t accustomed to complimentary remarks. He liked it so much, he adopted a bad habit of forming a gun with his thumb and index finger and firing in pantomime every time he made a spectacular catch or cut someone down from the outfield. It was just good, innocent fun. But innocent or not, Jimmy had to pay the price that day against the Spartans. Baseball has this inimitable way of regulating itself. No attorneys. No mediators or formal negotiations. It was so much easier. Blood for blood. Plain and simple. That was the code.

  Boxcar knew the code. Some said he created it. So when the first Spartan stepped to the plate in the top half of the eighth, he flashed a series of signals, the last one a closed fist, tightly drawn, with the exception of a wayward thumb pointing directly at the batter. Lefty peered in, furrowed his brow, and shook him off. Boxcar repeated the sign, only to be rebuked again. He threw his hand up in disgust.

  “Time!” the catcher screamed. He walked out to the pitcher’s mound, eyes filled with scorn. His mask was still pulled down across his face, making it difficult for Lefty to read his intention, but his gait summoned the other seven guys on the field to take cover.

  “Certainly you know what you have to do, right, Lefty?” Boxcar asked peremptorily, taking the ball from the pitcher’s hand.

  “Shit, yeah. I’ve gotten this guy twice already with high heat. No need to mess with that.”

  Boxcar slid his mask up to the top of his head. His eyes were still ablaze. “You’re shittin’ me, Rogers, right? High fastballs? Not this time. He’ll see just one pitch. Stick it in his ear.”

  “Are you kidding me, Box? No way. Jesus, I’ve got a perfect game here. A perfect game. You know how many scouts are out there tonight? Do you? I can’t mess with that. This is my ticket out of here.”

  Lefty stepped back off the mound. He stood there incredulously, hands resting on his hips in quiet defiance. Boxcar moved closer to him, coming to rest directly on the rubber, elevating his eyes to meet Lefty’s. The he placed his massive hand on his shoulder and put his lips to his ear.

  “You stick that goddamned ball in his ear, or after the game, I’ll put one in yours.” He smiled quickly and his eyebrows danced a little as he pressed the young athlete’s bravado, savoring the signs of its steady dissolution. He rubbed up the ball, dropped it deliberately in Lefty’s glove, and turned back toward the plate. Then, as if suddenly remembering something of vital importance, he came back and through the iron bars of his mask whispered, “And I’ll find another spot to put my bat.”

  The next pitch Lefty threw was a letter-high fastball that the batter tomahawked over the 326-foot sign in left field. In mere seconds, euphoria over minor league baseball immortality and a sure ticket to the big show was replaced by a suffocating shroud of failure. The perfect game, no-hitter, and shutout had all vanished like a fickle phantom. In just a few seconds, Boxcar’s disdain for Lefty leaped exponentially and dropped a veil of silence over the entire ballpark. Everyone, including every member of the Spartans, had expected retaliation.

  The Brewers dropped that game to the Spartans, 4–3. It was a heart-wrenching loss. When the final out was recorded, each Brewer walked off the field in ominous silence. No one said a word to Lefty. No one dared even look at Boxcar.

  They sat at their lockers and undressed with an alarming sense of urgency while Matheson, at Murph’s behest, prattled on, trying to lighten the mood.

  “That’s all right, fellas,” he babbled, unaware of the insidious subplot brewing inside the room. “Hope springs eternal, boys. I seen it all before. Ya see? I may be long in the tooth, but I seen it before. It’ll be fine. Greats oaks from little acorns grow.” The sentiments were met with a collective groan. Nobody really listened to Matheson anymore. Any baseball savvy the man still possessed was grotesquely overshadowed by the comedic air that attenuated his every move.

  Lefty remained by himself, as usual, indulging in his postgame ritual while buckling a little under the uncomfortable weight of his teammates’ furtive glances. Danvers, Pee Wee, Jimmy Llamas, and the others just sat at their lockers, waiting for the fallout. They believed, to a man, that Boxcar’s will would be done. They just could not understand what was taking so long. His justice was usually swift. But it had been almost a good forty-five minutes and he was nowhere to be seen.

  One by one, each man finished changing. Matheson was still yammering something about “every path having its own puddle” and how they should “bless both the flowers and the weeds” as a steady trickle of bodies began exiting the clubhouse, each irritated by the quixotic banter and by Boxcar’s apparent acquiescence. Nobody knew what to make of it. Was it the proverbial calm before the storm? Or had Boxcar finally gone soft, drifting without passion or purpose, like those shriveled paper bits that hover, black and weightless, in suspended animation above a campfire?

  Lefty was the last to leave. He packed his bag
and leaned for a while against the cool metal of his locker. No one was in sight, and the soft rays of the dying afternoon sun were falling, drowsy under the spell of dusk. He was replaying in his mind the bizarre sequence of events that had transpired just a few hours before. He was angry with Boxcar for breaking his rhythm with his white-knight routine. He was certain that his little visit to the mound was the reason for the “fat fastball” that landed some four hundred feet from home plate. He was also queasy. Truth be told, as cavalier as Lefty purported to be, he was still a little worried about what Boxcar would do now that Lefty had failed to execute his wishes. He had heard all the stories. But the longer he stood there, his contorted face obscured by falling shadows, the more he began to think that his concern was all for naught. He laughed at himself, then threw his duffel bag over his shoulder and headed for the door.

  “Going somewhere, candy ass?” a voice echoed through the indistinct air.

  “Listen, Box,” the pitcher explained. “This is all just a big misunderstanding.”

  “I don’t think so.” The catcher gnashed his teeth as he closed in.

  “Come on now. This is ridiculous. I really thought that—”

  Lefty tried to dissuade his assailant, but before he could utter another word, Boxcar dropped him with one punch.

  The lanky athlete stumbled over the bleached wood bench and crashed against the lockers. He lay there, his head swirling, looking up at Boxcar’s face, lit now by the glow of vindictive justice.

  “If it ever happens again, you’ll lose a lot more than just a perfect game. Got it?”

  “Yeah,” Lefty replied weakly, blanched by the humiliation. “Got it.”

  Neither of them spoke about the incident again.

  Matheson fitted Mickey with one of the extra jerseys, number 8, because as Mickey had explained, “it was an even number that looked the same no matter which way you turned it.” Then both Murph and Matheson continued showing Mickey around. It was early afternoon and the high sun shot rays of slanted light through the dusty blinds that adorned the small, cloudy windows of the clubhouse. Murph meandered on whimsically about the team and some of the unique personalities, mindful at every turn of the boy’s uneasiness.

  Murph was a terrific baseball man. He could really manage the flow of a game, pulling all the right strings at just the right time, and possessed enough baseball acumen to coach at any level. But the man’s real genius lay in his understanding of his players—his inimitable ability to maximize what he could get from each of them, both on and off the field. He knew just how much to stroke Lefty’s ego; he spoke to Jimmy Llamas with careful deliberation, the way you would a child; he understood Woody’s reticence during those interminable batting slumps and knew enough to let Boxcar dispense his own brand of justice whenever the situation necessitated such. That’s why when it came time to find someone to look out for Mickey in the clubhouse, he turned to his shortstop, Pee Wee McGinty.

  “Here’s your locker, Mick,” Murph said, smiling. “The furnace is a little loud, but it’s the best spot in the whole damn joint. Right next to Pee Wee’s.”

  Pee Wee held out his hand to Mickey. “Good to meet ya, Mickey. Welcome aboard.”

  The others chuckled when Pee Wee’s knuckles and all five fingers disappeared, swallowed by the massive grip of their newest teammate.

  Murph paused meditatively. He was wondering, as the guys jeered and guffawed, if he had done something foolish. Bringing Mickey in this soon. It had sure seemed like a good idea. Yesterday he was afloat with myriad possibilities and all sorts of visions of success. Now that the boy was here, in his clubhouse with the others, he wasn’t so sure. He shot a look at Matheson, who was clapping his hands and smiling a toothless smile.

  “Well, Mickey, what do ya think?” Murph continued.

  The room was silent. The entire team was looking on with hypnotic eyes. Mickey was vacant. He had lost track of his thoughts and was aimlessly staring off at a point in the distance.

  “Mickey,” Murph repeated uncomfortably under watchful eyes. “So, what do ya think? Will this be okay for you?”

  The gentle giant licked his lips and nodded spasmodically. “Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Mickey thinks that this is okay. Yeah. Okay. Okay.”

  Elliot “Pee Wee” McGinty stood a mere five foot five inches tall and weighed a staggering 127 pounds soaking wet. He had red, cherubic cheeks and a headful of corkscrew curls. With his uniform on and his cap pulled neatly across his brow, he looked as if he should be studying for an algebra exam or shooting marbles in the schoolyard. Only the pencil-thin line of black stubble dotting his upper lip let outsiders know he was indeed a member of the team and not some baseball lackey just along for the ride. That, and his soft hands and lightning-fast feet, both of which distinguished him as the premier shortstop in the league.

  McGinty was definitely the best fit for Mickey. His dad had died when Elliot was just eleven years old. Consequently, young Elliot became responsible for looking out for his mom and his younger sister, Emily, who was born with a degenerative hearing condition that had rendered her deaf by age four. The little girl struggled, drifting through life diffidently, unable to keep pace in a world that moved too swiftly and carelessly to allow for her needs.

  “Why are you crying, Em?” Pee Wee often asked. “What’s wrong?”

  The answer was always the same. “It’s the other kids,” she signed. “Nobody likes me. They look at me funny. Or walk the other way when I’m coming.”

  “Come on, Em, give it some time. Once they get to know you, you’ll have plenty of friends.”

  “I don’t think so, Elliot. Nobody wants to talk to someone’s hands.”

  Murph remembered the bus ride home from Millersport, when he and Pee Wee wound up sharing a seat up front, and Pee Wee told him all about his rough childhood. A pitch-black sky was overhead. The only visible light came like fireflies from distant farmhouses and on the rare occasion when the wheels of the bus rolled past a utility pole with a lamp. Then, for a brief second, the entire cabin would flood with light, and they would momentarily smile but watch helplessly as the white streak rolled gracefully across their faces and up and over the seats, ultimately receding like a phantom.

  “I’ve been in this racket for a lot of years, Pee Wee,” Murph lamented. “Bus rides never get any easier.”

  “How come you still here then?”

  “Gets in your blood, boy. Like a virus or the sweet scent of a woman. Something like that. Some would say I’m still looking for something. Got some unfinished business. I don’t know. I just can’t help it I suppose.”

  Pee Wee was staring at the hole in the back of the seat in front of them. “No, I don’t mean baseball. This. Here. How come you’re still here—not riding first-class somewhere?”

  In the safety of the darkness, Murph resurrected that dream. It wasn’t the type that just faded with waking, acquiescing to the early dawn. This dream was imbued with a colossal vitality, insinuating itself into everything he saw or heard. Everything he smelled. He couldn’t look at a scorecard or put a bat in his hands without hearing the calls from the crowd. Everything was haunted. The smell of freshly cut grass. The sound of flags dancing in a stiff breeze. Shit, he couldn’t even eat sweet-potato pie without reminiscing about Rosie’s, the little truck stop he used to frequent with the guys when he was just a rookie. The images of glory days past spilled out of his head prolifically, each bump the bus hit rattling another loose from its cell. His first game as a Brewer; the game-winning home run to win the championship; the newspaper headline that read, “Murphy Can’t Miss”; the little kids, a zealous throng that followed him around after every game, clamoring for his signature. Then he recalled the collision, and the glorious jaunt through his storied past faded, and he was left, once again, sitting in a broken-down bus staring into the dark.

  “I don’t understand,” Pee Wee repeated. “How come you’re not with the big club?”

  Murph sighed. “That’s a story b
etter told on a longer ride.”

  The two men sat quietly for a while, gazing out blankly through the window at the deserted landscape engulfed by a blanket of darkness. There were owls, not visible to their tired eyes, hooting from distant trees just beyond the open fields. Everything seemed to be inhabited by this vast emptiness. Through the still, lonely air, all they could discern were indistinct outlines of barns and cornstalks, as vapid and impalpable as their breath against the glass.

  “Say, what about you, McGinty?” Murph finally uttered softly, interrupting the silence. “What’s your story?”

  Pee Wee shrugged and his mouth twisted a little. “Ain’t a very happy one, I’m afraid. Daddy died when I was a kid. Mama was crushed. Damn near killed her too. She just cried all the time. I had to take care of her, and my deaf sister. Didn’t leave too much time for anything else.”

  “That is rough.”

  “Yeah, that’s it. I know what you’re saying about the whole baseball-in-your-blood thing. It’s what saved me. And I even had to fight for that. All the ‘he’s too small’ talk. But I wouldn’t have any of that! Shit, the diamond is the only place where I feel right. Like all the other bullshit that seems to matter outside the ballpark ain’t worth a hill of beans.”

  “Amen, McGinty. I hear that.”

  The bus rolled past one of those lighted utility poles, and an errant ray of soft white caught Pee Wee’s cheek and rested momentarily on a single tear that had come to rest. Murph pretended that he didn’t see.

  “It ain’t easy being a man when you’re a little boy,” Murph whispered. “Looking out for your mom, and little sister. Cripe, half the time you don’t know what to do, and the other half you do all wrong. And shit—when you’re your size, not too many folks take you seriously anyhow.” They both chuckled.

  “You’re all right McGinty,” Murph continued. “You know that old expression Matheson uses—‘It ain’t the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog.’ I like that one. Makes a whole lotta sense. And shit, by the looks of things, I’d say you swallowed yourself a Saint Bernard.”