“You know, McNally,” he finally said, biting the end off a cigar with some deliberation. “It’s taken a little while, but I have to say, I’m really starting to like your style.”
McNally arrived at the jailhouse early in the morning and was directed to an austere cell.
“This is my room,” Lefty said to the coach from the shadows of the farthest corner. “Nice, right? Sorry I haven’t had the time to write and thank you.”
McNally caught sight of the cockroaches on the broken toilet seat and the dilapidated cot on which Lefty had been sleeping and knew he would have no problem selling the pitcher on his proposal.
“Listen, Ace, how would you like to get out of here—leave this place and come pitch for me?”
“Haven’t I had to deal with enough of your bullshit already? Just how fucking stupid do you think I am?”
McNally looked at him and laughed soundlessly. “Listen, I can understand you being upset and all, Lefty, but I—”
“Upset? I ought to tear your fucking head off, you backstabbing piece of shit.”
McNally felt he had to placate Lefty at any cost. The guy was desperate, sure, but McNally needed him more than Rogers knew. So he let him rant until Lefty finally tired, like a boxer who had just emptied his load in the first round of a title match. Then McNally took over again.
“Come on now, Lefty, we’re your only real friends here. Wasn’t us who turned you in. That was your own team that did that. It’s terrible. Just terrible. I mean, we certainly could have. After all, you did break our agreement. Sore arm, remember? Anyway, that’s not why I’m here. I think you’re gonna like what I came here for. So I think, Mr. Rogers, that it would be in your best interest to control your anger and listen to what I have to say.”
A thaw was in the air as the two men discussed the possibility of Mr. Winston taking on Lefty’s case.
“Money talks, Lefty. We’ll get you out today, on bail, and then Winston will begin working on some of the legal issues. He’s good. He’ll have you cleared of charges in a jiffy. And the best part about it, for you anyway, is that it won’t cost you a goddamned dime—just a few innings.” McNally sighed and then smiled. “Well, Ace, what do you say?”
Mickey returned to the lineup the same day Lefty was released to the Rangers. Both teams had not played in days because of torrential downpours that had flooded the entire region. The hiatus provided by Mother Nature helped both squads, for each could now send its best hurler to the mound for the next game.
The water was still pretty high in most of Borchert Field, but small parts it of were dry enough for practice. Murph divided up the guys. The infielders took the right-field line and played pepper; the outfielders worked on cutoff throws in the opposite corner; the pitchers, including Mickey, threw lightly from a makeshift mound just at the edge of the center-field grass.
“Did you hear about Rogers?” Murph asked Boxcar as they watched the pitchers loosening up.
“Yeah, Danvers just told me. Didn’t take him long. Christ, Dennison just let him go a few days ago. Scumbag. He should feel right at home with the rest of them. Does Mickey know?”
“Don’t think so,” Murph said.
“Are you gonna tell him? I mean, before he finds out himself?”
“I really don’t know. Seems to me that I should hold off as long as possible. Why upset him any more than he is already. Besides, I don’t know how he’ll ever understand it all anyway. I barely do. Illegal search and seizure. Police brutality. It’s all bullshit. The goddamned guy’s guilty.”
Each of them realized just how elementary their principles had always been. Right was right, and wrong just wrong. It always seemed simple. Logical. Now, facing the unspeakable human vileness that had touched all of them so profoundly, they were at a loss to make any sense of it. Ultimately, though, they let it go, realizing they had bigger issues directly at hand.
Once Mickey had loosened up enough, Murph marked off with his feet the proper distance, sixty feet six inches, and called Mickey over. With Mickey back, Murph was a new man. The churning of uncertainty that always settled in his stomach waned. His appetite returned and he was sleeping again. He even looked better. His eyes were focused, his ashen face was restored to a healthy rose, and he appeared to be standing straighter, his shoulders square and strong.
“Okay, Mick,” he said, tossing a ball in his direction. “Let’s see if ya still got it.”
Boxcar squatted, and under waves of sunshine that had only just begun to sponge the puddled earth, Mickey tossed his first pitch in almost two months. The windup was still the same—that inimitable fist in the glove, followed by the rolling of the arms—but the delivery was off. Way off. The ball leaped from his hand and sailed a good two feet to the left of Boxcar’s glove and splashed to a stop off to the side.
“Relax, Mick,” Murph said assuredly, pulling out a new baseball from his jacket pocket. “The ball was probably wet. Try this one.”
Mickey took the ball, wound up once more, and fired. The ball missed the mark again.
Murph tried to buffer the flutter of anxiety that was rising from deep within his gut. Mickey’s eyes glazed over and he was mumbling incoherent thoughts adorned with rhyming couplets.
“Take it easy, big fella,” Murph said, looking at Boxcar, his alarm now rampant. “Just try again.”
Mickey continued to fire baseballs all over the place. His control had never been so erratic. Murph felt, as he watched the debacle unfold, a growing irritation that bordered on something far worse.
The grass behind Boxcar must have been littered with a dozen baseballs before Murph couldn’t stand it anymore.
“Box, where’s the other glove?” Murph screamed impatiently. “You know, the one we used last time?”
“Right here.” Boxcar reached into his bag and pulled out the special glove, the one with the red paint in the pocket. He put it on his hand and pounded it hard, then squatted back down and set the target. Mickey smiled, recognizing the familiar sight.
The results, however, were no different. Mickey just could not find Boxcar’s target. High, in the dirt, wide left, then right. He was all over the place. Murph sighed. His luck, he lamented silently, was curdling again. Time was waning, and he needed Mickey badly. His stomach burned, and he could barely breathe. He brought his fist to his chest and let out a belch, then motioned to Boxcar to stand up.
“This is not working,” Murph complained. “We need to try something else.”
Everything blurred before his eyes. He could not decide what to do. There would never again in his life be another moment like this— where every decision held the potential to either bathe him in champagne showers or lead him back to the pit of ignominy.
Boxcar saw Mickey sitting Indian-style on the damp grass a few feet away, the boy’s thoughts miles away, and said, “Shit, Murph, this is unreal. I really don’t know what to say. I’m sure it will be fine. But I have to say, I never saw someone have so much trouble tossing the old apple.”
Murph took off his cap and wiped his brow. Suddenly, his eyes lit, as if someone had just thrown a switch. “What did you just say?”
“I just can’t believe how much trouble he’s having throwing.”
“Yeah,” Murph said with curious alacrity. “Trouble throwing the old apple.”
Murph and Mickey left the park immediately. They walked quietly by a small brick schoolhouse and down past a defunct dairy farm, spotted here and there with weeping stacks of hay ravaged by blister beetles. Mickey wanted to stop, his gaze suspended somewhere beyond the chicken-wire boundary, but Murph trudged on, carrying with him an empty burlap sack, a piece of coal, and a half-baked idea of how he was going to fix Mickey’s problem.
Mickey’s eyes strayed though he followed Murph’s every step. Just around the bend, past an irregular lake, was Blaney Grove, seventy acres of the best-tasting apples around. The grounds were pristine, a brilliant canvas of seasonal colors, the trees all nestled in perfect rows on a
rolling, green lakeside slope.
Murph stopped momentarily and took a quick look all around. Then they hopped over the weather-beaten post-and-rail barrier and made their way across the grassy expanse, a pale green meadow littered here and there with random trees and some premature fruits of the season. They walked purposefully, Mickey stepping through some undergrowth, holding back branches and ducking his head, while Murph bent down now and again and loaded some of the damaged ground fruit into his sack, his eye ever watchful for the proprietor.
They walked quite a ways before this prairielike parcel finally gave way to some of the countless rows of pregnant trees. Where several of these rows intersected to form an empty triangular sector, Murph set down his sack and rested. “This is perfect,” he said, smiling. “Just what the doctor ordered.”
From the middle of the open space, he eyed one of the trees—a tall one with a large girth.
“Wait here, Mick,” Murph instructed. He jogged over to the mammoth tree, removing some of the loose, fragmented bits of bark from the ancient trunk with his hands before pulling out the piece of coal from his pocket. Carefully, he fashioned a black circle, eighteen inches in diameter. When he finished, he cocked his head to the side slightly, observing his handiwork. He smiled. Then he placed his feet together and precisely marked off the distance back to Mickey—sixty feet six inches.
“Okay, big fella,” he said with childlike exuberance, producing an apple from the sack. “Let’s see if you can get this thing right in that circle over there.”
Mickey nodded, although he was not quite certain what Murph meant. Confusion abounded in the slow lowering of his eyes.
“Come on, Mick,” Murph prodded, mindful of the young man’s hesitation. “Just like on the farm—back home. Pretend that circle over there is a big old barrel, lying on its side. Don’t think about anything else. Just let it fly.”
Mickey stood for a moment longer in the thickening afternoon, his eyes now glued to the primitive drawing some sixty feet away. The vision conjured by Murph’s words roused a host of other associations. He fingered the apple in his hand nervously, the rest of his body paralyzed by the poignant reminiscence.
“It’s okay, Mickey. Take your time. No rush. You can do this. I know you can. Come on, smash that apple, right in the circle. Oscar’s hungry, and you know how he loves apples.”
Mickey’s face softened as if Murph had pulled a plug, releasing all of the uncertainty and angst, sending it rushing through Mickey’s pores and extremities and into the ground. All at once the boy felt liberated. He brought the hand holding the apple into the other. Then, with the afternoon air heavy with the song of cicadas, he rolled his arms, reared back, and hurled the fruit at the tree.
The apple whizzed through the air like a meteor, a flash of red and green. Murph laughed out loud and pumped his fist in the air in relief when the apple hit the circle dead center, bursting into a thousand fragments that rained down like confetti all around the roots knotted at the tree’s bottom. “Yee ha!” he screamed, arms stretched to the heavens in unbridled exultation. He was smiling harder than he had in months.
“Here, Mick,” he said impatiently. “Try it again.”
Mickey took another apple from Murph. He stood there, scratching the backs of his hands with his fingernails, pondering the meaning behind Murph’s reaction, an explosion of emotion so powerful that it had now crossed over into his world. Buoyed, Mickey launched into his prepitch ritual and fired once more at the tree.
Splat.
The wormy fruit struck the tree in the exact same spot. Murph gushed with satisfaction, then emptied the sack and had Mickey throw again and again, just to make sure.
Splat. Splat. Splat.
It was the most melodious sound Murph had ever heard—the triumphant song of the bull’s-eye. A million thoughts flooded his mind but never made it past his lips.
The sun had begun to dip below the distant treetops, bathing the orchard in oblongs of rich shadows. Short of declaring right then and there that Mickey was “back,” there was absolutely nothing to say. They remained in the grove only a few more minutes, enjoying the cool beneath the tree’s lowest bough, chatting in between sampling some of the orchard’s offerings.
“Sure is pretty as a picture,” Murph commented, then bit into the sweet flesh of a burgundy indulgence. “Nothing like good old country living, huh, Mick?”
“Uh-huh,” he answered, his words garbled by cheeks distended with hunks of apple.
“I tell you what, Mick. You look good. Real good. I feel like you’re ready. You know, for the games coming up? Nothing too crazy. Maybe a few innings to start. We’ll play it by ear. What do ya say?”
Mickey heard the groaning of a passing freight train off in the distance, running heavy and slow, the laborious clatter of metal cars ringing, vacant and timeworn. He wondered what the train was carrying, where it was headed, and if, with its crawling speed, it would ever arrive at all.
“Mick? What do you say?”
“What do I say? What do you mean, Mr. Murphy?”
“Pitching. Tomorrow. Do you want to pitch for me tomorrow?”
The clickety-clack of the train’s wheels grew distant, a fading echo that wheezed and gasped before finally dying in the cool air of late afternoon.
“Yup,” Mickey said, his right arm raised in the direction of the train’s final timbre. “Mickey will pitch tomorrow, Mr. Murphy.”
Tomorrow came fast. The clouds hung low and thick, suffocating a hot sun that pushed against the steel gray curtain with little success.
The Sidewinders arrived at Borchert Field to find the modest arena transformed by festive ornamentation and breathless pandemonium. Throngs of ebullient fans spilled into the ballpark like a sea swell, cramming the stands with zip and vinegar, waving banners fashioned with love and fastidious care while stamping their feet and screaming, at fever pitch, Mickey’s name.
“We want Mickey!” Boom, boom, boom boom boom. “We want Mickey!” Boom, boom, boom boom boom.
“Do you believe this place?” one of the opposing players remarked, staring out incredulously at the raging energy. “It’s like the World’s Fair in here.”
Homespun signs and banners fashioned from bedsheets and paints rippled in the breeze. In one corner, the words baby bazooka back at last. In another, in mick we trust hung as a testimony to the phenom’s importance to the team. And in dead center field, draped over the railing for all to see, was the most heartfelt sentiment of all: WELCOME BACK MICKEY—WE LOVE YOU.
The fans’ frenzy lasted all through warm-ups, rising and falling, until reaching a crescendo when the object of their unadulterated affection stepped onto the field with the rest of the hometown heroes. All rose in joyful adulation, saluting Mickey with raucous cheers and undulating arms all rocking in unison. Mickey wanted to exclaim that he did not know what he did to deserve all of this, but Boxcar was calling for warm-up tosses.
With the announcement of the Sidewinders’ first batter, the roar of the crowd dulled to a restless murmur. Mickey stood on the hill, a prodigious wall of bone and muscle. He was calm, composed, staring in at Boxcar’s glove with stolid eyes cast in what appeared to be a pasteboard mask. The call of his name, popping in and out like an erratic heartbeat, found his ears. He tried to remain composed but couldn’t help but smile. It was good to be back. Buoyed by the overwhelming outpouring of affection, he rolled his arms, rocked back, lifted his leg, and fired. The fervor in the stands swelled again, strong and constant.
“Strike one,” the umpire called, his voice straining to be heard over the commotion.
The hooting and stamping grew stronger with the second strike and even stronger with the third. The little ballpark rocked beneath the zealous feet of rabid Brewer faithful. Their ace was back, and they were loving every minute of it. He was sharp and showed no signs of his prolonged absence, disposing of the Sidwewinders in routine fashion, one, two, three.
The air had a cool edge to it, a
subtle hint that postseason baseball would be arriving in the blink of an eye.
Murph wanted to draw first blood, so he sent Pee Wee up to bunt, hoping to push across an early run. The Brewers’ leadoff man, however, bunted through the first two offerings. Ripples of displeasure reverberated softly through the energized crowd. Pee Wee stepped out of the box and blew on his hands. His head throbbed at one temple. He considered, for a fleeting moment, attempting it again, figuring nobody would be expecting it, but the specter of a bunted third strike stopped him. He eased his way back in and backed off the plate a hair, convinced that he was about to see a little 0-2 chin music. But instead he was greeted by a twelve-six hook that buckled his legs, ringing him up for the first out. Instantly, the boobirds were off their roost, questioning Murph’s conservative strategy to open the game.
Mickey rolled on though, providing the fans with plenty to cheer about. He was perfect through the first four innings, with the exception of a second-inning walk and a hit batsman in the third. He was not the Mickey of old, not yet anyway—the guy who mowed down opposing batters with pitiless balls of fire. To the contrary, he never looked more human. Of the first twelve outs, only two were recorded by strikeout. The Sidewinders had put the ball in play all afternoon, but not with any sort of authority. Danvers, Pee Wee, and Arky Fries were called on several times each to corral routine grounders that sputtered weakly to their yawning gloves, and once or twice a Sidewinder bat found the bottom half of the ball and sent it airborne, launching cans of corn that fell harmlessly into the leather webbing of one of the outfielders. The only real challenge came with two outs in the fourth, when Mickey sawed off a bat with a hard two-seamer that cut the lumber in two, sending the splintered barrel spinning at Danvers’s head just as the ball approached.
“Holy hell,” the startled third baseman exclaimed. “Some mighty big mosquitoes buzzing around today.”
Mickey was as good as gold. But as the day wore on, he tired. His legs labored and the muscles in his shoulder and biceps atrophied, rendering his usually potent arm ineffectual. It was a troubling sight. Six innings of intense hurling brought to light his diminished stamina and left the standout pitcher merely a shell of his former self.
The Legend of Mickey Tussler Page 25