Three afternoons a week, all winter long, he and G. Q. Durham played an hour or so of indoor catch inside the local Moose Lodge. And one night in early winter, during one of these catch games, G.Q. announced, point-blank, that the straight fastball pitcher led “the sorriest damned baseball existence alive.” Papa had responded by firing in a fast one, and saying (as Durham cursed and shook his stinging hand), “I’d’ve thought it was the catcher of the straight fastball pitcher.”
“Catcher’s got the second sorriest,” G.Q. winced. “But the pitcher’s got it worse. Predictability’s the killer. Game after game o’ standing out there, a complete surprise to nobody, nine o’ them versus the one o’ him, playin’ power versus power till his arm falls out its hole. I say that’s- no way to live, Hubert. I say that’s—”
“Walter Johnson seemed to like it all right,” Papa interrupted.
“I’ll come up with the big league examples round here!” Durham roared. “You know damn well that for every Johnson there’s ten thousand Randy Crudenskis.”
“Who’s Randy Crudenski?” Papa asked.
“Now you’re gettin’ the picture,” G.Q. answered. “An’ Crudenski was faster than you and Johnson both.”
Papa smiled, and tossed an apologetically slow curve.
“What slays me in your case, Hubert, is the waste. A fastballer with brains like you an’ junk like me could be deadly for decades. But somethin’ in even the smart fastballer hates his own brains. Somethin’ in him just pines for that four- or five-year career endin’ with the ripped-out shoulder or shredded elbow.”
“I don’t long for that, Gale,” Papa said.
“Then shall we do somethin’ about it?”
“How do we start?”
“Maybe with a big league example besides Johnson, huh? Were you aware before we met, for instance, that I myself was once a highly successful hurler?”
Honest to a fault, Papa shook his head no.
“Well now, I take that as a compliment,” Durham lied. “Everybody knows G.Q. the Junkman, but almost nobody remembers Gale Durham the pitcher. And do you know why?”
Papa didn’t.
“Because the same spirit that infused my pitches infused a total lack of memory of those pitches. What’s that grin? You think I’m joking? Hey! Listen here. You ever hear of two fellas name of Foxx an’ DiMaggio?”
“You mean Trot and Dom?” Papa teased. But when the Bull was lecturing he was oblivious even to his own wit, let alone someone else’s.
“I mean Joltin’ Joe an’ Jimmy,” he said reverently. “The two one-man demolition squads o’ their day. Because I faced ’em fifty times each, easy, an’ they roughed me up some, sure. But listen. The only one of ’em ever homered off me was Foxx, an’ he hit a grand total o’ one!”
Durham left such a gravid pause here that Papa finally said “You’re kidding!” just to be polite.
“Nine thousand an’ some-odd home runs between ’em, those two. But as God is my witness, they never dinged Gale Durham but the once. An’ do you know why?”
Again, Papa didn’t.
“Because a DiMaggio or Foxx don’t sit around waitin’ for your hung curve. He steps right up an’ makes gopherballs outta the best heat an’ hooks on this planet. So your good curve an’ fast one is exactly what you never throw ’em. You don’t get no DiMaggio an’ Foxx excited. You don’t challenge the class genius to a spellin’ bee. You just stand out there lookin’ as lost an’ ignorant an’ hopeless as possible. And then you lull an’ disgust ’em with mediocrity an’ garbage. You throw ’em gooseshit, see? An’ dead slugs. An’ waffleballs. You sling ’em right on in where they’ll get hit too. You want ’em hit, see? ’Cause a man can hit gooseshit an’ dead slugs till his bat wears out, but he’s never gonna hit ’em very far now, is he?”
Papa guessed not.
“In eleven seasons,” Durham gloated, “I won 89 ballgames for three American an’ two National League teams. An’ I’d of won 100 easy if it weren’t for the war, an’ maybe 120 if it weren’t for that.” He jerked his thumb at a stack of empty beer cases over by the wall.
“Some sacrifices have to be made,” Papa said.
“An’ some don’t,” averred the Bull. “Me, I made one each o’ both.”
Papa was still trying to work this last statement out when Durham said, “Now come here, Hubert. The time has come for me to show you somethin’. Used to call it the road apple. It’s like a sinker only different. Dumber. Weirder. Slooooower …”
Two months later Papa pitched the Cornshuckers’ opener. Charged with adrenaline, he shook off his catcher with impunity, had a one-hitter going through four and a third innings, and had struck out five of the first fourteen batters he’d faced, all on fastballs, when G. Q. Durham called time, trudged morosely out to the mound, and confused every ump, fan and player in sight by kicking dirt all over the socks of his unhittable pitcher. “You throw three fast ones to any one man for the rest of the day,” he said, “and you’re on the next bus to the C Stands for Clap League in West Texas!”
Papa nodded, privately chalked the game up for lost, and proceeded to rely on varying speeds and deception instead of power for the first time in his life. It was a frighteningly odd experience: almost every batter he faced, even the pitcher, got wood on his dead slugs and road apples. But they seldom seemed to get much on them. Papa scattered six hits over the last four and two-thirds innings, walked one, struck out one, gave up two earned runs, knocked in two himself, won the game 6 to 3, and felt so fresh and relaxed by the time it was over that he wished it was a doubleheader so they could all go right on having fun. “That there,” Durham said afterward, “was called nine against nine. Whole different proposition, ain’t it?”
Papa agreed, so thoroughly that by the middle of June he was a different pitcher: oddity had become his norm. He varied speeds and directions like a drunk driver, developed a whole new set of mound quirks and spasms and deliveries and mannerisms devised almost solely to encourage batter bewilderment, and he was 10 and 3, with an ERA of 2.54. “Shit, son,” G.Q. told him one day. “You could of botched a few for my sake.” “What do you mean?” Papa asked. And Gale showed him the letter: the Senators were moving him up to Tacoma, in the Pacific Coast League. “Success” is the common name for it. But our whole family—including Papa and our adopted pig of an uncle—was in tears the day we piled into a U-Haul and left our half-grown garden and home in Kincaid, Oklahoma, for good.
5. The Bland Inquisitor
In the year of God-knows-whose Lord 1965, on an evening in late January, twenty-five or so pieces of writing, scribbling, doggerel-versifying, drawing or doodling stolen (or, as the Elder preferred, “confiscated”) from the personal effects and wastebaskets of Everett, Peter and Kincaid Chance over the period of half a year were placed inside Babcock’s briefcase and plunked ominously down in the center of our diningroom table. Seated, without the least sense of impropriety, in Papa’s chair was the Elder himself. To his right were his co-Inquisitors, Mama and Elder Wade Barnes (father of our old friend Micah “Nup nyours! Nup nyours!” Barnes). At the opposite end of the table was the innocuous softball hero and Sabbath School teacher, Brother Randy Beal. And to Babcock’s left was the innocent audience for whose spiritual benefit all the ponderous monkeyshines were about to be performed: Winifred, Beatrice and Irwin.
The time of the gathering had been carefully chosen: the resident anarchist, Everett, was unanarchistically bagging groceries for $1.00 an hour at Pullasky’s One Stop Market; the pundit, Peter, was doing homework at his egghead Catholic girlfriend Julie’s house; the sane parent, Papa, was maintaining his sanity by humiliating the competition in a one-night-a-week basketball league at the Vancouver YMCA; meanwhile the paper boy/drudge, yours truly, was upstairs trying to squeeze six or eight hours’ worth of homework into the single after-dinner hour available before my nightly lapse into stupefaction.
Elder Barnes opened the festivities by asking everyone present to bo
w their heads, and they prayed—or rather he prayed for them—asking the Lord for guidance, wisdom, patience and a number of other things He hasn’t seen fit to bestow upon either Elder to this day. Babcock then cranked out an introduction too long for Irwin or the twins to later remember, though they did recall him saying that they were “three fine Christian children,” that “your brothers have unfortunately chosen a very different path,” and that, little as he or Mama wished to shock or frighten them, they felt compelled for the sake of “your three precious souls” to reveal startling evidence of their brothers” “obscene” and “sacrilegious” tendencies.
Needless to say, he had their completely confused attention as he flipped his briefcase open. Unfortunately, he started things off with the “Why Apple Pie” poem. “There it is!” Irwin cried the instant he saw it. (He’d been afraid I’d thrown it away.) He then let out a loon-laugh, started reciting the thing from memory, and soon had the twins and Beal writhing in a suppressed-giggle fit so virulent that even the stereo grimaces of the Elders couldn’t quell it.
When Mama had finally managed to shut everybody but Beal up, Elder Babcock tried a fake book jacket—a homemade sixteenth-birthday present from Everett to Peter, sporting a meticulous pen-and-ink illustration of a cowpoke, decked out in ten-gallon hat, spurs, chaps and six-guns, leaping high in the air in order to give himself a vicious kick in the mouth with the toe of one of his own boots. Beneath that, in a painstaking calligraphy that looked like rope, was the book’s supposed title:
After reading this aloud, Babcock pulled every stop in his theater-organ voice and roared, “Zen, I will have you know, is the name of the most Satanic branch of the Atheistic (!) Japanese (!!) cult (!!!) of Boooooodism!”
This temporarily knocked the giggles out of Beal. But living as they did with Everett, the twins were not so easily impressed by theatrical baritone lung-blasts. “Grandawma was an Atheist,” Freddy casually remarked to her sister.
“A Famous Scientist too,” Bet said, while the Inquisitionists gaped.
“She was fun!” Freddy sighed.
“We sure loved her!” Bet gushed.
“And we sure love Pete too,” Irwin put in before the Elders could regroup, “and you know, he’s kind of a Buddhist.”
Then even Brother Beal got into the act: “Nancy and I met a Buddhist family over on Maui last winter. They visited the Adventist church there in Lahaina the day I did the guest sermon, and invited us to see their pagoda later that week. Beautiful place. And awfully nice people!”
Nothing like a little twentieth-century chitchat to ruin a late-Gothic mood. Refusing to depart from what he saw as an utterly damning point, Babcock tried describing Peter as “a rampant collector of Satanic paraphernalia” and “a devout worshipper of false Christs.” He then plundered his briefcase for items intended to prove this thesis—all of them stolen by Mama, that very evening, from the walls and shelf in the back of Peter and Everett’s closet, where Pete had been teaching himself to meditate. There were National Geographic pictures of Russian icons and Tibetan Buddhist tankas, handwritten sayings from various sutras and scriptures, a tiny plaster Buddha, a brass incense burner, a little three-inch gong. And Babcock and Mama were happy to note that Irwin and the twins finally had begun to look shocked. What they failed to guess—until Bet expressed it directly—was why: “Boy oh boy!” she gasped. “Is Pete ever gonna be mad when he finds out you guys took that stuff out of his closet!”
Irwin and Freddy both nodded passionately. And again it was the Inquisition, not their audience, that was nonplussed. What they just couldn’t grasp was that we kids loved and kept track of each other. The Famous Scientists had long ago joined Pete in the closet, and noted in their lab book that his pulse was slightly slower after meditation than before. As for Irwin, he’d once snuck into the same closet just to slip an ice cube down Peter’s back, but was so impressed when Pete hardly flinched and went right on meditating that he twice tried meditating himself (though he fell instantly to sleep both times). The problem was simply that our siblings knew us well and were, unlike Mama, unwilling to pretend that they didn’t. The accusations of “Satanism” and “sacrilege” therefore came off sounding like a game of make-believe, and though the twins and Irwin liked games, they found this one a little too ridiculous and mean-spirited to want to play.
Still hell-bent on making some sort of diabolical impression, Babcock tried reading the untranslated Persian half of an ancient Zoroastrian prayer called “The 101 Names of God” (also stolen from Pete) in the most sinister voice he could muster: “Mino-Satihgar!” he groaned. “A-minogar!” he grimaced. “Gat-gar … Garo-gar … Gar-a-gar … Gar-a-gar-gar … A-gar-agar … A-gar-a-gar-gar …”
The audience response? Desperation; a riot of constipated mirth; even Elder Barnes lost it long enough to let out a tiny, Micah-like snigger.
Baffled by the unmanageability of his tiny congregation, Babcock tried a few quotes from various sages which Peter had copied out in a little spiral notebook. From the Zen patriarch Dogen, he read, “If we seek the Buddha outside the heart, the Buddha becomes a devil.” Then he bellowed, “But the Buddha already is a devil!”
The response? Snorts; belly cramps; face cramps; ripping sounds in sinuses …
From the Prophet Muhammad, he read, “Let a man answer to me for what waggeth between his jaws, and what between his legs, and I will answer to him for Paradise …” Then he huffed, “Is that any way for a prophet of God to talk?”
The response? Quaking bodies; bulging neck veins; flecks of pressurized snot shooting out noses …
If Babcock were smart, he’d have surrendered right there. Needless to say, he did no such thing. Losing his temper completely, he shuffled wildly through the briefcase, but was unable to find what he was after for so long that when he finally succeeded, he cried out, “Ah-ha!” He then triumphantly revealed to all eyes a wrinkled-up, wastebasket-salvaged color-pencil study of a nude woman next to whom even Mae West would appear anorexic—bulging pink thighs, humongous breasts, belabored brown nipples, ruby-red lips. Boldly labeled “EVERETT’S DREAM WOMAN,” the sketch had been devised and deployed to tease Irwin, who had taken to speculating long and rather tediously upon the “Girl of My Dreams” of late. What Babcock expected it to arouse were indignant gasps and embarrassed blushes. What it did instead—thanks to his own happy “Ah-ha!”—was bring down the house: “Wah-haw-haw-haw! Whoo-hoo-hoohoo! We’re sorry, Edler! I mean ELDER! Whaw whaw whaw! We just can’t help it!”
That pretty well nailed the lid on the Inquisitorial coffin. Elder Barnes tried to quell the hysteria by threatening the very threesome they’d come to save with eternal hellfire. When that didn’t work Mama tried cutting Irwin’s allowance and threatening the twins with spankings. When that too failed, the eternally clueless Babcock—with a coal-black “That does it!” scowl—reached deep into the entrails of his briefcase and dragged out the greatest proof of iniquity in his possession: shaking a half dozen mildewy Playboy magazines in the three “precious souls’” faces, he roared so loud that I heard him upstairs, “Which of you will dare tell me these are funny?”
But Irwin did far worse than that. First he began to loon-laugh so uncontrollably that he knocked his chair over, lost his allowance forever, and got himself grounded clear up into his mid-forties or so. Then he managed to wheeze that normally he hated tattling, but that since this gathering was just a big old tattletale session anyhow, what the heck, it was too funny not to tell: the Playboys had been a going-away present to Everett, when he quit church, from his young friend and lifelong admirer, Dougy Lee Babcock.
While Elder Babcock turned to stone and Mama turned a number of interesting pastel colors, Elder Barnes heaved a sigh of relief: he’d felt sure that Irwin was about to finger Micah. Meanwhile Brother Beal scratched his nose, checked his watch, stared at his lap, but was finally reduced—by his herculean struggle not to explode with laughter—to the public twiddling of his thumbs. The twins might st
ill have joined in Irwin’s mirth, but they’d never seen Playboys before, felt confused by the mixed reaction to them, and were pooped out anyhow from all the fun they’d been having. So for quite a while—maybe fifteen or twenty seconds—there was no sound in the room but Irwin’s loonlike glee. And though Babcock was too angry and ashamed to look at him, let alone stop him, he never forgot that sound. And he never forgave it.
When it finally dawned on Irwin that the Elder was genuinely humiliated, he cut his laughter off and apologized for it. A long silence ensued. But no length of silence could hide the fact that Mama and Babcock had just been doused in the very dunking chair they’d hoped to use on Everett, Peter and me. All they felt now was confusion. And all they now wanted from their tribunal was a dignified escape route. Lucky for both of them, Babcock was just the fellow to provide it.
Throwing everything back into his briefcase and slamming it shut, the Elder stormed off into the one kind of prefabricated activity he knew could never be sullied by contact with anything so unpredictable as tolerance or intelligence or laughter: the nonstop, slag-slinging sermon. Yet the entire gathering—Irwin and the twins included—was nothing but grateful for the molten verbiage he proceeded to pour over them, because yes, it was hot, but it was a steady, predictable heat; and yes, the words threatened, insulted, and condemned them again and again, but the sound of the words, the physical experience of them, only warmed and lulled them. Like sitting in a sauna, like watching TV, like listening to loud rock or getting pleasantly drunk, Babcock’s brimstoning allowed each listener a total cessation of energy and thought, severed each from his neighbors, and preserved for each the dignity of his or her privacy until the embarrassment of their botched togetherness could end.
The Brothers K Page 30
