by Don DeLillo
Lockman squares around to bunt.
There’s a man in the upper deck leafing through a copy of the current issue of Life. There’s a man on 12th Street in Brooklyn who has attached a tape machine to his radio so he can record the voice of Russ Hodges broadcasting the game. The man doesn’t know why he’s doing this. It is just an impulse, a fancy, it is like hearing the game twice, it is like being young and being old, and this will turn out to be the only known recording of Russ’ famous account of the final moments of the game. The game and its extensions. The woman cooking cabbage. The man who wishes he could be done with drink. They are the game’s remoter soul. Connected by the pulsing voice on the radio, joined to the word-of-mouth that passes the score along the street and to the fans who call the special phone number and the crowd at the ballpark that becomes the picture on television, people the size of minute rice, and the game as rumor and conjecture and inner history. There’s a sixteen-year-old in the Bronx who takes his radio up to the roof of his building so he can listen alone, a Dodger fan slouched in the gloaming, and he hears the account of the misplayed bunt and the fly ball that scores the tying run and he looks out over the rooftops, the tar beaches with their clotheslines and pigeon coops and splatted condoms, and he gets the cold creeps. The game doesn’t change the way you sleep or wash your face or chew your food. It changes nothing but your life.
The producer says, “At last, at least, a run.”
Russ is frazzled, brother, he is raw and rumpled and uncombed. When the teams go to the top of the eighth he reports that they have played one hundred and fifty-four regular season games and two playoff games and seven full innings of the third play-off game and here they are tied in a knot, absolutely deadlocked, they are stalemated, folks, so light up a Chesterfield and stay right here.
The next half inning seems to take a week. Cotter sees the Dodgers put men on first and third. He watches Maglie bounce a curve in the dirt. He sees Cox bang a shot past third. A hollow clamor begins to rise from the crowd, men calling from the deep reaches, an animal awe and desolation.
In the booth Russ sees the crowd begin to lose its coherence, people sitting scattered on the hard steps, a priest with a passel of boys filing up the aisle, paper rolling and skittering in the wind. He hears the announcer from St. Louis on the other side of the blanket, it is Harry Caray and he sounds like his usual chipper self and Russ thinks of the Japanese term for ritual disembowelment and figures he and Harry ought to switch names about now.
Light washing from the sky, Dodgers scoring runs, a man dancing down the aisle, a goateed black in a Bing Crosby shirt. Everything is changing shape, becoming something else.
Cotter can barely get out the words.
“What good does it do to tie the score if you’re going to turn around and let them walk all over you?”
Bill says, “They’re going into that dugout and I guarantee you they’re not giving up. There’s no quit in this team. Don’t pull a long face on me, Cotter. We’re buddies in bad times—gotta stick together.”
Cotter feels a mood coming on, a complicated self-pity, the strength going out of his arms and a voice commencing in his head that reproaches him for caring. And the awful part is that he wallows in it. He knows how to find the twisty compensation in this business of losing, being a loser, drawing it out, expanding it, making it sickly sweet, being someone carefully chosen for the role.
The score is 4–1.
It should have rained in the third or fourth inning. Great rain drenching down. It should have thundered and lightning’d.
Bill says, “I’m still a believer. What about you?”
The pitcher takes off his cap and rubs his forearm across his hairline. Big Newk. Then he blows in the cap. Then he shakes the cap and puts it back on.
Shor looks at Gleason.
“Still making with the mouth. Leave the people alone already. They came here to see a game.”
“What game? It’s a lambasting. We ought to go home.”
“We’re not going home,” Toots says.
Jackie says, “We can beat the crowd, clamhead.”
Frank says, “Let’s take a vote.”
Toots says, “You’re tubercular in the face. Sit back and watch the game. Because nobody goes until I go and I ain’t going.”
Jackie waves down a vendor and orders beer all around. Nothing happens in the home half of the eighth. People are moving toward the exit ramps. It is Erskine and Branca in the bullpen now with the odd paper shaving dropped from the upper deck. Dodgers go down in the top of the ninth and this is when you sense a helpless scattering, it is tastable in the air, audible in the lone-wolf calls from high in the stands. Nothing you’ve put into this is recoverable and you don’t know whether you want to leave at once or stay forever, living under a blanket in the wind.
Engineer says, “Nice season, boys. Let’s do it again sometime.”
The closeness in the booth, all this crammed maleness is making Russ a little edgy. He lights another cigarette and for the first time all day he does not reproach himself for it. He hears the solitary wailing, he hears his statistician reciting numbers in fake French. It is all part of the same thing, the feeling of some collapsible fact that’s folded up and put away, and the school gloom that traces back for decades—the last laden day of summer vacation when the range of play tapers to a screwturn. This is the day he has never shaken off, the final Sunday before the first Monday of school. It carried some queer deep shadow out to the western edge of the afternoon.
He wants to go home and watch his daughter ride her bike down a leafy street.
Dark reaches for a pitch and hits a seeing-eye bouncer that ticks off the end of the first baseman’s glove.
A head pops up over the blanket, it’s the engineer from KMOX and he starts telling a joke about the fastest lover in Mexico—een May-heeko. An amazing chap named Speedy Gonzalez.
Russ is thinking base hit all the way but glances routinely at the clubhouse sign in straightaway center to see if the first E in CHESTERFIELD lights up, indicating error.
Robinson retrieves the ball in short right.
“So this guy’s on his honeymoon in Acapulco and he’s heard all the stories about the incredible cunning of Speedy Gonzalez and he’s frankly worried, he’s a highly nervous type and so on the first night, the night of nights, he’s in bed with his wife and he’s got his middle finger plugged up her snatch to keep Speedy Gonzalez from sneaking in there when he’s not looking.”
Mueller stands in, taking the first pitch low.
In the Dodger dugout a coach picks up the phone and calls the bullpen for the eighteenth time to find out who’s throwing good and who ain’t.
Mueller sees a fastball belt-high and pokes a single to right.
“So then he’s dying for a smoke and he reaches over for a second to get his cigarettes and matches.”
Russ describes Dark going into third standing up. He sees Thomson standing in the dugout with his arms raised and his hands held backwards gripping the edge of the roof. He describes people standing in the aisles and others moving down toward the field.
Irvin dropping the weighted bat.
“So then he lights up quick and reaches back to the bed finger-first.”
Maglie’s already in the clubhouse sitting in his skivvies in that postgame state of disrepair and pit stink that might pass for some shambles of the inner man, slugging beer from the bottle.
Irvin stands in.
Russ describes Newcombe taking a deep breath and stretching his arms over his head. He describes Newcombe looking in for the sign.
“And Speedy Gonzalez says, Sen-yor-or, you got your finger up my a-ass.”
Russ hears most of this and wishes he hadn’t. He does a small joke of his own, half standing to drape the mike with his suit coat as if to keep the smallest syllable of raunchy talk from reaching his audience. Decent people out there.
Fastball high and away.
The crowd noise is uncertain
. They don’t know if this is a rally in the works or just another drag-tail finish that draws out the pain. It’s a high rackety noise that makes Russ think of restive waiting in a train station.
Irvin tries to pull it, overeager, and Russ hears the soul of the crowd repeat the sorry arc of the baseball, a moaned vowel falling softly to earth. First baseman puts it away.
Decent people out there. Russ wants to believe they are still assembled in some recognizable manner, the kindred unit at the radio, old lines and ties and propinquities.
Lockman stands in, the towhead from Caroline.
How his family used to gather around the gramophone and listen to grand opera, the trilled r’s of old Europe. These thoughts fade and return. They are not distractions. He is alert to every movement on the field.
A couple of swabbies move down to the rail near third base.
How the records were blank on one side and so brittle they would crack if you looked at them cross-eyed. That was the going joke.
He is hunched over the mike. The field seems to open outward into nouns and verbs. All he has to do is talk.
Saying, “Carl Erskine and fireballer Ralph Branca still throwing in the bullpen.”
Pitch.
Lockman fouls it back into the netting.
Now the rhythmic applause starts, tentative at first, then spreading densely through the stands. This is how the crowd enters the game. The repeated three-beat has the force of some abject faith, a desperate kind of will toward magic and accident.
Lockman stands in once more, wagging the yellow bat.
How his mother used to make him gargle with warm water and salt when he complained of a sore throat.
Lockman hits the second pitch on a low line over third. Russ hears Harry Caray shouting into the mike on the other side of the blanket. Then they are both shouting and the ball is slicing toward the line and landing fair and sending up a spew of dirt and forcing Pafko into the corner once again.
Men running, the sprint from first to third, the man who scores coming in backwards so he can check the action on the base paths. All the Giants up at the front of the dugout. The crowd is up, heads weaving for better views. Men running through a slide of noise that comes heaving down on them.
The pitch was off the plate and he wrong-wayed it and Harry started shouting.
The hit obliterates the beat of the crowd’s rhythmic clapping. They’re coming into open roar, making a noise that keeps enlarging itself in breadth and range. This is the crowd made over, the crowd renewed.
Harry started shouting and then Pafko went into the corner and Russ started shouting and the paper began to fall.
One out, one in, two runs down, men on second and third. Russ thinks every word may be his last. He feels the redness in his throat, the pinpoint constriction. Mueller still on the ground at third, injured sliding or not sliding, stopping short and catching his spikes on the bag, a man in pain, the flare of pulled tendons.
Paper is falling again, crushed traffic tickets and field-stripped cigarettes and work from the office and scorecards in the shape of airplanes, windblown and mostly white, and Pafko walks back to his position and alters stride to kick a soda cup lightly and the gesture functions as a form of recognition, a hint of some concordant force between players and fans, the way he nudges the white cup, it’s a little onside boot, completely unbegrudging—a sign of respect for the sly contrivances of the game, the patterns that are undivinable.
The trainer comes out and they put Mueller on a stretcher and take him toward the clubhouse. Mueller’s pain, the pain the game exacts—a man on a stretcher makes sense here.
The halt in play has allowed the crowd to rebuild its noise. Russ keeps pausing at the mike to let the sound collect. This is a rumble of a magnitude he has never heard before. You can’t call it cheering or rooting. It’s a territorial roar, the claim of the ego that separates the crowd from other entities, from political rallies or prison riots—everything outside the walls.
Russ nuzzles up to the mike and tries to be calm although he is very close to speaking in a shout because this is the only way to be heard.
Men clustered on the mound and the manager waving to the bullpen and the pitcher walking in and the pitcher leaving and the runner for Mueller doing kneebends at third.
They are banging on the roof of the booth.
Russ says, “So don’t go way. Light up that Chesterfield. We’re gonna stay right here and see how big Ralph Branca will fare.”
Yes. It is Branca coming through the dampish glow. Branca who is tall and stalwart but seems to carry his own hill and dale, he has the aura of a man encumbered. The drooping lids, leaden feet, the thick ridge across the brow. His face is set behind a somber nose, broad-bridged and looming.
The stadium police are taking up posts.
Look at the man in the upper deck. He is tearing pages out of his copy of Life and dropping them uncrumpled over the rail, letting them fall in a seesaw drift on the bawling fans below. He is moved to do this by the paper falling elsewhere, the contagion of paper—it is giddy and unformulated fun. He begins to ignore the game so he can waft pages over the rail. It brings him into contact with the other paper throwers and with the fans in the lower deck who reach for his pages and catch them—they are all a second force that runs parallel to the game.
Not far away another man feels something pulling at his chest, arms going numb. He wants to sit down but doesn’t know if he can reach an arm back to lower himself to the seat. Heart, my heart, my god.
Branca who is twenty-five but makes you think he exemplifies ancient toil. By the time he reaches the mound the stretcher bearers have managed to get Mueller up the steps and into the clubhouse. The crowd forgets him. They would forget him if he were dead. The noise expands once more. Branca takes the ball and the men around the mound recede to the fringes.
Shor looks at Gleason.
He says, “Tell me you want to go home. What happened to let’s go home? If we leave now, we can beat the crowd.”
He says, “I can’t visualize it enough, both you crumbums, you deserve every misery in the book.”
Jackie looks miserable all right. He loosens his necktie and undoes the top button of his shirt. He’s the only member of the quartet not on his feet but it isn’t the shift in the game that has caused his discomfort. It’s the daylong booze and the greasy food.
Shor says, “Tell me you want to go home so I can run ahead and hold the car door open and like usher you inside.”
Paper is coming down around the group, big slick pages from a magazine, completely unremarkable in the uproar of the moment. Frank snatches a full-page ad for something called pasteurized process cheese food, a Borden’s product, that’s the company with the cow, and there’s a color picture of yellowish pressed pulp melting horribly on a hot dog.
Frank deadpans the page to Gleason.
“Here. This will help you digest.”
Jackie sits there like an air traveler in a downdraft. The pages keep falling. Baby food, instant coffee, encyclopedias and cars, waffle irons and shampoos and blended whiskeys. Piping times, an optimistic bounty that carries into the news pages where the nation’s farmers record a bumper crop. And the resplendent products, how the dazzle of a Packard car is repeated in the feature story about the art treasures of the Prado. It is all part of the same thing. Rubens and Titian and Playtex and Motorola. And here’s a picture of Sinatra himself sitting in a nightclub in Nevada with Ava Gardner and would you check that cleavage. Frank didn’t know he was in this week’s Life until the page fell out of the sky. He has people who are supposed to tell him these things. He keeps the page and reaches for another to stuff in Gleason’s face. Here’s a Budweiser ad, pal. In a country that’s in a hurry to make the future, the names attached to the products are an enduring reassurance. Johnson & Johnson and Quaker State and RCA Victor and Burlington Mills and Bristol-Myers and General Motors. These are the venerated emblems of the burgeoning economy, easier to iden
tify than the names of battlefields or dead presidents. Not that Jackie’s in the mood to scan a magazine. He is sunk in deep inertia, a rancid sweat developing, his mouth filled with the foretaste of massive inner shiftings.
Branca takes the last of his warm-up tosses, flicking the glove to indicate a curve. Never mind the details of manner or appearance, the weight-bearing body at rest. Out on the mound he is strong and loose, cutting smoothly out of his windup, a man who wants the ball.
Furillo watching from right field. The stone-cut profile.
The bushy-haired man still pacing in the bleachers, moaning and shaking his head—call the men in the white suits and get him outta here. Talking to himself, head-wagging like a street-corner zealot with news of some distant affliction dragging ever closer. Siddown, shaddap, they tell him.
Frank keeps putting pages in Gleason’s face.
He tells him, “Eat up, pal. Paper clears the palate.”
When in steps Thomson.
The tall fleet Scot. Reminding himself as he gets set in the box. See the ball. Wait for the ball.
Russ is clutching the mike. Warm water and salt. Gargle, said his mother.
Thomson’s not sure he sees things clearly. His eyeballs are humming. There’s a feeling in his body, he’s digging in, settling into his stance, crowd noise packing the sky, and there’s a feeling that he has lost the link to his surroundings. Alone in all this rowdy-dow. See the ball. Watch and wait. He is frankly a little fuddled is Bobby. It’s like the first waking moment of the day and you don’t know whose house you’re in.
Russ says, “Bobby Thomson up there swinging.”
Mays down on one knee in the on-deck circle half leaning on his cradled bat and watching Branca go into a full windup, push-pull click-click, thinking it’s all on him if Thomson fails, the season riding on him, and the jingle plays in his head, it’s the radio embrace of the air itself, the mosaic of the air, and it will turn itself off when it’s ready.
There’s an emergency station under the stands and what the stadium cop has to do is figure out a way to get the stricken man down there without being overrun by a rampant stomping crowd. The victim looks okay considering. He is sitting down, waiting for the attendant to arrive with the wheelchair. All right, maybe he doesn’t look so good. He looks pale, sick, worried and infarcted. But he can make a fist and stick out his tongue and there’s not much the cop can do until the wheelchair arrives, so he might as well stand in the aisle and watch the end of the game.
