Dead Ball

by R. D. Rosen

  “All right,” she said. She gave Harvey her cell phone number and disappeared behind two decorative screens that demarcated the bedroom in the open loft.

  Ten minutes later, Moss and Harvey said good-bye to her on Richmond Street in the shadow of the Route 95 overpass.

  “I’m just curious,” Harvey said to her, “how you knew I had a gun.”

  She thought for a moment. “You act like a cop. For one thing, honey, your eyes were everywhere from the moment you and Moss arrived. You were taking in everything. Recording and filing away. I have a lot of experience watching men watching me. I know what it is to check out and be checked out. I’ll see you tonight, Harvey Blissberg.”

  “Be careful, baby,” Moss said, not kissing her, even though there was no one on the sidewalk to see them in this city with its curious lack of bustle. The two men watched her in silent appreciation as she walked away toward Weybosset Street in her blue jeans and running shoes, with her backpack slung over one shoulder and her hair in a golden ponytail.

  “Moss?” Harvey said.

  “What is it now, Bagel Boy?”

  “Don’t fuck with her.”

  13

  MY PREGAME GUEST TONIGHT, folks, is someone you older Jewels fans will warmly remember, I’m sure, since he was a member of the Jewels’ original team. For five seasons before that he patrolled the main pasture up in the home of the bean and the cod. Since his retirement from the game almost fifteen years ago, he’s worked as a private investigator and now as a motivational speaker.” Coffman winked at Harvey as he said this. “I’m talking, of course, about Harvey Blissberg, who’s been good enough to come up here and chew a little fat with Snoot as we await the opener of the Jewels’ three-game set against the first-place Cleveland Indians and a game that we hope—no, we assume—will see the amazing Moss Cooley hit in his forty-eighth straight game. So, Harvey, what brings you back to Providence?”

  Harvey fiddled with his headset, which was bothering him. “I guess there’s a feeling that my experience as a motivational speaker might come in handy.”

  “Folks, as you may have read in this morning’s Providence Journal, Harvey Blissberg’s been hired as the Jewels’ new motivational coach, although I have to say, Harvey, the way this team’s been playing, you may have your work cut out for you.”

  Harvey laughed. “Yeah, this could be the shortest tenure of any motivational coach on record, since the team is really having a great season.”

  “You said it, my friend.” Coffman turned to him, chin on hand, with an expression of ridiculously solemn interest. “Maybe you can tell our listeners what exactly it is that a motivational coach does.”

  “Well, basically, Snoot, in the clubhouse before the game I put on a short pleated skirt and grab the pom-poms, and then I do a rousing cheer for the guys that ends with a cartwheel and the splits.”

  A laugh exploded out of Coffman’s mouth, showering Harvey with a fine spittle mist. “Ouch!” he said. “That’s gotta hurt!”

  “It’s more of a modified splits, but of course, I still have to be helped up. Seriously, though, I’m still feeling my way into the job. Trying to see where the problem areas are, what I can do to help certain players prepare better mentally for the game. You know the old saying—failure to prepare is to prepare for failure.”

  “Well, there’s one guy on the team who doesn’t need any extra motivation right now.”

  “Moss Cooley.”

  “My boy Moss has hit in forty-seven straight games, and tonight he’ll be trying for forty-eight, which would put him just eight shy of Joe DiMaggio’s remarkable record.”

  “There’s a cute sign out there, Snoot, hanging over the upper deck in right field. I don’t know if you spotted it.”

  “Folks, it’s a bedsheet with what looks like a mail slot drawn on it and the message, ‘Insert No. 48 Here.’ Harvey, you’re something of a student of the game and not a bad hitter in your playing days, so you must know how hard it is to hit in twenty straight games, let alone forty. Hard as a week-old biscuit.”

  “People should keep in mind that DiMaggio’s record is widely considered to be so many deviations above the norm that it’s the one record that shouldn’t even exist. I know Moss is closing in, but there’re a lot of people out there who don’t think he has a chance to break DiMaggio’s record.” Harvey wanted to add, “And there are some who don’t think he should have the chance, either.”

  “C’mon, now, Harvey, don’t do anything to jinx him.”

  “I’m just being realistic, Snoot, but you’re absolutely right. If anyone is going to do it, it’s Moss.”

  “Let’s take a minute for our sponsors, fans. We’ll be right back.”

  They shed their headsets. Harvey stretched.

  “Damn funny, your line about the pom-poms,” Coffman said.

  “Thank you.”

  “I’ve been doing a little digging, Harvey. What if I told you that at least one player on this team has been involved in racist activities? I don’t know about now, but he’s got a bit of a history.”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me,” Harvey replied, reaching for his can of Pepsi. “You want to tell me any more?”

  Coffman exhaled loudly. “I want to make a few more phone calls.”

  “Who are you talking to, Snoot?”

  “Just some friends around the league. Look, I’m only trying to help. I know you got your hands full taking care of Moss. Anyway, it probably won’t amount to much.” Observing Harvey’s expression, he added, “You don’t want me doing this, do you?”

  Harvey drained his Pepsi. “Look, I appreciate it, but I don’t want us to be tripping over each other.”

  “Got it. But what if I just make a few last phone calls and let you know what I found out?”

  “That’s fine.” Anything to keep him amused.

  Coffman glanced at his engineer and donned the headset. “We’re back, fans, and with me is Harvey Blissberg, a man who’s done it all. Played center field for the Red Sox and Jewels, been a private detective, a motivational speaker…”

  Harvey did not want to subject Marshall Levy and Felix Shalhoub to the distracting presence of a ravishing young woman in Marshall’s skybox, so they took two house seats along the third-base line and watched Moss Cooley’s first at-bat.

  “What’s the deal with the stupid grinning Indian face on Cleveland’s hats?” she said. “It’s so demeaning.”

  Although no slave to political correctness, he nonetheless agreed. “It’s like the Washington Redskins logo in football—they’ve got the profile of a brown-faced Indian chief. It’s like putting a rabbi on your hat and calling your team the Moneylenders.”

  Moss struck out on a wicked split-fingered fastball from Cleveland’s ace, Rick Rusansky, and Harvey feared it would be a long evening for the hometown boys. Cooley trudged back to the team’s first-base dugout, staring disappointedly at his bat.

  “Okay, Moss, you’ll get ’em next time!” Cherry Ann yelled, standing up in her tight jeans.

  That afternoon, his old mentor Jerry Bellaggio had called back with his preliminary findings, which did little to illuminate Moss’s predicament. Due to the lack of interracial violent crimes in recent years, the Rhode Island Attorney General’s Office and the Providence Police had disbanded their hate crimes units. Most of the serious violent crime took place within new immigrant groups. There were no white supremacist groups based in the state, nor any highly visible or active chapters of groups that were based elsewhere. As for the rogue supremacist group Izan Nation, to which Al Molis and Andy Cubberly had belonged, it was, according to Jerry, a splinter group that became a toothpick and then nothing at all. It did not even show up on the FBI’s radar screen. His FBI crony at the Behavioral Analysis Unit had run a check on the agency’s computers for anyone with a history of using lawn jockeys to threaten another person and come up empty.

  As for Negro lawn jockeys themselves, Jerry had discovered that the earliest “Jockos” (legend
had it that George Washington commissioned the first lawn jockey as a memorial to a young black volunteer named Jocko Graves, who had frozen to death holding the reins of Continental Army horses while waiting for Washington to cross the Delaware) were decorative stone tributes to the horse-savvy West African slaves who turned out to be such excellent groomsmen. Soon, despite their indentured status, they proved to be expert jockeys in the burgeoning sport of horse racing. The call to the post at the first Kentucky Derby in 1875 featured thirteen black jockeys in a field of fifteen. Seven of the first thirteen Derbies were won by black jockeys who owned their own horses. But the prominence of blacks in the equestrian world, and the threat emancipation posed to the social order, eventually gave rise to demeaning, caricatured lawn jockeys—stooped, bug-eyed, and grinning—like the one Moss had received. Lawn jockeys, according to Jerry’s research, had also played a political role in nineteenth-century America. Along the Underground Railroad, a lawn jockey sporting a brightly colored ribbon, or one with its lantern lit, signaled a safe house for escaping slaves. By the early twentieth century, black jockeys had virtually disappeared from American race tracks, but black lawn jockeys lived on, increasingly divorced from the progressive social reality to which they originally paid homage.

  Jerry had found no evidence that cast-iron jockeys were still made, but molded aluminum and cement ones were being manufactured in the United States and Mexico. Jerry had found an Equine Art and Gift Emporium in Florida that custom hand-painted cement-and-aluminum jockeys—four coats usually required—and sold them to thoroughbred horse farms, but neither bought nor sold cast-iron jockeys. The online auction service eBay offered collectible cast-iron jockeys ranging from eleven inches to forty-five inches high, weighing from two pounds to three hundred. (Harvey’s own phone calls that afternoon had failed to find a match between a description of any lawn jockey offered or sold on eBay and the one left for Moss.) Oddly enough, despite this friendly trafficking in lawn jockeys, Jerry had been unable to find any information on them in the major Americana, collectibles, and flea market price guides.

  Jerry had found only one reported legal case involving lawn jockeys on the Internet. The American Civil Liberties Union litigation docket for 1998–99 included a pending case involving an African-American firefighter in Maryland who had complained about the presence of a black lawn jockey in the station’s recreation room in 1991. The station chief had moved it to the volunteer firefighter’s area, from which it returned to its original location, this time with a mop in its hand. The statue was again moved and later returned with a noose around its neck. The black firefighter requested and received a transfer and later sued the volunteer fire company, the station chief, and a volunteer firefighter he believed responsible for the act.

  Harvey’s own calls to the ACLU lawyers representing the firefighter revealed that the lawn jockey in question was made of cement, not cast iron.

  In any case, there was a decent chance none of this would matter after tonight’s game. Rusansky, already a twelve-game winner with a week and a half left in July, was mowing down the Jewels. Cooley didn’t bat again until the fourth, when, on a two-and-two count, he popped up to the third baseman and the crowd grumbled.

  “Rusansky’s got great stuff tonight. Excellent location, too.”

  “Location?” Cherry Ann asked.

  “Where the pitch is. Pitching’s got that in common with real estate. The three most important things are location, location, and location. Most of Rusansky’s pitches are right on the black.”

  “The black?”

  “See,” he said, warming to the forgotten pleasures of explaining a subject he knew well to a gorgeous young woman, “the strike zone’s an imaginary box whose position is determined by the width of the plate and the batting stance of the batter. According to the rules, the height of it is supposed to be from the player’s chest—the letters of his uniform—to his knees. Actually, though, it’s an abstraction defined by the home-plate umpire. Almost everything else in the game is governed by clear rules and physical boundaries, but the strike zone is this weird exception, the game’s most critical set of parameters, and it really exists only in the mind of a middle-aged man wearing a chest protector.”

  Guercio got out in front of, and underneath, an off-speed pitch and also popped up. Harvey waited until the ball settled into the second baseman’s glove before continuing.

  “Now, for some reason, the umpires had been shrinking the strike zone over the last several years so that, effectively, it became from the batter’s waist to his knees. Some sort of tacit conspiracy, I guess, unless they find that the umps had been meeting secretly in the off season. They took away the high strike. Pitchers complained. Batting averages and home run production went up because batters had less strike zone to worry about, and the pitchers were throwing to a smaller target. So, this year, the leagues have ordered the umps to restore the original zone. You follow me?”

  “Yes,” she said. “But you were going to tell me what ‘the black’ is.”

  “Right. Sorry.” Sitting next to her had made him garrulous. He was ashamed to admit it even to himself, but he was not immune to her effortless charms. His attention to the game had been interrupted on more than one occasion by a sexual fantasy involving Cherry Ann Smoler and Marshall Levy’s skybox. And this had happened despite the fact that (1) she was dating Moss Cooley, (2) he had enjoyed quite respectable sexual relations with Mickey Slavin only two nights before, and (3) Cherry Ann was a professional stripper who, Harvey was old enough to know, was in the business of mechanically seducing strange men into thinking they had a personal relationship with her and her body. No one knew better than a stripper how cheaply a man’s full attention could be bought, how shallow a trough his soul could be, how susceptible the gender was to bad music and beer combined with a chance to visually inspect a pretty woman’s crotch. Harvey desperately wanted Cherry Ann not to think he was one of those men.

  “The black,” he said, “is the imaginary outline of the strike zone—the spot where a pitch is hardest to hit and will still be called a strike.”

  “Ah,” she said.

  “The black is where Rick Rusansky is living so far today. The man is threading the needle at sixty feet. You will notice, by consulting the fabulously expensive Jumbotron scoreboard, that the Jewels have yet to get a hit.”

  “But Cleveland only has one.”

  “It’s called a pitchers’ duel.”

  “You know, I’ve only seen him play once before. Before the streak started.”

  “Can I ask you a question?” Harvey asked.

  “As long as it’s not, ‘How can you let strange guys stare at your monkey night after night?’ Or ‘Were you abused as a child?’ ”

  “Damn,” Harvey said and pretended to sulk.

  Cherry Ann was taken in for a minute, then laughed when she realized he was joking.

  “I was going to ask you how you and Moss got together.”

  “That. One night he came to Teasers, watched me dance, and sent me a note backstage. It’s the only time I’ve gotten a note I answered.”

  “It must’ve been quite a note.”

  “Actually, it was very sweet. It said”—she kept her voice low so their neighbors in the box seats couldn’t hear—“that he was the black ballplayer in the first row wearing Oakley shades and that he knew what it was like to do your job in front of a lot of people you didn’t know. He said he hoped I’d let him buy me dinner because he’d love to see what I looked like with my clothes on. I thought that was so funny I went out with him.”

  Barney singled up the middle for the Jewels with one out, bringing up Andy Cubberly. “So you do have a heart of gold.”

  “He’s the one with the heart of gold,” she said. “Though he saw plenty of bad stuff as a kid too. Maybe that’s another thing we have in common.”

  He wondered if she knew about his grandfather, but he was more interested in her childhood at the moment. “And what did you se
e?”

  “The usual. I saw people being bad to each other and bad to me. I saw what men were really like at an age when I shouldn’t have seen it.”

  “And stripping’s a way to get back at them?”

  “Save your psychobabble for someone else.”

  “I was just trying to save you some shrink bills.”

  She gave him a sharp look and retreated into a silence that lasted until the bottom of the seventh inning, with Cleveland holding on to a 1-0 lead. Rusansky was pitching a two-hitter—singles by Guercio and Barney. Cooley was leading off the inning, and perhaps Cherry Ann’s anxiety about his streak made her want to talk again.

  “I didn’t mean to snap at you before,” she said. She took a sip from the giant cup of Sprite she’d bought in the fifth inning and now kept secured between her knees. “Don’t worry, I can tell you’re a decent guy.”

  “C’mon. I hate that.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with being a decent man.”

  “No, that part I can live with. It’s being called one that I hate.”

  “You’d rather be a tough son of a bitch?”

  “I can be one of those if called upon.” Cooley fouled off Rusanksy’s first pitch.

  “Well, good for you,” she said.

  “It’s required in this business. Just as it is in yours.”

  She turned away and yelled. “Let’s go, Moss, let’s go!”

  Rusansky kicked and delivered—a rising fastball over the outside half of the plate. Cooley liked what he saw and uncoiled ferociously, but he got half an inch under the ball’s sweet spot and lofted a routine fly that Cleveland’s center fielder drifted over in medium left center to put away. Tens of thousands of Jewels partisans groaned in unison, a decrescendo that filled the stadium with its brief sorrow.

  “Damn,” said Cherry Ann Smoler.

  An electronic snippet of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” began to emanate from Harvey’s pants.

  It was Mickey. “Tough luck,” she said.

  “You’re watching?”

  “ESPN is cutting to Providence every time Moss is up. This is easily Rusansky’s best outing of the year.”