Switch Pitchers

by Norman German

  “Joo son of a bastard, me llama Ricardo. Joo understand? I am not my brother! I am not my brother! I am not my brother.” First with the right, then with the left.

  By the time Chozen and his players had reached Ricardo, the fan in fact felt like two men had been working him over.

  Approaching Ricardo from behind, Chozen hooked his muscular forearms around his pitcher’s elbows to restrain him.

  “Are you crazy, boy? You could hurt your pitching hand—hands.” Chozen backed down the steps, hauling the furious Cuban with him. When he reached the ground, he dared not let go and sat the two of them down, Ricardo in his lap, so he could catch his breath. After the others took control of Ricardo, Chozen stood and adjusted his chest protector. He took a deep breath and started for his position behind home plate. “Sweet Jezebel,” he said, “I’m too old for this.”

  To no one’s surprise, Mr. Five-by-Five ejected Ricardo from the game. After a too-short warm-up, Bill German loaded the bases before picking off the runner on third, then the one on first to wind up the game.

  * * *

  Stepping up to the driver’s seat of the Lunkermobile to start the cattle drive to Laredo, Chozen was counting his blessings. When Roberto was sent up to Little Rock, the manager had lost perhaps the greatest pitcher the game would ever see, but that was in the natural course of things. That’s what the minor leagues are for, he reminded himself. Still, he had given twenty years of his life to baseball and had never won a pennant. He began the season with three starting pitchers, gained two, lost one, then gained another without adding a man to his roster. As bizarre as it seemed, he was back up to a five-man rotation with only four starting pitchers.

  Harry Chozen knew he could win the championship of the Gulf Coast League—providing the Lunkers made a good showing on the cattle drive, and no one got injured, and the bats came through, and the Pelicans faltered a bit, and his luck held, and the bus didn’t crash and kill everyone. Chozen put his battered hands on the wheel and looked skyward. Is that too much to ask, he said to himself and Whoever was in charge.

  The team had a free day to drive to Laredo. Then they would visit Galveston and Houston on the way home. In the border town, Bobby hit a home run in a sandstorm. He jacked a sure-out fly ball into deep right and the wind swirled it over the fence. When he returned to Lake Charles, he would find the front page of the sports section on his hotel bed.

  LAKE CHARLES SPLITS

  TWIN BILL WITH LAREDO

  German Gains 3-2 Win,

  Helps Out With Homer

  Tycer won his game the next day and the team reached Galveston two games out of first.

  Then Harry Chozen began to run out of luck. The national forecasters had directed a hurricane for Matamoros, but it took a wrong turn at Corpus Christi and blew away three games in Galveston. The games would have to be made up as a triple-header of seven-inning games on the only off-day before the final clash with New Orleans.

  In the darkened bus on the drive to Houston, the Lunkermobile’s opaque headlights barely illuminating the wet blacktop, Chozen asked Bobby a question after everyone had fallen asleep.

  “What do you think the saying means, ‘It rains on the just and the unjust’?”

  Given the recent hurricane, Bobby thought the question a fair one. “I guess it means that bad things happen to good people as well as bad people.”

  “That’s what almost everybody would say. And that shows how much our society has gotten away from nature.” Chozen paused as if needing to force himself to say it. “Rain is a good thing, Bobby, a good thing. No rain, no crops. So really the proverb means that good things happen to both good people and bad people.” He drove for a while in dark silence. “Good things happen to bad people. That’s a much harder pill to swallow.”

  Bobby nodded. “I know. I’ve swallowed it before.”

  PART FIVE

  The Way Home

  Chapter 21

  THE hurricane had broken up after landfall, most of it shearing east, a remnant stalling over Galveston. Harry Chozen’s only consolation was that his pitching staff was afforded a two-day rest. From the third floor of the Hotel Galvez, while watching angry breakers breach the seawall, Chozen had drawn up the next week’s pitching schedule, the one that had to carry the Lunkers to the championship. Only Ricardo’s ambidexterity gave him a chance at all. Even so, the Lunkers needed to win five of the next eight games, and the Pelicans had to drop at least three of their final five.

  In the rotation Chozen devised, Ricardo would throw left-handed in the number-two slot, then right in the five slot.

  Bobby

  Ricardo (L)

  Vance

  Tycer

  Ricardo (R)

  Chozen worked out his pitching schedule over the old calendar, with Bill German as the wild card filling in the weak spot.

  Sept. 12Houston: double-header vs. Buffs

  Bobby

  Ricardo (L)

  Sept. 13Lake Charles: triple-header vs. Galveston

  Vance

  Tycer

  Ricardo (R)

  Sept. 14Lake Charles: double-header vs. New Orleans

  Bill German

  Ricardo (L)

  Sept. 15Lake Charles: vs. New Orleans

  Bobby

  Chozen was trying to maximize the mound time of his best pitchers. The schedule allowed him to use Bobby and Ricardo in five of the last eight games over four days. On closing day, Bobby would have to pitch on two days’ rest, so Chozen scheduled him to pitch the first game of the double-header in Houston. Ricardo would pitch three straight days, but the middle game on the thirteenth was seven innings, and it was the only game he would throw right-handed.

  The field in Houston was soggy, the conditions cool and damp. The Buffs, used to their perennial second position in the Gulf Coast League, were looking to spoil the Lunkers’ bid for first and try to recapture second. Bobby warmed up slowly and did not start aggressively. He knew the strategy would cost him in the short run, but if his hitters came through, he would be all right. He gave up two runs in the first inning and one in the second, then settled into a rhythm that carried him through the sixth, which ended with the score 4-3, Lunkers. His hitters got on a streak and batted around in the seventh to extend the lead by another three runs. Bobby took the mound with a 7-3 lead, but he had cooled between innings and felt a twinge in his shoulder after striking out the second batter with a fastball.

  Bobby tried to hide his pain from Chozen, but he got knocked around for two runs before a double play ended the near disaster.

  Chozen met Bobby at the entrance to the dugout. “You hurting, Bobby?”

  “No, sir, I’m all right.”

  “Then why’d you keep waving off the fastball? That’s your money pitch.”

  “It doesn’t seem to have much giddy-up on it tonight.”

  “It did in the middle innings. And movement. You sure you’re all right?”

  “I’m fine,” Bobby said, taking a seat. “I just thought my curve was working better than the fastball.”

  The Lunkers added a run in the top of the eighth. Bobby escaped the Houston half after giving up only one. With the score 8-6, Chozen decided to let Ricardo relieve Bobby right-handed. Chozen’s thinking was that Ricardo wouldn’t spend more than two dozen pitches, and that would warm his body up for the night game, when he would throw left-handed.

  As a plan, the plan worked. Bobby got his win, but then Ricardo lost his full game. The Lunkers could now lose only two of the next six games, and three of those would be against division-leading New Orleans. After the double-header, Chozen wanted his men to get a good night’s rest, so he hustled the team onto the bus right after the game. Seven innings apiece or not, a triple-header was still a triple-header.

  * * *

  The Lunkermobile broke down on the outskirts of Houston. For the first time since he fell out of the Majors, Chozen felt like crying. Ordering the men to get what sleep they could, he started walking for
an Esso station whose red and white sign glowed like a tiny halo on the western horizon. In five minutes, half the men were asleep. In another five, a handful more were felled by the hypnotic influence of snoring. To Bobby, though, the snoring was like an alarm clock.

  He stepped off the bus into the breezeless night to smoke a Lucky. When he raised the cigarette to his lips with his left hand, his shoulder felt like a toothache the size of a cantaloupe. Up the blacktop to the west, he could see the gas station lights but not his manager. To the east, through a black corridor of tangled mesquite shrubs, the blinking green and purple neon of a honky-tonk beckoned him. He hadn’t smoked a minute before his feet moved him in the direction of a muscle-soothing, mind-numbing drink.

  Bobby stepped into the low-ceilinged joint wondering if he had made the right decision. A solitary man sat on a stool hunched over the bar. Bobby eased over to the glowing but silent jukebox. Pretending to read the labels, he studied the lean man with his cream-colored cowboy hat parked on the bar beside his drink. Bobby imagined him to be a local caballero drowning his sorrows for the señorita he left in Nuevo Laredo with a posse close on his heels. The bartender was nowhere in sight.

  Bobby punched in a couple of songs he thought the man would like. As he approached the bar, Ernest Tubb’s gravelly voice waltzed around the room.

  You left me and you went away.

  You said that you’d be back in just a day.

  You’ve broken your promises and left me here alone.

  I don’t know why you did, dear, but I do know that you’re gone.

  I’m walking the floor over you . . .

  Bobby spoke as he approached the man so he wouldn’t startle him. He had heard about the knives and boots of such men. If you looked at them wrong, they would cut you to shreds with the metal-toed boots while you worried about the switchblade in each hand.

  In the friendliest voice he could muster while still sounding like a man, Bobby said, “Buy you a drink?”

  The man looked over just as Bobby straddled a seat, leaving a stool between them. The man lifted his glass. “Got mine. You the one looks empty-handed.”

  Surprised by the high voice, Bobby was more taken by the man’s gaunt but boyish face and snake-thin lips like his own. It was like meeting a wasted version of himself.

  “What you drinking?” Bobby asked.

  The man lifted the glass and inspected the swirling liquid as if it were his lover.

  “Hady-col.”

  Bobby laughed. Organized by a quack senator from Louisiana who invented the restorative, The Hadacol Caravan was the last of the old-time traveling medicine shows. Bobby had seen part of a show between double-headers while playing for the Jackson, Mississippi, Judges. Visions of Minnie Pearl and Milton Berle, combined with the way the man pronounced Hadacol, amused Bobby.

  “I appreciate it,” Bobby said. “I really do. But I’ll pass on the Hadacol.”

  “It ain’t half bad, once you get used to it.”

  Bobby thought, I’ve heard the same thing about castor oil and horse piss. But he said, “A man swallows so much crap in this world, he could get used to anything.” He knew how to loosen the tongue of a stranger in a bar and make a friend of him in five minutes.

  “Well put,” the youthful-looking man said. He produced a bottle of Hadacol from his coat and lifted it to Bobby. “It’s mostly alcohol, you know. That’s what you’re after, ain’t it?”

  Bobby looked around for the bartender.

  “Ain’t seen him for an hour,” the man said.

  Bobby nodded.

  The man reached for a row of tumblers and turned one up.

  “Try it,” he said. “It won’t kill you.”

  Bobby grinned. “So I’ve heard. Fountain of Youth and all that.”

  The man poured some of the liquid into the glass and slid it down the bar.

  “Me, I can’t do without it.”

  Bobby didn’t want to offend the man by declining his offer, so he lifted the glass to his lips and took a sip. His head jerked back at the taste.

  The man chuckled. “Well, one man’s sugar is another man’s salt.” He stood on the foot rail and peered over the bar. His hand reached and came back with a fifth of Jack Daniels.

  “That’ll do it,” Bobby said.

  The man turned up another tumbler and poured. “How you make your way in this world?”

  Bobby paused. He was never sure how people would react to his answer, so he always passed it off quickly and threw the talk to the questioner. “Play a little baseball. How about you?”

  “Strum a little guitar.” The man pronounced it gee-tar. “You play semipro?”

  Bobby looked askance at him. If Bobby’s ploy to turn the conversation the other way didn’t work, that was the usual response he got and it always offended him. He took a hard hit of the sour mash whiskey. “Shee-it,” he said when his throat was purged. “Went from B to Triple-A in ’45, then ran into some woman trouble. Dropped all the way down to D-ball, then worked my way back up to Double-A.”

  “They pay good?”

  “Brother,” Bobby said, wanting to entertain both of the lonely men in the bar, “I’m so poor, I bet you a nickel if I stepped on a dime, I could tell if it was heads or tails.”

  The man chuckled briefly, then seemed to go inside himself. Bobby had drunk with men from Pawtucket, Rhode Island to Amarillo, Texas. He knew to leave the man with his thoughts until he came back around.

  The man finally spoke. “Where’d you get that sayin’?”

  “Picked part of it up somewhere, part of it somewhere else, and made up the rest.”

  The man nodded, tilted his head up, and drained the last of the Hadacol from his glass. He put a lean, strong hand around the bottleneck and twisted the cap off with the same hand’s thumb and forefinger, then poured thoughtfully.

  “You know,” he said, “Hady-col ain’t nothing but Vitamin B, alcohol, and a few minerals.” He took a swallow and looked at the drink like it was a magician’s elixir. “I’m not sure which one has my gizzard by the balls, but I’d lay good odds it’s the alcohol. Probbly kill me down the road someday.”

  “Well,” Bobby said, raising his bourbon and glad to have it, “one thing’s for sure.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Sooner or later, something gets us all.” He lifted his glass of amber to make a toast. The man clinked his glass against Bobby’s.

  “Here’s to moving from Double-A to Double-A,” Bobby said.

  “How’s that?”

  “From Double-A ball to Alcoholics Anonymous.”

  Without smiling, the man lifted his head once in appreciation. “Been there a few times myself.”

  “That so?”

  The man went inside himself again. He went places he had been before and wished he hadn’t gone, then went places he’d never gone and wished he had. When he came back to Bobby, he said, “I count myself an honest man, mostly.”

  “Me, too.” Bobby knew when a drinking man wanted prompting. “What’s on your mind?”

  “A fair trade,” the youthful-looking man said.

  “I’m always interested in a fair trade,” Bobby said, because he had been on the wrong end of a number of unfair ones.

  The man didn’t want to show his hand too quickly. He took a bored sip of his drink, then spread his cards. “I was thinking fifty dollars for that line about the nickel and dime.”

  Bobby laughed. “Just saying ‘nickel and dime’ don’t make the line worth fifteen cents. You can have it for nothing.”

  “No can do,” the man said. “I use it in a song, you should make something too.”

  “Twenty dollars, then,” Bobby said, expecting the man to drink himself to sleep and wake up in the morning with no recollection of a ball player, twenty dollars, or the line.

  The cowboy pulled a roll from his pocket and peeled off two tens. “It’ll spend quicker that way.” He flipped the bills on the bar in front of Bobby.

  After dr
inking and listening to the jukebox for a while, the thin-lipped man said, “Ever thought about what you want on your tombstone?”

  The question didn’t surprise Bobby. Drunks being philosophers by nature, they always came around to the topic of death sooner or later. Bobby thought for a minute. “You mean like the hypochondriac?”