Blockade Billy

by Stephen King

  That was the first game I managed until I got the Athletics in ’63, and it was a short one, because as you probably know if you’ve done your research, Hi Wenders ran me in the sixth. I don’t remember much about it, anyway. I had so much on my mind that I felt like a man in a dream. But I did have sense enough to do one thing, and that was to check the kid’s right hand before he ran out on the field. There was no Band-Aid on the second finger, and no cut, either. I didn’t even feel relieved. I just kept seeing Joe DiPunno’s red eyes and haggard mouth.

  That was Danny Doo’s last good game ever, and he never did get his two hundred. He tried to come back in ‘58, but it was no good. He claimed the double vision was gone and maybe it was true, but he couldn’t hardly get the pill over the plate anymore. No spot in Cooperstown for Danny. Joe was right: that kid did suck luck.

  But that afternoon Doo was the best I ever saw him, his fastball hopping, his curve snapping like a whip. For the first four innings they couldn’t touch him at all. Just wave the stick and take a seat, fellows. He struck out six and the rest were infield ground-outs. Only trouble was, Kinder was almost as good. We’d gotten one lousy hit, a two-out double by Harrington in the bottom of the third.

  Now it’s the top of the fifth. The first batter goes down easy. Then Walt Dropo comes up, hits one deep into the left field corner, and takes off like a bat out of hell. The crowd saw Harry Keene still chasing the ball while Dropo’s legging for second, and they understood it could be an inside-the-park job. The chanting started. Only a few voices at first, then more and more. Getting deeper and louder. It put a chill up me from the crack of my ass to the nape of my neck.

  “Bloh-KADE! Bloh-KADE! Bloh-KADE!”

  Like that. The orange signs started going up. People were on their feet and holding them over their heads. Not waving them like usual, just holding them up. I have never seen anything like it.

  “Bloh-KADE! Bloh-KADE! Bloh-KADE!”

  At first I thought there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell; by then Dropo’s steaming for third with all the stops pulled out. But Keene pounced on the ball and made a perfect throw to Barbarino at short. The rook, meanwhile, is standing on the third-base side of home plate with his glove held out, making a target, and Si hit the goddam pocket.

  The crowd’s chanting. Dropo’s sliding, spikes up. The kid don’t mind; he goes on his knees and dives over em. Hi Wenders was where he was supposed to be—that time, at least—leaning over the play. A cloud of dust goes up…and out of it comes Wenders’s upraised thumb. “Yerrrr…OUT!” Mr. King, the fans went nuts. Walt Dropo did, too. He was up and dancing around like a coked-up kid at a record hop. He couldn’t believe it.

  The kid was scraped halfway up his left forearm, not bad, just bloodsweat, but enough for old Bony Dadier—he was our trainer—to come out and slap a Band-Aid on it. So the kid got his Band-Aid after all, only this one was legit. The fans stayed on their feet during the whole medical consultation, waving their ROAD CLOSED signs and chanting “Bloh-KADE! Bloh-KADE!” like they wouldn’t ever get enough of it.

  The kid didn’t seem to notice. He was in another world. He was the whole time he was with the Titans, now that I think of it. He just put on his mask, went back behind the plate, and squatted down. Business as usual. Bubba Phillips came up, lined out to Lathrop at first, and that was the fifth.

  When the kid came up in the bottom of the inning and struck out on three pitches, the crowd still gave him a standing O. That time he noticed, and tipped his cap when he went back to the dugout. Only time he ever did it. Not because he was snotty but because…well, I already said it. That other world thing.

  Okay, top of the sixth. Over fifty years later and I still get a red ass when I think of it. Kinder’s up first and loops out to third, just like a pitcher should. Then comes Luis Aparicio, Little Louie. The Doo winds and fires. Aparicio fouls it off high and lazy behind home plate, on the third base side of the screen. The kid throws away his mask and sprints after it, head back and glove out. Wenders trailed him, but not close like he should have done. He didn’t think the kid had a chance. It was lousy goddam umping.

  The kid’s off the grass and on the track, by the low wall between the field and the box seats. Neck craned. Looking up. Two dozen people in those first- and second-row box seats also looking up, most of them waving their hands in the air. This is one thing I don’t understand about fans and never will. It’s a fucking baseball, for the love of God! An item that sold for seventy-five cents back then. Everybody knew it. But when fans see one in reach at the ballpark, they turn into fucking Danny Doo in order to get their hands on it. Never mind standing back and letting the man trying to catch it—their man, and in a tight ballgame—do his job.

  I saw it all. Saw it clear. That mile-high popup came down on our side of the wall. The kid was going to catch it. Then some long-armed bozo in one of those Titans jerseys they sold on the Esplanade reached over and ticked it so the ball bounced off the edge of the kid’s glove and fell to the ground.

  I was so sure Wenders would call Aparicio out—it was clear interference—that at first I couldn’t believe what I was seeing when he gestured for the kid to go back behind the plate and for Aparicio to resume the box. When I got it, I ran out, waving my arms. The crowd started cheering me and booing Wenders, which is no way to win friends and influence people when you’re arguing a call, but I was too goddam mad to care. I wouldn’t have stopped if Mahatma Gandhi had walked out on the field butt-naked and urging us to make peace.

  “Interference!” I yelled. “Clear as day, clear as the nose on your face!”

  “It was in the stands, and that makes it anyone’s ball,” Wenders says. “Go on back to your little nest and let’s get this show on the road.”

  The kid didn’t care; he was talking to his pal The Doo. That was all right. I didn’t care that he didn’t care. All I wanted at that moment was to tear Hi Wenders a fresh new asshole. I’m not ordinarily an argumentative man—all the years I managed the A’s, I only got thrown out of games twice—but that day I would have made Billy Martin look like a peacenik.

  “You didn’t see it, Hi! You were trailing too far back! You didn’t see shit!”

  “I wasn’t trailing and I saw it all. Now get back, Granny. I ain’t kidding.”

  “If you didn’t see that long-armed sonofabitch—” (Here a lady in the second row put her hands over her little boy’s ears and pursed up her mouth at me in an oh-you-nasty-man look.) “—that long-armed sonofabitch reach out and tick that ball, you were goddam trailing! Jesus Christ!”

  The man in the jersey starts shaking his head—who, me? not me!—but he’s also wearing a big embarrassed suckass grin. Wenders saw it, knew what it meant, then looked away. “That’s it,” he says to me. And in the reasonable voice that means you’re one smart crack from drinking a Rhinegold in the locker room. “You’ve had your say. Now you can either go back to the dugout or you can listen to the rest of the game on the radio. Take your pick.”

  I went back to the dugout. Aparicio stood back in with a big shit-eating grin on his face. He knew, sure he did. And made the most of it. The guy never hit many home runs, but when The Doo sent in a changeup that didn’t change, Louie cranked it high, wide, and handsome to the deepest part of the park. Nosy Norton was playing center, and he never even turned around.

  Aparicio circled the bases, serene as the Queen Mary coming into dock, while the crowd screamed at him, denigrated his relatives, and hurled hate down on Hi Wenders’s head. Wenders heard none of it, which is the chief umpirely skill. He just got a fresh ball out of his coat pocket and inspected it for dings and doinks. Watching him do that, I lost it entirely. I rushed out to home plate and started shaking both fists in his face.

  “That’s your run, you fucking busher!” I screamed. “Too fucking lazy to chase after a foul ball, and now you’ve got an RBI for yourself! Jam it up your ass! Maybe you’ll find your glasses!”

  The crowd loved it. Hi Wenders,
not so much. He pointed at me, threw his thumb back over his shoulder, and walked away. The crowd started booing and shaking their ROAD CLOSED signs; some threw bottles, cups, and half-eaten franks onto the field. It was a circus.

  “Don’t you walk away from me, you fatass blind lazy sonofabitching bastard!” I screamed, and chased after him. Someone from our dugout grabbed me before I could grab Wenders, which I meant to do. I had lost touch with reality.

  The crowd was chanting “KILL THE UMP! KILL THE UMP! KILL THE UMP!” I’ll never forget that, because it was the same way they’d been chanting “Bloh-KADE! Bloh-KADE!”

  “If your mother was here, she’d be throwing shit at you, too, you bat-blind busher!” I screamed, and then they hauled me into the dugout. Ganzie Burgess, our knuckleballer, managed the last three innings of that horrorshow. He also pitched the last two. You might find that in the record-books, too. If there were any records of that lost spring.

  The last thing I saw on the field was Danny Dusen and Blockade Billy standing on the grass between the plate and the mound. The kid had his mask tucked under his arm. The Doo was whispering in his ear. The kid was listening—he always listened when The Doo talked—but he was looking at the crowd, forty thousand fans on their feet, men, women, and children, yelling KILL THE UMP, KILL THE UMP, KILL THE UMP.

  There was a bucket of balls halfway down the hall between the dugout and the locker room. I kicked it and sent balls rolling every whichway. If I’d stepped on one of them and fallen on my ass, it would have been the perfect end to a perfect fucking afternoon at the ballpark.

  Joe was in the locker room, sitting on a bench outside the showers. By then he looked seventy instead of just fifty. There were three other guys in there with him. Two were uniformed cops. The third one was in a suit, but you only had to take one look at his hard roast beef of a face to know he was a cop, too.

  “Game over early?” this one asked me. He was sitting on a folding chair with his big old cop thighs spread and straining his seersucker pants. The bluesuits were on one of the benches in front of the lockers.

  “It is for me,” I said. I was still so mad I didn’t even care about the cops. To Joe I said, “Fucking Wenders ran me. I’m sorry, Cap, but it was a clear case of interference and that lazy sonofabitch—”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Joe said. “The game isn’t going to count. I don’t think any of our games are going to count. Kerwin’ll appeal to the Commissioner, of course, but—”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  Joe sighed. Then he looked at the guy in the suit. “You tell him, Detective Lombardazzi,” he said. “I can’t bear to.”

  “Does he need to know?” Lombardazzi asked. He’s looking at me like I’m some kind of bug he’s never seen before. It was a look I didn’t need on top of everything else, but I kept my mouth shut. Because I knew three cops, one of them a detective, don’t show up in the locker room of a Major League baseball team if it isn’t goddam serious.

  “If you want him to hold the other guys long enough for you to get the Blakely kid out of here, I think he does need to,” Joe says.

  From above us there came a cry from the fans, followed by a groan, followed by a cheer. None of us paid any attention to what turned out to be the end of Danny Dusen’s baseball career. The cry was when he got hit in the forehead by a Larry Doby line drive. The groan was when he fell on the pitcher’s mound like a tagged prizefighter. And the cheer was when he picked himself up and gestured that he was okay. Which he was not, but he pitched the rest of the sixth, and the seventh, too. Didn’t give up a run, either. Ganzie made him come out before the eighth when he saw The Doo wasn’t walking straight. Danny all the time claiming he was perfectly okay, that the big purple goose-egg raising up over his left eyebrow wasn’t nothing, he’d had lots worse, and the kid saying the same: it ain’t nothing, it ain’t nothing. Little Sir Echo. Us down in the clubhouse didn’t know any of that, no more than Dusen knew he might’ve been tagged worse in his career, but it was the first time part of his brain had sprung a leak.

  “His name isn’t Blakely,” Lombardazzi says. “It’s Eugene Katsanis.”

  “Katz-whatsis? Where’s Blakely, then?”

  “William Blakely’s dead. Has been for a month. His parents, too.”

  I gaped at him. “What are you talking about?”

  So he told me the stuff I’m sure you already know, Mr. King, but maybe I can fill in a few blanks. The Blakelys lived in Clarence, Iowa, a wide patch of not much an hour’s drive from Davenport. Made it convenient for Ma and Pa, because they could go to most of their son’s minor league games. Blakely had a successful farm; an eight hundred acre job. One of their hired men wasn’t much more than a boy. His name was Gene Katsanis, an orphan who’d grown up in The Ottershaw Christian Home for Boys. He was no farmer, and not quite right in the head, but he was a hell of a baseball player.

  Katsanis and Blakely played against each other on a couple of church teams, and together on the local Babe Ruth team, which won the state tournament all three years the two of them played together, and once went as far as the national semis. Blakely went to high school and starred on that team, too, but Katsanis wasn’t school material. Slopping-the-hogs material and ballplaying material is what he was, although he was never supposed to be as good as Billy Blakely. Nobody so much as considered such a thing. Until it happened, that is.

  Blakely’s father hired him because the kid worked cheap, sure, but mostly because he had enough natural talent to keep Billy sharp. For twenty-five dollars a week, the kid got a fielder and a batting-practice pitcher. The old man got a cow-milker and a shit-shoveler. Not a bad deal, at least for them.

  Whatever you’ve found in your research probably favors the Blakely family, am I right? Because they had been around those parts for four generations, because they were rich farmers, and because Katsanis wasn’t nothing but a state kid who started life in a liquor carton on a church step and had several screws loose upstairs. And why was that? Because he was born dumb or because he got the crap beaten out of him three and four times a week in that home before he got old enough and big enough to defend himself? I know a lot of the beatings came because he had a habit of talking to himself—that came out in the newspapers later on.

  Katsanis and Billy practiced just as hard once Billy got into the Titans’ farm-system—during the off-season, you know, probably throwing and hitting in the barn once the snow got too deep outside—but Katsanis got kicked off the local town team, and wasn’t allowed to go to the Cornholers’ workouts during Billy’s second season with them. During his first one, Katsanis had been allowed to participate in some of the workouts, even in some intersquad games, if they were a man shy. It was all pretty informal and loosey-goosey back then, not like now when the insurance companies shit a brick if a major leaguer so much as grabs a bat without wearing a helmet.

  What I think happened—feel free to correct me if you know better—is that the kid, whatever other problems he might have had, continued to grow and mature as a ballplayer. Blakely didn’t. You see that all the time. Two kids who both look like Babe Fuckin’ Ruth in high school. Same height, same weight, same speed, same twenty-twenty peepers. But one of them is able to play at the next level…and the next…and the next…while the other one starts to fall behind. This much I did hear later: Billy Blakely didn’t start out as a catcher. He got switched from center field when the kid who was catching broke his arm. And that kind of switch isn’t a real good sign. It’s like the coach is sending a message: “You’ll do…but only until someone better shows up.”

  I think Blakely got jealous, I think his old man got jealous, and I think maybe Mom did, too. Maybe especially Mom, because sports moms can be the worst. I think maybe they pulled a few strings to keep Katsanis from playing locally, and from showing up for the Davenport Cocksuckers’ workouts. They could have done it, because they were a wealthy, long-established Iowa family and Gene Katsanis was a nobody who grew up i
n an orphan home. A Christian orphan home that was probably hell on earth.

  I think maybe Billy got ragging on the kid once too often and once too hard. Or it could’ve been the dad or the mom. Maybe it was over the way he milked the cows, or maybe he didn’t shovel the shit just right that one time, but I’ll bet the bottom line was baseball and plain old jealousy. The green-eyed monster. For all I know, the Cornholers’ manager told Blakely he might be sent down to Single A in Clearwater, and getting sent down a rung when you’re only twenty—when you’re supposed to be going up the ladder—is a damned good sign that your career in organized baseball is going to be a short one.

  But however it was—and whoever—it was a bad mistake. The kid could be sweet when he was treated right, we all knew that, but he wasn’t right in the head. And he could be dangerous. I knew that even before the cops showed up, because of what happened in the very first game of the season: Billy Anderson.

  “The County Sheriff found all three Blakelys in the barn,” Lombardazzi said. “Katsanis slashed their throats. Sheriff said it looked like a razor blade.”

  I just gaped at him.

  “What must have happened is this,” Joe said in a heavy voice. “Kerwin McCaslin called around for a backup catcher when our guys got hurt down in Florida, and the manager of the Cornhuskers said he had a boy who might fill the bill for three or four weeks, assuming we didn’t need him to hit for average. Because, he said, this kid wouldn’t do that.”

  “But he did,” I says.

  “Because he wasn’t Blakely,” Lombardazzi says. “By then Blakely and his parents must already have been dead a couple of days, at least. The Katsanis kid was keeping house all by himself. And not all his screws were loose. He was smart enough to answer the phone when it rang. He took the call from the manager and said sure, Billy’d be glad to go to New Jersey. And before he left—as Billy—he called around to the neighbors and the feed store downtown. Told em the Blakelys had been called away on a family emergency and he was taking care of things. Pretty smart for a loony, wouldn’t you say?”