A Kind of Flying: Selected Stories

by Carlson, Ron

  Billy loved the Castaway. “This is exotic,” he’d say. “Right? Is this a South Sea island or what?” And he meant it. You had to love him. Some dim dive pins an old fishing net on the wall and he’d be in paradise.

  Anyway, Polly had ordered the Bushel o’ Shrimp again and we were having a couple of Mutineers, the daiquiri deal that comes in a skull, when Ketchum came over and asked me—as he does every time we meet—“How you feeling, kid?” which means have I still got the crippling heebie-jeebies. He has told me all winter that if I want another shot, just say so. Well, who doesn’t want another shot? In baseball—no matter what you hear—there are no ex-players, just guys waiting for the right moment for a comeback.

  I told Ketchum that if anything changed, he’d be the first to know. Then I asked him what he thought of today’s game and he said, “The White Sox are young.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Especially that pitcher.”

  “I wouldn’t make too much out of that mix-up at the plate today. You know Billy. He’s a kind that can change the weather.” Ketchum was referring to the gray preseason game a year before. Billy came up in a light rain when a slice of sunlight opened on the field like a beacon, just long enough for everyone to see my roommate golf a low fastball into the right-field seats for a round trip. It was the at-bat that clinched his place on the roster, and that gave him his nickname.

  “Billy Day is a guy who gets the breaks.” Ketchum reached into the wicker bushel and sampled one of Polly’s shrimp. “And you know what they say about guys who get a lot of breaks.” Here he gave Polly a quick look. “They keep getting them.” He stood up and started to walk off. “Call me if you want to hit a few. We don’t head north until April Fools’ Day.”

  “I don’t like that guy,” Polly said when he’d left. “I never liked him.” She pushed her load of shrimp away. “Let’s go.” I was going to defend the coach there, a guy who was fair with his men and kept the signals (steal, take, hit-and-run) simple, but the evening had gone a little flat for me too. There we were out to celebrate, but as always the room was full of Billy Day. He was everywhere. He was in the car on the way back to the hotel; he was in the elevator; he was in the room; and—if you want to know it—he was in the bed too. I knew that he was in Polly’s dreams and there he was in my head, turning back to the umpire, changing a strike to a ball.

  The papers got ahold of what was going on during the last week of March. It was a home game against the Yankees and it was the kind of day that if there were no baseball, you’d invent it to go with the weather. The old Bradenton stands were packed and the whole place smelled of popcorn and coconut oil. Polly was wearing a yellow sundress covered with black polka dots, the kind of dress you wear in a crowded ballpark if you might want one of the players to pick you out while he played first. By this time I was writing a friendly little column for the Pittsburgh Dispatch twice a week on “Lifestyles at Spring Training,” but I had not done much with Billy. He was getting plenty of legitimate ink, and besides—as I said—we weren’t really talking. I liked the writing, even though this was a weird time all around. I kind of had to do it, just so I felt useful. I wasn’t ready to go home.

  It was a good game, two-two in the ninth. Then Billy made a mistake. With one down, he had walked and stolen second. That’s a wonderful feeling being on second with one out. There’s all that room and you can lead the extra two yards and generally you feel pretty free and cocky out there. I could see Billy was enjoying this feeling, leaving cleat marks in the clay, when they threw him out. The pitcher flipped the ball backhand to the shortstop, and they tagged Billy. Ralph “the Hammer” Fox was umping out there, and he jumped onto one knee in his famous out gesture and wheeled his arm around and he brought the hammer down: OUT! After the tag, Billy stood up and went over and planted both feet on the base.

  “What?” Polly took my arm.

  Ralph Fox went over and I could see Billy smiling while he spoke. He patted Ralph’s shoulder. Then Fox turned and gave the arms-out gesture for safe—twice—and hollered, “Play ball.” It was strange, the kind of thing that makes you sure you’re going to get an explanation later.

  But the ballpark changed in a way I was to see twenty times during the season: a low quiet descended, not a silence, but an eerie even sound like two thousand people talking to themselves. And the field, too, was stunned, the players standing straight up, their gloves hanging down like their open mouths during the next pitch, which like everything else was now half-speed, a high hanging curve which Red Sorrows blasted over the scoreboard to win the game.

  Well, it was no way to win a ballgame, but that wasn’t exactly what the papers would say. Ralph Fox, of course, wasn’t speaking to the press (none of the umpires would), and smiling Sunny Billy Day only said one thing that went out on the wire from coast to coast: “Hey guys, come on. You saw that Mickey Mouse move. I was safe.” Most writers looked the other way, noting the magnitude of Red Sorrows’s homer, a “towering blast,” and going on to speculate whether the hit signaled Sorrows’s return from a two-year slump. So, the writers avoided it, and in a way I understand. Now I have become a kind of sportswriter and I know it is not always easy to say what you mean. Sometimes if the truth is hard, typing it can hurt again.

  There were so many moments that summer when some poor ump would stand in the glare of Billy’s smile and toe the dirt, adjust his cap, and change the call. Most of the scenes were blips, glitches: a last swing called a foul ticker; a close play called Billy’s way; but some were big, bad, and ugly—so blatant that they had the fans looking at their shoes. Billy had poor judgment. In fact, as I think about it, he had no judgment at all. He was a guy with the gift who had spent his whole life going forward from one thing to the next. People liked him and things came his way. When you first met Billy, it clicked: who is this guy? Why do I want to talk to him? Ketchum assigned us to room together and in a season of hotel rooms, I found out that it had always been that way for him. He had come out of college with a major in American Studies, and he could not name a single president. “My teachers liked me,” he said. “Everybody likes me.”

  He had that right. But he had no judgment. I’d seen him with women. They’d come along, one, two, three, and he’d take them as they came. He didn’t have to choose. If he’d had any judgment, he never would have let any woman sit between him and Polly.

  Oh, that season I saw him ground to short and get thrown out at first. He’d trot past, look back, and head for the dugout, taking it, but you got the impression it was simply easier to keep on going than stop to change the call. And those times he took it, lying there a foot from third dead out and then trotting off the field, or taking the third strike and then turning for the dugout, you could feel the waves of gratitude from the stands. Those times I know you could feel it, because there weren’t many times when Billy Day took it, and as the season wore on, and the Pirates rose to first place, they became increasingly rare.

  Sunny Billy Day made the All-Stars, of course. He played a fair first base and he was the guy you couldn’t get out. But he was put on the five-day disabled list, “to rest a hamstring,” the release said. But I think it was Ketchum being cagey. He wasn’t going to gain anything by having a kid who was developing a reputation for spoiling ball games go in and ruin a nice July night in Fenway for fans of both leagues.

  By August, it was all out: Billy Day could have his way. You never saw so much written about the state of umping. Billy was being walked most of the time now. Every once in a while some pitcher would throw to him, just to test the water. They were thinking Ketchum was going to pull the plug, tell Billy to face the music, to swallow it if he went down swinging, but it never happened. The best anybody got out of it was a flyout, Billy never contested a flyout. And Ketchum, who had thirty-four good years in the majors and the good reputation to go with them, didn’t care. A good reputation is one thing; not having been in the Series
is another. He would be seventy by Christmas and he wanted to win it all once, even if it meant letting Billy have his way. Ketchum, it was written, had lost his judgment too.

  I was writing my head off, learning how to do it and liking it a little more. It’s something that requires a certain amount of care and it is done alone at a typewriter, not in the batting box in front of forty thousand citizens. And I found I was a hell of a typist; I liked typing. But I wasn’t typing about my old roommate—at all. I missed him though, don’t think I didn’t miss him. I had plenty to say about the rest of the squad, how winning became them, made them into men after so many seasons of having to have their excuses ready before they took the field. Old Red Sorrows was hitting .390 and hadn’t said the word “retirement” or the phrase “next season” in months. There was a lot to write about without dealing with Billy Day’s behavior.

  But, as September came along, I was getting a lot of pressure for interviews. I had been his roommate, hadn’t I? What was he like? What happened to my career? Would I be back? Wasn’t I dating Billy Day’s girl? I soft-pedaled all this, saying “on the other hand” fifty times a week, and that’s no good for athletes or writers. On the topic of Polly I said that we were friends. What a word. The papers went away and came out with what they’d wanted to say anyway: that Billy Day’s old roommate had stolen his girl and now he wouldn’t write about him. They used an old file photograph of Billy and Polly in the Castaway and one of Billy and me leaning against the backstop in Pittsburgh, last year, the one year I played in the major leagues. Our caps are cocked back, and we are smiling.

  During all this, Polly stopped coming to the games with me. She’d had enough of the Pirates for a while, she said, and she took a job as a travel agent and got real busy. We were having, according to the papers, “a relationship,” and that term is fine with me, because I don’t know what else to say. I was happy to have such a pretty girl to associate with, but I knew that her real ambition was to be with Billy Day.

  The Pirates won their division by twenty-eight games, a record, and then they took the National League pennant by whipping the Cardinals four straight. With Billy talking the umps into anything he wanted, and the rest of the team back from the dead and flying in formation, the Pirates were a juggernaut.

  It took the Indians seven games to quiet the Twins, and the Series was set. Pirate October, they called it.

  The Cleveland Press was ready for Billy. They’d given him more column inches than the Indians total in those last weeks, cataloguing his “blatant disregard for the rules and the dignity of fair play.” Some of those guys could write. Billy had pulled one stunt in the playoffs that really drew fire. In game four, with the Pirates ahead five-zip, he bunted foul on a third strike and smiled his way out of it.

  As one writer put it, “We don’t put up with that kind of thing in Cleveland. We don’t like it and we don’t need it. When we see disease, we inoculate.” As I said, these guys, some of them, could write. Their form of inoculation was an approved cadre of foreign umpires. They brought in ten guys for the Series. They were from Iceland, Zambia, England, Ireland, Hungary, Japan (three), Venezuela, and Tonga. When they met the press, they struck me as the most serious group of men I’d ever seen assembled. It looked good: they knew the rules and they were grim. And the Tongan, who would be behind the plate for game one, looked fully capable of handling anything that could come up with one hand.

  Polly didn’t go out to Cleveland with me. She had booked a cruise, a month, through the Panama Canal and on to the islands far across the Pacific Ocean, and she was going along as liaison. She smiled when she left and kissed me sweetly, which is just what you don’t want your girl to do. She kissed me like I was a writer.

  So I went out alone and stayed in the old Hotel Barnard, where a lot of the writers stay. It was lonely out there in Ohio, and I thought about it. It was the end of a full season in which I had not played ball, and here I was in a hotel full of writers, which I had become, instead of over at the Hilton with my club.

  I was closing down the bar the night before the Series opener when Billy Day walked in. I couldn’t believe my eyes.

  “I thought I’d find you here,” he said.

  “Billy,” I said, waving the barman to bring down a couple of lagers. “I’m a writer now. This is where the writers stay. You’re out after curfew.”

  He gestured back at the empty room. “Who’s gonna write me up, you?” He smiled his terrific smile and I realized as much as I had avoided him for eight months, I missed him. I missed that smile.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think so.” Our beers came and I asked him, “What’s up?”

  “It’s been a rough season.”

  “Not from what I read. The Pirates won the pennant.”

  “Jesus,” he said. “What is that, sarcasm? You gonna start talking like a writer too?”

  “Billy, you’ve pulled some stunts.”

  He slid his beer from one hand to the other on the varnished bar of the Hotel Barnard. And then started to nod. “Yeah,” he said. “I guess I did. You know, I didn’t see it at first. It just kind of grew.”

  “And now you know.”

  “Yeah, now I know all about it. I know what I can do.”

  “So what brings you out on a night to the Hotel Barnard?” I pointed at his full glass of beer. “It’s not the beer.”

  “You,” he said, and he turned to me again and smiled. “You always knew what to do. I don’t mean on the field. There was no rookie better. But I mean, what should I do? This is the Series.”

  “Yeah, it’s the Series. If I were you, I’d play ball.”

  “You know what I mean. Ketchum wants me to use it all. He doesn’t care if they tear down the stadium.”

  “And you?”

  “I don’t know. All my life, I played to win. It seems wrong not to do something that can help your team. But the people don’t like it.”

  I looked at the clouds crossing the face of Sunny Billy Day, and I knew I was seeing something no man had ever seen there before: second thoughts.

  “These new umps may not let you get away with anything.”

  “Kid,” he said to me, touching my shoulder with his fist, his smile as wide and bright as the sun through a pop-up, “I’ve been missing you. But I thought you knew me better than that. I’ve lived my life knowing one thing: everybody lets me get away with everything. The only thing I ever lost, I lost to you. Polly. And I didn’t even think about it until she was gone. How is she?”

  “I’d get her back for you if I could,” I said, lifting my glass in a toast to my old friend Billy Day. “Polly,” I told him, “is headed for Tahiti.”

  BILLY WAS right about the umps. They looked good, in fact, when they took the field and stood with their arms behind their backs along the first-base line, they looked like the Supreme Court. The people of Cleveland were ready for something too, because I noted in the article I wrote for the Dispatch that the squadron of umpires received a louder ovation when they took the field than the home team did. Everybody knew that without an iron heel from the umps, the Indians might as well take the winter off.

  Okay, so it was baseball for several innings. Ohio in October smells sweet and old, and for a while I think we were all transported through the beautiful fall day, the stadium bathing in the yellow light and then pitching steeply into the sepia shadow of the upper decks. See: I was learning to write like the other guys.

  Sunny Billy Day hadn’t been a factor, really, walking twice and grounding a base hit into left. It was just baseball, the score two to one Cleveland in the top of the eighth. Now, I want to explain what happened carefully. There were seventy-four thousand people there and in the days since the Series I’ve heard almost that many versions. The thirty major papers disagreed in detail and the videotapes haven’t got it all because of the angle and sequence
. So let me go slow here. After all, it would be the last play of Sunny Billy Day.

  I wasn’t in the press box. The truth is that the season had been a little hard on me in terms of making friends with my fellow reporters. I’d had a hundred suppers in half-lit lounges and I don’t think it came as a surprise that I didn’t really care for the way they talked—not just about baseball, for which they had a curious but abiding disdain. And I’m not one of these guys who think you have to have played a sport—or really done anything—to be able to write about it well. Look at me—I was good in the field, but I can’t write half as good as any of the guys I travel with. But sportswriters, when they are together at the end of the day, a group of them having drinks waiting for their Reuben sandwiches to arrive, are a fairly superior and hard-bitten bunch. You don’t want to wander into one of these hotel lounges any summer evening if you want to hear anything about the joy of the sport. These guys don’t celebrate baseball, and really, like me, they don’t analyze it very well. But they have feelings about it; I never met a man who didn’t. That’s why it’s called the major leagues.

  Anyway, I don’t want to get going on writers and all that stuff. And don’t get me wrong. Some of them—hell, most of them—are nice guys and quick about the check or asking how’s it going, but it was October and it was all getting to me. I could see myself in two years, flipping my ash into somebody’s coffee cup offering a weary expert’s opinion. So I wanted to sit where someone might actually cheer or spill a little beer when they stood up on a third strike or a home run. Journalists are professionals, anyone will tell you this, and they don’t spill their beer. I ended up ten rows behind third in a seat I paid for myself, and it turned out to be a lucky break given what was going to happen.