Strike Three You're Dead

by R. D. Rosen

  On Friday, September 21, the Red Sox came to town on a roll. They were closing fast on the first-place Yankees and were only two games out at the start of the three-game weekend series. During their infield practice before the opener, Boston had a lot of chatter and good hop on their throws, and Harvey watched his former team from the dugout with the regret of someone viewing home movies of more prosperous times. It was a cool evening, and the setting sun seeped through the arches in the concrete wall of the grandstands and glinted off the vinyl-covered padding on the outfield fences. For Boston, it was a pennant race; for the Providence Jewels, baseball only seemed to be intruding on weather meant for other things. The Jewels had lost seven of eight, and eighteen of the twenty-two games they had played since Rudy’s death. The Rankle Park crowds had been dwindling, and on Friday night the chill quieted those few who came out, so that only the vendors’ lonely cries rose from the stands.

  Boston took all three games and left town on Sunday only one game out of first. Toronto had dropped three to Chicago, so Providence stayed a game behind them. Harvey had a bad series at the plate, going 2-for-13, and his batting average now stood exactly at .300.

  An hour after the game on Sunday, Harvey and Mickey were heading down Route 1 to have some steamers at a clam shack near Narragansett, overlooking Rhode Island Sound.

  “Do you think I’m a good reporter, Bliss?” she said, turning off the car radio.

  “Sure you are.”

  “But am I really good?”

  “You’re really good.”

  “Really, really good?”

  Harvey adjusted the rearview mirror. “I get it,” he said. “You heard.”

  “Yes.”

  “From a certain organization whose call letters are the first three letters of the alphabet. In their proper sequence.”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “Yesterday.” She smiled.

  “You got the job!” Harvey shouted.

  “Yes.”

  “Mick, that’s great.”

  “I’m scared.”

  “You’re going to be terrific.”

  “They offered me a lot of money.”

  “You deserve it.” He leaned over and kissed her.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Then give it to me and I’ll support you.”

  “You’ll hate me if I go to New York. I’ll start calling everyone ‘honey’ and drinking expensive mineral water at lunch.”

  “I’ll hate you if you don’t go. This is the proverbial big break.”

  “I’ll blow it.”

  “The hell you will, Mick. You’re hot, you’re a comer.”

  “Stop it. You sound like Campy Strulowitz.”

  “You’re the kid, babe, you’re the one, hum-a-now, have an idea.”

  “Oh, stop it!” Mickey laughed.

  “You’re the looker, be a kid, hum babe, you the babe.”

  “Stop it! I’m going to wet my pants.”

  “When do they want you?”

  “Sometime in November. Bliss, I don’t want to leave you.”

  “You’re not leaving me. You’re just heading down the road a piece.”

  “Maybe I can get a clause in my contract that says the Yankees have to trade for you so we can be together.”

  “I’d even settle for the Mets. Hell, maybe I’ll just get Marshall Levy to transfer the franchise to New Rochelle or something.”

  “I’d like that.”

  “Better yet, Mick, I’ll retire and come to New York, and you can support me in the style to which neither of us is accustomed. I’m tired of baseball.”

  “Retire? You’ve never played better.”

  “It’s a fluke. Three seasons ago, I was hitting the ball better and I ended up with a two-seventy-two average. This year they’re just falling in. It’s a difference of about fifteen hits falling in for you, that’s all.”

  “Don’t be silly. You’re just a late developer. You’ll see. Next season, you’ll be up there again.”

  “It’s wearing off, Mick.”

  “You’re just in one of your famous moods.” She stuck her head out the window, and he stole a glance at her profile. When she brought her head back in, she said, “Are you upset about my new job?”

  “Of course not. I couldn’t be happier. Why would I be upset?”

  She picked at a fingernail. “You know. Athletes use themselves up at such a young age. You’re not through yet, believe me, but here I am, just really getting started in my career.” Harvey didn’t say anything. “I didn’t mean to depress you, Bliss.”

  “No, it’s not you. Obviously. It’s me. You know, the worst part about being an average ball player having a good year at my age is that it makes you think there’s still time to become a great ball player.” He switched lanes. “Just two careers passing in the night.”

  “Don’t get maudlin on me.”

  “I don’t want to be one of those guys who sit around on the weekend reading their scrapbooks.”

  They were at a rotary. Mickey clapped her hands together and pointed at a miniature golf course set behind a Dairy Freeze.

  “Please,” he said sourly. “Anything but miniature golf. The only sport I hate more is actual-size golf.”

  “Not the golf, dummy. Next to it. The batting cages.”

  “Batting cages? Where?”

  “Look. Next to it. Those machines.”

  Harvey saw the cages. “No, Mick. I’ve had enough baseball for one day. I’ve had enough for one lifetime.”

  “Please. You get to hit all the time. I never get to. I want to show you I can hit.”

  “I already think of you as one of the guys. I’m hungry.”

  “Don’t be selfish, Bliss.”

  They waited in line behind some teenagers who were hitting against the two machines, one fast and one slow, positioned at the far end of the netted cage. An old man in a T-shirt emblazoned with the name of a rock group sat on a stool behind the machines and periodically loaded the rubber-coated baseballs into bins that fed them one at a time down a chute and between two rapidly spinning discs that propelled them across the plates. After every pitch, no matter how well his customers hit the ball, he announced loudly, “You’re out!” and spat copiously on the ground.

  “You could be in the league another five years,” Mickey said as they watched the teenagers. “Your legs are good.”

  “Not as good as yours.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t feel this way.”

  “Maybe it’s Providence. I haven’t played for a loser since high school.”

  “Maybe it’s Rudy,” she said, as if she’d been wanting to say it all along.

  Harvey watched a towheaded kid hit line drive after line drive off the slow machine. “Yeah,” he said, “it’s like I lost him twice.”

  “Twice?”

  “Rudy wasn’t Rudy.”

  She took his hand. “You haven’t heard from Linderman since you gave him the bank statements, have you?” she said, as the towheaded kid came out of the cage.

  “No.”

  “Give me a quarter, will you?” Mickey kicked off her sandals, selected a batting helmet and bat from the management’s aging collection, and fed the quarter into the coin box behind home plate. She dug her bare feet expertly into the dusty batter’s box and rotated the bat in frantic circles over her head. The towheaded kid and his friend, intrigued by the sight of a woman in a sundress preparing to do battle against the machine, hung along the netting and shouted encouragement.

  “Let’s go, lady, step into one!”

  “Break the machine, lady!”

  Mickey stroked the first arching pitch high into the net behind the machine.

  “You’re out!” the old man bellowed and spit.

  “Looking good, Mick,” Harvey called out.

  She pushed her hair behind her ear with an index finger and waited for the machine’s next looping delivery. “Why do you think you haven’t heard from him?” she
called.

  “Who?” Harvey said.

  “Linderman,” she said. She bounced the second pitch solidly up the middle.

  “You’re out,” the old man bellowed.

  “Pretty good stick up there, huh, Bliss?” Mickey said. “Do you think Linderman knows anything?”

  “Way to hit, lady,” the towheaded kid’s friend said.

  “I know he thinks Ronnie Mateo’s out of the picture,” Harvey said.

  Mickey powdered the next pitch, adjusted her helmet, and to the delight of her audience, sent a small stream of saliva behind her into the dust. “And Frances?” she said. “What could Rudy do that’d be worth fifteen grand to her? Keep their love a secret?”

  “I doubt it was love on Frances’s part. Anyway, Felix already knew about the two of them. No, it’s something else, Mick. If it was Frances, she was paying him for something else. But what? What can a relief pitcher do?”

  Mickey lined the next pitch into the net, a solid base hit. “This is fun, Bliss,” she said. “But even if Frances was paying Rudy for something, you don’t think she’s the one who killed him, do you? That’s too crazy.” She spit in her left hand. “I need a batting glove.”

  “Tough it out, Mick.” She popped up the next pitch. “Keep your back shoulder up, Mick,” he said. “No, I can’t believe she’d ever kill anybody, but I swear to God she’s in there somewhere. She’s too interested in making me and in making Linderman not to be. She’s hiding something, Mick, but I don’t know what she’s hiding. There’s one piece missing. I need one piece, Mick.”

  Mickey bounced the next one, and it hit the machine.

  “Break it, lady!” one of the teenagers yelled.

  “You’re out!” the old man bellowed again.

  “Well, look,” she said, waiting for the seventh and final offering. “You said Ronnie Mateo works for the guys who run the concessions at the park where the team that Frances owns twenty percent of plays, and therefore”—she fouled off the last pitch—“Damn!” She flung the helmet aside and strutted out.

  “You’re out!” said the old man.

  “And therefore what?” Harvey said.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said, stooping to put on her sandals. “What was that woman’s name?”

  “Which woman?”

  “The one in New York. Who used to work for Frances.”

  “Oh, you mean Sharon Meadows,” Harvey said. “What do you want with her?”

  Mickey brushed dust off her dress. “It may come in handy.”

  “One piece, Mick. That’s all I need.”

  “Mister, let’s see you in there,” the towhead said. “C’mon, I bet the lady’s better’n you.”

  They got on Route 1A above Saunderstown and drove south to a shingled clam shack with a gravel apron and a string of red and blue bulbs running from one corner of its roof to a telephone pole beside the highway. After dinner, they threw their shoes in the car and walked over the scrubby dunes to a slender band of cold beach. Low over the water, the darkening sky was striped with purple, copper, and rose. Their only company was a gathering of quizzical fat gulls at the water’s edge scavenging among the remnants of a picnic. They kicked along the damp sand for a hundred yards and came to a clearing in the dunes. Harvey took Mickey by the hand and walked over to it before he realized what it was.

  The clearing was an abandoned Little League field set between the highway and the beach. The infield had grown over with weeds, and the rest was a ragged pasture of tall grass. The chicken wire on the primitive backstop had pulled away from its wood frame and curled back like a page. At center field, behind the rusty chain-link fence that described the tiny outfield, was a scoreboard, a splitting sheet of painted plywood nailed to two two-by-four posts. According to the numbered plywood squares still hanging by small hooks, HOME was leading VISITORS 3-1 in the top of the fourth inning. Mickey and Harvey stood at home plate, a piece of wrinkled rubber, with the light fading fast over the Sound and the wind picking up, and it seemed as if the world had ended long ago, in the middle of a Little League game.

  THE WHITE SOX TREATED Providence poorly in Chicago, winning Tuesday night in Comiskey Park and sweeping the Wednesday twi-night double-header. The Jewels broke their new seven-game losing streak on Thursday night when Dan Van Auken, on only three days’ rest, pitched a five-hit shutout. Harvey accounted for all the runs with a long fly ball in the fourth that crept up a westerly breeze and landed in the first row of the right field seats, scoring Manomaitis and Stiles ahead of him.

  He was sitting in front of his locker with a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon when two hands grabbed him from behind around the neck.

  “Goddamn it!” Harvey yelled and turned around. “Oh, it’s you. How’d you get in here? I said I’d meet you outside.”

  “The clubhouse guard took one look at me and knew I wasn’t lying when I said I was your brother,” Norm said, slapping Harvey on the back. He looked like an inflated version of his younger brother, slightly taller, heavier, puffier, and paler. At thirty-four, Norm wore a few more creases around his eyes and mouth that implied what would become of his face. In his fist, there was a scorecard filled in with a professorially florid hand. “So this is it,” he said, glancing around the clubhouse at the half-naked ball players and fully attired reporters. “The madcap, zany guys who make up what is, at the moment, the worst team in professional baseball.”

  “Good to see you too, Norm. Want a beer?”

  “No, thanks. But, hey, thanks for hitting a home run for me out there. Looked like a tough pitch.”

  “It was a lousy hanging slider, and I should’ve parked it in the upper deck.” Harvey wrapped a towel around his waist.

  “Okay, okay, excuse me.” Norm reached into his brother’s locker and picked up his baseball glove. He tried it on. “Nice piece of leather, Harv. You know, when you were rounding the bases, I kept thinking about the Wiffleball games we used to play in the backyard and how every time you hit one off of me into the Milners’ yard you’d prance around the imaginary bases, taunting me. Remember?”

  “I’m going to take a shower, Norm. Can you keep out of trouble?”

  “Gee, you’re in a great mood, slugger. Can’t a guy reminisce?”

  In Norm’s Saab, they headed north to the Loop along Lake Shore Drive. Norm talked about his family as if he were its manager: “Nicky’s really coming along, we’re looking for him to have a great year in sixth grade, and Linda’s new job’s a real bonus for everybody….” Harvey stared out the window at the city’s huge sparkling skyline. Providence was small; it could hardly even be called a city. Boston was prissy and didn’t have the look of a place where important things got done. New York was a real city, but a claustrophobic one with nowhere to stand and take its measure. But Chicago, especially if you saw it from Lake Shore Drive on a clear night, looked like what you would imagine if you had never seen a city, only had one described to you.

  They went for broiled Lake Superior whitefish at Berghoff’s in the Loop, where the waiters embodied the efficiency and kindness of a family doctor, even though the hour was late. Norm wanted to talk about their childhood—about Big Al Blissberg’s old restaurant, summers on the Cape, endless games invented to pass the time growing up. By the time Harvey had laid two beers on top of the one he had drunk in the clubhouse, he, too, was in a nostalgic mood.

  “Remember the summer we played stickball against the grammar school every day and kept records for each game?” Norm was saying. “Don’t think I’ve forgotten that I struck you out four hundred twenty-three times in one summer.”

  Harvey piled fragments of a parsley potato on the back of his fork. “You were crazy about statistics even then.”

  “Speaking of which, Harv, I’ve got another one for you.”

  “You promised.”

  “All right, forget it,” Norm said.

  “Well, one more can’t hurt. Let me have it.”

  “No, no, I don’t want to…”

&nbs
p; “Damn it, Norm, what is it?” The restaurant was almost empty, and a white-haired waiter a few tables away looked up in their direction, then resumed collecting silverware.

  “Okay, I was looking over the pitching statistics for the entire season—”

  “What do you do, anyway? Cut out every Jewels box score?”

  “And mount them in a scrapbook. Now listen. This is interesting.” Norm swabbed his plate with a piece of seeded roll. “You guys have used four pitchers in the starting rotation most of the year: Stan Crop, Bobby Wagner, Dan Van Auken, and Andy Potter-Lawn. I was going over the season, and I began to notice how many times they had actually carried a lead into the late innings, only to be taken out of the game with men on base.” He dabbed his mouth with a napkin.

  “It happens all the time, Norm.”

  “I’m not through. Seventeen times, Harv, seventeen times your starting pitchers have been taken out of the game with a lead in the seventh, eighth, or ninth inning, and then you guys have gone on to lose the game. Is that bad managing or what?”

  “I know we’ve lost a lot of games in the late innings,” Harvey said between sips of decaf, “but that’s what happens when you’ve got a mediocre team. The starting pitcher gets tired, and Felix isn’t going to leave him in the game in the late innings, even if he’s got a small lead. We’re not a high-scoring team, and we’re not going to pad that lead and make the pitcher’s job any easier for him, so Felix wants a fresh arm in the game. You’ve got to use your relievers even if you’ve got a weak bull pen. Anyway, Norm, a bull pen that loses seventeen games in the late innings sounds about average to me for any second division team.”

  Norm was finishing his last few string beans with his fingers. “Okay, but you can’t fault me for trying. It beats preparing for my lecture tomorrow on Flaubert’s letters to Louise Colet.”

  “There’s a limit to what you can squeeze out of statistics.”

  “I still think I ought to be managing a major league ball club.” Norm wiped his fingers along the tablecloth, leaving parallel smudges.