Plan B for the Middle Class: Stories

by Ron Carlson

  I could hear Hanna downstairs with some of her students, moving around to the music: “Come on, baby, do the twist!” And I was kind of smiling sadly about how my life had turned out, and I wasn’t really watching the television commercial, which showed a house burning up while people in blankets discussed insurance.

  And then: KA-BANG! In the flames I saw the message clearly, the last subliminal message before arriving here. In the bright orange of the fire danced the words:

  JOIN THE ARMY

  Hey, it’s not so bad here at Fort Bragg. I feel a little funny, being the oldest recruit by twenty years. A lot of the kids call me sir. But I’ve organized a little group in the barracks, and I’ve already taught them the Hustle, the Mississippi Three Step, and the Grand Rondalay. I miss Doreen and Hanna, but I did leave Hanna the house, and I read in Sports Illustrated that Doreen has a good fast support team that can change a tire in seven seconds.

  So, my life has changed, but who knows, the Army may help. Be all you can be, that’s my motto. Boot camp is tough, but Fort Bragg is real nice. We don’t have time for magazines or television, and listen: the dental care here is tremendous.

  SUNNY BILLY DAY

  The very first time it happened with Sunny Billy Day was in Bradenton, Florida, spring training, a thick cloudy day on the Gulf, and I was there in the old wooden bleachers, having been released only the week before after going o for 4 in Winter Park against the Red Sox, and our manager, Ketchum, saw that my troubles were not over at all. So, not wanting to go back to Texas so soon and face my family, the disappointment and my father’s expectation that I’d go to work in his Allstate office, and not wanting to leave Polly alone in Florida in March, a woman who tended toward ball players, I was hanging out, feeling bad, and I was there when it happened.

  My own career had been derailed by what they called “stage fright.” I was scared. Not in the field—I won a Golden Glove two years in college and in my rookie year with the Pirates. I love the field, but I had a little trouble at the plate. I could hit in the cage, in fact there were times when batting practice stopped so all the guys playing pepper could come over and bet how many I was going to put in the seats. It wasn’t the skill. In a game I’d walk from the on-deck circle to the batter’s box and I could feel my heart go through my throat. All those people focusing on one person in the park: me. I could feel my heart drumming in my face. I was tighter than a ten-cent watch—all strikeouts and pop-ups. I went .102 for the season—the lowest official average of any starting-lineup player in the history of baseball.

  Ketchum sent me to see the team psychiatrist, but that turned out to be no good, too. I saw him twice. His name was Krick and he was a small man who was losing hair, but his little office and plaid couch felt to me like the batter’s box. What I’m saying is: Krick was no help—I was afraid of him, too.

  Sometimes just watching others go to bat can start my heart jangling like a rock in a box, and that was how I felt that cloudy day in Bradenton as Sunny Billy Day went to the plate. We (once you play for a team, you say “we” ever after) were playing the White Sox, who were down from Sarasota, and it was a weird day, windy and dark, with those great loads of low clouds and the warm Gulf air rolling through. I mean it was a day that didn’t feel like baseball.

  Billy came up in the first inning, and the Chicago pitcher, a rookie named Gleason, had him o and 2, when the thing happened for the first time. Polly had ahold of my arm and was being extra sweet when Billy came up, to let me know that she didn’t care for him at all and was with me now, but—everybody knows—when a woman acts that way it makes you nervous. The kid Gleason was a sharpshooter, a sidearm fastballer who could have struck me out with two pitches, and he had shaved Billy with two laser beams that cut the inside corner.

  Gleason’s third pitch was the smoking clone of the first two and Sunny Billy Day, my old friend, my former roommate, lifted his elbows off the table just like he had done twice before and took the third strike.

  It was a strike. We all knew this. We’d seen the two previous pitches and everybody who was paying attention knew that Gleason had nailed Billy to the barn door. There was no question. Eldon Finney was behind the plate, a major league veteran, who was known as Yank because of the way he yanked a fistful of air to indicate a strike. His gesture was unmistakable, and on that dark day last March, I did not mistake it. But as soon as the ump straightened up, Sunny Billy, my old teammate, and the most promising rookie the Pirates had seen for thirty years, tapped his cleats one more time and stayed in the box.

  “What’s the big jerk doing?” Polly asked me. You hate to hear a girl use a phrase like that, “big jerk,” when she could have said something like “rotten bastard,” but when you’re in the stands, instead of running wind sprints in the outfield, you take what you can get.

  On the mound in Bradenton, Gleason was confused. Then I saw Billy shrug at the ump in a move I’d seen a hundred times as roommates when he was accused of anything or asked to pay his share of the check at the Castaway. A dust devil skated around the home dugout and out to first, carrying an ugly litter of old sno-cone papers and cigarette butts in its brown vortex, but when the wind died down and play resumed, there was Sunny Billy Day standing in the box. I checked the scoreboard and watched the count shift to 1 and 2.

  Eldon “the Yank” Finney had changed his call.

  So that was the beginning, and as I said, only a few people saw it and knew this season was going to be a little different. Billy and I weren’t speaking—I mean, Polly was with me now, and so I couldn’t ask him what was up—but I ran into Ketchum at the Castaway that night and he came over to our table. Polly had wanted to go back there for dinner—for old times’ sake; it was in the Castaway where we’d met one year ago. She was having dinner with Billy that night, the Bushel o’ Shrimp, and they asked me to join them. Billy had a lot of girls and he was always good about introducing them around. Come on, a guy like Billy had nothing to worry about from other guys, especially me. He could light up a whole room, no kidding, and by the end of an hour there’d be ten people sitting at his table and every chair in the room would be turned his way. He was a guy, and anybody will back me up on this, who had the magic.

  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 wh
en 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.