by Philip Roth
“It’s a racket, is what it is!” John said to the diaperman. “Fifteen bucks and he don’t even got a piece of hamburger meat! You probably cut the pablum with water!”
“You’re supposed to cut pablum with water, wiseguy. Now just quiet down, how about it? Maybe there are people tryin’ to sleep around here, you know?”
Nickname by now had made his way to the head of the stairs. “Hi, Jawn … What’s up?”
“Let’s git, niño.”
“How come?” asked Nickname, nervously.
“How come? On accounta what they get around here for ‘Alouette,’ that’s how come!”
“What’s an al-oo-etta?”
“It is a French song, that’s all it is, keed—and it’ll cost you two dollars and fifty cents! Know what they get for ‘Happy Birthday’? Four dollars weekdays and five on Sundays! For ‘Happy Birthday to You’!”
“Well,” said Nickname, watching the two diapermen closing in on his protector, “it ain’t my birthday anyhow—I already had it for this year.”
“It ain’t the birthday, damn it—it’s the principle! You know what you can get for four bucks down by the lake? I hate to tell you. You know what you can get for two-fifty? You don’t get no French song—you get Frenched itself! Come on, tweak your mom on the tittie, and let’s get out of here!”
Nickname shrugged. “I guess we’re goin’ now,” he said to Mary.
“Suits me. I been up since four. That’ll be fifteen.”
Nickname looked down the stairway to Big John. “Jawn? It’ll be fifteen.”
“Yeah, well, you tell her it’ll be five, what with it bein’ not even nine in the night.”
“Sorry, Mac,” said Mary. “Fifteen.”
Big John said, “Five, slit,” and reaching into his pocket for some change, added, “but here’s two bits for yourself, for givin’ us a glimpse of your can. Haw! Haw!”
One of the diapermen was beneath Big John, pinned to the floor of the playpen—an alphabet block stuffed in his mouth—and the other was preparing to bring the fire truck down on the first baseman’s head, when the sirens came screaming into the street. “The cops!” cried the diaperman who could still speak, and he ran for the kitchen door—and there was a Kakoola policeman pointing a pistol.
“Pimp bastard,” said the officer, and fired into the air.
Immediately, from the windows of the little white houses, men began to leap out onto the lawns, men in diapers and Doctor Dentons, some still holding bottles and clutching blankets in their hands. Nickname and Big John, charging out through the front door, found themselves on the front lawn beside a man in combat boots and a crew cut, clinging to a teddy bear; apparently he had been in another bedroom of the same house. “The Japs or the cops,” he screamed, “which is it?”
“Haw! Haw!”
Now a squad car turned up off the street and came right at them there on the lawn, siren howling and searchlight a blinding white. The man with the teddy bear (a sergeant in the U.S. Marines according to the story in the morning paper about the raid on “the pink-’n-blue district”) broke for the backyard. Zing, and he fell over into a forsythia bush, his teddy bear still in his arms.
They came out with their hands in the air after that; some were in tears and tried to hide their faces with their upraised arms. “Cry babies,” mumbled a cop, and he beat them around the ankles with his nightstick as they stepped up into the police van one by one.
Meanwhile, they had begun to empty the houses of the “mothers.” Storybooks in hand, they filed out, women more or less resembling Mary, wearing aprons and cotton dresses, and all, it would seem, very much in possession of themselves. They were lined up in the crossbeams of the squad cars and frisked by a policewoman; standing together in the street, they looked as though they might have been called together to give the neighborhood endorsement for 20 Mule Team Borax, rather than to be charged with a crime of vice.
When the policewoman reached into Mary’s apron pocket and withdrew a handful of diaper pins, she exploded—“You and your diapers and your diaper pins and your diaper service! Filth! You live in filth! You’re a disgrace to your sex!”
“Lay off,” said the cop who was covering the “mothers” with a submachine gun.
“Shit and puke and piss! Just get a whiff of them!”
“Lay off, Sarge,” said the armed policeman.
But she couldn’t. “You perverts make a person sick, you stink so bad!” And she spat in Mary’s face, to show her contempt.
The “mothers” stood in the middle of Euphrates Drive listening with expressionless faces to the insults of the policewoman. A few like Mary had to laugh to themselves, however, for nothing the policewoman said could begin to approach the contempt that they felt for their own lives.
Nor did the “mothers” show any emotion when the diapermen, many of them badly beaten and covered with blood, were driven past them with nightsticks, and pushed on their faces into the police van. Only when the body of the dead customer with the teddy bear was carried to the ambulance—diapered down below, and above now too, where they had covered the fatal wound in his head—only then did one of them speak. It was the woman who had fed him that night. “He was just a boy,” she said—to which a policeman replied, “Yeah, and so is Hitler.”
“I wouldn’t doubt it,” the “mother” answered, and for her cheekiness was removed from the line and taken by two policemen into the back of a squad car. “What do you want to hear, officers,” she asked as they led her away, “the Three Bears or—”
“Shut her up!” shouted the policewoman, and they did.
The van for the “mothers” was over an hour in arriving; it grew cold out in the street, and though the abuse from the policewoman grew more and more vile, the “mothers” never once complained.
* * *
Now because of the proximity of “the hog factory” to the ball park, playing against the Butchers in the Pork Capital of the World had never been considered a particularly savory experience by Patriot League players, and it was a long-standing joke among them that they would rather be back home cleaning out cesspools for a living than have to call Aceldama their home on a sultry August day. Of course, one full season at Butcher Field and a newcomer was generally as accustomed to the aromas wafting in from the abattoir as to the odors of the hot dogs cooking on the grill back of third. Only the visiting teams kept up their complaining year in and year out, and not so much because of the smell, as the sounds. Visiting rookies would invariably give a start at the noise that came from a pig having his throat slit just the other side of the left-field wall, and when a thousand of the terrified beasts started in screaming at the same time, it was not unheard of for a youngster in pursuit of a fly ball to fall cowering to his knees.
In ’43, the Mundys had to come through Aceldama to play not just eleven, but twenty-two games, and from the record they made there that year, it would not appear that playing twice as many times in Butcher Field as each of the other six clubs did much to accustom them to the nearby slaughterhouse and processing plant. “Lose to this mess of misfits,” the Butcher manager, Round Ron Spam, had warned his team when the Mundys—fresh from their disasters in Kakoola—came to town to open their first four-game series of the year, “and it is worse than a loss. It is a disgrace. And it will cost you fifty bucks apiece. And I don’t want just victory either—I want carnage.” Subsequently the Bloodthirsty Butchers, as they came to be called that year, went on to defeat the Mundys twenty-two consecutive times, yet another of the records compiled against (or by) the roaming Ruppert team. The headlines of the Aceldama Terminator told the story succinctly enough:
MUNDYS MAULED
MUNDYS MALLETTED
MUNDYS MUZZLED
MUNDYS MURDERED
MUNDYS MOCKED
MUNDYS MINED
MUNDYS MOWED DOWN
MUNDYS MESMERIZED
MUNDYS MORGUED
MUNDYS MANGLED
MUNDYS MASHE
D
MUNDYS MUTILATED
MUNDYS MANHANDLED
MUNDYS MAUSOLEUMED
MUNDYS MACK-TRUCKED
MUNDYS MELTED
MUNDYS MAROONED
MUNDYS MUMMIFIED
MUNDYS MORTIFIED
MUNDYS MASSACRED
MUNDYS MANACLED
—and, after the final game of the season between the two clubs, in which “the meat end,” so-called, of the Aceldama batting order hit five consecutive home runs in the bottom of the eighth—
MUNDYS MERCY-KILLED
From Aceldama, which was the third stop on the western swing after Asylum and Kakoola, the Mundys traveled overnight to the oldest Pony Express station in the Wild West and the furthest western outpost in any of the major leagues, Terra Incognita, Wyoming, there to play against the least hospitable crowd they had to put up with anywhere. No wonder Luke Gofannon had collapsed and called it quits in the middle of his first season as a Rustler. After twenty years as the hero of Rupe-it rootas—loving, tender, loyal, impassioned Rupe-it rootas!—how could he take those Terra Inc. fans in their bandannas and their undershirts, staring silently down at him in that open oven of a ball park? To be sure, in Luke’s case, their silence had been punctuated with derisive insults and chilling coyote calls from the distant bleachers, but what nearly drove you nuts out there wasn’t the noises, no matter how brutish, but that otherworldly quiet, that emptiness, and that staring: the miners, the farmers, the ranchers, the cowhands, the drifters, even the Indians packed into their little roped-off corner of the left-field stands, silent and staring. Or maybe the word is glaring. As though there was nothing more horrible to behold than these Mundys, a bunch of ballplayers who came from, of all places, nowhere.
Then there was this matter of the late, great Gofannon—fans out there hadn’t forgotten yet the fast one that had been put over on them back in ’32. Oh, you could see it plain as day in the set of the jaw of those Indians: a time would come when they would take their vengeance on these white men who had sold them a lemon for a hundred thousand dollars. As though Hothead, or Bud, or the Deacon had made a single nickel off that deal! As though these poor homeless bastards had anything to do with what had happened to the people of Terra Incognita ten long years ago! No, it was not pleasant being a Ruppert Mundy in the far western reaches of America. If the white ball emerging out of the acre of white undershirts in deep center wasn’t enough to terrify a batsman who was a stranger to these parts, there were those cold, contemptuous, vengeful eyes looking him over from the seats down both foul lines. How they drew a bead on you with those eyes! Why, you had only to scoop up a handful of dust before stepping into the box, for those eyes to tell you, in no uncertain terms, “That there dirt ain’t yours—it’s ours. Put it back where you got it, pardner.” And if you were a Ruppert Mundy and the year was 1943, you put it back all right, and pronto.
And then the long, long train ride back to the East, “the eastern swing” as it was called by the four western clubs, and by the Mundys too, though always self-consciously, for they were hardly a western club in anybody’s eyes, including their own. But then strictly speaking they weren’t an eastern club anymore either, even if on those eastward journeys, when they turned their watches ahead, the rapid sweep of the minute hand around the dial encouraged them to imagine the present over and done with, and the future, the return to Ruppert, upon them.
Independence, Virginia, where tourists surge through cobbled streets, and taxi drivers wear buckled shoes and powdered wigs, and in the restaurants the prices are listed in shillings and pence; where busloads of schoolkids line up next to the pillory in the town square to have their photo taken being punished, and a town crier appears in the streets at nine every night to shut the place down in accordance with the famous “Blue Laws” after which the baseball team is named. Talk about a place where they make a grown man feel welcome, and you are not talking about Independence, Virginia …
And then the worst of it, the coastal journey north from Independence to Tri-City, passing through Port Ruppert on the way …
Port Ruppert? Looked more like the Maginot Line. Soldiers everywhere. Two of them, fine-looking young fellows in gleaming boots and wearing pistols, hopped aboard the engine as it slowed in the railroad yard, awaiting clearance to enter the station. Guards in steel helmets and bearing arms stood some fifty feet apart all the way along the tracks, while still other soldiers, in shirt sleeves and blowing on whistles, directed empty flatcars into the roundhouse and back out onto the broad network of tracks. Where were the hobos who used to squat on their haunches cooking a potato at the track’s edge, the bums who used to smile their toothless smiles up at the Mundys when they returned from the road? Where were the old signalmen who used to raise their lanterns in salute, and, win or loss, call out, “Welcome home, boys! You done okay!” Where, where were their hundred thousand loyal fans?
“Haven’t you heard?” the Mundys chided themselves, “there’s a war on.”
With a gush from the train (and a sigh from the Mundys), they glided the last hundred yards into the station. “Rupe-it! Station Rupe-it!” the conductor called, and though many disembarked, nobody who played for the team of that name left his seat.
Rupe-it. Oh, how could something so silly as the way they pronounced those two syllables give you the gooseflesh? Two little syllables, Rupe and It, how could they give you the chills?
Hey, listen! They were announcing the arrival of their train in four different languages. Listen! English, French, Russian—and Chinese! In Rupe-it! And catch them faces? And all them uniforms! Why, you did not think there could be so many shades of khaki! Or kinds of hats! Or belts! Or salutes! Or shades of skin, for that matter! Why, there was a bunch of soldier boys wearing earrings, for Christ sake! Where the hell are they from—and how come they’re on our side, anyway? Damn, who they gonna scare, dressin’ up like that! Hey, am I seem’ things or is that there big coon talkin’ to that other coon in French? Hey, Ass-Start, is them niggers parlayvooin’ French? Wee-wee? Hey, Frenchy’s cousins is in town, haw haw! Hey—ain’t those things Chinks? Yeah? And I thought they was supposed to walk in them little steps! I’ll be darned—I never seen so many of ’em at the same time before. Kinda like a dream, ain’t it? Hey—lookee there at them beards on them boys! Now where you figger those fellers hail from? Eskimos? In this heat? They would be leakin’ at the seams, they would be dead. Zanzeebar? Never heard of ’em. And now what do you think them tiny little guys is? Some kind of wop looks like to me, only smaller. And now dang if that ain’t some other kind of Chink altogether—over there! Unless it’s their Navy! Christ, the Chinee Navy! I didn’t even know they had one. And in Rupe-it!
Now the two soldiers who had leaped aboard in the yard came through each car checking the papers of all the service personnel. Because of the crowding the Mundys were huddled together now, three to a seat, in the last car of the train. “You fellas all flat-footed?” the soldier quipped, looking around at the bald pates of the pitching staff. He smiled. “Or are you enemy spies?”
“We are ballplayers, Corporal,” said Jolly Cholly. “We are the Ruppert Mundys.”
“I’ll be darned,” the young corporal retorted.
“We are on our way to play four games against the Tycoons up in Tri-City.”
“I don’t believe it,” said the corporal. “The Mundys!”
“Right you are,” said Jolly Cholly.
“And you know what I took you for?” said the corporal.
“What’s that?”
“All squished up there, looking out the windows with them looks on your faces? I took you for a bunch of war-torn immigrants, just off the boat. I took you for somebody we just saved.”
“Nope,” said Jolly Cholly, “we ain’t off no boat. We’re from here. Matter of fact,” he added, peering out the window, “probably the only folks in sight that is.”
“I’ll be darned,” said the corporal. “Do you know, when I was just a little
boy—”
But no sooner had he begun to reminisce, than the train was moving. “Uh-oh. See ya!” the corporal called, and in a flash he was gone. And so was Rupe-it.
* * *
Ballplayers’ ballplayers—that was the phrase most commonly used to describe the Tycoon teams that in the first four decades of the twentieth century won eighteen pennants, eight World Series, and never once finished out of the first division. “Play,” though, is hardly the word to describe what they were about down on the field. Leaving the heroics to others, without ferocity or even exertion, they concentrated on doing only what was required of them to win, neither more nor less: no whooping, no hollering, no guesswork, no gambling, no elation, no despair, nothing extreme or eccentric. Rather, efficiency, intelligence, proportion—four runs for the pitcher who needed the security, two for the pitcher who liked the pressure, one in the ninth for him who rose only to the challenge. You rarely heard of the Tycoons breaking out, as teams will on occasion, with fifteen or twenty hits, or winning by ten or eleven runs; just as rarely did you hear of them committing three errors in a game, or leaving a dozen men stranded on base, or falling, either individually or as a team, into a slump that a day’s rest couldn’t cure. Though they may not always have been the most gifted or spectacular players in the league considered one at a time, together they performed like nine men hatched from the same perfect egg.
Of course the fans who hated them—and they were legion, particularly out in the West—labeled them “robots,” “zombies,” and even “snobs” because of their emotionless, machinelike manner. Out-of-town fans would jeer at them, insult and abuse them, do everything they could think of to try to rattle them—and watched with awe and envy the quietly flawless, tactful, economical, virtually invisible way in which the Tycoons displayed their superiority year in and year out.
Afterwards it was not always clear how exactly they had done it. “Where was we when it happened?” was a line made famous by a Rustler who did not even know his team had been soundly beaten until he looked up at the end of the ninth and read the sad news off the scoreboard. “They ain’t human,” the other players complained, “they ain’t all there,” but out of their uniforms and in street clothes, the Tycoons turned out to be fellows more or less resembling themselves, if a little better dressed and smoother in conversation. “But they ain’t that good!” the fans would cry, after the Tycoons had come through to sweep a four-game series—and yet there never did appear to be anybody that was better. “They steal them games! They take ’em while nobody’s lookin’!” “It’s that park of theirs, that’s what kills us—that sunfield and all them shadows!” “The way they does it, they can win all they want, and I still ain’t got no use for ’em! I wouldn’t be a Tycoon fan if you paid me!” But the even-tempered Tycoons couldn’t have cared less.
