The Great American Novel

by Philip Roth

  Yes, to the delight of the multitude, Chico Mecoatl began the long sad walk in from the Mundy bullpen. “Eeeep!” they cried, “eeeep!” imitating that little yelp he made when he pitched. Oh, how the crowd loved it—while the Mundys themselves were dumbstruck. Chico, even Chico, with an E.R.A. of 14.06, could no longer bear the indignity of wearing the Ruppert R!

  “And,” continued Mazuma, “covering second, to take the throw from Hothead—” “No!” the fans roared. “—Mundy second-sacker—” “No! No!” “—Nickname—”

  “MURDERER! KILLER! THUG!” they shrieked, as Nickname, tipping his cap, ran gamely out to his position.

  When Big John rose from the Mundy bench to go out to cover first, he quickly assured his startled teammates that he was only doing it for the kicks involved. “Don’t worry, boys. I ain’t no turncoat. Only trade I’d consider is to the Gypsys—wouldn’t mind dancin’ with a bear before I die! Haw! Haw!”

  Mrs. Mazuma, meanwhile, had retired to the Reaper dugout, to leave her purse for safekeeping with the Boy Scouts of Troop 40, and to change into her spikes.

  To spare himself some suffering, Chico rolled his warm-up pitch on the ground to Hot, who then pegged the ball down to Nickname at second. Ducky Rig, the Reaper catcher, came out to pretend to be the batter, and to yet another standing ovation—seven in all during the pregame ceremony, “let me check—yes sir, that’s it all right, a major league record,” said the sportscaster, “for standing ovations in a pregame ceremony in regular season competition”—Mazuma’s mom walked to first in her baseball shoes, being careful to avoid stepping down on the freshly laid foul line.

  “How do you do, Mr. Baal,” she said, and Big John gave the fans their money’s worth by sweeping off his cap and bowing in the manner of Sir Walter Raleigh.

  Then the Mexican right-hander went into his stretch; he looked cursorily back over his left shoulder to first—and sure enough, the old lady in the print dress came climbing down off the bag, and taking one inch, and then another, and then another, wound up taking herself a very healthy lead indeed. Engaging Chico’s eyes, she began to move her arms in a slow swinging motion, looking for all the world as though she would be breaking for second as soon as he went into his delivery.

  Well, let her. Chico hadn’t thrown to first to hold a regular base runner to the bag so far this year, and he wasn’t starting up at this late date with an old lady. Not with his arm, he wasn’t. So, into his snake-like wind-up he went, and with that yelp of his—“Eeeeep!”—looped the ball into the dirt. Hot blocked it neatly with his wooden leg, and Mrs. Mazuma held at first.

  On the second pitch she went! The pitch, when it finally arrived, was high, but Hot, playing inspired ball, leaped to grab it and still in the air, fired down to Nickname.

  Dress and all, Mrs. Mazuma slid, and her son, who was serving now as umpire at second, called, “Y’r out!”

  The look she gave him when she rose to brush the dirt off herself could hardly be described as maternal. “He missed the tag, Frank.”

  “I call ’em the way I see ’em, Mom,” said Mazuma into the hand mike he was carrying.

  “He never touched me, Frank,” said Mrs. Mazuma, kicking angrily at the bag.

  “Look, no favors around here just because you happened once upon a time to have nursed the umpire! If I said ‘Y’r out!’, y’r out!”

  Shaking her head in dismay, she trotted back to first, but not before turning to toss a few words Nickname’s way.

  Nickname now walked the ball to the mound, waving for Hot and Big John to join him and Chico for a conference. “Look,” he said, “you ain’t gonna believe this—but know what Mrs. Mazuma just told me? She flashes me this look, see, and she says, ‘Don’t block that bag, sonny, or next time I’ll cut your ears off!’”

  “Well, whattayaknow! Just as I suspicioned! That card Mazuma done it to us again—the she is really a he! Haw!”

  “Look,” snarled Hot, “I don’t care if it’s a it! You block that bag good, Nickname! And Chico, don’t you give her no jump like that, you heart Fire to first when she takes that lead!”

  “Oh, Caldo, no, please Caldo, I don’t be happy fire to first—too much hurt, Caldo—”

  “And what about bein’ a friggin’ Mundy, don’t that hurt? Hold that slit to first, you yelpin’ little spic, or the whole lot of us is doomed to Rupe-it forever!”

  “Haw! Doomded we is anywhichway,” said Big John, and strode back to first base as though doom was so much lemonade to him. “How they hangin’, honey?” he asked Mrs. Mazuma, placing a wad of tobacco juice between her spikes.

  “Here, here,” retorted Mrs. Mazuma, “we don’t need any of that, young man,” and stepped down off the bag with her lead.

  Chico’s sorry throw to first, preceded as it was by a squeak, enabled Mrs. Mazuma to get back to the bag in plenty of time.

  “Ain’t you afraid you’ll tear your nice dress, sweetie, if you have to hit the dirt again?” asked Big John.

  “I can look after myself perfectly well, thank you,” and she broke for second! Again Hot’s peg was perfect, but with a slide reminiscent of the Georgia Peach himself, Mrs. Mazuma swept in on her back to the right of the bag—and the tag—while reaching behind to tick the base with the fingers of her left hand.

  “Safe!” called Mazuma, extending his arms, palms down. “She is safe!”

  With the crowd on its feet again, Mrs. Mazuma rose to clap the dust out of her dress and to adjust her rubberized hose. And all the while, in a voice that was no less menacing for being muted, she issued a warning to the Mundy second-baseman, who though he could not believe his ears, listened as politely as he would to any lady her age dressed in that kind of dress: “Now back in the kitchen, sonny,” she told him, brushing herself clean, “I have got me a special grinding stone for honing my carving knives—and you know what I do with it? I sit around with the other nice ladies in the afternoon over a cup of coffee and some petit fours, and I sharpen up my spikes. Now this is the last time I’m telling you: that basepath, in case you ain’t heard, belongs to the runner. You get in the runner’s way one more time, and she is going to take you, buster, clothes and all. I’m stealing this next one for a kid in the hospital, Nickname, little girl name a’ Doubloon—so just you give me room, boy, if you want to have a face left.”

  “But,” replied Nickname, “she whipped me—with her whip! Look, this blood is mine!” But Mrs. Mazuma was trotting back to first, accompanied by a joyous roar from the crowd.

  As the two stood together on the bag, Big John came up to within an inch of her jaw, and inquired, “Just couldn’t be, under that wig and make-up and all, that you are the outlawed and unfamous Gil Gamesh pickin’ up a few pesos—could it, Mrs. M.? That couldn’t be you under there, playin’ the slit again, could it, Gilly boy?”

  “Now you just watch your tongue, Mr. Baal. One more crack—”

  “You call it how you want—haw! haw!”

  “—and I will report you to General Oakhart for even mentioning that name on a big league diamond, and what’s more, to an American Mom.” And like a big, calm, cunning cat, she started inching away from that bag.

  Behind the plate, Hothead was already screaming, “Hold her to the—!” But it was too late now; the old lady had gotten the jump and was already midway to second while Hot was still waiting for Chico’s slow ball to arrive at the plate. According to some of the ironists in the league, you really had to feel sorry for that pitch—slow is slow, but that poor thing was retarded. Hot, too frantic to think, did the unthinkable: while the ball was still on its way to the plate, he rushed forward to meet it, thus putting himself directly in the path of the bat, should the man at the plate decide to take a cut at either the ball or the catcher.

  “Swing!” the fans cried to Duck Rig. “Knock the cover off his skull!”

  Ducky was really of a kindly nature (and the fans of course were only kidding), but still and all, it was his job up there to keep the whole thing hon
est, and so he swung—a kind of golf stroke, was all, at Hothead’s wooden leg, driving it cleanly off the stump and down the third-base line—“Foul!” according to the sportscaster up in the radio box. One of the Boy Scouts ran instantly out to retrieve it, even as Hot, balancing on just one leg, burned one down to second and then went toppling after it on to his face. God, did ever a man want to be traded as much as Hothead Ptah?

  “A perfect peg!” the sportscaster cried—only Mrs. Mazuma was sliding in with her right leg so high in the air, you could for a moment see the sunlight glinting off her spikes. Then shoe, leg, and the flying folds of her long dress disappeared into the crumbling figure of Nickname, who went down as if in slow motion, closing over Mrs. Mazuma’s lower extremities like the jaws of a crocodile.

  Silence in the ball park, the silence of the spheres, while the dust cleared and Mazuma looked to ascertain whether the runner had managed to separate the second-baseman from his head, which had pretty much seemed her intention. But no, though she had sliced his uniform open diagonally from the shoulder to the waist, Nickname himself was intact; the second-baseman had, however, been separated from the ball, which lay fifteen feet beyond him at the edge of the grass.

  “Safe!” exclaimed Mazuma, and as they said next day in the papers, you could have renamed Reaper Field Pandemonium Park.

  Halfway to the mound, the Mundy catcher lay pounding the dirt with his fists, and howling, as though those tears he wept were scalding his face.

  Suddenly a Boy Scout appeared at the side of the fallen catcher, holding the wooden limb in his two outstretched hands. “Here, sir, your leg.”

  “Aww, stick it up your ass,” wept Hothead. “You go through life a jelly-apple!”

  “You mean,” cried the Boy Scout, a look of pure delight breaking across his freckled face, “I can keep it? And the baseball shoe, too? Wow! Hothead Ptah’s leg!” he called, running back with his prize to the troop in the Reaper dugout. “He said I can have it!”

  And now Nickname was kneeling beside him, and Big John too. “How could you do it?” Hot cried, grabbing the second-baseman by the shirt, “How could you be afraid of a sixty-year-old lady’s spikes?”

  “Aw, lay off, Hot,” said Big John. “It warn’t no old lady. If you ask me, it was a ringer named Gamesh.”

  But Nickname, wiping the warpaint of his own blood and tears across his cheek with the back of his mitt, blubbered, “But it was a old lady, Jawn, that’s the worst of it. That’s how come I dropped the ball! It weren’t them spikes that scared me, Hot. Look, I took ’em full in the letters.”

  “Then what?” screamed Hot. “Was you bein’ polite to her that you lost the ball?”

  “No! No! It’s, it’s when she raised up her leg—that’s how come I lost it! I damn near went unconscious.”

  “Why?” demanded Hothead.

  “Aw jeez, Hot, I ain’t never smelled nothin’ like that at second base before. Or in a cathouse even. It stunk like somethin’ that’s been left out somewhere and turned green. I ain’t lyin’ to you, Hot—I thought maybe it was a shrimp boat dockin’ at the bag. Only worse! Then my whole life flashed before my eyes, and I thought, by Jesus, I’m gonna die from whatever it is!”

  “That keen, huh?” said Big John.

  “Keen? I’druther be drownin’ in a swamp!”

  “Well,” said Big John, consoling the catcher as he and Nickname each took the dumbstruck Hothead by an arm and helped him back to the Mundy dugout, “old or young, they all of them knows how to get the use out of that thing, don’t they? Cheer up now, ol’ Hothead, you ain’t the first feller to get done in by the black hole of Calcutta—or the last either.”

  And Chico? No sooner had Hot’s leg been driven foul than he ran from the field to the visitors’ clubhouse, climbed inside his locker and pulled the door shut behind him. A devout and simple man (albeit an ingrate), he had taken what happened as a judgment upon himself. Through the airholes of the locker he whispered a plea, “I like Mundy! I be Mundy! I stay Mundy!” and though Jolly Cholly shortly appeared to open the locker and remove the trembling reliever from his makeshift confessional, thereafter Chico’s sleep was plagued with visions of limbs being batted back at him out of the box, of eyeballs dropping like bunts, and whole heads, severed at the neck, that he took with a shriek on one hop … oh, in torment he would roll from his hotel bed to the floor, and there on his face, in yet another strange town, beg to be forgiven for his disloyalty to the team that owned him, and his hatred of the uniform he wore. He prayed to the Holy Mother to keep him a Mundy forever—hoping against hope of course, that because he was so unworthy, his prayers would go unanswered.

  * * *

  In the name of mercy (and narrative brevity, fans), let us pass over Bud Parusha’s protracted demonstration of how he tied his shoelaces, and over the eight and two-thirds innings of baseball that ensued, to arrive at the final bloodletting of “Welcome Bud Parusha Day,” wherein the refugees from Ruppert, bereft of the player whose name at least had endowed their line-up with some small claim to big league legitimacy, went from being simply the most inept and ludicrous team in the history of Organized Baseball, to the most universally despised. In that nobody on the Kakoola club had any idea of how to remove the ball from between their new right-fielder’s jaws when in his anxiety it would become lodged there (as it did in one out of every two chances he had during his first day as a Reaper), what should have been an easy 8–0 victory for the home team, went to the last of the ninth with the score tied 8–8, thanks to Bud Parusha’s big mouth.

  The bottom of the ninth then, score tied, two men down, and the bases full of Reapers—could it have happened any more dramatically in a storybook? With a weary, wild fifty-year-old on the hill for the Mundys, and the winning run on third, the longed-for words were uttered:

  “Your attention, please. Pinch-hitting for Kakoola, Number ¼—”

  His name was lost in the roar.

  But for a small (a very small) Band-Aid across the bridge of his nose, Bob Yamm bore no marks of the fierce combat of the previous afternoon. Nor was there any indication in his bearing that the decision made by an entire nation “in the long dark night of its soul” (to hear Frank M. describe it) “to bring Bob back to baseball and baseball back to Bob” had affected by so much as one iota, by so much as one micron, by so much as one millimicron, his exquisite sense of propriety. He emerged from the Reaper dugout swinging his two little bats and proceeded on to home plate with the grave, determined manner of a man with a job to do, no more, no less. The tumultuous ovation being accorded him he acknowledged only by pulling on the bill of his cap. And when he looked for the briefest second to the stands, it was not to the roaring multitude, but to a seat in Frank Mazuma’s box back of first, where Judy Yamm, perched on two Kakoola telephone directories, chewed upon her manicured and polished nails. To her alone Bob smiled.

  On the mound, Deacon Demeter, who had already walked fourteen full-grown men in the course of the long, harrowing afternoon, leaned way down off the rubber and searched for that narrow slot in space through which the ball must now pass to be considered a strike. He looked and he looked and he looked—the Deacon was a patient man—and then instead of rearing back to pitch, he walked off the field and out of the game, all on his own. “Believe me, Cholly,” he told the Mundy coach in the dugout, “if it was possible, I’d a tried. But, hell, you couldn’t even a got a nickel in there to make a phone call.”

  “Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please: coming in to pitch for the Mundys, Number 1⁄16—”

  The rest is Patriot League history, or was, when P. League history was still extant around here. Pitching to someone approximately his own size, Number 1⁄16—who was of course O.K. Ockatur, wearing on his Mundy shirt the number of his dreams and of his own devising—cut loose with two overhand curveballs, quite normal little pitches such as a pretty good fifth-grader might throw; each broke in across the waist of the immobile Yamm and over the outside corner for
strikes one and two. Now, Yamm was as unfamiliar with an 0 and 2 situation as a man from Mars, or Budapest; likewise he was utterly without ability as a hitter, which was why Mazuma had warned him at the outset that he wasn’t to lift the bat off his shoulder if he wanted to live to tell the tale. But Bob did not intend to go down looking at called strike three. It wasn’t a matter of sparing his pride, either; what concerned him was the pride of respectable, honest, hardworking midgets everywhere, the average American midget whose dignity he embodied and trust he bore. He stood for too much to too many little people, to stand there helpless and impotent before Ockatur’s third strike. It came down to this: he was loved and Ockatur was loathed. One had only to listen to that crowd to know that.

  Of course with two quick strikes on the hitter, Ockatur decided to waste his next pitch—as who wouldn’t, freak or Hall of Famer? Yamm, however, imagining that the high hard one sailing toward his hands was going to break down and away like the two preceding curveballs, went lunging after it with his bat. He swung with all his might, and he missed, even as the ball kept right on coming at his face.

  * * *

  The first bulletins from the hospital were hopeful. Millions of Americans went to bed at midnight September 15, 1943, believing that the crisis had passed. Then, at 4:17 A.M. Central Daylight Saving Time, Frank Mazuma emerged from Kakoola Memorial and wearily mounted the hood of a police car. He was unshaven and his face was streaked with tears. To the gathering of newsmen, to the hundreds of fans and well-wishers who had continued to stand vigil outside the hospital even as a fine morning drizzle had begun to fall, Mazuma announced that the ball that had struck Bob Yamm between the eyes had blinded him for life. When he came to deliver the rest of his report, he broke down completely and had to be helped from the police car by his sons Jack and Gelt, and hurried away. It was only a matter of minutes, however, before a hospital orderly who wanted his picture in the paper collared the sportswriter Smitty and revealed that the curvaceous Doubloon would never wiggle her sweet ass again, as she was paralyzed from her twenty-two-inch waist clear to the ground.