by Rick Wilber
Every Broadway chorine thought she could start in a show. Every pug thought he could have been a champ. And every halfway decent ballplayer thought he could have been Buzz Arlett. Even a nonfan like Mencken knew his name. Back in the Twenties, people said they were two of the handful of Americans who needed no press agent. He came to Brooklyn from the Pacific Coast League in 1922. He belted home runs from both sides of the plate. He pitched every once in a while, too. And he turned the Dodgers into the powerhouse they’d been ever since. He made people forget about the Black Sox scandal that had hovered over the game since it broke at the end of the 1920 season. They called him the man who saved baseball. They called Ebbets Field the House That Buzz Built. And the owners smiled all the way to the bank.
Trying to be gentle with a man he rather liked, Mencken said, “Do you really think so? Guys like that come along once in a blue moon.”
Ruth thrust out his jaw. “I coulda, if I’d had the chance. Even when I got up to Philly, that dumbshit Fletcher who was runnin’ the team, he kept me pitchin’ an’ wouldn’t let me play the field. There I was, tryin’ to get by with junk from my bad flipper in the Baker Bowl, for Chrissakes. It ain’t even a long piss down the right-field line there. Fuck, I hit six homers there myself. For a while, that was a record for a pitcher. But they said anybody could do it there. An’ I got hit pretty hard myself, so after a season and a half they sold me to the Red Sox.”
“That was one of the teams that wanted you way back when, you said,” Mencken remarked.
“You was listenin’! Son of a bitch!” Ruth beamed at him. “Here, have one on me.” He drew another Blatz and set it in front of Mencken. The journalist finished his second one and got to work on the bonus. Ruth went on, “But when the Sox wanted me, they was good. Time I got to 'em, they stunk worse’n the Phils. They pitched me a little, played me in the outfield and at first a little, an’ sat me on the bench a lot. I didn’t light the world on fire, so after the season they sold me down to Syracuse. 'Cept for a month at the end of '32 with the Browns”—he shuddered at some dark memory—“I never made it back to the bigs again. But I coulda been hot stuff if fuckin’ Rasin came through with the cash.”
A line from Gray’s “Elegy” went through Mencken’s mind: Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest. A mute (or even a loudmouthed) inglorious Arlett tending bar in Baltimore? Mencken snorted. Not likely! He knew why that line occurred to him now. He’d mocked it years before: There are no mute, inglorious Miltons, save in the imaginations of poets. The one sound test of a Milton is that he functions as a Milton.
Mencken poured down the rest of the beer and got up from his stool. “Thank you kindly, George. I expect I’ll be back again before long.”
“Anytime, buddy. Thanks for lettin’ me bend your ear.” George Ruth chuckled. “This line o’ work, usually it goes the other way around.”
“I believe that.” Mencken put on his overcoat and gloves, then walked out into the night. Half an hour—not even—and he’d be back at the house that faced on Union Square.
Ray Gonzalez is an award-winning poet, editor and writer. He is the author of ten books of poetry and several collections of essays and short fiction, and also the editor of a dozen anthologies. He specializes in poetry, creative nonfiction, flash fiction and prose poetry. He teaches in the English and Creative Writing departments at the University of Minnesota. In this compact and literate story he toys with time, history, baseballs and baseball, giving us a collapsed novel's worth of storytelling.
Baseball
Ray Gonzalez
THE HOME RUN BALL rose over right field and disappeared before it started its downward arc. The right fielder backed to the warning path, but there was no ball to catch. He stood dazed as the roar of the crowd turned to confusion. Thousands of fans were on their feet for the home run. But, where was it? The hitter, a national hero who led the league in home runs, slowed to a hesitant jog as he rounded first base. The first and second basemen stood at their positions, one of them removing his cap from his head as he searched the night sky for the ball. The hitter nodded to the closest umpire, as if asking permission to keep running the bases, though he kept going. Managers, coaches, and players from both benches came out of the dugout. Unable to lower their heads from searching for the ball, some of the players stumbled over each other in front of the dugouts. The manager of the team at bat waved to his batter to keep running. The opposing manager ran toward one of the umpires. There was no ball, just the memory of the loud whack as the player’s bat met the ball and sent it rocketing toward the right field bleachers. The ball’s rapid trajectory was the last thing anyone recalled before it vanished. Thousands of witnesses amplified their stunned silence with a magnetic restlessness. With two men on base, the home run would give the visiting team a 3—2 lead in the first game of the World Series. It was the bottom half of the sixth inning. Where was the ball? As the hitter, his mouth agape, rounded third and headed home, the right fielder ran as fast as he could toward the second base umpire. With his confused manager joining him, both men screamed at the umpire to do something. The right fielder claimed the ball had not been hit hard enough for a home run. He screamed that he was in position to catch it when it vanished. His manager yelled that the three runs should not count because there was no ball hit out of the park. The opposing manager was welcoming his hero at home plate. He was not going to argue with anybody, even though he had no idea what had happened to the ball. In his book, it was a home run and the ball’s speed and height made that obvious to the entire stadium before it disappeared. The beleaguered umpire at second base walked toward the umpire at first. He was surrounded by angry players and one red-faced manager. The first base umpire was coming to his defense when, suddenly, the ball appeared in the night sky. It fell where the right fielder was previously standing and settled in the warning path. Thousands of spectators saw it and both teams saw it. They pointed, screamed, and waved, but it was too late. The bases had been run, the three men had scored, and it would be ruled an inside-the-park home run. The last thing reported in the sports pages of every major newspaper was the right fielder running from the umpire he had been attacking, to the ball in the right field corner. He picked it out of the dirt and stared at it. What was not reported was his surprise at how old and yellow the baseball was. The stitches were coming off, and the ball was slightly warped. Some balls looked like that after a good hit, but this one was different. He threw it to the cut-off man at second, who also noticed how old the ball was. He picked it out of his glove and handed it to the umpire who was recovering from being attacked. When the umpire realized he had not seen this brand of baseball since his dirt lot days in the fifties, he tucked it into his coat pocket. The home plate umpire threw out another ball. When the papers carried the story, the second base umpire was surprised no sports writer asked him about the ball. Maybe it was because the home team won by a score of 5—3, three more runs coming on base hits. After the game, the umpire took his coat off in the umpire’s dressing room and searched the pockets, but couldn’t find the antique ball.
Ron Carlson is the author of six story collections and six novels, most recently Return to Oakpine. His fiction has appeared in Esquire, Harper's, The New Yorker, GQ, and many other magazines and journals and has been selected for The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Series, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction and dozens of other anthologies. He is the Director of the Graduate Program in Fiction at the University of California, Irvine. In this touching and comic story, Carlson uses small-town baseball to explore the acceptance of the Other, telling the story through the naive eye of a farm-boy ballplayer who's just glad to be playing the game for as long as he can.
My Last Season with the Owls
Ron Carlson
DEVLIN IS A VAMPIRE and Coleman is also a vampire, but there are no two guys in the whole Mid-Prairie League who can turn a sweeter double play at second base, one of them on a knee or flat ou
t on the infield with the other leaping over the slide and throwing from his place in the air. If records were kept in this league, and they’re going to be next year, they’d have the record twice. As is, every player on all seven teams in the Mid-Prairie League knows that to hit it on the ground up our middle is going to about retire the side. They’re good, and for little guys they can hit.
There may be one other vampire on the team, but no one’s sure. No one’s exactly sure about Devlin and Coleman; it’s what they call an open secret. I mean, they’re vampires, but none of us has really talked about it. At batting practice, I’ve talked to both of them. I asked Devlin when he learned to hit left (meaning how long has he been a vampire), and he said that he decided in high school to learn because there were all those farm boy right-handers. I asked Coleman if he was going to try for the River League (meaning is it hard being a vampire, is there a future in it), and he told me that it was a long shot, that league, but he’d take what he could get.
You’d think two vampires on a baseball team in the Midwest would hang out together, but they really don’t. They don’t sit together on the bus or room together and they’re not even from the same towns. But still. I don’t care. What I care about is taking the grounder off the line at third and throwing across to Coleman and knowing for perfect sure that he’ll make the play. What I care about is that when Devlin hits in front of me that he gets on and steals second, so that I’m not the dummy every night who hits into the double play.
Coach Kaiser doesn’t care about what the guys do off the field as long as they show up and play their hearts out. Everybody has something, he has said in our team meetings, and he’s right. Our right fielder, Benito Porch, who can run like a demon, has full blown diabetes, and Kaiser has to check before every pitch that he hasn’t gone face down in the bunchgrass. It has happened. Harry Whisper is our best pitcher and he’s only got three fingers on his business hand. He can be a pain when he wins, arrogant, and he says some things. Like he said that he had the finger removed on purpose so he could throw his drop ball, a pitch that wins games—for the team. He always says for the team. If you look at him sideways, he adds: You want to see it. I kept it. I've got it back at the farm in a jar. He does not have it in a jar. Some skunk ate it the same day he tore it off in a cornfield in a mistake with a combine. And then there’s Mikel Antenna who had our team name OWLS picked off the back of his jersey and replaced with his name in big satin letters. I tike to hear my name, he told me. It helps me at the plate and it doesn't hurt with the scouts either. He is kidding himself about the scouts, but I’m not going to correct him after he’s altered his shirt that way.
Here are the steps from Mid-Prairie to the Big Leagues: you’d get called to the River League up in Illinois. They have one scout total, a hard drinking guy name of Fergus Finity who is on like a permanent DUI and arrives by bus most times. The backseat of his car, Coach Kaiser told me, has got more tickets in it than player notes. The one night last season he was coming to see us play the Hawks out in the village of Toil, he spent the night in jail or so they said. He never showed up, but that didn’t prevent Mikel Antenna from playing his heart out, strutting around, showing his back to two men he thought were the scouts. They were surprised when he went out to where they sat by third base after the game and asked them how they liked it. They said they’d liked it fine, though it had been hard to see because the lights in Toil are old streetlights hung too low. He smiled at them, chewing his gum, waiting, and then he found out they were the vacuum truck drivers waiting for the park to clear so they could clear the septic tanks. Still, there’s hope. From the River League, if you make it, you try for the Ice League, so called because it is up on the North Dakota border and half of the teams are from Canada. It looks like a tough league, and almost all the guys there have full beards, none of these designer goatees you see in Triple A. From the Ice League, you’d go into the Outskirts Association which plays all over. They’ve got an airplane that will seat most of any team, and there have been, so far three guys, all infielders, go on to play in that league with the Bucket Vikings and the LaFluge Pioneers both of whom play one game a year, preseason, near Wrigley Field. It doesn’t get any better than that.
My bride Afton and I made an agreement about my career in sport. She liked it when I played at Mount Nadir. We were dating then and she came to the games, and I said some of my best things to her walking back from the Vo-ed field to the dorms. When we got married, I said I’d like to give it a try. She said, “How long is a try?”
I thought about it. We were living in an apartment in Coalseam, a nice little place, and we had our expenses screwed down tight, and Afton was clerking for the dentist, and I told her, “Three years. If I don’t get called up in three years, I’ll let her go, and we’ll go back up to Fidelity River and take my dad up on his offer to farm there.”
“And we’ll have those kids,” she said.
“Right,” I said. “There’s room for all the kids we want. But for now, I’ll play my heart out and see what happens.”
Well, what happened was what happened. I’m a good ball player and I love it, and I found out that there are about one million good ball players who have the same personal feeling for the sport. I did an inventory last year of the skills and abilities and talents and special dexterities that single me out from the infielders I was running across, and there are none. I was doing just fine, and then two vampires join the team and they glisten every game. They make the infield look like it was a birthday present and they had the pretty paper, the scissors, and the tape.
You stand at third base as the pitch goes in with only two thoughts in the world: hit it to me right now because I am so ready and hungry to join the contest, or please please please do not hit it to me or near me or ary where at all really for I am fearful and not prepared. These two thoughts fought for space in my head like kids playing king of the hill; they were my constant companions. Every time I looked over at Dracula and Dracula, they were showing their teeth having a wonderful time.
I asked Coleman why he doesn’t show up for our day games, and he looked real surprised. “I’ve got something to do,” he told me.
“Like a job?” I said. We were in the dugout spitting sunflower seeds waiting to see if Kaiser was going to let Benito Porch steal second. We were playing the
Herons in Lake Catbite, where there is no lake and never was, and if we won, we’d be above five hundred and get a good seed at the Jubilee Tournament. Benito was dodging and hopping, and he had a good six foot lead. He could run. Then the Heron left-hander just stepped and threw to first. Benito hadn’t moved, and Kaiser picked up the Tupperware of orange juice off the shelf and started out of the dugout because he knew, as we all did, what was going to happen next. Benito Porch went face down in the dirt. He’d forgotten to check his blood sugar. When he falls, it is beautiful, like a kite on a broken string. Just down. No kaboom.
Coleman packed his mouth with sunflower seeds, showing me his beautiful incisors, and he grabbed his mitt as we took the field. “I’m finishing my second year at Lavender Craft.”
“In heating and air-conditioning?” I asked him.
“God, no,” he said. “I’m making teeth for the cosmetic dentistry industry; it is exploding. All the teeth in Chicago come from Lavender.” He ran off to play ball, and I stood at third base, wondering.
We won that game but it took eleven innings. We scored on three errors in that inning, and then Three-fingers Whisper came in and struck out the side. His pitching was way off, but he kept showing his hand and scaring the guys and it worked. So much of being at the plate is about fear.
On the bus back home, I went back and sat by Devlin and told him good game, though he didn’t look too happy. He never really looked too happy. He had a long face from the get-go. ‘Devlin,” I said. “Why don’t you come to our day games?”
“I’ve got school,” he said. This surprised me because he was like twenty-five.
“Are you
at Saint Permission?”
“No, I’m at the seminary in Fort Lunch.”
“There’s a seminary there? I thought it was just the theme park. What are you going to be?”
He tapped his backpack on the floor and said, “I’m going to read these books and then god only knows.”
“What about the weekend games?” I said. He wasn’t fooling me.
“Retreats,” he said. We were driving past the weigh station outside of Catbite and the panes of light flashed across his doleful face. "Different places,” he said. “We were over in Mount Nadir two weeks ago.” I was going to tell him I went to school there, but thought better of it. We were silent. The long dark bus rides are twenty guys sleeping with their iPods in, and Coach Kaiser up in front with his lighted clipboard going over the box score. They are comfortable as a team gets, but I wasn’t comfortable.
I had one more gambit. I pulled my little silver crucifix from my pocket and showed it to Devlin in the dark bus. “You wear these?”
He turned on his light and held it in his two fingers. “No,” he said. “We don’t.” I was astonished that he could let it touch his skin, if that was his skin. “And you shouldn’t either,” he said. “I saw a guy in More put one into his breastbone when he rammed the catcher sliding in at home. I’ll bet you did, I wanted to say, but I held my tongue.
I keep a lot of things to myself. Such as, I would never really tell anyone how much I want to play ball, because first of all, I couldn’t express it with dexterity. Secondly, I would get about half way through it and start to cry. I still cry. Another thing I hadn’t spoken about to anyone was the fact that I promised a three-year shot at the baseball, and this was it. The third season was over and there was one more week of baseball in my whole life forever and ever amen. Afton knew it, but she hadn’t said anything or done anything like X out the days on the calendar or put any countdown on the fridge. She supported me and every time I grabbed my kit to go off to play, she’d say, “Play your heart out and come home to me.” She even said that at home games where I could see her in the stands, sometimes with my folks.
