by Rick Wilber
Later, in the dugout, he said this to me:
“I love running, lungs full of air and legs flying. It’s an honest measure of a man, isn’t it, David?”
I smiled at him, nodded. “Sure. An honest measure.”
“You know, David,” he said, crossing his legs there in the dugout and pulling out his pipe to suck on it dry, since the league rules didn’t allow you to smoke. “You know, near the end, when the consumption had about claimed me fully there at Brede, Herbert would come visit”
“Herbert? Oh, H. G., right?” I said. “You know, he once said that The Open Boat’ was an imperishable gem.”
He smiled. “Really? Nice of him. That was a true story, you know.”
I nodded. “The Commodore went down off the Florida coast. You were on your way to Cuba to cover the insurrection and you and the captain and a few others wound up in a lifeboat. You drifted just off the coast for a couple of days and then finally tried to ride it in through the surf. One guy died.”
He smiled, nodded. “Close enough, David.”
“And the month before that, waiting for the Commodore to be ready, you stayed in Jacksonville, Florida. That’s where you met one Cora Stewart. She ran the Hotel de Dream.”
He smiled. “She was stunning, David. A big ample bosom, that blond hair that she would loosen and let fall around her shoulders.” He sighed. “I forgot everyone else.”
“The drama critic for the Chicago Daily News?”
He nodded. “Amy Leslie. Lovely woman.”
“But Cora?”
“Better. By yards old chap, by yards and miles.”
Then he went on. Herbert would come visit Cora and I there at Brede, and he’d bring along a whole group of nieces and nephews so we could play rounders. I taught them how to play base ball instead. With a cricket bat and no gloves. That was the closest I came to baseball over there. Rounders, with a cricket bat.” He shook his head, smiled again, and waved toward the field. “This, this splendid game. It’s wonderful, David. You know that, right, how utterly splendid it is just to be out here playing baseball on a Sunday afternoon?”
I did know it, and told him so. You start to get a little older and suddenly things like a good hard slider down low and away, a hard-hit double off the wall, or even a scratch single up the middle—sure, they matter. Like making love to a beautiful woman in her twenties, like getting good reviews on your short-story collection, like writing well and knowing you’re in that zone: like all those things, it matters.
“Are you still writing?” I asked him.
He shook his head, then stood up, took in a deep breath through his nose. “What do you smell, David? Right now, take in the air and tell me what you smell.”
I smiled, took a long, deep sniff. “Fresh air,” I said, “and green grass.” “Leather,” he said, holding up the glove I’d bought him, a good Rawlings catcher’s mitt, an XPG 2000. “And sweat. And the dirt of the infield. I missed all this.” “Is it still the same?”
He laughed, picked up one of our metal bats, Louisville Slugger Terminator, thirty-four inch, thirty-ounce. He held the bat up and laughed again.
“Yeah,” I said, “me too. I miss the smell of the wood. We still had those wooden bats when I was a kid, you know.”
He sat back down, slouched back against the bench. “It’s close, old chap. It’s nearly the truth. It smells like my childhood, like my father, the preacher, before he died. It smells like learning the game, throwing and catching and hitting out in the vacant lot next door. It smells like college, like playing for Syracuse and throwing out that Colgate man who was trying to steal. My God, I could play, David. I could really play.”
“Why did you quit? Your health?”
He shrugged. “I suppose. Life. Death. My writing. Finding the truth. They all mattered, too. And baseball is, after all, only a game.”
“True enough.”
“I’m on deck,” he said, and stood, picked up the metal bat, walked out to the on-deck circle, and slipped the weighted doughnut over the barrel. I watched him as he took a few swings to loosen up. He was thin, but healthy; God, he glowed with it. Then Tommy ground out and it was Steve’s at bat again. He turned once to look at me, smiled, and then stepped into the batter’s box. Two pitches later he slapped a single up the middle. The look on his face as he stood there at first, happy with his base hit—there was some truth, some reality, in that too, I thought.
The Monster
I’ve lied about a lot of this. I drive a gray Honda Accord, not a Lexus. I’ve never seen the green flash at sunset. Cora wasn’t really that good looking, or that young, or even a student. She didn’t dance at the Club De Dream; she worked in customer relations for the phone company, and she was well into her thirties if she was a day; and her breasts sagged and she hadn’t read my short-story collection and she didn’t flirt with me and we never made love. My earned run average in the big leagues was really 7.50. I was only up for one game, not one month, and I got ripped by the Mets for three very long innings. In fact, I was never in the big leagues at all, but was lucky to spend three years in the lower minors, trying to get by with breaking balls. I never did have very good control.
My short-story collection sold six-hundred and fifty copies and the reviews were awful. My novel? In four years I’ve written about ten thousand words. Are they good words, at least? I don’t know. I don’t think so.
I make it all up. That’s what fiction is, I thought—all lies. It’s not real; it’s safer than that; there’s more distance.
Here’s the truth about Emily, my ex-wife. She wasn’t nearly as good looking as I said, and she was a great deal nicer. In my second year of minor league ball, in Medford, Oregon, we had a baby, a perfect little girl, Annie, her hair as red as her mommy’s.
A year later I was in Lakeland, Florida, playing A ball for the Lakeland Tigers in the Florida State League. It was ten in the morning and Emily was at work; her job as assistant manager at the Pancake House paid our bills while I struggled to find the strike zone. There was a fire in our apartment complex. I crawled in through a bedroom window and rescued Annie, but my face was ruined in the effort and by the time my wounds had healed, my baseball career was over, my wife and child had left. I wound up homeless. I died penniless at twenty-nine.
Or maybe it was this way: Emily was a hooker, working the streets of New York. I rescued her from that and we had a child, a beautiful little blond Annie and for a while everything seemed fine. But then I was let go by the Cardinal organization and I couldn’t find work, and Emily went back to what she did best and little Annie died and Emily was murdered by her pimp and I was a crackhead and I died, penniless, in the gutter, at age twenty-nine.
Or, no; our child was abducted and I found her, dead, in the woods, her body placed against the rotten trunk of a downed tree that lay in a bower, her body framed by the overhanging branches so that the autumn sun came through like cathedral lighting. There were ants on her face, crawling in and out her nostrils, the empty sockets of her eyes. I was shattered by that sight. No, I was the murderer, and I turned myself in and I was executed in Florida’s Old Sparky, smoke rising, sparks flying, the smell of burnt flesh. I was twenty-nine.
No. We were all in a small boat together. Me, my wife, our daughter, adrift after our cruise ship sank off the coast of Florida. We could see the shoreline, huge breakers rolling in just a few hundred yards away, so big we didn’t dare try to get through them to safety. Finally, exhausted, we had to try. I made it and dragged Annie to safety; but Emily, poor Emily drowned and I’ve never forgotten the look on her face, the rage of it, as she slipped away. She wanted so badly to live. It broke my heart. She was twenty-nine.
No. Those are all lies too, of course. Here’s the real truth:
My father was an agent for Farmer’s Insurance in Edwardsville, Illinois. He was good at his job. Mom taught English at Ward Junior High. We had a good life there, my brother and sister and I. I played Little League and we won more th
an we lost. I went to Mary, Queen of Peace for grade school and survived the nuns, then Edwardsville High School where I played football, basketball, and baseball for the Tigers and did fine. Then off to major in English at Southern Illinois University, where I discovered Crane, and myself, and a good changeup that got us to the Division II national championship game, where we lost to Cal Poly when I gave up a scratch single to their worst hitter at the wrong moment.
My two best friends went to Vietnam while I played baseball in college. One of them came home alive; the other in a box. I was lucky in the first draft lottery and didn’t go. Instead, I started that minor league career, which stayed minor league in writing, in life. I married a nice girl. We have a nice family. I have nice degrees from nice colleges and did a nice master’s thesis on the truth in Stephen Crane’s fiction. I teach at Pinellas County Community College, where I’m head of the creative writing program. I’ve sold exactly three short stories—one to the online version of the Mississippi Review, one to Elysian Yields, and the third to Alabaster. That makes me well published by community-college standards. I make a nice living. When I write, I really use that antique Waterman that Emily bought me. It connects me, somehow, to the man I studied so much.
I play baseball on weekends with some other nice people. We lose more than we win, but I’ll be damned if it isn’t fun. Just like Steve said, it’s an honest measure of a man, this splendid game. When you face a good hitter, when you’re at bat facing a hard slider, when that sharp grounder comes your way or that sinking liner loops toward you in right—you can’t hide; you can’t lie; you can’t fake it. You make the play or you don’t. Reality sounds pretty boring, doesn’t it? But that’s it; that’s me; that’s the truth of it.
A Notebook
And there’s this too: Stephen really did come rowing in that Sunday in May. He tied up his rowboat and walked over to watch us and we gave him a glove and a ball and a bat and, my, he could play The Game. We finished with two wins and twelve losses the season before he came. We won ten this past season, with Steve catching and hitting third. He made me a better pitcher. I learned things from him, some of them about baseball.
I looked up his stats, which is what we do in baseball. He played in the Knickerbocker League for the New Jersey Athletics. They played at the Elysian Fields. He gave the professional game five good years before he turned to writing for a living, where he finally made a lot of money and married a rich, young socialite named Cora Stewart. They moved to England, where he became a real man of letters and lived a long, productive life.
No. I lied about that. He played baseball for Lafayette College his freshman year and at Syracuse University the next year, where he said, “The truth of the matter is that I went there more to play base ball than to study.” That’s the way they spelled the game in those days, like two words. I want this to be accurate.
He flunked out of Syracuse, drifted into purposeful poverty in the Bowery, and emerged from there with a self-published short novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. That got him the chance to do more, and so he wrote his The Red Badge of Courage and became famous, if not rich.
The Red Badge was in 1894. In 1897, a famous writer at age twenty-six, he met Cora Stewart, already thirty years old and a failed socialite who ran a discreet bordello, the Hotel de Dream. They fell in love. He truly did survive the sinking of the Commodore and wrote a news story that became a short story that is generally said to be the best thing he ever did—and every word of it a kind of truth: “The Open Boat.”
Three years later he was dead, his frail lungs doing him in. Those last few years he traveled as much as he could, but called England his home. Henry James, Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells—they all loved him and his work. They thought him important. In 1899 he declined rapidly. They sought a cure in Germany. Cora was with him at the end. You can look all this up if you don’t trust me, and I wouldn’t blame you.
And this is the truth too: There really was a rainbow that last day in September and those dark clouds to the east over the gray chop of the bay, and that small rain that down could rain to soak me, sneaking up on me until I realized, at game’s end, that the rain, my sweat, the lies, my curveball, my lack of control— that all of it was a lie, that nothing was real except, maybe, Stephen and his stories and Cora, his and mine, there in the stands.
Wounds in the Rain
In the bottom of the ninth of that final game, Steve got me through it and I slowly found my control again. I let in enough damage that they tied the score, but we answered with a run in the top of the tenth and then all I needed was three outs in the bottom.
I was so tired, so hot and wet that I couldn’t think straight. Steve, behind the plate, was calling the pitches. I trusted him completely. We were up by that one run and I had no relief. Slider, slider, slider to the first guy and he went down swinging on all three, thank God. One out.
The next guy up had hit a double in the seventh and here he was again. Okay, then, slider wide, slider inside, fastball down the middle and he ripped it— another double, this one into the comer in left.
Steve came clanking back out again. “Got that one up,” he said.
I nodded.
“I’d like to win this one, old chap, wouldn’t you?” he asked.
I was too tired to care, but you can’t say that to your catcher. “Sure,” I said. “Let’s get two more outs and we’ll all go home happy.”
“Yes, that’s it,” he said. “Everyone goes home happy.” And he grinned at me, tossed me the ball.
This is probably what happened after that. I came in with a slider again, low and inside, but the guy went down and got it, drilled it right down the line. Foul.
Another slider, over the plate some more, and a hard groundball, but right at Randy Miller, our first baseman. He fielded it cleanly and stepped on the bag while the runner moved over from second to third.
Two outs and a man on third. Okay, more tired sliders, then; Steve with his two fingers stabbing at the red dirt behind the plate. Ball one. Strike one.
And then, like I meant it, like I could pick my spots like that, like I had that kind of control over my pitches, over myself, my life, I came in with a good pitch, low and outside. Strike two. Steve, back there, shook his fist at me, good pitch.
Same call, same pitch and the guy hit a two-hopper right back at me. I gloved it, pulled it free, tossed it to first and that was that. We win. Season over. First damn place for the first damn time in the five years I’d been playing again.
No. Same call, same pitch and the guy hit a two-hopper right back at me. I gloved it, pulled it free, and threw it fifteen feet over my first baseman’s head. Runner scored from third. Game over. Season over. We lost. We came close, but we lost. I lost.
It was raining, I realized. It had been raining lightly for two innings and I hadn’t noticed until the game ended and the rain started coming down harden with a distant flash of lightning and a rumble of thunder.
I walked over to shake hands with the other team, like we always do in this league. Nice game, I told them, which was true. Good job, they told me, and there was some truth in that too.
I got back to the dugout and Steve wasn’t there. I looked in the stands. Cora was gone. I dropped my glove into my athletic bag and saw some paper folded in there. Those placemats. His scribbling. The antique Waterman I’d loaned him was clipped to the folded sheets, holding them together. I pulled the pen free, opened the pages. The first page had this on it in that careful handwriting of his:
None of them knew the color of the sky. Their eyes glanced level, and were fastened upon the waves that swept toward them. These waves were of the hue of slate, save for the tops, which were of foaming white, and all of the men knew the colors of the sea. The horizon narrowed and widened, and dipped and rose, and at all times its edge was jagged with waves that seemed thrust up in points like rock.
That’s the opening passage from “The Open Boat.” I looked at the second sheet. I
t began like this:
The great Pullman was whirling onward with such dignity of motion that a glance from the window seemed simply to prove that the plains of Texas were pouring eastward. Vast flats of green grass, dull-hued spaces of mesquite and cactus, little groups of frame houses, woods of light and tender trees, all were sweeping into the east, sweepring over the horizon, a precipice.
That’s the opening passage from “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky.”
I looked at the next sheet and it was the opening from “The Blue Hotel.” All that writing that day, I thought, all of that just copy work, scribbling down what he’d already done. I shook my head, tossed those first three sheets back into the athletic bag. Held the fourth and fifth in my hands, looked at them.
And didn’t recognize them.
I’d read every story that he’d ever written and this one wasn’t among them. He’d been editing on it; you could see the scratched-out words and their replacements, see whole lines scratched out and rewritten. My hand started shaking as I read it. I got dizzy, then steadied myself, put those precious pages and the pen he’d used back into the athletic bag, then walked out of the dugout and stood there for a few minutes, looking up to feel the rain on my face.
Last Words
Okay, then, this is the truth as I know it: We lost, but losing is part of winning and they both are part of what’s real. Maybe I threw that ball away on purpose so Steve wouldn’t be able to let it go at that, so he’d be back in February when we start the next season. Maybe he’ll have Cora with him, and maybe Conrad, so I can finally find out what he thinks of The Game. They’ll show up that first practice, rowing into the harbor in that little boat, emerging from the haze and fog of February’s heat over cold winter water. I’ll walk over there, and say hi, and help them out of the boat, help them tie it up to the dock.
