Short Stories

by Harry Turtledove

Ruth gave himself his--or rather, Mencken’s--money’s worth, and then some. In a mixing glass, he built a Tom Collins the size of a young lake. Lemon juice, sugar syrup, ice cubes (which clinked on a note different from the coins’), and enough gin to put every pukka sahib in India under the table. So much gin, Mencken laughed out loud. Ruth decorated the drink with not only the usual cherry but a couple of orange slices as well.

  And then, as Mencken’s eyes widened behind his round-lensed spectacles, Ruth proceeded to pour it down his throat. All of it--the fruit salad, the ice cubes, the works. His Adam’s apple bobbed a couple of times, but that was as much hesitation as he gave. A pipe big enough to manage that . . . Mencken would have thought the Public Works Department needed to lay it down the middle of the street. But no.

  “Not too bad. No, sirree,” Ruth said. And damned if he didn’t fix himself another Collins just as preposterous as the first one. He drank it the same way, too. Everything went down the hatch. He put the empty mixing glass down on the bar. “Boy, that hits the spot.”

  Both cops were staring at him. So was Mencken. He’d done some serious boozing in his day, and seen more than he’d done. But he’d never witnessed anything to match this. He waited for Ruth to fall over, but the man behind the bar might have been drinking Coca-Cola. He’d been a minor-league ballplayer, but he was a major-league toper.

  “My hat’s off to you, George,” one of the policemen said, and doffed his high-crowned, shiny-brimmed cap.

  “Mine, too, by God!” Mencken lifted his own lid in salute. “You just put a big dent in this week’s profits.”

  “Nahh.” Ruth shook his head. “I was thirsty, that’s all--thirsty and pissed off, know what I mean?” How he could have absorbed that much gin without showing it Mencken couldn’t imagine, but he had.

  “Pissed off about what?” the journalist asked, as he was surely meant to do.

  “That cocksucker Rasin. Carroll Wilson Chickenshit Rasin.” Here was a name Ruth remembered, all right: remembered and despised. “You know who that rotten prick was?”

  Nobody who hadn’t lived in Baltimore for a long time would have, but Mencken nodded. “Politico--Democrat--back around the time of the last war. Had a pretty fair pile of cash, too, if I remember straight.”

  “Yeah, that’s him, all right,” Ruth agreed. “Lousy four-flushing cocksucker.”

  “What did he ever do to you?” Mencken had trouble envisioning circles in which both Rasin and Ruth would have traveled a generation earlier.

  “Back in 1914, Jack Dunn of the Orioles, he signed me to a contract. Signed me out of St. Mary’s Industrial School, way the hell over at the west end of town.”

  “All right.” If Mencken had ever heard of George Ruth’s baseball beginnings, they’d slipped his mind. “But what’s that got to do with Carroll Rasin?” He wondered if the gin was scrambling Ruth’s brains. That the big palooka could still stand up and talk straight struck him as the closest thing to a miracle God had doled out lately. Wherever the ex-ballplayer had bought his liver, Mencken wanted to shop there, too.

  “Rasin talked about putting a Federal League team in town. The Baltimore Terrapins, he was gonna call ‘em. And when Dunn heard about that, he damn near shit. The Federal League, it was a major league, like.” Ruth paused to light a cigar: a cheroot that, with Mencken’s, thickened the fug in the air. After a couple of irate puffs, Ruth went on, “The International League, that was minor-league ball. With the Terrapins in town, the Orioles wouldn’t’ve drawn flies.”

  Mencken remembered the Federal League only vaguely. Had Ruth not reminded him of it, he probably wouldn’t have remembered it at all. He’d long since outgrown his fandom by 1914. “So what’s that got to do with you?” he asked. “And while you’re at it, how about another beer?”

  “Sure thing.” Ruth took back the glass, but waited to see money before working the tap again. As he gave Mencken the refill, he growled, “What’s it got to do with me? I’ll tell you what. If the Oriole’s ain’t drawin’ flies, Dunn ain’t makin’ any dough. How’s he supposed to keep the Orioles goin’? Hell, how’s he supposed to eat?”

  “How?” Mencken lobbed another question down the middle.

  “You sell your players, that’s how. Weren’t no farm teams in those days.” Ruth’s lip curled so scornfully, the cigar threatened to fall out. “Nah, none o’ that crap. The minor-league owners was out for themselves, same as the guys in the bigs. An’ they got cash by sellin’ contracts. I had people innarested in me, too, let me tell you I did. Connie Mack of the Athaletics, he was innarested, only he didn’t have no money himself then, neither. The Red Sox, they was innarested. And Cincinnati, they was makin’ noises like they wanted me.”

  He reminded Mencken of an aging chorus girl, all crow’s-feet and extra chins, going on about the hot sports who’d drunk champagne from her slipper back in the day. The bloom went off a baseball player just about as fast. It was a cruel way to try to make a living. “So why didn’t you sign with one of them, then?” he asked.

  Ruth snorted angrily--he’d missed something. “I couldn’t. Fuckin’ Dunn held my contract. Unless he turned me loose, I had to play for him or nobody. And that no good piece of shit of a Rasin crapped out on me. Turned out he didn’t have the moolah, or maybe didn’t wanna spend the moolah, to get into the Federal League after all. The Milwaukee Creams was the last franchise instead. The Creams! Ain’t that a crappy name for a team? And Dunn made a go of it here after all. I was stuck, is what I was. Fuckin’ stuck.”

  Now that Mencken thought about it, fragments of the war between the upstart league and its established rivals came back to him. “Why didn’t you join the Federal League yourself? Plenty of players did.”

  The man behind the bar threw his hands in the air, a gesture of extravagant disgust. “I couldn’t even do that, Goddamn it to fucking hell. When Dunn got me out of St. Mary’s, I was a whole hot week past my nineteenth birthday. Deal he made with the holy fathers said he was my legal guardian till I turned twenty-one. I couldn’t sign nothin’ without him givin’ the okay. An’ by my twenty-first birthday, goddamn Federal League was dead as shoe leather. I got screwed, an’ I didn’t even get kissed.”

  “You did all right for yourself,” Mencken said, reasonable--perhaps obnoxiously reasonable--as usual. “You played your game at the highest level. You played for years and years at the next highest level. When you couldn’t play any more, you had enough under the mattress to let you get this place, and it’s not half bad, either.”

  “It’s all in the breaks, all dumb fuckin’ luck,” Ruth said. “If Dunn had to sell me to the bigs when I was a kid, who knows what I coulda done? I was thirty years old by the time they changed the rules so he couldn’t keep me forever no more. I already had the start of my bay window, and my elbow was shot to shit. I didn’t say nothin’ about that--otherwise, nobody woulda bought me. But Jesus Christ, if I’d made the majors when I was nineteen, twenty years old, I coulda been Buzz Arlett.”

  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.”

  “Any time, 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.

  Copyright © 2009 Harry Turtledove

  The Star and the Rockets

  Harry Turtledove

  illustration by Chris Buzelli

  A chilly January night in Roswell. Joe Bauman has discovered that’s normal for eastern New Mexico. It gets hot here in the summer, but winters can be a son of a bitch. That Roswell’s high up--3,600 feet--only makes the cold colder. Makes the sky clearer, too. A million stars shine down on Joe.

  One of those stars is his: the big red one marking the Texaco station at 1200 West Second Street. He nods to himself in slow satisfaction. He’s had a good run, a hell of a good run, here in Roswell. The way it looks right now, he’ll settle down here and run the gas station full time when his playing days are done.

  Won’t be long, either. He’ll turn thirty-two in April, about when the season starts. Ballplayers, even ones like him who never come within miles of the big time, know how sharply mortal their careers are. If he doesn’t, the ache in his knees when he turns on a fastball will remind him.

  He glances down at his watch, which he wears on his right wrist--he’s a lefty all the way. It’s getting close to nine o’clock. He looks up Second Street. Then he looks down the street. No traffic either way. People here make jokes about rolling up the sidewalks after the sun goes down. With maybe 20,000 people, Roswell seems plenty big and bustling to Joe. It’s a damn sight bigger than Welch, Oklahoma, the pissant village where he was born, that’s for sure.

  He could close up and go home. Chances that he’ll have any more business are pretty slim. But the sign in the rectangular iron frame says OPEN ‘TIL MIDNIGHT. He’ll stick around. You never can tell.

  And it’s not as if he’s never done this before. Dorothy will be amazed if he does come home early. He’s got a TV set--a Packard Bell, just a year old--in a back room, and a beat-up rocking chair she was glad to see the last of, and a shelf with a few books in case he doesn’t feel like staring at the television. He’s got an old, humming refrigerator in there, too (he thinks of it as an icebox more often than not), with some beer. Except for a bed, all the comforts of home.

  When he goes in there, he ducks to make sure he doesn’t bang his head. He’s a great big guy--six-five, maybe 235. Maybe more like 250 now, when he’s not in playing shape. Lots and lots of afternoons in the sun have weathered the skin on his face and his forearms and especially his hands.

  He leaves the door to the back room open so headlights will warn him in case anybody does come in. When he turns on the TV, the picture is snowy. He needs a tall antenna to bring it in at all, because Roswell doesn’t have a station of its own, though there’s talk of getting one. It isn’t nine yet. Milton Berle isn’t on. Joe can’t stand the program that runs ahead of him. He turns the sound down to nothing. He doesn’t turn the set off: then it would have to warm up again, and he might miss something. But he does ignore it for the time being.

  To kill time till Uncle Miltie’s inspired lunacy, he pulls a book off the shelf. “Oh, yeah--the weird one,” he mutters. Something called The Supernatural Reader, a bunch of stories put together by Groff and Lucy Conklin. Groff--there’s a handle for you.

  Brand-new book, or near enough. Copyright 1953. He found it in a Salvation Army store. Cost him a dime. How can you go wrong?

  Story he’s reading is called “Pickup from Olympus,” by a fellow named Pangborn. The guy in the story runs a gas station, which makes it extra interesting for Joe. And there’s a ‘37 Chevy pickup in it, and damned if he didn’t learn to drive on one of those before he went into the Navy.

  But the people, if that’s what you’d call them, in the pickup . . . Joe shakes his head. “Weird,” he says again. “Really weird.” He’s the kind of guy who likes things nailed down tight.

  He puts The Supernatural Reader back on the shelf. With a grunt, he heaves his bulk out of the rocker, walks over to the television, and twists the volume knob to the right. When he plops himself down in the chair once more, it creaks and kind of shudders. One of these days, it’ll fall apart when he does that, and leave him with his ass on the floor. But not yet. Not yet.

  A chorus of men dressed the way he would be if he really spiffed himself up--dressed like actors playing service-station jockeys instead of real ones, in other words--bursts into staticky song:

  Oh, we’re the men of Texaco.

  We work from Maine to Mexico.

  There’s nothing like this Texaco of ours;

  Our show tonight is powerful,

  We’ll wow you with an hourful

  of howls from a showerful of stars;

  We’re the merry Texaco-men!

  Tonight we may be showmen;

  Tomorrow we’ll be servicing your cars!

  Joe sings along, even if he can’t carry a tune in a pail. Texaco is his outfit, too, even more than the Roswell Rockets are. If you’re not a big-leaguer--and sometimes even if you are--baseball is only a part-time job. He’ll get six hundred dollars a month to swing the bat this year, and a grand as a signing bonus. For a guy in a Class C league, that’s great money. But a gas station, now, a gas station is a living for the rest of his life. You get into your thirties, you start worrying about stuff like that. You’d goddamn well better, anyhow.

  Out comes Milton Berle. He’s in a dress. Joe guffaws. Christ on His crutch, but Milton Berle makes an ugly broad. Joe remembers how horny he got when he was in the Navy and didn’t even see a woman for months at a time. If he’d seen one who looked like that, he would have kept right on being horny.

  Or maybe not. When you’re twenty years old, what the hell are you but a hard-on with legs?

  Uncle Miltie starts strumming a ukulele. If that’s not scary, his singing is. It’s way worse than Joe’s. Joe laughs fit to bust a gut. He hope the picture stays halfway decent. This is gonna be a great show.

  * * *

  There’s a sudden glow of headlights against the far wall of the back room. “Well, shit,” Joe m
utters. He didn’t think it was real likely he’d get a customer this time of night. But he didn’t go home. Unlikely doesn’t mean impossible. Anybody who’s spent years on a baseball field will tell you that. Play long enough and you’ll see everything.

  Out of the chair he comes--one more time. He doesn’t want to turn his back on Milton Berle, but he does. When you’re there to do a job, you’ve got to do it. Anybody who made it through the Depression has learned that the hard way.

  Parked by the pumps is . . . Joe shakes his head, wondering about himself. Why the hell should he expect a ‘37 Chevy pickup? That damn book, he thinks. That crazy story.

  But the story wouldn’t get to him the way it does if he lived in Santa Fe or Lubbock. Something funny happened in Roswell a few years before he got here. He doesn’t exactly know what. The locals don’t talk about it much, not where he can overhear. They like him and everything. He knocks enough balls over the right-field fence for the ballclub, they’d better like him. Still and all, he remains half a stranger. Roswell may be bigger than Welch, Oklahoma, but it’s still a small town.

  Nobody here laughs about flying-saucer yarns, though. They do in Midland and Odessa and Artesia and the other Longhorn League towns, but not in Roswell.

  Anyway, in spite of his jimjams, it’s not a ‘37 Chevy pickup stopped in front of the pumps, engine ticking as it cools down. It’s an Olds Rocket 88, so new it might have just come off the floor in Albuquerque or El Paso, the two nearest cities with Oldsmobile dealerships.

  As he walks around to the driver’s side, the jingle that started off the TV show pops back into his head, God knows why. We’ll wow you with an hourful of howls from a showerful of stars. That’s what he’s singing under his breath before the guy in the Oldsmobile rolls down the window so they can talk.

  Warmer air gusts out of the car; Joe feels it against his cheek. Well, of course a baby like this will come with a heater. He’s already noticed it sports a radio antenna. Probably has an automatic transmission, too, he thinks. All the expensive options.