That was what she said, but Willie, looking at her and seeing her face so brown and beautiful in the faint, suddenly trembling light, could scarcely hear the words for the racket starting in his heart.
As she sat there, she seemed slowly at first, then quickly, magically, transfigured, a creature he had never seen before, yet had always known.
His mouth opened a little but he was dumb as a lamppost.
“… of whatever you wanted to be.”
What was she saying? He could see her eyes and her mouth and the soft shoulders and her arms. The definite lovely curve of her breasts. Her lips.
“… what you think yourself… .”
I love you, he wanted to say. But she had numbed and stunned him, and he could only look at her with the wonder pumping and pouring in his heart.
“… technical schools… .”
His mind raced through the riot of his feelings, looking for words. Insanely, the name of Isaia Corales came to him. Isaia Corales, who had come by the tenement that very afternoon to show her a camera he had bought. Isaia Corales, who was very handsome and had a wonderful singing voice and played the classical guitar and got straight A’s without even reading the books. Carolyn and Isaia. Isaia and Carolyn.
Carolyn.
Overwhelmed, confused, somersaulted, he put his hand in his shirt like the emperor Bonaparte of long ago and said, “Maybe I’ll be the President,” clowning because he did not know how to say what he wanted to say more than anything else.
“Don’t you think I know how you feel—about serious things?” Carolyn said, faltering a little herself, and feeling a somersault in her own heart—the one she had felt before and had not known how to handle.
They had been friends so long they were like brother and sister, and Carolyn did not understand the new bewildering, aching, sometimes frightening feeling she felt for him when she saw him at school, or coming up the stairs of the tenement.
She knew no way to break through the old intimacy to make room for the new one.
And on top of everything else, she feared that Willie loved Sara Miro, the beautiful girl who had every boy in the class crazy about her for one reason or another but mostly for the one reason.
Willie’s wonder kept searching and groping, trying to ground itself on something definite.
“I don’t know what—” he began. “I don’t think much—of what I should do.”
She felt the aching, frightening, wonderful feeling then more powerfully than ever.
Love me, she wanted to say, but Sara Miro and her own bewilderment would not let her.
“You will become the first lady President,” Willie said, not paying attention to this tumble of words, “President Carolyn.”
She loves Isaia Corales, his brain babbled.
The moon sailed up orange and huge before them.
Willie reached for her hand and that was his moment, his only moment, to be completely serious, and it was wrecked even as it was born, exploded by the blue-white light that hit them from the street where the police car had driven up under the gaudy moon.
Across the dead pond the voice of Officer Harlowe Judge came rasping through the beam of blue light:
“Curfew Sam, curfew Jane—ah mean, na-ow!”
The light was still on them as they left the Richard M. Nixon Park, taking their shattered moment with them, with Harlowe Judge’s voice trailing after them, “Break curfew and it’s Jesus comin’ down.”
So they went back to the William McKinley Arms, Willie joking and bending his tall, funny frame this way and that and Carolyn laughing, each of them caught in their incommunicable love, unable to speak to one another those simple words that are the best in the books of man.
If they had had one more night like that in the Richard M. Nixon Park, or only one more hour, or even twenty minutes, they might have managed to break through the things that were in the way.
But there were no more nights like that.
The next day Carolyn went with Isaia Corales to think things over, and that was the afternoon that everything changed with Willie, and the world itself seemed to speed up, and nothing was the same again.
Chapter three
Willie and Clio had long been the best athletes at George A. Custer Memorial High—Clio in football and baseball, Willie in basketball and baseball. They played first string on all the Custer teams, and people said that sooner or later one or the other of them would reach what they called the Big Time.
Still, no one was prepared to say in what sport or which boy. And no one was prepared for the events that took place that warm spring afternoon when the Custer baseball team opened its season against Sam Houston High.
Willie, by far the best pitcher on the team, had been picked to start the first game. Clio was his catcher.
They had been warming up on the regular diamond for about ten minutes when Willie threw a pitch that broke upward and hit Clio’s mask.
“What was that!” Clio hollered.
“It slipped,” Willie called back. “Sorry.”
“Do it again.”
“It was a mistake.”
“Try it anyway.”
So Willie gripped the ball between his thumb, index finger and middle finger and tried to repeat the pitch. This time the ball went over Clio’s head and into the screen.
Clio came out to the mound.
“You sidearmed it too much. The first time you threw it slower, from the top.”
“It was a curve that slipped,” said Willie.
“Just try it, will you?”
Willie tried the pitch again. This time it came into the plate like a fast ball, then swerved up, tipping the edge of Clio’s mitt.
“It’s a new pitch!” Clio shouted.
Coach Moss Gideon, who had been watching all this on the sideline, came out to the mound.
“What you boys doing?”
“He’s got a new ball,” said Clio.
“Wait a minute,” said Coach Moss Gideon. “We’ve got a game to win here. This isn’t any time for new balls or experiments. Just throw the usual stuff, Willie, and keep away from anything screwy.”
“We were just fooling around,” said Willie. Coach Gideon went back to the batting cage.
Clio said, “What does he know? All he cares about is his record. You’ve got a new pitch, man!”
But Willie pitched the game Coach Moss Gideon had ordered—fast balls, change-ups, the fairly good curve he had mastered. At the end of five innings, the score was tied one to one.
In the sixth, Clio tripled, then stole home. When he got back to the bench, he said to Coach Gideon, “Why not let Willie try the new pitch? Just for an inning.”
“He can’t control it.”
“Just a couple of pitches.”
The coach sighed. “Will you get the runs back when he starts walking them?”
“If he walks them, we’ll go back to the straight stuff.”
So Willie went out for the sixth, and then and there for the first time in baseball, the eyes of men beheld what later became known as the Up Ball, the Loop Ball or, in some cities, the Bird.
In that first game, it is true, Willie walked two batters.
It is also true that Clio missed two third strikes and that in the first of the ninth Sam Houston nearly tied the score.
But what made the game remarkable was that from the sixth inning on, not a single batter even touched Willie’s pitch, which the Houston coach called “pretty amazing—in fact damned amazing.”
All twelve batters struck out, utterly baffled by the pitch. Some said the ball was an upcurve, though no one had ever heard tell of an upcurve.
Others said that the pitch was a fast ball that hopped when it got to the plate—though neither the coaches, nor the umpire, nor the players, nor any of the bystanders had ever seen a ball hop a foot and a half.
The ball would come zipping in to the batter exactly like a fast ball. About ten feet from the plate, perhaps twelve feet—at that point in space where the e
ye of the batter fixes a pitch and in that split second when his brain decides swing—the ball would skip up sharply, sailing up across the shoulders of the batter who was swinging underneath it.
The batters missed the pitch by a foot and a half, so swift was the upturn of the ball. Some missed it by two feet.
Clio, too, missed it. It was a most difficult pitch to handle. Of the sixty-three pitches Willie threw in those four innings, Clio dropped, muffed, tipped or otherwise mishandled forty-five. Only in the final inning did he succeed in guessing the approximate point where the pitch would cross the plate.
It was strange to see a catcher crouched down behind the plate holding his mitt above his head. The umpire complained he couldn’t see the strike zone.
After the game, the players and coaches of both teams crowded around Willie.
“How do you throw it, boy?” the Houston coach asked.
Willie said, “It’s simple. You just take the ball like this,” and he began to demonstrate the pitch.
“Wait a minute,” Clio broke in. “It’s his pitch. He’s not showing it to anyone.”
“Take it easy, Clio,” Coach Moss Gideon said. “We’re all friends here.”
“It’s Willie’s pitch,” Clio said.
“It doesn’t matter, Clio,” said Willie gently.
And Willie was right; it didn’t matter. After showing every pitcher on both clubs how to throw the pitch and after spending an hour demonstrating it for both coaches, Willie was still the only one who could throw the ball.
The others succeeded in throwing simple fast balls with nothing but spin on them, or else they couldn’t throw the ball at all. Something in the release of the pitch, something Willie did with his wrist, hurt everybody else’s arm.
Willie and Clio stayed on the field practicing until darkness fell. The more Willie threw the ball, the better his control. And the better Clio’s control.
“It’s a miracle!” Clio shouted to the empty bleachers.
Off the field, the coaches walked to their cars.
“Who is the kid?” asked the Sam Houston coach.
“Just some chink-nigger,” said Coach Moss Gideon.
“Where did he come from?”
“He’s been around. He beat you twice last year.”
“I don’t remember him.”
“How could you forget him?” Coach Moss Gideon said. “Isn’t he the craziest looking kid you ever saw?”
“I can’t remember kids—only scores. What were the scores of those games?”
“Four to one, and six to two.”
“Yeah,” said the Sam Houston coach. “You mean that’s the same kid?”
“Yup.”
“Where’d he get the pitch?” ,
“God knows—just jacking around probably. Anyway, it’ll be forgotten tomorrow. He’s the dumbest kid in school. Buy you a beer?”
Chapter four
But Coach Moss Gideon was wrong.
Willie’s pitch wasn’t gone the next day or the day after that or the day after that when Custer played Thoreau, the strongest team in the city high school league.
Willie and Clio had spent the afternoons between the games practicing the pitch until Willie could throw it with true control and Clio, after a thousand catches, could hold it.
The Custer-Thoreau game became a legend in the history of baseball in the Southwest.
It was the first time in those parts anyone had ever struck out twenty-seven straight batters.
Willie’s pitch bobbed, jumped, skipped, bounced in the air, as the Houston telenews said, as if ten feet in front of the plate, it hit an invisible iron bar. The ball seems to move under its own mysterious power, which not even its affable young hurler can explain. Though he will demonstrate the pitch to anyone holding a scorecard, no one seems to be able to throw it but the young multinational Willie himself. And so far, no one catches it quite as well as Clio, the other half of the battery, who incidentally is one of the best switch-hitters this town has seen in many a moon.
So went the first of the stories about Willie’s remarkable pitch.
In the next few weeks there were other stories, stories on TV and in the papers of other cities, stories that carried across the land, to the Midwest, to the East, and to the far West.
A week later, Willie pitched his second no-hit, no-run, all strikeout game and the stories multiplied and carried even farther across the land.
In the great city of New York, a TV sports show seen by five million persons carried a film about Willie. The film was titled “Young Texan Invents Miracle Pitch.”
Seven thousand people showed up for the next game.
They thronged along the foul lines, they stood on the tops of automobiles, they crowded the diamond on every side and made such a roaring commotion that there was something frightening about their presence.
A simple game of ball, thought Willie, looking at the faces distorted by excitement, grotesque faces pinkening and reddening in the hot sun—a simple game of ball.
Then, as he started to throw, he had the first vague impression of the crowd as being something other than it was, a strange dusky animal with a life of its own.
His first pitch went flying in at the first batter.
Strike one.
When the roar went up, vaulting into the blue spaces, the animal image came again. He felt a little shiver of fear but he shook it off and looked down at Clio.
Strike two.
It’s a game, he told himself feeling the fear again. People need games. Games are good. People need—but when he looked at the people once more, he saw this brutish being, this gray-blue animal that stretched all around. The fear came up to his mouth.
Whiz! The batter missed the pitch by two feet and the crowd-beast coiled and twisted about the field, excited and somehow angry.
Willie stood still, looking at the spectacle, as the next batter waited for the pitch.
Clio, seeing his hesitation, came out to the mound.
“What’s wrong?”
“The people… .”
“Some crowd!” said Clio. “Somebody said there’s a scout here from Dallas.”
Willie was staring at the people along the foul lines.
“Don’t pay any attention to them,” said Clio, following his gaze. “Just throw the ball.”
So Willie threw and the fears went away but from time to time he felt the sinister energy of that strong sinewy creature coiling around the diamond, which seemed to be calling to him, demanding something other than a game.
The game was a repeat of the others—not a single batter even touched the ball.
As the last batter walked away, the crowd pressed inward, roaring and shouting.
Willie thought for a moment they were angry because the game was over and the game had not been enough, and again he felt the fear.
People moved and pushed against him, wanting to shake his hand or clap his shoulder.
A television film crew cut a path through the crowd, and a man in a bright red blazer held a microphone to Willie’s dry lips.
“How’s it feel to pitch a superperfect game?”- the man asked, looking not at Willie but at the camera.
“Sir?” asked Willie, who had not heard the question.
“Wonderful,” said the man, who then moved in front of Willie and made a little speech that Willie could not hear.
When he had finished his speech, he turned once more to Willie and said, “Isn’t that right, young fella?”
“Sir?” asked Willie.
“And so, folks,” the announcer said, turning back to the camera, “a legend is born—perhaps the greatest legend in Texas sports, right here on the Custer High School diamond,” and the rest of his words were lost in the shouting of the crowd.
Coach Moss Gideon came now to rescue Willie from the pressing, perspiring mob.
The coach led Willie back to the school and into his office behind the locker room. Clio was there sitting by the coach’s desk, listening to t
wo strange men who wore shiny, expensive dark blue suits and great red rings marked with a strange insignia.
“These gentlemen,” said Coach Gideon, “are scouts from the New York Hawks. They are here to offer you and Clio major league contracts.”
“How do you do?” said one of the men, extending his hand. “I’m Mr. Ware and this is Mr. Cole.”
Smiling the smile he could not help, Willie shook hands with the two men. He saw that the insignia on their rings showed a great silver hawk perched on crossed baseball bats made of platinum or silver. He could not take his eyes off the rings.
“You have a great career ahead of you, young fella,” said Mr. Ware.
“Also a very lucrative one,” said Mr. Cole.
“The gentlemen mean you’ll be rich,” Coach Gideon explained. “You’ll make a lot of money.”
Willie’s eyes met Clio’s. They both were dumbstruck.
“As I explained to you gentlemen earlier,” Coach Gideon said, “Willie and Clio are minors. I do think they’ll need some guidance and good advice.”
“By all means,” said Mr. Ware.
“Certainly,” said Mr. Cole. Then the men left the office, leaving on the desk a stack of official looking papers.
“Boys,” said Coach Gideon, “we’ve been friends a long time, haven’t we?”
“Yes,” said Willie.
Clio said nothing. He was studying the picture that hung on the wall of Coach Gideon’s office. The picture was of Jefferson Davis, who had been president of the Confederate States of America back in the days no one remembers.
“Good friends,” said Coach Gideon, “and loyal friends. I feel that I know you two fellows as though you were my own sons. That is what I said in explaining our relationship to Mr. Ware and Mr. Cole. Now boys,” said Coach Gideon, looking a little like Jefferson Davis behind him, “now, I know you well enough to know that you won’t take offense when I say that you are not experienced in the legals. And since I have had many years of experience in the legals, I feel an obligation as a friend to step in and act as an agent in your behalf—for say twenty percent of the bonus money. Both Mr. Ware and Mr. Cole agreed with that viewpoint completely. In fact, they thought it most generous.”
The Last Western Page 7
