“But don’t let things worry you, son,” he said. “And remember, be faithful to yourself.”
Mr. Grayson hesitated. He gestured with his pipe as if he wanted to say more but didn’t know how.
“I’ll be okay, Mr. Grayson,” said Willie.
“That’s what I been praying for,” said Mr. Grayson.
Willie spied the Vest Pocket Ezee Bible in Mr. Grayson’s jacket pocket.
“I been reading what the Lord Jesus told the players in his day,” said Mr. Grayson. “Do not store treasures for yourselves on earth, where moths and woodworms destroy them and thieves can break in and steal. But store up treasures for yourselves in heaven. I been praying in that vein tonight. Now, son, go to bed and you too try to pray.”
Willie thanked Mr. Grayson and went to his room, promising to pray.
But that night his prayers were fretful. Clio did not return.
Willie lay awake listening to the tolling of a bell somewhere in the city. He kept thinking of all that had happened that night and once, after dozing off a little, he awoke with the feeling that it had not really happened, that Regent and the whole night on the town had been a dream. Then he felt the ring on his finger.
He tried to understand what had happened—had it happened?
He thought then of his mother and Cool Dawn and of the people of the William McKinley Arms. He thought of Carolyn. He called the desk—it was three in the morning, too late to phone her. So he lay awake and tried to make the shadows of the room go together to make a picture of her face. The bell tolled again.
At dawn the key turned in the door, and there in the gray light stood Clio. He looked wan and dazed. Willie got out of bed.
“Are you all right?”
“She works for him,” Clio said from a long way off. “He owns that restaurant. Everybody there works for him.”
“Where did you go?”
“To her place. Her name is Martha and she—she’s—she works for him. He’s got something on her father, and the manager of the restaurant says she has to work there. She has to do all sorts of things because they have something on her father—it’s terrible!”
“We’ll help, Clio,” said Willie. “Tomorrow we’ll go see Mr. Regent and—”
“He’s a crook!” cried Clio. “Why, he owns people all over. Martha says he owns the tenements where she lives.”
“He doesn’t own people.”
“Yes he does. He controls them. Like Martha,” and Clio’s voice broke. “We’ve got to do something. We’ve got to help her.”
But there wasn’t time to help. After the game the next day, the team boarded an airplane for Chicago to start the season.
Earlier, a cab had brought Martha to the ball park, and for a little while before the game and a little while after it, she and Clio talked.
Willie watched them from his place in the dugout and tried to think of what to do.
Martha seemed very beautiful to Willie, much more beautiful in the sunlight than in the restaurant the night before. But there was a sadness about her; she looked tiny and helpless in the stands.
After the game, Clio nearly missed the bus. He stood holding Martha until the last minute on a little platform outside the ball park, under a sign that said, REGENT WINE—AND THE WORLD IS FINE.
Willie saw them there. Clio seemed to be reassuring her.
But there was no reassuring Clio on the plane hurrying up the great Mississippi Delta.
“I love her,” he kept saying, “and he owns her.”
“We’ll work it out,” Willie would say. “We’ll work it out with Regent.”
“It’s impossible,” said Clio. “He doesn’t have a heart.”
Chapter seven
The next day the baseball season opened in Chicago, Illinois.
The President of the United States opened the season by throwing the first ball to the catcher of the Chicago Cougars.
It took the President several throws to accomplish this feat. He was tired and worn and had a bad arm besides.
One of his pitches hit the Vice-President of the United States, who was dozing in a box seat under the presidential pavilion.
The Vice-President, dreaming that someone had nudged him at some banquet, stood up and said: “My fellow Americans, I believe in JERCUS, I believe in God, I believe in reason.”
An aide told him he was at a ball game.
“Where?” said the Vice-President.
“Chicago,” said the aide.
“I believe in Chicago,” said the Vice-President.
The President, having finally got the ball to the Chicago catcher, moved to a bank of microphones.
“Fellow Americans,” he said, “it is good for us to be here on this beautiful day to observe our national pastime.
“Today, with so much trouble in the world and with so many people trying to destroy our American way of life, it is particularly good for us to come together, to put aside our cares and at the same time, to remember who and what we are.
“As I look at this beautiful new stadium and the new miracle grass that is so much greener and so much neater than the old regular grass, and as I listen to the chirping of the new mechanical birds that fly through the air so much more gracefully than the old sparrows and starlings we used to have, I can only think that if we can apply the same imagination, hard work and sacrifice that have brought these wonders into our lives to the problems we face in other countries, then ours shall be the inevitable victory.”
Here the people applauded.
“I have just returned from the battlefields of the six conflicts our nation, along with our JERCUS allies, is presently involved in. And though the news freeze, which I myself put into effect six months ago, prevents my speaking about those struggles in detail, I want to assure you today that our fighting men are representing you in the finest traditions of our country.
“I know they join me from the far corners of the world as I say, play ball!”
A great roar went up from the crowd.
As the President slumped back in his beribboned box seat, Willie began to think of the wars. In Uruguay. In Uganda. In India. In the Arctic. In the Middle East. In the Philippines.
He wondered not how the wars were going, as most Americans wondered then, but why they were going on at all.
The reason for the wars was never discussed.
Since the news freeze had begun, only good news could be printed or televised, so there had been no news of the wars for more than eight months and there had been no news of the civil disturbances in the cities either, even though it was rumored that the civil disturbances this year were the worst in the history of the country.
There were rumors of civil disturbances in Chicago, and on the way to the ball park, the players had seen a burning building. There were barricades blocking off certain streets, and the ball park itself was surrounded by troops of the National Guard.
Willie could see the soldiers patrolling through the stands and prowling about the top of the stadium, their rifles glinting in the sun, the mechanical birds whirling about them.
Mr. Grayson, seeing Willie lost in his thoughts, tapped him on the shoulder.
“You feel okay, son?”
“Yessir.”
“You ready?”
“Yessir.”
“So I pray,” said Mr. Grayson.
But Willie was not ready in his heart.
He could not get his mind off the wars or the civil disturbances. Nor could he get his mind off the war that was going on in the heart of his friend Clio who sat now on the edge of the dugout, scanning the box seats for a glimpse of Robert ‘Bob’ Regent.
A few minutes earlier, as they were warming up, a brilliant red, white and blue helicopter had come swooping into the stadium and Clio had cried, “That’s him!”
But a walkie-talkie in the dugout contacted the chopper, which proved to be carrying only Mr. Ware and Mr. Cole and other executives of the Hawks club.
And still earli
er, that morning, Clio and Willie had phoned every hotel in the Chicago area, trying to find Robert ‘Bob’ Regent. He was nowhere to be found.
“Maybe he’s here in disguise,” Mr. Grayson told the boys. “He wears disguises so much I don’t recognize him myself sometimes even though I’ve known him all these years.”
“Why would he wear a disguise?” Willie asked.
A look of melancholy settled upon Mr. Grayson’s leathery old face. “That,” he said, “is a long story.”
The Hawks went down in order in the first half of the first inning, and Willie took the mound to perhaps the most tumultuous ovation ever heard at a sports event in Chicago.
It was a strange ovation that came from the stands, a mixture of cheers and jeers.
Some people believed that Willie’s miracle pitch was a hoax designed to sell more tickets and revive interest in the game of baseball. These people jeered Willie as he threw his first practice pitches to Clio.
Certain fans of baseball were set against the whole idea of a miracle pitch which destroyed so many records and memories of past events and upset things held in balance. These people also jeered.
Then there were those who could only be called enemies. Willie was too great a success not to have enemies.
There were enemies even on his own club—pitchers and other players who had once been superstars and who were now suddenly out of the spotlight. There were supporters of these other players in the Chicago ball park that day and they too were booing.
But most people had come to the opening game to see a marvel. It was a time of marvels, when people prized marvels more than anything else and would travel great distances to see some curiosity or freak of nature that would break the boredom of their lives and help them forget the civil disturbances and the wars.
The marvels of course were never marvelous enough, for the boredom the people felt was inside them, in what the people of the unremembered times had called the soul.
Even the great wonders of space travel bored and disappointed the people now. Only when some accident occurred would they take an interest in space explorations. They watched and hungered for disaster.
So as the first Cougar stepped to the plate, a sort of frenzied moan came from the crowd, that frightening sound Willie had heard before.
When he looked at the faces of the people and saw their anger and excitement, he knew that however he pitched, whether he succeeded or failed, that hungering and thirsting for marvels would go on. There was nothing he, or anyone else, could do about it.
But now he had to pitch—pitch before the President of the United States and the Vice-President of the United States and 61,000 fans and the twenty-six red eyes of television cameras that were beaming this game to every state in the country, to Canada, to six Latin American nations and by satellite to the armed forces of the United States that were fighting the six strange unexplained, undeclared wars.
High in the broadcasting booth, the famed sportscaster Zack Taylor described the action as follows:
So here he is, fans, the wonder boy from the Southwest, with the wonder pitch. STRIKE ONE!
Tall, about six feet one, on the slender side at 175, red hair,
Oriental eyes and a face that has been described as that of a happy Aztec warrior—though that isn’t exactly right either because Willie is also a black American and supposedly there’s an Irishman back in the fam—STRIKE TWO!
The ball, as you saw, really jumped that time. It looked to us like it jumped a yard as it swooshed up from the plate. There was absolutely no way for Al Freud to get near the ball as it seemed to swerve—and STRIKE THREE!
An amazing spectacle, ladies and gentlemen, absolutely amazing! We here in the booth—let’s be honest—we’ve been somewhat skeptical of this youngster. Like others, we’ve had our doubts. But there was no doubt about those three pitches, and Al Freud has one of the best eyes in baseball.
Here now is big Bill Bultman, slugging outfielder of the Cougars. Last year the Bull hit .356 and drove in 115 runs. Let’s see if young Willie can work his wonders on one of the real power hitters of the league.
Now, looking in from our center field camera, Willie goes into his motion and now—STRIKE ONE! He did it again.
On the replay: The ball leaves his hand, you’ll notice, just a shade earlier than with most pitchers and with a sort of flutter of the wrist. It looks at that point like something in the curve family, but watch closely now. The ball does not break to either side. There! You see that? The ball actually breaks up, and not like a rising fast ball.
Back to live action and strike two! Bill Bultman’s objecting to that call, but umpire Am Toynbee is unmoved.
We started to say, fans, that while many pitchers throw a rising fast ball, this pitch jumps suddenly in the air, as if, in the words of the press, the young pitcher had strung a piano wire ten feet in front of the plate and had somehow mastered the knack of hitting it every time.
And called strike three!
And now Bultman’s hopping mad—wait a minute—Bultman hit Toynbee! Toynbee is down!
Bill Bultman, angered by that last call and the one before it, has just slugged the dean of American umpires, Am Toynbee, who appears to be out cold back of the plate.
So now, with this break in the action, how about opening a nice cold bottle of Regent Ale?
Remember, if it’s happiness you’re after, the magic word is Regent.
Willie pitched another perfect game, the crowd shrieking and screaming with every pitch, but never so excitedly as in the first inning when Bultman slugged the umpire or in the eighth inning when another batter, having struck out for the third time, started out to the mound waving his bat menacingly.
When his teammates pulled the batter back to the dugout, the crowd groaned in disappointment.
After the game, the people spilled out onto the field to get close to Willie, to touch him or talk to him or perhaps only see him at close range.
But Willie, as he went to the dugout with Clio and Mr. Grayson, was frightened. He sensed the anger that was in the air.
He had made a perfect thing and the perfect thing was not enough.
In the clubhouse, though the Hawks had won 5 to 0, there was no joy.
The players dressed quickly and filed out to the bus.
They too had had their fill of perfection. Nothing they cpuld ever do could match what Willie had done. Willie had taken something from each of them—each man’s golden dream of himself.
Only Clio and Mr. Grayson were happy, but their happiness could not survive against the gloom of the players.
Back at the hotel Willie phoned his mother and Cool Dawn in Houston.
They told him he was wonderful.
Willie said it was much more wonderful to hear their voices again.
Then he thought he heard a quavering in something his mother said.
“Is everything all right, mama?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“Trouble,” said Cool Dawn.
“What kind of trouble?” said Willie anxiously.
“In the streets,” said Cool Dawn.
“Worse than last year?”
“No,” said Willie’s mother. “Anyway, we’re safe and well. The police have controlled it. Don’t worry.”
But Willie could not help worrying. There had been talk in the lobby of a further civil disturbance in Chicago, and he feared what might be happening in Houston.
He called Carolyn.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes.”
“The trouble?”
“Just some of the Apaches fighting.”
“Carolyn?”
“Yes.”
“You won’t—go out?”
“I can take care of myself.”
The sound of her voice made him want to leave everything and go to her.
“I saw the game today. You must be the most famous person in the country.”
“Carolyn, I miss you.”
>
He waited for her voice again, but over the phone came the laugh of Flexer Sage.
“You was magnificent, boy,” said Flexer, “sheer magnificent.”
“Thanks, Mr. Sage.”
Flexer Sage wanted to know about the game, the Bultman-Toynbee fight, what Thatcher Grayson was like and so on. Finally Willie asked if he could talk to Carolyn again.
“Sure, sure,” said Flexer. “You just keep striking them out, hear? There isn’t no record you can’t bust now, boy.”
There was so much talking and laughter in the background when Carolyn got back on the line that she could hardly be heard.
“I’ll write you a letter,” said Willie. “It’s hard talking on the phone.”
“I got your cards.”
“I’m a terrible writer.”
“Terrible.”
They hung up then in the old joking way, and Willie had failed once more to say the splendid words.
He sat on the edge of the bed and began to worry about the trouble again.
“Carolyn says the Apaches are fighting,” he said to Clio.
But talking to Clio was like talking to a statue. His worries about Martha had locked him up, away from everything.
“I got to talk to her again,” he said.
So Willie left the room while he made his call. When he came back, Clio was even worse off than before.
“Now she doesn’t want us to find Regent,” he said. “She says if we find him, it’ll only be worse for her.”
“Clio,” said Willie, “Mr. Regent is a human being. I’m sure if we find him, we can get him to help Martha.”
“She says he’d call it meddling.”
“Why? How?”
“I don’t know,” said Clio miserably.
The boys discussed the matter at length, Willie finally convincing Clio that they should continue their search for Robert ‘Bob’ Regent.
So began another night of telephoning—hotels, motels, restaurants, nightclubs.
They phoned the New York offices of Regent Wines, and got a list of the TV and radio stations, the publishing houses and other properties of Robert ‘Bob’ Regent and phoned them all, one after the other, but no one anywhere was able to tell them where Robert ‘Bob’ Regent was.
The Last Western Page 10
