"Look up, good man, cast your eye on the Ineffable Name," intones Cuss, "and give praise!"
Gringo stares gapemouthed upward. "Oh yeah!"
"Do you see it?"
"Yeah!"
"What does it say?"
"100 Watt."
"Imagine!" cries Cuss into their laughter. "I always thought it said, 'Sandy lives!' "
"So it's Tuck Wilson, is it?" observes Raspberry Schultz, having orbited to the rear to read the magic number.
"Might have known McCamish would wrangle a deal for himself like that," snipes Squire Flint with a squint of ire. True, of course.
"In the giant's very gear," Cuss says. "Lucky Tuck!"
"Not all that much of a giant," notes Skeeter Parsons. "You appear to be coming out at the seams."
"Yes, Tuckered Son of Will was a bit low on the bone," confesses corpulent Costen, and they admire the parting threads. Hardy Ingram, proud scion of the avenging giant of the bloody past, and Paunch Trench, humble Damonite, do not join them, intent upon their pre-game task. Between pitches, Cuss sees, Hardy flexes his fist, staring curiously at it, probably thinking he's got something special there today, poor fool.
"You mean, long on the bone," cracks good man Greene. "I notice the crotch is holding."
The beast roars, startling them all. Casey has entered the Knickerbocker bull pen. Can't see him.
"If we could only get to whoever's playing Casey," Squire Flint says, half to himself, staring toward that distant figure.
"Awake! Awake!" cries Costen McCamish across the verdant pastures. "Put on strength, o arm of the league! Awake, as in days of old, the generations of long ago! Was it not thou that didst cut Rutherford in pieces, that didst deck the daemon? Was it not—"
"Cut it out!" cries Squire Flint.
"That is going a little too far," says Raspberry Schultz soberly. They all glance guiltily over toward Ingram and Trench, who, undisturbed, are still pitching, pitching, pitching. "I don't believe in just making fun of things you don't understand."
"What's this?" demands Skeeter Parsons. "You been converted, Razz?"
"No," says the Witness, blushing Raspberry, "but, well, legend, I mean the pattern of it, the long history, it seems somehow, you know, a folk truth, a radical truth, all these passed-down mythical—"
"Ahh, your radical mother's mythical cunt!" sniffs Gringo Greene. "It's time we junked the whole beastly business, baby, and moved on."
"I'm afraid, Gringo, I must agree with our distinguished folklorist and foremost witness to the ontological revelations of the patterns of history," intercedes (with a respectful nod to Schultz) Professor Costen Migod McCamish, Doctor of Nostology and Research Specialist in the Etiology of Homo Ludens, "and have come to the conclusion that God exists and he is a nut."
Skeeter Parsons cum Tubby-ass Ram's-Eye laughs: "Why, that's funny, I was just thinking ... !"
"I think you better shut up," snaps friar Squire over his shoulder, still facing out toward the Knick bull pen where Casey works.
"Say, you're pretty lucky yourself," quoth Cuss to Squire's numbered back. "I see you drew McDermott."
Flint spins around full wroth. "You trying to be funny, you bastard?" Now what did he say that . . . ? Well, of course, Flint wanted to be Casey himself.
"Who do you think Casey is today?" asks Skeetoby.
"Galen Flynn, I hear," offers the occult Schultz, man who has turned, so Costen has heard, to the folklore of game theory, and plays himself some device with dice.
"Flynn!" snorts Flint, whose line in this league is the longest of them all, indeed to the first of the vicars. "That damn toady!"
"Easy, easy!" cautions Raspberry Schultz, nodding with squinted eyes toward Paul Trench, son of the establishment, now receiving Hardy-Damon's warm-up pitches. "Even the eyes have spies!"
But fiery Squire McFlint in a temper is no easy man to hush. "A bunch of idiots, that's what we got running this league! Nobody understands Casey anymore! Nobody understands history!" Paunch, asquat, uniformed as Royce Ingram, mighty arm of divine retribution, is faceless behind his mask.
"Anyway," proffers the conciliatory Parson Ramsey, "maybe it isn't Flynn."
"Of course, it isn't," Cuss-Tuck McWilson informs them.
"No?" asks Witberry Yultz. "Then who do you think that ... ?"
"Why," quoth this hero who shall walk today from home to home to the inevitable satisfaction of all parties under the sun, "that it is Jock Casey himself!"
"Ho ho!" cheers Skeetoby Ramparts. "I might have guessed!"
"But how ... ?" asks the witless Jerkberry.
"You're crazy," grumps Drusquire McWormy, lover of the Casey dead, but not alive.
"Crazy? Well, yes, I am," Cusstuck confesses nobly. "Else how account for my stuffing body and bunghole into this museum piece of a rag bag?" He flexes a leg to rip a stitch and spring a general laughter. "But as for Casey, what do we know?"
"Aw, let's find a bar, for God's sake!" butts the good Gringo impatiently in.
"That no man ever lived a life like his," responds Squire Flint, the humorless one.
"First, we know that—"
"Thirst is first!" gripes Gringo Greene. But as Cuss McCamish knows full well, it is all bravado; the first sack will be tupped many times over by the sober Pioneer cleats of Goodman James today.
"He thirsts for the True Church," wry Raspberry smiles.
"And what of your fans, Gringo?" asks Skeeter Parsons.
"Mother can smother in her own vat of fat," Gringo grumbles.
"A dogmatist," Cuss McCamish complains, and all nod, pitying. "Now, as for Casey, the first thing we know is that he was still pitching long after Damonsday the First."
"Everybody knows that," is Squire's reposte. "They've just squeezed the two deaths into one ceremony in order to—"
"But if this is a falsehood, dear comrades, where is truth? We know who buzzarded about the immortal remains of our friend Hardy here—or I mean, Damon—know when and where he was immortally interred, even know the music performed at his immortal obsequies, but of Casey what can we say? That Hardy's own glorious ancestor knocked Jock on the block and fixed his clock? A mere fairy tale, adorned with the morbid imaginations of a century of sentimental artisans!" His efforts to draw in Hardy Ingram avail him not. Hardy Ingram he is no more. "We don't even know if his corpus delicti was scraped off the rubber, or if it just sank into the premises! As the great historian U. R. Obseen has informed us:
Said Long Lew to Fanny
Whilst inspecting her cranny:
'Why! someone inside I have found?'
Said Fanny to Lew:
'Dear, don't you know who?
It's the Man Who Sleeps there in the Mound!'"
"You're sick, McCamish!" is the reward the noble historian reaps from the furious Flint, though elsewhere he fares better.
"So I say it is he, in the flesh of the bone and the bone of all flesh, the Man in the Mound, Jock the Mad Killer Casey, come back this day once yearly to victimize us all, we of the green hinderparts and the wives and daughters of honest men!"
"Casey died to prove his freedom!" Squire Flint blurts out. "And ours! And all we do—"
"Well, a great man, Casey, but not the greatest."
"Who was the greatest, Cuss?" asks the grinning Skeeter.
"Why old Pappy Rooney, of course."
"Rooney! What did he do?"
"Lived to the age of a hundred and forty-three and, so they say, could get it up to the very end!"
'To the very end of what?" asks the Green Gringo.
"That's stupid!" Drew McSquire snaps.
"Stupid? I should say not! In fact, may we all, my friends, meet such a reasonable demise!"
"Death is never reasonable," argues Squire the great denier, "even for an old fool at one hundred and forty-three."
'Take it easy on Squire," laughs Skeeter. "He's writing a book on Jock Casey."
"So I've heard," says he whose very seams split with a loat
hing of giants. "It's The Man Who Stood Alone, isn't it?"
"That's right," says Squire grimly.
"If Squire writes it, then I shall bring out my long-awaited biography of Long Lew Lydell!"
Raspberry Schultz laughs and claps. "Wonderful! What are you going to call it, Cuss?"
"The Man Who Stood on his Bone!" Full-bellied laughter at last, which he gathers in, then adds:
"Said Fanny to the spectre
As soon as he'd decked her:
'Why, sir! you're positively pneumatic!
Unlike my old feller,
You tickle the cellar
Without making a mess in the attic!'"
But no rewards this time, for it's Dame Society herself who responds, a terrible roar dredged up from the very gut of the beast, a horrendous witless bellowing, that sucks up all their scrotums, and makes them catch their breath. Skeeter Parsons checks his timepiece: "It's time," he says. Trench and Ingram depart, under a cascade of cheers. But yes! It is really they! See how they go! Two still-young heroes of the golden past: miraculous transformation! And soon even he, Costen McCamish, will shrink instinctively to Tuck Wilson, step over the crushed skull and blinded eyes of that one who, in spite of all, must be loved, and walk the magic bases while the whore weeps. No cheers for him. Only survival.
Paul Trench, at the grim edge, too wise to step back and too frightened to leap, walks miserably toward the diamond beside Hardy Ingram, wanting to speak of it, his gloom, and why, but not knowing where to begin. Paul is a plain-spoken man, and his despair is too complex for plain speech. Though none would ever guess it, the thunder of the crowd only makes it worse. He is afraid. Not only of what he must do. But of everything.
Beyond each game, he sees another, and yet another, in endless and hopeless succession. He hits a ground ball to third, is thrown out. Or he beats the throw. What difference, in the terror of eternity, does it make? He stares at the sky, beyond which is more sky, overwhelming in its enormity. He, Paul Trench, is utterly absorbed in it, entirely disappears, is Paul Trench no longer, is nothing at all: so why does he even walk up there? Why does he swing? Why does he run? Why does he suffer when out and rejoice when safe? Why is it better to win than to lose? Each day: the dread. And when, after being distracted by the excitement of a game, he returns at night to the dread, it is worse than ever, compounded with shame and regret. He wants to quit—but what does he mean, "quit"? The game? Life? Could you separate them?
High in the stands, enjoying the rewards of mere longevity, sit the twelve Elders, his grandfather among them. In the government's official box, beside the Chancellor himself, sits his father. Though he knows they watch him, he doesn't look their way, afraid his own doubts will betray him. It began with them, after all. Discovering their fallibility, he encountered the pathos of all life, then reasoned that the Age of Glory was perhaps no different than this, his own inglorious times.
At first, he thought of it as tragic, saw himself as a kind of Damon Rutherford: young, brilliant . . . dead. He became suspicious when he realized the idea gave him a certain grim pleasure. He became interested in Jock Casey then, felt the terror and excitement of the Great Confrontation, asserted himself and learned to hate—but discovered that, even here, there was something he was enjoying that seemed wrong, a creature of false pride. It was Barney Bancroft who led him to the final emptiness; at every point in the man's life, he found himself asking: but why go on? Bancroft went on, but gave no reasons. And wasn't that, finally, a kind of cowardice?
The green grass at the edge of the infield feels spongy to their cleats. They walk in silence, beneath the loud blessing of the exalted and exultant populace, onto the diamond itself. . A sacred duty, his father said. But "sacred," what is that? The Whore-Mother, Costen calls the people: Is it they, is it she who defines it for them? Is it in her name that he must kill today? Or is it for the record books that we go on, exposing our destinies? "Exposing our destinies"—that book Raspberry gave him, called Equilibrium Through Intransigence. It was Raspberry Schultz one day who told him: "I don't know if there's really a record-keeper up there or not, Paunch. But even if there weren't, I think we'd have to play the game as though there were." Would we? Is that reason enough? Continuance for its own inscrutable sake?
He noticed back there in the bull pen how they all avoided him, how they talked about him, wrong about everything. They think he's a Damonite. He isn't. He has read all he can find on the Association's history, and he knows now he is nothing. He has relived the origins and growths of the Bogglers, the Legalists, the Guildsmen, has examined their aspirations and how they tried to realize them, has suffered the pain and shock of Bancroft's murder, has watched the rescue of the Association by Patrick Monday's Universalists— later called the Caseyites—and their efforts, honest enough, to bring order to the chaos, has cringed under their ultimate tyranny and joined with the first courageous Damonites in their small and secret meetings, then ascended with them, pious and forever amazed, through the long slow years, to power—and has discovered, in the end, his own estrangement from them all. If anything, he is simply a willing accomplice to all heresies, but ultimately a partisan of none—like fat Costen, a negator, without any hope of rediscovering affirmation. Not that Cuss is any help to him. Cuss mocks the regime and everything else, but his mockery encapsulates him, cuts him off from any sense of wonder or mystery, makes life nothing more than getting by with the least pain possible, and somehow, to Paul Trench, such a life seems less than human.
Casey, in his writings, has spoken of a "rising above the rules," an abandonment of all conceptualizations, including scorekeepers, umpires, Gods in any dress, in the heat of total mystic immersion in that essence that includes God and him equally. Of course, some say he never wrote it, it's all apocryphal, inventions of Monday and his Universalists, distorted by redactions without number, but no matter, the idea itself remains. What it leads to, though, is inaction, a terrible passivity: Casey on the mound, shaking Flynn off, waiting—but who is playing Casey today? And will he wait? Trench, alias Ingram the Avenger, squatting dutifully behind the plate to receive the last of Hardy Ingram's warm-up pitches, feels a tingle in his hands, a power there he neither wants nor asked for.
He'd like to trade places with Hardy. Against the rules, of course; Hardy couldn't do it, can't play your own progenitor. No, even better, he'd like to trade with Galen Flynn or whoever it is that's playing Casey. What would he do? He'd burn them in, that's what he'd do, try to strike Ingram out. Or: why not an intentional pass? Or bean him. How about that? Is Flynn-Casey thinking about that? Going for number two? Namely, him? Royce Ingram tries to kindle up an anger, but Paul Trench can't bring it off. I'll strike out.
The idea excites him. A rising above. Yes, why not? He feels better than he's felt for months! Of course, so simple! What will they do to him after? Is he martyrizing himself? It doesn't matter: death is a relative idea, truth absolute! Yes, it was Squire who said that. He understands it now. Or did Squire put it the other way around? Stop and think. But he is too upset to think. He forgets now which is relative and which is absolute. If either. It is all falling apart on him. And either way it's coming. Yes, now, today, here in the blackening sun, on the burning green grass, and the eyes, and the crumbling— they shout. He sweats. Damon's pitches sting his hands. Can't hang on to them. All like a bad dream. And die. They're all going to die. And nothing he can do about it. Foolish things pass through his head. Rooney reaching the age of 143. The mystery of Casey's burial. The Brock Rutherford Era—
"Play ball!" the umpire cries, and he feels a terrific grabbing in the chest.
That dead boy. And the wake. Sandy's songs. The sack in the back of Jake's—cordoned off with a rope now and overseen by a museum guard, just like his ancestor Mel's Circle Bar, so they won't tear it up and carry off the pieces as souvenirs. They! Pieces! He laughs.
He flings the ball to second; then, impulsively, he walks out there, to the mound, not because it's a rule of th
e game, but because he feels drawn. The ball goes from Ramsey to Wilder to Hines. Hatrack comes in halfway from third, tosses the ball to Paul. He hands it to Damon, standing tall and lean, head tilted slightly to the right, face expressionless but eyes alert.
Paul tries to speak, but he can find no words. It's terrible, he says; or might have said. It's all there is.
And then suddenly Damon sees, must see, because astonishingly he says: "Hey, wait, buddy! you love this game, don't you?"
"Sure, but..."
Damon grins. Lights up the whole goddamn world. "Then don't be afraid, Royce," he says.
The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop Page 22
