Wild Pitch

by Guthrie, A. B. ;

  “His name is Loose.”

  “Nickname.” The sheriff motioned to me, and I came to my feet and went out with him.

  The dog growled us into the Special.

  We were quiet while Charleston wound the car over the bouldered trail, but when the going got easier I asked the little question that was first in my mind. “What’s this heel-fly business, Sheriff? Heel flies, he kept saying.”

  “Old name,” Charleston told me. “Some time, way back, the law was after him. Heel flies, that was what rustlers and cowpunchers on the run called sheriffs and deputy marshals.”

  I could understand, having seen livestock on the bolt from the pests. “It says it,” I said.

  “Better than fuzz.” The sheriff turned left on the main trail, away from the town. “McNair’s set against the likes of us two. Whatever he saw and whatever he knows, he’d play tight-mouth with the law. Guilty or not guilty, witness or no.”

  I made bold to ask, “And the hat?”

  “Hard telling,” he answered, “but it wasn’t calks made those holes.”

  I didn’t press him, but it seemed to me that the hat, being pale, would have served as a target almost as well as Buster’s bald head. Almost, but not quite, which maybe was the reason that Buster still lived. But, saying the hat was the mark, what happened to Loose’s story that Buster had taken it off? And where did it leave Loose?

  Pretty soon I realized we were bound for Pierre Chouquette’s. The place lay in the scrub pine in a gulch close to the river. I knew it from fooling around while out fishing.

  Charleston pulled up a few yards from the cabin, which looked old-maid tidy, something you wouldn’t expect from a hermit. Beyond it was a little barn and a store of corral poles set on their butts against the weather and sloped in to the top, tepee fashion. They were one of Chouquette’s sources of income. Beyond the barn the gulch opened up into wide, slanting fields that rose to a butte.

  “Nobody home,” I said.

  “Sure?”

  “The running gear to his lumber wagon is gone, and so are those two old horses of his. They’d be in the catch pasture this time of year or in the shade of the barn. Likely he’s gone into the canyon for logs or more poles.”

  To make certain, Charleston gave a couple of blasts with his horn and, getting no answer, settled back in his seat.

  Here, beside the little cabin, we might have been alone in the world. There was a sort of free desolation about the place, as if the owner had been taken away and left as proof of his once being only the forsaken work of his hands. There came to my mind, while the silence sang around us, a couple of lines liked by my father. “They are all gone away. There is nothing more to say.” The sight and clucks of a brood of blue grouse—I counted six plus the mother hen—pointed up the absence of man, whom the earth had been made for but wasn’t his anymore.

  The sheriff’s voice brought me up with a bump. “Jase,” he said, and got out one of the two or three thin cigars he rationed himself day by day. After he had it going, he went on, “The fix we’re in reminds me of old Chet Bayliss.”

  “Bayliss?”

  “Down south. You wouldn’t know him. He lived by himself, Chet did, in a cabin—a house it was really—ten, twelve miles from town. He had enough to get along on, having saved up his money just so, in old age, he could get away and not be pestered by people. Toward the human race he was like our friend, Chouquette, here. Four miles away a lawyer, name of Bill Rogers, had a summer and weekend cabin. They got to be good friends, strange to say.”

  The sheriff drew deep on his cigar and breathed out the smoke slow, seeing that other time and organizing his story.

  “Trouble had come to Chet earlier. It was his eyes. Cataracts. But he had them operated on and could see all right, all right as long as he wore specs as thick as ice cubes. Without them he couldn’t be sure about daylight and dark. So he had them on his nose all the time, except when he went to bed he laid them on a little table close to his head. You savvy?”

  I said I did, and the sheriff breathed out another slow puff.

  “We go back to Bill Rogers, the lawyer. His trouble was pack rats. You have to keep after those varmints or they’ll chew up the place and get in the house one way or another, even down a stovepipe and out through the damper, and they’ll gnaw what can be gnawed and what can’t and leave trails of such shit as would embarrass a hog.”

  “That’s what I’ve heard,” I said, and thought to squeeze my neglected baseball.

  “Bill got after them. Not with poison, for that killed off the chipmunks and squirrels, but with traps. He bought half a dozen and set them in old lengths of stovepipe, laid flat, which rats like to travel, and he placed a couple of them behind a wornout door put on its side and angled against the wall of his barn.”

  Charleston looked at his cigar and decided on a drag or two more before going on.

  “Came the day. Saturday and just sunup, it was, and Bill Rogers hustled from town to run his trap line. First off, he looked at the barn door. One chain was tight, so he knew he had a catch there under cover. He hunted up a stick to knock the rat in the head with.

  “Stick in hand, he swung back the door, and, by God, he had a catch all right, but it was a skunk and, what’s more, ass-aimed right at him. It let fly.

  “Bill dropped the door back and gave himself two seconds for shock and two more for inspiration. He was that kind of a man.”

  The sheriff paused, for effect I supposed, but I couldn’t help prodding him. “Then?” I asked.

  “Then,” he answered after more pause, “he walked to his car, got in and drove to Chet Bayliss’ place. He was pretty sure Chet would still be in bed, him liking to sleep late, and he hid his car behind a bunch of aspen, went to the house and let himself in, slow and quiet. He tiptoed to Chet’s bedroom. There he just stood. And stood and stood.

  “And all at once Chet came out of his sleep, flicked open his poor eyes, took a trial sample of the air, snorted it out and clawed for his glasses. Before he could find them and get them set on his beak, Bill tiptoed out.”

  Abruptly, the tale told, Charleston put the cigar in his teeth, started the car and backed up for a turn-around. I was laughing.

  “Last I heard,” Charleston said after he had shifted gears, “old Chet was still talking about that goddam invisible skunk. Where it came from, how it got in and out, leaving no sign of itself except stink. Old Chet, never knowing the right of it.”

  We were back on the road to town now, and the sheriff concluded, “What? Who? Why? Whence and wherefore? The invisible skunk. There we are, Jase.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  We were the visiting team, and so most of the fans were against us, but we won the ball game, 5 to 3, and I went the route, though without much to brag about at the finish. For the record, just one of Bear Paw’s three runs was earned, but no doubt about it. In the first inning one of the city ringers opposing us got the fat of his bat on a damn gopher ball and hit it about three cow pastures beyond my left fielder.

  We kept pecking away, though, and at the bottom of the ninth, with only three outs to go, led by four runs. The first two men to come up we disposed of by a couple of miracles. Terry Stephens was catching, in the absence of our regular man who worked at Brick’s Butcher and Locker Shop and had had to slaughter a steer, Sunday being no excuse for a let-up in blood-letting. The first batter fouled a ball that would have sailed over the back screen if there’d been one, or into the press box of a big-city park. Terry charged back for it, trampling a couple of kids and a dog in his chase but somehow keeping his feet. At the last minute, falling, he speared it. The second man up socked a line drive that our center fielder couldn’t have caught in a month of Sundays, but this Sunday must have been one over the count, for he hauled the drive in over his shoulder.

  Only one out to go, and some of the spectators were drifting away. So I walked the next man on four pitches. The next scratched a single. The next got on base when our shortstop
fumbled his grounder. Bases loaded, then, and the tying run at the plate. The fans decided they were leaving too soon. They were.

  Wild as a blind gunner, I walked in a run. I hit the next batter, and a second run scored. And at bat was that comedian who had murdered a pitch in the first inning.

  Our manager—Felix Underwood, the undertaker—lagged out on the field to ask if I thought I should be embalmed, there being a live replacement of sorts. The dying man said he felt fine and was left to his fate.

  I worked the count, or the comedian worked the count, to three and two. Terry Stephens came out to the mound. He said, “You’re all right, Jase,” and scuffed the ground, stalling for time. “You’ll get him, the bastard. Blaze one through.”

  “Sure. Sure, Terry. Some foul catch you made.”

  Back of the plate again, Terry signaled for a fast ball, knowing I had better control with it than with a curve. But that joker at the plate was expecting a hard one, I felt sure, so I shook the sign off and fed the joker a curve that just caught the corner of the plate and left him looking. That was it, naturally, though the umpire got some hell for his call.

  I knew why I lost control there in the ninth, though I wouldn’t have confessed under torture. To get the picture, as they say, you must understand that those country-town ball parks had no grandstands or bleachers, only a couple of benches for players. People sat on the ground or stood up, back of the lines from home to first base and from home to third, and some of them watched from back of the catcher, to the rear of the postage-stamp backstop behind him, where they could make sure whether the umpire was blind. Drivers parked their cars beyond the sitters and standers, and a lot of the occupants looked on without getting out.

  Of the two I saw him first, there at the end of the eighth inning. He was a trim, older man who wore a necktie, glasses and a Vandyke beard and appeared too bookish for baseball, but you never knew. In our region the national game was hanging on long after it had been reduced elsewhere to Little Leaguers and Babe Ruthers or whatever they called those tadpole teams. We had town teams, supported by townspeople, and the local loyalties were fierce. But whatever side he was on, I figured the old gentleman—that was the word for him—had come from his car to be in at the finish.

  Then I saw the girl who moved up to his side, or, rather, she burst on my sight. If there were better words than freshness and loveliness, I would use them to describe her. She was like a rare flower, sprung up by magic from the weed patch. The lines of an old trail song, sung by Terry to the soft strumming of his guitar, ran in my head.

  Eyes like the morning star,

  Cheeks like the rose …

  It was for her that I performed in that ninth inning. It was because of her that I performed poorly. Self-display goeth before bases on balls.

  Bear Paw lay, and still lies, thirty miles from my old hometown, all of them via the new highway except for the turnouts into the two settlements. In spite of the traffic, which was pretty heavy because of the tourists and a just-ended rodeo farther up the line, we made pretty good time. Five of us were in Terry’s car, owned by his old man, and five in Felix Underwood’s, which tailed us on the way home. Ten players were all we could muster that day.

  The entrances and exits into my town—which were two in number and, for lack of overpasses or underpasses, were both open to either exit or entry—were separated by a half-mile or less. We had decided on the second and lower road because it ran next to Hamm’s Big Hamburger stand.

  But we hadn’t gone far past the first turnout than traffic slowed and came to a standstill, coming and going. A lot of adventurers, balked in their pursuits of paved distance, were leaning on their horns. Their combined blasts would have satisfied the deafest of rock-music hounds. And ahead, we could barely see, a bunch of people, afoot, had gathered around something we couldn’t see. “Accident,” Terry said.

  We piled out of the car, my officer’s duty running high even in a baseball suit. The others followed me as we pushed through the gathering crowd to the march music of honks.

  There, smack in one lane, lay a horse in harness and behind it a buggy. They blocked one lane. Curiosity blocked the other.

  Then I saw Chick Charleston bending over the horse and an old codger bent over him. It took me a second to recognize Plenty Toogood.

  Charleston gave an abrupt “Good!” to my “Hi, Sheriff.”

  Before he could go on, Toogood broke in. “Old Rex ain’t dead, goddam your eyes!”

  Felix Underwood, who ought to know, had pushed up for a look and a feel. He stood up to report, “Not yet.”

  Charleston nodded to the diagnosis, straightened and turned to Terry and me. “Terry,” he said, “get the boys out. Post them at the turnouts. Have them flag down the drivers and route them through town.”

  “What with?” Terry asked.

  “Your hats are red. So are your socks. Fix them on your bats.”

  “Right.”

  “And, Terry, when they can, have the stalled cars back up and take the detour. And for Christ’s sweet sake and old Rex’s, tell those horn players it’s intermission”

  Terry went away, and Charleston told me, “You, Jase, see if you can chase up Old Doc Yak.”

  Running, I wondered what Doc Yak could do. He wasn’t above treating a horse, or a dog for that matter, since we had no resident vet, but how minister to an old bag-of-bones pelter that had decided to lie down and die?

  Doc Yak wasn’t home. He wasn’t at his office. Then I saw his wreck of a car parked in front of the Bar Star Saloon. He wasn’t one of those storybook, boozy medical men, but on occasion he was known to add a quick shot to his own store of restoratives.

  I hurried him out of the place or would have done so if necessary. You couldn’t hurry Doc because he was always in a hurry himself. He put his car into first gear first, which was like him, and climbed the curb before he knew which way he was going. He should have been careful backing out, for the traffic from the highway had begun rolling through.

  When we had got as close to the scene as we could, Doc grabbed his bag and hopped out, leaving his car to roll to a stand in Duke Appleby’s yard. Duke got his lawn mower out of the way just in time, seemed about to yell something, then saw who the driver was and just smiled.

  The situation was changing. There were the down horse and the buggy and Charleston, Toogood, Underwood and a few of the curious standing by, but the cars had thinned out, and the drivers weren’t honking as if honks could waft away a dead horse. Terry and the boys were doing their job.

  Doc didn’t speak as he forged ahead to the patient. Anyone could see the horse was still breathing. Doc thumbed one of its eyelids and then forced its jaws open. He stood up to ask, “Just how goddam old is this animal?”

  Plenty answered, “Not as old as you by a damn sight.”

  We were interrupted by a new arrival, a state patrolman, who said, “Hi, Chick,” to Charleston. “What’s the hitch?”

  His arrival prodded Plenty into an explanation that I guessed he’d made earlier and often. “It was one of your men, damn your eyes,” he told the patrolman. “That’s the hitch. Just last week your pretty-prim joy boy said I couldn’t see good enough to drive my car anymore. Said hell to pay if I did.”

  The patrolman said, “Yes?”

  “Well, by God, old Rex sees good enough. Give him an eye test. Try arrestin’ him, will you?”

  The patrolman looked funny.

  “So what do I do, havin’ my car took out from under me, so to speak? I hitched up old Rex to that buggy there. Ain’t been used for a coon’s age, but it’s solider than General Motors or Ford, you can bet your ass. Then I hit out for town. Would have made it, too, wasn’t for these hell-crazy drivers, tearin’ by, honkin’ or draggin’ ass to watch, like as if a horse and buggy had no right to the road. Damn their eyes!”

  “What was the hurry? I mean, the purpose?”

  “Hurry? Christ save me. To get to town. What else?”

  Whil
e they had been talking, a sort of biography ran through my mind. Old Plenty Toogood had a place south of McNair’s. It was a little haywire ranch held together by the squaw he said he was married to. Milk cow, chickens, a few hogs, maybe thirty beef cattle, all mostly tended by her. He said he was too old for hard work and, for that matter, probably was. But he wasn’t too old for a drink or a dozen, which I guessed was what he was coming to town for.

  Now he said, though we already saw, “See! I told you.”

  The horse had climbed to its feet. It stood drooping, ribs and hip bones showing and its ancient muscles a little atremble, but it stood.

  “Nothin’ the matter with him,” Plenty told us.

  “Except exhaustion,” Doc Yak put in.

  Charleston added, “And shock.”

  “Goddam right,” Plenty said as if struck by a fresh idea. “Shock. These run-for-Jesus highways shock the shit out of better men than old Rex.”

  “Can he make it to the courthouse, taking it easy?” Charleston asked.

  “Why not?”

  “Get along then. I’ll see you there,” Charleston said. “We’ll make arrangements to get you and your outfit back to the ranch. Not tonight. I’ll find a place for the horse, and you can put up at the jail.”

  “Jail! And slam the bars, huh? All on account of a innocent horse.”

  “Naw. Naw,” the sheriff said. “Just friendly accommodations. Get along.”

  Toogood climbed into the buggy, the like of which couldn’t be seen except in museums, and slapped the old horse with the reins while he clucked to it. The horse moved, bowed by the weight of centuries like the man with the hoe.

  Doc Yak picked up his bag. Felix Underwood started back toward his car. The patrolman smiled before leaving. “No charge,” he said to Charleston.

  “Unless cruelty to old animals, including old Toogood.”

  When they had all gone, Charleston turned to me. “Soon as Ben Hur turns into town, you can disperse your posse, Jase. Tell the boys I’ll set up the hamburgers. Meet you there.”