26
Stole Your Undies
The next Sunday, Roger pitched great against Albany and beat the Meinschafters, 7-2, on a grand slam by Ronnie Piggott, who ran the bases backwards, knees pumping high, arms outstretched, waving his cap, whooping like an Indian, and fell on home plate and kissed it and hopped up and did a somersault, he was so pleased with himself. Nobody’d ever seen such showboating by a Whippet before. Jim Dandy sat glumly in the press box and announced the batters and tipped the vodka, and I asked him if he ever heard from his brother Ricky, and he shook his head. “Young Richard is gone. We’ll never see him again in this life,” he said. I asked how “My Girl” was doing—Big Daddy Fats played it almost nightly on Weegee—and he said that it was going down the toilet, that the distributors and jukebox jobbers and program directors were against them because they were local. “People in Memphis love Elvis, and Fats Domino is a god in New Orleans, but Minnesota? Huh-uh. Don’t stand a chance if you’re from here. You get no favors. Nix on you. If you were any good, you’d be in New York, not here. That’s the psychology.” He said that Earl the Girl was talking about joining the Dominos who were on the road with the Crew Cuts and Teresa Brewer. “If he does, we’re kaput. Ausgespielt. The Doo Dads will be dead.” The sound of it made him smile. “Doo Dads dead,” he said. “Dead indeed. Doo-dah, doo-dah.”
The ump was a squat man solemn as a bishop who called strikes with a motion like someone ripping a cardboard box and yelling “HEE-raw!” and Roger had him ripping boxes all night. Roger was improving every week, you could see it. He had refined his windup so now it looked like a man turning to close a window and then lunging for the door while falling off the stair, and his money pitch was right on the money, curving up and away from a right-handed batter, and the change-up defied the law of gravity, and the fastball blew their hair back, and he tied Albany in knots. One bullet-eyed batter after another stood and waved his little stick and stepped out of the box between pitches and did stuff with dirt and small stones and scratched his heinie and hoisted his testicles and looked down to the third-base coach as if he might have a handle on things, and then stood in to the plate again, and Roger threw another HEE-raw! And another box got ripped. And the batter walked back to the bench and sat down. Wham bam, thank you, ma’am.
Kate sat in the front row, her bare arms on the rail, her chin on her arms, not taking her eyes off Roger. I trotted down to visit with her after Ronnie’s grand slam and she said she couldn’t wait for the summer to end. Why? Too hot. She hated the heat, and hated everyone asking her what she was going to do come fall.
“What are you going to do?”
“Well, see, that’s the question I hate. The answer is, I don’t know, and I’m looking forward to doing it, whatever it is, that’s for sure.”
I asked if she still wrote poems. I was only trying to make conversation.
“I’m too busy for that,” she said. “I think, before you sit around writing poems about what you feel inside and shit, you ought to go live a little and have some experiences worth writing about someday. So that’s what I’m doing. I’m having experiences.”
I nodded. I wished she’d say more, but she didn’t. What experiences? I wondered, and then I guessed maybe I’d rather not know. So I just said that that all sounded fine to me and that it’d be nice to see her again, but something told me I shouldn’t hope for too much. The afternoon we shot pool and kissed in the movie seemed like a thousand years ago. Like something I’d read in a book.
On Tuesday night the team traveled to Bowlus and Roger had the Bull batters corkscrewing themselves into the ground with his fastball and then the change-up winging its way like a silver moth and the batters swinging as if at the moon, saliva churning in their mouths, teeth grinding, their eyeballs ratcheted tight as ball bearings, all of them so PO’ed at the thought of losing to the pitiful Whippets, they could hardly see straight. Roger took his sweet time, stopped to carefully tie a shoelace, pat the resin bag and bounce it in his palm, study his outfield, and adjust his pants, then he bent in for the sign, wound up with great gathering force, and threw letter-high, and the batter swung with conviction as the change-up putt-putt-putted across the plate a second or two later. The ump made his strike sign like he was pulling a starter rope on an outboard motor. Different ump. Roger sped up, he slowed down. He worked that Bowlus team like a monkey works a banana.
The sky turned dark in the seventh and black thunderheads floated in from the west like a range of mountains, and when Roger came striding out for the bottom of the ninth, the light was like an old black-and-white movie, as Bowlus’s dreaded Hang-man’s Row of Wagner, Wagner, Schimmer, and Schultz came to bat, the Bulls down by two, the Bull fans standing and pleading, Doctor, save my baby! One by one three of the ferocious four came to the plate and stood heavy-browed and fearsome to behold, waving their manly clubs, and the Bowlus fans tightened the imaginary noose and made choking sounds, but it was the hang-men who choked, not Roger. He gave them all his gaudiest stuff and they scowled and swung at the pitch previous and missed the current one and were set down like legless men at a square dance. The last batter, Schimmer, swung hard at two straight ankle-high fastballs, and stepped out of the box and stood, wishing no doubt that he had stayed home with the hogs, and loosened his crotch and stepped back in, and Roger threw him a slow change-up that fluttered homeward and bounced on the plate and skittered off and Schimmer flung himself at it swinging like a ton of bricks and the ump pulled the starter rope and the sky exploded into light, as brilliant jagged bolts of electricity ripped toward the earth, thunder slapping against the grandstand ker-whammmm, sheets of rain sweeping across the parking lot, and the Whippets dashed for the bus laughing like children at Christmas, and the Bowlus crowd had to trudge home in the storm, which pitched its tent over the ballpark and dumped the entire contents on their heads. They looked like drowned cats as they straggled past our Whippet bus. They didn’t bother to run, the defeat had taken the will to run right out of them.
It was a festive bunch on the bus. Even Ernie, who had injured his throwing arm in a drinking mishap, was going around backslapping, and Milkman Boreen and Lyle Dickmeier, the Beer Belly Boys, were passing out boilermakers in paper cups, and Boots Merkel and Rudy and Orv Schoppenhorst and Marv Mueffelman dealt out the cards for a round of Borneo, and Lyle let out a long melodious belch.
Kate was there. She and Roger sat snuggled together in the back. Roger showed her his billfold with her picture tucked in a secret pocket along with a perpetual calendar, a Prayer for Times of Discouragement, and a George (The Ace) Fisher baseball card. The Ace was an Avon boy who pitched three seasons in the New Soo and then went up to the Chicago Cubs for five sterling years in the Windy City. If it could happen for him, it could happen for Roger. The lovebirds whispered and smooched, and Ernie said, in a stage voice, “Ole and Lena, you know—they had twelve kids, because they lived near the train tracks, and when the midnight train came through and woke Ole up, he’d say, ‘Well, should we go back to sleep or what?’ and Lena’d say, ‘What—?’ ”
“Yeah,” said Rudy, “and then he run off with the waitress, but Lena, she had six more kids, because ever so often Ole would come back home to apologize. He never sent her money for the kids, though: he always wrote in the letter, ’P.S. I meant to enclose money but I already sealed the envelope.’ ”
Ernie told a couple of raw ones about a man and a woman making out in a car with the gearshift on the floor between them, trying to get Roger’s goat, but he wouldn’t rise to the challenge. I sat next to Ronnie. He said, “I heard Roger got lucky again last night. Nothing like a piece of fish pie to get a man ready to pitch a ballgame.”
The Perfesser chuckled. “I understand that he got her depantsed and the stairway to heaven was waiting and he couldn’t get his flag unfurled. He reached for the pistol and it was a pistachio.”
“Lordy, Lordy.”
“Yes, sir.” They said this just loud enough for Roger to maybe hear it, but he didn’t raise an eyebrow.
The bus chugged through Bowlus, which already seemed chastened and diminished by our victory. “Drive around the block again,” yelled Ronnie, and Ding’s brother Fred at the wheel cranked it and we circled downtown, the windows down, yelling, “Bowlus, Bowlus, you’ve been beaten! Your pants are gone and your lunch is eaten! We can beat you Sundays and beat you Mondays! Your ass is bare ’cause we stole your undies! We can beat you Tuesdays and beat you Fridays! We stole your ladies in the little pink nighties! Thanks for the memories, Bowlus!” Round and round the block we went in the rain, past the café full of Bowlusites waiting for the storm to let up and the Big Bowl supermarket, where shoppers hustled to their cars with brown bags in both hands, and the taverns with the loungers huddled in the doorway, and we expressed our wholehearted disdain for Bowlus and everything it stood for, even Ding was sort of chanting it. Ronnie yelled, “Let’s go get some red paint!” but that was too much, and Fred steered us toward home.