CHAPTER 16

There remained one small hope. If I could last through Lopata and Bill Mazeroski of the Pittsburgh Pirates, the last batter in the National League lineup, I might get a chance while the teams changed sides to puff a bit in the cool of the dugout, to put a wet towel around the back of the neck, and perhaps find a second wind to get through Fox and Mantle and Kuenn and the others in the American League batting order. It was a forlorn hope, and not one to look forward to with eagerness; as soon as I started throwing to Lopata again, the weight of the twenty previous minutes of hard throwing—by then I’d thrown a few pitches short of seventy—pressed down hard like a stifling tropic heat… the field seemed as limitless under that blazing sun as a desert, spreading out forever on all sides, unreal, and the players stiff and distant as obelisks in a surrealist landscape. The whine in my ears increased, the nausea fulminating, the knees rubbery, so shaky that the desert’s fixity was disturbed and the ground itself then began to undulate softly and thickly, like a bog, and there were times when the motion became violent and the pitcher’s mound hunched up under me so that I teetered on its summit, on the cone of a vast anthill whose slopes beat with that insect hum; at times its physical aspect would be inverted, and I would find myself at the bottom of a murky hollow—the air heavy and clammy—and I would twist and convolute and hurl up the long sides of that bowl a baseball as heavy and malleable as a ripe mango—throwing it up toward Lopata, perched on that distant rim as implacable as a squatting Sphinx.

I don’t remember Lopata grounding out, but he did, finally, hitting a big, hopping ground ball toward the shortstop position, where—according to my statistician—Billy Martin first gave a little startled jump as if in surprise to hear the whack of the ball being hit, then moved for it on legs that seemed “stiff from disuse,” as my statistician friend put it (after all, he’d been standing in his position for some time), and promptly fumbled it. I don’t remember that at all.

I don’t remember Bill Mazeroski either. I only know I pitched to him that afternoon because my statistician wrote in his notes Mazeroski at plate… takes, and then four downward strokes in a row with his pencil to indicate the batter stood with his bat on his shoulder and watched either four or one thousand one hundred and eleven balls go by. When I look at his photographs in the sports magazines, I feel no association, no sense of recognition. Curiously, one of his nicknames is spectral: No Touch, his teammates call him—actually for his great fielding speed, executing the sweep of the ball from the pivot in the double-play so rapidly it hardly seems human hands have been involved in the maneuver. Once, just by chance, passing a television set glowing in a corner during a buffet dinner, I saw the letters M-a-z-e-r-o-s-k-i spelled out in a shaving-soap commercial under a face bulbous with white lather, just his eyes visible above the soap, and I said, “Wait a minute,” and dropped down in front of the set. The girl carrying the salad bowl came up behind me and said: “What’s wrong… you thinking of changing shaving soaps or something?”

“No, no,” I said, looking intently at the screen. “It’s that guy doing the commercial behind all that soap… I’m supposed to know him.”

“You’re supposed to know him?” She knelt down gracefully, setting the salad bowl in front of us on the carpet. “How do you mean you’re supposed…”

“What I mean is I should know him,” I began to explain. “I was associated with him once—under trying conditions—but I just don’t remember…”

The girl leaned forward eagerly. “My God!” she said. “You mean it’s sort of like shock therapy: you’ll see this guy emerge from all that soap and something’ll click and it’ll all come back?”

“Something like that,” I said.

“It’s absolutely terrific,” she said.

You never can tell whether she’s joking or not. “Now cut it out,” I said, “and watch.”

Mazeroski had finished his heavy lathering and reached for the razor blade. It was an adjustable razor and we had a close-up of Mazeroski fiddling with it.

A blue-faced cat with large agate eyes, huge-whiskered, was staring out at us from under the set; something apparently moved behind him, for quickly he whirled around with a scrabble of claws in the carpet and tensely inspected the dark corner behind the set; his tail switched back and forth just in front of us; you could sense by the way the girl’s hand moved on the carpet that she wanted to reach out and touch that blue tail, but she kept her eyes on Mazeroski’s shaving.

“Hey, listen,” she said. “I like the way he shaves. Good, firm strokes.” She looked at me. “Can you tell yet? Can you recall anything? Any click?”

“Cut it out.”

“No, it’s absolutely thrilling. It’s like those drawings coming out—those puzzle-drawings where you follow the numbers with a pencil and suddenly, just like that! you’ve drawn something: a house, a cocker spaniel…”

We watched Mazeroski finish, work a towel briskly over his face, and then, while the commentary on the shaving soap was completed, we had a four- or five-second full-face portrait of him, freshly shaved, a thin, frozen smile on his face which suggested he was holding in some sharp physical hurt, as if down below, out of camera range, some unbearable weight had been placed on his bare feet; as he looked stiffly into the tube of the television camera, beside me the girl kept saying, “Well? Well? Well? Did it work? Did it work?”

“I feel obliged to say,” I said, thinking suddenly of the Hiss-Chambers confrontation, “that to the best of my knowledge I’ve never laid eyes on this man.”

“Gee, that’s too bad… no ringing of bells, or anything?” She seemed genuinely distressed under the helmet of her bamboo haircut. But then she said brightly: “Well, I think you’re absolutely nuts—you know that—absolutely blotto… I’m not even going to trust you with the salad bowl.”

And she didn’t either. She picked it up swiftly, looking for the cat as she did so, which had gone, and when we went through the rooms toward the porch where the others waited in the summer evening she walked just a little bit ahead of me and off to one side.