Blockade Billy Page 3
Because the Yankees kicked the living shit out of us and took over first place. It was no fault of the kid’s; he hit in every game and tagged out Bill Skowron between home and third when the lug got caught in a rundown. Skowron was a moose the size of Big Klew, and he tried to flatten the kid, but it was Skowron who went on his ass, the kid straddling him with a knee on either side. The photo of that one in the paper made it look like the end of a Big Time Wrestling match with Pretty Tony Baba for once finishing off Gorgeous George instead of the other way around. The crowd outdid themselves waving those ROAD CLOSED signs around. It didn’t seem to matter that the Titans had lost; the fans went home happy because they’d seen our skinny catcher knock Mighty Moose Skowron on his ass.
I seen the kid afterward, sitting naked on the bench outside the showers. He had a big bruise coming on the side of his chest, but he didn’t seem to mind it at all. He was no crybaby. The sonofabitch was too dumb to feel pain, some people said later; too dumb and crazy. But I’ve known plenty of dumb players in my time, and being dumb never stopped them from bitching over their booboos.
“How about all those signs, kid?” I asked, thinking I would cheer him up if he needed cheering.
“What signs?” he says, and I could see by the puzzled look on his face that he wasn’t joking a bit. That was Blockade Billy for you. He would have stood in front of a semi if the guy behind the wheel was driving down the third base line and trying to score on him, but otherwise he didn’t have a fucking clue.
We played a two-game series with Detroit before hitting the road again, and lost both. Danny Doo was on the mound for the second one, and he couldn’t blame the kid for the way it went; he was gone before the third inning was over. Sat in the dugout whining about the cold weather (it wasn’t cold), the way Harrington misplayed a fly ball out in right (Harrington would have needed rockets on his heels to get to that one before it dropped), and the bad calls he got from that sonofabitch Wenders behind the plate. On that last one he might have had a point. Hi Wenders didn’t like The Doo, never had, ran him in two ballgames the year before. But I didn’t see any bad calls that day, and I was standing less than ninety feet away.
The kid hit safe in both games, including a home run and a triple. Nor did Dusen hold the hot bat against him, which would have been his ordinary behavior; he was one of those guys who wanted fellows to understand there was one big star on the Titans, and it wasn’t them. But he liked the kid; really seemed to think the kid was his lucky charm. And the kid liked him. They went bar-hopping after the game, had about a thousand drinks and visited a whorehouse to celebrate The Doo’s first loss of the season, and showed up the next day for the trip to KC pale and shaky.
“The kid got laid last night,” Doo confided in me as we rode out to the airport in the team bus. “I think it was his first time. That’s the good news. The bad news is that I don’t think he remembers it.”
We had a bumpy plane-ride; most of them were back then. Lousy prop-driven buckets, it’s a wonder we didn’t all get killed like Buddy Holly and the Big Fucking Bopper. The kid spent most of the trip throwing up in the can at the back of the plane, while right outside the door a bunch of guys sat playing acey-deucey and tossing him the usual funny stuff: Get any onya? Want a fork and knife to cut that up a little? Then the next day the sonofabitch goes five-for-five at Municipal Stadium, including a pair of jacks.
There was also another Blockade Billy play; by then he could have taken out a patent. This time the victim was Clete Boyer. Again it was Blockade Billy down with the left shoulder, and up and over Mr. Boyer went, landing flat on his back in the left batter’s box. There were some differences, though. The rook used both hands on the tag, and there was no bloody foot or strained Achilles tendon. Boyer just got up and walked back to the dugout, dusting his ass and shaking his head like he didn’t quite know where he was. Oh, and we lost the game in spite of the kid’s five hits. Eleven to ten was the final score, or something like that. Ganzie Burgess’s knuckleball wasn’t dancing that day; the Athletics feasted on it.
We won the next game, lost a squeaker on getaway day. The kid hit in both games, which made it sixteen straight. Plus nine putouts at the plate. Nine in sixteen games! That might be a record. If it was in the books, that is. If any of that month’s records were in the books.
We went to Chicago for three, and the kid hit in those games, too, making it nineteen straight. But damn if we didn’t lose all three. Jersey Joe looked at me after the last of those games and said, “I don’t buy that lucky charm stuff. I think Blakely sucks luck.”
“That ain’t fair and you know it,” I said. “We were going good at the start, and now we’re in a bad patch. It’ll even out.”
“Maybe,” he says. “Is Dusen still trying to teach the kid how to drink?”
“Yeah. They headed off to The Loop with some other guys.”
“But they’ll come back together,” Joe says. “I don’t get it. By now Dusen should hate that kid. Doo’s been here five years and I know his MO.”
I did, too. When The Doo lost, he had to lay the blame on somebody else, like that bum Johnny Harrington or that busher bluesuit Hi Wenders. The kid’s turn in the barrel was overdue, but Danny was still clapping him on the back and promising him he’d be Rookie of the Goddam Year. Not that The Doo could blame the kid for that day’s loss. In the fifth inning of his latest masterpiece, Danny had hucked one to the backstop in the fifth: high, wide, and handsome. That scored one. So then he gets mad, loses his control, and walks the next two. Then Nellie Fox doubled down the line. After that The Doo got it back together, but by then it was too late; he was on the hook and stayed there.
We got a little well in Detroit, took two out of three. The kid hit in all three games and made another one of those amazing home-plate stands. Then we flew home. By then the kid from the Davenport Cornholers was the hottest goddam thing in the American League. There was talk of him doing a Gillette ad.
“That’s an ad I’d like to see,” Si Barbarino said. “I’m a fan of comedy.”
“Then you must love looking at yourself in the mirror,” Critter Hayward said.
“You’re a card,” Si says. “What I mean is the kid ain’t got no whiskers.”
There never was an ad, of course. Blockade Billy’s career as a baseball player was almost over. We just didn’t know it.
We had three scheduled at home with the White Sox, but the first one was a washout. The Doo’s old pal Hi Wenders was the umpire crew chief, and he gave me the news himself. I’d got to The Swamp early because the trunks with our road uniforms in them got sent to Idlewild by mistake and I wanted to make sure they’d been trucked over. We wouldn’t need them for a week, but I was never easy in my mind until such things were taken care of.
Wenders was sitting on a little stool outside the umpire’s room, reading a paperback with a blond in step-ins on the cover.
“That your wife, Hi?” I asks.
“My girlfriend,” he says. “Go on home, Grannie. Weather forecast says that by three it’s gonna be coming down in buckets. I’m just waiting for DiPunno and Lopez to get here so I can call the game.”
“Okay,” I says. “Thanks.” I started away and he called after me.
“Grannie, is that wonder-kid of yours all right in the head? Because he talks to himself behind the plate. Whispers. Never fucking shuts up.”
“He’s no Quiz Kid, but he’s not crazy, if that’s what you mean,” I said. I was wrong about that, but who knew? “What kind of stuff does he say?”
“I couldn’t hear much the one time I was behind him—the second game against Boston—but I know he talks about himself. In that what do you call it, third person. He says stuff like ‘I can do it, Billy.’ And one time, when he dropped a foul tip that woulda been strike three, he goes, ‘I’m sorry, Billy.’”
“Well, so what? Til I was five, I had an invisible friend named Sheriff Pete. Me and Sheriff Pete shot up a lot of mining towns together.”
“He’s apt to have a five as the first number in his batting average before long,” I says. “That’s all I care about. Plus he’s a hell of a stopper. You have to admit that.”
“I do,” Wenders says. “That little cock-knocker has no fear. Another sign that he’s not all there in the head.”
I wasn’t going to listen to an umpire run down one of my players any more than that, so I changed the subject and asked him—joking but not joking—if he was going to call the game tomorrow fair and square, even though his favorite Doo-Bug was throwing.
“I always call it fair and square,” he says. “Dusen’s a conceited glory-hog who’s got his spot all picked out in Cooperstown, he’ll do a hundred things wrong and never take the blame once, and he’s an argumentative sonofabitch who knows better than to start in with me, because I won’t stand for it. That said, I’ll call it straight-up, just like I always do. I can’t believe you’d ask.”
And I can’t believe you’d sit there scratching your ass and calling our catcher next door to a congenital idiot, I thought, but you did.
I took my wife out to dinner that night, and we had a very nice time. Danced to Lester Lannon’s band, as I recall. Got a little romantic in the taxi afterward. Slept well. I didn’t sleep well for quite some time afterward; lots of bad dreams.
Danny Dusen took the ball in what was supposed to be the afternoon half of a twinighter, but the world as it applied to the Titans had already gone to hell; we just didn’t know it. No one did except for Joe DiPunno. By the time night fell, we knew we were fucked for the season, because our first twenty-two games were almost surely going to be erased from the record books, along with any official acknowledgement of Blockade Billy Blakely.
I got in late because of traffic, but figured it didn’t matter because the uniform snafu was sorted out. Most of the guys were already there, dressing or playing poker or just sitting around shooting the shit. Dusen and the kid were over in the corner by the cigarette machine, sitting in a couple of folding chairs, the kid with his uniform pants on, Dusen still wearing nothing but his jock—not a pretty sight. I went over to get a pack of Winstons and listened in. Danny was doing most of the talking.
“That fucking Wenders hates my ass,” he says.
“He hates your ass,” the kid says, then adds: “That fucker.”
“You bet he is. You think he wants to be the one behind the plate when I get my two hundredth?”
“No?” the kid says.
“You bet he don’t! But I’m going to win today just to spite him. And you’re gonna help me, Bill. Right?”
“Right. Sure. Bill’s gonna help.”
“He’ll squeeze like a motherfucker.”
“Will he? Will he squeeze like a motherf—”
“I just said he will. So you pull everything back.”
“I’ll pull everything back.”
“You’re my good luck charm, Billy-boy.”
And the kid, grinning: “I’m your good luck charm.”
“Yeah. Now listen…”
It was funny and creepy at the same time. The Doo was intense—leaning forward, eyes flashing while he talked. Everything Wenders had said about him was true, but he left one thing out: The Doo was a competitor. He wanted to win the way Bob Gibson did. Like Gibby, he’d do anything he could get away with to make that happen. And the kid was eating it up with a spoon.
I almost said something, because I wanted to break up that connection. Talking about it to you, I think maybe my subconscious mind had already put a lot of it together. Maybe that’s bullshit, but I don’t think so.
In any case, I left them alone, just got my butts and walked away. Hell, if I’d opened my bazoo, Dusen would have told me to put a sock in it, anyway. He didn’t like to be interrupted when he was holding court, and while I might not have given much of a shit about that on any other day, you tend to leave a guy alone when it’s his turn to toe the rubber in front of the forty thousand people who are paying his salary. Expecially when he’s up for the big two-double-zero.
I went over to Joe’s office to get the lineup card, but the office door was shut and the blinds were down, an almost unheard-of thing on a game day. The slats weren’t closed, so I peeked through. Joe had the phone to his ear and one hand over his eyes. I knocked on the glass. He started so hard he almost fell out of his chair, then looked around. And I saw he was crying. I never saw him cry in my life, not before or after, but he was crying that day. His face was pale and his hair was wild—what little hair he had.
He waved me away, then went back to talking on the phone. I started across the locker room to the coaches’ office, which was really the equipment room. Halfway there I stopped. The big pitcher-catcher conference had broken up, and the kid was pulling on his uniform shirt, the one with the big blue 19. And I saw the Band-Aid was back on the second finger of his right hand.
I walked over and put a hand on his shoulder. He smiled at me. The kid had a real sweet smile when he used it. “Hi, Granny,” he says. But his smile began to fade when he saw I wasn’t smiling back.
“You all ready to play?” I asked.
“Sure.”
“Good. But I want to tell you something first. The Doo’s a hell of a pitcher, but as a human being he ain’t ever going to get past Double A. He’d walk on his grandmother’s broken back to get a win, and you matter a hell of a lot less to him than his grandmother.”
“I’m his good luck charm!” he says indignantly…but underneath the indignation, he looked ready to cry.
“Maybe so,” I said, “but that’s not what I’m talking about. There’s such a thing as getting too pumped up for a game. A little is good, but too much and a fellow’s apt to bust wide open.”
“I don’t get you.”
“If you popped and went flat like a bad tire, The Doo wouldn’t give much of a shit. He’d just find himself a brand new lucky charm.”
“You shouldn’t talk like that! Him and me’s friends!”
“I’m your friend, too. More important, I’m one of the coaches on this team. I’m responsible for your welfare, and I’ll talk any goddam way I want, especially to a rook. And you’ll listen. Are you listening?”
“I’m listening.”
I’m sure he was, but he wasn’t looking; he’d cast his eyes down and sullen red roses were blooming on those smooth little-boy cheeks of his.
“I don’t know what kind of a rig you’ve got under that Band-Aid, and I don’t want to know. All I know is I saw it in the first game you played for us, and somebody got hurt. I haven’t seen it since, and I don’t want to see it today. Because if you got caught, it’d be you caught. Not The Doo.”
“I just cut myself,” he says, all sullen.
“Right. Shaving. But I don’t want to see it on your finger when you go out there. I’m looking after your own best interests.”
Would I have said that if I hadn’t seen Joe so upset he was crying? I like to think so. I like to think I was also looking after the best interests of the game, which I loved then and now. Virtual Bowling can’t hold a candle, believe me.
I walked away before he could say anything else. And I didn’t look back. Partly because I didn’t want to see what was under the Band-Aid, mostly because Joe was standing in his office door, beckoning to me. I won’t swear there was more gray in his hair, but I won’t swear there wasn’t.
I came into the office and closed the door. An awful idea occurred to me. It made a kind of sense, given the look on his face. “Jesus, Joe, is it your wife? Or the kids? Did something happen to one of the kids?”
He started, like I’d just woken him out of a dream. “Jessie and the kids are fine. But George…oh God. I can’t believe it. This is such a mess.” And he put the heels of his palms against his eyes. A sound came out of him, but it wasn’t a sob. It was a laugh. The most terrible fucked-up laugh I
ever heard.
“What is it? Who called you?”
“I have to think,” he says—but not to me. It was himself he was talking to. “I have to decide how I’m going to…” He took his hands off his eyes, and he seemed a little more like himself. “You’re managing today, Grannie.”
“Me? I can’t manage! The Doo’d blow his stack! He’s going for his two hundredth again, and—”
“None of that matters, don’t you see? Not now.”
“What—”
“Just shut up and make out a lineup card. As for that kid…” He thought, then shook his head. “Hell, let him play, why not? Shit, bat him fifth. I was gonna move him up, anyway.”
“Of course he’s gonna play,” I said. “Who else’d catch Danny?”
“Oh, fuck Danny Dusen!” he says.
“Cap—Joey—tell me what happened.”
“No,” he says. “I got to think about it first. What I’m going to say to the guys. And the reporters!” He slapped his brow as if this part of it had just occurred to him. “Those overbred assholes! Shit!” Then, talking to himself again: “But let the guys have this game. They deserve that much. Maybe the kid, too. Hell, maybe he’ll bat for the cycle!” He laughed some more, then went upside his own head to make himself stop.
“I don’t understand.”
“You will. Go on, get out of here. Make any old lineup you want. Pull the names out of a hat, why don’t you? It doesn’t matter. Only make sure you tell the umpire crew chief you’re running the show. I guess that’d be Wenders.”
I walked down the hall to the umpire’s room like a man in a dream and told Wenders that I’d be making out the lineup and managing the game from the third base box. He asked me what was wrong with Joe, and I said Joe was sick.