A Kind of Flying: Selected Stories (23 page)

I was writing my head off, learning how to do it and liking it a little more. It’s something that requires a certain amount of care and it is done alone at a typewriter, not in the batting box in front of forty thousand citizens. And I found I was a hell of a typist; I liked typing. But I wasn’t typing about my old roommate—at all. I missed him though, don’t think I didn’t miss him. I had plenty to say about the rest of the squad, how winning became them, made them into men after so many seasons of having to have their excuses ready before they took the field. Old Red Sorrows was hitting .390 and hadn’t said the word “retirement” or the phrase “next season” in months. There was a lot to write about without dealing with Billy Day’s behavior.

But, as September came along, I was getting a lot of pressure for interviews. I had been his roommate, hadn’t I? What was he like? What happened to my career? Would I be back? Wasn’t I dating Billy Day’s girl? I soft-pedaled all this, saying “on the other hand” fifty times a week, and that’s no good for athletes or writers. On the topic of Polly I said that we were friends. What a word. The papers went away and came out with what they’d wanted to say anyway: that Billy Day’s old roommate had stolen his girl and now he wouldn’t write about him. They used an old file photograph of Billy and Polly in the Castaway and one of Billy and me leaning against the backstop in Pittsburgh, last year, the one year I played in the major leagues. Our caps are cocked back, and we are smiling.

During all this, Polly stopped coming to the games with me. She’d had enough of the Pirates for a while, she said, and she took a job as a travel agent and got real busy. We were having, according to the papers, “a relationship,” and that term is fine with me, because I don’t know what else to say. I was happy to have such a pretty girl to associate with, but I knew that her real ambition was to be with Billy Day.

The Pirates won their division by twenty-eight games, a record, and then they took the National League pennant by whipping the Cardinals four straight. With Billy talking the umps into anything he wanted, and the rest of the team back from the dead and flying in formation, the Pirates were a juggernaut.

It took the Indians seven games to quiet the Twins, and the Series was set. Pirate October, they called it.

The Cleveland Press was ready for Billy. They’d given him more column inches than the Indians total in those last weeks, cataloguing his “blatant disregard for the rules and the dignity of fair play.” Some of those guys could write. Billy had pulled one stunt in the playoffs that really drew fire. In game four, with the Pirates ahead five-zip, he bunted foul on a third strike and smiled his way out of it.

As one writer put it, “We don’t put up with that kind of thing in Cleveland. We don’t like it and we don’t need it. When we see disease, we inoculate.” As I said, these guys, some of them, could write. Their form of inoculation was an approved cadre of foreign umpires. They brought in ten guys for the Series. They were from Iceland, Zambia, England, Ireland, Hungary, Japan (three), Venezuela, and Tonga. When they met the press, they struck me as the most serious group of men I’d ever seen assembled. It looked good: they knew the rules and they were grim. And the Tongan, who would be behind the plate for game one, looked fully capable of handling anything that could come up with one hand.

Polly didn’t go out to Cleveland with me. She had booked a cruise, a month, through the Panama Canal and on to the islands far across the Pacific Ocean, and she was going along as liaison. She smiled when she left and kissed me sweetly, which is just what you don’t want your girl to do. She kissed me like I was a writer.

So I went out alone and stayed in the old Hotel Barnard, where a lot of the writers stay. It was lonely out there in Ohio, and I thought about it. It was the end of a full season in which I had not played ball, and here I was in a hotel full of writers, which I had become, instead of over at the Hilton with my club.

I was closing down the bar the night before the Series opener when Billy Day walked in. I couldn’t believe my eyes.

“I thought I’d find you here,” he said.

“Billy,” I said, waving the barman to bring down a couple of lagers. “I’m a writer now. This is where the writers stay. You’re out after curfew.”

He gestured back at the empty room. “Who’s gonna write me up, you?” He smiled his terrific smile and I realized as much as I had avoided him for eight months, I missed him. I missed that smile.

“No,” I said. “I don’t think so.” Our beers came and I asked him, “What’s up?”

“It’s been a rough season.”

“Not from what I read. The Pirates won the pennant.”

“Jesus,” he said. “What is that, sarcasm? You gonna start talking like a writer too?”

“Billy, you’ve pulled some stunts.”

He slid his beer from one hand to the other on the varnished bar of the Hotel Barnard. And then started to nod. “Yeah,” he said. “I guess I did. You know, I didn’t see it at first. It just kind of grew.”

“And now you know.”

“Yeah, now I know all about it. I know what I can do.”

“So what brings you out on a night to the Hotel Barnard?” I pointed at his full glass of beer. “It’s not the beer.”

“You,” he said, and he turned to me again and smiled. “You always knew what to do. I don’t mean on the field. There was no rookie better. But I mean, what should I do? This is the Series.”

“Yeah, it’s the Series. If I were you, I’d play ball.”

“You know what I mean. Ketchum wants me to use it all. He doesn’t care if they tear down the stadium.”

“And you?”

“I don’t know. All my life, I played to win. It seems wrong not to do something that can help your team. But the people don’t like it.”

I looked at the clouds crossing the face of Sunny Billy Day, and I knew I was seeing something no man had ever seen there before: second thoughts.

“These new umps may not let you get away with anything.”

“Kid,” he said to me, touching my shoulder with his fist, his smile as wide and bright as the sun through a pop-up, “I’ve been missing you. But I thought you knew me better than that. I’ve lived my life knowing one thing: everybody lets me get away with everything. The only thing I ever lost, I lost to you. Polly. And I didn’t even think about it until she was gone. How is she?”

“I’d get her back for you if I could,” I said, lifting my glass in a toast to my old friend Billy Day. “Polly,” I told him, “is headed for Tahiti.”

BILLY WAS
right about the umps. They looked good, in fact, when they took the field and stood with their arms behind their backs along the first-base line, they looked like the Supreme Court. The people of Cleveland were ready for something too, because I noted in the article I wrote for the
Dispatch
that the squadron of umpires received a louder ovation when they took the field than the home team did. Everybody knew that without an iron heel from the umps, the Indians might as well take the winter off.

Okay, so it was baseball for several innings. Ohio in October smells sweet and old, and for a while I think we were all transported through the beautiful fall day, the stadium bathing in the yellow light and then pitching steeply into the sepia shadow of the upper decks. See: I was learning to write like the other guys.

Sunny Billy Day hadn’t been a factor, really, walking twice and grounding a base hit into left. It was just baseball, the score two to one Cleveland in the top of the eighth. Now, I want to explain what happened carefully. There were seventy-four thousand people there and in the days since the Series I’ve heard almost that many versions. The thirty major papers disagreed in detail and the videotapes haven’t got it all because of the angle and sequence. So let me go slow here. After all, it would be the last play of Sunny Billy Day.

I wasn’t in the press box. The truth is that the season had been a little hard on me in terms of making friends with my fellow reporters. I’d had a hundred suppers in half-lit lounges and I don’t think it came as a surprise that I didn’t really care for the way they talked—not just about baseball, for which they had a curious but abiding disdain. And I’m not one of these guys who think you have to have played a sport—or really done anything—to be able to write about it well. Look at me—I was good in the field, but I can’t write half as good as any of the guys I travel with. But sportswriters, when they are together at the end of the day, a group of them having drinks waiting for their Reuben sandwiches to arrive, are a fairly superior and hard-bitten bunch. You don’t want to wander into one of these hotel lounges any summer evening if you want to hear anything about the joy of the sport. These guys don’t celebrate baseball, and really, like me, they don’t analyze it very well. But they have
feelings
about it; I never met a man who didn’t. That’s why it’s called the major leagues.

Anyway, I don’t want to get going on writers and all that stuff. And don’t get me wrong. Some of them—hell, most of them—are nice guys and quick about the check or asking how’s it going, but it was October and it was all getting to me. I could see myself in two years, flipping my ash into somebody’s coffee cup offering a weary expert’s opinion. So I wanted to sit where someone might actually cheer or spill a little beer when they stood up on a third strike or a home run. Journalists are professionals, anyone will tell you this, and they don’t spill their beer. I ended up ten rows behind third in a seat I paid for myself, and it turned out to be a lucky break given what was going to happen.

With one out in the top of the eighth, Billy Day doubled to right. It was a low fastball and he sliced it into the corner.

On the first pitch to Red Sorrows, Coach Ketchum had Billy steal. He’s one run down with one out in the eighth, a runner in scoring position, and a fair hitter at the plate, and Ketchum flashes the steal sign—it’s crazy. It means one thing: he’s trading on Billy’s magic all the way. When I saw Ketchum pinch his nose and then go to the bill of his cap, which has been the Pirate’s steal sign for four years, I thought: Ketchum’s going to use Billy any way he can. The pitch is a high strike which Sorrows fouls straight back against the screen, so now everybody knows. Billy walks back to second. I have trouble believing what I see next. Again Ketchum goes to his nose and his cap: steal. The Cleveland hurler, the old veteran Blade Medina, stretches and whirls to throw to second with Billy caught halfway down and throws the ball into center field. He must have been excited. Billy pulls into third standing.

Okay, I thought, Ketchum, you got what you wanted, now
stop screwing around.
In fact, I must have whispered that or said it aloud, because the guy next to me says to my face, “What’d I do?” These new fans. They don’t want to fight you anymore, they want to know how they’ve offended you. Too much college for this country. I told him I was speaking to someone else, and he let it go, until I felt a tap on my shoulder and he’d bought me a beer. What did I tell you? But I didn’t mind. A minute later I would need it.

Sorrow goes down swinging. Two outs.

It was then I got a funny feeling, on top of all the other funny feelings I’d been having in the strangest summer of my life, and it was a feeling about Ketchum, and I came to know as I sipped my beer and watched my old coach walk over to Billy on the bag at third that he was going to try to steal home. Coach Ketchum was the king of the fair shake, a guy known from Candlestick to Fenway as a square shooter, and as he patted Billy on the rump and walked back to the coach’s box, I saw his grin. I was ten rows up and the bill of his cap was down, but I saw it clearly—the grin of a deranged miser about to make another two bucks.

Billy had never stolen home in his career.

Blade Medina was a tall guy and as he launched into his windup, kicking his long leg toward third, Billy took off. Billy Day was stealing home; you could feel every mouth in the stadium open. Blade Medina certainly opened his. Then he simply cocked and threw to the catcher, who tagged Billy out before he could decide to slide.

Ketchum was on them before the big Tongan umpire could put his thumb away. For a big guy he had a funny out call, flicking his thumb as if shooting a marble. I have to hand it to Billy. He was headed for the dugout. But Ketchum got him by the shirt and dragged back out to the plate and made him speak to the umpire. You knew it was going to happen again—and in the World Series—because all the Indians just stood where they were on the field. And sure enough after a moment of Ketchum pushing Billy from the back, as if he was some big puppet in a baseball suit, and Billy speaking softly to the umpire, the large official stepped out in front of the plate and swept his hand out flat in the air as if calming the waters: “Safe!” he said. He said it quietly in his deep voice. Well, it was quiet in Cleveland, do you see? I sat there like everyone else looking at the bottom of my plastic glass of beer and wishing it wasn’t so. Seventy-four thousand people sitting in a circle feeling sour in their hearts, not to mention all the sad multitudes watching the televised broadcast.

Then my old coach Ketchum made it worse by hauling Billy over to touch the plate; Billy hadn’t even stepped on home base yet. Just typing this makes me feel the ugliness all over again.

But then the real stuff started to happen, and, as I said, there were no good reports of this next part because of everybody looking at their shoes, programs, or their knuckles the way people in a restaurant read the menu real hard when a couple is arguing at the next table. But I saw it, and it redeemed Sunny Billy Day forever to me, and it gave me something that has allowed me, made me really, get out my cleats again and become a baseball player. I’m not so bad a writer that I would call it courage, but it was definitely some big kick in the ass.

What happened was, halfway back to the dugout,
Billy turned around.
His head was down in what I called
shame
in my report to the
Pittsburgh Dispatch,
and he turned around and went back to home plate. Ketchum was back at third, smug as a jewel thief, and he caught the action too late to do anything about it. Billy took the ump by the sleeve and I saw Billy take off his cap and shake his head and point at the plate. We all knew what he was saying, everybody. The ballpark was back, everyone standing now, watching, and we all saw the big Tongan nod and smile that big smile at Ketchum, and then raise his fist and flick his thumb.