Broken Vessels (3 page)

In the spring of 1948, in the first softball game during the afternoon hour of physical education in the dusty schoolyard, the two captains chose teams and, as always, they chose other boys until only two of us remained. I batted last, and first came to the plate with two or three runners on base, and while my teammates urged me to try for a walk, and the players on the field called Easy out, Easy out, I watched the softball coming in waist-high, and stepped and swung, and hit it over the right fielder's head for a double. My next time at bat I tripled to center. From then on I brought my glove to school, hanging from a handlebar.

That summer the Bulls came to town, and we boys in the neighborhood played baseball every morning, on a lot owned by the father of one of our friends. Mr. Gossen mowed the field, built a backstop, and erected foul poles down the left and right field foul lines. Beyond them and the rest of the outfield was tall grass. We wore baseball shoes and caps, chewed bubble gum and spat, and at the wooden home plate we knocked dirt from our spikes. We did not have catcher's equipment, only a mask and a mitt, so our pitchers did not throw hard. We did not want them to anyway. But sometimes we played a team from another neighborhood and our catcher used their shin guards and chest protector, and we hit fast balls and roundhouse curves. I don't know about my other friends, but if Little League ball had existed then I would not have played: not with adult coaches and watching parents taking from me my excitement, my happiness while playing or practicing, and returning me to the tense muscles and cool stomach and clumsy hands and feet of self-consciousness. I am grateful that I was given those lovely summer days until we boys grew older and, since none of us was a varsity athlete, we turned to driving lessons and romance.

There were three or four of those baseball seasons. In that first one, in 1948, we went one morning to the Bulls' clinic. The ball field was a crowd of boys, young ones like us, eleven or twelve, and teenagers too. The day began with short drills and instruction and demonstrations; I don't remember how it ended. I only remember the first drill: a column of us in the infield, and one of the Bulls tossing a ground ball to the first boy, then the next boy, and so on: a fast, smooth exercise. But waiting in line, among all those strangers, not only boys but men too, professional ballplayers, I lost my months of backyard practice, my redemption on the softball field at school and the praise from my classmates that followed it, lost the mornings with my friends on our field. When my turn came I trotted toward the softly bouncing ball, crouched, took my eyes off the ball and saw only the blankness of my secret self, and the ball went between and through my legs. The player tossed me another one, which I fielded while my rump puckered as in anticipation of a spanking, a first day at school. Harry Strohm was watching.

So later that summer, amid the aroma of coffee and tobacco smoke at the table at Poorboy's, when he gazed at me with those eyes like embedded gems, brilliant and ancient, I saw in them myself that morning, bound by the strings of my fear, as the ball bounced over my stiffly waiting gloved hand. Harry Strohm said nothing at the table; or, if he did, I heard it as nothing. Perhaps he said quietly: That's good.

I was wrong, and I did not know I was wrong until this very moment, as I write this. When Harry looked at me across the table, he was not looking at my body and into my soul and deciding I would never be a ballplayer, he was not focusing on my trifling error on that long day of the clinic. He was looking at my young hope and seeing his own that had propelled him into and kept him in this vocation, this game he had played nearly all his life. His skin was deeply, smoothly brown; the wrinkles in his face delineated his skin's toughness. He wore a short-sleeved shirt and slacks. I cannot imagine him in a suit and tie, save in his casket; cannot imagine him in any clothing but a baseball uniform, or something familiar, something placed in a locker before a game, withdrawn from it after the game and the shower, some assembly of cotton whose only function was to cover his nakedness until the next game, the next season. He had once played Triple A ball.

So had Norm Litzinger, our left fielder. A shoulder injury was the catalyst for his descent from the top of the wall surrounding the garden where the very few played major league baseball. I do not remember the effect of the injury on his performance in the Evangeline League. Perhaps there was none, as he threw on smaller fields, to hold or put out slower runners, and as he swung at pitches that most major leaguers could hit at will. He was brown, and broad of shoulder and chest, handsome and spirited, and humorous. He was fast too, and graceful, and sometimes, after making a shoestring catch, he somersaulted to his feet, holding the ball high in his glove. Once, as he was sprinting home from third, the catcher blocked the plate. Litzinger ducked his head and ran into the catcher, who dropped the ball as the two men fell; then Litzinger rose from the tumble and dust, grinning, holding his shoulders sloped and his arms bent and hanging like an ape's, and walked like one into applause and the dugout.

He was in his thirties. At the end of every season he went home, to whatever place in the North. For us, everything but Arkansas above us was the North; everything but California, which was isolate and odd. One season he dated a beautiful woman who sat with another beautiful woman in a box seat behind home plate. I was thirteen or fourteen. Litzinger's lady had black hair and dark skin, her lips and fingernails were bright red, her cheeks rouged. Her friend was blonde, with very red lips and nails. They both smoked Chesterfields, and as I watched them drawing on their cigarettes, marking them with lipstick, and blowing plumes of smoke into the humid and floodlit night air, and daintily removing bits of tobacco from their tongues, I felt the magical and frightening mystery of their flesh. The brunette married Norman Litzinger; and one night, before the game, the blonde married Billy Joe Barrett with a ceremony at home plate.

One season I read a book by Joe DiMaggio. I believe it was a book of instruction, for boys. I only remember one line from that book, and I paraphrase it: If you stay in Class D or C ball for more than one season, unless you have been injured, you should get out of professional baseball. Perhaps DiMaggio wrote the word
quit
. I can't. I've spent too much of my life in angry dread of that word.

How could I forget DiMaggio's sentence? I loved young ballplayers who, with the Bulls, were trying to rise through the minor leagues, to the garden of the elect. I loved young ballplayers who, like the outfielder with the condom, were in their second or third seasons in Class C ball. And I loved old ballplayers, like Harry Strohm; and Bill Thomas, a fifty-year-old pitcher with great control, and an assortment of soft breaking balls, who one night pitched a no-hitter; and once, when because of rain-outs and doubleheaders, the Bulls had no one to pitch the second game of a double header, he pitched and won both of them. And I loved players who were neither old nor young, for baseball: men like Tom Spears, a pitcher in his mid-twenties, who had played in leagues higher than Class C, then pitched a few seasons for us on his way out of professional baseball. He was a gentle and witty man, and one morning, because we asked him to, he came to one of our games, to watch us play.

Late one afternoon Mrs. Strohm gave both my cousin Jimmy and me the night off, and we asked the visiting manager if we could be his batboys. Tom Spears pitched for the Bulls that night. This was a time in baseball when, if a man was pitching a no-hitter, no one spoke about it. Radio announcers hinted, in their various ways. Fans in seats looked at each other, winked, raised an eyebrow, nodded. We were afraid of jinxing it; and that belief made being a fan something deeper than watching a game. An uninformed spectator, a drunk, even a thirteen-year-old boy could, by simply saying the words
no-hitter
, destroy it. So you were connected with everyone watching the game, and everyone listening to it too, for a man alone with his radio in his living room, a man who lacked belief, could say those two sacred words and break the spell.

But Jimmy and I did not know until the night Spears pitched a no-hitter, while we were batboys for the New Iberia Pelicans, that the opposing team transcended their desire to win, and each player his desire to perform, to hit, and instead obeyed the rules of the ritual. We were having fun, and we were also trying to do perfect work as batboys; we did not know Spears was pitching a no-hitter. We sat in the dugout while the Pelicans were in the field, sat with pitchers and the manager and reserve ballplayers. When the Pelicans were at bat we stayed close to the on-deck circle, watched hitter after hitter returning to the dugout without a hit. And no one said a word. Then the last batter struck out on a fastball, a lovely glint of white, and the crowd was standing and cheering and passing the hat, and the Bulls in the field and from the dugout were running to the mound, to Spears. Then the Pelicans were saying the two words, surrounding them with the obscenities I first heard and learned from ballplayers, and they went quickly to their bus — there were no visiting locker rooms in the league — and left their bats. Jimmy and I thrust them into the canvas bat bag and ran, both of us holding the bag, to the parking lot, to the bus. The driver, a player, had already started it; the team was aboard. Your bats, we called; Your bats. From the bus we heard the two words, the obscenities; a player reached down through the door and hoisted in the bag of Louisville Sluggers.

How could I forget DiMaggio's sentence? Our first baseman, in the Bulls' first season, was a young hard-hitting lefthander whose last name was Glenn. We were in the Detroit Tiger system, and after Glenn's season with us, he went up to Flint, Michigan, to a Class A league. I subscribed to
The Sporting News
and read the weekly statistics and box scores, and I followed Glenn's performance, and I shared his hope, and waited for the season when he would stand finally in the garden. At Flint he batted in the middle of the order, as he had for us, and he did well; but he did not hit .300, or thirty home runs. In the next season I looked every week at the names in
The Sporting News
, searched for Glenn in double A and triple A, and did not find him there, or in Class A or B, and I never saw his name again. It was as though he had come into my life, then left me and died, but I did not have the words then for what I felt in my heart. I could only say to my friends: I can't find Glenn's name anymore.

I believed Billy Joe Barrett's name would be part of baseball for years. I believed he would go from us to Flint, then to double and finally triple A, and would have a career there, at the top of the garden wall. And, with the hope that is the essence of belief, I told myself that he would play in the major leagues; that one season, or over several of them, he would discover and claim that instant of timing, or that sharper concentration, or whatever it was that he so slightly lacked, and that flawed his harmony at the plate. In the field he was what we called then a Fancy Dan. He was right-handed and tall, fast and graceful and lithe. He leaped high and caught line drives as smoothly as an acrobat, as though the hard-hit ball and his catching it were a performance he and the batter had practiced for years. On very close plays at first, stretching for a throw from an infielder, he did a split, the bottom of one leg and the top of the other pressed against the earth; then quickly and smoothly, without using his hands, he stood. He stole a lot of bases. He often ended his slide by rising to his feet, on the bag. He batted left-handed and was a line drive hitter, and a good one; but not a great one.

I have never seen a first baseman whose grace thrilled me as Barrett's did; and one night in Lafayette he hit a baseball in a way I have never seen again. He batted lead-off or second and every season hit a few home runs, but they were not what we or other teams and fans or Barrett himself considered either a hope or a threat when he was at the plate. But that night he hit a fast ball coming just above his knees. It started as a line drive over the second baseman, who leaped for it, his gloved hand reaching up then arcing down without the ball that had cleared by inches, maybe twelve of them, the glove's leather fingers. Then in short right field the ball's trajectory sharply rose, as though deflected higher and faster by angled air, and the right fielder stopped his motion toward it and simply stood and watched while the ball rose higher and higher and was still rising and tiny as it went over the lights in right field. Billy Joe Barrett's career ended in Lafayette.

How could I forget DiMaggio's sentence? Before I got out of high school, the Bulls' park was vacant, its playing field growing weeds. The Strohms had moved on, looking for another ball club; and Norm Litzinger and Billy Joe Barrett and their wives had gone to whatever places they found, after Lafayette, and after baseball. I was driving my family's old Chevrolet and smoking Lucky Strikes and falling in love with girls whose red lips marked their cigarettes and who, with painted fingernails, removed bits of tobacco from their tongues; and, with that immortal vision of mortality that youth holds in its heart, I waited for manhood.

DiMaggio was wrong. I know that now, over forty years after I read his sentence. Or, because I was a boy whose hope was to be a different boy with a new body growing tall and fast and graceful and strong, a boy who one morning would wake, by some miracle of desire, in motion on the path to the garden, I gave to DiMaggio too much credence; and his sentence lost, for me, all proportion, and insidiously became a heresy. Which I am renouncing now, as I see Billy Joe Barrett on the night when his whole body and his whole mind and his whole heart were for one moment in absolute harmony with a speeding baseball and he hit it harder and farther that he could at any other instant in his life. We never saw the ball start its descent, its downward arc to earth. For me, it never has. It is rising white over the lights high above the right field fence, a bright and vanishing sphere of human possibility soaring into the darkness beyond our vision.