Short Stories (17 page)

“That’s right,” the driver answers after a hesitation Joe should find odd but somehow doesn’t. It’s almost as if he’s used to it.

He pumps the gas. It comes to a dollar thirty-five. The little guy gives him a ten-spot. He has to go inside to make change: he knows he’s only got six bucks in his own wallet. He’s just coming out when the Rocket 88 drives off. “Hey, wait!” Joe yells, money clenched in his big, beefy fist. “You forgot your . . .” His voice trails off. The car isn’t coming back. He gets a tip every once in a while, but he’s never got one like this before.

Shaking his head, he goes back in to finish watching his TV show. Uncle Miltie is spoofing
The Shadow
, which still runs on the radio. “I am Lamont Creampuff!” he intones. “I have the power to crowd men’s minds!” He shoves, uselessly, at two enormous actors who are crowding
him
. With a pathetic shrug, he goes, “Well, sometimes.”

Joe should be falling out of the chair laughing. He knows he should. For some reason he can’t fathom, though, he doesn’t find the sketch funny.

* * *

Not much to spring training, not when you play for an independent team in a Class C league. On weekends, the guys go out to Park Field to hit and to field grounders and shag flies. Joe puts in as much time as he can. He usually gets off to a slow start. Maybe this year he won’t. He can hope. You can always hope, even if you’re in the Longhorn League.

He doesn’t remember much of what happened that cold January night. Most of what he does remember is missing part of Milton Berle and getting the nice tip. Sometimes he thinks there’s more to it, but less and less as the days go by.

He doesn’t talk about it. What’s to say? Nothing that makes sense. Nothing anybody will believe. He can’t even joke about it, the way Berle made a joke out of Lamont Cranston. People in Roswell don’t laugh at jokes about flying saucers.

He boots a ground ball. It goes right between his legs. “What the hell’s the matter with you?” says the guy who hit it. “You shoulda snagged that one in your sleep.”

“Musta been thinking about something else,” Joe answers sheepishly. Why is he worrying about flying saucers? He’s never seen one in his life. He’s seen the two red taillights of that Oldsmobile receding down Second Street, though.

 ”Don’t think, for Chrissakes,” the other Rocket tells him. “You’ll only screw yourself up.”

He’s not wrong. You can’t think when you’re playing ball. You’ll be a split second late, half a step slow, if you do. You have to play and play and play till your body automatically knows what to do, and your head backs off and lets it.

Joe’s swing is like that. He’s always been a hard hitter. This year, he’s something extra special. The ball jumps off his bat, in the practices and after the season starts. Some of the shots he hits go farther than Professor Goddard’s prewar experiments that gave the Roswell Rockets their name.

He hits ‘em long. He hits ‘em early. He hits ‘em often. The Longhorn League belongs to the hitters. So do the West Texas–New Mexico League, the Big State League, and the Arizona-Texas League, all in the same part of the country. The air is thin. The weather’s hot. Pitching staffs are small, and wear down as summer grinds along. Lots of guys run up big numbers here. But even by the inflated standards people in these parts are used to, Joe has a season to remember.

They play mostly night games. During the day, when the Rockets are home, Joe pumps gas. At night, he takes dead aim at the whitewashed planks of the right-field fence at Park Field. It’s only 329 down the line. He’s smacking ‘em way farther than that. He knocks one into the rodeo grounds next to the ballpark, which interrupts the calf-roping.

He gets a free ham every time he hits one out, too: the team has a deal with a local meat-packer. He doesn’t keep most of them. Some of the Cuban kids who play for the Rockets praying a big-league organization will notice them are hungry all the time. They don’t get paid the way he does, and they need the meat.

He passes fifty homers early in August. By the end of the month, with the season winding down, he has sixty-four. That means he’s passed Babe Ruth, whose sixty has stood as the major-league mark since 1927. But the record in the minors is sixty-nine. Joe Hauser did it in 1933, and Bob Crues tied it in 1949 playing for Amarillo in the West Texas–New Mexico League. Joe Bauman played with him there a couple of years earlier.

On the night of September 1, Joe gets close. Real close. The Sweetwater Spudders are in Roswell. Their franchise is spuddering; they moved from Wichita Falls in June. And Joe has a game for the ages. Four homers. A double. Ten RBIs. Oh, yeah. The Rockets win, 15-9.

Sixty-eight. One to tie the record. Two to bust it wide open. Nobody in history has ever hit seventy, not since Abner Doubleday said “Let there be bases” and there
were
bases. All of a sudden, Joe’s a big story. Oh, he’s been a big story in Roswell the whole season, and in the other Longhorn League towns, too. But now he’s a story across the whole country. AP lines carry news of what he’s doing from coast to coast. When’s the last time
that
happened in Roswell?

Oh. The thing back in ‘47, the one people don’t care to talk about. Whenever Joe thinks about that, he shies away from it like a cat that just got a squirt in the face from a water pistol. So he doesn’t think about it much. It’s not as if he hasn’t got other things on his mind.

The next day, Pat Stasey, the manager, moves him from cleanup to the leadoff spot so he’ll get more chances to hit. But he doesn’t connect on the second. The record sits on his shoulders, heavy as a piano. He hates the flash bulbs going off every time he comes up. It’s not just the local photographers, either.
Sports Illustrated
has sent a guy to Roswell. So has
Life
. He
is
big news, and kind of wishes he weren’t.

The game on the third, against Midland, is the Rockets’ last one at Park Field. Joe ties the record in the seventh inning. The piano falls off. But if he’s gonna break it, he’ll have to break it on the road. Along with the rest of the guys, he climbs into the bus for the long, hot haul to Big Spring, Texas. The national shutterbugs and reporters bum lifts from the gentlemen of the Fourth Estate who usually cover Longhorn League games. A little convoy rolls east along US 380.

Not quite knowing why, Joe wonders if he’ll see a Rocket 88 pacing the rickety old bus, but he doesn’t. Is that good news or bad? He’s not even sure it’s news at all.

Big Spring is bad news. The Broncs won’t pitch to him. Time after time, he has to toss the bat aside and trot down to first base. Even the Big Spring fans boo. The Rockets have nothing else to play for. They won’t win the pennant. Artesia has already clinched it. And that’s where they head next, for a Sunday doubleheader to close out the season.

Joe played for Artesia for a couple of years before moving up to Roswell ahead of the ‘53 season because he could get the Texaco station there. The fans of the NuMexers (they were the Drillers when he played for them) razz him whenever he comes back to town.

“Whoever made this schedule’s just plain squirrely,” Stasey complains. “Two hundred miles from Roswell to Big Spring, two hundred more from Big Spring back to Artesia. But Artesia’s only forty miles south of Roswell. We shoulda gone there first, then into Texas.”

“You want things to make sense, you shouldn’t play this game,” says Vallie Eaves, the pitching coach. He’s past forty, but he still goes out on the mound every once in a while. When he was younger, he made it to the bigs--the only Rocket who can say that. He wasn’t very good, but he made it. Stasey and Joe nod.

Before the game, the Artesia manager walks over to Joe. “I heard what they done to you in Big Spring,” he says, and spits a stream of tobacco juice onto the hard-baked ground. “I think that was chickenshit. We’ll pitch to you. We won’t groove one, but we’ll give you your chance. Fair’s fair.”

“Obliged,” Joe answers. “That’s white of you.” Would the other manager say the same thing if he didn’t have the pennant sewed up? Not likely! But Joe will take what he can get.

He happens to notice three little bald guys in fedoras and sunglasses sitting in the grandstand back of first base. They look so strange, he almost points them out to the guys he plays with. Somehow, though, it slips his mind. As a matter of fact, it slips right out his mind. So do they, which is odd, because they’re down by the front. And none of the other Rockets seems to see them at all.

Joe still feels funny batting leadoff, but whatthehell, whatthehell. Though Artesia hasn’t liked him since he bailed for Roswell, the crowd cheers and stomps when the PA announcer calls his name. That, or something, makes him feel easier as he steps to the plate.

On the hill for the NuMexers is a Cuban kid, José Galardo. Their manager wasn’t kidding--he pitches to Joe. Joe takes a couple, fouls off a couple. Artesia has a big ballpark. It’s over 350 to right, and the wind blows toward the plate. If Joe breaks the record, he won’t break it with a cheap shot.

The kid comes in with a fastball on the 2-2 pitch. Joe swings. Nothing sweeter than bat hitting ball squarely. He knows it’s gone before he finishes his follow-through. No, it’s no cheap home run. It’s way the hell out of there.

“Number seventy!” the PA man yells. Like a man in a dream, Joe rounds the bases. His feet hardly seem to touch the ground. If hitting number sixty-nine was getting the piano off his back, seventy is the piano stool. When his spikes come down on the plate, he’s grinning just like Christmas.

And it’s just like Christmas another way, too. When you do something special in the Longhorn League, the fans let you know they appreciate it. They shove cash out through the chicken-wire screening that keeps foul line drives from murdering them. Joe walks down the first- and third-base lines, gathering it in.

He doesn’t count it as he collects, but it’s got to be a month’s pay, maybe more. Certainly more in effect. Because it’s cash, the IRS won’t have to hear about it.

One of the bills is a C-note. The hand that thrusts it at Joe is very small, and has only four fingers. “Well done, man of the star,” says a strange voice--half growly, half squeaky--that seems to come from inside his head. Joe blinks, like a man trying to awaken from a dream. But the dream is too sweet. He walks on down the line, grabbing more greenbacks. Photographers follow, clicking away. By the time he gets back to the dugout, he doesn’t care about the voice any more. Still a game--no, two games--to play.

Roswell wins the first one. And the Rockets murder the NuMexers, 17-0, in the nightcap. Joe launches two more in the second game, one off a guy named John Goodell and one off Frank Galardo, who happens to be José’s uncle. That lets the Rockets slide into second, half a game ahead of the Carlsbad Potashers.

So it’s a busful of happy ballplayers who go back up US 285 to Roswell. Happy reporters and photographers, too--they have their story. And the national guys are doubly happy. They can get the hell out of New Mexico and back to the big city.

When Joe comes home, Dorothy shows him a fistful of wires. They’re all congratulating him, telling him what a great guy he is. That’s nice, sure. Then he shows her all the money the Artesia fans gave him. That’s way nicer.

More wires the next morning. By then, he’s back at Joe Bauman’s Texaco, pumping gas. Almost the first thing that happens when he gets there is a Rocket 88 Olds pulls up to the pump. In it are . . . a guy with greasy hair and kind of a cute redhead. They congratulate him, too. They were at the game when he hit his sixty-ninth. He fills the Olds’s tank. He takes their money and makes change. He feels disappointed, and can’t say why.

* * *

He hopes something big will come from his record, but it doesn’t. No major-league team cares about an old first baseman who hit a ton and a half of homers in the low minors. The San Francisco Seals from the PCL call, but that doesn’t pan out, either. He plays two more years for Roswell, then hangs ‘em up for good. Pumping gas, fixing cars . . . yeah, you can make a lifetime living at that. And he does.

He always wonders if he could have hacked it. Anybody good enough to play the game for money does. Joe has better reason than most. If he’d done some things differently back in the forties. . . . Too late now.

Years go by. That thing people in Roswell didn’t talk about? Some folks decide they can make money off it. Before long, people sell funny-looking aliens with big eyes in every gift shop, every drug store, every 7-Eleven. Even in gas stations.

Joe won’t sell them. The first time he sees one, he studies it for a second, then shakes his head. “Nah,” he says. “They don’t look quite like that.”

“Oh, yeah? And how do you know?” asks the poker buddy he’s with--they’re on a beer run.

He has no idea. “I just know, that’s all,” he says. The poker buddy gives him the horselaugh. He takes it. What else can he do? But, the rest of his days, he never laughs at a flying-saucer joke. Never once.