The Boys of Summer (19 page)

“Meat?” he said in a small voice. “Who’s that?”

I said my name.

“Rog,” Furillo said, as he lay in darkness. “Am I gonna be okay?”

“Sure, Carl, sure. You’re doing fine.” My own voice was not strong. I was shocked at the anomaly of a man in a full Dodger uniform—they had not even taken off his spiked shoes—so terribly stricken.

“You wouldn’t lie to me?” Furillo said.

“Shit, no. You’re fine.”

“Hey,” he said, pulling at my hand. “Tell me the truth? Am I blind?”

I saw Dressen later. “You gonna tell Joe Black to get Rush?” I said.

“Aaah,” Dressen said. “Fuckin’ dumb outfielder.”

“What?”

“Furiller shoulda ducked. An’ Snider is just as dumb.”

Watching Duke Snider turned Bill Roeder sardonic. The Duke could run and throw and leap. His swing was classic; enormous and fluid, a swing of violence that seemed a swing of ease. “But do you notice when he’s happiest?” Roeder complained. “When he walks. Watch how he throws the bat away. He’s glad.” Roeder would have liked to have Snider’s skills, he conceded. If he had, he believed he would have used them with more ferocity. Snider was living Roeder’s dream, and so abusing it.

Edwin Donald Snider was the full name, but Duke suited. His hair had started graying when he was twenty-five, but his body bespoke supple youth. As Duke moved in his long-striding way, one saw the quarterback, the basketball captain, the Olympian.
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it.
“If’ was a perfect poem for the Duker. He and Kipling would have been to one another’s taste.

While trying to become a man, Snider suffered periodic sulks. His legs were not really steel springs; they ached sometimes like anybody else’s. His model swing was useless when he lunged at a bad pitch. In a hurt boyish way, he saw forecasts of his golden future as pressure. Why can’t I be ordinary? he said. When his hitting wavered, he brooded and fielded sloppily. Portnoy’s hero was an only child. A confrontation with Dressen was inevitable and fierce.

The final Western trip began with a train ride to Cincinnati on Sunday night, August 17. I decided to fly and remember packing two books. I was having difficulty finishing
Crime and Punishment.
I had seen notices for Bernard Malamud’s
The Natural,
a mysterious account of a flaming, gifted ball player,
a super-Snider, who came to a bad end. “What
The Natural
demonstrates,” John Hutchens wrote in the
Herald Tribune
, “is problematical, except that Mr. Malamud is quite a card and nothing seems safe any more, nothing at all.”

I was starting a story on the real Snider, who was slumping, that Monday when a call came from the Dodger office to report that Dressen had decided on a benching. “Indefinitely,” said Frank Graham, Jr., the publicity man. “This is Snider’s first benching since he became a regular in 1949. He’s gone twelve games without a homer and he has only nine hits in his last forty-six times at bat.”

“Anything else?”

“You miss the game yesterday?”

“I was off.”

“There was a short fly to center. Some of the fellers say he should have had it but he loafed.”

“Well, Duke says Dressen ripped him in front of everyone the other day.”

“Is that right?”

I compounded the elements into a story, in which I tried to balance objections. Snider had a point. The stronger argument was Dressen’s.

At twilight Tuesday, after a three-hour flight, I walked onto Crosley Field in Cincinnati and someone went, “Pssst.” Snider was standing by himself in a corner of the dugout, while the rest of the team worked out. His long face was somber and white.

“Hiya, Duke. Sorry.”

“It probably won’t do any good,” he said, “but if either Mike Gaven or Dick Young comes on the field tonight, I’m gonna punch him in the mouth.”

“Well, it won’t do any good. I can tell you that.”

“They got no right to write what they did.”

“Duke, the club announced yesterday that you were benched. Everybody had to write it. It was news, and because there was no game, it was big news.”

“Maybe I should be benched. It’s okay to write that. But Young did a whole piece saying that I was a crybaby and Gaven said my salary was gonna be cut by 25 percent no matter what I did from now on.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because Beverly called me up from Bay Ridge and read me the stories. She was crying.”

After a while, I said, “Okay, but don’t start hitting people. You outweigh Young by fifty pounds, and Gaven’s an old guy. You might kill him.”

“Where you going?”

“To the press room. Let me see what I can do.”

“They won’t listen,” Snider said. “They’re too busy lapping up the sauce.”

Gaven, a porky man with great jowls, was eating. “I can write anything I want,” he insisted without interrupting the rhythm of his chewing. “Maybe I got private information you don’t have that his salary
will
be cut.”

“Well, if you go on the field, he says he’ll hit you.”

The chewing stopped. “He better not,” Gaven cried. “If he does, every Hearst newspaper in the United States will be on him.” But Gaven stayed off the field.

Talking to Young, who arrived later, I watched the jet eyes harden. “As if I fuckin’ benched him,” Young said. “As if I fuckin’ loafed on that fly ball.” After the game, Young sought out Snider in a bar and said, talking quickly, “Hit baseballs, Duke, not writers. Then I’ll be able to write good things about you.”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

“Don’t get down on yourself.”

“I was sore, Dick. Maybe your story was okay.” Young turned away. Snider sipped at a Canadian whisky and ginger ale. His eyes became enormous and sad. “Stop thinking so much, Duke,” I said.

Three days later Snider was back and for the rest of the season
he played brilliantly. Dressen’s impersonal brutality worked. I don’t know what was more disturbing, that or the way Snider, while hitting at a .400 pace, continued to discard his bat jubilantly when walked, joyous, as Roeder had observed, not to have to face another challenge.

Malamud’s first novel downed quickly. One of the pitchers saw me with it as we were leaving Cincinnati for St. Louis and I lent it to him. “I like that book,” he said, the next day, “as far as I got. I liked it when he screwed that brunette and they describe her muff.”

“Well, stay with it because he’s gonna make it with a blonde and redhead and Malamud describes the pubic hair each time.”

“Goddamn.”

“What’s the matter?”

“I left your son of a buck of a book on the fucking train.”

Without thinking, I bore
Crime and Punishment
into the St. Louis dugout, along with my scorebook. “Hey-yup,” Dressen cried. “What you doing with that book?”

“It’s a helluva book, Charlie,” I said.

The ferret face softened. “Ya know something? I never read a book in my whole life.”

“Not even in school?”

“I only went a few years. But I can read good. Newspapers and magazines and them. But I never read a book. Ya think I should?”

I was instant ambassador from culture to the dugout. They were all behind me as I stood on the old boards, Shakespeare and Southey, Dante and Hardy, Olga Kahn, Shelley, Hemingway, Housman and, in my right hand, Dostoyevsky. “Sure, Charlie,” I said on behalf of literature. “It would help your vocabulary. You’d learn new words. You’d make better speeches and all.” I was addressing a major league manager as one might speak to a truant boy of ten.

“Ah, fuck,” Dressen said. “I got this far without readin’ a book. I ain’t gonna start now.”

We flew from Chicago, with the team seven games in front, on a flight that ended in a literary way. One of Harold Rosenthal’s favorite jokes consisted of composing the headline and the story that would appear in the
Tribune
if a plane carrying the Dodgers crashed. He prepared rough drafts, after which Allan Roth and I made suggestions. The result looked like this:

My contribution was one sentence, concluding the eight-hundred-word story. It read, in full:

Nine sportswriters also perished.

Black humor roots within its creators’ brains and makes them victims. By September I’d had enough of airplanes, and on this final flight, aboard a DC-4, relief flooded me when the pilot said, “Uh, folks, we’re in a hold. It’s a little foggy up around New York. We’re going to circle Allentown for a while.” Allentown lies east of Allegheny peaks, I thought. But the descent stretched on. Ten minutes. One cigarette. The honking noises came from the hydraulic system, but the creaking had to be the wings. What was it a pilot once told me? “A DC-4 in weather
will snap twice as many struts as a Constellation.” Twenty minutes. As we dropped toward the city of skyscrapers, visibility was zero. Plane lights blinked. The fog glowed red. Otherwise everything was black. How would it be, the brilliant red death of exploding wing tanks, or sudden, utter, inconceivable dark?

“Hey,” Carl Erskine said. “Do you like poetry?” He had slipped into the seat beside me and meant to cheer me or himself, or both.

“Sure, Carl. I majored in English.”

“Ever hear of a poet named Robert W. Service?”

“Right.”

“A poem called ‘The Cremation of Sam McGee’? Well, would you like to hear me say it?” And he was off:

Erskine’s eyes sought me. I nodded.

Now Sam McGee was from Tennessee, where the cotton blooms and blows,

Why he left his home in the South to roam ‘round the Pole, God only knows.

He was always cold, but the land of gold seemed to hold him like a spell;

Though he’d often say in his homely way that “he’d sooner live in hell.”

Over five more stanzas the Arctic cold killed Sam. His body was placed in a furnace, where coals blazed. After a long time the door was opened to see if the cremation was done.

And there sat Sam, looking cold and calm, in the heart of the furnace roar;

And he wore a smile you could see a mile, and he said: “Please close that door!

It’s fine in here, but I greatly fear you’ll let in the cold and storm—

Since I left Plumtree, down in Tennessee, it’s the first time I’ve been warm.”

Robert Service’s envoi and our landing coincided. Carl winked. I said, “Good going.” And we went our separate ways.

By September 3 the Dodger lead over the Giants had dropped to five games. In almost empty Braves Field, Boston moved five runs ahead; then the big hitters rallied, tying the score in the fourth inning. Dressen called for Joe Black, and watching the big man stride in, you could tell. There would be no more easy scoring for Boston today.

Black had come on slowly and irresistibly. He possessed only a fast ball and a small, sharp curve. Dressen liked pitchers with varied weapons and he was reluctant to believe that Black could win with just two pitches. But Joe pitched strongly in Chicago. He won in Pittsburgh. “It isn’t all that hard,” he said. “When they say pitch high, I pitch high, and when they say pitch low, I pitch low.” His control was superb, but what probably won Dressen was a game when the Cincinnati bench sang a soft, derisive “Old Black Joe.”

Black neither responded nor changed expression. He simply threw one fast ball each at the heads of Cincinnati’s next seven batters. “Musta been some crooners in the lot,” he said. “That stopped the music.” Dressen admired Black’s unpretentious toughness. By mid-season, Black became the principal reliever on the team.

Now in September in New England, he overpowered the Braves. The game stayed tied until the eighth inning. Then
Robinson hit a grounder which the Boston second baseman threw wildly. Robinson never broke stride, and slid safely into third. That was his way—stealing the extra base when it mattered. Furillo bounced out and Robinson had to stay where he was. Snider bunted at Ed Mathews, the third baseman. Mathews charged and Robinson charged with him, staying one step behind. Mathews gloved the ball. He glanced back at Robinson, who stopped short. He threw to first. As Mathews released the baseball, Robinson sprinted home. He scored the winning run, with a long, graceful slide.

“Helluva play,” I said in the clubhouse.

“No,” Robinson said. “Just the play you make in that situation. As long as I’m a step behind him, he can’t tag me. He can’t reach that far. And he can’t catch me. I’m quicker than he is. So he can do two things. He can hold the ball. Then I stay at third and Duke is safe at first. Or he can throw. Then I go home. But there’s no way they can get an out without giving up the winning run.”

The next night Dressen summoned Black into the seventh inning of a tie game. Joe held off the Braves until the eleventh. Then he tired and, allowing his first run in ten tense innings of relief, he lost. The next morning Dressen ordered Black to fly to New York. “If he’s around again,” Charlie said, “I might use him again, and I want to save him for them Giants. There’s one guy ain’t afraid of them Giants.” Without Black the Dodgers lost the final game and the evening train ride down the coast of southern New England was a cortege. No one spoke poetry.

A day later the team lost a double-header to the Giants. The Giants had come to within four games, and they would play the team three times in the next two days. If the Giants swept, momentum would carry them to another pennant.