The Brothers K (19 page)

“What possible good will a pitcher’s mound in a manurey backyard hutch do him with the rest of the ballpark, not to mention the team, completely missing?”

And “What good will any sort of mound anywhere do him with his pitching thumb still dead as a doornail and his life still chained to a daily stint at the mill?”

Still, once I knew that the shed had to do with baseball—once I realized that he was focusing (however fuzzily) on pitching, and that this new focus had him looking darned near as happy as he looked insane—I kept my questions to myself. While the trapeze artist is in mid-flip, while the tamer’s head is halfway down the lion, while the magician’s saw is
passing through the lady in the box, even the thickest kid in the audience knows it’s no time for questions.

P
apa eventually made his pitcher’s mound perfect. He spent four or five hours, two nights in a row, painstakingly shaping, reshaping and tamping down the dirt with shovels and feet and a big iron bar before he was satisfied enough to plant a pitcher’s rubber smack-dab on the summit. Then—one balmy, half-mooned mid-April evening when my brothers were all off at their various ball practices and Mama and the twins were inside the house—I suddenly had Papa, his shed, and his happy insanity all to myself …

The first thing Papa did that night was drag the old wood extension ladder out from under the house and lean it against the back wall of the garage. Next he stuck an electric drill and a few other tools in his carpenter’s belt, climbed the ladder, and began wiring two lights in up under the garage eave—spotlights this time, great big powerful ones. When he got them both working he aimed their brilliant beams in a V straight down the wall, then tried—and failed—to sound casual as he told me to grab a tape and check the distance from the pitcher’s rubber to the spot where the beams struck the ground. “It’s a clue, Kade,” he said. “A good one.”

But I needed no clues. I’d finally pieced it together. This was no harebrained fraction of an imaginary ballpark. It was something perfectly practical—assuming that its builder was a pitcher. Papa’s backyard shed was an all-weather bullpen, and the garage wall was simply its backstop. He’d just built himself a warm, dry place in which to practice pitching year-round. Trying to play it cool, and failing just like Papa, I said, “I don’t need a tape. I can eyeball it. It’s sixty feet six inches—exactly.”

He didn’t laugh when I said this. He barely even smiled. He just said, “A regular Sherlock,” meaning Holmes, I guess, and tossed down his keys like I was sixteen and had asked to borrow the car. “Bring back anything odd you might find in the trunk of the Fortyford,” he said.

I ran round the house and down to the car at the curb, yanked open the trunk, and was not at all surprised to find a battered old home plate lying there. What did surprise me was that the instant I picked it up, wham!
yak butter
… Papa’s whole project ceased to feel arcane or mysterious and began instead to make a boy’s kind of sense. Common sense.
Baseball
sense. Had it been a new plate I don’t know what I’d have felt, but something about this beat-up matter-of-fact one made everything Papa was doing seem just as matter-of-fact. Some sort of genuine athletic
comeback was in the making here. I just knew it. I could taste it. But only on the inside of me. Outside of me the whole project still seemed so crazy and vulnerable that in order to protect it I carried that indestructible house-shaped old slab of rubber back around the garage as if it were blown glass or precious china. “It won’t break,” Papa laughed when he saw me coming. “You can pound it in yourself,” he added, “soon as you’ve done the preliminary honors.”

I asked what honors those were. He pointed at the garden hoe and rake leaning against the toolshed. “How about weeding me out a batter’s box?”

I set to work like a pirate who’s just found the X on the map. Meanwhile Papa went back in the garage, and returned with a used twin mattress. When he’d spotted this pee-stained relic at a Goodwill drop-box a few weeks back, he’d cried, “Perfect!” and tied it to the roof of the car—causing my brothers and me to wonder yet again about his mental health. But when he got it home he’d calmly covered it with two sheets of black plastic and a third layer of rainproof Army surplus canvas, and now its purpose was obvious: padding and soundproofing for his garage-wall backstop. Nailing two stout metal bookshelf brackets to the wall, he hung the mattress from them by its handles.

He disappeared into the garage again, and this time was gone long enough for me to de-sod the “batter’s box,” pick out every last rock and weed, and work the dirt smooth as the top of a fresh pumpkin pie by dragging the back of the rake over it again and again. While I worked the day turned dusky without my noticing. But what I did notice, under the spotlights, was the odd, half-canceled dual shadows that I was casting. They looked uncannily familiar. I straightened up, tried to place them, couldn’t, and had just started raking again when it hit me: they were almost exactly the sorts of shadows that ballplayers cast at a night ballgame. Like a painter trying to get perspective, I backed away from my efforts then, and was delighted to see that, at least in this light, my hokey handmade batter’s box had truly begun to resemble a few square feet of bona fide bush league ball diamond.
And if a homemade batter’s box can get this real this fast
, I thought,
there’s no reason why Papa can’t make it out of this yard, out of the mill, clear on out of this town and back into pro ball …

At which point I heard the school bus bringing my brothers home, my brain kicked in, our yard turned back into a yard, and I mumbled aloud, “Naw. No way. Don’t be ridiculous.”

“What’s ridiculous?” Papa asked—and I jumped. I hadn’t heard him slip up behind me.

“Nothing!” I snapped. “Nothing’s ridiculous!” But he looked a little hurt, so I added, “You weren’t supposed to hear is all. I was thinking out loud.”

“About what?”

I shrugged. “You and baseball.”

“Oh,” he said. “Well. Me and baseball. That
is
ridiculous.”

We both began to laugh then, and for a moment that yak butter belief in a comeback filled me a second time. But right at the height of it Papa stopped laughing, looked around the yard, waved a careless hand at everything we’d done, and said, “You know, Kade. This whole thing, this shed business, it really
is
ridiculous.” Then he smiled—and sadly, almost shyly added, “But Vera says her stupid prayers no matter what. Right?”

This remark washed over me in slow, silent waves: the shredding of the cigarettes, the tortured four-mile runs, the scavenged lumber and laborious building project—it was some kind of elaborate apology, some sort of self-imposed penance for having hit me. It was a gesture, a wonderful gesture. But a gesture nonetheless. “Look, Kade,” he said, reaching down and squeezing my sagging shoulders. “My situation, baseball-wise, is hopeless.”

My throat began to close. I looked away to hide the welling in my eyes.

“The thing is,” he said, “I don’t want you getting worked up over nothing when I start spending time out here. I built this shed because throwing baseballs keeps my head on straight. I did
not
build it to inaugurate some sort of fairytale comeback. Do you understand that?”

I stared at the little piece of diamond we’d just made.

“No matter how well I may eventually seem to be throwing, and no matter what your all-knowing brother Everett may say, all I’m ever gonna do out here is toss the pitcher’s equivalent of harelip prayers. Okay?”

My tongue felt thick and dry now—not a hint of yak butter anywhere.

“Don’t think of it as baseball, Kade. Call it my hobby, or some weird kind of worship maybe. Call it psalmball, or shedball, or thumbball if you like. But remember it’s not baseball. It’s not a comeback. You’ve got to promise me that.”

A lump of sandstone lay in my throat. I couldn’t speak. But he waited. He waited till our eyes met, then bent my will like an arm wrestler bends a wrist: I had to nod to keep from breaking. “Okay,” he said, handing me his hammer. “Let’s pound in that plate.”

We did so. But I took no pleasure in it now. And when Papa stepped
back and sighed, “That’s it, such as it is …” he just looked like a worn-out millworker.

Mama banged on the kitchen window, signaling that dinner was ready. Papa waved and nodded. But he didn’t move. Tired as he was, he too seemed reluctant to leave the summery air and ballpark lighting. We walked up to the shed to turn off the lights in there, but I stepped onto the mound first, toed the rubber, and looked down the pipe at the batter’s box. It seemed a long way off. If it were me throwing I wasn’t sure I’d even hit the mattress. Papa eyed me, shook his head, and said, “Go stand in the box down there and make like a batter. I’ll show you a stance.”

I ran down to the wall, picked up the garden hoe, gripped it like a bat, and stepped into the box. But when I looked back at Papa, I was shocked: the distance between us had somehow shrunk to almost nothing. And with those naked bulbs blazing behind him he was unrecognizable—an ominous, mountainous shape blocking out the light. I took my best batter’s stance and gripped the hoe hard, but my father’s body was so unfamiliar, so confident and so
large
that I felt ludicrous. I watched him work his neck and shoulders loose, his left arm dangling all the while, limp as a hangman’s noose. I watched him peer at a catcher hidden in the wall at my back, shake off a sign, nod grimly at a second. I watched his lungs and hangman’s arm suddenly fill with air and energy, watched him swirl into a slow, full windup. But when he suddenly, violently hurled his right leg and left arm and whole shadowy being toward me, I shut my eyes, fell back out of the box, and landed flat on my backside—though I knew, or thought I knew, that his hand held no ball.

Papa snorted. He thought my fall was an act. I dusted my rear, forced a grin, and tried to pretend the same. “Shedball,” he said again, shutting off the lights. “Just harelip prayers, Kade. Don’t forget.”

I didn’t. But I didn’t forget, either, that some prayers just maybe, just might, receive answers.

What the U.S. Army figured, Hugh reports himself figuring at the time, was that a Pro Ballplayer was worth more against Koreans as morale boosters than as a common foot soldier. This became extra
true after hardly any Big League ballplayers got drafted in the Korean War due to how the owners of Big League Ballclubs were a bunch of regular Einsteins when it came to finding loopholes to keep their star players out of the military with. So the few stars the Army nabbed, they decided to show off, Hugh says. And the best way to do this, they figured, was to make a Morale Boosting Club out of them.

Sounds fun, doesn’t it, cheering up all the scared young recruits by playing exhibition ball for them instead of marching off to War with them? But think again sucker! Because the Team Of Stars was only one team, and to really boost morale they needed somebody to play against. And even though he’d been 14 and 2 for Triple A Skenechtudy and was on his way Upstairs, Hugh Chance was just Mister No-Face No-Name as far as your typical Army fan or officer was concerned. Such was how one of America’s finest young prospects came down with a splat on Baseball’s saddest excuse of a ballclub ever!

Known amongst themselves as The Goon Squad, they were mostly a bunch of scruddy Big League bench-warmers, bush leaguers, and as many as possible Oriental fellas to remind the cheering U.S. troops of the Korean enemy as the Star Squad knocked the snot out of them every night at Fort This or Fort That. What
about OUR morale?
the Goon Squad sometimes wondered. But to the Army’s way of thinking, morale boosting was pretty much a Punch and Judy type show intended to teach our lads in uniform to go reef on Communists the same rough way the Stars always reefed on the Goons.

It made for one weird brand of baseball, Hugh reports in retrospect. Especially since the Stars had a lieutenant who just happened to be an ex-Double A manager managing them, while meanwhile the Goons were skippered by this deadbeat sergeant who spent most of every game on a walkytalky taking orders from the lieutenant on exactly how that game should be thrown. That’s right folks! THROWN! The games were totally rigged is what I’m getting at! As long as they stank it up the Stars lieutenant let the Goons pretty much swing away so that things would seem lifelike to the dumber fools amongst the spectators. But if the Goons got the least little rally going, the lieutenant would kill it in a variety of several different ways.

One of his favorites was wiping Goon runners off the basepaths by ordering the sergeant to order his Goons to steal on the next pitch, then signalling his own catcher and pitcher to pitch a pitch-out. In this way the Star catcher would nail the runner by several miles, after which the fans heckled and jeckled the poor Goon all the way back to
the bench about how slow he was. Another neat trick of the lieutenant’s was how Goon pitchers were allowed to throw hard enough so that things didn’t look like sheer BP out there, but weren’t allowed to throw full speed fastballs, change-ups, or anything inside enough to be considered a brush-off, nor fast curves nor knucklers nor knock-downs nor any other major offensive type tool of the Hurling Trade. One last trick: gopherballs. These were phoned in by the lieutenant like pizzas over the walkytalky, which the Goon sergeant (waiter) relayed to his Goon pitchers (cooks) by picking his nose with his little finger, meaning that Hugh or whoever had to ooze over a nice no-hop fastball (pepperoni pizza) for the Star batter (pizza-eater) to clomp halfway to Hong Kong.

The results of these tricks? Every last game the Goon pitchers got royally destroyed.

One night at Fort Sill in the heat of battle though, Hugh got carried away and ignored several flagrant nose picks with the bases loaded, fanning two famous sluggers in a row to retire the side. So when he got back to the bench, there stood the lieutenant on the walkytalky, reading him off about how missed signals in Army Morale Booster Ball were Treachery and War Crimes and Court Martial Material. Ordering the big southpaw onto K.P. for about the two hundredth time, the lieutenant told Hugh if he repeated the mistake he would find himself in a snowy trench on the Mongol Border so fast his head would melt. And the worst part was how “Yes SIR! Very sorry SIR!” poor Hugh had to grovel inspite of being so sick of tossing gopherballs that snowy Mongol trenches sounded somewhat lovely and peaceful. What with the Big Leagues awaiting him however, and what with Laura, Marion, Everett and Peter all depending on Hugh for love, rent, groceries and such, he decided he’d better mind his pees and cues.