The Brothers K (38 page)

where Mama found it, recognized my handwriting, and pounced like a crow on a road kill.

So what did J. Edgar Babcock and Agent Double O Mama make of it? My guess is, the very worst they possibly could. With her straight and narrow knowledge of literature, I wouldn’t be surprised but what Mama paid my parody the supreme compliment by assuming that I had, out of sheer perversity, simply copied down some obscene drivel by an idiot named Carroll in order to pollute poor Irwin’s Jesus-loving mind. The Elder, however, expert as he was in the ways of Satan, had apparently formed a more colorful opinion: “Drool.”
Hmmm
. “Fingers in pants.”
Hmmmmmm …
I have no way of proving that he actually told Mama to start checking our rooms for evidence of pornography use, group masturbation parties or Babcock-knows-what other defilements. But I did come home from school an hour early one day to find Mama—months after she’d quit cleaning or even visiting our rooms—buried to the waist in under Everett’s mattress. When she finally backed out (empty-handed) and saw me standing in the doorway, she turned crimson as the OLY sign next to her head and began furiously stripping the bed, muttering,
“Filthy!
Just
filthy!”

She was right: what she and Babcock were up to
was
filthy. And in the end, it bore filthy results.

W
hen he worked for the Senators in the Forties and Fifties, G. O. Durham had a corner on a market which nobody else in professional baseball seemed interested in at the time. The Bull’s field of operation was the athletic wreck, the broken-down talent, the potential salvage operation. Here’s how Durham himself put it in a little “automobiographical [sic] confidence” he shared, late in life, with our family:

… If there is one thing besides money on God’s green earth this U.S. of A. has got more than anybody else of it is every type of used junk on earth. Including junk ballplayers. Yet the hirers and firers of today ain’t interested. Among the baseball thinking of today the tired old password is New! New! New!, so off they trot out both ends of the word through every damned dictatorship in every South and Central and Mexican America on earth trying to locate that short brown foxy Newness, totally ignoring the faithful black and white dogs right under
their lamebrained noses, right here at home on the range. That was why I built me a little operation that tapped into what we had the most of. I’m talking used cars and appliances here. I’m talking thrown rods and fried circuits, singles punchers who lost the punch, flamethrowers who lost the fire, sluggers who lost the meanness, wife or balls. I was a regular Statue of Liberty down there in Oklahoma. Give me your pooped and your poor was my motto, and I’d give ’em a sniff in return. Because if there was baseball in the blood, I’d smell it at a glance. I’d whiff it right through the street clothes, right through the injuries, right through the drink and divorces and gambling debts and every other type of crap. It’s been my one lifelong talent, this nose in the middle of this face here. And on the day I met Hugh Chance, let me tell you, he
reeked
. Lame arm, diaper-stench, bad attitude and all, the man reeked so bad of baseball I didn’t see how he could walk down a street on two legs. Seemed to me he ought to roll …

O
n the day Papa showed up lame-armed, bad-attituded and reeking of kid piss and baseball on Durham’s porch in Kincaid, Oklahoma (pop. 1010), in 1951, the Bull had started slinging around his nicknamesake the instant he opened the door. “Hugh Chance!” he burst out.

Papa nodded grimly, unable to hide the despair he felt at first sight of this pig-eyed, sweat-covered, beery-looking old Okie.

“Any kin to Tinkers to Evers to Frank Chance the first baseman?”

“No, sir.”

“How ’bout to Fat?”

“No,” Papa sighed.

“How ’bout to Last, then? Or our ol’ friend No?”

“Maybe Last,” Papa said. “But not No. Not yet.”

“You look a little down, Chance. What’s the trouble?”

“Double A
is
down,” Papa answered. “I’m just looking how I am.”

G.Q. shook his head. “Like an outfielder, Chance. That’s how you’re lookin’. It’s clear as beer.”

“What’s an outfielder supposed to look like?”

“A natural athlete,” Durham answered.

“Then what’s a pitcher look like?”

G.Q. fluffed up his paunch like a big feather pillow. “Me,” he snorted. “Too often anyhow. It’s the evil ‘at comes o’ the two-day workweek.”

With that he turned inside his big, shambling farmhouse, headed down the hall, and, when they reached the livingroom, raised a red dust cloud as he flopped down in an overstuffed chair. Housekeeping wasn’t
his strong suit. Furniture repair wasn’t either: Papa tried a wire-braced rocker close by the chair, but as the thing took his weight it gave off such a tremendous report that he flung himself out to one side. As he gathered himself up off the floor, though, he noticed the Bull smiling at him so serenely that he got the feeling Durham might seat all his prospects in the same chair on purpose, as some kind of crackpot reflex test. He tried the couch next, because it was biggest. It held. But so did the fat man’s interest in outfielders:

“Scoutin’ report says you hit .290 in Single A, .278 in Three A, with power in both.”

Papa nodded guardedly.

“So you hit like an outfielder too.”

“I’ve heard about you, Mr. Durham,” Papa sighed. “I mean about you being quite the salvage artist and all. But I’m a pitcher. It’s my calling. I’m going to heal up, then pitch again. Okay?”

“You got one choice, son,” the Bull said amicably. “You either bat a whole lot worse, or you don’t mind folks sayin’ you bat like an outfielder.”

“One choice is no choice,” Papa said. “I learned that much in the Army.”

G.Q. shook his head. “How you look at a thing, Chance, how you feel about a thing, there’s
always
choice in that.”

Papa eyed his new manager more carefully. No doubt about it, the man looked like a pig. But pigs, he remembered, could be very intelligent animals.

“That shoulder hurt your hitting any?” Durham asked.

“No,” Papa admitted. “It only hurts when I throw. Curves are worst, but speed’s bad too.”

“Ever play first base?”

“Never.”

“Can you catch the goddamn ball?”

“Yes.”

“Then hot damn!” the Bull cried, bursting up out of his chair and wheeling off toward one of his two beer-crammed refrigerators. “That seals it! This is great! This is good! Let’s celebrate!”

“Celebrate what?” Papa asked.

“My new first sacker, Hubert.”

“I told you, Mr. Durham,” Papa said coolly. “I’m a pitcher.”

G.Q. froze in front of his Number Two refrigerator, then turned and trudged, slow and beerless, all the way back to Papa’s couch. Once there he sat down right beside him (causing Papa to blush), looked at him
sadly, and then, with surprising quickness, lightly punched his left shoulder. Papa was on his feet, fists cocked, before he knew what he was doing. The only thing that kept him from decking his new manager was that Durham didn’t stand up. “Case dismissed,” was all he said. “Pitcher’s got an arm in that spot, son, not a gob o’ raw nerve ends.”

Half miserable, half furious, Papa began to pace. G.Q. stood, and headed back toward the kitchen. “I’m not disputin’ your vocation, son,” he said. “I’m just practicin’ mine. I manage ballplayers. You play ball. An’ I’m sayin’ that, if you play for me, all of you but your left arm is the new first sacker for the Kincaid Cornshuckers. I’m sayin’ that’s all the baseball gods wrote for you this year. I’m sayin’ if you don’t like it, go play for one of them teams hirin’ players who can’t even goddamn
throw.”

Fully awake now to the absurdity of his position, Papa paced faster, but kept his mouth shut. “As for healin’, Chance,” Durham added, “and as for the future, let the left arm and pitcher in you think on this: you make
one
hard throw, you get excited an’ fire that ball just
once
, all season, an’ I’ll ship you somewhere so bush you’ll need a goddamned machete just to find the mound. You got that?”

“No I don’t got that!” Papa fired back. “What if a runner’s going? What if I
have
to make a throw?”

“Whip off your glove an’ fling ’er right-handed!” Durham roared.

“I can’t
throw
right-handed!” Papa roared back.

“I like
ballplayers
, Chance, not worriers! An’ I like you, so you must be a ballplayer, so stop the goddang worryin’, will ya?”

Papa didn’t stop worrying, but he did pause to admire Durham’s logic.

“Shit, son!” snorted the Bull. “It’s Two A ball down here.
Throwin’
don’t matter.”

“It don’t? I mean, it doesn’t?”

“Hell
no
it don’t! It’s pure Yahooism in these leagues. Buncha numbnuts is what we basically got here, standin’ around waitin’ for talent to rain down like pigeon crap. Buncha anti-intellectuals pissin’ their lives away, waitin’ for God to up an’ turn ’em into Mickey Mantle.”

“Well, uh, I’m not worrying now, sir” (Papa tried to phrase it politely this time), “but what if, say, for instance, some runner was going to score from third, and I was holding the ball over at first?”

“Keeerist, son! What do
you
think? Just flip ’er to the nearest guy and let
him
fling it!” And with that Durham doddered off once more to his refrigerators, yammering, “My first sacker! Hot
damn!
This is good! This is fine! We gonna have an outfield, gonna have an infield, gonna play some offense, gonna play some defense. Hot
damn
, Hubert! We gonna
have us a year!” Meanwhile Papa thought about it: he imagined himself actually flipping the ball to his nearest teammate while enemy runners were streaking round the bases—and when he heard a soft snort, turned, and noticed Durham’s beady-bright pig eyes peering in over the icebox door, he realized that what he’d been imagining had been making him grin.
“Now
you’re gettin’ the picture!” G.Q. cackled.

Papa gave up completely, and started to laugh.

S
o in the summer of ’51—the summer I was born, though by then the birth of a baby boy was something my parents scarcely noticed, let alone mentioned to friends—Papa spent an anomaly season as a power-hitting but virtually nonthrowing first baseman (and G.Q. was right: no one took advantage of it), thereby rehabilitating not only his shoulder but his blithe love for the game. Meanwhile he and Mama found a surprisingly decent, dirt-cheap two-story frame farmhouse, planted the first garden they’d ever stayed put long enough to harvest, and Mama made some friends and located some child-care that enabled her to deal with four sub-school-age sons with a semblance of sanity, if not quite grace. So, come late September, even before G.Q. suggested it, they decided to winter over in Kincaid rather than return home to Grandawma’s cramped place in Pullman. Mama, in addition to tending the four of us, managed to harvest her garden and put up preserves, canned fruit and vegetables for the first time since marrying. And Papa took a full-time graveyard-shift job as night watchman at a Shell oil refinery, skipped sleep every Sabbath to babysit us boys while Mama went to church, then rushed off, still sleepless, to a square- and swing-dancers’ honky-tonk, where he held down an incredibly self-defeating Saturday night job as a combination bartender/janitor who the first half of the night poured booze down his patrons till they barfed, and the second half had to clean it up. Yet he and Mama both insist (from the safety of retrospection, anyway) that they’ve never loved a house or town or two-year chunk of family or baseball life more. The irony—as so often seems to happen—is that their unwilling departure was forced by Papa’s attainment of the very goal that had brought them to Oklahoma in the first place: his complete rejuvenation as a pitcher.

Three afternoons a week, all winter long, he and G. Q. Durham played an hour or so of indoor catch inside the local Moose Lodge. And one night in early winter, during one of these catch games, G.Q. announced, point-blank, that the straight fastball pitcher led “the sorriest damned baseball existence alive.” Papa had responded by firing in a fast one, and
saying (as Durham cursed and shook his stinging hand), “I’d’ve thought it was the
catcher
of the straight fastball pitcher.”

“Catcher’s got the second sorriest,” G.Q. winced. “But the pitcher’s got it worse. Predictability’s the killer. Game after game o’ standing out there, a complete surprise to nobody, nine o’ them versus the one o’ him, playin’ power versus power till his arm falls out its hole. I say that’s- no way to live, Hubert. I say that’s—”

“Walter Johnson seemed to like it all right,” Papa interrupted.

“I’ll come up with the big league examples round here!” Durham roared. “You know damn well that for every Johnson there’s ten thousand Randy Crudenskis.”

“Who’s Randy Crudenski?” Papa asked.

“Now you’re gettin’ the picture,” G.Q. answered. “An’ Crudenski was faster than you and Johnson both.”

Papa smiled, and tossed an apologetically slow curve.

“What slays me in your case, Hubert, is the waste. A fastballer with brains like you an’ junk like me could be deadly for decades. But somethin’ in even the smart fastballer hates his own brains. Somethin’ in him just
pines
for that four- or five-year career endin’ with the ripped-out shoulder or shredded elbow.”

“I don’t long for that, Gale,” Papa said.

“Then shall we do somethin’ about it?”

“How do we start?”

“Maybe with a big league example besides Johnson, huh? Were you aware before we met, for instance, that I myself was once a highly successful hurler?”

Honest to a fault, Papa shook his head no.

“Well now, I take that as a compliment,” Durham lied. “Everybody knows G.Q. the Junkman, but almost nobody remembers Gale Durham the pitcher. And do you know why?”

Papa didn’t.

“Because the same spirit that infused my pitches infused a total lack of memory of those pitches. What’s that grin? You think I’m joking? Hey! Listen here. You ever hear of two fellas name of Foxx an’ DiMaggio?”