The Brothers K (43 page)

Sears chuckled politely, but he’d grown bored with all of Hultz’s details. “So that’s ol’ Junkface out there, is it?” he said.

“Pay attention, Buddy. Junkface was the phone guy.”

“Whatever you say, Johnny.”

T
he following afternoon, when an assistant coach gave Papa an opportunity to show his stuff, Johnny Hultz—despite his opinion of G.Q.’s
phone call—slipped away from the infield drill he’d been running, stepped into the shade of a dugout, and soon saw that the sinking fastball really was incredible. Six batters, four grounders and two K’s later, Buddy Sears joined him in the dugout, flashed an incredulous grin, and said, “You weren’t makin’ any o’ that shit up yesterday, were you?”

Hultz shook his head.

“Way to go, Junkman!” Sears roared as Papa stepped off the mound to give the next prospect a turn.

“Name’s Chance,” said Hultz.

“Whatever,” Buddy said, and laughed.

And with that word, “whatever,” Hultz fell from elation to depression—because on the basis of pitching alone he knew already that Hugh Chance deserved to make his team. But Buddy’s “whatever” underlined the inarguable fact that his pitching, like his name, didn’t make any difference: minor league baseball just isn’t a gray-hair’s game.

F
ive days and two player cuts later there was still no one in camp who could hit the Kamikaze. And everyone knew Papa Chance by name. And everybody who wasn’t a meathead admired him in so many different ways that, like some esteemed old pro dropped down from the bigs, he was usually accompanied by an entourage of young players. Some just studied him in silence, some joined him at meals to badger him for stories about the old days, and some showed up at his door at night in search of a little discreet, pressure-free advice on a hitting or pitching or personal problem. As for John Hultz, he couldn’t take his eyes off Papa Chance when he took to a mound either—but the entourage business was really starting to burn him up. Not only could the gimp still pitch, he was the People’s Choice as manager! And any day now Hultz himself—the Organization’s Choice—was going to have to alienate his players and betray his own baseball instincts when he told this knowledgeable, courageous, deserving old duffer to pack his bags and head back off into whatever oblivion he’d come from. For a while he considered letting Sears do his dirty work. But Buddy, for all his knowledge of pitching, was such a tactless old blob at times. Chance deserved better. “Especially,” Hultz thought, “from a guy who never could hit him.”

So late that afternoon, when he found his doomed prospect deftly slapping fungoes out into a prancing, dancing band of hormoneous young outfielders, he puffed himself up into something he hoped would appear dispassionate and managerial, then barked, far louder than he’d intended, “Chance!”

Papa turned and scowled.

Embarrassed by his own bark, Hultz let the air out of himself, scratched his aching head, and muttered, “What the hell are you doing here, anyhow?”

“Hittin’ fungoes,” Papa said, turning to slap out another one.

“That’s not what I mean,” Hultz sighed. “Come on. Come talk to me.” And with that he marched miserably off toward the one unused diamond of the camp’s five. Papa handed his fungo bat to a kid not much older than Everett, shrugged, and jogged to catch up.

“Okay,” Hultz said as he paced furiously back and forth in front of a waist-high wall of motor-oil ads. “Let’s hear it. What, in your own words, did you come here for?”

Noting the man’s obvious frustration, Papa opted for the barest kind of truth. “To play some ball,” he said.

Hultz shook his head. “‘Hittin’ fungoes.’ ‘Play some ball.’ That’s cowboy talk, Chance. Let’s try sentences.”

Papa looked Hultz in the eye, and in a perfect deadpan said, “Sorry—pardner.”

Both men laughed, and for a moment Hultz relaxed. Then he noticed the crow’s-feet the laughter brought out around Papa’s eyes. “Damn!” he blurted. “How old
are
you, anyway?”

“Thirty-five,” Papa said. “But I turn thirty-six May fifth.”

When Hultz just gaped at the thoroughness of his reply, Papa smiled and added. “It’s too old not to be honest.”

“That’s not honesty,” Hultz muttered. “That’s attempted suicide.”

Papa grinned. Hultz didn’t. In fact, he said, “Chance. You make me mad.”

Papa tried to read his face, couldn’t, and so asked the obvious: “Why?”

“Because you’re a gentleman and a baseball scholar, the players all love you, your geek-show pitching is the talk of the camp, and if this place was run like the
Queen for a Day
show you’d bust the applause meter and tote home the new Frigidaire. But that’s not how things work here.”

“I understand,” Papa said.

“Then you must understand that your age just flat puts me in an impossible situation.”

Papa shrugged, but he didn’t nod. He wasn’t
that
suicidal.

“You’re just about my age, Chance, so it should be easy to put yourself in my shoes. Could
you
tell the Pirate brass you wanted to bump some young kid they’ve been scouting since high school to make room for a hot thirty-six-year-old prospect with a fake toe and weird thumb who hitched
here and is broke too and has twelve kids by the way, so they’d better pay him a bonus and an extra-big salary?”

Papa smiled at the description, but said, “For the right prospect, I might.”

“Christ!” Hultz protested. “You said you were too old not to be honest!”

Papa shrugged. “Guess I’m not as old as you thought.”

The two men eyed each other. The two men liked each other. It didn’t solve the problem. “Just what did you want out of this camp?” Hultz asked, pacing furiously again. “You know this is a kiddies’ league. You know the key word here is ‘potential.’ Why did you come? What can I possibly do for you? Tell me your thinking, Chance. And try to
impress
me this time, dammit.”

But Papa just shrugged again, and murmured, “Everybody likes doing what they do best.”

“No way!” Hultz shook his head. “That’s not
near
good enough.”

“Maybe not,” Papa said. “But try my cleats on here a minute, Mr. Hultz.”

“John to you.”

“Okay, John. This is a baseball camp, and I’m here playing ball. There’s guys trying to hit here, and I’ve been gettin’ ’em out. There’s guys trying to pitch here, and I’ve been pitching better. But they’re teammates too. So when they come to me for help, I tell ’em what I know. As I always understood it, these things are the object of the game. And if that doesn’t explain me being here, if being the right age is the object now, then I don’t see how some fancy speech is gonna help.”

After a silence, Hultz nodded and said, “Better. Very good, in fact. But slip my shoes on again and you’ll see I
need
that fancy speech. Because I like you. But if I tell my bosses I’m making room for your bones on my bench, it’ll take magic words just to keep ’em from slappin’ a straitjacket on me. So come on. Help me think.”

Papa tried. He groped through his mind for some sort of argument, saw the hopelessness, felt panic, started to speak anyway, but then realized he couldn’t, or didn’t want to. All he really wanted was to remain where he was—to go on smelling the scent of the desert and grass of the five green diamonds; to go on listening to the varied pops and cracks of leather and bad wits, fungo bats and bubble-gum wads. And not for a week or two. He wanted measureless amounts, days and days. He had promised himself and us, before leaving Camas, that he’d enjoy what was enjoyable here and head home when it was over. But he’d forgotten something: this
too was a home. It was a world he’d loved all his life, had never left willingly, had always feared leaving. And here it was: that same old fear, strong and sick-making as the first time it hit, half a life ago, when he’d torn up his shoulder at a Sox camp. Feeling it again, knowing how it would scourge him if he let it grow, or poison him if he shoved it down and took it home to his family, Papa realized he had no choice but to try, right in front of John Hultz, to call up the one tool that might help him.

So that’s what he did. Turning a little to one side, he shut his eyes, relaxed his shoulders as if before a pitch, took a slow, deep breath, and began conjuring the ten thousand harelip throws he’d made in his backyard shed. With that one long breath—O
Nyeesus!
—he summoned the rain, the muggy heat, the fatigue and despair, called up the thwams on siding, silly thuds in the dirt, helpless punching of walls, then reached deep for the fruit
(How snorely we need nthee!)
of that two-year effort, which was simply the ability not to judge a pitch—not the worst or best of them—but just to sling out what was in him, come what may …

He’d been gone maybe ten seconds when he turned back to John Hultz. But when he returned, he was calm. “I figured it might come to this,” he said. “And I’ve got no magic words for your bosses, John. I’m just here because I work in a papermill, which doesn’t come natural to me. Whereas playing ball, that does come natural. From the day I could hold a ball I’ve played this game. And when I’ve had to quit—from injuries or whatever—my insides have kind of quit on me too. So soon as I could I’d be back at it, even gimpy, even if it was just in my own backyard. I’ve never used up the ballplayer in me, John. I doubt I ever will. And since you’re about to boot me outta here—no offense taken, and none intended—I’d rather go hit a few more fungoes to the boys there than stand here jawing with you.”

With that, Papa smiled and offered his hand. And Hultz shook it. But he couldn’t smile back.

T
he leap from Papa Chance to a beefy red close-up of Buddy Sears was a major comedown for Manager Hultz—and he’d already been down. It didn’t help matters when Buddy’s first words turned out to be: “So what’d you tell the old fuck?”

“The truth!” Hultz barked.

“Which one?” Sears cackled, oblivious to Hultz’s mood, as usual. “Goodbye? So long? Or adios, Gramps?”

“What I told him,” Hultz said, staring in dismay at an incredibly
cloudy, viscous-looking bead of sweat dangling from the tip of Buddy’s nose, “is that there is no justice in this world.”

“Well,” Buddy said, “leastways the old fuck won’t have to wait long for the next.”

Hultz took a hard look at Sears as he began howling at his own wit, glanced back out at the “old fuck” hitting fungoes, looked back at Buddy—and had a sudden idea that made him smile so hugely that Sears, thinking his joke had finally been appreciated, started howling all over again …

The next morning Hultz made an early phone call to Pittsburgh. By lunchtime he’d made a dozen more—some to other camps in Arizona and Florida, some up to Saskatchewan, one back to Pitt, one to Kincaid, Oklahoma. The very next morning he received a call from Pittsburgh which he savored so much that he let it marinate in his mind all day. Then, after dinner, he phoned Papa Chance. “Meet me at my office!” he barked. “I’ve got one last question for you.”

Papa was carrying his suitcase and wearing his Goin’ Home clothes—plaid shirt, brown leather belt, baggy tan trousers—when he walked into Hultz’s office. “One question, before you go,” the manager repeated.

“Fire away,” Papa said.

“I don’t know what’s got into our front office, but they’ve taken it into their cantankerous heads to shunt poor Buddy Sears up—or down, depending on how you look at it—to our Two A club in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. So what I was wondering, my one question was, would you care to take his job as our pitching coach?”

Papa was completely stunned by this. So stunned, in fact, that he had to shut his eyes a while, in order to conjure another pure shedball response. When he was through, though, he’d come up with a regular Kamikaze. “I’d like it a
lot,”
he said, “on one condition.”

Hultz was immediately suspicious. “Name it,” he said.

“Make me your stupid-situation reliever,” Papa told him.

“My what?”

“Can I explain?”

“You damn well better.”

“Baseball’s a nice game, John, but we both know that the summers get muggy, the season gets long, there’s the bus and plane rides, the extra innings and packed schedules, the loneliness, the drinking, and all the rest of it. What I’m saying is that sooner or later there comes some nights when the players’ brains and bodies turn to Jell-O and the games get kind of strange. The result is what I call the ‘stupid situation.’”

With no sign of comprehension, Hultz repeated, “Stupid situation.”

“Like the butt end of a July doubleheader, say, where the other team scores fourteen runs in two innings, and you run through six or eight pitchers, and the fans all leave and the bullpen’s empty, but you’ve still got three more outs to play. Or all those late-season games, after the team’s been stripped by the big leagues and is out of the standings, where you’re still on the road and there’s a—”

“What the hell are you driving at?” Hultz snapped, waving his hand like his face was full of flies.

“Okay. All right. Listen, John. I’m
very
grateful for this offer, I’d
love
to be your pitching coach, and I’d throw body and soul into the job. But what I’m driving at is, I also want to play some ball—even if it’s only as your stupid-situation reliever, and that—”

“God
damn
it, Chance! This is the opportunity of a
lifetime
and you’re about to waste it! You’re a baseball nonentity! You’re a
zero
, fella! And I stuck my neck
way
out to get you this shot!”

“I may be a gimp and a zero and all sorts of other low-down things, John. But as your potential pitching coach it’s my duty to tell you that, for three or so innings every other day, I’m also the best pitcher you’ve got.”

“Arrogance will get you nowhere!”

“Honesty isn’t arrogance, John.”

“Okay, okay. So you can throw. I admit that. But you’re not thinking like a coach here, Chance. Say you just worked your boys hard, for weeks, on some crucial technique, then strolled out on the mound, used it yourself, and got shelled. See what happened? You just lost all your credibility. You just painted the ugly picture that erased your thousand wise words.”