The Twilight Zone: Complete Stories (6 page)

In the seventh inning Mouth McGarry took his fifth walk over to the mound and this time didn’t return to the bench till he’d motioned to the bullpen for Casey’s relief—a very eager kid, albeit a nervous one, who chewed tobacco going to the mound and got violently sick as he crossed the third-base line because he swallowed a piece. Coughing hard, he arrived at the mound and took the ball from Mouth McGarry. Casey solemnly shoved his mitt into his hip pocket and took the long walk back toward the showers.

At ten minutes to midnight the locker room had been emptied. All the players save Casey had gone back to the hotel. Bertram Beasley had left earlier—on a stretcher in the sixth inning. In the locker room were a baseball manager who produced odd grunts from deep within his throat and kept shaking his head back and forth and a kindly white-haired old man who built robots. Casey came out of the shower, wrapped in a towel. He smiled gently at Mouth and then went over to his locker where he proceeded to dress.

“Well?” Mouth shouted at him. “Well? One minute he’s three Lefty Groves, the next minute he’s the cousin to every New York Giant who ever lived. He’s a tanker. He’s a nothing. All right—you wanna tell me, Casey? You wanna explain? You might start by telling me how one man can throw nine pitched balls and give up four singles, two doubles, a triple and two home runs!”

The question remained unanswered. Stillman looked toward Casey and said very softly, “Shall I tell him?”

Casey nodded apologetically.

Stillman turned toward McGarry “Casey has a heart,” he said quietly.

Mouth fumed. “So? Casey has a heart! So I know he’s gotta heart! So this ain’t news, prof! Tell me something that is!”

“The thing is,” Casey said in his first speech over three sentences since McGarry had met him. “The thing is, Mr. McGarry, I just couldn’t strike out those poor fellahs. I didn’t have it in me to do that—to hurt their feelings. I felt—I felt compassion!” He looked toward Stillman as if for confirmation.

Stillman nodded. “That’s what he’s got, Mr. McGarry. Compassion. See how he smiles?”

Casey grinned obediently and most happily, and Stillman returned his smile. “You see, Mr. McGarry,” Stillman continued. “You give a person a heart—particularly someone like Casey, who hasn’t been around long enough to understand things like competitiveness or drive or ego. Well,” he shrugged, “that’s what happens.’’

Mouth sat down on the bench, unscrewed the bottle of pills and found it was empty. He threw the bottle over his shoulder. “That’s what happens to
him
,” he said. “Shall I tell you what happens to me? I go back to being a manager of nine gleeps so old that I gotta rub them down with formaldehyde and revive them in between innings.” He suddenly had a thought and looked up at Casey. “Casey,” he asked, Don’t you feel any of that compassion for the Brooklyn Dodgers?”

Casey smiled back at him. “I’m sorry, Mr. McGarry,” he said. “It’s just that I can’t strike out fellahs. I can’t bring myself to hurt their careers. Dr. Stillman thinks I should go into social work now. I’d like to help people. Right, Dr. Stillman?”

“That’s right, Casey,” Stillman answered.

“Are you going?” Casey asked McGarry as he saw the manager head for the door.

Mouth nodded.

“Well good-by, Mr. McGarry,” Casey said. “And thank you for everything.”

Mouth turned to him. The grin on his face was that of dying humanity all over the world. “Don’t mention it,” he said.

He sighed deeply and walked out to the warm August evening that awaited him and the black headlines on a newspaper stand just outside the stadium that said, “I told you so” at him, even though the lettering spelled out, “CASEY SHELLED FROM MOUND.” A reporter stood on the corner, a guy McGarry knew slightly.

“What about it, McGarry?” the reporter asked. “What do you do for pitchers now?”

Mouth looked at him dully. “I dunno,” he sighed. “I just feel them one by one and whoever’s warm—”

He walked past the reporter and disappeared into the night, a broken-nosed man with sagging shoulders who thought he heard the rustle of pennants in the night air, and then realized it was three shirts on a clothesline that stretched across two of the adjoining buildings.

From Rod Serling’s closing narration, “The Mighty Casey,”

The Twilight Zone
, scheduled for telecast March 25, 1960,

CBS Television Network.

A BASEBALL FIELD-LONG ANGLE SHOT

It is empty and in absolute quiet.

NARRATOR’S VOICE

Once upon a time there was a major league team called the Brooklyn Dodgers who during the last year of their existence as a ball team wound up in last place and shortly thereafter wound up in oblivion. They are rarely if ever mentioned in these parts again. Rumor has it that a ball club on the West Coast is the residue of what was left of the original ball club.

(a pause)

And on occasion in a dark bar off Flatbush Avenue, someone might whisper the name of a certain pitcher with an exceptional left hand. Somebody else will softly murmur the question—whatever happened to the mighty Casey?

(a pause)

No, you won’t find any of the answers in the records. Though they are available should anyone be interested by checking under “B” for baseball in The Twilight Zone.

FADE TO BLACK

Walter Bedeker lay on his bed waiting for the doctor. He wore a heavy, wool bathrobe over heavy wool pajamas, and had a heavy wool scarf wrapped tightly around his head and knotted under the chin in a giant bow. On the nightstand next to him was a tray full of bottles. There were pills, lotions, antibiotics, nasal sprays, throat sprays, ear drops, nose drops, three boxes of Kleenex and a book titled,
How To Be Happy Though Bedridden
. He stared dourly up at the ceiling then cocked an irritated eye toward the bedroom door, beyond which he could hear his wife’s footsteps walking from kitchen to living room.

Ethel his wife was healthy. Oh God, she was healthy! Like a horse was Ethel. Never even had a cold. But he, Walter Bedeker, went from crisis to crisis, ailment to ailment, agonizing pain to agonizing pain.

Walter Bedeker was forty-four years old. He was afraid of the following: death, disease, other people, germs, drafts and everything else. He had one interest in life, and that was Walter Bedeker; one preoccupation, the life and well-being of Walter Bedeker; one abiding concern about society; if Walter Bedeker should die, how would it survive without him. In short, he was a gnome-faced little man who clutched at disease the way most people hunger for security.

Ethel entered his room for the fifth time that hour to even out his blankets, fluff up his pillow. He looked at her jaundice-eyed and didn’t say anything except to groan slightly when she helped him put his head back down on the pillow.

“Head still ache, darling?” Ethel asked him.

“Ache, Ethel, is not the word for it,” he told her through a taut mouth. “Ache is a mild inconvenience. What I have is an agony. What I have is a living torture!”

Ethel made a brave attempt at a sympathetic smile. Walter never talked of his ailments in anything less than superlatives and this was his fifth stay-in-bed that month. The door chimes rang and she was unable to keep the look of relief from crossing her features. Walter recognized it instantly.

“Can’t stand being in the room with me, can you,” he said to her. “Sick people bore you, don’t they?” He turned away to look at the wall to his right. “That is the tragedy of illness,” he said to the wall. “The fleeting compassion of your so-called loved ones!”

“Oh, Walter—” Ethel began, and then stopped. She shrugged resignedly and went to answer the front door.

The doctor was waiting there with his black bag and he followed Ethel into the bedroom.

“Well, how are you feeling today, Mr.Bedeker?” he asked. The doctor was tired and his feet hurt. He hated house calls unless they were emergencies and Walter Bedeker’s beckonings were never emergencies. He had difficulty keeping the tiredness out of his voice.

“How do I look?” Bedeker barked at him.

The doctor smiled at him and said, “Rather well, as a matter of fact.”

Bedeker’s face screwed up like a persimmon and mimicked him fiercely. “Rather well, as a matter of fact, huh? Well I can assure you, doctor, I’m not rather well. I’m not in the least bit well. I’m a very sick man. Which you’ll soon discover once you examine me. But I want you to tell me the worst. I don’t want any cushioning. I’m not a coward, doctor.”

“I’m sure you aren’t. Hold your arm out, Mr. Bedeker. I’d like to take your pressure first.”

Bedeker thrust out a remarkably well muscled arm for a man his age and the doctor wrapped the pressure cloth around it.

Ten minutes later he was putting most of his impedimenta back in the bag while Bedeker stared at him glumly.

“Well, doctor?”

The doctor closed the bag and turned to Bedeker without speaking.

“I asked you a question, doctor. How bad is it?”

“It isn’t bad at all.” the doctor said. “As a matter of fact, it’s quite good. You have no temperature. Pressure normal. Respiration normal. Heart action normal. No infection. Throat clear. Nasal passages clear. Ears clear.”

“What about the pains in my back and side? what about four sleepless nights in a row? What about
that
?” Bedeker shouted triumphantly.

The doctor shook his head. “What about that? ‘That,’ Mr. Bedeker, is psychosomatic!”

Bedeker’s eyes grew large. “Psychosomatic? You’re trying to tell me that I’m sick only in the mind?”

“Something like that, Mr. Bedeker,” the doctor answered quietly. “There’s nothing wrong with you, really, except the ailments you manufacture for yourself. Your pains, Mr. Bedeker, are imaginary. Your inability to sleep is a case of nerves—but nothing more. In short, Mr. Bedeker, you’re a very healthy man!”

Walter Bedeker smiled sadly at his favorite confidant, the wall on the right, and talked to it, occasionally jerking his head toward the doctor.

“See? This is a doctor. Four years premed. Four years medical school. Two years internship. Two years residency. And what is he? I ask you, what is he?” Then he shouted, “A quack!”

The doctor had to smile in spite of himself. Ethel came in on tiptoe, and whispered to the doctor, “What’s the prognosis?”

Bedeker shouted, “Don’t ask him. The man’s an idiot!”

“Walter, darling,” Ethel said patiently, “Don’t excite yourself.”

“Don’t whisper,” Bedeker shouted. “You’re looking at half of my troubles right there,” he said to the doctor. “This woman. This awful woman who runs around whispering all day long to make me think I’m sick even if I’m not. And I am,” he added quickly. “I’m lying here at death’s door and who’s ushering me out? A quack and this whispering woman without a mind!”

“I’ll call tomorrow, Mrs. Bedeker!” the doctor said jovially.

“There’ll be no need to call,” Bedeker answered. “just come on over with the death certificate and fill it out.”

“Oh, Walter—” Ethel said piteously.

“Don’t drench me with those crocodile tears of yours, idiot,” Bedeker screamed at her. “She’d be so happy to get rid of me, doctor, I just can’t tell you.”

The doctor was no longer smiling as he went out, followed by Ethel. At the front door he looked at her very closely. She must have been a very attractive woman in her day. God, to be married to that man for as long as she’d been married to him!

“How is he, doctor?” Ethel asked.

“Mrs. Bedeker,” the doctor said, “your husband is one of the healthiest patients I have. If he were up in front of me for an exam to get into the combat Marines, I’d pass him with flying colors.”

Ethel shook her head dubiously. “He’s sick most of the time. He won’t let me open a window in the house. He says for every cubic foot of air, there are eight million, nine hundred thousand germs.”

The doctor threw back his head and laughed. “He’s probably right.”

Ethel said worriedly, “And he’s just quit his job. The fifth job he’s quit since the first of the year. He says they make him work in a draft.”

The doctor stopped laughing and looked at this small, comely woman in front of him. “Mrs. Bedeker,” he said softly, “there isn’t a thing in the world I can do for your husband. Or any other doctor for that matter—except, perhaps, a psychiatrist.”

Ethel’s hand went to her mouth in a shocked gesture. “A psychiatrist,” she said.

The doctor nodded. “His trouble is in his mind This awful fear of disease. This phobia about death. I suppose I’m oversimplifying it when I say there’s nothing wrong with him because in a sense there really is. This constant worrying about himself is an illness of a sort. Has he always been this frightened?”

“Ever since I can remember,” said Ethel. “When he was courting me he told me he was in the last stages of T.B. and only had a week to live.” She looked away reminiscently and sadly. “I only married him because I felt so sorry for him—!” She bit her lip. “What I meant, doctor—”

The doctor patted her on the arm and said, “I understand. I’ll give you a call tomorrow.” He looked closely at her again, reached in his pocket for a pad and scribbled down a prescription. “Here,” he said, handing it to her. “You look a little rundown yourself. This is for vitamins.”

Bedeker’s voice came shrieking from the bedroom. “Ethel! There’s a draft in here and I feel a coma coming on!”

“Yes, darling,” Ethel hurriedly called. “I’ll be right in.”

“Don’t forget about the vitamins,” said the doctor, wincing a little at the sound of Bedeker’s voice. “Good-by, Mrs. Bedeker.”

Ethel shut the door behind him and rushed back into the bedroom. Bedeker lay on the bed, his head off the pillow, and waved weakly toward the window to his left. “Ethel,” he whined at her, “there’s freezing air blasting into the room!”

The window was open about a fifth of an inch. As she put it down, Bedeker half rose in bed.

“Do you know how many germs come in one cubic foot of air, Ethel?”