Thirst (5 page)

The rivalry went on for years and decades until a mild late-winter afternoon that promised spring, when the streets of both cities rang with the high-pitched cries of newsboys peddling extras. The news was this: Each team had traded all its players to the other, an even swap.

In the first half hour, hardly anyone would buy the papers, not believing that they were “for real.” Then the outraged fans turned on the newsboys, nearly lynching one of them in Aix until the police restored order.

The citizens of each city did not know what to make of the news, once it was confirmed by the teams’ front offices. Men furrowed their brows around beer taps. Fathers took their sons for long, stone-kicking walks, their arms on the boys’ shoulders. The two teams’ owners, an Aix rail magnate and a Petrozavodsk steel
tycoon, had reached agreement in secret, without consulting their business partners or the press, and as it turned out, the arrangement was more complicated than the newspapers first reported. Certain business interests of the two were also exchanged, other assets consolidated, recapitalized, or eliminated; a foundry was involved; so was a railroad right-of-way and a bank. The ballplayers were in fact a minor consideration, a throw-in at the last minute. The newspapers could not determine which of the plutocrats got the better deal.

Fate had decreed that the two teams would open the 1931 season in Aix’s Charlemagne Field. The game was sold out and the ferry from Petrozavodsk had to augment its schedule, but the fans who filed into the ballpark that day were subdued and wary, at odds with themselves, as if unsure what kind of sporting event they had come to see. They gingerly took their seats, shoulder-to-shoulder with the other city’s fans. When the Aix team, composed entirely of players who until a few weeks earlier had been Petrozavodsk Boilermakers—even the manager, coaches and batboys had been traded—took their defensive positions, there was a scattering of applause and boos, all of it tentative. The fans asked themselves for whom had they rooted all these years: the abstraction called a “home team” or its tangible constituent parts?

Here, scraping the foreign dirt around first base with his cleats, was Emil Hockstader, the powerful right-handed cleanup hitter who had led the Boilermakers to the pennant three times in the past decade. He was
wearing Aix’s red, blue, and white. Coming to the plate was Hector Sauvage, the base-churning leadoff hitter and base stealer that had bedeviled a generation of Petrozavodsk catchers. Just the year before, in an incident burned into the hearts of Petrozavodsk fans, he had slid hard into the Boilermakers’ second baseman and was led off the field under police protection. Now he wore the Petrozavodsk traveling grays.

The trade was an abomination, of course. A non sequitur. An overthrow of the natural order. But there it was, for all to see, on the newly manicured basepaths and lush green outfield. Further questions nagged at the fans. How did the virtues of a ballplayer transmit itself to the city for which he played, or vice versa? How could our heroes win glory for the other side as they had for us? Why was it “good” when the home team won?

In subsequent years, some fans continued to root for their favorite players in the opposite city, sometimes even when they played against the fans’ own home team; others deferred, minimized, or reversed their support during those particular games. Other fans maintained their partisanship in favor of their reconstituted home team, perhaps developing a dislike for the departed, once-beloved players by dwelling on those professional traits that had once secretly irritated them, the hitch in the swing, the insolent home run trot. But few fans were as passionate as they had been, and their sense of their hometowns’ distinctiveness gradually faded until the two cities’ expanding peripheries merged into a single suburban sprawl, and the cities themselves dissolved into the river’s mists.

Harmon Field in Detroit, in 1948. The move was reluctant. Although he announced that the introduction of night baseball was made out of “economic necessity,” the stadium’s owner, Walter J. Harmon, could not understand, despite the explanations of his front office staff, what those necessities were. He continued to maintain, even in public, that the sport was “meant to be played in the daylight.”

Horace Watkins, a veteran baseball reporter covering the first night game for the following afternoon’s issue of the Detroit
Independent,
agreed, especially as the new lighting system had not yet been extended to the press box. Did anyone care whether he wrote his story?

In fact, all the stands were near dark, the fans invisible, their cheers part of the ether, like static. Nor could Watkins see the other writers upstairs with him, except for the occasional incandescence at the end of a cigar or cigarette and the reflection of the lit field on a pair of eyeglasses. The few comments they made during the course of the game arrived in his vicinity disembodied, nearly inaudible.

The field, however, was as bright as day; no, it was much brighter. It glowed as if its light were coming not from the arc lamps suspended above his head, but from beneath a translucent skin. The grass and the infield dirt radiated their colors from garish, heretofore invisible, regions of the spectrum. Nothing was real. The ballfield’s measures were hemmed by the moth-filled night, with the left fielder lost beyond the edge of the dark. The
features of the players were difficult to distinguish in the glare, and the relentless light destroyed their shadows, robbing them of dimension and substance. Running around on the flat, foreshortened field, the athletes were mere schematics, electrified ghosts, as if—Watkins realized years later, after Harmon Field was torn down, lights and all, and the
Independent
had folded—the game were being played on a television screen.

Chuck Murry of the Seattle Pilots, with fifty-six in his only plate appearance in the major leagues, September 28, 1969. Now a part-owner of a Ford dealership in Vancouver, Murry sometimes wakes after midnight in his completely darkened room next to his wife, who in sleep smells like warm bread. For a few moments he lies there disconcerted. He knows he’s at home and in bed, but it seems that he is also back in Seattle’s now-demolished Sicks Stadium, the one-day, one big league chance given him after he’d kicked around the minors for eight years not yet exhausted. He cannot make out the bedroom but he can feel the tape around the bat handle and the dirt under his cleats.

Distracted by the crowd and his own overheated awareness of where he was, he had taken the first pitch, the best he would ever see again, for a strike. The next two balls, sophisticated sliders, were well outside, but he almost went after them, eliciting a tiny, wicked smile from the pitcher, Wallace Porter. He laid off the fourth pitch, a strike at the knees, and then realized he was
nearly back in the dugout without having swung his bat. Smelling his eagerness, Porter crossed him up next on a change-up, but Murry hung on and dribbled the ball left of the third base line, determined to survive.

Indeed, the rookie now dug himself into the batter’s box as if it were a foxhole, swinging at everything he could reach, fouling twenty-one consecutive pitches into the net protecting the fans behind the plate, Reserved Admission, the Pilots’ dugout, the press box, down the runway into the clubhouse, at the first base coach, and against the toes of the home plate umpire. “C’mon, straighten it out,” shouted someone from his own team, less encouraging than impatient. The umpire swore after he was hit, and not at the blind chance of such a mishap but at Murry himself. The batter, however, was enjoying his cuts. He was disappointed when Porter, tiring, nearly threw wild and he had to take ball three.

Even with a full count Murry hacked at everything thrown at him, hitting each pitch. He popped up balls that cleared the height of the stadium and returned three rows into the box seats, forcing the catcher into fruitless wrestling matches with the paying customers. He smoked a liner against the rolled rain tarp, which responded with a pained thud. He slammed Porter’s forty-first offering 450 feet into the roped-off area of the upper deck, just inches from the foul pole. The ball rattled around like a loose part until a boy sprinting from the $1.25 section behind third pried it from another in a desperate tussle under the folded seats. Murry was still watching them, wondering why they were not in
school, when the next pitch came. He casually fouled it behind him, hardly even looking at it.

He had stopped thinking about getting a base hit or striking out, or even of putting the ball in play. He expected to foul off balls to the end of time, forever drawing from the stadium’s supply (the management would have to call for more), forever dispensing souvenirs of this historic event among the game’s spectators. Time had stopped; each foul ball further dilated the moment. He was no longer tense or in any way muddled. In fact, he saw (and now often recalls) everything: a blister above the first baseman’s lips, the batboy kneeling by the rack, a pretty woman in the season boxes who looked like his own mother had when he was younger.

It was a cool, autumn afternoon, more the season for football. Shadows had overtaken the playing field, and all that was left of summer (Apollo 11, Woodstock) was a brilliant bolt of light against the sparsely populated stands in right field. A pale, vitreous moon rose over the scoreboard. There are still afternoons like this in Pompeii, Massachusetts, where Murry had grown up. Three thousand miles west, he could taste (slapping the ball to the left of the leaping third baseman) the air seared by drying leaves and hear (slamming it against the catcher’s mask) the last-minute assignations made by students in the high school parking lot.

Each memory is telescoped inside another, as all would be at the end of life and, if the world of living things is lucky, as our lives would be left to us in death: remembering remembering remembering, and so on. Murry was astonished when Porter’s sixty-second pitch
passed through his bat, emerging on the other side of it into the catcher’s glove. The pop sounded like a champagne bottle being opened, and he recalled a New Year’s Eve that had not yet come. “All right,” said the umpire. “Get your ass out of here.” Murry, however, does not recall the return to the dugout, and as sleep gently retakes him, his memory turns back in confusion to the thought that the at bat would last forever. A happy man, he curls his body around that of his wife, as if he were crowding the plate.

F
or reasons that had become unknown, a large number of cats occupied the otherwise orderly suburban neighborhood in which I grew up. They belonged to no one and were fed by no one, yet they proliferated the way roaches did elsewhere. None had names, except those that distinguished them by their defects: One Eye, Torn Ear, Limpo. They knocked over garbage cans, tore up gardens, and shrieked across the night. They were unloved, even by the sweetest of the block’s littlest kids. My across-the-street neighbor, Ricky Brennan, shot BBs at them from his bedroom window.

Every spring, as if by ancient tradition, Nathan Wasserman’s older brother Mark would visit the places where we had discovered litters the previous few weeks, under porches and in garages. He’d tear the kittens from their mothers two or three at a time and toss them into a brown paper supermarket bag, scrupulously using one bag per litter. Then he’d tie the bag closed with a piece of twine. The mother cats were too phlegmatic to offer opposition, hardly even hissing. They had, like us, become accustomed to the routine.

Mark would put the bags in his father’s car, we’d pile in, and without saying a word he’d drive us to the shallow body of water we called either the pond, the swamp, or the sump, about three quarters of a mile away. It was
large—we could have called it a lake—but it appeared to be fed only by the dregs of beer bottles tossed in from cars parked on the secluded, unlit strip of road that grazed it on the way to the next suburban subdivision. The pond never looked clean, or like water at all. Its liquid thick and oily, on humid days the pond sweated the odor of mothballs. Fathers sometimes brought their very young kids there and, with a hook and a line, allowed them to pretend to fish.

Once every spring five or six of us would lean against the car while Mark carried the shopping bags to the pond’s edge. As he picked up the bags, the kittens inside became frantic, now crying, now snarling, now moaning, now crying again. Mark showed neither pleasure nor discomfort at his task, nor even that he noticed the animal commotion in his hands. We admired him for this, though as we got older we discovered that his cool was in fact a kind of dullness and he became something of a joke. Mark would step to the water’s edge and without ceremony fling the sacks about twenty feet into the pond. They spun end over end a few times and then made an odd, tinny, unwatery splash. One or two of the bags might resurface for a moment. The mewls of the drowning kittens, clearly heard from where we stood, were wonderfully terrifying, the authentic song of death.

Although one couldn’t swim in the pond, it was a frequent make-out site for our older brothers and, incredibly, our older sisters. A line of parked cars fronted the pond every weekend and summer night. Once there was a “drought,” or at least a couple of hot months of infrequent rainfall. The pond didn’t dry up completely,
but the level fell, revealing tire husks, encrusted automobile batteries, corroded bicycle frames, and empty paint cans. One afternoon that summer I walked along the water’s edge with a few of my friends. They believed they would find used condoms in the cracked mud. I myself was looking for bags of dead kittens, bags I expected to number in the hundreds. I didn’t discover any, which made me wonder if they had somehow dissolved. My friends didn’t find any condoms.

The drownings only limited the growth of the cat population: there were always more than enough to go around for various entertainments and scientific experiments, most of which tested their ability to land on their feet. We threw quite a few cats off Billy Osinski’s roof as, over the years, these experiments became increasingly sophisticated. Five of us, each with a cheap snapshot camera against his face, once lined up alongside the house, while Osinski held the subject cat over our heads. Then he let it drop and, as documentation for a science fair project that would never be completed, we took the animal’s photograph at each stage of its descent. It landed on its feet, smashed its snout against the cement, and then slinked away, sneezing. Each sneeze sprayed a fine crimson mist.