Bang The Drum Slowly (19 page)

I still did not know what they were booing at, and the paper did not know, neither, some saying one thing and some another, but I now know it was none of the things they said. It was only a lot of disgusted people wondering how a club consisting of what the Mammoths consisted of in the way of power and brains on paper only managed to be 1½ games in front of the pack with time half run out. It was the same as saying, “Everything is at your fingertips. Yet you are libel to blow as high as the sky any day. Can you not get a move on?” I believe that for once in their life the clucks were right, and Holly says the same.

Me and Coker and Perry and Sid and George and Pasquale and Van Gundy left Monday for Milwaukee, 7 of us, more Mammoths than from any club in the league, which gives you some idea the kind of a club it was, rich with stars, and 3 of us were in the starting lineup Tuesday, me and Sid and Pasquale, and in the end it was George saved the ball game with a running catch over his shoulder in short left. He catches many like that, one a week, but Milwaukee never set eyes on him before, and it was all anybody talked about all night. I got credit for the win, my first All-Star win, the first All-Star Game I played in since 52, though I was on the squad in 53.

Back in the hotel Pop called and said, “Hank, I took Holly to the hospital.”

“Is he born yet?” I said.

“Not yet,” he said.

“Is something up?” said I.

“No,” he said, “it is a first baby,” which it was. “You looked good. Ain’t you ever going to take the rest of your weight off?”

“Trade your set in on a smaller screen,” said I. “I will look smaller then,” and he got a great laugh out of that.

“I kind of looked for Sid to hit one today,” he said. “It would of been a nice touch. How is Bruce?”

“The same,” said I. “He is supposed to call me.”

“I sure think about him night and day, Hank. You know, if you will pardon me for saying it, he sure been handed one shit deal.”

“You are swearing,” I said. You have got to make Pop awful mad to swear, and it give me a great charge inside. Here was somebody else besides myself carrying this mad around inside him. It really hit me, and I done a crazy thing. I got up and kicked the door shut, and it felt good, and I kicked the little telephone table there and sent it flying across the room, and the telephone come off the hook and the operator started screaming, “May I help you? May I help you?” over and over again, and I yanked a drawer out of the dresser and heaved it at her, and I remember I stood there bawling and breathing and looking for something to throw and finally seen the shower curtain, and I grabbed it and pulled it off the bar and tore it in 2 and kicked the toilet and stood with a glass in my hand and aimed it very carefully and slung it across the room at a painting on the wall of a girl carrying flowers and smashed the glass and the frame together and felt much better, and the house detectives busted in and put the phone back on the hook. “Where is the person you beat up in here?” they said.

“Person?” I said. “Person hell. There were 9 of them. Add up the damage and put it on the bill.”

“Pay the damage in cash and no questions asked,” the detectives said, and they added it up and I paid it, and they give me a receipt. We will put it on the tax on the long run, medical expenses, because somewheres along the line you have got to blow your fume little by little or else blow it all in one blow later.

I waited for Bruce to call, and he done so and was fine, and I went down and hung in the lobby. I seen a lot of old familiar faces, Sam Yale and Swanee Wilks and Hams Carroll from the 52 Mammoths. I thought Red might show, but he did not. He never does. Jocko Conrad took me around and introduced me to many old-time ballplayers, telling them, “Here is Henry Wiggen, my very own discovery,” which was about 2% true, but I said nothing. I used to correct people a lot when they lied, but I cut that out. They stood around lying and went in for dinner and lied some more, and they sat around all evening drinking and lying, telling me things I knew never quite happened that way, and I said, “Yes, I remember reading about that,” or “Yes, I heard that game on the radio when I was a kid,” or “Yes, my old man told me about that many a time,” because why in hell snag old men on their lies? Who cares anyhow? Every year they die. You see an old fellow at the All-Star Game, or at the World Series, or in the South, or hanging at the winter meetings, and they lie to you, and the next thing you read in the paper where they are dead, old fellows not so many years before so slim and fast, with a quick eye and great power, and all of a sudden they are dead and you are glad you did not wreck their story for them with the straight facts.

In the middle of it all I called the hospital in Perkinsville. The operator would not leave me charge the call, saying, “Young men that smash up their room are not in title to telephone long distance,” and I went down and paid cash and went back up and called, and the hospital said, “Nothing doing yet,” and I flew home.

She was already born when I got there, laying on her belly in a little glass cart on wheels in Holly’s room, practically bald, and I said to Holly, “How come no hair?” for I always had the idea you were born with a lot of hair.

“She is perfect in every way,” said Holly, “and exactly at her weight, which is more than I can say for everybody,” and we give her the name of Michele, for Mike Mulrooney, manager of the Queen City Cowboys.

“Flip it over,” I said, “so I can have a look.”

“You flip it over,” said Holly. “And do not call her “it” because she is a human person already.”

I flipped her over, and then I picked her up and held her, Michele I mean, sitting on the bed with Holly, and the sun was first coming in the window like it was that morning when Bruce had the attack, or thought he did, and I was about ready to bawl again after just getting through bawling in Milwaukee, sitting there with this little bit of a human person in my hand.

“It was a good thing George made that catch,” she said. “I could not of waited a minute longer. Then when I got here she did not wish to pop. You were a good boy to come. How is Bruce?”

“The same,” said I. “He will be pleased. Not a day goes by but what he asks.”

“Go grab some sleep,” she said.

“I grabbed some on the plane,” I said.

“I did not sleep,” she said. “I just laid awake trying to cry.”

“There is nothing to cry about,” I said. “Why cry?”

“I do not know,” she said. “Probably if I knew I could. I wonder if they made a mistake out there. It is hard to see how a fellow in such good shape as him could be in such bad shape. I am reading all the books on Hodgkin, and it is true.”

“It is hard to believe they could make such a mistake,” I said. “They have got such a wonderful reputation on paper.”

“Go see your father,” she said, and I stuck Michele back in the cart and kissed her and kissed Holly and went home in Neil Weiss’s cab. Neil told me tell Dutch why not bench Vincent Carucci and play McGonigle in left, and why not buy a good catcher or else develop one in a hurry, and I said I would.

I called Pop. “Rise and shine, Grandpa,” I said. “I will round you up some breakfast,” and he come over and we ate, and he looked at me and said, “It gets more like looking in the mirror every day.”

“I doubt that I will ever run as heavy as you,” I said.

“Do not put money on it,” he said. “That is a wonderful kid of yours, bright as she can be like her grandfather.”

“Her hairline, too,” said I. “She also gets that from her grandfather,” and we laughed a good bit back and forth until Pop stopped laughing all of a sudden and said, “Write down Bruce’s old man’s address. I been writing him a letter in my head all summer and might put it down any day. You should of long since shook Washington in my opinion.”

“In my opinion also,” said I.

“Do the boys know?” said he.

“Only Goose and Horse,” I said.

“That seems like a funny combination to tell it to. Piney Woods never showed the stuff. All spring it looked like he might. Well, life is life I guess, burn up the world in the spring and back to AA by summer.” Pop talked and packed it away, both. I always love to watch him eat. It is almost as good as eating yourself. “I sure think a lot about the old man,” he said. “Goddam it, you raise up a kid from 7 pounds to 205 and then some doctor comes along and tells you he has got a fatal disease. Nobody is supposed to die that young in these modern times, but I can not think what to write. Every time I put something down it looks like somebody else wrote it.”

“Say it out loud first,” I said, “and remember it and write it down, and then get up and walk around and say some more, and quick run and write that down, too. Write it like you speak it and then knock out the apostrophes.”

“Why?” said he. “What have you got against apostrophes?”

“Nothing,” said I. “They do it in the paper, so I do it.”

“I guess you ought to know,” he said, “being an Author and all.”

I went to bed but I could not sleep. I started writing in my head, the first time I done any since “The Southpaw” over the winter between 52 and 53, and I could not sleep but got up and fished out the paper and started writing from the beginning, where the telephone call come, “Me and Holly were laying around in bed around 10
A.M
. on a Blank morning,” not remembering what morning because over the winter one day is about like the next. The summer you can follow in the paper. I hunted up the old telephone bills and saw when the collect call come from Rochester, Minnesota, and I checked it with my Arcturus calendar, and it was a Wednesday, and I filled it in, and then I wrote some more, and the more I wrote the better I felt, and I stopped and thought, “But if he does not die there is no book in it, and all my work is for nothing,” and then I thought, “That will be good,” and then I thought again, “Still, if he dies or not it might still be a book at that,” and I went on writing until I simply could not keep my eyes open and went to bed and fell asleep pitching. If I give us 10 or 12 runs in the first inning I can make it the dullest game on earth and fall asleep easy.

We seen Holly and Michele in the afternoon, and Pop drove me to the train, and I brung cigars back for the boys and passed them around, and they all said “Congrats” and said they hoped she would not grow up and look like me, and I said I hoped so too.

The west moved in and put the stopper on Washington, and we picked up a game. It was not much, nothing like what we would of liked, but it was something.

Goose caught. The 3 days of rest over the All-Star Game done him a lot of good, and when he tired Jonah took over, for the power was on. Sid slammed Number 30 off Rob McKenna and was the talk of the town the way he was hitting left-handers, and Number 31 Sunday, which was the day I racked up Number 15, worth $1,500. It paid off the baby and a lot of little debts we been carrying on the books for quite some time. Sid was one up on Babe Ruth.

Bruce broke into the lineup on July 19. He caught the whole St. Louis series, the first time he caught 3 games in a row since Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, August 15, 16, and 17, 1951, according to the paper, and he caught the first night against Pittsburgh, and done well, though we lost, my loss, a sloppy ball game, for it rained all day and the ground was soaked and should of never been played to begin with, and then when we got back to the hotel his father called and said his mother died, and Bruce spoke to him and hung up and looked at me and smiled and said, “She died,” glad she died before she knew, and he called Katie, and she begun bawling on the phone and said she would be right down and help him pack, and she come, and we went to the airport with him, Katie crying all the way.

When he was in the air she said, “Leave us drink a drink together and drown our sorrow, Author, plus which I must discuss a little matter of business with you.”

“I personally rather put away a good meal after a ball game and anyhow never drink,” said I.

“No doubt such a meal has that extra zip to it when somebody else picks up the tab,” she said.

“Very often such is the case,” said I, and we went back in town to The Green Cow, same place we all ate Memorial Day night.

We ate in a private room, and after the food come she chased the waiters out and pulled the curtain. “Author,” she said, “I have here 2 letters phonier than a rubber bat,” and she shoved 2 or 3 of the Arcturus letters that Holly wrote under my eyes. “You may see but not touch,” she said, “for any day I am libel to run these up to Boston and inform the Arcturus Company that one of their agents is trying to swindle one of their fully paid-up insurees out of the right to change their beneficiary, which will win you the heave from Arcturus and blackmail you out of the insurance racket forever and a day.”

“They will laugh in your face,” said I.

“I doubt it,” she said, “because I doubt that they will like the looks of the signatures on these letters. I doubt that there are any such people working for them by these names because they are the names of very famous writers up in Boston quite some years back.” She put them back in her purse.

“The day you open your yap to the Arcturus Company,” said I, “I will stroll up to the police department on 66 Street and swear out a complaint against a certain whorehouse.”

She laughed. “I am not anxious to go up to Arcturus,” she said, “and I see no reason why me and you must have all this fuss and feathers between us. Who in hell are you protecting? His mother is dead and his father is a farmer. What does a farmer need with $50,000? The price of oats ain’t gone up that much.”

“It is the principle of the thing,” said I. “I hate to see a man get took for a ride.”

“What principle of what thing?” she said. “He been getting took for rides all his life. Everybody that ever laid eyes on him stole something off him. He is not only from the country but he is dumb from the country, and on top of that from the dumbest part of the country there is. He ain’t even from Texas or Wyoming where the Lord knows they are dumb enough to begin with, but from Georgia. If he wound up in the black he would not feel natural, which he will not wind up in anyhow because if we do not take his money from him the doctors and the insurance company and the undertakers will get there before us and swindle the old man dizzy no sooner than the grave is dug.”