Calico Joe (11 page)

“Clarence, dinner is ready,” Fay yells from the porch, and we do not waste time. That barbecue pork sandwich for lunch was now at least eight hours in the past. Directly under a ceiling fan, Fay has set a beautiful table, small and round, with fresh-cut flowers in a small vase in the center. There is a large bowl of tomato, cucumber, and onion salad and another of grilled squash and eggplant over brown rice. She waves at the food and says, “Two hours ago, it was still on the vine.”

We pass the bowls and begin eating. I feel compelled to at least make an effort to discuss her art but decide against it. A visit like this will never be repeated, and I want to hear and talk about Joe Castle. After some chatter about my wife, daughters, and job, I manage to get things back on track.

“What was it like in 1970 when the draft was approaching?” I ask.

Clarence chews, swallows, takes a sip of water, and says,
“Pretty crazy. We thought he would be the number one pick in the draft, at least that’s what the scouts had been saying for two years.”

“The town thought he was about to get rich,” Fay adds.

“Top money back then was $100,000 for the early picks. In case you haven’t noticed, this is a small town. Folks were openly discussing what Joe might do with all his money. Then something weird happened. In late May, Calico Rock was playing in the finals of the state tournament, over at Jonesboro, and Joe had two bad games. He had not had a bad game in ten years, then bam, two in a row. Some of the scouts got spooked, I guess. The Cubs took him in the second round, offered him $50,000, and away he went.”

“What happened to the money?” I ask.

“He gave $5,000 to his church,” Fay says, “and $5,000 to the high school, right, Clarence?”

“That sounds right. Another $5,000 went to dress up the Little League park where he had played so many games. Seems like he paid off the mortgage on his parents’ home, which wasn’t that much.”

“No shiny new Corvette?” I ask.

“Oh no. He paid $2,000 for Hank Thatcher’s Ford pickup. Hank had just died, and his wife was selling some of his stuff. She didn’t want the truck, so Joe bought it.”

I remind myself, again, of why I do not want to live in a small town. Such personal details would never be discussed, or even known, in a city.

I cannot remember the last time I have eaten vegetables as fresh as Fay’s. Sara cooks healthy meals, but I have never tasted squash and eggplant like this. “Delicious,” I say for the second or third time.

“Thank you,” Fay replies graciously. I notice that she eats very little. Clarence washes his food down with water, but the lemon gin is still close. Two fishing boats float quietly by on the river and head for the docks below the bridge in the distance. Our conversation drifts to Fay’s sister, who is dying of cancer in Missouri and wants them to visit her over the weekend. The cancer talk brings things around to my father. “When was he diagnosed?” Fay asks.

“Last week. It’s terminal, just a few months, maybe weeks.”

“I’m so sorry,” she says.

“Have you seen him?” Clarence asks.

“No, I’m going down tomorrow. As I said, we’re not close, not close at all. Never have been. He left the family when his baseball career flamed out and soon remarried. He’s not a nice person, Clarence, not the kind of guy you’d want to spend time with.”

“I believe that. I read a story about him years ago. After baseball, he tried to make it as a golfer, but that went nowhere. Seems like he was selling real estate in the Orlando area and not doing very well. He was still adamant that he did not throw at Joe, but the writer was skeptical. I guess we’re all skeptical.”

“You should be,” I say.

“Why is that?”

I wipe my mouth with a linen napkin. “Because he threw at Joe. I know he did. He’s denied it for thirty years, but I know the truth.”

There is a long pause as we pick at our food and listen to the whirling of the old ceiling fan just above us. Finally, Clarence lifts his lemon gin and gulps down an ounce. He licks his lips, smacks them, and says, “You have no idea how excited we were, how much it meant to this town and especially to the family. After producing so many great players, a Castle had finally hit the big time.”

“I wish I could say I’m sorry.”

“You can’t. Besides, it was thirty years ago.”

“A long time,” Fay observes as she looks down at the river. A long time, maybe, but never to be forgotten.

“I don’t suppose you were there,” Clarence says.

“Indeed I was. August 24, 1973. Shea Stadium.”

M
y father was in a foul mood when he left the house, alone.

I dropped a few hints about riding to the stadium with him, but he wasn’t listening. The New York papers were relentlessly hyping the game, and one writer, my father’s loudest critic, described the matchup as “a contrast between youth and age. Warren Tracey, age thirty-four and over the hill, versus Joe Castle, the brightest young star baseball has seen since the arrival of Mickey Mantle in 1951.”

Jill was away at a camp in the Catskills. I cajoled my mother into taking an early train to the city. I wanted to watch batting practice and, more important, get my first live look at Joe Castle. We stepped off the subway at 4:30, two and a half hours before the first pitch, and the atmosphere outside Shea Stadium was electric. I was surprised at the number of Cubs fans, most of them wearing white jerseys with the Number 15 across the back. Some were families who were well behaved, but many were young men in packs roaming around
like street gangs, yelling, drinking beer, looking for trouble. They found it. New York fans are far from shy and seldom back down from a challenge. I saw the police break up three fights before we passed through the turnstiles. “Disgusting,” my mother said. It would be her last trip to the ballpark.

Shea held fifty-five thousand, and it was already two-thirds full when we settled into our seats. The Cubs were taking batting practice, and there was a swarm around the cage at home plate. Ron Santo, Billy Williams, Jose Cardenal, and Rick Monday were in one group, and as they rotated through, I searched the outfield until I saw him. As he turned to chase a fly ball, I saw the name Castle across the back of his royal blue hitting jersey. He caught the ball near the right field foul line, and a thousand kids screamed for his autograph. He smiled and waved and jogged back to a group of Cubs loitering in right center, probably talking about the women up in the outfield bleachers.

By then, I had read many descriptions of Joe Castle. In high school, some scouts had worried that he was too thin. He weighed 170 pounds when he was eighteen, and this had bothered a few of the experts. However, his father had been quoted as saying, “He’s not even shaving yet. Let the boy grow up.” And he was right. In the minors, Joe had filled out, thanks to a combination of nature and hours in the weight room. He had broad shoulders and a thirty-three-inch waist. He wore his game pants tight, and one article in the
Tribune
gossiped
about the avalanche of provocative mail he was getting from women across the country.

As I watched, he seemed to glide across the outfield as the bats cracked and baseballs flew everywhere. I saw my father in the Mets dugout, sitting alone, going through his pregame ritual. It was far too early for him to head to the bull pen and begin stretching. Odd, though, that he was in the dugout. Usually, at two hours and counting, he was in the locker room getting a massage from a trainer. With ninety minutes to go, he put on his uniform. At seventy-five minutes, he left the locker room, walked through the dugout, and headed for the bull pen, head down, refusing to look at the opposing dugout. The more I thought about it, the stranger it seemed. Baseball players, and especially pitchers, are fanatics about their rituals. My father was three and one in his last six starts and four days earlier had pitched perhaps his best game in the last five years. Why would he change things?

My mother bought me a souvenir program, then some ice cream, and I chatted with the fans around me. Eventually, Joe drifted to the Cubs dugout opposite where we were sitting. He got his bats, put on his helmet, and began limbering up. To get away from the stands, he stayed close to the batting cage. When it was his turn, he jumped in, bunted a few, then began spraying the ball to all fields. Bodies moved closer to the cage. Photographers were scrambling into position and clicking away. In his second round, he cranked it up, and the
balls went deeper and deeper. He unloaded in his third round, from both sides of the plate, and hit five straight bombs into the bleachers, where hundreds of kids scrambled to get the souvenirs. The Cubs fans were screaming with each shot, and I would have cheered too, but I was in the Mets section; plus, my father was the opposing pitcher, and it did not seem appropriate.

When he walked to the mound in the top of the first, the fans gave him a rowdy welcome. There was not an empty seat in the stadium, and for over an hour the Cubs and Mets fans had been yelling back and forth. When Rick Monday lined to short on the first pitch, the stadium roared again. Two pitches later, Glenn Beckert popped out to right field, and Warren Tracey was cruising.

The announcer said: “Now batting and playing first base, Number 15, Joe Castle.”

I took a deep breath and began chewing my fingernails. I wanted to watch, then I wanted to close my eyes and just listen. My mother patted my knee. I envied her apathy. At that crucial moment in my life, in the life of her husband, in the lives of countless Mets and Cubs fans across the country, at that wonderfully supercharged moment in the history of baseball, my mother could not have cared less what happened next.

Not surprisingly, the first pitch was high and tight. Joe, batting left-handed, ducked but did not fall; nor did he glare at my father. It was a simple brushback. Welcome to New
York. The second pitch was a called strike that looked low, but Joe did not react. The third pitch was a fastball that he slapped into the stands near us. The fourth pitch was low and inside. The fifth pitch was a changeup that fooled Joe, but he managed to foul it off.

I was holding my breath with each pitch. I was praying for a strikeout, and I was praying for a home run. Why couldn’t I have both? A strikeout now for my father, a home run later for Joe, back and forth? In baseball, you always get another chance, right? I pondered these things between pitches, a complete nervous wreck.

The sixth pitch was a curve that bounced in the dirt. Three balls, two strikes. Billy Williams on deck. Shea Stadium rocking. The Cubs ten games in first place. The Mets ten games back but winning. My father versus my hero.

Joe fouled off the next eight pitches as the at bat turned into a dramatic duel, with neither player yielding an inch. Warren Tracey was not about to walk him. Joe Castle was not about to strike out. The fifteenth pitch was a fastball that looked low, but at the last second Joe whipped his bat around, scooped the ball up, and launched it to right center, where it cleared the wall by thirty feet. For some reason, when I knew the ball was gone, I looked back at the mound and watched my father. He never took his eyes off Joe as he rounded first, and when the ball cleared the fence, Joe gave himself a quick pump of the fist, as if to say, “All right!” It was nothing cocky or out of line, nothing meant to show up the pitcher.

But I knew my father, and I knew it was trouble.

The home run was Joe’s twenty-first home run in thirty-eight games, and it would be his last.

The score was tied 1–1 when Joe walked to the plate in the top of the third with two outs and no one on. The first pitch was a fastball outside, and when I saw it, I knew what would happen next. The second pitch was just like the first, hard and a foot off the plate. I wanted to stand and scream, “Look out, Joe!” but I couldn’t move. As my father stood on the mound and looked in at Jerry Grote, my heart froze and I couldn’t breathe. I managed to say to my mother, “He’s gonna hit him.”

The beanball went straight at Joe’s helmet, and for a second, for a long, dreadful second that fans and writers would discuss and debate and analyze for decades to come, Joe didn’t move. He lost the ball. For a reason no one, especially Joe, would ever understand or be able to explain or re-create or reenact, he simply lost sight of the ball. He had said that he preferred to hit from the left side because he felt as though his right eye picked up the pitches faster, but at that crucial split second his eyes failed him. It could have been something beyond the center field wall. It could have been a slight shift in the lighting. He could have lost the ball as it crossed between my father’s white jersey and home plate. He could
have been distracted by the movements of Felix Millan, the second baseman. No one would ever know because Joe would never remember.