Dead Ball (16 page)

“Damn,” said Cherry Ann Smoler.

An electronic snippet of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” began to emanate from Harvey’s pants.

It was Mickey. “Tough luck,” she said.

“You’re watching?”

“ESPN is cutting to Providence every time Moss is up. This is easily Rusansky’s best outing of the year.”

“I don’t know what happened to Moss’s fabled patience on that one. I’m worried the pressure’s getting to him. Where are you?”

“Cincinnati. The big Reds-Cubs clash. What’s new with Cooley?”

“We’ve got a safe house we’re in. Man’s being pursued by ten thousand journalists, and we’re playing gin rummy in the wilds of Rhode Island.”

“Every scoreboard in baseball is tracking his at-bats. The whole world’s watching.”

“I know. I’ve got a nasty stack of letters to prove it. And a lawn jockey’s head.”

“Let’s just hope he gets up again,” Mickey said.

Harvey clucked. “If Providence can’t get someone on base, he won’t.”

When he got off, Cherry Ann asked who it was.

“My girlfriend.”

“Does she know what a decent guy you are?”

“No,” he said.

“Oh. So, will Moss get up again?”

Although the scoreboard showed that Rusansky was still throwing in the nineties and Harvey could tell he still had his stuff too, and that meant that Moss might be through for the day, he reassured her. “He will.”

And he did, in dramatic fashion. With two outs in the bottom of the ninth and Moss Cooley waiting patiently in the on-deck circle, Jewels third baseman Craig Venora got enough of a Rusansky slider to slice a soft line drive over second, just out of the second baseman’s reach. Only the team’s third hit.

The crowd was quiet as Cooley stepped in against Rusansky and took a curve for strike one. With a 2-0 lead, the Cleveland outfield played deep. Rusansky missed with a slider. Cooley fouled off a fastball, fouled off a slider, and watched another fastball sail just high.

Unable to sit still any longer, the crowd now rose majestically in unison to watch the two-and-two pitch. Cherry Ann stood, biting a thumb, as Rusansky looked in for the sign. Venora danced off first base, trying to unsettle Rusansky, who made a sullen pro forma throw over to keep him honest. Cooley stayed glued to the batter’s box, eyes locked on the pitcher, hands kneading the bat handle.

Harvey stood too, feeling a curious sensation. His jaded feelings about baseball surrendered to a moment of pure appreciation. He was no longer inside the game looking out, but outside looking in, and he saw what any fan could see: baseball’s best pitcher and hitter facing each other across sixty feet of grass and soil. It was as though Harvey suddenly understood for the first time in years what fans meant when they talked about how much they loved the game. The game was a stately procession of conflicts, each one a test of will, cunning, and expertise. The team that won the majority of a game’s little battles—between pitcher and batter, pitcher and baserunner, fielder and ball, between the manager and all the possibilities at his command—was the team that won the war. Compared with baseball, football was an unintelligible street fight, hockey a beautiful blur from which sense only occasionally emerged, basketball a furious ballet too complex to grasp. But baseball’s crucial moments were played out in a kind of naked stillness. Baseball broke the confusion down, strung out the logic for all to see.

It seemed the whole season had been merely preamble to this moment, a series of sketches working up to this masterpiece on which Rusansky and Cooley were now putting the finishing touches. Of the many millions of boys in their generation who had picked up a bat and ball and dreamed of glory, it was these two—one from Starrett, Alabama, one from Oil City, Pennsylvania, who had earned the privilege today of making baseball history.

Harvey felt Cherry Ann’s hand in his as Rusansky set himself, turned to glower for an instant at Venora leading off first base, his glance enough to freeze the base runner. Then the pitcher kicked and delivered a slider headed for the outside corner of the plate. The crowd, which had been holding its breath, let out a strange collective sound as Moss got the fat of the bat on the ball and sent it on a line toward right center. Cherry Ann’s hand squeezed Harvey’s.

Everyone in The Jewel Box could imagine the ball as it found the gap and skipped to the right-center field wall with Indian outfielders in pursuit, Venora racing around the bases as Cooley, now the tying run, pulled into scoring position at second.

But Cleveland’s second baseman stood directly in its path. He intercepted the ball’s rising trajectory with a timed leap, and the ball disappeared into his glove, demolishing the fantasy as suddenly as it began, so abruptly necessitating a mass revision of hope that the crowd continued its expectant noise for another second or two before it registered the truth.

It was as if the entire crowd had been shot dead. Fans everywhere stood in a kind of shock, as did Moss Cooley himself, who had pulled up just a few feet down the first-base line. The Indians swarmed Rusansky near the mound. In the Providence dugout, the players quietly gathered their possessions.

The surreal silence was dispelled only when some fans in the box seats recovered enough to begin applauding Cooley. It quickly spread, and within seconds the entire park was paying homage to Moss Cooley’s remarkable forty-seven-game hitting streak, the second longest in baseball history.

Cooley, sensing the need to commemorate the crisis, overcame his reserve and gave the fans in the first-base line boxes a shallow bow. He then turned to the fans on the third-base side and did the same. He raised his right hand to the fans in left, center, and right, and then slowly walked to the dugout as the cheering doubled.

It was pure baseball, Harvey thought, everyone doing their job. Rusansky’s perfect pitch, Cooley’s perfect contact, the second baseman’s perfect positioning and perfect leap. Chance too had played its perverse part, nullifying Moss’s very best effort. On another day, perhaps, the score would now be 2–1 and Moss would be dusting himself off as he stood triumphantly on second base. But this was not another day; it was this day, and so the crowd began its sad shuffling toward the exits.

Cherry Ann Smoler reached under her seat for her Jansport backpack amid the litter of popcorn kernels, Pepsi puddles, and discarded programs.

When she straightened, she looked at Harvey and said, “Can I have my boyfriend back now?”

Harvey took Cherry Ann inside the clubhouse to stand with him at the back of a crowd of print, radio, and television reporters jostling each other for a better view of Moss, clad only in a towel as he sat on the chair in front of his cubicle and fielded the predictable queries. “How does it feel…? Are you disappointed that…? What were you thinking…? Was Rusansky the toughest pitcher you’ve…? Are you glad the pressure’s off…? Do you think anybody will ever break DiMaggio’s…?” He was gracious, nodding thoughtfully at each cliché before answering, as if he had never considered such a question before. He kept his poise in the thicket of microphones and cameras, under the barrage of flashbulbs, even when reporters shouted at him to turn in his direction.

“Cool! Moss! Over here! Look this way a minute! Cool! Let me have a smile!”

“Be right with you,” he’d say. “One moment, please.”

“This is a switch,” Cherry Ann whispered to Harvey as two Jewels, recently showered, casually removed their towels at nearby cubicles for a final blotting of their privates before putting on their briefs. “I’m in the audience looking at guys’ dicks.”

“Cool! Cool!” a reporter shouted. “Your streak may be over, but the team’s still hot. What do you think of the Jewels’ chances this year?” His words ran seamlessly and urgently together, uninterruptible.

The voice was familiar, and when Harvey craned his head to see who it was, he felt a shiver in his spine as he spied the
Providence Journal’s
Bob Lassiter on his tiptoes, flexing an outstretched arm, still plying his trade after all these years. Moss Cooley hadn’t been thought of yet when Lassiter began covering baseball. Every year, Harvey mused morbidly, physically gifted babies were born who would grow up some day to supply quotes and sound bites for aging men to fill column inches with. It had been a dozen years since he had spoken with or seen Lassiter, now ashen and jowly. Harvey averted his face and told Cherry Ann they should wait for Moss by the entrance to the player’s parking lot.

“I think I’d rather dance naked in front of a bunch of dorks than do that,” she said as they walked down the concrete corridor under the stands. “Answer all those stupid questions.”

“You’re in luck. ’Cause dancing naked in front of dorks is your current form of employment.”

“You know, for a decent guy you can come pretty close to being an asshole.”

“I’ve been told that I can walk that fine line.”

“So, what do you do now?”

“I’m still on the clock.”

“You mean, this thing isn’t over yet?”

“Our enemies may not have heard the news yet. The team’s general manager wants me to stay with Moss at least through tomorrow.”

“So Moss and I can’t go out and celebrate?”

“Not yet. Anyone’s who’s sick enough to want to hurt him for approaching DiMaggio’s streak may be sick enough to want to hurt him for hitting in as many as forty-seven games.”

W
ON’T COOLEY BE SURPRISED
, he thought as he dabbed the glue stick on the back of the small square of newsprint. For some reason, maybe because the past was on his mind, he remembered LePage’s mucilage from his childhood, the tapered bottle with the slanted, red rubber nipple that dispensed the glue from a small slit. You pressed the nipple against the paper, producing a slick film of honey-colored adhesive. If you didn’t use it for a while, a dried crust formed over the slit that you had to peel off with your fingernail. Oh, well. He took the tweezers and turned the scrap over, placing it in its proper position and pressing it down with the heel of his hand. The latex gloves made everything feel a little strange. Remote, like the event itself.

The activity steadied him. As a child, he’d loved making models, all those B-29s and Spitfires and Sherman tanks and destroyers. His bedroom was crammed with miniature materiel. They lined his shelves and hung from the ceiling of his bedroom on black threads, spinning slowly in the summer breeze coming in through the windows. He was good with his hands, knew how to apply glue with a toothpick, just the right amount so that the plastic parts didn’t ooze excess when he joined them. He took pride in painting the tiny pilots and gun barrels and wingtips, dipping the slender brush into the small bottles of Testors enamel paint and carefully stroking on the paint, always in one direction. He had once dreamed of being a doctor, a surgeon, a man whose job it was to do small, important things well, tying off the sutures to finish up. He’d always been good with knots. Tying a knot was a pleasingly final motion. He thought of watching the ropers with their furious flurry of movements over the prostrate calf, tying off the rope and raising their hands for the judges. Done! It never frustrated him to tie the black threads that cradled his models and suspended them from the ceiling. Done! He could lose himself in it. It was a compartment, a pretty little compartment full of small, important gestures.

Baseball was a compartment. A series of compartments, really, beginning with the park itself, set off from life. Inside the park was the field, set off from every place else by white lines and fences, and within that compartment was the compartment of the infield, more subtly marked by three bases and the plate, and above the plate the compartment of the strike zone, which contained the good pitches and none of the bad. And there were the batters’ boxes on either side of the plate to contain the batter, and the stands to contain the fans, and the dugouts to contain the teams, and the scoreboard to contain the information, and most of all the rules of the game to contain the anarchy outside the game.

Now he pressed the last scrap of paper down with the heel of his hand, and he observed his handiwork and saw that it was good. He felt he had hit the right tone, nothing spelled out, but the message lying there just below the surface like a dead body beneath the ice of a frozen pond where a terrible accident had occurred. If Cooley was smart, he would get it and make the right decision. If he wasn’t, then the situation would require more than a glue stick and tweezers. He had to seal the slit, the chink in the present through which the sticky past was in danger of oozing, ruining everything.

And he had the same full, no longer lonely feeling he had as a child in his room when he finished a model. He laid the paper next to the doll on the worktable in his basement and began cleaning up, putting the scissors and glue and paper away in the bottom of a cardboard box filled with old Mason jars that he’d found in the little canning pantry in the basement. Canning was another thing that belonged to the past, like LePage’s mucilage. He gathered up the magazines and put them in a plastic bag along with the latex gloves he peeled off. He let himself out the basement door, carrying the bag, and took it to the Rubbermaid trash barrel and dumped the bag inside, all the magazines, the magazines that were missing only the letters that made up Cooley’s next instruction. His next lesson in keeping the past in its compartment.

When he entered the basement again, he guzzled a Seagram’s miniature. Then he plucked a fresh pair of gloves, tissuelike, from the box and put them in his pocket. Now he was free to think about the girl for a few minutes and who she was. In a bigger city—L.A., Chicago, maybe even Boston, New York above all—these things would be known. The rumormongers and the gossip columnists would see to it. But Providence, fucking Rhode Island? Might as well be Missoula, Montana. No one knew anything. And Cooley kept to himself anyway, didn’t play with the boys, no one knew anything about his private life, just like that fucking Jew Moe Berg.

“T
HAT WAS ONE LONG-ASS
streak,” Moss said in the Subaru the next morning as Harvey drove him back to his own house to pick up a few things before taking him to the ballpark for the afternoon game against Cleveland and the resumption of his normal life. They’d spent one last uneventful night in the Exeter safe house, watching ESPN and drinking beer. “Yes, sir, I think God made one fifty-six-game streak, and naturally He or She gave it to the white man. But I’ll take my forty-seven and be goddamn proud of it.”