The Big Rock Candy Mountain (69 page)

Spooning his breakfast food automatically, Chet looked through the wall, which opened suddenly to show him trying out on a green diamond with the Bees, striking out the head of the lineup one—two—three while Bill Talbot stood on the third base line watching. He saw the headlines at the end of a season, when Mason was announced as the standout pitcher in the Coast League with a record of twenty-five won and six lost. He saw the Big League scouts coming, heard the prices they quoted to Talbot, saw his picture on a sport page snapped at the top of his windup with his spikes in the air, and underneath the legend, “Seventy-five Thousand Dollar Beauty goes to Cardinals.” He saw himself playing ball with Collins and Sisler and Ruth and Schulte. He saw himself starting a game in the World Series, and the headlines and the chatter about that: “Miller Huggins, masterminder for the New York Yanks, has his work cut out for him to think up some magic to counteract the stuff his Yanks will have thrown at them today via the good left arm of Chet Mason, brilliant young freshman hurler who this season set a record for strikeouts in the National League ...”

He pushed the cereal bowl away and reached for a roll. His mother, clearing up the rest of the dishes, looked at him and smiled. “Got it memorized?”

“Oh, bushwah,” Chet said. He grinned and waved the paper in her face. “See what Bill Talbot said? Did you get an eyeful of that ‘promise' stuff? You'll grin out of the other side of your face when I'm pitching in the big leagues and drawing down twenty-five thousand a year and splitting a World Series melon every fall.”

He didn't know his father had come into the room until he heard him grunt. “Maybe you'd better get out of short pants before you start swallowing all of Bill Talbot's guff,” he said. “What was the matter with those guys yesterday? All sick?”

“I was just throwin' it past ‘em,” Chet said.

His father laughed and looked across at his mother. “Modest, isn't he?”

“Terrible,” she said. “But I guess he must have been just a little bit good.”

“Just a little bit my eye,” Chet said. “I was terrific. My fast one was hopping four inches.”

“You know me, All” his father said.

“Well, it was.”

“How about those six bases on balls?”

“I didn't walk six guys.”

His father's big blunt hand came down and took the paper and held it in front of his nose. “Bases on balls, off Mason, six,” he read from the box score. Chet took the paper and read it for himself. “They must have got it wrong,” he said. “Even if this is right, how about those eleven strikeouts?”

“I don't care how many you strike out. If you walk six guys you put six possible runs on base.”

“None of ‘em got past second.”

“But they might have,” his father said. “Six walks are as good as six singles.”

“Well, the umpire was blind in both eyes,” Chet said. “You had to groove it or it was a ball.”

“Now we've got an Alibi Ike around the place,” Bo Mason said. He chopped out a laugh from down below his belt. “Come on out in the yard,” he said. “Let's see this hot one of yours.”

“You couldn't hang onto it,” Chet said. “It takes a good catcher to catch me.”

“I was catching guys faster than you when you were nothing but a vague idea,” his father said, “and doing it with my bare hands.”

“You won't need the mitt then,” Chet said.

His father looked at him. “Come on, Smarty,” he said. “Get that pillow and a baseball and get out and let's see what you've got.”

Chet dug the mitt, his own glove, and a ball from the hall closet. “Bo,” Elsa said as they went past her, “I don't think you've played catch with the kids for ten years.”

Chet winked. “This'll be the last time. I'm going to blow him over backwards.”

He would show the old man whether or not he had a fast one. They laid down a folded dishtowel from the clothesline for a plate, and Chet stepped off the distance. He put his toe on an imaginary rubber, took an easy windup, and lobbed one over. It plunked into his father's mitt and came back smartly. For a few minutes they tossed the ball back and forth, warming up. “All right,” his father said. “Let one go.”

Chet wound up and threw. The ball smacked into the mitt with a flat, wet-leather sound. The return throw stung. “High and outside to a right hander,” his father said. “Ball one. Come on now, quit babying them.”

Chet pitched again, a perfect waist-high strike. “Okay,” his father said. “Pitch to me.”

He held his mitt for a target, low and inside. Chet threw him a hook that broke a little late, and he had to move the mitt six inches. “Hit where I call for ‘em,” his father said. “Never mind the roundhouse stuff.”

He moved the mitt thereafter only when he had to to stop a pitch, and Chet threw at the target, really trying to put it squarely in the pocket, bearing down as if the bases were loaded and nobody out. He walked the first imaginary batter, struck out the next two, walked another, and everything he threw his father took handily, peppering the ball back with a sharp wrist throw.

“You must have had a pretty fair peg to second when you were playing ball,” Chet said.

“Fair,” his father said drily. “I used to stand on home plate and throw balls into a barrel in center field on the first bounce.”

He pulled off the mitt, examined his pink palm, and tossed the mitt to Chet. “That's enough,” he said, and took a cigar from his leather case. He squinted at Chet speculatively, and Chet, wondering what the old man thought of his pitching, looked off down the street as if expecting someone.

“Your fast one is pretty fast,” his father said. “You're no Walter Johnson, but you can burn one in. But it doesn't hop as much as you think.”

“I can't get a good toehold without spikes. It was hopping yesterday.”

“Forget the alibis,” his father said, watching him steadily. “What I'm telling you I'm telling you for your own good. You might make a ball player. You've got the build and you've got an arm. But it's awful easy to think you're Christy Mathewson when you're only some little busher. You'll never make a class-A league till you buckle down to throwing baseballs at a knothole in a barn. You're wild as a steer.”

“Well, I'll practice up and pitch me a no-hitter with no walks next time,” Chet said. He grinned, but his father did not grin back.

“And forget to be so proud of what the papers say,” his father said. “You'd have got knocked out of the box yesterday if those kids didn't all step in the bucket. They're scared of a fast ball. Throw ‘em up that way to a hitter and he'll lose your ball for you.”

“You just think they step in the bucket. That's a heavy-hitting outfit.”

“I know they step in the bucket,” his father said, “because I was there. I was sitting right beside Bill Talbot. One or two heavy hitters who weren't scared of a fast one. and you'd have had half a dozen runs scored against you, with all those walks. You got to remember one thing about a fast ball. If a guy even meets it it's likely to go for two or three bases.”

“Yeah,” Chet said, a little sullenly. The old man could never say anything without sounding as if he was daring you to contradict him. Well, maybe he knew a lot of baseball and maybe he didn't.

He tossed the ball up and caught it, wishing the old man would go on inside or somewhere and get this catechism over, when the other thought cut into his mind like a car cutting into a stream of traffic. Chet Mason, it said, is not nineteen. He's only seventeen. But just the same in two or three years he may be playing in the big leagues, and this morning, now, he is engaged to a woman twenty-one years old. This is not, he said, any punk kid you're dishing up free advice to. It‘s' about time you got next to that notion.

But it was funny about the old man being at the game yesterday.

“Pa,” he said, “can I have the car for a couple hours this afternoon?”

“What for?”

“Van and I have got a line on summer jobs at the Magna smelter. They put you on the bull gang or something, but what you really do is play ball for them. We have to get out and see a guy about it.”

That about the smelter job was true enough, but it was not true that he and Van had to see anyone. The smelter man was coming up to school to interview four or five team members on Monday. Chet's lips had gone over the lie smoothly, but he felt sullen and defensive under his father's eyes. He hated to be made to explain.

“What's the matter with the streetcar?”

“You can't take a streetcar to Magna.”

“You can't take the car either,” his father said. “I need it myself.”

“But Jeez, I want that job, Pa!”

He felt aggrieved, as if his father were keeping him from a real appointment. His mother, out on the back porch and listening, looked at his father.

“Why not?” she said. “If it's a chance to play ball ...”

“Maybe we can all drive out,” Bo said.

Chet opened his mouth, shut it, fished up another excuse. “But I have to pick up Van, and we may have to hunt all over Magna for this fella. We haven't got a regular appointment, he just said come out any time and see him.” He shot a look at his father's suspicious face. “I know you,” he said. “If you had to wait around for me ten minutes you'd be sore as a boil.”

His mother laughed. “That touched you, Papa,” she said.

His father was staring at him somberly. “If I let you have it,” he said, “I want it understood that you don't go over forty and that you're back here by four o‘clock. I've got a delivery to make.”

“Okay,” Chet said.

“Remember now,” his father said, and went inside.

“Good gosh,” Chet said to his mother. “You'd think that car was made of solid gold. Other guys can get their dads' cars when they need them.”

“You're getting it,” she reminded him. “It's Van more than anything that makes Pa careful. He thinks Van is wild. Is he?”

“No,” Chet said. “He's all right.”

“He looks like a kind of girl-chaser. You don't want to get mixed up that way.”

“Well, I'm not.”

His mother smiled. “You don't have to bite my head off. You didn't get enough sleep last night. Can't you try to get in earlier?”

“I couldn‘t,” he said. “We were with Van and his girl and we had to wait for them for an hour.”

“What'd you do after the game?”

“Just went out to Saltair and fooled around.” “That's one thing that made Pa grumpy,” Elsa said. “He went to the game and thought you were real good, and he was expecting to talk it all over with you last night. And then you didn't come home. He was proud of you yesterday, Chet.”

“He sure doesn't act like it.”

“That's just his way,” she said. “He's been around a lot more than you have, and he knows what it takes to be a good ball player, and how a boy can be ruined by getting off to the wrong kind of start. He thinks if you'd quit smoking and train more you'd make something big out of baseball.”

“Well,” Chet said. “If this smelter job pans out I can get some experience this summer, anyway.”

He went down to the drug store and bought the
Telegram
and the
Deseret News,
read their accounts of the game, clipped them both carefully, along with the one from the
Tribune,
and brought his scrap book up to date. At one o‘clock, before the family were more than half through dinner, he got the keys and drove out of the garage. But he didn't head either for Van's house or for Magna. He headed for South State Street and Laura.

 

She met him at the door, and her smile so clearly asked him to remember last night that he slipped into the hall and took her in his arms. She leaned back and put her finger on her lips. “Come in and meet the folks,” she said aloud.

He had never been in her house, only in the hall at night. It was not, he saw now, a very good house. Neither it nor her family looked prosperous. Her father looked him over pretty sharply, put out a big rough workman's hand, and sat back. Her mother was excessively fat, almost as broad as she was tall, and fully as thick as she was broad. Her mouth disappeared in great buttery cheeks. The two kids in the kitchen were her brother Jim, about twelve, and her sister Connie, eight. It seemed funny that Laura should be so grown up and still have brothers and sisters as little as that.

“Chet's the fellow that pitched the three-hitter yesterday,” Laura said. Her father raised his eyebrows, but he didn't say anything.

“I saw what Bill Talbot said about you,” Laura said.

“Oh well,” Chet said. “You can't believe all that stuff. I just had a lucky day. I walked so many guys that a few solid hits would've sunk me.”

He waited for a denial of this from any of the Bettertons, but none came. “Going to play ball this summer?” Laura's father asked.

“I'm talking to a fellow on Monday about a job at Magna, playing in the Copper League.”

“I thought you'd be working at Saltair,” Laura said.

“Not if this other job turns up.”

“Would it pay more?”

“Quite a bit more, I think,” Chet said. “I'll know Monday.”

He was getting uncomfortable. He kept stealing looks at Mrs. Betterton, the fattest woman he had ever seen. The parlor seemed warm. His eye flicked around looking for ashtrays as he thought of lighting a cigarette. There weren't any ashtrays. Mormons, he supposed. He had never thought to ask Laura.