George Martin - Deuces Down

You bastard, he thought, you big dumb ugly bastard.

Butch put his face close down almost against Tommy’s. Tommy’s eyes were still shut, but he could feel Butch’s hot breath against his cheeks. “Piss your pants, boy,” the bully said, his breath oddly sweet as a field of flowers in May. “Pisssssssss-”

Butch’s final word was elongated, like a reptilian hiss, and it concluded with a strange, funny sound like a whispered, gagging, choke. Tommy opened his eyes. Butch’s suddenly stricken face was changing contours.

His features slackened, then seemed to stiffen and tighten. He screamed into Tommy’s face as his head grew narrower, more elongated. His hair fell out in clumps, down upon his shoulders and chest. Butch screamed again and his tongue flopped out of his mouth. It was long and bifurcated. It caressed Tommy’s face like gentle fingers.

“Clarence-” one of his sycophants said, “Uh, I mean, Butch?”

Everyone stared at Butch as he started to twitch all over. Tommy got it first.

“He’s turning a card!” Tommy pulled away from the bully’s suddenly slack grip and started to back away fast. It took the other two a moment, then they barkpedaled as Butch sank to his knees.

“Whu-whut’s happening to me?” Butch asked plaintively, barely able to shape the words with his suddenly lolling tongue and elongated jaw. He shook like a dog trying to throw off droplets of invisible water, but no one answered him.

The boys ran from the bathroom, Butch’s companions screaming like they were on fire. Tommy lost himself in the ensuing excitement, blending in as just another ordinary kid in a group of ordinary, if excited, kids. Eventually Butch was taken away by emergency medics. Tommy, watching safely from the crowd as they wheeled him past, saw that he was tied down to the dolly with all but his head covered with a sheet. He was still alive, at least. He twisted frantically against his bonds, almost as sinuous as a snake or lizard, hissing all the time.

Everyone was talking about it. Tommy, after getting back to the bathroom and unburdening his frightfully over-strained bladder, kept silent about his participation in the affair. He wondered about the strange smell Butch had exuded like a night-blooming orchid. As the morning progressed he managed to get next to Sister Aquilonia for a moment, and took a deep sniff. She gave off the same smell, but not as strongly. A couple others around Christi had it, too. Tommy made careful inquiries among his classmates, and nobody seemed aware of Sister Aquilonia’s perfume, or that of the strange girl in eleventh grade who was quite pretty but had feathers instead of hair. As he checked out of Sanguis to take the sub-way to Ebbets Field over in Brooklyn, Tommy began to wonder. Began to think if maybe detecting that odor was an ability he had alone. It made him feel queasy and excited at the same time.

Was he a wild carder? If so, he was one of the lucky ones. He wasn’t one of those pathetic misfit jokers, but more like Golden Boy, and that Eagle guy, and Cyclone who had that cool uniform. And the Turtle, of course, but no one knew what he looked like. Maybe he was a creepy joker hiding in his shell, but he, Tommy, was a normal kid, maybe just a little smarter than the others.

Tommy was running over the possibilities in his head as he arrived at Ebbets Field and asked directions to the locker room. The gate attendants were skeptical that he was a reporter, but all he had to do was show his magic pass and they let him through.

As he walked through the bowels of Ebbets Field, heading to the locker room, his mind wasn’t on baseball. It was whirling with notions of him, Tommy Downs, actually being a wild carder, being-let’s face it-an ace, with the secret power to ferret out those infected with the virus.

God , he thought as he entered the locker room, that would be great. I wonder if I should get a cool uniform of some kind, like Cyclone’s?

He stood on the threshold of the locker room, looking over the scene of ball players undressing. They were legends, too. Some of them, anyway. Don Drysdale, Tom Seaver, Ed Kranepool. Others were just faces to Tommy, who was just a casual fan. Reporters wove in among them, chattering, asking questions, laughing, taking notes. Real reporters, from real newspapers. Not rags like The Weekly Gospel .

Tommy swelled with a sudden pride. He could do something the real reporters couldn’t. He could sniff out wild carders. Maybe. He took a deep breath, almost unconsciously, and, almost unconsciously, focused his nascent power. And in among the locker room odors of dirty uniforms and sweaty athletes and ointments and balms of a hundred acrid scents, he caught a weak whiff of what he thought of as the wild card smell, and stood there stunned as someone went by and said, “Hey, kid, don’t block the doorway.”

But he hardly heard him, hardly felt the man brush by. He didn’t even recognize him as Pete Reiser, Dodger manager.

All he was thinking was, There’s a secret ace on the Brooklyn Dodgers! Gee, what a story!

It had been quite a year for Pete Reiser. He’d received the call from Cooperstown in January telling him he’d been elected to the Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility. It wasn’t unexpected because when he’d retired he’d had the most hits, most runs scored, and highest batting average in baseball history, but it was still a stunning achievement for a poor boy from the mid-west who’d wanted nothing more from life than to be a ball-player, who, throughout his twenty-one season career, played like his pants were on fire in every inning of every game, no matter the score, unafraid of opposing players, head-hunting pitchers, or outfield walls.

What was unexpected was that as the first-year manager of a team that hadn’t been out of the cellar since ’62 he was still managing in October, his team tied at one game apiece in the World Series. He could hardly hope for things to get any better, but he did. He longed with all his heart to win the Series, to bring the Dodgers back to the heights of glory that he knew with them in the 1950s.

And it just seemed possible that they might do it.

He stood inside the doorway to the clubhouse, watching his team unwind after a light workout. They were a loose bunch, mainly kids with a sprinkling of veterans, built around a solid core of young pitching and little else. Seaver, Koosman, Ryan, Gates, and Drysdale, the glowering veteran brought in to solidify the staff and, not incidentally, to teach how and when to throw inside, a lesson that Seaver, the young superstar, had learned quickly and well… Jerry Grote, great at handling a staff and calling a game, not so great at hitting… Tommy Agee, a gifted defensive center fielder… Ron Swoboda, a lousy defensive right fielder with occasional binges of power… Cleon Jones, their only.300 hitter… Al Weis, the hundred and sixty five pound infielder who couldn’t hit his weight… Donn Clendenon, bought from the expansion Expos to spell the grizzled Ed Kranepool (he was only twenty-five but had been with the Dodgers for eight seasons; that was enough to grizzle anyone) and provide some pop from the right side of the plate… Ed “The Glider” Charles, their oldest everyday player who could still pick it at third but whose bat had left him two seasons ago… they were an odd and motley crew, but they managed to win, somehow, with great but inconsistent pitching, timely hitting, and an often suspect defense.

And excellent coaching, of course , Reiser thought.

One of the excellent coaches, the pitching coach, was conversing with rookie Jeff Gates at the youngster’s locker. Gates and most of the pitchers called him “Sir,” Drysdale and Reiser and a few of the older players still called him El Hacon , The Hawk. He’d gotten the name as a youngster, partly for the great blade of his nose, partly for his sharp, black eyes. Campy had hung it on him in the spring of 1950 when he’d been traded to the Dodgers from the Washington Senators. He’d pitched for the Dodgers for fifteen seasons, many of them great, some of them awful, and finished his career with four years with the powerhouse Washington Senators. Reiser had watched him save the last game of the ’68 Series for the Senators, throwing with guile and guts and nothing else. He could see that there was nothing left in the Hawk’s arm but pain. Reiser knew that if he was going to make anything out of the mess that had become the Dodgers, he needed El Hacon. Not for this arm anymore, but for his sharp brain which had absorbed so much knowledge over his twenty year major league career. The one thing the Dodgers had was some good young throwers. He needed a pitching coach who could turn them into pitchers, and he knew that Fidel Castro was the man for the job.