Stephen King - Blockade Billy

I went back to the dugout. Aparicio stood back in with a big shit-eating grin on his face. He knew, sure he did. And made the most of it. The guy never hit many home runs, but when The Doo sent in a changeup that didn’t change, Louie cranked it high, wide, and handsome to the deepest part of the park. Nosy Norton was playing center, and he never even turned around.

Aparicio circled the bases, serene as the Queen Mary coming into dock, while the crowd screamed at him, denigrated his relatives, and hurled hate down on Hi Wenders’s head. Wenders heard none of it, which is the chief umpirely skill. He just got a fresh ball out of his coat pocket and inspected it for dings and doinks. Watching him do that, I lost it entirely. I rushed out to home plate and started shaking both fists in his face.

“That’s your run, you fucking busher!” I screamed. “Too fucking lazy to chase after a foul ball, and now you’ve got an RBI for yourself! Jam it up your ass! Maybe you’ll find your glasses!”

The crowd loved it. Hi Wenders, not so much. He pointed at me, threw his thumb back over his shoulder, and walked away. The crowd started booing and shaking their ROAD CLOSED signs; some threw bottles, cups, and half-eaten franks onto the field. It was a circus.

“Don’t you walk away from me, you fatass blind lazy sonofabitching bastard!” I screamed, and chased after him. Someone from our dugout grabbed me before I could grab Wenders, which I meant to do. I had lost touch with reality.

The crowd was chanting “KILL THE UMP! KILL THE UMP! KILL THE UMP!” I’ll never forget that, because it was the same way they’d been chanting “Bloh-KADE! Bloh-KADE!”

“If your mother was here, she’d be throwing shit at you, too, you bat-blind busher!” I screamed, and then they hauled me into the dugout. Ganzie Burgess, our knuckleballer, managed the last three innings of that horrorshow. He also pitched the last two. You might find that in the record-books, too. If there were any records of that lost spring.

The last thing I saw on the field was Danny Dusen and Blockade Billy standing on the grass between the plate and the mound. The kid had his mask tucked under his arm. The Doo was whispering in his ear. The kid was listening-he always listened when The Doo talked-but he was looking at the crowd, forty thousand fans on their feet, men, women, and children, yelling KILL THE UMP, KILL THE UMP, KILL THE UMP .

There was a bucket of balls halfway down the hall between the dugout and the locker room. I kicked it and sent balls rolling every whichway. If I’d stepped on one of them and fallen on my ass, it would have been the perfect end to a perfect fucking afternoon at the ballpark.

Joe was in the locker room, sitting on a bench outside the showers. By then he looked seventy instead of just fifty. There were three other guys in there with him. Two were uniformed cops. The third one was in a suit, but you only had to take one look at his hard roast beef of a face to know he was a cop, too.

“Game over early?” this one asked me. He was sitting on a folding chair with his big old cop thighs spread and straining his seersucker pants. The bluesuits were on one of the benches in front of the lockers.

“It is for me,” I said. I was still so mad I didn’t even care about the cops. To Joe I said, “Fucking Wenders ran me. I’m sorry, Cap, but it was a clear case of interference and that lazy sonofabitch-”

“It doesn’t matter,” Joe said. “The game isn’t going to count. I don’t think any of our games are going to count. Kerwin’ll appeal to the Commissioner, of course, but-”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

Joe sighed. Then he looked at the guy in the suit. “You tell him, Detective Lombardazzi,” he said. “I can’t bear to.”

“Does he need to know?” Lombardazzi asked. He’s looking at me like I’m some kind of bug he’s never seen before. It was a look I didn’t need on top of everything else, but I kept my mouth shut. Because I knew three cops, one of them a detective, don’t show up in the locker room of a Major League baseball team if it isn’t goddam serious.

“If you want him to hold the other guys long enough for you to get the Blakely kid out of here, I think he does need to,” Joe says.

From above us there came a cry from the fans, followed by a groan, followed by a cheer. None of us paid any attention to what turned out to be the end of Danny Dusen’s baseball career. The cry was when he got hit in the forehead by a Larry Doby line drive. The groan was when he fell on the pitcher’s mound like a tagged prizefighter. And the cheer was when he picked himself up and gestured that he was okay. Which he was not, but he pitched the rest of the sixth, and the seventh, too. Didn’t give up a run, either. Ganzie made him come out before the eighth when he saw The Doo wasn’t walking straight. Danny all the time claiming he was perfectly okay, that the big purple goose-egg raising up over his left eyebrow wasn’t nothing, he’d had lots worse, and the kid saying the same: it ain’t nothing, it ain’t nothing. Little Sir Echo. Us down in the clubhouse didn’t know any of that, no more than Dusen knew he might’ve been tagged worse in his career, but it was the first time part of his brain had sprung a leak.

“His name isn’t Blakely,” Lombardazzi says. “It’s Eugene Katsanis.”

“Katz- whatsis? Where’s Blakely, then?”

“William Blakely’s dead. Has been for a month. His parents, too.”

I gaped at him. “What are you talking about?”

So he told me the stuff I’m sure you already know, Mr. King, but maybe I can fill in a few blanks. The Blakelys lived in Clarence, Iowa, a wide patch of not much an hour’s drive from Davenport. Made it convenient for Ma and Pa, because they could go to most of their son’s minor league games. Blakely had a successful farm; an eight hundred acre job. One of their hired men wasn’t much more than a boy. His name was Gene Katsanis, an orphan who’d grown up in The Ottershaw Christian Home for Boys. He was no farmer, and not quite right in the head, but he was a hell of a baseball player.

Katsanis and Blakely played against each other on a couple of church teams, and together on the local Babe Ruth team, which won the state tournament all three years the two of them played together, and once went as far as the national semis. Blakely went to high school and starred on that team, too, but Katsanis wasn’t school material. Slopping-the-hogs material and ballplaying material is what he was, although he was never supposed to be as good as Billy Blakely. Nobody so much as considered such a thing. Until it happened, that is.

Blakely’s father hired him because the kid worked cheap, sure, but mostly because he had enough natural talent to keep Billy sharp. For twenty-five dollars a week, the kid got a fielder and a batting-practice pitcher. The old man got a cow-milker and a shit-shoveler. Not a bad deal, at least for them.

Whatever you’ve found in your research probably favors the Blakely family, am I right? Because they had been around those parts for four generations, because they were rich farmers, and because Katsanis wasn’t nothing but a state kid who started life in a liquor carton on a church step and had several screws loose upstairs. And why was that? Because he was born dumb or because he got the crap beaten out of him three and four times a week in that home before he got old enough and big enough to defend himself? I know a lot of the beatings came because he had a habit of talking to himself-that came out in the newspapers later on.

Katsanis and Billy practiced just as hard once Billy got into the Titans’ farm-system-during the off-season, you know, probably throwing and hitting in the barn once the snow got too deep outside-but Katsanis got kicked off the local town team, and wasn’t allowed to go to the Cornholers’ workouts during Billy’s second season with them. During his first one, Katsanis had been allowed to participate in some of the workouts, even in some intersquad games, if they were a man shy. It was all pretty informal and loosey-goosey back then, not like now when the insurance companies shit a brick if a major leaguer so much as grabs a bat without wearing a helmet.