Бернард Маламуд - The Natural

Hoping for a better fate in the future he stepped on the gas and was at once seized by an uneasy fear they were being followed. Since the mirror showed nobody behind them, he wondered at his suspicions and then recalled a black sedan that had been on their tail, he thought, all the way down from the city, only they had lost it a while back in turning off the highway. Yet he continued to watch in the mirror, though it showed only the lifeless moonlit road.

Memo said Jones Beach was too far and told him to stop the next time they came to a brook or pond where she could take off her shoes and go wading in the water. When he spied a small stream running along the edge of a wooded section between two towns, he slowed down. They parked across the shoulder of the asphalt and got out but as they crossed this wooden bridge to the grassy side of the stream, they were confronted by a sign: DANGER. POLLUTED WATER. NO SWIMMING. Roy was all for getting into the car to find another place, but Memo said no, they could watch the water from the bridge. She lit a cigarette, all in light, her hair and green summer dress, and her naked legs and even the slave bracelet around her left ankle gleaming in the light of the moon. Smoking, she watched the water flowing under the bridge, its movement reflected on her face.

After a while, seeing how silent she was, Roy said, “I bet I got enough today to furnish a house.”

Memo said, “Bump was coming up for a Day just before he died.”

He felt anger rise in his heart and asked coldly, “Well, Memo, what did he have that I haven’t got?” He stood to his full height, strong and handsome.

Without looking at him she spoke Bump’s name thoughtfully, then shook her head to snap out of it, as if it didn’t pay to be thoughtful about Bump. “Oh,” she answered, “he was carefree and full of life. He did the craziest things and always kept everybody in stitches. Even when he played ball, there was something carefree and playful about it. Maybe he went all the way after a fly ball or maybe he didn’t, but once he made up his mind to catch it, it was exciting how he ran and exciting how he caught it. He made you think you had been wishing for a thing to happen for a long time and then he made it happen. And the same with his hitting. When you catch one, Roy, or go up to hit, everybody knows beforehand that it will land up in your glove, or be a hit. You work at it so — sometimes you even look desperate — but to him it was a playful game and so was his life. Nobody could ever tell what would happen next with Bump, and that was the wonderful thing of it.”

Roy thought this is how she sees him now that he is dead. She forgets how hopping sore she was at him after that time in bed with me.

But Bump was dead, he thought, dead and buried in his new box, an inescapable six feet under, so he subtly changed the subject to Gus.

“Gus?” Memo said. At first her face was expressionless. “Oh, he’s just like a daddy to me.”

He asked her in what way but she laughed and said, “That was a funny business you did with him in the Pot of Fire. How did you do all those tricks?”

“Easy. They had a magic act all laid out to go on. I walked into the guy’s dressing room and when they saw who I was they let me use his stuff just for the laughs.”

“Who showed you how to use it?”

“Nobody. I have done some different things in my time, Memo.”

“Such as what other ones?”

“You name it, I did it.”

“What you did to Max was a scream.”

A black cloud rolled like a slow wave across the moon. “It’s so strange,” she murmured, looking at the moving water.

“What is?”

For a time she didn’t speak, then she sighed and said she meant her life. “It’s been strange ever since I can remember except for a year or two — mostly the part with Bump. That was the good part only it didn’t last very long, not much of the good part ever did. When I was little my daddy walked out on us and I don’t ever remember being happy again till the time I got to go to Hollywood when I was nineteen.”

He waited.

“I won a beauty contest where they picked a winner from each state and she was sent to Hollywood to be a starlet. For a few weeks I felt like the Queen of the May, then they took a screen test and though I had the looks and figure my test did not come out so good in acting and they practically told me to go home. I couldn’t stand the thought of that so I stayed there for three more years, doing night club work and going to an acting school besides, hoping that I would some day be a good enough actress but it didn’t take. I knew what I was supposed to do but I couldn’t make myself, in my thoughts, into somebody else. You’re supposed to forget who you are but I couldn’t. Then I came east and had some more bad times after my mother died, till I met Bump.”

He thought she would cry but she didn’t.

Memo watched the pebbles in the flowing water. “After Bump I realized I could never be happy any more.”

“How do you know that?” Roy asked slowly.

“Oh, I know. I can tell from the way I feel. Sometimes in the morning I never want to wake up.”

He felt a dreary emptiness at her words.

“What about yourself?” she asked, wanting to change the subject.

“What about me?” he said gloomily.

“Max says you are sort of a mystery.”

“Max is a jerk. My past life is nobody’s business.”

“What was it like?”

“Like yours, for years I took it on the chin.” He sounded as if he had caught a cold, took out his handkerchief and blew his nose.

“What happened?”

He wanted to tell her everything, match her story and go her a couple better but couldn’t bring himself to. It wasn’t, he thought, that he was afraid to tell her what had happened to him that first time (though the thought of doing that raised a hot blush on his pan, for he had never told anybody about it yet), but about the miserable years after that, when everything, everything he tried somehow went to pot as if that was its destiny in the first place, a thing he couldn’t understand.

“What happened?” she asked again.

“The hell with it,” he said. “I told you about myself.”

He watched the water.

“I have knocked around a lot and been hard hurt in plenty of ways,” he said huskily. “There were times I thought I would never get anywhere and it made me eat my guts, but all that is gone now. I know I have the stuff and will get there.”

“Get where?”

“Where I am going. Where I will be the champ and have what goes with it.”

She drew back but he had caught her arm and tugged her to him.

“Don’t.”

“You got to live, Memo.”

He trapped her lips, tasting of lemon drops, kissing hard. Happening to open his eyes, he saw her staring at him in the middle of the kiss. Shutting them, he dived deep down again. Then she caught his passion, opened her mouth for his tongue and went limp around the knees.

They swayed together and he turned his hand and slipped it through the top of her dress into her loose brassiere, cupping her warm small breast in his palm.

Her legs stiffened. She pushed at him, sobbing, “Don’t touch it.”

He was slow to react.

She wailed, “Don’t, please don’t.”

He pulled his hand out, angrily disappointed.

She was crying now, rubbing her hand across her bosom.

“Did I hurt you?”

“Yes.”

“How the hell did I do that? I was nice with it.”

“It’s sick,” she wept.

He felt like he had had an icy shave and haircut. “Who says so?”

“It hurts. I know.”

She could be lying, only her eyes were crisscrossed with fear and her arms goosefleshed.

“Did you go to a doctor?”