Бернард Маламуд - The Natural

“I don’t like them.”

“You ought to go.”

Memo ran off the bridge. He followed her to the car. She sat at the wheel and started the motor. Figuring she would calm down quicker this way he let her.

She backed the car onto the road and drove off. The moon sank into an enormous cloud-sea. Memo sped along the asphalt and turned at a fork down a hard dirt road.

“Put on the lights.”

“I like it dark.” Her white arms were stiff on the wheel.

He knew she didn’t but figured she was still nervous.

Dripping dark cloud spray, the moon bobbed up and flooded the road ahead with bright light. Memo pressed her foot on the gas.

A thundering wind beat across his skull. Let her, he thought. Whatever she has got on her mind, let her get it off, especially if it is still Bump.

He thought about what she had said on the bridge about never being happy again and wondered what it meant. In a way he was tired of her — she was too complicated — but in a different way he desired her more than ever. He could not decide what to say or do next. Maybe wait, but he didn’t want to any more. Yet what else was there to do?

The white moonlight shot through a stretch of woods ahead. He found himself wishing he could go back somewhere, go home, wherever that was. As he was thinking this, he looked up and saw in the moonlight a boy coming out of the woods, followed by his dog. Squinting through the windshield, he was unable to tell if the kid was an illusion thrown forth by the trees or someone really alive. After fifteen seconds he was still there. Roy yelled to Memo to slow down in case he wanted to cross the road. Instead, the car shot forward so fast the woods blurred, the trees racing along like shadows in weak light, then skipping into black and white, finally all black and the moon was gone.

“Lights!”

She sat there stiffly so he reached over and switched them on.

As the road flared up, Memo screamed and tugged at the wheel. He felt a thud and his heart sickened. It was a full minute before he realized they hadn’t stopped.

“For Christ sake, stop — we hit somebody.”

“No.” Her face was bloodless.

He reached for the brake.

“Don’t, it was just something on the road.”

“I heard somebody groan.”

“That was yourself.”

He couldn’t remember that he had.

“I want to go back and see.”

“If you do, the cops will get us.”

“What cops?”

“They have been after us since we started. I’ve been doing ninety.”

He looked back and saw a black car with dimmed headlights speeding after them.

“Turn at the next bend,” he ordered her, “and I will take over.”

They were nearer to the Sound than he had suspected, and when a white pea-souper crawled in off the water Roy headed into it. Though the Mercedes showed no lights the whiteness of it was enough to keep it in the sedan’s eye, so he welcomed the fog and within it easily ditched those who chased them. On the way back he attempted to find the road along the woods to see if they had hit somebody. Memo had little patience with him. She was sure, despite Roy’s insistence of an outside groan, that they had hit a rock or log in the road. If they went back the cops might be laying for them and they’d be arrested, which would cause no end of trouble.

He said he was going back anyway.

Roy had the feeling that the sedan was still at his shoulder — he could see it wasn’t — as he tried to locate the bridge and then the road along the woods. He wasn’t convinced they had not hit somebody and if he could do anything for the kid, even this late, he wanted to. So he turned the lights on bright, illuminating the swirling fog, and as they went by the fogshrouded woods — he couldn’t be sure it was the right woods — he searched the road intently for signs of a body or its blood but found nothing. Memo dozed off but was awakened when Roy, paying no heed to what lay ahead, ran off a low embankment, crashing the car into a tree. Though shaken up, neither of them was much hurt. Roy had a black eye and Memo bruised her sick breast. The car was a wreck.

Helping Memo out of a cab that same morning before dawn, Roy glanced into the hotel lobby just as Pop Fisher bounced up out of a couch and came charging at them like a runaway trolley. Memo said to run, so they raced down the street and ducked into the hotel by the side entrance, but they were barely to the stairs when Pop, who had doubled back on his tracks, came at them smoking with anger.

Memo sobbed she had taken all she could tonight and ran up the stairs. Roy had hoped to have another chance at a kiss but when Pop flew at him like a batty, loose-feathered fowl, killing the stillness of the place with his shrill crowing, he figured it best to keep him away from Memo.

He turned to Pop, who then got a closeup of Roy’s rainbow eye and all but blew apart. He called him everything from a dadblamed sonovagun to a blankety blank Judas traitor for breaking training, hurting his eye, and blowing in at almost 5 A.M. on the day of an important twin bill with the Phils.

“You damn near drove me wild,” he shouted. “I just about had heart failure when Red told me you weren’t in your room at midnight.”

He then and there fined Roy two hundred and fifty dollars, but reduced it to an even hundred when Roy sarcastically mentioned how much the Knights were paying him.

“And nothing is wrong with my eye,” he said. “It don’t hurt but a little and I can see out of it as clear as day, but if you want me to get some sleep before the game don’t stand there jawing my head off.”

Pop was quickly pacified. “I admit you are entitled to a good time on your Day but you have no idea of all that I have suffered in those hours I was waiting up for you. All kinds of terrible things ran through my mind. I don’t hafta tell you it don’t take much to kill off a man nowadays.”

Roy laughed. “Nothing is going to kill me before my time. I am the type that will die a natural death.”

Seeing the affectionate smile this raised up on Pop’s puss, he felt sorry for the old man and said, “Even with one eye I will wow them for you today.”

“I know you will, son,” Pop almost purred. “You’re the one I’m depending on to get us up there. We’re hot now and I figure, barring any serious accidents, that we will catch up with the Pirates in less than two weeks. Then once we are first we should stay there till we take the flag. My God, when I think of that my legs get dizzy. I guess you know what that would mean to me after all of these years. Sometimes I feel I have been waiting for it my whole life. So take care of yourself. When all is said and done, you ain’t a kid any more. At your age the body will often act up, so be wise and avoid any trouble.”

“I am young in my mind and healthy in my body,” Roy said. “You don’t have to worry about me.”

“Only be careful,” Pop said.

Roy said good night but couldn’t move because Pop had gripped his elbow. Leading him to the corner, he whispered to Roy not to have too much to do with Memo.

Roy stiffened.

“Don’t get me wrong, son, she’s not a bad girl —”

Roy glared.

Pop gulped. “I am the one who is really bad. It was me who introduced her to Bump.” He looked sick. “I hoped she would straighten him out and sorta hold him in the team — but — well, you know how these things are. Bump was not the marrying kind and she sorta — well, you know what I mean.”

“So what?” said Roy.

“Nothing,” he answered brokenly. “Only I was wrong for encouraging them to get together with maybe in the back of my mind the idea of how they would do so—without getting married, that is — and I have suffered from it since.”