Бернард Маламуд - The Natural

He was greatly confused and thought she was kidding but a grating lump formed in his throat and his blood shed ice. He cried out in a gruff voice, “What’s wrong here?”

She said sweetly, “Roy, will you be the best there ever was in the game?”

“That’s right.”

She pulled the trigger (thrum of bull fiddle). The bullet cut a silver line across the water. He sought with his bare bands to catch it, but it eluded him and, to his horror. bounced into his gut. A twisted dagger of smoke drifted up from the gun barrel. Fallen on one knee he groped for the bullet, sickened as it moved, and fell over as the forest flew upward, and she, making muted noises of triumph and despair, danced on her toes around the stricken hero.

“I shoulda been a farmer,” Pop Fisher said bitterly. “I shoulda farmed since the day I was born. I like cows, sheep, and those horniess goats — I am partial to nanny goats, my daddy wore a beard — I like to feed animals and milk ‘em. I like fixing things, weeding poison oak out of the pasture, and seeing to the watering of the crops. I like to be by myself on a farm. I like to stand out in the fields, tending the vegetables, the corn, the winter wheat — greenest looking stuff you ever saw. When Ma was alive she kept urging me to leave baseball and take up farming, and I always meant to but after she died I had no heart for it.” Pop’s voice all but broke and Red Blow shifted nervously on the bench but Pop didn’t cry. He took out his handkerchief, flipped it, and blew his nose. “I have that green thumb:” he said huskily, “and I shoulda farmed instead of playing wet nurse to a last place, dead-to-the-neck ball team.”

They were sitting in the New York Knights’ dugout, scanning the dusty field, the listless game and half-empty stands.

“Tough,” said Red. He kept his eye on the pitcher.

Removing his cap, Pop rubbed his bald head with his bandaged fingers. “It’s been a blasted dry season. No rains at all. The grass is worn scabby in the outfield and the infield is cracking. My heart feels as dry as dirt for the little I have to show for all my years in the game.”

He got up, stooped at the fountain and spat the warm, rusty water into the dust. “When the hell they going to fix this thing so we can have a decent drink of water? Did you speak to that bastard partner I have, like I said to?”

“Says he’s working on it.”

“Working on it,” Pop grunted. “He’s so tight that if he was any tighter he’d be too stiff to move. It was one of the darkest days of my life when that snake crawled into this club. He’s done me out of more dough than I can count.”

“Kid’s weakening again,” Red said. “He passed two.” Pop watched Fowler for a minute but let him stay. “If those boy scouts could bring in a coupla runs once in a while I’d change pitchers, but they couldn’t bring their own grandmother in from across the street. What a butchering we took from the Pirates in the first game and here we are six runs behind in this. It’s Memorial Day, all right, but not for the soldiers.”

“Should’ve had some runs. Bump had four for four in the first, and two hits before he got himself chucked out of this.”

Pop’s face burned. “Don’t mention that ape man to me — getting hisself bounced out of the game the only time we had runners on the bases when he come up.”

“I’d’ve thrown him out too if I was the ump and he slid dry ice down my pants.”

“I’d like to stuff him with ice. I never saw such a disgusting screwball for practical jokes.”

Pop scratched violently under his loosely bandaged fingers. “And to top it off I have to go catch athlete’s foot on my hands. Now ain’t that one for the books? Everybody I have ever heard of have got it on their feet but I have to go and get it on both of my hands and be itchy and bandaged in this goshdarn hot weather. No wonder I am always asking myself is life worth the living of it.”

“Tough,” Red said. “He’s passed Feeber, bases loaded.” Pop fumed. “My best pitcher and he blows up every time I put him against a first place team. Yank him.”

The coach, a lean and freckled man, got nimbly up on the dugout steps and signaled to the bullpen in right field. He sauntered out to the mound just as somebody in street clothes came up the stairs of the tunnel leading from the clubhouse and asked the player at the end of the bench, “Who’s Fisher?” The player jerked his thumb toward the opposite side of the dugout, and the man, dragging a large, beat-up valise and a bassoon case, treaded his way to Pop.

When Pop saw him coming he exclaimed, “Oh, my eight-foot uncle, what have we got here, the Salvation Army band?”

The man set his things on the floor and sat down on a concrete step, facing Pop. He beheld an old geezer of sixty-five with watery blue eyes, a thin red neck and a bitter mouth, who looked like a lost banana in the overgrown baseball suit he wore, especially his skinny legs in loose blue-and-white stockings.

And Pop saw a tall, husky, dark-bearded fellow with old eyes but not bad features. His face was strong-boned, if a trifle meaty, and his mouth seemed pleasant though its expression was grim. For his bulk he looked lithe, and he appeared calmer than he felt, for although he was sitting here on this step he was still in motion. He was traveling (on the train that never stopped). His self, his mind, raced on and he felt he hadn’t stopped going wherever he was going because he hadn’t yet arrived. Where hadn’t he arrived? Here. But now it was time to calm down, ease up on the old scooter, sit still and be quiet, though the inside of him was still streaming through towns and cities, across forests and fields, over long years.

“The only music I make,” he answered Pop, patting the bassoon case, “is with my bat.” Searching through the pockets of his frayed and baggy suit, worn to threads at the knees and elbows, he located a folded letter that he reached over to the manager. “I’m your new left fielder, Roy Hobbs.”

“My what!” Pop exploded.

“It says in the letter.”

Red, who had returned from the mound, took the letter, unfolded it, and handed it to Pop. He read it in a single swoop then shook his head in disbelief.

“Scotty Carson sent you?”

“That’s right.”

“He must be daffy.”

Roy wet his dry lips.

Pop shot him a shrewd look. “You’re thirty-five if you’re a day.”

“Thirty-four, but I’m good for ten years.”

“Thirty-four — Holy Jupiter, mister, you belong in an old man’s home, not baseball.”

The players along the bench were looking at him. Roy licked his lips.

“Where’d he pick you up?” Pop asked.

“I was with the Oomoo Oilers.”

“In what league?”

“They’re semipros.”

“Ever been in organized baseball?”

“I only recently got back in the game.”

“What do you mean got back?”

“Used to play in high school.”

Pop snorted. “Well, it’s a helluva mess.” He slapped the letter with the back of his fingers. “Scotty signed him and the Judge okayed it. Neither of them consulted me. They can’t do that,” he said to Red. “That thief in the tower might have sixty per cent of the stock but I have it in writing that I am to manage this team and approve all player deals as long as I live.”

“I got a contract,” said Roy.

“Lemme see it.”

Roy pulled a blue-backed paper out of his inside coat pocket.

Pop scanned it. “Where in blazes did he get the figure of three thousand dollars?”

“It was for a five thousand minimum but the Judge said I already missed one-third of the season.”