J. Powers - The Stories of J.F. Powers

“Well, if I’m the head of the powerful—”

Mr Murgatroyd came to the back door and told Francis to get ready.

“I can’t go to the game, Jamesie,” Francis said. “I have to caddy for him.”

Jamesie got a ride with the calliope when it had to stop at the corner for the light. The calliope was not playing now, but yesterday it had roamed the streets, all red and gold and glittering like a hussy among the pious, black Fords parked on the Square, blaring and showing off, with a sign, Jayville vs. Beardstown.

The ball park fence was painted a swampy green except for an occasional new board. Over the single ticket window cut in the fence hung a sign done in the severe black and white railroad manner, “Home of the Jayville Independents,” but everybody called them the “Indees.”

Jamesie bought a bottle of Green River out of his savings and made the most of it, swallowing it in sips, calling upon his willpower under the sun. He returned the bottle and stood for a while by the ticket window making designs in the dust with the corrugated soles of his new tennis shoes. Ding Bell, with a pretty lady on his arm and carrying the black official scorebook, passed inside without paying, and joked about it.

The Beardstown players arrived from sixty miles away with threatening cheers. Their chartered bus stood steaming and dusty from the trip. The players wore gray suits with “Barons” written across their chests and had the names of sponsors on their backs — Palms Café, Rusty’s Wrecking, Coca-Cola.

Jamesie recognized some of the Barons but put down a desire to speak to them.

The last man to leave the bus, Jamesie thought, must be Guez, the new pitcher imported from East St Louis for the game. Ding Bell had it in the Dope Box that “Saliva Joe” was one of the few spitters left in the business, had been up in the Three Eye a few years, was a full-blooded Cuban, and ate a bottle of aspirins a game, just like candy.

The dark pitcher’s fame was too much for Jamesie. He walked alongside Guez. He smelled the salt and pepper of the gray uniform, saw the scarred plate on the right toe, saw the tears in the striped stockings — the marks of bravery or moths— heard the distant chomp of tobacco being chewed, felt — almost — the iron drape of the flannel, and was reduced to friendliness with the pitcher, the enemy.

“Are you a real Cuban?”

Guez looked down, rebuking Jamesie with a brief stare, and growled, “Go away.”

Jamesie gazed after the pitcher. He told himself that he hated Guez — that’s what he did, hated him! But it didn’t do much good. He looked around to see if anybody had been watching, but nobody had, and he wanted somebody his size to vanquish — somebody who might think Guez was as good as Lefty. He wanted to bet a million dollars on Lefty against Guez, but there was nobody to take him up on it.

The Indees began to arrive in ones and twos, already in uniform but carrying their spikes in their hands. Jamesie spoke to all of them except J. G. Nickerson, the manager. J. G. always glared at kids. He thought they were stealing his baseballs and laughing about it behind his back. He was a great one for signaling with a score card from the bench, like Connie Mack, and Ding Bell had ventured to say that managers didn’t come any brainier than Jayville’s own J. G. Nickerson, even in the big time. But if there should be a foul ball, no matter how tight the game or crucial the situation, J. G. would leap up, straining like a bird dog, and try to place it, waving the bat boy on without taking his eyes off the spot where it disappeared over the fence or in the weeds. That was why they called him the Foul Ball.

The Petersons — the old man at the wheel, a red handkerchief tied tight enough around his neck to keep his head on, and the sons, all players, Big Pete, Little Pete, Middle Pete, and Extra Pete — roared up with their legs hanging out of the doorless Model T and the brass radiator boiling over.

The old man ran the Model T around in circles, damning it for a runaway horse, and finally got it parked by the gate.

“Hold ’er, Knute!” he cackled.

The boys dug him in the ribs, tickling him, and were like puppies that had been born bigger than their father, jollying him through the gate, calling him Barney Oldfield.

Lefty came.

“Hi, Lefty,” Jamesie said.

“Hi, kid,” Lefty said. He put his arm around Jamesie and took him past the ticket taker.

“It’s all right, Mac,” he said.

“Today’s the day, Lefty,” Mac said. “You can do it, Lefty.”

Jamesie and Lefty passed behind the grandstand. Jamesie saw Lefty’s father, a skinny, brown-faced man in a yellow straw katy.

“There’s your dad, Lefty.”

Lefty said, “Where?” but looked the wrong way and walked a little faster.

At the end of the grandstand Lefty stopped Jamesie. “My old man is out of town, kid. Got that?”

Jamesie did not see how this could be. He knew Lefty’s father. Lefty’s father had a brown face and orange gums. But Lefty ought to know his own father. “I guess it just looked like him, Lefty,” Jamesie said.

Lefty took his hand off Jamesie’s arm and smiled. “Yeah, that’s right, kid. It just looked like him on account of he’s out of town — in Peoria.”

Jamesie could still feel the pressure of Lefty’s fingers on his arm. They came out on the diamond at the Indees bench near first base. The talk quieted down when Lefty appeared. Everybody thought he had a big head, but nobody could say a thing against his pitching record, it was that good. The scout for the New York Yankees had invited him only last Sunday to train with them next spring. The idea haunted the others. J. G. had shut up about the beauties of teamwork.

J. G. was counting the balls when Jamesie went to the suitcase to get one for Lefty. J. G. snapped the lid down.

“It’s for Lefty!”

“Huh!”

“He wants it for warm up.”

“Did you tell this kid to get you a ball, Left?”

“Should I bring my own?” Lefty said.

J. G. dug into the suitcase for a ball, grunting, “I only asked him.” He looked to Jamesie for sympathy. He considered the collection of balls and finally picked out a fairly new one.

“Lefty, he likes ’em brand new,” Jamesie said.

“Who’s running this club?” J. G. bawled. But he threw the ball back and broke a brand new one out of its box and tissue paper. He ignored Jamesie’s ready hand and yelled to Lefty going out to the bull pen, “Coming at you, Left,” and threw it wild.

Lefty let the ball bounce through his legs, not trying for it. “Nice throw,” he said.

Jamesie retrieved the ball for Lefty. They tossed it back and forth, limbering up, and Jamesie aped Lefty’s professional indolence.

When Bugs Bidwell, Lefty’s battery mate, appeared with his big mitt, Jamesie stood aside and buttoned his glove back on his belt. Lefty shed his red blanket coat with the leathersleeves and gave it to Jamesie for safekeeping. Jamesie folded it gently over his arm, with the white chenille “J” showing out. He took his stand behind Bugs to get a good look at Lefty’s stuff.

Lefty had all his usual stuff — the fast one with the two little hops in it, no bigger than a pea; his slow knuckler that looked like a basketball, all the stitches standing still and staring you in the face; his sinker that started out high like a wild pitch, then dipped a good eight inches and straightened out for a called strike. But something was wrong — Lefty with nothing to say, no jokes, no sudden whoops, was not himself. Only once did he smile at a girl in the bleachers and say she was plenty… and sent a fast one smacking into Bugs’s mitt for what he meant.

That, for a moment, was the Lefty that Jamesie’s older cousins knew about. They said a nice kid like Jamesie ought to be kept away from him, even at the ball park. Jamesie was always afraid it would get back to Lefty that the cousins thought he was poor white trash, or that he would know it in some other way, as when the cousins passed him on the street and looked the other way. He was worried, too, about what Lefty might think of his Sunday clothes, the snow-white blouse, the floppy sailor tie, the soft linen pants, the sissy clothes. His tennis shoes — sneakers, he ought to say — were all right, but not the golf stockings that left his knees bare, like a rich kid’s. The tough guys, because they were tough or poor — he didn’t know which — wore socks, not stockings, and they wore them rolled down slick to their ankles.