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

After getting two strikes on the next batter, Lefty threw four balls, so wide it looked like a deliberate pitchout, and that loaded the bases.

J. G. called time. He went out to the mound to talk it over with Lefty, but Lefty waved him away. So J. G. consulted Bugs behind the plate. Jamesie, lying on the grass a few feet away, could hear them.

“That’s the first windup I ever seen a pitcher take with a runner on first.”

“It was pretty bad,” Bugs said.

“And then walking that last one. He don’t look wild to me, neither.”

“He ain’t wild, J. G.; I’ll tell you that.”

“I want your honest opinion, Bugs.”

“I don’t know what to say, J. G.”

“Think I better jerk him?”

Bugs was silent, chewing it over.

“Guess I better leave him in, huh?”

“You’re the boss, J. G. I don’t know nothing for sure.”

“I only got Extra Pete to put in. They’d murder him. I guess I got to leave Lefty in and take a chance.”

“I guess so.”

When J. G. had gone Bugs walked halfway out to the mound and spoke to Lefty. “You all right?”

“I had a little twinge before.”

“A little what?”

Lefty touched his left shoulder.

“You mean your arm’s gone sore?”

“Naw. I guess it’s nothing.”

Bugs took his place behind the plate again. He crouched, and Jamesie, from where he was lying, saw two fingers appear below the mitt — the signal. Lefty nodded, wound up, and tried to slip a medium-fast one down the middle. Guez, the batter, poled a long ball into left — foul by a few feet. Bugs shook his head in the mask, took a new ball from the umpire, and slammed it hard at Lefty.

Jamesie saw two fingers below the mitt again. What was Bugs doing? It wasn’t smart baseball to give Guez another like the last one!

Guez swung and the ball fell against the left-field fence — fair. Lee Coles, the left fielder, was having trouble locating it in the weeds. Kelly Larkin came over from center to help him hunt. When they found the ball, Guez had completed the circuit and the score was 5 to 2 in favor of the Barons.

Big Pete came running over to Lefty from first base, Little Pete from second, Pid Kirby from short, Middle Pete from third. J. G., calling time again, walked out to them.

“C’mere, Bugs,” he said.

Bugs came slowly.

“What’d you call for on that last pitch?”

“Curve ball.”

“And the one before that?”

“Same.”

“And what’d Lefty give you?”

“It wasn’t no curve. It wasn’t much of anything.”

“No,” J. G. said. “It sure wasn’t no curve ball. It was right in there, not too fast, not too slow, just right — for batting practice.”

“It slipped,” Lefty said.

“Slipped, huh!” Big Pete said. “How about the other one?”

“They both slipped. Ain’t that never happened before?”

“Well, it ain’t never going to happen again — not to me, it ain’t,” J. G. said. “I’m taking you out!”

He shouted to Extra Pete on the bench, “Warm up! You’re going in!” He turned to Lefty.

“And I’m firing you. I just found out your old man was making bets under the grandstand — and they wasn’t on us! I can put you in jail for this!”

“Try it,” Lefty said, starting to walk away.

“If you knew it, J. G.,” Big Pete said, “whyn’t you let us know?”

“I just now found it out, is why.”

“Then I’m going to make up for lost time,” Big Pete said, following Lefty, “and punch this guy’s nose.”

Old man Peterson appeared among them — somebody must have told him what it was all about. “Give it to him, son!” he cackled.

Jamesie missed the fight. He was not tall enough to see over all the heads, and Gabriel, sent by Uncle Pat, was dragging him away from it all.

“I always knew that Lefty was a bad one,” Gabriel said on the way home. “I knew it from the time he used to hunch in marbles.”

“It reminds me of the Black Sox scandal of 1919,” Uncle Pat said. “I wonder if they’ll hold the old man, too.”

Jamesie, in tears, said, “Lefty hurt his arm and you don’t like him just because he don’t work, and his father owes you at the store! Let me out! I’d rather walk by myself than ride in the Hupmobile — with you!”

He stayed up in his room, feigning a combination stomach-ache and headache, and would not come down for supper. Uncle Pat and Gabriel were down there eating. His room was over the dining room, and the windows were open upstairs and down, but he could not quite hear what they said. Uncle Pat was laughing a lot — that was all for sure — but then he always did that. Pretty soon he heard no more from the dining room and he knew they had gone to sit on the front porch.

Somebody was coming up the stairs. Aunt Kate. He knew the wavering step at the top of the stairs to be hers, and the long pause she used to catch her breath — something wrong with her lungs? Now, as she began to move, he heard ice tinkling in a glass. Lemonade. She was bringing him some supper. She knocked. He lay heavier on the bed and with his head at a painful angle to make her think he was suffering. She knocked again. If he pinched his forehead it would look red and feverish. He did. Now.

“Come in,” he said weakly.

She came in, gliding across the room in the twilight, tall and white as a sail in her organdy, serene before her patient. Not quite opening his eyes, he saw her through the lashes. She thought he was sick all right, but even if she didn’t, she would never take advantage of him to make a joke, like Uncle Pat, prescribing, “A good dose of salts! That’s the ticket!” Or Gabriel, who was even meaner, “An enema!”

He had Aunt Kate fooled completely. He could fool her every time. On Halloween she was the kind of person who went to the door every time the bell rang. She was the only grownup he knew with whom it was not always the teetertotter game. She did not raise herself by lowering him. She did not say back to him the things he said, slightly changed, accented with a grin, so that they were funny. Uncle Pat did. Gabriel did. Sometimes, if there was company, his father did.

“Don’t you want the shades up, Jamesie?”

She raised the shades, catching the last of that day’s sun, bringing the ballplayers on the wall out of the shadows and into action. She put the tray on the table by his bed.

Jamesie sat up and began to eat. Aunt Kate was the best one. Even if she noticed it, she would say nothing about his sudden turn for the better.

She sat across from him in the rocker, the little red one he had been given three years ago, when he was just a kid in the first grade, but she did not look too big for it. She ran her hand over the front of his books, frowning at Baseball Bill, Don Sturdy, Tom Swift, Horatio Alger, Jr, and the Sporting News . They had come between him and her.

“Where are the books we used to read, Jamesie?”

“On the bottom shelf.”

She bent to see them. There they were, his old friends and hers — hers still. Perseus. Theseus. All those old Greeks. Sir Lancelot. Merlin. Sir Tristram. King Arthur. Oliver Twist. Pinocchio. Gulliver. He wondered how he ever could have liked them, and why Aunt Kate still did. Perhaps he still did, a little. But they turned out wrong, most of them, with all the good guys dying or turning into fairies and the bad guys becoming dwarfs. The books he read now turned out right, if not until the very last page, and the bad guys died or got what was coming to them.

“Were they talking about the game, Aunt Kate?”

“Your uncle was, and Gabriel.”

Jamesie waited a moment. “Did they say anything about Lefty?”

“I don’t know. Is he the one who lost the game on purpose?”