Pete Hamill - Snow in August

“Is like a story,” the rabbi said. “Each day, a new chapter.”

“It’s history,” Michael said.

“And something else,” the rabbi said. “In America, he is new . Just like me.” He paused and ran his hand over one of the clippings. “With Jackie Robinson, the book I am not starting in the middle. In America, it takes so long to learn what happened before. But here, we are at a beginning.”

When the game was on the radio, all that had happened before to Rabbi Hirsch seemed to disappear. He never talked about Prague. He didn’t evoke the spires of the cathedrals. There was no need for the Golem, if Jackie Robinson was taking a long lead off first. There were too many questions to be answered, too much to learn. The rabbi wanted to know about Sportsman’s Park in distant St. Louis, where a man named Country Slaughter — such a name! — hit one over the pavilion roof. He wanted to know about Forbes Field in Pittsburgh and Shibe Park in Philadelphia. Forbes, who was he? And Shibe? He was a ballplayer? The rabbi tried hard to imagine these sun-drowned places in the vastness of America. While he had baseball, there was no place in his mind, it seemed, for night and fog.

Zip-a-dee-doo-dah , the rabbi sang during a game, when Robinson scampered home from second on a wild pitch.

Zip-a-dee-ay ,

My-oh-my, what a wonderful day…

Baseball made him sing. He was always out of tune, but it didn’t matter. He learned the words to “Don’t Fence Me In,” all about straddling his own saddle underneath the Western skies, and Michael found the English words to “And the Angels Sing.” These the rabbi sometimes changed. You hit , he would sing, and then the angels sing … and laughed at himself.

One warm evening in June, Michael was walking home from the synagogue, brooding about Pete Reiser. Nine more days until the end of the term, and then Sonny can help us get PAL tickets so we can go to Ebbets Field, and Pete Reiser runs into another goddamned wall! Ends up in a hospital. Unconscious. Just like ’42. Reiser was hitting.383 that year, then he runs into a wall and hits.200 the rest of the season and we lose the pennant. In ’41, he hit.343, led the league in doubles and triples, and we won the pennant. We need Pistol Pete. We need him. And where is he? In the goddamned hospital, just like Mister G, and he can’t talk, and the sportswriters said when his head hit the wall, the sound was sickening. That’s like Mister G too. When Frankie McCarthy hit him with the cash register. Sickening. We never saw Mister G again, and his wife left and his kids left and the store is empty, like it has a curse on it. Maybe center field will have a curse on it. The curse of Pete Reiser. Oh sure, they put Carl Furillo there for now. Great arm, but not Reiser. And they brought up this Duke Snider, but he strikes out too much. Shit. Jackie Robinson can’t do it alone. The Dodgers need Reiser too. I wish I could go to the hospital and pray and pray and Reiser’s eyes would open and he’d get up like nothing happened and take a cab to the ballpark. Maybe if I prayed hard enough, Mister G would get up too and go to the candy store and everything would be the way it was before. And summer would come, all hot and green, and we could go to see Reiser and Robinson. Watch Reiser steal home. Against the Cardinals. Cheer Robinson dancing off second base against the goddamned Phillies, just the way Red Barber describes him. And here comes Robinson! And There goes Reiser…

Michael was crossing the street beside the factory, his head full of green fields and roaring crowds, when they reached him.

His arms were grabbed and he was lifted and jerked sideways and shoved hard against the picket fence of the factory. The streetlight was out. But Michael saw the faces. The Falcons. Tippy Hudnut and Skids, Ferret and the Russian. He smelled sour beer. Stale sweat. He felt hard fingers digging right to the bone of his arms and his heart pounding. This can’t be happening. Not now. No. Not tonight. No. Please, no. Then he was twisted around and one of them drove a punch into his stomach. His body exploded in pain. He couldn’t feel his legs. His belly felt split. He couldn’t breathe. He tried to speak, but no words came from his mouth, only a kind of whimper. A shameful kid’s whimper.

Then he smelled shit.

His own shit.

No.

Then there was another tearing jolt. No , and he bent over, No, no , and something, a bat, a billy club, smashed against his legs.

“Little cocksucker,” one of them snarled. “Singin’ like a canary.”

“Fuckin’ Jew-lover,” a second voice growled, panting as another punch smashed into Michael’s stomach. “Half a fuckin’ Hebe. How do you like dat ?”

“This is from Frankie,” a third voice said. “He sends you his best. He wants you to have a real good fuckin’ summer. He’ll think about you every night. You and your fuckin’ friends.”

Michael thought: I’m going to die. They’re going to kill me.

Then the shit-stained world exploded into a high, white, ringing emptiness.

His mother’s voice was soothing and whispery but her eyes were wide and anxious, and then she went away. A bald man with thick eyeglasses peered at him and used his smooth fingers to pull back one of his eyelids. Behind the bald man there were horizontal bars of light and dark. They went away too. Father Heaney’s face peered at him and his lips moved but no words came out and then he went away. A tube of cold glass was slipped under his tongue and then grew warm and then slid out. Every time he tried to move, he hurt. He felt warm and wet and realized he had pissed in the bed and was embarrassed. His mouth tasted like nickels. There was something attached to his arm, and when he was alone and stared at the bars of light and darkness and then closed his eyes he saw purple lines and pink bars. Sounds came from a long way off. Wheels squeaking. Dishes clattering. A blurred loudspeaker voice. He heard rosary beads clicking smoothly against each other. He smelled something soapy. He was tossed, pierced, penetrated, moved, washed, handled.

He lost two days.

And then woke to his mother’s face again, her eyes wide in relief, her cool hand touching his cheek. He said, Hello, Mom, and she exhaled and said, Thank God.

His tongue felt furry, and she held a glass to his lips while he sipped the cool water. The taste of nickels remained. After a while, her eyes narrowed, and her face was full of wrath, and she said, Who did this to you, son?

He tried to tell her. He described the Falcons. He tried to make them clear without naming them. He did not say the names of Tippy Hudnut and Skids, Ferret and the Russian. He wanted to tell what he could tell, without violating the codes. The Irish codes. The codes of the parish. Even though they had done this to him. Tippy Hudnut and Skids, Ferret and the Russian. Even though they had beaten and broken his body. Even though they had put him in this room.

But then he remembered the humiliating smell of his own shit, and he could not hold back. This wasn’t the police. This wasn’t the district attorney. This was his mother, right here in a third floor room at Brooklyn Wesley an Hospital. He told her the names, as precise as a batting order: Tippy Hudnut and Skids, Ferret and the Russian. He didn’t know their full names. He knew what they were called on Ellison Avenue. He told her how. Ferret and Skids held his arms while Tippy and the Russian took turns hitting him. He told her about the smell of beer. He told her what they’d said about delivering a message from Frankie McCarthy. He did not mention the shit.

“Did they use a club on you?”