Robert Coover - The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop

Who was up? Ingram. Damon's old battery mate. Damon's old battery mate struck out — for the third straight goddamn time. Then Wilder singled to spoil — at last — Mad Jock's no-hitter (and oddly he felt regret, because not even punishment then was total), but Goodman James bounced into a double play. Why am I murdering myself like this? he wondered, but he went on pitching the dice, and in the top of the eighth, the Knicks' Walt McCamish drew a base on balls, Maverly whacked a fly ball out to Witness York, who dropped it, and Shook-up O'Shea belted out his fourth hit of the game, bringing in McCamish. Musgraves walked to fill the bags, and Casey knocked a ball out to the mound, busting McDermott's finger, two runs scoring on the error. That was too much. Henry threw the dice across the kitchen, took a cold shower, put on fresh clothes, pulled the chain on the lamp over the kitchen table, and went out for breakfast.

His bus was already overloaded when it arrived at his stop, and Henry was tempted to walk, getting out in the air was already doing him some good, but he couldn't risk arriving late, not today, so he squeezed on with the others, joining the sour community on its morning pilgrimage. Din of coughing and snuffling, here and there a sneeze exploding from a buffed nose: assailed by microbes, his head uncovered, he felt anything but invulnerable. He pressed rearward, pushed out a couple stops early, the bus exhaling as though with profound relief, and bought a newspaper at a stand on the corner there, obeying some old impulse which, he realized, he'd nearly forgotten, the giving of the coin, the snapping up of the paper, taking the world to heart and mind, or some world anyway.

In the coffee shop, he looked around for Lou: not here yet. He waited for one of the small tables in front of the counter to clear, glancing the while at the headlines. Some priest who quit and got married. Gold and silver shortages. Orgy that the cops broke up. Rapes and murders. Makings of another large war. A table opened up: Henry claimed it, looping his scarf over the second chair. War seemed to be a must for every generation. A pageant to fortify the tribal spirit. A columnist plumped for bloodless war through the space race. Henry sympathized with the man, but it could never work. Mere abstraction.

People needed casualty lists, territory footage won and lost, bounded sets with strategies and payoff functions, supply and communication routes disrupted or restored, tonnage totals, and deaths, downed planes, and prisoners socked away like a hoard of calculable runs scored. Besides, war was available to everybody, the space race to few: war was a kind of whorehouse for mass release of moonlust. Lunacy: anyway, he sure wasn't inventing it. The dishes on his table were cleared with a hard clap and rattle that hammered on the bare raw lobes of his brain and made him wince with pain. Don't give up, he cautioned himself. The waitress sponged the table with a rag that smelled like something between an old goat and a dead fish. He ordered a muffin and coffee, hoping he could keep it down.

New customers wheezed in, questioned the scarfed chair: "Sorry, taken." Henry ducked from their scowls into his paper, sipping the hot coffee, and thankful for it.

Finally, Lou showed up, spare hat — Henry's gray felt — in hand. "Henry!" He huffed and puffed excitedly down the aisle between the counter and the tables, smashing toes and jogging elbows, brandishing the hat on high, flushed face openly smiling: man without disguises. "You left your hat yesterday, Henry!"

Henry cleared the spare chair of his scarf, accepted the hat —"Thanks, Lou" — and held on to his coffee and the table until Lou could come to complete rest across from him.

"I was worried, I mean, I didn't know where you'd— what're you gonna do today about…?"

"I don't know. I suppose I'll just have to—"

"I went by last night, thought you'd be home, I asked down in the delicatessen, I was afraid you might have, I don't know, left town, or. ."

"I went out for a drink." "A drink? Oh."

"Your order?"

"Anyway, I went by again this morning, just in case. I thought you'd need your hat, and I thought I'd maybe go up just to, well, I mean, I didn't know what you might have, how you might have — but Mr. Diskin told me he'd seen you leave this morning, so—"

"Lou, the girl's waiting."

"Hunh? Oh! Uh, number four, please, easy over, and tea. And a Danish on the side." He glanced at his watch, tongue between his lips.

" Four over tea'n Danish! "

"Oh, uh, Miss. ." Lou blushed when she turned back on him, then smiled shyly. "Could you make that… two number fours?"

" Double up that four! "

"Say, he certainly has wonderful pastrami!"

"Who'sthat?"

"Mr. Diskin." Lou smiled. Well, anyway he didn't waste his trip. Holly Tibbett himself.

"You know, Lou, I was just thinking, what if we divided up the world into eight clubs, split the wealth more or less among them, and let them, taking turns, choose space teams from all the present available talent—"

"What're you talking about, Henry?"

"The space race. See, I was thinking, if you could just work it out so that statistically it was more exciting — and see, you might make a rule where the teams could buy, sell, and trade personnel, and then for rule infractions, you could bench key scientists and pilots—"

"Henry, are you. .?" Lou leaned forward, studying Henry's face quizzically, as though discovering something horrible there. "Do you feel okay? You look, I don't know… changed."

"Just a little tired, Lou. I didn't get much sleep."

"Oh." Food arrived, several platters of it, erasing some of the anguish on Lou's big round face, and making him wonder: "Say, Henry, are you sure you've had enough to eat?"

"Sure, plenty." Lou eyed the empty muffin plate disdainfully, then stared again at Henry's face, while scooping the eggs in. Well, Henry thought, I have changed. "Don't worry, Lou, it'll be all right." He was very tired, and it was making him restless. He shifted in his chair, took a couple deep breaths. "Anyway, it doesn't matter." It was amazing to watch Lou when he got really attuned to his eating. All clumsiness vanished and his fingers played over the food as upon a musical instrument, his face flushing with pleasure and mild exertion. And yet there was something demonic about it, too, something destructive: as though, if given the chance, his mountainous bulk could consume all there was. "I figure the best thing is just to go tell Ziff I was sick and hope he buys that."

Lou looked up from his eggs in shock. "But" — he dabbed yolk from his mouth with a paper napkin—"why don't you tell him the truth?"

*The truth?"

"The, you know, your… I mean, the relative, the one who, the funeral. ."

"Oh, that!" Inwardly, he smiled. True, he could… "I don't know, I guess I didn't feel that. ."

"Nobody goes to work when there's a death in the family, Henry. I'm sure Mr. Zifferblatt will understand that, he's not inhuman, you know."

"I suppose not."

"Is it that you're, that you don't want to, you know, talk about it?"

"Something like that, I guess."

Lou smiled broadly around a jowlful of half-chewed pastry and pointed at himself. The advocate. "I'll go up first," were his Danish-muffled words of amity.

And true, two's opposition, three's a coalition, for after Lou's preparing of the way, Horace Zifferblatt's welcome on behalf of the firm of Dunkelmann, Zauber & Zifferblatt was perhaps still something less than open-armed, but he twitched his old head in what was no doubt intended as a commiserating nod, and paid his respects to the deceased with an embarrassed grunt and floorward scowl, glancing then at the clock which showed that he recognized Henry had arrived not only on time, but five minutes early; then returned to his glassed-in office to clock the rest of the arrivals.