Роберт Паркер - Double Play

Burke stared out the window, his eyes following a horse-drawn carriage moving slowly uptown through the park.

“You have to take care of me,” Lauren said. “No one has ever taken care of me... You have to take care of me.”

Burke turned from the window and looked at her silently. Then he took in some air in a long slow breath and let it out.

“I can’t take care of anyone,” Burke said. “Not the way you mean.”

The muscles in Burke’s cheeks twitched. The lines around his mouth were very deep. There was sweat on his forehead.

“There,” Julius said to Lauren. “Does that satisfy you?”

Lauren’s breath was short. It sounded raspy. Her chest rose and fell arrythmically. Tears ran down her face. She kept looking at Burke. He shook his head. She looked at him some more and then her eyes dulled, and her breathing began to regularize. She turned and looked at her father.

“If you think I was corrupt before...” she said.

She stood suddenly and dropped her cigarette on the rug and walked out of the den without looking back. She left the door open behind her. No one moved for a moment. Then Julius came over and picked up the burning cigarette and snubbed it out in an ashtray. He scuffed the burn mark on the carpet with the toe of his shoe, as Burke left.

In 1946, five years after the Dodgers lost the 1941 World Series, in the first fully postwar season, in the summer before my fourteenth birthday, in a year when Stan Musial hit .365, the Dodgers and the Cardinals tied for the National League pennant. There was a post-season playoff for the first time in modern baseball history, which for me seemed to stretch back primordially. The pennant was decided in a two-of-three playoff. I felt I was witness to a historical event. The Cardinals won two straight games. Howie Schultz, as I recall, struck out to end the season.

I was heartbroken. But I had puberty to worry about, and, in a few weeks, the pain receded.

In October of that year, Brooklyn Dodgers GM Branch Rickey announced the signing of a Negro player, Jack Roosevelt Robinson, a four-sport star at UCLA, to a minor league contract with the Dodgers’ Triple A farm club, the Montreal Royals.

I was thrilled. Once again I was given the chance to bear witness to history. To be around when something happened that people a hundred years from now would write and speak of. I didn’t forget the playoff loss to the Cardinals. I haven’t forgotten it yet. But this seemed as if it might be sufficient compensation. There were pictures of Jackie and Branch Rickey at the signing. Rickey with his cigar and bow tie. Jackie gleaming black.

By then we had moved to a town east of New Bedford called Mattapoisett where the Dodgers games could still be heard, coming up the coast on WHN, which was now called WMGM. Negroes lived in the town, and went to school with me. I knew them. At least one of them was a friend, which did not please my mother. My mother said that if there was trouble it would be the colored guy that would get blamed and if I was with him, I’d be blamed too. I don’t remember now quite what I thought of that position, but I do remember that I continued to be friends with the colored guy in question.

Interestingly enough, in a group that had debated whether to have sex with Lena Horne, no one seemed shaken by Robinson’s signing. We were interested and excited, but no more so than we were by, say, the deal that sent Hank Greenberg from Detroit to Pittsburgh three months later. I, being the out-of-place Dodgers fan, was expected to react more intensely than anyone else, and I did. I cannot explain why I was so pleased, any more than I can fully explain why my racial attitudes differed from the norm. I know that I was pleased that the people in the news, doing the historic thing, were the Dodgers.

The war was over... The players were back... The Dodgers were pennant contenders... The team had just done something that no team had done before... I was fourteen... My voice was changing... I hadn’t had sex yet... But I would sooner or later... And the uncluttered world lay ahead of me to the horizon.

Hubba, hubba.

Mr. Rickey was wearing a blue polka dot bow tie and a gray tweed suit that didn’t fit him very well. He took some time getting his cigar lit and then looked at Burke over his round black-rimmed glasses.

“Mr. Burke,” Rickey said. “Do you follow baseball?”

“Yes.”

“I’m bringing Jackie Robinson up from Montreal,” Rickey said.

“The other shoe drops,” Burke said.

Mr. Rickey smiled.

“I want you to protect him,” he said.

“Okay.”

“Just like that?” Rickey said.

“I assume you’ll pay me.”

“Don’t you want to know what I’m asking you to protect him from?”

“I assume I know,” Burke said. “People who might want to kill him for being a Negro. And himself.”

Rickey nodded and turned the cigar slowly without taking it from his mouth.

“Good,” he said. “Himself was the part I didn’t think you’d get.”

Burke didn’t say anything.

“Jackie is a man of strong character,” Rickey said. “One might even say forceful. If this experiment is going to work he has to sit on that. He has to remain calm. Turn the other cheek.”

“And I’ll have to see that he does that,” Burke said.

“Yes. And at the same time, see that no one harms him.”

“Am I required to turn the other cheek?”

“You are required to do what is necessary to help Jackie and I and the Brooklyn Dodgers get through the impending storm.”

“Do what I can.”

“My information is that you can do a lot. It’s why you’re here. You’ll stay with him all the time. If anyone asks you, you are simply an assistant to the general manager. If he has to stay in a Negro hotel, you’ll have to stay there too.”

“I got through Guadalcanal,” Burke said.

“Yes, I know. How do you feel about a Negro in the major leagues?”

“Doesn’t matter to me.”

“Good. I’ll introduce you to Jackie.”

He pushed the switch on an intercom, and spoke into it, and a moment later a secretary opened the office door and Robinson came in wearing a gray suit and a black knit tie. He moved as if he were working off a steel spring. He’s nobody’s high yellow, Burke thought. He’s dark black. And did not seem furtive about it. Rickey introduced them.

“Well, you got the build for a bodyguard,” Robinson said.

“You too.”

“But, I ain’t guarding your body,” Jackie said.

“Mine’s not worth ten grand a year.”

“One thing,” Robinson said, and he looked at Rickey as he spoke. “I don’t need no keeper. You keep people from shooting me, good. And I know I can’t be fighting people. You gotta do that for me. But I go where I want to go, and do what I do. And I don’t ask you first.”

“As long as you let me die for you,” Burke said.

Something flashed in Robinson’s eyes.

“You got a smart mouth,” he said.

“I’m a smart guy.”

Robinson grinned suddenly.

“So how come you taking on this job?”

“Same as you,” Burke said. “I need the dough.”

Robinson looked at him with his hard stare.

“Well,” Robinson said. “We’ll see.”

Rickey had been sitting quietly. Now he spoke.

“You can’t ever let down,” he said. He was looking at Robinson, but Burke knew he was included. “You’re under a microscope. You can’t drink. You can’t be sexually indiscreet. You can’t have opinions about things. You play hard and clean and stay quiet. Can you do it?”

“With a little luck,” Robinson said.

“Luck is the residue of intention,” Rickey said.