Offbeat: Uncollected Stories Page 7

  Harry wasn’t happy that day—that was easy to see. Three hundred wins and he sat on the locker room bench like a condemned prisoner. Every one kept slapping him on the back and shaking his hand and he tried to smile but it just didn’t come off. And it wasn’t just that day.

  I roomed with Harry and he’d been under the weather for close to a year. I mean really bad. He’d always been nervous, had the jumps but this last year it was getting terrible. I gave up counting the nights Harry used to toss on his bed groaning and the sweat pouring off him while he muttered things to himself I couldn’t make out.

  I’d seen some of that same sweat on him when Atwell poled that ball out of the park—foul. And all during the game too. But not because he was afraid he was going to lose it. He knew he’d win—he told me so before the game started. No that wasn’t it.

  He was afraid he was going to win it.

  Anyway I went over to the bench and sat down beside Harry. I noticed him jump a little when I did.

  “You better get out of those shorts, pop,” I told him and I saw his hands—the hands of a three hundred game winner: They looked as if they couldn’t even hold a baseball.

  “I didn’t see you,” he said.

  “What’s wrong, Harry?” I asked him. “You should be in the showers singing victory songs. You look sick.”

  “I’m all right,” he said.

  I patted him on the shoulder.

  “You should be, you old dog,” I said. “You’re an immortal now.”

  He stared at his hands for a second, then he exhaled slowly.

  “Immortal,” he said and something like a sob caught in his throat.

  “You sure nothing’s wrong?” I asked.

  He shook his head and I let it go. I figured if I’d just won my three hundredth I’d be a little rocky too.

  “I didn’t even mind you nixing all my signals today,” I told him. “Man you were really loose today. You looked as if you were trying to throw those pitches into the stands—and every one of them came right in there.”

  His lips pressed together for a second.

  “I was,” he said, “I was trying to throw them into the stands.” He shivered. “But I couldn’t do it,” he said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Nothing, nothing,” he said hurriedly, forcing a quick unpleasant smile to his face. “I’m just kidding around, Jess.”

  I looked at his lean, sweat-streaked face, his thin black hair surrounding the white bald spot. I punched him on the arm lightly.

  “Go on, get in the shower,” I ordered him.

  Later I sat and watched Harry dress and I kept thinking about his pitching—about the way he always pitched his own game never taking my advice or my signals more than once or twice a game and even that more to please me than anything else I think. I thought about how his delivery got wilder and wilder every year without his accuracy changing a bit. And I thought about what he’d told me before—how he tried to throw the ball into the stands and couldn’t. He wasn’t ribbing me. And when he said he couldn’t I don’t think he was talking about principles.

  When he was putting on his hat and coat I went over and told him about the dinner the team was holding over in the Village that night. As manager of the party I invited him as our guest of honor.

  “I can’t make it, Jess,” he said, “I’m sorry. I got business.”

  “What? Oh you’re kidding, not tonight!”

  “Tonight,” he said.

  And the way he said it gave me a chill. We were walking under the stands by then and I thought it was the dampness. Now I know what it was and the dampness had nothing to do with it.

  “Can’t you get out of it, Harry?” I asked.

  He shook his head.

  “I . . . I’d like to Jess but I can’t. I can’t get out of it.”

  His voice sounded hollow and lost and I found myself watching him as we trudged along heading for the exit. Every time we passed under an opening in the stands I saw the light move across his white face. Never tanned, Harry didn’t. A whole season in the sun and he was still white.

  There was a mob waiting at the gate for Harry. They were yelling and shoving and waving their autograph books. Harry sort of drew back when he saw them out there. His face was like a mask.

  “Face it, pop,” I said. “Face it. You’re the greatest now.”

  “Oh, God,” he said.

  I never saw him look so bad as that late afternoon when he went out there to sign autographs. There was a twitch in his right cheek and when someone knocked off his hat and they all laughed and cheered at his bald head I saw his lips pull back from his teeth as if he was going to scream. He kept getting shoved and mauled while they pushed book after book under his face. I finally rescued him and half led him across the street to the garage where I kept my car. The mob followed us every inch of the way and they didn’t back off until I almost ran down a few of them. Then they retreated, booing and hissing. At me, of course.

  Harry didn’t say anything while I headed for my place in the city. I was hoping I could talk him into going to the party that night. I didn’t say anything either. Not until we were waiting out a light at the foot of Manhattan Bridge.

  “You’re gonna cancel your business engagement,” I told him. “You’re coming to our party. You need some relaxation, Harry, that’s what you need.”

  He didn’t seem to be listening to me but he shook his head once, his chin practically on his chest.

  “No, Jess, no,” he said. “I have to go.”

  “What’s so important it can’t wait till tomorrow?”

  He just shook his head and shut up. I didn’t say anymore until we reached my place and he came in for a drink. He said he could because his appointment wasn’t until eight.

  “Where are you going?” I asked him, handing him his drink.

  “Out on the Island.”

  “Where, Bay Shore?”

  “Around there.”

  “How you gonna get there, Harry?”

  “I’ll . . . take the Long Island Railroad, I guess.”

  “Well look,” I said, “Take my car and . . .”

  He shook his head.

  “Why not?” I asked. “Take it. Maybe you can get back in time for some of the party.”

  “No,” he said.

  “Oh, for . . . !” I almost blew up but then I shrugged. “Well, take the car anyway,” I said. “You can bring it back in the morning.”

  “I better not,” he said, “Thanks anyway Jess. I . . .”

  I put down my drink.

  “Harry, for God’s sake, what’s wrong?” I asked him.

  He seemed about to say something, then he stopped. He put down his drink as if he were going. Then he picked it up again and sank back on the couch cushions.

  “I . . .” he started and gritted his teeth. “Jess, I don’t want to get you mixed up in this.”

  “Harry, where are you going tonight?”

  I saw his throat move. He looked like a hundred year old man sitting there. He stared into his drink with haunted eyes.

  “I have to make a payment,” he said.

  “What . . . kind of payment Harry?”

  He sat there a long time without looking at me. He stared into his glass and jiggled the ice cubes slowly. There was a battle going on in him, I could see that. As if he knew he had something terrible to tell and wanted to tell it but was afraid to involve me. I saw a line of sweat on his upper lip.

  Then, abruptly, he put down his glass and pulled out his wallet. He fumbled nervously with it and finally drew out a small creased square of paper. He handed it to me and his hand shook helplessly.

  “There,” he said, “T—there.”

  I opened up the paper and looked at it a long time before I understood. And then my stomach pulled in and my breath was gone.

  “I.O.U.,” it read, “my soul.”

  I looked up at him, the paper still in my fingers.

  “I don’t get
it Harry,” I said.

  “That’s what I’m paying tonight,” he said and he put down his drink because his hand shook too much.

  For a long time we sat there staring at each other. Outside we could hear cars passing in the street and upstairs I heard a woman laughing. This was New York, 1976, and everything was just as it had always been. Yet here I was holding a slip of paper that read I.O.U., my soul and underneath those words was Harry’s signature in red but not red ink.

  I looked up again from the slip.

  “Tonight?” I said.

  He looked at me bleakly. “That was the agreement,” he said.

  “When . . . when did this happen, Harry?”

  I saw his throat move.

  “I was thirty-six,” he said.

  Harry Campbell was drunk and he meant to get drunker and he was going to stay drunk. What else could a man do when he was thirty-six and a failure. He’d been married but that was ended. Virg had divorced him when he’d tried to clutch out and grab fleeting magic and only got a bar pickup and an adultery charge. Now he was alone and a failure. Virg was right even though she’d yelled it in bitterness and hate that night they’d separated. You’ll never get anywhere! You’re useless, you’ll end up in the gutter!

  She was right, that’s where he’d end up.

  He sat in the dark booth and stared ahead with sick eyes. A bitter chuckle sounded in his throat as he thought about his teens when he was the star pitcher for Bay Shore High. What a year, what a future; him with a record of 15 and 2 with 127 strike-outs. He’d been so certain of the future then. Oh, sure, the world was his oyster. What a laugh! Harry snickered and wanted to pick up his glass and fling it at the television set because it sat up there over the bar and reminded him. And mocked him.

  This was all he had left. Odd jobs around town. Spending his spring afternoons and evenings in this bar, losing the summer days and nights here in this booth watching the ball games Brooklyn played. Trying to pretend he didn’t notice the empathic twitch of degraded muscles in his arm that paralleled every pitch he watched. He just sat there dull eyed and ill and drank and watched ball games on the flickering screen.

  Until that moment in that night when, in a fever of lost misery he had muttered through clenched teeth—“I’d sell my soul to be pitching again.”

  Then the man came into the bar.

  It seemed nothing unusual. The man certainly was nothing unusual; just a moderately dressed man entering the bar on a July evening. He wore a plain summer suit and wore a woven hat with a colored hat band. He came over and sat down in the booth and asked Harry’s pardon. All the bar stools were taken, he said and there were no empty booths and would Harry mind terribly?

  Harry didn’t notice the empty booth in back or the empty seat in the front of the bar. He just nodded gruffly and kept his glittering eyes on the television screen while in his tightly shut mouth his teeth remained clenched.

  Then the man said, “So you’d like to pitch again.”

  Harry almost spilled his drink as his hand twitched violently on the smooth table top. He stared at the man blankly and felt a tremor in his stomach muscles.

  “What?” he said.

  “You’d like to pitch again,” said the man.

  Harry’s throat moved and, almost instinctively, he pushed back against the wall of the booth. There was something in the man’s eyes.

  “How do you know?” he asked in a hollow voice.

  The man chuckled. “Why, who doesn’t remember your pitching exploits in high school? I’ve lived in Bay Shore a good many years. As a matter of fact I used to watch you pitch. You were destined for stardom. What happened?”

  Harry’s muscles unknotted. He didn’t recognize the man but he recognized what the man was saying. What had happened? He’d married his school sweetheart that’s what happened. She’d made him study law, that’s what happened. He’d enrolled at St. John’s and flunked out and gotten a job as a Wall Street messenger and never gotten anywhere, that’s what happened.

  “That’s too bad,” said the man.

  Again Harry jumped because the man seemed to be reading his thoughts.

  “What?” It was all he could say.

  “I was just thinking about your potential,” the man said, “You could have made the major leagues with very little difficulty.”

  Harry grabbed at that straw because, after all, he was drowning.

  “You . . . think so?”he said and he forgot the look in the man’s eye because he liked what the man said.

  “Very definitely,” the man said. “You had every gift a top pitcher needs—control, a splendid eye, a good strong arm and the will to win. It was a shame you had to give it up.”

  “Yeah,” Harry said, playing with his drink again. “A shame.”

  Be practical, Harry, he remembered. Pitching’s a child’s game. You can’t make a decent living at it. You’re good Harry but not good enough to make a decent living at it. Now law . . .

  His thoughts trailed off and he suddenly picked up the glass and emptied it with one swallow.

  “She was mistaken,” was all the man said and then, before Harry could speak, the man pulled something from his inside vest pocket.

  “My card,” he said.

  Harry stared at the man, then he picked up the card and read it.

  Leonard De Ville, Manipulative Surgery

  Harry blinked. “What’s that?” he asked.

  “Your passport to the major leagues,” the man said.

  Doctor De Ville’s office was in a section of Bay Shore Harry had never been near—on the other side of the Long Island Railroad tracks. He walked slowly along the quiet, tree-lined street looking for the house number. The doctor had no downtown office. He told Harry that was because the Chamber of Commerce did not regard his profession as one entitled to the privilege of legality.

  Harry really felt like a fool going to the man’s office. He’d never in his life heard of Manipulative Surgery. Yet he was in no position to turn down any possible aid, he knew that. He was in just that state where he would grasp out at anything and this man had told him he could pitch again. Him, Harry Campbell, thirty-six, semi-balding, with a pot belly—promised the ability to pitch again. And not just in a local park with local amateurs. Pitching in the major leagues. It was insane but the man had said it and Harry knew he had to find out if it was true.

  He found the place. There was no name outside but the house number was the one Doctor De Ville had scrawled on a scrap of paper. It was an old wooden house, vintage 1890 or thereabouts. Harry looked around as he went up the creaky porch steps. He didn’t want anyone to see him, the doctor had said it was illegal.

  The front door opened before he reached it and Doctor De Ville, in a white smock, met him and ushered him into a small, musty-smelling hall. It didn’t smell like a doctor’s office, Harry thought.

  “Well, you see my brand of practice is not dependent on usual equipment,” said the doctor.

  Harry’s head snapped around. There it was again, the man reading his mind.

  “I could see from the look on your face that you doubted my profession,” said Doctor De Ville. “Since my office does not resemble what you visualize as a doctor’s office.”

  “Oh,” said Harry.

  They went right in and the doctor had Harry take off his suit coat and roll up his right shirt sleeve. He set Harry down on a leather-topped table in a room that was bare and dusty except for a desk and two chairs.

  “My profession,” said Doctor De Ville, “deals with the arrangement of musculature. We of Manipulative Surgery are of the opinion that it is in this skein of nerve, tendon, muscle, et al. that the physical abilities lie. It is, further, our contention, that no amount of time and abuse can change this ability so much that manipulative surgery cannot restore the old arrangement and, thus, the old abilities. To be brief,” he said, seeing the blank look on Harry’s face, “I massage your arm and when I am finished you will be as good a pitcher as eve
r you were. No, you will be even better. For that fine point of coordination you once possessed will be surpassed. You see the athlete possesses a muscular arrangement which is, purely through accident, the very compendium of mobile efficiencies. My profession,” he concluded, “Takes these accidents of arrangements and reduces them to controllable actualities.”

  It sounded good to Harry. The doctor started to massage.

  “I’m . . . not very well off,” Harry said embarrassedly as the doctor rubbed and tapped, “I mean to get work but . . .”

  “Say no more about it,” said Doctor De Ville affably, “I’m glad to help you. Besides, well to be frank, we are mistrusted and there are not many who will allow us to work on them.”

  “I see,” Harry said.

  The office was quiet. There was no sound outside either. The sunlight filtered through the drawn shades and Harry watched the dust motes dancing in the sun as he lay there silently and felt the strong hands of the doctor on his arm. It might be true, what the doctor said. He did seem to feel a new strength in his arm, a rejuvenated ability.

  “Of course,” said the doctor, “There will be a slight payment. I am dependent to a point on my patients.”

  “Will it be more than . . . than I can afford?” Harry asked.

  The doctor stopped working momentarily and looked Harry in the face.

  “I don’t think so,” he said.

  Then, very shortly, the massage was over and they sat at the desk and the doctor asked Harry if he had the slip of paper with the address on it. Harry took it out and gave it to the doctor. The doctor pulled out a fountain pen and, turning the slip of paper over, he wrote a few words on it. Then he slid the paper over to Harry.

  “Payment,” he said.

  For a long time Harry stared at the paper without moving a muscle. Then he raised his eyes and looked into the bland eyes of Doctor De Ville.

  “Is this a . . . joke?” he asked in a husky voice.

  “A great joke,” said the doctor. “Will you sign?”

  Harry shuddered and shrank back against the chair.

  “You may go,” said the doctor, “without signing. However, as soon as you walk out the door your arm will be useless again. You’ll never pitch.”