The Given Day

  And he took off from second just as Sticky Joe Beam came out of that octopus throwing motion of his, had a hair of a moment to see the white man’s eyes bulge out big as his belly, and Luther’s feet moved so fast the ground ran under him more than he ran over it. He could actually feel it moving like a river in early spring, and he pictured Tyrell Hawke standing at third, twitching because he’d laid out all night drinking, and Luther was counting on that because he wasn’t just settling for third today, no sir, thinking that’s right, you best believe baseball is a game of speed and I’m the speediest son of a bitch any ya’ll ever see, and when he raised his head, the first thing he saw was Tyrell’s glove right beside his ear. The next thing he saw, just to his left, was the ball, a shooting star gone sideways and pouring smoke. Luther shouted “Boo!” and it came out sharp and high and, yep, Tyrell’s glove jerked up three inches. Luther ducked, and that ball sizzled under Tyrell’s glove and kissed the hairs on the back of Luther’s neck, hot as the razor in Moby’s Barbershop on Meridian Avenue, and he hit the third base bag with the tiptoes of his right foot and came barreling up the line, the ground shooting so fast under his feet he felt like he might just run out of it, go off the edge of a cliff, right off the edge of the world maybe. He could hear the catcher, Ransom Boynton, shouting for the ball, shouting, “Hea’ now! Hea’ now!” He looked up, saw Ransom a few yards ahead, saw that ball coming in his eyes, in the tightening of his kneecaps, and Luther took a gulp of air the size of an ice block and turned his calves into springs and his feet into pistol hammers. He hit Ransom so hard he barely felt him, just went right over him and saw the ball slap into the wooden fence behind home at the exact moment his foot hit the plate, the two sounds—one hard and clean, the other scuffed and dusty—wrapping around each other. And he thought: Faster than any of y’all even dream of being.

  He came to a stop against the chests of his teammates. In their pawing and hooting, he turned around to see the look on the fat white man’s face, but he wasn’t at the tree line anymore. No, he was almost at second base, running across the field toward Luther, little baby’s face all jiggly and smiling and his eyes spinning in their sockets like he’d just turned five and someone had told him he was getting a pony and he couldn’t do nothing to control his body, had to just shake and jump and run for the happiness of it.

  And Luther got a real look at that face and thought: No.

  But then Ransom Boynton stepped up beside him and said it out loud:

  “Ya’ll ain’t gonna believe this, but that there is Babe Ruth running toward us like a fat fucking freight train.”

  Can I play?”

  No one could believe he’d said it. This was after he’d run up to Luther and lifted him off the ground, held him over his face, and said, “Boy, I seen some running in my day, but I ain’t never—and I mean ever—seen anyone run like you.” And then he was hugging Luther and clapping him on the back and saying, “Me oh my, what a sight!”

  And it was after they’d confirmed that he was, really, Babe Ruth. He was surprised so many of them had even heard of him. But Sticky Joe had seen him once in Chicago, and Ransom had caught him in Cleveland twice, seen him pitch and play left. The rest of them had read about him in the sports pages and Baseball Magazine, and Ruth’s eyebrows went up at that, like he couldn’t quite believe there were darkies on the planet who knew how to read.

  Ruth said, “So you’ll be wanting some autographs?”

  No one appeared too interested in that, and Ruth grew long in the mouth as everyone found reasons to look at their shoes, study the sky.

  Luther thought about telling Ruth that standing here before him were some pretty great players themselves. Some bona fide legends. That man with the octopus arm? He went 32—2 last year for the Miller-sport King Horns of the Ohio Mill Workers League—32—2 with a 1.78 ERA. Touch that. And Andy Hughes, playing shortstop for the opposing team of the hour, this being a scratch game, man was hitting .390 for the Downtown Sugar Shacks of Grandview Heights. And, besides, only white folks liked autographs. What the hell was an autograph anyway, but some man’s chicken scrawl on a scrap of paper?

  Luther opened his mouth to explain this, but got one good look at Ruth’s face and saw it wouldn’t make no difference: man was a child. A hippo-size, jiggling child with thighs so big you’d expect them to sprout branches, but a child all the same. He had the widest eyes Luther’d ever seen. Luther would remember that for years after, as he saw them change over time in the papers, saw those eyes grow smaller and darker every time he saw a new picture. But then, in the fields of Ohio, Ruth had the eyes of a little fat boy in the school yard, full of hope and fear and desperation.

  “Can I play?” He held out his St. Bernard paws. “With you-all?”

  That just about busted everyone up, men bending over from the snickering, but Luther kept his face still. “Well…” He looked around at the rest of the men, then back at Ruth, taking his time. “Depends,” he said. “You know much about the game, suh?”

  That put Reggie Polk on the ground. Bunch of other players cackled, swiped arms. Ruth, though, he surprised Luther. Those wide eyes went small and clear as the sky, and Luther got it right away: With a bat in his hand, he was as old as any of them.

  Ruth popped an unlit cigar in his mouth and loosened his tie. “Picked up a thing or two in my travels, Mr….?”

  “Laurence, suh. Luther Laurence.” Luther still giving him that stone face.

  Ruth put an arm around him. Arm the size of Luther’s bed. “What position you play, Luther?”

  “Center field, suh.”

  “Well, boy, you don’t have to worry about nothing then but tilting your head.”

  “Tilting my head, suh?”

  “And watching my ball fly right over it.”

  Luther couldn’t help himself; the grin blew across his face.

  “And stop calling me ‘suh,’ would you, Luther? We’re baseball players here.”

  Oh, it was something the first time Sticky Joe whiffed him! Three strikes, all right down the pipe like thread following the needle, the fat man never once touching cowhide.

  He laughed after the last one, pointed his bat at Sticky Joe and gave him a big nod. “But I’m learning you, boy. Learning you like I’m awake in school.”

  No one wanted to let him pitch, so he subbed for a player each inning in the rest of the field. Nobody minded sitting for an inning. Babe Ruth—Lord’s sake. Might not want no sad little signature, but the stories would buy some drinks for a long time.

  One inning he played left and Luther was over in center and Reggie Polk, who was pitching for their side, was taking his sweet time between pitches like he was apt to do, and Ruth said, “So what do you do, Luther, when you’re not playing ball?”

  Luther told him a bit about his job in a munitions factory outside of Columbus, how war was a terrible thing but it sure could help a man’s pocket, and Ruth said, “That’s the truth,” though it sounded to Luther like he said it just to say it, not because he really understood, and then he asked Luther what had happened to his face.

  “Cactus, Mr. Ruth.”

  They heard the crack of the bat and Ruth chased down a soft-fade fly ball, moving like a ballerina on his stumpy little tiptoes and throwing the ball back into second.

  “Lotta cactus in Ohio? Hadn’t heard that.”

  Luther smiled. “Actually, Mr. Ruth sir, they be called ‘cacti’ when you talking ’bout more’n one. And, sho’, there’s great fields of them all over the state. Bushels and bushels of cacti.”

  “And you, what, fell into one of these fields?”

  “Yes, suh. Fell hard, too.”

  “Looks like you fell from an airplane.”

  Luther shook his head real slow. “Zeppelin, Mr. Ruth.”

  They both had a long soft laugh over that, Luther still chuckling when he raised his glove and stole Rube Gray’s shot right out of the sky.

  The next inning, some white men straggled out of the tree
s, and they recognized a few of them right off—Stuffy McInnis, no lie; Everett Scott, Lord; and then a couple of Cubs, dear Jesus—Flack, Mann, a third guy no one knew by face, could have played for either team. They worked their way along right field, and pretty soon they were standing behind the rickety old bench along the first base line, wearing suits and ties and hats in the heat, smoking cigars, occasionally shouting to someone named “Gidge,” confusing the hell out of Luther until he realized that’s what they called Ruth. Next time Luther looked, he saw they’d been joined by three more—Whiteman of the Sox and Hollocher, the Cubs shortstop, and some skinny boy with a red face and a chin that stuck out like an extra flap of skin who no one recognized, and Luther didn’t like that number—eight of them plus Ruth comprising a full team.

  For an inning or so everything was fine and the white men kept mostly to themselves, couple of them making ape sounds and a few more calling out, “Don’t miss that ball, tar baby. Coming in hot,” or “Should’ve got under it more, jigaboo,” but shit, Luther’d heard worse, a lot worse. He just didn’t like how every time he looked over, the eight of them seemed to have moved an inch or two closer to the first base line, and pretty soon it was hard to run that way, beat out a throw with white men so close on your right you could smell their cologne.

  And then between innings, one of them said it: “Why don’t you let one of us have a try?”

  Luther noticed Ruth looking like he was trying to find a hole to climb into.

  “Whadaya say, Gidge? Think your new friends would mind if one of us played a few? Keep hearing how good these nigras are supposed to be. Run faster’n butter on the porch in July is the rumor.”

  The man held out his hands to Babe. He was one of the few no one recognized, must have been a bench warmer. Big hands, though, a flattened nose and axe-head shoulders, the man all hard boxy angles. Had eyes Luther’d seen before in the white poor—spent his whole life eating rage in place of food. Developed a taste for it he wouldn’t lose no matter how regular he ate for the rest of his life.

  He smiled at Luther like he knew what he was thinking. “What you say, boy? Maybe let one of us fellas take a cut or two?”

  Rube Gray volunteered to sit a spell and the white men elected Stuffy McGinnis as their latest trade to the Southern Ohio Nigra League, haw-hawing in that donkey laugh big white men seemed to share, but Luther had to admit it was fine with him: Stuffy McInnis could play, boy. Luther’d been reading up on him since he’d broken in back in ’09 with Philadelphia.

  After the inning’s final out, though, Luther came jogging in from center to find the other white men all lined up by home plate, the lead guy, Chicago’s Flack, resting a bat on his shoulder.

  Babe tried, at least for a moment, Luther’d give him that. He said, “Come on now, fellas, we were having us a game.”

  Flack gave him a big, bright smile. “Gonna have us a better game now, Ruth. See how these boys do against the best in the American and National Leagues.”

  “Oh, you mean, the white leagues?” Sticky Joe Beam said. “That what ya’ll talking about?”

  They all looked over at him.

  “What’d you say, boy?”

  Sticky Joe Beam was forty-two years old and looked like a slice of burnt bacon. He pursed his lips, looked down at the dirt, and then up at the line of white men in such a way that Luther figured there’d be a fight coming.

  “Said let’s see what you got.” He stared at them. “Uh, suhs.”

  Luther looked over at Ruth, met his eyes, and the big baby-faced fat boy gave him a shaky smile. Luther remembered a line from the Bible his grandmother used to repeat a lot when he was growing up, about how the heart be willing but the flesh be weak.

  That you, Babe? he wanted to ask. That you?

  Babe started drinking as soon as the black guys picked their nine. He didn’t know what was wrong—it was just a ball game—but he still felt sad and filled with shame. It didn’t make no sense. It was just a game. Some summer fun to wait out the train repair. Nothing more. And yet, the sadness and the shame wouldn’t leave, so he unscrewed his flask cap and took a healthy swig.

  He begged off pitching, said his elbow was still sore from game one. Said he had a World Series record to think about, the scoreless-innings-pitched record, and he wasn’t risking that for some bush league pickup game in the sticks.

  So Ebby Wilson pitched. Ebby was a mean, flap-jawed boy from the Ozarks, who’d been playing for Boston since July. He smiled when they put the ball in his hands. “That’s right, boys. Be done with these niggers ’fore you know it. ’Fore they know it, too.” And he laughed even though no one laughed with him.

  Ebby started it off throwing high heat and burned right through the top of their order in no time. Then Sticky Joe came to the mound, and that nigra had no other gear but full on, and when he uncorked that loping, tentacle-swing delivery, god knew what was coming at you. He threw fastballs that went invisible; screwballs that had eyes—soon as they saw a bat, they ducked, winking at you; curveballs that could circle a tire; breaking balls that exploded four inches before the plate. He whiffed Mann. He whiffed Scott. And he got McInnis out to end the inning on a pop-up to second.

  It was a pitchers’ duel there for a few innings, not much hit past the mound, and Ruth starting to yawn out in left, taking longer sips from the flask. Still, the coloreds scored a run in the second and another in the third, Luther Laurence turning a run from first to second into a run from first to home, tear-assing so fast across the infield it took Hollocher by surprise and he muffed the relay from center and by the time he stopped bobbling the ball, Luther Laurence was crossing the plate.

  What had started as a joke game went from surprised respect (“Ain’t ever seen anyone put mustard on the ball like that ol’ nigra. Even you, Gidge. Hell, even Walter Johnson. Man’s a marvel”) to nervous joking (“Think we’ll score a run before we got to get back to, you know, the World Fucking Series?”) to anger (“Niggers own this field. That’s what it is. Like to see them play Wrigley. Like to see them play Fenway. Shit”).

  The coloreds could bunt—good Lord could they bunt; ball would land six inches from the plate and stop moving like it’d been shot. And they could run. They could steal bases like it was as simple as deciding you liked standing on second more than first. And they could hit singles. By the bottom of the fifth, it looked like they could hit singles all day long, just step up and poke another one out of the infield, but then Whiteman came over to the mound from first and had a chat with Ebby Wilson, and from that point Ebby stopped trying to play cute or clever, just unloaded heat like he didn’t care if it put his arm in the sling through winter.

  Top of the sixth, the coloreds ahead 6—3, Stuffy McInnis took a first-pitch fastball from Sticky Joe Beam and hit it so far over the trees that Luther Laurence didn’t even bother looking for it. They got another ball from the canvas bag beside the bench, and Whiteman took that one long, got into second standing up, and then Flack took two strikes and fought off six more for fouls, and then pooched a single to shallow left and it was 6—4, men on first and third, no one out.

  Babe could feel it as he wiped his bat down with a rag. He could feel all their bloodstreams as he stepped to the plate and horse-pawed the dirt with his shoe. This moment, this sun, this sky, this wood and leather and limbs and fingers and agony of waiting to see what would happen was beautiful. More beautiful than women or words or even laughter.

  Sticky Joe brushed him back. Threw a hard curve that came in high and inside and would have taken Babe’s teeth on a journey through Southern Ohio if he hadn’t snapped his head back from it. He leveled the bat at Sticky Joe, looked down it like he was looking down a rifle. He saw the glee in the old man’s dark eyes, and he smiled and the old man smiled back, and they both nodded and Ruth wanted to kiss the old man’s bumpy forehead.

  “You all agree that’s a ball?” Babe shouted, and he could see even Luther laughing, way out in center field.

  Go
d, it felt good. But, oh, hey, here it comes, a shotgun blast of a breaking ball and Ruth caught the seam with his eye, saw that red line dive and started swinging low, way lower than where it was, but knowing where it was going to be, and sumbitch, if he didn’t connect with it, tore that fucking ball out of space, out of time, saw that ball climb the sky like it had hands and knees. Ruth started running down the line and saw Flack take off from first, and that was when he felt certain that he hadn’t gotten all of it. It wasn’t pure. He yelled, “Hold!” but Flack was running. Whiteman was a few steps off third, but staying in place, arms out in either direction as Luther drifted back toward the tree line, and Ruth saw the ball appear from the same sky into which it had vanished and drop straight down past the trees into Luther’s glove.

  Flack had already started back from second, and he was fast, and the moment Luther fired that ball toward first, Whiteman tagged up from third. And Flack, yes, Flack was very fast, but Luther had some sort of cannon in that skinny body of his and that ball shrieked over the green field and Flack trampled the ground like a stagecoach and then went airborne as the ball slapped into Aeneus James’s glove, and Aeneus, the big guy Ruth had first encountered playing center field when he’d come out of the trees, swept his long arm down as Flack slid on his chest toward first and the tag hit him high on the shoulder and then his hand touched the bag.

  Aeneus lowered his free hand to Flack, but Flack ignored it and stood up.

  Aeneus tossed the ball back to Sticky Joe.

  Flack dusted off his pants and stood on the first base bag. He placed his hands on his knees and planted his right foot toward second.

  Sticky Joe stared over at him from the mound.

  Aeneus James said, “What you doing, suh?”

  Flack said, “What’s that?” his voice a little too bright.