The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

  Okay, top of the sixth. Over fifty years later and I still get a red ass when I think of it. Kinder's up first and loops out to third, just like a pitcher should. Then comes Luis Aparicio, Little Louie. The Doo winds and fires. Aparicio fouls it off high and lazy behind home plate, on the third base side of the screen. That was my side, and I saw it all. The kid throws away his mask and sprints after it, head back and glove out. Wenders trailed him, but not close like he should have done. He didn't think the kid had a chance. It was lousy goddam umping.

  The kid's off the grass and on the track, by the low wall between the field and the box seats. Neck craned. Looking up. Two dozen people in those first-and second-row box seats also looking up, most of them waving their hands in the air. This is one thing I don't understand about fans and never will. It's a fucking baseball, for the love of God! An item that sold for seventy-five cents back then. But when fans see one in reach at the ballpark, they turn into fucking greed-monsters. Never mind standing back and letting the man trying to catch it--their man, and in a tight ball game--do his job.

  I saw it all, I tell you. Saw it clear. That mile-high pop-up came down on our side of the wall. The kid was going to catch it. Then some long-armed bozo in one of those Titans jerseys they sold on the Esplanade reached over and ticked it so the ball bounced off the edge of the kid's glove and fell to the ground.

  I was so sure Wenders would call Aparacio out--it was clear interference--that at first I couldn't believe what I was seeing when he gestured for the kid to go back behind the plate and for Aparicio to resume the box. When I got it, I ran down the line, waving my arms. The crowd started cheering me and booing Wenders, which is no way to win friends and influence people when you're arguing a call, but I was too goddam mad to care. I wouldn't have stopped if Mahatma Gandhi had walked out on the field butt-naked and urging us to make peace.

  "Interference!" I yelled. "Clear as day, clear as the nose on your face!"

  "It was in the stands, and that makes it anyone's ball," Wenders says. "Go on back to your little nest and let's get this show on the road."

  The kid didn't care; he was talking to his pal The Doo. That was all right. I didn't care that he didn't care. All I wanted at that moment was to tear Hi Wenders a fresh new asshole. I'm not ordinarily an argumentative man--all the years I managed the A's, I only got thrown out of games twice--but that day I would have made Billy Martin look like a peacenik.

  "You didn't see it, Hi! You were trailing too far back! You didn't see shit!"

  "I wasn't trailing and I saw it all. Now get back, Granny. I ain't kidding."

  "If you didn't see that long-armed sonofabitch--" (here a lady in the second row put her hands over her little boy's ears and pursed up her mouth at me in an oh-you-nasty-man look) "--that long-armed sonofabitch reach out and tick that ball, you were goddam trailing! Jesus Christ!"

  The man in the jersey starts shaking his head--who, me? not me!--but he's also wearing a big embarrassed suckass grin. Wenders saw it, knew what it meant, then looked away. "That's all you get," he says to me. And in the reasonable voice that means you're one smart crack from drinking a Rhinegold in the locker room. "You've had your say. You can either shut the hell up or listen to the rest of the game on the radio. Take your pick."

  I went back to the box. Aparicio stood back in with a big shit-eating grin on his face. He knew, sure he did. And made the most of it. The guy never hit many home runs, but when The Doo sent in a changeup that didn't change, Little Louie cranked it high, wide, and handsome to the deepest part of the park. Nosy Norton was playing center, and he never even turned around.

  Aparicio circled the bases, serene as the Queen Mary coming into dock, while the crowd screamed at him, denigrated his relatives, and hurled hate down on Hi Wenders's head. Wenders heard none of it, which is the chief umpirely skill. He just got a fresh ball out of his coat pocket and inspected it for dings and doinks. Watching him do that, I lost it entirely. I rushed down to home plate and started shaking both fists in his face.

  "That's your run, you fucking busher!" I screamed. "Too fucking lazy to chase after a foul ball, and now you've got an RBI for yourself! Jam it up your ass! Maybe you'll find your glasses!"

  The crowd loved it. Hi Wenders, not so much. He pointed at me, threw his thumb back over his shoulder, and walked away. The crowd started booing and shaking their ROAD CLOSED signs; some threw bottles, cups, and half-eaten franks onto the field. It was a circus.

  "Don't you walk away from me, you fatass blind lazy sonofabitching bastard!" I screamed, and chased after him. Someone from our dugout grabbed me before I could grab Wenders, which I meant to do. I had lost it entirely.

  The crowd was chanting "KILL THE UMP! KILL THE UMP! KILL THE UMP!" I'll never forget that, because it was the same way they'd been chanting "Bloh-KADE! Bloh-KADE!"

  "If your mother was here, she'd yank down those blue pants and spank your ass, you bat-blind busher!" I screamed, and then they hauled me into the dugout. Ganzie Burgess, our knuckleballer, managed the last three innings of that horror show. He also pitched the last two. You might find that in the record books too. If there were any records of that lost spring.

  The last thing I saw on the field was Danny Dusen and Blockade Billy standing on the grass between the plate and the mound. The kid had his mask tucked under his arm. The Doo was whispering in his ear. The kid was listening--he always listened when The Doo talked--but he was looking at the crowd, forty thousand fans on their feet, men, women, and children, yelling KILL THE UMP! KILL THE UMP! KILL THE UMP!

  There was a bucket of balls halfway down the hall between the dugout and the locker room. I kicked it and sent balls rolling every whichway. If I'd stepped on one of them and fallen on my ass, it would have been the perfect end to a perfect fucking afternoon at the ballpark.

  Joe was in the locker room, sitting on a bench outside the showers. By then he looked seventy instead of just fifty. There were three other guys in there with him. Two were uniformed cops. The third one was in a suit, but you only had to take one look at his hard roast beef of a face to know he was a cop, too.

  "Game over early?" this one asked me. He was sitting on a folding chair with his big old cop thighs spread and straining his seersucker pants. The bluesuits were on one of the benches in front of the lockers.

  "It is for me," I said. I was still so mad I didn't even care about the cops. To Joe I said, "Fucking Wenders ran me. I'm sorry, Cap, but it was a clear case of interference and that lazy sonofabitch--"

  "It doesn't matter," Joe said. "The game isn't going to count. I don't think any of our games are going to count. Kerwin'll appeal to the Commissioner, of course, but--"

  "What are you talking about?" I asked.

  Joe sighed. Then he looked at the guy in the suit. "You tell him, Detective Lombardazzi," he said. "I can't bear to."

  "Does he need to know?" Lombardazzi asked. He's looking at me like I'm some kind of bug he's never seen before. It was a look I didn't need on top of everything else, but I kept my mouth shut. Because I knew three cops, one of them a detective, don't show up in the locker room of a Major League baseball team if it isn't goddam serious.

  "If you want him to hold the other guys long enough for you to get the Blakely kid out of here, I think you better put him in the picture," Joe says.

  From above us there came a cry from the fans, followed by a groan, followed by a cheer. None of us paid any attention to what turned out to be the end of Danny Dusen's baseball career. The cry was when he got hit in the forehead by a Larry Doby line drive. The groan was when he fell on the pitcher's mound like a tagged prizefighter. And the cheer was when he picked himself up and gestured that he was okay. Which he was not, but he pitched the rest of the sixth, and the seventh, too. Didn't give up a run, either. Ganzie made him come out before the eighth when he saw The Doo wasn't walking straight. Danny all the time claiming he was perfectly okay, that the big purple goose egg raising up over his left eyebrow was nothing, he'd had lot
s worse, and the kid saying the same: it ain't nothing, it ain't nothing. Little Sir Echo. Us down in the clubhouse didn't know any of that, no more than Dusen knew he might've been tagged worse in his career, but it was the first time part of his brain had sprung a leak.

  "His name isn't Blakely," Lombardazzi says. "It's Eugene Katsanis."

  "Katz-whatsis? Where's Blakely, then?"

  "William Blakely's dead. Has been for a month. His parents too."

  I gaped at him. "What are you talking about?"

  So he told me the stuff I'm sure you already know, Mr. King, but maybe I can fill in a few blanks. The Blakelys lived in Clarence, Iowa, a wide patch of not much an hour's drive from Davenport. Made it convenient for Ma and Pa, because they could go to most of their son's Minor League games. Blakely had a successful farm; an eight-hundred-acre job. One of their hired men wasn't much more than a boy. His name was Gene Katsanis, an orphan who'd grown up in The Ottershaw Christian Home for Boys. He was no farmer, and not quite right in the head, but he was a hell of a baseball player.

  Katsanis and Blakely played against each other on a couple of church teams, and together on the local Babe Ruth team, which won the state tournament all three years the two of them played together, and once went as far as the national semis. Blakely went to high school and starred on that team also, but Katsanis wasn't school material. Slopping-the-hogs material and ballplaying material is what he was, although he was never supposed to be as good as Billy Blakely. Nobody so much as considered such a thing. Until it happened, that is.

  Blakely's father hired him because the kid worked cheap, sure, but mostly because he had enough natural talent to keep Billy sharp. For twenty-five dollars a week, the Blakely kid got a fielder and a batting-practice pitcher. The old man got a cow-milker and a shit-shoveler. Not a bad deal, at least for them.

  Whatever you've found in your research probably favors the Blakely family, am I right? Because they had been around those parts for four generations, because they were rich farmers, and because Katsanis wasn't nothing but a state kid who started life in a liquor carton on a church step and had several screws loose upstairs. And why was that? Because he was born dumb or because he got the crap beaten out of him three and four times a week in that home before he got old enough and big enough to defend himself? I know a lot of the beatings came because he had a habit of talking to himself--that came out in the newspapers later on.

  Katsanis and Billy practiced just as hard once Billy got into the Titans' farm system--during the off-season, you know, probably throwing and hitting in the barn once the snow got too deep outside--but Katsanis got kicked off the local town team, and wasn't allowed to go to the Cornholers' workouts during Billy's second season with them. During his first one, Katsanis had been allowed to participate in some of the workouts, even in some intersquad games, if they were a man shy. It was all pretty informal and loosey-goosey back then, not like now when the insurance companies shit a brick if a major leaguer so much as grabs a bat without wearing a helmet.

  What I think happened--feel free to correct me if you know better--is that Katsanis, whatever other problems he might have had, continued to grow and mature as a ballplayer. Blakely didn't. You see that all the time. Two kids who both look like Babe Fuckin' Ruth in high school. Same height, same weight, same speed, same twenty-twenty peepers. But one of them is able to play at the next level . . . and the next . . . and the next . . . while the other one starts to fall behind. This much I did hear later: Billy Blakely didn't start out as a catcher. He got switched from center field when the kid who was catching broke his arm. And that kind of switch isn't a real good sign. It's like the coach is sending a message: "You'll do . . . but only until someone better shows up."

  I think Blakely got jealous, I think his old man got jealous, and I think maybe Mom did, too. Maybe especially Mom, because sports moms can be wolverines. I think maybe they pulled a few strings to keep Katsanis from playing locally, and from showing up for the Davenport Cocksuckers' workouts. They could have done it, because they were a wealthy, long-established Iowa family and Gene Katsanis was a nobody who grew up in an orphan home that was probably hell on earth.

  I think maybe Billy got ragging on the kid once too often and once too hard. Or it could've been the dad or the mom. Maybe it was over the way he milked the cows, or maybe he didn't shovel the shit just right that one time, but I'll bet the bottom line was baseball and plain old jealousy. The green-eyed monster. For all I know, the Cornholers' manager told Blakely he might be sent down to Single A in Clearwater, and getting sent down a rung when you're only twenty--when you're supposed to be going up the ladder--is a damned good sign that your career in organized baseball is going to be a short one.

  But however it was--and whoever--it was a bad mistake. The kid could be sweet when he was treated right, we all knew that, but he wasn't right in the head. And he could be dangerous. I knew that even before the cops showed up, because of what happened in the very first game of the season: Billy Anderson's ankle.

  "The county sheriff found all three Blakelys in the barn," Lombardazzi said. "Katsanis slashed their throats. Sheriff said it looked like a razor blade."

  I just gaped at him.

  "What must have happened is this," Joe said in a heavy voice. "Kerwin McCaslin called around for a backup catcher when our guys got hurt down in Florida, and the manager of the Cornhuskers said he had a boy who might fill the bill for three or four weeks, assuming we didn't need him to hit for average. Because, he said, this kid wouldn't do that."

  "But he did," I says.

  "Because he wasn't Blakely," Lombardazzi says. "By then Blakely and his parents must already have been dead a couple of days, at least. The Katsanis kid was keeping house all by himself. And not all his screws were loose. He was smart enough to answer the phone when it rang. He took the call from the manager and said sure, Billy'd be glad to go to New Jersey. And before he left--as Billy--he called around to the neighbors and the feed store downtown. Told em the Blakelys had been called away on a family emergency and he was taking care of things. Pretty smart for a loony, wouldn't you say?"

  "He's not a loony," I told him.

  "Well, he cut the throats of the people who took him in and gave him a job, and he killed all the cows so the neighbors wouldn't hear them bawling to be milked at night, but have it your way. I know the DA's going to agree with you, because he wants to see Katsanis get the rope. That's how they do it in Iowa, you know."

  I turned to Joe. "How could a thing like this happen?"

  "Because he was good," Joe said. "And because he wanted to play ball."

  The kid had Billy Blakely's ID, and this was back in the days when picture IDs were pretty much unheard of. The two kids matched up pretty well, anyway: blue eyes, dark hair, six feet tall. But mostly, yeah--it happened because the kid was good. And wanted to play ball.

  "Good enough to get almost a month in the pros," Lombarazzi said, and over our heads a cheer went up. Blockade Billy had just gotten his last big-league hit: a roundtripper. "Then, day before yesterday, the LP gas man went out to the Blakely farm. Other folks had been there before, but they read the note Katsanis left on the door and went away. Not the gas man. He filled the tanks behind the barn, and the barn was where the bodies were--cows and Blakelys both. The weather had finally turned warm, and he smelled em. Which is pretty much the way our story ends. Now, your manager here wants him arrested with as little fuss as possible, and with as little danger to the other players on your team as possible. That's fine with me. So your job--"

  "Your job is to hold the rest of the guys in the dugout," Jersey Joe says. "Send Blakely . . . Katsanis . . . down here on his own. He'll be gone when the rest of the guys get to the locker room. Then we'll try to sort this clusterfuck out."

  "What the hell do I tell them?"

  "Team meeting. Free ice cream. I don't care. You just hold them for five minutes."

  I says to Lombardazzi, "No one tipped? No one? You mean no on
e heard the radio broadcasts and tried calling Pop Blakely to say how great it was that his kid was tearing up the bigs?"

  "I imagine one or two might have tried," Lombardazzi said. "Folks from Iowa do come to the big city from time to time, I'm told, and I imagine a few people visiting New York listen to the Titans or read about em in the paper--"

  "I prefer the Yankees," one of the bluesuits chimes in.

  "If I want your opinion, I'll rattle your cage," Lombardazzi said. "Until then, shut up and die right."

  I looked at Joe, feeling sick. Getting a bad call and getting run off the field during my first managerial stint now seemed like the very least of my problems.

  "Get him in here alone," Joe said. "I don't care how. The guys shouldn't have to see this." He thought it over and added: "And the kid shouldn't have to see them seeing it. No matter what he did."

  If it matters--and I know it don't--we lost that game two to one. All three runs were solo shots. Minnie Minoso hit the game winner off of Ganzie in the top of the ninth. The kid made the final out. He whiffed in his first at bat as a Titan; he whiffed in his last one. Baseball is a game of inches, but it's also a game of balance.

  Not that any of our guys cared about the game. When I got up there, they were gathered around The Doo, who was sitting on the bench and telling them he was fine, goddammit, just a little dizzy. But he didn't look fine, and our old excuse for a doc looked pretty grave. He wanted Danny down at Newark General for X-rays.

  "Fuck that," Doo says, "I just need a couple of minutes. I'm all right, I tell you. Jesus, Bones, cut me a break."

  "Blakely," I said. "Go on down to the locker room. Mr. DiPunno wants to see you."

  "Coach DiPunno wants to see me? In the locker room? Why?"

  "Something about the Rookie of the Month award," I said. It just popped into my head from nowhere. There was no such thing back then, but the kid didn't know that.

  The kid looks at Danny Doo, and The Doo flaps his hand at him. "Go on, get out of here, kid. You played a good game. Not your fault. You're still lucky, and fuck anyone who says different." Then he says, "All of you get out of here. Gimme some breathing room."