The Stories of J.F. Powers (New York Review Books Classics)

  “Get your aunt Kate to take that cap up in the back,” Uncle Pat said, smiling.

  Vaguely embarrassed, Jamesie said, “Well, I got to get back.”

  “If that’s Lefty’s cap,” Gabriel called after him, “you’d better send it to the cleaners.”

  When he got back to the bench and handed the ball over, J. G. seemed to forget all about the bases being crowded.

  “Thank God,” he said. “I thought you went home with it.”

  The Barons were all on Lefty now. Shorty Parker, their manager, coaching at third, chanted, “Take him out . . . Take him out . . . Take him out.”

  The Barons had started off the ninth with two clean blows. Then Bugs took a foul ball off the chicken wire in front of the grandstand for one out, and Big Pete speared a drive on the rise for another. Two down and runners on first and third. Lefty wound up—bad baseball—and the man on first started for second, the batter stepping into the pitch, not to hit it but to spoil the peg to second. The runner was safe; the man on third, threatening to come home after a false start, slid yelling back into the sack. It was close and J. G. flew off the bench to protest a little.

  After getting two strikes on the next batter, Lefty threw four balls, so wide it looked like a deliberate pitchout, and that loaded the bases.

  J. G. called time. He went out to the mound to talk it over with Lefty, but Lefty waved him away. So J. G. consulted Bugs behind the plate. Jamesie, lying on the grass a few feet away, could hear them.

  “That’s the first windup I ever seen a pitcher take with a runner on first.”

  “It was pretty bad,” Bugs said.

  “And then walking that last one. He don’t look wild to me, neither.”

  “He ain’t wild, J. G.; I’ll tell you that.”

  “I want your honest opinion, Bugs.”

  “I don’t know what to say, J. G.”

  “Think I better jerk him?”

  Bugs was silent, chewing it over.

  “Guess I better leave him in, huh?”

  “You’re the boss, J. G. I don’t know nothing for sure.”

  “I only got Extra Pete to put in. They’d murder him. I guess I got to leave Lefty in and take a chance.”

  “I guess so.”

  When J. G. had gone Bugs walked halfway out to the mound and spoke to Lefty. “You all right?”

  “I had a little twinge before.”

  “A little what?”

  Lefty touched his left shoulder.

  “You mean your arm’s gone sore?”

  “Naw. I guess it’s nothing.”

  Bugs took his place behind the plate again. He crouched, and Jamesie, from where he was lying, saw two fingers appear below the mitt—the signal. Lefty nodded, wound up, and tried to slip a medium-fast one down the middle. Guez, the batter, poled a long ball into left—foul by a few feet. Bugs shook his head in the mask, took a new ball from the umpire, and slammed it hard at Lefty.

  Jamesie saw two fingers below the mitt again. What was Bugs doing? It wasn’t smart baseball to give Guez another like the last one!

  Guez swung and the ball fell against the left-field fence—fair. Lee Coles, the left fielder, was having trouble locating it in the weeds. Kelly Larkin came over from center to help him hunt. When they found the ball, Guez had completed the circuit and the score was 5 to 2 in favor of the Barons.

  Big Pete came running over to Lefty from first base, Little Pete from second, Pid Kirby from short, Middle Pete from third. J. G., calling time again, walked out to them.

  “C’mere, Bugs,” he said.

  Bugs came slowly.

  “What’d you call for on that last pitch?”

  “Curve ball.”

  “And the one before that?”

  “Same.”

  “And what’d Lefty give you?”

  “It wasn’t no curve. It wasn’t much of anything.”

  “No,” J. G. said. “It sure wasn’t no curve ball. It was right in there, not too fast, not too slow, just right—for batting practice.”

  “It slipped,” Lefty said.

  “Slipped, huh!” Big Pete said. “How about the other one?”

  “They both slipped. Ain’t that never happened before?”

  “Well, it ain’t never going to happen again—not to me, it ain’t,” J. G. said. “I’m taking you out!”

  He shouted to Extra Pete on the bench, “Warm up! You’re going in!” He turned to Lefty.

  “And I’m firing you. I just found out your old man was making bets under the grandstand—and they wasn’t on us! I can put you in jail for this!”

  “Try it,” Lefty said, starting to walk away.

  “If you knew it, J. G.,” Big Pete said, “whyn’t you let us know?”

  “I just now found it out, is why.”

  “Then I’m going to make up for lost time,” Big Pete said, following Lefty, “and punch this guy’s nose.”

  Old man Peterson appeared among them—somebody must have told him what it was all about. “Give it to him, son!” he cackled.

  Jamesie missed the fight. He was not tall enough to see over all the heads, and Gabriel, sent by Uncle Pat, was dragging him away from it all.

  “I always knew that Lefty was a bad one,” Gabriel said on the way home. “I knew it from the time he used to hunch in marbles.”

  “It reminds me of the Black Sox scandal of 1919,” Uncle Pat said. “I wonder if they’ll hold the old man, too.”

  Jamesie, in tears, said, “Lefty hurt his arm and you don’t like him just because he don’t work, and his father owes you at the store! Let me out! I’d rather walk by myself than ride in the Hupmobile—with you!”

  He stayed up in his room, feigning a combination stomach-ache and headache, and would not come down for supper. Uncle Pat and Gabriel were down there eating. His room was over the dining room, and the windows were open upstairs and down, but he could not quite hear what they said. Uncle Pat was laughing a lot—that was all for sure—but then he always did that. Pretty soon he heard no more from the dining room and he knew they had gone to sit on the front porch.

  Somebody was coming up the stairs. Aunt Kate. He knew the wavering step at the top of the stairs to be hers, and the long pause she used to catch her breath—something wrong with her lungs? Now, as she began to move, he heard ice tinkling in a glass. Lemonade. She was bringing him some supper. She knocked. He lay heavier on the bed and with his head at a painful angle to make her think he was suffering. She knocked again. If he pinched his forehead it would look red and feverish. He did. Now.

  “Come in,” he said weakly.

  She came in, gliding across the room in the twilight, tall and white as a sail in her organdy, serene before her patient. Not quite opening his eyes, he saw her through the lashes. She thought he was sick all right, but even if she didn’t, she would never take advantage of him to make a joke, like Uncle Pat, prescribing, “A good dose of salts! That’s the ticket!” Or Gabriel, who was even meaner, “An enema!”

  He had Aunt Kate fooled completely. He could fool her every time. On Halloween she was the kind of person who went to the door every time the bell rang. She was the only grownup he knew with whom it was not always the teetertotter game. She did not raise herself by lowering him. She did not say back to him the things he said, slightly changed, accented with a grin, so that they were funny. Uncle Pat did. Gabriel did. Sometimes, if there was company, his father did.

  “Don’t you want the shades up, Jamesie?”

  She raised the shades, catching the last of that day’s sun, bringing the ballplayers on the wall out of the shadows and into action. She put the tray on the table by his bed.

  Jamesie sat up and began to eat. Aunt Kate was the best one. Even if she noticed it, she would say nothing about his sudden turn for the better.

  She sat across from him in the rocker, the little red one he had been given three years ago, when he was just a kid in the first grade, but she did not look too big for it. She ran her hand o
ver the front of his books, frowning at Baseball Bill, Don Sturdy, Tom Swift, Horatio Alger, Jr, and the Sporting News. They had come between him and her.

  “Where are the books we used to read, Jamesie?”

  “On the bottom shelf.”

  She bent to see them. There they were, his old friends and hers—hers still. Perseus. Theseus. All those old Greeks. Sir Lancelot. Merlin. Sir Tristram. King Arthur. Oliver Twist. Pinocchio. Gulliver. He wondered how he ever could have liked them, and why Aunt Kate still did. Perhaps he still did, a little. But they turned out wrong, most of them, with all the good guys dying or turning into fairies and the bad guys becoming dwarfs. The books he read now turned out right, if not until the very last page, and the bad guys died or got what was coming to them.

  “Were they talking about the game, Aunt Kate?”

  “Your uncle was, and Gabriel.”

  Jamesie waited a moment. “Did they say anything about Lefty?”

  “I don’t know. Is he the one who lost the game on purpose?”

  “That’s a lie, Aunt Kate! That’s just what Uncle Pat and Gabriel say!”

  “Well, I’m sure I don’t know—”

  “You are on their side!”

  Aunt Kate reached for his hand, but he drew it back.

  “Jamesie, I’m sure I’m not on anyone’s side. How can I be? I don’t know about baseball—and I don’t care about it!”

  “Well, I do! And I’m not one bit sick—and you thought I was!”

  Jamesie rolled out of bed, ran to the door, turned, and said, “Why don’t you get out of my room and go and be with them! You’re on their side! And Uncle Pat drinks near beer!”

  He could not be sure, but he thought he had her crying, and if he did it served her right. He went softly down the stairs, past the living room, out the back door, and crept along the house until he reached the front porch. He huddled under the spiraea bushes and listened to them talk. But it was not about the game. It was about President Coolidge. His father was for him. Uncle Pat was against him.

  Jamesie crept back along the house until it was safe to stand up and walk. He went down the alley. He called for Francis.

  But Francis was not home—still with his father, Mrs Murgatroyd said.

  Jamesie went downtown, taking his own special way, through alleys, across lots, so that he arrived on the Square without using a single street or walking on a single sidewalk. He weighed himself on the scales in front of Kresge’s. He weighed eighty-three pounds, and the little card said, “You are the strong, silent type, and silence is golden.” He weighed himself in front of Grant’s. He weighed eighty-four pounds, and the card said, “Cultivate your good tastes and make the most of your business connections.”

  He bought a ball of gum from the machine in front of the Owl Drugstore. It looked like it was time for a black one to come out, and black was his favorite flavor, but it was a green one. Anyway he was glad it had not been white.

  He coveted the Louisville Sluggers in the window of the D.&M. Hardware. He knew how much they cost. They were autographed by Paul Waner, Ty Cobb, Rogers Hornsby, all the big league stars, and if Lefty ever cracked his, a Paul Waner, he was going to give it to Jamesie, he said.

  When Lefty was up with the Yankees—though they had not talked about it yet—he would send for Jamesie. He would make Jamesie the bat boy for the Yankees. He would say to Jake Ruppert, the owner of the Yankees, “Either you hire my friend, Jamesie, as bat boy or I quit.” Jake Ruppert would want his own nephew or somebody to have the job, but what could he do? Jamesie would have a uniform like the regular players, and get to travel around the country with them, living in hotels, eating in restaurants, taking taxicabs, and would be known to everybody as Lefty’s best friend, and they would both be Babe Ruth’s best friends, the three of them going everywhere together. He would get all the Yankees to write their names on an Official American League ball and then send it home to Francis Murgatroyd, who would still be going to school back in Jayville—poor old Francis; and he would write to him on hotel stationery with his own fourteen-dollar fountain pen.

  And then he was standing across the street from the jail. He wondered if they had Lefty locked up over there, if Uncle Pat and Gabriel had been right—not about Lefty throwing a game—that was a lie!—but about him being locked up. A policeman came out of the jail. Jamesie waited for him to cross the street. He was Officer Burkey. He was Phil Burkey’s father, and Phil had shown Jamesie his father’s gun and holster one time when he was sleeping. Around the house Mr Burkey looked like anybody else, not a policeman.

  “Mr Burkey, is Lefty in there?”

  Mr Burkey, through for the day, did not stop to talk, only saying, “Ah, that he is, boy, and there’s where he deserves to be.”

  Jamesie said “Oh yeah!” to himself and went around to the back side of the jail. It was a brick building, painted gray, and the windows were open, but not so you could see inside, and they had bars over them.

  Jamesie decided he could do nothing if Mr Burkey was off duty. The street lights came on; it was night. He began to wonder, too, if his father would miss him. Aunt Kate would not tell. But he would have to come in the back way and sneak up to his room. If it rained tomorrow he would stay in and make up with Aunt Kate. He hurried home, and did not remember that he had meant to stay out all night, maybe even run away forever.

  The next morning Jamesie came to the jail early. Mr Burkey, on duty, said he might see Lefty for three minutes, but it was a mystery to him why anyone, especially a nice boy like Jamesie, should want to see the bum. “And don’t tell your father you was here.”

  Jamesie found Lefty lying on a narrow iron bed that was all springs and no covers or pillow.

  “Lefty,” he said, “I came to see you.”

  Lefty sat up. He blinked at Jamesie and had trouble getting his eyes to see.

  Jamesie went closer. Lefty stood up. They faced each other. Jamesie could have put his hand through the bars and touched Lefty.

  “Glad to see you, kid.”

  “Lefty,” Jamesie said, “I brought you some reading.” He handed Lefty Uncle Pat’s copy of Liberty magazine.

  “Thanks, kid.”

  He got the box of Rosebud salve out of his pocket for Lefty.

  “Well, thanks, kid. But what do I do with it?”

  “For your arm, Lefty. It says ‘recommended for aches and pains.’”

  “I’ll try it.”

  “Do you like oranges, Lefty?”

  “I can eat ’em.”

  He gave Lefty his breakfast orange.

  A funny, sweet smell came off Lefty’s breath, like perfume, only sour. Burnt matches and cigar butts lay on the cell floor. Did Lefty smoke? Did he? Didn’t he realize what it would do to him?

  “Lefty, how do you throw your sinker?”

  Lefty held the orange and showed Jamesie how he gripped the ball along the seams, how he snapped his wrist before he let it fly.

  “But be sure you don’t telegraph it, kid. Throw ’em all the same—your fast one, your floater, your curve. Then they don’t know where they’re at.”

  Lefty tossed the orange through the bars to Jamesie.

  “Try it.”

  Jamesie tried it, but he had it wrong at first, and Lefty had to reach through the bars and show him again. After that they were silent, and Jamesie thought Lefty did not seem very glad to see him after all, and remembered the last gift.

  “And I brought you this, Lefty.”

  It was Baseball Bill in the World Series.

  “Yeah?” Lefty said, momentarily angry, as though he thought Jamesie was trying to kid him. He accepted the book reluctantly.

  “He’s a pitcher, Lefty,” Jamesie said. “Like you, only he’s a right-hander.”

  The sour perfume on Lefty’s breath came through the bars again, a little stronger on a sigh.

  Wasn’t that the odor of strong drink and cigar smoke—the odor of Blackie Humphrey? Jamesie talked fast to keep himself from think
ing. “This book’s all about Baseball Bill and the World Series,” he gulped, “and Blackie Humphrey and some dirty crooks that try to get Bill to throw it, but . . .” He gave up; he knew now. And Lefty had turned his back.

  After a moment, during which nothing happened inside him to explain what he knew now, Jamesie got his legs to take him away, out of the jail, around the corner, down the street—away. He did not go through alleys, across lots, between buildings, over fences. No. He used the streets and sidewalks, like anyone else, to get where he was going—away—and was not quite himself.

  HE DON’T PLANT COTTON

  SPRING ENTERED THE black belt in ashes, dust, and drabness, without benefit of the saving green. The seasons were known only by the thermometer and the clothing of the people. There were only a few nights in the whole year when the air itself told you. Perhaps a night in April or May might escape the plague of smells, achieve a little of the enchantment, be the diminished echo of spring happening ardently in the suburbs, but it was all over in a night and the streets were filled with summer, as a hollow mouth with bad breath, and even the rain could not wash it away. And winter . . .

  The beginning snow swirled in from the lake, dusting the streets with white. Baby squinted down the lonesome tracks. The wind twisted snow into his eyes, the flakes as sharp as sand, grinding, and his eyeballs were coated with cold tears. Baby worked his hands in his overcoat pockets to make heat. He saw a woman cross the street to catch the Big Red, which was coming now, but the woman refused stiffly to run for it. The wind went off hooting down the tracks ahead. Baby got on. The conductor held out one hand for the fare and yanked a cord twice with the other, prodding the red monster into motion.

  Baby sat down inside. A cold breeze swept the floor, rattling old transfers and gum wrappers. Baby placed his feet uneasily on the heater to make the meager warmth funnel up his pants’ legs. The dark flesh beneath the tuxedo was chilled to chalky gray at the joints. He listened to the wheels bump over the breaks in the track, and the warmth from the heater rose higher on his legs. He became warm and forgetful of the weather, except as scenery. The streets were paved evenly with snow twinkling soft and clean and white under the lights, and velvet red and green from the neon signs.