Maniac couldn’t stop laughing. Neither could Grayson, especially when he got a load of the kid drowning in his clothes.
An hour later, after a minor shopping spree, Maniac had clothes of his own.
For the rest of the afternoon, they cruised around town, talking and eating Krimpets.
“So,” said the old man, “now what’re you gonna do?”
Maniac thought it over. “How about a job? I could work for the park, like you.”
Grayson didn’t answer that. He said, “Where you think you’re gonna stay?”
Maniac’s answer was prompt: “The baseball room. It’s perfect.”
A tiny idea was beginning to worm its way into Grayson’s head; he could barely feel it as it brushed by all the claptrap in his brain. He ignored it. He said, “What about school?”
Maniac was silent. Some butterscotch icing had stayed behind on a wrapper. He scooped it up and mopped it from his finger, wishing it were Mrs. Beale’s, and not his own.
Grayson, who was not comfortable asking questions, was even less comfortable waiting for answers. “I said, what about school?”
Maniac turned to him. “What about it?”
“You gotta go. You’re a kid. Ain’t ya?”
“I’m not going.”
“But you gotta. Doncha? They’ll make ya.”
“Not if they don’t find me.”
The old man just looked at him for a while with a mixture of puzzlement and recognition, as though the fish he had landed might be the same one he had thrown away long before. “Why?” he said.
Maniac felt why more than he knew why. It had to do with homes and families and schools, and how a school seems sort of like a big home, but only a day home, because then it empties out; and you can’t stay there at night because it’s not really a home, and you could never use it as your address, because an address is where you stay at night, where you walk right in the front door without knocking, where everybody talks to each other and uses the same toaster. So all the other kids would be heading for their homes, their night homes, each of them, hundreds, flocking from school like birds from a tree, scattering across town, each breaking off to his or her own place, each knowing exactly where to land. School. Home. No, he was not going to have one without the other.
“If you try to make me,” he said, “I’ll just start running.”
Grayson said nothing. What the kid said actually made him feel good, though he had no idea why. And the brushing little worm of a notion was beginning to tickle him now. He kept on driving.
24
They got back to the band shell just as they finished the last of the Krimpets. Grayson looked at his watch. “Guess it’s time to quit the job I never did today. Time for dinner, too.”
Grayson was joking, but Maniac was serious when he piped, “Great! Where to?”
Dumbfounded, the old man drove back out of the park to the nearest diner, where he sat with a cup of coffee while the boy wolfed down meatloaf and gravy, mashed potatoes, zucchini, salad, and coconut custard pie.
Grayson had a way of jumping into a subject without warning; it was during Maniac’s dessert that he abruptly said, “Them black people, they eat mashed potatoes, too?”
Maniac thought he was kidding, then realized he wasn’t. “Sure. Mrs. Beale used to have potatoes a lot, mashed and every other way.”
“Mrs. who?”
“Mrs. Beale. Do you know the Beales? Of seven twenty-eight Sycamore Street?”
The old man shook his head.
“Well, they were my family. I had a mother and father and a little brother and sister and a sister my age and a dog. My own room, too.”
Grayson stared out the diner window, as if digesting this information. “How ’bout meatloaf?”
“Huh?”
“They eat that, too?”
“Sure, meatloaf too. And peas. And corn. You name it.”
“Cake?”
Maniac beamed. “Oh, man! You kidding? Mrs. Beale makes the best cakes in the world.”
Grayson’s eyes narrowed. “Toothbrushes? They use them?”
Maniac fought not to smile. “Absolutely. We all had our toothbrushes hanging in the bathroom.”
“I know that,” said Grayson, impatient, “but is theirs the same? As ours?”
“No difference that I could see.”
“You didn’t drink out the same glass.”
“Absolutely, we did.”
This information seemed to shock the old man.
Maniac laid down his fork. “Grayson, they’re just regular people, like us.”
“I was never in a house of theirs.”
“Well, I’m telling you, it’s the same. There’s bathtubs and refrigerators and rugs and TVs and beds. … “
Grayson was wagging his head. “Ain’t that some-thin’…ain’t that something’…”
It was after dark when they got back to the baseball-equipment room. The worm in Grayson’s head had long since ceased to be a tiny tickle; it was now a maddening itch. As with all such itch-worms, it would exit by only one route, the mouth. He said: “Uh, I was thinkin’, uh, maybe you want to come over to my place. This here floor’s pretty hard.” He tapped his foot to show how hard.
The grizzled, gray old parkhand could never know how much Maniac was tempted, or how deeply the offer touched him. Neither could Maniac explain that the bad luck he always seemed to have with parents had led him to the conclusion that he’d better stick to himself.
“Oh, it’s not so bad here,” he said. “Look — “ He lay down on the chest protectors and closed his eyes. “Ah…just like a mattress. I can feel myself dozing off already.” And then, not wanting to hurt the old man’s feelings, he quickly added, “Hey, I told you everything about me. How about you?” He pulled Grayson’s coat over himself. “A bedtime story.”
Grayson snorted. “Story? I don’t know no stories.”
“Sure you do,” Maniac prodded. “About yourself. You know about you. Everybody has a story.”
“Not me.” Grayson was edging for the door. “I ain’t got no story. I ain’t nobody. I work at the park.”
“You line baseball fields?”
“Yep. I do that.”
“You live at the Y. You drive the park pickup. You like butterscotch Krimpets.”
Grayson shook his head. “Not as much as you. I was just eating ’em to be friendly, so’s you wouldn’t have to eafr’em all by yourself.”
“And there’s another thing about you.” Maniac joked. “You’re a liar.”
They both laughed.
Grayson opened the door.
“Wait—” called Maniac. “What did you want to grow up to be when you were a kid?”
Grayson paused in the doorway. He looked out into the night. “A baseball player,” he said. He turned out the light and closed the door.
25
In the morning Grayson bought Maniac an Egg McMuffin and a large orange juice. He bought the same thing for himself, so they ate breakfast together in the baseball-equipment room.
“You sent me to bed without a story last night,” Maniac kidded.
Grayson brushed a yellow speck of egg from his white stubble. “I don’t got no stories. I told you.”
“You wanted to be a baseball player.”
“That ain’t no story.”
“Well, did you become one?”
Grayson drank half his orange juice. “Just the Minors,” he muttered.
Maniac yelped, “The Minors!”
“Couldn’t never make it to the Majors.” There was a frayed weariness in the old man’s words, as though they had long since worn out.
“Grayson — the Minors. Man, you must have been good. What position did you play?”
Grayson said, “Pitcher.” This word, unlike the others, was not worn at all, but fresh and robust. It startled Maniac. It declared: I am not what you see. I am not a line-laying, pickup-driving, live-at-the-Y, bean-brained parkhand. I am not rickety, whisker
ed worm chow. I am a pitcher.
Maniac had sensed there was something more to the old man; now he knew what it was. “Grayson, what’s your first name?”
The old man fidgeted. “Earl. But call me Grayson, like ever’body.” He looked at the clock on the wall. “Gotta go.”
“Grayson, wait —”
“I’m late for work. You oughta be in school.”
He was gone.
Grayson returned at noon, bearing zeps and sodas, and was not allowed to leave until he told Maniac one story about the Minor Leagues.
So he told the kid about his first day in the Minors, with Bluefield, West Virginia, in the Appalachian League. Class D. “Can’t get no lower’n that,” he told the kid. “That’s where you broke in. Don’t have D ball no more.”
He told about thumbing a ride to Bluefield, and, when he got there, going up to a gas station attendant and asking which way to the ballpark. And the gas station man told him, “Sure, but first I gotta ask you something. You’re a new ballplayer, right? Just comin’ on board?” And Grayson said, “Yep, that’s right.” And the man said, “I thought so. Well then, you’re just gonna want to make your first stop right over there” —he pointed across the street — “that there restaurant, the Blue Star. You just go right on in there and sit yourself down and tell the waitress you want the biggest steak on the menu. And anything else you want, too, because it’s all on the house. The Blue Star treats every new rookie to his first meal in town free.” He gave a wink. “They want your business.”
Great, thought Grayson, and he did just that; Only when he got up and left, the restaurant owner came running after him down the street, all mad at Grayson for skipping out. And when Grayson told him he was a rookie just picking up his free first meal, the owner got even madder. Seems the gas station man was a real card and liked to welcome dumb rookies with his little practical joke.
And that’s how it came to be that when the Bluefield Bullets took the field that day, they did so without the services of their new pitcher, who was back in the kitchen of the Blue Star restaurant, doing dishes to work off a sixteen-ounce steak, half a broiled chicken, and two pieces of rhubarb pie.
After a story like that, Maniac couldn’t just stay behind, so he tagged along when Grayson went back to work. He helped the old man raise a new fence around the children’s petting farmyard. When the park Superintendent came around and asked about the kid, Grayson said it was his nephew come to visit for a while. The Superintendent, who managed the budget, said, “We can’t pay him, you know.” And Grayson said, “Fine, no problem,” and that was that.
From then on Maniac was on the job with Grayson every afternoon. They raised fences, mended fences, hauled stone, patched asphalt, painted, trimmed trees. They ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner together, sometimes in the equipment room, sometimes at a restaurant. They spent weekends together.
All the while Grayson told baseball stories (insisting, all along, “I ain’t got no stories”). He told about the Appalachian League and the Carolina League and the Pecos Valley League and the Buckeye and the Mexican Leagues. About the Pedukah Twin Oaks and the Natchez Pelicans and the Jesup Georgia Browns and the Laredo Lariats. All Minor League teams, Minor League baseball.
Sleazy hotels. Sleazy buses. Sleazy stadiums. Sleazy fans. Sleazy water buckets. Curveballs and bus fumes and dreams, dreams of the Majors — clean sheets and an umpire at every base.
Funny stories. Happy stories. Sad stories. Just plain baseball stories.
The happiest story being the one about Willie Mays’s very last at-bat in the Minor Leagues, before he went up to the New York Giants and immortality. Well, it was ol’ Grayson himself who had last crack at Mays, in the ninth inning of a game with Indianapolis — and what did Grayson do? All he did was set the Say Hey Kid down swinging — on three straight curveballs.
The saddest story was the one about the scout who came down from the Toledo Mud Hens. The Mud Hens had a roster slot, and the scout had a notion to fill it with the pitcher with the wicked curveball, name of Earl Grayson. This was Grayson’s big chance, for the Mud Hens were Class AAA ball, one short step from the Majors.
The night before the game, Grayson spent half of it on his knees by his bed, praying. And even five minutes before the game, in the dugout, he bent down, pretending to tie his shoe, and closed one eye and prayed: “Please let me win this ball game.” Which was something, since he had never gone to a church in his life. (“God musta fainted,” he said to Maniac.)
And indeed, maybe God did, or maybe He only listened to Major Leaguers, because Grayson took the mound and proceeded to pitch the flat-out awfulest game of his life. His curveball wasn’t curving, his sinker wasn’t sinking, his knuckler wasn’t knuckling. The batters were teeing off as if it were the invasion of Normandy Beach. Before the third inning was over, the score was 12—0, and Grayson was in the showers.
He was twenty-seven years old then, and that was the closest he would ever get to the Big Show. He hung on for thirteen more years, a baseball junkie, winding up in some hot tamale league in Guanajuato, Mexico, until his curveball could no longer bend around so much as a chili pepper and his fastball was slower than a senorita’s answer.
He was forty, out of baseball, and, for all intents and purposes, out of life. All those years in the game, and all he was fit to do was clean a restroom or sweep a floor or lay a chalk line — or, far, far down the road, tell stories to a wide-eyed, homeless kid.
26
It was impossible to listen to such stories empty-handed. As soon as Grayson started one, Maniac would reach into one of the equipment bags and pull out a ball or a bat or a catcher’s mitt. Sniffing the scuffed horsehide aroma of the ball, rippling the fingertips over the red stitching — it’s hard to say how these things can make the listening better, but they do, and, for Maniac, they did.
And of course, as happens with baseball, one-thing led to another, and pretty soon the two of them were tossing a ball back and forth. And then they were outside, where the throws could be longer; where you could play pepper on the outfield grass of the Legion field, the old man pitching, the kid tapping grounders; where you could shag fungoes, the old man popping high fliers, the kid chasing them down.
And now the stories were mixed with instruction: the grizzled, rickety coot showing the kid how to spray liners to the opposite field; how to get a jump on a long fly even before the batter hits it; how to throw the curveball. Stiff, crooked fingers that grappled clumsily with Krimpet wrappers curled naturally around the shape of a baseball. With a ball in his hand, the park handyman became a professor.
As to the art of pitching, of course, the old man could show and tell, but he could no longer do. Except for one pitch, the only one left in his repertoire from the old days. He called it the “stopball,” and it nearly drove Maniac goofy.
The old man claimed he’d discovered the stopball one day down in the Texas League and that he was long gone from baseball when he perfected it. Unlike most pitches, the stopball involved no element of surprise. On the contrary, the old man would always announce it.
“Okay,” he’d call in from the mound, “here she comes. Now keep your eye on her, ‘cause she’s gonna float on up there, and just about the time she’s over the plate, she’s gonna stop. Now, nobody else ever hit it, so don’t you go getting’ upset if you don’t neither. It’s no shame to whiff on the stopball.” And then he’d throw it.
Well, of course, Maniac knew that most if not all of that was blarney, and, just to make sure, he watched the ball extra carefully. There sure didn’t seem to be anything unusual about it, not at first, anyway; but as the ball came closer, it did somehow seem to get more and more peculiar; and by the time it reached the plate, it might just as well have stopped, because Maniac never knew if he was swinging at the old man’s pitch or at his speech. Whatever, in weeks of trying, he never hit out of the infield.
It was October. The trees rimming the outfield were flaunting their colors. Th
e kid and the geezer base-balled their lunchtimes away, and the after-dinner-times and weekends.
And every night, as the old man left for his room at the Y, he would grouse, “You oughta go to school.” And one night, the kid said back, “I do.”
And that’s how the old man found out what the kid was doing with his mornings.
He had noticed the books before, rows and piles of them that kept growing; but their being books, he didn’t think much of it. Now, the kid tells him, “You know the money you give me” — each morning he gave the kid fifty cents or a dollar to get himself some Krimpets — “well, I take it up to the library. Right inside the door they have these books they’re selling, cases of them, old books they don’t want anymore. They only cost five or ten cents apiece.” He pointed to the piles. “I buy them.”
He showed them to the old man. Ancient, back-broken math books, flaking travel books, warped spellers, mangled mysteries, biographies, music books, astronomy books, cookbooks.
“What’s the matter?” said the old man. “Can’t you make up your mind what kind you want?”
The kid laughed. “I want them all.” He threw his hands out. “I’m learning everything!”
He opened one of the books. “Look … geometry … triangles … okay, isosceles triangles. These two legs, they look equal to you?”
The old man squinted. He nodded.
“Okay, but can you prove it?”
The old man studied the triangle for a full minute. “If I had a ruler maybe —”
“No ruler.”
The old man sighed. “Guess I give up.”
So the kid proved it — absolutely, dead-center proved it.
Two days later, while playing pepper in the Legion infield, the old man said to the kid, “So why don’t you go ahead and teach me how to read?”
27
The story he told now was not about baseball. It was about parents who were drunk a lot and always leaving him on his own; about being put in classes where they just cut paper and played games all day; about a teacher who whispered to a principal, just outside the classroom door, “This bunch will never learn to read a stop sign.” Right then and there, as if to make the teacher right, he stopped trying.