When we burst out laughing she asked what was so damned funny. Everett told her, “You only know Ruth and Gehrig because of Irwin and Kade’s piggy banks. So how can you say what baseball has turned Papa into? You don’t know what it’s turned anybody into. You don’t know what baseball is.”
Everett’s the only kid I know who refuses to back down from grownups in arguments. Most times I even think he wins, though the grownups never admit it. The trouble with Grandawma, though, is that she makes you spitting mad, so you fight her, but then her head starts to palsy so bad you feel like you’re beating up on old ladies, so you stop. Then, despite the wobble, she turns around and says something that makes you even madder. That’s exactly what she did this time. “I don’t want to know what baseball is,” she told Everett. “I refuse to squander mental energy pondering the technicalities of anything so patently inane.”
“All ballplayers are nobodies to you,” Everett retorted. “Even the greatest, and kindest, and most heroic. So Papa couldn’t please you to save his life. So you might as well be quiet and leave him alone.”
“A long time ago,” she said, wobbling so bad it seemed her head might roll clean off her shoulders, “your father showed signs of keen intelligence. Then he made this boy’s game his entire life. Thanks to this boy’s game he barely finished high school. Thanks to this boy’s game one small injury has ended his career. Thanks to this boy’s game he is a man with six children, no money, no employable knowledge or skills, and he stands an excellent chance of being trapped in that miserable mill for the rest of his life. So no, I don’t understand baseball. But I see what it’s done to my son. He’s a beautiful young man with the jaded, hopeless eyes of some pathetic old derelict. And you wonder why, when I see you and Peter hellbent on following in his footsteps, I am not enthusiastic!”
What she said about his eyes scared me. But all it did to Everett was make him madder. “Papa could make you sound stupid too!” he roared. “He could make your life sound wasted and your eyes sound ugly too! But he doesn’t, does he? So how come he learned better manners playing ball than you learned in college? And while we’re at it, how come you’re not happy? How come you like fossils and dead scientists better than living people?”
“Don’t you dare take that tone with me!” she cried, her voice quavering like someone dying.
“I apologize!” Everett shouted. “I apologize for loving my nobody of a father. I’ll try to learn to despise him, like you!”
With a quickness that stunned me she snatched Everett’s wrist and gripped it. “We’re all nobodies,” she said, and her calm was awful, her head nearly still. “We’re nothing, and less than nothing. You’re a child, Everett Chance. A callow, arrogant little mill-town child. Oh, if you could see some of the things these old eyes have seen!”
Her dry, red-rimmed eyes turned suddenly, fixing on mine, and I looked away in terror. But there was no escaping her voice: “You know, I had brothers once. Three fine brothers, and a father I dearly loved. And they died, every one of them, in the Great War. I must tell you, sometime, what they thought they were fighting for. And I must tell you exactly how and why they died.”
Everett was quiet, and scared now too. She’d been part of a family as real and nearly as big as ours. They’d had everything we had, and money too. And it was gone, every bit of it. This grim, palsying old woman was all that was left.
“But enough of this,” she sniffed suddenly, her face and voice so changed, so eerily pleasant that the bitterness still scalding us seemed like something we’d dreamed. “I notice you didn’t mention Oscar Unitas. What’s the matter, Everett? Have I shocked you by passing my little quiz?”
I thought Everett might laugh at her again, but he didn’t. He just nodded, and said quietly, “You pass, Gran. You pass.”
Given her opinion of baseball, I don’t know how this could please her. But it obviously did.
Much as she dislikes baseball, Grandawma likes the Bible even less. This is because her hero, Charles Darwin, discovered evolution before God even mentioned it, proved scientifically that men are just apes at heart, and got the Christians all worked up because none of this was in the Bible. That’s what Everett and Peter say anyway. Late one night when we were sitting around yapping, Peter said to Everett that if the Christians had any horse sense they’d just sit down and write themselves a new Bible, sticking some evolution in there this time. He said the biblical creation story was a dud anyhow, especially if you were a girl, since God made everything in the Universe, claimed He saw it was good, and then when the First Lady went out naked for a walk to enjoy all this so-called goodness, a completely evil Devil in snake’s clothing came down out of a tree, lied his head off to her, got her thrown out of Paradise and cursed into having it hurt like hell to have babies, and she was still such a nice person that she didn’t go back with a stick and kill that damned snake. Whose fault was all this? Peter wanted to know. Who claimed it was “good” in spite of the snake, then tried to cover Their tracks with a lot of cockamamie hoodoo about Forbidden Fruit and Trees of Knowledge and Eve’s wicked curiosity? And what harm could a little Darwinian evolution possibly do to a mess of a story like that?
But Everett told Peter it’d be a snowy day in hell before the Christians wrote themselves a new Bible. Too many bugs in the plan, he said. In the first place, who do you ask to do the writing? An Adventist? A Catholic? A Baptist? If you picked just one, he said, the others would kill you. And if you picked one of each they’d kill each other. In the second place, he said, most Christians would refuse to rewrite the Bible anyway, because they’d want God to do it for them, because most of them think it was God who sat down and wrote the one they’ve got.
“Well, wasn’t it?” Irwin butted in, looking pretty shocked.
“See what I mean?” Everett said to Peter.
“Oh that’s right!” said Irwin, smacking himself in the forehead. “It was Jesus!”
Peter and Everett looked at each other, then slowly shook their heads.
“Okay! I give!” Irwin cried, laughing like a loonbat. “Who did? Who did write the Bible?”
“King James,” said Peter.
“Oscar Unitas,” said Everett.
Irwin went loonbats again.
“Anyhow,” Everett said to Peter, “you can bet any amount, any odds, the Christians will stick with the Bible they’ve got, sure as the Chicago Cubs’ll stick with Wrigley Field—even though it’s got no lights.”
Peter nodded. “Nightfall is to the Cubs,” he said, “exactly what Charles Darwin is to the Christians.”
“Quit jumping around!” Papa hollers.
Oops. I guess I was sort of hanging on his chair by one leg and one arm, and maybe kicking and swinging around some. It’s Darwin’s fault, though. He’s who got me thinking about apes. When I drop to the floor I hear Pee Wee Reese start yelling and see Roger Maris running, but thanks to my dud concentration I missed the pitch that whoever it was—Jimmy Piersall, I guess—hit. Maris leaps, grabbing a drive bashed clear to the warning track. But when Papa hollers, “Great catch! Great catch!” my brain changes channels again, coughing up a picture of me in the Wind, catching fish.
Papa says we could get trout today, no trouble, but we’re not going to because we’ll be after summer steelhead, which are like trout, except huge. He caught one two weeks ago that almost broke his pole, and it was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen dead, and one of the most beautiful things, period. It took all eight of us two days to eat it, and the smoke from Papa’s cigarettes and the blue-gray ballplayers on the screen are the exact same color as the steelhead’s back, and its sides were as silver as a brand-new—
“KADE!”
“Oops. Sorry, Papa.” I guess I was banging my head on the back of his chair. The thing was that if I squatted down and lined my eye up just right, I could make it look like the blue-gray batter was using Papa’s Lucky for a bat, so I was conking my head on the chair when they were supposed to swing.
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“If you can’t sit still and watch,” Papa says, “go get the mail. I think I just heard it come.”
I want to watch, but I want to bang around and jump and roar and wonder about the Wind and Darwin and steelhead and not being in church too, and look! A commercial. Run! Catch the mail! Great catch!
The screen door slams behind me. I sprint like Roger Maris after Piersail’s long drive. But the day is so bright I can’t see where I’m going, the air’s so hot my lungs burn, and who wants to be Roger Maris anyhow? I slow to a walk.
It’s more interesting, walking. I can see, and try to think if I want, though I doubt I’ll want to. There’s a mirage lake in the street that almost looks worth fishing. The mailman’s jeep is in it up to the hubs. Everywhere I turn the air is watery, wiggling upwards. The whole world looks warped. I hope steelhead like weather like this. The local animals and people sure don’t. The whole neighborhood has disappeared except for one small bunch of starlings, who are running through a sprinkler like a bunch of ugly little kids might. They act just like kids, the starlings do, till one of them stops to eat a bug. But come to think of it, some kids will even do that. There’s this kid at school, Meredith Starr, who’ll eat flies for a penny apiece till he’s had three, then with the three cents he buys an extra milk to wash down his lunch. It looks so awful when he snorfs them that you can’t help laughing, but it’s actually kind of sad, I guess. Meredith is one of these kids who smells but can’t help it. He was born without a dad and his mom’s too crazy to cook, so he eats about a ton at school. I give him everything from my lunches I hate, which is called Charity, which is something the Babcocks tell us at Sabbath School always to give to wretches like Meredith Starr. I’d do it anyway, though, since he really seems to want it, and when it’s pukey stuff like eggplant or mashed cabbage it’s fun to watch. He can gulp it down almost as fast as Gomorrah.
The mailman is feeding a row of boxes two blocks down the street, up to his hood now in another fake lake. Even the shade is hot and bright: I think the sunlight must be bashing the top side of everything so hard that some dark-colored version of light is starting to leak clear through. It would scare me to hook a steelhead. I’ve never caught a fish, except minnows by hand, so I hope I just catch a trout. Everett caught a steelhead once and wasn’t a bit scared, but he’s not scared of anything except Grandawma’s dead family, and maybe Mama’s dead dad. I might not be scared either, except last summer Irwin brought a catfish home from the Columbia for a pet, and the first time I tried to pick it up it spiked me so bad my hand got infected and hurt for three weeks. I was glad when the chlorine in our water finally killed it, though it made me sort of wonder why it doesn’t kill us. We buried the catfish by the trash burner, and Irwin made a wood cross for it, and a sign that said: HERE LIES TYRUS COBB JUNIOR. That’s what Everett said to name it, since Tyrus Cobb Senior liked to spike people too.
I open the mailbox. A letter from Everett, addressed to me! Postcards from Irwin and Pete! The commercial! It must be over! Run!
The screen door slams behind me. I try to dial a wider opening into my eyes, but the TV’s so dim compared to outside that the ballplayers look like ghosts. I tell Papa we got mail from the Three Stooges. He says, “Great!” but just goes on watching the game. When my eyes finally adjust, though, I see why:
Roger Maris is up, no outs, top of the ninth. Maris homered in the third with nobody aboard. That’s the only mistake Mudcat Grant has made all day, Papa says. And even Maris’s homer was just a routine fly, he says, except for a hard wind gusting into right. I can’t wait to see the other Wind, I tell him. The river, I mean. No, it won’t be too windy there, he says when I ask him, it’s just called that. Yes, it’s sheltered, he says, it’s in a deep canyon. Yes, there are trees in the canyon, and yes, there will be steelhead, but that doesn’t mean we’ll catch one. Spikes? Like who? No, they won’t have spikes like Ty Cobb. No, not even the bucks. No, no antlers either. Yes, it’ll be great, he says. QUIET! he says. He says he’ll only answer baseball questions from now till the game is over.
The score has gone:
NEW YORK: 001 000 00 …
CLEVELAND: 100 010 10 …
Roger Maris takes a ball, then a strike. His hair’s so short the sides of his head look like wads of skinned chicken meat, and there’s dark bags under his eyes, and he’s incredibly sweaty and nervous-looking. I usually like watching home runs, but there is something about Roger Maris that makes even his homers boring. I don’t hate the Yankees like most people, so it’s not that. I just don’t care to watch Roger Maris. Everett feels the same way, only worse. Everett says he’s from Mars, which is why he’s named Maris, so maybe it’s a racial thing. Whatever it is, it worries me a little, because one of the things Jesus used to say was to love everybody the same whether they’re geeks, Yanks, Wops, Micks, Meredith Starrs or what have you, and when I look at Roger Maris I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to pull it off.
Peter says there was once this Italian saint called San Francisco (the same guy they eventually named the Giants after) who loved Jesus a ton and was a truly wonderful person, except for one small thing. He couldn’t stand lepers. And I guess they were coming out of the woodwork, there in Italy in his day. But one night in a dream, Pete says, who should come walking up to San Francisco but Jesus Himself, and what does Christ do but order poor San to go out and kiss the first leper he sees! Pete says San Francisco woke up quaking in his boots or sandals or whatever. And of course, no sooner does he step out the door than the skankiest-looking leper ever invented comes dribbling right toward him down the road! For a minute there, Pete says, poor San can’t figure out whether to shit or eat a doughnut. But he loves Jesus so much that he somehow staggers up to the leper, puckers his lips, shuts his eyes, and manages to get the job done. Except (here’s the great part, Pete says) right while they’re smooching San peeks and sees that this walking oozeball was actually Jesus all along! This was the big breakthrough the saint needed, apparently, since afterwards, Peter says, he went out and converted all the Italians and fish and wolves and sparrows to Catholicism, and eventually got himself crucified on a Miraculous Cross up in the mountains that wasn’t even there really. Anyhow, Peter says, the thing is, everybody on earth must eventually face up to their own personal leper. In other words, he says, someday Everett and me will have to get past our feelings about Roger Maris. We may even have to kiss him if we don’t watch it, he says. Of course Everett told Pete straight off that it’d be a snowy day in hell before he kissed Roger Maris. But Peter just laughed and said what if Jesus forced him to? What if He forced him to walk right up and lick Roger Maris’s crewcut? Everett about barfed.
I think I might do it, though. That is, I think I might do it if I knew that licking it would turn Roger Maris into Jesus. But then again, what if the Jesus I turned Roger Maris into just went on playing right field for the Yankees? They’d be even more unbeatable! Everett would murder me. And all the Catholics would be running around with a little ballplayer on a cross around their necks, and the ballparks’d fill with holy water and priests instead of ice-cream and peanut vendors. It’d be chaos, most likely. So I don’t know. Hopefully the chance to lick it will never arise.
Peter reads lots of religious books, like the one about San Francisco. That’s where he gets most of his weirder stories and ideas. He has this oddball teacher at school, Stefan Delaney, who thinks Pete’s a genius and started giving him stacks of special books to read. But not long ago Mama flipped her lid over one called the Bog of Vod Geeta, which she felt was filling Pete’s head full of heathen ideas and turning him away from God. How could it do that, Mr. Delaney wanted to know, since God was exactly Who the whole book was aimed at? And I wouldn’t know, since I’ve never read the thing. But I do remember the day Mama flipped her lid, and I didn’t blame her a bit. …
We were all in the car coming home from Spokane, and Mama was reading an adventure book about Tibet that Uncle Marv had loaned her. Being a good Adventi
st, Mama was against books about things such as Tibet unless a missionary wrote them. But she’s the opposite of practically everybody on earth in that she has to read in a car to keep from getting carsick, and the Tibet book was the only one her skunk of a brother would loan her. So anyhow, at some point in the book the author-adventurer got himself invited into this smoky little Tibetan house, sat down to dinner with the whole Tibetan family, and started eating stuff with names like Zahpahhayabrugmancharya and drinking stuff with names like Padmaywhang. And as she was reading about this, Mama started squirming all over the front seat, giggling and muttering to herself and acting all delighted, till every last one of us was gaping at her. And when Papa finally asked what on earth was going on, Mama just turned to him with this wonderful, dazed smile on her face, smacked her lips, and said, “Yum! Yak butter!” And we almost died laughing—literally—since Papa gawked at her so long he nearly drove off the road.
But Peter—who is so soft-spoken most of the time—didn’t laugh at all. Instead he got red in the face and shrill in the voice and started drilling Mama with pointed questions, trying to get her to cross her heart and hope to die admitting she remembered a past life as a Tibetan. It was strange. I mean, there he was trying to prove some mysterious point about Buddhism or rebirth or some damn thing, but all he reminded me of was ol’ Mrs. Babcock at Sabbath School bullyragging us about how we must praise Jesus and hate sin all the time, whether we feel like praising and hating or not. I don’t know yet, between Pete and Mama, whose beliefs are better or truer. All I know is that by the time he finished grilling her, nobody felt like laughing about her yak butter anymore.
When she got over being stunned, Mama got good and mad and started firing pointed questions back. That’s when she found out about the Bog of Vod Geeta, and about Peter believing in past lives and Hindu Christs and the world being a kind of gigantic delusion and everybody really being a Drip of God and I don’t remember what all. Then Pete started this big stupid fight with her, arguing about how Krishna and Buddha and several other guys were actually Jesus in different human disguises, and vice versa, which any fool could see was a wacko thing to fight about even if they were, since they also obviously weren’t. By the time it was over Mama had strictly forbidden him to read any more of Mr. Delaney’s heathen religious books. So of course now he reads tons, every night, under the covers by flashlight. Mr. Delaney even gives him batteries. And Mama was right: Peter’s head is getting filled with heathen beliefs and stories—and they’re really great! Pete’s just a kid, but already he has more interesting ideas and tells better tales than anybody I know, even Everett, though Everett makes better pissed-off speeches and tells funnier jokes. I think I might even agree with Mr. Delaney about Pete being a genius, though it’s an odd thing to think about your own brother. And in his feisty way sometimes I think maybe Everett’s one too. Irwin, though, is practically a dunce from a schoolteacherly point of view, yet sometimes just watching him laugh and eat his dinner and grow new muscles and tickle Bet and Freddy and misunderstand Pete and Everett’s discussions and stories and punchlines is more fun than the discussions and stories themselves.