* * * *
PHILIP ROTH HAD ALREADY written The Great American Novel; Victor Harris was screwed. If you’re going to be successful with the writing thing you have to write about what you know, and the only thing Victor Harris really knew was baseball. (He thought he knew sex, but that’s another story.) The only question remaining was: How much longer would he be able to keep up the sweet, unstressful position of sensitive, creative, Aspiring-Author/ Househusband (without actually becoming Published Author/Househusband) before Barb, his wife, caught wise?
He kept a copy of Stephen King’s Playboy interview prominently displayed in the small basement cubby that was his “office,” the better to remind Barb of at least one loyal lady who’d held down a decidedly unfun job (Dunkin’ Donuts) while hubby mud-wrestled with the Muse until he hit pay dirt. Stand by your man, it seemed to say, and soon you shall limo beside him. Cast your sugar crullers upon the waters and they shall be returned unto you an hundredfold as caviar. But the interview was curling with age faster than Victor’s first rejection slip (also prominently displayed: it was from the New Yorker and had the distinction of sporting an actual, human, hand-written note of comment scrawled in the margin, viz.: “Sorry.” Whether this referred to the rejecting editor’s regrets or the manuscript’s quality was best left nebulous) and Barb was starting to get the hard-bitten, narrow look of a ten-year-old facing off against parents who persist in chirping about Santa. Not good.
So the King interview was a life-vest whose kapok molecules were rapidly metamorphosing into cesium. Victor told himself that many a good woman of Barb’s generation would be grateful to have a fulfilling multiphase career as aesthetician by day, Amway rep by night, but Barb didn’t see it that way. Why didn’t she appreciate the stresses of the Art? Why must he cringe each time she demanded, “Haven’t you sold anything yet?” or “Why don’t you go down to Four Comers Used Cars and see if Jerry’ll give you your old job back?” or “Why in bell did you ever major in English? Everyone around here speaks it already.”
Useless to attempt explaining the creative nature to such a scrawny soul. Futile to preach the exquisitely painful yet glacial process of inspiration, motivation, and execution in l’oeuvre Harris to the heathen. None so blind as they who will not see themselves vacationing in Hawaii this year — again! — and the Millers next door have already gone four times!
Of the bricks of such marital differences are the divorce courts of this fair nation built. So, too, the occasional ax-murder-with-P.M.S.-defense case. On the surface it would seem that a miracle would be necessary to save Victor Harris’ neck from the chop. That was where the Brothers’ Meeting Little League came in.
No, really.
And that was why, with luck, there would forever be one less used car salesman at Four Comers and never a moment’s peace for the Harris family at the Sharon Valley Regional Elementary School P.T.A. spring picnic.
“Barb, hon, you look just gorgeous!” Sally McClellan swept down on Barb like a tornado on a trailer park.
The McClellans and the Harrises didn’t usually move in the same circles. Victor Harris moved in circles pretty constantly, while Phil McClellan moved solely in a steep, straight line of ascent to the windswept heights of financial success whence he might safely piss on the upturned faces of those below.
However, when the first sweet shoots of spring green burst through the hard Sharon Valley earth, Phil McClellan graciously maintained temporary bladder control so far as Victor’s face went. As he told The Little Woman, if kissing Victor Harris’ skinny ass was called for to achieve your goals, then by God and Ted Turner Industries, Phil McClellan would take a back seat to no one when it came to posterior pucker-ups. The Little Woman conducted herself accordingly as regarded Mrs. Victor Harris’ more shapely buns, indeed.
Barb was nobody’s fool except Victor’s and he’d had to marry her for that privilege. She knew just what Sally was after and she sat back on the picnic table bench with all the smirking superiority of a Renaissance prince contemplating where to insert his next dagger. “Sally, darling” she purred. Cheeks brushed. Kissy-kissy mwah-mwahs were uttered. “When are you gonna come around to the La Belle so I can get my hands on your hair?” (La Belle being the town aesthetorium where Barb currently aestheted.)
Sally gave a nervous little giggle and fluffed her golden pour of curls with no apparent need. “Oh, I’ll be around. I don’t think I’m due for a trim just yet.”
“Every six weeks.” Relentless, that was Barb in the spring. “And I know I haven’t seen you since last September.” Somewhere a ghostly poniard glittered. “I hear tell you’ve been going up to Pittsburgh to have it done.” Zzzip-zot, a slender blade slipped in and out between Sally McClellan’s spareribs without The Little Woman feeling anything but a draft tickling her pancreas.
Sally turned bright red. “Who told you that?”
“Marylynn Drummer.” Barb’s eyes were hooded and inscrutable, but she licked her lips to savor the taste of blood.
“Well, it’s just a baldfaced lie!” Sally spat. “When did she say so?”
“Mmmm, hard to recall.” Barb sucked a few last crimson drops off the tip of her index finger. “I see her so often. Every week she’s in the La Belie for a shampoo and blow-dry at least. She’s got a standing appointment.” It was time for the coup de grace, the mercy stroke to end the victim’s misery but good. “Sometimes she even brings in little Bobby, and you would be amazed to see how that boy has grown. Why, just the other day Vic was saying to me, ‘Barb, I’d like to see what Bobby Drummer could do if I gave him a chance to pitch, I really would.’”
It was all over except for where to ship the body.
Sally McClellan’s face sank in on itself like an old helium balloon with a pinhole leak. “Isn’t that interesting,” she said through a smile so stiff it clattered. “But do you think it’s wise? My Jason has always pitched for the Bobcats, and I assumed —”
Barb laughed. “It’s not like Vic was breaking up a winning team set-up, sweetie. Who knows? If Vic gives Bobby a chance to pitch, maybe that’ll turn the trick. And you should have seen Bobby’s little face light up when I told him what Coach Vic was considering.”
“Considering? Then it’s not settled?” Sally’s eyes flashed. She fingered her hair. “You know, it’s so easy to let yourself go over the winter, don’t you agree, Barb? Maybe I should take a lesson off Marylynn Drummer. You got room for another standing appointment on your calendar?”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Barb murmured. “Of course it is harder to fit things in these days. Did I tell you that Pauline Fleck’s having me host an Amway party at her family reunion?” Needless to say, Barb went on to rhapsodize over how much dear little Scott Fleck had grown this past winter and didn’t Sally agree that the boy deserved a tryout as pitcher for the Bobcats, too?
That night, Victor didn’t have to listen to Barb’s barbs about where he was on the stairway to success and where he ought to be. Happily swamped with pleas for La Belle and Amway appointments (high tips and high sales guaranteed, you betcha), Barb had better things to do with her tongue than rag on the man whose chronic underemployment made his Little League coaching job possible. Yes, baseball season was upon them once more, and so long as Victor owned the power to say whose son played (and whether the boy’s field position were somewhere in this time-zone), domestic bliss and Barb’s own auburn-turfed diamond were his all his.
Nor did it matter a lick that the Brothers’ Meeting Bobcats were a team so slack and poorly that a reputable publisher of dictionaries had asked them to pose as the illustration for pathetic.
No, it didn’t matter to Coach Vic at all, but it mattered very much to Vic Junior.
Vic Junior loved baseball. He was one of those pure souls born with a vision of The Game untainted by the dross and illusion of this sorry world. To him, baseball spoke of Buddha-nature, not Lite Beer. (The Tao which can be named is not the Tao, but the Tao which has its batting stats printed on the back of a trading card is way awesome.) I The smell of a newly oiled glove, the clean crack of bat hitting ball, the sight of so many strong, young lads tearing around the bases in those tight-fitting pants, all moved him in ways he could not yet hang a name on. It was a source of spiritual pain to him that his team so seldom won.
It was a pain less spiritual every time Jase McClellan knocked him down in the school yard and taunted him with the fact that he wouldn’t be on the Bobcats team at all if not for the fact that his old man was the coach.
Vic Junior could have tattled on Jase, but he was what adults called a good child. In other words, there were sponges adorning the ocean floor who had more backbone than he. He went to church without a fuss and riven listened to what his Sunday school teacher had to relate of Hell. He tithed his allowance not because his mother made him but in the sure and certain hope that he was making time payments on one colossal, outsize, super-mega-omniprayer of his own asking being answered some day. He wasn’t sure what he was going to request when he finally submitted his sealed bid to Glory, but he knew it would be something much better than just asking God to burn Jase McClellan in the fiery pit until his eyeballs melted and his hair frizzled away and the skin on his face blackened and cracked and flaked from the charting bones and his dick fell off.
And then, one day, something happened. Who knows how these things get started? So much depends on serendipity. Pharaoh’s daughter might have kept on walking when she heard that wailing in the bulrushes. “Just one of the sacred cats being devoured by one of the sacred crocodiles,” she’d say with a shrug of her sweet brown shoulders, and Charlton Heston’s resume would have been several pages shorter.
What serendipped in this case was Vic Junior came into La Belle to see his Morn and by some karmic radar happened to find the one copy of Sports Illustrated in the whole establishment. Like a crow among the lilies it reposed in dog-cared splendor amidst the issues of Woman’s Day and Mademoiselle and Good Housekeeping. Last desperate refuge of the male compelled for whatever unholy cause to accompany his woman into the lair of glamor, its well-thumbed antique pages gave moving testimony that a man will submerge himself in last year’s sports “news” sooner than he will open a copy of Cosmopolitan to willingly read “Impotence: Things Are Looking Up.”
“Mom!” Vic Junior cried, bursting in on his hardworking parent, waving the tattered magazine. “More, did you see this?”
Barb was giving Edna Newburgh a streak job. More couldn’t see much of anything for all the ammonia fumes peeling her eyeballs raw. “Don’t bother Mommy now, sweetheart,” she said testily.
“But Mom, look! There’s an article in here about how the American Little League champions got to go to Japan!” Vic Junior was insistent. Despite the noxious atmosphere he jiggled closer to Edna Newburgh’s reeking head and thrust the magazine under his mother’s nose.
“So what’s that to you? Champions means winners. I said not now!” Barb snapped, flipping the open copy out of Vic Junior’s hands with one jab of her elbow. (That she could do this at all was mute testimony to the worthiness of Vic Junior’s team nickname, “Wimpgrip Harris.”) Like some monstrous mutant butterfly, the magazine took wing and fluttered to the hair-strewn floor.
Giving his mother a cold you’ll-be-sorry-when-I-grow-up-to-be-a-cross-dresser eye, Vic Junior gathered up his treasure, brushed clots of brown, black, blonde, and red tresses from the slick pages, and retreated to his chair in the waiting area.
He didn’t need her to tell him what champions meant. It was a fishbone of resentment lodged deep in his throat, proof against all psychological Heimlich maneuvers, that the Bobcats were the losingest team in the history of Little League, baseball, and American sport. The only time a group of kids ended up with that much public egg on their faces was during the Children’s Crusade when hundreds of starry-eyed juvenile pilgrims to the Holy Land ended up in the slave pens of the East instead. But even some of those guys could hit better than the Bobcats.
For Vic Junior it was his mother’s scorn that hurt more than losing per se. A man might rail against the sun’s rising in the east as easily as against the Bobcats once again playing the part of the walked-on in the league’s latest walk-over — such were the dull-eyed Facts of Life —but she didn’t have to be so mean about it! Of course she wouldn’t see it that way; she’d say she was only being realistic.
In his subconscious, Vic Junior understood as follows: A man ought to be entitled to hold onto his dreams without some fern ale always yawping at him about reality. Somewhere in the Constitution it should say that any woman apprehended in the act of trying to yank us back down to earth by the seat of our pants will be stood on her head in a pit of hog entrails and left for the buzzards, just to see how she likes that for reality!
But a little above the subconscious, in his heart-of-hearts, all that Vic Junior said into the listening dark was: Please, God, give us the way to win!
It was a child’s simple prayer: sincere, unadorned, pure as a baby dewdrop. On the cosmic scale of values it had clout, pizzazz, and buying power.
It worked.
EXCUSE ME, sir, but is this where the Little League tryouts are?”
Victor Harris looked down at the brat presumptuous enough to tug at his clipboard-toting arm. “Who are you?” he snapped. His mirrorshades filtered through the picture of a skinny twelve-year-old kid like many others on the team: dark hair, dark eyes, all arms and legs, a little more sunbrowned than most of the specimens currently blundering through warm-ups on the outfield. “Did you sign up at school?”
“No, sir,” the kid replied, too respectful to be true. “I just got here.” He tapped the brim of his cap so Victor could see the Angels logo.
Fine, good, no problemo, that explained it. Brothers’ Meeting wasn’t exactly your hub of suburban commerce, but it was close to Pittsburgh. You did get the occasional corporate family popping in from points unknown to settle down amongst the simple natives to swap beads ‘n’ trinkets until Daddy’s company shipped the poor bastard somewhere else.
“L.A., huh? Nice tan. Okay, kid, what’s your name?”
“Yeshua ben Jose.”
Was that an accent? Accents made Victor nervous. So did names that sounded like they ought to be stuffed in a pita pocket instead of spread on Wonder Bread.
“Yeshu — what?”
“Yeshua ben Jose, sir.” The kid pounded a fist into his glove. “Can I play?”
Victor thumbed back the brim of his cap. “You’re not from L.A., are you, son?”
“No, sir.” The boy didn’t volunteer anything more. In another kid, you could put it down to obnoxiousness, but this one’s face was empty of anything except a clear-burning eagerness to please. It wasn’t natural and it made Victor’s teeth curl.
“You wanna tell me where you are from?”
“Israel.”
A big fat wrinkled Uh-oh tickertaped across Victor’s face and stayed there until he heard the kid go on to say: “Last thing I was in Jerusalem, but I was born in Bethlehem and —”
“Bethlehem?” It was like saying Paris to someone from Kentucky. Notre Dame and la Tour Eiffel just didn’t show up in the equation. “Oh, hey, fine, that’s all right, then. My mother’s people came from Bethlehem,” Victor said. He clapped the boy on the shoulder. “So your father work in the steel mills before or what?”
For the first time, the boy looked doubtful. “My father works just about everywhere.”
“No fooling. It’s a pain, isn’t it?” Victor was starting to feel sorry for the kid. Hard enough row to hoe, coming all the way from Israel where things kept going kaboom! Harder when your old man couldn’t hold down a job and had to keep switching positions and places to live and even countries just to cam a living. At least the kid had been born in this country, but still, just wait until the other Bobcats found out he was Jewish! (Brother’s Meeting wasn’t exactly world famous for its cosmopolitan attitude in matters of religion. Old Mrs. Russell, a devout Presbyterian, had disinherited her daughter for entering into a mixed marriage with a Lutheran.)
Maybe the kindest thing to do would be to send him out onto the field for the tryouts and let him fall on his face. That shouldn’t take too long. Everyone knew for a fact — including Victor Harris, who had once owned a Sandy Koufax card — that Jews played even worse baseball than Bobcats.
Of course the kid was dynamite. Prayers for smiting your enemies don’t get answered with your enemies just catching mild colds and missing a couple of days’ work, oh no! It’s the plague or nothing. The same and more goes for a child’s prayer that the hand of the Omnipotent yank his Little League team out of the cellar. Yes sir, one look at how little Yeshua ben Jose (simpler to call him “Bennie” and be done with it) hit, pitched, fielded, and ran, and Coach Vic was left slack-jawed, poleaxed, and passionately in love at home plate. “Porter Rickin’,” he declared later that night while Barb cleared the dinner dishes. “That’s got to be the only explanation.”
“What has?” Barb asked, not really giving a damn.
“That new kid, Bennie. I mean, with a last name like lose? I know he doesn’t pronounce it Spanish, but still — I mean, there is no other way to account for how good he is and he’s still Jewish. His folks might come from Israel, but somewhere back along the line they must’ve had a Porter Rickin’ in the kibbutz woodpile. Or a Mexican at least. Now they can play ball!”
“Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh,” said Barb which was her little way of playing ball with her husband without having to endure the drag of actually listening to what he had to say.
“He’s pretty good, isn’t he, Dad?” Vic Junior asked brightly, proud of himself.
“Good? Why he’s a fuckin’ mira — !”
“Victor!” Barb’s warning tone got drowned out by the shrilling of the telephone. Coach Vic was still going on about how he was going to play Bennie to best advantage when she went to answer it.
She returned a grimmer woman.
“That was Sally McClellan,” she said, in the same way a medieval peasant might have returned from a visit to the local witch to announce The good news is I’ve got the Black Death. “She says you’re not letting her Jason pitch this year.”
“You bet your sweet ass, I’m not!” Victor beamed. “With someone like Bennie who can actually get the ball over the center of the plate ten out of ten, I should put in ‘Twelve Thumbs’ McClellan? What am I, crazy?”
“What you are,” Barb said, “is stupid.”
“Look, Barb, I know baseball, and I’ve been coaching this team for five years, ever since Vic Junior was in Pee Wees and didn’t know which end of the bat to hold. And five years is exactly how long it’s been since I saw a glimmer of hope for the Bobcats winning even one damn game. I’m telling you, Bennie is it!”
“Is Bennie’s mother going to take over the weekly appointment Sally McClellan just cancelled, and pay up all the ass-kissing big tips that went with it?” Barb shot back. “Is she going to buy all the Amway products that Sally McClellan just happened to discover were defective and wants to return for a refund? And if she’ll do that, will she do the same when all the other mothers come after us with chainsaws because you dumped Jason as pitcher and didn’t replace him with one of their brats? Oh no! You had to pick a newcomer, a foreigner, a Jew!” She stomped out of the house. The two Victors could hear her car fires gouging canyons in the gravel driveway as she roared off.
Barb’s outburst was so shocking that it left her husband staring off agape into space. “Do you think I did the wrong thing, son?” Victor asked his boy. Normally he never asked Victor Junior anything except Where did your mother hide the butter! but these were special circumstances.
“I’ve got faith in you, Dad.” Victor Junior reached across the table to pat his father’s arm and got his elbow in the leftover mashed potatoes.
Faith can move mountains even i f it’s no good at getting mashed potatoes out of the way. In the next few days, Coach Vic had his faith sorely tested in the raging fires of angry mothers. At every practice, he found another of the ladies lurking for him, wearing flinty eyes and a deadly ninja combat brassiere that turned perfectly good ornamental boobs into twin symbols of outthrusting, nuclear warhead-tipped aggression.
The questions they inevitably shot at him were always the same:
“Who is that kid?”
“Why are you letting him pitch and not my [insert child’s name here]?”
“Is something funny going on?”
“What, did his mother sleep with you or something?”
“Why didn’t you tell me that was the way to do it?”
Coach Vic just as inevitably replied, “Bennie, because he’s good, no, no,” and “Well, it’s too late for that to change anything this year because I’ve got the roster all set up but I bet by next season Bennie’s folks will have moved somewhere else so see me then, honey.”
Then the Bobcats met their first opponents of the season and it was a whole new ball game.
“We won.”
It was uttered as a whisper, softer than a butterfly’s tap-dance routine, on a dozen lips at once. No one dared to say it out loud, at first, for fear that they would wake up and discover it had all been just a Frank Capra movie.
Still, there were the Bobcats, for once getting to give the Good Sportsmanship cheer to the losing team. It was a simple “Two-four-six-eight, who do we appreciate?” holler, but there was a slight delay while Coach Vic taught his boys the never-used words they’d long since forgotten.
Mothers turned to fathers, eyes meeting eyes in a climax of mutual awe and wonder better than what most of them had been having in the bedroom. Hands clasped hands, bosoms swelled, manly chests inflated, pulses raced. (There were more than a few damp spots left behind on the bleachers, but delicacy prevents any closer investigation into how they got there.)
“We fuck-u-lutely won!” Coach Vic shouted in the confines of his home, and got a dirty look from Barb that quickly melted when she recalled the ecstatic smiles of the other mothers. For once they had seen their man-children taste the thrill of victory, and lo, it was savory to the max. Their maternal fibers exuded endorphins like crazy. They were happy. A happy more is a beauty-shop-going, Amway-buying mom.
“You fuck-u-lutely said it!” Barb shouted back and threw her arms around her hubby’s sweaty neck.
Well, there it was: They won. And there it was again the next week, and the next. Bennie’s skills on the mound left other teams looking at a steady diet of three-up-three-down while his batting savoir faire was —
Hmmm. Honesty’s best when speaking of matters pertaining to the divine or the IRS. Bennie could hit, but Bennie was only one skinny little kid. He got a homer every time he was up, then Coach Vic had to plod his hitless way through the team roster until Bennie’s number came up again before the Bobcats could get another run on the board. They won, but never by much. It was galling.
Still, since Bennie’s pitching disposed of the other team one-two-three and the other team’s pitcher could do the same for every Bobcat save Bennie, the local Little League enjoyed a season of the shortest games on record. Parents with limited attention spans and only one six-pack in the cooler were grateful.
Ward Gibbon was not grateful.
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