Grand Slam

Jack Steele                                                                                                   1739 wds.

240 Regency Drive

Marstons Mills, MA 02648

508-280-8645

jacksteele1@comcast.net

Grand Slam

By

Jack Steele

     The baseball story went like this:  “When I was 16 I got signed by the New York Giants.  I was playing centerfield for a semi-pro league in Indiana, and one of their scouts saw me have a pretty good day.  They sent me to one of their farm clubs down in Alabama.  The rest of that season, three months or so, I hit .455 with 30 home runs.  During the off-season I went back to work at the factory, and then in the spring the Giants sent me to play Triple-A ball in Pennsylvania.  I hit over four hundred there too and had just hit home run number fifty when they called me up.  It was late in the season and they were still in the pennant race.  I was there to pinch hit, but I was low man on the totem pole, so it took them five or six games to get around to me.  It was extra innings and the bases were loaded.  We were behind a run.  Two out.  They put me up only because they’d used everybody else.  I guess they figured green as I was I still had a better chance of getting on than the pitcher did.  I took three balls in a row.  Not even close.  I looked down at third base, got the take sign of course, and then the pitcher wound up and threw me the fattest pitch you ever saw.  I knew he would.  He didn’t have no other choice, and well boys, like Dizzy Dean always says, I went for the downs.  I swung so hard that my feet came off the ground, and I hit that ball right out of the park.  Cleared right center by twenty feet.  I felt like Babe Ruth jogging around those bases, let me tell you, never felt better in my life, but it didn’t last long.  I knew the minute I rounded second and saw the look on the third base coach’s face that I was in deep trouble.  No one said a word to me.  No one would look at me.  The players too, not just the coaches.  And the next day they sent me back to Alabama, but I didn’t go.  I went back home.  Didn’t even have the heart to play semi-pro after that.  Screw’em.”

     It was the first time I’d ever heard an adult say “screw” in that way, and it shocked me.  Now that I think of it, I can’t remember when people forgot that screw means fuck, or decided it didn’t matter.  Maybe it came early in the sixties, or even before that.  Otherwise, I think I’d know.  The point is that my world was a lot smaller then.  I’d just turned twelve.  I played baseball in the morning, rode my bike in the afternoon and watched TV at night.  Actually, I read a lot too, either in the library downtown or on the floor of the one room in our house that was air-conditioned.  Sports and war.  Mostly baseball.  Mostly the Civil War.  And I ate whatever was put in front of me, and more if I could get it.  I also started noticing the exposed legs of dancers on TV when they did twirls, and how the skirts of the women on the covers of 25 cent novels were always well above their knees.  The magazines on a separate rack in a certain drug store caught my eye as well, and I was sorely tempted to look, but I was afraid that if I was seen, I wouldn’t be allowed to read The Sporting News for free anymore.

     Adults never told you anything in those days, but I’m guessing that the man who told me that story was widely known to be of “no account.”  He was Mrs. Phelps’ brother-in-law, recently arrived from “somewhere up north.”  We knew that because he talked funny.  Mrs. Phelps ran the little store we rode our bikes to for cold drinks after baseball.  She’d run it forever for all I knew, but her brother-in-law appeared for the first time that summer, and he was always sitting in front of the store in a metal lawn chair, the kind that give a little when you sit down.  Or give a lot if you’re fat, which Raymond was.  He insisted we call him Raymond, and after a while we got used to it. 

     Another story he told us was about Tojo’s son, what the G.I.’s did to him when he was captured.  According to Raymond, who claimed to have been there, they put a reed in Tojo Jr.’s mouth, buried him alive in a shallow grave, and took turns peeing into the reed.  That went on for several days, Raymond said, but no one knows how long it took him to die and no one bothered to dig him up.  He laughed and blushed when he told that story, which made him even uglier than usual.  His teeth were yellow and crooked.  His face was unhealthy, the color and consistency of chalk.  It reminded me of an illustration in a Robin Hood book I’d come across in the library.  Not Friar Tuck, but another monk, a bad one.

     We played baseball at Stewart’s lot, so-called because it was next door to the Stewart’s house.  We never had enough for two teams, so we played flies and skinners, and by that summer, when most of us were twelve, give or take a year, we’d refined the game into an art form.  A chain link fence separated the vacant lot from the Stewart’s backyard, and a line of rose bushes continued the “fence” to the street.  The rule was that a ball hit over the “fence” and not caught was a home run.  We had a winner each day, but we also kept a running tally for the summer.  Flanagan even knew the standings of the summer before, down to third place, and the summer before that.  We kept the gate open to the backyard and jockeyed for position around the rose bushes.  We started early, and by ten in the morning it was too hot even for us.  We all felt drained and had cotton-mouth, but we didn’t always go to Phelps’ store.  Sometimes we wanted a place where we could also read magazines, or if we were short on cash, we stole bottles from behind the supermarket and traded them in up front for cold drinks.  The bottle deposit was two cents, but Mrs. Phelps would only give us a penny.

     A liveoak is an evergreen with relatively small leaves, but its trunk and branches are stout and gnarled like the oaks you see in children’s books.  It might smile or frown at you, but it seems in any case to have its arms out wide, to shelter or smother, to welcome or frighten you.  Raymond’s chair, as we quickly began to think of it, sat under such a tree, and more often than not, when we rode up to the front of the store, he was in it, doing absolutely nothing but rocking and staring into space.  He never greeted us, and when one of us said, “Hey Raymond,” he’d just barely lift his head, and sometimes an eyebrow.  It’s how northeners are, someone said.  It doesn’t mean anything.  And we’d be settled down and talking among ourselves before he ever said a word, if he was going to say anything that day at all.  “Tell us one of your stories, Raymond,” didn’t work.  He’d either spit or not do anything, so we learned fast to leave him alone.  Most days though he’d come up with something.  He’d just start talking.  He never worried about interrupting any of us.

     “They should have given that nigger the electric chair,” he said one day.  We all knew who he was talking about.  Most of our parents had similar opinions, but to know that you had to listen from the other room, and they didn’t express themselves in the same way.  “Colored” was the more acceptable term in polite society, and mothers especially preferred to focus on “that poor woman.”  Opinions about the sentence were given more indirectly:  “He got off easy,” or “I just don’t know if life in prison is enough for someone who would do that.”  We’d learned from Watkins, whose parents tended to be less discreet than most, that a nineteen-year-old had been convicted of raping an 84-year old-woman.  None of us knew or asked whether she was white or black.  I didn’t even think to ask.  I was too amazed at the crime itself.  It didn’t seem to make any sense.  I was beginning to understand how a person might get so horny that he’d lose control of himself and do something he later regretted, but I couldn’t imagine getting that way over an old woman.  “Fry his balls and feed’em to the crows,” Raymond said.  Then he told us about seeing a lynching in East Texas when he worked in the oil fields.  The only lynchings I’d ever heard of before were in cowboy movies.  They were bad things that almost but never actually happened.  Raymond’s lynching did actually happen, and I heard about it in detail.  I can’t look at a photograph of a lynching now without thinking about Raymond.  Sometimes I think that metal lawn chair started to squeak as he told us about it, but I couldn’t swear to that.  I just remember for sure that we’d never seen him so excited before, not even when he told about hitting the home run.

     But it was Tojo’s son that got him into trouble.  Someone’s little brother decided to tell it at the dinner table, and that was the end of our bike rides to Mrs. Phelps’ store.  Watkins wanted to go anyway, but no one else had the nerve to go against our parents, and I suspect we’d have been run off.  Ralston’s father was a lawyer, and he took it upon himself to speak to Raymond.  No one at that time had much affection for the Japanese, but as my mother put it, “the story is too gruesome for boys your age.”  Dad had his doubts about it being true, which made me decide not to tell him about the grand slam.  I had my own doubts about that one.