Departures

DESIGNATED HITTER

As I’ve said, I love baseball. If I were the athletic type, I would have tried to play. Since I’m not, I sometimes play beer league softball, which is not the same thing at all, at all. Those of you who have done likewise will recognize that a good deal of this story is drawn straight from life. I never met anyone like Michael, though. I wish I had.

You find all kinds playing beer league softball. I ought to know. They let me play, for instance.

I’ve been a baseball nut since I was a kid. Unfortunately, I’m also a klutz. I can hit, a little; I can’t field at all. As soon as they saw me with the leather, the rest of the Gators-that’s my team, in case you hadn’t worked it out-took to calling me Dr. Strangeglove, after Dick Smart, a notorious nonfielding first baseman with the Pirates and Red Sox back in the sixties. I have to say I earned the name.

So when we go out there, I’ll catch some of the time. That’s pretty safe for the team-there’s no stealing in slow-pitch. If we’re way ahead or way behind, I’ll get in an inning or two at first. Mostly I’m a designated hitter. The leagues we play in-a lot of beer leagues, come to that-all fifteen guys on the team get to hit, even if only ten can be on the field at any one time.

I’m also our official scorer, statistician, what have you-damn sight better at that side of the game than playing, worse luck. And at beer and pizza, I’m a champ. That’s as important as the game, just about.

Besides, my girl thinks I look good in the uniform.

Which is more than I can say for some of the Gators who are nine times the ballplayer I’ll ever be. Joe Humphreys, our real first baseman, looks like an avocado with a beard in his dark green softball togs. And Stuart Boileau at short is skinny enough to be a lizard. He has this habit of licking his lips all the time, too, which doesn’t hurt the image. Once at Shakey’s we ordered him a pepperoni-and-bugs pizza. If they would’ve served it, he would’ve eaten it.

All of which brings me around by easy stages to the oddest-looking ball player I ever saw. This was at the start of last year’s spring leagues, and my Gators were in deep Bandini. A couple of guys have been transferred out of state since last fall, and two or three more were working nights for a while. We were plain strapped for troops. A bare ten had shown up for our opener, and our archrivals, the Tomcats, trounced us, 14-5.

I didn’t exactly cover myself with glory in that game, either. I was a fat 0 for 3, though I got on my last time up when their pitcher embarrassed himself by throwing my comebacker eight feet over the first baseman’s head. I razzed him as I stood out there, and he gave it right back. “That’s the only way you’ll ever reach against me,” he said, which was near enough true that I shut up.

After me came our leadoff hitter. Stuart did us proud with a sharp single to center. Like an idiot, I tried to go to third on it, even though the other guys had a fellow with a rocket for an arm out there. Gave it all I had-headfirst dive into the bag. Well, actually shoulder first-something went crunch-pop when I hit. “Ouch!” isn’t what I yelled. I jammed it good. My right arm was in a sling for the next couple of weeks.

To add insult to injury, I was out.

Sling and all, I showed up at the park next Tuesday night. Even if I couldn’t play, I liked hanging around with the guys- and I can drink left-handed.

It didn’t look like there was going to be a game, though. Only nine of us were there, counting me, which you shouldn’t. You’re supposed to field ten in softball, but it’s legal to go out there with nine. Eight or fewer and you forfeit. “Where’s Roy?” I asked Wes Humphreys, Joe’s little brother (he’s only six-three) and our manager.

“Called me this afternoon-he’s got the flu. Sounded like hell.”

“Bad.” Without Roy we didn’t have a prayer of fielding a team. And with a forfeit, we’d be two games back of the Tomcats right off the bat. In a ten-game season, that’s death.

Wes knew all this better than I did. He hates losing, and won’t take it lying down. So now he called to this fellow sitting in the bleachers watching us loosen up: “Hey, man! You play this game?”

“Me?” The guy looked startled. “A little, maybe.” He had an accent that wasn’t Spanish. Not a good sign, if we were after a ballplayer.

Well, he had to be foreign, or else the melting pot had gone and melted down. I’d noticed him watching us the week before, too. I couldn’t help it. He was a medium-dark, medium-heavy black guy, maybe thirty, but his hair-he corn-rowed it, very neatly-was Irishman red, I mean flaming, and hung past his shoulders. He wore a mustache and goatee that were even brighter. I went to high school with a Japanese kid who spoke pure, hush-ma-mouf Arkansas-turned out his folks had been resettled there during the war, and stayed a while afterward. He jolted me every time he said something. Looking at this guy now was like that-his hair and his hide spectacularly didn’t match.

Wes would have taken him if he was a giant panda covered with chocolate feathers. “Come on down!” he said, waving. “We’ve got open roster slots. You can join us for the season if you want, or sign up and then duck out after tonight-we’ll have more people here next week. Whatever you want.”

Wes is a good talker. He has to be. He sells glassware for a living. You could see the guy thinking it over. Finally he shrugged and ambled on over to us. He didn’t have a uniform, of course, but his clothes were grubby enough to play in: faded Levi’s, a Coors T-shirt, and beat-up running shoes. About what we wear to practice.

He said his name was Michael, with a bit of a guttural on the “ch.” He shook hands with everybody (left-handed with me), then Wes dug our ancient spare glove out of the bottom of his duffel bag.

Michael hadn’t been stretching when he said he played “a little.” He lunged awkwardly for balls when he was playing catch, blocked grounders with his shins or his feet as often as he fielded them cleanly. He threw from the elbow, girl-style, not too straight. I could see Wes regretting things already, but Michael was a warm body, anyhow, and catching he wouldn’t be all that much worse than I was.

When it was Michael’s turn to hit in our warm-ups, Wes, who was pitching BP, waved him to the plate. He looked worse up there than he had in the field. He stood straight up and down, with his left foot so far in the bucket it wasn’t ever pointing at third base: more like at our dugout off third. He held his bat at a funny angle, with his hands a couple of inches apart. Yeah, I know Ty Cobb did the same thing, but Ty Cobb’s grandmother had to be a more stylish hitter than this Michael.

Wes gave him a nice, fat pitch to hit. He took a clumsy swing, missed. He muttered something under his breath and tossed the ball back. Next pitch, he hit a little ground ball that dribbled between Stuart at short and Pete Sadowski, our third baseman: a hit, sure enough. Not impressive, but it’ll look like a line drive in the box score, as the saying goes. “Attaboy!” Wes yelled.

Next pitch was another clean miss. Michael took the one after that, then hit a bloop just past first that Joe couldn’t quite reach. In a game, that would have been a double. Then a grounder straight at Pete on third, except it hit a pebble and kicked away from him. Another miss. Then a pop fly over Smart but too short for the outfielders. Then a big bouncer right at Smart, but on the last hop it flattened out and went between his legs. Then another bloop that sent Joe puffing down the line. He couldn’t catch that one, either.

This must have gone on for another five minutes. Every so often Michael would miss, and those incandescent cornrows would fly as he shook his head in annoyance. But when he hit, it would be one little bleeder or bloop or bad hop after another. Nothing like art, but nothing like outs, either. Finally our left fielder, Ted Canter, who was far and away the best athlete on the team, slid six feet on his belly to snag one of those pops maybe two inches off the ground.

“Good catch!” Michael shouted. He tossed the bat to somebody else.

Nobody said anything for a few seconds. We weren’t quite sure what we’d seen, or what to make of it. Wes stood on the rubber, scratching his head. At last he said, “Remind me not to play poker with you, man. You’d probably draw four to a ten and end up with a royal flush.”

“Yeah, Flush!” Pete yelled, so Michael got his nickname. He smiled, and looked a lot younger. He was pretty sober most of the time.

We let the other team have the field for their warm-ups. They were an outfit called Snafu. They played like their name a lot of the time, too. Still, they were pretty cocky, seeing us short a guy. We gathered around Wes while he made out the lineup sheet. He was still scratching, trying to figure out where to bat Michael. On form he deserved to hit last, but if all those hits were legit, he was a clear third hitter. Wes finally compromised and put him sixth.

It turned out to be a busy sort of game. Snafu got two runs in the first and another four in the second. Michael got knocked ass over teakettle in a play at the plate. The throw was high, and as he went up for it, the runner, a big Samoan built like a linebacker, cut the legs out from under him. He was safe; Michael never did get the ball. He found it and threw it back to Wes.

“Way to hang in there, Flush,” Wes said, nodding. Michael just dusted himself off and went back into his crouch.

We were hitting, too, scoring as fast as Snafu. I was in a 1–0 slow-pitch game once, but most of them aren’t like that. We finally won this one 13–11 when Snafu made back-to-back errors, the first one with the bases loaded, in the last inning.

Michael? Damned if he didn’t go four for four: a soft liner over second, another one of those dinkers back of first-though he got thrown out trying to stretch that one-and a couple of ground balls with eyes. The second one started our big rally; he scored a couple of runs, in fact.

At Shakey’s afterward, Pete got a pitcher of Bud and set it in front of Michael. “You got a choice, Flush,” he said, as threatening as you can be with a big grin on your face.”Tell me you’ll be back next week, and you can drink it. Otherwise I’ll pour it over your stupid head.’

“When do we play?” Michael said. We all cheered. It got pretty drunk out. That’s an advantage early games have-they give you more time to party afterward. I remember asking Michael what he did.

He thought about it. It took a few seconds; he had nothing against beer. Finally he said, “Some of this, some of that. I spend a lot of time looking.”

I backed off in a hurry.” Say no more.” I’d been unemployed not too long before that. A bad feeling.

By the next game, I had that miserable sling off, thank God-ever try to bathe in one? I’m glad I wear a beard. Shaving left-handed is something I’d sooner not think about. I was still combing my hair that way, though. The arm wasn’t ready for anything serious. It twinged whenever I lifted it higher than my shoulder.

We had enough people there this time, and Wes made Michael a DH. He was awful shaky in the field. He knew it, too, and didn’t say boo. But in warm-ups he put on another hitting show. He looked terrible up there, but he wasn’t making any outs.

Wes threw his hands in the air. “All right, I’m convinced!” He batted Flush third. It worked, too. He was up three times, got three more cheap but effective hits, and we won again. Not only that, for once Snafu kept their act together for a whole game and knocked off the Tomcats, so we were tied with them again. Even the postgame pizza wasn’t as greasy as usual. A fine week.

I was up for the next game. We had some momentum, we were going against another weak team-a gang called the Mother Truckers-and I was well enough to play. My arm still grumbled, but I could use it. To make sure I didn’t hurt it again, I went through warm-ups doing just what I would have done anyway: throwing knuckleballs.

Typical of me to have my one baseball talent be absolutely useless. What good is someone who can throw a knuckler only with a slow-pitch ball? But I’ve got a mean one, if I say so myself. And a knuckleball is the easiest thing in the world on your arm. Look at Hoyt Wilhelm or Phil Niekro or Charlie Hough-big leaguers all, well into their forties.

A knuckleball comes up to the plate (or to whoever’s trying to catch it) with about as much oomph as a marshmallow. But if you’ve thrown it right, you’ve killed almost all the spin on the thing, and every tiny little air current can have fun with it as if flies.

If you’re a batter, it’s like a drunken moth heading your way. It’ll dance. It’ll float. It’ll shimmy. The best one I ever threw seemed to stub its toe halfway there, and hop on one leg the rest of the way. Marvelous fun. Hitters have no idea what it’ll do next. That’s fair; neither does the guy who threw it. Catchers hate it-they can’t handle it, either.

Trouble is, sometimes it doesn’t knuckle. Then it might as well be batting practice. Think of a hanging curve, only more so.

Tonight, though, playing catch with Pete, I had a good one. He caught it the first time I threw it, barely; it looked like a scoop of ice cream sitting right at the top of his glove. “Damn thing has the staggers,” he said, and fired it back to me harder than I can throw even when my arm’s fine. My mitt popped. My hand started burning.

But I had my revenge. Pete’s a pretty fair ballplayer. He caught most of what I threw, lunging and stabbing and guessing which way the rabbit would hop. But he dropped a couple, missed one clean and had to chase it, and took one right in the leg. It’s hard to hurt anybody with a knuckler, especially with a slow-pitch ball, but he did the Stanislavsky routine, yelling and bouncing up and down and generally malting an ass of himself.

When he was done with that nonsense, he flipped the ball to Michael, who was next to him loosening up with Ted. “Here, Flush,” he said, “trade places with me. This bastard”-which was the nicest thing he’d called me since I plunked him-“throws like you hit.”

One of Michael’s gingery eyebrows went up. “Really?” he said, and threw me the ball. He was better than he’d been a couple of weeks before, starting to get his whole arm into it.

But with that funky old glove he was still using, he couldn’t have hung on to the first knuckler I gave him if he were Johnny Bench. I was proud of it. It wobbled seven different ways, and the last one caught him right in the chest.

He picked up the ball and looked at it as if it’d taken a bite out of him. “Do that again,” he said, like he didn’t believe what he’d seen. He couldn’t’ve picked a better way to flatter me. The next one wasn’t as good. It only broke once, but down and away, and zigged under his glove and past him.

He ran after it hard and burned it back to me-mustard on it. If he ever learned to throw right, he’d have a good arm. “How do you do that?” he said.

It made me proud. “Mind over matter,” I told him grandly, flexing what passes for my right bicep.

His eyes got big and round. They were a light, golden brown, an interesting color. “Let me have another one.”

Hell, I’d throw that thing all night if somebody’d catch it for me. I give him credit: he fought it all the way, catching the ones that didn’t knuckle too much, even a couple of good ones, getting his glove on most of them. But several got by him, and I’m afraid I nailed him a few more times, the last one in a tender spot. Knuckleball or not, he doubled over.

So did Pete, but he was laughing. “Ohh, that stings!” he sang out in falsetto.

Wes came rushing over. He wasn’t mad at Pete. He was mad at me. “Don’t you go racking Flush up, Dr. Strange,” he growled, and he meant every word of it. “He’s worth more to this team than you’ll ever be, you goddamn clown.”

“Do not blame him,” Michael said when he could talk again. “That is a remarkable talent he has, and the ball eluded me time after time. Pete is right: I think he does pitch like I hit.”

“Remarkable, my left one,” Wes snorted. “You okay?”

“Yes, yes.” Michael sounded impatient. It was about time to play; we started crowding into the dugout. Michael slapped me on the back. “Congratulations. I doubted your people could do such a thing.”

“Huh?” I said, but just then Stuart tied out, and Michael had to go out on deck. When he came up, he singled between second and first-nobody’d got him out since he had joined us. He promptly scored when Wes’ brother, Joe, boomed one past the center fielder. He tried to stretch it into a triple, slid hard into the Mother Truckers’ third baseman, and they started wrestling. Joe’s all right off the field, but he plays rough. He picked on somebody his own size; that third baseman had “Whale” lettered on the back of his shirt. Both benches emptied. We managed to pry ‘em apart without any punches getting thrown.

In the fun and games, I forgot about Michael’s peculiar remark. I didn’t make anything much of it, anyway. He had the same right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of weirdness as any other Gator.

Sure enough, he ended up going 3 for 3, two rollers and a humpbacked liner nobody could reach. We won; I think it was 8–5.

At Shakey’s afterward I remembered again. “Hey, Flush,” I said, and looked around for him.

“He took off, man,” Ted told me. “Gulped a beer and split. Probably afraid you were gonna clunk him some more.”

“Smartass. Something I wanted to ask him. Oh well, if I think of it, I’ll catch him with it next week.”

But when next Tuesday rolled around, Michael didn’t show. He hadn’t called; he hadn’t left word. He just wasn’t there. Wes cussed me up one side and down the other. He had no more idea than I did whether it was my fault, but he took no chances. And when we lost-nobody hit a lick-he reamed me all over again. He plain hates to lose.

Michael didn’t come back, either, and it took us a couple of games to get used to having him gone. We lost one of those, and then lost to the Tomcats again, and ended up tied for third with Snafu. Lord, Wes was furious.

We played in two summer leagues, then a fall one, then took a rest for winter-Sun Belt or not, it’s too damn cold. Life went on. Joe got married (again); Wes got divorced (again); Ted’s wife had twins; Pete got busted for drunk driving and spent a night in jail.

We were going to get together last week for our first spring practice, but it got canceled, of course-that was the day the aliens showed up. God knows how they did it from somewhere out around the orbit of Uranus, but they sent every country their message in its own number one language.

Naturally, you saw the one who was talking to us here m the States the same way I did. Humanoid, sure, but not from here, even if he did wear a pin-striped three-piece suit (to reassure the natives, I suppose): not with elephant-gray skin and bright blue hair. Those first few awful seconds, with everyone wondering whether they were going to blow us away, I was too freaked to notice that he corn-rowed it.

Then I saw a couple of the others going back and forth behind him. They were a little out of focus, but brown skin and brick-red hair isn’t a combination you forget in a hurry. “Ohmygod,” I said, all one word.

The one in front started talking. His English had the same raspy accent as Michael’s, but he knew how to handle himself in front of a camera. “I greet you in peace,” he said, and you believed him. He had a presence Dan Rather would kill for.

“I greet you,” he said again, “And congratulate you, and extend to you the invitation of the Confederacy of Sentient Beings to join our ranks. You have fulfilled the three criteria for membership. You have gained control of the atom. True, you use it in war, but your national struggles are over now. Yes, and this ship itself is armed. That is only proper: danger must be guarded against.

“You seek to explore space. A race without the curiosity to step outside its cradle is not worth knowing.

“And you have at last begun to master your own minds and use them directly, not merely through the clumsy mediation of the body.” He glanced at something on the desk in front of him: whatever an alien uses for a paperweight, maybe. It lifted up about six inches and hung in the air. I didn’t think it was special effects. What I thought was more like, No wonder Michael was such a good place hitter.

“Of the three,” he went on, “this last is the key, for without control of the mind, no race can truly be said to be mature. We searched for it long in you, and began to fear you lacked it. Then one of our investigators”-remember how the picture cut away to a redheaded black man in a Gators cap? That’s Flush, all right-”found a member of your folk using the talent in one of your games. Where it exists, it can be trained. We shall do this for you: it is the least we can do to welcome you among us. We will be landing soon, my friends. You are no longer alone.”

The screen went blank after that, right? And you’ve seen the broadcasts since, everything we’ll gain by joining this Confederacy of theirs: the trade, the ideas, far horizons when we’d almost forgotten what that meant. Everybody’s going nuts celebrating the end of war, the end of poverty, the end of everything bad. I sure hope they’re right.

But I’m a little worried. That “mature” thing Grayface was talking about. All I’ve been thinking of is that goddamn knuckleball and what it must have looked like to Michael, especially when he was used to shoving things around with his own mind and looking for evidence we could do it, too.

Well, ”soon” is tomorrow now. But their ship is armed. They said so. I wonder what happens when they realize we can’t.

Like I said, I’m a little worried.