FOUR
A woman floated on a rubber raft, not far, not close to the dock. Her dark, dark flesh was crossed by two thin bands of electric pink bikini. The surface of her back shone with sun or oil, and her hair was a phosphorous blond, beautiful at this distance, though it would have seemed hard looking on shore.
There was no one else out on the lake and it was already eleven in the morning, but this lake was private and surrounded with year round homes, a great oval green water where businessmen sailed sunfish after work and cast phosphorescent pink plugs and neon plastic worms at the bass they had paid to stock here. The woman floated, unmindful of all, her arms folded before her in a perfect diamond, her head slightly turned across the infield. The raft seemed to undulate slightly in an unseen series of waves. Flynn imagined that her toes trailed in the water where she turned them under at the end of the raft, the flesh barely licked by the cool water.
He imagined that the ride on the water was something like an endless orgasm for her. Still, warm, away, and slightly tremoring.
It was because he was young that he had thought something so foolish. And, too, because he had just come out from one of those houses, where he had spent the night making love, with more enthusiasm than skill, with a woman he had met whose husband was away.
He was an hour late for the bus, a bonus baby miles away from the park of his rookie league club.
In many ways he thought it the first memory of the big leagues.
The lady had called him Meat, likely because she knew players and the language that they used.
"Oh more of that, Meat, please. I like how you touch me, darlin..."
She hadn't really, Flynn knew. He was not very good, nor apparently possessed of the stamina she was used to in her ballplayer friends. She let him know with sighs, and by teasing him to keep him from dozing off.
He had wanted to sleep because he was tired. That seemed simple enough. He had pitched well and won a game--not his first but his first won right--and by three in the morning he wanted to sleep.
"Meatsy wants a sleepy bye, does he? He's gotta give Momma a kiss."
She pushed her groin toward him. He knew he was supposed to laugh and act, one way or the other. Either play the ballplayer and slap her ass and laugh, call a cab and go; or bitch her out and laugh and drink another glass of her bourbon and snore, farting on her bed. But he was tired and wanted to sleep.
And he resented her calling herself Momma.
He had called home after the game. They spoke to him, his father, Jim and then his mother, bothered by a summer cold like she was every year. A bronchial wheeze on the phone, long pauses as she choked on her cigarettes.
Flynn imagined something like the Lou Gehrig story, or some such film, a mother cured--or dying happy--at her son's success.
"Struck out ten, allowed three hits, and pitched mostly ground balls."
"Oh, that's good, Jack."
She tried to understand. She was ill and there was a lot of noise on both ends. Jim and his wife and kids were there on the river, the assholes in the clubhouse were shouting "Hi Mom" and stealing quarters from the payphone ledge in front of him.
"I wanted you to know," he whispered, "I'm on my way."
"You're coming home."
"No. You know."
"We believed in you then, Jack, we believe in you now. You're the only one you have to prove it to now."
He nodded and began the goodbyes. The guys in the clubhouse were throwing his gameball around. He had had to pay for it, the club had no provision for memoralizing someone's first rookie league artistic success. The game had drawn two thousand and fourteen on a Friday night.
"We love you, Jack," she said.
He nodded and said, "Goodnight, Momma.
The guys on the club called him Sweet Momma for weeks. For awhile he thought it would stick, but he was one of those white pitchers who would never be nicknamed, never a Dutch Master, Flash, or even Righty. He was always too good for that, like Seaver, Carlton, or Palmer, though even Seaver got stock with Tom Terrific for a time.
Some pitchers just had a kind of intense presence, a lordliness that kept them from having any nickname stick other than their own. Gibson did. Early on, Flynn too knew he was one of them, he had to admit it. He grew tan and silent.
The game made him become something, it wasn't what he wanted. He had begun playing baseball for noise and for the secret reason most boys and men have for the game: it authorized intimacy and companionship. Not the pat on the butt that writers liked to notice in witty or thinky columns, not even the high fives and double clasps shown in slo-mo. Rueful smiles were what Flynn remembered, VFW style practical jokes, looking into someone else's face to see how the pressure showed on him. Roommates watching eleven o'clock news on television, reaching to pick up the phone and answer a bedcheck call, all the while still watching the news and making an asshole face. Rows of colored bottles--of aftershave and cologne and herbal balms--on a locker shelf; the wood click of rows of men in spikes along a runway from the clubhouse to the dugout.
Women's reasons, Flynn supposed, but then his mother gave him the game. She thought it would be good for him to get involved in organized play; not, he thought, to keep him from following his father into something as solitary as the river, but to make that inevitable choice have a reason to it.
The reader shouldn't get the idea that the elder Flynn opposed the lad's choice of such cooperative athletic endeavor.
Nossir. His father loved baseball, though he understood it little.
Times on the river at night. Mel Allen on the Yankee netword from the Syracuse station echoing on the water. Humid air, mosquitoes druggy and fat. Clear nights, planets in a row on the horizon, a stripe of shimmering moonlight making a river within the river. On all kinds of nights, they listened together, the sound of the radio slapping off the resistant water, echoing and pooling in the night air, exactly like haze. Dodger games out of Watertown, the reception fading to whispers and then Red Barber's voice booming out so loud you heard men in other boats hooting it down. Whether they had a client in the boat or they fished alone, baseball was there.
His father loved the outfield, the range and darkness of it. It was like water, something Flynn came in his own time to recognize as well. The swirling eddies of the left field corner, the lake of right, the fanning channels of the power alleys, the oceanic--yet breachable--expanse of center field. To Flynn's father all baseball reduced to a single play. Flynn recalled being taken to see it in the newsreels at age eleven.
The catch. Everyone called it that, everyone had a way to describe it. Mays, in deep, deep water, in shadows, turning his back to the ball and swimming out to the mark where the stone already began to sink through the slow water. A loping, certain stride, like the old men with goggles and rubber caps you sometimes saw in the river, distance swimmers, their bodies dark with grease and tan, as dark as Willie's. On each great stroke of their paddlewheel arms, they would look up over their shoulders, as Willie did, almost stopping in the water, the next stroke pulling them through a long glide before the arm came up again, Willie turning cooly and making the throw in a while, falling back down in the water. Wertz and the Series gone.
It was one of two times Flynn's father broke his allegiance--an allegiance, Flynn sometimes thought, based on the patriotic directness of the name--to the American league. The other time was in '47 when Robinson came up. Flynn was only four years old then, he couldn't have remembered, yet he liked to think he did.
His father said something beautiful once about all that.
"When you see something like Jackie Robinson," he said, "you know how beautiful America could be if we would let it. People have a beauty all their own, son. You have to see it."
It was unusual for him to be so eloquent, but not so democratic. He had fought at Normandy during the war. He was silent about it, he had seen too many people die. Once Flynn pressed him and he was shocked at the bitterness of the story his father told.
"We had been there some time, mostly mopping up. It was a long time after we hit the shore, a long time. This one morning we were in the woods near the beach, you see, doing all the shitty little odds and ends you never hear about in war. This fresh faced lieutenant comes up to us and he has us measure the frigging tree stumps. It wasn't that strange, Jackie, there were always these bullshit jobs to do. Finally someone asks and this pisspot says we were responsible for the damages to the trees. We had to measure so we could pay the owners..."
Flynn asked who the owners were.
"No one owns a tree," his father said blankly.
"Who?"
"When we marched out, we seen it. Up over the road was this horseshoe arch, a sign like they have up at Alex Bay. Chase Bank of New York, it says. I learned right then that we fought the goddamned war for the banks and not for people floating in salt water with their guts hanging out..."
It was during the time that there were troubles with the bank over the loan for the business. "Let em come, Honeybabe," his father told his mother once, "I'll blow their asses off with my twelve gauge."
"It'll be the sheriff, not the bank," his mother said.
"I'll fill his ass with lead too, he knows better, he's a veteran."
Even so, Flynn did not doubt the story. It marked something for him. He marked it and fed it back to the old man in 1967 when the war came, and later when Ali lost his championship because he would not go. His father couldn't argue, nor could Flynn. Team doctors assured him he could not be drafted. It made little sense--it would be grandstanding--to make a public statement.
Still he signed a letter against the war in the New York Times, his name listed with actors and singers. And he went to Washington while Nixon watched a football game behind a wall of buses. Flynn had something of a box seat and saw a sea of people waving together, singing all we are saying..
And whenever he saw a clip of the catch, or saw or heard Jackie Robinson's name, he had the kind of family feeling you have when someone dies who you knew as a kid, when someone comes up to bat who you played with in the minors.
Still he wondeered if that was not how his father came to call him Jackie. And he remembered how no one owns a tree, and how people have a beauty of their own, when, in college, a bearded little man made him read Walt Whitman.
"The sun falls on his crispy hair and moustache, falls on the black of his polish'd and perfect limbs. I behold the picturesque giant and love him."
Flynn still has the book somewhere, a critical edition it's called. There's a picture of Walt Whitman inside; he looks like God.
Flynn looked into other poems since, but none were the same. There was a poet with the Pirates in '72 or '73, he was writing a book with Doc Ellis. The guy was a big teddy bear, awkward, and yet real pleased with himself. Flynn wasn't very impressed, but the guy had a poet's beard like Walt Whitman and a pretty fair belly. He huffed playing fungo.
Flynn headed back upriver toward Clayton, sure somehow Emma had gone back there. In the sun along the highway near Chippewa Bay, a car was pulled over in the shimmering heat of the shoulder, its hazard lights flashing like a spaceship. The man behind the wheel sat staring ahead, patient and weary, his hands gripping ten and two on the wheel, while next to him a woman shook the child on her lap, violently angry, the woman and child both screaming, the child's baseball cap shaken off as Flynn went by. They had paused for this, life--even on vacation in the islands--had too much anger to it.
Kids often made Flynn sad. Especially hearing them in some game gone beyond salvation, down six runs in the bottom of the ninth and two away, a whole section of little leaguers chanting, "We need a hit, we need a hit, we need a hit...," high in the grandstand behind them. The afternoon seemed closed around them, and only they did not know. You could already hear the traffic outside the stadium, see everyone in the dugout getting on their postgame faces and beginning to dream of beer and roast beef. The kids kept chanting. We need a hit, we need a hit.
Flynn was that once. It was why he played. The best was the kind of baseball disappearing now; everyone showing up at the park after school, choosing up with an absolute sense of relative forces, with neither kindness nor lies. Later in the summer, the kids would come out early before the haze quite burned off.
"Flynn has to pitch from behind the mound or we don't go."
"Make him pitch both sides..."
"No."
Even then he should have known he could never be one of them, that he would end up the tall, handsome man without a nickname.
"We'll only pitch him three innings and then he goes to right field."
"He has to throw something we can hit."
"I try, I really do."
"Bullshit, Flynn. You can't do shit but throw the ball fast. I'd like to see you reallly have to play."
"Leave him alone."
He didn't play baseball to be alone and yet that was how it worked out. Something in you chose you for it. The muscles of the thighs and back, an appreciation for the rhythm and concentration a game requires, the goopy look about your face that when you grow up makes you handsome, but when you're a kid gets you laughed at and called names.
His mother's hero was a goop too. Something of the Catholic in her made her latch onto Don Larsen and the concept of a perfect game. Flynn imagined she saw it like the unblemished soul the nuns talked about. He always imagined the soul as a milk jug, white and cool and full; but what form sins took in this image he couldn't say. Perhaps specks of dirt, or a housefly afloat on the creamy surface. Larsen had allowed none of these specks. There was a picture Flynn remembered, number eight with his mask still on in Larsen's arms, Yogi like a fat frog in the arms of a prince. It was about this time that Flynn turned against the Yankees.
The stupid Yankees! Mantle, the big hick, hit a homer. Meanwhile Maglie pitched a sweet little five hitter and no one remembered that until trivia games started to get popular.
They had The Barber up that year for the annual father-son communion breakfast and Flynn made his father go, but then everyone asked questions about how it felt to see Larsen do what he did. The Barber was a guinea from Niagara Falls and he answered all the questions like a priest, real quiet and dark, nasty eyes.
Lifetime The Barber had it all over Larsen. Like they say, you could look it up. But the goop's who they remember.
Flynn saw Maglie again when he was pitching coach for the Seattle Goddamn Pilots that Bouton wrote about. By that time he was a real goombah looking guy, king of flatfoot and lost looking but still mean in the eyes. They didn't talk.
It had to be because of Larsen that his mother made him play ball in the leagues. He was thirteen years old then, late to start, baseball if it hits you should hit you at twelve.
Flynn remembered running out on the porch and down into the shady street, shouting because the Dodgers won the Series. He was twelve then and Johnney Podres threw a shutout. There was no one else out on the street and he jumped and shouted awhile and then went in, feeling foolish and lost.
Hodges batted both runs in. Sandy Amaros robbed the fat turtle Berra of at least a double down the line, then doubled up McDougald, the throw going Reese to Hodges.
For awhile that first high school season, after they made Flynn a pitcher, his mother would ask, "Did you pitch a perfect game, Jack?" when he came home. He finally explained when she pissed him off once too often with it after a game where he got knocked off the mound.
She was still alive for the no-hitter. Only Hooton and Pappas and Stoneman did it with him that year, and only Hooton's was on the books when Flynn pulled his in July. It wasn't on television, which was good because it was fairly boring when all was said and done.
"It wasn't a perfect game, Momma, but it was a long time coming," he had said on the phone.
"At least there weren't any questionable plays, if you know what I mean, Jack."
He knew. It was a clean, workmanlike no-hitter by a lord of the game. He had walked three and there were no errors to question, so it was also far enough from perfect to take that out of his mind. Once he had it in his hand, there was nothing special, it was like climbing a hill. But you couldn't say that. It was an exclusive club and it has been a long time coming.
How does it feel, Jack, to be part of an exclusive club so long denied you?
He wanted to say, ask Seaver or Carlton. Not being a smartass, but really. Ten to one they'd tell you the same. It's a hill you climb, and when you get there you go back down.
Tom Seaver, the hardest hitter I ever faced.
He wanted to say that once before he quit, but never got the right chance. Seaver was so damn smart looking up there, so certain of his body. Flynn was jealous, Seaver a year younger.
Johnny Bench and Foster.
They were hills you got up and then came back down. Sometimes Bench seemed worst because he seemed to know what every pitch would be and where you'd place it. When he twisted all around missing a fastball, he'd sort of nod at you as settled back in, as if he was saying nice pitch, I didn't expect it to rise so much but otherwise it was right on the money where I wanted.
Other times Foster seemed worse because you never really knew if he wanted to play that day. When he did, he would murder you, he was like Wolfman that way; and when he didn't, he would scare you with an easy cannon shot falling just short of the fences.
"What's wrong?" she asked.
"Nothing. Why?"
"You have a look on your face. I thought you were in pain."
Flynn turned to Emma.
"Do you like the car? This car?"
She laughed. "Yes, I like it, of course."
"Good. I'll give it to you when I'm done."
It hurts to reminisce he thought she knew.
Why.
They turned inland at Alex Bay. "I don't want your lovely car," she said. He nodded silently, he did not mean to insult her, not even to have her think he thought the gift would even things up.
"Can I ask you something?"
Of course he nodded.
"Why," she said, "Why when we came up from Syracuse didn't we stay on eighty-one? Why'd we cut back through the country?"
I wanted to see my mother.
He remembered it was very clear turning now back there.
"I understand you saw Willard Walker today," she said.
"Yes."
"I didn't know you knew him."
"Why's he in there?"
"Shouldn't be. Nowhere else to go, and he does lose it now and then."
It? Yes I know him like the duck knows the bird dog.
"He says black people drove him crazy."
"He's a sick, old man, Jack."
Nodded. Heading toward Redwood and then to Theresa--pronounce the "h" and drop the "e", lisping like: Thressa, like Plessy for Plessis up the road. Down between the two lakes.
The woman floated on the rubber raft.
"Have to be pushing off, Meat?" the married lady asked.
She wore a long jade-colored bathrobe, embroidered in gold.
"Wanna screw her too, big boy?" She pointed out on the water. "In Johnson City there are mucho available women, Meat. It comes with the territory," she laughed ugly. "A territory where no one comes, except the 6:15 train."
The woman floated, Flynn had to hitch into town because the married lady was expecting something.
When he caught up with the team, a taxi fare of thirty some dollars, everyone whistled as he came into the shabby clubhouse. They knew the married lady. The skipper did also.
"Listen peckerwood," he said behind the thin folding door that was the visiting manager's office, "you want to dip your stick into every honeypot that sees you pitch one, that's alright with me. The word has come down from the front office: you, Flynn, are certified stuff! You're gonna be the next Bob Gibson...ha! You pitch every five days, whether I like it or not. And you may not ask me now whether I like it. But!" and here he shouted, Flynn heard the room hush outside the folding door, "you miss my goddamn bus or any of my goddamn pre-game warmups and I'll have you run pecker off, which if I'm right will begin to run by itself soon enough, seeing as who you've picked for your hall-of-fame flop in the hay-hey-hey."
Flynn looked at him.
"What are you waiting for, flatass?"
Flynn didn't know, so he let himself out the folding door.
"Shut it please, Mr. Pitcher Flynn," the skipper growled.
When he entered the squirrely little room, they greeted him differently. He was certified stuff, even though he didn't play baseball to be alone.
Within weeks he was up in the New York Penn, the old PONY league, "a short season 'A' league," the Irish commissioner insisted to him, "Not a damn rookie league!"
He was moving up and near to home, fans already coming down out of North Country to see him at Utica. Local boy makes good. Alone.
The woman floated.
"Which of the young men does she like the best? Ah the homeliest of them is beautiful to her."
"What's that, Jack?"
"It's a poem," he said, "I learned it in college."
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