“Get your ass in the car, Gomez.”
“I’m busy.”
“You’ll either get your ass in the car or I’ll put it in there with my foot.”
“You’re just going to look like a dumb shit running in a kid again.”
“That’s it.” The policeman pulled the boy off his feet by his arm and walked him to the car as though he were a crippled bird. He closed the back door on him, made a call on his radio, and then turned out into the traffic.
“What’s he going to do with him?” the professor said to the boy who had walked over to play first.
“Take him down to juvie and call his old man so he’ll get a whipping.”
“Why did he shoot the cop the finger?”
“Everybody gives Pork Butt the finger. He’s a turd. He runs in guys all the time.”
Twenty minutes later the policeman drove down the street again, alone, and parked in the same shady spot under the elm. On the window rested a fat arm with a cigar between two thick fingers. His mouth was partly opened, but because of the dark green sunglasses the professor couldn’t tell if he was asleep or not. Incredible, he thought, a grown man investing his day in monitoring the public morality of fifteen-year-olds. Ah, there’s nothing like the moral vision of a nation that can send a whole generation to Vietnam and then worry about an upraised middle finger.
He crossed the street to the hardware store and bought an ice pick with a cork stuck on the tip. He put the ice pick in his pocket and walked down the street toward the park house, then circled back through the trees and approached the police car.
“Excuse me, Officer. The rec director in the park house is having trouble with a kid and would like for you to walk over there.”
“Is it a big colored kid?”
“I think so.”
“All right.” The policeman put on his cap and walked across the diamond toward the park house, oblivious to the pitch he interrupted.
The professor sat on the curb by the squad car’s front tire, unscrewed the valve cap, and picked up a rock from the gutter. He inserted the ice pick into the valve and hammered the point deep into the tire. The kids on the diamond had stopped playing and were staring at his back, dumbfounded. The air rushed out instantly. How’s that for meeting community need, he thought, and rose to his feet, the wind cool on his face, his mouth grinning in the roar of applause from the field. Then he jogged with a high step down the tree-shaded sidewalk toward his apartment building.
. . .
The boys were playing a practice game when he went back to the park the next morning and began his laps. As he jogged through the trees behind the backstop, he saw the crippled boy sitting alone in the bleachers, his fielder’s glove strapped through his belt.
“Why aren’t you playing?” the professor said.
“I just play in the work-up games and help out at batting practice.” The boy looked away from the professor when he spoke. Then he smiled. “Say, that was great yesterday. You should have seen Pork Butt when he saw his tire. I thought he was going to brown his pants. Then he broke a lug off trying to change the tire. When he left we all gave him the bird.”
“Forget about that. Let’s talk about pitching. You’ve got a good arm, but you’re not using your leg right.”
“Oh yeah. What am I supposed to do with it?”
“You’ve got a bad leg there, so you don’t pretend it’s a good one. You take what’s wrong with it and make it work for you. See, a pitcher’s left leg isn’t good for anything except weight. You throw it out in front of you, and then bring your arm and hip over with your delivery. Let me tell you about a guy who used to pitch in the old Texas League when I was a kid. His name was Monty Stratton, and he threw nothing but gas, then he went rabbit hunting one day and blew his left leg off with a shotgun. So he was finished, right? Well, wrong, because he learned to pitch with an artificial leg, throwing it out in front of him and swinging his weight around with his arm.”
“What happened to this guy?”
“He had to hang it up eventually, but not before he went to the Dixie Series. My point is that the best thing on a pitcher’s side is his intelligence. He knows what pitch he’s going to throw and the batter doesn’t. So you give them the whole buffet: curves, sliders, fastballs, spitters, inshoots, and then a forkball at the head in the interest of batter humility.”
“Why don’t you get your glove and play with us?”
“I don’t have one.” The professor formed a pocket of air in his jaw and looked at the diamond. “But I’m going to get one. I’ll be back before the inning is over.”
But the sporting-goods store on the corner was closed Sundays, and he had to jog almost a mile to the shopping center to find a store that sold gloves. He bought a catcher’s mitt and a fielder’s glove, a green-and-gold cap, a ball in a cardboard box, and a can of Neatsfoot oil. He wore the cap low over his eyes as he jogged back to the park. Tonight he would fold the crown down into a crease and cup the bill with tape to give the cap the only proper shape for a ballplayer. There were a lot of things he could teach the boys. For example, it was no accident that Sandy Koufax didn’t shave before he pitched and wore his cap darkly on his brow. And what oil and pocket shape meant to a glove and a fielder’s ability with it. Tonight he would work the oil deep into the leather and then fold the fingers and thumb over the ball and tie them down with thick twine. There were all the illegal things he could teach the boys, too: how to hide Vaseline under the belt buckle or the bill of the cap, wetting down the ball with a sponge the second baseman kept inside his perforated glove, blocking the bag with a folded knee that left the runner senseless.
When he got back to the park the boys were gone and the diamond was startlingly empty, as though it had been vacated by elves in a dream. He sat for a half hour in the empty bleachers, watching the dust blow in the wind, and then walked home just as the rain broke over the mountains.
But at three-thirty the next afternoon they were back, whipping the ball around the diamond, their faces electric with energy in the spring air. These boys weren’t made for schoolrooms, he thought, or leather shoes when the days turned warm or new clothes still stiff from the box. They were intended for wash-faded blue jeans and dusty elbows and knees and hands grimed with rosin from the bat. They were heroic in a way that no school could teach them to be. The catcher stole the ball out from under the batter’s swing, the third baseman played so far in on the grass that a line drive would take his head off, the base runners sanded their faces off on a slide.