The Complete Collection. William Wharton

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СКАЧАТЬ pauses briefly, but then he’s off and running. We’re both laughing now.

      ‘Frieda fell to one stump, then to the other,

      Some even say she muttered MUTTHUH!

      She looked straight up at the trees spinning round;

      Then, with a sigh, Frieda hit the ground.’

      He’s buzzing and laughing so hard he can hardly drive. He even forgets to keep his foot on the accelerator and we’re doing a legal fifty-five for the first time all day. I’ve got tears in my eyes and my sides hurt; definitely working up a hysterical laugh. I’ve got to watch myself.

      About five miles farther on we pull up for gas and some lunch. The lunch stand is a converted trailer chocked up on railway ties. A lightweight swinging aluminum door latches shut behind us.

      Along the back is a counter and there are two tables on the side we came in. We order hamburgers, then sit at one of the tables. There are no other customers. It’s almost two, late for the lunch crowd. We order milkshakes with the hamburgers.

      Now, there’s something about an American hamburger in America; it’s like French bread in France. Maybe it’s the atmosphere, or the grass the cows eat, but an American hamburger in America is something special.

      And these hamburgers we have in this jacked-up trailer are sensational. We spread them with everything: relish, mustard, ketchup, mayonnaise. Those hamburgers leak out our fingers. The milkshakes are solid ice cream, stiff enough to hold the straws straight up. If there were an American equivalent to the Michelin Guide, this place deserves three stars with an asterisk.

      Counting the milkshake, I’m probably putting back on three pounds in one sitting. I lost almost twenty over the past five months, twenty I could well afford to lose, and now I’ll be packing them back on.

      Pizzas, hot dogs, hamburgers, milkshakes; by the time we get to Philadelphia I won’t be able to squeeze behind the wheel.

      I’m still waiting for Billy to elaborate on his reasons for leaving Santa Cruz. I didn’t even know he’d left school till he showed up at Mother’s. I asked then if he’d walked out in the middle of the quarter but he said he didn’t even start.

      He’s been up in Oregon working as a choker, living out Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion, I think. I only wish he’d told me, for income tax purposes at least. I’m carrying him as a deduction and if he’s getting W-2 forms I’m in trouble. All I need is the IRS on my tail.

      I can just see Billy up there in the woods, no experience with that kind of life or even work itself, and he’s choking: hooking cables on felled timber. Lord! It’s like me going into the infantry when I’d never had a BB gun or firecrackers. I know Billy did get hurt; he told me that much.

      We drive on, skipping all the big towns. Once you get off the highway, you’re dumped into local traffic. None of these towns have any real interest. When you’ve lived in Paris for over fifteen years, it’s hard to work up a big interest in Abilene, Kansas, even if Dwight D. Eisenhower did spend his profitable boyhood there. The most you can hope for is a town like Denver, which is a smoothed-over Westernized imitation of Chicago, which is an imitation of New York, which is an imitation of Paris or Rome or Athens or London.

      For dinner we stop and have another pizza. We haven’t had a pizza for over twenty-four hours. We get a big, green salad too, because we’re plugged up. The salad’s more expensive than the pizza, but we both definitely need grass-type food. Later, we find a motel well off the road.

      This is a true Midwest town, all separate houses with porches, everything wood or fieldstone; sidewalks.

      After dinner, Billy and I walk around. The people on the porches stare at us.

      There are locusts or crickets in the trees, making the most godawful noise. It sounds like an electric generator gone mad; the buzzing comes from every direction.

      At the edge of town we see a lit-up baseball field with cars parked all around it. Now, Billy has never played baseball. He doesn’t even know the names of the positions. If I said shortstop, it wouldn’t mean anything to him. Like as not, he’d think it’s some soft drink or a deodorant for men.

      But, God, as a kid, I lived, breathed, died for baseball. There was no way I could’ve survived in my neighborhood if I didn’t play. Our year wasn’t spring, summer, fall, winter. It was baseball, football, basketball and ice hockey. We squeezed the kite, roller-skating and swimming seasons in the spaces.

      By March I’d be down in the cellar taping up balls and bats. Soon as the snow was gone we were throwing balls against steps, getting our eyes and arms in shape. We had more damned varieties of games we played against cement steps with tennis balls. Then, all summer long, it was baseball. We went from after breakfast till nine o’clock at night. We’d keep games going when you could only see the ball if it was against the sky.

      We’d play three or four nine-inning baseball games every day. The second game was at lunchtime and the unchosen usually got to play then. Bringing your lunch was an admission of defeat.

      Mornings, I’d put on my ragtag baseball uniform, crowned by my Philadelphia A’s baseball cap, fill a milk bottle with water, hang my glove on the end of the bat, tuck a ball in my pocket and go down to the baseball field. There’d always be a bunch there ready to play. It was usually choose up; we rarely had regular teams; but we always had more than enough to make two full nines, and it was tough competition getting chosen. There were whole rituals for the choosing process, involving swinging a bat round your head three times after catching it and then hand-fitting around the bat. After the teams were chosen, there were backup jobs for the unlucky: scorekeeping, umping, shagging fouls and hunting lost balls.

      It was interesting how the slotting happened, how you found out just what you could play according to your skills and abilities. At first, I caught because I wasn’t agile or quick enough to play infield and I wasn’t a good enough hitter to play outfield, even right field.

      But I wasn’t strong enough to be a good catcher either. When Ray Ziggenfuss moved into the neighborhood, it wasn’t long before I knew my days as catcher were over. Ray was strong, quick with his hands and he could hit. He could hit well enough to play outfield but he wanted to catch. A kid named Mickey Mullens was the other catcher and he was good, too. I was about to be slotted as foulchaser and lunch-bringer.

      I took my carefully saved Christmas money, and bought a genuine first baseman’s mitt. I practiced tagging and making all the combinations, day and night, for weeks. My left foot could stretch back the full length of my body. I could reach and grab with that glove like a lizard catching flies. It was the one place in the infield where I might make it.

      Only I wasn’t left-handed. A left-handed first-baseman has a tremendous advantage; his gloved hand’s to the infield so he has a bit more reach toward the ball. Also left-handers had an advantage on right-handed pitchers.

      So I still didn’t make it. I worked my way from foul-chasing to scorekeeping but I wanted to play more than one game a day.

      I decided to become a pitcher. In our neighborhood, pitching was the nonathlete’s job. I worked for hours pitching to Ziggenfuss or at a circle on a brick wall, and developed into a fairly accurate thrower with a reasonable slider. In those days we called it a drop or a hook. Today they call a hook a curve and what we called a curve, a screwball. Even baseball changes.

      Now here Billy СКАЧАТЬ