Magic Time, page 3
“In that case I think we might be able to arrange a business proposition.”
For the next few minutes, Roger Cash outlined his plans, while Byron and I nodded at his every suggestion. It was obvious he had done this thing many times before.
All the time he was talking, I was eyeing the mileage chart, searching for an easily reversible number.
“Have you spotted one that will beat me?” Roger asked suddenly. He had been talking about how many practices our team would need, and the switch in subject caught me by surprise.
“Maybe.”
“You want to put some money on it?”
“A dollar.” I gulped. I could feel the pace of my heart pick up.
“You’re on,” he said, turning away from where the chart lay open on the table top. “Name the cities.”
“Albuquerque to New York.”
Roger laughed. “You picked one of the hardest. A mileage easy to reverse. Now, if I wanted to win your dollar I’d say 1,997.” He paused for one beat. I could feel my heart bump, for the number was right.
“But if I wanted to set you up to bet five dollars on the next combination, I’d say 1,979. I might miss the next one, too. People are greedy and like to take money from a stranger. I might even miss a third or fourth time, and I always leave the chart out where a man with a sharp eye can spot an easily reversible number. You men aren’t old enough to go to bars, or I’d show you how it really works.”
I took out my wallet, opened it up and lifted out a dollar.
“No,” said Roger. “I’ll chalk that one up to your experience. I have a mind for distances. I once read a story about a blind, retarded boy who played the piano like a master. And I heard about another man who can tell you what day of the week any date in history, or future history, was or will be. Myself, I have an idiot’s talent for distances.”
“What’s so great about distances?” asked Byron. “If I was smart I’d choose something else to be an expert on.”
“Let me tell you about distances,” said Roger, his golden eyes like coins with black shadows at the center. “Six or eight inches doesn’t make any difference, say, between Des Moines and Los Angeles, right?”
We nodded.
“Now suppose you’re in bed with your girlfriend.”
Roger Cash moved forward, hunching over the table, lowering his voice, because over behind the counter Mrs. Grover was doing her best to hear our conversation. Nothing went on that Mrs. Grover didn’t know about. And if there was a shortage of happenings, Mrs. Grover was not above creating some rumors just to get things fermenting.
“Suppose your peter won’t do what it’s supposed to — you men do know about such things?”
We both nodded eagerly. My experience was more limited than I was willing to admit; but Byron, who was fifteen months younger than me, had always liked girls and girls had always liked him. Though we seldom talked about our sexual adventures, I suspected Byron had more actual experience than I did.
“If your peter won’t produce that six or eight inches,” our faces were in a tight triangle over the table, and Roger was whispering, “no matter how close you are to pussy, you might as well be 1,709 miles away, which is how far it is from Des Moines to Los Angeles.”
Roger laughed, and we joined in, though more from nervousness than appreciation. At the lunch counter, one ear still tipped toward us, Mrs. Grover smiled crossly.
“The distances in baseball are perfect,” Roger went on, “ninety feet from base to base, sixty feet six inches from the mound to the plate. Not too far. Not too close. But change any one of them just six or eight inches, the length of your peter, and the whole game’s out of kilter.”
Byron and I nodded, wide-eyed.
“Well, since you men say you can get me a team, all we have left to do is find ourselves an opponent,” said Roger. “Who’s the best pitcher in these parts?”
“That would be Silas Erb,” I said. “Chucks for First National Bank in the Division One Commercial League.”
“Is he crafty or a hardball thrower?”
“Strictly a thrower. Ninety miles an hour straight down the middle, dares anybody to hit it.”
“Scratch him. I want a guy who’s a curveballer, maybe tries to throw a screwball, has a wicked change.”
“That would be McCracken,” I said. “McCracken Construction have been Division One Champs two years in a row.”
“And he owns the company?”
“His father does.”
“Would he be the kind to accept a challenge from an elderly pitcher with a two-and-nineteen high-school team on the field in back of him?”
‘Who wouldn’t? McCracken thinks he’s the sneakiest junkball-pitcher since Hoyt Wilhelm. He throws a knuckle curve.”
“If we were to set up this game with McCracken, get posters printed, and talk up this challenge game, what sort of attendance do you think we could expect?”
“People are hungry for good baseball,” I said. “I think we could get five or six hundred fans out, maybe more, with people from the new subdivisions.”
“Would they pay three dollars a head?”
“No problem.”
Roger Cash grinned, the right side of his mouth opening up to show his dice-like teeth. I noticed then, even through the suit, that his right upper arm and shoulder were huge, many inches larger than his left.
THREE
What he proposed to McCracken that night was a winner-take-all game, my high-school team with Roger Cash pitching, against McCracken Construction, Division One Champs and one of the best commercial-league baseball teams in the state.
“I said to him,” Roger told us later, ‘“I’ll be happy to cover any wagers you, your teammates, or the good citizens of this area might like to make, all in strictest confidence, of course!
“‘At what odds?’ McCracken wanted to know.”
Byron and I had waited in the cool interior of the Cadillac, outside McCracken’s sprawling ranch-style home, while Roger had done his bargaining and arranging.
“‘Even odds,’ I said. ‘Roger Cash is not greedy.’ And you should have seen him smile.
“‘I’d like to see you work out,’ McCracken said to me.
“‘Oh no,’ I said. ‘The element of surprise is all I’ve got on my side. I hear tell you played in Triple A for a year, so you’re not likely to be surprised by anything an old amateur like me can throw. Myself, I played a dozen games one summer for a Class C team in Greensboro, North Carolina; but they didn’t pay me enough to keep my mustache waxed so I moved on. Actually they suggested I move on, but that’s another story.’ I smiled real friendly at him, and he didn’t give me any argument.”
Back in front of the Springtime Café and Ice Cream Parlor, after the game was set, Roger led us around to the trunk of the Caddy. Byron and I were on our tiptoes trying to stare over and around him. The trunk was almost as austere as the car interior.
It contained a black valise, very old, almost triangular, with heavy brass latches, and a canvas duffel bag with a pair of worn black baseball cleats tied around its drawstring.
A few garden tools were cast diagonally across the trunk: a rake, a hoe, a small spoon-nosed shovel, all spotless. Built into the depression where the spare wheel would ordinarily have been was a small, black safe, anchored in concrete.
“We’re going to need some money to finance this operation,” Roger said, and smiled slowly, lines appearing in the deeply tanned skin around his eyes. “I’ll have to ask you gentlemen to turn your backs while I operate on Black Betsy here. I’d be obliged if you kept the secret of her existence among the three of us.”
Though it wasn’t worded as one, Byron and I both recognized that the final statement was a command. We stared up and down the street and studied the windows of the Springtime Café while Roger turned the dial on the safe. It made little buzzy sounds like a bicycle lock.
“You can turn around now,” he said finally.
The safe was stuffed with money; from what I could see, mostly hundreds.
The deal Roger proposed was that each of the eight players to back him up was to receive twenty dollars for the game. Byron and I were to be paid extra for distributing posters to the downtown area, and over a thousand handbills to homes in nearby bedroom communities, and on car windshields.
And we were to be paid for selling tickets right up until game time. Roger also suggested that we arrange to sell hot dogs, soda, and popcorn, since I’d told him no one ever bothered to do that at the local baseball grounds.
He peeled off a few bills from a collar-sized roll, advancing us enough to buy and rent what supplies we needed, and to hire people for the concessions. In return, we were to split the profits with him. For the next few days Byron and I felt like real businessmen, going around town hiring women three times our age to work for us Sunday afternoon.
I suspect it was that experience — Roger letting me see how easy it was to set up a business operation if you had the capital — that decided me on a career in business.
Roger let us know he needed a place to stay. Our only hotel had closed up years before, not long after a Ramada Inn opened in a shopping center a few miles down the highway. I was quick to volunteer our home.
The past few years, since Byron no longer required a babysitter, Dad, Byron, and I had lived harmoniously in what Dad referred to as controlled chaos. We struggled along, sharing the household chores, often on Saturday morning, so that by Friday night we had to push our way into the house, every dish and piece of clothing we owned in need of washing.
“If he can stand it, I guess we can,” was how Dad answered my suggestion that Roger move into the spare bedroom until the challenge game.
“If you want to check him out first I can arrange it,” I said.
“I’ve got to start trusting your judgment some time, Son. If this Roger friend of yours steals any of our valuable art work or silverware, you have to pay for it.”
Our art work and silverware came from K-Mart.
But Dad was happy to have company, and when Roger arrived carrying only his black valise, Dad was at the door to greet him. Roger accepted a beer and they talked baseball for an hour before Dad headed for bed.
“I need to ask you another favor,” Roger said to me the next morning. “I need a place to work out. A private place. I don’t want McCracken or any of his spies to see me pitch before game time.”
“There’s an abandoned ball field behind the factory where Dad works,” I said. “They used to have a team in one of the commercial leagues, but they dropped out about five years ago. It’s pretty overgrown with weeds, but since all you need is the mound and home plate, I think that can be made playable with an hour’s work. And I bet McCracken doesn’t even know it exists.”
A few minutes with the tools from Roger’s trunk cleared away the weeds, and we embedded a new length of two-by-four in the mound to replace one that was squishy and rotten. We dug a small depression and inset two pieces of wood side by side to form a crude plate, after Roger produced a well-worn tape from his duffel bag. I held one end of the tape on the rubber while he measured to the spot where home plate should be.
Roger then dug out his glove and a ball. He gave me the glove and tossed a few practice pitches while I crouched behind the newly installed plate. I guess I was expecting Nolan Ryan. After about fifteen pitches I said, with that terrible candor the young consider honesty, “You’re not very good.”
“You haven’t seen me with an enemy batter at the plate,” he replied. “I may not look like much, and I’m no Roger Clemens, but I change speeds and keep the hitters off balance: that’s a pitcher’s most important function. If they can’t time your pitch, even if you’re slow as water finding its own level, they can’t hit you. Besides, that ain’t a catcher’s glove, and I wouldn’t want to hurt your hand.”
“Yeah, right,” I said under my breath.
Preparations for the big day kept Byron and me running all week. Tuesday night, my dad, Roger, Byron, and I scouted McCracken Construction during a league game in a neighboring town. McCracken was a stocky, barrel-chested man with dirty blond hair. He pitched a three-hitter. Roger made notes on McCracken, and on the batters he would face.
After the game we discussed strategy.
I had a difficult time tracking down enough players from my high-school team. Several were working shift for the summer and weren’t certain they would be available. Some were on vacation. We ended up with a third-string catcher, and I had to recruit Byron to play right field. He was not a total loss as a ball player, but he would rather have charted the game on his computer than play.
“I’m gonna have you lead off,” Roger said to me.
I alternated between batting second and seventh most of my high-school career. I showed Roger the statistics I kept on our team’s season.
“I prefer being the lead-off man,” I said. “How did you know?”
“I know more than you think,” said Roger, flashing his disarming grin.
“Look at these stats,” I said. “I steal successfully nine out of ten tries. But my high-school coach doesn’t play a base-stealing game.”
“And you have a high on-base percentage,” said Roger. “You walk a lot. Walks are important. You need patience to walk. I need your help here, because I’m going to put my batters up in the order of their patience.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “McCracken has great control. I went over his stats in back issues of the local paper. They don’t always print box scores but the ones I could find show McCracken only walks 2.1 batters per game and averages 6.4 strikeouts.”
“You don’t miss a trick, do you?” said Roger. “But it’s a strategy, trust me.” And he smiled once again, his teeth glinting like porcelain.
We had another practice Friday evening. I’m afraid we didn’t look very good. Byron reported that someone from McCracken’s team was sitting in a pickup truck about three blocks down the street, studying us through binoculars, hoping to get a glimpse of Roger in action.
Roger did not pitch. Our regular pitcher, Dusty Swan, who I had recruited to play third base because our regular third-base man was in California, threw batting practice.
“I want you guys to lay back and wait for the fastball,” Roger told us. “McCracken’s got a killer curve, a mean slider, a big-league change-up you can break your back on. But his fastball’s nothing. He uses it to set up his other pitches. If we can keep from swinging at anything outside the strike zone, he’ll give up lots of walks. Then he’ll have to throw the fastball and, when he does, we’ll hammer it.”
Though Roger’s strategy went against McCracken’s statistics, it was Roger’s game, and Roger’s money was bet on it.
All that week, in the afternoons, Roger Cash worked out at the abandoned ball field behind the lumberyard. Sometimes I acted as his catcher, but more often he employed Walt Swan, a brother to Dusty. He paid Walt five dollars cash after every workout.
In the evenings, accompanied by his trusty road atlas, he played the mileage game in every bar in the area. Dad heard at work that Roger was picking up several hundred dollars in winnings each night.
“It’s also a way for me to become known real quickly,” Roger said. “It will help assure a good turnout for the game on Sunday.”
By the end of his third evening in town he had a very pretty brunette on his arm. She had a pleasant laugh, a crooked smile, and pale brown, almond-shaped eyes. She was a cocktail waitress at Hot Mama’s on the outskirts of town. Her name was Jacqueline, and she spent the rest of the nights that week in Roger’s room, except the night before the big game.
“Do you have any objection, Gil,” Roger asked my dad our first night at supper, “to my having occasional female company in my room?”
Dad looked up from his chicken-fried steak.
“You can bring a goat to your room as far as I’m concerned,” he said, “as long as you’re quiet.”
FOUR
It was during that week before the challenge game, that I found out a lot about distances myself. Like myself, most of my friends were just discovering girls. Most of our discoveries involved talk. We talked about the mystery of them, we talked about them individually and collectively, often in a disparaging manner learned from older boys at the Springtime Café or the Main Street Pool Hall.
Byron had gone to the movies a number of times with a green-eyed girl named Janice, who wore no lipstick or make-up because her family belonged to a fanatical religious group that thought the end of the world was imminent, and that everyone should be in a natural state when the end came.
“I asked her why she wears clothes,” Byron said, after his fourth and final date, “and she said, ‘Modesty. The Lord expects modesty from all His creations.’”
It was on that date he discovered the only reason her parents let her go out with him was that he seemed a likely candidate for conversion. That evening, when they arrived back at her house after the show — her father drove them to the movie and picked them up at the Springtime Café afterward — their preacher, Pastor Valentine, and eight members of the congregation were camped in Janice’s living room, which, Byron said, was decorated like a church.
Pastor Valentine conducted an impromptu service, and everyone prayed loud and long for Byron’s wandering soul. They said many unkind things about the Catholic Church in general and the Pope in particular, having wrongly assumed, I suppose because of our last name being French, that Byron was a practicing Roman Catholic. We had never attended any church, and Dad said our family had had no religious affiliation for at least three generations. “I have no intention of breaking with tradition,” Byron said.
Meanwhile I was in love for the first time. Or, more accurately, I had let being in love move from my imagination to real life. Her name was Julie Dorn, and I had become enamored of her just at the end of the school year. She was a farm girl, almost my height and fifteen pounds heavier. She was clean-up hitter for the high-school girl’s softball team, and I liked her because she wasn’t a giggler, and always looked me in the eye when we talked. She drove a four-ton grain truck to school.
