The Iowa Baseball Confederacy

The men who cleared and leveled the land to create a baseball diamond on the outskirts of Big Inning often saw, or thought they saw, flashing like a deer through the fluttering poplars beyond the outfield, the figure of a giant Indian.

He loped beyond the poplar grove, knees raised high, back bent forward as if he were performing some ritual dance or high ceremony. Sometimes, in the clean morning air, as they bent picking roots, they would hear his voice, yipping like a coyote or trilling a plaintive birdcall. Other times, they only felt his presence. Occasionally on a humid afternoon the men would stop what they were doing, notice the all-encompassing silence of the land, the trees, the nearby river. One of them would shiver, though sweat tracked in rivulets down his face and chest.

‘Someone just stepped on my grave,’ he would announce, and laugh self-consciously.

Someone else would say, ‘That damn Indian is somewhere close. I can smell his ornery hide, but I can’t see him.’

Everyone would stand still in the stifling afternoon and stare around them. Then a bird would squawk or a horsefly would bite or a frog would sing from the riverbank, and everything would be back in order just as if the moment of silence had never happened.

Drifting Away, who had been near enough to smell the white men’s sweat, near enough to reach out and touch their glistening wet backs, disappeared into the poplars, chuckling softly as a breeze.

‘Walt “No Neck” Williams, do you remember him?’ my friend Stan asks suddenly, in the way he has of jumping from subject to subject.

We are with our wives, driving back from a night game in Cedar Rapids.

‘Mm-hmm,’ I say noncommittally. ‘I know the name, but the details are fuzzy. He ended up playing in Japan, didn’t he?’

‘He played for the Sox. The White Sox. They called him No Neck because he didn’t have one.’ Stan laughs his long, stuttering laugh, sounding as if he has peanut shells lodged in his throat. There is a car following us closely and the headlights bury themselves in the rearview mirror, which then paints a moonlight-like bar across Stan’s face. As I glance across the front seat at him he looks as though he is wearing a golden mask.

‘Last summer I met No Neck Williams on the street in Chicago,’ Stan goes on. ‘I just about went crazy. “Hey, No Neck,” I called to him, and I set down my suitcases and went running after him.

‘You remember that, Gloria?’ He directs the last words at his wife, turning toward the back seat to acknowledge her, the mask of light slipping around his ear as he does.

Gloria is a big, blowzy Polish girl, cheerful and resilient. She has so far fouled off all the curves life has thrown at her, though I notice that her brows have squeezed together in a mini-scowl, as if she has been staring too long at the horizon.

‘He actually edged away from me. You remember that, Gloria? I guess you must meet a lot of nuts when you’re in the Bigs. I mean, I kept sayin’ to him, “Man, I used to watch you when you played for the Sox. You were great, man. You were great.” And I hauled out my wallet and looked for something he could sign, and I didn’t have any paper, not even a Master Charge slip or anything, so I got him to sign the back of Gloria’s picture. It’s one I’ve carried around for ten years, with Gloria in jeans and her hair up in a beehive, standing beside her old man’s ’69 Buick. No Neck looked at me like I was crazy, leaving my wife with our suitcases and chasing after him for a block like that. Don’t you remember him, Gid?’

‘I don’t get involved with modern-day players the way you do, Stan.’

My wife, Sunny, is squashed into the corner of the back seat behind me. She hasn’t said a word since we left the ballpark in Cedar Rapids. I catch a glimpse of the red glow of her cigarette. She is tiny as a child, sitting back there. I wonder how someone so small and insignificant-looking can tear me apart the way she does.

‘No Neck’s only a couple of years older than us, Gid,’ Stan says. ‘Played his last game in the Bigs in ’75. You know how that makes me feel? A guy just two years older than me, retired. And me still strugglin’ to make the Bigs?’

‘You’ll make it, Stan,’ I say automatically, just as I have been saying every year for over half my life.

Stan and Gloria have come to visit Gloria’s mother in Onamata; she’s the only family either of them has here anymore. Stan’s father is dead and his mother has gone to Florida to live with a married sister.

Since spring, Stan has been playing Triple A ball in Salt Lake City, but he sprained his right hand pretty badly a couple of weeks ago and the club put him on the disabled list and brought up a kid from a team in Burlington, Iowa, to replace him.

‘I wanted to ask No Neck how much he practiced. I bet he practiced like crazy or he never would have got to the Bigs. God, but I used to practice. Remember how I used to practice, Gideon? Gloria? Hey, Sunny, you’re bein’ awful quiet. I ever tell you how I used to practice?’

Sunny draws deeply on her cigarette but does not answer.

Stan is tall and muscular, his head square, his hair cut short, but his face is wide and innocent as a husky child’s. His eyes are pale blue and wide-set; his hair, though it’s darker now, was a lemony color when we were kids, and Stan was forever watering it, as if it were grass that would grow stronger when wet.

‘My old man never liked baseball, but I used to make him come outside and he’d stand in front of the barn, and I’d make him hit fly balls to me. I spent all my pay on baseballs – all the money I earned working for Old Piska, the cement contractor. Saturdays I used to carry a bucket of cement in each hand, from the mortar box to the sidewalk we were laying, or the garage floor. I took the money I earned and bought a box of baseballs, a whole dozen.

‘I laid them out on my bed like a bagful of white oranges, and I smelled them and touched them and handled them like a miser handling his money. Too bad I couldn’t have made real ones the way we made balls to play in your back yard, eh Gideon? God, they used to stink, but it was fun.

‘Speakin’ of stinking, the old man wasn’t a very good batter, and every once in a while he’d foul one into the goddamned pigpen. I’d have to wash the pigshit off it, and sometimes when I went into the pen, one of those big red buggers would have the ball in his teeth, and I’d have to whack his snout to make him let go, and then the ball would have tooth marks on it forever.’

Stan stops for a second or two. The highway is dark. There is an orange flash behind me as Sunny lights a new cigarette. I see that her left eye is closed, squinted up against the smoke. There is an inch-long scar, pink as a worm, on her dusky skin, running vertically from the corner of her eye onto her cheekbone. There are fine age lines spreading out from the corners of her eyes. Sunny aged a good deal the last time she was away.

‘I love the game, I’ve always loved the game, right, Gid? I used to dream about a career in baseball. It wasn’t just vague hopes like a lot of kids have. I knew what I was doing. I’ve made a living from the game for almost fifteen years. And I’m gonna make the Bigs yet, you wait and see.’

‘You’ll make it, Stan. We know that,’ I say.

‘I mean, I’ve seen guys with twice as much talent as me throw it all away. They party all night and stagger in ten minutes before a game, wearing their hangovers like badges. It’s not fair that my reflexes are one one-hundredth of a second slower than theirs. I mean, I work out three hours every afternoon. I’ve always hustled, haven’t I, Gid?’

‘You’ve always hustled,’ says Gloria from the darkness. Her voice is lifeless. She answers by rote. She, like me, has learned to agree with Stan without even listening to him.

‘And I put a washtub on its side, used it for home plate. I’d make the catch and rear back, and I got so I could hit that tub on the first or second bounce about nine times out of ten. You know what the difference is between the Bigs and the minors?’ Stan waits only one beat, not expecting a reply. ‘Consistency. The whole thing is consistency. There are players in the minors who make spectacular plays and hit the ball just as hard as in the majors, but the guys in the Bigs are more consistent. They make the plays not just nine out of ten times but ninety-nine out of a hundred.’ He pauses thoughtfully for a moment. ‘You know, I’d hit that tub nine out of ten times, but the tenth one might end up thirty feet down the line, or hit the barn door fifteen feet in the air, making a sound like a gun going off. Hey, Gideon, how about you come out and hit me some flies in the morning?’

When we got home after the game, I kissed Sunny gently and pulled her against me. Her lips were dry and she made them thin and did not return my kiss. I did everything I could think of to please her. I touched her with my finger tips, gently undressed her, massaged her, fondled her, loved her with my hands, my tongue, held back my own passion, waited for a response from her, received none.

I remember once, at a time like this, when Sunny was in one of her moods, she said something bitter, something designed to make me hate her.

‘Can’t you tell by the way I touch you that I love you?’ I said.

‘No,’ said Sunny, precipitating a long silence.

Eventually I made love with her. Her body was unpliant, mannequin-like. I wanted so desperately to rouse her, I controlled myself carefully, rocked her gently for a long time, until our bodies were slick and delicious.

‘Can’t you finish up?’ Sunny said, not even in a whisper. ‘I’m tired.’

If she had known how close I came to killing her then, it would have made her happy.

I threw myself off her without a word and lay like a rock in the darkness, my body taut, nerve ends twitching. Late in the night I heard her leave. I woke to the tinkling of hangers in our closet, knew she was packing a few blouses, a couple of pairs of jeans, in the same battered suitcase she arrived with twelve years ago. I lay, tense as piano wire, afraid to speak, afraid not to. She closed the front door quietly; I listened to her tiny footsteps descend the stairs, fade away as she moved down the sidewalk.