"Underworld" - читать интересную книгу автора (DeLillo Don)

3

We sat in the Stadium Club with our sour-mash whiskey and bloody meat, pretending to watch the game. I'd been to Los Angeles many times on business but had never made the jaunt to Dodger Stadium. Big Sims had to wrestle me into his car to get me here.

We were set apart from the field, glassed in at press level, and even with a table by the window we heard only muffled sounds from the crowd. The radio announcer's voice shot in clearly, transmitted from the booth, but the crowd remained at an eerie distance, soul-moaning like some lost battalion.

Brian Classic said, "I hear they finally stopped ocean dumping off the East Coast."

"Not while I'm eating," I said.

"Tell him," Sims said. "Describe it in detail. Make him smell the smell."

"I also hear the more they dumped in a particular area, the richer the sea life."

Sims looked at the Englishwoman, who alone ate fish.

"Hear that?" he said. "The sea life thrived."

And Classic said, "Let's eat fast and get out of here and go sit in the stands like real people."

And Sims said, "What for?"

"I need to hear the crowd."

"No, you don't."

"What's a ball game without crowd noise?"

"We're here to eat a meal and see a game," Sims said. "I took the trouble to book us a table by the window. You don't go to a ballpark to hear a game. You go to see a game. Can you see all right?"

Simeon Biggs, Big Sims, was famous in the firm for his midbody girth. He was fat, bald and fifty-five but also strong, with a neck and arms resembling rock maple. If he liked you enough he might trade chest thumps or invite you to race him around the block. Sims ran the operational end of our Los Angeles campus, as we called it, and designed landfills that were prettier than pastel malls.

Classic looked at me and said, "We need video helmets and power gloves. Because this isn't reality. This is virtual reality. And we don't have the proper equipment."

Sims said, "We can't take our drinks with us if we go to our seats."

"That's a forceful point," I said.

The only time I ate the wrong food, just about, or drank too much, if ever, was when I was out with Sims, who was a living rebuke to the tactics of moderation.

The Englishwoman said, "Now as I understand it the pitcher gets a signal from the catcher. This pitch or that pitch. Fast or slow, up or down. But what happens if he ardently opposes the catcher's selection?"

"He shakes off the sign," Classic said.

"Oh I see."

"He waggles his glove or shakes his head," Sims said. "Or he stares down the catcher."

The Englishwoman, Jane Farish, was a BBC producer who wanted to do a program about the salt domes we were testing for the storage of nuclear waste, under the direction of the Department of Energy. She'd been busy for some years devouring American culture, leaving the earth scorched with interviews, she said-porno kings, contemplative monks, blues singers in prison. She'd just finished a sweep of California and was headed to a poker tournament in Reno and then into the desert to interview Klara Sax.

The Dodgers were playing the Giants.

Sims looked at Parish and said, "You know these two teams go way back. They were New York teams until the late fifties."

"They moved west, did they?"

"Moved west, taking Nick's heart and soul with them."

Farish looked at me.

"There was nothing left to take. I was already a nonfan by that time. Burnt out. This is my first ball game in decades."

"And it turns out to be silent," Classic said.

Big Sims ordered another round and told Farish about the old Brooklyn Dodgers. Sims grew up in Missouri and he got some of it right, some of it wrong. No one could explain the Dodgers who wasn't there. The Englishwoman didn't mind. She was absorbing things chemically, sometimes shutting her eyes to concentrate the process.

"Nick used to take his radio up to the roof," Classic said.

Farish spun in my direction.

"I had a portable radio I took everywhere. The beach, the movies- I went, it went. I was sixteen. And I listened to Dodger games on the roof. I liked to be alone. They were my team. I was the only Dodger fan in the neighborhood. I died inside when they lost. And it was important to die alone. Other people interfered. I had to listen alone. And then the radio told me whether I would live or die."

It isn't easy to be smart about baseball if you didn't grow up with the game but Farish asked decent enough questions. It was the answers that came hard. We must have resembled three mathematicians so lost in their highly refined work that they haven't noticed how quaint and opaque the terminology is, how double-meaning'd. We argued the language and tried to unravel it for the outsider.

"Does anyone want wine?" Farish said. "I wouldn't mind trying a local white."

"Wine is a copout," Sims told her. "We clean toilets for a living."

Classic pointed out that an inning was an inning if we were speaking from the viewpoint of a pitcher getting three outs but it was only half an inning in the broader scheme of a nine-inning game with top halves and home halves. And the same half inning is also two-thirds of an inning if the pitcher is lifted with one out remaining.

I asked the waiter to get a glass of wine for our guest. Classic returned to the paradox of the innings but Big Sims waved him off.

"Let's go back to the Dodgers," he said. "We left the kid on the roof with his radio."

"Let's not," I said.

"You have to tell Jane what ended your career as a die-hard rooter."

"I don't remember."

"Killed you so dead you never went back."

"These are local afflictions. They don't travel."

"Tell her," Sims said, "about the Bobby Thomson homer."

Parish looked politely hopeful. She wanted someone to tell her something that made sense. So Sims told her about Thomson and Branca and how people still said to each other, more than forty years later, Where were you when Thomson hit the homer? He told her how some of us had stopped the moment and kept it faithfully shaped and how Sims himself had gone running in the streets, a black kid who didn't even root for the Giants-heard the game on good old KMOX and ran out of the house shouting, I'm Bobby Thomson, I'm Bobby Thomson. And he told Parish how people claimed to have been present at the game who were not and how some of them honestly insisted they were there because the event had sufficient seeping power to make them think they had to be at the Polo Grounds that day or else how did they feel the thing so strongly in their skin.

"You're not saying like Kennedy. Where were you when Kennedy was shot?"

Classic said, "When JFK was shot, people went inside. We watched TV in dark rooms and talked on the phone with friends and relatives. We were all separate and alone. But when Thomson hit the homer, people rushed outside. People wanted to be together. Maybe it was the last time people spontaneously went out of their houses for something. Some wonder, some amazement. Like a footnote to the end of the war. I don't know."

"I don't know either," Sims said.

Parish looked at me.

"Don't look at me," I said.

"But you were on the roof, were you, when the blow was struck?"

"I didn't have to rush outside. I was already outside. I rushed inside. I closed the door and died."

"You were anticipating Kennedy," Parish said, and got a little laugh.

"The next day I think it was I began to see all sorts of signs pointing to the number thirteen. Bad luck everywhere. I became a budding numerologist. I got pencil and paper and wrote down all the occult connections that seemed to lead to thirteen. I wish I could remember them. I remember one. It was the date of the game. October third or ten-three. Add the month and day and you get thirteen."

"And Branca's number," Sims said.

"Of course. Branca wore thirteen."

"They called it the Shot Heard Round the World," Sims told Parish.

"A little bit of American bluster?"

"But what the hell," Sims said.

Classic was looking at me in a strange way, almost tenderly, the way someone regards a friend who is too dumb to know he is about to be exposed.

"Tell them about the baseball," Classic said.

He reached across the table and took some food from Sims' plate.

Classic was supposed to be my pal. I'd known Sims and Classic a long time and Classic, freckled free-style Brian, a man of shambling charm, was the guy I talked to when I talked about something. I talked to Big Sims but maybe I talked to Classic more readily because he did not challenge me with his own experience, he did not narrow his eyes as Sims did and fix me in his gaze.

"Let's change the subject," I told him.

"No. I want you to speak about this. You owe it to Sims. It's a crime that Sims does not know this. He's the only one here who still loves the game." Classic turned to the Englishwoman. "I go to ball games when I go at all for the sake of keeping up. It's a fall from grace if you don't keep up. Nick has fallen from grace. Only Sims is completely, miserably in touch. We had the real Dodgers and Giants. Now we have the holograms."

Parish said, "What baseball?"

Sims was looking at me. He was finished with his food and was untubing a panatela, a simple exercise that he surrounded with detailed ceremony.

Classic gave me a final melting look and turned to Sims.

"Nick owns the baseball. The Bobby Thomson home-run ball. The actual object."

Sims took his time lighting the cigar.

"Nobody owns the ball."

"Somebody has to own it."

"The ball is unaccounted for," Sims said. "It got thrown away decades ago. Otherwise we'd know it."

"Simeon, listen before you make pronouncements. First," Classic said, "I found a dealer on a trip I took back east some years ago. This guy convinced me that the baseball in his possession, the ball he claimed was the Thomson home run, was in fact the authentic ball."

"Nobody has the ball," Sims said. "The ball never turned up. Whoever once had the ball, it never surfaced. This is part of the whole- what? The mythology of the game. Nobody ever showed up and made a verifiable claim to this is the ball. Or a dozen people showed up, each with a ball, which amounts to the same thing."

"Second, the dealer told me how he'd traced the baseball almost all the way back to October third, nineteen fifty-one. This is not some fellow who turns up at baseball shows looking for bargains. This is pathological obsession. A completely committed guy. And he convinced me to a probability of ninety-nine and nine-tenths percent that this is the baseball. And then he convinced Nick. And Nick asked how much. And they worked out a deal."

"You got rooked," Sims told me.

I watched the Dodger shortstop field a grounder and make a wide throw to first.

Classic said, "The guy spent many years tracing the thing. He probably spent more money in phone calls, postage and travel miles, I'm exaggerating, than Nick paid for the baseball."

Sims had a derisive smile, a fleer, and it grew meaner by the second.

"Whole thing's phony," he told me, "If that was the authentic ball, how could you afford to buy it?"

"I will count the ways," Classic said. "First, the dealer wasn't able to provide absolute final documentation. That cut the price. Second, this was before the market boom in memorabilia and the auctions at Sotheby's and the four hundred thousand dollars that somebody paid for an itty-bitty baseball card."

"I don't know," Sims said.

"I don't know either," I said.

Parish finally got her wine. She looked at me and said, "How much did you pay?"

"My shame is deep enough. Let's not examine the details."

"What shame?"

"Well, I didn't buy the object for the glory and drama attached to it. It's not about Thomson hitting the homer. It's about Branca making the pitch. It's all about losing."

"Bad luck," Classic said, spearing a potato on my plate.

"It's about the mystery of bad luck, the mystery of loss. I don't know. I keep saying I don't know and I don't. But it's the only thing in my life that I absolutely had to own."

"A shameful secret?" Parish said.

"Yes. First to spend serious money on a souvenir baseball. Then to buy it for the reason I bought it. To commemorate failure. To have that moment in my hand when Branca turned and watched the ball go into the stands-from him to me."

Everyone laughed but Sims.

Classic said, "Even his name. Somber Ralph Branca. Like a figure out of an old epic. Somber plodding Ralph slain in something something dusk."

"Dark-arrowed," said the woman.

"Very good. Except it's not a joke of course. What's it like to have to live with one awful moment?"

"A moment in a game," she said.

"Forever plodding across the outfield grass on your way to the clubhouse."

Sims was getting mad at us.

"I don't think you fellows see the point," The way he said fellows. "What loss? What failure are we talking about? Didn't they all go home happy in the end? I mean Branca-Branca's got the number thirteen on his license plate. He wants us to know he was the guy. Branca and Thomson appear at sports dinners all the time. They sing songs and tell jokes. They're the longest-running act in show business. You fellows miss the point." Making us sound like scrubbed boys in preppy jackets. "Branca's a hero. I mean Branca was given every chance to survive this game and we all know why."

A little pall fell across the table.

"Because he's white," Sims said. "Because the whole thing is white. Because you can survive and endure and prosper if they let you. But you have to be white before they let you."

Classic shifted in his chair.

Sims told the story of a pitcher named Donnie Moore who gave up a crucial home run in a play-off game and ended up shooting his wife. Donnie Moore was black and the player who hit the home run was black. And then he shot and killed himself. He shot his wife several times, nonfatally, and then shot himself. He took a dirt nap in his own laundry room, Sims said. Sims told this story to the Englishwoman but it was completely new to me and I could tell that Classic barely remembered. I'd never heard of Donnie Moore and missed the home run and didn't know about the shootings. Sims said the shootings came a few years after the home run but were directly traceable. Donnie Moore was not allowed to outlive his failure. The fans gave him every grief and there weren't any skits at the baseball dinners,

Sims knew a lot about the shootings. He described the shooting of the wife in some detail.

Parish shut her eyes to see it better.

"We hear what you're saying," Classic said. "But you can't compare the two events on the basis of color."

"What else is there?"

"The Thomson homer continues to live because it happened decades ago when things were not replayed and worn out and run down and used up before midnight of the first day. The scratchier an old film or an old audiotape, the clearer the action in a way. Because it's not in competition for our attention with a thousand other pieces of action. Because it's something that's preserved and unique. Donnie Moore-well I'm sorry but how do we distinguish Donnie Moore from all the other ball games and all the other shootings?"

"The point is not what we notice or what we remember but what happened," Sims said, "to the parties involved. We're talking about who lived and who died."

"But not why," Classic said. "Because if we analyze the reasons honestly and thoroughly instead of shallow and facile and what else?"

"Unhistorical," I said.

"Then we realize there were probably a dozen reasons why the guy started shooting and most of them we'll never know or understand."

Sims called us fellows again. I switched sides several times and we ordered another round of drinks and went at it some more. We were not talking to Jane Parish now. We didn't notice her reactions or encourage her interest. Sims called us fellows many times and then he called us chaps. It began to get a little funny. We ordered coffee and watched the game and Parish sat in a thoughtful knot, arms and legs crossed, body twisted toward the window, yielding to the power of our differences.

"Buying and selling baseballs. What heartache. And you never told me," Sims said.

"It was some time ago."

"I would have talked you out of it."

"So you could buy it yourself," Classic said.

"I deal in other kinds of waste. The real stuff of the world. Give me disposable diapers by the ton. Not this melancholy junk from yesteryear."

"I don't know," I said again.

"What do you do, take the ball out of the closet and look at it? Then what?"

"He thinks about what it means," Classic said. "It's an object with a history. He thinks about losing. He wonders what it is that brings bad luck to one person and the sweetest of good fortune to another. It's a lovely thing in itself besides. An old baseball? It's a lovely thing, Sims. And this one's got a pedigree like no other."

"He got taken big-time," Sims said. "He's holding a worthless object."

We paid the bill and started filing out. Sims pointed to a photograph over the bar, one of dozens of sporting shots. It was a recent photo of a couple of gray-haired ex-players, Thomson and Branca, dark-suited and looking fit, standing on the White House lawn with President Bush between them, holding an aluminum bat.

We went out and sat in the company box for ten minutes so Classic could hear the crowd noise. Then we walked down the ramp and headed for the parking area. Parish had some questions about the infield fly rule. Sims and Classic were able to get together on this by the time we got out to the car. It was an unexpected boon for the BBC.

I sat in back and looked at the city flowing past and I thought of Sims the kid running down a street in St. Louis. He's wearing dungarees with the lower legs rolled into bunchy cuffs that are paler than the dark denim twill of the outer cloth. He's waving his arms and shouting that he's Bobby Thomson.