Bang The Drum Slowly (3 page)

Moving south he noticed cows out of doors. “We are moving south all right,” he said, “because they keep their cows out of doors down here.” He knew what kind they were, milk or meat, and what was probably planted in the fields, corn or wheat or what, and if birds were winter birds or the first birds of spring coming home. He knew we were south by the way they done chicken. “We ain’t real south,” he said, “but we are getting there. I can taste it.”

He did not talk about it. It was OK with me either way. I was getting so I could talk about it or not by now, for the first shock wore off. It was his business and up to him to say the word, which a number of times he was just about set to do, opening his mouth and looking for the words but then not saying them, maybe shoving in a chew instead. He chews this Days O Work. Mostly he watched the country go by, now and then rolling down the window and spitting out and rolling it up again, maybe pointing at something, saying “Look there,” and I looked and said “Well!” or “What do you know about that!” without really knowing what he was pointing at. When he drove he drove slow, slouched down a little, only his one middle finger hooked around the wheel, maybe studying the car ahead for a long time and then suddenly taking a notion to pass, and swinging out no matter what was coming, and sometimes if the passing looked tight he would stop his chewing, and when I seen him stop I closed my eyes a little and waited for the big noise in case that was what was in store. He had no science, then nor ever, but drives like he plays ball, on hunches, which in some ballplayers pays big dividends because some ballplayers are natural and their hunches usually never go wrong. But Bruce is not a natural.

We drove maybe 24 hours at a stretch, never calling a halt for sleep until he said so, doing whatever he said because I figured that was up to him, too. I had more time, and it did not seem fair to stop and sleep until he wished to, even as tired as I sometimes got, and then he would say, “Leave us hunker down,” saying right afterwards, “I am sorry, Arthur,” because I never could stand him saying “Hunker down.” Yet it did not seem to make much difference if he said “Hunker down” or not any more, and I said, “Go ahead and speak any way that suits you because to tell you the truth probably a lot of things I say ain’t the King’s English neither.”

I called Holly the first night out from a little town in Iowa name of South Cedar Rocks, Iowa, where there was only one telephone. The girl put the call through and then got up from her chair so I could sit. Usually I call Holly every night, person to person, asking for some phony party like Mr. Frank Furter or Mr. U. R. Madd or Mr. M. Y. Love, and she says he is out in the ice-house and cannot be bothered or sprained his leg climbing the wall or down in Perkinsville buying striped paint, and that way she gets to hear my voice, and me hers, and no cost to anybody except the company. When things went sour on me around in June of 53, when every time I worked I lost if it didn’t rain, the club got wind of these calls and brung her down and set us up in the apartment on 66 Street downstairs from the whorehouse, thinking I was worried about her, which I was not. All that was wrong with me was the club wasn’t hitting, and soon she went back home and I went back in the hotel with Bruce. I could not tell her what was up. I meant to, but the telephone girl was standing there with her ears a mile wide and all I said was I was going home with Bruce and would fill her in later. “OK, Henry,” she said, “if that is what you must do it is what you must do. I have faith in you,” which made me think of the airplane stewardess, and I lifted up one foot and kicked myself, which set the telephone girl off in a fit of giggles.

“What word from 600 Dollars?” I said.

“No sign of life as yet,” she said.

Driving along I couldn’t think why in hell I didn’t tell her, nor why I shouldn’t, and I kept writing these letters in my head, breaking it gentle, and then tearing them up and finally calling her when we hit St. Louis and busting right out with it, saying, “Holly, Bruce has got a fatal disease.”

She always liked him. She always said, “Add up the number of things about him that you hate and despise, and what is left? Bruce is left,” and she did not scream nor faint, though why I should of thought she would I do not know because she never done so in my life. All she said was “Oh?” and I said, “Are you there?” and she said, “Yes, I am only pulling up a chair and collecting my thoughts.”

“Well, sit on your thoughts awhile,” I said, trying to be funny and take the sting out of it a little. Actually you get over it fairly quick. You might not think so, but it is true. You are driving along with a man told he is dying, and yet everything is going on, the gas gage getting lower, the speedometer registering, cows nibbling in the field, birds singing, chickens crossing the road, clouds moving across the sky, and the sun coming up and going down. It is still 27 miles to this place and 31 miles to that, and you keep getting hungry and you keep getting tired, and then you eat and then you sleep, and everything begins all over again. You cannot go on staggering from the first blow of it. You take it full, but you come back in.

“How can you be in a joking mood?” she said.

“Bruce been cheering me up,” said I.

“Where is he?”

“Right now,” said I, “he is just outside the booth playing the pinball machine.”

“How unfair is life,” she said.

“Yes,” I said. What else could I say? It was true. One chap will get knifed whatever way he turns while others they keep falling down on dollar bills, and she said call her tomorrow, which I done for about 3 days running until she could get it out of her, and by the third day she was joking a little herself, back off the floor. It happened that way to everybody.

Still in St. Louis I called Dutch, meaning to tell him because I thought he should know for the sake of the club and lay his plans according. I couldn’t find his number in the book and the information wouldn’t give it out, so I called “The Globe.” They said how in hell did they know I was who I said I was. They asked me what was the name of Red Traphagen’s wife, and who signed my paycheck, and what hotel did St. Louis stay at when St. Louis was in New York, and I told them, and they give me Dutch’s number, and then after all that waltzing I did not have the nerve to tell him. He does not like bad news and does not like the person that breaks it. I pity his letter carrier and his tax man. He likes things to go smooth, no headaches, and hates the man that ruffles up the smoothness of it, never forgetting nor forgiving but only keeping his hate in his head. He remembers raw calls an umpire made 20 years before, and he hates that man though he made 50,000 right calls since, hating everybody then because everybody some time or other crossed him, players, coaches, writers, the Moorses, all the world, admired by millions and loved by none, hated by his closest friends. If he wasn’t the greatest genius in baseball he would be out of a job, buying and selling when the moment is ripe, now gambling, now playing safe, always figuring, playing his own strength one day and the other fellow’s weakness the next, now juggling, now standing pat, always driving and never letting up, and almost never wrong. He has finished out of the money only 5 times in 24 years. When he dies they will need 5 men to hold him down while the other clamps the lid. “When I die,” he says, “the paper will write in their headline THE SON OF A BITCHES OF THE WORLD HAVE LOST THEIR LEADER, yet many a boy might shed a tear or 2 that I brung to fame and greatness.” When he answered he said “What!” and I jumped, and I could not speak, and he said “Whatwhat!” fast, like that, like a gun, like those rapid repeaters we used to shoot off on the Fourth, and I said, “Howdy there, Dutch. This is Henry.”

“Where the hell are you?” he said, and I quick held the receiver off a ways and said, “Up home. Can you hear me?”

“How is the insurance racket?” he said.

“Fine,” said I. “I am tip-top and will have a great year.”

“Do not squawk to me about it,” he said. “Call the office. You had a bad year, Author. Have a good year and they will make it back to you in 56.”

“I am not squawking,” I said. “It did not even come yet.”

“You are squawking in advance,” he said.

“No,” I said, “I am only calling to wish you a Happy New Year. Money is nothing to me,” and I told him how we come out in court against the United States Bureau of Internal Revenue, and he got quite a laugh out of that.

But he stopped laughing. “There is something very fishy here,” he said. “I can not imagine you running up a big phone bill gassing over nothing.”

“Well, I will see you in Aqua Clara,” said I. “How is the weather out there?” It was clear and warm, not a cloud in the sky.

“Miserable,” he said. “Just miserable.”

*   *   *

We crossed the river at St. Louis and went down the other side, down through the bottom of Illinois and chipped off a corner of Kentucky and Tennessee. We seen kids playing ball in a field down around a town name of Opelika, Alabama, because I remember we stopped there and got the car greased and walked around some and stood watching these kids whacking a ball around with the cover coming loose. “The first field I ever played baseball in,” Bruce said, “was in a field of peanut hay.”

He said nothing more. He never tells you anything much in a bunch, only a little now and a little later until over the long pull you will find out a lot that he will never tell in one day or one week. He will just leave things eat. Coming across the bridge out of St. Louis he said, “Yes, it is best to say nothing to Dutch,” and I said yes it was, and then maybe down around Murphysboro, Illinois, he said, “Dutch would can me for sure,” until along around Paducah, Kentucky, he said, “I would hate being canned if he did.” Then he did not say another word about it until the other side of the Tennessee line, and then he said, “I always give him my best,” which was true. Dutch never asked much of Bruce, and what Bruce give him was not always perfect, but it was his best. “Dutch knows I always give him my best,” he said, and then he said it 2 or 3 more times, fixing it in his mind, saying it the last time like he was more sure of it than ever, and dropping it cold and thinking new ideas.

We were a pretty good ways out of Opelika, not far from the Georgia line, and he said, “It was my grand-daddy’s.”

“What was?” I said.

“The field.”

“The peanut hay?”

“Yes it was,” he said, and then 10 miles later said, “It was warm on your feet,” and little by little he told it, the smell of it when it was wet in the morning, and the smell of it when it dried, how it stuck to your feet wet and then crumbed off, and how a baseball picked up the color of the field until soon you could not hardly see the ball against the ground, and you took it and taped it in white tape until the tape, too, was the color of the field, and you taped it again, and then maybe again until the ball was too big and you all got a hold of nickels and dimes that you hid in the mill and went over to Bainbridge, 6 or 8 of you because you never trusted any one kid with the money and bought a new white baseball and tried for a long time to keep it off the ground. He remembered the names of the kids, this one now doing this, and that one that, one dead in the war, one the father of triplets, except here and there a name slipped his mind and he doubled up his fists against his cheeks and leaned forward and closed his eyes, saying, “I can see that goddam kid as clear as day.”

“Probably some morning when you wake up his name will be right there on your tongue,” I said.

“Or it might be too late,” he said.

“That is true,” I said. “It might. We will all of us die with things never remembered.”

“His hair was parted in the middle,” he said. “I will ask my old lady, for she never forgets a name.”

Soon we hit the line. I kept watching for it on the speedometer, and then when we hit it it was not much, just a little wormy sign that might of said “Apples For Sale” or “No Fishing” but instead said “Entering Georgia” that probably been stuck in the ground years and years before and left to rot, half hid by the bushes by the side of the road like nobody was particularly proud of this part of Georgia and just as soon you thought you were still in Alabama. Bruce never seen it, but he knew. He knew the whole country around in there, the names of all the little rivers we crossed and the names of all the railroads. Every train we seen he knew if it hit Bainbridge, and if it did what time. To him Georgia is a special place, different than all the others, and Bainbridge a special town, and Mill more special yet. Me, I believe one place is like the next. I been in 43 states and 4 countries, Mexico, Canada, Japan, and Cuba.

BRUCE PEARSON was born on June 4, 1926, in Bainbridge, Georgia. He has one sister, Helen, now of Seattle, Washington, and either one other brother or one other sister, I forget, that died when but a child. I never met Helen.

His father farmed on a farm about 300 yards up the road. I seen the farm and also seen where their house was, the well still there and the crapper out back, but the house moved down now, same house, different spot, that Southern States U dug up from its roots and hoisted on a flat-top truck, the farm rented out now to a colored man name of Leandro, Gem’s brother or brother-in-law. I do not know. Gem is their hired girl. Leandro also barbers on the side, cutting colored hair, or maybe barbers first and farms on the side. I do not know that neither. The number of things I do not remember or maybe never knew or am only in the foggiest haze about is quite amazing.