The Legend of Mickey Tussler (4 page)

“Aw, whatcha worried about now, Molly?” Clarence chided. “What'yre saying, woman? That my boy's some kind of retard? Leave him be. Ya hear? He'll be fine. Just fine. He's just a littler slower than the other kids. He'll catch up.”

Clarence was so sure. But she knew better. A mother always knows.

Mickey was four years old when Molly's suspicions were confirmed. She was in the kitchen, pouring beeswax into candle molds while Mickey and Tommy Myers played quietly on the carpet in the other room. Heat was pouring out of the woodburning stove. The warm air washed across the tiny window above the sink and collided with the biting January wind from the other side, forming beads of condensation that caught the light being thrown from a pair of candles on the table. She ran her open palm across her forehead, then wiped the moisture on the front of her apron. She peeled off her sweater and stepped away from the candles in search of some cooler air. She smiled when she saw Tommy. He had dumped Mickey's crate of wood blocks and was sitting in the middle of the floor building a house of some sort and talking feverishly about the imaginary people who lived there. The gleam in the child's eye juxtaposed with Mickey's wooden countenance alarmed her. It had never been so clear to her as at that moment. Something was wrong. Mickey was still, except for his usual rocking back and forth. He was staring blankly at the pile of blocks yet to be used, all the while repeating the word
barn
over and over. Tears formed in her eyes as she yielded to the power of this recognition.

As the years unfurled, Clarence was forced to recognize the grim reality of life with a child who, by his estimation, was not “square.” Mickey learned to talk and was fairly quick with numbers and computations. He could also memorize certain things, such as Molly's favorite poem—the one she would recite to him when he was a child and would get upset. It's the only thing that calmed him down. He was always affectionate with Molly. But certain things he could not do. Things that a farm boy was expected to do. The horrible scenes still haunted her.

“Listen, boy, you and me are gonna fix that there fence out front. Grab that hammer and follow me.”

“Clarence,” Molly protested. “He's only eleven years old. He can't do that. Leave him be.”

Her protectiveness burdened Clarence to irritation. “Now, what did we say about sticking your nose where it don't belong, woman. Hush up. He's fine. Time he started acting like a real boy. Now I don't want to hear nothing more about it or you'll feel me.”

The narrow gravel path stretched away slowly to a chain of irregular tufts of dry earth dotted here and there with patches of crabgrass and dandelions, on which a series of crooked slats of threadbare wood rested precariously. Molly watched from the window through tearful eyes as the man and the boy schlepped a metal box of tools down the path, with Clarence barking at Mickey the entire way.

She didn't want to look anymore. She just couldn't. Whenever she felt this way, her chest hurt. Tightened up as if someone had wrapped a rope around her ribs and were pulling at both ends. She had to busy herself, the same way she always did whenever the dreadful reality of her existence enveloped her this way.

She placed her hand on the closet doorknob, turned it, and reached inside. She pulled out a broom and swept feverishly, raising a tiny cloud of dust. After that, she scrubbed the countertops and washed and rewashed every plate and glass she could pull from the cabinets. As she worked, her thoughts wandered to a better time—a time when she was young, and life was effortless. She drifted past weathered red barns, sleepy cornfields, and wide, clovered pastures filled with grazing cows. She saw rustic farmhouses with wraparound porches and flower boxes bursting with brilliant reds and yellows. She heard children, herself included, playing ring-a-levio on a lush green lawn that stretched out endlessly like a thick, beautiful blanket. She also heard the clink of horseshoes and the gentle drone of a crop duster scraping the sky. She smelled honeysuckle and wisteria, and all of a sudden she could taste the wood reed in her clarinet. It was all there. So vivid. So real. Harlequin images of life in its purest form. But the life depicted wasn't her life. Not anymore. The emptiness mastered her. She sat down for a moment, let her head fall limp into her open palms, and just wept.

The discordant song of crickets and katydids clashed on the cool breath of early evening. Darkness was pulling the sun down beyond the distant treetops. She had all but arrested the unavailing flight of her heartbreak when suddenly there broke from the somber silence the most horrible cry she had ever heard. It began softly, but soon swelled, louder and louder, escalating into a plaintive wail of pain and fear and anger all mixed together in this one dreadful shriek. She rushed to the window. Peering out, she was aghast at what she saw. It was Mickey. He was on his knees, chin pressed tightly to his chest, eyes closed and hands firmly placed over his ears. He was rocking back and forth and screaming. Clarence was standing over him ominously, wielding a freshly cut two-by-four while firing spontaneous invectives at the child before finally breaking a piece of wood over the boy's back.

“You lousy, good-fer-nothing moron! Get your ass up off the ground. I'll learn ya to hammer nails like a sissy.”

The boy continued to scream. His father's voice was a dull, roaring sound crashing in his ears. His stomach tightened and his chest heaved. Then he lost control of his bladder and wet himself. It infuriated Clarence even more.

He fired another two-by-four across the yard and looked skyward in exasperation. “What the hell did I do to deserve this horseshit!” he thundered. “Jesus Christ!” With his hands on his hips, he turned to face the other direction. His eye followed the gravel path back to the farmhouse, where it caught Molly in the window, cowering behind a thin blue-and-white curtain, drying her eyes with a damp handkerchief.

Murph introduced Mickey to the team on a day when faces were long and expectations at an all-time low. They were mired in a thirteen-game skid, and their descent in the standings had been well publicized in all the newspapers. It had them all on edge. “Listen up, fellas,” Murph announced. “I want you all to meet Mickey. Mickey here is gonna be doing some pitching for us.”

George “Lefty” Rogers, the team's star hurler and only southpaw on the staff, was the first to fix his narrow eyes on Mickey. Lefty was a tall, lanky fireballer himself who had, up until now, seemed destined for the majors. He'd led the league in each of the last two seasons in both wins and strikeouts. Most said only his surliness had kept him from the big show for this long. But there was a dearth of good pitching throughout the league. Another good year in the minors and it would be hard for some struggling team not to pick him up. A recent injury to his left elbow, however, had taken some velocity off his fastball and rattled his confidence. His recent decline was, as all the papers reported, a large part of what ailed the Brewers. Sitting at his locker, he had one eye on Mickey and the other locked on the equipment boy, Larry.

“I don't understand what happened today, Larry,” he lamented, his long fingers curled tightly around the seams of a pearl white baseball. “This is how I always hold my curveball. Don't this look right to you?”

The first thing they all noticed was Mickey's size. At six foot five, 250 pounds, he was easily the biggest guy on the team. They wondered how such a big kid could possess enough agility to throw a baseball. And all of them worried secretly about his ability to hit one. This was especially true of Woodrow Danvers.

Woody Danvers was the Brewers' hard-hitting third baseman. He wasn't particularly big himself, but he was barrel-chested and had bulging forearms and lightning-fast wrists. His long-ball prowess and boyish good looks made him a real crowd-pleaser. He was a pretty good teammate as well—supported all the other guys enthusiastically—provided everything was going well for him. A few hits would always launch him into a garrulous fit of dizzying proportions. He'd prattle on about baseball or their families or about the most insipid things, from the smell of his girl's new perfume to his nightly routine of brushing each tooth individually and then rinsing out his mouth with some sort of homemade antiseptic and a turkey baster. It was so bad sometimes that the guys found themselves making wild excuses just to get away. But on days when he wore the collar, had nothing to show for his four at bats, he'd walk right by you as if he didn't even know you. Murph always joked that when Woody was in a slump, he wouldn't give you a second thought even if your balls were on fire.

The hulking farm boy stood there, faintly rocking, his massive right hand attached to Murph's shoulder. He was scanning the room, and Arthur could hear the faint whisper of poetic words beneath the boy's breath. His eyes darted between the spirals of white towels draped over the edge of a yellow bin and the half-dressed guys sitting on the pine bench just in front.

“Hey, Murph,” Woody called. “We starting a football team or something?” Woody looked around for affirmation. He was pleased when a couple of the others chuckled.

“Don't you go getting your jockstrap all bunched up now, Danvers,” Murph shot back. “Mickey here is quite a pitcher, but God knows there's only room for one glamour boy on this team.” The biting comment elicited even more laughs from the guys.

The words
quite a pitcher
drew the full attention of Lefty, who abandoned his curveball grip to devote his full attention to Murph's announcement. He struggled for a moment against himself. He felt a slight throb of pain at the thought of his talent, once certain, now fleeting.

“Well, maybe he can pitch a little Murph. But, shit, can the boy talk?”

That got the rest of them buzzing. They had all observed Mickey's reticence and unusual mannerisms and wondered what Murph was trying to pull. Over the steady murmur echoing off the stone walls of the cavernous room could be heard more audible comments laced with exasperation, such as “Now they're sending us retards” and “Welcome to the fucking circus.” Some thought Murph could be a little out of touch sometimes, but he still possessed a good ear.

The same was true for Murph's bench coach, Farley Matheson. Matheson was a good twenty, maybe thirty years Murph's senior and had been in baseball forever, although no one actually knew how old he
really
was. There was a lot of talk that Matheson played with Honus Wagner and would have become a fixture at shortstop for the Pirates if Wagner had never come along. Some said he went further back than that—that he was the third person, the one nobody ever wrote about, there that day in Elihu Phinney's cow pasture in Cooperstown, along with Abner Doubleday, hitting a makeshift ball with a piece of wood and running around in circles like a banshee. He was barely five feet tall, a grizzled geezer with hunched shoulders, a thin, wrinkled neck, and watery eyes, a garrulous old coot who talked almost exclusively in metaphor and cliché. He was truly a caricature, like some almshouse flunky swimming in his baseball flannels.

“Pipe down now. All of you. You hear?” the cantankerous old man growled. “What the hell kind of question is that? Of course he can talk. You gotta trust your skipper. The chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Ya see? That's the problem with ballplayers today. It's gonna be fine, God willing and the creek don't rise. Just give the young colt a look-see.”

Lefty and most of the others sighed heavily and rolled their eyes.

“Farley's right, boys,” Murph added. “Mickey's down-right friendly once you get to know him.” Murph turned to his latest discovery, patted him on the back, and smiled. Mickey's face was pale and dotted with perspiration. “Say hello to the fellas, Mickey.”

The smell of sweat and musty lockers was strong in the boy's nose. His eyes were still roving, and he felt a little sick. His thoughts, wild and varied, were killing him. The enormity of the scene frightened him and stole his voice.

“Now, don't be bashful, son,” Murph cajoled. “It's just the fellas. They're okay, Mickey. Say hello.”

Mickey fidgeted a bit, licked his lips, and after great effort managed to pass a word. “Hello,” he said languidly. “Hello.”

Lefty guffawed and Woody and a few of the others joined in the ruckus. Aware of the derisive laughter, Mickey's face contorted and the rocking became more severe. Murph grew restless. He was just about to lambaste the entire bunch when the sound of a locker slamming split the commotion. That sound was followed by a voice, bold and vituperative.

“Shut your yaps. All of you. This is sickening. Giggling like a bunch of goddamned schoolgirls. That's what you all are. Your manager's trying to tell you something. And when your manager's trying to tell you something, you best listen.”

Raymond Miller. He was the Brewer catcher. Had been for years. He stood at just five foot nine but was built like a tank—or a boxcar—which is how he earned his nickname. Many a runner rounding third with visions of glory in his eye had his hopes, and most often his body, dashed at home plate by a collision with Boxcar. He had gotten the better of every runner who had ever tried to run him down—all except Peter Barker of the Saratoga Generals, who took out Miller's legs illegally one afternoon when he rolled across the catcher's knees, even though the ball was still in the outfield and Boxcar was standing off to the side of the plate. His left knee popped and he lay there, grimacing, as the hope of making it to the next level slipped away.

His long, sandy hair and toothy smile belied the ferocity of his competitive fire. He was the most gregarious guy you could ever meet. And he could get you laughing so hard your sides would almost split. But everyone in the league knew the other side of him. And despite his affability, and the bum knee, everyone in the league feared him as well.