The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

The kid looks at Danny Doo, and The Doo flaps his hand at him. ‘Go on, get out of here, kid. You played a good game. Not your fault. You’re still lucky, and fuck anyone who says different.’ Then he says, ‘All of you get out of here. Gimme some breathing room.’

‘Hold off on that,’ I says. ‘Joe wants to see him alone. Give him a little one-to-one congratulations, I guess. Kid, don’t wait around. Just—’ Just scat was how I meant to finish, but I didn’t have to. Blakely or Katsanis, he was already gone.

You know what happened after that.

If the kid had gone straight down the hall to the umpire’s room, he would have gotten collared, because the locker room was on the way. Instead, he cut through our box room, where luggage was stored and where we also had a couple of massage tables and a whirlpool bath. We’ll never know for sure why he did that, but I think the kid knew something was wrong. Hell, he must have known the roof was going to fall in on him eventually; if he was crazy, it was like a fox. In any case, he came out on the far side of the locker room, walked down to the ump’s room, and knocked on the door. By then the rig he probably learned how to make in The Ottershaw Christian Home was back on his second finger. One of the older boys probably showed him how, that’s what I think. Kid, if you want to stop getting beaten up all the time, make yourself one of these.

He never put it back in his locker after all, just tucked it into his pocket. And he didn’t bother with the Band-Aid after the game, which tells me he knew he didn’t have anything to hide anymore.

He raps on the umpire’s door and says, ‘Urgent telegram for Mr Hi Wenders.’ Crazy like a fox, see? I don’t know what would have happened if one of the other umps on the crew had opened up, but it was Wenders himself, and I’m betting his life was over even before he realized it wasn’t a Western Union delivery boy standing there.

It was a razor blade, see? Or a piece of one. When it wasn’t needed, it stayed inside a little tin band like a kid’s pretend finger-ring. Only when he balled his right fist and pushed on the band with the ball of his thumb, that little sliver of blade slid out. Wenders opened the door and Katsanis swept it across his neck and cut his throat with it. When I saw the puddle of blood after he was taken away in handcuffs – oh my God, such a pool of it there was – all I could think of was those forty thousand people screaming KILL THE UMP the same way they’d been screaming Bloh-KADE. No one really means it, but the kid didn’t know that, either. Especially not after The Doo poured a lot of poison in his ears about how Wenders was out to get both of them.

When the cops ran out of the locker room, Billy Blockade was just standing there with blood all down the front of his white home uniform and Wenders laying at his feet. Nor did he try to fight or slash when the bluesuits grabbed him. No, he just stood there whispering to himself. ‘I got him, Doo. Billy got him. He won’t make no more bad calls now.’

That’s where the story ends, Mr King – the part of it I know, at least. As far as the Titans go, you could look it up, as ol’ Casey used to say: all those games canceled out, and all the double-headers we played to make them up. How we ended up with old Hubie Rattner squatting behind the plate after all, and how he batted .185 – well below what they now call the Mendoza Line. How Danny Dusen was diagnosed with something called ‘an intercranial bleed’ and had to sit out the rest of the season. How he tried to come back in 1958 – that was sad. Five outings. In three of them he couldn’t get the ball over the plate. In the other two … do you remember the last Red Sox–Yankees playoff game in 2004? How Kevin Brown started for the Yankees, and the Sox scored six goddam runs off him in the first two innings? That’s how Danny Doo pitched in ’58 when he actually managed to get the ball over the dish. He had nothing. And still, after all that, we managed to finish ahead of the Senators and the Athletics. Only Jersey Joe DiPunno had a heart attack during the World Series that year. Might have been the same day the Russians put the Sputnik up. They took him out of County Stadium on a stretcher. He lived another five years, but he was a shadow of his former self and of course he never managed again.

He said the kid sucked luck, and he was more right than he knew. Mr King, that kid was a black hole for luck.