Tyrus by Patrick Creevy

Author:Patrick Creevy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2011-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

MOVED FROM CENTER

With every breath he breathed, as the team’s train clanked in over Chicago’s far-spread steel delta of docking rails, he took in the stink of the city’s hog and beef slaughter. This whole place was gone thirty-five years ago, he thought, as he looked out, running his eyes over the city’s smokestacks, seeing buildings taller than he’d ever seen anywhere else, breathing in that stockyard stench. All of it, burned to the ground. Ashes to ashes. But their fire was not like Atlanta’s. No one to blame for the conflagration here except God. Makes things a helluva lot easier (the mind being naturally too loyal and pious to complain long against the Lord); and he was certain that these Yankees here, in their sweet ignorance of real devastation, got past their losses the day they got new roofs over their heads. And again he confessed an envy, at the very least for their freedom from the weight of resentment. He could smell some big money too in that shambles-reek. And see the energy of these nothing-very-dark-to-recall ignoramuses in those buildings taller than New York’s and these endless docking rails, which the train now moved through even more slowly. A huge bloody sledgehammer and reeking butcher knife. That’s how he thought of this place. But he had to admit he liked the muscle, and even the stench in the air.

He had some fine Chicago adventures, too, in the first game with the Sox. They’d seen him bunt before and were afraid as hell of his bunting skill (so thank you, Papa Leidy) and of his speed (thank only God and the Chitwood half of his blood). So they played him in very close. And he set up for a bunt, all right, and went into his bunt action, to draw them even farther in—but then stepped back and took his bat fully back and slashed a murderous shot right past third and into the corner for an easy two, which turned into three after a speed-forced bungle in left!

And in the sixth, after singling, he danced off first well beyond the normal tether—but always sprang back too fast for them to get him, for all their furious efforts (which, as the world’s number-one believer in the significance of small measures, he attempted to frustrate just that much more by foottapping first base toward second every time he returned to the bag: the base posts allowed just an inch, but if one cared and knew, he took it). And he wouldn’t fall for Schalkey’s snap throws from the plate, of which there were three (expressive indeed of the man’s violent, frustrated animosity; and a very sweet stimulus to the base runner, who remembered this catcher’s mouth and who prayed hard for an overthrow). And he got a very sizeable jump on a 2-0 pitch to O‘Leary (not fearing with that count any sneaky little pitchouts, which he’d noticed previously that Schalkey telegraphed with a slightly farther spread-out right foot, one he’d named the quarter-duck).

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