The Pacific and Other Stories by Mark Helprin

Author:Mark Helprin [Helprin, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101644331
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2005-06-27T16:00:00+00:00

THE WHITE SOX were a repulsive bunch of taciturn midgets whose throwing arms seemed attached to stolid blocks of steel. Whereas most pitchers were like supple human fly rods, the White Sox were like trench mortars or doughnut machines. They never looked anyone in the eye, they had flat heads, and although they did everything to win, as long as they belched forward like steam shovels they really didn’t care if they won or lost, which was lucky for them, because, after Roger took to the field and single-handedly prevented a single ball from touching the grass, they had to decharter their airplane and go home on a bus. The final score for this, Roger’s second game, had been Chicago nothing, Yankees 147.

The Yankees were regretful but too stunned by the whole situation not to accept that Roger would play only three more games. Sure to lose him, they yearned to know how he did it, so Stengel gingerly asked him if he would hold a clinic for the rest of the team.

“A clinic?” Roger asked.

“A baseball clinic,” Stengel said. “You know, teach them how to hit, how to field, how to run. You’re only going to play three more games, and we thought, well, it’d be great if you could leave behind some of what you brought. We’re doing okay now—I mean, look at the score against Chicago—but you never know. The way we were going this year, before you came. … We could lose it.” He laughed nervously, not daring to bring up money, which he knew Roger would refuse.

“I don’t know from baseball,” said Roger, “not a thing.”

Stengel bowed his head. “Really,” he said, in awe.

“No.”

“Then how did you … how did you. …”

“That?” Roger asked.

“Yes, Roger,” Stengel said politely, “that.”

“I could tell them what I do know.”

Stengel looked at Roger, who was illuminated in fading reddish-brown light. He was less than half Stengel’s size. He didn’t know the rules of baseball, much less the subtleties. By rights and the laws of physics he should not have been able, even had he connected with the ball, to have hit it beyond the diamond. A child of his size and underdevelopment would not be able to throw the ball from home to second, much less leap twenty feet in the air (as he had done in the White Sox game) and then get the ball off on a flat trajectory to burn into the catcher’s mitt at home plate before the thrower was back on the ground. “Yes,” said Stengel, “tell us what you do know.”

“Okay,” said Roger, “but I’m telling you, I don’t know anything.”

That was not quite true. He had begun to think about the game. For example, he liked very much that the ball was an object descending from heaven, and he thought of it, therefore, not as an object to be captured for the glory of the captor but as a gracious gift that brought with it in train a bit of the loveliness of the sky.

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