Underworld

neighborhood. I died inside when they lost. And it was important to die alone. Other people interfered. I had to listen alone. And then the radio told me whether I would live or die.'

It isn't easy to be smart about baseball if you didn't grow up with the game but Farish asked decent enough questions. It was the answers that came hard. We must have resembled three mathematicians so lost in their highly refined work that they haven't noticed how quaint and opaque the terminology is, how double-meaning'd. We argued the language and tried to unravel it for the outsider.

'Does anyone want wine?' Farish said. 'I wouldn't mind trying a local white.'

'Wine is a copout,' Sims told her. 'We clean toilets for a living.'

Classic pointed out that an inning was an inning if we were speaking from the viewpoint of a pitcher getting three outs but it was only half an inning in the broader scheme of a nine-inning game with top halves and home halves. And the same half inning is also two-thirds of an inning if the pitcher is lifted with one out remaining.

I asked the waiter to get a glass of wine for our guest. Classic returned to the paradox of the innings but Big Sims waved him off.

'Let's go back to the Dodgers,' he said. 'We left the kid on the roof with his radio.'

'Let's not,' I said.

'You have to tell Jane what ended your career as a die-hard rooter.'

'I don't remember.'

'Killed you so dead you never went back.'

'These are local afflictions. They don't travel.'

'Tell her,' Sims said, 'about the Bobby Thomson homer.'

Parish looked politely hopeful. She wanted someone to tell her something that made sense. So Sims told her about Thomson and Branca and how people still said to each other, more than forty years later, Where were you when Thomson hit the homer? He told her how some of us had stopped the moment and kept it faithfully shaped and how Sims himself had gone running in the streets, a black kid who didn't even root for the Giants-heard the game on good old KMOX and ran out of the house shouting, I'm Bobby Thomson, I'm Bobby Thomson. And he told Parish how people claimed to have been present at the game who were not and how some of them honestly insisted they were there because the event had sufficient seeping power to make them think they had to be at the Polo Grounds that day or else how did they feel the thing so strongly in their skin.

'You're not saying like Kennedy. Where were you when Kennedy was shot?'

Classic said, 'When JFK was shot, people went inside. We watched TV in dark rooms and talked on the phone with friends and relatives. We were all separate and alone. But when Thomson hit the homer, people rushed outside. People wanted to be together. Maybe it was the last time people spontaneously went out of their houses for something. Some wonder, some amazement. Like a footnote to the end of the war. I don't know.'

'I don't know either,' Sims said.

Parish looked at me.

'Don't look at me,' I said.

'But you were on the roof, were you, when the blow was struck?'

'I didn't have to rush outside. I was already outside. I rushed inside. I closed the door and died.'

'You were anticipating Kennedy,' Parish said, and got a little laugh.

'The next day I think it was I began to see all sorts of signs pointing to the number thirteen. Bad luck everywhere. I became a budding numerologist. I got pencil and paper and wrote down all the occult connections that seemed to lead to thirteen. I wish I could remember them. I remember one. It was the date of the game. October third or ten-three. Add the month and day and you get thirteen.'

'And Branca's number,' Sims said.

'Of course. Branca wore thirteen.'

'They called it the Shot Heard Round the World,' Sims told Parish.

'A little bit of American bluster?'

'But what the hell,' Sims said.

Classic was looking at me in a strange way, almost tenderly, the way someone regards a friend who is too dumb to know he is about to be exposed.

'Tell them about the baseball,' Classic said.

He reached across the table and took some food from Sims' plate.

Classic was supposed to be my pal. I'd known Sims and Classic a long time and Classic, freckled free-style Brian, a man of shambling charm, was the guy I talked to when I talked about something. I talked to Big Sims but maybe I talked to Classic more readily because he did not challenge me with his own experience, he did not narrow his eyes as Sims did and fix me in his gaze.

'Let's change the subject,' I told him.

'No. I want you to speak about this. You owe it to Sims. It's a crime that Sims does not know this. He's the only one here who still loves the game.' Classic turned to the Englishwoman. 'I go to ball games when I go at all for the sake of keeping up. It's a fall from grace if you don't keep up. Nick has fallen from grace. Only Sims is completely, miserably in touch. We had the real Dodgers and Giants. Now we have the holograms.'

Parish said, 'What baseball?'

Sims was looking at me. He was finished with his food and was untubing a panatela, a simple exercise that he surrounded with detailed ceremony.

Classic gave me a final melting look and turned to Sims.

'Nick owns the baseball. The Bobby Thomson home-run ball. The actual object.'

Sims took his time lighting the cigar.

'Nobody owns the ball.'

'Somebody has to own it.'

'The ball is unaccounted for,' Sims said. 'It got thrown away decades ago. Otherwise we'd know it.'

'Simeon, listen before you make pronouncements. First,' Classic said, 'I found a dealer on a trip I took back east some years ago. This guy convinced me that the baseball in his possession, the ball he claimed was the Thomson home run, was in fact the authentic ball.'

'Nobody has the ball,' Sims said. 'The ball never turned up. Whoever once had the ball, it never surfaced. This is part of the whole- what? The mythology of the game. Nobody ever showed up and made a verifiable claim to this is the ball. Or a dozen people showed up, each with a ball, which amounts to the same thing.'

'Second, the dealer told me how he'd traced the baseball almost all the way back to October third, nineteen fifty-one. This is not some fellow who turns up at baseball shows looking for bargains. This is pathological obsession. A completely committed guy. And he convinced me to a probability of ninety-nine and nine-tenths percent that this is the baseball. And then he convinced Nick. And Nick asked how much. And they worked out a deal.'

'You got rooked,' Sims told me.

I watched the Dodger shortstop field a grounder and make a wide throw to first.

Classic said, 'The guy spent many years tracing the thing. He probably spent more money in phone calls, postage and travel miles, I'm exaggerating, than Nick paid for the baseball.'

Sims had a derisive smile, a fleer, and it grew meaner by the second.

'Whole thing's phony,' he told me, 'If that was the authentic ball, how could you afford to buy it?'

'I will count the ways,' Classic said. 'First, the dealer wasn't able to provide absolute final documentation. That cut the price. Second, this was before the market boom in memorabilia and the auctions at Sotheby's and the four hundred thousand dollars that somebody paid for an itty-bitty baseball card.'

'I don't know,' Sims said.

'I don't know either,' I said.

Parish finally got her wine. She looked at me and said, 'How much did you pay?'

'My shame is deep enough. Let's not examine the details.'

'What shame?'

'Well, I didn't buy the object for the glory and drama attached to it. It's not about Thomson hitting the homer. It's about Branca making the pitch. It's all about losing.'