Gus tore up the check and wrote another. Seeing how she felt about it, Roy took Memo’s, figuring he would return it in the form of some present or other.
Gus handed him a check for the twenty-one hundred. “Chicken feed,” he said.
Roy gave the paper a loud smack with his lips. “I love it.”
Gus dropped his guard and pinned his restless eye on Roy. “Say the word, slugger, and you can make yourself a nice pile of dough quick.”
Roy wasn’t sure he had heard right. Gus repeated the offer. This time Roy was sure. “Say it again and I will spit in your good eye.”
Gus’s grayish complexion turned blue.
“Boys,” Memo said uneasily.
Gus stalked into the bathroom.
Memo’s face was pale. “Help me with the sandwiches, Roy.”
“Did you hear what that bastard said to me?”
“Sometimes he talks through his hat.”
“Why do you invite him here?”
She turned away. “He invited himself.”
As she was slicing meat for the sandwiches Roy felt tender toward her. He slipped his arm around her waist. She looked up a little unhappily but when he kissed her she kissed back. They broke apart as Gus unlocked the bathroom door and came out glaring at them.
While they were all drinking coffee Roy was in good spirits and no longer minded that Gus was around. Memo kidded him about the way he wolfed the sandwiches, but she showed her affection by also serving him half a cold chicken which he picked to the bone. He demolished a large slab of chocolate cake and made a mental note for a hamburger or two before he went to bed. Though Gus had only had a cup of coffee he was thoughtfully picking his teeth. After a while he looked at his gold watch, buttoned his vest, and said he was going. Roy glanced at Memo but she yawned and said she had to get up very very early in the morning.
To everybody’s disgust the Reds, as if contemptuous of the bums who had so long lived in the basement below them, snapped the Knights’ streak at seventeen and the next day again beat them over a barrel. A great groan went up from the faithful. Stand back everybody, here they go again. Timber! As if by magic, attendance for a single game with the Phils sank to a handful. The Phils gave them another spanking. The press tipped their hats and turned their respectful attention to the Pirates, pointing out again how superb they were. It was beyond everybody how the half-baked Knights could ever hope to win the N.L. pennant. With twenty-one games left to play they were six behind the Pirates and four in back of the Phils. And to make matters worse, they’d fallen into a third-place tie with the Cards. Pop’s boys still retained a mathematical chance all right but they were at best a first-rate third- place team, one writer put it, and ended his piece, “Wait till next year.”
Pop held his suffering head. The players stole guilty looks at one another. Even the Great Man himself was in a rut, though not exactly a slump. Still, he was held by inferior pitching to three constipated singles in three days. Everyone on the team was conscious something drastic had to be done but none could say what. Time was after them with a bludgeon. Any game they lost was the last to lose. It was autunm almost. They saw leaves falling and shivered at the thought of the barren winds of winter.
The Pirates blew into town for their last games of the year with the Knights, a series of four. Thus far during the season they had trounced the Knights a fantastic 15-3 and despite the loss of their last three to the Knights (fool’s luck) were prepared to blast them out of their field. Watching the way the Pirates cut up the pea patch with their merciless hitting and precision fielding, the New Yorkers grew more dejected. Here was a team that was really a team, not a Rube Goldberg contraption. Every man jack was a fine player and no one guy outstanding. The Knights’ fans were embarrassed… Yet their boys managed to tease the first away from the Pirates. No one quite knew how, here a lucky bingle, there a lucky error. Opposite the first-place slickers they looked like hayseeds yet the harvest was theirs. But tomorrow was another day. Wait’ll the boys from the smoky city had got the stiffness of the train ride out of their legs. Yet the Knights won again in the same inept way. Their own rooters, seeping back into the stands, whistled and cheered. By some freak of nature they took the third too. The last game was sold out before 10 A.M. Again the cops had trouble with the ticketless hordes that descended on them.
Walt Wickitt, the peerless Pirate manager, pitched his ace hurler, Dutch Vogelman, in that last game. Vogelman was a terrific pitcher, a twenty-three game winner, the only specimen in either league that season. He was poison to the Knights who had beat him only once in the past two years. Facing Roy in some six games, he had held him to a single in four, and crippled him altogether in the last two, during Roy’s slump. Most everyone kissed this game goodbye, although Roy started with a homer his first time up. Schultz then gave up two runs to the Pirates. Roy hit another round tripper. Schultz made it three for the Pirates. Roy ended by slamming two more homers and that did it, 4–3. High and mighty to begin with, Vogelman looked like a drowned dog at the end, and the Pirates hurriedly packed their duffel bags and slunk out of the stadium. The Phils were now in first place by a game, the Pirates second, and the Knights were one behind them and coming up like a rocket. Again pennant fever raged through the city and there was cheering in the streets.
Now all that was left for the Knights in this nerve-racking race were four games in Brooklyn, including a Sunday double header, four with Boston and two more with the Reds, these at home. Then three away with the Phils, one of which was the playoff of the washed-out game in June when Roy had knocked the cover off the ball. Their schedule called for the wind-up in the last week of September, against the Reds in another three-game tilt at home, a soft finish, considering the fact that the Pirates and Phils had each other to contend with. If, God willing, the Knights made it (and were still functioning), the World Series was scheduled to begin on Tuesday, October first, at the Yankee Stadium, for the Yanks had already cinched the American League pennant.
The race went touch and go. To begin with the Knights dropped a squeaker (Roy went absolutely hitless) to the Dodgers as the Pirates won and the Phils lost — both now running neck and neck for first, the Knights two behind. Just as the boys were again despairing of themselves, Roy got after the ball again. He did not let on to anyone, but he had undergone a terrible day after his slaughter of the Pirates, a day of great physical weakness, a strange draining of strength from his arms and legs, followed by a splitting headache that whooshed in his ears. However, in the second game at Ebbets Field, he took hold of himself, gripped Wonderboy, and bashed the first pitch into the clock on the right field wall. The clock spattered minutes all over the place, and after that the Dodgers never knew what time it was. All they knew was that Roy Hobbs collected a phenomenal fourteen straight hits that shot them dead three times. Carried on by the momentum, the Knights ripped the Braves and brutally trounced the Reds, taking revenge on them for having ended their recent streak of seventeen.
With only six games to play, a triple first-place tie resulted. The Knights’ fans beat themselves delirious, and it became almost unbearable when the Phils lost a heartbreaker to the Cards and dropped into second place, leaving the Pirates and Knights in the tie. Before the Phils could recover, the Knights descended upon Shibe Park, followed by wild trainloads of fans who had to be there to see. They saw their loveboys take the crucial playoff (Roy was terrific), squeak through the second game (he had a poor day), and thoroughly wipe the stunned Phils off the map in the last (again stupendous). At this point of highest tension the Pirate mechanism burst. To the insane cheering of the population of the City of New York, the Cubs pounded them twice, and the Reds came in with a surprise haymaker. A pall of silence descended upon Pennsylvania. Then a roar rose in Manhattan and leaped across the country. When the shouting stopped the Knights were undeniably on top by three over the Pirates, the Phils third by one more, and therefore mathematically out of the race. With three last ones to play against the lowly Reds, the Knights looked
The ride home from Philadelphia usually took a little more than an hour but it was a bughouse nightmare because of the way the fans on the train pummeled the players. Hearing that a mob had gathered at Penn Station to welcome the team, Pop ordered everyone off at Newark and into cabs. But as they approached the tunnel they were greeted by a deafening roar as every craft in the Hudson, and all the way down the bay, opened up with whistles and foghorns…
In their locker room after the last game at Philly, some of the boys had started chucking wet towels around but Pop, who had privately wept tears of joy, put the squelch on that.
“Cut out all that danged foolishness when we still need one more to win,” he had sternly yelled.
