Again I lowered the letter. How had Le Caron been sprung so fast? What the hell kind of network had I gotten myself tangled in? I prayed it didn’t extend this far.
Twain finished by congratulating me on pulling the whole thing off. He swore that for security purposes he planned not to touch any of his share “for years & years.”
In August he still intended to visit California. Meanwhile he was looking for a newspaper to buy controlling interest in. The first four hundred copies of Innocents Abroad were finally off the press. It was a handsome, big volume, he said, and he was mortally sick of the whole thing.
I will follow your progress in the National Game. (How could I not? The exalted feats of your red-hosed mates are trumpeted over the continent like’ installments of Homer’s epic!) Some day, when our venture is no longer fearsome & merely the stuff of old men’s lies, we’ll drink champagne and chuckle. Meanwhile, fasten all latches & burn this to powder!
It was signed “SLC”
I didn’t burn it, of course. Wondering if he’d read about the Avitor, I tucked the letter into the drawer that held my important possessions: the note from Cait, the tiny red stocking emblem I’d received at the reception banquet, and my gun.
We played the Buckeyes that afternoon. Allison’s mother was seriously ill, and he’d left that morning for Philadelphia. Harry asked me to catch.
With security tightened at the gates, we collected virtually a hundred percent on admissions that afternoon. The booth ran out of wares midway through the contest. Several hundred satisfied customers were introduced to our new delights: big German pretzels and ice-cream sodas. We netted over two hundred bucks—but I nearly had to take Johnny to a hospital afterward. Physically exhausted, he said he’d swallowed the smoke from three hundred frying hamburger patties.
The game was hardly artistic. Using our new bats, we hammered fifty-three hits including ten homers. I went only three for ten—fewest hits among the Stockings—but I made them count, lining a double over short, banging a homer off the top of the fence, and later clearing it with a towering shot down the left-field line. I have a wonderful sense-memory of it—the shivering impact up my arms, the recoil of the heavy bat, the deep THOCK!
In the final inning a pitch got by me and rolled back to the foot of the Grand Duchess. As I chased it down, a boy’s voice yelled, “Quick, Sam!” I threw to Brainard, covering the plate, then turned and saw Timmy looking down. I gave him the thumbs-up sign, then found myself staring beyond him into Cait’s eyes. It couldn’t have lasted long—a second, two seconds—but in that interval some kind of throbbing, eerily familiar energy pulsed between us. I forced myself to turn away, realizing afterward that I hadn’t noticed whether O’Dono-van was there.
The next pitch produced a foul tip that tore the nail halfway from my left index finger, effectively capturing my attention. At game’s end, when I finally looked again, they were gone. I felt let down.
Stockings 71, Buckeyes 15.
The Forest Citys arrived at one in the morning. Champion had let me know he didn’t want to be disturbed, so I met them at the Indianapolis & Lafayette depot. The Rockford players greeted me pleasantly, except for Spalding, who gave me a fish-eyed glance.
“Say,” said Bob Addy, “we hear Allison ain’t gonna catch agin’ us.”
“That’s how it looks.”
“You kept the score book before, so you’re the first substitute?”
“That’s right.”
He looked significantly at my bandaged finger. “Why, that’s good for us, then.” He laid a country-boy shit-eating grin on me. “Real good.”
Even with the heat wave finally breaking, we should have known better than to expect an off day between games. To Harry, if baseball was your profession, that’s what you did, six days a week, like any other job. So with juniors filling some positions, we played a long intrasquad game Friday afternoon. Allison was definitely gone till next week. Brainard and Sweasy were AWOL from practice. Harry looked more than a little pissed off.
I was starting to worry about Brainard. While it was true that everybody but Andy and Mac tried to beg off practicing occasionally—even George, to Harry’s consternation—Brainard was becoming chronic at it. His jealousy of George verged on the obsessive, and his sizzling of us, always barbed, was becoming cynical and deadly. I’d noticed too that his eyes were bloodshot a number of afternoons. Where, I wondered, did he spend his nights?
Because of my damaged finger Harry spared me from playing catcher or first. I spent the afternoon shagging flies in center, unsure whether Harry’s reminders to Andy and Mac not to leave me unguarded ultimately boosted or undercut my confidence. But I did know I was finally hitting with authority. Getting my weight into them, I unloaded a series of shots during my turns at the plate. Too bad there weren’t pinch hitters or DHs. I’d’ve been awesome. I think Harry wished something similar after I’d belted the second homer against the Bucks. True, it had come on fat pitching, not Spalding’s, but still . . .
That night, after making sure the Forest Citys’ needs were met at the Gibson—they had skipped Champion’s city tour to work out on the Iron Slag Grounds—and stopping by Gasthaus zur
