Blockade Billy

I was so sure Wenders would call Aparicio out-it was clear interference-that at first I couldn’t believe what I was seeing when he gestured for the kid to go back behind the plate and for Aparicio to resume the box. When I got it, I ran out, waving my arms. The crowd started cheering me and booing Wenders, which is no way to win friends and influence people when you’re arguing a call, but I was too goddam mad to care. I wouldn’t have stopped if Mahatma Gandhi had walked out on the field butt-naked and urging us to make peace.

“Interference!” I yelled. “Clear as day, clear as the nose on your face!”

“It was in the stands, and that makes it anyone’s ball,” Wenders says. “Go on back to your little nest and let’s get this show on the road.”

The kid didn’t care; he was talking to his pal The Doo. That was all right. I didn’t care that he didn’t care. All I wanted at that moment was to tear Hi Wenders a fresh new asshole. I’m not ordinarily an argumentative man-all the years I managed the A’s, I only got thrown out of games twice-but that day I would have made Billy Martin look like a peacenik.

“You didn’t see it, Hi! You were trailing too far back! You didn’t see shit!”

“I wasn’t trailing and I saw it all. Now get back, Granny. I ain’t kidding.”

“If you didn’t see that long-armed sonofabitch-” (Here a lady in the second row put her hands over her little boy’s ears and pursed up her mouth at me in an oh-you-nasty-man look.) “- that long-armed sonofabitch reach out and tick that ball, you were goddam trailing! Jesus Christ!”

The man in the jersey starts shaking his head-who, me? not me!-but he’s also wearing a big embarrassed suckass grin. Wenders saw it, knew what it meant, then looked away. “That’s it,” he says to me. And in the reasonable voice that means you’re one smart crack from drinking a Rhinegold in the locker room. “You’ve had your say. Now you can either go back to the dugout or you can listen to the rest of the game on the radio. Take your pick.”

I went back to the dugout. Aparicio stood back in with a big shit-eating grin on his face. He knew, sure he did. And made the most of it. The guy never hit many home runs, but when The Doo sent in a changeup that didn’t change, Louie cranked it high, wide, and handsome to the deepest part of the park. Nosy Norton was playing center, and he never even turned around.

Aparicio circled the bases, serene as the Queen Mary coming into dock, while the crowd screamed at him, denigrated his relatives, and hurled hate down on Hi Wenders’s head. Wenders heard none of it, which is the chief umpirely skill. He just got a fresh ball out of his coat pocket and inspected it for dings and doinks. Watching him do that, I lost it entirely. I rushed out to home plate and started shaking both fists in his face.

“That’s your run, you fucking busher!” I screamed. “Too fucking lazy to chase after a foul ball, and now you’ve got an RBI for yourself! Jam it up your ass! Maybe you’ll find your glasses!”

The crowd loved it. Hi Wenders, not so much. He pointed at me, threw his thumb back over his shoulder, and walked away. The crowd started booing and shaking their ROAD CLOSED signs; some threw bottles, cups, and half-eaten franks onto the field. It was a circus.

“Don’t you walk away from me, you fatass blind lazy sonofabitching bastard!” I screamed, and chased after him. Someone from our dugout grabbed me before I could grab Wenders, which I meant to do. I had lost touch with reality.

The crowd was chanting “KILL THE UMP! KILL THE UMP! KILL THE UMP!” I’ll never forget that, because it was the same way they’d been chanting “Bloh-KADE! Bloh- KADE!”

“If your mother was here, she’d be throwing shit at you, too, you bat-blind busher!” I screamed, and then they hauled me into the dugout. Ganzie Burgess, our knuckleballer, managed the last three innings of that horrorshow. He also pitched the last two. You might find that in the record-books, too. If there were any records of that lost spring.

The last thing I saw on the field was Danny Dusen and Blockade Billy standing on the grass between the plate and the mound. The kid had his mask tucked under his arm. The Doo was whispering in his ear. The kid was listening-he always listened when The Doo talked-but he was looking at the crowd, forty thousand fans on their feet, men, women, and children, yelling KILL THE UMP, KILL THE UMP, KILL THE UMP.

There was a bucket of balls halfway down the hall between the dugout and the locker room. I kicked it and sent balls rolling every whichway. If I’d stepped on one of them and fallen on my ass, it would have been the perfect end to a perfect fucking afternoon at the ballpark.

Joe was in the locker room, sitting on a bench outside the showers. By then he looked seventy instead of just fifty. There were three other guys in there with him. Two were uniformed cops. The third one was in a suit, but you only had to take one look at his hard roast beef of a face to know he was a cop, too.

“Game over early?” this one asked me. He was sitting on a folding chair with his big old cop thighs spread and straining his seersucker pants. The bluesuits were on one of the benches in front of the lockers.

“It is for me,” I said. I was still so mad I didn’t even care about the cops. To Joe I said, “Fucking Wenders ran me. I’m sorry, Cap, but it was a clear case of interference and that lazy sonofabitch-”

“It doesn’t matter,” Joe said. “The game isn’t going to count. I don’t think any of our games are going to count. Kerwin’ll appeal to the Commissioner, of course, but-”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

Joe sighed. Then he looked at the guy in the suit. “You tell him, Detective Lombardazzi,” he said. “I can’t bear to.”

“Does he need to know?” Lombardazzi asked. He’s looking at me like I’m some kind of bug he’s never seen before. It was a look I didn’t need on top of everything else, but I kept my mouth shut. Because I knew three cops, one of them a detective, don’t show up in the locker room of a Major League baseball team if it isn’t goddam serious.

“If you want him to hold the other guys long enough for you to get the Blakely kid out of here, I think he does need to,” Joe says.

From above us there came a cry from the fans, followed by a groan, followed by a cheer. None of us paid any attention to what turned out to be the end of Danny Dusen’s baseball career. The cry was when he got hit in the forehead by a Larry Doby line drive. The groan was when he fell on the pitcher’s mound like a tagged prizefighter. And the cheer was when he picked himself up and gestured that he was okay. Which he was not, but he pitched the rest of the sixth, and the seventh, too. Didn’t give up a run, either. Ganzie made him come out before the eighth when he saw The Doo wasn’t walking straight. Danny all the time claiming he was perfectly okay, that the big purple goose-egg raising up over his left eyebrow wasn’t nothing, he’d had lots worse, and the kid saying the same: it ain’t nothing, it ain’t nothing. Little Sir Echo. Us down in the clubhouse didn’t know any of that, no more than Dusen knew he might’ve been tagged worse in his career, but it was the first time part of his brain had sprung a leak.

“His name isn’t Blakely,” Lombardazzi says. “It’s Eugene Katsanis.”

“Katz-whatsis? Where’s Blakely, then?”

“William Blakely’s dead. Has been for a month. His parents, too.”

I gaped at him. “What are you talking about?”

So he told me the stuff I’m sure you already know, Mr. King, but maybe I can fill in a few blanks. The Blakelys lived in Clarence, Iowa, a wide patch of not much an hour’s drive from Davenport. Made it convenient for Ma and Pa, because they could go to most of their son’s minor league games. Blakely had a successful farm; an eight hundred acre job. One of their hired men wasn’t much more than a boy. His name was Gene Katsanis, an orphan who’d grown up in The Ottershaw Christian Home for Boys. He was no farmer, and not quite right in the head, but he was a hell of a baseball player.

Katsanis and Blakely played against each other on a couple of church teams, and together on the local Babe Ruth team, which won the state tournament all three years the two of them played together, and once went as far