The Great American Novel by Philip Roth Read Free Book Online Page A

and miserable. The slit had already packed her diary and boarded the first train back to Poughkeepsie. I was not in such good spirits myself.
    â€œBig John Baal of the Mundys,” my story began, “was robbed of a four-bagger during batting practice this afternoon in Clearwater. Credit a pelican with the put-out.
    â€œHe looked at first glance like any other pelican. He was wearing the grayish-silvery home uniform of his species, with the white velvety neck feathers and the fully webbed toes. The bird was of average size, I am told, weighing in at eight pounds and with a wing spread of seven and a half feet. On close inspection there seemed nothing unusual about the large blackish pouch suspended from the lower half of his bill, except that when they pried the bill open, the pouch was found to contain, along with four sardines and a baby pompano, a baseball bearing the signature of the President of the Patriot League. The pelican was still soaring upwards and to his left when he turned his long graceful neck, opened his bill, and with the nonchalance of a Luke Gofannon, snared Big John’s mighty blast.
    â€œWe had pigeons when I was a boy. My old man kept them in a chicken-wire coop on the roof. My old man was a pug with a potent right hand who trained in the saloons and bet himself empty on the horses before he evaporated into thin air when I was fifteen. He loved those pigeons so much he fed them just as good as he did us—bread crumbs and a fresh tin of water every day. A boy’s illusions about his father are notorious. I thought he was something very like a god when he stood on the roof with a long pole, shaking and waving it in the air to control the pigeons in their flight. And the next thing I knew he had evaporated into the air.
    â€œThe press and the players are calling the pelican’s catch an ‘omen,’ but of what they can’t agree. As many say a first division finish as a second. That is the range of some people’s thinking. Of course there are the jokers, as there always are when the utterly incomprehensible happens. ‘Forgive them Father,’ begged the suffering man on the cross one Friday long ago, and the smart Roman punk betting even money the shooter wouldn’t make an eight in two rolls looked up and said in Latin, ‘Listen who’s trying to cut the game.’
    â€œThe learned Christian gentleman who manages the Mundys is not happy about what Big John Baal is going to do with the dead pelican, but then he has never been overjoyed with Big John’s sense of propriety. Mister Fairsmith, a missionary in the off-season, tried to bring baseball to the Africans one winter. They disappointed him too. They learned the principles of the game all right but then one night the two local teams held a ceremony in which they boiled their gloves and ate them. ‘The pelican represented as piercing her breast is called “the pelican vulning herself” or “the pelican in her piety,”’ Mister Fairsmith reminded Big John. ‘She then symbolizes Christ redeeming the world with His blood.’ But Big John is still going to have the phenomenal bird stuffed and mounted over the bar of his favorite Port Ruppert saloon.
    â€œI loved my old man and because of that I never understood how he could disappear on me, or play the ponies on me, or train in taverns on me. But he must have had his reasons. I suppose that pelican who made the put-out here in Clearwater today had his reasons too. But I don’t pretend to be able to read a bird’s brain anymore than I could my own dad’s. All I know is that if the Mundys plan on breaking even this year somebody better tell Big John Baal to start pulling the ball to right, where the pasture is fenced in.
    â€œBut that’s only one man’s opinion. Fella name a’ Smith; first name a’ Word.”
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    Nursing Ernest all day, I had been forced to