The Natural by Bernard Malamud Read Free Book Online Page B

Pop wouldn’t agree to his release, so if he was going to be stuck in this swamp he would at least have a little fun.
    He laughed loudly and said, “Here’s one for your colyum, kid. We were in Cincy in April and had a free day on our hands because this exhibition game was called off, so in the Plaza lobby that morning we get to bulling about players and records, and you know Pop and this line of his about how lousy the modern player is compared to those mustached freaks he played with in the time of King Tut. He was saying that the average fielder nowadays could maybe hit the kangaroo ball we got — he was looking at me — but you couldn’t count on him to catch a high fly. ‘How high?’ I ask him, innocent, and he points up and says, ‘Any decent height. They either lose them in the sun or misjudge them in the wind.’ So I say, ‘Could you catch the real high ones, Pop?’ And he pipes up, ‘As high as they went up I could catch them.’ He thinks a minute and says, ‘I bet I could catch a ball that is dropped from the top of the Empire State Building.’ ‘No,’ I says, like I was surprised, and ‘Yes,’ he says. So I say, ‘We have nothing on for today, and although there isn’t any Empire State Building in Cincinnati, yet I do have this friend of mine at the airport who owns a Piper Cub. I will give him a National League baseball and he will drop it at the height of the building if you will catch it.’ ‘Done,’ he says, as perky as a turkey, so I call up this guy I know and arrange it and off we go across the bridge to the Kentucky side of the river, where there is plenty of room to move around in. Well, sir, soon this yellow plane comes over and circles a couple of times till he has the right height, and then he lets go with something that I didn’t tell Pop, but which the boys are onto, is a grapefruit so that if it hits him it will not crack his skull open and kill him. Down the thing comes like a cannonball and Pop, in his black two-piece bathing suit, in case he has to go a little in the water, and wearing a mitt the size of a basket, circles under it like a dizzy duck, holding the sun out of his eyes as he gets a line on where it is coming down. Faster it falls, getting bigger by the second, then Pop, who is now set for the catch, suddenly lets out a howl, ‘My Christ, the moon is falling on me,’ and the next second, bong — the grapefruit busts him on the conk and we have all we can do to keep him from drowning in the juice.”
    Now there was a loud cackle of laughter in the trainer’s room. The voice Roy didn’t like — the frightening thought dawned on him that the voice
knew
what he was hiding — it changed the subject and wanted to know from Bump if there was any truth to the rumor about him and Pop’s niece.
    “Naw,” Bump said, and cagily asked, “What rumor?”
    “That you and Memo are getting hitched.”
    Bump laughed. “She must’ve started that one herself.”
    “Then you deny it?”
    The door was shoved open and Bump waltzed out in his shorts, as husky, broadbacked, and big-shouldered as Roy had thought, followed by the trainer and a slightly popeyed gent dressed in an expensive striped suit, whose appearance gave Roy a shooting pain in the pit of the stomach — Max Mercy.
    Ashamed to be recognized, to have his past revealed like an egg spattered on the floor, Roy turned away, tucking his jersey into his pants.
    But Bump paraded over with his hairy arm outstretched. “Hiya, Buster, you the latest victim they have trapped?”
    Roy felt an irritable urge to pitch his fist at the loudmouth, but he nodded and shook hands.
    “Welcome to the lousiest team in the world, barring none,” Bump said. “And this is ol’ Doc Casey, the trainer, who has got nobody but cripples on his hands except me. And the bawkshaw with the eyes is Max Mercy, the famous sports colyumist. Most newspaper guys are your pals and know when to keep their traps shut, but to Max a private life