I was never very quick with backtalk, not like Scooter Kirby who is this smart-aleck black guy from Detroit who Jiggs doesn’t mess with because he gets it back worse. Scooter used to try to get me to talk back to Jiggs, but I never could understand how he could think of stuff like that. So I mostly just had to take it.
By the beginning of June, that day we were in Fort Smith, I was a wreck. I’d slept maybe an hour the night before, and not at all the night before that. I was 3 for 57.
It was two out in the bottom of the ninth, we were down 6–1, nobody was on, and I was up. I had struck out four times already off that Dominican, and he got me swinging again on three pitches.
I walked back to the dugout, kicking the bat. Jiggs was standing there with a couple of the guys, grinning with those brown teeth. “That was quite a cut you took at that last pitch, Johnson,” he said. “What was that, a slider?”
“It was a curveball,” I said.
“Looked just a little bit low,” he said.
“Uh-huh.” It had bounced about two feet in front of the plate, if you want to be exact.
“You had quite a cut, though. If it had of been a couple of feet closer, you might of actually nicked it! Ha, ha.”
“Ha, ha,” said Joey Scapetto, who is this second baseman who last time I checked nobody was confusing with Rogers Hornsby, but he’s all the time sucking up to Jiggs.
“I could feel the wind all the way over here,” said Jiggs.
“Damn near took my cap off,” said Joey.
“Ha, ha,” said Jiggs. “That’s a good one, Joey.” He spat, the brown liquid dribbling down his jowl, and squinted up at me. “You know, Johnson, I been in professional baseball thirty-seven years. I seen some of the greats. I played with the Yankees, the Goddamned 1961 New York Yankees, the best team to ever have played the game. Now every day I come to the ballpark expecting to see the worst play I’ve ever seen in thirty-seven years, and I got to say you never disappoint me.” He shook his head. “Man my age got to be thankful for the entertainment when he got to put up with ballplayers like you.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say. After a minute he said, “Get the hell out of here before I puke.”
I trudged back to the clubhouse. Of course nobody said anything to me while they undressed. I was sitting there, still in my uniform, staring at the floor and seeing in my mind this Rodriguez throwing BB’s at me, thinking that I was now 3 for 66 and might never get a hit again, when Jiggs came strolling in. He stopped in front of me, puffing a little from the exertion of walking all the way from the dugout, which was maybe twenty yards away. Everybody looked over at Jiggs, and it got quiet.
“You know, Johnson,” he said, “I suppose you are wondering why I left you in that last at-bat, when we were down 6–1 and you were the last out? And when that Dominican had already struck you out four times?”
I didn’t say anything.
He looked around and grinned, his little eyes almost disappearing. “I left you in because the official Tri-State League record for being struck out in one game is five times. I wanted to give you the chance for the record, which I am happy to say you now share. I figured it was going to be the only batting record you’d ever get.”
He laughed, and some of the other guys snickered a little, too, although I could tell some of them were embarrassed. Joey Scapetto laughed like he was Ed McMahon and it was the funniest thing Johnny Carson ever said.
“The only record you’d ever get,” Jiggs said again, enjoying the joke. “When you are back flipping burgers in Hooterville, or wherever you are from, you can remember that.”
A red mist seemed to settle on me as I heard some of the guys laughing. At that moment, I knew I was going to kill him.
It is not so easy to kill somebody as it would seem to be from watching TV. I wanted to kill Jiggs, but I didn’t want to get caught. I stayed up most of the night thinking about it, thinking about guns, and knives, and heavy objects, and drowning, and hanging, but none of them seemed any good. But on the bus to Grand Island the next day, Monday, it hit me.
Tuesday was a night game, so that morning I put on sunglasses, left the Best Western, and went downtown. It took a while for me to find what I was looking for, but I finally found it in this dingy little hardware and farm supplies place, where this old guy in a feed cap was sitting behind the counter. It was this old box sort of faded on one side and covered with dust. “Rat Poison,” it said. “Contains Strychnine.” Then I found a 7-Eleven out on the highway where there was this Iranian clerk, which I did not know they had Iranians in Nebraska, and bought a can of the kind of snuff that Jiggs used. The clerk never looked up.
Back at the hotel, I opened the snuff can and dumped a quarter of it out, filling it up with the rat poison and shaking it up to mix it. The tobacco was dark brown and the rat poison was dark gray and you could hardly tell the difference. I poured the rest of the rat poison down the toilet and then stuffed the box in the dumpster behind the Best Western.
I knew from TV they always check on poison sales when somebody is poisoned, so I figured I would put them off the trail by waiting until we left Nebraska before I used it. I decided I would do it Friday when we were in St. Joseph, Missouri.
I went 0 for 3 that night, then 0 for 2 on Wednesday, Jiggs making some real clever remarks to me, which I didn’t seem to mind so much when I thought about the can of snuff. He benched me Thursday night because the Islanders were pitching this kid Sanders who Jiggs knew I had hit real good in the past and might have got a hit off of.
On the bus that night Jiggs was talking for about the millionth time about the 1961 New York Yankees. I had looked it up, and I knew he had played only five games with those Yankees, after the September call-up, and had then gone to Syracuse the next year and got cut and then played four years in the Kansas City organization, hitting.212 for the Athletics in 1964. But he talked like he was best friends with Mantle and Maris and Berra and all those guys, hinting that old Whitey Ford wouldn’t even get on the mound without he had Jiggs Holloway at shortstop.
Friday was a night game in St. Joe. Jiggs’s uniform was too tight for him to keep things in the pockets, and everybody knew he always set his snuff can down next to his seat in the dugout. It was while he was watching the Saints take batting practice that I switched cans. It was easy.
Just before the National Anthem, I saw him take a huge pinch and stuff it into his cheek.
The game was awful. I was so jittery that I misplayed a pop fly in the top of the first that went for a double, then I almost missed the cutoff man. When I came back to the dugout, Jiggs said something to me that I could barely hear. He was not looking good. In the second I was called out on strikes, hardly seeing the ball because I kept looking back at the dug-out. Jiggs did not say anything about it, though. He was looking queasy. In the fourth I made a bad throw that almost cost us a run, and in the fifth I got fooled real bad on a change-up and hit into a double play to kill a rally. In the seventh I looked in from the field and his seat was empty. I don’t remember much after that.
Jiggs wasn’t in the clubhouse when the game was over. Somebody said he was sick, but nobody knew anything. We took the bus back to the hotel.
In my room it suddenly came over me what I had done. I was brought up right, and I suppose I should have felt remorse or something, but actually I felt free, better than I had in a month, like somebody had lifted a semi that had been parked on top of me. I wanted to be alone, but I figured it was important to act natural and I wanted to find out about Jiggs, so I went down to the hotel bar with some of the guys.