Death of the Right Fielder
After too many balls went out and never came back we went out to check. It was a long walk — he always played deep. Finally we saw him, from the distance resembling the towel we sometimes threw down for second base.
It was hard to tell how long he’d been lying there, sprawled on his face. Had he been playing infield, his presence, or lack of it, would, of course, have been noticed immediately. The infield demands communication — the constant, reassuring chatter of team play. But he was remote, clearly an outfielder (the temptation is to say outsider). The infield is for wisecrackers, pepper-pots, gum-poppers; the outfield is for loners, onlookers, brooders who would rather study clover and swat gnats than holler. People could pretty much be divided between infielders and outfielders. Not that one always has a choice. He didn’t necessarily choose right field so much as accept it.
There were several theories as to what killed him. From the start the most popular was that he’d been shot. Perhaps from a passing car, possibly by that gang calling themselves the Jokers, who played sixteen-inch softball on the concrete diamond with painted bases in the center of the housing project, or by the Latin Lords, who didn’t play sports, period. Or maybe some pervert with a telescopic sight from a bedroom window, or a mad sniper from a water tower, or a terrorist with a silencer from the expressway overpass, or maybe it was an accident, a stray slug from a robbery, or shoot-out, or assassination attempt miles away.
No matter who pulled the trigger it seemed more plausible to ascribe his death to a bullet than to natural causes like, say, a heart attack. Young deaths are never natural; they’re all violent. Not that kids don’t die of heart attacks. But he never seemed the type. Sure, he was quiet, but not the quiet of someone always listening for the heart murmur his family repeatedly warned him about since he was old enough to play. Nor could it have been leukemia. He wasn’t a talented enough athlete to die of that. He’d have been playing center, not right, if leukemia was going to get him.
The shooting theory was better, even though there wasn’t a mark on him. Couldn’t it have been, as some argued, a high-powered bullet traveling with such velocity that its hole fuses behind it? Still, not everyone was satisfied. Other theories were formulated, rumors became legends over the years: he’d had an allergic reaction to a bee sting, been struck by a single bolt of lightning from a freak, instantaneous electrical storm, ingested too strong a dose of insecticide from the grass blades he chewed on, sonic waves, radiation, pollution, etc. And a few of us liked to think it was simply that chasing a sinking liner, diving to make a shoestring catch, he broke his neck.
There was a ball in the webbing of his mitt when we turned him over. His mitt had been pinned under his body and was coated with an almost luminescent gray film. There was the same gray on his black, high-top gym shoes, as if he’d been running through lime, and along the bill of his baseball cap — the blue felt one with the red C which he always denied stood for the Chicago Cubs. He may have been a loner, but he didn’t want to be identified with a loser. He lacked the sense of humor for that, lacked the perverse pride that sticking for losers season after season breeds, and the love. He was just an ordinary guy, 250 at the plate, and we stood above him not knowing what to do next. By then the guys from the other outfield positions had trotted over. Someone, the shortstop probably, suggested team prayer. But no one could think of a team prayer. So we all just stood there silently bowing our heads, pretending to pray while the shadows moved darkly across the outfield grass. After a while the entire diamond was swallowed and the field lights came on.
In the bluish squint of those lights he didn’t look like someone we’d once known — nothing looked quite right — and we hurriedly scratched a shallow grave, covered him over, and stamped it down as much as possible so that the next right fielder, whoever he’d be, wouldn’t trip. It could be just such a juvenile, seemingly trivial stumble that would ruin a great career before it had begun, or hamper it years later the way Mantle’s was hampered by bum knees. One can never be sure the kid beside him isn’t another Roberto Clemente; and who can ever know how many potential Great Ones have gone down in the obscurity of their neighborhoods? And so, in the catcher’s phrase, we “buried the grave” rather than contribute to any further tragedy. In all likelihood the next right fielder, whoever he’d be, would be clumsy too, and if there was a mound to trip over he’d find it and break his neck, and soon right field would get the reputation as haunted, a kind of sandlot Bermuda Triangle, inhabited by phantoms calling for ghostly fly balls, where no one but the most desperate outcasts, already on the verge of suicide, would be willing to play.
Still, despite our efforts, we couldn’t totally disguise it. A fresh grave is stubborn. Its outline remained visible — a scuffed bald spot that might have been confused for an aberrant pitcher’s mound except for the bat jammed in the earth with the mitt and blue cap fit over it. Perhaps we didn’t want to eradicate it completely — a part of us was resting there. Perhaps we wanted the new right fielder, whoever he’d be, to notice and wonder about who played there before him, realizing he was now the only link between past and future that mattered. A monument, epitaph, flowers, wouldn’t be necessary.
As for us, we walked back, but by then it was too late — getting on to supper, getting on to the end of summer vacation, time for other things, college, careers, settling down and raising a family. Past thirty-five the talk starts about being over the hill, about a graying Phil Niekro in his forties still fanning them with the knuckler as if it’s some kind of miracle, about Pete Rose still going in headfirst at forty, beating the odds. And maybe the talk is right. One remembers Willie Mays, forty-two years old and a Met, dropping that can-of-corn fly in the ’73 Series, all that grace stripped away and with it the conviction, leaving a man confused and apologetic about the boy in him. It’s sad to admit it ends so soon, but everyone knows those are the lucky ones. Most guys are washed up by seventeen.
Bottle Caps
Each day I’d collect caps from beer bottles. I’d go early in the morning through the alleys with a shopping bag, the way I’d seen old women and bums, picking through trash in a cloud of flies. Collectors of all kinds thrived in the alleys: scrap collectors, deposit-bottle collectors, other-people’s-hubcap collectors. I made my rounds, stopping behind taverns where bottle caps spilled from splitting, soggy bags — clinking, shiny heaps, still sudded with beer, clotted with cigarette ashes from the night before.
I’d hose them down and store them in coffee cans. At the end of the week, I’d line up my bottle caps for contests between the brands. It was basically a three-way race between Pabst, with its blue-ribboned cap, Bud, and Miller. Blatz and Schlitz weren’t far behind.
That got boring fast. It was the rare and exotic bottle caps that kept me collecting — Edelweiss; Yusay Pilsner; Carling’s Black Label, with its matching black cap; Monarch, from the brewery down the street, its gold caps like pieces of eight; and Meister Brau Bock, my favorite, each cap a ram’s-head medallion.
By July, I had too many to count. The coffee cans stashed in the basement began to smell — a metallic, fermenting malt. I worried my mother would find out. It would look to her as if I were brewing polio. Still, the longer I collected, the more I hoarded my bottle caps. They had come to seem almost beautiful. It fascinated me how some were lined with plastic, some with foil. I noticed how only the foreign caps were lined with cork. I tapped the dents from those badly mangled by openers. When friends asked for bottle caps to decorate the spokes on their bikes, I refused.