Had he done it already or was it something he still had to do?
On the third pitch he swung under the ball and hit a major league foul that the squat catcher caught between first and home, staggering jelly-assed under his burden. When Rocco went back to the bench he asked the manager what he had to do to get that taken from his record.
Pop said, “Do you know what the trouble with you is, Kidd, the trouble with you is you think you’re too good for this game.”
Always the curve ball sliding away from the bat, sliding obliquely down and away almost as if it were insubstantial, the faded recollection of a pitch. Always in his dreams the snakelike pitch eluded the expectation of his club.
“If you admit to him you were wrong,” his wife said to him over the phone, “maybe he’ll let you play again.”
“What did I do that was wrong?”
“Just tell him that you sincerely regret what you did and that you won’t do it again.”
“Won’t do what again?”
“You know. Why do you always pretend you don’t know when you do?”
It may even have been a replay of an earlier conversation, the filmed highlights, his non playing time given over to a study of the real and imagined past. Untouched by education, Rocco had never lost his faith in it,
He used to consider Slaughter Hatchmeyer, whom he roomed with on the road, his best friend on the team, but since the other had acquired Rocco’s home run it made him angry just to look at the long-haired rookie. When Hatchmeyer came into the room, Rocco would find some excuse for leaving it.
“Cool,” said Hatchmeyer, an easy-going type oblivious to slight.
“What do you say later, man, we go out for a couple of steaks and catch a flick?”
When Rocco came back from the road trip he found Hatchmeyer in his apartment having dinner with his wife.
“What’s he doing here?” he asked,
“I thought you invited him,” said his wife. “We’ve been talking about you. Slaughter thinks you have an extraordinary natural talent.”
“I’d like you to clear out,” he said to Hatchmeyer. “I’d like a little time alone with my old lady if you don’t mind.”
“I’d like to oblige you, man,” said the imperturbable Hatchmeyer, who in the off-season studied self-oblivion in an Adult Education Program in his home town, “but I’ve’ already asked Mrs. Kidd, I mean Venestra, to run away with me.”
All eyes, including in a manner of speaking her own, were on Venestra.
“I have nothing to say,” she said, opening the second and third buttons of her blouse.
“Man, I was seeing the ball good today,” said Slaughter. “Some days you see it big as a balloon, Venestra, and some days, it’s like a pimple on a cow’s ass. Right, Rocco?”
Rocco wasn’t hungry and he didn’t want to talk, particularly not to his roommate and former friend, so he sat in the living room and collected himself while they ate.
The phone rang.
“How you doing?” a familiar voice asked. “Your arm still hurting?”
“Nothing wrong with my arm,” said Rocco. “Anyone tells you there’s something wrong with my arm is in the pay of a foreign power.”
“Sure. What I called to say was that I want you to think of yourself as the regular left-fielder until I tell you different.”
“Yeah?” He had the impression that someone was playing a joke on him, although he couldn’t imagine who or why.
“I want a man to know a job is his so he can have the confidence to go out and do a good job. You really made good contact out there today, which is what I like to see.”
“Look, I didn’t get in the game today. Who is this?”
“This is Pop, Who is this?”
Rocco announced his name in a fierce whisper though not before hanging up to protect himself from the embarrassment of being discovered an imposter in his own house.
He returned to the dining room, swinging a weighted bat he kept in the closet for training purposes, to catch his wife and Hatchmeyer like a commercial between bits of movie finishing up their salad.
“Who was it, dear?” she asked her husband. There were four buttons open now on her blouse.
“It wasn’t anybody.”
Hatchmeyer was eating Wheat Thins with brie, stuffing them into his jaw three at a time. His large face diminished, though swollen, by a crossing thought.
After a moment Rocco said what he had planned not to say.
“Why the hell don’t you get out of here, Slaughter? Take as many crackers as you like.”
“I think it’s good that you can express your anger,” said his wife. “You usually just deny what you’re feeling.”
“Cool,” said Hatchmeyer, nodding benignly.
It was his own place no matter what was going on in it. He could swing his practice bat any place he liked in his own house. He could even, if that’s the way he felt about things, bring it down like a sledgehammer on the dining room table inches from Hatchmeyer’s plate, precipitating a shift in the balance of objects and some broken wooden boards.
“This time you’ve gone too far,” said Venestra. “Expressing your anger is one thing, dumping it on others something else altogether.”
Hatchmeyer collected his double-breasted red jacket from the closet and looked around the room for a way out. “One of us is going to have to be traded,” he said. “I mean that sincerely, man.”
The deposed left-fielder took a practice swing and caught his replacement in the side of the knee with the weighted end of the bat. Now he had gone too far.
“I’m sorry as hell, Slaughter,” he said, the suspicion of a smile emerging in the teeth of his regret.
They put him to bed, the crippled starting left-fielder, in the room they had set aside for the children they had never had.
His wife explained herself when they were alone. “Slaughter and I experience an attraction for each other which is hard to explain.”
“Cool,” said Rocco.
The next day, wearing the rookie’s uniform, which was a little tight in the waist, he took Hatchmeyer’s place as the temporary regular left-fielder. Rocco thought to fail — it was his game plan — as a means of winning back his job under his own name. His second time up, the first pitch looked so sweet he hated to pass it by so he laid his stick on it as lightly as a kiss just to prove to himself that he could make contact if he had to. Somehow the ball got between the outfielders and Rocco wound up on third, running as slowly as he could.
The more he didn’t try — he also didn’t not try — the more success he seemed to have. It was the uniform, he thought, or the number or the dumb luck of the former tenant of that uniform. After getting three triples in one game, he went up with his eyes closed and knocked the ball over the fence.
It went on for days, his not trying — his not not trying — with disturbing, really crazy success.
Rocco wore a false mustache and a long-haired wig doing Hatchmeyer, which he took off when he played himself. In his own right, under his own name and number, the old bad luck continued to plague him.
For the first few days he came home to his own apartment where his wife and Hatchmeyer were now living, but after a while it was simpler to stay in Hatchmeyer’s hotel room as if he were in fact the very man he pretended to be.
One day his wife called and asked him over for lunch, the other Hatchmeyer being away at a doctor’s appointment.
Wherever he went reporters followed him, asking impertinent questions. Rocco did everything he could think of to elude them, disguising himself once as a woman, and another time as a black man, several times going in the wrong direction, but no matter what you did you could only fool them on essentials.