The Boys of Summer Read online

  On the interstate highways that band Pennsylvania no signs announce mileage to the petrified village of Newport, where Billy Cox, the great third baseman, tends bar. Like Clem La-bine’s Woonsocket, Newport lies close to arterial roads, but bypassed. You drive west from New York into Pennsylvania Dutch country, and at Harrisburg the main routes press farther west and south. To reach Newport, you turn north along the Susquehanna until it forks just past Duncannon. The left fork is the Juniata River.

  I had found everyone now but Cox, that odd, incongruous figure, hints of intelligence set in curious camouflage. The others remembered him as solitary, strange, gifted, troubled. Some reminded me that Preacher Roe had done a lot for Billy, by rooming with him and buoying his spirits. Pee Wee Reese called Cox the greatest glove and least likely-looking major league infielder he’d ever known. I can still see him going toward the line, the barehand side, and reaching across the wiry body, slapping that Whelan glove, capturing a two-base hit, and turning it into a ground out. “Five to three if you’re scoring,” Connie Desmond, the sportscaster, liked to say.

  Even in the major leagues third base begins with the hard, wordless truths my father and I explored thirty years ago. You have to see the ball. You have to look the ball into your glove. But as you do, your face is bare to any sudden hop, and as you lower the glove, the way you must, you leave torso and groin unguarded.

  It is the same in the majors. The fields are better, making truer bounces, but then the batters hit harder. The balance holds, and sometimes you want to cringe for a third baseman, but not for Billy Cox. With Billy crouched, motionless, staring down a hitter’s craw, the ball, not he, would be the victim.

  Hoss Cox had a long face, thin hair and a sorrowful, inward expression. Along with the index-finger wag, for “Fuckit,” he put off serious talk. “Ah,” he would say, “don’t start that shit.” At times, when something odd, comical or ghastly happened, the long sad face transformed. He cocked his head and pursed his lips and seemed about to grin. “Look at this,” Hoss Cox’s expression said. “Look what the sonsabitches are up to now.”

  When I telephoned, he explained carefully that he had left the job tending bar at the American Legion. His Cousin Gumby worked there now. He himself was at the Owls Club. ‘

  “Elks?”

  “Nah. Not Elks. Owls. You cross the bridge to the Gulf Station and you turn left.”

  We made a date to meet at four o’clock on Thursday afternoon. I knew Billy liked the night. I packed a few things and the glove, the Wilson A-2000. Each Dodger had signed it. Fingers read Joe Black, Jackie Robinson, Preacher Roe. Only Cox was left to close the circle of nostalgia.

  Newport sits among ridges and cuts in cold, handsome country, a town of perhaps fifteen hundred on the south bank of the Juniata. I crossed an old bridge and made the left at the Gulf Station. Near the end of a narrow street stood a two-story building, faced with dull, glossy slabs of mica. A sign etched in light gray read, “social order of owls (private).”

  Cox has not yet reported for work. “Wait for him over at the Newporter,” suggested the day bartender. “It’s half a block away.” The Newporter, a frame building three floors high, is the town hotel. The main entrance leads to a foyer feeding a wooden stairway. A registration desk and newsstand lie off to the right, in a bare square room that serves as lobby. Beyond, the bar was dark. Four men sat drinking quietly. A chubby blonde, with a farm girl’s face but pressing thirty, was sipping beer and giggling. An older woman watched her, with intent amusement.

  I ordered Rolling Rock, a beer that calls itself the pride of Pennsylvania. Suddenly an old man, beyond the two women, called hoarsely, “Big Bill.” Cox had entered. He wore an open-collared plaid shirt and work pants. “Yeh,” he said to me. “Yeh. How ya doing? Need a room? Jack here, he’ll get you one. I come here to eat. Then I gotta work. Then we can talk. Maybe I’ll take ya up the hill like the other time, or maybe we’ll go to the Vets. Hey, Jack, a meat loaf. And another drink for him. He’s a writer from New York.”

  “I grew up with Bill,” said the bartender, a short, stumpy man in eyeglasses. “My name’s Jack Heisey. I knew him as a boy.”

  “Don’t believe any shit he tells you now,” Cox said.

  He has grown a belly and he was bigger than I remembered. He is no taller, of course, perhaps five feet nine, but above the new paunch powerful high shoulders hunched. Among Hodges, Snider and Robinson, you overlooked the power in Cox’s build.

  “Hey,” he said. “Lookit this, will ya?” Cox extended his right hand. The middle finger ended between knuckles. The skin was smooth. It looked like a normal finger end, a dwarf finger, without the nail.

  “What happened?”

  Cox jerked his head back, and pursed his lips. “Dumbness,” he said, “dumbness. I thought the power mower was off. I put my hand in to find out. It got the longest finger. Started spurting blood. Didn’t hurt. I’m standing there with part of my finger on the grass looking at the blood, saying, ‘Dumbness, dumbness.’”

  “When was this?”

  “Last summer.”

  “Can you throw? You ought to have a sinker now.”

  “Yer right, but I don’t know. I ain’t tried to throw a ball since it happened.”

  The blonde girl’s cry filled the bar: “Billy Cox.”

  He started and drew back his head.

  “Are you really Billy Cox? The third baseman? Who played for the Dodgers? Really? I use to watch you.”

  “You was six months old.”

  “Oh, Billy.” The girl sprawled away from the bar stool. She was wearing tight blue slacks and a white blouse. “Would you give me your autograph?”

  Cox turned to his beer. “Can’t write.”

  “I never met a major leaguer before.”

  “I got to work a while,” Cox said to me, pointedly ignoring the blonde. “We can talk after. Jack here’ll take care of ya. Get ya a room. Private bath, if you want it.”

  The girl pressed pencil and paper between us. Cox shook his head and signed his name.

  “Here’s the meat loaf, Bill,” Jack said.

  “Big Bill,” said the old man in the corner. He offered me a hand. “I’m Kenneth S. Smith.”

  “Above your name,” the blonde said to Cox, “you have to write ‘love and kisses.’”

  “No,” Cox said.

  “Suppose I go out and buy a baseball and a pen.”

  “Can’t get a baseball in this town no more.”

  “Sure I can.”

  “Hey,” Cox said, jerking his head. “You find a baseball left in this town, I’ll sign anything.”

  The women walked out into Main Street, the blonde rolling in the slacks. Cox shook his head and said to no one, “Whoosh. She’s trying to get me in trouble.”

  “She’s a secretary over to Harrisburg,” said Kenneth S. Smith. “The older one runs a bar.”

  “I don’t want no trouble,” Cox said to me. “This here’s a small town. Everybody knows what ya do.”

  In a few minutes the girl came squealing back. “I found it, I found it.” She carried a dollar baseball in a box and a yellow pen.

  “Son of a bitch,” Cox muttered.

  “It’s not much of a ball, miss,” I said.

  “But it’s a baseball,” Cox said. “She found a baseball in Newport.”

  “Now you got to sign ‘love and kisses,’ “ the girl said.

  Cox pursed his lips and signed. The chubby girl put her arms around him and kissed his cheek. His eyes glinted with amusement.

  “This happen every day, Willie?” I said.

  “This is the first real ball player I ever met,” the secretary said.

  “Over ta York,” Cox said, “Kenny Raffensberger lives there.”

  The girl paced. Cox finished his meat loaf and put sixty cents on the counter. “When I get done, we get together,” he said. Jack Heisey called, “See ya,” as Cox left. The blonde stopped pacing. She clutched the baseball at a hip. “Hey,” she sai
d to her friend, “let’s go on over to Enola or Duncannon and see what’s doing there.”

  Jack Heisey said room Number 8, one flight up, came with a private bath. “Cost ya more, though. Five dollars.” I took the key and followed the wide staircase to a landing and an inked sign marked, “This way to public bathroom.” In Number 8 a double bed, covered with a tea-rose spread, stretched diagonally. The private bath was an unenclosed toilet in one corner of the room.

  Downstairs a man in the lobby sat studying a television set that showed a basketball game among commercials. He had a long face and a thick chin. “Yes, sir,” he said to the announcer of commercials. “You’re right, sir. I will get some Kellogg’s bran cereal. I know, sir. It is good for my system. I should have it more.” He looked toward me. “You eat bran cereals?” he said.

  I crossed into the bar where Jack Heisey and Kenneth S. Smith waited. Billy had told them I would be coming back, and they both began to speak, almost in turn.

  “We had some good ball players round here,” said Kenneth Smith. “I oughta know. I managed the town team starting in ‘27. Charley Zeidders, he was fast. Les Bell. A pitcher named Red. They were the good ones.”

  “Billy,” Jack Heisey said, “used ta stand down by the Pennsy tracks. If there was nobody to play with, he’d pick up stones and hit ‘em with a stick.”

  “The day he come out for the team he was so skinny, his shadow looked thinner than a bat.”

  “His mother died. The Cox kids didn’t have no mother.”

  “The other fellers on the town team didn’t want him there. He was so small.”

  “When he was ten, he fielded like a man.”

  “I said, ‘He stays. The rest o’ you can go.’”

  “But he got lonely. He was always getting lonely.”

  “Over ta Marshall Field, that’s Agway now, Charlie Zeidders hit one out to left.”

  “He didn’t never want to leave this town.”

  “Billy said, ‘Gimme a bat. Come on. I’ll show ya who’s skinny!’”

  “He was always quitting to come back.”

  “Billy hit one clear outa sight to center.”

  “We never seen a ball player like him in Newport or Port Royal.”

  “Or Mifflintown.”

  “We won’t see one like Billy Cox again.”

  “The tannery; you heard about the tannery? When I first come here, people said, ‘Ken Smith, the tannery is where you oughta work. Secure. We got a mountain town, you know, and times get hard.’ Hell, I was a salesman. I traveled some. Bucks County. Seen New York. I was selling when the tannery got closed. Depression come and went. The tannery was dead. There was no call. You don’t tan leather goods with tanbark these days. Chemicals, that’s what it is.”

  “Bill’s father worked the tannery. Fred Cox. When it closed down, he went to WPA. They never had no decent meals, them kids.”

  “Billy kept playing baseball.”

  “We had a common near the ironworks.”

  “He’d pick up anything, off grass or rocks.”

  “They closed that, too. Play an’ watch baseball was all we had to cheer us.”

  “The Pirates signed him ta play over ta Harrisburg.”

  “And he was proud.”

  “He didn’t have no clothes. I ran the town collection. We gave him clothing and a send-off.”

  “A month later he come home.”

  “He got too goddamn lonely.”

  “The next year I sent Red, the pitcher, too. He’d never make it, but he’d sit with Billy.”

  “The Pittsburgh Pirates. Billy was their shortstop.”

  “Shoulda played third. He played third for my team.”

  “Fast company in Pittsburgh. He did fine.”

  “ ‘Cept they was drinkers on that club.”

  “He got to like it there in Brooklyn.”

  “Poor guy come out of the war and had to play with boozers.”

  “The Brooklyns let him go. The best third baseman anybody saw.”

  “He shouldn’t be here now. Should be on top of the world.”

  “The Brooklyns sent him to the other league. Then he come home. Showed me his legs. All swole and purple. Thirty-six and they was gonna teach him how to slide. ‘Fuckit,’ he said.”

  “Jack,” said Kenneth Smith, “would you pipe down so’s I can tell this here man how Billy Cox played ball?”

  The reasons for which Newport was built died along with the tannery and ironworks. A river bend no longer makes a town and jobs are so short at the Penn Central that only men with twenty years’ seniority survive recurrent layoffs. But Newport is not dying; the petrified village may even grow. It is a refuge for certain whites, raising young families, who talk about “the niggers stealing America.” No black man lives in Newport, Pennsylvania. None wants to come and none is asked. A few blacks who work for Bethlehem Steel have built a cabin near Lost Creek Gap, but the Newport elders say these aren’t bad ones. Hunting and fishing is what those fellers like, the elders announce in the barrooms. No boozing or womanizing. (But the blacks and the white secretaries have not yet found each other.)

  As much as excellence and pride, the team was black and white together. Preacher Roe felt it and Joe Black, and this untinted friendship was the richest element in Carl Erskine’s career. But here was Billy Cox, who was not very good at talking or dealing with other people, not brilliant at anything truly but picking up ground balls, alone now in a prison of intolerance.

  “The Vets,” he said. “Come in my car.” Kenneth S. Smith, past seventy, declared that he would have to go to sleep, but Jack Heisey announced that he would stay. Halfway up a midnight hill, windows of the VFW shone bright. Inside, twelve high stools rimmed the bar. A pool table filled the other space.

  “Goddamn catcher’s mitt,” Cox said, picking up the Wilson A-2000.

  “When we played near the tracks” Jack Heisey said, “the gloves wasn’t bigger than yer hand.” Cox slipped fingers into the glove. “Not bad,” he said. “Ain’t heavy like a catcher’s mitt.” He flexed his hand. “Good leather.” He swept the glove across his chest, one way, then the other. In the movement, eighteen inches, you could see, if you had ever seen baseball close, that the old hand in the new glove was phenomenal.

  “All right,” Cox said. “Ya shouldn’t miss too much.”

  He sipped beer. His look softened. “Do you think about Brooklyn much?” I said.

  “Oh,” Cox said. “Oh.” The long face jerked and he nodded.

  “You remember?”

  “Hey,” Cox said, “there was this day Preach was pitching. I put on a catcher’s mask and shin guards and a chest protector and I said, ‘Okay, I’m ready.’ Preach said, ‘Wear anything you want, long as you’re there.’ It wasn’t trouble to make the joke. Campy’s locker was right near mine.”

  Someone else prattled about niggers. “You was lucky, Cox. It wasn’t like today. You didn’t play with no niggers. Campanella was a gentleman. Robinson been to college. You didn’t play with no niggers.” A film fell over the eyes of Billy Cox. He walked to the pool table and began practicing shots. “Ah,” he said at a billiard ball. “Get the fuck down.” He was throwing himself into pointless practice.

  “New York’s fulla niggers,” the man said.

  Before he spoke again, a shapeless woman marched up and shouted, “I know about the redhead.” The woman wore a teal kerchief and brown-rimmed eyeglasses. She started swinging. The man hunched shoulders and held his drink. “You been with that redhead,” the woman screamed. “I know, ya lousy bastard.” But her blows were not equal to her fury. While she pummeled and shrieked, the man sat, feeling embarrassment more than pain, and tried to focus on his glass of Rolling Rock beer.

  I stepped off the bar stool. The sign, “WILLIAM GAYLOR POST, V.F.W., #34,” was blue and white.

  Cox looked at me, the film lifting from his eyes, and he jerked his head. “Now look at this, willya. Look what the sonsabitches are up to now.”


  He bent and stroked the cue ball. It caromed far across the table and gently tapped an eight-ball toward a pocket. The woman swung. She cried, “You rotten fucker.”

  No one present, I thought, except myself, witnessing this 2 A.M. talk of niggers, the ugly woman clouting the sodden man, could have realized that this broad-shouldered, horse-faced fellow tapping billiard balls, missing half a finger on one hand, sad-eyed, among people who would never be more than strangers, was the most glorious glove on the most glorious team that ever played baseball in the sunlight of Brooklyn.

  INTERLUDE II

  I can never be sure whether it is arrogance, hostility or a streak of good sense that prevents me from taking millionaires as seriously as they would like to be taken. In the course of an education by journalism one frequently sees millionaires naked of press agents, but such intimacy breeds an unpredictable variety of attitudes.

  Jack Tibby of Sports Illustrated once quoted Henry R. Luce on what he wanted of the magazine. “He put it all into a word,” Tibby said. He paused and made a small, smug smile and said, “Excitement.”

  “They want that on the Tribune, Jack. Everywhere.”

  “Excitement,” Tibby repeated, as though oracular, trying to freight a rich-man’s offhand banality with wisdom.

  Having audited many scenes played by millionaire and vassal, and lacking Tibby’s native reverence, my own situations with the rich tend to crumble. George Bernard Shaw said after meeting a film producer, “All he wanted to talk about was art and all I wanted to talk about was money.” That is continually happening in more complicated ways, but Walter Francis O’Malley, of Dodger Stadium, Los Angeles, is a rare millionaire in that he senses the limits of his expertise. I have never heard O’Malley discuss a second baseman’s hands, the speed of someone’s swing or the rotation of a curve. O’Malley considers people, whom he manipulates, and money, which he appears to coin in incalculable quantities, while saying from time to time, “I’m just a fan.”