The Natural - Маламуд Бернард

The conductor popped open his watch. “Be a good hour late into the city.”

“All aboard,” he called.

“Aboard,” Eddie echoed, carrying the bassoon case.

The buxom girl in yellow broke through the crowd and threw her arms around Roy’s neck. He ducked but she hit him quick with her pucker four times upon the right eye, yet he could see with the other that Harriet Bird (certainly a snappy goddess) had her gaze fastened on him.

They sat, after dinner, in Eddie’s dimmed and empty Pullman, Roy floating through drifts of clouds on his triumph as Harriet went on about the recent tourney, she put it, and the unreal forest outside swung forward like a gate shutting. The odd way she saw things interested him, yet he was aware of the tormented trees fronting the snaky lake they were passing, trees bent and clawing, plucked white by icy blasts from the black water, their bony branches twisting in many a broken direction.

Harriet’s face was flushed, her eyes gleaming with new insights. Occasionally she stopped and giggled at herself for the breathless volume of words that flowed forth, to his growing astonishment, but after a pause was on her galloping way again — a girl on horseback — reviewing the inspiring sight (she said it was) of David jawboning the Goliath-Whammer, or was it Sir Percy lancing Sir Maidemer, or the first son (with a rock in his paw) ranged against the primitive papa?

Roy gulped. “My father? Well, maybe I did want to skull him sometimes. After my grandma died, the old man dumped me in one orphan home after the other, wherever he happened to be working — when he did — though he did used to take me out of there summers and teach me how to toss a ball.”

No, that wasn’t what she meant, Harriet said. Had he ever read Homer?

Try as he would he could only think of four bases and not a book. His head spun at her allusions. He found her lingo strange with all the college stuff and hoped she would stop it because he wanted to talk about baseball.

Then she took a breather. “My friends say I have a fantastic imagination.”

He quickly remarked he wouldn’t say that. “But the only thing I had on my mind when I was throwing out there was that Sam had bet this ten spot we couldn’t afford to lose out on, so I had to make him whiff.”

“To whiff — oh, Roy, how droll,” and she laughed again.

He grinned, carried away by the memory of how he had done it, the hero, who with three pitched balls had nailed the best the American League had to offer. What didn’t that say about the future? He felt himself falling into sentiment in his thoughts and tried to steady himself but couldn’t before he had come forth with a pronouncement: “You have to have the right stuff to play good ball and I have it. I bet some day I’ll break every record in the book for throwing and hitting.”

Harriet appeared startled then gasped, hiding it like a cough behind her tense fist, and vigorously applauded, her bracelets bouncing on her wrists. “Bravo, Roy, how wonderful.”

“What I mean,” he insisted, “is I feel that I have got it in me — that I am due for something very big. I have to do it. I mean,” he said modestly, “that’s of course when I get in the game.”

Her mouth opened. “You mean you’re not —” She seemed, to his surprise, disappointed, almost on the verge of crying.

“No,” he said, ashamed. “Sam’s taking me for a tryout.” Her eyes grew vacant as she stared out the window. Then she asked, “But Walter — he is a successful professional player, isn’t he?”

“The Whammer?” Roy nodded.

“And he has won that award three times — what was it?”

“The Most Valuable Player.” He had a panicky feeling he was losing her to the Whammer.

She bit her lip. “Yet you defeated him,” she murmured. He admitted it. “He won’t last much longer I don’t think-the most a year or two. By then he’ll be too old for the game. Myself, I’ve got my whole life ahead of me.”

Harriet brightened, saying sympathetically, “What will you hope to accomplish, Roy?”

He had already told her but after a minute remarked, “Sometimes when I walk down the street I bet people will say there goes Roy Hobbs, the best there ever was in the game.”

She gazed at him with touched and troubled eyes. “Is that all?”

He tried to penetrate her question. Twice he had answered it and still she was unsatisfied. He couldn’t be sure what she expected him to say. “Is that all?” he repeated. “What more is there?”

“Don’t you know?” she said kindly.

Then he had an idea. “You mean the bucks? I’ll get them too.”

She slowly shook her head. “Isn’t there something over and above earthly things — some more glorious meaning to one’s life and activities?”

“In baseball?”

“Yes.”

He racked his brain —

“Maybe I’ve not made myself clear, but surely you can see (I was saying this to Walter just before the train stopped) that yourself alone — alone in the sense that we are all terribly alone no matter what people say — I mean by that perhaps if you understood that our values must derive from — oh, I really suppose —” She dropped her hand futilely. “Please forgive me. I sometimes confuse myself with the little I know.”

Her eyes were sad. He felt a curious tenderness for her, a little as if she might be his mother (That bird.) and tried very hard to come up with the answer she wanted — something you said about LIFE.

“I think I know what you mean,” he said. “You mean the fun and satisfaction you get out of playing the best way that you know how?”

She did not respond to that.

Roy worried out some other things he might have said but had no confidence to put them into words. He felt curiously deflated and a little lost, as if he had just flunked a test. The worst of it was he still didn’t know what she’d been driving at.

Harriet yawned. Never before had he felt so tongue-tied in front of a girl, a looker too. Now if he had her in bed —

Almost as if she had guessed what he was thinking and her mood had changed to something more practical than asking nutty questions that didn’t count, she sighed and edged closer to him, concealing the move behind a query about his bassoon case. “Do you play?”

“Not any music,” he answered, glad they were talking about something different. “There’s a thing in it that I made for myself.”

“What, for instance?”

He hesitated. “A baseball bat.”

She was herself again, laughed merrily. “Roy, you are priceless.”

“I got the case because I don’t want to get the stick all banged up before I got the chance to use it.”

“Oh, Roy.” Her laughter grew. He smiled broadly.

She was now so close he felt bold. Reaching down he lifted the hat box by the string and lightly hefted it.

“What’s in it?”

She seemed breathless. “In it?” Then she mimicked, “— Something I made for myself.”

“Feels like a hat.”

“Maybe a head?” Harriet shook a finger at him.

“Feels more like a hat.” A little embarrassed, he Set the box down. “Will you come and see me play sometime?” he asked.

She nodded and then he was aware of her leg against his and that she was all but on his lap. His heart slapped against his ribs and he took it all to mean that she had dropped the last of her interest in the Whammer and was putting it on the guy who had buried him.

As they went through a tunnel, Roy placed his arm around her shoulders, and when the train lurched on a curve, casually let his hand fall upon her full breast. The nipple rose between his fingers and before he could resist the impulse he had tweaked it.