The Natural

Now there was a loud cackle of laughter in the trainer’s room. The voice Roy didn’t like — the frightening thought dawned on him that the voice knew what he was hiding — it changed the subject and wanted to know from Bump if there was any truth to the rumor about him and Pop’s niece.

“Naw,” Bump said, and cagily asked, “What rumor?”

“That you and Memo are getting hitched.”

Bump laughed. “She must’ve started that one herself.”

“Then you deny it?”

The door was shoved open and Bump waltzed out in his shorts, as husky, broadbacked, and big-shouldered as Roy had thought, followed by the trainer and a slightly popeyed gent dressed in an expensive striped suit, whose appearance gave Roy a shooting pain in the pit of the stomach — Max Mercy.

Ashamed to be recognized, to have his past revealed like an egg spattered on the floor, Roy turned away, tucking his jersey into his pants.

But Bump paraded over with his hairy arm outstretched. “Hiya, Buster, you the latest victim they have trapped?”

Roy felt an irritable urge to pitch his fist at the loudmouth, but he nodded and shook hands.

“Welcome to the lousiest team in the world, barring none,” Bump said. “And this is ol’ Doc Casey, the trainer, who has got nobody but cripples on his hands except me. And the bawkshaw with the eyes is Max Mercy, the famous sports colyumist. Most newspaper guys are your pals and know when to keep their traps shut, but to Max a private life is a personal insult. Before you are here a week he will tell the public how much of your salary you send to your grandma and bow good is your sex life.”

Max, whose mustache and sideboards were graying, laughed hollowly. He said to Roy, “Didn’t catch the name.”

“Roy Hobbs,” he said stiffly, but no one seemed to think it mattered very much.

The game was over and the players hoofed through the tu

Pop stepped up on a chair where for once, a bald, bristling figure, he towered over them. Waving his bandaged hands he began to berate them but immediately stopped, choked by his rage into silence.

“If he coughs now,” Bump boomed, “he will bust into dust.”

Pop glared at him, his head glowing like a red sun. He savagely burst out that not a single blasted one of them here was a true ballplayer. They were sick monkeys, broken-down mules, pigeon-chested toads, slimy horned worms, but not real, honest-to-god baseball players.

“How’s about flatfooted fish?” Bump wisecracked. “Get it, boys, fish — Fisher,” and he fell into a deep gargle of laughter at his wit, but the semi-frozen players in the room did not react.

“How’s he get away with it?” Roy asked the ghost standing next to him. The pale player whispered out of the corner of his mouth that Bump was presently the leading hitter in the league.

Pop ignored Bump and continued to give the team the rough side of his tongue. “What beats me is that I have spent thousands of dollars for the best players I could lay my hands on. I hired two of the finest coaches in the game. I sweat myself sick trying to direct you, and all you can deliver is those goddamn goose eggs.” His voice rose. “Do you dimwits realize that we have been skunked for the last forty-five i

“Not Bumpsy,” the big voice said, “I am terrific.”

“You now hold the record of the most consecutive games lost in the whole league history, the most strikeouts, the most errors —”

“Not Bumpsy —”

“— the most foolishness and colossal stupidities. In plain words, you all stink. I am tempted to take pity on those poor dopes who spend a buck and a half to watch you play and trade the whole lousy lot of you away.”

Bump dropped down on his knees and raised his clasped hands. “Me first, Lawdy, me first.”

“— and start from scratch to build up a team that will know how to play together and has guts and will fight the other guy to death before they drop seventeen games in the cellar.”

The players in the locker room were worn Out but Bump was singing, “Many brave hearts are asleep in the deep.”

“Beware,” he croaked low in his throat, “bewaaare —”

Pop shook a furious finger at him that looked as if it would fly off and strike him in the face. “As for you, Bump Baily, high and mighty though you are, some day you’ll pay for your sassifras. Remember that lightning cuts down the tallest trees too.”

Bump didn’t like warnings of retribution. His face turned surly.

“Lightning, maybe, but no burnt out old fuse.”

Pop tottered. “Practice at eight in the morning,” he said brokenly. But for Red he would have tumbled off the chair. In his office behind the slammed and smoking door they could hear him sobbing, “Sometimes I could cut my own throat.”

It took the Knights a while to grow bones and crawl out after Bump. But when everybody had gone, including the coaches and Dizzy, Roy remained behind. His face was flaming hot, his clothes soaked in sweat and shame, as if the old man’s accusations had been leveled at his head.

When Pop came out in his street clothes, a yellowed Panama and a loud sport jacket, he was startled to see Roy sitting there in the gloom and asked what he was waiting for.

“No place to go,” Roy said.

“Whyn’t you get a room?”

“Ain’t got what it takes.”

Pop looked at him. “Scotty paid you your bonus cash, didn’t he?”

“Two hundred, but I had debts.”

“You shoulda drawn an advance on your first two weeks’ pay from the office when you came in today. It’s too late now, they quit at five, so I will write you out my personal check for twenty-five dollars and you can pay me back when you get the money.”

Pop balanced his checkbook on his knee. “You married?”

“No.”

“Whyn’t you ask around among the married players to see who has got a spare room? That way you’d have a more regular life. Either that, or in a respectable boarding house. Some of the boys who have their homes Out of town prefer to stay at a moderate-priced hotel, which I myself have done since my wife passed away, but a boarding house is more homelike and cheaper. Anyway,” Pop advised, “tonight you better come along with me to the hotel and tomorrow you can find a place to suit your needs.”

Roy remarked he wasn’t particularly crazy about hotels.

They left the ball park, got into a cab and drove downtown. The sky over the Hudson was orange. Once Pop broke out of his reverie to point out Grant’s Tomb.

At the Midtown Hotel, Pop spoke to the desk clerk and he assigned Roy a room on the ninth floor, facing toward the Empire State Building. Pop went up with him and pumped the mattress.

“Not bad,” he said.

After the bellhop had left he said he hoped Roy wasn’t the shenanigan type.

“What kind?” Roy asked.

“There are all sorts of nuts in this game and I remember one of my players — seems to me it was close to twenty years ago — who used to walk out on the fifteenth floor ledge and scare fits out of people in the other rooms. One day when he was walking out there he fell and broke his leg and only the darndest luck kept him from rolling right overboard. It was begi