The Natural

Memo said she longed to see the ocean so they drove over the bridge and down into Long Island toward Jones Beach, stopping when she was hungry, for charcoal-broiled steaks at a roadside tavern. Afterwards it was night, lit up by a full moon swimming in lemon juice, but at intervals eclipsed by rain clouds that gathered in dark blots and shuttered the yellow light off the fields and tree tops.

She spoke little, once remarking it looked like rain.

He didn’t answer. Though he had started off riding high (he had paid back the patrons of his Day by walloping a homer that drove in the wi

In another sense it wasn’t a bad evening. He was with her, at least, and they were traveling together, relaxed, to the ocean. He didn’t exactly know where it was and though he liked the water, tonight he did not much care if they never came to it. He felt contentment in moving. It rested him by cutting down the inside motion — that which got him nowhere, which was where he was and she was not, or where his ambitions were and he was chasing after. Sometimes he wished he had no ambitions — often wondered where they had come from in his life, because he remembered how satisfied he had been as a youngster, and that with the little he had had — a dog, a stick, an aloneness he loved (which did not bleed him like his later loneliness), and he wished he could have lived longer in his boyhood. This was an old thought with him.

Hoping for a better fate in the future he stepped on the gas and was at once seized by an uneasy fear they were being followed. Since the mirror showed nobody behind them, he wondered at his suspicions and then recalled a black sedan that had been on their tail, he thought, all the way down from the city, only they had lost it a while back in turning off the highway. Yet he continued to watch in the mirror, though it showed only the lifeless moonlit road.

Memo said Jones Beach was too far and told him to stop the next time they came to a brook or pond where she could take off her shoes and go wading in the water. When he spied a small stream ru

After a while, seeing how silent she was, Roy said, “I bet I got enough today to furnish a house.”

Memo said, “Bump was coming up for a Day just before he died.”

He felt anger rise in his heart and asked coldly, “Well, Memo, what did he have that I haven’t got?” He stood to his full height, strong and handsome.

Without looking at him she spoke Bump’s name thoughtfully, then shook her head to snap out of it, as if it didn’t pay to be thoughtful about Bump. “Oh,” she answered, “he was carefree and full of life. He did the craziest things and always kept everybody in stitches. Even when he played ball, there was something carefree and playful about it. Maybe he went all the way after a fly ball or maybe he didn’t, but once he made up his mind to catch it, it was exciting how he ran and exciting how he caught it. He made you think you had been wishing for a thing to happen for a long time and then he made it happen. And the same with his hitting. When you catch one, Roy, or go up to hit, everybody knows beforehand that it will land up in your glove, or be a hit. You work at it so — sometimes you even look desperate — but to him it was a playful game and so was his life. Nobody could ever tell what would happen next with Bump, and that was the wonderful thing of it.”

Roy thought this is how she sees him now that he is dead. She forgets how hopping sore she was at him after that time in bed with me.

But Bump was dead, he thought, dead and buried in his new box, an inescapable six feet under, so he subtly changed the subject to Gus.

“Gus?” Memo said. At first her face was expressionless. “Oh, he’s just like a daddy to me.”

He asked her in what way but she laughed and said, “That was a fu

“Easy. They had a magic act all laid out to go on. I walked into the guy’s dressing room and when they saw who I was they let me use his stuff just for the laughs.”

“Who showed you how to use it?”

“Nobody. I have done some different things in my time, Memo.”

“Such as what other ones?”

“You name it, I did it.”

“What you did to Max was a scream.”

A black cloud rolled like a slow wave across the moon. “It’s so strange,” she murmured, looking at the moving water.

“What is?”

For a time she didn’t speak, then she sighed and said she meant her life. “It’s been strange ever since I can remember except for a year or two — mostly the part with Bump. That was the good part only it didn’t last very long, not much of the good part ever did. When I was little my daddy walked out on us and I don’t ever remember being happy again till the time I got to go to Hollywood when I was nineteen.”

He waited.

“I won a beauty contest where they picked a wi

He thought she would cry but she didn’t.

Memo watched the pebbles in the flowing water. “After Bump I realized I could never be happy any more.”

“How do you know that?” Roy asked slowly.

“Oh, I know. I can tell from the way I feel. Sometimes in the morning I never want to wake up.”

He felt a dreary emptiness at her words.

“What about yourself?” she asked, wanting to change the subject.

“What about me?” he said gloomily.

“Max says you are sort of a mystery.”

“Max is a jerk. My past life is nobody’s business.”

“What was it like?”

“Like yours, for years I took it on the chin.” He sounded as if he had caught a cold, took out his handkerchief and blew his nose.

“What happened?”

He wanted to tell her everything, match her story and go her a couple better but couldn’t bring himself to. It wasn’t, he thought, that he was afraid to tell her what had happened to him that first time (though the thought of doing that raised a hot blush on his pan, for he had never told anybody about it yet), but about the miserable years after that, when everything, everything he tried somehow went to pot as if that was its destiny in the first place, a thing he couldn’t understand.