FOUR DAYS IN OCTOBER
By John J. Miller
MONDAY, OCTOBER 13, 1969: OFF DAY
TOMMY DOWNS kept a straight face as he showed Sister Aquilonia the Ebbets Field press pass his father had obtained for him. It was hard not to smile, but he knew the Sister would deem him insufficiently serious if he did, and deny him leave from school.
Sister Aquilonia, his ninth grade English teacher at Sanguis Christi and the faculty advisor to the school newspaper, The Weekly Gospel, was obviously impressed by the pass, but still needed some convincing to sign him out of school for the day. Tommy didn’t know how he knew that, he just did. He was, he frequently told himself, a good judge of character. It helped when he was hot on a story.
“Well . . .” Sister Aquilonia stroked her vermillion chin. She used to be a Negro, until the wild card virus had turned her a striking orangey-reddish. Some of the boys said that it had changed her body in other interesting ways, but it was impossible to tell for certain because of her voluminous habit. She did, Tommy noted, smell rather sweet, but he wasn’t sure if that was her actual odor, or some kind of perfume. Nuns, he knew, generally didn’t use perfume, but neither did he remember her smelling so nice before. He thought of complimenting her on it, but something told him not to.
“I gotta get to Ebbets today, Sister,” Tommy pressed his case. “I gotta take advantage of this opportunity. My Dad went through a lot of trouble to get me the pass.”
Tommy’s father was a salesman for a Cadillac dealership over in Manhattan. He was a real wheeler dealer. He knew how to get a little sugar for himself when he closed the deal, or in this case, for his son. Even though Tommy was only in the ninth grade there was no doubt that he was going to be a reporter when he grew up, and he was already working hard to establish his credentials. The Weekly Gospel was only his first step, as he saw it, on his way to journalistic immortality.
“No doubt,” Sister Aquilonia agreed.
Tommy knew he almost had her. “Think of it. I bet I’m the only reporter on a high school paper with a Series press pass. The Gospel will have an exclusive: Inside the World Series through the eyes of Thomas Downs.”
The idea of covering the Series appealed to him largely because it meant four days away from school, four days of freedom untrammeled by nuns and uniforms and kids mostly bigger than himself. Not that Tommy wasn’t a Dodger fan. There was hardly a boy breathing in the city who wasn’t a Dodger fan that summer. Cellar dwellers for as long as Tommy could remember, the Dodgers had somehow catapulted themselves out of the basement and had taken the National League East Division crown. Then they’d beaten the vaunted Milwaukee Braves in the first ever Divisional Series, and, as National League champions, were facing the heavily favored American League champs, the Orioles, in the World Series. They’d already split the first two games in Baltimore. The next three were scheduled Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday for the Dodgers old park in Flatbush, a thirty minute subway ride from Sanguis Christi, in Queens.
“Well . . .” The nun considered options with agonizing deliberation. “Okay.” Tommy suppressed any signs of glee as Sister Aquilonia scribbled on a release form, tore it off the pad, and handed it to him. “Here’s a pass for the day—good for noon. That should give you plenty of time to get over to Brooklyn and run down your story.”
Tommy hid his disappointment. Only noon? He’d miss less than half the day? Well, he philosophized, that was better than nothing. Knowing he had to stay on the nun’s good side, he pasted a smile on his face. “Thanks, Sister. I’ll get a good story, you’ll see.”
“I’m counting on it.”
“I won’t let you down,” Tommy said, as he pushed open the classroom door and went into the corridor beyond. Let’s see, he thought, first period study hall. The penguin’s note will let me report late. No need to hurry.
Study hall was in the cafeteria. He didn’t hate it, but it was boring. You had to sit there for almost an hour, being quiet, at least pretending you were doing something. He went down the silent, empty corridor, his footsteps echoing loudly. At the intersection he showed his pass to the hall monitor, almost contemptuously. There was no lower form of life at Sanguis Christi than hall monitors. They were all brown noses.
The monitor checked his pass, waved him on. He went down the hall, past the second floor boy’s bathroom. Dare he go in, he wondered? Sometimes you could kill some time with the guys, but sometimes it wasn’t the best place to be, all depending on who was hanging. A sudden urge to pee decided him, and he pushed open the heavy door and ducked inside.
Almost immediately, he knew he’d made a mistake. By then it was too late to back away. That would only have compounded his mistake, making him look like a scaredy-cat, and he couldn’t afford to look like that.
The air was redolent with cigarette smoke, and something else. Tommy couldn’t define it, but he could smell the wrongness in the air, hidden in the cigarette smoke. He couldn’t define that smell, though the familiar odor had been popping up lately in unexpected, unexplained times and places. It was subtle. He couldn’t figure out where it came from. It was just sometimes there, tickling his nose and prodding his consciousness, as it was doing now.
“Hey, look,” one of the three said, “it’s Tommy boy.”
Tommy recognized him from around Christi. He was known to all, even the nuns, as Butch. The kids also called him Butch the Bully, but not to his face. He was a senior, much older than Tommy, who having skipped a year in grade school, was young for a freshman. If rumors were to be believed, Butch was older than anyone else in school. From what Tommy knew about him, he was dumb enough to have been held back a year, or even two. Dumb but big. And mean.
That was a bad combination.
“C’mere, Tommy boy.”
Tommy approached the three reluctantly. Butch was looking pseudo-serious. His sycophants were grinning. Not a good sign. Tommy knew that anything from a verbal hazing to a lunch money shakedown to a serious beating was in store. He also knew that it’d be worse if he ran and they had to chase him.
Butch straightened up from the sink he was leaning against. He expelled a long stream of smoke from his nostrils. It didn’t smell like smoke from a real cigarette. Maybe that was where the sweet smell was coming from.
“How come you’re not in class, Tommy boy?”
He had six inches and fifty pounds on Tommy. He was as menacing as any monster out of myth or movie, and much more frightening because he was there, he was real, and Tommy knew he could kick the shit out of him without breaking a sweat. That sudden, sweet order was strong around him. It was coming off him in waves. Not from the hand-rolled cigarette he was sucking on, pulling the smoke deep into his lungs, but from him. None of the others seemed to notice it. Somewhere in a corner of his frightened mind, Tommy wondered why.
“How come, Tommy?” Butch the Bully repeated, a harder edge in his already edgy voice.
“I have to pee,” Tommy said.
Butch looked at his sycophants. “He has to pee,” he repeated in an almost apt imitation of Tommy’s higher, lighter voice. He looked back at Tommy. “I hope you don’t pee your pants little boy.”
His voice was lilting, mocking. The other two laughed. “Yeah, pee your pants,” one of them said.
Tommy gulped, started to move backward, and Butch came towards him, his sycophants right at his heels. He had a bright, weird look in his too-focused eyes. Some bullies, Tommy knew, liked to have their henchmen deliver beatings for them. Butch looked like he liked to hand them out himself. “Do you need a diaper, little boy?” he said, grinning slow and lazy. “Only babies need diapers.”
I hate this place, Tommy thought, closing his eyes.
Butch towered over him. Backed up against the row of sinks, Tommy had nowhere to go. Butch grabbed Tommy’s shirt and pulled him up onto his toes with little effort. Tommy closed his eyes against the tears that suddenly sprang up in them. Would he rather take the humiliation of a pants-wetting, or the pain of a beating? Considering, though, that they’d probably kick his ass no matter what. . . .
You bastard, he thought, you big dumb ugly bastard.
Butch put his face close down almost against Tommy’s. Tommy’s eyes were still shut, but he could feel Butch’s hot breath against his cheeks. “Piss your pants, boy,” the bully said, his breath oddly sweet as a field of flowers in May. “Pisssssssss—”
Butch’s final word was elongated, like a reptilian hiss, and it concluded with a strange, funny sound like a whispered, gagging, choke. Tommy opened his eyes. Butch’s suddenly stricken face was changing contours.
His features slackened, then seemed to stiffen and tighten. He screamed into Tommy’s face as his head grew narrower, more elongated. His hair fell out in clumps, down upon his shoulders and chest. Butch screamed again and his tongue flopped out of his mouth. It was long and bifurcated. It caressed Tommy’s face like gentle fingers.
“Clarence—” one of his sycophants said, “Uh, I mean, Butch?”
Everyone stared at Butch as he started to twitch all over. Tommy got it first.
“He’s turning a card!” Tommy pulled away from the bully’s suddenly slack grip and started to back away fast. It took the other two a moment, then they barkpedaled as Butch sank to his knees.
“Whu—whut’s happening to me?” Butch asked plaintively, barely able to shape the words with his suddenly lolling tongue and elongated jaw. He shook like a dog trying to throw off droplets of invisible water, but no one answered him.
The boys ran from the bathroom, Butch’s companions screaming like they were on fire. Tommy lost himself in the ensuing excitement, blending in as just another ordinary kid in a group of ordinary, if excited, kids. Eventually Butch was taken away by emergency medics. Tommy, watching safely from the crowd as they wheeled him past, saw that he was tied down to the dolly with all but his head covered with a sheet. He was still alive, at least. He twisted frantically against his bonds, almost as sinuous as a snake or lizard, hissing all the time.
Everyone was talking about it. Tommy, after getting back to the bathroom and unburdening his frightfully over-strained bladder, kept silent about his participation in the affair. He wondered about the strange smell Butch had exuded like a night-blooming orchid. As the morning progressed he managed to get next to Sister Aquilonia for a moment, and took a deep sniff. She gave off the same smell, but not as strongly. A couple others around Christi had it, too. Tommy made careful inquiries among his classmates, and nobody seemed aware of Sister Aquilonia’s perfume, or that of the strange girl in eleventh grade who was quite pretty but had feathers instead of hair. As he checked out of Sanguis to take the sub-way to Ebbets Field over in Brooklyn, Tommy began to wonder. Began to think if maybe detecting that odor was an ability he had alone. It made him feel queasy and excited at the same time.
Was he a wild carder? If so, he was one of the lucky ones. He wasn’t one of those pathetic misfit jokers, but more like Golden Boy, and that Eagle guy, and Cyclone who had that cool uniform. And the Turtle, of course, but no one knew what he looked like. Maybe he was a creepy joker hiding in his shell, but he, Tommy, was a normal kid, maybe just a little smarter than the others.
Tommy was running over the possibilities in his head as he arrived at Ebbets Field and asked directions to the locker room. The gate attendants were skeptical that he was a reporter, but all he had to do was show his magic pass and they let him through.
As he walked through the bowels of Ebbets Field, heading to the locker room, his mind wasn’t on baseball. It was whirling with notions of him, Tommy Downs, actually being a wild carder, being—let’s face it—an ace, with the secret power to ferret out those infected with the virus.
God, he thought as he entered the locker room, that would be great. I wonder if I should get a cool uniform of some kind, like Cyclone’s?
He stood on the threshold of the locker room, looking over the scene of ball players undressing. They were legends, too. Some of them, anyway. Don Drysdale, Tom Seaver, Ed Kranepool. Others were just faces to Tommy, who was just a casual fan. Reporters wove in among them, chattering, asking questions, laughing, taking notes. Real reporters, from real newspapers. Not rags like The Weekly Gospel.
Tommy swelled with a sudden pride. He could do something the real reporters couldn’t. He could sniff out wild carders. Maybe. He took a deep breath, almost unconsciously, and, almost unconsciously, focused his nascent power. And in among the locker room odors of dirty uniforms and sweaty athletes and ointments and balms of a hundred acrid scents, he caught a weak whiff of what he thought of as the wild card smell, and stood there stunned as someone went by and said, “Hey, kid, don’t block the doorway.”
But he hardly heard him, hardly felt the man brush by. He didn’t even recognize him as Pete Reiser, Dodger manager.
All he was thinking was, There’s a secret ace on the Brooklyn Dodgers! Gee, what a story!
It had been quite a year for Pete Reiser. He’d received the call from Cooperstown in January telling him he’d been elected to the Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility. It wasn’t unexpected because when he’d retired he’d had the most hits, most runs scored, and highest batting average in baseball history, but it was still a stunning achievement for a poor boy from the mid-west who’d wanted nothing more from life than to be a ball-player, who, throughout his twenty-one season career, played like his pants were on fire in every inning of every game, no matter the score, unafraid of opposing players, head-hunting pitchers, or outfield walls.
What was unexpected was that as the first-year manager of a team that hadn’t been out of the cellar since ’62 he was still managing in October, his team tied at one game apiece in the World Series. He could hardly hope for things to get any better, but he did. He longed with all his heart to win the Series, to bring the Dodgers back to the heights of glory that he knew with them in the 1950s.
And it just seemed possible that they might do it.
He stood inside the doorway to the clubhouse, watching his team unwind after a light workout. They were a loose bunch, mainly kids with a sprinkling of veterans, built around a solid core of young pitching and little else. Seaver, Koosman, Ryan, Gates, and Drysdale, the glowering veteran brought in to solidify the staff and, not incidentally, to teach how and when to throw inside, a lesson that Seaver, the young superstar, had learned quickly and well . . . Jerry Grote, great at handling a staff and calling a game, not so great at hitting . . . Tommy Agee, a gifted defensive center fielder . . . Ron Swoboda, a lousy defensive right fielder with occasional binges of power . . . Cleon Jones, their only .300 hitter . . . Al Weis, the hundred and sixty five pound infielder who couldn’t hit his weight . . . Donn Clendenon, bought from the expansion Expos to spell the grizzled Ed Kranepool (he was only twenty-five but had been with the Dodgers for eight seasons; that was enough to grizzle anyone) and provide some pop from the right side of the plate . . . Ed “The Glider” Charles, their oldest everyday player who could still pick it at third but whose bat had left him two seasons ago . . . they were an odd and motley crew, but they managed to win, somehow, with great but inconsistent pitching, timely hitting, and an often suspect defense.
And excellent coaching, of course, Reiser thought.
One of the excellent coaches, the pitching coach, was conversing with rookie Jeff Gates at the youngster’s locker. Gates and most of the pitchers called him “Sir,” Drysdale and Reiser and a few of the older players still called him El Hacon, The Hawk. He’d gotten the name as a youngster, partly for the great blade of his nose, partly for his sharp, black eyes. Campy had hung it on him in the spring of 1950 when he’d been traded to the Dodgers from the Washington Senators. He’d pitched for the Dodgers for fifteen seasons, many of them great, some of them awful, and finished his career with four years with the powerhouse Washington Senators. Reiser had watched him save the last game of the ’68 Series for the Senators, throwing with guile and guts and nothing else. He could see that there was nothing left in the Hawk’s arm but pain. Reiser knew that if he was going to make anything out of the mess that had become the Dodgers, he needed El Hacon. Not for this arm anymore, but for his sharp brain which had absorbed so much knowledge over his twenty year major league career. The one thing the Dodgers had was some good young throwers. He needed a pitching coach who could turn them into pitchers, and he knew that Fidel Castro was the man for the job.
He caught Castro’s eye across the room, and Castro acknowledged him with a slight nod, offered a few more words of wisdom to the young rookie, patted him on the ass, and made his way slowly across the room, dropping a word here and there for Seaver and Drysdale and Grote.
“What’s your thoughts about tomorrow, amigo?” Reiser asked his pitching coach in a low voice.
Castro’s eyes were dark and earnest. His voice was that of a prophet supplying wisdom to his high priest. “We’re one and one. Plenty of games left to play. Go with the Drysdale tomorrow, then we can come back with Seaver on three day’s rest for Wednesday. Keep Gates in the bullpen, with Ryan, just in case. But Drysdale, he is ready.”
Reiser nodded thoughtfully. “I believe you’re right, Hawk.” His gaze suddenly narrowed as he looked across the locker room. “Who’s that kid talking to Agee? Should he be here?”
Castro looked, shrugged. “Who knows, jefe? Maybe a new club-house boy.”
Reiser shrugged as well. He had more important things to do than worry about stray clubhouse boys. He had a World Series to win.
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 14, 1969: GAME 3
The next day Tommy decided to forego school entirely. If he didn’t show up they couldn’t stop him from leaving early, and he had something more important to do than waste his time on phys ed, algebra, and Great Expectations. He was on the trail of a real honest-to-Jesus story. An exclusive about the Dodgers’ secret ace. This was a story a real paper would be glad to print, and maybe even pay big bucks for.
He arrived at Ebbets Field early, and his press pass again got him past skeptical security guards at the gate. The stadium was empty and eerily quiet. Tommy thought it downright spooky as he wandered around, trying to find the manager’s office. He got lost almost immediately, and probably would have stayed lost until game time if he hadn’t run into a clubhouse attendant wheeling a cart of freshly washed uniforms to the home locker room. The attendant dropped Tommy off at the door of the manager’s office while on his way to the adjacent locker room, and left him there standing nervously in front of the closed door.
Tommy was not a huge baseball fan, but every boy who grew up in New York and had an atom of interest knew who Pete Reiser was. Besides Babe Ruth, maybe, he was simply the greatest player ever. Ruth held the career home run record, but Reiser had set marks in many other offensive categories while playing a stellar center field. He’d done most of that with the Dodgers, though his last four years he’d spent with the Yankees as a part-time outfield and pinch-hitter. He was a baseball god, and Tommy was reluctant to disturb him in his sanctuary.
But, Tommy thought, disturbing a god was a small price to pay for a good story. He made himself knock on the door. There was an instantaneous reply of “Come in,” and Tommy did.
The office was a lot smaller than he’d imagined. The walls were covered with black and white photos of old Dodgers, going back to the real old days. There was a rickety bookcase across the back wall crammed with notebooks and thick manilla folders and across the opposite wall an old leather sofa with cracked upholstery. The room needed painting. Reiser was seated behind his desk, pen in hand, scowling down at a blank line-up card on his neat desktop. He transferred the scowl to Tommy. “No autographs now, son. I’m busy,” he said, then looked back down at the card.
“I—” Tommy’s voice caught, then he took a deep breath, trying to calm himself. “I’m not looking for an autograph. I’m on a story.”
“What?” Reiser asked, looking up again.
Tommy took a step into the room, suddenly confident. “Yeah, I’m a reporter. See.”
He took the press pass from the pocket of his Sanguis Christi uniform jacket and held it out for Reiser to see.
Reiser frowned. “Christ, I can’t read that from here. Come on in.”
Tommy advanced into the room until he stood across Reiser’s desk. Reiser studied the pass, frowning. “You sure you didn’t steal that from your father?”
“No, sir. I’m Tommy Downs. I represent The Weekly Gospel.”
Reiser grunted. He seemed to notice Tommy’s Sanguis Christi uniform for the first time. “Catholic boy, huh?”
Actually, he wasn’t. Tommy’s father just didn’t want him in public school, and the really private private schools were just a little too pricey. Sanguis Christi fit the family budget, barely. But Tommy saw no sense into going into all that. He could discern approval radiating from Reiser when he eyed the uniform. He simply nodded vigorously to Reiser’s question.
“Well, I guess I can spare you a couple of minutes. Sit down.”
Tommy took the chair across the desk, and slipped the note-book out of his pocket. He opened it and poised his pen over the first page, and said, “Ummmm.” He realized that he didn’t know what to ask Reiser. He couldn’t just ask him if there was a secret ace on the Dodgers. Tommy suddenly had an awful thought. What if Pete Reiser were the secret ace?
What if all season long he’d been manipulating a lousy Dodger team, nudging things here and there with the awesome power of his mind, making a ball go through the infield here, making a batter strike out there, clouding a base runner’s mind so that he tried to go on to third where he was easily thrown out?
Tommy surreptitiously took a long, shallow breath.
He smelled nothing unusual, discounting the stale odors seeping from the locker room next door. Still, he was uncertain in this ability. It was new to him. He wasn’t sure how reliable—
Suddenly he realized that Reiser was frowning.
“Have I seen you before?” Reiser asked.
“I was in the locker room yesterday,” Tommy said, “getting background for my story.”
“Yeah, I remember you now,” Reiser said. “So, what’s this story you’re talking about?”
“Story?” Tommy repeated. “Sure. I was just wondering. Wondering if, ummm, anything strange has happened this season? Anything unusual?”
Reiser laughed. “Unusual? Hell, son, the Dodgers were in last place last year. This year we won the pennant. I’d say the whole damned season was pretty damned unusual. Um—” Reiser hesitated. “Don’t say ‘damned’ in your article. Say ‘darned.’”
“Yes, I understand. But what I’m getting at . . . what I mean . . .”
Reiser waited patiently. Tommy realized that the only way he could think of saying it, was just by saying it. “What I wonder is if you suspect that maybe someone on the team has some kind of power or ability that he used to help win ball games, like, maybe a secret ace or something?”
Reiser stared at him. “A secret ace? You think someone on the Dodgers is an ace?”
Tommy nodded. Reiser suddenly turned cold.
“Using an unnatural ability to win a ball game would be cheating,” Reiser said flatly. “What makes you think someone on my team would cheat like that?”
“I can—” Tommy shut his mouth. He was about to say, “I can smell him,” and then he realized how unbelievably dorky that sounded. Smell him.
Reiser just looked at him.
“I can—I can read their minds.”
“Really?” Reiser asked, apparently unconvinced. “Can you read my mind?”
Tommy shook his head. “No. Only the minds of wild carders. I can tell that they’re different than normal people. But, I’m, uh, I’m kind of new at it. I’m just learning how, so, especially in crowds, it’s hard to tell who’s who.” That much, anyway, was true.
Reiser nodded. “Okay. Well. I’ll tell you what. You’ve got your press pass. Hang around. Check things out. And come back to me first thing,” he emphasized, “when you discover who the secret ace is. Because I want to know, first thing, when you uncover him. All right?”
“Okay.” Tommy stood. There was no sense in questioning Reiser any longer. Reiser didn’t know anything, and couldn’t help the investigation. Tommy was sure of that.