The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

The crowd loved it. Hi Wenders, not so much. He pointed at me, threw his thumb back over his shoulder, and walked away. The crowd started booing and shaking their ROAD CLOSED signs; some threw bottles, cups, and half-eaten franks onto the field. It was a circus.

‘Don’t you walk away from me, you fatass blind lazy sonofabitching bastard!’ I screamed, and chased after him. Someone from our dugout grabbed me before I could grab Wenders, which I meant to do. I had lost it entirely.

The crowd was chanting ‘KILL THE UMP! KILL THE UMP! KILL THE UMP!’ I’ll never forget that, because it was the same way they’d been chanting ‘Bloh-KADE! Bloh-KADE!’

‘If your mother was here, she’d yank down those blue pants and spank your ass, you bat-blind busher!’ I screamed, and then they hauled me into the dugout. Ganzie Burgess, our knuckleballer, managed the last three innings of that horror show. He also pitched the last two. You might find that in the record books too. If there were any records of that lost spring.

The last thing I saw on the field was Danny Dusen and Blockade Billy standing on the grass between the plate and the mound. The kid had his mask tucked under his arm. The Doo was whispering in his ear. The kid was listening – he always listened when The Doo talked – but he was looking at the crowd, forty thousand fans on their feet, men, women, and children, yelling KILL THE UMP, KILL THE UMP, KILL THE UMP.

There was a bucket of balls halfway down the hall between the dugout and the locker room. I kicked it and sent balls rolling every whichway. If I’d stepped on one of them and fallen on my ass, it would have been the perfect end to a perfect fucking afternoon at the ballpark.

Joe was in the locker room, sitting on a bench outside the showers. By then he looked seventy instead of just fifty. There were three other guys in there with him. Two were uniformed cops. The third one was in a suit, but you only had to take one look at his hard roast beef of a face to know he was a cop, too.

‘Game over early?’ this one asked me. He was sitting on a folding chair with his big old cop thighs spread and straining his seersucker pants. The bluesuits were on one of the benches in front of the lockers.

‘It is for me,’ I said. I was still so mad I didn’t even care about the cops. To Joe I said, ‘Fucking Wenders ran me. I’m sorry, Cap, but it was a clear case of interference and that lazy sonofabitch—’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Joe said. ‘The game isn’t going to count. I don’t think any of our games are going to count. Kerwin’ll appeal to the Commissioner, of course, but—’

‘What are you talking about?’ I asked.

Joe sighed. Then he looked at the guy in the suit. ‘You tell him, Detective Lombardazzi,’ he said. ‘I can’t bear to.’

‘Does he need to know?’ Lombardazzi asked. He’s looking at me like I’m some kind of bug he’s never seen before. It was a look I didn’t need on top of everything else, but I kept my mouth shut. Because I knew three cops, one of them a detective, don’t show up in the locker room of a Major League baseball team if it isn’t goddam serious.

‘If you want him to hold the other guys long enough for you to get the Blakely kid out of here, I think you better put him in the picture,’ Joe says.

From above us there came a cry from the fans, followed by a groan, followed by a cheer. None of us paid any attention to what turned out to be the end of Danny Dusen’s baseball career. The cry was when he got hit in the forehead by a Larry Doby line drive. The groan was when he fell on the pitcher’s mound like a tagged prizefighter. And the cheer was when he picked himself up and gestured that he was okay. Which he was not, but he pitched the rest of the sixth, and the seventh, too. Didn’t give up a run, either. Ganzie made him come out before the eighth when he saw The Doo wasn’t walking straight. Danny all the time claiming he was perfectly okay, that the big purple goose egg raising up over his left eyebrow was nothing, he’d had lots worse, and the kid saying the same: it ain’t nothing, it ain’t nothing. Little Sir Echo. Us down in the clubhouse didn’t know any of that, no more than Dusen knew he might’ve been tagged worse in his career, but it was the first time part of his brain had sprung a leak.

‘His name isn’t Blakely,’ Lombardazzi says. ‘It’s Eugene Katsanis.’

‘Katz-whatsis? Where’s Blakely, then?’

‘William Blakely’s dead. Has been for a month. His parents too.’

I gaped at him. ‘What are you talking about?’