The World's Greatest Undiscovered Fastball

by Robert Brewer

It's not so hard getting out now as it used to be. Before, you had to get adopted out, or foster parents had to sign you out, or sometimes when you were really lucky your own flesh and blood parents would come to their senses and take you out. But that was all BC, Before Carmen, who invented his own way out.

The scuttlebutt was that Carmen beat up a teacher in Mary Queen of Heaven, that Trenton grammar school. He was too young for reform school, too young for State Prison, so the orphanage here was the only place he could get straightened out before they locked him up for good. One day after school, I'm drinking the 3:30 milk that comes for us in a dirty silver milk tank. The outside is that way, but the inside is clean, with milk white and frothy as foam. The tank is bored at the bottom with a spigot and a button on top we could push and fill a Dixie cup. I remember a keg like this at a picnic somewhere, although none of us were allowed to drink from it, only adults gathered around drinking brown apple cider must have been, in clear plastic cups. Robin and I are about to leave the lockerroom through the tile lined corridor leading out to the gray gravel pathway and the Platform when we hear the shouting, a boy's voice neither of us recognize.

"Get away from me," the voice says. It's a husky yell coming from the hallway about 40 feet or so from the lockerroom. Somebody new getting dumped off, I thought, but then new arrivals usually come in tame and docile. Right away, this voice sounds different so we figure we might as well hang around and see what the wind blows in.

"You'll stay right here until I'm ready to let you go," The Supervisor screams. We've been hearing her bellow for years, and there's something in that voice right now that tells me she's got something she can't handle.

"Hell no I'm getting out right now," the new voice says.

"That's what you think," she says again. The voices are getting closer now. The boys at the milktable freeze; Ronnie Estep has a white upper lip.

"Now, you get right in here and..."

Our first look at him is that mad and fleeing face of his and the ruby drawn-in cheeks when he rushes past, then the shocks of that long black hair greased in Vitalis and combed to a duck's ass doo Elvis like. He is running, his hair streaming, away from the milk keg, toward the lockers, and he spins around at the last minute because he runs out of room. It is only about 15 feet from the hallway door to the lockers themselves, a distance he bolts in about a second or two, then backs his broad shoulders right up against the lockers and a huge "Boom" echoes throughout the room as he hits the lockerwall.

She follows him and stops about 3 feet away and the two of them stand there, him like a revved up '61 Plymouth Fury and her, black habit full out swarming like the cape worn by the headless horseman in that Disney movie, and for a while they stare each other down, then she rushes to grab him and it all hits the fan, every morsel.

"Get the fuck outta my life," he roars. Yakety Yak, don't talk back the Coasters sing on the record playing in the game room across the hall, and he races to the clothes table at the other end of the lockerroom where sacks of laundry are put Wednesdays. We fold the fresh clothes and put them inside our lockers, although its early and we haven't done it yet. It is a good thing because this new mustang running around footloose and fancy in our lockerroom now has a laundry bag in a headlock, then heaves it at her and there are boxer drawers, briefs, guinea T's and athletic supporters all over the place. I'm looking at Robin, he's looking at me and we both know something is over and something else has started although we can't quite figure out what it is yet. In a leap, he's high and up onto the clothes table.

"Leave me alone," he screams again.

Up on the table, he is certainly a horse, a black crazy horse with a wild mane, that long black hair of his, running in a field and you couldn't rope or tame it. Now that he's up on the table, she sees she won't get him either, and she huffs away probably figuring at least she got him into the corral with the rest of us. Or maybe she's coming back with reinforcements. When she's gone, I walk over to the laundry table, slow so I don't spook 'im.

"Whoa boy, easy boy," I say. "Easy does it now, big fella," which is what Zorro said to Toronado, the big black stallion that became his horse on the Zorro TV show we watched Thursday nights at 8. "C'mon boy, c'mon down," I say, just the way Zorro did when Toronado reared back on his hind legs.

I give him my hand, throw it right out in the air, although he's hesitating, not knowing I got a TV show running in my head. "S'ok, S'ok boy, won't hurt 'cha now, c'mon down," I say. Then he takes my hand and jumps off the table right onto the tile floor. "Atta boy, atsa good boy," I say, and when he is down, all the boys surround him and take turns patting him across his broad back like a big bronco that wasn't ever ridden. Then I slip the bridle over his neck light and easy.

"Say, let's go out and play some ball," I tell him, and he takes the bit.

"Yoos got gloves?" he asks.

Out together we walk over the crushed rock, all the boys together, Robin, Jaybird, Billy, Richie Waluda, together with the Estep brothers Kenny, Jimmy and Phil, the big Puerto Rican boys Benny Gonzalez and Audi Aquaviva, plus middler kids nine, ten, and eleven, even little kids seven and eight years old, all of us escort him out onto the gray gravel and past the manhole promontory on the hill, down past the Platform, across the blacktop and the basketball backboard which is on the way out toward the lower fields and Old John's barn if you wanted to go that way, but we veer a little to the right and head over to the baseball diamond, a little shaggy now that the season's over, and we break stuff out of the equipment bag, yanking out bats, balls and gloves. Robin passes me the catcher's mitt, and I walk over to the new boy, handing him a glove too, but he gets his dander up again.

"Where the hell am I?" he screams. "And who the hell are you?"

"I'm the catcher," I say. "Just you and me now. Put one down the middle."

I scuttle away next to Robin, and turn the beak backward on my Dodger cap, one of the first ones with that new lettering, that LA logo on the beak. Dodger baseball cards are different this year now that the players've gone west, which makes it all strange. Anyway, the new boy just looks at the ball and twirls it around in his glove. He looks at me, then back into his glove, then curls his lip remembering whatever it was that happened to him before we got him, and looks at me like I shouldn't have done what I did. Without a word, without warning, worst, without a windup, he takes the ball out, kicking his leg high, mad as hell, whipping his arm at me, firing that ball.

I've done this lots, catching fastballs. Every time, it's a case of a straight line being the shortest distance to somewhere. Pick up the flight of the ball, check the speed, and a monkey can tell you where to put the glove. Only now though, this ball is rising and coming. I'm not familiar with this action, and I can't quite judge it let alone see it, and I feel a bit the rise of goosebumps just as I remember to put the glove over my face before the ball cracks cannon-like into the thin unlined pocket of the mitt, then my eyes close, I'm knocked backward and a wind stream passes.

"Got a starter," Robin says to me.

"I guess," I say to the sky and the billowing clouds, still on my back. My hand smarts like hell, and we meet Carmen this way.

The ball tossing goes on, and the other boys join in until the sun flashes low between the leaves of the Robin Hood tree, late autumn red fills the sky, and my hand, pulped like a beet, makes it hard to go on. When we are through playing ball, Benny, Billy, Robin and Jaybird put the gear into the equipment bag and after they finish, Carmen grabs the handles on the bag, and in one clean motion like the snatch and jerk, lifts the entire green bag, balls, bats, gloves and everything, hoisting it right over his shoulder like a flour sack, and we walk up the hill again, everyone with a lighter load now than before his lockerroom romp and tromp.

"Ain't that heavy mister," one of the little kids says to him.

"S'not boy," he says.

We pass the Platform and the picnic alcove walking on the gray gravel pathway again that takes us past the fire escape, the classrooms on our right and Rin Tin Tin's house, the home of the boyside dog. Rinny leaps and puts his paws on our shoulders, his big black flews slobbering appreciative, as Robin flits up alongside us, and into the dormitory corridor we go, three abreast. It takes our eyes some time to adjust to the corridor darkness, although I know where we are every instant. We pass the billboard on our left, the intra-squad team notices are still posted, and the monarch butterfly is still pinned to the corkboard, one silver pushpin through the spiracle, another through the thorax, as we head back toward the lockerroom and the open doorway further down. On our right, you can see the furl of the American flag through the window of the fourth grade classroom door, the very end of the hallway.

Just as I suspected, The Supervisor meets us again inside the lockerroom with a posse of other nuns I haven't seen before, aiming I guess, to take Carmen back up to the principal's office to see about his language problem. But even with the black rubber hoses they have in their hands, they are no match for the white ash, 36 ounce, Willie Mays Louisville Slugger that Audi Aquaviva slips out of the equipment bag and rests on his shoulder. Richie Waluda takes the thick taper Jackie Robinson bat, Benny Gonzalez the Hillerich and Bradley Stan Musial model, and the three of them stand in front of Carmen looking like murders row on the 1927 Yankees, their hands wrapped around the bat handles, the smooth wooden barrels hanging like torpedoes over their shoulders, and it is declared a direct stand-off when the last patch of their black fabric skirts slinks noiselessly out the lockerroom door.

In the showerroom, somebody steps on the grooved black footring that runs around the circular washbowl. Water jets out in thin tiny streams and we wash up around the circular sink. When we're done, we walk past the clothestable and sit at the bench around the milk keg, down where the TV is, and Carmen looks around the room, scanning the tops of the lockers.

"Everybody's got a model, lookit all the models," he says.

It's as though our way of life here is making sense to somebody. And why shouldn't it? Look at the model airplanes. A P38-Lightning is steep in a dive over Richie Waluda's locker. You can't see the string looped around the water pipe that keeps the Lightning suspended. Kenney Estep has a silver Saberjet; its wings are spread back, the air intake painted yellow. Billy Dennis has a Hustler bomberjet, silver and black around the wings and fuel pod, and Ronald Bogamil has a '59 Ford Galaxie like the one Father Steve lets us ride in. On the top of every kid's locker, you can see a model plane, a bird, animal, or a customized AMT model car, and every model is painted, trimmed, shined, and dusted off each week, looked at and admired only because in real life, these things really move. Something we're still working on.

"Billy, that's some jet," Carmen says. "Any more jets?"

Ronald Bogamil runs to his locker, reaches up to the topshelf, and pulls a Revell box down from the lockertop. "How about a Stratofortress? Paint it green. Green is neat," he says.

"Look at the spear on the nose," Carmen says. "Thanks."

"That's a drogue. That's how it gets gas," Ronald says.

"Need that gas, need lots a gas." Carmen says.

Other boys get their models, bring them to Carmen, and one by one, he inspects what they have and I too am under this show and tell spell. My locker is to our left and back toward the showers, fourth from the end, number 4 it reads on the metal plate below the louvers, Duke Snider's number. I've put a strip of masking tape under the number 4 and written on it with a black marking pen, "Snider," I've written. Robin's locker is three down from mine, number 7. There is another strip of masking tape underneath the number seven, and another name written on the tape. "Mantle," the strip reads. Further down the lockerbank, some of the number 30's are open. Robin takes a piece of masking tape and pastes it underneath the number 32, then writes on it.

"Carmen," he says, "here's your locker, Sandy Koufax, number 32."

"Good player, lots of gas." Carmen says, admitting it like he really believed.

Carmen's era ended when Father Steve took us in the Galaxie, to a ballgame way out I didn't know where, no one did until the tall cement wall said Yankee Stadium. Kubek hit one that I lost in the high city air but the crowd roared on, so I guess it went out, Ballantine beer they all were drinking. On the way home, they let you walk along the warning track in right field, out past the bullpen, near the gate across from small ugly trains out beyond the road. As we're leaving, Carmen sees somebody with a catcher's mitt and warm up jacket, one of the coaches maybe, who warms up the relievers. Out of the blue he just yells, "Hey Mister, can I throw one."

Father Steve trys to excuse Carmen. "He's from the orphanage, it's Ok," he says. But Christ, the guy actually turns around and stares at us.

"Sure kid," he says, and he tosses the ball to Carmen then squats low in the bull pen and holds his catchers mitt out toward us. It is way past 4 o'clock, the crowd has gone, the grandstand shadows have swept way past the pitcher's mound and practically the whole place is empty except for guys cleaning up hot dog wrappers out near the monuments to great Yankees.

"Right here fella. Put it right here," the man calls out.

Old John took us hunting once, way out in the fields behind the red barn where the deer steal out from behind the sugar maple. It must have been the same way for that buck, that uneasy terror looking down the barrel of a hunting rifle, when that man squatting in the low Stadium shadows came face to face with the world's greatest undiscovered fastball. The ball cracked that mitt, the sound erupted all through the empty seats, the ushers in Section G quit reaching for hot dog wrappers and picked their heads up to see what hapened. The guy in the Yankee jacket fell backwards like I did, his arms extended out, his legs up in the air, like the box turtles we turn upside down when we count their markings down at the creek side. His cap falls off, he squirms around in the bullpen dirt and when he finally does get up, he comes over to see us.

"Where in the world you fellas from?"

Father Steve tells him, and although we all leave the Stadium with Carmen, we know there's a part of the world he won't be going back to for long. Sometime later, we see that same man again with a woman this time, and they're walking down the stairs of the Front Hall with Carmen, us watching them drive away.

Whenever I want to get Vada, I have to open my locker and step inside for a second, and reach up before I can take the bird in my hands. Sometimes, I bring him to the milktable and look at the color paint map. It says paint the bird that special red and shade it lighter in parts, to rose, then darker along the wings and black on the throat. The bird colors remind me of this building, which is red too, scarlet in places, and dull red, maroon, in others. But I cannot imagine this building rising or lifting, elevating in any way birdlike, or anything. I can imagine it going the other way though. Cracking, collapsing, falling all over itself until every flake of brick is a dust speck on the ground.

There were other lessons we drew from the animal kingdom to get along here in the time of Carmen. Once we saw a TV show about birds of prey. There were eagles, a mother and father, and a chick in a nest high over a mountain top somewhere. The mother eagle went off to find food. When she left, the father eagle sat on top of the chick to keep it warm. Then the mother came back with a fish, fed it to the chick, and the father eagle flew off and returned with a rabbit he ripped the guts out of before giving strips of rabbit meat to the chick.

"When I'm a Dad, I'd like to act like that," Carmen said, shaking his thick black hair, putting things together so we wouldn't go walking around crazy, fighting, and all shook up.

Robert Brewer teaches social studies in the New York public school system. "The World's Greatest Undiscovered Fastball" is an excerpt from a novel.