Part 69 (2/2)

The team that finally made Bangor West stop was Westfield, Ma.s.sachusetts. Bangor West played them in the second round of the Eastern Regional Little League Champions.h.i.+p, at Bristol, Connecticut, on August 15th, 1989. Matt Kinney pitched for Bangor West and threw the game of his life, striking out nine, walking five (one intentional), and giving up only three hits. Bangor West, however, got only one hit off Westfield pitcher Tim Laurita, and that one belonged, predictably enough, to Ryan Larrobino. The final score was 2-1, Westfield. Credit Bangor's one RBI in the game to King, on a bases-loaded walk. Credit the game-winning RBI to Laurita, also on a bases-loaded walk. It was a h.e.l.l of a game, a purist's game, but it couldn't match the one against York.

In the pro world, it was a bad year for baseball. A future Hall of Famer was banned from the sport for life; a retired pitcher shot his wife and then took his own life; the commissioner suffered a fatal heart attack; the first World Series game to be played at Candlestick Park in over twenty years was postponed when an earthquake shook northern California. But the majors are only a small part of what baseball is about. In other places and in other leagues - Little League, for instance, where there are no free agents, no salaries, and no gate admissions - it was a pretty fine year. The Eastern Regional Tournament winner was Trumbull, Connecticut. On August 26, 1989, Trumbull beat Taiwan to win the Little League World Series. It was the first time an American team had won the Williamsport World Series since 1983, and the first time in fourteen years that the winner had come from the region in which Bangor West plays.

In September, the Maine division of the United States Baseball Federation voted Dave Mansfield amateur coach of the year.

Brooklyn August (For Jim Bishop) In Ebbets Field the crabgra.s.s grows (where Alston managed) row on row as the day's axle turns into twilight I still see them, with the green smell of just-mown infield gra.s.s heavy in the darkening end of the day: picked out by the right-field floods, just turned on and already a.s.saulted by battalions of circling moths and bugs on the night s.h.i.+ft; below, old men and offduty taxi drivers are drinking big cups of Schlitz in the $0.75 seats, this Flatbush as real as velvet Harlem streets where jive packs the jukes in the June of '56.

In Ebbets Field the infield's slow and seats are empty, row on row Hodges is hulked over first, glove stretched to touch the throw from Robinson at third, the batters' boxes float in the ghost-glow of this sky-filled Friday evening (Musial homered early, Flatbush is down by 2).

Newcombe trudged to an early shower through a shower of popcorn and newspaper headlines.

Carl Erskine is in now and chucking hard But Johnny Podres and Clem Labine are heating in case he blows up late; he can, you know, they all can In Ebbets Field they come and go and play their innings, blow by blow time's called in the dimness of the 5th someone chucked a beer at Sandy Amoros in right he spears the empty cup without a word and hands it to a groundkeeper chewing Mail Pouch while the faceless fans cry down juicy Brooklyn vowels, a plague on both their houses.

Pee Wee Reese leans on his knees west of second Campanella gives the sign with my eyes closed I see it all smell steamed franks and 8 pm dirt can see those heavenly shades of evening they swim with angels above the stadium dish as Erskine winds and wheels and throws low-inside: The Beggar and the Diamond AUTHOR'S NOTE: This little story - a Hindu parable in its original form - was first told to me by Mr. Surendra Patel, of Scarsdale, New York. I have adapted it freely and apologize to those who know it in its true form, where Lord s.h.i.+va and his wife, Parvati, are the major characters.

One day the archangel Uriel came to G.o.d with a downcast face. 'What troubles you?' G.o.d asked.

'I have seen something very sad,' Uriel replied, and then pointed between his feet. 'Down there.'

'On earth?' G.o.d asked with a smile. 'Oh! No shortage of sadness there! Well, let us see.'

They bent over together. Far below they saw a ragged figure trudging slowly along a country road on the outskirts of Chandrapur. He was very thin, this figure, and his legs and arms were covered with sores. Dogs frequently chased after him, barking, but the figure never turned to strike at them with his staff even when they nipped at his heels; he simply trudged onward, favoring his right leg as he walked. At one point a number of handsome, well-fed children with wicked smiling faces boiled out of a large house and threw stones at the ragged man when he held his empty begging bowl out to them.

'Go away, you nasty thing!' one of them cried. 'Go away into the fields and die!'

At this, the archangel Uriel burst into tears.

'Now, now,' G.o.d said, clapping him on the shoulder. 'I thought you were made of sterner stuff.'

'Yes, no doubt,' Uriel said, drying his eyes. 'It's just that the fellow down there seems to sum up everything which has ever gone wrong for all the sons and daughters of the earth.'

'Of course he does,' G.o.d replied. 'That is Ramu, and that is his job. When he dies, another will hold it. It is an honorable job.'

'Perhaps,' Uriel said, covering his eyes with a shudder, 'but I cannot bear to watch him do it. His sorrow fills my heart with darkness.'

'Darkness is not allowed here,' said G.o.d, 'and therefore I must take steps to change what has brought it to you. Look here, my good archangel.'

Uriel looked and saw that G.o.d was holding a diamond as big as a peac.o.c.k's egg.

'A diamond of this size and quality will feed Ramu for the rest of his life, and keep his descendants unto the seventh generation,' G.o.d remarked. 'It is, in fact, the finest on the earth. Now . . . let us see . . . ' He leaned forward on His hands and knees, held the diamond out between two gauzy clouds, and let it drop. He and Uriel marked its fall closely, watching as it struck the center of the road upon which Ramu walked.

The diamond was so large and so heavy that Ramu would no doubt have heard it strike the earth had he been a younger man, but his hearing had failed quite severely in the last few years, along with his lungs and his back and his kidneys. Only his eyesight remained as keen as it had been when he was one-and-twenty.

As he struggled up a rise in the road, unaware of the huge diamond which lay gleaming and flas.h.i.+ng on the far side in the hazy suns.h.i.+ne, Ramu sighed deeply . . . then stopped, bent over his staff, as his sigh turned into a fit of coughing. He held onto his staff with both hands, trying to weather the fit, and just as it was easing, the staff - old and dry and almost as worn-out as Ramu himself - snapped with a dry crack, pitching Ramu into the dust.

He lay there, looking up at the sky and wondering why G.o.d was so cruel. 'I have outlived all those I loved the most,' he thought, ' 'but not those I hate. I have grown so old and ugly that the dogs bark at me and the children throw stones at me. I have had nothing but sc.r.a.ps to eat these last three months, and no decent meal with family and friends for ten years or more. I am a wanderer on the face of the earth with no home to call my own; tonight I will sleep under a tree or a hedge with no roof to keep the rain off. I am covered with sores, my back aches, and when I pa.s.s water I see blood where no blood should be. My heart is as empty as my begging bowl.'

Ramu slowly got to his feet, unaware that less than sixty feet and a dry bulge of land hid his still-keen glance from the world's largest diamond, and looked up at the hazy blue sky. 'G.o.d, I am unlucky,' he said. 'I do not hate You, but I fear You are not my friend, nor any man's friend.'

Having said this, he felt a little better and resumed his trudge, pausing only to pick up the longer piece of his broken staff. As he walked, he began to reproach himself for his self-pity and for his ungrateful prayer.

'For I do have a few things to be grateful for,' he reasoned. 'The day is extraordinarily beautiful, for one thing, and although I have failed in many respects, my vision remains keen. Think how terrible it would be if I were blind!'

To prove this to himself, Ramu closed his eyes tightly and shuffled along with his broken staff stretched out in front of him, as a blind man uses his cane. The darkness was terrible, stifling, and disorienting. He soon had no idea if he was moving on as he had been, or if he was wandering off to one side of the road or the other, and might soon go tumbling into the ditch. The thought of what could happen to his old, brittle bones in such a fall frightened him, but he kept his eyes firmly shut and continued to forge ahead.

'This is just the thing to cure you of your ingrat.i.tude, old fellow!' he told himself. 'You will spend the rest of the day remembering that you may be a beggar, but at least you are not a blind beggar, and you will be happy!'

Ramu did not walk into the ditch on either side, but he did begin to drift off to the right of the road as he topped the rise and started down the far side, and this was how he walked past the huge diamond which lay glowing in the dust; his left foot missed it by less than two inches.

Thirty yards or so farther on, Ramu opened his eyes. Bright summer suns.h.i.+ne flooded them, and seemed to flood his mind, as well. He looked with gladness at the dusty blue sky, the dusty yellow fields, the beaten-silver track of the road upon which he walked. He marked the pa.s.sage of a bird from one tree to the next with laughter, and although he never turned once to see the huge diamond, which lay close behind him, his sores and his aching back were forgotten.

'Thank G.o.d for sight!' he cried. 'Thank G.o.d for that, atleast! Perhaps I shall see something of value on the road - an old bottle worth money in the bazaar, or even a coin - but even if I do not, I shall look my fill. Thank G.o.d for sight! Thank G.o.d for G.o.d!'

And, well satisfied, he set off again, leaving the diamond behind. G.o.d then reached down and scooped it up, replacing it beneath the mountain in Africa from which He had taken it. Almost as an afterthought (if G.o.d can be said to have afterthoughts), He plucked up an ironwood branch from the veldt and dropped it onto the Chandrapur Road, as He had dropped the diamond.

'The difference is,' G.o.d told Uriel, 'our friend Ramu will find the branch, and it will serve him as a staff for the rest of his days.'

Uriel looked at G.o.d (as nearly as anyone - even an archangel - can look at that burning face, at least) uncertainly. 'Have You given me a lesson, Lord?'

'I don't know,' G.o.d responded blandly. 'Have I?'

Notes.

Not long after I published Skeleton Crew, my previous book of short stories, I spoke to a reader who told me how much she had liked it. She had been able to ration the stories out, she said - one a night for about three weeks. 'I skipped the notes at the end, though,' she said, keeping a close eye on me as she said it (I think she believed I might leap upon her in my anger at this terrible affront). 'I'm one of those people who don't want to know how the magician does his tricks.'

I simply nodded and told her that was her perfect right, not wanting to get into a long, involved discussion on the subject when I had errands to run, but I have no errands this morning, and I want to make two things perfectly clear, as our old pal from San Clemente used to say. First, I don't care if you read the notes that follow or not. It's your book, and you can wear it on your head in a horserace for all of me. Second, I am not a magician and these are not tricks.

That's not to say there isn't magic involved in writing; I happen to believe that there is, and that it twines around fiction with particular luxuriance. The paradox is this: magicians don't have anything to do with magic, as most of them will readily admit. Their undeniable wonders - doves from handkerchiefs, coins from empty pitchers, silk scarves from empty hands - are achieved through exhaustive practice and well-tested misdirections and sleights of hand. Their talk of 'ancient secrets of the Orient' and 'the forgotten lore of Atlantis' is so much patter. I suspect that, by and large, stage-magicians would deeply identify with the old joke about the out-of-towner who asks the New York beatnik how to get to Carnegie Hall. 'Practice, man, practice,' the beatnik replies.

All that goes for writers, too. After twenty years of writing popular fiction and being dismissed by the more intellectual critics as a hack (the intellectual's definition of a hack seems to be 'an artist whose work is appreciated by too many people'), I will gladly testify that craft is terribly important, that the often tiresome process of draft, redraft, and then draft again is necessary to produce good work, and that hard work is the only acceptable practice for those of us who have some talent but little or no genius.

Still, there is magic in this job, and it comes most frequently at that instant when a story pops into a writer's head, usually as a fragment but sometimes as a complete thing (and having that happen is a little like being hit by a tactical nuke). The writer can later relate where he was when that happened, and what the elements were that combined to give him his idea, but the idea itself is a new thing, a sum greater than its parts, something that is created from nothing. It is, to paraphrase Marianne Moore, a real toad in an imaginary garden. So you need not fear to read the notes that follow on the grounds that I will spoil the magic by telling you how the tricks work. There are no tricks to real magic; when it comes to real magic, there is only history.

It is possible to spoil a story which hasn't been read yet, however, and so if you're one of those people (one of those awful people) who feel a compulsion to read the last thing in a book first, like a willful child who is determined to eat his or her chocolate pudding before touching the meatloaf, I'm going to invite you to get the h.e.l.l out of here, lest you suffer what may be the worst of all curses: disenchantment. For the rest of you, here is a whirlwind tour of how some of the stories in Nightmares and Dreamscapes happened to happen.

'Dolan's Cadillac' - I'd guess the train of thought which led to this story is pretty obvious. I was idling my way through one of those seemingly endless road-repair sites where you breathe a lot of dust, tar, and exhaust and sit looking at the a.s.s end of the same station wagon and the same I BRAKE FOR ANIMALS b.u.mper sticker for what feels like about nine years . . . only the car infront of me that day was a big green Cadillac Sedan DeVille. As we inched our way past an excavation where huge cylinders of pipe were being laid, I remember thinking, Even a car as big as that Cadillac would fit in there. A moment later I had the idea of 'Dolan's Cadillac' firmly in place, fully developed, and none of the narrative elements ever changed so much as an iota.

That is not to say the story was an easy birth; it most definitely was not. I have never been so daunted - s nearly overwhelmed, in fact - by technical details. Now I'll give you what the Reader's Digest likes to call A Personal Glimpse: although I like to think of myself as a literary version of James Brown (the self-styled 'Hardest-Working Man in Show Business'), I am an extremely lazy sod when it comes to research and technical details. I have been twigged again and again by readers and critics (most accurately and humiliatingly by Avram Davidson, who writes for the Chicago Tribune and Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine) for my lapses in these areas. When writing 'Dolan's Cadillac,' I came to realize that this time I could not simply fudge my way through, because the story's entire underpinning depended on various scientific details, mathematical formulae, and the postulates of physics.

If I had discovered this unpalatable truth sooner - before I had roughly 15,000 words already invested in the story of Dolan, Elizabeth, and Elizabeth's Poe-esque husband, that is - I undoubtedly would have consigned 'Dolan's Cadillac' to The Department of Unfinished Stories. But I didn't discover it sooner, I didn't want to stop, and so I did the only thing I could think of I called my big brother and asked for help.

Dave King is what we New Englanders call 'a piece of work,'' a child prodigy with a tested IQ of over 150 (you will find reflections of Dave in Bow-Wow Fornoy's genius brother in 'The End of the Whole Mess') who went through school as if on a rocket-sled, finis.h.i.+ng college at eighteen and going right to work as a high-school math teacher at Brunswick High. Many of his remedial algebra students were older than he was. Dave was the youngest man ever to be elected Town Selectman in the state of Maine, and was a Town Manager at the age of twenty-five or so. He is a genuine polymath, a man who knows something about just about everything.

I explained my problems to my brother over the telephone. A week later I received a manila envelope from him and opened it with a sinking heart. I was sure he'd sent me the information I needed, but I was equally sure it would do me no good; my brother's handwriting is absolutely awful.

<script>