62
PARTISAN REVIEW
By late afternoon he'd ridden around a good deal and then set–
tled in a bar where the game of the week was on, but with the sound
turned off so you didn't have to listen to some banjo-hitter with a pot–
belly pretend to know what was what.
It
was the Dodgers and San
Diego, but nobody seemed sure who was ahead. This kid was pitch–
ing who might as well have been lobbing beachballs. Kelly could just
feel how hard it would be to wait and then how sweet it would be to
have waited so his bat caught the ball just when his hips were driving,
and even with his head down like Manny kept yelling at him to do,
he'd
know
where it was headed, and nobody going to catch it either.
One fat one after another the kid pitcher threw; but nobody was do–
ing much with it. Kelly had three beers pretty fast and then two more
and then began to lose patience with a skinny guy at the end of the
bar who was sure that curveballs never curved and everybody in the
bigs was a hophead and anybody with a brain wouldn't need to play
baseball anyhow, and wasn't it all for the money and.... Kelly left
before he took a poke at the guy, because what did he know? You
didn't know unless you could do it, and if you could do it there was
nothing else. He imagined locking the skinny guy and Verna into a
shed down at the lumberyard and letting them use all that jaw power
for roughing out planks.
It
was a bright warm evening and he felt like
driving some more, maybe even driving back to surprise the Skip
and getting one good lick in if the game was running long, but he
forgot where they were now-Attleboro? Bridgeport? Manchester?
some dim burg, and nowhere near where he deserved to be. When
the siren started up he didn't really notice, until the cruiser was
alongside waving him over; and when the cop said
seventyJive
Kelly
didn't believe it and started to explain. The cop wasn't buying and
asked if Kelly had been drinking, so Kelly could see where it was
headed, and damned if he'd let one more thing come down.
It
really
wasn't a punch at all, just a push, sort of, but the damn cop had a
short fuse. The jail cell smelled like it was where they emptied the
pisser. They let him make one phone call and then another trying to
get somebody to findJo-An at the hospital. When he finally talked to
her she was miles and miles away. "I don't have time to take care of
both of you, you know?" she said; and he said, "I know but they say
somebody's got to come get me," and she said, "Maybe Verna," and
he said, 'jesus!" "Then you can stay, 1 guess," she said, and hung up.
They let him out in the morning, but with no license and they'd
keep the car keys until somebody sensible showed up. There was a
bus that ran downtown and then another one out to the hospital; peo-
