The Natural

“Yes, it’s their function to be the best and for the rest of us to understand what they represent and guide ourselves accordingly.”

He hadn’t thought of it that way but it sounded all right.

“There are so many young boys you influence.”

“That’s right,” said Roy.

“You’ve got to give them your best.”

“I try to do that.”

“I mean as a man too.”

He nodded.

“I felt that if you knew people believed in you, you’d regain your power. That’s why I stood up in the grandstand. I hadn’t meant to before I came. It happened naturally. Of course I was embarrassed but I don’t think you can do anything for anyone without giving up something of your own. What I gave up was my privacy among all those people. I hope you weren’t ashamed of me?”

He shook his head. “Were you praying for me to smack one over the roof?”

“I hoped you might become yourself again.”

“I was jinxed,” Roy explained to her. “Something was keeping me out of my true form. Up at the plate I was blind as a bat and Wonderboy had the heebie jeebies. But when you stood up and I saw you with that red dress on and thought to myself she is with me even if nobody else is, it broke the whammy.”

Iris laughed.

Roy crawled over to her and laid his head in her lap. She let him. Her dress was scented with lilac and clean laundry smell. Her thighs were firm under his head. He got a cigar out of his pocket and lit it but it stank up the night so he flung it away.

“I sure am glad you didn’t stand me up,” he sighed.

“Who would?” she smiled.

“You don’t know the half of it.”

She softly said she was willing to.

Roy struggled with himself. The urge to tell her was strong. On the other hand, talk about his inner self was always like plowing up a graveyard.

She saw the sweat gleaming on his brow. “Don’t if you don’t feel like it.”

“Everything came out different than I thought.” His eyes were clouded.

“In what sense?”

“Different.”

“I don’t understand.”

He coughed, tore his voice clear and blurted, “My goddamn life didn’t turn out like I wanted it to.”

“Whose does?” she said cruelly. He looked up. Her expression was tender.

The sweat oozed out of him. “I wanted everything.” His voice boomed out in the silence.

She waited.

“I had a lot to give to this game.”

“Life?”

“Baseball. If I had started out fifteen years ago like I tried to, I’da been the king of them all by now.”

“The king of what?”

“The best in the game,” he said impatiently.

She sighed deeply. “You’re so good now.”

“I’da been better. I’da broke most every record there was.”

“Does that mean so much to you?”

“Sure,” he answered. “It’s like what you said before. You break the records and everybody else tries to catch up with you if they can.”

“Couldn’t you be satisfied with just breaking a few?” Her pinpricking was beginning to annoy him. “Not if I could break most of them,” he insisted.

“But I don’t understand why you should make so much of that. Are your values so — ”

He heard a train hoot and went freezing cold.

“Where’s that train?” he cried, jumping to his feet.

“What train?”

He stared into the night.

“The one I just heard.”

“It must have been a bird cry. There are no trains here.”

He gazed at her suspiciously but then relaxed and sat down.

“That way,” he continued with what he had been saying, “if you leave all those records that nobody else can beat — they’ll always remember you. You sorta never die.”

“Are you afraid of death?”

Roy stared at her listening face. “Now what has that got to do with it?”

She didn’t answer. Finally he laid his head back on her lap, his eyes shut.

She stroked his brow siowiy with her fingers.

“What happened fifteen years ago, Roy?”

Roy felt like crying, yet he told her — the first one he ever had. “I was just a kid and I got shot by this batty dame on the night before my tryout, and after that I just couldn’t get started again. I lost my confidence and everything I did flopped.”

He said this was tile shame in his life, that his fate, somehow, had always been the same (on the train going nowhere) — defeat in sight of his goal.

“Always?”

“Always the same.”

“Always with a woman?”

He laughed harshly. “I sure met some honeys in my time. They burned me good.”

“Why do you pick that type?”

‘It’s like I say — they picked me. It’s the breaks.”

“You could say no, couldn’t you?”

“Not to that type dame I always fell for — they weren’t like you.”

She smiled.

“I mean you are a different kind.”

“Does that finish me?”

“No,” he said seriously.

“I won’t ever hurt you, Roy.”

“No.”

“Don’t ever hurt me.”

“No.”

“What beats me,” he said with a trembling voice, “is why did it always have to happen to me? What did I do to deserve it?”

“Being stopped before you started?”

He nodded.

“Perhaps it was because you were a good person?”

“How’s that?”

“Experience makes good people better.” She was staring at the lake.

“How does it do that?”

“Through their suffering.”

“I had enough of that,” he said in disgust.

“We have two lives, Roy, the life we learn with and the life we live with after that. Suffering is what brings us toward happiness.”

“I had it up to here.” He ran a finger across his windpipe.

“Had what?”

“What I suffered — and I don’t want any more.”

“It teaches us to want the right things.”

“All it taught me is to stay away from it. I am sick of all I have suffered.”

She shrank away a little.

He shut his eyes.

Afterwards, sighing, she began to rub his brow, and then his lips.

“And is that the mystery about you, Roy?”

“What mystery?”

“I don’t know. Everyone seems to think there is one.”

“I told you everything.”

“Then there really isn’t?”

“Nope.”

Her cool fingers touched his eyelids. It was unaccountably sweet to him.

“You broke my jinx,” he muttered.

“I’m thirty-three,” she said, looking at the moonlit water.

He whistled but said, “I am no spring chicken either, honey.”

“Iris.”

“Iris, honey.”

“That won’t come between us?”

“What?”

“My age?”

“No.”

“Nothing?”

“If you are not married?”

“No.”

“Divorced?”

“No.”

“A widow?”

“No,” said Iris.

He opened his eyes. “How come with all your sex appeal that you never got hitched?”

She gazed away.

Roy suddenly sat up and bounced to his feet. “Jesus, will you look at that water. What are we waiting for?” He tore at his tie.