The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop

8

DAMONSDAY CLVII. Down in the Pioneer locker room, Knickerbocker rookie Hardy Ingram pulls on the old jersey with its bold antiquated "1." Was it really his? Probably not: too pat. Numerology. Lot of revealing work in that field lately. Made you wonder about a lot of things. Like the idea Damon was killed in Game 49: seven times seven. Third inning. Unbelievable. Or like that guy who's discovered that the whole damn structure from the inning organization up and double entry bookkeeping are virtually identical: just multiply it by twenty-one, the guy claims, and you've got it all. Grim idea. As Hardy tugs the shirt on over his head, there's like a — some said always a sudden chill — the others pause to watch: he gives them no sign. Fakes a yawn. Still, there is something strange — what is it? Fits too well. Coincidence. Or maybe they made it for him, new shirt, not the old one at all. In fact, the original must be in tatters by now.

When he arrived at the ball park a few minutes ago, Hardy was set upon by the usual runty mob of kids wanting autographs, but there was this one, standing at the fringe, just looking on. Peculiar, and it's still bugging him. What to make of it? Nothing, forget it. Trick probably. Get him upset. They all know the story from the catechism. Have a big laugh about it later. Next to him, the Universal Baseball Association's best rookie catcher, Paul Trench, who's to play Hardy's own great-great-great-grandfather, pulls on cleats. Paunch is good, but a Bridegroom, and Hardy isn't used to throwing to him. He hopes it'll come off all right. Paunch doesn't have much to say. Stage fright. Hardy grins at him: HOF Royce Ingram, the Avenger, the man who in remorse sank to the bottom of the UBA, then rose again to be the greatest backstop of them all, the Great Atonement Legend.

Sudden roar! Crowd. Big one. Ceremonies beginning. Take an hour or more, no hurry. Makes his throat catch just the same, though, and he grabs too fast for his pants. Take it easy, plenty of time. Still watching him, the bastards. Hardy Ingram isn't sure what might happen out there today. The annual rookie initiation ceremony, the Damonsday reenactment of the Parable of the Duel, is an Association secret. Lot of rumors, unnerving hearsay, but you can't be certain. Maybe it's like some claim and he won't come back. Doesn't make sense to him to knock off your best young talent every season, but he knows people aren't always rational. And if that's the way they want it, if that's how it's got to be, Hardy Ingram wants to take it like a man. Like the man himself. Poised. Knowing. Cool.

Really got them packed in up there. Not only a holiday and a good show, but in the middle of another centennial year as well — one hundred years since the assassination of HOF Barney Bancroft, the ninth UBA Chancellor, and the subsequent Monday Revolt. Weird times they had back then, all right. Still: ninth Chancellor, nine innings — all just so much bullshit, probably, like Cuss says. Centennial of everything these days. Enough to give a guy the creeps.

"How ya feeling?" Trench asks, standing. He tugs his belt one notch tighter under his belly, clops his cleats a couple times on the cement Boor, picks up his mask and guard.

"Okay, I guess, Paunch." He uses the real name on purpose and grins to see Paunch blink.

"Good boy! Nothing to worry about. See you up on the field. . Damon." He squeezes Hardy's arm, not looking at him, and leaves him. The rest watch this exchange, looking for — for what? some sign. Sign of weakness. Or sign that he knows. . Nothing to worry about: hah! like hell! Hardy yanks on his knickers, feeling suddenly a little sore: why him? Because, goddamn it, you're the greatest, that's why. Rather be a second-rater like Squire? No. Well, then, shape up. Talks to himself like that, keeping his nerve up, hoping the others don't see the cold sweat of doubt starting to prickle his face.

Paul Trench is Hardy's age, but already looks and acts like an old man. A company man, a loyal Damonite, at home in the world, incurious and doltish. His old man was a Damonite, so is he. All there is to it. Well, it'd be nice to have it so simple. Attractive ideas, though, Hardy has to admit. Not easy to love the establishment, but on the other hand, if he'd been born back in the days of the Damonite origins, he'd have probably joined them. Return to the simplistic and pious view of Damon as Good and Jock as Evil. Seems silly now, but back then, the Caseyites having turned despotic and fractious, and the Association at the tag-end of two bleak decades of unalleviated mediocrity, it all must have made some sense. And something about Damon the man, legend or no, always excites Hardy. Genius. Yep, he'd have joined.

And the Damonites didn't lift an arm and still they got their way. Plain simple-minded faith in the ultimate power of justice and truth. Must have excited the hell out of them to see it happen like they said it would. Of course, once they got in, they grew a little muscle. Lot of different ways to get what you wanted, but only one to keep what you had.

Hardy hauls on socks, watching his teammates-for-a-day head out on the field to warm up, nodding back when they nod to him, reading their numbers… Stan Patterson… Gram-mercy Locke… Hatrack Hines. The strange resonance those names have! well, the childhood programing, the catechism, all the mythic residue hidden away in daily life. Still: hard not to feel it. Squire Flint shuffles by looking cast down— whose…? oh yes, Drew McDermott. Well, understandable. He has to relieve Halifax, suffer an humiliating shelling, then get his finger busted by Casey's line drive. Squire, like most failures, is in love with Casey — he's one of the new breed of radical Caseyites, heretical sect attempting to bring back the golden age of Patrick Monday, celebrate the mystery of Casey's uniqueness, his essential freedom, God active in man, and, as Cuss McCamish would say, all that shit. Hardy has noticed these guys have a way of using "must" pretty often. "Man must achieve authentic transcendence.. Casey must be made relevant to our times… Man must have inferiority… We must support human aspirations that cry out for fulfillment"… and who don't like it, bust his balls. Of course, Hardy has to admit, there's something exceptional and appealing about Gawky Jock the Mad Killer, too, something fascinating about the way he altered the entire course of UBA history. With one pitch. Hardy feels a tingling just behind his left ear.

So the Squire Flint types are saying that Damonism is a perversion and a tyranny, while others say the original Damonites had the truth, but have been betrayed by opportunists; others — like Paul Trench and his dad — hold that power itself is proof they are still in the right, that the continuing strength of this story through time is evidence that it is somehow essentially true, while guys like Cuss McCamish think everybody concerned should just go diddle themselves and leave the league in peace. Amen to that, thinks Hardy, but feels burnt by a wave of guilt. How is it that a goddamn renegade like himself got Damon Rutherford's part to play today? How does Trench feel about that? Ironic? Or just a proper victim? Don't think about it, man. Just remember how you love the guy, that second son who pitched such great ball and died so young, and do him justice.

Book he's been reading lately. The Doubter. One of the flood of centennial Bancroft biographies out this year. Author tries to show that Bamey Bancroft, not Rutherford or Casey or Hardy's own progenitor Royce Ingram, was actually the central figure, the real heart and point of the Parable of the Duel, as they call it now. Rutherford and Casey seem to be giants, this guy claims, but are really only subhuman masks, predesigned roles, while Bancroft is the only one wholly rounded and thus truly human participant in that incredible drama. Maybe the only real one. Skepticism, doubt, fear: yet the ability to act, to participate. Cute idea: old-fashioned humanism founded on abiding ignorance and despair, but who says man's condition is, eternally, dread and doubt? Funny how you can play that game so many ways. Other theories have Brock Rutherford, Sycamore Flynn, Fennimore McCaffree, Chauncey O'Shea, even Flynn's or McCaffree's daughters at the center. Can't even be sure about the simple facts. Some writers even argue that Rutherford and Casey never existed — nothing more than another of the ancient myths of the sun, symbolized as a victim slaughtered by the monster or force of darkness. History: in the end, you can never prove a thing.

Crowd noise over his head following a rhythmic pattern now. Speeches. Awards. Eulogies. Special ceremonies this year for the man who coached Damon Rutherford. HOF Barney Bancroft. The Old Philosopher. The Man Who Couldn't Quit. Real tear-jerker. Interesting guy, just the same. UBA in the Balance was the first book Hardy read, and he's never quite got over it. And Bancroft's assassination does bring that story full circle, when you think about it. But whether it makes it more or less human is hard to say. Who killed him? Doesn't really matter. They hanged Long Lew Lydell for it, but nobody really believed he did it. Part of the parable. Cuss McCamish's parody of the Long Lew and Fanny ballad in which Long Lew uses his fabulous dong as a life* saving crutch while on the rope — Fanny comes to tell him she's pregnant again: it goes soft and that's the end of Long Lew. Damonites like to claim it was Patrick Monday who killed Bancroft in a plain power grab. To be sure, given the collapse of the familiar patterns and the emotions aroused, it was easy for Monday and his Universalists to take over. On the other hand, Squire Flint is sure Barney killed himself. Remorse. But the point is, Bancroft's death was a kind of synthesis for the Duel, no matter who you think Rutherford and Casey really were or stood for, no matter who finally did the job. Must have been a poet who shot him. Sandy Shaw maybe. Good stuff for another song. Or maybe it just happened. Weirdly, independently, meaninglessly. Another accident in a chain of accidents: worse even than invention. Invention, even by a Monday or a Trench, implies a need and need implies >purpose; accident implies nothing, nothing at all, and nothing is the one thing that scares Hardy Ingram.

"Well, as I live and breathe! Hang down your heads, old pricks, and pee, it's the boy with the matchstick arm!" A familiar voice: his friend Costen McCamish, dressed as Tuck Wilson.

With him is his drinking buddy Gringo Greene, who sings: "The corpse it stinks most lov-huh-ly!" Greene is in the togs of Goodman James. Soft jobs; they've both lucked out.

"I think you guys got your dates mixed up," Hardy says. "The Holly and Molly Show is next week." They're pretty drunk and for some reason that irritates him today.

"Say, tell us, glorious hero," says Cuss, "is it true what they say about the Virgin Daughter?"

"I don't know, what do they say?"

"Why, that:

Anyone could get in

To Harriet Flynn,

The problem was how to get out!

When she got you pinned,

Her daddy'd come in,

And give you one hell of a clout!"

Hardy has to grin at that one, but feels that tingle behind his ear again. "You drunken irreverent bastards! How you malign our common mother!"

"On the sack in the back of Jake's!" sings Gringo. Then, in a hush, leaning forward: "Hey, I just got the word, men, this game is fixed!"

"That, my boy," declaims Cuss McCamish, "is the immortal parable's very message!"

"What?" asks Hardy. "That the game is fixed, or that Gringo gets the word?"

"The only thing I'm getting outa this," grumbles Gringo, "is a pain in the ass."

"Which is more than you deserve," says Cuss.

"Deserve!" croaks Gringo. "I deserve love, truth, beauty, meaning, and eternal life. . but I'll settle for a fuckin' drink."

They start to move away, but first Costen turns back to say: "Now, you know the rules, Hardy: no intentional wild pitches thrown at the Chancellor, no soiling of the immortal skivvies at the moment of truth, leave all your unconsumed liquid assets to your old buddy Cuss, and remember: you've got first crack at the Kill—"

"Get outa here, you sonsabitches!" hollers Hardy, "before I bust a few immortal skulls myself!" He looks for a ball to throw but before he can find one, they've staggered out in a drunken gallop, whooping and snorting as they go.

His roommate Skeeter Parson, dressed for the role of rookie Toby Ramsey, wanders over. He and Skeeter get along fine, play hard, accept everything with a grain of salt, josh each other out of the dumps, and when in doubt, go chasing tail together. Skeeter is wearing his usual one-sided grin, but doesn't look his old happy-go-lucky self. Hardy bends over his laces. Looking at his right hand, he thinks suddenly: by God, I've got something there today, all right. . something different. He flexes his fingers.

"I don't see why we can't reenact 'Long Lew and Fanny* instead of this old doggerel," Skeeter complains. Hardy straightens up, half smiling. The grin on Skeeter's face fades. Something peculiar crosses his expression, like aWe, something Hardy hasn't seen before. "Hardy… is that you?"

"Sure!" laughs Hardy, taken aback. He notices now that he and Skeeter are alone down here. "What's" the matter?"

"I don't know." Skeeter's color conies back, makings of a grin again, but he keeps eyeing Hardy in a funny way. "For a minute there…"

"You thought I was Fanny McCaffree herself."

Skeeter laughs, but that funny look doesn't leave his face. "Do me a favor, roomie."

"Name it."

"When that pitch comes today, step back."

"You kidding?"

"No, Hardy, I'm dead serious." The grin is gone and Skeeter's gaze is fixed on him. But can he trust even Skeeter? Isn't this just another trick, another prearranged ploy to see if he'll break? Cuss hinting he should deck Casey when he pitches to him in the top of the third, Skeeter tempting him with cowardice. Won't know for sure until the initiation is over. "Seeing you there just now, I don't know, I got the idea suddenly that maybe this whole goddamn Association has got some kind of screw loose, Hardy."

"You just finding that out?"

"No, wait, Hardy, I'm not joking. Maybe… maybe, Hardy, they're really gonna kill you out there today!"

Hardy feels a cold chill rattle through him, tingling that patch behind his ear, pulverizing his organs and unhitching his joints, but outwardly he laughs: "Bullshit, Skeeter. The old-timers just build it up this way to give the rookies a little scare each year. They'd have to be crazy to—" He's sorry the minute he's said it.

"Exactly!" Skeeter cries. "Crazy! Why have we been assuming all along they weren't? Listen!"

Above them, the crowd growls spasmodically. Do sound a little mad at that. Like a big blind beast. "Well, if that's what they want," he says, troubled, and tucking a glove in his armpit, clops out of the locker room.

Skeeter trails, sighing. He's still trying to tell Hardy something, but the autograph hunters in the passageway are making so much noise he can't hear him. Mostly kids, sprouting girls, a few women who can always be found outside locker rooms. Hardy grins, pauses to sign a few scorecards, and Skeeter does, too. Going by the rules, they sign the names they are playing under today. Hardy notices that Skeeter is leaving the "e" out of "Ramsey." Rebellious streak. Get him in trouble someday. Lot of these cards will end up in the Chancellor's office.

They push forward, through the young bodies, crowd roars egging them on. Time soon. Have to warm up. Sun slicing through open bleachers on to the ramp ahead. Brilliant day. Always like that on Damonsday. Or so they say. Signing a baseball, he notices it already has a lot of autographs. He looks closer. They're all Damon Rutherfords! He swallows, looks up uneasily: Yes, by God, that same kid! Who the hell are you, he wants to ask, but something holds him back. He adds his version of the signature — not all that different from the others, he notices — and hands the ball back. A girl, grabbing at his fly, distracts him — by the time he's got her hand out of there, the kid has disappeared.

"Come on, let's get up there!" he snaps at Skeeter Parsons — but where is Skeeter? There, way up ahead, alone on the ramp, looking back, oddly aloof. Hardy plunges ahead, but they're all over him now. Excited, all right, he's never seen anything like it. "Damon!" they're screaming, and "Damon!" and "Damon!" Excites him, too, damn it. Their hands and mouths are all over him. He realizes he is walking on some of them. Looks down, but they swarm so thickly over him, all he can see is an occasional thigh or face down there. They groan under his cleats and praise his name. He struggles: "Come on! For God's sake, let me go!" Suddenly he is in sunlight and breaking free. He staggers forward, propelled by his own thrust, blinded by the sun, dragging the more desperate with him — and a tremendous stunning roar brings him up short! As one, the fans in the stadium stand and cheer, stand and cry the magic name: "RUTHERFORD! RUTHERFORD! RUTHERFORD!" Appalled, in pain, terrified, he wrenches one kid off his shoulder, kicks free of another, pries loose the fingers of the girl who hangs on between his legs, her poor face cleat-battered, pulls up his shorts and his knickers, and marches, suffering more than he'd ever guessed possible, to the bull pen. "RUTHERFORD! RUTHERFORD!"

Well now, a sight for whore eyes! Those immortal hairy cheeks ablush in the blazing sun, immortal ankles in a bind of antiquarian knickerbockers, the whole immortal creation pirouetting gracelessly bullpenward, and the whore of whores, Dame Society, in all her enmassed immortal fervor, fixes her immortal eyes thereupon, missing not one mote and mentally putting the measure to the royal shillelagh — well, a whit bulkier than last year's, though not so far reaching perhaps, nothing to compare with the Hall of Famer of two years past, to be sure, but 'twill do for a bit of a turn, dearie, 'twill do — and lets fly from the black and cavernous depths of her immortal bosom a lusty approbation: "RUTHERFORD! RUTHERFORD!"

Costen the Rotund Transient McCamish, not to be confused with that lord of old whose musty Pioneer woolies he wears now, nor even with that grand paterfamilias Walter R. F. McCamish (and who was his preterient lodger today? Warwick was it? Or Raspberry Schultz?), only he, Cuss the contemned and contemning, side by side with Gringo Greene, the heavy-lidded atheist, he Cuss remarks this strange scene: the Association of the Stars. "Gringo, I swear by the holy cock of Saint Brock the Great, we've been born in a wondrous world, borne to a wondrous pass!"

"God bless our mothers," is Gringo's yawning reply.

"We have no mothers, Gringo. The ripening of their wombs is nothing more than a ceremonious parable. We are mere ideas, hatched whole and hapless, here to enact old rituals of resistance and rot. And for whom, I ask, for whom? For that old whore?"

Gringo Greene in affectionate accord turns and blows kisses to the old girl, the mass assembled, now crying wet-lipped for Casey (and who is it to be? is it Galen Flynn, as they have rumored? proper response to the immortal lust for sentiment and pattern, and yet…), and "The one true thing!" cries he.

"I can't believe it, Gringo. If all this fuss is just a rash in the old girl's crotch, then pray, where'd she get the rash?" Cuss McCamish, negator even of negations, surrenders to the paradox, surrender facilitated by his conviction that paradox, impossibility, confusion, and emptiness are the natural abode of a mind at rest; and proposes: "Let us hie us to the immortal pen and commend ourselves to yon heroes!"

"So be it fenn mccaffree!" vows Gringo, already in his cups it would seem, and off they go there, the thin and the stout of it, the good man Goodman and fat Tuck, reluctant participants in a classic plot, too wise to fable a future fortune, too distressed ever to invent their childhoods, left with nothing but the spiky imprint of their cleats upon the turf and the passage from envelope to maddening envelope of inscrutable space. Behind them, electronified voices recount the miracles that graced the ruptured but still radiant reign of the lofty Barney Bancroft HOF: well, there have been worse. As a point of fact, Gringo is himself celebrating this greenhorn season the centennial of the founding of his own inglorious line, his patriarch Copper Greene having been the most fabulous fly-by-night in Association history: up in LVII to whale out a record.411 and out of the league a year later with a.138.

"Greetings, personages of large consequence!" hails he of little consequence, Costen McCamish. In company out here with Hardy Ingram cum Damon Rutherford are his diminutive sidekick Skeeter Parsons, the party proselyte and jack-straw Paul Trench, the star-crossed iconoclast dire Squire Flint — and who is that slackbritches in the raiment of the greatest Witness of them all? Why, Raspberry Schultz it is, the gentle folklorist and gamesplayer. Hmmm. So in grand-pop's knickers it's to be Wicked Willie Warwick, after all: may he reflect due honor on the happy clan, shy of immortals though it be.

"Where's the bar?" asks Gringo Greene, his emblematic salute.

"Ah, it's Cuss and Gringo!" complains the raspberry-complected Witness York with a turn of his knobby head. "As if things aren't already bad enough!"

"Pull the switch on that thing, man!" Gringo hollers up at the sun. "I can't even find my drink!" And clutches blindly before him, not so blindly punching Squire Flint in the chest. No love there, and feckless Flint flicks the hand away.

"Look up, good man, cast your eye on the Ineffable Name," intones Cuss, "and give praise!"

Gringo stares gapemouthed upward. "Oh yeah!"

"Do you see it?"

"Yeah!"

"What does it say?"

"100 Watt."

"Imagine!" cries Cuss into their laughter. "I always thought it said, 'Sandy lives!' "

"So it's Tuck Wilson, is it?" observes Raspberry Schultz, having orbited to the rear to read the magic number.

"Might have known McCamish would wrangle a deal for himself like that," snipes Squire Flint with a squint of ire. True, of course.

"In the giant's very gear," Cuss says. "Lucky Tuck!"

"Not all that much of a giant," notes Skeeter Parsons. "You appear to be coming out at the seams."

"Yes, Tuckered Son of Will was a bit low on the bone," confesses corpulent Costen, and they admire the parting threads. Hardy Ingram, proud scion of the avenging giant of the bloody past, and Paunch Trench, humble Damonite, do not join them, intent upon their pre-game task. Between pitches, Cuss sees, Hardy flexes his fist, staring curiously at it, probably thinking he's got something special there today, poor fool.

"You mean, long on the bone," cracks good man Greene. "I notice the crotch is holding."

The beast roars, startling them all. Casey has entered the Knickerbocker bull pen. Can't see him.

"If we could only get to whoever's playing Casey," Squire Flint says, half to himself, staring toward that distant figure.

"Awake! Awake!" cries Costen McCamish across the verdant pastures. "Put on strength, o arm of the league! Awake, as in days of old, the generations of long ago! Was it not thou that didst cut Rutherford in pieces, that didst deck the daemon? Was it not—"

"Cut it out!" cries Squire Flint.

"That is going a little too far," says Raspberry Schultz soberly. They all glance guiltily over toward Ingram and Trench, who, undisturbed, are still pitching, pitching, pitching. "I don't believe in just making fun of things you don't understand."

"What's this?" demands Skeeter Parsons. "You been converted, Razz?"

"No," says the Witness, blushing Raspberry, "but, well, legend, I mean the pattern of it, the long history, it seems somehow, you know, a folk truth, a radical truth, all these passed-down mythical—"

"Ahh, your radical mother's mythical cunt!" sniffs Gringo Greene. "It's time we junked the whole beastly business, baby, and moved on."

"I'm afraid, Gringo, I must agree with our distinguished folklorist and foremost witness to the ontological revelations of the patterns of history," intercedes (with a respectful nod to Schultz) Professor Costen Migod McCamish, Doctor of Nostology and Research Specialist in the Etiology of Homo Ludens, "and have come to the conclusion that God exists and he is a nut."

Skeeter Parsons cum Tubby-ass Ram's-Eye laughs: "Why, that's funny, I was just thinking…!"

"I think you better shut up," snaps friar Squire over his shoulder, still facing out toward the Knick bull pen where Casey works.

"Say, you're pretty lucky yourself," quoth Cuss to Squire's numbered back. "I see you drew McDermott."

Flint spins around full wroth. "You trying to be funny, you bastard?" Now what did he say that. .? Well, of course, Flint wanted to be Casey himself.

"Who do you think Casey is today?" asks Skeetoby.

"Galen Flynn, I hear," offers the occult Schultz, man who has turned, so Costen has heard, to the folklore of game theory, and plays himself some device with dice.

"Flynn!" snorts Flint, whose line in this league is the longest of them all, indeed to the first of the vicars. "That damn toady!"

"Easy, easy!" cautions Raspberry Schultz, nodding with squinted eyes toward Paul Trench, son of the establishment, now receiving Hardy-Damon's warm-up pitches. "Even the eyes have spies!"

But fiery Squire McFlint in a temper is no easy man to hush. "A bunch of idiots, that's what we got running this league! Nobody understands Casey anymore! Nobody understands history!" Paunch, asquat, uniformed as Royce Ingram, mighty arm of divine retribution, is faceless behind his mask.

"Anyway," proffers the conciliatory Parson Ramsey, "maybe it isn't Flynn."

"Of course, it isn't," Cuss-Tuck McWilson informs them.

"No?" asks Witberry Yultz. "Then who do you think that…?"

"Why," quoth this hero who shall walk today from home to home to the inevitable satisfaction of all parties under the sun, "that it is Jock Casey himself!"

"Ho ho!" cheers Skeetoby Ramparts. "I might have guessed!"

"But how…?" asks the witless Jerkberry.

"You're crazy," grumps Drusquire McWormy, lover of the Casey dead, but not alive.

"Crazy? Well, yes, I am," Cusstuck confesses nobly. "Else how account for my stuffing body and bunghole into this museum piece of a rag bag?" He flexes a leg to rip a stitch and spring a general laughter. "But as for Casey, what do we know?"

"Aw, let's find a bar, for God's sake!" butts the good Gringo impatiently in.

"That no man ever lived a life like his," responds Squire Flint, the humorless one.

"First, we know that—"

"Thirst is first!" gripes Gringo Greene. But as Cuss McCamish knows full well, it is all bravado; the first sack will be tupped many times over by the sober Pioneer cleats of Goodman James today.

"He thirsts for the True Church," wry Raspberry smiles.

"And what of your fans, Gringo?" asks Skeeter Parsons.

"Mother can smother in her own vat of fat," Gringo grumbles.

"A dogmatist," Cuss McCamish complains, and all nod, pitying. "Now, as for Casey, the first thing we know is that he was still pitching long after Damonsday the First."

"Everybody knows that," is Squire's reposte. "They've just squeezed the two deaths into one ceremony in order to—"

"But if this is a falsehood, dear comrades, where is truth? We know who buzzarded about the immortal remains of our friend Hardy here — or I mean, Damon — know when and where he was immortally interred, even know the music performed at his immortal obsequies, but of Casey what can we say? That Hardy's own glorious ancestor knocked Jock on the block and fixed his clock? A mere fairy tale, adorned with the morbid imaginations of a century of sentimental artisans!" His efforts to draw in Hardy Ingram avail him not. Hardy Ingram he is no more. "We don't even know if his corpus delicti was scraped off the rubber, or if it just sank into the premises! As the great historian U. R. Obseen has informed us:

Said Long Lew to Fanny

Whilst inspecting her cranny:

'Why! someone inside I have found?'

Said Fanny to Lew:

'Dear, don't you know who?

It's the Man Who Sleeps there in the Mound!'"

"You're sick, McCamish!" is the reward the noble historian reaps from the furious Flint, though elsewhere he fares better.

"So I say it is he, in the flesh of the bone and the bone of all flesh, the Man in the Mound, Jock the Mad Killer Casey, come back this day once yearly to victimize us all, we of the green hinderparts and the wives and daughters of honest men!"

"Casey died to prove his freedom!" Squire Flint blurts out. "And ours! And all we do—"

"Well, a great man, Casey, but not the greatest."

"Who was the greatest, Cuss?" asks the grinning Skeeter.

"Why old Pappy Rooney, of course."

"Rooney! What did he do?"

"Lived to the age of a hundred and forty-three and, so they say, could get it up to the very end!"

'To the very end of what?" asks the Green Gringo.

"That's stupid!" Drew McSquire snaps.

"Stupid? I should say not! In fact, may we all, my friends, meet such a reasonable demise!"

"Death is never reasonable," argues Squire the great denier, "even for an old fool at one hundred and forty-three."

'Take it easy on Squire," laughs Skeeter. "He's writing a book on Jock Casey."

"So I've heard," says he whose very seams split with a loathing of giants. "It's The Man Who Stood Alone, isn't it?"

"That's right," says Squire grimly.

"If Squire writes it, then I shall bring out my long-awaited biography of Long Lew Lydell!"

Raspberry Schultz laughs and claps. "Wonderful! What are you going to call it, Cuss?"

"The Man Who Stood on his Bone!" Full-bellied laughter at last, which he gathers in, then adds:

"Said Fanny to the spectre

As soon as he'd decked her:

'Why, sir! you're positively pneumatic!

Unlike my old feller,

You tickle the cellar

Without making a mess in the attic!'"

But no rewards this time, for it's Dame Society herself who responds, a terrible roar dredged up from the very gut of the beast, a horrendous witless bellowing, that sucks up all their scrotums, and makes them catch their breath. Skeeter Parsons checks his timepiece: "It's time," he says. Trench and Ingram depart, under a cascade of cheers. But yes! It is really they! See how they go! Two still-young heroes of the golden past: miraculous transformation! And soon even he, Costen McCamish, will shrink instinctively to Tuck Wilson, step over the crushed skull and blinded eyes of that one who, in spite of all, must be loved, and walk the magic bases while the whore weeps. No cheers for him. Only survival.

Paul Trench, at the grim edge, too wise to step back and too frightened to leap, walks miserably toward the diamond beside Hardy Ingram, wanting to speak of it, his gloom, and why, but not knowing where to begin. Paul is a plain-spoken man, and his despair is too complex for plain speech. Though none would ever guess it, the thunder of the crowd only makes it worse. He is afraid. Not only of what he must do. But of everything.

Beyond each game, he sees another, and yet another, in endless and hopeless succession. He hits a ground ball to third, is thrown out. Or he beats the throw. What difference, in the terror of eternity, does it make? He stares at the sky, beyond which is more sky, overwhelming in its enormity. He, Paul Trench, is utterly absorbed in it, entirely disappears, is Paul Trench no longer, is nothing at all: so why does he even walk up there? Why does he swing? Why does he run? Why does he suffer when out and rejoice when safe? Why is it better to win than to lose? Each day: the dread. And when, after being distracted by the excitement of a game, he returns at night to the dread, it is worse than ever, compounded with shame and regret. He wants to quit — but what does he mean, "quit"? The game? Life? Could you separate them?

High in the stands, enjoying the rewards of mere longevity, sit the twelve Elders, his grandfather among them. In the government's official box, beside the Chancellor himself, sits his father. Though he knows they watch him, he doesn't look their way, afraid his own doubts will betray him. It began with them, after all. Discovering their fallibility, he encountered the pathos of all life, then reasoned that the Age of Glory was perhaps no different than this, his own inglorious times.

At first, he thought of it as tragic, saw himself as a kind of Damon Rutherford: young, brilliant. . dead. He became suspicious when he realized the idea gave him a certain grim pleasure. He became interested in Jock Casey then, felt the terror and excitement of the Great Confrontation, asserted himself and learned to hate — but discovered that, even here, there was something he was enjoying that seemed wrong, a creature of false pride. It was Barney Bancroft who led him to the final emptiness; at every point in the man's life, he found himself asking: but why go on? Bancroft went on, but gave no reasons. And wasn't that, finally, a kind of cowardice?

The green grass at the edge of the infield feels spongy to their cleats. They walk in silence, beneath the loud blessing of the exalted and exultant populace, onto the diamond itself. A sacred duty, his father said. But "sacred," what is that? The Whore-Mother, Costen calls the people: Is it they, is it she who defines it for them? Is it in her name that he must kill today? Or is it for the record books that we go on, exposing our destinies? "Exposing our destinies" — that book Raspberry gave him, called Equilibrium Through Intransigence. It was Raspberry Schultz one day who told him: "I don't know if there's really a record-keeper up there or not, Paunch. But even if there weren't, I think we'd have to play the game as though there were." Would we? Is that reason enough? Continuance for its own inscrutable sake?

He noticed back there in the bull pen how they all avoided him, how they talked about him, wrong about everything. They think he's a Damonite. He isn't. He has read all he can find on the Association's history, and he knows now he is nothing. He has relived the origins and growths of the Bogglers, the Legalists, the Guildsmen, has examined their aspirations and how they tried to realize them, has suffered the pain and shock of Bancroft's murder, has watched the rescue of the Association by Patrick Monday's Universalists— later called the Caseyites — and their efforts, honest enough, to bring order to the chaos, has cringed under their ultimate tyranny and joined with the first courageous Damonites in their small and secret meetings, then ascended with them, pious and forever amazed, through the long slow years, to power — and has discovered, in the end, his own estrangement from them all. If anything, he is simply a willing accomplice to all heresies, but ultimately a partisan of none — like fat Costen, a negator, without any hope of rediscovering affirmation. Not that Cuss is any help to him. Cuss mocks the regime and everything else, but his mockery encapsulates him, cuts him off from any sense of wonder or mystery, makes life nothing more than getting by with the least pain possible, and somehow, to Paul Trench, such a life seems less than human.

Casey, in his writings, has spoken of a "rising above the rules," an abandonment of all conceptualizations, including scorekeepers, umpires, Gods in any dress, in the heat of total mystic immersion in that essence that includes God and him equally. Of course, some say he never wrote it, it's all apocryphal, inventions of Monday and his Universalists, distorted by redactions without number, but no matter, the idea itself remains. What it leads to, though, is inaction, a terrible passivity: Casey on the mound, shaking Flynn off, waiting — but who is playing Casey today? And will he wait? Trench, alias Ingram the Avenger, squatting dutifully behind the plate to receive the last of Hardy Ingram's warm-up pitches, feels a tingle in his hands, a power there he neither wants nor asked for.

He'd like to trade places with Hardy. Against the rules, of course; Hardy couldn't do it, can't play your own progenitor. No, even better, he'd like to trade with Galen Flynn or whoever it is that's playing Casey. What would he do? He'd burn them in, that's what he'd do, try to strike Ingram out. Or: why not an intentional pass? Or bean him. How about that? Is Flynn-Casey thinking about that? Going for number two? Namely, him? Royce Ingram tries to kindle up an anger, but Paul Trench can't bring it off. I'll strike out.

The idea excites him. A rising above. Yes, why not? He feels better than he's felt for months! Of course, so simple! What will they do to him after? Is he martyrizing himself? It doesn't matter: death is a relative idea, truth absolute! Yes, it was Squire who said that. He understands it now. Or did Squire put it the other way around? Stop and think. But he is too upset to think. He forgets now which is relative and which is absolute. If either. It is all falling apart on him. And either way it's coming. Yes, now, today, here in the blackening sun, on the burning green grass, and the eyes, and the crumbling— they shout. He sweats. Damon's pitches sting his hands. Can't hang on to them. All like a bad dream. And die. They're all going to die. And nothing he can do about it. Foolish things pass through his head. Rooney reaching the age of 143. The mystery of Casey's burial. The Brock Rutherford Era—

"Play ball!" the umpire cries, and he feels a terrific grabbing in the chest.

That dead boy. And the wake. Sandy's songs. The sack in the back of Jake's — cordoned off with a rope now and overseen by a museum guard, just like his ancestor Mel's Circle Bar, so they won't tear it up and carry off the pieces as souvenirs. They! Pieces! He laughs.

He flings the ball to second; then, impulsively, he walks out there, to the mound, not because it's a rule of the game, but because he feels drawn. The ball goes from Ramsey to Wilder to Hines. Hatrack comes in halfway from third, tosses the ball to Paul. He hands it to Damon, standing tall and lean, head tilted slightly to the right, face expressionless but eyes alert.

Paul tries to speak, but he can find no words. It's terrible, he says; or might have said. It's all there is.

And then suddenly Damon sees, must see, because astonishingly he says: "Hey, wait, buddy! you love this game, don't you?"

"Sure, but…"

Damon grins. Lights up the whole goddamn world. "Then don't be afraid, Royce," he says.

And the black clouds break up, and dew springs again to the green grass, and the stands hang on, and his own oppressed heart leaps alive to give it one last try.

And he doesn't know any more whether he's a Damonite or a Caseyite or something else again, a New Heretic or an unregenerate Golden Ager, doesn't even know if he's Paul Trench or Royce Ingram or Pappy Rooney or Long Lew Lydell, it's all irrelevant, it doesn't even matter that he's going to die, all that counts is that he is here and here's The Man and here's the boys and there's the crowd, the sun, the noise.

"It's not a trial," says Damon, glove tucked in his armpit, hands working the new ball. Behind him, he knows, Scat Bat-kin, the batter, is moving toward the plate. "It's not even a lesson. It's just what it is." Damon holds the baseball up between them. It is hard and white and alive in the sun.

He laughs. It's beautiful, that ball. He punches Damon lightly in the ribs with his mitt. "Hang loose," he says, and pulling down his mask, trots back behind home plate.