—Maniac Magee—
by Jerry Spinelli

Chapter 25

 

In the morning Grayson bought Maniac an Egg McMuffin and a large orange juice. He bought the same thing for himself, so they ate breakfast together in the baseball equipment room.

"You sent me to bed without a story last night," Maniac kidded.

Grayson brushed a yellow speck of egg from his white stubble. "I don't got no stories. I told you."

"You wanted to be a baseball player."

"That ain't no story."

"Well, did you become one?"

Grayson drank half his orange juice. "Just the Minors," he muttered.

Maniac yelped, "The Minors!"

"Couldn't never make it to the Majors." There was a frayed weariness in the old man's words, as though they had long since worn out.

"Grayson --- the Minors. Man, you must have been good. What position did you play?"

Grayson said, "Pitcher." This word, unlike the others, was not worn at all, but fresh arid robust. It startled Maniac. It declared: I am not what you see. I am not a line-laying, pickup-driving, live-at-the-Y, bean-brained parkhand. I am not rickety, whiskered worm chow. I am a pitcher.

Maniac had sensed there was something more to the old man; now he knew what it was. "Grayson, what's your first name?"

The old man fidgeted. "Earl. But call me Grayson, like ever'body." He looked at the clock on the wall. "Gotta go."

"Grayson, wait---"

"I'm late for work. You oughta be in school."

He was gone.

 

Grayson returned at noon, bearing zeps and sodas, and was not allowed to leave until he told Maniac one story about the Minor Leagues.

So he told the kid about his first day in the Minors, with Bluefield, West Virginia, in the Appalachian League. Class D. "Can't get no lower'n that," he told the kid. "That's where you broke in. Don't have D ball no more."

He told about thumbing a ride to Bluefield, and, when he got there, going up to a gas station attendant and asking which way to the ballpark. And the gas station man told him, "Sure, but first I gotta ask you something. You're a new ballplayer, right? Just comin' on board?" And Grayson said, "Yep, that's right." And the man said, "I thought so. Well then, you're just gonna want to make your first stop right over there" --- he pointed across the street --- "that there restaurant, the Blue Star. You just go right on in there and sit yourself down and tell the waitress you want the biggest steak on the menu. And anything else you want, too, because it's all on the house. The Blue Star treats every new rookie to his first meal in town free." He gave a wink. "They want your business."

Great, thought Grayson, and he did just that. Only when he got up and left, the restaurant owner came running after him down the street, all mad at Grayson for skipping out. And when Grayson told him he was a rookie just picking up his free first meal, the owner got even madder. Seems the gas station man was a real card and liked to welcome dumb rookies with his little practical joke.

And that's how it came to be that when the Bluefield Bullets took the field that day, they did so without the services of their new pitcher, who was back in the kitchen of the Blue Star restaurant, doing dishes to work off a sixteen-ounce steak, half a broiled chicken, and two pieces of rhubarb pie.

After a story like that, Maniac couldn't just stay behind, so he tagged along when Grayson went back to work. He helped the old man raise a new fence around the children's petting farmyard. When the park Superintendent came around and asked about the kid, Grayson said it was his nephew come to visit for a while. The Superintendent, who managed the budget, said, "We can't pay him, you know." And Grayson said, "Fine, no problem," and that was that.

From then on Maniac was on the job with Grayson every afternoon. They raised fences, mended fences, hauled stone, patched asphalt, painted, trimmed trees. They ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner together, sometimes in the equipment room, sometimes at a restaurant. They spent weekends together.

All the while Grayson told baseball stories (insisting, all along, "I ain't got no stories"). He told about the Appalachian League and the Carolina League and the Pecos Valley League and the Buckeye and the Mexican Leagues. About the Pedukah Twin Oaks and the Natchez Pelicans and the Jesup Georgia Browns and the Laredo Lariats. All Minor League teams, Minor League baseball.

Sleazy hotels. Sleazy buses. Sleazy stadiums. Sleazy fans. Sleazy water buckets. Curveballs and bus fumes and dreams, dreams of the Majors --- clean sheets and an umpire at every base.

Funny stories. Happy stories. Sad stories. Just plain baseball stories.

The happiest story being the one about Willie Mays's very last at-bat in the Minor Leagues, before he went up to the New York Giants and immortality. Well, it was of Grayson himself who had last crack at Mays, in the ninth inning of a game with Indianapolis --- and what did Grayson do? All he did was set the Say Hey Kid down swinging --- on three straight curveballs.

The saddest story was the one about the scout who came down from the Toledo Mud Hens. The Mud Hens had a roster slot, and the scout had a notion to fill it with the pitcher with the wicked curveball, name of Earl Grayson. This was Grayson's big chance, for the Mud Hens were Class AAA ball, one short step from the Majors.

The night before the game, Grayson spent half of it on his knees by his bed, praying. And even five minutes before the game, in the dugout, he bent down, pretending to tie his shoe, and closed one eye and prayed: "Please let me win this ball game." Which was something, since he had never gone to a church in his life. ("God musta fainted," he said to Maniac.)

And indeed, maybe God did, or maybe He only listened to Major Leaguers, because Grayson took the mound and proceeded to pitch the flat-out awfulest game of his life. His curveball wasn't curving, his sinker wasn't sinking, his knuckler wasn't knuckling. The batters were teeing off as if it were the invasion of Normandy Beach. Before the third inning was over, the score was 12-0, and Grayson was in the showers.

He was twenty-seven years old then, and that was the closest he would ever get to the Big Show. He hung on for thirteen more years, a baseball junkie, winding up in some hot tamale league in Guanajuato, Mexico, until his curveball could no longer bend around so much as a chili pepper and his fastball was slower than a senorita's answer.

He was forty, out of baseball, and, for all intents and purposes, out of life. All those years in the game, and all he was fit to do was clean a restroom or sweep a floor or lay a chalk line --- or, far, far down the road, tell stories to a wide eyed, homeless kid.