Read Online Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears? by Robert Coover - Free Book Online Page B

they’d used me as the means to their own withdrawal. I’d seen them push the men in front off balance and into the police, then, yelling curses all the while at the cops (these were ritual phrases, repeated woodenly like recognition signals), start laying about wildly, as though fighting off unseen monsters. And it was Bill who, glancing over his shoulder to take aim, had laid me out with his elbow. If it was his elbow. Felt harder than one. It might have been about then, sprawling in the dirt and getting kicked and stepped upon in the night-dark turmoil, that I began to feel I might be able to live with myself if I didn’t after all make it to Spain. Amazingly, some of these guys do this sort of thing every Saturday night just for fun; I prefer a little music on the radio and a handful of soft clay.
    The next day Leo let a rumor start circulating that the committee had identified at least five company spies in their midst, and that they would be “dealt with” by all the comrades after sundown. “Bill” and “Smitty” (we no longer supposed those were their real names) were occasionally mentioned. They kept up a good front through the afternoon, but by sundown they had cleared out. Along with seventeen others. “Thanks, Meyer,” Leo said, and sent me home.

It’s still chilly and overcast, but the rain’s stopped by the time I reach my street in Old Town. In the school playground a block or so before my studio, boys are playing a ballgame. Other times of the year, it would be football or basketball, today it’s baseball: the Cubs versus the White Sox, about five to a side, they’re taking names like Billy Herman and Luke Appling, Dixie Walker, Jimmy Collins. Both teams—the real ones—are having good seasons, fighting right now for second place in their respective leagues, so the boys have a lot of pride in being who they are. The kid pitching for the White Sox five is, not surprisingly, calling himself Bill Dietrich, that down-and-outer the Sox picked up earlier this year on waivers who astonished everyone this week with his unlikely no-hitter. The kid even wears glasses like Dietrich, maybe that’s why they’ve let him pitch.
    I remember those games. I was never good enough to be Cobb or Wagner, I was always content to be somebody like Frank Schulte or Three-Finger Brown. For me, it wasn’t whether you won or lost, but it wasn’t exactly how you played the game either. The other boys used to complain I wasn’t trying my best—I was, but what was best for me wasn’t the same thing as it was for them. Participation was what I loved about ballgames, still do. Participation in the movement. It’s what I love about socialism, theater, life itself. Even sculpture in a slightly different way: all the movement then is between me and my figures, but it’s a real involvement just the same, a real dialectic. Probably I have Levite blood in me from somewhere, more in love with the choreography of gesture than with its aims. Sometimes this was useful in a ballgame, often it was not. As in life. Gliding toward a fly-ball, I often arrived too late for the catch; swinging easily around the bases, I’d run into easy putouts. This didn’t bother me, but it bothered the others. They said I didn’t have enough “hustle.”
    Just the opposite from Gloomy Gus. Winning was everything for him. Or at least scoring. In a magazine interview, he once said: “I have never had much sympathy for the point of view ‘It isn’t whether you win or lose, but how you play the game.’ One must put top consideration on the will, the desire, and the determination to win!” Ghostwriters maybe, but the sentiment—or something very close to it—was his: “I never in my life wanted to be left behind.” He once had a football coach back at Whittier College, a fierce half-breed Indian ironically confined to a