“I just cut myself,” he says, all sullen.
“Right. Shaving. But I don’t want to see it on your finger when you go out there. I’m looking after your own best interests.”
Would I have said that if I hadn’t seen Joe so upset he was crying? I like to think so. I like to think I was also looking after the best interests of the game, which I loved then and now. Virtual Bowling can’t hold a candle, believe me.
I walked away before he could say anything else. And I didn’t look back. Partly because I didn’t want to see what was under the Band-Aid, mostly because Joe was standing in his office door, beckoning to me. I won’t swear there was more gray in his hair, but I won’t swear there wasn’t.
I came into the office and closed the door. An awful idea occurred to me. It made a kind of sense, given the look on his face. “Jesus, Joe, is it your wife? Or the kids? Did something happen to one of the kids?”
He started, like I’d just woken him out of a dream. “Jessie and the kids are fine. But George…oh God. I can’t believe it. This is such a mess.” And he put the heels of his palms against his eyes. A sound came out of him, but it wasn’t a sob. It was a laugh. The most terrible fucked-up laugh I ever heard.
“What is it? Who called you?”
“I have to think,” he says-but not to me. It was himself he was talking to. “I have to decide how I’m going to…” He took his hands off his eyes, and he seemed a little more like himself. “You’re managing today, Grannie.”
“Me? I can’t manage! The Doo’d blow his stack! He’s going for his two hundredth again, and-”
“None of that matters, don’t you see? Not now.”
“What-”
“Just shut up and make out a lineup card. As for that kid…” He thought, then shook his head. “Hell, let him play, why not? Shit, bat him fifth. I was gonna move him up, anyway.”
“Of course he’s gonna play,” I said. “Who else’d catch Danny?”
“Oh, fuck Danny Dusen!” he says.
“Cap-Joey-tell me what happened.”
“No,” he says. “I got to think about it first. What I’m going to say to the guys. And the reporters!” He slapped his brow as if this part of it had just occurred to him. “Those overbred assholes! Shit!” Then, talking to himself again: “But let the guys have this game. They deserve that much. Maybe the kid, too. Hell, maybe he’ll bat for the cycle!” He laughed some more, then went upside his own head to make himself stop.
“I don’t understand.”
“You will. Go on, get out of here. Make any old lineup you want. Pull the names out of a hat, why don’t you? It doesn’t matter. Only make sure you tell the umpire crew chief you’re running the show. I guess that’d be Wenders.”
I walked down the hall to the umpire’s room like a man in a dream and told Wenders that I’d be making out the lineup and managing the game from the third base box. He asked me what was wrong with Joe, and I said Joe was sick.
That was the first game I managed until I got the Athletics in ’63, and it was a short one, because as you probably know if you’ve done your research, Hi Wenders ran me in the sixth. I don’t remember much about it, anyway. I had so much on my mind that I felt like a man in a dream. But I did have sense enough to do one thing, and that was to check the kid’s right hand before he ran out on the field. There was no Band-Aid on the second finger, and no cut, either. I didn’t even feel relieved. I just kept seeing Joe DiPunno’s red eyes and haggard mouth.
That was Danny Doo’s last good game ever, and he never did get his two hundred. He tried to come back in ‘58, but it was no good. He claimed the double vision was gone and maybe it was true, but he couldn’t hardly get the pill over the plate anymore. No spot in Cooperstown for Danny. Joe was right: that kid did suck luck.