The Residue of Design
The Residue of Design
Elliot Smith
It had been a long, hard winter since that glorious October afternoon, when Bill Mazeroski’s World Series-winning homer turned our living room into a circus.
No sooner had the cheers faded, the beer stains and cigar ash merged permanently with the carpet, than the stump where the old man’s leg used to be became infected. The leg was crushed a couple of years before in an accident at the steel mill. He lay up wailing in agony through the cold Pennsylvania nights, while Mom took a waitressing job at some diner on Braddock Avenue, serving up steaks and chops to crooked grimy men sliding off of twelve-hour shifts. Even with tips, it only just covered one meal a day for the four of us, so I’d begun a spate of minor larceny and illicit trade, convincing my folks that the spoils came from a paper route.
Some of the local storeowners in Braddock had begun to recognize me, and I was worried one of them would march into the diner and cost Mom her gig. The word of a businessman would always win out over that of a Polak steelworker’s wife. I had to expand my operation.
My little sister Linda was three and we shared a small room with a broken window in our one-up, one-down rowhouse of smoke-blackened red brick. The first real day of spring, early April 1961, I awoke to a rusty blade of early morning sunlight streaking in through the hole and the Mon Valley steel mill’s endless symphony. Giant furnaces and machinery roaring and whirring, metallic crashing and grinding, hisses of steam, the rhythmic pulse and whine of a welder, the steady bassline hum of motors and generators. This was the soundtrack to our lives, a greyscale penance for the nation’s prosperity.
I leapt out of bed, soothed a stirring Linda back to sleep, and grabbed my splintering bat from the corner of the room. For months, I’d collected any newspaper clipping I could find in which the signature of a famous ballplayer was visible and studied them under lamplight, practicing the art of forgery through repetition on a little notepad. I could never get my head around math or science, but reproducing things I’d seen out in the world with a pen or brush came easy. With the Magic Marker I’d pilfered from the stationery store, I deftly daubed Maz’s signature along the barrel. Anticipation fizzed through my bones – the new season was starting tomorrow. I couldn’t take away Dad’s pain, but I knew the Pirates were one of his last remaining sources of joy. If I could sell the bat for a pretty penny, we may even be able to fix his leg.
The idea to head to Point Breeze that day came from my buddy Billy McKinstry, who left our school to move there the previous year. His old man was an engineer at the mill and got a better-paying job up in Harmarville. Billy bragged that they were moving to a street lined with trees and big white houses with beautiful lawns, a stone’s throw from Forbes Field. Billy’s dad said the steel industry would die out and Braddock would be a ghost town in a few decades. When I relayed that to my old man, he snorted, said, “Yeah, well until then, us lunch-bucket stiffs will keep the country running so assholes like Jack McKinstry can enjoy their country clubs.”
I snuck downstairs, rucksack stuffed with the barrel of the bat, my battered glove and the previous day’s shoplifting haul. Two of Dad’s old friends from the mill were sitting in the living room, nodding as Mom poured steaming black coffee into their cups. Guys sometimes dropped by before their shifts, either to shoot the shit or deliver care packages generously assembled by their wives. I recognized these two—Roy and Carl—from the smoky haze of last October. Mom saw me nudge into the doorway and I saw her paint on her smile, as she did whenever me or Linda entered a room. It was a sad smile, unassailable in its inauthenticity – a smile so fake that no quantity of anguish could subdue it.
“Here he is, the Braddock Bruiser,” Roy laughed, jerking a thumb toward me, “I swear son, if you was any skinnier, you’d need to run around in the shower just to get wet.”
I gave a half-hearted chuckle, checked the time on the ticking clock between Dad’s dusty framed portraits of Ralph Kiner, Paul Waner, and Pie Traynor. Each one smiled out from sepia distance, trapped in time, in the faded roar of a ballpark and the hearts of ailing men. The old man lay sprawled along the sofa, bad leg covered in bandages stained ugly burnt orange, sipping his whisky. His face sagged a pale yellow, eyes shimmering green from the back of ashen sockets, and he growled in pain as he shifted to set his glass down on the coffee table.
“Damnit, Don, sure is some rotten luck,” Cal shook his head and gestured at the absence extending from Dad’s right thigh, then sat back and slurped his coffee loudly.
“No such thing as luck,” the old man slurred. “Luck is just the residue of design.”
I rolled my eyes, having heard that saying more times than I could count. After my first little league game, in which I struck out three times and could only muster a grounder to first, Coach Chambers waddled up, patted me on the shoulder and said, “Don’t worry kid, sometimes you just gotta have some luck on your side.” After a prickly silence on the drive home along the Monongahela River from McKeesport, as the billowing steelworks loomed into view, the old man shut off the radio, cracked his neck, said, “Don’t listen to that nonsense back there, d’you hear me? There’s no such thing as luck, in baseball or in life. Luck is just the residue of design.”
He said he invented that phrase, but I’d later find out it was stolen from Branch Rickey.
The next evening, face still blackened from the furnace and wearing filthy US Steel overalls, the old man pitched me two hundred balls in the street, evoking Mom’s ire as dinner went cold and the sun sank over the valley. Next game, I went 3-4 with a double and two singles.
“My own damn stupid fault,” the old man sighed, running his fingers over his goatee and gesturing to Mom to top up the boys’ coffee, “shoulda been payin’ attention.”
“Hell, you were at the end of a thirteen-hour shift. Coulda been any one of us. If you’re gonna blame anyone, it should be that sonofabitch Wheeler,” Cal reasoned, referring to their cantankerous foreman. “You should sue ‘em.”
“Ach,” the old man waved away the suggestion, “everybody’s suin’ everybody nowadays. In the America I grew up in, men took their lumps with dignity. Now we’re becomin’ a country of fuckin’ lawyers, and I don’t trust them any more than I trusted Wheeler.”
“Who the hell do you trust, ya miserable bastard?” Cal chuckled.
“My wife, my kids, and Bill fuckin’ Mazeroski,” he raised his glass and the men cackled and raised their coffee cups. “To the Bucs.”
As I edged toward the door, Dad called out: “Work hard, kiddo, and remember to grab some ground beef on your way home. There’s a dollar on the counter.”
I grabbed the dollar and slipped out into the noisy light. Kids shouting. Motors humming. The Black family who just moved in down the street was walking to church in their Sunday best. I waved at their son, who was roughly my age. I think his name was Samuel. He raised a hand awkwardly until his dad draped an arm around his shoulders, nodded at me with a pursed-lipped smile, and shepherded him up the road.
*
I hopped a busy trolley and hid at the back to avoid the fare, disembarking somewhere near Schenley Park and walking the rest of the way, heading vaguely east through tree-lined streets and rows of big houses set upon raised lawns, back from the road. Women sat beneath awnings in rocking chairs, talking, laughing, sipping from cups. Men trimmed hedges, washed pristine cars. A couple eyed me suspiciously as I trudged past, haggard rucksack and protruding bat sagging from my skinny shoulders. I took giant, greedy breaths, snatching oxygen from the greenery, savoring the smell of cut grass and leaves outside the mill’s perpetual smog.
There was no plan, but I knew Billy McKinstry lived somewhere just north of Frick Park and figured there’d be a ballgame going on somewhere. I skirted along the west side of the park, past rows of cemeteries, and turned right at South Dallas and Willard, the northwestern corner. Families getting into cars. Men and boys in suit and ties. Women and girls in pale dresses and hats. Quiet and formulaic, they went. In our street, someone was always shouting. Car doors here shut gently, tenderly. Ours slammed with haste or anger. The cool breeze of early spring caressed my cheeks, cleansed my pores. The thin scatters of birdsong, so crisply audible against the silent Sunday rituals, felt like a luxury I hadn’t earned, a fancy opera I’d snuck into without a ticket.
Weaving through the rows of houses, I nodded and smiled at people. I don’t know why. Maybe I just wanted to feel what it was like to be seen as just another kid growing up there. Ah, that’s the Kozlowski boy—Don and Erika’s son. You’ve met them at church, honey. Bright boy, little mischievous, but very bright, full of promise, great little ballplayer.
Some of the kids waved nervously until their parents glanced me up and down and ushered them into backseats. I realized my t-shirt, a hand-me-down from some nephew of Dad’s back in Kentucky, had a hole in the right shoulder and a brown coffee stain along the sleeve.
Then I heard a groundswell of voices mounting— boys—maybe a couple of blocks away.
“Hey Andy, won’t your dad kill you?”
“Nah, so long as I bring it back, he won’t find out.”
“What if you lose it?”
“I ain’t gonna lose it.”
I followed the voices as they clamored over each other – nearer and farther, rising and falling – onto Willard. The boys came into view about forty yards up ahead. Seven or eight, two carrying bats, several gloves. Billy’s stocky frame and shock of red hair were unmistakable at the back. He snatched a ball from a smaller boy beside him and seemed to be inspecting it. The others glanced back nervously as he tossed it up away from his body, toward the road. A mousey-haired boy in the middle lunged for it, but Billy reeled it in and laughed, holding it aloft for a second before handing it over. I kept my distance, watched them peel off left.
It was a thin and unkept rectangular park between two rows of houses, far corner overhung by a copse of trees, shrouded in overgrowth and weeds. An elderly man sat alone with a Post-Gazette on the sole park bench, smoking a pipe and watching as the boys threw down rucksacks and spread out into the park. Heart fluttering, I shuffled into the park, extracting the bat from my pack and checking over the signature once again. The boy who reached for the ball had taken up a position at the far end, the others scattering into the field.
“Billy!” The words left my mouth before I’d had a chance to concoct a sales pitch. From his position at center field, the red-haired boy shielded his eyes from the sun and peered out toward me as I blundered across the uneven grass with the bat. It was a gift to the old man, I’d tell him. Maz heard about the steel mill injury to Don Kozlowski – once proud owner of the fastest four-seamer in western Pennsylvania – and sent an emissary to deliver it. It’s men like you that make this the most beautiful game on earth, the note in my head read.
“Just a sec, boys,” Billy called back as he jogged to meet me halfway to the makeshift diamond. His raised eyebrows and curled lip looked bemused, almost derisive.
“Jimmy? What are you doin’ all the way up here?”
He looked back, scratched the back of his neck with his glove, glanced down at me. I sensed he was trying to intercept me before I reached his new buddies.
“I got this bat, signed by Maz – d’you think anyone here might wanna buy it?”
“Gee, Jimmy…” he studied it for a moment, gaze flicking back over his shoulder. The pity in the rise and fall of his shoulders, the soft release of breath, prickled beneath my skin.
“Look, between us, Andy over there caught Maz’s World Series ball,” he handed the bat back to me and nodded back toward the slender boy hitting flyballs from the shadows. “He was in the newspaper and everything. Nobody around here is gonna go for that, bud. I’m sorry.”
We’d known each other since kindergarten and played together in Little League and he looked at me like I’d seen my mother look at the homeless fella who used to sit outside the convenience store. It was a look that said, through a thin hollow smile: I’m not a bad person, I just can’t help you right now. Fragments of memory bubbled up and dissolved into the still air – notions of self, of pride, of what it meant to be a man, to be a ballplayer.
“Okay, no problem,” I stuffed the bat back into my pack as his gaze clawed around for anything but me, fixing mine on the ball whistling through the air to deep right field. “Looks like you could use a shortstop.”
He looked back again, then down at the grass.
“Billy! Who are ya talkin’ to? Get back here and field, forchrissakes,” the biggest of the group shouted across.
“Sorry Jimmy, we’re just hitting a few balls…” he seemed to intuit that I didn’t need any further explanation, that after all these years, we both knew where this was going. I nodded and turned to trudge back toward the street.
“Hey Jimmy, was good seein’ ya,” he called after me with a quiet resignation, as though he understood that this would be the last we’d see of one another. “Hope your dad’s leg gets better.”
*
It must have been an hour or so since the boy with the ball—Andy—sliced a flyball off into the miniature jungle of waist-high grass. The sun had peaked between the two rows of houses and begun its descent toward the empty promise of tomorrow. I lingered behind a rusty Buick, peering intermittently around the bumper as they hacked at the overgrowth with bats, slowly diminishing in vigor. Andy was panicking, directing the boys to various corners shaded by trees.
“I knew I shouldn’t have brought it out here. What am I gonna do?!” he cried, almost resignedly. “Dad’s gonna be so mad.”
I watched and I waited as one by one, they muttered their apologies and began sliding off.
“I’ve gotta go for lunch,” I heard Billy tell Andy, “but we’ll find it later, bud, I promise.”
When the last of the supporting cast had disappeared, Andy stood alone for a while, casting his eyes around the grass as though the ball might suddenly materialize. I’d traced the flight and could see it nestled at the nearest corner, at the base of a wire fence that bent in on itself like a sick orca’s dorsal fin. I heard him sniff and curse under his breath and apologize to his old man in absentia, then his gentle footsteps faded away through the grass.
*
I stuffed it into the backpack and ran. I don’t know why I ran. After roughly twenty minutes heading south, the clean houses with awnings and raised front lawns and garages and thick trees of emerald green gradually melted into scarred brick and metal, a familiar world of granite skies and smoke and everything painted a brownish rust.
I didn’t have a number in mind as I approached the pawn shop on the edge of Swissvale, cutting under the railway bridge. The sign above the barricaded window read JP’s Buy & ell, the ‘s’ having seemingly fallen away long ago to leave a kind of scorched shadow in its wake.
I stopped outside, beneath a sagging telephone wire and extracted the ball from my bag. The signature had faded into the leather’s aged yellowish hue, but the lettering was unmistakable. Perhaps a hundred dollars would be enough to see us through the summer, I mused, entering to the tired ring of a brass shop bell. Inside the shop was a dust-caked treasure trove of Pirates memorabilia, unloved paintings, weighty tomes, and jewelry. In each piece, I saw the quietly dignified acceptance of these faded lives—of long hard weeks ground out for a flicker of gold. Of the once-vivid triumph of a state championship ring, now but a memory offering diminishing emotional returns down the empty years that followed.
“Can I help you, son?” coughed the portly man in his fifties behind the counter.
I ran my fingers over the seams, picturing my old man almost falling out of his sofa as that ball – this ball, this ball I was holding – disappeared through deep left field, over the wall and into the trees. “Art Ditmar throws—There’s a swing and a high fly ball going deep to left, this may do it! Back to the wall goes Berra, it is over the fence, home run, the Pirates win!”
Maz, helmet off, right arm windmilling backwards, rounding the bases in unbridled joy before leaping into the arms of teammates, staff, fans. Leaping headlong into the arms of our little city. Our little city that saw off the mighty Yankees. The old man, rising on his crutches to throw his arms around the friends beside whom he’d spent two decades at the furnace, watching those Bucs engulfed as Forbes Field became the center of the universe.
“Son, can I help you?” the man asked again.
“No, sir,” I said, and walked back out into the great twisting afternoon.
*
By October, he’d set up a bed in the living room, partly so Mom could get some sleep upstairs and partly so the old man could watch the playoffs. A few days prior, before his lungs started to give out, he’d joked that he should have shuffled off his mortal coil on October 14, 1960, and that God keeping him alive to see the ‘61 season was proof of His wrath. The Pirates went 75-79, placing sixth in the National League. We sat by his bedside watching him wilt as the white noise of the Yankees cruising past Cincinnati in our absence fizzed from the TV in the corner.
Roy and Cal and their wives came by every other day to reminisce about their early days in the mill and the players and teams that came and went before I was even a glint in the old man’s eye. By the last day, each trip into consciousness felt shorter and more strained than the last. Mom sat with her hands clasped in her lap, stoic as ever, then stood to stroke his pale forehead, as though she wanted to say something but couldn’t do it in front of me. Linda had gone to stay with one of Mom’s friends, away from it all. We waited, watching New York dismantle the Reds. I couldn’t tell if he could see and hear it, but just knowing there was a ballgame on was enough. Eventually, as the hours became minutes and his breathing began grinding to a halt, Mom took me out into the hall and said, “Jimmy, I think you need to go in alone and say goodbye to your father now.” And she smiled, that sad smile, only somehow even worse than before.
I charged upstairs and barged into my room. Mom yelled up after me as I pulled out my old rucksack, stashed back against the wall since the spring, and pulled it out. She stepped aside as I blundered back down and into the living room, shutting the door behind me.
“Dad,” I sat in the chair beside him and grabbed his arm, butter yellow and brittle. He opened his eyes and peered up as I held the ball in front of him. “I got you somethin’. Remember October 13?”
He appeared to be straining to see, to understand, to process one last piece of information. I lifted his arm, turned his palm upward and placed the ball in it, then folded his fingers around it, clasping my hand over his cold knuckles. “It’s Maz’s home run ball, Dad.”
From the corner of his mouth, I thought I saw the faint twitch of a smile. A single tear broke from his left eye and traversed a bristled cheek. I felt his knuckles tighten over the seams. Glancing up again, there was a faint quizzicality in his eyes.
“Just a bit of luck,” I said, before catching myself and squeezing his hand over the ball. “Sorry, I mean the residue of design.”
Elliot Smith is a British journalist, writer, and awful baseball player currently based in Denmark, having previously been a Correspondent for CNBC in London. His fiction has been published in The Words Faire and Half and One, and was recently shortlisted for The Letter Review Prize for Short Fiction.
Jeff Brain is a San Francisco-based baseball artist and poet. He was a featured poet at the first two National Baseball Poetry Festivals, and now serves on the Poets Committee of the NBPF held each May in Worcester, MA.
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