The Twilight Zone: Complete Stories Read Free Page B

McCarthy. You ain’t one half Joe McCarthy.”
    “Go die, will you,” McGarry said. He turned back to stare down the third-base line at nothing in particular. He was unaware of the cherubic little white-haired man who had just entered the dugout. Beasley did see him and stared wide-eyed. The little old man came up behind Mouth and cleared his throat.
    “Mr. McGarry?” he said. “I am Dr. Stillman. I called about your trying out a pitcher.”
    Mouth turned slowly to look at him, screwed up his face in distaste. “All right! What’s the gag? What about it, Grampa? Did this muttonhead put you up to it?” He turned to Beasley. “This is the pitcher, huh? Big joke. Yok, yok, yok. Big joke.”
    Dr. Stillman smiled benignly. “Oh, I’m not a pitcher,” he said, “though I’ve thrown baseballs in my time. Of course, that was before the war.”
    “Yeah,” Mouth interjected. “Which war? The Civil War? You don’t look old enough to have spent the winter at Valley Forge.” Then he glared at him intently. ‘Come to think of it—was it really as cold as they say?”
    Stillman laughed gently. “You really have a sense of humor, Mr. McGarry.” Then he turned and pointed toward the dugout. “Here’s Casey now,” he said.
    Mouth turned to look expectantly over the little old man’s shoulder. Casey was coming out of the dugout. From cleats to the button on top of his makeshift baseball cap there was a frame roughly six feet, six inches high. The hands at his sides were the dimensions of two good-sized cantaloupes. His shoulders, McGarry thought to himself, made Primo Carnero look like the “before” in a Charles Atlas ad. In short, Casey was long. He was also broad. And in addition, he was one of the most powerful men either McGarry or Beasley had ever seen. He carried himself with the kind of agile grace that bespeaks an athlete and the only jarring note in the whole picture was a face that should have been handsome, but wasn’t, simply because it had no spark, no emotion, no expression of any sort at all. It was just a face. Nice teeth, thin lips, good straight nose, deep-set blue eyes, a shock of sandy hair that hung out from under his baseball cap. But it was a face, McGarry thought, that looked as if it had been painted on.
    “You’re the lefty, huh?” McGarry said. ‘‘All right.” He pointed toward the home plate. “You see that guy with the great big mitt on? He’s what’s known as a catcher. His name is Monk. Throw a few into him.”
    “Thanks very much, Mr. McGarry,” Casey said dully.
    He went toward home plate. Even the voice, McGarry thought. Even the voice. Dead. Spiritless. McGarry picked up another long piece of grass and headed back to the dugout, followed by Beasley and the little old man who looked like something out of Charles Dickens. In the dugout, McGarry assumed his familiar pose of one foot on the parapet, both fists in his hip pockets. Beasley left the dugout to return to his office which was his custom on days the team didn’t play. He would lock himself in his room and add up attendance figures, then look through the want ads of The New York Times . Just Stillman and Mouth McGarry stood in the dugout now, and the elderly little man watched everything with wide, fluttering eyes like a kid on a tour through a fireworks factory. McGarry turned to him.
    “You his father?”
    “Casey’s?” Stillman asked. “Oh, no. He has no father. I guess you’d call me his—well, kind of his creator.”
    Dr. Stillman’s words went past McGarry the way the superchief goes by a water tank. “That a fact?” he asked rhetorically. “How old is he?”
    “How old is he?” Stillman repeated. He thought for a moment. “Well, that’s a little difficult to say.”
    Mouth looked over toward the empty bench with a see-the-kind-of-idiocy-I-have-to-put-up-with kind of look. “That’s a little difficult to say,” he mimicked fiercely.
    Stillman hurriedly tried to explain. “What I mean