Without knowing it, Daniel Chizzum has been driving lost since he left Tupelo. Not that he should be driving at all. His face is freshly scarred with cuts and bruises, and he can hardly use his right hand it hurts so bad. But buoyed by the prospect of signing a new shortstop-a kid from Tuscaloosa rumored to be fast as a Kentucky racehorse-Chizzum is nearly grinning when he stops at the state line and lights a cigar. Then, thinking he is on one highway when in fact he is on another, he slides back into traffic. Smoke from the cigar floats up past his bloodshot eyes until he lowers a window and the breeze carries it off, a thin grey plume that trails the black car as it drops down a steep hill and on into Alabama.
When he begins to suspect he is lost, Chizzum considers checking the map folded neatly on the seat beside him. But he does not feel like stopping, and with his hand busted up he cannot drive and wrestle with a road map at the same time. Besides, his baseball hunches are rarely wrong, and though Chizzum has never seen the kid play, he has such a strong feeling about this Tuscaloosa shortstop that he becomes overconfident, gives the car its head, lets it choose what highways it will while he sits almost passively at the wheel enjoying his cigar and the spring-scented wind that whips through the windows he opens wide as the day grows warmer and the car surges blindly over the blacktopped hillsides.
An old roadsign`s peeling legend cuts into Chizzum`s reverie. LEOPARD ALA 13 MILES. He grips the steering wheel fiercely with his good hand and spins it in the direction pointed by the sign, forcing the auto into the confines of a narrow lane. As a boy Chizzum had owned a spotted mongrel named Leopard, and as he used to follow the mutt`s lead then, he chooses to follow it now. He senses something more than coincidence at play in the sudden appearance of his dog`s name on the faded signpost. Though the lane becomes bumpier and the flanking trees encroach further, Chizzum persists in driving on. Even when the poorly paved road finally tapers off to dirt, he is not dismayed. His feelings about the immediacy of great discovery are only heightened as his journey becomes more difficult, and he presses forward eagerly, involuntarily ducking beneath the low-hanging branches that occasionally sweep across the windshield. Only when the car`s violent lurching can no longer be attributed solely to the rough conditions of the roadway does Chizzum begin to suspect he took too many blows to the head the night before. While not ready to admit he is actually lost-though he most certainly isn`t any place near where he`d set out to be-there`s no denying he has a flat tire. What`s more, once he stops the car and tries to raise its back end with the jack, he discovers that, with only one sound hand, he does not have the st rength to change the tire. Chizzum flings the jack into the trunk and contemplates the situation. He undoubtedly needs help, and since odds are slim some other fool might blunder down this dark path, he must either go back to the main road or push forward. From the pocket of his dirtied seersucker jacket he retrieves a flask. He takes a long drink, but his hand shakes and whiskey spills onto the ground. He stirs the liquor into the red clay with the toe of his shoe, then studies the mess he has made. His hunch has led him to this predicament, and so, like the idiot he is beginning to think he is, Chizzum figures to hell with the flat tire and drives on ahead. Ten minutes later, staggering like a punch-drunk fighter, the car rolls into a clearing, occupied already by a weather-beaten house, a flock of noisy chickens and a tall, long-armed boy scattering feed.
It isn`t until Chizzum slams the car door that the boy looks up. He carefully folds shut the bag of feed and walks over to the car. He listens to Chizzum`s problem, moves the car off the road, down the drive and towards the house, and sets about chan ging the tire. Chizzum wants to help, but he only gets in the way and so walks off. Set well behind the house he finds a spacious pen containing more than a dozen healthy pigs lolling in the shade, and they appear so content that, if only for a moment, Chizzum actually envies them their short but happy lives.
Back out front Chizzum takes a seat on the porch. An old man comes out of the house, introduces himself as Virgil Skinner and identifies the boy as his 17-year-old grandson, Theophilus. He begins a detailed explanation of the route back to Tuscaloosa, but after a while Chizzum stops listening. The directions are so convoluted that in no time he`d probably be driving in circles again. Another two hours until sundown. He must get back to a main highway before dark or spend the night roaming these back roads. He thanks the old man, interrupting him in mid-sentence, and turns back to the car.
The boy Theophilus has finished changing the tire but is down on his knees searching for a missing lug nut he`s lost in the tall grass. Chizzum decides to chance going on without it and drives up onto the road. He glances towards the house set back in the clearing. Theo is waving his arms and Chizzum responds with a half-hearted gesture of his own. Then, appalled, he watches the boy rear back and throw. He ducks his head and waits, but the impact never comes. Apparently Theo had found the lug nut and thrown it at the car but missed his target entirely. By the time Chizzum has raised his head, the boy is walking nonchalantly toward the house. Chizzum shouts a string of obscenities at Theo`s indifferent back, presses the accelerator to the floor and races back in the direction he had come. It isn`t until he is checking into a motel that night near Selma-when he discovers, sitting safely among the folds of his jacket on the back seat, the rusted lug nut that Theophilus Skinner, with unerring accuracy, had flung more than 20 yards through the opened back window of the moving car-that Chizzum realizes that another of his hunches has paid off.
Two weeks later, Chizzum, a scout for the Boston Red Sox, personally delivers Theo to the club`s Class A minor league team in Florida. It had taken him that long to convince first himself and then his bosses that this no-name from nowhere indeed poss essed the un-nurtured talent to become a baseball immortal. Unfortunately, Chizzum makes the mistake of imparting that same information to Theo, and, burdened by great expectations, the kid moves slowly through the minors. From the beginning he has that incredible fast ball which, at its best, stymies his opponents. Chagrined, they return to the bench and complain to angry coaches about not being able to hit what they can`t see. But overeager, Theo tends to overthrow, trying to earn a spot in t he Hall of Fame with each pitch. New to the game, he tires easily, and in the late innings his fast ball loses some of its smoke. It`s then the good hitters generally tag him for extra bases.
After nearly three years Theo has racked up only a mediocre record, and even Chizzum begins to suspect the kid got just too late a start to make it to the majors. Theo seems resigned to that fact and goes on enjoying his new life. Each week he accepts his salary with quiet gratitude, surprised at being paid to play a game. While his teammates complain about the travel, Theo, who has never been away from home, spends hours happily exploring even the smallest town. He also takes a renewed interest in reading, an activity which hadn`t been encouraged at home since he left the eighth grade. It starts in the bullpen, where he looks through whatever reading material is lying around. Soon he is an avid reader, voraciously consuming newspapers, hunting magazines and cheap paperback westerns.
It is about this time Shari appears on the scene, a freelance sportswriter looking for a story. On this particular afternoon Theo has one of his typical outings. He goes five innings without surrendering a hit and then loses the game when he gives up three runs in the seventh and four more in the eighth. Despite the final score, Shari can`t shake the memory of the first half of the game, and she seeks out Theo for an interview. Over dinner she learns his history, and when he refuses to let her pay for the meal, she expresses her thanks with a bit of advice. She pulls a book from a worn leather bag, and Theo sits expectantly while she ruffles the pages. Voices from surrounding tables mingle with the odors of food, but all that falls away as Shari speaks.
”You remind me of the poet Yeats as a very young man,” she says, ”a gifted but uneducated provincial aspiring after perfection. His fantastic dreams were the source of his power, but they also clouded his vision, hampered his execution. The words pou red forth uncontrolled until he learned to master cadence.”
”Cadence?”
”The ordered flow of words or music. Their beat. Cadere. To fall.”
Rock-and-roll cascades from the jukebox and Shari bangs the tabletop in time. Theo`s head begins to rise and fall along with the music, but his shy grin could just as easily signify pleasure as comprehension.
”You must learn to impose a rhythm on your pitches, just as Yeats learned to direct the flow of his words. Once he tempered his dreams with the force of his will, the shapes they took were not merely fantastic but beautiful. There`s no reason you can `t succeed like he did. You both started at about the same age. Sure, the effective career of a poet is considerably longer than a pitcher`s, but not every poet gets a chance at 40 starts a season.”
Shari pushes the book in front of Theo. It is an anthology of poetry. He turns the pages, perplexed by something so much different than the westerns he has been reading lately. He is still reading the anthology the next day in the bullpen, and the day after that, and the day after that. Rather than improving, his pitching gets worse. Now he no longer has even the strong early innings, and after a month of this he is sent down to Class A ball. He gets fewer opportunities to start games, and at th e end of the season the team`s manager wonders aloud if it`s worth asking Skinner back next season.
But back in Alabama, with nothing to distract him, Theo begins to understand what Shari was talking about. He orders a dozen new volumes from a Birmingham bookseller and pores over them every night until dawn. At sunrise, with his brother catching, he throws for an hour as hard as he can, and each sequence of pitches is a rhythmic torrent of words, Shakespeare or Milton or Blake. Chizzum shows up for a week of hunting and then stays for a month when he sees the improvement in his protege. To augment his fastball, he teaches Theo how to throw the slider, but mastery of the pitch eludes the kid until, providentially, a gift from Shari arrives, a collection of verse by the Beats. Theo disappears for a week and tries to fathom the book. Chizzum has given up on him and is packing his bags one morning when Theo reappears with the gloves. Outside, they throw the ball casually for a few minutes to warm up, and then Theo uncorks his heater. The ball explodes from his hand and screams towards Chizzum. The pitch is a sure strike until the moment it crosses the plate and the bottom falls out. It catches Chizzum in the shin and he howls.
Chizzum asks Theo for the same pitch, only this time when the ball comes in and drops he is ready for it. Theo throws again and again, and each time the ball behaves identically. Though his shin still aches, Chizzum smiles. It is a pitch batters will be unable to resist, but a pitch few of them will hit.
