It was two minutes until game time at the antique wreck of a baseball park whose official title was CornAmerica Stadium, but which had been known for years as The Great Beyond. Almost everyone with any talent who had ever played there had been dead for decades. The park languished in disrepair at the edge of Des Moines, Iowa, like a brontosaurus succumbing to a tar pit. Among the good folk of Des Moines, there were many who wished the slumping catastrophe torn down, or perhaps pushed into the Skunk River, whose desperate and malodorous waters it overlooked.
But it was a landmark, and Des Moines, a city pitifully in need of any tangible sign of distinction, maintained it, although it was a fire marshal’s nightmare and no insurance company would touch it. The place had long been kept afloat by anonymous donations from local baseball fanatics whose adoration of the stadium’s mostly mythical past was limitless and whose common sense was every bit as fictitious as the legendary feats that supposedly occurred there.
In all fairness, Connie Mack had passed through, as had The Babe and Mel Ott and Three-Fingered Brown and John McGraw and some of the guys who threw the 1919 World Series.
Attendance had always been sluggish at The Great Beyond, but since Nick Artery began making a run at the home run records—most home runs in a season, and most convicted felons executed by home runs in a season—the home team started drawing sellout crowds, whose members ranged from gifted and prematurely retired career investors too rich to work, to a sizable contingent of intoxicated retirees who took advantage of the Early Bird Senior Citizens Special: The first five hundred souls to the ticket office every night sat in the bleachers for a buck. They enjoyed being close to the scoreboard, where the executions occurred.
Game time was seven, and Nick Artery—clean-up hitter and home run king of the Des Moines Lightning Bugs—showed up at six fifty-eight. Cooties Lumbago, the wizened old full-time misanthrope who hired Nick years ago, greeted him.
“Complacency is death to the soul of a true executioner,” Cooties said as Nick approached his locker.
Cooties stood about five-foot-four and was pure meanness. He was seventy-seven and looked a hundred and ten, thanks to a painstakingly inadequate diet, oceans of whiskey, and the foul chewing tobacco which filled his gums, his complexion and his view of the world, not to mention his soul. It was called “Black Dog,” and smelled like the gates of hell. Cooties was devoted to it.
“I warmed up on the way over,” Nick said, lying through a hangover. He had only been awake a few minutes, and would still have been sleeping if one of his many generous fans had not called to wake him. Since making a serious run at the home run records, his social stock increased dramatically, and it troubled him that he was starting to lose touch with his wife, Veronica, who spent most of her time at the community college reading Proust these last few years.
Artery donned his dirty uniform, fled the foul miasma of the locker room and took the field to wave at his admirers.
Ever since the Iowa legislature brought back the death penalty and allowed certain defendants to be electrocuted on the giant scoreboard whenever a home run not only reached it but landed inside of a big silver ring known as The Halo, attendance had improved, even more than the legislators hoped. The Great Beyond was packed. At first, cynics argued the new attraction coincided with visits from pennant-contending teams who would have attracted fans anyway. But as the seasons progressed, even when the Lightning Bugs played losers, the stands were full.
While the National Anthem played, armed guards marched a death row inmate to center field, where he was strapped spread-eagle to a giant iron wheel and hoisted skyward, facing home plate. A series of mechanical pulleys and chains lifted him to the top of the scoreboard, locking the wheel inside the thirty-five foot circumference of the Halo. If a batted ball—hit by the home team, of course—landed inside the circle, electricity flowing through the big board ignited numbers indicating a home run for the home team, igniting fireworks to put the locals in a celebratory mode, with the remaining voltage igniting the condemned.
Artery felt sure that the exuberance of today’s crowd was not related to the Lightning Bugs’ opponent, nor even entirely to the anticipation of his own stellar performance, but to Leontes Daleiden, notorious degenerate scumbag of the first water, a celebrity among the perverts and low-lifes of greater Des Moines. Daleiden’s crime of choice was indecent exposure. He stood before orphanages, convents, hospices, schools for the gifted and talented, and, especially, the local P.E.O. chapter, unfettered as the day he was born, bawling bawdy alehouse ballads from medieval days.
Waving one’s own flag in public did not, under ordinary circumstances, subject a one to capital punishment, but no circumstances involving Leontes Daleiden were ordinary.
Iowa had a “Three-Strikes-and-You’re-Out” law, and Daleiden accumulated at least eighteen strikes, and despite attempts by numerous judges and legal clinics to keep him from having to make that last long walk across the outfield of The Great Beyond, his options had run out.
Nick Artery gazed out of the steamy, reeking dugout as Daleiden was escorted by two armed guards. Damned if Daleiden didn’t look every inch the pervert: his mangy beard still fiery red, his hair, an anarchic mop that flaunted the laws of good grooming as brazenly as Leontes himself thumbed his nose at the laws of God and Man.
“I’m an innocent man, Artery,” Daleiden cried.
“Then why are you naked?” Artery said.
“It was a trade-off,” Daleiden said, turning toward the Lightning Bug dugout as the guards dragged him onward. “They offered me a final meal, and I told them I’d spare the state the expense of a costly surf ’n turf dinner if they’d let me expire au naturel. The cheap bastards took me up on it!”
“I never killed no naked guy before,” Artery said to Cooties.
“Grab a bat, kid,” Cooties said.
“Don’t be in no hurry,” said Clarence “Machine Shed” Washington, the league’s second-best hitter, just two behind Artery in the home-run standings. He was in a perpetual snit at Artery, who always zapped the day’s executionee, even though Clarence batted one notch ahead of Artery in the Lightning Bug line-up. Clarence generally got his homers in the later innings, when the defendant’s ashes had already been hauled away. Clarence took a fierce practice swing at the summer air. “I’m gonna toast that little pussy.”
“Hit one high for me, Artery,” Daleiden cried, seeming to enjoy the attention. “By the end of the day, I’ll be in the great hereafter, waving the big one in front of the finest, most distinguished broads that ever lived: Joan of Arc, Marie Antoinette, Catherine the Great, Calamity Jane, Amelia Earhart, Annie Oakley…”
“The hell he talking ’bout?” Washington asked, his face clouded with perpetual disbelief.
“Daleiden was a school teacher,” Artery said. “A real intellectual. That’s what my wife says, anyway. He has a strong sense of history. Just ‘cause he’s an incorrigible degenerate and perverter of young minds doesn’t mean he hasn’t got a spiritual side. He believes that he’ll enjoy an afterlife of uninhibited freedom and that there he’ll be able to flash all the women who ever lived, free from secular interference.”
“…Lily Langtry, Sarah Bernhardt, Marie Curie, Evelyn Nesbit, Mae West, Madame Schumann-Heink, Helen of Troy, Mata Hari, Cleopatra…”
Washington spat again. “That boy’s just plain crazy,” he said. “My mama told me not to mess with no crazy man. Maybe you’d best be takin’ him out, Nick. I don’t want
the Good Lord thinking I took advantage of some poor man’s retardation just for the sake of snatching the home-run title from the sorry likes of you.”
“…Carole Lombard, Jean Harlow, Gilda Radner…”
The crowd rose when organist Uma Turner struck the opening chords of the National Anthem. There were a few hoots and catcalls, and the odd sign of disrespect, but most of all there was silence, a sort of tacit respect for a man who, though a pervert, was a career pervert.
A heavy chain hoisted the iron ring up to the scoreboard and locked it into place inside the larger Circle. Daleiden had now achieved his ultimate goal in life, which was to flash it to the world, in front of God and everybody. If any man about to absorb a few hundred thousand volts of electricity was ever happy, that man was Leontes Daleiden.
“I feel bad about toasting a guy just because he’s got a happy pecker,” Artery said.
“That boy’s got a whitesnake like a boa constrictor,” Washington said. “Society don’t neutralize that dude, it’s gonna put the squeeze on the whole wide world, you know what I’m sayin’? I got nothing ’gainst wildlife, you understand. I just don’t want it putting the squeeze on any of the sisters, or my kids. Dig?” Artery dug.
Artery, the designated hitter, sat in the dugout as Washington and his teammates took the field and quickly recorded three outs against Dubuque. As his team prepared to bat, beer-sweat poured out of every pore on Artery. He smelled like a brewery, and the lust for a cold one overwhelmed him; he nearly fainted, but Cooties Lumbago stuck a freshly opened can of Black Dog under artery’s nose and the reek popped the home run king straight back into reality.
The Lightning Bugs’ lead-off hitter grounded out, short to first, and the next batter hit an anemic pop-up to second. But Washington, although desperate for a pitch to hit into the Halo, could find nothing he could use and loped to first base after taking two godawful sliders and a couple of wretched change-ups.
The crowd roared as Artery trudged toward the plate, stopping briefly to knock some imaginary mud from his cleats. He closed his eyes, said something resembling a prayer, and took his place inside the batter’s box.
“I hope the pitcher gives you the high hard one,” Daleiden cried from his roost atop the scoreboard. “Just like I threw your wife! She looooved the high hard one, Artery!”
Artery was awestruck by the little pervert’s shameless mockery of a man’s sacred marital bonds. In fact, Daleiden’s plight moved him to pity.
Artery took the first pitch high and inside. The young pitcher was trying to brush him back, but Artery never flinched. Once his cleats were planted in the box, they stayed planted. The next pitch caught the outside corner: a questionable call, but Artery’s father always said, “The umpire’s always right,” and Artery never argued with the umpire. Daleiden was not so magnanimous.
“Drop your contacts, bozo?” the condemned yelled from his lofty perch. “No way was that a strike!”
“What’s his problem?” asked the umpire.
“I think he’s a little nervous,” Artery said.
“Homos usually are.”
Artery looked at the ump. “He’s not a homo,” he said. “He loves women. That’s why he tried to share his bounty with as many of them as possible.”
“He’s a homo,” the umpire said, discharging a wad of tobacco perilously close to Artery’s pristine cleats. “All flashers is homos.”
“I beg to differ,” Artery said. “And—”
“And I’m tellin’ you to shut up and play ball,” the ump said.
Artery glared at the pitcher, solidified his stance, and took a perfect fastball for strike two.
“Geez, Nick,” the catcher said. “You ain’t afraid to ice Daleiden, are you?”
“Of course not—”
“Shut up and play ball!” The voice was Daleiden’s, swooping down from the center field scoreboard like a predatory bird.
Daleiden cursed Artery in several languages, taunted him, questioned his lineage, suggested that his ancestors sought the nocturnal embrace of quadripeds, challenged his masculinity, and asserted that Artery’s wife had slept with the Lightning Bugs’ infield and bullpen, as well as the Bolshoi Ballet, the entire membership list of the Book-of-the-Month Club, one or two touring companies of Cats, and Teamsters Local 982 of Amalgamated Meatcutters. He also said that Artery was too chickenshit to do his civic, patriotic, cultural and religious duty, which was to send the next hanging curveball he saw out, out, out into the ozone, but not too far, just far enough so that its arc would terminate in the gleaming white country of the Halo, dispatching a tsunami of voltage through Daleiden’s corpuscles, joy to the fans, and justice—that frisky critter—to the city, the state, the nation, nay, to the entire brotherly world.
The next pitch was an unfortunate choice: yet another fastball, but this one delivered right into the wheelhouse of a hitter who had sent many a fastball pitcher into the used-car business.
Artery usually felt nothing when he tagged one into the cheap seats, but today he knew as soon as the ball left the hapless schoolboy’s green hand that the ball and Daleiden were history. Daleiden knew it too. With the crack of the bat the flasher’s voice ceased. The baseball was a meteor, a lunar trajectory, a space shuttle, a shooting star, a solar eclipse, the dawn of man.
For the first time in his career, Daleiden was naked and speechless at the same time. Terror swept over his face like a sunset. He opened his mouth to insult his demise, but he knew it was all over, and just before the ball landed six inches above his warped little head, he closed his eyes, uttered his Creator’s generic name, and prepared to buy the farm.
When the ball hit the Halo, the sky was peppered with Vesuvian fireworks. The scoreboard erupted in a glorious tintinnabulation of numbers and justice and victory bells and joy. Dancing girls dressed in stars and stripes and twirling batons emerged from behind the big board, urging the fans on to greater celebration. The fans needed no urging. They poured beer on each other, they beat each other up, they stood on their chairs and mooned the sky, until finally, exhausted with alcohol they put their arms over one another’s shoulders and segued into “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”
As they swayed and sang, Daleiden turned to steam. Not even toast. One moment the Halo contained the pulsating flesh and blood of the ungodliest limb of Satan ever to disgrace the streets of Polk County, and the next, it contained naught but a barely visible vapor, wafting in the thrilled and thrilling air.
When Artery circled the bases, children and guys on crutches and in wheelchairs joined him. The lame walked, the VFW Honor Guard shot each other full of holes. Miss Polk County, eighteen-year-old Jessica Headley, greeted him at home plate, thrusting a bouquet of roses into his arms, and her agile and much-sought-after tongue into his ear. “My place at ten,” she whispered, and planted a kiss on his beery brow.
“What’s for din-din, hon?” Artery asked on his return home.
“I needn’t reiterate my opposition to capital punishment, Artery,” his beloved wife Veronica said, sodden in her martini chair, a big green number that occupied the living room like an armed camp.
“Can we discuss politics post-prandially, sweets?” he said. “My tummy’s rumbling. Is it soup yet, my love?”
“Daleiden’s probably still hanging out there, vultures have flown a thousand miles to gobble up his eyeballs, and you’re talking about food? You’re sick, Artery. You need help,” she said. When she waxed self-righteous, her voice, which had once reminded him of Lauren Bacall, sounded like a muffler dangling from the belly of a dying Buick, scraping along the lonely pavement.
“Daleiden was a weenie-wagger, toots,” he said. “He terrorized schoolyard innocents, spooked spinsters, and jarred the nervous. He was the scourge of supermarkets, rare-book rooms and homes for senior citizens. Besides, there’s nothing left of him to gobble. He’s steam.”
“He was expressing himself,” she said. “It was a form of free speech. You violated his First Amendment rights, Artery. Your supper’s on the table. I hope you choke.”
Artery headed for the kitchen, lifted the lid from the silver serving tray, and found a big slab of raw and not especially fresh beef. Artery sighed and sagged.
“I kind of like it cooked, a little,” he said.
“You wanted blood, there’s your blood, you Nazi meatball.”
“But lammikins, Daleiden was a plague. I’m a hungry breadwinner.”
“There’s a grocery store down the street,” Veronica said. “I’m going to my seminar.”
For the last couple of years, Veronica attended some Proust seminar twice a week, but she couldn’t get her story straight and Artery knew she was stepping out on him. Thirty seconds after the front door closed, Artery looked out the window. Her seminar, a pimply doofus with thick glasses and greasy hair, sat at the wheel of a pitiful pile of junk. Even when Artery had been broke, he had more respectable wheels than that.
Within the hour, he was in the red-hot whirlpool of Jessica Headley, who personally prepared a video of Artery’s greatest executions, gearing up to market it just as soon as she screened it for a few selected entrepreneurs whose distribution techniques she deemed worthy of the project. Artery cringed as he soaked and looked up at the giant screen Jessica erected poolside.
“Your legendary zapping of Scaggs Irwin is my personal favorite,” she said between sips of pina colada. “Anyone who does reefer in algebra class deserves to get nuked.”
“But he was the teacher,” Nick said. “If I had to spend my days with smelly kids and the value of “x,” I’d get high, too.”
Jessica fell silent. A diminutive dope fiend went up in flames when a long tater by Nick Artery hit the magic circle, igniting fireworks, a rainbow of flames, and an ocean of electricity that engulfed the defendant, leaving naught but a smoking crisp in its wake.
“Man, that sure was pretty,” she said, exhaling a lungful of quality grass.
“Will this video be made available to young people?” Artery asked.
“Who the hell do you think cheers when you hit those death bombs?” she said. “Who buys the jerseys, the hot dogs, the videos? You want to stay on top in this business, son, you’d best think young.”
Artery sank in the tub. Since he’d started spending two evenings a week with Jessica, he felt a corrupting influence sneaking up on him. But he wasn’t sure who was corrupting whom.
Jessica’s unauthorized videos competed with those released by Artery’s own production company, but he wouldn’t sue her. Her videos scared him—the camera lingered almost lovingly on the death agonies of the various and sundry condemned. The tapes crafted and marketed by his own company had only fleeting glimpses of the condemned once the electricity began to flow. Mostly the videos concentrated on Artery, who, skillfully and in the workmanlike manner admired by the good folk of Des Moines, drove off-speed sliders up, up, up into the Halo, and, while electrocution and fireworks occurred in center field, the hero methodically circled the bases to the accompaniment of tastefully-pirated rock anthems soaring in the background.
Jessica was at her acrobatically erotic best while the videos played, and while Artery was a little embarrassed to be risking conception with Miss Polk County while the sound of the crack of his own bat he felt obligated to humor her, providing, as she did, shelter and safe harbor for him while Veronica guzzled martinis at home and caviled about his violation of her moral and theological standards.
Since Artery began to challenge the record for most executions in a season by a Triple-A designated hitter, Veronica became sullen, even mean, these last few months, withdrawing, almost withering, as Artery’s fame and fortune bloomed. Was she jealous? Artery couldn’t see why. She had never been particularly career-driven, content to keep house and occasionally volunteer and putter around at the day-care center or the hospice, and such additional education as she desired Artery was more than happy to finance. This Proust seminar she attended, for example. Artery wasn’t jealous. It was a big world, he believed, and there was room for everyone and everything, except perhaps Leontes Daleiden and his tribe.
Outside the stadium, women of varying quality and degrees threw themselves and assorted objects at him every night: car keys, phone numbers, plane reservations (first class!), family Bibles, ribbed condoms that glowed in the dark (some played music from erotic films), and passwords to mysterious pleasure palaces and private steam rooms on the fashionable and heavily restricted east side of town.
What chance did he have in a world of women who were getting stronger? When Artery was young, women didn’t have biceps, never worked out. Now you couldn’t walk across the street without bumping into a sweating woman. They were everywhere, jogging, jumping, aerobicizing up and down the block, always flinging their glistening, tawny arms toward him in gestures of greetings and procreation.
And somehow, they got his unlisted phone number.
“How did you get my phone number?” he had asked Moira Lefkowitz, society harridan and heiress of Des Moines’s lone newspaper, The Des Moines Dollar, as they basked together on her father’s yacht at Lake Okoboji on one of Artery’s rare days off. Moira, who had no interest in journalism, but disguised herself as a sports reporter to gain access, first to Artery’s locker room and then to his voice, his lips, his heart and his soul, craved the additional social cachet companionship with a home run king and chief executioner would bring.
“Phones and newspapers, same difference. My family owns them all. There are no secrets, Art,” Moira had said.
No secrets, no privacy, and, increasingly, no home life. Artery started being afraid to be anywhere but the old ball park, where a 95-mile-per-hour fastball from an
unreliable southpaw seemed positively comforting, compared to the perils of being accosted in his own front yard.
“You want, we can have your old lady bumped off,” Moira said.
From sleek Moira, gentle Moira, totally amoral and detached Moira, the suggestion did not seem shocking in the least. In another century, Moira would have been a key player in any purge, any pogrom, any pitiless act of mass betrayal and extermination, while not allowing one hair of her splendidly coiffed head to be disturbed.
“She’s my wife. I love her,” Artery had said.
“I didn’t say you didn’t love her. I just said she’s a drag, n’est-ce pas, stud muffin?”
“It’s the Proust,” Artery had said. “I’d rather she dated a hockey player than spend half her time with a guy that doesn’t even write in English.”
Moira had said that if he didn’t want Veronica killed, she could get him a nice quick divorce and then Moira and Artery could be married and live in palatial splendor on one of her family’s many estates scattered across the globe like so much stardust.
“I gotta get the record first,” Artery had said. “Soon as I get the record, Veronica and I will talk. Anything can happen. But the team comes first.”
Moira had placed her martini glass on the deck with the same studied insouciance with which Marie Antoinette must have put aside her plate of cake. She neared Artery on a pair of legs for which any army of antiquity would have gladly crossed continents and exterminated entire populations, and proceeded to demonstrate to him, so that there could be absolutely no misunderstanding, exactly what did, in fact, to her way of thinking, come first.
