Top-Notch Magazine/Volume 50/Number 5/When the Game's on the Hook

by C. S. Montanye

 

When The Game's on the Hook

By

C. S. Montanye

WHEN Bella, the wife’s sister, got married I sort of imagined that Grace and I would have a little rest and peace. Isn’t it funny how you get foolish ideas like that? What you expect never happens, and what you don’t expect comes along and give you a soak on the bean with the club of circumstance. After we had hurled rice and old shoes at Bella we left the church, believing all our troubles were over.

Three days after Bella and her newly wedded husband had gone to a watering place known as Niagara Falls, the wife got a letter from Rosie, her other sister. Rosie didn’t like the State of Ohio and wanted to trade it for New Jersey. She said there were no eligible young men there, and so she wanted to come to Trenton.

Well, talk as I would, it did no good. The wife sent Rosie a letter and sixty dollars of my money, and about two weeks after that I went down to the railroad station, collected Rosie, two trunks, and four hand bags, and brought them out to the bungalow.

After that the fun began.

II.

IT was the middle of August. Baseball, mosquitoes, ice-cream cones, open-air movies, and moonlight spooning were at the top of their form. August in Trenton meant that the Tigers, Joe Bain’s hard-hitting baseball team, were beginning to slump, that business at my sporting-goods emporium was rotten, and that Grace, the wife, frequently mentioned some place known to the world at large as Atlantic City.

It was the second Tuesday night in the month, and Grace and I were sitting on the porch of the bungalow. We usually sat there when we didn’t disagree or argue. When we did that we went inside. We looked at the moon once in a while, smelled the honeysuckle, yawned, and got an earful of our neighbor’s latest phonograph records for nothing. At this time Rosie had been with us for two weeks.

It seemed like two years.

“Ed,” the wife said, after we had rocked and knocked for an hour or so, “don’t you think Rosie is a pretty girl?”

“I don’t know,” I answered.

“Why don’t you know?” Grace asked.

“Because,” I replied. “I’ve never been able to see her with the war paint off. Ask me again some time after it rains and she goes out without an umbrella.”

The wife looked at the moon and sighed. “I’m very fond of Rosie and I feel it is my duty to see that she marries well. I admit that she dresses a little fancy and tries hard to look like a movie vamp, but she doesn’t mean a thing by it. She’s just at that impressionable age. She’s a dear girl. She’s got a good heart.”

“But poor judgment,” I said. “I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but personally I think she’s a dumb Dora.”

Grace stopped rocking. “You are prejudiced, Ed. She is a little silly and a trifle man-crazy, but all girls are like that at seventeen. But she’ll be getting married soon and get over her nonsense. I wish that Joe Bain would like her.”

“From what he said to me yesterday,” I cut in, “I didn’t get the idea that he despised her.”

Grace waited until the car of the family across the street got a little quiet. “I wish we could find Rosie a little something to do to keep her mind occupied, Ed. She’s a very clever girl, if I do say so myself. You’d be surprised. She went through business school——”

“In the front door and out the back?” I interrupted.

“Rosie knows stenography and typewriting,” Grace continued, paying no attention to what I said. “I’ve been thinking it over. I believe it would be a splendid idea for you to take her down to the store and give her a job.”

“Business is bad enough as it is,” I said.

“We won’t argue about it out here on the porch,” Grace returned sharply. “You heard what I said. I have already spoken to Rosie and she rather likes the idea of earning twelve dollars a week.”

I threw half of a good cigar out on the lawn. “Twelve dollars a week! Who has she been working for—Rockefeller?”

“You can pay her the money out of my allowance,” the wife snapped.

“Well, that makes it different,” I answered. “Tell her to be on hand at nine o’clock to-morrow morning. Now that I think it over I have got a letter to be typewritten.”

I had finished speaking when the front gate opened. Three people came across our two square yards of lawn and climbed up on the porch. One was Rosie, one was Joe Bain, the John McGraw of Trenton, and the other was Harry Hurley, the best catcher on the Tigers.

“Hello!” said the wife. “Isn’t it a pleasant evening? So few mosquitoes to bother one.”

Everybody lied by agreeing with Grace.

“It’s a bear of a night,” Joe Bain said.

Rosie flopped down in the porch swing. It was near the front screen door. The light from the hall came out. I looked at Rosie. She was worth a glance from anybody. She wore an orange-colored sport sweater and a very short black-silk skirt. Her hair was dressed like the Hopi Indians and disguised her ears. She had two red spots of color on each cheek that made her look as if she had a fever. Her lips were gummed up with carmine, and she had beaded her eyelashes. She looked more like Times Square than Trenton.

“Where have you all been at?” I asked.

“I was taking a walk with Rosie,” Harry Hurley explained, “when we ran into Joe down at Coogan’s ice-cream parlor.”

“I had a nut sundae that was a wiz,” Rosie chirped.

“It’s funny,” I said, “but that’s the very dish I’d expect you to order.”

“It’s getting warmer,” Joe Bain said, looking at the moon. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it rained some time.”

After this amazing prognostication, Hurley threw a glance at his watch. “I guess I’ll go back to the hotel and turn in,” he said. “To-morrow we open up with the Englewood Eagles. They’re a tough bunch. I’ll need my strength.”

“Yes,” Bain agreed, stealing a glance at the porch swing, “you’d better be getting along.”

I put the bee on Joe by speaking to Rosie. “You’d better slip up to bed, too,” I said. “We open the store at nine o’clock sharp. If you’re going to work for me, nine o’clock means nine o’clock and not ten minutes after eleven.”

Rosie jumped up, excited. “Fine! Boys, beginning to-morrow I’m a fifteen-dollar-a-week wage slave!”

“How much?” I asked, when Hurley and Bain got through congratulating her.

Rosie handed me a frown. “Fifteen per! I wouldn’t work for a cent less. My business course cost father an awful wad of jack.”

Rather than come to blows, and inasmuch as I wasn’t paying it, I let it go at fifteen. When we finished the fight Harry Hurley said good night and ducked. Then Joe Bain woke up to the fact Rosie had to retire and did the same thing, dragging a pair of lazy dogs down the path to the front gate.

“I’m so excited!” Rosie exclaimed when we were alone. “I never thought much about going to work before.”

“Neither did a lot of people,” I said. “Married men, for example, who had been used to finding good jobs for their wives.”

III.

ROSIE showed up at the store around half past nine. It was earlier than I expected. I gave her the letter to typewrite and in less than an hour she brought it to me. There wasn’t a single mistake on the first line.

Because she was a fan and liked baseball she took a deep interest in sporting goods. To show she had the good of the firm in mind she read a catalogue in her odd moments. During the next two hours she used a powder puff, the mirror, made a date with a salesman from Philadelphia who dropped in, vamped two truckmen, and talked baseball for twenty minutes with a bill collector, while I hid in the back room.

Rosie decided it was too hot to walk back to the bungalow for lunch. She managed to struggle along on a pair of dill pickles, a half a pound of chocolate candy the Philadelphia salesman went out and bought her, and a piece of French pastry.

About half past one Ray Weeks, the manager of the Englewood Eagles, dropped in to leave some tickets for the last two games with the Tigers to be played in his home town. Weeks bought all the stuff for his team in New York. A dozen times or more I had tried to hook him on an order, but there was nothing stirring.

“How is everything?” he inquired, looking superciliously at a new fielder’s mitt I was featuring.

“If they were a little better you could just begin to call them worse,” I answered.

Weeks smoothed out the mustache he wore on his upper lip and lighted a cigarette. “Are you going to be present at this afternoon’s fracas?” he asked. “If we don’t knock the Tigers for the whole four games it will be the first time in three seasons that they tore our collars off.”

Weeks raved on about the Eagles and was talking batting averages when he suddenly stopped as if he had been shot. His face grew red and his eyes began to bulge. I didn’t know what was the matter with him until I heard a step behind me and Rosie joined us.

“Excuse me for butting in,” she cooed, “but what’ll I do now, Ed? I’ve finished reading all the morning papers.”

Weeks straightened out his necktie, smoothed his mustache again, and stepped forward. There was nothing for me to do but introduce them. I did this and then beat it away to answer the telephone.

When I came back in five minutes Rosie and Weeks were smiling into each other’s eyes. I heard him telling her that she looked an awful lot like a girl he used to go to school with in Delta, Missouri.

I wasn’t sure if he was trying to compliment or knock her.

“Ed,” Weeks said, when he got wise I was with them again, “your sister-in-law has kindly consented to be my guest at the game this afternoon.”

“Isn’t that nice?” I said.

“Yes; it’s awfully sweet of Mr. Weeks to ask me,” Rosie murmured, giving her powder puff exercise again.

“Get your hat on,” the Englewood manager said. “We’ve got lots of time, and I’d like to take you to lunch before we go down to the park.”

“That will be just great,” Rosie said enthusiastically. “I haven’t had hardly a thing to eat since breakfast this morning!”

After they had both gone I got the notion I’d have a look at the game myself. I closed up the store, met Grace, and went out to the park, where Joe Bain got us into the grand stand for nothing.

It wasn’t hard to discover the whereabouts of Rosie. Even in the mob she stuck out like a chorus girl in a room full of scrubwomen. She was in a front-row box, talking to Ray Weeks, who was lounging beside her. All of the Tigers were giving her the double-o. Harry Hurley looked as pleased as a man whose house has just burned down. And if looks were daggers Joe Bain could have gone in the cutlery business.

“Rosie seems to be writing something,” Grace said, when I had pointed her sister out.

I strained my eyes. She had a piece of paper and a pencil and was writing down something that Ray Weeks was dictating.

“She’s probably giving him the telephone number of the store,” I said.

A few minutes later the game began.

It was a sizzler from the first ball over. The Tigers were on their own lot and full of steam. They fell on the Eagles like seven tons of coal, had them dizzy by the beginning of the fourth chapter, and at the end of the seventh had piled up a dozen hits and five tallies, standing two runs to the good. Weeks threw in a pair of his best twirlers to stem the avalanche. It was like trying to inflict punishment on an elephant with a feather.

When the game was over each member of the Trenton team had some of the Eagles’ plumage as a souvenir for the first time in three seasons.

We didn’t see Rosie until supper was on the table.

“Well,” she said, when she came in and sat down, “I’ll tell the world I earned my eighteen dollars a week this afternoon!”

“How much?” I asked.

The wife’s sister took something out of the pocket of her orange-colored sweater and passed it across the table. “Eighteen dollars,” she repeated. “I guess I’m worth that much. Here’s a sixty-five-dollar order Ray gave me for bats, gloves, and balls for his team. Not so bad for an afternoon, eh?”

I looked at the list of stuff she had written down.

“Do you like Mr. Weeks?” Grace asked.

Rosie pulled a funny smile. “Like him? Of course I do. You don’t suppose I’d be engaged to any one I didn’t like, do you? By the way, I would have been home earlier if we hadn’t stopped off to buy a ring. Pretty, isn’t it?”

She stuck out her left hand. On the fourth finger of it was a diamond hock rock that blazed like ice-blue fife.

IV.

THE next day the Tigers took another fall out of the Englewood Eagles. Rosie sat in a box. Weeks lounged beside her. The wife and I sat on our shoulder blades in the bleachers because we had arrived late and couldn’t find Joe Bain. After the sixth inning we didn’t care who won.

When the game was over Rosie brought Weeks around, introduced him to her sister, and said they were going out to supper together. Before Grace could think up a good reason why she shouldn’t go they were halfway across the park.

“It happened so quickly that I can’t get over it,” the wife said, when supper was put away and we were out on the porch of the bungalow. “What do you think of the ring he gave her?”

“The one on her finger or the one on the telephone this afternoon at the store?” I asked.

Grace let it go at that and delivered a ten-minute lecture entitled, “Rosie Is a Sweet Girl.” When the address was over she asked me what I knew about Ray Weeks.

“Not a thing,” I admitted, “except that he never bought anything from me before.”

Grace kept quiet for a while. “I knew a girl like Rosie wouldn’t last long,” she said at length. “She’s so lively and pretty. Why, she hadn’t been in Trenton ten minutes before Harry Hurley was treating her to ice cream. She’s not the kind of a girl who remains single long. Aren’t you glad she’s engaged?”

"No; suspicious,” I answered. “It seems too good to be true.”

We talked for a time and then Joe Bain and Harry Hurley came down the street and stopped in. Both of them had a grouch.

“Somebody ought to warn Rosie about this Ray Weeks fish,” Hurley said. “He’s been mixed up in a couple of funny deals and I wouldn’t trust him from here to there. I think he’s a crook. Furthermore, I don’t like him.”

This looked so much like childish jealousy that I had to laugh. “You’ve got an awful rotten line of comedy, Harry,” I said.

He shrugged. “It isn’t comedy. I know Weeks is a sharper who would take any kind of a crooked chance. I guess it’s useless trying to steer you on him because it does look like jealousy. All I ask is just to wait. Time will tell.”

I looked at Joe Bain. “What have you got against him?” I inquired.

“His mustache,” Joe snarled. “Can a man be on the level with a thing like that on his upper lip?”

Grace came to the rescue. “You certainly can’t judge a man’s character by his mustache,” she said decidedly. “Personally, I think that Mr. Weeks is a perfect gentleman.”

“Time will tell!” Harry Hurley croaked again.

Five minutes later the manager of the Tigers and the catcher departed for the village to drown their troubles in lemonade.

“Jealous!” I said. “The pair of them had hopes of Rosie.”

“Of course,” the wife agreed. “Ed, let us both go up to Englewood to-morrow and see the two games. We can take Rosie and stay at the Springers’. Don’t you remember how they came here last year and sponged on us for a week?”

“Am I likely to forget it?” I answered. “One of the nerviest grafting families in the whole State of New Jersey!”

The next day Rosie, the wife, and myself left Trenton with the Tigers. I sat in the smoking car with the bunch and played poker. Before we had reached Jersey City I was out six dollars. This was good proof of how much I expected to enjoy myself. Hurley proved that being lucky at cards means unlucky in love, by winning it.

When we got to Englewood at last we discovered the Springers had probably expected us, because they had moved. It took us two hours to find their new house. When we did, they proved how much regard for the truth they had by telling us they were glad to see us, and that we must stay as long as we wanted.

We had lunch and went straight out to the Englewood ball park afterward.

“So this is the town where I suppose I shall live,” Rosie said, when we were in the stand.

“Not live—exist,” I said.

“It’s a very pretty place,” the wife remarked.

“Isn’t it?” I agreed. “I’m just beginning to notice how much air there is and what a lot of sky they have.”

“You’re as funny as a butcher’s bill!” Grace snapped.

I thought that since the Eagles were on their own home grounds that they would play better ball than they did at Trenton. I was mistaken. From the first one over the pan to the last strike called they made a miserable showing. The best they could do was to squeeze a single run out of the nine chapters. They only garnered that through a long hit and a brace of errors pulled by the Tiger outfield.

After the game Rosie made an exit with Weeks, and I went down to the clubhouse. I found Joe Bain sitting on the front steps, smelling a four-leaf clover. He looked thoughtful.

“Ed,” he said, when I dropped down beside him, “there’s something funny on the fire. Weeks has an idea he’s going to walk in with to-morrow’s game. He’s offering odds on the Eagles, and all the gamblers in town are doing the same thing.”

“Then he’s a dumb egg,” I said. “The Tigers have got his bunch on the hip and what happens to-morrow will be what has happened for the last three afternoons. A person don’t have to be any relation to Connie Mack to realize that.”

Just at this moment Hurley came out of the showers. He was looking thoughtful. He came over, rolled a cigarette, and sighed. “From the gossip downstairs,” the catcher said, “it looks like that crook Weeks had an ace up his sleeve. He thinks he’s going to hang to-morrow’s game on the hook.”

Bain laughed. “I know he does. But he’ll have to have more than an ace up his sleeve to do it. He’ll have to have a whole deck of cards in his clothes.”

“Time will tell!” Hurley sighed.

We had dinner with and on the Springers. After it was over I wandered down to the village to mingle with the local cut-ups. One of them must have known something about hypnotism because before I knew what I was doing I had bet twenty dollars on the Englewood Eagles to win the last game of the quartet. I sort of figured that I ought to make a little wager on the team managed by a person who was going to marry my wife’s sister.

“What do you think of Englewood?” Grace asked, when I got back to the Springers.

“Well, I’ll tell you better after to-morrow’s game,” I answered.

V.

THE last game between the Tigers and the Eagles was played on a day made to order for baseball. The whole town had been tipped off that the Englewood crowd was out for a killing and the field was jammed. A fifteen-cent shine was ruined before I had followed Grace and Rosie up to a seat. Then when somebody got a poke in the eye with my elbow I hoped it was the baby who had wiped his shoes all over my coat.

The game was a fliv. If the Eagles were out to win, nobody would have known it if they hadn’t been told so in advance. Of the entire four games they had mixed in with the Tigers, the last game was the sorriest one of the lot. I tried to forget my twenty dollars and watch what was going on, but my mind wandered. I did know, however, that the Trenton nine opened the game up by clouting out two homers and a three-bag hit that was good for another run. They kept up that pace until the fifth, when the Eagles staged a desperate rally that got them nothing but a lot of laughs.

The game ended to the tune of a twelve-nothing score, with Joe Bain’s gang dangling on the long end of it.

We didn’t get back to Trenton until quite late. Rosie motored down in Bain’s new car. She arrived about an hour after Grace and I had finished supper and were out on the porch.

The manager of the Tigers came up with her. “Some game!” Joe said. “And those fat odds the sharks handed out! It was better than poker with the deuces wild! I hope you got yours, Ed!”

“I got mine,” I replied. “What about the ace up the sleeve of Mr. Weeks?”

Bain laughed shortly. “Oh,” he answered mysteriously, “we played safe by changing our signals. Sometimes it’s good to do that. Well, as Harry says, time will tell. Good night, everybody.”

I noticed that Rosie was pretty quiet. I didn’t think anything of it until we all went into the house. I began to close the windows and had almost finished when I heard the wife give a little scream.

“Rosie!” she cried. “Why, where’s your lovely engagement ring? You didn’t lose it, did you?”

I looked at my sister-in-law’s fingers and saw there was nothing on them except sunburn.

“No; I didn’t lose the ring,” she replied calmly. “I gave it back to him.”

“You gave it back to him!” Grace exclaimed.

Rosie used her powder puff and looked at herself in a mirror. “Yes, I gave it back to him,” she said after a while. “The other day I happened to tell Ray that Harry Hurley had once given me a set of the Tigers’ signals. Ray said it would be fun if I gave him a copy so we could use them as a code for love letters. Last night I happened to tell this to Joe Bain and—well, Joe said would I believe that Ray was crooked? I told him no. Then Joe changed the signals for this afternoon’s game and threw in a couple of the old ones just as a test. When I handed the ring back to Mr. Weeks he said that everything was fair in love, war, and baseball. I’m glad I didn’t marry him. That mustache was awfully foolish looking.”

She went upstairs and I locked the front door.

“Isn’t it awful?” Grace said.

I turned out the hall light. “Yes, it’s awful,” I replied. “Rosie can get engaged again. But if Weeks cancels that sixty-five-dollar order, where am I going to get another one?”

Another story in this series will appear in the nest issue of TOP-NOTCH.