THE ELEVEN PEOPLE Eddie Zanduce has killed have been properly eulogized, the irony in the demise of each celebrated in the tabloid press, the potentials of their lives properly inflated, and their fame—brief though it may have been—certainly far beyond any which might have accompanied their natural passing, and so they needn’t be listed here and made flesh again. They each float in the head of Eddie Zanduce in his every movement, though he has never said so, or acknowledged his burden in any public way, and it has become a kind of poor form now even in the press corps, a group not known for any form, good or bad, to bring it up. After the seventh person, a girl of nine who had gone with her four cousins to see the Orioles play New York over a year ago, and was removed from all earthly joy and worry by Eddie Zanduce’s powerhouse line drive pulled foul into the seats behind third, the sportswriters dropped the whole story, letting it fall on page one of the second section: news. And even now after games, the five or six reporters who bother to come into the clubhouse—the Orioles are having a lackluster start, and have all but relinquished even a shot at the pennant—give Eddie Zanduce’s locker a wide berth. Through it all, he has said one thing only, and that eleven times: “I’m sorry; this is terrible.” When asked after the third fatality, a retired school principal who was unable to see and avoid the sharp shot of one of Eddie Zanduce’s foul balls, if the unfortunate accidents might make him consider leaving the game, he said, “No.”
And he became so stoic in the eyes of the press and they painted him that way that there was a general wonder at how he could stand it having the eleven innocent people dead by his hand and they said things like “It would be hard on me” and “I couldn’t take it.” And so they marveled darkly at his ability to appear in his uniform, take the field at all, dive right when the hit required it and glove the ball, scrambling to his knees in time to make the throw either to first or to second if there was a chance for a double play. They noted that his batting slump worsened, and now he’s gone weeks in the new season without a hit, but he plays because he’s steady in the field and he can fill the stands. His face was the object of great scrutiny for expression, a scowl or a grin, because much could have been made of such a look. And when he was at the plate, standing in the box awaiting the pitch, his bat held rigid and ready off his right shoulder as if for business, this business and nothing else, the cameras went in on his face, his eyes, which were simply inscrutable to the nation of baseball fans.
And now, at thirty-three he lies on the queen-size bed of the Bayside Inn, his fingers twined behind his head, as he watches Carol Ann Menager come dripping into the room, her hair partially in a towel, her nineteen-year-old body a rose-and-pale pattern of the female form, five years away from any visible wear and tear from the vocation she has chosen. She warms him appearing this way, naked and ready to chat as she reaches for her lavender bra and puts it of all her clothing on first, simply as convenience, and the sight of her there bare and comfortable makes him feel the thing he has been missing: befriended.
“But you feel bad about it, right?” Carol Ann says. “It must hurt you to know what has happened.”
“I do,” he says, “I do. I feel as badly about it all as I should.”
And now Carol Ann stops briefly, one leg in her lavender panties, and now she quickly pulls them up and says, “I don’t know what you mean.”
“I only mean what I said and nothing more,” Eddie Zanduce says.
“What was the worst?”
He still reclines and answers: “They are all equally bad.”
“The little girl?”
Eddie Zanduce draws a deep breath there on the bed and then speaks: “The little girl, whose name was Victoria Tuttle, and the tourist from Austria, whose name was Heinrich Vence, and the Toronto Blue Jay, a man in a costume named William Dirsk, who was standing on the home dugout when my line drive broke his sternum. And the eight others all equally unlikely and horrible, all equally bad. In fact, eleven isn’t really worse than one for me, because I maxed out on one. It doesn’t double with two. My capacity for such feelings, I found out, is limited. And I am full.”
Carol Ann Menager sits on the bed and buttons her new sweater. There is no hurry in her actions. She is thinking. “And if you killed someone tonight?”
Here Eddie Zanduce turns to her, his head rolling in the cradle of his hands, and smiles the smile he’s been using all day, though it hasn’t worn thin. “I wouldn’t like that,” he says. “Although it has been shown to me that I am fully capable of such a thing.”