"What's the matter?" Flip yelled. "Did you hit something?"
"Not yet," Satch said, pushing open the door. He ran out of the car and around the back to open the trunk.
"What's he doin'?" Flip asked.
"Beats me."
The next thing we knew, Satch was running off into the woods, and he had a rifle in his hand! Flip and I jumped out of the car and followed him.
"Where's he going?" I yelled to Flip.
"Maybe he's goin' crazy," Flip replied.
We finally caught up with Satch, hiding behind a bush next to a bubbling stream. He was taking aim with the rifle.
"What is it?" I asked.
"Dinner," Satch whispered, not taking his eyes off his target.
I looked off in the distance where he was pointing the gun, and I could see what he was aiming at. It was a deer. A beautiful white-tailed deer, standing motionless in the forest. It must have been about a hundred yards away.
"Are you gonna kill it, Satch?" I asked.
"Darn tootin' I am."
Now, I have mixed feelings about hunting. I mean, it's not like I'm a vegetarian or anything. I eat hamburgers. I eat steak. I don't mind animals being killed for food. I just don't particularly like watching it happen.
Satch pulled the trigger and bam!
He missed. Startled by the noise, the deer dashed off into the woods.
"Shoot!" Satch said. "Woulda had 'im if I was throwin' a ball."
We went back to the car so Satch could put his gun away. You should have seen the trunk of that Packard. He kept food and a portable stove in there. There was a heat lamp, an electric massager, and a ukelele. Bats, balls, a couple of gloves, and catcher's equipment. Then there were his clothes. He had a bunch of suits, shirts, and at least two dozen ties. I don't know how all that stuff fit in there.
"What's this?" Flip asked, picking up a pair of red-and-yellow-flowered shorts. They looked like they were made from silk or something.
"Those are my underdrawers, thank you very much," Satch said, snatching them away.
The trunk of the car looked like somebody's closet. I suppose that made sense, because Satch seemed to live in his car.
"I'm starved," Satch said, taking a fishing pole out of the back of the trunk. "You boys up for chow?"
Now that he mentioned it, there was that empty feeling in my stomach. The whole time Flip and I spent at that diner, I never did get anything to eat. We had given all our food to Josh Gibson and the Homestead Grays.
"Aren't you afraid you'll be late for the World Series?" Flip asked. "The Monarchs' bus must be miles ahead of us by now."
"Don't you worry 'bout that," Satch said. "They can't start the game without me. That's why they call it the startin' pitcher, right?"
Satch pulled out his stove and told us to make a fire. He grabbed the fishing pole and a bag and went back into the woods. I gathered some sticks and wood that were lying around under a tree. Flip built the fire. It couldn't have been more than fifteen minutes when Satch came back with a bag of fish.
"Catfish!" Satch said. "Oh, we're gonna eat good tonight!"
Flip offered to cook, but Satch said nobody cooks catfish like he does. He gutted each fish in a few seconds, and then he pulled all kinds of spices and sauces out of the trunk. Soon the smell of roasting fish had my mouth watering. Satch cooked up some potatoes too, which he had stashed in another box.
The food was truly excellent. Flip told Satch that if he ever stopped playing baseball, he could make a good living as a chef.
"Oh, I don't know 'bout that," Satch said, scraping the last of the potatoes off his plate. "Maybe I'll pitch forever. I pitched over a thousand games already, you know."
"A thousand?" I asked. That was hard to believe.
"I won 31 games in 1933," he said, leaning back against a tree. "Threw 64 scoreless innings. Once I won 21 games in a row."
"I didn't know that," Flip said, and he knew just about everything there was to know about baseball.
"Nobody knows," Satch said sadly. "I feel like the majors is a big old house, and it's Christmas morn-in' and there are presents everywhere. And I got my nose pressed against the window lookin' in."
"The major league record is 24 wins in a row," Flip said. "Carl Hubbell."
"Major league record?" Satch spit on the grass. "Major league records don't mean nothin,' 'cause I ain't in the major leagues. I don't wanna sound big-headed, but if I was up there, they'd have to rewrite that record book, and you better believe it."
"You're gonna get in the majors, Satch," Flip said. "I can tell you that for sure."
"Well, they better hurry up," Satch said. "I'm just prayin' I get to the big show before my speedball loosens."
"How old are you, Satch?" I asked.
"Don't rightly know," he replied. "My momma told me she kept my birth certificate in the family Bible. But then the house burned down. I'm guess-in' I'm 'bout thirty-six, give or take a few."
Satch got up and dusted himself off. He went to the trunk and came back with his ukelele. It was dark out now. I was really tired.
"All this talk is depressin'," Satch said. "How about a song?"
"Sounds good to me," said Flip.
"And you ain't even heard my melodious voice yet," he replied.
Satch strummed the uke and then he started to sing, "'Let me call you sweetheart, I'm in love with you.'"
He could really sing and play! Forget about becoming a chef, I told Satch. He should become a musician.
I can't tell you which songs he played or how long he played or anything like that. Because in the middle of Satch's little concert, I fell asleep right there in the grass.
11.
Catching Satch THUD!.
That was the sound my head made when it whacked against the front seat of Satch's car. I had fallen off the backseat when Satch hit the brakes. That woke me up fast. Flip told me I'd slept so soundly that he and Satch had to pick me up off the grass in the middle of the night and throw me in the backseat of the car.
I felt like I had slept a hundred years. It was daytime now. Flip was in the front seat. I was groggy, like I had jet lag. In a way, I did.
"Where are we?" I asked when Satch turned off the engine. "Is this Pittsburgh?"
"Good mornin'," Satch said. "No, we are in the great state of North Carolina."
I sat up and looked out the window. We had pulled off the road at the edge of a field. Some cows were grazing in the distance.
"Why'd you stop here, Satch?" Flip asked.
"I feel like throwin' some," he replied. "Why don't you crank up that gun of yours, and we'll see how high she goes?"
"Sure thing!" I yelled, hopping out of the car. I wasn't groggy anymore. This was the whole reason why I came.
Satch got out and opened the trunk. He took off his fancy clothes and folded them up neatly. He really did wear red-and-yellow-flowered underwear!
You would think that a guy who can throw a baseball so hard would have tremendous arm muscles. But when Satch took off his shirt, he seemed to have no muscles at all. His arms were unbelievably long. His right arm must be like a slingshot, I figured, with rubber bands instead of muscles.
Satch rooted around in the trunk until he pulled out a jar. There was no label on it. He unscrewed the top and scooped out some brown gooey stuff with two fingers. Then he rubbed the stuff on his pitching arm.
"What's that?" I asked.
"My secret weapon," Satch said, "Venezuelan snake oil."
The stuff smelled horrible.
"I discovered it when I was playin' in Bismarck, North Dakota, in '35," Satch went on. "There were these Sioux Indians up there, and I got to know 'em real good. One day I had a sore arm and I couldn't play. These Indians invited me to their reservation. Well, one of 'em got bit on the leg by a snake and he's rollin' 'round like he's gonna die. The medicine man pulls out some goop and rubs it on the leg to take away the hurt. That put me to thinkin'. I asked him if he could rub some of the stuff on my arm. He said no, it's only for snake bites. So I give him ten American dollars and he rubs some on my arm."
"What happened?" Flip asked.
"Well, my arm got all warm and twitchy," Satch said. "It didn't hurt no more. The next day I went out there and pitched me a no-hitter. That's the truth. So I bought a bucket of the stuff from him, and I dab some on before every game. Keeps my arm young."
"What's in it?" I asked. "It smells disgusting."
"It's a secret formula," Satch said. "The medicine man would only tell me he scoops water out of a hollow tree stump in the woods."
"If you were in North Dakota, why is it called Venezuelan snake oil?" Flip asked.
Satch stopped rubbing the stuff on his arm and thought about it for a moment.
"Maybe it was Venezuela where it happened," he said. "I don't rightly remember. Grab that catcher's gear, Stosh. Let's see if you can catch my speedball."
I was beginning to think that half the stories Satch told he just made up for the fun of it. But I didn't care. Finally we were going to see how fast he really was.
Flip got out the radar gun. I took a catcher's mitt, mask, and chest protector out of the trunk and started putting everything on. The mitt was a fat, round little saucer with a pocket about the size of a ball. It didn't look anything like the catcher's mitts I had used. He didn't have any shin guards.
Satch finished rubbing on that evil-smelling snake oil. He pulled a baseball uniform out of the trunk and put it on. Spikes too.
The uniform said NEW YORK STARS across the front. When I asked him why it wasn't a Kansas City Monarchs uniform, he said that sometimes he pitched for the Monarchs, sometimes he pitched for the Stars, and sometimes he pitched for other teams.
"I play for whoever pays," he said. "When the green's floatin' 'round, make sure you get your share."
The three of us hopped a wooden fence and went out into the field. Satch found a bump that looked a little like a pitching mound. He paced off sixty feet and six inches and put a chewing-gum wrapper on the ground there.
"You squat down right behind that," he said.
"That's home plate?" I asked. "It's a little small, don't you think?"
"Don't you worry 'bout a thing," Satch said. "I can hit a butterfly with a clamshell."
Satch went back to the "mound" and swung his arm around a few times.
"Never do nothin' till your muscles are all loosed up," he said.
I squatted behind the "plate." Flip stood a few feet behind me with the radar gun and pointed it toward Satch.
This was the moment. We weren't just going to witness history, we were going to make history.
I was a little nervous. I'm pretty good with the glove, but I had never caught anyone who threw really hard. Satch himself said that Josh Gibson wouldn't be able to hit what he couldn't see. What if I couldn't see the ball coming at me? I made sure the catcher's mask was strapped on tight.
"I'll start you off nice and slow and easy," Satch said.
I put the mitt up and got ready to receive the pitch. I watched his motion carefully so I'd see the ball the whole way. He brought his arms high over his head really slowly, kicked up his leg, and- I never saw the ball. It just exploded in the mitt like it had been sent to me electronically. It felt like a bomb went off in my hand. Tears came to my eyes.
"75 miles per hour," shouted Flip.
Only 75? It felt like the ball must have been going 100 miles an hour.
"You okay, Stosh?" Flip asked.
"Yeah."
No way I was going to let them know how much my hand hurt. I threw the ball back to Satch.
He caught it and wound up again. I braced myself for the impact. The ball made a weird humming noise after he released it, and it exploded in the mitt again. I didn't have to move it an inch.
"81 miles per hour," Flip called.
That one didn't hurt as much as the first one. Maybe it was because I was ready for it. Or maybe it was because my hand was so numb I couldn't feel anything. I threw the ball back to Satch.
He let another one fly. Again, it hit the center of the mitt. The guy had incredible control.
"89 miles per hour," Flip called. "Is that your fastest, Satch?"