Battle Fatigue by Mark Kurlansky Page A

wished he would pitch but he wouldn’t, and they lost that first game. But now that the holiday is over, Koufax is pitching complete games almost every other day and the series is tied for the final game seven, and the winner takes the series. Should Don Drysdale pitch or Koufax? Koufax is better. Drysdale was awful in the first game. But Koufax just pitched nine innings two days ago. Donnie LePine is insisting that it’s too hard on Koufax and that starting Drysdale is “the only responsible way to play it.”
    â€œDon’t give me that,” says Rocco, who, after all, is a pitcher. “If he couldn’t do it, he would say so.”
    I am about to point out that you could start Koufax, with Drysdale warmed up and ready to go if needed. But something out of the corner of my eye stops me. It is Dickey Panicelli. He is back. His hair is long and hangs down straight like something limp and damp. He has a mustache. He is wearing green marine fatigues. It strikes me how different his green clothes are from the army field jacket from the Battle of the Bulge that I am still wearing. It fits me now. But Dickey wears marine green and I realize that my generation is going to be wearing a completely different type of old used fatigues. But his eyes have that same dead look that my uncle’s have when he watches television, that I see in Mr. Shaker, and sometimes in my father. Dickey was one of us—but now he is more one of them.

    Dickey uses the F-word a lot now. He uses it in places you can’t, like in front of my parents and especially in front of his mother.
    â€œFuck this,” he says.
    â€œDickey!” she shouts in horror.
    â€œSorry, Mom. What the fuck.”
    â€œKnock it off,” says Popeye. “I thought the marines would teach respect.”
    â€œIs that what you thought the fuckin’ marines teach? That’s not it, Dad. They fuckin’ teach you, though.”
    I can hear this from my window. There is something wrong with Dickey. But it takes time. My uncle and Mr. Shaker and the vegetable guy, all of them took my entire childhood to get just a little better, my whole childhood, and they are still struggling.
    Night seems to be worse. I go to sleep and about midnight I wake up. I hear this sound, a strange long note. Then I realize it is screaming. It is Dickey next door, screaming. Why is he screaming? What has happened to him? I hear his parents go into his room. But soon a fight breaks out about his language or respect or something.
    Poor Dickey. The next night I hear him screaming and I decide to go over there and talk to him. I quietly slip out the back door of my house. I don’t know why I am trying to be quiet. He is shouting so loud it almost echoes in the night. No one is going to hear my footsteps. As I get closer I realize that he is screaming the F-word. Poor Mrs. Panicelli. For a while he screams it, then he starts crying it, sobbing it, then mumbling something, then suddenly screaming into the night again.
    Between our backyard and theirs is a small chain-link fence, which I hop over. But now the screaming has stopped. Their house is quiet and I don’t know what to do. I can’t just knock on their door in the middle of the night. I walk up to the window of what I know is Dickey’s bedroom and stand on my toes. I can see into the room. There is a light on and the room seems an awful mess, with sheets and clothes tossed across the floor.
    Suddenly I feel pain in my right shoulder and hear a shout. The next thing I know I am lying faceup in the mud, staring at the shiny heavy rubber treads of Dickey’s combat boot. He is standing over me with his boot on my face.
    â€œDickey,” I say, as though trying to wake him up.
    â€œFuck, man. One short kick and I drive your nasal septum clear into your brain. You’re fucking dead, man.”
    â€œDickey, it’s me.”
    â€œI know,” he says with a smile, and helps me