The Shill

I know my father had a good fastball, a better curve, and a great knuckleball. I know this because when I was a child in the late 1950’s I watched him pitch in a charity baseball game at Gil Hodges Field in Princeton, Indiana. He was not quite forty years old at the time. Jim Pegram, his close friend caught the game, and they made a strong duo. I remembered the game when a friend called me the other day and asked if my dad ever pitched in professional baseball. He had.

Dad signed a contract with the St. Louis Cardinal organization in1939 right out of high school and spent a couple of years with one of their farm teams in the Canadian League. You know what happened after that. As a member of what’s been called “the greatest” generation he joined the 82^nd Airborne and spent the next three and a half years fighting a war in North Africa and Europe. By 1945, his youth was well over emotionally and physically and so was his athletic career.

This background is factual, and I related it to make a point about the story I’m sharing with you. This story came to me through my uncle—my father’s older brother—and is hearsay since both men have been dead for decades. As I wrote it became a product of my uncle’s memory and recall of his words. All memory is a combination of recall, imagination, perspective, and myth. But I’m sure it’s at least mostly, if not completely, accurate because I knew my father very well.

The Shill

Imagine a hot night in the county seat of any rural area of any Midwestern state somewhere in the early to middle 20^th century. A freckled girl connected to the hand of a future pig farmer bounces and floats like a helium balloon down the midway of the annual county fair. Bittersweet smells from the melting cotton candy, burnt bearing grease, stale popcorn, and rotting caramel apples coat that same midway lit with neon bulbs and dim moonlight. The humidity remains constant and heavy on this night of the Gibson County Fair, let’s say, as it had for decades in the past and probably would for several decades forthcoming. The carnies pace and smoke around the equipment and rides inspecting them for maximum efficiency. The crowds move slowly and purposefully. Some filter out the main gate, arms laden with souvenirs and the remnants of extraordinary foods such as taffy, frozen hokey-pokeys, or the famous fairgrounds fish sandwich that would not reappear till the following summer. Others wander in for a last glimpse of the side show freaks with garish limbs and hideous mutations or listened to the barely clothed hoochie-coochie girls painted like kewpie dolls as they hawked at old men to come in and watch them dance naked. The shaded spotlights shadowed perfectly their puffy, yellowing bodies and scarred eyes.

As he passed the gambling tents, a greasy man wrinkled like leather and puffing between coughs on a cigarette waved John Bill toward the bottle toss game. He juggled three baseballs in his hands and the cigarette bobbed between his thin lips in time with their rise and fall. A teenager stacked milk bottles on a small stool behind him, and then the kid turned to smile. Let’s pretend it was the summer of 1939.

John Bill, paced the sawdust covered dirt in front of a three sided canvas tent and rubbed two nickels together in his pocket for luck, a habit he carried with him all his life. Facing him, the open side of the tent beckoned—a long counter stacked with baseballs and behind the counter hanging from the walls, rows of bright, stuffed teddy bears, puppy dogs, and horses, along with shelves of costume jewelry and an odd assortment of whistles, badges, handcuffs, marbles, and balloons. On the ground against the back canvas wall, two stools were stacked with five painted milk bottles each, three on the bottom row and two on the top.

The object seemed simple. You paid a nickel and the black-toothed carnie in a straw hat who stood next to the counter let you throw three baseballs. If you knocked over all the milk bottles, you could pick your prize.

My father was a star, a pitcher on his high school baseball team who would soon sign a professional contract. He felt desperate to win a stuffed animal. It was both a matter of athletic challenge and a way to impress my future mother Juanita, who was never easily impressed. Her current boyfriend happened to be Jim Peck, tall, well-to-do captain of the basketball team and honor student headed for Indiana University in the fall. But the two nickels in my father’s pocket didn’t belong to him. He had come to the fair on an errand. His mother, my grandmother, entrusted him with the little extra money available in their Depression era household to buy seeds at the Co-op stand that she could plant and turn into vegetables so the family might eat healthy meals during the coming winter. If dad lost her money and returned without those seeds, the result could prove a dietary and economic catastrophe with nothing to harvest and can, unless it was a stuffed animal, and no income to buy fresh vegetables from the store.

The family, like many working-class families during the Great Depression, subsisted on almost nothing. My grandfather had labored for many years at the Southern Railway shop in Princeton, Indiana, repairing the great locomotives that hauled coal and grain out of the Midwest to both coasts. Since the Depression began, he faced one layoff after another, working only sporadically, earning barely enough to keep bread and beans on the table, a few lumps of coal in the stove, and an occasional block of ice in the ice box. My grandmother reduced her weekly dairy orders to blue john, milk with a pastel blue tint because the cream had been skimmed off the top and that tasted like water. This was their life and they all accepted it with a stoic resignation, but they all had to do their part, make sacrifices.

The sacrifice making had always been the most difficult for my father. He didn’t mind suffering and he enjoyed hard work. What my dad hated all of his life was deferred gratification. He could barely stand to wait for something he wanted and believed he had earned, whether it was money, a drink, a house, a vacation, or a car. This itch, as he called it, required more scratching in his youth than when I knew him later in life. Of course, the infection passed from him to me. I know this because I’ve labored through four marriages, a dozen jobs, and several stages of penury believing that I deserve what I want before I’ve earned it and knowing a big score waits with the purchase of the next lottery ticket, the running of another race, a visit from the mailman, or the turn of a card. The sins of the father….you know the rest…are often multiplied by the son.

Beyond the economic concerns, a deeper and darker ethical gloom lurked in my father’s mind, arising from fear, not only a legitimate anxiety created by his conscience but the absolute terror of getting on my grandmother’s bad side. This ambivalence, the desire to gamble with money not his and the knowledge of his mother’s strict disciplinary code if he did, had caused him to shuffle and hesitate indecisively just long enough for the carnival huckster to beckon,

“Hey you…yeah, you…the good looking ball player…the one standing there waiting to win yore girl a big ole cuddly bear…the one in bib overalls…the one who’s gonna break my bank…come on over…be a real man…take a chance…I got connections with a major league baseball scout, you know.”

The hypnotic cadence of the man’s baritone voice enhanced the decision my dad wanted to make anyway and he found himself pulled, as if by some magic lasso to the carnie’s counter.

“What do I have to do?” Dad asked.

“What’s your name son?”

“John Bill.”

“Well, John Bill, you ain’t got much to do at all, not a big strappin’ guy like you. You play ball?”

“I pitched for my high school team.”

 “I bet you’re a good un, too.”

  “I won a few of games.”

It wasn’t until much later in his life, after WWII, after years in the automobile business and after raising a half-crazed teenager that my father learned to fully dismiss bull shit. He worked hard for decades to give each stranger the benefit of the doubt until the world became so jaded around him he could no longer afford to do it. On this last night of the fair, he honestly believed that the man complimenting him was a nice man. Also, I’m sure that in the glare of the neon lights and the crooning of calliope music and his excited fantasies of Juanita, my future mother, he forgot his own mother’s evangelical stringency about children obeying parents. She had always been a great advocate of the adage spare the rod, spoil the child.  My father and his brother were definitely not spoiled, as he could have attested to this last night of the fair had his memory not been numbed by his over stimulated senses and by the bright environment.

Once, and only once, Dad and Uncle “Ding” had stolen a chicken from Mr. Nixon’s hen house a mile or so up the road in a neighborhood on the other side of the fairgrounds called Coal Mine Row. Their mother waited for them at the front door.

“Where’d that chicken come from?” She said, stepping out onto the porch.

“Ding won the spelling bee at school and this was the prize.”

“I see,” she said. Moving forward, she took the chicken by the neck and twirled it over their heads, wringing the life from it before the poor bird sensed its impending doom.  “Walter Nixon just rang on the telephone to tell me he saw you two boys stealing this here chicken.”

“Oh no, that’s not the way…,” sputtered my uncle.

“Shut up. And git your overalls off. This chicken will be bought and paid for tomorrow because your father’s going to spend his morning off work chopping a chord of wood for Walter for free. Meanwhile, your sister, your dad, and me are going to eat it for supper.”

“What about us. We’re hungry too.”

“You won’t be in a few minutes.”

Both boys stripped down to their underwear. My grandmother reached behind the door and produced a willow switch. Smacking them across the calves in tandem, she ran them semi-nude into the field of razor sharp nettle weeds that bordered her property.

“There won’t be thieves and liars named McGarrah anywhere in this county.”

Her voice could barely be heard above the screams of her sons. Dad and my uncle went to their room without supper and nursed their bleeding legs. Imagine, if you can, a thousand paper cuts across your shins and thighs filled with itching, burning sap. In the 21^st century my grandmother would be jailed for abuse and her children placed in foster care. As it turned out, this lesson helped my father grow up to be the most honest man I ever met and at his funeral hundreds of people lined the streets of Princeton, Indiana, to pay their respects for the same reason.

Unfortunately, that chicken theft and corresponding accountability escaped his mind as he placed the first nickel on the counter nervously and picked up three baseballs.

“Now John Bill, you got to knock all five bottles over. Do it on the first pitch and anything from the top row is yours.”

With his eye on a huge black and white panda bear, Dad cocked his arm, went into his windup and let the ball fly. It whistled through the air and thudded, a direct hit, on the middle bottle, scooting it out from the two-on-top and three-on-bottom pyramid built by the man running the game. Instead, only that particular one toppled over, along with the two above it. Dad fired two more strikes and collapsed the other bottles one at a time.

“You got a mighty fine throwing’ arm, but it took you all three balls. You have to pick something from the bottom row.”

“I don’t understand. They all should’ve fallen with the first one.”

“Sometimes life just ain’t fair.”

My father received a penny whistle for his five cents and started to leave.

“You ain’t a quitter, are ya boy?”

“Not hardly.”

“Well, there surely ain’t no way the same bad break can happen twice.”

Sometimes circumstance brings us to the edge of an abyss, a confluence of several events at once that are totally random and beyond our control. I bring that point up because at the exact moment my father’s manhood was being challenged, a group of his friends, including my future mother, prowled the midway, drifting into his line of sight. The second and last nickel dropped into the carnie’s hand. Again, my father fired a strike. Again, the same bottles fell and the same remained upright. Two more throws and he earned another whistle.

Broke and broken, he started to walk away when the group noticed his presence and waved, moving like a school of fish in his direction. He was a popular guy in school and a leader, what my children today might refer to as an alpha male.

“Them your friends?” asked the hustler.

“Yes.”

“I like you. Ya got a good strong arm and ya seem like a nice kid.”

“I’m glad you think so. My mom’s going to kill me when I get home for losing her seed money.”

“I can fix that problem and git you a little extra money, but you gotta do me one small favor.”

“What?”

“Just throw these balls again like you did before.”

“I told you, I’m out of money.”

“I’ll set you up for free. The only condition is whatever you win comes back to me after, except for one stuffed animal of yore choice, and I’ll give you a quarter besides.”

“A whole quarter?”

“Yep.”

It seemed as if life had backed my father away from the abyss.

“And all I have to do is throw a baseball at those bottles? What if I don’t knock them down? I’m throwing my best right now.”

“I think yore luck’s gonna change. I’ll risk it.”

Juanita and the rest of his schoolmates, along with dad’s older brother and a couple of his friends, arrived at the tent, shucking and jiving, laughing and squealing, innocent teenagers with full pockets of nickels and dimes saved from hours of paper routes, lawn mowings, house cleanings, and hay baling. Juanita laid her hand on John Bill’s arm. “Are you going to win me a bear?” My father, who had just about decided not to throw again for fear of embarrassing himself if he still couldn’t knock over the bottles, now had no choice. Her slightly aquiline nose, translucent, silk-like skin, and the husky sigh of her voice were more than a calloused farm boy could bear. He ran straight back to the edge of that void and leaped.

The rest of his friends crowded around as John Bill fired one true fastball after another. Milk bottles flew in all directions like coveys of frightened quail. His luck had changed. The black-toothed carnie spat, cursed, and then handed my father his choice of prizes. Finally, the carnie threw up his hands. “Stop it,” he yelled over the laughter and excited buzzing of the crowd, which had increased exponentially with every clank of ball against bottle. “I can’t afford to let you play no more,” he said, gesturing at a huge stack of stuffed animals and costume jewelry on the counter.  “Yore takin’ all my profits.”

Once John Bill stepped away from the counter, nickels and dimes rained down from all directions. Young men, old men, crazies, and cripples, grabbed for baseballs. The carnie, seeming confused and frightened, backed away from the counter and set the bottles on the stools again. “One at a time, one at a time. I can’t keep up.” But, he did keep up and little by little all their money disappeared into his pocket. Not a single person, no matter how hard they tried, could duplicate my dad’s success. Always…always, the two outside bottles on the bottom row remained upright.

Uncle Ding took his brother by the elbow, steering him away from the area and into the shadows behind the row of canvas tents, tripping over tent pegs and guide ropes. He took John Bill by the shoulders and shook him.

“Do you know what you’re doing?”

“I’m earning enough money to get some extra seeds and this panda bear,” said my father, shaking the fuzzy animal under my uncle’s nose. “This bear might just convince Juanita that I’m a better catch than Peck.”

“You’re shilling for that carnie.”

“I am not.”

“You don’t honestly believe you could knock all those bottles over so easily, do you?” asked Ding. “If it was that easy, the guy’d be out of business in ten minutes.”

“Never thought about it. I am a pretty good pitcher, you know. Maybe my luck changed.”

I believe that my father told the truth at this point. He wanted so badly to win a prize and undo the mistake of losing his mother’s money that he never really considered the impossibility of his good fortune.

“Nobody’s that good. Two of those bottles are loaded with lead weights. They wouldn’t fall over if you hit them with a truck, unless those are the two you stack on top. The other three are made out of balsa wood. My job last summer was stacking bottles just like that for a different guy. Everybody’s losing their money now based on what they saw you do. It’s a shill game and you helped that asshole play the crowd.”

Realizing he was helping to cheat his friends, John Bill rushed back to the midway only to find the disappointed and empty-handed crowd dispersing and my future mother going off to ride the Ferris wheel with Jim Peck. The carnival employee closed out the game by counting his money into a metal cash box..

“Come back for the money? Yore a pretty good shill. Couldn’t interest you in comin’ with us to the 4-H Fair in Albion, could I? Them boys over there is natural born suckers. We could clean ‘em out the first day.”

“You cheated my friends.”

“No, you did. I just collected the money.” He handed my father a shiny new quarter and said, “Here’s yore share.”

I suppose that my father might have refused the quarter, pummeled the greasy little man, or rounded up all of his buddies, or the sheriff, and retrieved the stolen money. He could have rushed over to my mother and presented her with his panda bear trophy right in front of Jim Peck. But, like many questionable situations he got himself into over the course of his life, John Bill simply took his earnings, hung is head in shame, and buried his guilt so deep in his subconscious that it remained innocuous unless it surfaced under the influence of too many martinis. The same was true of his male bravado. I don’t mean bravery. My father came home from WWII a hero after serving three and half years in combat with the 82^nd Airborne. I’m referring to that quality of the male ego that allows us a thick-skin in intra-personal situations. He remained one of the most awkward men I ever knew around women he didn’t know well and always felt out of place with strangers at social affairs and cocktail parties.

Much too humiliated to admit in front of any of his schoolmates that he had allowed himself, even unknowingly, to be manipulated into being an accomplice in the con game that relieved them of their hard-earned cash, he salved his conscience by purchasing extra seeds for my grandmother and won his repentance by working extra hours cultivating the family garden. From this experience, my dad formed a rule that he lived by all of his life, one I never realized myself until well beyond middle age – never gamble with money you can’t afford to lose. He also developed a healthy skepticism for any deal that seemed too good to be true, along with an over-active obsession with honesty at all cost. I never saw or heard my father recommend any financial dealings for anyone without qualifying his advice by saying something like, “Be careful. A fool and his money are soon parted.” Or, “This may not work out the way you expect.”  In that way, he never felt responsible for someone’s reversal of fortune.

This was not an incident John Bill would have ever confessed to me. He had far too much pride for admitting how easily he had been used. The tale would have been in poor taste and a bad example for his children. Nevertheless, my uncle slipped up and shared the story one evening during the summer I returned home from Vietnam in 1969. We sat on my grandmother’s front porch drinking beer and watching the brightly colored people walk in and out of the brightly colored fairgrounds just across the road. I confessed my frustration and anger at being used by a government I trusted to fight an unjust war against a poor third world country for no apparent reason other than to line corporate pockets.

“You’re not the first young man to find himself working as someone else’s shill…,” he began as the barkers on the midway beckoned their prey.

While the stakes were exponentially higher in my war than in my father’s fairgrounds con, the principle remains the same. We all use and get used. We all make choices in life that divide us into victim and villain simultaneously. The key to each choice lies in what lesson we bring away from the result. My father became an obsessively honest businessman from the moment he discovered the economic hardship to others and the emotional pain to himself of dishonesty. Following his example, I’ve become a tireless and stentorian advocate of negotiation and non-violence since that moment in Quang Tri when I sighted another human being down the long blueblack barrel of my M-16 and with my sweaty cheek pressed tightly against the cold plastic stock gently squeezed the trigger.

The world has changed greatly since my childhood and even my young adulthood in the late 1960’s. Our 21^st century has become a breeding ground for carnival shills, only we call them politicians. Through our own fears and desires we have created an environment where it is almost impossible to separate reality from illusion and truth from delusion. Almost everyone we should be able to trust treats everyone else as an easy mark. This doesn’t have to be our permanent situation, however. If we, as citizens and participants in this experience called America, can learn to look behind the curtain we call democracy at our own flawed attitudes (i.e. racism, greed, arrogance, sloth, etc.), admit them, and work to correct them, we can, to a great extent, avoid being shilled by governments, mass media, corporate CEO’s, and our own expectations. This last paragraph may sound like I’m sermonizing. I apologize if it does. I have flaws too, and one is slipping into a professorial tone on occasion. I do it because I’m passionate about our world becoming a better place for us all and that requires a lot of work from us all.