The Natural Read Online Free PDF

Roy?”
    He had already told her but after a minute remarked, “Sometimes when I walk down the street I bet people will say there goes Roy Hobbs, the best there ever was in the game.”
    She gazed at him with touched and troubled eyes. “Is that all?”
    He tried to penetrate her question. Twice he had answered it and still she was unsatisfied. He couldn’t be sure what she expected him to say. “Is that all?” he repeated. “What more is there?”
    “Don’t you know?” she said kindly.
    Then he had an idea. “You mean the bucks? I’ll get them too.”
    She slowly shook her head. “Isn’t there something over and above earthly things — some more glorious meaning to one’s life and activities?”
    “In baseball?”
    “Yes.”
    He racked his brain —
    “Maybe I’ve not made myself clear, but surely you can see (I was saying this to Walter just before the train stopped) that yourself alone — alone in the sense that we are all terribly alone no matter what people say — I mean by that perhaps if you understood that our values must derive from — oh, I really suppose —” She dropped her hand futilely. “Please forgive me. I sometimes confuse myself with the little I know.”
    Her eyes were sad. He felt a curious tenderness for her, a little as if she might be his mother (That bird.) and tried very hard to come up with the answer she wanted — something you said about LIFE.
    “I think I know what you mean,” he said. “You mean the fun and satisfaction you get out of playing the best way that you know how?”
    She did not respond to that.
    Roy worried out some other things he might have said but had no confidence to put them into words. He felt curiously deflated and a little lost, as if he had just flunked a test. The worst of it was he still didn’t know what she’d been driving at.
    Harriet yawned. Never before had he felt so tongue-tied in front of a girl, a looker too. Now if he had her in bed —
    Almost as if she had guessed what he was thinking and her mood had changed to something more practical than asking nutty questions that didn’t count, she sighed and edged closer to him, concealing the move behind a query about his bassoon case. “Do you play?”
    “Not any music,” he answered, glad they were talking about something different. “There’s a thing in it that I made for myself.”
    “What, for instance?”
    He hesitated. “A baseball bat.”
    She was herself again, laughed merrily. “Roy, you are priceless.”
    “I got the case because I don’t want to get the stick all banged up before I got the chance to use it.”
    “Oh, Roy.” Her laughter grew. He smiled broadly.
    She was now so close he felt bold. Reaching down he lifted the hat box by the string and lightly hefted it.
    “What’s in it?”
    She seemed breathless. “In it?” Then she mimicked, “— Something I made for myself.”
    “Feels like a hat.”
    “Maybe a head?” Harriet shook a finger at him.
    “Feels more like a hat.” A little embarrassed, he Set the box down. “Will you come and see me play sometime?” he asked.
    She nodded and then he was aware of her leg against his and that she was all but on his lap. His heart slapped against his ribs and he took it all to mean that she had dropped the last of her interest in the Whammer and was putting it on the guy who had buried him.
    As they went through a tunnel, Roy placed his arm around her shoulders, and when the train lurched on a curve, casually let his hand fall upon her full breast. The nipple rose between his fingers and before he could resist the impulse he had tweaked it.
    Her high-pitched scream lifted her up and twirling like a dancer down the aisle.
    Stricken, he rose — had gone too far.
    Crooking her arms like broken branches she whirled back to him, her head turned so far around her face hung between her shoulders.
    “Look, I’m a twisted tree.”

    Sam had sneaked out on the squirming, apologetic Mercy, who, with his back to the