Brittle Innings (11 page)

10

A
t practice that morning, I backed up Buck Hoey at shortstop. Heggie backed up Lamar Knowles at second. Skinny Dobbs birddogged Trapdoor Evans in right field. Philip Ankers, who’d probably learned to pitch chunking clods at cows, went down to the bullpen to warm up with our second-string catcher, Nyland “Turkey” Sloan.

“S only me you’ve got to get by, Dumbo,” Hoey said as we stood in the infield watching Mister JayMac hit fungoes to the outfield. I gave Hoey a look. “Roper’s gone. Roper, Pettus, Jorgensen—they all took Mister JayMac’s offer of back pay, railway tickets, and severance pay. So did Bob Collum. Mister JayMac’s savvy. He knows everybody’s skills and limitations. Yours too, Dumbo. So I hope he’s right.”

From right, Dobbs threw one in like a bazooka shot to Dunnagin at home plate—a no-hopper, the kind of dead-on-target throw you don’t see twice all year.

“S too soon to showboat, Mr. Dobbs!” Mister JayMac yelled. “You ruin that arm, I’ll unsocket the other, jes to keep em a matched set.”

“Yessir!” Dobbs yelled back. “Sorry, sir!”

“My wife and Collum’s wife’re big pals,” Hoey said. “Now the Collums’re leaving. Looks like Mister JayMac may’ve guessed right on Dobbs, though. Collum never threw like that. What about you? Did he guess right on you? Or am I gonna send you home with a dent in your cup and mud on your face?”

I pretended to watch the fielders catching and throwing in. In fact, I
did
watch em, them and Mister JayMac.

In refusing to wear baseball duds, Mister JayMac set himself apart from most other managers. He dressed like a man off for a scrambled dog at the corner drug store, casual but neat. Today, he wore beat-up spikes instead of street shoes. The dirt around home was loose, and hitting fungoes from there required purchase.

Seeing Mister JayMac at a flip chart, you’d’ve figured him for a manager who’d ride the bench with a bourbon bottle in a paper sack. But I’d seen him throwing hard yesterday, and today he was
smacking
the ball. He’d even step in front of his catcher to pick off one-hop throws from the outfield. He liked his players to put out. “Exert!” he’d yell. “Sweat! Dive!” He liked leaping grabs, all-out tumbles, flamethrower pegs to first or home.

Even in his linen pants, dirt spilling from his cuffs, Mister JayMac was something. Trying out for him, I busted my tail. So did Junior at second and Dobbs in right. Not only did we want to earn ourselves starting spots, we also wanted to please—really please—Mister JayMac.

At the three challenge spots, three rookies against three old hands, we had us three battle royals. Mister JayMac tested every pair of rivals, turn by turn. He’d say, “Men on first and third, one out, Boles and Heggie up,” or, “Bottom a the ninth, tie score, runner on second, Hoey and Knowles up,” toss the ball up, feint one way, and fungo it another, with such a skitter on it you’d be lucky not to catch it in your teeth.

I had my championship year on the Red Stix going for me. Even more important, I had a history of hundreds of thousands of fielded ricochets from the wall of Tenkiller’s icehouse. I don’t think even Buck Hoey, a career minor leaguer, had handled more chances than me. Eight or nine a game tops it out for a shortstop, with a few hundred to a thousand more chances in spring training. Hoey had talent and more experience in actual game situations, but I had talent too and I’d practiced more—a hundred years as an all-star vet of Ye Olde Icehouse Loop. Off the field, I lacked confidence, but I had so much sass on it, you could’ve given half of mine to Stepin Fetchit and made him swagger like Mussolini. Swear to God.

Today, back from whatever errand he’d run yesterday, Jumbo
owned
first base. His backup was Norm Sudikoff, a married guy renting one of the boss’s Cotton Creek mill houses. Jumbo had Sudikoff behind him all day, but Mister JayMac waved Sudikoff into action only every fourth or fifth time he fungoed to the infield. Mostly, Sudikoff stood twenty yards behind the bag, in foul territory, while Jumbo put on a fielding clinic.

Standing or striding, Jumbo was a disjointed wreck. His shoulders, elbows, knees, and head jutted weirdly. Slouching from here to there, he looked a step away from unhinging and falling apart. His physique and his hitch-along gait gave him a brittle, palsied look.

On the field, though, Jumbo sparkled. He played a deep first base, on the edge of the outfield grass. (Not even Howie Gooch, who’d had better range than any other high school player I’d ever seen, had played so deep.) This gave Jumbo extra time to catch hard-hit shots to either side, even if the pitcher sometimes had to cover the bag for the putout.

Vito Mariani—Speedy himself—fielded the pitcher’s spot. Each time Mister JayMac sent a runner to first after rapping out an alley-seeking fungo to Jumbo, Jumbo and Manani would team to nip the runner by a step or two. Red dust would geyser up. My heart would stagger at the sheer loveliness of their execution and the thrill of the race to the bag.

But Jumbo didn’t
always
toss to Mariani. Sometimes he’d short-hop the ball, wave Mariani off, and pelt across the bag, all windmilling elbows and knees, before the runner’d even come out of the blocks. He had the headlong out-of-control velocity of a runaway locomotive. Scary.

“He can’t walk,” Hoey told me after one of these plays, “but he sure can jump and run.” Jumbo also had a never-miss lobster pincer in his glove and an arm like a catapult. Once, after Mister JayMac had put an invented runner on third with less than two outs, Jumbo’d almost knocked Dunnagin silly with a blistering throw home.

In the challenges at second and short, Jumbo played no favorites. He’d rumble to the bag, shift instinctively for the throw, and pick it out of the air or scoop it up from the dirt, to hell whether you were vet or rookie. His acrobatics at first made every player throwing to him look like an all-star. Not much got by him.

Sudikoff, by comparison, was a graceful second-rater. He had style around the bag and an easy way of carrying himself, but he’d screw up. Throws in the dirt were his comeuppance—he couldn’t come up with them. On some chances, he’d look like a matador doing a cape twirl, nifty and elegant as you please, but the ball’d scoot past him and roll to the seats. Sudikoff put on an
act
, Jumbo a bona fide
show
.

At second, Junior Heggie et Lamar Knowles’s lunch. The kid from Valdosta backhanded screamers up the middle, twisted like a gill-hung bass, and threw back over his shoulder without a spike in the ground to push off of or anything but desire on the ball to get it to first. He et Knowles’s lunch.

I did okay, but I didn’t eat Hoey’s lunch. My steadiness had him hassled, though. Mister JayMac’d gone out to Oklahoma to recruit a new shortstop, so Hoey saw himself on his knees under a guillotine blade. If I made a play, he had to. If I knocked a darter out of the air, pounced on it, and got back on my feet to nip the runner, he had to match my heroics. Mostly, he did. But the heat—from the sun, from Mister JayMac—made him snippish and petty. He tried to rag me into misplays. He asked me how far I reckoned beginner’s luck would carry a dumb-fart Okie in the CVL. It irked him I couldn’t answer. He’d’ve enjoyed an insult-slinging free-for-all.

“You’re a showboat, Dumbo. I’d tell Mister JayMac to stick one in your ear, but that’d be too easy.”

Hoey was
scared
. About Dunnagin’s age, he’d never spent six minutes, much less six seasons, in the bigs. With time out between ’36 and ’40 peddling Ohio real estate, his whole career had played out in the minors: the Carolina League, the Southern Association, the Appalachian League, the Sally League. A wife and four pre-Pearl Harbor rug rats had kept him out of the Army, but a smidgen less talent than he needed, or bad luck, had kept him out of the bigs. The worry in Hoey’s good-looking mug came through loud and clear. I wanted to outplay the jerk, but I didn’t want to unemploy him. How would he tell Mrs. Hoey? How would he feed his rug rats?

“Yall get in here!” shouted Mister JayMac, red-faced and sweaty. He’d soaked his shirt out. His T-shirt showed through like a filmy corset. His trousers were sopped, from waist to thigh, like he’d sat down in a wash tub. We circled him on the infield grass, amazed by his energy, just as he wanted. You had to hand it to him, though. He didn’t huddle in the dugout with a jar of white lightning and a hand-held Jesus fan from Stiffslinger & Sons’ Christian Mortuary.

“How’d we do?” Reese Curriden said. Curriden’d played third, with relief from Burt Fanning, and he’d done fine. You just had to hope he didn’t go down with a sprung hamstring. A pitcher or a utilityman would have to replace him, and no sub could do it. The Hellbenders weren’t exactly the Georgia Light and Power Company. Like most other CVL clubs, we had a shortage of utilitymen.

“Better than yesterday,” Mister JayMac said. “Yall seem to’ve remembered what this”—he held up a dirty baseball—“is for, after all. Praise Saint Doubleday.”

“Screw Saint Doubleday,” Buck Hoey said. “Who’s starting where the next time we play for keeps?”

“Whoa,” Mister JayMac said. “I got to see how my rookies measure up in the hitting department.”

“Look at our box scores,” Hoey said. “Check our averages. Knowles and me didn’t fall off a milk wagon three hours ago. It’s too damned hot for this chickenshit.”

“So they say out to Camp Penticuff too,” Mister JayMac said. “Except it
isn’t
, not for Army recruits. Men’s lives hang in the balance. Likewise this team’s.”

“I meant my chickenshit remark respectfully, sir.”

Everybody laughed.

“A queer bit of English on it then,” Mister JayMac said.

“Should Trapdoor, Lamar, and I start pounding the pavement for defense jobs and new housing?” Hoey said.

“No one here today’s in danger of the ax. Only my next lineup’s in doubt. We’ll play an exhibition so I can decide.”

“
Now?
” Peter Hay said.

The other ballplayers called Hay Haystack. He had yellow hair and waddled like a haywagon. Mister JayMac always had him running, but he could pitch and that kept him on the squad. As soon as he said, “Now?” a half dozen Hellbenders linked arms and spieled:

“Huge Peter Haystack,

Please move your hulk.

Your gut goes by flat car,

Your butt goes by bulk.”

Hay just grinned and pounded a fist on Turkey Sloan’s head, mashing his cap in.

Sloan had started the chant. He’d got half the team to join in by waving his arms like a chorus leader. Mister JayMac let it happen, seeing it as a tension-breaker.

Turkey Sloan backed Double Dunnagin at catcher and handled most bullpen chores.
Turkey
didn’t mean, back then, what it does now—a brainless jerk, like a turkey that lifts its head to watch it rain and ends up drowning. Sloan had got his nickname because he caught, and ballplayers at the turn of the century, thinking home plate looked like a serving plate at Thanksgiving, started calling it the turkey.

Anyway, Sloan had a catcher’s body build—big shoulders, big thighs, and a teddy bear’s friendly mug. He also had brains. He’d written the “Huge Peter Haystack” rhyme, among others, and the team saw him as its unofficial poet laureate. A weakness for Mother Goose doggerel and a lot of time on his hands had helped him claim the title.

I glanced around.

The only other guy not laughing was Jumbo. He squinted at us like a scowling Jehovah. You figured he’d been born during a Puritan sermon with a dirge as accompaniment. You figured if he ever told a joke, it would start with “Inasmuch as” or something else lawyerly.

“No, Mr. Hay, not now,” Mister JayMac said when everybody’d quieted down. “In”—he checked his watch—“forty minutes. Take a break.”

Players cheered, like kids let out for recess.

Hoey said, “Hey. Who’s gonna be playing who? The regulars versus the rubes?”

“With that breakdown,” Mister JayMac said, “some of yall’d have to play yourselves.”

“All right, then. Who’s pitching for who?”

Mister JayMac held us there on hooks. He didn’t want to tip his hand yet.

“Fess up, Mister JayMac,” Parris said. “What’s forty minutes gonna mean? Announce your pitchers.”

“Tell us!” a whole slew of players cried.

Mister JayMac made calming motions. “Easy. Don’t herniate yourselves. The rookies and their pals will play behind—”

“Ankers!” Hoey said.

“Astute deduction.” Mister JayMac smiled like a kindly grandpa with a bandolier full of machine-gun ammo.

“And who for us?” Hoey said. “Who for us?”

I wanted to know too. Which pitcher, after our break, would I have to step in against? Quip Parris? Nutter, the ex-big leaguer? Mariani? Or Dunnagin’s roomy, Jerry Wayne Sosebee? They all looked tough, even the Eye-talian, a 4-F punctured-eardrum.

But Mister JayMac said, “Darius Satterfield.”

“You’re kidding,” Hoey said gleefully.

“Darius Satterfield,” Mister JayMac repeated.

Hoey shadow-boxed a tornado of noseeums. “Hot dog!”

Sudikoff, doomed to play with rookies, cried, “Jesus, why you wanna throw that speedballin nigger at these new boys?”

“At
you
, you mean.” Even with his spikes in red Georgia clay, Hoey walked on a bed of cumuli, giddy as hell.

Showily, Mister JayMac checked his watch. “Yall’re down to thirty-six minutes. Be back at ten-fifteen. Nickel-a-minute fine for latecomers.”

“Don’t sound so fine to me,” Quip Parris said.

“Beat it!” Mister JayMac said.

11

M
ost Hellbenders stumbled to the clubhouse to shoot a jet from the water cooler up their noses or to lie down on the concrete. Muscles, Curriden, and Charlie Snow, gluttons for punishment, played a game of pepper in some outfield shade.

A small crew—including Junior and Mariani, Junior’s new roomy—crossed a tree-lined street to a row of pretty shops. Junior was a rookie too, so I followed these guys. Oaks, elms, and sycamores strained a kind of surf music through their leaves. Behind the shops, you could see folksy neighborhood stuff: tool sheds, a dog house, an automobile up on blocks, a loaded clothes line, lots of victory-garden plots. One garden had a fort of bamboo staves and a web of strings for pole beans to vine around and tomato plants to lean against. The street seemed human, a harbor in Highbridge’s angry summer dazzle.

One store in the row was a ma-and-pa grocery. Over its door, a metal sign with glossy red letters as tall as shovel blades said HITCH & SHIRLEEN’S NEIGHBORLY MARKET. Two Coca-Cola ads flanked this sign, and paper scrolls in the windows advertised Fancy Pink Salmon, Dixie Crystals Pure Cane Sugar, and Campbell’s Vegetable Soup, for cash plus ration points. Even after the other Hellbenders had gone inside, I stood on the curb. How would I ask for what I wanted? If I pointed, I’d look like a moron or a stuck-up creep.

But, hey, I didn’t have two cents on me. Baseball togs don’t have change pockets, per se, and I’d left McKissic House outfitted for ball, not a market trip. Four guys came out with Cokes and Twinkies and sat on the curb in shifting patches of shade. Sheepishly, I spiked past them and went inside. Dobbs toasted me with his bottle.

Junior stood next to a gingerbreaded-up cash register flirting with the clerk. My eyes had to adjust. When they did, I looked around. Six double shelves ran front to back. A soft-drink cooler with ice water in the bottom and metal stalls for the bottles stood opposite the cash register. Two creaky overhead fans turned. The store had a pressed-tin ceiling with design squiggles in the stamped-out squares. The smells of damp sawdust and wrapped cold cuts hung in the air. At last, I could see to read a homemade sign nailed to a shelf near the cash register:

PLEASE!!! COUNT YOUR

CHANGE AND EXAMINE

YOUR POINT BOOK

BEFORE LEAVING WITH FOOD ITEMS.

MISTAKES
CAN’T
BE FIXED

LATER!!!

Every Hellbender player who lodged at McKissic House had given his ration book (War Ration Book Two) to Kizzy, through Mister JayMac, so she could shop for the whole house. Only team members with their own places got to keep their books. So if you wanted a snack, you couldn’t buy rationed items. You had to get junk food—soda, cupcakes, and such, from companies that had already justified their sugar allotments—and you bought it with coin, not coins and stamps. But I had no coin, and it looked like all I’d be able to do was shuffle and covet.

“Danny!” Junior Heggie called. “Danny, git yore tail over here and meet this spitfire pixie!”

I angled back to the cash register. The clerk behind it was a girl with a fox’s face, reddish-blond hair, and a costume-jewelry cluster, a kind of exploded pearl, on one ear. She wore a khaki shirt with a single set of captain’s bars on one collar and a pair of rolled-up blue jeans. She didn’t reach five feet. She looked twelve, but the earring and her hipshot stance told you twelve underestimated it. Well, maybe the earring didn’t. Girls will do a lot as preteens to make themselves look older, but wearing Papa’s shirt isn’t usually one of them, so you knew this pixie had a grudge on, a war orphan’s crow to pick. Her daddy was overseas, and don’t you forget it, buster.

“Who’s this?” she said. “Ichabod Crane in a baseball suit?”

“He don’t talk,” Junior said. “Name’s Danny Boles. He’s from Oklahoma. Plays a whangdoodle shortstop.”

“Whynt you talk, Okie? Explain yoresef.”

The sunburn from our workout probably hid my blush.

Junior got mad. “You half-wit! I said he don’t talk, and he don’t. It’s an affliction. Leave him be.”

“Folks come in here to buy junk, not to sashay about going, ‘Mmmm,’ ” she said, mocking an uppity window shopper.

“You deaf?” Heggie said. “He
cain’t
talk. I done told you.”

“Take your Twinkie, son, and put it where your mama won’t ever find it.” A genteel little piece, passing out Suthren hospitality.

Junior like to gagged. We had our speechlessness in common.

“What a man,” the girl said. “Absodamnlutely flusterated if a female don’t drop down P.D.Q. to kiss his shoe.” She looked at me. Her next words weren’t so smart-alecky. “Like a person who cain’t talk, cain’t talk. Like yo’re no different from a box of laundry soap.”

“I didn’t say he wasn’t no different from a box of laundry soap,” Junior said. “I uz jes trying to—”

“For sweet pity’s sake,” the girl cried, “will you have the decency to hush? Yo’re a disgrace to yore sex—a ballplayer’s commonest failing.”

Creighton Nutter came back into the store. He grabbed a pack of cigarettes, the last pack of Regents, and paid the girl from a coin pouch looped through his belt. Junior muttered something—
bitch
, I think—and brushed past Nutter onto the sidewalk, as flusterated as the girl had accused.

“Ah, you’re being neighborly again here at your Neighborly Market,” Nutter said. “Swell.”

“Mister Creighton, take a leap,” she said.

“She can’t stand ballplayers,” Nutter told me. “Or thinks she can’t. In her view, we should all be in the Army.”

“Not you,” she said. “Yo’re too old. You’d git ten jokers round you and blow em all up by accydent.”

“Miss Pharram,” Nutter said, “allow me to present to you Danny Boles. Mr. Boles, the fair Miss Phoebe Pharram.”

“You think I want to know this skinny pill?” Phoebe said.

“Calm down,” Nutter said. He yanked the pull on his Regents, tapped out a cigarette, and lit up. Smoke whirled away in the downdraft from an overhead fan. “Phoebe here is Mister JayMac’s great niece, daughter of his late brother Jude’s child, LaRaina. Hitch and Shirleen are her paternal grandparents, and by a special arrangement with the team, their Neighborly Market allows us Hellbenders to buy on credit. Get what you want and Phoebe will record your purchases in a ledger set aside for us.” He took a deep drag on his cigarette, blew the smoke at Phoebe, and elbowed out, letting the screen slam like the neck-snapper on a mouse trap.

“I hate the name Phoebe!” Phoebe yelled after him. “I pee on it!” Somebody on the sidewalk giggled. “I hate all first and last names that start with the same letters!”

I stood there awed, drinking her in.

“Call me Skeeter,” she told me. “I hate the name Phoebe, and I shore as Shirleen don’t answer to bitch.”

Of course, I would think of her then and always as Phoebe. Skeeter cut this feisty little girl down to something you went to a lot of trouble to swat. Besides, back then, girls who talked like Phoebe were about as plentiful as cow bells in an Episcopal choir.

“Cripes, Ichabod.” My admiration chapped her. “Bring me somepin to write up in this ledger. Or clear out.”

I hustled to get an orange soda from the cooler and a Baby Ruth from the candy aisle. I brought them over to Phoebe, who turned to take inventory of the cough-drop boxes, poker chips, and clip combs on the shelf behind her. I rolled the bottom of my soda bottle on the glass countertop.

“Yeh?” she said, not looking around.

I waited. Phoebe ignored me. I fidgeted. It might be nearly time for our practice to resume. I used my soda bottle like a bell clapper, ringing it against the fancy metal register. She spun around. Her eyes, a marbly grayish green, jumped like hard-thrown jewels.

“Watch it, Ichabod.” She came to the counter, grabbed my drink and candy bar, pulled a book out from under the counter, and wrote down all the needed info—everything but my name. She’d heard my name twice, but’d already forgotten it. She saw me looking, waiting for her to finish up.

“Okay,” she said. “What gives here, Ichabod?”

I pounded my fist on the countertop. Phoebe blinked. Her face turned fish-belly pale, then her eyes flared again. Even an Army .45 wouldn’t have scared her for long. It embarrassed her not to remember my name, though, and I couldn’t tell her because . . . well. Mexican standoff.

I charged around the counter, yanked the “Big Red” Parker Duofold pen from her, and bent over the ledger to scribble my own name in. The Duofold was a clumsy near-antique, and I wrote my John Hancock just like Hancock,
big
: DANIEL HELVIG BOLES. Then I went back out front, grabbed a pack of Camels, and had Phoebe add them to my tab. Rustled some matchbooks from a box, took my soda bottle by the neck, scooped up my Baby Ruth, and headed out the door afraid I might drop something and wind up looking a cluck.

“Hey, wait a sec.” I stopped and looked back at Phoebe. “Sorry I called you Ichabod. Nobody likes a name dropped on em like a peed-on blanket.”

She had that right. I banged outside and sat down on the curb next to Nutter, now puffing away like a factory.

“Camels,” Nutter said, seeing my pack. “ ‘They don’t tire my taste. They’re easy on my
throat
. They suit me to a
T
.’ If we smoked sandpaper dust, their ads would say the same thing.”

I drank my orange soda, I ate my candy bar, I smoked a Camel. I thought I heard an adult—Hitch? Shirleen?—talking to Phoebe. Good. A high-strung gal that age didn’t need to be tending a whole store all by herself. Wasn’t safe.