Brittle Innings (13 page)

The game goose-egged on.

But in the bottom of the eighth, Jumbo rainbowed one off Fadeaway over the right-field wall, and Fadeaway fell apart, yielding four more quick runs on a series of walks and hits, including a triple by Darius.

Fadeaway slapped his glove against his leg. His face got this weird stove-in look. He began blubbering. Mister JayMac went out to the mound.

“That hulksome galoot!” Fadeaway nodded in at Jumbo. “Him and that biggity
damned
nigger!”

“Shut up and sit down.” Mister JayMac put Quip Parris in for Fadeaway. Parris retired the next three batters. Darius trotted home on Hoey’s sacrifice fly, though, and at the end of eight full innings the score stood six to zip.

That was the final score, although in the top of the ninth I sent Charlie Snow to the wall for a long out, the best hit ball of the game against Darius.

At the end, Darius shone with sweat. It encased and oiled him. I could see him pitching another nine, eighteen, maybe even twenty-seven innings—without grouse or twinge. Darius shone like a jewel.

13

I
n the clubhouse, Mister JayMac gave Junior, Fadeaway, Dobbs, and me our own lockers. Mine had belonged to Bob Collum, a popular player axed along with Sweet Gus Pettus, Roper, and Jorgensen. We peeled off the faded masking tape marked with their names and stuck on new strips marked with ours. My locker hunched between Curriden’s and Jumbo’s. Curriden sat next to me removing stirrup socks, then skinning out of his clay-stained sanitaries. Jumbo had flat-out disappeared.

“You did good out there, Dumbo,” Curriden said. “A leg hit and a liner to the wall.”

I nodded my thanks, silently damning Hoey for hanging that nickname on me again.

“Darius no-hit yall except for that legger,” Curriden said, “so you were the B boys’ heavy artillery today.”

I grinned, sort of, and took off my sweat-sopped shirt. Behind us, a shower ran. Dunnagin stood in it singing “I’m Getting Tired So I Can Sleep,” crooning in a tenor better than half your big-band soloists’. It echoed out to us prettier than a clarinet.

“No one wants to bat against Darius,” Curriden said. “If he uz white and his manager let him pitch every other day, he’d win thirty-five games a year in the CVL. Forty. And you, a bony little dink, lined out to Snow up against the Feen-A-Mint sign. That makes you bout the hittingest thing, ever, against Darius, Dumbo. No crap.”

I looked around. Had Darius and Jumbo gone back to McKissic House in their uniforms? Cripes. Sweaty flannels weigh a ton. And the smell . . .

Curriden stood up buck naked. “Darius showers on the visitors’ side—else he’d have to wait for us to finish up in here.”

I tapped Jumbo’s locker.

“Jumbo?” Curriden said. “Keeps an extra glove in there. Some sanitaries. Cept for that, he don’t use it at all. Won’t shower here. Foots it back to McKissic House.”

“There’s something wrong with him,” Turkey Sloan said from Fadeaway’s bench. “He’s different from the rest of us.” Sloan looked at me. “Till you come along, sweet cheeks, none of us but him had a private room.”

Something wrong with him? Like what?

“I reckon he was born with some oddball deformity,” Sloan said, like he’d just read my mind.

“Or it’s a war injury,” Hoey said. “From the last war. A problem like that guy in the Hemingway book had.”

“The Germans blew his pecker off?” Parris said. “Naw, the poor guy’s an auto-wreck victim—that’s my theory.”

There was an empty lapse in the guessing. Hoey seized Parris and knuckled the crown of his head. “Your theory makes me feel like a heartless jerk.”

Parris weaseled away. “People should feel like what they are—so they don’t wake up thinking they’re Albert Schweitzer. Or Jack Benny.”

“‘
Oh, Rochester
,’ ” someone said, mimicking Benny’s radio voice: “‘
Oh, Rochester
.’ ”

In a gravelly copy of the voice of the colored fella that played Rochester, somebody else said, “‘
Yes, boss?
’ ”

This back-and-forth went on all around me. I couldn’t get into it. Even if I could’ve talked, I’d’ve felt too much like the new kid in the neighborhood.

I went to the farthest spigot in the shower room and faced into it so the other guys in there could see only my skinny backside and jutting ears.

“Listen, Okie,” Mariani said. “Don’t drop the soap. You bend down to fetch it, Norman there starts to get ideas.”

“Screw you, wop,” Sudikoff said.

“Baby, don’t you wish,” Mariani said.

Don’t drop the soap
. I flash-backed on Pumphrey and the lavatory on the troop train. Really quickly, I finished showering, dressed, and scrammed.

Outside, I walked under a bleacher section, part of the concession area behind home plate—a cave for hot-dog stands and program hawkers. Shady. Semicool. All around me, support girders, chain-link gates, and cubbyholes for vendors.

Then I saw Phoebe—beside an aquarium in the main gangway. Coming through the turnstiles from the parking lot, you got funneled past this tank, a yard long and two feet tall, mounted on a belt-high base. Phoebe had climbed to the tank’s rim on a set of movable wooden steps.

“Hello, Daniel Helvig Boles.” Her voice echoed.

I lifted my hand: How, squaw. Did Mister JayMac use tropical fish to homify his ballpark?

Did Phoebe have to feed them?

“Cmere, Boles.” She waved me towards her. “I don’t bite. If yo’re careful, neither does Homer.”

I walked over. Even without a stool, I stood about as high as she did. Water in the tank. A gravel bottom. A thin strip of sunken wood. Some ferns, like seaweed on stalks, poking up from the gravel, hula-dancing in the currents.

“You met Homer yet, Boles?”

I shook my head.

“Well,
look
,” she said. “Looking’s how you meet him. I won’t pull him out for you to shake his iddy-biddy hand.”

I bent. I stared. The narrow strip of bark hovering above the sand, floating in the tank’s thready green murk, had eyes. One end of the mystery thing resembled a tail.

“There,” Phoebe said. “You’ve just met Homer.”

I kept staring at the critter. It really did look like a piece of bark. With legs. With eyes. Like sombody’d epoxied it out of sycamore cork and pecan twigs.

“Donchu even know what Homer
is
, Boles?”

I just kept staring at him. It. Whatever it was. I might not know much, but a lunk who tipped his ignorance to a girl was doomed to regret it.

“You
don’t
know what Homer is,” Phoebe accused.

I tapped my head to show her I’d already safely stored the information. I was a walking Smithsonian Institution.

“Horsefeathers. You don’t know squonk, do you, Dumbo?”

Dumbo!
I’d rather she called me Ichabod. If she said it again, I’d strangle her.

“Homer’s yore stupid team’s mascot, stupid. A hellbender. You ever heard of a hellbender, Okie boy?”

Phoebe Pharram seemed to want to show me up, like some pitchers will taunt a patsy they’ve just struck out. I stood a frog’s hair away from dumping her into the tank.

“I’ll bet you think a hellbender’s a damned soul who breaks alla Mr. Pitchfork’s rules,” Phoebe said.

I stared at her, one eye starting to tic.

“A hell
bender
. Git it?”

I banged the tank with my fist and headed for the parking lot.

“Hang on, Boles!” she called. “I don’t mean nothing, talking this way. Mostly, it’s other folks giving
me
what-for, not vicy-versy. Mostly, I jes give back what I’ve awready got. Gits to be a habit. When somebody cain’t or won’t talk, I imagine em giving me what-for before it’s even come. Then I give em it back thout em ever giving it to me to begin with. You git me?”

Funny enough, I did. The explanation almost made sense. I walked back to look at Homer again. My jug ears were reflected in the tank’s glass, but Phoebe kept talking. My looks, or my lack of them, hadn’t scared her off.

“A hellbender’s a quatic salamander,” she said. “I found this un in a creek when I uz nine. Uncle JayMac gave me a dollar for it and put it here in McKissic Field when Highbridge entered the CVL. I feed Homer, change his water out, tote him home when the season’s over. Got a table in my bedroom for his tank. During ball season, though, I keep a typewriter on it and write letters to homesick sojers.”

How thoughty and patriotic. FDR, or
Mrs.
FDR, should give you a medal, Phoebe.

“A corporal and two PFCs have awready proposed to me. They think I’m older. I sorta let em spose it. My letters read pretty passionate, I guess.”

The knuckleheaded hussy. I’d’ve laughed, but she had no more sense of humor about herself than I did about me. We both had the teenage disease of raging self-solemnity.

“Baseball’s a mug’s game,” Phoebe lectured me. “Sometimes it’s jes not very nice. Yall do things in front of a thousand folks I wouldn’t do alone in my own bedroom.”

One minute she admitted writing “pretty passionate” letters to servicemen and the next she suggested it embarrassed her to see a ballplayer setting his jock straight.

“We do have
one
thing in common,” Phoebe said.

Okay, I thought. Don’t keep me in suspense.

“Good reasons for not being in the military—I’m a woman, and yo’re, well, yo’re a dummy.”

Yeah. I put my hands behind my ears and made em flap like a flying elephant’s.

“Anyway, if you didn’t have yore . . . problem, you’d join the Army. Wouldn’t you?”

Hmmmm. In another five and a half months, I’d be eligible for the draft. Maybe my dummyhood was a ploy I’d come up with, subconsciously, to sidestep induction.

Dunnagin walked up behind us from the clubhouse. “You’re right, Phoeb. I know I’d rather be out killing Nips than chasing a CVL pennant. It burdens my mind, getting left out of all the fun.”

“Yo’re old, Dunnagin,” Phoebe said. “But not so all-fired old you couldn’t enlist.” She looked more or less pleased to see him.

“If only you knew,” Dunnagin said. “Methuselah’s got nothing on me. If I don’t make it back to the bigs this year, my career’s over. I’ll be yesterday’s papers.”

“You’d be doing more for the Uncle Sam in the Army. And more for yoresef.”

“I’m boosting civilian morale,” Dunnagin said. “I’m boosting
player
morale. They see me on the field, they think anybody can do it. They go home fortified and hopeful.”

“Shame on you,” Phoebe said.

Dunnagin didn’t look too abashed. “Danny, the
Bomber
’s about to leave. Hustle it up.”

I nodded, and Dunnagin wandered away.

Phoebe came down off the stair step. In the tank, Homer wriggled, stirring the murk—the first time I’d seen him look like anything other than a spongy piece of bark. Hooray. No ball team wants a dead or paralyzed critter for its mascot.

“Go git yore bus,” Phoebe said. “Yo’re keeping a slew of folks stewing in a real pressure cooker.”

I did a two-fingered salute.

“You do play a whangdoodle shortstop,” she said. “And you can run like a autumn crop fire.”

Unexpected praise. But I still wanted to add, Did you know I can outrun the word God? A local authority told me so today.

My speech problem, thank the Lord, kept my mouth shut.

14

O
n my second evening in McKissic House, I tried to delay entering the hole I shared with Jumbo. Its heat and the idea of huddling on the other side of his throat-tickling grass mat while he slept or read—well, why bother going up? I couldn’t talk to him, of course, and the curtain he’d hung between us said he didn’t much care. Thank God. Maybe he’d taken me on as a roommate
because
I couldn’t talk.

Back from practice, I washed dishes, sat next to some guys playing hearts, and listened to dance-band music and news reports on the old cathedral Philco. John L. Lewis, said H. V. Kaltenborn, had taken his soft-coal miners out on a strike that had patriots gnashing their teeth. Up in Alaska, the Army’d finished mopping up Jap resistance on Attu, and the Eleventh Air Force kept on bombing the hell out of Kiska. Not caring for cards, I worked on a jigsaw puzzle—the Eiffel Tower—while listening to the radio. Nobody bothered me.

Finally, I had to go up. McKissic House had an eleven o’clock curfew. Rest and regular hours guarded Mister JayMac’s investment in us. He’d fine you for missing curfew.

Anyway, Jumbo lay stretched out on his bed reading. He’d tied back the grass mat divider so a breeze from the window could reach him, if a breeze ever blew up. His fan bumped and shimmied like a stripper in a whalebone corset. From the door I could see into the whole room. What I saw flabbergasted me.

Jumbo had put a big bronze vase of cut flowers—hydrangeas, snowballs, Queen Anne’s lace—on the floor next to my cot. The flowers helped. Except for the labels on the cans of his Joan of Arc red kidney beans, the room didn’t boast much color. The flowers livened the place up. I saw Jumbo look up at me—even in that heat, his eyes made me shiver—and started to walk over to my cot. Jumbo lifted his hand.

“You played well this morning.”

I ducked my head. He’d played well too. He’d knocked a heavy balata ball out of McKissic Field and fielded like a man with some kind of magnet for horsehides sewn into his glove. But his looks made me think of the other players’ guesses about him. Of injury, pain, and death. Up close, I had an
aversion
to his looks. Well, I was no prize myself.

My reaction to Jumbo reminded me of my reaction as a twelve-year-old to my best friend in Tenkiller after he’d had a sledding accident. My friend’s name was Kenneth Ward—Kenny for short. One snowy winter, Kenny’d cracked up on a Northern Flyer going over a ledge into a sink hole lined with briars. He dropped ten or twelve feet. The briars ripped and scraped him like so many darning needles wrapped in wet cotton. The plunge knocked Kenny out. He concussed. It took three of us to rescue him, and we may’ve hurt him even more pulling him up through all those white brambles to the edge of the drop-off. Kenny’s dad got there somehow and hurried him to the emergency room at the Cherokee County hospital. I didn’t visit Kenny in the hospital, but I saw him several days later at the Wards’ little house in Tenkiller.

Kenny didn’t look like Kenny. He looked like . . . I don’t know, the victim of a thousand wasp stings. Or a pit-bull attack. He had two puffy black eyes (actually, more red and purple than black), an out-of-kilter nose, and a set of lips more like an albino channel cat’s. Kenny’s looks scared and confused me. Away from his house, I started to think I hadn’t seen Kenny at all. Instead, I’d called on something strange, ugly, and maybe a quarter dead planted in the Wards’ house by UFO people. I didn’t go again. Even when Kenny got over his injuries and began looking like the buck-toothed kid I’d once known, a weirdness between us—disgust on his part, shame on mine—kept us from getting friendly again.

Jumbo made me feel the way Kenny, with his nose whacked askew and his eyes in bruised pouches, had made me feel.

“Last night,” Jumbo said, “I was, ah, less than friendly.”

Uh-uh. I pointed at myself, meaning he’d behaved more or less okay but I’d acted like a total jerk.

A lie.

Because he’d acted at least as jerky as I had, not speaking more than three sentences all evening and dividing his digs the way small-town Suthren doctors once split their waiting rooms into a half for coloreds and a half for whites.

“I hung that”—Jumbo nodded at the mat rucked up against one wall—”assuming you’d prefer a little privacy to no barrier at all.” Jumbo grimaced. He made a face. And he could make a face, a spasm of cheek and forehead muscles.

“Forgive. I seldom talk. U. S. slang confounds me. All my speech originates in the written word.” He gestured at his book shelves. “My tastes run to philosophy, science, religion, medicine, Victorian novels, and current events. And my tastes inevitably influence my diction.”

Wow. An attack—for Jumbo, anyway—of verbal diarrhea. It embarrassed him. He rubbed his hands like a man trying to coax blood into frost-bitten fingertips.

“To you, the mat must have appeared a method of exclusion, not a courtesy.”

I stayed mute, of course.

“If you want privacy, pull the mat out from the wall. If not, leave it.” He looked me in the eye. “At certain points, whatever your state of mind, I’ll draw the mat. Please don’t view my doing so as a sign of pique or ill favor. I sometimes require solitude.”

I nodded. Okay. Understood.

“And you have my standing consent to draw the mat whenever you wish. Would you care to do so now?”

Not really. Outside of Dunnagin’s counsel in the gazebo, no other talk I’d had in Georgia had lasted so long or promised so much. On the other hand, I couldn’t add much to it. So I started toward my cot again, and Jumbo halted me again.

“You’ve lost a button,” he said. “Give me your shirt.”

I undid the buttons I had, gave him my shirt, and sat down on my cot. Jumbo took a needle, thread, and a carved ivory button box from one of his shelves and sewed on the new button in five minutes. You’d’ve thought his sausage-size fingers would’ve made the task hard for him, but he did it like a pro, quick and neat.

“Here,” he said, holding up the shirt. It danced like a flag in the breeze from his fan, dropped like a windsock on a calm morning, then danced again. Fetching my shirt, I noticed the grooves, calluses, dents, and scars in the ends of Jumbo’s fingers. The skin looked dead at the tips, white or yellowish, with whorls of brown or feverish pink on their inner pads. The clay-and-persimmon smell came off him in ripples. Near to, his eyes were like peeled orange slices with the membranes still on. It was my lost friend Kenny Ward all over again.

On the floor by Jumbo’s headboard sat a cardboard box full of old—but not too dirty—baseballs. Most used balls in those days ended up in the servicemen’s Baseball Equipment Fund so the men at military posts here and overseas could play ball for training purposes or to relax. Even I knew that. The Baseball Equipment Fund was a big patriotic deal. So this box of balls struck me as suspiciously like hoarding. What did Jumbo plan to do with them? The team had all the baseballs it needed, and none of this battered bunch looked fit to plump out a scarecrow with, much less to toss or fungo around.

Jumbo reached down and grabbed a ball. He inserted his fingernails into its split seam and peeled its more or less glossy cover off. He dropped its balata core back into the box and spread the leather cover open on his knee. He rubbed the cover with his thumb, as if to work out its only visible stain and make it spotless again, then flip-flopped the spread cover and rubbed its other side.

“They lived once,” he said. “Think of it—these skins, once the hides of tall and powerful animals.” He stopped rubbing and laid the split jacket on top of the other baseballs in the box, the way you or I would return a silver dollar to a display of rare coins.

That chilled me. I slipped my shirt on.

Jumbo said, “May I call you Daniel rather than Mr. Boles?”

I hesitated a second before nodding.

“Then you may call me—you may think of me—as Henry. Two men lodging together in such intimacy shouldn’t have to stand on oppressive formalities.”

I figured just the opposite, but what could I do? Jumbo had some age on me and deserved a little respect. He stuck out his hand to seal our bargain. I took it with as much zeal as I’d grab a hot wire.

“Daniel, know me from henceforth as Henry.” His hand felt cold and dry, spongy and hard—like sliding your palm into the grip of a solid-rubber statue.

Henry
didn’t strike me as a suitable name for a power-hitting ballplayer.
Hank
did, like in Hank Greenberg, but Jumbo hadn’t asked me to call him Hank.

“A moment yet. I have a small present for you, Daniel.” From under his pillow, he took two notebooks and a handful of pencils snugged together with a rubber band. One notebook you could’ve used in school, a fat thing the size of a Leo Tolstoy novel. The other, a little bigger than a deck of cards, you could carry around in a pocket. One of the pencils, already sharpened, had a pocket clip on it. Jumbo dumped this caboodle into my hands.

“Should you wish to converse with me,” he said, “simply write in the smaller notebook, tear out that page, and hand it over. I will respond as its substance dictates.”

I hammocked Jumbo’s gifts in my shirt tail and duck-walked to my cot, where I spilled them all out.

“The larger notebook you may use as a journal,” Jumbo said, “chronicling your exploits throughout the remainder of the season.”

Hey, I’d graduated. Why would I want to scribble rehashes of ballgames in a notebook? It was the thought that counted, I guessed, but I’d’ve been happier with a candy bar or a risque pulp magazine. In the next moment, though, I started thinking I might
enjoy
keeping a record of my days in Highbridge. I didn’t plan to live in Georgia, after all, and one day I might like having a memory token of my minor league career here.

Jumbo, however spooky his looks or weird-sounding his talk, had begun to treat me like a roomy, not just a pestiferous kid Mister JayMac’d dumped on him. Probably, my play at McKissic Field had turned him around. What did that say for his scale of values? If I’d played lousy, would he’ve gone on treating me like a cockroach? But, hundreds of miles from Tenkiller, Oklahoma, I rejoiced in his turnaround, whatever’d caused it.

I fell asleep in my clothes, with my notebooks and pencils nearby and Jumbo reading Wendell L. Willkie’s
One World
.

When I woke up, darkness everywhere.

Jumbo had pulled his woven-grass mat into place between us. I could smell it. I could also smell the gritty perfume of the hydrangeas in their bronze vase. I undressed and lay down again. Jumbo’s snores wheezed above the whirr of the fan, and our grass divider swayed.