Brittle Innings (35 page)

In early July, I relocated to eastern Alabama. There I apprenticed to a laconic and seldom occupied blacksmith who understood that the automobile had long since rung the death-knell of his profession. In any event, he led me to proficiency in horseshoe making and harness repair while I educated him in the esoteric niceties of scrimshaw painting and the making of fishing nets from the sinew strands of whitetail deer. On December 7th, the Japanese executed a disabling strike on the Pacific fleet of the United States, and my mentor, against my ardent counsel, quit Skipperville to enlist in the Army at Fort Benning, Georgia.

For three and a half months, I oversaw the daily trade of my departed teacher’s blacksmith enterprise. My income supported me in austere comfort. With it, I rented an upstairs room in a shabby antebellum home belonging to an eccentric widow. Miss Rosalind, as the townspeople knew her, smoked Cuban cheroots, raised hairless chihuahua dogs, and wore jumpsuits adorned with sequins. She viewed me as excellent company, not as a grotesque curiosity. Indeed, she so heavily freighted my leisure, of which I had a severe plenty, with such meandering local genealogies and such mazy accounts of her dogs’ ills and achievements that upon occasion I would have preferred to be shot. Moreover, the fumes from her cheroots pervaded my clothing, begot in me migraines of excruciating tenacity, and called forth my tears. (This liquid Miss Rosalind always misconstrued as a sign of my tender heart.) Often, then, I felt indentured less to my smithery than to my landlady.

In April, Mr. Jordan McKissic and his wife, Miss Giselle, stopped in a handsome automobile outside the dingy garage in which I laboured. A player of his, a young man recently taken into the Navy, hailed from Skipperville, and the player’s mother’s epistolary accounts of the giant who had moved to town to assume the blacksmithery of Millard Goodsell had come to Mr. McKissic’s attention via the low route of boardinghouse gossip. After a visit to his wife’s cousin in Brundide, he had driven to Skipperoille seeking to learn the truth of this gossip and the exact identity of the blacksmith’s apprentice.

“Ah, Mr. Clerval, it’s you,” said he. “I renew my offer of almost two years ago. Don’t immediately say no. With a war on, baseball at the training level needs an infusion of fresh talent—or the return of competent old talent—merely to survive.”

He continued in this vein, appealing to my love of the sport, and stressing what he regarded as my unsatisfactory present circumstances, to finagle my consent. At length his words merely clanged, for the lack of useful blacksmith work and the dubious benediction of Miss Rosalind’s society had predisposed me to accept his offer. He may not have noted this pliability in me, however, for I stood in the crepuscular gloom of my garage like a yoked ox, a harness over my shoulders and a bellows in one hand, a figure of almost Satanic apostasy and discouragement.

Then, Miss Giselle made a self-effacing appearance in the doorway, a spectre of sunshine and organdy. She much resembled Elizabeth Lavenza Frankenstein, the bride of my creator, as Elizabeth might have come to look had I not slain her for my own revengeful purposes in the freshness of her young womanhood. Miss Giselle’s eyes had not yet adjusted to the dinginess of the garage; she had no cause to fall back in dismay at the sight of an ogre of my bulk and hideousness; but, as her pupils contracted, it seemed that she adjusted without strain or upset not only to the twilight in my unkempt shop but also to the parodic human creature trapped in its gloom.

“Jordan, I see you’ve found him,” said she. “Will it be much longer? The sun’s ferociously hot.”

“I’ll be along shortly,” said Mr. McKissic with a curtness I had never heard from him before. “Go back to the car.” He somewhat relented. “Or stand under that sycamore.” He nodded towards it. “Mr. Clerval and I have an item or two more to discuss.”

“Mr. Clerval,” said the woman, although her husband had offered no formal introduction.

“Ma’am,” said I, inclining my head.

She withdrew, leaving me stunned with reminiscences; and Mr. McKissic returned to his needless suasions, for, by now, I had determined to give Miss Rosalind notice. Mr. McKissic nonetheless reiterated his various incentives, including the many chances I would have to try myself against redoubtable competitors.

“Thank you,” said I.

“Anything else, Mr. Clerval?” asked Mr. McKissic.

“The occasional use of an auto,” said I. “And driving lessons.”

“Yes. I’d forgotten. But never fear, you’ve got it. Report to spring training as soon as you can.”

“Yes, sir.”

And so began the latest chapter in the long chronology of my second life, a tale whose theme remains occluded to its hero and whose end is not yet told. . . .

43

O
n Tuesday, July 27, the ball field at Camp Penticuff basked red and dusty in the sun. We rode out to it in the Bomber, dressed out in our flannels, more anxious than we’d admit about taking on these Negro barnstormers in front of a hopped-up crowd of colored GIs. We’d just come off a five-game road trip (three wins, two losses), and the Mockingbirds and the Gendarmes would play us three games each at home towards the end of the week. I had the impression, jouncing past the stripped-down barracks and the parched parade grounds, that Muscles, Hoey, Dunnagin, and some of the other Hellbender vets felt we’d bitten off a chaw big enough to choke us.

The stands out here already teemed with khaki-clad black soldiers. They sat or stood in the main grandstand behind the backstop or on portable metal bleachers a maintenance unit had set up beforehand. The sun blazed, slapping the whole sports and training complex like a huge catfish bladder on an unseen stick. The very air seemed to stretch out and pop under the blows. The Bomber pulled up, after the Splendid Dominicans had already arrived, to some ear-splitting whistles.

“Bout damn time!” yelled somebody sun-sore and antsy.

We parked behind a fleet of ten- or twelve-year-old Buick touring cars, dented and furred with rust; and the Splendid Dominicans ran out onto the field. Until we’d showed, they’d apparently spent their time mingling with the troops: boosting morale. Learning that about em lowered ours. It implied the Dominicans (“These guys’re Dominicans like I’m a Hawaiian,” said Turkey Sloan) hadn’t felt obliged to warm up in advance of our arrival. Two seconds after hitting the field, though, they had a ball whipping around the horn like men born in spikes and caps. I watched them from the Bomber while, outside the fence around the park, Mister JayMac and Darius shook hands with Mr. Cozy Bissonette and Major Dexter.

Inside the bus, Fadeaway said, “Cottonton all over again—no dugouts. We’ll bake in this sorry-ass sun.” He had bench time ahead of him, and I almost sympathized. Almost.

In baggy white flannels—shirts with numbers whip-stitched to their backs and the letters SDT sewn to their chests—the Splendid Dominicans didn’t seem much like black supermen. Like us, they had guys built like fire hydrants, flag poles, or haystacks. This one could’ve pruned Azalea hedges in Alligator Park, that one could’ve tonged blocks of ice at the cold plant. No doubt, though, that Cozy Bissonette’s ragtag bunch could hit and hustle.

“All right,” Mister JayMac said from up front. “Pile off.”

“Criminy, we’ll slide out on our own sweat,” Parris said.

We got up and pushed through the aisle, looking for relief—from the heat, from our nerves, from the suspense of taking on these colored unknowns, who, in their own cities, had even more fans than we did in Highbridge.

I saw a few white faces—brass and senior NCOs, company commanders and cowcatcher-jawed topkicks. But the faces of the Negro GIs outnumbered the pasty or sunburnt faces among them fifty-to-one. A dark sea in the stands: beige, caramel, chestnut, shiny bruise-black. Even at a military post deep in the heart of Dixie, those hundreds of young Negro men shook me to my boots. What if they all got loose and we had to wade through their strutting tide?

Darius touched my arm and urged me through a gate onto the field. “See?” he asked. (Or was it “Sea,” like in “body of water”?) When I glanced at him over my shoulder, he gave me an unreadable smile.

The field had a press box, a platform on stilts that may’ve sometimes served as a reviewing stand. A goofy-looking white lieutenant in wire-rimmed glasses sat behind a microphone on the platform. His welcome blared out at us from metal speakers mounted on creosoted poles.

“Men of the First and Second Battalions of the Special Training Regiment of Camp Penticuff, Georgia,” he said, echoes from the speakers overlapping and blurring, “give a soldierly hello to the fine ball clubs that’ve come out here today to entertain you—our sister community’s Highbridge Hellbenders of the Chattahoochee Valley League, and the Splendid Dominican Touristers, some talented barnstormers from the Negro American League! Let em hear you, men!”

A tumult of claps and gospel shouts. The lieutenant broke into it to read lineups, ours first, and each Hellbender player trotted out to line up between second and third base. Oddly enough, the GIs of the Special Training Regiment made as much racket for us as our own fans in Highbridge would’ve.

Then the lieutenant read the starters for Mr. Bissonette’s glorified pickup squad. “Batting in the lead-off spot and playing second base, Terris ‘Slag Iron’ Smith!” If that ball field’d had a roof, those colored soldiers would’ve blown it into the Gulf of Mexico. Slag Iron Smith could’ve been every last one of em’s favorite cousin.

I recall the name of every other Dominican Tourister the lieutenant said, each with a road alias cornier by several degrees than any of ours—Rufus “Pepperpot” Cole, Luis “Gumbo” Garcia, Hosea “The Gator” Partlow. Each of their guys got a send-off Highbridge fans would’ve reserved for a regiment of heroes. Don’t think it wasn’t intimidating either.

The Army appointed umpires. No big deal? Ordinarily, maybe not, but Major Dexter’d asked a Negro captain from a Negro tanker unit to call balls and strikes, and a black NCO from his own battalion to patrol the bases. You’d’ve thought, gauging these appointments by the reactions of our biggest in-house bigots, he’d asked Attila the Hun and Vlad the Impaler to do it. Even Mister JayMac, seeing these men on the field, felt it incumbent upon himself to buttonhole Major Dexter and argue for one white ump—on the grounds we’d made dozens of courtly concessions to Mr. Cozy’s boys already, including playing them at all, meeting them in front of their enlisted cousins, and using a CVL rest day to come out here.

Neither Mister JayMac nor Major Dexter would allow himself the pleasure of ranting or kicking dirt—but the argument drug on. Both teams went to their benches, and the GIs began to get restless. They swayed on their seats and sang out ad-lib Jody chants:

“Left, right, left, right, march yo ass.

All that glitters must be brass!

“Left my home in Tennessee.

Ever DI looks de same to me!

“Why you fellas has to stall?

We come out to watch some ball!

“Jody, Jody, see me sweat.

My po body got a liquid debt!

“Count yo fingers, count yo toes.

Be a year fo one team scohs!”

During these chants, the Dominicans retook the field, but without a ball. They
pretended
to have one, though. Their pitcher—Turtlemouth Thomas Clark, a crafty s.o.b. once the game got clocking—went into this showboaty boa-constrictor windup and let absolutely nothing fly. A Dominican at the plate with a bat took a swing as broad as Turtlemouth’s windup and drove that whistling air ball into right for a make-believe single.

By this time, the crowd’d stopped chanting. You could even hear the
thwock!
the bat made hitting the ball. (The catcher’d made it, sticking a finger into his cheek and popping it out like a champagne cork.) Anyway, as the batter ran to first, the right fielder scooped up the ghost liner on two invisible hops and fired absolutely nothing to the shortstop covering second. This man looked the runner back to first, walked the nothing in his hands a few steps towards the mound, and flipped it to old Turtlemouth.

“Hell’re they doing?” Fadeaway said, not trusting his eyes.

“Shadow ball,” Dunnagin told him. “Watch.”

The next batter took a couple of pitches, on both of which Turtlemouth wound himself tighter than the rubber band on a model airplane’s propeller. The batter banged his third pitch—
thwock!
—an air-ball knuckler, to the shortstop, Pepperpot Cole. Cole flung himself down, trapped absolutely nothing under his scrap of a glove, retrieved it, and zipped it to the second baseman, Slag Iron Smith, who caught this nothing at belt height. The runner from first tried to take Smith out of the play, but Slag Iron pivoted, leapt like a deer, and threw absolutely nothing to first.

A peg in the dirt. The first baseman yanked it out of the dust like a man cracking a whip, and spun around to call the batter out as the runner somersaulted over the bag. Then the first baseman started the ghost ball around the horn in honor of the phantom double play.

The GIs loved it. You’d’ve figured them at a county-fair strip show, they whooped so shrill and sassy.

“Hard to make that kinda stuff look real,” Dunnagin said. “You’ve got to have your timing down.”

Mister JayMac finally got the Negro captain assigned to home plate moved to the base paths, along with the black DI from the First Battalion of the Special Training Unit. The major himself went behind the plate. That way, the foul lines had an ump each. If a wronged Hellbender needed to dispute a call at the plate, he wouldn’t have to test the will of a racial and social inferior. Mister JayMac, as I heard later, had used “whitemail” to get his way—he’d threatened to take us Hellbenders home.

Another problem remained. Which team qualified as visitors and which as homies? Mister JayMac wanted the advantage of last bats. So did Mister Cozy. They both went out to Major Dexter—sweating in his chest protector, birdcage, and shin guards—to present their cases. Mister JayMac said no team named Dominican Touristers could be a home team, barnstormers were visitors by definition, and Camp Penticuff lay within hailing distance of Highbridge. Thus, the Hellbenders, even in our away flannels, deserved home-field advantage.

Mister Cozy said this exhibition had begun in his head, his Dominicans had reached the ball field first, and if either team had the local crowd on its side, well . . .

“Flip a coin,” Mister JayMac said.

“Okay by me,” Mister Cozy said. “Do it.”

Major Dexter flipped a coin, it landed tails, and the Splendid Dominicans took the field with last bats in their baggy pockets and grins on their faces.

“Please stand for the National Anthem,” said the lieutenant at the press-box mike. Camp Penticuff’s flag pole, with the Stars and Stripes hanging limp in the sultry afternoon, grew out of a pile of stones on a hillock two parade grounds beyond the left-field fence. We flapped our caps over our hearts, and a black trumpeter with one stripe on his sleeve marched up into the press box and blew the clearest “Star-Spangled Banner” I’d ever heard, a cross between high-church music and Harry James. As soon as he hit those “home of the brave” notes, the GIs started a cheer that echoed in chilling sweeps to the barracks, the PX, the main gate.

I dug into the batter’s box while this unnerving roar went on. Turtlemouth Clark looked past me for his catcher’s sign like I wasn’t there. My Red Stix bat caught some libel from the crowd—“Hey, you gon hit with a Tootsie Pop stick?” “Boy from Californy, got him a bitty redwood bat.”—but Mister Cozy’s boys didn’t blink. I could’ve walked up there with a blue shillelagh without goading them to curl a lip. No more shadow ball, the life-or-death horsehide only.

Turtlemouth Clark wound up—except now, he hardly had a windup at all, just a quick pat-a-cake at his chest with glove and ball. Out of this business, he attacked me with sidearm smoke. His pitch had me looking for a doorway in the clay, to escape having a Fearless Fosdick hole drilled through me. I leapt at least four feet backwards.

“
Steeeeeee-rike!
” Major Dexter cried.

The Special Training soldiers laughed a load of wrinkles into their khakis. But I deserved it. I reset myself with a throb in my head and crushed chili peppers in my cheeks.

“Mebbe you’ll see the nex one,” the catcher said.

Before Turtlemouth could go into his stingy game windup, I called time and walked aside.

“Batter up,” Major Dexter said. “
Now!
”

I stepped back in. Turtlemouth struck me out, but put a couple of Band-Aids on my stigma by also whiffing Charlie Snow and Lon Musselwhite—to the noisy delight of the troops. Snow made him unleash seven pitches before chasing a sidearm change, but Muscles, like me, took three wild cuts at three stuttering speedballs and slunk back to the dugout mumbling about the legality of Turtlemouth’s delivery.

When Darius took the mound for us, a murmur spiced with a few profanities lapped the stands. If Darius heard, he made no sign, just cycled through his warm-up tosses to Dunnagin, then stepped back to let us infielders throw the ball around. Once in the field, Darius didn’t give a cucumber pip what color his opponents were; he wanted them out, the scairter the better, his whole devotion to the uniform on his back. In this case, our dingy Hellbender ash-browns.

In the bottom of the first, Darius matched Turtlemouth’s strikeout feat, and we had us a pitched battle—literally—of K’s and O’s, connipted hitters tossing away their bats after fruitless trips to the box.

Oh, a couple of fellas hit the ball. Charlie Snow tagged one on a pearl-bright clothesline right to the center fielder, and Henry cracked a pop-up that Turtlemouth himself, waving everybody else off, caught at shoe-top height from a ridiculous outhouse squat, a basket catch two inches from the ground. The crowd gobbled up this showboating like peanuts.

In the top of the fourth, I drew a walk—the first hitter on either team to reach base. It seemed near lunatic, but I wondered if Turtlemouth had put me on on purpose, just to wake the crowd. The four balls he’d shown me had all thwapped in too high to hit, too high even to lunge for.

Buck Hoey, in his boot-blackened bedroom slippers, left his coaching box to talk to me.

“What’d you do to deserve a free pass? Promise to suck him off after the game?”

“Up yours,” I said as plainly as I could.

“Think you can steal on the shine, Dumbo? We need a runner in scoring position.”

Sure I did. I always thought so.

“Play ball,” said the colored officer umpiring first.

Hoey ignored him. “Try to draw a throw. See what kind of move to first he’s got. Then watch for a pitchout. Waxahachie Beckland has the second best slingshot on this club.”

Waxahachie Beckland was the catcher, Turtlemouth’s battery mate. Hoey wanted me to measure my lead against both men and mind my p’s and q’s. He sashayed back into his coaching box.