Brittle Innings (48 page)

61

T
he CVL shut down at the end of the 1943 season. Mister JayMac hadn’t wanted it to, but only three of the league’s eight teams had turned a profit that summer—the Hellbenders, the Gendarmes, and the Orphans. The other five clubs had taken a bath. Mister JayMac might still’ve willed the loop to go on, but the loss of Hank Clerval and myself, along with Darius’s vamoosement and Miss Giselle’s self-pyrotechnics, had yanked the heart right out of him. When the owners met in Highbridge after the Yankee-Card World Series, they voted five to three to suspend the CVL until the war ended and able-bodied prospects again came into the talent pool. Mister JayMac’s vote counted twice—maybe three times—as much as any other owner’s, but you can’t force five smart men to bleed themselves bankrupt and so he had to bow to majority rule.

Over the winter, the Phillies, the Hellbenders’ big-league holding company, tried to spruce up their image—the elite of Philadelphia’s professional losers?—by sponsoring a contest to change their nickname. (What the hell was a Phillie anyway?) Thousands of people sent in entries, and Mrs. John L. Crooks, a caretaker along with her husband of the local Odd Fellows Grand Lodge, won. Her suggestion was Blue Jays. This was more than thirty years before Toronto organized an American League club with that name, and the Phillies played under it for only a season. They also lost their young, wise-ass owner that winter when Commissioner Landis kicked William Cox out of baseball for betting cold cash on his own team.

Anyway, when Mister JayMac learned of the name change, he told Miss Tulipa in a letter he thanked God for the CVL’s decision to pack it in. “A blue jay isn’t a ballplayer,” he wrote. “It’s a defecating, marauding, squawking pest in a fowl’s deceitful glad rags, and I wouldn’t want a player of mine to have to bear that epithet, not to mention the tatty costume they’re like to design for it.” Phillies, though, he could live with, even if it meant something squishy like, well, humanitarian.

When I got home, Tenkiller seemed downright boring. I passed most of one day studying a pair of prewar Texaco road maps and underlining names—Muskogee, Eufaula, Cherokee—with sound-alikes back among the counties and towns of the CVL. Trail of Tears connections. Well, I had some links to it of my own. Mostly, that fall, I laid or limped about, taking in
Life Can Be Beautiful
,
Stella Dallas
, and other suchlike day-time crap on the radio.

Eventually, I tossed my crutches, but when I walked, I hitched around like a man with a fresh load in his drawers. No one hired me to bale hay, dehorn cattle, or set up wildcat rigs over in Stillwell. To Mama Laurel’s disgust, and even my own, I loafed. Tenkillerites knew I was loafing too; the town was too small for anybody local to suppose I was a poor wounded GI wrestling with the afterclaps of combat. I didn’t pretend to that condition either. Some of my Red Stix pals had entered the services, and I respected their sacrifice too much to try to siphon off any of their glory, potential or real.

By December, a family friend had helped me get a position as a clerk at Funderburke’s Penny & Nickel Emporium, a notions and stationery shop where I could move at my own pace and had no heavy lifting to do. Deck Glider, Inc., ran full tilt, of course, but every job there had someone in it and a whole queue of applicants standing by. My salary at Funderburke’s fell ten or twelve bucks a week shy of the minimum janitorial salary at Deck Glider, but at least I had a job and folks stopped looking at me with pity or contempt.

I got a couple of letters from Phoebe that fall and a homemade Christmas card at Christmas. (She’d made the card out of construction paper and carefully scissored magazine photos—Santa Claus standing outside the Bethlehem stable with Oveta Gulp Hobby of the WACs, Alan Ladd, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the starting lineup of the ’43 Yankees.) The second of her two letters read this way:

Dear Ichabody Beautiful (alias Daniel Boles),

How are things in Oklahoma. OK, I hope. I’d tell you to keep an eye out for injuns but you ARE one, sort of—an injun not a eye, but we’re all eyes to ourselves, aren’t we? (Eye = I, if you can’t shred my wheat without a scorecard.) Sorry. School’s started here, and I hate it. I’m blinkng away sand ten seconds after Mrs. Camson opens her mouth. My I’s turn to ZZZZZ’s.

Mama keeps on improvng. It helps the Hellbender players have almost all gone home. It also helps Daddy writes more often—I suggested he shd. Letters seem to arrive every week now, even if some cutup in the S.O.S. or whatever has censored parts of them all with scissors.

A senior boy here named Hal Frank Kimball thinks he likes me. He has one eyebrow and hormone hickeys. My girlfriend Sunny Ruth Grimes says he’s AWOL—A Wolf On the Loose. When he comes paddng around, I ice up or shove in my clutch. Now don’t get yr ego or yr dander up, Daniel, but I am waitng for YOU.

No jump the gun panic, please. I’m NOT in a family surcumstance. No rabbit died. On the other hand, I never want to do the aweful thing we illeegly did until we do it again together—licensed and sanctified. That wld have to be better, wldn’t it? God, I hope so. In the meantime, keep the tool cool, OK?

Uncle Jay has been in a 2 maybe a 3 month mope. You shd drop him a line. You shd drop ME a letter. I promise to catch it.

Yr patient little BB, Phoebe

P.S. If you buy every word in my billydoo, yr a real smack. Read between the lines and hit the ones that count.

P.P.S. Homer says hello.

Phoebe and I married in the early summer of 1947, the year the CVL started back up. (Her daddy, long home from the war, gave her away.) The Blakely Turpentiners replaced the Marble Springs Seminoles in Georgia, and the Roanoke Rebs took over for the Cottonton Boll Weevils in Alabama.

But I jump ahead of myself.

In the spring of ’44, I’d hobble out of Funderburke’s every afternoon and watch the Red Stix play or practice. I watched the players who came into town as closely as I did my ex-high school teammates. I noticed things—sneaky foot speed, an unhittable specialty pitch, hidden room for improvement—that other baseball folks, not exempting Coach Brandon and Miss Tulipa, couldn’t see, and I wrote letters to Mister JayMac recommending a half dozen players—a couple of locals and four unscouted visitors—as guys to watch. Mister JayMac followed up, and after the war three of my first six picks wound up playing full- or part-time in the National League, two with the Phillies and one with Brooklyn.

Early in May, Coach Brandon got word a barnstorming team of Negro all-stars called the American-Afrique Something-or-Others had an official invitation to play an infantry team at Camp Gruber, a training post eighteen miles southeast of Muskogee. Coach Brandon had a drill instructor friend who could get us a pass onto the post to see the game, if we wanted it. A memory clip of the Splendid Dominican Touristers ran in my head—old Turtlemouth Clark pitching, Tommy Christmas chasing down long flies in center, our own Charlie Snow falling over the fence and fatally hemorrhaging, with Oscar Wall’s game-winning drive in his glove—and I told Coach Brandon, Yep, I’d go, especially since it was a Sunday contest and I didn’t have to work.

The game itself was the damndest exhibition I ever saw. The American-Afrique Zanies—that was their nickname—came out onto the field in clown costumes, all tricked out with pompons, face paint, big shoes, and fright wigs. They warmed up in these outfits, they even played the Army squad in them. They pranced and tomfooled around like circus performers. But despite their shenanigans, they still managed to rap the Army boys something like sixteen to zip. A walkover. The only thing making it bearable for us fans was the GIs’ realization that the Freakies (as a few guys started calling them) could’ve beaten them in suits of armor. These decent dogfaces saved the game. They acknowledged the Zanies’ talents without giving up on themselves or letting the coloreds push their lead up into the twenties or thirties.

I also got a kick out of the PFC announcing the game: “Now pitching for the Zanies, Whim-Wham? Dinkum-Do to center? And taking over at shortstop, Gumbo Giddyup?”

Three innings into the game, I figured out the Zany playing right field and going by the name Cuffy was none other than Darius Satterfield. His clown suit couldn’t hide his muscular lankiness. The greasy white makeup melting on his cheek bones and the green and purple wig raying out from his head like a crown of vat-dyed yarn—well, that crap kept me from making a positive ID for an inning or three, but it couldn’t blind me forever to the smoothness of Cuffy’s play or the whiplash grace of his hitting.

I wanted to wade down the bleacher tier and pull Darius aside for a chat, but I never got within a hundred feet of him till the game ended and he sat under an awning of the barracks building provided as the Zanies’ locker room. While Coach Brandon talked to his DI buddy, I limped into Darius’s line of sight. When he saw me, his eyeballs gave me a bounce and his hand snapped up like it meant to hold me at bay.

“Danl Boles. Sweet gentle Jesus.”

“What happened to the Splendid Dominicans, Darius?”

He studied me real good. “You look kinda puny, hoss. What happened to you?”

I gave him the short version and pressed my own question.

“Us Dominicans ran out of gas. Coupons. Working capital. Also goodwill. Mister Cozy got us all back to KayCee with him, but we had creditors galore and jes dropped apart. So I’m here today and mebbe tomorry as”—spreading the balloon sleeves of his arms—“a damn ol American-Afrique Zany.”

“Mister JayMac’d love to see you back in Highbridge.”

“Well, he aint big enough to beat me no mo, and I aint big enough to let him try.” He pulled off his wig and used it to daub at the sweat-runneled grease on his face. “Sorry bout yo setback, Danl. Real, real sorry.”

“He’s your daddy. At least you got one. Miss Giselle’s dead and he needs you.”

“I heard that, bout po Miss Giselle. But Mister JayMac needs me like a hound needs another tic.”

“You gonna stay with these . . . Zanies?”

“Nosir. Gonna quit em and join up. A man cain’t play ball in wartime. I guess his duty lies elsewhere, but the war angles gainst you and it’s a sorry style ball that gits played anyway. Take this turkey strut today.”

“The wrong team was wearing the clown suits.”

“Amen.”

“Still, you should go home. You should let Mister JayMac help you get into a decent unit. You should probably—”

“Danl, put yo cumulated wisdom in a croker sack with a cow flop and burn it fo a night light. Nice to see you again.”

Darius strolled around the corner and into the building. I tried to follow him. An MP with a billy and a .45 pistol in an unsnapped leather holster blocked my way: “Zanies only. You a Zany, kiddo?”

I tried to wait, to meet Darius when he came back out in his civvies with his teammates, but Coach Brandon found me, and took me home, and I never saw Darius again. So far as I know, he never played integrated pro ball, and I sometimes think he died overseas after enlisting—maybe right there at Camp Gruber—under a phony name.

62

T
hree years later I received a registered letter from Seattle, Washington. It contained round-trip airline tickets to Seattle from Tulsa, with stopovers in Denver, Salt Lake City, and Spokane. From Seattle, I had other tickets to Juneau, Alaska, from Juneau to Anchorage, and from Anchorage to Kodiak Island. The packet also contained a money order for two hundred dollars and a note:

Dear Daniel,

I have found your father’s grave on Attu Island, at the westernmost extremity of the Aleutian archipelago. Allow yourself two weeks and embark upon a pilgrimage to your sire’s final resting place. I enclose money and tickets to return you to Oklahoma at the conclusion of your valedictory journey. I will meet you at the airfield at Kodiak. You may recognise me by the stalk of wild celery I wear as a boutonniere.

Faithfully, “J.” H. C.

Like I’d need a corny sign. Unless he’d cut himself down to a Munchkin’s height or had plastic surgery on his ugly mug.

Anyway, the idea of a trip scared me. I’d never flown before, and the distance and the layovers terrified me. I broke the news to Mama, though, and told her both who’d sent the tickets and that I planned to go. She knew Henry from a creased team photo as “that big ugly-gawky fella m the back,” and from my letters home as a decent roommate, and from stories out of Highbridge at the end of the ’43 season as an on-the-lam murder suspect.

It’d crossed my mind Mama might take this news and pass it on to Miss Tulipa, or Mayor Stone, or our county sheriff, but I couldn’t fly off thousands of miles without taking that chance and trusting Mama to trust me.

“Dick Boles don’t deserve a graveside visitor,” Mama Laurel said.

“I’m still going, Mama.”

“Take the Brownie then. Take some pictures.”

On my trip, I must have smoked a carton—
two
cartons—of cigarettes in all those different airports and on the flights themselves. I was twenty years old, almost legally an adult, but because of all my travel, bad meals, and missed sleep, I had an outbreak of schoolboy acne that upped my dependence on tobacco. By the time my umpteenth flight—this one aboard a small Electra prop plane—came down through the gray tattered fog and landed on Kodiak’s airstrip, I had a lung-crumping cough.

Henry stood on the edge of the field near the parking lot. No one could miss him, even though he’d separated himself from the other two parties there to greet the plane. As a sure ID, though, he clutched a pale yellow stalk of wild celery in one hand. It also struck me, as I wobbled towards him, his face looked awfully ugly and fearsome that afternoon—most likely because of the ivory labrets, carven like polar bears, he’d inserted in the cheek holes (in Highbridge, mere scar-tissue welts) at the corners of his mouth.

“Roomy,” I said.

Henry glanced about him, at the overarching sky and the nearby mountains visible through cloud or fog wisps. “Yes,” he said, “but on clear days it seems even moreso.”

*

A Russian Aleut by the name of Dorofey Golodoff—Henry called him Fego—flew us in a beat-up light aircraft to Nikolski, an Aleut village on Umnak, where my father had been stationed during the war. Fego lived near Nikolski in a
barabara
, or dugout sod house, that put me in mind of Henry’s underground hideaway in a branch of Tholocco Creek in Alabama. We spent the night with Fego, a burly Asiatic-looking man with a broad squashed nose and long jet-black hair. I had a couple of inches of height on him, but he outweighed me by forty pounds or more, even though he moved from room to room in his house with the speed and agility of an otter. For supper, he fed us steamed clams, batter-fried octopus, and a salad of kelp, wild onions, and Fox Islands celery.

As we ate, Fego told us, “When the tide goes out, the table is set.” Beyond repeating this comment, he said little else, and all I recall of what he did say is that Aleut folk saying, which explains how this hardy people could subsist in such a forbidding place. Fego, however, also received pay from the United States government as a surveyor and a backup mail pilot, and the next day he flew us to Attu, the remotest island in the chain, with a single delivery and refueling stopover at the naval station airfield on Adak Island, not quite midway between Umnak and Attu.

Luckily, or we wouldn’t have flown, the day broke and stayed clear, with no fogs or willawaws arising from the collision of Bering Sea waters and the warmer flow of the Kurishio or Japan current, and an easy pewter chop moving along beneath the high whine of Fego’s prop plane.

On Attu, Henry led me inland on foot from Massacre Bay towards the island’s western mountains. Fego didn’t accompany us. Through most of this trek, it drizzled on us. Towards late afternoon, the drizzle thickened into a light snow, and my injuries put an extra hitch and a gnawing round of lesser and greater pains into my limp.

We took shelter from the snow, the day’s chronic gauziness, and the ache that had settled in my legs in a Japanese hut not demolished during the U.S. invasion four springs earlier. In the hut’s litter, I found an empty sake bottle, a half-burnt diary in Japanese characters, and two sets of weather-warped snow skis. We ate from tins we’d backpacked in.

“Henry, what’re you doing in this godforsaken place?” I asked between spoonfuls of lumpy pork and beans.

“Escorting you to your father’s grave.”

“I mean, besides that. Did you come back up here to live, to be the Eskimo Hiding Man—?”

“Inyookootuk.”

“Yeah, Inyookootuk. To be the Hiding Man forever?”

“I am not an Aleut. I would hide forever among the Innuit of the mainland, but not in this storm-wracked island chain.”

“Is that what you plan to do? Hide forever?”

“This is a temporary exile, Daniel, a mere sabbatical. I wish to re-create myself. As Wordsworth wrote, ‘So build we up the Being that we are.’ But I despair of the authenticity of my materials.” He removed and pocketed his labrets, so as not to be distracted by them on our hike tomorrow, and refused to say another word that night.

The next day we reached a peak called Sarana Nose. The snow had stopped. The drizzle had stopped. Sunlight dropped through the whirling fog like lamplight through an aquarium full of seaweed. We reached an embankment on the mountain, a tierlike balcony on its flank, where several small stone cairns and a group of flat-nailed wooden crosses jutted up out of the muddy soil to mark burial plots. One cross boasted a round Japanese grave marker with Oriental paint-brush characters on it. I stood next to Henry in the chill, sweeping wind, dwarfed by him on a big volcanic sea rock at the top or maybe the end of the world.

“Here your father lies,” Henry said.

“How do you know?”

“A party of Eleventh Air Force personnel came out here during the Army’s mopping-up exercises—as hunters, not merely observers. They were shot or hand-grenaded by snipers. The snipers buried them here and memorialized their sacrifice.”

“How do you know?” I said again.

Henry read the hand-lettered inscription: “‘
Sleeping here, five brave soldier heroes who forfeited youth and happiness for their motherland.’
”

“A Jap wrote that?”

Henry said nothing.

“A Jap my daddy and his pals had come out here to hunt down and kill?”

Henry still said nothing.

“How do you know it’s the graves of Dick Boles and his friends? Does the inscription list names?”

“I fear it doesn’t.”

“Then how do you know?”

“
‘Sleeping here, five brave soldier heroes who forfeited youth and happiness for their motherland,’
” Henry read again.

“That doesn’t answer my—”

“Shhhh,” Henry said, a mittened finger to his lips, exactly between the ugly labret holes at each mouth corner. “In this place, Daniel, before your father’s grave, and in the presence of his enemy’s uncommon integrity, you should stand speechless, humbly mute.”

“B-B-But I—”

“Shhhh.”

I bowed my head. Memories welled. When next I looked up, a bald eagle had caught a towering updraft. It wheeled in the high Aleutian gauze. Its talons seemed to spiral through my feelings like the threads of a screw. Finally, I looked at Henry, almost blinded by the sting of the wind and the thin wax of grief in my eyes.

Henry reached into his pack and rummaged out a brand-new National League baseball. He flipped it to me. I caught it with both hands, like an amateur. I stood there for a minute turning that ivory ball in my gloves before it occurred to me to wedge it into the natural cup of the stone cairn supposedly marking my daddy’s grave. In that cup, the ball glinted like a lighthouse beacon and focused the whole of Attu Island around it, a pivot for the world to turn on.

I got out Mama’s Brownie and took a picture.

As evening drew on, Henry and I walked back to the hut where we’d spent the night. The ache in my knee had let up, and my limp seemed less pronounced. I asked Henry what he’d done with
his
old man. He didn’t answer.

“Come on, Henry. You didn’t leave him in ’Bama, did you?”

He shook his head, still striding, still thoughtful.

“Then what? What’d you do?”

“He lies among a host of ancient Aleut mummies, fur- and grass-wrapped carcasses in a cave on one of the Islands of Four Mountains southwest of Umnak. His traveling days are over. There he will rest until the generative vulcanism of this archipelago drowns its islands, Daniel, or until the world expires in either fire or ice. I am resigned.”

*

Henry refused to fly back to Kodiak with Fego and me aboard Fego’s battered prop plane. He said he’d eventually return for a look-see to Oongpek, on Alaska’s Seward Peninsula, but in the meantime wanted solitude and a chance to sort through his options. He paid Fego with a small stack of U. S. bills of various denominations for flying us to Attu and for returning me to Kodiak to pick up a commercial flight to Anchorage. Then he hugged me and stood clear as Fego and I taxied for takeoff, under a streaky sky, in a moderate crosswind.

“Whachu thinka that Henry fella?” Fego asked me when were up and rippling over the ashy chop of the Bering Sea.

His question startled me because he didn’t talk all that much. I said, “Why do you ask?”

“Sumfin funny bout him. Not joos how beeg he is— sumfin else. Lak mebbe summa his feelins been cut loose. Lak beeg as he is, you know, sum parta him’s missin.”

“Which part?”

“Dunno. Soul mebbe. The spirit part,”

“How long’ve you known Henry, Fego?”

“Hey, I
don’t
know him. Joos met him lass winter. I work for him sumtimes since, thass it.”

“Oh.”

“He tol me you roomed with him. Gude. Cause I lak to know the pipple I fly bettern I know this beeg ol Henry guy.”

“Oh.”

“So whatchu thinka him?”

“I think he’s working hard on his soul,” I said. “I think he’s becoming a real person.”

Editor’s Note

Danny Boles, a long-time scout for the Philadelphia Phillies who began working for the Atlanta Braves in 1978, died on opening day of the 1991 baseball season. He was 66. In the early 1980s, he had his vocal cords removed to halt the advance of a throat cancer whose recurrence in 1989 led to his death.

Always a famous raconteur. Boles learned to talk with the aid of a microphone-like amplifier that he held to his throat. The amplifier gave him a mechanical-sounding “robot” voice that he was still able to infuse with personality. To obtain the material assembled in his memoir
Brittle Innings
, I conducted nearly forty interviews with Mr. Boles. They ranged in length from twenty minutes to nearly three hours. He also gave me access to his longhand transcriptions of the journals of “Henry Clerval.” From these sources, I distilled the remarkable text now in your hands.

Look next year for my sports biography
The Good Scout
, in which I chronicle Mr. Boles’s career as one of the most able major league scouts in post-war America. It will not stretch your credulity quite so far as
Brittle Innings
has likely done, and I immodestly regard it as the best book on this topic since Mark Winegardner’s
Prophet of the Sandlots
.

——GABRIEL STEWART

Columbus, Georgia