Brittle Innings (6 page)

“
Tear up another one, Dickie, and I’ll kill you!
”

“
Try it! Jes try it!
”

My leg’d gone to sleep, but I limped into the front room to see the row firsthand. I hoped just a glimpse of me would shame my parents into making up. But I’d walked into a holy mess. Daddy had been playing Jack the Ripper with Mama’s
Life
magazines. Black-and-white photos of Hitler, Shirley Temple, Lou Gehrig, and so on shingled the floor. Bedsheet pages. Daddy had torn them out and strewn them. One teetered on a lampshade. Marian Anderson at the Lincoln Memorial dangled from between a pair of Venetian-blind slats. I took in every detail because the room looked like a hand grenade had deranged it.

“See there,” Mama said. “You’ve done woke up Danny.”

“Get out of here!” Daddy yelled. “Go back to bed!”

I stood there in my too-short pajama bottoms, and Daddy hurled a rolled-up magazine at me. It opened out and slid to rest at my feet. All the coverless copies of
Life
lay about like stepping-stones to a loony bin.

“Yell at me if you like!” Mama said. “Go ahead! But leave your son be!”

“Mine, is he? Look at him. He don’t favor me. He don’t favor me a bit.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Danny don’t look, or do, like I do. Moren likely, some smoothie planted the boy while I was over to Tahlequah trying to make some dough.”

“Filth! An adult’d be ashamed to say it.”

“I
am
ashamed. My son aint my son. My wife let somebody else spike her.” Daddy’s high pink color told his drunkenness.

Mama cried, “Lousy redskin scum!” and started for him. A
Life
squirted out from under her. She toppled before she could begin flailing away. Daddy caught her, but yanked her sideways and dumped her on the sofa like a potato sack. She made for him again, cursing and wailing. But Daddy seemed an even worse monster, the way he’d insulted us. I charged, nearly slipping on a photo page. Daddy held me off with one hand. “Lousy redskin scum!” I said. A curse good enough for Mama was fine for me. I started to curse him again when he chopped me in the throat with his hand. I crashed. It felt like he’d knocked my head off. If I looked back, I’d see my body jumping around like a neck-wrung chicken’s. I wanted to scream, but couldn’t even gargle.

Daddy’s bloated face came down for a look-see. “He don’t favor me, Laurel. And he don’t do like I do, neither.”

“Baseball,” Mama said from the sofa. “You taught him how to play. He does that the way you do.”

“Mebbe so. But it’s a trick.” Daddy gave me a goatish wink. “Well, you bastid, your mama’s secret’s safe with me.”

He slammed out the door without even scrounging up a change of clothes. Late August, early September, Hitler messing up folks’ lives in Europe. You heard about it on the radio. Like a fight between your parents scrawled in letters the size of buildings.

“Dick! Come back!” Mama shouted at Daddy, who’d just said he wasn’t. Finally, she realized her boy lay hurt.

My voice box had closed. I sat up amongst black-and-white portraits, still lifes, scenes of war. Except for the mark on my throat, I must’ve looked more or less okay. When I started breathing again, I was okay. But I didn’t talk again for two years. And when I did, I st-st-stammered.

*

On the troop train, I pulled on my clothes and made my way between curtained berths to the coupling where I liked to ride. The shanties of poor white and colored sharecroppers clicked by like old photos, or maybe negatives, of themselves. They looked as empty as I felt. My voice box had closed again. When our locomotive whistled going into the curve on a kudzu-smothered ridge, I tried to mimic it. I tried to scream like that monster two-six-two engine.

Nothing came out.

5

T
hat night between cars lasted forever. I kept expecting Pumphrey to come through. The sun
did
come up, finally, and we rattled into Georgia over the Chattahoochee River and a swaying trestle bridge. The tracks looked like poured mercury. Early June, but already godawful hot. If we stopped in some podunk town or weedy switching yard, gnats and noseeums attacked us in eggbeater tornadoes.

Oklahoma got hot—its dust storms could blast you raw—but Georgia’s heat came like the rolling smoke of a junkyard tire fire. Once, its land had been wooded, but loggers and peanut fanners had cut the trees and turned it into a clayey plain. We chugged over it into a sprawl of roadhouses, motor inns, and billboards: Highbridge’s outskirts. (Gas rationing had killed most of the inns and roadhouses.) Camp Penticuff lay six or seven miles southeast of town. The Panhandle-Seminole Railway line we’d come in on cut a slant through the post. Civilians got off in town, soldiers kept riding.

Climbing down from the train, I finally saw some of the other nonmilitary types who’d been aboard. They stood in knots on the platform fanning themselves and greeting friends. Don’t ask me where they’d hid themselves. I’d seen mostly uniforms aboard—one damned uniform too many. With all the signs around asking you to limit your time in the dining car and to forgive any travel delays, you realized the railroad preferred military cargo to nonessential civs like me.

At Highbridge station, I began to get scared. I’d figured Mister JayMac would meet me, but Mister JayMac was nowhere to be found. Now what? If somebody could’ve proved to me that Pumphrey had got off in Alabama, I would have ridden on into camp with the dogfaces.

Instead, I wandered into the depot. My duffel saved me. It had a bat—a red bat—poking up through it.

“
Yoobo?
” said a high-pitched voice in the gloom. I looked around, bumpkinlike. Louder, the voice said, “
Yoobo?
” I turned and looked down. There, staring up at me blank-faced out of chocolately eyes, slouched a twelve- or thirteen-year-old urchin, barefoot. He wore a too-big man’s shirt and shiny cotton trousers. Little Black Sambo. On top of my manners, I might’ve called him a colored, or a pickaninny. I only had a few years on him, but at our ages that was a generation. What did he want? A handout? “
You Danny Bo?
” he shouted, like I was deaf as a jackhammer jockey.

Holy cow. Someone in Highbridge—a barefoot nigger kid out of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
—knew my name. Sort of.

“
Yookla
.” He stuck out his hand—to shake, I figured. So I reached to give his hand a pump. His look curled from blankness to suspicion. He didn’t pump back. His hand dropped like a slab of raw liver, detouring to my duffel bag, his aim all along. He was my reception committee, sent out by Mister JayMac to fetch me to him. Should I feel honored or snubbed?

“
Cmn
,” he mumbled, then dragged my duffel through the waiting room to the street. Out front, at the curb, hulked a rusty brown-and-white bus, a wingless Flying Fortress. The kid jumped up its steps and disappeared inside.

The bus had some fancy curlicue writing on its side: HIGHBRIDGE HELLBENDERS. Under that, in smaller letters, terrors of the cvl. On the fender above the front wheel ran a line of script giving the bus’s nickname:
The Brown Bomber
.

“Well, Mr. Boles, you riding or admirin?” said a deep voice from the driver’s seat. It belonged to a well-built colored in his mid to late twenties. He had one big hand on the steering wheel and one on the door lever. To show him I couldn’t talk, I touched my throat and shook my head. I didn’t want him, nigger or no, thinking I was stuck up.

“So thoat?” he said. “Damn. A so thoat in summer’s bout the wusst.”

Uh-uh. I waved off his guess, tapping the end of my tongue with my finger. Passersby gave me looks.

“Git on up here,” the driver said. “Keep that up, somebody haw you off to the rubber room.”

I climbed aboard. The kid with my duffel had gone all the way to the back. Above a far seat, the top of his head poked up like a nappy black cactus.

“Cain’t talk, eh?” the driver said. When I shook my head, he stipulated, “Sit down and lissen, then.”

I slid into a seat catawampus to the driver’s, sweating so bad I put a Rorschach blot on it. Except for him and my half-pint porter, I had
The Brown Bomber
to myself.

“At boy back there’s Euclid,” the driver said. “Euclid. Like the Greek geometry man.”

Yookla
, I thought. Yookla equaled Euclid.

“I’m Darius Satterfield.” He drew out the long i in the middle of Darius. “Euclid’s my brother. Fo now, Danl, that’s bout aw you need to know.”

Danl, not Mr. Boles. A true-born white boy might have taken offense, but it never crossed my mind Darius had overstepped his place. Besides, nobody—black, white, or polka dot—had ever called me Mr. Boles.

Darius drove us away from the railway depot. Factories and cars floated by. Giant water oaks and live oaks lined some of the streets. Toward Highbridge’s eastern edge, glimpses of pancake-flat land flickered between mill houses and shanties. A few soldiers strolled by, but mostly I saw white civilians—until, at least, we reached a market area where colored women carried baskets of tomatoes, okra, beans, and squash on their heads. Close by, dusty lots had filled up with covered traps, mule-drawn wagons, even a couple of ox carts.

I felt like a visitor to Tanganyika. Darius didn’t act as a tour guide, though, and Euclid’s head had slumped out of sight. Anyway, everything about Highbridge—part city, part country crossroads—amazed me: the sights, the smells, the people. I was a foreigner.

Even in ’43, Highbridge had nearly 10,000 people, with another five or six thousand soldiers, WACs, and support personnel out to Camp Penticuff. The locals, with the war on, made a lot of their money off the doughboys. On Penticuff Strip, which angled southeast from the old business district, there were pawn shops, beer joints, dancehalls, tattoo parlors, even some two-buck-a-tussel cathouses. For jobs, the town had some holdover industries from prewar days: meat-packing plants, textile mills, foundries. The ironworks now made torpedoes, though, and a crate-making factory had started turning out duckboards for trenches and foxholes. Peanuts were the biggest local crop, but cattle, pecans, and cotton weighed in as old reliables too.

On a single ride from the railway depot, you couldn’t see everything in Highbridge. If you started regarding it as a sleepy burg, maybe even malaria-ridden, you began to feel superior to it—even if you hailed from a no-account town in Oklahoma. Tenkiller at least qualified as a frontier town, you figured, but Highbridge, even if more like an African colonial outpost, gave itself big-city airs, airs like trying to support a professional ball club.

In about fifteen minutes, Darius pulled the Brown Bomber into a parking lot at McKissic Field. The stadium reared up: tall wooden walls, bleachers like railway trestles, insect-eye lights on poles above the clubhouse and the outfield. Even on the bus, I could hear bats cracking, horsehide popping glove leather, players shouting. Looking at McKissic Field’s rickety outside, I figured not even the New York Yankees had a stadium as grand.

“Come see the end of Mister JayMac’s morning sweatout,” Darius said. I wanted to fetch my duffel from Euclid, thinking I might need my glove, but Darius shook his head. “Naw, naw. Jes you watch today, Danl. Jes be thanking God the
obligation
aint on you to huff it up wi them mens awready out there.”

Darius led me through an entrance near the bleachers on the third-base line. We ducked through a low concrete tunnel and broke into the ballpark’s summer dazzle.

Grass you wouldn’t believe, trim and green, the pride of an eager-beaver team of groundskeepers. Even the ads on the walls seemed magical: signs for local department stores, Octagon Laundry Soap, Obelisk Self-Rising Flour, War Bonds, Old Golds, Shelby Razor Blades, 666 Cold Medicine. Most touted stuff you can’t buy now, but, just then, they bamboozled me. I wanted to dash through the outfield grass (me, a shortstop), make leaping grabs against the Feen-A-Mint and the Moroline Petroleum Jelly signs. I wanted to play the caroms off their paint. And right after the game, I’d run downtown to stock up on chewing gum, cola, soap, smokes, you-name-it.

Lord among us, McKissic Field was Heaven!

Never mind no other park in the CVL, except maybe the one in LaGrange, could stand beside Mister JayMac’s place. Never mind how quickly I learned even McKissic Field didn’t equal the Land of Beulah. I mean, it had bumps in the infield, shadowy corners where a fielder could get lost, camelback crickets in the showers, and split benches in the bleacher sections. That morning, though, the old stadium dazzled me.

Near the third-base line, Darius hurtled a low wall and ambled onto the infield grass. He picked up a catcher’s mitt and waved it at a player lazing around the batting cage. The player—Peter Hay, better known as Haystack, but I didn’t know that then—followed him to the bullpen, where Darius squatted and caught Hay’s warm-up tosses. After a while, Darius pounded his mitt, asking for more heat; he fired Hay’s pitches back harder than Hay’d thrown them. Hay struggled to put more zip into what he was doing. An amazing scene: In a south Georgia ballpark, a black man instructing, even cussing out, an older white player.

“Nigger gave
me
that crap, I’d deball him with a spoon.”

Until then, I hadn’t seen the rookies—three guys in street clothes—in the stands behind me. The kid who’d just spoken hunched between two others about his age, all of them squinting like moles, each about as nervous and mock-tough as the other two. The one who’d spoken wore caked boots and denim overalls; he had a blacksmith’s arms. He also had, several hours ahead of schedule, a five-o’clock shadow.

“Would you let a nigger boss you thataway?” he asked me.

I turned half around. I shrugged.

“You a ballplayer?” he said. “Or jes lost?”

“The nigger brought him,” one of the other two guys said. “He cain’t be lost.”

Both these fellas had on cheap jackets and ties. They were taller than the farm boy; next to him, they looked like
Esquire
models—or like they’d mistaken the day for Sunday and McKissic Field for a concert hall. Their names, I found out later, were Heggie and Dobbs. The farm boy with the stubble was a south Georgia cracker name of Philip Ankers.

“He’s ugly, though,” Ankers said, looking at me. “Nothing that nigger do or say can stop him being ugly.”

Maybe these drips were dogfaces on furlough.

“What’s yore name?” Ankers asked.

I patted my throat and gargled a few gargles. For safety’s sake, I stayed put, three bleacher rows ahead of him.

“What is it, Rube? Ya swaller a sock? Or ya jes don’t know yore name?”

I gave the farm boy a quick up-yours sign, half expecting him and his dime-store clothes-horse buddies to come down and boot the pea-turkey out of me.

But Ankers laughed and said, “Screw ya, Rube.” His pals chuckled too. When they started watching the practice again, I edged over a few feet so they wouldn’t be right behind me.

From the mound, Mister JayMac hurled batting practice into a chicken-wire cage. Criminy. Mister JayMac had his health, I guess, but the sight of that old guy unleashing strikes on his own players couldn’t help but get you. He creaked some (not too much), but the dust on his cuffs and the clay on his shoes didn’t faze him. After yanking a swinging strike on a batter, he made the klutz take three laps. No one, Mister JayMac said, should flat-out whiff against him. He wasn’t Bob Feller. Or even Lefty Grove. Thing was, though, not many Hellbenders took Mister JayMac to the outfield, and nobody hit one over the wall off him.

At Mister JayMac’s orders, players changed in and out, coming in to hit or hustling out to field. Pretty soon, I’d started sizing up the shortstop. The number on his practice flannels, also the team’s away uniforms, was seven. I didn’t expect to move in on this guy unless he produced nothing but air currents at the plate. He could field, and throw, and think. I reckoned him at least twice my age, mid-thirties, maybe older, gray winking at his temples, cowboy creases from his nose to his lip corners. On every pitch, he crouched so low you wondered if he had the body grease to unravel and make a play. He always did, though, and gracefully: a whangdoodle shortstop.

The other big thing I recall about that practice is how bad the guys playing first base did. Mister JayMac used at least four fellas there, but not one could handle a first baseman’s glove. That leather claw gave them fits. One fella, Norm Sudikoff, moved pretty as a gazelle, but usually managed to turn a sure out into a misplay. My pal Goochie would’ve given all these goons a clinic.

Me, I wished I was six or seven inches taller. Then, if I couldn’t beat out Number Seven at short, I might win a starting job from the relay team of jokers yo-yoing in and out at first base. Otherwise, I might spend my whole season on the bench. Growing a half foot fast would help, but I’d do as well to pray for a Hollywood agent to tap me as the next Gary Cooper.

At noon, practice ended. Darius hadn’t brought me to McKissic Field so much to watch it as to keep from having to make an extra trip from the players’ boardinghouse to the stadium. He’d picked up the other three rookies, Georgia boys all, a couple of hours earlier, when a train from the Atlantic coast had dropped them at Highbridge Station.

Now Darius came over, diamonds winking in the black lamb’s wool of his hair, his coffee-colored skin aglow. “Yall go git on the bus. Sit toards the back. The other mens don’t like rookies crowding em.”

“Who sez?” Ankers said to Darius.

“Ast em,” Darius said. “Be my guest. But ast em on the bus, or yall might have to foot it to Mister JayMac’s.”

Dobbs and Heggie didn’t grumble, but Ankers flicked Darius a lightning storm with his eyes.

On the bus, these guys sat a row or two in front of Euclid, now reading a
Plastic Man
comic, but I plonked down next to him, not out of any Eleanor Roosevelt fondness for black folk, but because he had my duffel. He paid me no mind, poring over his comic like it was a book of secret codes.