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  Brittle Innings

  Michael Bishop

  Frankenstein meets Field of Dreams in this nostalgic, gracefully written but fundamentally flawed baseball novel. Set in a sleepy Georgia town during WW II, this coming-of-age saga is based on the real-life story of Danny Boles, a major league scout who died of throat cancer in 1989. The fictional Boles leaves his rural Oklahoma digs to become shortstop for the Hightower Hellbenders, vaulting the Class C team into a pennant race in the process. Veteran writer Bishop (No Enemy but Time) delivers smooth and polished baseball prose and does some nice tricks with sports colloquialisms. He also tackles gritty issues such as the origins-in sexual abuse-of Boles's stuttering, the ravages of war and the rampant racism that plagued the sport. More problematic is Boles's huge teammate, slugging first baseman Henry "Jumbo" Cerval, who bears a suspicious resemblance to the gargantuan outcome of Victor Frankenstein's grand experiment. In the beginning, Bishop presents Cerval as a literate, likable freak. As the season unfolds, Cerval is revealed as the original monster, having escaped and survived for almost a century in the frozen North. Bishop milks the ludicrous premise for an intriguingly macabre ending, but the real problem is that Henry is far more interesting as a flawed human than as a scientific creation. That flaw aside, Brittle Innings should prove an engaging read for both sports buffs and fiction fans.

  Michael Bishop

  Brittle Innings

  Prologue

  After pursuing him a week (half my annual vacation from the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer), I caught up with Danny Boles on a blustery day in early April at a high school in eastern Alabama. I knew I’d found him because his fabled motor home-he called it Kit Carson, a sly allusion to his job-was parked on the asphalt above the school’s ram-shackle athletic complex.

  I pulled in next to the RV, climbed out, and peered through the driver’s-side window. An empty fast-food sack and an old ruled notebook lay on the front seat. I tried the door. It was locked. From the ball field came the faint chatter of two or three players and a coach’s blistering shout, “Come on, you guys, talk it up!”

  Although not quite five in the afternoon, a twilight chill had begun to creep over the tilled red clay beyond the collapsing rail of the center-field fence. A red-shouldered hawk, hungry or curious, sailed above the clay. I watched it as I heel-walked down the slope looking for Boles.

  In that puny weekday crowd, he stood out plainly enough. There were aluminum bleachers on each baseline, but Boles leaned on the fence midway between first base and the right-field foul marker, a metal pole topped by a limp blue pennant. He wore faded dungarees, scuffed loafers, and, as if it were July, a short-sleeved Hawaiian shirt. A wispy-haired and frail-seeming man, Boles rested his arms on the fence and studied the talent on the field. Most folks would have supposed him some player’s grandfather.

  Aping nonchalance, I strolled past the first-base bleachers, tiptoed around Boles, and took up a place beside him. I hesitated to interrupt his scrutiny of the earnest kids scattered across the field. I also hesitated to confess my real business, for Boles had a reputation as a hater of newshounds.

  When that dull half-inning had concluded and the teams began lackadaisically changing places, I said, “Mr Boles, you’re a hard man to track down.”

  He squinted at me as if I’d jabbed him with a stick.

  “If not for your RV,” I said, gesturing toward the parking lot, “I might’ve kept going. This is the umpity-umpth town I’ve visited in the past five days.”

  Boles’s squint unclenched. His eyes grew a size or two, his irises like tiny pinwheels. April sunlight turned his jug-handle ears translucent. Although it looked as if I could knock him over with a string bean, Boles intimidated me. Why? The sleeves of his flamboyant shirt came down to his elbows, giving him the look of a frail gnome with a bad haircut. Maybe it was his rep that daunted me, or the hint of flint in his close-set eyes.

  Almost indifferently, Boles looked away. A between-innings pitching change had taken his attention. A long-armed black kid, with a fullback’s thighs, took the mound and hurled incandescent heat during his warm-ups.

  Sadly, with a batter at the plate, the kid’s performance was high, wide, and ugly. He walked the first two batters to face him, struck out a wild swinger, walked a third kid, struck out a second hitter on a dozen pitches (including several that would have been sure tickets to first if the batter hadn’t foul-tipped them), and came irreparably unglued when a blooper to right center rolled to the fence for a bases-clearing double. He shied his next pitch into the hitter’s ribs, then stalked around the mound muttering and banging his glove against his thigh.

  “If he just had some control,” I said.

  The manager signaled for the right fielder and the distraught black kid to swap positions.

  Only then did Boles look at me again. “That’s where he shoulda been playing to start with. He’s a pitcher like the Incredible Hulk’s a doily maker.”

  Although his look scalded, Boles’s voice unnerved me most. I’d forgotten that several years ago, during an operation for throat cancer, he’d had his vocal cords removed. Today he spoke with the help of an amplifying device, a kind of cordless microphone, held to his throat above the Adam’s apple. The sound from the amplifier was intelligible enough, but mechanical in tone. Listening to him, you got the feeling that his rubbery face masked the shiny features and the artificial vocal apparatus of a robot.

  “Who the hell are yvu, anyway?”

  “Sorry, Mr Boles.” I tried to recover. “A sports writer.”

  “Yeah? Who for?”

  “The Columbus papers. Columbus, Georgia.”

  Boles nodded and pocketed the microphonelike gadget.

  “I telephoned your home in Atlanta a few weeks back,” I said. “I want to do a major profile. A full-length book. Your wife said she’d relay the message. In the meantime, she advised me to look for you at high school games up and down the Chattahoochee Valley. She said we should have a face-to-face about the feasibility of the project.

  “Sir,” I added.

  Boles put a finger to his lips. In a sudden sweep, he moved it to mine. He wasn’t here to jawbone; if I wanted his cooperation, I had better knock off the kibitzing. The scoreboard in left field said that this game was only four innings along. How many innings did high school teams play? Seven? Nine?

  Despite a windbreaker and woolen slacks, I had Himalayan-size goosebumps, while Boles, tanned and stringy in his Hawaiian shirt, seemed primed for another four to six innings.

  Surprisingly, he lasted only two more feeble ground-cuts, then limped away from the fence toward the parking lot, gesturing at me to follow. He didn’t look back. Never mind his hitch-along gait, he made good time. At his RV, he keyed open the driver’s door.

  “The game wasn’t over,” I said.

  He turned around, his amplifier to his Adam’s apple. “At this level, it’s not games that matter. It’s players. I don’t have to wait for meaningless overall outcomes to sort the stumblebums from the racehorses.” He said outcomes, even with his flat mechanical voice, as if it were a disease. “Sides, you were getting itchy to leave. Weren’t you?”

  “Yessir.” It didn’t embarrass me to say so. The April twilight had rolled down on us like a corrugated iron door.

  Boles said, “Go around back. I’ll open up for you. We’ll have us a nip and chew the fat.”

  In less than a minute, he’d admitted me to the boudoir-kitchen-sitting-room of his motor home. We sat across from each other in a cramped table booth that undoubtedly opened out, at night, into a spine-deforming bed. From plastic cups, we sipped Early Times Kentucky whiskey. Kit Carson’s interior, redolent of hamburger grease and lime-scented aftershave, felt airtight and stuffy. Its warmth,
and that of the booze, made Boles’s filmy shirt seem almost practical. I shed my windbreaker.

  “I let you find me,” Boles said.

  “How so?”

  “Usually, on the job, I park this rolling flophouse where the competition aint likely to see it.”

  “The competition?”

  “Other scouts. They know my rep. They figure if I’m tooling around a certain neighborhood, I’ve scented a prospect, maybe even another MVP.”

  I wasn’t above buttering him up. “You’ve signed over forty big leaguers, haven’t you?”

  “Forty-six. So I don’t let the competition see Kit. I park behind a gym, a dumpster. Sometimes I drive a renter.”

  “You abandon Kit Carson?”

  “Else guys’ll poach. I’m only out here today”-waving his cup at the parking lot-“cause I knew you’d throw in the towel if you didn’t find me in a year or two. Right?”

  “Why’d you want me to find you? Are you ready to talk?”

  “I’m ready to retire. Talking may be the way to fatten up the goose that’ll let us do it in comfort.” He smiled. “Or the only way to clear my head.”

  Boles said he had a story to tell. He just didn’t trust himself to tell it like a professional writer would. So he proposed that I ghostwrite it for half any advance monies, plus a seventy-thirty split of all royalties, subsidiary sales, licensing fees, and other incidental income. He had pored over too many rookie contracts not to have acquired an acute business sense. Cannily, he had also checked out my credentials, surveying both my work for the Columbus papers and my profile of the first female National League umpire in a months-old issue of Sports Illustrated. His verdict? I was no Shakespeare, but I did okay.

  “Mr Boles, that’s nice to hear, but I hadn’t planned to do an ‘as-told-to’ book. I’m an interviewer and an analyst.”

  “So interview. So analyze.”

  “Sir, I want to write a book about a major-league scout’s life on the road, a book based on firsthand observation.”

  “So the goofball who lets you observe him doesn’t cut into your profits?”

  “Mr Boles-”

  “So he doesn’t get a damned thing out of it but the pleasure of your company?”

  I held my tongue. I didn’t care much for Boles’s phrasing, but his assessment of what I hoped for-a book of my own, profits of my own-hit the target dead center.

  “No offense, young fella, but your personality lacks the dazzle to make that trade-off work for me.”

  “Well, there’s also glory.”

  Boles cut his eyes.

  “The book I have in mind has the working title The Good Scout. You’re the good scout. It’ll chronicle a full year of your life on the road, scouting for the Atlanta Braves. It’ll also-”

  “If you did that, traveled with me a year and wrote it all up, you’d deserve the money, all of it. But that aint the book I want to do. Uh-uh.” He sloshed himself another finger of Early Times and twisted around to snap on a portable radio balanced on the ledge above our booth. The static-riven broadcast of a ball game gabbled away behind us as we talked. Effortlessly, though, Boles followed the game’s progress, even as he outlined his own literary plans and parried my bemused objections.

  Other writers, he told me, had produced good stuff-magazine articles, newspaper pieces, even entire books-about major-league scouts, limelight-shunning sandlot prophets who had immeasurably enriched the game. The topic was tried and true, even old hat. I argued that a bang-up writer and a well-chosen scout’s signature methods and idiosyncracies could reinvigorate the topic. Boles shook his head. Yeah, sure, maybe I could do an interesting book, a colorful book, about his career (I’d have to be a droning hack to render his story a total yawn), but it wouldn’t be a ground-breaking book, a book resembling nothing else ever published about America’s national pastime.

  Peeved, I said, “What’re you talking about, Mr. Boles? Exactly what do you want me to help you write?”

  “Ever hear of the CVL? Of Mr Jordan McKissic? Of the Highbridge Hellbenders? Of Jumbo Clerval? Of a seventeen-year-old shortstop named Danny Boles?”

  Danny Boles, yes. Everything else, no. In fact, everything else in his catalogue had registered as gibberish. Only later was I able to sort out the separate items and give each one a distinct identity. Only later did I learn that CVL stood for Chattahoochee Valley League and that the CVL had a mysterious sub rosa cachet among older Southern sportswriters.

  “That’s right. Once I was a minor-league shortstop, a real comer in Class C ball. The league I played in lasted six seasons, from 1938 to 1943, and its final season was the only year that young Danny Boles played professionally. That’s what I want you to help me write about, sport.”

  The high-school ball game had ended. The home team had lost. You could hear the away boys monkey-hooting in their dugout. A gaggle of fans filtered into the parking lot, approaching their vehicles and closing in on Boles’s motor home. In the greenish glow of the safety lamps that had just fuzzed on, the home team’s partisans looked ghoulish: drained and unreal.

  I groaned inwardly. Boles wanted me to write about his brief and obscure professional career during World War II. It sounded like a vanity set up. Here he was, arguably the most successful major-league scout ever, but a nagging sense of the illegitimacy of that career made him view his playing days as more bookworthy than his near-mythic accomplishments as a scout. Sad.

  Noting my hesitation, Boles tugged one long earlobe. “I got called up at the end of the ’43 season, but an injury, on the very day Mister Jay Mac gave me the good word, kept me from reporting.”

  “An injury?”

  “The Phillies wanted me to take over for them at short, but a spiking… Hey, you saw me limp up here from the ball field.”

  I had, but Boles’s limp, because he could still locomote with gusto, had struck me as a minor handicap. Besides, no one expected a man his age to be as svelt and rapid as a whippet. So I’d given no thought to his likely goals before signing on in 1948 as a scout with the Philadelphia Phillies.

  “The importance of that war-year season wasn’t what happened to me,” Boles said, “so much as it was the fate of my roomy, Jumbo Clerval, and the demise of the whole blamed league.A story unlike any you’ve ever heard.”

  I’m sorry: I doubted it. I also doubted that the Phillies (in ’44, they were renamed, for two unhallowed seasons, the Blue Jays, long before Toronto had a team on which to hang that nickname) had called Boles up to play for them. After all, not many players make it in a single jump from a Class C ball club to a starting job with a team in the Show. Thus I dismissed Boles’s claim as unverifiable and unseemly brag.

  And he picked up on my skepticism. “Wonder why I let you find me, sport? I mean, a dozen other pretty good sportswriters ’ve been after me, but I let you track me down. Any idea why?”

  He had me stumped.

  “Cause you byline your stuff Gabe Stewart.”

  “That’s my name, Mr Boles.”

  “Danny. It’s too tight in here to stand on formalities.”

  “All right. Danny.”

  “I chose you because of your name. When the Phillies called me up in ’43, a fella named Gabby Stewart was playing short for em. His batting average hung around.200. Not that great a glove man, either. In ’44, Freddy Fitzsimmons, the manager, moved him over to third. Stewart upped his average nine or ten points, but the next year he was gone, whether drafted or sent back down to the minors I couldn’t say. He never got back to the bigs. Gabby Stewart was my favorite Phillie, though. His weak stick and shaky glove persuaded the front office to give a skinny, big-eared Oklahoma kid a shot. You aint related to the guy, are you?”

  “My first name’s Gabriel. Stewart’s a pretty common surname.”

  Boles laughed, silently; he had taken the mike away from his throat. The crow’s-feet around his eyes crinkled. His shoulders jogged like the scapulae of a medical skeleton on strings.

  Finally, he
said, “First, my book the way I want it done, then yours the way you want it done. You get a split on mine, but yours is all yours, from first pitch to final putout. Deal?”

  “Deal,” I said, surprised. How could I do better?

  Boles and I shook hands. The ball game on the radio dropped away like a whistling porpoise going under. Over some more Early Times, we agreed on a series of tape-recording sessions.

  A few days later, fortified by the prospect of a lucrative book contract, I sashayed into my managing editor’s office and resigned from the Ledger-Enquirer.

  1

  Way I look at it, minor league ball back then was sort of like B movies. Thrills on the cheap. Cheap buses, cheap hotels, cheap stadiums, cheap seats, cheap equipment, cheap talent.

  Cheap-cheap.

  Sound like an Easter chick, eh? Or like the mechanical conductor on those subway trains out to Atlanta ’s airport. What do people call it, a “robot voice”? Yeah, a robot voice. Sorry. Can’t help it. At least with this gizmo up to my throat, I have a voice. Couple of long stretches in my life, I couldn’t talk. Back then, Mama would’ve reckoned this sci-fi gizmo an honest-to-God miracle. Awful as I sound, she’d’ve paid money to hear me talk with it.

  Oh, yeah: B movies. What I meant was, they were second-line stuff. Not Gone With the Wind, not For Whom the Bell Tolls, none of that highbrow crap. Sometimes, though, they were fine. Made on the cheap, but not tacky. Monster flicks. Nifty musicals. Gangster shows. You got your money’s worth.

  Same with an evening at the Highbridge ballpark, McKissic Field, watching the Hellbenders take on the Mudcats or the Boll Weevils. There was a war on. Half of what you wore and three-quarters of what you ate was rationed. Not movies, though, and not ball games. Folks flocked to both for about the same reason-to forget the war, especially the bad or the confusing news, and to have em a bang-up time. To get lost in something besides a muddle of depressing newsprint.