Brittle Innings Read online

  I dug in. Darius threw me some chin music for a ball, but the pitch did what he wanted, moved me off the plate. Next, a curve on the outside corner, just beyond my swing, for a called strike. I edged up a little. The next pitch jammed me, a hundred-mile-an-hour bullet. I swung in self-defense. The ball hit my bat handle and nubbed out between Hoey and Curriden on a half dozen skittering hops.

  Contact! On my follow-through, the bat’s barrel had splintered like kindling, helicoptered into the outfield, and landed on the grass. My broken bat had gone farther than the ball. I ran with five inches of bat handle in my fist. My hands and forearms stung from the vibes. Hoey made a grab in the hole and threw off-balance to Jumbo. Parris, umpiring at first, signaled me safe, and not one A-squad player yelped, not even Hoey.

  Darius came down off the mound and ambled over to take Jumbo’s flip-back. “Danl,” he said, about twenty feet away, “I reckon you could outrun the word God.”

  It took me a minute, standing there winded, to realize he’d complimented me.

  But not much happened after my scratch hit. Junior struck out, and Dobbs blooped one to Knowles at second.

  Sudikoff came up. He had bulk, but Darius owned him. If I wanted to get around the bases, I’d have to shove myself along and hope a passed ball, a wild pitch, or an error on an infield grounder assisted me. But despite his praise, Darius didn’t seem to think I’d steal. He pitched from a full wind-up, not a stretch. It worked because, after his second pitch to Junior, he whipped the return throw from Dunnagin over to Jumbo and nearlybout picked me off.

  On his first pitch to Sudikoff, though, I got a decent lead and broke for second the moment Darius twisted into his wind-up. Bless his heart, Sudikoff lunged at an obvious ball, missing it by a foot or better, to help me out, and I did a quick down-and-up slide into second, where Hoey knelt for a throw that never came.

  I’d stolen on Darius, not Dunnagin, and when Darius had the ball again, he walked over and peered at me like I was a channel cat with legs.

  “Like I say,” he said.

  On his next offering to Sudikoff, I edged off second and darted for third as soon as his motion home committed him to throw. I barreled. Sudikoff laid off a low fastball-he’d already swung at one for me-and Dunnagin, uncoiling from his crouch, leapt in front of the plate and fired the ball to Curriden at third.

  All my B-squad teammates popped up from our bench to watch me slide. The peg from home had me nailed, but my toe hooking the corner of the base got under Curriden’s tag.

  Nutter, coaching third, gave the safe sign. Mister JayMac, out from behind the plate, agreed. A cheer went up from the B-squad bench, the A-squad boys groaned.

  Darius sashayed over, loosy-goosy, to get the ball from Reese Curriden. He gave me a smirk. The smirk didn’t seem to be at me, though, but for me. “G, O, D,” Darius said. From then on, he pitched from the stretch. I’d’ve been nuts to try to steal home on him, or on a catcher as smart as Dunnagin. Anyway, I had no chance. Darius got Sudikoff on strikes, the third one a swing a herd of chiropractors could’ve retired to Bermuda on.

  Sudikoff flung his bat away. “Pesky damned nigger.”

  Darius had to’ve heard him, but he strolled to the A-squad dugout with his back straight and his head up and spoke not a word.

  Just about then, I saw somebody in the bleachers behind our dugout: Phoebe Pharram, Mister JayMac’s great-niece.

  My first thought-pretending not to see her-was, Did she see my hit? Did she see me steal second? Did she see me slide into third like the great Mike “King” Kelly?

  Dumb. Phoebe was jail bait and blood kin to my boss. Why in Cupid’s name would she take a bead on me anyway? “Ichabod,” she’d called me-the high-pockets drip in an old American short story. Besides being a drip, I couldn’t talk. For God’s sake, my nickname was Dumbo.

  The game goose-egged on.

  But in the bottom of the eighth, Jumbo rambowed 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

  In the clubhouse, Mister JayMac gave Junior, Fadeaway, Dobbs, and me our own lockers. Mine’d 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’d 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,’ ” somebody said in 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 ne
ighborhood.

  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. As quickly as I could, I finished showering, dressed, and beat it.

  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’d 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. “Locking’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’ve rather she called me Ichabod. If she’d said it again, I’d’ve strangled 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 hellbender. Git it?”

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

  “Wait a minute, Boles!” she called out. “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’ve 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?”

  Hmmm. 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 it.

  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

  On 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 bo
mbing 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.