Brittle Innings Read online

  Kenny didn’t look like Kenny. He looked like… I don’t know, the victim of a thousand wasp stings. Or a pit-bull attack. He had two puffy black eyes (actually, more red and purple than black), an out-of-kilter nose, and a set of lips more like an albino channel cat’s. Kenny’s looks scared and confused me. Away from his house, I started to think I hadn’t seen Kenny at all. Instead, I’d called on something strange, ugly, and maybe a quarter dead planted in the Wards’ house by UFO people. I didn’t go again. Even when Kenny got over his injuries and began looking like the buck-toothed kid I’d once known, a weirdness between us-disgust on his part, shame on mine-kept us from getting friendly again.

  Jumbo made me feel the way Kenny, with his nose whacked askew and his eyes in bruised pouches, had made me feel.

  “Last night,” Jumbo said, “I was, ah, less than friendly.”

  Uh-uh. I pointed at myself, meaning he’d behaved more or less okay but I’d acted like a total jerk.

  A lie.

  Because he’d acted at least as jerky as I had, not speaking more than three sentences all evening and dividing his digs the way small-town Suthren doctors once split their waiting rooms into a half for coloreds and a half for whites.

  “I hung that”-Jumbo nodded at the mat rucked up against one wall-”assuming you’d prefer a little privacy to no barrier at all.” Jumbo grimaced. He made a face. And he could make a face, a spasm of cheek and forehead muscles.

  “Forgive. I seldom talk. U. S. slang confounds me. All my speech originates in the written word.” He gestured at his book shelves. “My tastes run to philosophy, science, religion, medicine, Victorian novels, and current events. And my tastes inevitably influence my diction.”

  Wow. An attack-for Jumbo, anyway-of verbal diarrhea. It embarrassed him. He rubbed his hands like a man trying to coax blood into frost-bitten fingertips.

  “To you, the mat must have appeared a method of exclusion, not a courtesy.”

  I stayed mute, of course.

  “If you want privacy, pull the mat out from the wall. If not, leave it.” He looked me in the eye. “At certain points, whatever your state of mind, I’ll draw the mat. Do not view my doing so as a sign of pique or ill favor. I sometimes require solitude.”

  I nodded. Okay. Understood.

  “And you have my standing consent to draw the mat whenever you wish. Would you care to do so now?”

  Not really. Outside of Dunnagin’s counsel in the gazebo, no other talk I’d had in Georgia had lasted so long or promised so much. On the other hand, I couldn’t add much to it. So I started toward my cot again, and Jumbo halted me again.

  “You’ve lost a button,” he said. “Give me your shirt.”

  I undid the buttons I had, gave him my shirt, and sat down on my cot. Jumbo took a needle, thread, and a carved ivory button box from one of his shelves and sewed on the new button in five minutes. You’d’ve thought his sausage-size fingers would’ve made the task hard for him, but he did it like a pro, quick and neat.

  “Here,” he said, holding up the shirt. It danced like a flag in the breeze from his fan, dropped like a windsock on a calm morning, then danced again. Fetching my shirt, I noticed the grooves, calluses, dents, and scars in the ends of Jumbo’s fingers. The skin looked dead at the tips, white or yellowish, with whorls of brown or feverish pink on their inner pads. The clay-and-persimmon smell came off him in ripples. Near to, his eyes were like peeled orange slices with the membranes still on. It was my lost friend Kenny Ward all over again.

  On the floor by Jumbo’s headboard sat a cardboard box full of old-but not too dirty-baseballs. Most used balls in those days ended up in the servicemen’s Baseball Equipment Fund so the men at military posts here and overseas could play ball for training purposes or to relax. Even I knew that. The Baseball Equipment Fund was a big patriotic deal. So this box of balls struck me as suspiciously like hoarding. What did Jumbo plan to do with them? The team had all the baseballs it needed, and none of this battered bunch looked fit to plump out a scarecrow with, much less to toss or fungo around.

  Jumbo reached down and grabbed a ball. He inserted his fingernails into its split seam and peeled its more or less glossy cover off. He dropped its balata core back into the box and spread the leather cover open on his knee. He rubbed the cover with his thumb, as if to work out its only visible stain and make it spotless again, then flip-flopped the spread cover and rubbed its other side.

  “They lived once,” he said. “Think of it-these skins, once the hides of tall and powerful animals.” He stopped rubbing and laid the split jacket on top of the other baseballs in the box, the way you or I would return a silver dollar to a display of rare coins.

  That chilled me. I slipped my shirt on.

  Jumbo said, “May I call you Daniel rather than Mr Boles?”

  I hesitated a second before nodding.

  “Then you may call me-you may think of me-as Henry. Two men lodging together in such intimacy shouldn’t have to stand on oppressive formalities.”

  I figured just the opposite, but what could I do? Jumbo had some age on me and deserved a little respect. He stuck out his hand to seal our bargain. I took it with as much zeal as I’d grab a hot wire.

  “Daniel, know me from henceforth as Henry.” His hand felt cold and dry, spongy and hard-like sliding your palm into the grip of a solid-rubber statue.

  Henry didn’t strike me as a suitable name for a power-hitting ballplayer. Hank did, like in Hank Greenberg, but Jumbo hadn’t asked me to call him Hank.

  “A moment yet. I have a small present for you, Daniel.” From under his pillow, he took two notebooks and a handful of pencils snugged together with a rubber band. One notebook you could’ve used in school, a fat thing the size of a Leo Tolstoy novel. The other, a little bigger than a deck of cards, you could carry around in a pocket. One of the pencils, already sharpened, had a pocket clip on it. Jumbo dumped this caboodle into my hands.

  “Should you wish to converse with me,” he said, “simply write in the smaller notebook, tear out that page, and hand it over. I will respond as its substance dictates.”

  I hammocked Jumbo’s gifts in my shirt tail and duck-walked to my cot, where I spilled them all out.

  “The larger notebook you may use as a journal,” Jumbo said, “chronicling your exploits throughout the remainder of the season.”

  Hey, I’d graduated. Why would I want to scribble rehashes of ballgames in a notebook? It was the thought that counted, I guessed, but I’d’ve been happier with a candy bar or a risque pulp magazine. In the next moment, though, I started thinking I might enjoy keeping a record of my days in Highbridge. I didn’t plan to live in Georgia, after all, and one day I might like having a memory token of my minor league career here.

  Jumbo, however spooky his looks or weird-sounding his talk, had begun to treat me like a roomy, not just a pestiferous kid Mister JayMac’d dumped on him. Probably, my play at McKissic Field had turned him around. What did that say for his scale of values? If I’d played lousy, would he’ve gone on treating me like a cockroach? But, hundreds of miles from Tenkiller, I appreciated his turnaround, whatever’d caused it.

  I fell asleep in my clothes, with my notebooks and pencils nearby and Jumbo reading Wendell L. Willkie’s One World.

  When I woke up, darkness everywhere.

  Jumbo had pulled his woven-grass mat into place between us. I could smell it. I could also smell the gritty perfume of the hydrangeas in their bronze vase. I undressed and lay down again. Jumbo’s snores wheezed above the whirr of the fan, and our grass divider swayed.

  15

  Mister JayMac called our first Friday home game against Lanett Scrap Metal Collection Drive Night. Every kid under eighteen who brought a pound of scrap metal-a shovel blade, a bag of spent cartridges, a hoard of old soup cans-got in free. Ushers collected the scrap, and businessmen-volunteers turned it over to the War Production Board.

  Anyway, the stands rocked, a lot of the crowd teenagers or soldiers from
Camp Penticuff. It being wartime, GIs got in for half price, paying fifty cents for baseline seats and watching the skirts closer than they did the game. Milt Frye, the PA announcer, told us attendance stood at over three thousand, a better than decent turnout even if beaucoups of our admissions had “paid” for their seats with scrap metal.

  CVL teams staged most games on weekends. Sometimes you’d have a series start on Thursday or Wednesday evening, but you could always count on open Mondays and Tuesdays, as travel days or as make-up days for rainouts.

  In the clubhouse, Mister JayMac announced his starting lineup. Not a rookie in it. Junior, Skinny, and I would ride the bench until somebody got hurt or one of us was needed for strategic reasons. Fadeaway wouldn’t play at all-Mister JayMac planned to start him on Sunday.

  “That’s just two days’ rest,” Fadeaway said.

  Everybody gaped like he’d just decided not to join the bucket brigade at an orphanage fire.

  “Way I figure it, it’s three,” Mister JayMac said. “Hell, son, you’re fifteen, aren’t you?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Then your recovery time for both pitching and screwing’s bout as fast as it’ll ever be, and I didn’t recruit you to screw. You gonna pitch when I ask you to or jes when you feel like it?”

  “When you ast me to.”

  “Good,” Mister JayMac said. “Stop pouting.”

  Twilight crept over the field. The electric pole lights came on, bright as day. That summer, no one worried about a Nazi U-boat swimming up the Chattahoochee to knock out a riverside shipyard or a lone supply barge. Under the lights, McKissic Field looked like a wonderland: green grass, shiny signs, the gauzy ghosts of cigar and cigarette smoke curling everywhere. Even the tiresome smell of burnt peanuts couldn’t douse my wonder. When Mrs Harry Atwill, the organist, played “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” I got shivers. It seemed the sky would split open, like a milkweed pod, and an air force of seraphim drift down to mingle with the crowd like Mardi Gras partiers.

  Creighton Nutter pitched that night, and if he hadn’t had his stuff, Highbridge would’ve lost. Our regulars played like cripples. They missed signs, booted grounders, misplayed easy flies, overthrew cutoff men, and so on. In the fourth inning, our fans began to catcall us. They singled out Trapdoor Evans for abuse after he turned a basket catch into a thump to the groin that left him writhing on the grass. Charlie Snow dashed over from center to pick up the ball and throw it in.

  “Ball-less Evans!” a row of soldiers chanted. “Ball-less Evans!”

  Over the PA system, Milt Frye said, “Steady now, folks. Your management has great regard for our military, but we won’t tolerate smut from any quarter.”

  “Ball-less, ball-less, ball-less Evans!” the GIs chanted. Frye’s scolding didn’t faze them a bit, and when he barked, “Those persisting in immature hooliganism, even men in uniform, will be removed,” a whole row of them turned towards the press box and shot it a rippling sequence of birds that would’ve won a drill competition at Camp Penticuff. But, truth to tell, no spectacle was grosser that night than our Hellbender regulars. Even folks with kids had more kindly feelings for the GIs than they did for our stumblebums.

  Going into our final at bat, after playing like blind men, we were down just one run. Nutter’d kept us in it, pitching smart and refusing to rattle even when his fielders performed like dancing hippos. The shock of the night-a blow to Mister JayMac’s strategy of letting us humiliate ourselves at home-came when we somehow won the game, three to two.

  It wasn’t pretty. Or just. But so what?

  The win put us at eight-and-eight on the season. Opelika, Eufaula, and Cottonton lost that same night-to Quitman, Marble Springs, and LaGrange respectively-so we picked up a full game on both the Orphans and the Mudcats and broke a fourth-place tie with the Boll Weevils. But it still teed me Mister JayMac had held us rookies out, especially with his starters sucking wind like they had.

  “What would our starters have to do to pit the boss to give us new boys a chanst?” Junior asked Skinny Dobbs.

  “Lose,” Skinny said. “Them buggers got to lose.”

  Actually, Skinny’d got that wrong. We played our next game against Lanett at five on Saturday afternoon. The league’s schedule makers had decreed a number of twilight weekend games, to go on without lights. A nagging drought’d dogged the South for years, crimping its ability to make electric power. Day and twilight games eased demand. That was good. War plants-shipyards, torpedo factories, assembly lines-had to run around the clock. You could squeeze a whole game in between five and sunset, if you didn’t go to extra innings.

  Anyway, just before we dressed out for the second game in the Lanett series, Darius came into the locker room and read the lineup to us:

  “Batting first, playing shortstop, Danl Boles…” He went on from there, but the only other items to get my interest came in the seventh and eighth spots, where Junior and Skinny would bat, Junior playing second base and Skinny taking over from Trapdoor Evans in right.

  “Is this a joke?” Buck Hoey asked Darius. “I hit one for three last night. Nobody else did better.”

  “Mr Curriden did,” Darius said. “If you hadn’t walked up his backside on that pop-up, he mighta done even better. That knot on yo fohead go down yet?”

  “Easy, Darius,” Hoey said. “You’re treading thin ice.”

  Darius rubbed his oxford’s toe across the concrete floor. “Aint no ice in here atall. Was, you could put it on that knot you got.”

  “Read it again,” Junior said.

  So Darius read the afternoon’s starting lineup again. My body began to hum, like a tuning fork. Saturday, June 5th, 1943. Soon, I’d actually start at short on a pro ball club.

  “I can’t believe Mister JayMac wants me on the bench,” Hoey said. “I’ve got a nine-game hitting streak going.”

  Darius popped the lineup card with his knuckles. “Nothing here say the change got to last fo awways, Mr Hoey.”

  That drilled a nerve with me. If I booted a chance, or fanned with runners in scoring position, Hoey’d most likely have his job back tomorrow.

  “So whatn hell we sposed to do!” Evans asked Darius.

  “How bout rest?” Darius said. “Seems logical to me.”

  “The hell with that,” Hoey said.

  “Well, capn, Mister JayMac wants you to coach first.”

  Vito Mariani was scheduled to pitch. “Buck up, Buck. I’ll set em down so fast you won’t have enough bench time to rub the nap off your pants.”

  Darius left. Hoey stared at the floor. Knowles, the deposed second baseman, went over to Junior and put a hand on his shoulder.

  “Tear em up, kid,” he said.

  The game wasn’t a laugher, but the Linenmakers never really got close either. Kitchen Fats for Victory Night followed Friday’s Scrap Metal Collection Night, and although nobody got in free for bringing in hamburger grease or bacon drippings, Milt Frye and three usherettes saw to it every fan who turned in a can of solidified fat got his or her name put in a drum for a drawing during the seventh-inning stretch. Top prize was a weekend for two in Atlanta, with a room at the Ponce de Leon Hotel. Anyway, the drawing seemed to mean as much to the civilians in the stands as the ball game did.

  You could smell the rancid kitchen fats everyone’d brought in. The idea was that munitions factories would melt down the drippings to extract their glycerin, then use it to make bombs or howitzer shells. Kitchen Fats for Victory. After the war, though, I heard we’d used it to make soap. Dirty dogfaces have low morale, and the services needed our kitchen fats for soap. But asking civilians to turn in fats for soap didn’t sound romantic. Or sanitary. So the government told the public our used grease would go to make devices for blowing people up, and wham! the home front got with the program.

  Anyway, I went three for four. A squib behind second base was my first safe bingle in money ball. A row of GIs gave me a standing O-out of sheer relief the Hellbenders wouldn’t stink worse than th
e stadium did, like we had last night. They loved it I could put wood on the ball.

  Hoey, coaching first, sauntered over to me as I returned to the bag after making my turn. The center fielder’d just faked a throw behind me, a threat I hadn’t much credited.

  “Don’t let the cheers go to your head. Those guys’d cheer a little old lady tripping on a popcorn box.”

  I watched Charlie Snow, a super hitter, settle in and tap his spikes with a Louisville Slugger he’d lathed into the shape of a skinny champagne bottle.

  “Me, I’d be ashamed to reach base with a dying gull like the one you goofy-bunted out there,” Hoey said.

  I shrugged. My batting average was a perfect thousand-at least for now.

  “Watch O’Connor’s pick-off move. Get tagged out here and you might as well’ve gone down swinging.”

  “Back in the coach’s box,” the umpire Happy Polidori told Hoey, “and leave the poor kid be.”

  “Up yours, Polidori. It’s my job to give advice to kids with marshmallows for brains.”

  “Move it,” Polidori said. “Your body, not your mouth.”

  With no go-ahead from anyone, I stole second on O’Connor’s first pitch. The GIs came to their feet, whooping. Lanett’s catcher didn’t even try to throw me out. I lifted a hand to Hoey-to show him I hadn’t hurt myself, not to mock him-but he kicked up a cloud of red dirt, p.o.’d.

  Snow hit a long single to right. I came home. The whole rest of the game went like that. We ended up winning eight to three-no laugher, as I say, but no knuckle-whitener either. My other two hits were a bunt toward first and a high bounder off the pitcher’s rubber. Hoey badmouthed them too, calling them luck, saying the next time I went to church I should drop a C-note in the plate. It almost, not quite, relieved me when the Linenmaker right fielder ran down my longest clout of the day and webbed it against the Belk-Gallant sign for the game’s second-to-last out.