Brittle Innings Read online

Hoey applauded this catch. He liked seeing me robbed of a four-for-four outing on a ball I’d flat-out creamed.

  At shortstop, though, I did manage a perfect day. Despite his earlier brag, Mariani didn’t pitch well. Junior and I consistently got him out of jams by turning double plays or knocking down potential RBI rollers. On our double plays, we clicked like castenets.

  “For the fourth time today,” Milt Frye told us all, “your double-play combo was Boles-to-Heggie-to-Clerval, tying a team record set back in ’39.”

  Whistles, applause, foot-stomping. Mrs Atwill swung into an up-tempo version of “I Get a Kick Out of You.”

  “Danny Boles hails from Tenkiller, Oklahoma,” Frye said. Then, stretching it: “Boy’s got a few quarts of Cherokee blood, making him the first uprooted Injun to find his way back South on the Trail of Cheers.” Frye said Junior Heggie, a Georgia boy from Valdosta, deserved some applause too, and Hoey’s spit probably turned to battery acid in his mouth.

  After the game, a scratchy recording of the National Anthem blasted through the speakers. I stood on our dugout’s top step with my cap over my heart listening to the boozy chorusing of our remaining fans. Mister JayMac had to order the field lamps snuffed to get them to leave.

  In the clubhouse, Lamar Knowles told Junior and me if we kept it up, Boles-to-Heggie-to-Clerval would become as famous in the CVL as Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance was in the bigs. He wasn’t kissing tail either-he meant it. Junior’d taken his starting job, and Knowles could’ve moped or cried beginner’s luck, but he didn’t. My respect for him hitched right up the pole.

  After we’d showered, Mister JayMac came in and said the most important thing about the evening’s game wasn’t breaking in some jittery rookies or tying the old club double-play mark, but that for the first time since our season opener on May the 7th, the Hellbenders had a winning record.

  “Tonight, gentlemen, we stand nine and eight. That’s good: a winning percentage of about.530. But it won’t take this or any other pennant. Beat these loom-operating yokels one more time, tomorrow, and we’ll head down to Quitman on Wednesday to pluck the Mockingbirds three out of three. Opelika lost again tonight, and LaGrange is in another extra-innings brawl with Cottonton.

  “Keep scratching and clawing, gentlemen. By the end of August, we should be at the king-rooster top of the whole CVL cock pile.”

  Everybody slapped backs and hurrahed.

  Hoey said, “Who starts at short tomorrow?”

  That turned our jazz-band parade through an empty swimming pool into echoey silence.

  Mister JayMac said, “Given our performance in our past two games, who do you think should start tomorrow?”

  “Given my performance over the past sixteen games, I don’t think that’s a fair question. Sir.”

  “Perhaps we should vote on our lineups every day. Ask team members to judge the fairness of my decrees.”

  Hoey shut up. He could win this debate only with a pistol or a hypnotist’s help. Everyone but Evans, Sloan, and a couple of others wanted him to clam up. He’d turned our victory party into a nitpicky postmortem.

  “Good,” Mister JayMac said. “Curfew tonight’s one A.M. No, to hell with that. Be in bed by midnight and sleep late tomorrow.” He left.

  Oh yeah. In that night’s game, Jumbo didn’t have a hit, but he’d sucked up every chance at first smarter than a Hoover and played his monster heart out. So if Buck Hoey was ammonia under our noses, Jumbo was honeysuckle and mint.

  16

  That night-three or four in the morning-I had a powerful urge to pee. Kizzy’d set metal pitchers of lemonade all over the parlor after our game, and I’d drunk gallons of it. I’d sweated away a lot, but about a quart still ached for release, so I got up, tiptoed past Jumbo’s bed, and bumbled down the hall to the third-floor John. Weird thing: When I got there, light showed in the cracks around the door, the knob wouldn’t turn, and I could hear a rough drizzle on tin.

  It wasn’t Jumbo. He’d been in bed, a forbidding ridge of lumps and gulleys wheezing dreamily. Somebody from downstairs had come upstairs. Why? Had Sosebee organized a crap shoot up here? It teed me off. Where’d this Hellbender palooka get off hijacking our shower?

  My bladder was a pulled-pin bomblet. I needed relief. I didn’t have time for the jerk in the shower to finish up, towel down, and let me in. I’d flood the hall first. I looked for alternatives: open windows, flower pots, umbrella stands. But nothing presented itself. I had just one option, to creep downstairs and check out the bathroom on Dunnagin, Junior, and everybody else’s floor. So down I went. Each step on that narrow staircase threatened to trigger me. If I went off, I’d turn the steps into a waterfall and drown my teammates in their beds-everyone in McKissic House but Jumbo and the skinnydipper in our shower.

  I kept my bladder dammed and reached the second floor. Nobody was in its bathroom. Nobody. I dashed in and drained off my pain. My physical pain. It still irked me some unknown soul had stolen our bathroom. The one down here had four times the square footage and more soap and toilet paper. Why would another lodger sneak upstairs to ours?

  For privacy, maybe. Somebody on the second floor didn’t want spectators while he showered.

  I started back upstairs. As I groped my way up, somebody else groped down, and I froze at the bottom of the chute. The person coming down looked suspiciously-deliciously-like a woman. By the glow of an electric sconce on the wall, I could see that although the woman had some age on her-late thirties, early forties-she was a looker, maybe even something of a vamp.

  She had on a towel. Anyway, she sort of had it on.

  Obviously, she hadn’t expected to meet anyone. She didn’t scram, though. She cockedher head and smiled, her strawberry hair pulled back from her forehead and swept over her shoulder in a damp strand. She clutched that strand and kept her towel from slipping with the same hand, her left. I know it was her left because she had a wedding band on it.

  “Mr Boles-our brand-new whangdoodle shortstop.”

  My shorts covered more than a bathing suit would’ve, but I blushed. If I’d rubbed myself with horse liniment, I couldn’t have felt any hotter or glowed any brighter.

  “Relax, kiddo. I’ll let you by.” The woman laughed. “Two ships passing in a tight.” She pressed herself, towel and all, against the wall. “Climb on past, handsome.”

  I climbed with my head down. Shadows moved around us, but the amber sconce gave the woman’s shins, arms, and breastbone the gleam of knife blades. Head high, I’d’ve stared straight up her towel into the valley of the shadow. As I climbed, I quaked. Stand me, any day, in the batter’s box against a guy with a ninety-miles-per-hour speedball.

  On the very same step as the woman, I brushed her hand and something damp landed on my instep. Her towel had fallen. I reached down to get it. My brain had shut off. My bumpkimsh chivalric instincts had kicked in. When I straightened again, I was gazing on her nakedness, breathing the scented glycerin of Palmolive. I froze. I got dizzy. I felt like a statue on a revolving lazy Susan.

  “Thanks.” She didn’t hurry to rewrap. “Predate it.”

  I shut my eyes and dropped to my knees. In a darkness of my own concoction, I walked on them to the top of the stairs. When I got there and nerved up to look back down, the woman’d started moving again. The towel wrapped her from midback to just below the pretty half moons of her fanny. I peeked. When she reached the second floor and angled out of sight, I crept back down and peeked again. She sashayed to a room at the far end of the hall and tapped on the door. Curriden opened it and pulled her inside.

  Skinny Dobbs roomed with Curriden. Did this woman whore for a living? Had Curriden and Skinny hired her for an orgy? Did an early morning of sweaty sex qualify as an orgy if more than two folks got in on it? Hold it. Maybe Curriden and the woman were secretly married. Bingo. The woman’d worn a ring. She looked about the right age to be Curriden’s old lady. But if so, why didn’t they live in Cotton Creek like all the other married Hellbender couples?
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  As I watched, the woman came out of Curriden’s room wearing a polka-dot white-on-red dress and a big wheel-brimmed hat with ribbons. She had a straw handbag. She toted her high heels by their straps. She ran on her toes to the other staircase and tripped down its steps. She’d vamoosed before I could draw any conclusions except she was stunning and really knew how to wear clothes. (She also knew how not to wear them.) And she knew I played a “whangdoodle shortstop.” That gave me pause-not that she liked my play, but the phrase itself.

  I didn’t move. Mostly, I didn’t move. An old friend found the door of my shorts and poked his head through for a one-eyed look around. I was about to ease my old pal when Skinny Dobbs came up the main staircase shuffling like a drunk. He crossed to his and Curriden’s room. He didn’t have a hangover, he just hadn’t slept much. My old pal collapsed in wrinkles. On her way out, Curriden’s wife had probably told Dobbs, sleeping on a parlor sofa, he could slink back to his room-her and Reese’s conjugal visit was over.

  I crept back upstairs, with a side trip to the steamed-up John, and sacked out again. Didn’t get much shuteye, though. I kept seeing that lady jaybird-nude on the stairs.

  The CVL, I learned, had started playing Sunday games in its very first season. People called Dixie the Bible Belt. Even at midweek, street preachers in Highbridge could work up a powerful rant and a healthy amening crowd. Nobody opposed Sunday baseball, though. It took place after church and ranked right up there with God, flag, motherhood, and hunting.

  Fadeaway Ankers started the final game of our series against Lanett-on either two or three days’ rest, depending on whether you figured it like Fadeaway or Mister JayMac. During his warm-ups, he grinned and preened and threw screaming BBs, like he enjoyed being out there, which, I guess, he did. He wanted his first Linenmaker hitter bad as a starveling bluetick wants its next soup bone. And he struck him out.

  Mister JayMac had tapped me, Junior, and Skinny to start too. Unofficially, it was Rookies’ Day. Officially, it was War Bonds Day.

  In the outfield, groundskeepers had hung War Bonds banners over some of the biggest signboards, with the okay of the companies whose ads they hid:

  IT’S TEN MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT!

  WAKE UP, AMERICANS…

  YOUR COUNTRY’S MOST FATEFUL HOUR IS NEAR!

  DON’T BE TIGHTER WITH YOUR MONEY THAN

  WITH THE LIVES OF YOUR SONS!

  MONEY TO PAY FOR THE WAR, YES;

  BUT NONE AT ALL FOR FRILLS IN THE

  CIVIL OPERATIONS OF ANY OF OUR GOVERNING BODIES.

  THAT IS THE EDICT OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.

  Neither Skinny nor Curriden looked at full speed. Even though Curriden hadn’t gotten up for church, he could barely haul his ass around. That gal in the towel might as well’ve strapped an icebox to his back, he had so little vim. Skinny looked sharper; he could run and throw. Sometimes, though, he stopped dead and opened his eyes so wide he seemed to be trying to breathe through his eye balls.

  “What ails you two?” Mister JayMac asked after our second at bat. “Yall stay up last night herding woolyboogers? I swan, Mr Curriden, with some rouge on your cheeks, you’d look like a dead man.” He put Hoey at third for Curriden and Evans into right for Skinny.

  When he did, Hoey said, “Why don’t you move Dumbo over to third and let me pick up where I left off Friday? Sir.”

  Mister JayMac just looked at him, his eyes as dead blue as an old lady’s hair rinse. From then on, though, Hoey played next to me at Curriden’s spot, never making an error. None of the right-handed Linenmakers could pull Fadeaway’s scroogie, and none of their lefties ever hit to third.

  The game was a walkover. I rapped my first extra-base hit, a triple off the EDICT OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE banner, and a single too. Every other Hellbender, Hoey and Evans excepted, got good wood too, and when Fadeaway’d finished pitching the sixth, Mister JayMac lifted him for Sosebee.

  “That’s plumb stupid!” Fadeaway shouted in the dugout when he realized what’d happened. “I got a three-hitter going!”

  “Relax, Mr Ankers,” Mister JayMac said. “All you can do if you stay in is lose it.”

  “My daddy taught me to finish what I start.”

  Parris said, “He shoulda taught you a little respect for-”

  Mister JayMac made a hush-up gesture at Parris. “You like to finish what you start, Mr Ankers?”

  “Damn right!”

  “Then I want you to know you started six innings. You’ve jes finished em. A helluva fine job you did for us too, start to finish.”

  Fadeaway looked confused, a bird dog thrown off the scent. Then Mister JayMac’s “reasoning” sunk in, and he bought it, the whole bolt. He strolled along the bench and sat down next to Haystack with a hambone-licking smirk on his face.

  “You won’t lose,” Haystack said. “You’ll either win or get a no-decision if Sosebee fucks up. You’re sitting pretty.”

  “I don’t sit no other way,” Fadeaway said.

  Sosebee’s stuff didn’t sizzle, but the Linenmakers couldn’t hit a raindrop in a south Georgia thunderstorm. At game’s end, the scoreboard read 13-0. The crowd whooped so loud we could hardly hear the recording of the National Anthem.

  Afterwards, Mister JayMac cornered me in the dugout. “You youngsters’ve come along jes fine, Mr Boles. My sister Tulipa is a bred-in-the-bone baseball gal, but she never scouted me a kid worth leftover pot liquor till she stumbled on you. You’re hitting.750 after two games, and you play short as good as anybody, including Ligonier Hoey.” Ligonier was Buck Hoey’s real first name-he came from a town in Pennsylvania called Ligonier. So he went by Buck.

  “Grab a shower and meet me under the grandstand in your street togs,” Mister JayMac said. “Dinner’s on me tonight.”

  Why not Fadeaway, Junior, and Skinny too? I thought. Why not Jumbo, for that matter? He’d had another long home run and another errorless day at first. Did proving the shrewdness of Miss Tulipa’s judgment entitle you to dine every Sunday evening with the boss?

  I met Mister JayMac in the concessions area. He stood next to Homer’s tank, talking to two people-females?-half-hidden by girder shadows. One of the females, I saw, was Phoebe. The other had to be her mama, the daughter of Mister JayMac’s dead brother. Made sense, I guess, but my heart double-clutched-I hadn’t seen Phoebe at any of our recent games-and my hands turned cold as ice tongs.

  “Ah, Mr Boles!” Mister JayMac shouted. “Got some ladies here I’d like you to meet!”

  I sauntered over. Phoebe was Phoebe, of course-but tonight she had on a dress instead of blue jeans, and a pair of tiny gold earrings instead of one gaudy exploded pearl. In her open-toed heels and her wide-brimmed straw hat, she looked like a miniature woman. Her mother… well, I reddened. My eyes glanced down to flit over the candy wrappers and dirty popcorn around the base of the aquarium.

  “Mrs Luther Pharram, better known around here as LaRaina, and her lovely daughter Phoebe,” Mister JayMac said. “Ladies, Mr Daniel Boles-Mr Boles, Mrs Pharram and Phoebe.”

  Not too long ago, LaRaina Pharram and I’d bumped into each other between the second and third floors at McKissic House, only she’d worn a towel and I’d worn shorts and an all-over blush. My blush’d come back, prickly as radioactive shellac. Miss LaRaina, despite the damage she’d wreaked on Curriden and Skinny, looked bright-eyed and amused. Every time I glanced up, she gave me a batted eyelash-mockery-and a smile halfway between a grin and a pout.

  We have a secret, her grin-pout said. Aren’t you glad you can’t tell my uncle? “Sorry, Uncle JayMac,” LaRaina Pharram said aloud, “but I can’t call this handsome fella Mr Boles.”

  Handsome! More mockery. I wanted not to like this woman-she had a husband overseas, she’d spent the night playing slip-skins with a ballplayer, she’d gotten a big kick out of my embarrassment, and now she was making mock of me-but I still felt more or less kindly toward her.

  Mister JayMac said Miss LaRaina could call me Daniel, if she liked, but he�
�d stick to Mr Boles.

  “My, such a fuddy-duddy,” Miss LaRaina said.

  Phoebe’d picked up on my jitters, and my behavior struck her as rude or immature. Her pretty lips seemed to’ve wrapped themselves around a sour lemon drop.

  “So how’s Miss Giselle?” she suddenly piped, then went back to sucking her make-believe candy.

  “Fine,” Mister JayMac said. “Now. Where would you gals advise taking our hero for a victory supper?”

  “Ast him where he’d like to go,” Phoebe said.

  Mister JayMac said, “But he’s ignorant of his choices.”

  “Ast him what he’d like to eat,” Phoebe said. “American, Eye-talian, Chinese.”

  Mister JayMac lifted an eyebrow at me. At that moment, I had all the appetite of a spooked cat. I was trying to adjust to Miss LaRaina’s presence and cooling down from nine innings of sticky twilight baseball.

  “The Live Oak Tea Room at the Oglethorpe,” Miss LaRaina suggested.

  Phoebe looked at me. “Thass a nice place.”

  “The Linenmakers booked rooms at the Oglethorpe,” Mister JayMac said. “The tea room’s going to swarm with em.”

  Miss LaRaina smiled at her uncle. “I know.”

  Mister JayMac’s jaw tightened. “Have a care,” he said. “For decency. For your daughter.”

  “Phoebe’s not likely to put the mash on a Linenmaker. She hates ballplayers.”

  “Not awluvem,” Phoebe said.

  You could’ve fooled me. The pinched V between her eyebrows and the pucker of her mouth didn’t say fondness, not in any language I knew.

  “The Oglethorpe Tea Room is out,” Mister JayMac said.

  “Corporal John’s over on Penticuff Strip?” Miss LaRaina said. “It’s got an attractive clientele.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “A joke. It’s closed today anyway. Sunday sure limits a body’s choices here in Highbridge.”

  Mister JayMac herded us into the parking lot, where Darius had pulled the Caddy as close as he could to the main gate, given the fans still about. Darkness’d just begun to settle, and several groups of people smoked and gabbed in the parking lot. Dance music drifted from a radio through an open car window. Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller.