Brittle Innings Page 5

I try to dig in against the Otter Point pitcher anyway. He jams me with an inside curve. The ball rotates in like a chunk of packed ice. When I foul it, mostly to protect myself, my thumb shatters. Now I’m holding the bat with one finger and the heel of my hand. How can I drive the ball even if I make contact? The outlook isn’t brilliant. I seem to fall apart the piecemeal way icebergs do. D-D-Daddy! I yell.

  The Otter Point pitcher vanishes. So do the guys in Army-green parkas and gutta-percha boots behind him. Just like the Red Stix, gone. I stand at the plate, a perforated steel grid at the end of a steel runway. The runway looks like an ocean, an ocean of Marsden matting. It laps at the foothills of a squat rampart of mountains.

  An airplane appears in a notch of the mountains. Its wings rock in the fog as it drops toward the field. A P-40 Warhawk, like the planes flown by Chenault and the Flying Tigers, tiger jaws painted on its snout. It comes straight at me. Behind the P-40, lightning splits the sky. Zigzagging fiery snakes of lightning. A thunderclap bounces the runway’s long steel gridwork, the first thing besides the wind I’ve really heard. More thunderclaps. They back up on one another and blend into one flat murmuring BOOOOM! The landing strip buckles in waves. If the P-40 doesn’t plow me under, the mats will hurl me down and stamp me like a waffle. But I freeze where I stand. The Warhawk’s pilot doesn’t drop his landing gear or try to land. He blitzes toward me a few feet above the steel plates, ahead of the crest of their buckle. If he won’t pull up, his propellers will dice me for sure.

  Then I see the pilot in the cockpit. His face belongs to my father, Richard Oconostota Boles, but it’s a twisted version of the face I remember. His eyes bulge. His lips sneer. His nose lies flat, like a second-rate pug’s. Just before he yanks back on his joystick and goes roaring away toward the sea, he gives me a wink; a wink, for Christ’s sake.

  Then the last running wave of the Marsden grid drops toward me, clattering. I cross my arms over my head in a stupid attempt to keep the panels from crushing me. The background keen of the wind seems a fit sort of white noise to what’s happening to me. I still can’t tell if its keening scours my mouth or comes from it, but so what? It suits our loss. Also, my daddy winked.

  I jerked awake. The clicking of the rails echoed in my chest: clickety-clack, dickety-clack. Life meant more than baseball. The look on Daddy’s face rushing toward me in that P-40 was a look he’d really given me once, right down to the wink. Sitting there, I dredged up that old memory, the whole lousy business.

  When I was thirteen, early one A.M., Richard Oconostota Boles and the former Laurel Helvig shouted and scraped chairs around. Again. I’d have to remap the living room in my head to get to the John without stubbing a toe. The shouting never let up. The shouts smeared into an angry howl. Sofa legs scraped, chair legs tap-danced.

  Usually when my folks argued, at some point the noise level dropped off. A breather. Not this time. The din got so loud I wondered if they’d called in a few pals to help them argue. Then, atop the raised voices, I heard a storm of flaps and soft collisions-the noise you’d probably get if you set up a huge fan at one end of Sparrow Alley. Had Daddy released a bunch of bats in the front room?

  “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 seeing me would shame my parents into making up.

  But I walked into a holy mess. Daddy’d 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’d torn them out and thrown them all over. 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’d 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 strewn 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 two-bit 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’d 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

  That 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’d got off in Alabama, I’d’ve 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 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. I shook my head. “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. But 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’ve taken offense, but it never crossed my mind Darius’d 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’d 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, you figured, at least qualified as a frontier town, 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.