And then she stood up, walked around her desk, took my face in her young hands, and kissed me on the forehead. When she hugged me, the side of my face wedged directly into her cleavage. My classmates let out an “ooh” in a way none of us could perform in music class. I blushed, almost cried, and then the bell rang.
On my way out of school that day I passed Mr. Uldrick’s office. My teacher sat across from him, her face turned away. I stood there and watched the principal wave his arms. Then he leaned back in his chair and spread his feet on the desk. Miss Dupre stood up, pointed at him, then looked at me standing by the door.
Years later I would say that she blew a kiss, mouthed “Thank you,” and waved to me in a manner that meant for me to get away and keep going.
EMBARRASSMENT
Every country boy on our Little League team could hit that knuckleball during practice. We had no choice. Coach D. R. Pope and both of his assistants had worked in the cotton mill, and all three of them had undergone tragic digit loss due to spinning frames, looms, and/or pneumatic presses of one sort or the other. D. R. pitched batting practice most of the time with his right hand, which had only a thumb and a little finger. So the baseball always lolled toward the plate without as much as one rotation between his grasp and the Louisville Slugger. Our own pitcher during games—a farm boy named Yancey Allison—must’ve thought that the knuckleball was some kind of Forty-Five, South Carolina, miracle, for he’d perfected it, too. Yancey let his nails grow out an inch beyond his fingertips, he dug them into the ball’s seams, and even with the arm movement of a catapult, the ball crossed the plate at maybe twenty miles an hour. Our foes regularly hit Yancey’s pitches a good hundred feet past the outfield fences. Meanwhile, all the rest of us stood stock-still when the opponents’ pitchers threw fastballs, sliders, changeups, and curves in our direction. I wasn’t the only player to take a mighty swing after the ball reached the catcher’s mitt and he threw back to his pitcher. One time I actually got two strikes called on me by the umpire because I stood there and watched for strike one, then fouled off a ball as the catcher threw back and I finally swung.
Let me make it clear that the grounds on which we played needed regular tending before each game, for hunters would steal onto the field at night, regardless of legal hunting season, and deposit salt blocks and mounds of sweet corn to attract deer. If anyone decided to sleep in the bleachers overnight, like my friend Compton Lane and I did once, he’d be awoken an hour before dawn by camouflaged men sporting anything from .410 shotguns to thirty-aught-sixes. D.R. and his assistant coaches sent us out like boys with metal detectors to scour the rye grass between the infield and the cheap outfield signs advertising 45 OFFICE SUPPLY, 45 EXTERMINATION, 45 FLORISTS, 45 LUMBER, 45 GRAVEL AND AS PHALT, 45 MEN’S WEAR, 45 DEBS AND BRIDES, 45 JEANS, the FORTY-FIVE PLATTER newspaper, 45 TRASH PICK-UP, 45 RECORDS, 45 MODERN BARBERS (who sponsored our Little League team, the Flattops), SUNKEN GARDENS LOUNGE (which used to sponsor our team before Mr. Red Edwards decided he couldn’t afford a losing team’s destruction of his reputation), and RUFUS PRICE’S GOAT WAGON store. We took wheelbarrows out with us while the opposing team got to stretch, run wind sprints, take infield practice, and get ready to raise their collective batting averages.
“Just do the best you can, Mendal,” my father always said as we pulled into the parking lot of the Forty-Five rec center. “I’ll talk to D. R. and see if we can’t get you playing first base, or left field.” More than once he’d said something about how Bennie Frewer didn’t really have head lice, and that it was okay for us to touch the baseball after Bennie threw it in from right field on those odd occasions when somebody from the other team didn’t hit the ball over the fence and Bennie would gather it up and throw it to first or second base.
“I don’t like being catcher,” I said to my dad. “I’m a faster runner than anyone else. Why’s D. R. have me be Yancey’s catcher? A slow fat guy usually plays catcher. I’ve seen it on TV.” Me, I crouched every game, waiting for Yancey to throw one of his knuckleballs. I waved my arm back and forth like a windshield wiper in hopes of only touching the ball coming my way. A blind boy could’ve caught for Yancey just as well.
My father never answered. Years later, I would think that for some reason he knew it would be best for me to hear what went on in the stands, right behind me, as I crouched, eyes closed, while the slow projectiles came my way.
“Hey, Mendal, you might want to get two catcher’s masks,” Coach D.R. Pope said more than once. “Find a way to fashion one over your privates.”
“Yessir,” I always squeaked out. D. R. held up his right hand with that thumb and little finger poked out like the biggest peace sign ever, like a big-time Texas Longhorns fan, like a deaf man saying he loved me, like—I would learn later—a man trying to approximate the length of his pecker.
“We don’t want to set no records as to the worst team in Little League baseball, Mendal. You a smart boy. Can’t you not figure out nothing to say back there to avert the batter none?”
I’d think, This is some kind of double- or triple- or quadruple-negative trick on me. And then I’d crouch, and close my eyes, and smile with glee about every tenth time, when I’d actually catch a ball thrown by Yancey that didn’t either get thrown in the dirt or smacked straight over the 45 FEED AND SEED COMPANY sign in center field.
I sat in front of the umpire two days a week for an entire summer and listened to him bark “Ball!” unless our opponent’s batter blasted a pitch out of the park. A lot of times I missed catching it completely, of course, and the umpire’s shin stopped the ball. He said often, “Goddamn you, Dawes, I’mo send your daddy my doctor’s bill for bruises.”
And I always said, “A man with his leg stuck hard on the ground isn’t going to go far in life,” like my father told me to say, which wasn’t the smartest thing, of course. Or I thought, A man with his leg stuck hard on the ground will never learn how to fly no matter how hard he flaps his arms. Invariably the umpire was one who’d worked at the cotton mill at one time or another and was missing digits, too.
COACH D. R. POPE wouldn’t get his wish in regard to the team not setting a losing-streak record. Our team had lost all of its games for the three years before I could play and went on to lose until D. R. quit the mill and moved down to Myrtle Beach less than a year later. He got a job, I found out, as the maître d’ at a fancy shellfish restaurant in Murrells Inlet. He had always talked about his dreams and goals and ambitions after we lost games by enormous margins, but I thought he talked big like that so that we would play harder the next game, maybe win, and not chance losing him for a coach who popped his players’ hamstrings after every strikeout or error.
“My wife’s cousin Sandy married into a rich family down there at the beach. They made they money paving driveways with seashells, you know. And then they thought, Hey, why don’t we open up a big old restaurant, and we can get our clam and oyster and scallop shells for free every night? So that’s what they done. And Sandy’s husband, Claude—he’s no account, and the family just flat-out give him his place to manage called Sandy Claude’s—he said I’d be perfect for greeting eaters, when the time was right.”
D. R. Pope told me his little story after everyone else left the players’ bench, while I tried to stuff my mask, glove, shin guards, and chest protector into an old duffel bag.
“You know what’s keeping him from going down to that restaurant today?” my father asked me as we drove home maybe midway through the 1968 season. This was a time before some touchy-feely psychologist figured out that losing kids would feel better about themselves if a game plain ended when one team was behind by ten runs at the end of the third inning or whenever. We’d lost this particular massacre 49-0. I remember only because their coach kept yelling at D. R., “Hey, we done scored seven touchdowns and every extra point after!”
To my father I said, “Coach doesn’t want to go on to Myrtle Beach until we finally win a game, I guess.”
My fathe
r honked the horn at nothing and laughed. “He’d never get to go to Myrtle Beach if he waited for that.” He laughed and laughed. “That’s a good one, Mendal.”
I said, “I ain’t trying to be funny and you know it. Why’s he waiting, then?”
My father pulled into the Dixie Drive-In so we could get milkshakes. “The mill pays those boys a thousand dollars for every missing digit. It’s something like five thousand dollars for an arm from the elbow down. Times get tough, a man like D. R. Pope just grits his teeth and sticks his arm in a machine. I’m thinking that his cousin-in-law wants D. R. to go ahead and lose the matching fingers on his left hand so he’ll look more like a lobster. Or crab. Or any of those other things with pincers. Like a scorpion. And I bet D. R. needs three more thousand dollars in order to make the move, you know. If he puts his other three grand in a bank account, that’s a pretty nice little jump start.”
I ordered a plain vanilla when the carhop woman showed up. I always got plain vanilla. My father ordered weird things, like strawberry with a glob of peanut butter whisked through it, but I think he just did this in order to shock people. “He doesn’t put his hand in any of those spinning frames,” I said. “Anybody that crazy doesn’t care about coaching baseball.”
My father turned the radio dial to some man singing opera. “Anybody that crazy doesn’t want to hang out around kids who can’t hit a baseball. Ask him. Or ask those other two coaches helping out. You make a buck-sixty an hour after a number of years and feel your lungs turning inside out, you’ll about do anything to move away. If you’re smart. D. R. Pope’s a smart man, son. His daddy was a smart man. Why you think he’s named D. R.? It’s so when he got a checking account it looked like ‘Dr. Pope.’ People treat him with respect when he writes out a check. Dr. Pope. You can’t be a surgeon with all those missing fingers, of course. But you can be a dermatologist. Or an English professor.”
My father went on to list a number of doctors, from allergists to zoologists. He didn’t say, “Gynecologist.” The carhop returned with our extra-large milkshakes and said, “I ain’t never heard no one order a strawberry peanut butter milkshake. What’s it taste like?”
My father pulled out his straw, turned it toward the woman, and said, “Stick this in your mouth and give me your opinion.”
I didn’t pay much attention to what was going on over on that side of the Buick. I sucked.
“Hey, did you ever work over at Forty-Five Cotton?” my father asked the carhop. She wore a paper hat.
“Both my parents do. I made a pact with myself, though. I said I wanted to get out of high school and do better for myself. My momma and daddy never got a tip on their jobs.”
My father nodded. He said, “What’s your name?”
“Emmie Gunnells.” She pointed at a name tag half-hidden beneath her collar.
“Emmie Gunnells, I want you to help my boy and me with a little argument we’re having. Did your folks ever have any tough times financially? I’m talking, like, back when gasoline prices went up to thirty-five cents a gallon?”
Emmie leaned down and looked at me closer. She said, “Y’all ain’t union organizers are you? We’ve already had the union organizers over to the house.”
I shook my head. My face felt like an hourglass, that’s how thick the vanilla milkshake was. My father said, “Hell no, we ain’t no organizers. I’m only trying to prove a point with Mendal here.”
“I don’t know,” Emmie Gunnells said.
My father said, “How many fingers has your father lost at this point in time?”
Emmie Gunnells slapped her hip with the tray she was holding. “Law!” she said. “How’d you know?” She stooped back down to look at me. “Y’all are from the fair, I bet. Y’all are those people who can guess ages and weights and family trees.”
My father said, “How many?”
Emmie Gunnells said, “He’s got six left. It’s enough for him to drive his Cadillac.”
SEEING AS THERE was little else to do in Forty-Five, everyone came out to the games. If a mastermind thief ever traveled through, he could’ve broken in to about every house in the entire town on early-dusk nights. And he might’ve gotten gold watches and pearl earrings from those doffers and weavers who’d jammed their hands into machines. Here’s what I heard from behind the plate every game: “Y’all are an embarrassment to Forty-Five”; “Hey, Bennie Frewer, see if you can get knocked in the head with the ball so no one will touch it and you can run around the diamond”; “Nice reflexes, boy. Remind me not to let you in on my driver’s ed class in six years”; “You boys must all think you’re famous, standing there like statues”; “I thought y’all’ses were the Flattops, not the Heart Stops.”
I couldn’t not listen to what went on. I mean, I was prepared to hear “Ball!” four times in a row from the umpire, or “Hotdamn, I hope NASA ain’t sent up a mission—that ball might hit one them astronauts up there,” when Yancey Allison offered up a slow melon with no movement on it.
But I never was prepared to hear Compton Lane’s father say something like, “This is going to be a long game. Do y’all have anything back there that’s got arsenic in it?” from the concession stand. Midway through the season I heard my own father’s voice. He tried to whisper, but I could tell that he had sat down next to Emmie Gunnells. “I thought me up another concoction,” he said. “Banana and liver pudding. You know what liver pudding does for a man, don’t you? And, hey, I thought of another concoction. You and me.”
The concession stand was owned and operated by Danny Clements’s father, and for some reason it occurred to me that he must’ve been in cahoots with D. R. Pope. Games lasted sometimes five hours, and probably each sad, sunburned, tired spectator averaged a Coke an hour, a couple hot dogs, maybe some potato chips. These were brown-bagging days, too, so every player’s father might’ve put away two Cokes an hour to go with his Old Crow or Rebel Yell or Southern Comfort. Forgetful mothers loaded up on zinc oxide. Bored little kids inevitably started a game of tag or hide-and-go-seek or kick-the-can in the gravel parking lot, fell down, and required Band-Aids sold by Mr. Clements.
During one particular game against Calhoun Falls—a town that later got mostly submerged by shallow and algae-ridden Strom Thurmond Lake—the Calhoun Falls team batted around three times in one inning. I heard the parents of our shortstop, Bev Lagroon, get in such a fight that they vowed to end the marriage. Then they went off to the concession stand separately—she ordered chili tater tots, a Dr Pepper, and some Juicy Fruit gum; he, two Cokes to go with his Jim Beam, a corn dog, and pork rinds—before finally settling back down just before a six-foot-two-inch fourth grader from Calhoun Falls hit a ball that went through the 45 DRUGS sign in left field right where it read COSMETICS! The umpire said to me, “We better call the fire department and make sure that ball’s not smoldering back there on Leonard Self’s dry land.”
Mr. Lagroon said to his wife, “I didn’t mean nothing by all that. Let’s you and me go down to Myrtle Beach and renew our vows.”
I called time-out and walked to the pitcher’s mound. The bases were empty and there were no outs. I called the infield in and kept my back to D. R. Pope. Bev Lagroon came in pounding his fist to his glove. I said, “Okay. We’re getting smeared. But not all’s bad. Bev’s parents are going to Myrtle Beach next week for some kind of second honeymoon. I’ll steal some of my father’s beer, and, Yancey, you steal some of your father’s peach-bounce moonshine, and we’ll all meet at Bev’s. That okay with you, Bev?”
He faced the stands. “Shirley Ebo’s waving at us up there.”
Comp said, “Hey. When this games over, let’s all beat these boys up. Let’s get in a big fight and kick them in the nuts instead of shaking hands.”
I turned around and looked at their bench. I said, “No. No way. The only thing we got going for us is knowing that the best thing those boys got going for them is moving to Forty-Five, getting jobs at the mill, and losing their fingers on purpose. Let’s just let the
m beat us silly.”
It’s what I said. My father had given me a pep talk of his own before this particular game. He said that the funny thing about Emmie Gunnells thinking he was a union organizer was that he really was one, in his own way. My father had said, “Down here, if they was called rebel organizers we’d have a lot better chance. All them mill workers would have the same chance in life as D. R. Pope’s lucky marriage into a crab joint–owning family. But let us learn to live the way we live, and do the best that we can. Let us be strong and proud and forward-looking.”
I said, “Amen.”
He whapped me a little too hard upside the head. “Amen? What the hell are you talking about, boy? I thought I taught you better than that.” Luckily I was wearing my catcher’s mask already.
I said, “I wasn’t thinking. I’m sorry.”
My father opened the car door for me. I threw my duffel bag on the backseat. He said, “You’re not sorry. Your team is sorry, but you’re not sorry, son. You’re the best goddamn thing that’s ever happened to Forty-Five. What you need to do is get out of here and tell everyone about it.”
I said, “I’m not doing so great in English.”
He said something about how stand-up comedians don’t need to write things for print. He said that archaeologists and anthropologists didn’t either, what with the advent of the television documentary.
THE SEASON DRAGGED ON, and I continued listening to all the conversations that went on behind the backstop. I caught wind of people making plans, breaking promises, speculating who’d be the first dead Forty-Fiver sent back from Vietnam. People made bets as to who would be the first player on my team to foul a ball off, actually get a hit, or knock himself out plowing into one of the outfield signs. They made bets as to what time the seventh-inning stretch would take place, when the game would end, and who would be the first batter to throw his bat toward the opposing team’s bench. Coach D. R. Pope smiled throughout our long, long losing season. He clapped his hands to make puttering muffler sounds. Grover Henderson, the local dermatologist, salivated in the bleachers, for he knew that skin cancer was growing on the nine of us in the field and the couple hundred local spectators.
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