“We gone be leaving Forty-Five within the next year for Myrtle Beach,” I heard D. R. Pope’s wife say one extended first inning. Mrs. Pope sat with Danny Clements’s mother. “I know I give him a little bit of Hades, but he’d do about anything for me. He’s promising another three thousand dollars before September. Then we ready. I’m thinking I might could get a job down at that hammock factory, what with my skill before a loom. D. R.’s got a fancy job lined up, due to my family connections.”
This was the first inning of the last game against the team from Graywood. Yancey Allison threw a knuckleball that came closer to our third baseman than it did the plate. I tried to point my ears in another direction. I tried to listen to Shirley Ebo and her daddy talking about how they might invest in some horses, seeing as horsehide got so worn out at our Little League games, et cetera. But I couldn’t get it out of my mind, my coach sticking his hand in a spinning frame just so he could wear a shiny suit at the entrance of a place that probably prided itself on its homemade cocktail sauce. I heard Mrs. Pope say, “If I don’t get a job at the hammock place, then I might see if D.R. can bring some oyster shells home. I had a dream one time about putting those little plastic wiggle-eyes on shells and selling them as ashtrays.”
“Time out, please,” I said to the umpire.
I walked to the mound and motioned for the infield. Yancey said, “That last pitch slipped from my hand.” He showed me his index finger. “I broke off half the nail trying to pry off some old nasty bathroom tile my daddy said had hidden treasure behind. It didn’t.”
I said, “Coach D. R.’s planning on cutting more fingers off.”
One of the assistant coaches yelled out, “Watch the runner at first,” even though there was no one on base, seeing as their lead-off batter was still standing there with a 3-0 count.
“There’s got to be a better way to spend the summer,” I said. My father had started me reading Kierkegaard.
I looked out at Bennie Frewer in right field and it came to me as if God had tapped me on the forehead to think harder. Without even looking back to our coach, I yelled out so that the opposing team on its bench could hear—and everyone on our team and the people in the stands—“Bennie’s got head lice real bad! Let’s have him pitch!” I motioned for Bennie to come in. He pointed at his own chest just like in a sitcom, like in a cartoon, and I sent Yancey out to right field. “Head Lice is going to pitch!” I yelled. “Come on down here, Head Lice.”
Bennie could throw in a straight line, I knew that much. He didn’t have much range or velocity, but that didn’t matter. Coach D. R. came out to the mound at the same time as the umpire to get things going. The umpire said, “Y’all know that these games already last longer than a Pentecostal Sunday. Come on. I got things to do tonight. I promised my wife we’d play Yahtzee later.”
D.R. Pope said, “Yancey’s our pitcher, Mendal. You kind of stepping on my authority.” He held his deformed hand out like a manta ray.
I might’ve been four-foot-six back then, but I said, “We’d kind of like to make a showing, once.”
My father yelled from the stands, “I told you reading that Danish fellow would get you thinking right!”
The coach went back to the bench. I sent the infield back out to their positions. Yancey started crying until I said that I had a feeling that the Graywood team’s left-handers might start hitting the ball toward right field, and only Yancey could run a ball down and catch it. I said to Bennie Frewer—a boy who looked as if he’d been whipped every day since he’d starred in an educational television-produced documentary about the myths and realities of head lice—“You can lob up pitches softball-style for all I care. Just leave it to me. I’ll talk to the batters.”
Like I said, Graywood’s lead-off batter had a 3-0 count. I crouched back behind the plate and said, “This old boy Bennie Frewer’s got lice so bad I’m afraid if he scratches his scalp and touches the ball, it might look like sparks coming off our way.”
Bennie threw his first pitch overhand, but it came up in a loop the likes of a top-heavy bottle rocket. The umpire hesitated before saying, “Strike one?” The batter practically ran back toward the on-deck circle.
Danny Clements’s father understood what was going on. He yelled from his concession stand, “Somebody get me another pot to boil ’dogs in, boys!”
The Graywood players jumped back from each pitch as if it was soaked in toxic waste. They regularly struck out watching, as if they played for Forty-Five. And our players—me included—did about the same at bat, seeing as we couldn’t hit a pitch whatsoever. This continued. Somewhere between the twelfth and thirteenth inning Coach D.R. Pope came up to me in the dugout, gripped my neck like a C-clamp, and said, “You a different kind of boy living down here. How come you didn’t figure this out about game number two?” I shrugged. “This game might last ten days. They’s got to be some kind of record for the longest Little League game ever in the history of boyhood.”
“Maybe you won’t have to cut off the rest of your fingers and go down there to the beach,” I said. “Maybe you can get on television.”
The umpire yelled out, “Play ball!” again, the score tied nothing to nothing. Bennie Frewer, our hero, came to the plate. Evidently Graywood’s team had a boy with something like my ability to figure out ways to win. Their pitcher hit Bennie right in the head with a fastball that must’ve clocked in at seventy miles an hour. Bennie went down. The Gray-wood catcher ran away from the batter’s box.
IT DIDN’T TAKE a second for me to figure out what to do next, I swear. I’m not sure if it was reading Kierkegaard, or if my father was beaming ESP into my brain from his vantage point behind the backstop. I said to the coach, “If we use a pinch runner for Bennie, he can’t go back in. Let’s just set him down on first. The next two batters are going to strike out anyway.”
Coach D. R. Pope gave me a thumbs-up. He gave me a pinkie-up, too, of course. Glenn Flack and little Johnny Scott came up next, and stood there to watch their three balls zip straight over the plate. Bennie sat on first base with his head turned backwards, probably trying to regain his senses. Coach Pope said, “What’re we going to do now, smarty-pants?”
Smarty-pants! I envisioned him working at Sandy Claude’s and saying, “Where do you want to sit, smarty-pants?” or “Would you like a menu or the buffet, smarty-pants?” I was that way—looking into the future—even back then. I said, “I’ll pitch. Bennie Frewer will play second base, but really let him just stand there by me on the mound. Go get … I don’t know,” I looked down the bench for who might be able to play catcher. I looked up to the stands at Shirley Ebo, who shook her head no. I said, “It doesn’t matter. You pick someone.”
Coach Pope gave a death-ray point toward Blink Harvel—a little fat kid with the IQ of a doorknob—and said, “You catching, boy.” Harvel spent most games finding a way to sneak off the bench to scour beneath the bleachers and retrieve the outside paper wrappers of Doublemint, Juicy Fruit, and Fruit Stripe gum he used to make chains and necklaces.
Blink Harvel said, “Okay, Coach,” and dropped his paper chain. He would’ve said the same thing if the coach asked him to pull off his pants and run down the third-base line.
When we got to the field I motioned for Blink to approach me at the mound. I said, “This won’t be hard. I’m going to throw the ball to you just like playing catch. You don’t worry any.”
Blink said, “How’m I supposed to know if it’s a ball or a strike? I’ve never called balls and strikes.” Blink went on to get a doctorate in administrative studies, and got a job with the Department of Education as a grief-therapy expert. He got interviewed on the local news whenever a tornado hit some trailer park where children lived, or a fourth grader shot another fourth grader, or when Clemson lost a football game and no little redneck kid felt like living anymore.
I explained to him that it was the umpire’s job. I said, “Just catch the ball and throw it back to me. That’s it.”
Bl
ink Harvel nodded his head around, wearing my catcher’s mask.
I jerked my head to Bennie Frewer, who lolled around near second base. He wandered my way and said, for no apparent reason, “This itches, y’all.”
I said, “Uh-huh.” Oh, he’d have trouble in his later years—maybe rob a couple of banks or whatever—and try to say to both judge and jury that his damaged frontal lobe had caused it all. I said, “Take off your hat and just stand beside me. Right here.”
Graywood’s first batter came up and held the bat like Carl Yastrzemski. I held the ball in my mitt, rubbed my hand on Bennie Frewer’s head as if his head were a lucky piece, then threw toward home. Yastrzemski stepped back twice, and the umpire yelled, “Strike one!” Blink Harvel handed the ball to the umpire, who acted like he didn’t want to touch it, then told Blink, “Throw it on back to the pitcher, son.”
And so it went. I rubbed Bennie’s head, the Graywood batters thought head lice was still coming their way, I struck out three batters in a row each time, and we—the Forty-Five Flattops, sponsored by 45 Modern Barbers—came in at the bottom of the inning to act likewise.
We didn’t win. But we didn’t lose, either. It was the end of the season, and there was no way to make up the game later. About an hour after dark, it seemed, the umpire motioned both managers to the field and explained how he had to call the game. I was glad, because my palm was burning from rubbing Bennie Frewer’s head so much. It was the twenty-sixth inning. Probably a record, everyone said. For the first time in my life I knew what it was like to be Bennie Frewer, for when both teams lined up to shake hands, no one would touch me. No one touched Blink Harvel, and no one shook hands with Bennie.
On the drive home my father said, “This worked out exactly as I wanted it to work out, son. Did you learn anything about life today?” He laughed and looked at his watch. “I mean, today and tonight?”
I nodded. To be honest, I didn’t get it.
We went to the Dixie Drive-In and barely got there before it closed. A new woman took our orders. My father asked about Emmie Gunnells. The new carhop said that Emmie had quit, that she left without notice, but word was she had hitchhiked down to Myrtle Beach and gotten a job as a third-shift desk clerk at the Anchored Sloop hotel. My father said, “I’ll be damned,” and I heard the sadness of loss in his voice.
We didn’t talk after we got our milkshakes. He rubbed my head a couple times in the same way I had rubbed Bennie Frewer’s. My father and I both came down with head lice within the week, maybe from Blink’s borrowing my catcher’s mask. But we didn’t tremble around the house. My father and I scrubbed our scalps, washed our bedsheets. We furrowed our hair with those special nit combs. My father promised a weekend of camping out in the Forty-Five rec center bleachers, where we could point a flashlight and look for what deer were staring back, either mesmerized or transformed, not knowing whether to jump the fence or not.
A WHEELCHAIR’S TOO SLOW
Because my father believed that there was some kind of inherent and inexorable value in understanding what other people lived without, he procured—without warning or father-son discussion—a suspect, paying, part-time job for me down at a former elementary school turned nursing home. I was to perform whatever duties my boss, Mr. Wylie Alexander, asked of me, and my father promised that I would probably only empty waste-baskets, sweep tile floors, and take residents on short jaunts around the perimeter of Forty-Five Longterm Care, pushing their wheelchairs around the playground. There were still eight-foot-high basketball hoops, tetherball poles, and faded hopscotch outlines. A quarter-mile cinder track encircled the area, and Wylie Alexander said that I might help organize a field day of sorts, should the nursing home residents gain my trust. I said that maybe I should lower the basketball goals another four feet. My boss handed me a time sheet to fill out and said I’d do fine, more than likely, if I remained nothing but honest.
“We might have to build a higher fence around the track,” Wylie said. “For the most part you get the ambulatory going in a circle, they’ll keep it up until the next meal. Every once in a while, though, one’ll make a break for it. I remember one day we had three ladies snagged to the fence, what with their gowns getting caught.”
My father said that I would be getting paid under the table, because I wasn’t old enough for a social security card. I told my friend Compton Lane, “I only have to work Wednesday nights and Sundays, and all I do is pick up peas and forks from the floor. And then I’ll get paid under the table.”
“You better wear a rubber suit,” Compton said. “They’re going to be peeing on you all the time. Especially those old men.” He shook his head, then squinted toward the sun. We sat atop a new load of torn-down barn wood my father stacked in the front yard for—at the time—unknown purposes. “Don’t ever say to those old-timers that you want them to eat every bean and pea on their plates. They might hear you wrong.”
I punched his arm. The only thing Compton got paid for at this point was riding around with his daddy, pretending to be helpful and needed. He would live his teenage years without ever having to fill out a job application, though Mr. Lane did make him partake in some questionable activities for which Compton got money. Sometimes I did, too. One time Compton’s father had invested money in a dent-and-fender man’s shop, and then Compton got paid to go out with a roofer’s hammer and ding just about everybody’s car hoods and roofs and trunks, just as though a nighttime hailstorm had traveled through.
I didn’t help him out that night. It was ten days after the Duke Power meter reader came through, and—as always—I had to help my father jerk out our pronged meter, turn it upside down, and run our electricity bill backwards for a while. A couple weeks later we’d unplug it again, shove it in right side up, then wait for the meter reader to come by. He’d write down the number and drive away wondering how we lived off four bucks’ worth of heat and light, I imagine.
Let me say that, although Compton Lane was my same age, I believed about everything that he said. He wasn’t bigger and didn’t hold his mouth half-open like my classmates and their parents, and he wasn’t any smarter than I was. But he could flat-out tell lies. Compton could look George Washington in the face and convince him that George hadn’t chopped down the cherry tree, after all. So you can’t blame me for showing up to retrieve slung vegetables and fallen silverware wearing a big yellow rain suit and galoshes, Playtex rubber gloves, and a pair of work goggles my father wore when he dealt with car batteries and chain saws.
Mr. Alexander said, “Well, Mendal, I’m happy that you showed up early. Why exactly are you dressed such?” He looked outside. “It ain’t raining, is it?”
This was 3:30 on a Wednesday. I’d taken my outfit with me to school, changed in the boys’ bathroom, then ridden my bicycle the three miles out to the nursing home. I got there as residents rolled into the dining hall—it still had a LUNCH ROOM sign on the door from the old days. Man, I felt like a regular breadwinning adult. I said, “My father doesn’t want me messing up my good clothes,” as if I had any.
“Huh,” said Wylie Alexander. “Well. I’m no psychologist or anything, but I’d be willing to bet that that cap and goggles might confuse some of the older residents here. You kind of look like the Morton Salt Girl’s crazy brother, son.”
He held out his hand. He said he’d put my unneeded belongings in the ex-janitor’s office, beside the nurse’s handbag. Then he told me to fetch Mr. Self and push his wheel-chair as slowly as possible in any direction until I saw a property stob. Mr. Self, I soon learned, was prone to stealing food from anyone not paying attention.
I’M NOT SURE what a regular, square elementary classroom’s dimensions might be—at least forty by forty—but the Forty-Five Longterm Care facility, which was once known as Forty-Five Black School, had been refurbished in such a way that the entrance to any classroom turned hard left, then three pie-shaped rooms shot off to the side. The first room always held a chalkboard. When viewed from above, if there had been no
roof, it would’ve looked as if a warped hard-boiled-egg cutter had come down and inserted walls. Forty-Five Black was a one-story L-shaped elementary school, as opposed to the one-level U-shaped old Forty-Five White, first through sixth. When Forty-Five Black became a nursing home, for what reason I didn’t understand until much later, no white man would place his mother or father there unless a certified medical doctor admitted that the parent’s condition had gone past any capability of recognizing family. Oddly enough, the Forty-Five Longterm Care facility may have been the only bastion of nonracist thought or action in town, if not in all of South Carolina.
The dozen chalkboard rooms were given to men. My father said it was due to notch-on-bedpost mentality, and that the chalkboard’s presence helped preserve their sense of manliness. Yellow sticks of chalk even stayed on the shelves, which I thought wasn’t all that smart a move when asthmatics moved in. Maybe it was done intentionally. The male patients did seem to die off faster.
I pushed wheelchairs and emptied trash cans. I learned to grasp the hands of old men and women who stretched their arms out when I walked in. On Wednesday nights—church going nights in the rest of Forty-Five—I helped people turn the pages of their useless hymnals in what used to be Forty-Five Black’s sad, poor auditorium, which wasn’t anything more than two classrooms without a partition in between.
I did my work a few good Wednesday/Sunday stints before Mr. Self said, “You know they using you. I hope you smart enough to know how you smarter than any doctor they bring rambling through here to check us once a week. I can tell.”
We had circled the playground and gone past the track on our way to a yellow metal property stob south of the home. Up to this point Mr. Self had only rattled on about things like how cotton didn’t loom like it used to in the mills he once owned, or how a nurse named Glorene shuffled his balls a little roughly while giving him sponge baths. I said, “I’m supposed to keep you out of the way until all those old women get done eating. It’s corn-dog night, from what I understand. They have you figured out.” Wylie Alexander had taught me how to hard-lean a wheelchair back in case Mr. Self or anyone else looked like he was about to conjure up some leg muscles.
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