Brittle Innings

by Michael Bishop

  Mama and I left the Cass Mansion, and I comforted myself by remembering that in Highbridge, at least, I wouldn’t be playing for the Phillies, I’d be playing for the Hellbenders, a team supposedly on the rough-and-tumble rise.

  2

  Jordan McKissic-Mister JayMac to everyone in Highbridge, as I learned later-came riding into Oklahoma in a Pullman car behind an old steam engine. He planned to watch two Red Stix games, one on a Saturday, one the following Tuesday, and return to Georgia. April of ’43, two weeks before the Hellbenders kicked off their regular season. Mister JayMac came by train because the Office of Defense Transportation had nixed pleasure driving. You could legally call a scouting trip business, but patriotic pols-like the scoundrels LaGuardia’d lit into in the paper-wouldn’t admit pro ball deserved that courtesy.

  ’Forty-three was the year the ODT forbid major leaguers to go South for spring training. Except for the Cardinals, who practiced in St. Louis, ballplayers had to train east of the Mississip and north of the Potomac and Ohio rivers. Wiseguys called this the Landis-Eastman Line, after Baseball Commissioner Landis and the fella heading up the ODT. Mister JayMac was a mucky-muck on the Hothlepoya County draft board, down in Highbridge. To do his part for national defense, he’d left his Cadillac and colored driver at home and faced the blowing coal dust and the jostling hoi polloi on a passenger train.

  In Tenkiller, Mister JayMac stayed in the Cass Mansion. I first laid eyes on him on Saturday, when he climbed into the Deck Glider bleachers with Mama and his hosts. He stood out in that crowd. He was pushing sixty-a couple of years younger than I am now-but tall, fit, and dapper. He wore a striped white dress shirt, old-fashioned pleated linen trousers, and a pair of military-pink suspenders. His hair was iron gray, cut close at temples and neck. A salt-and-peppery forelock fell over his forehead like an owlet’s wing. Even from my shortstop position, I could see this terrific blue glint in his eyes: a sharper blue than Miss Tulipa’s, like sapphire dust bonded to a couple of zinc-coated war pennies.

  From the stands, Mister JayMac watched me. He watched Toby Watersong, Franklin Gooch, every kid on both teams. Whenever I had the chance, I watched him back. Mister JayMac was the Great Stone Face, perched above the hubbub like a Supreme Court judge, mysterious and cool. Studying.

  I had a good game Saturday, thank God, a couple of singles and an unassisted double play at short. Afterwards, I sort of expected Mister JayMac to come down and speak, maybe even to make me a job offer, but he and the Elshtains vanished, off to the Cass Mansion, I guess, without so much as a nod. In the stands, Mama said, Miss Tulipa and the colonel had been as supportive of the team and as complimentary of me as ever, but Mister JayMac had scarcely spoken two words.

  “Not my notion of a courtly Suthren gentleman,” Mama said. “Eyes like a starved wolf’s.”

  The Red Stix never practiced Sundays, and Mister JayMac didn’t attend church with Miss Tulipa and the colonel. Monday, though, he watched us from the stands on the third-base line, taking in our every wind sprint, pepper game, and half-assed batting-practice bunt. I could feel him studying me, intense and chillylike. The process-letting him gander-reminded me of what a beauty-pageant hopeful has to suffer.

  During this workout, I muffed a cozy roller at short, then overthrew Jessie Muldrow at first trying to outgun the runner. Bad. Baaad. At the plate, I swung too hard, topping the ball once and popping it up on my second at bat. Rotten. Not even the Phillies would’ve wanted me. Time I got a third chance to hit, Mister JayMac’d vamoosed. I got on base, but with a cheap swinging bunt I legged out from sheer embarrassment. But so what? Mama’d better check with Colonel Elshtain to see if Deck Glider had an assembly-line job for me.

  Tuesday afternoon, in a game against Checotah, I forgot the crowd, the bench jockeys in the other dugout, the dogs barking on Cookson Road, everything but the rope-sized seams on every ball floating my way. Don’t know why, but the ball looked big as the moon to me. Hitting or fielding, I couldn’t miss it. For all the effect he had on me, Mister JayMac-up in our stands-could’ve been in the Belgian Congo. I played great. Afterwards, the boys from Checotah got on their bus as low and hollowed-out as dogwood stumps.

  Mister JayMac didn’t speak to me after this game, either. Once we’d put it away, I did start thinking about him again, my ticket out of Tenkiller. When he still didn’t show up, though, I thought, Nuts to you, mister.

  Shortly after supper that evening, Mister JayMac showed up at our stucco house on Cody Street. Five-and-a-half rooms, just big enough for a couch, a pair of beds, a beat-up table, a w.c., and a cheap cathedral radio. It always seemed to smell of hash and eggs.

  Mister JayMac didn’t reach six feet, but in a buttermilk coat with awning-sized lapels and pockets, he filled our house the way a film actor can sometimes glut a whole movie screen. Mama got a chair from the kitchen and made him sit. Didn’t want him looming. Then, like two kids in a dentist’s waiting room, she and I huddled together on the sofa.

  “Ma’am,” Mister JayMac said, “I’d like your son to come with me to Highbridge tomorrow.” He didn’t bother to look at me. He aimed all his magnolia gallantry at Mama. “My club, the Hellbenders, has need of him.”

  “So do the Red Stix. Plus, Danny’s got school to finish.”

  “Yessum,” Mister JayMac said.

  “He’s been going twelve years, nearly,” Mama said. “Why fall shy of a sheepskin by a piddlin two months?”

  “Why, indeed? An enlightened attitude,” Mister JayMac said.

  “He needs his education.”

  “ ‘What sculpture is to a block of marble,’ ” Mister JayMac told Mama, “ ‘education is to the soul.’ Addison.”

  “Well, Addison spoke true.”

  “Yes he did,” Mister JayMac said. “But there’s education and there’s education. If Danny doesn’t return to Highbridge with me tomorrow, he’ll miss the chance to train with us and the opening month of our season.” He pulled a string-tied packet from inside his coat. “Here’s a contract, Mrs Boles.” He untied the packet and handed an official-looking form with a clip-on to Mama. “Also a check for seventy-five dollars, his first full month’s pay.” He could’ve dropped a garter snake down my shirt-that kind of thrill went through me. “But, Mrs Boles, you must countersign my enabling form and let Danny go back with me.” He reached over and tapped the check.

  I was a slave who wanted to be sold. School was lectures and yawns, girls smirking and wiseacres pulling stupid jokes.

  Mama stared down at my clipped-on check. “Coach Brandon says some nigger ballplayers make twice this, maybe.”

  “That’s probably true,” Mister JayMac said. “I daresay those players draw better than Danny’s likely to jes yet.”

  “Well, he can’t go now anyway,” Mama said. “Even when he can, seventy-five won’t do. That’s coffee-and-cake pay. Danny may jes be starting, but no colored boy ought to make more than him.”

  My mama, the John L. Lewis of ball agents. All she needed was Lewis’s eyebrows. Mister JayMac ripped up his check, and I almost swallowed my tongue. Smithereened. My whole career.

  “Mrs Boles, you drive a hard bargain.” Mister JayMac took the contract back. “I’ll up his pay twenty-five and send yall a new contract. Forget this one. Mr Boles,” finally looking at me, “we’ll send you a train ticket. Ride down soon’s you’ve got your diploma, hear?”

  I tried to answer. “Yessir,” I wanted to say, but it might as well’ve been the Lord’s Prayer in Gullah.

  As promised, the revised contract came two weeks later. Mama and I signed it for a notary, with Coach Brandon and the Elshtains as witnesses. Two, three days later, Mr Ogrodnik announced my good fortune to the student body in the gym. Kids cheered, pretty girls and class-officer types among them. If I’d had the guts, I’d’ve dynamited half the hypocrites there, even though I did like hearing them cheer.

  Franklin Gooch said I was a lucky bastard. When we’d won the war, guys like DiMaggio, Williams, and Greenberg wo
uld come home and their stay-at-home subs would disappear completely. A real talent, though, would survive.

  “You,” Goochie said, “are a real talent.”

  Goochie was already eighteen. Early in ’42, his mama’s younger brother had been killed on the cruiser Houston in the Battle of the Java Sea. Goochie wanted to take a few Jap scalps in the Marines, but he didn’t begrudge me my shot at a career in pro ball. Envied me, but didn’t call me a feather merchant. He had other kettles of fish to fry. Too bad his goals led him into the hands of a graves-registration crew on Okinawa.

  3

  Tenkiller was a side-track burg. So I caught the train in Tahlequah. Mister JayMac had sent me a ticket.

  Colonel Elshtain had a C gas-rationing sticker on the divided window of his automobile, supposedly because his job at Deck Glider had such import to the national defense. Actually, I think, he had buddies in the War Department, who knew folks in the Office of Price Administration. Anyway, that C sticker got Colonel Elshtain all the gas he wanted, and he and Miss Tulipa drove Mama and me to the station in Tahlequah in his 1939 Hudson Terraplane. (That car was a picture of chrome and ivory. It even had a radio.) My only luggage was a duffel full of clothes. The handle of my favorite baseball bat-Coach Brandon had given it to me-stuck out of my bag, and my bag rode in the Hudson ’s trunk. In the back, next to Mama, I felt partly like a rich swell and partly like a murderer riding in style to the gallows.

  On the station platform, Mama looked angry enough to spit. In truth, she’d just clamped her lips to keep from crying. I was grateful she was managing so well. No seventeen-year-old kid wants his mama blubbering all over him in public. And that railway depot was crowded. Tahlequah looked like Tulsa.

  Recruits in civvies heading for Camp Gruber or Fort Sill. GIs going back to Chaffee, Benning, Polk, or Penticuff after furloughs. Cardboard suitcases and duffels. Parents and girls mingling with the sad-sack soldiers and recruits. All the guys were riding passenger trains, not troop-train expresses, with civilians like me in a near-invisible minority.

  Some of the GIs wove back and forth through the redbrick station building. In buddy-buddy groups. Sometimes they’d stop near Mama and me to look me up and down. I was only to scoff at-soldier material like marshmallows are ammo. I could hardly believe I’d have to share a car with these rude and crude dogfaces. The ones with stripes on their sleeves scared the Cherokee piss out of me.

  “You puny cur,” Mama said, “don’t forget to write.”

  I only stood five-five, but Audie Murphy, who came along later, wound up the war’s most decorated soldier, and he was no bruiser either. Me, I was in tiptop trim. If I could play ball in the Chattahoochee heat, why’d so many of these wiseguy doughboys seem to think I couldn’t charge into Jap artillery fire? Why’d Mama assume I’d steam into vapor under the Georgia sun and never even send her a postcard?

  “I can’t watch you leave. Be good. Do good.”

  A pair of nuns came up, smiling. Only they weren’t nuns, but pillow-breasted Red Cross gals in habits and wimples. They had a hospital cart loaded with goodies, like stewardesses on a Delta flight. They took me for a recruit. They wanted to give me magazines, Tootsie Rolls, Lucky Strikes.

  “He don’t want none,” Mama said. “Thank you.”

  The Red Cross nuns toddled off, but the soldiers nearby didn’t. When Mama kissed me on the lips, a good slobbery one, they had a snicker riot. Mama left me with the Elshtains. I hoped the colonel would put the fear of God into those dogfaces by calling them down for crooked gig lines and ungentlemanly public comportment, but he didn’t. Soldiers on furlough were privileged characters, prodigal sons in gaberdine. Rightly so, maybe. They’d sweated out fourteen weeks of basic, and a lot of em, like Goochie, would come home as statistics, battle fatalities, instead of people. Colonel Elshtain understood. He’d served in the Great War, the War to End All Wars, and he understood.

  Then the colonel and Miss Tulipa left too, and I was alone with all the trained heroes and smiling Red Cross nuns. A redcap directed us-everybody going my way, at least-to our coaches, and porters with hand trucks stowed our duffels in the proper baggage cars. Anyway, this rail ride from Oklahoma to Georgia gave me a new look at humanity. Time I jumped off that train, I’d’ve sworn the defense of the United States was in the hands of sadistic cretins. Jerks that shot up colored training camps in New York State and Louisiana. Yahoos that, a couple of months later, danced the hat dance on zoot-suiters in L.A. As a civvie, I felt like soft-shelled predator bait too. Forget that my draft status had everything to do with being seventeen and nothing to do with being afraid. Did a wish to cap off the last year of my childhood playing Class C baseball make me a coward?

  They packed us aboard that train like cattle. On a mirror in the John, somebody’d taped an “Off the Record” cartoon of a GI in his skivvies standing outside a Pullman lavatory with his shaving gear. He fingers his stubbly jaw. “Great Scott!” he barks. “I must’ve shaved the guy next to me!” Every seat in every coach was taken; every aisle was a logjam.

  I got up once, and a sergeant took my place. So I squeezed my way through the clicking coaches till I found the only empty seat in the last five Pullmans. I sat next to a PFC whose head looked like the bowling-ball jaw of the guy in the cartoon. A hulk, with a mug like a skinned Pekingese’s.

  “How you know that seat’s not saved?” he asked me.

  I wanted to say, “Screw you,” but the snarl in the PFC’s challenge had taken all my sand away. I hadn’t exactly had a quarryful to begin with.

  The PFC said, “Nice ears, yokel. Buy em by the yard?”

  I went “Duh” like the yokel he’d pegged me and laid a hand on my Adam’s apple to indicate my speech problem.

  “Tonsillitis?” he said. “Strep throat? You got some kinda contagious damned communicative disease?”

  “I have a st-st-stammer.”

  “You do, huh? And astigmatism too if you couldn’t see I was holding this seat for Pumphrey.”

  “P-P-Pum-?”

  “P-P-Pum yourself,” he mocked. “What’s your name? I’d like to meet your whole yokel cl-cl-clan.”

  He was probably from a real metropolis like Coffeyville or Enid, but I was a yokel.

  “B-B-Boles,” I said. “D-D-Danny Boles.”

  “Where from?”

  “ Tenkiller, Oklahoma.” No stammer. Give me a medal. Send me to radio-announcer’s school.

  “Well, Boles, ya goddamned Okie, move your skinny ass fore I line it with teeth.” The guy bumped me with his elbow. His nose floated in front of me like an elevator button I didn’t dare mash. “Hey, you’re still in Pumphrey’s seat.”

  “B-but where can I g-g-go?”

  He laughed. He couldn’t believe me, a kid innocent as bottled water. He put his thumb into the dent behind my chin, to show he meant for me to hop up. I jerked away and stumbled into the aisle-which jostled with foot traffic, landlubbers trying to get their rail legs.

  I went enginewards. GIs, recruits, MPs with gunbelts sat jammed into their seats, not one tender female among them. Every car smelled of dried sweat, scorched khaki, cigarette smoke, caked boot polish.

  I finally stopped on a platform between two coaches. An accordion-pleated rubber hood was supposed to join the cars (to keep passengers out of the wind and coal dust), but the train people hadn’t hooked it up. I rode the coupling. The wind felt good. So did being alone. The countryside had gentle hills, dogwoods and redbuds still showing color in amongst the evergreens. It got prettier the farther from Cherokee County we chugged. Had Congress designated the Injun Territories for their flatness and lack of trees? Probably.

  I’d stood there a couple of minutes when a baby-faced GI banged through from the forward car. He scowled and patted his pockets. He shouted, “Got a smoke, buddy?”

  “N-no, I d-d-don’t.”

  “Screw you!” he shouted. Did he think I’d mugged a Red Cross lady for her cigarettes, then squirreled away my booty from regular Joes l
ike him? I just stared at him. Maybe a 4-F civilian had snaked his girl, or a recruit had short-sheeted his bunk. Running into such meanness just then felt like having grain alcohol poured into a cut. My stare got harder. I lifted my fists to my ribs. The kid saw them shaking. He spit down at the tracks, easy-like, and returned to the coach he’d come from. That should’ve boosted my morale. I’d shown my steel and a GI had backed off. Problem was, he’d looked like a Campbell ’s Soup kid.

  In all the wind and clatter, I began to cry. The platform had me for good, then. I couldn’t go back in with tears on my face. The GIs would’ve ridden me all the way to Georgia.

  Our train wasn’t an express. It crawled through every podunk crossing, rattled to a chain-reaction stop in every town with as many as two letters to its name. Passengers lurched back and forth between coaches, but I clung to the coupling’s guard rail and ignored them.

  It took an hour and a half to get to Fort Smith and another thirty minutes to pass through Fort Chaffee, the post southeast of it. Recruits off, GIs on. A trackside do-si-do. Finally, we clacked off through Arkansas again.

  Later, in the dining car, I sat with three other guys who seemed to be loners too. A swabbie going to Pensacola and two dogfaces. We’d all been strangers, but the other fellas struck up a friendly debate about the credentials (Ol’ Diz would’ve said differentials) of the Cards without Enos Country Slaughter and the Dodgers without Pistol Pete Reiser, who ran full-tilt into outfield walls and knocked himself out.

  My kind of debate. Except my vocal cords had a clamp on them. All I could do, like some kind of chimp, was point, nod, grunt, and grin. The other guys-the friendliest servicemen I’d yet bumped into-must’ve figured me for a runaway from the Oklahoma Institute for Hayseed Dummies. I paid my check and stumbled back to the coupling platform.