Brittle Innings

by Michael Bishop

  At Mister JayMac’s orders, players changed in and out, coming in to hit or hustling out to field. Pretty soon, I’d started sizing up the shortstop. The number on his practice flannels, also the team’s away uniforms, was seven. I didn’t expect to move in on this guy unless he produced nothing but air currents at the plate. He could field, and throw, and think. I reckoned him at least twice my age, mid-thirties, maybe older, gray winking at his temples, cowboy creases from his nose to his lip corners. On every pitch, he crouched so low you wondered if he had the body grease to unravel and make a play. He always did, though, and gracefully: a whangdoodle shortstop.

  The other big thing I recall about that practice is how bad the guys playing first base did. Mister JayMac used at least four fellas there, but not one could handle a first baseman’s glove. That leather claw gave them fits. One fella, Norm Sudikoff, moved pretty as a gazelle, but usually managed to turn a sure out into a misplay. My pal Goochie would’ve given all these goons a clinic.

  Me, I wished I was six or seven inches taller. Then, if I couldn’t beat out Number Seven at short, I might win a starting job from the relay team of jokers yo-yoing in and out at first base. Otherwise, I might spend my whole season on the bench. Growing a half foot fast would help, but I’d do as well to pray for a Hollywood agent to tap me as the next Gary Cooper.

  At noon, practice ended. Darius hadn’t brought me to McKissic Field so much to watch it as to keep from having to make an extra trip from the players’ boardinghouse to the stadium. He’d picked up the other three rookies, Georgia boys all, a couple of hours earlier, when a train from the Atlantic coast had dropped them at Highbridge Station.

  Now Darius came over, diamonds winking in the black lamb’s wool of his hair, his coffee-colored skin aglow. “Yall go git on the bus. Sit toards the back. The other mens don’t like rookies crowding em.”

  “Who sez?” Ankers said to Darius.

  “Ast em,” Darius said. “Be my guest. But ast em on the bus, or yall might have to foot it to Mister JayMac’s.”

  Dobbs and Heggie didn’t grumble, but Ankers flicked Darius a lightning storm with his eyes.

  On the bus, these guys sat a row or two in front of Euclid, now reading a Plastic Man comic, but I plonked down next to him, not out of any Eleanor Roosevelt fondness for black folk, but because he had my duffel. He paid me no mind, poring over his comic like it was a book of secret codes.

  In about twenty minutes, ballplayers started straggling out and climbing aboard, including Darius. Mister JayMac swung up into the seat back of Darius’s. None of his players had tried to sit in it, his reserved spot. They always scattered about here and there, flopping like wore-out bird dogs. Number Seven, the shortstop, came laddering down the aisle and dropped into the long rear seat. He stretched his arms along its back and goggled around.

  “Hey, Darius,” he said, “who’re these handsome cats?” He meant the three new Georgia boys.

  “I disremember their names, Mr Hoey. Course I’m jes a driver, not a traveling secretary.”

  “Oh now, Darius,” the shortstop said, “you’re more n a driver, you’re a Hellbender institution.”

  Hands on the wheel, Darius didn’t seem to want any of Hoey’s soft soap and told him so by clamming up. Of all the men who’d practiced that morning, he was the only one still wearing the clothes he’d worked out in. The top of his head showed in the big rectangular mirror just inside the divided windshield, his hair asparkle with sweat.

  Mister JayMac grabbed the pole of the driver’s cage and pulled himself up. He sported a string tie and a white linen coat. If we didn’t get rolling soon, his ballplayers would start slinging off enough BTUs to give every last joe aboard a drop-dead case of heat prostration.

  “Don’t yall worry who thesere boys are,” he said. “Worry about how piss-poor yall played today.” He paused, more for effect than from tiredness. “I could drum up a half dozen 4-Fs in a TB ward who’d look sharper than yall did this morning. So think, gentlemen, on your many personal deficiencies.”

  You could hear Euclid turning comic-book pages.

  “Understand?” Mister JayMac said.

  “Yessir!” nearly everyone on the Bomber said, like recruits out to Camp Penticuff.

  “Meeting in the parlor this evening right after supper,” Mister JayMac said. “I want everybody there. Understood?”

  “Everybody?” the infielder named Hoey said. “Even Jumbo?”

  “I said everybody.”

  “So why wasn’t Jumbo at practice, sir?” Number Seven said. “We could’ve used him at first. His subs made him look like Nijinski. Compared to those galoots, he is Nijinski.”

  “Take a leap, Buck!” Norm Sudikoff shouted.

  “Jumbo Hank Clerval had some personal business in Alabama to attend to,” Mister JayMac said. “He’ll be at our meeting tonight, Mr Hoey, never you fear.”

  Buck Hoey, the shortstop, just wouldn’t let up: “ Alabama? How’d Jumbo get to Alabama?”

  “He borrowed my car,” Mister JayMac said,

  “Your Caddy?” Hoey said. “How’d Jumbo get to be such a privileged character? Going four for four gainst Marble Springs? Shit-a-load, sir, I once hit for the cycle gainst those palookas, and you never loaned me a car. What’s Jumbo got anyway? Proof of some kinda draft-board hanky-panky?”

  The other men on the Brown Bomber ducked; they cowered in their places. The only soul among us not drawn gut-tight with shock and worry, except maybe Hoey, was Euclid. He was paging through Plastic Man for maybe the twentieth time.

  “Let it go, Mr Hoey,” Mister JayMac said.

  “Jesus,” Hoey started. “You’d think the guy was-”

  “Let it go.”

  Hoey let it go. Didn’t seem too trodden upon, though. He seemed happy. Mister JayMac sat down. Darius put the bus in gear, and we bumped out of the parking lot onto a boulevard lined with water oaks. Hoey caught my eye and waved at all the browbeaten ballplayers in front of us.

  “Ever see such a bunch of pantywaists?” he asked.

  I could only look at him. Hoey was the stud I’d have to beat out to become a regular. Worse luck, he was lean, tough, and not to be messed with.

  “S matter with you, kid? Cat got your tongue?”

  6

  Darius drove us to McKissic House, the team boardinghouse where Mister JayMac, for part of everyone’s monthly salary, put up all the single men on his team. In McKissic House, this entire summer, I’d eat my meals and spend my nights when the Hellbenders didn’t have an away game.

  Cripes, I thought when our bus growled up the semicircular drive. How great, not to have to wear down my shoe leather looking for a place to rent-especially with Camp Penticuff so close and wartime housing so tight that roomers doubling up with relatives or friends matter-of-factly read the obits to get a jump on likely vacancies.

  Because Mister JayMac owned a dozen or more old mill houses in the Cotton Creek area of Highbridge, he’d taken that worry off all his players’ shoulders. Men with wives and kids in town, I learned later, rented these tarboxes from Mister JayMac for at least six months, April through September, his minimum lease. In October, he’d offer his vacant houses to military transients, but with the stipulation they clear out at the end of March so married Hellbenders could reclaim the premises in time for the new season. In a military town with beaucoups of demand for rental properties, he had a high-handed marketing approach, maybe even a greedy-seeming one, but Mister JayMac didn’t care about the money he could make-he could do that renting to either GIs or players-but about the welfare of his immediate employees during each CVL season. So most of us looked at Mister JayMac not as a robber baron but as our very own Daddy Warbucks.

  Only two-thirds of the Hellbenders made the trip all the way from McKissic Field to McKissic House. Darius drove first to the Cotton Creek neighborhood, where six men rented houses, and dropped them off. Buck Hoey, the wiseguy shortstop who’d bellyached about the first baseman who hadn’t come to pr
actice, hopped down last, near a blue frame house with more shrubs and a prettier paint job than any house around it. When Hoey got off, I relaxed a bit.

  As for McKissic House, it hunkered back from Angus Road, on a woodsy stand of acreage on Highbridge’s southeastern corner, floating among the magnolias and the leafy pecan trees like a man-of-war. It had cupolas, turrets, gables, a widow’s walk, and a pair of outside staircases for fire escapes. It wasn’t Tara, though: no columns. Also, Mister JayMac’s ancestors had built it after, not before, the War Between the States.

  The front half of the house smacked your eyes out. It had a wrap-around porch with fresh-painted balusters and a half dozen or more rocking chairs. It had shutters and a huge oaken door with a stained-glass fanlight above it. It had plum-colored draperies in the windows and umbrella ferns in hanging baskets. The whole place shone white, like some kind of lighter-than-air marble.

  Coming around the drive, though, you saw that the back part of McKissic House didn’t keep up appearances. No shutters on the sides. In places, boards overlapped on a fallen slant. Paint had cracked or curled or flaked or flat-out vanished. One tricky back wall had a two-tone color, light above and dark below, like an unfinished kitchen cabinet nailed to a barn’s weathered side. I still liked what I saw. It outdid any place I’d ever lived. It had such size and so many build-ons I imagined myself prowling through it for weeks, finding hidden passages, secret nooks, the decaying skeletons of roomers who’d lost their way and starved to death. McKissic House spoke to the strangled poet in me, stirring a wormy sort of dread into my blood. Could I last a whole summer in one of its closed-in rooms?

  “You new boys,” Mister JayMac said from the bus’s step well, “make yourselves to home, best yall can. Supper’s at five-thirty, team meeting an hour later. Darius’ll settle you in. Tomorrow, spot challenges and an intrasquad tussel of big-time importance.”

  Mister JayMac got off, climbed the wide fan of steps into McKissic House, and went inside. Everybody else but Darius, me, Euclid, and the other three rookies piled out after him.

  “Shoo,” Darius said. “Kizzy’ll give you somethin befo dinner. Yall gots to be hongry.”

  Ankers, Dobbs, and Heggie got off the bus and jostled up the steps. I held my seat.

  Darius said, “You deef as well as dumb?” He regarded me in the rearview.

  I shook my head. I thought Darius would coddle me a tad, give me a little encouragement. Instead, he shut the Brown Bomber’s door and jammed the bus into gear. He bounced it off the gravel drive, through a lane of pecans and dogwoods, and past one of McKissic House’s shabby pine-board fire escapes to the backyard. To keep from cracking my head on the bus’s tin ceiling, I hung on for precious life.

  Darius braked by a screened-in porch on the side of the house, not far from an old carriage house. The porch’s fly-blown screen had tears in it; its splintery steps, just off the kitchen, canted this way and that. The house’s rain gutters had rusted through; sections hung loose, like chutes at a gravel quarry. The eaves, if you looked up from under, had neat little holes bored into them, like somebody’d corkscrewed hooks in there, to swing mum or begonia pots from. Carpenter bees had drilled the holes, though, not a flower-mad lodger. The only decorations between the porch and the carriage house were a compost heap, some rusted-out metal pans, and a tractor cannibalized for war scrap.

  Through the porch screen, I could see a long row of kitchen windows. Through those windows, the yarny-looking gray head of a colored woman bobbed back and forth behind a counter. The woman’s face had caved-in cheeks, bulgy lips and eyes, and a beaklike nose. Her hair had braided rat tails coming down behind her head and over her shoulders to the front, a more squawlike than a mammylike do. From the bus, her head seemed to lack a body; it rolled here and there in the kitchen’s steam and clatter.

  “Kizzy,” Darius said. “She either feed you or use you in a pie. Whynt you see which it gon be today?”

  Just then, though, I saw Mister JayMac strolling through a big victory garden toward the old servant quarters behind the main house: a neat little bungalow. It had hydrangea bushes with smoky blue flowers big as cabbages, and a red-tile roof that made it look more Spanish than Suthren.

  “Office back there,” Darius told me. “Office and bedroom. Him and Miss Giselle got to have they privacy.” I watched Mister JayMac amble, thinking Darius might say more, but he added only, “Git out, Danl. Go on. Git.”

  I stood up. I’d reached my “home.” Never mind I had no notion what to do now or even how to make my feet move.

  “Holy Jesus,” Darius said. He came down the aisle, grabbed my arm, and dragged me off the bus and up the decaying steps into the kitchen. “This young man hongry and speechless,” he said. “Feed him, Kizzy, but don’t spec no thanks.” He slammed on out of the kitchen through a swinging door more like you’d see in a restaurant than in an old Victorian home.

  Euclid came through another door from the dining room and the parlor beyond, where Hellbender ballplayers, from kids like me to grizzled codgers like Creighton Nutter, were listening to the news and debating the capture of Attu in the Aleutians.

  “Stupid,” somebody said. “Shoulda let the Japs have it. Two-bit icy rock aint worth one GI’s life, much less five hunnerd’s.”

  “You betcha,” a second player said. “Troops up there’d be more use here to home kicking striking miners’ butts.”

  “You don’t know squat, Fanning,” somebody else said. “My dad mined coal. If not for baseball, the mines’d have me too.”

  And so on. I remember the argument because my dream of Umnak and the tidal wave of Marsden plates clattering down still sprocketed through my head. I could close my eyes and relive the nightmare in milky black-and-white.

  Euclid gave me his Plastic Man comic book. He climbed up on a stool next to the wood stove and asked for something to eat. Kizzy poured him a fruit jar of buttermilk and gave him a plate of tomato slices with a crumbly chunk of cornbread.

  “Danbo too, Awnt Kiz,” he said.

  “Whynt you eat in the dining room wi the other mens?” Kizzy asked me. “Got a full spread out there.”

  I shook my head. They’d ask me questions, just like that farm boy Ankers at McKissic Field had done, and the silence I gave them back would irk or tickle them in troublesome ways.

  Kizzy (if she was Euclid ’s aunt, she had to be Darius’s too) had hands like long ash-colored mackerels. She sliced me a chunk of cornbread and sloshed me a glass of buttermilk even bigger than Euclid ’s fruit jar. I wolfed the cornbread and the buttermilk standing at a dough-rolling counter in the middle of the kitchen, sweating in the heat pouring off the wood stove. The kitchen’s wallpaper-calico-gowned ladies and top-hatted men on old-timey bicycles-peeled in strips, steamed away by heat and the fumes from boiling kettles of greens or tea.

  “Meetin in parlor, six-thuddy,” Euclid said. He put a dollop of strawberry jam on his cornbread and wedged the whole chunk into his mouth. “Yo hea?”

  Kizzy gave me all I could eat, including a bowl of greens with some pepper sauce and a piece of cold chicken, and shoved me into the backyard with my comic book and a baseball-sized green apple.

  “Iw caw you fo supper,” she said.

  I sat in the rusty metal seat of the junked tractor reading Plastic Man and shooing away noseeums. From the parlor, I could hear dance music on the radio, jokey arguments over a hearts game, a soap opera, more war news. I dozed, tuckered from my train ride. I woke and thumbed back through Euclid ’s comic. I dozed again. Next time I woke, I got down from the tractor and explored the house’s spread-out grounds. I stood clear of the bungalow out back, out of respect for Mister JayMac and Miss Giselle’s privacy, and maybe the simple fear he’d shotgun me if I bothered them. Eventually, I dozed off again.

  “Danbo,” Euclid said. “Suppa.”

  I didn’t want to, but I ate with the other players boarding in McKissic House. Counting me, sixteen fellas crowded the long table. Lon Musselwhite,
the team’s six-foot-four left fielder and the biggest man in the dining room, had the seat of honor next to the kitchen. (Musselwhite was team captain.) The chair at the table’s foot, more a throne than a piece of furniture, stayed empty, even though Kizzy had set it a place. I guessed it was for Mister JayMac, who’d show up when he felt like it. Reese Curriden, the third baseman, and Q. U. Parris, a pitcher nicknamed Quip, served us, toting bowls of vegetables and plates of meat in from the kitchen so Kizzy wouldn’t drop dead trying to do everything alone.

  “Don’t fret,” Reese Curriden told us newcomers. “This is just a get-acquainted deal. Yall’ll get your shot next week.”

  “KP,” Quip Parris said. He was short, blond as wheat, and triggered like a clock spring. Soon enough, I learned he saw himself as the linchpin of the pitching staff. He hailed from Raleigh, North Carolina. His initials stood for Quintus Uriah, which explains why everybody called him Quip.

  With nearly all the food on the table, Musselwhite rapped his spoon against his tea glass and said, “Yall please bow.” Everyone bowed. Kizzy came back in with three banana cream pies on a rack of lacquered dowels. She sighed loudly. “Sweet and holy Jesus,” Musselwhite said, “thy blessings on the lady that prepared these victuals, the victuals themselves, and all who aim to eat em. Give us strength-also victories over our CVL enemies, as Thou dost give our fighting forces victories over the Nips and Krauts. Amen.”

  “Amen,” said everybody at table.

  “Pass them ol field peas,” Musselwhite said.

  Bowls began shuttling around. Kizzy finally got to squeeze her rack of meringue-topped pies onto the table.