Brittle Innings

by Michael Bishop

  “You gentlemen come up here,” Mister JayMac said. He tapped the floor, and two fellas I’d’ve never guessed shuffled to the front of the room. Ex-big leaguers! Even Ankers got excited.

  “Huzza!” Hoey called. “Failures! They went up, but they came back down!” Joshing, but not totally. His little barb rang true.

  “Failures!” some other guys chanted. “Failures!”

  “At least we made it up,” Creighton Nutter said,

  “I think you made it all up. You and Dunnagin’s adventures in the bigs’re all in your heads.” Laughter. Musselwhite was captain, but Hoey did his bit as official team comedian.

  “In the record books, you mean,” Nutter said.

  Nutter and Dunnagin, our former Showmen. Nutter reminded me of the chip-on-his-shoulder second barber in a two-man shop, a fella who argues because he’s sick of playing second fiddle. He had acorn-colored skin, which he’d probably got from a north Georgia farmer with Cherokee blood.

  Dunnagin was thirty-eight or -nine, a mick with jet-black hair and eyes as blue as core samples of Canadian sky. His upper body said weight lifter; his legs said whooping crane. At practice that morning he’d worn full catcher’s gear: chest pad, shin guards, birdcage, the works. Even then I’d noticed his shin guards were wider than his thighs. You expected him to tumble over, like a tower of alphabet blocks with a block too many at the top.

  “Tell them who you played for, Mr Nutter,” Mister JayMac said, “and what kind of record you compiled.”

  “Murder,” Hoey said. “Corrupting female minors.”

  Nutter blew off the kibitzing. “In 1927, I pitched in nineteen games for the Boston Braves. Seventy-six innings.”

  “Ah, but your record,” Hoey said. “Tell us your record.”

  Nutter glanced over at Mister JayMac, who gave him a nod. “I was four and seven with two saves. My ERA was… 5.09.”

  Total silence. Hoey may’ve already known Nutter’s record, but most of the other Hellbenders didn’t.

  “Four and seven,” said Vito Mariani, himself a pitcher. “Not so hot. That earned run average aint so hot either.”

  “Mr Mariani, you have no ERA in the majors at all,” Mister JayMac said. “And there’s not another pitcher in Highbridge today with more big-league victories than Mr Nutter nailed down for the Braves. Give him the respect due him.”

  Ankers started clapping, the rest of us joined in. Nutter glued his chin to his chest, but smiled an angry-barber smile, like he disagreed with a customer’s opinion of the New Deal but didn’t want to job his tip by saying so aloud.

  “Very well, Mr Dunnagin,” Mister JayMac said, “tell us in what capacity you reached the bigs and how you fared there.”

  Dunnagin stood like a Marine at parade rest. “I went up as a puling babe with the St. Louis Browns in 1924. I played reserve catcher and pinch hit for all or parts of the next six seasons.”

  “After which the Browns cut you?” Mister JayMac asked.

  “Nosir. In 1929, my pa’s business hit an iceberg. I quit the Browns to take care of my folks, God rest them.”

  Hoey faked playing a violin. Imagine, though. Dunnagin had played in the majors two years before I was born. He’d held on to a Browns roster spot for six years! And the club hadn’t dumped him for half-assed play. He’d quit to sweep up the debris of a family disaster. Now, a dozen years down the line, he was trying to earn another berth in the bigs.

  “Tell the boys your nickname,” Hoey said. His violinist act hadn’t made anybody laugh, so he was trying something else.

  “ ‘Double,’ ” Dunnagin said. “My teammates on the Browns called me Double. In my first-ever at bat, against the Yankees, I slapped a two-bagger off Bullet Joe Bush. The ball scooted into the alley between Witt and Ruth. Well, I thought, I’m on my way. Look out, Cobb. Look out, Ruth and Hornsby.”

  “Go on, Percy,” Hoey said. “Tell em the rest.”

  “Double worked as a nickname later not because I regularly knocked out two-baggers,” Dunnagin said, “but because I had a bad tendency to ground into double plays every time the Browns looked like they might score.” He stared past Clerval into the foyer, where a grandfather clock’d begun to bong.

  “Son, you’re modest to a sadistic extreme,” Mister JayMac told Dunnagin. “Tell them about your best year.”

  “I hit.330 in 1926,” Dunnagin said, reciting it by rote and looking bored. “In ninety-four at bats, I had two home runs and fourteen doubles. But with more at bats in ’27 and ’28, my average fell off over sixty points both years.”

  “Which means he’d’ve still outhit all but three other Hellbender starters here with us this evening,” Mister JayMac said. “A hand for Mr Dunnagin, please.”

  This time I led the applause. So what if he’d last put on his catcher’s getup for the Browns the year the stock market crashed? We had a near legend for a teammate, a fella who’d once hit over.300 in the bigs.

  “With this leadership,” Mister JayMac said, “we belong in a tie for fourth about as much as Patton and Montgomery belong in a tie for anything with von Arnim and the Eye-talians. (No offense, Mr Mariani.) So look to these men as inspiration and examples. Thank you, gentlemen.”

  Nutter and Dunnagin returned to their spots in the parlor. Junior Heggie started to follow, but Mister JayMac halted him with the pointer. “Stay. We’re not quite finished. Darius.” He whacked the chart. Darius folded the franchise sheet over the back of the easel to show us a new page:

  CVL STANDINGS

  (As of June 3, 1943)

  “Remember, gentlemen,” Mister JayMac said, “yall haven’t even played the Gendarmes or Linenmakers yet-one of the best teams and the absolute sorriest. So, mostly, we’ve lost to mediocrities and also-rans. Were I given to worry, I’d be a total ruin. But I’ve long since taken to heart the scriptural counsel that anxious thought adds not a minute to our lives, and I sleep like a babe in swaddling clothes.”

  “Jesus,” Hoey said, not exactly reverently.

  “Selah,” Mister JayMac said. “I’ve prayed and I’ve rounded up these fresh-faced youths.”

  “Glory!” Quip Parris said. “What if they’re bums, sir?”

  Mister JayMac smiled. “If yall wanted aiggs, would I foist on you scorpions?”

  “Don’t like aiggs,” Burt Fanning said. No one else said a word, not even Buck Hoey.

  “And so, gentlemen, I give you Messieurs Ankers, Boles, Heggie, and Dobbs,” Mister JayMac said. “They’ll no doubt irk a few of yall, but I also expect em to be a hypodermic in this team’s draggy ass. Now, give em another Hellbender welcome.”

  A smattering of claps. Hoey, Jumbo, and Parris didn’t clap at all. But this time, Mister JayMac didn’t jump all over his men for cold-shouldering us.

  He had Darius flip the chart page. Another chart came up. Then another one after that. And so on. A chart showing which CVL teams had ex-big leaguers. A map of Highbridge’s business district, another of the part of town called Penticuff Strip, and even one of Camp Penticuff itself, down to parade grounds, dining halls, obstacle courses, and ball fields. Would we all be inducted if we didn’t pass muster as Hellbenders? Anyway, Darius kept flipping the charts, and the grandfather clock in the foyer kept bonging out the quarter hours.

  Finally, blueprints of every floor of McKissic House.

  “Okay,” Mister JayMac said. “Who’s rooming with whom?”

  The boardinghouse had two rooms for ballplayer-lodgers on the first floor, four on the second story, and a sort of garret nook on the third. Us rookies’d settle in faster, the theory went, if we each had an old hand for a roommate.

  “Sir, don’t we need to see who’s gonna get cut before we start assigning roommates?” Sweet Gus Pettus said.

  Mister JayMac studied Pettus sorrowfully, his head cocked. “To be fair, yes. But I already know who I think’ll be gone by tomorrow noon. You, Mr Pettus. Also, Charlie Jorgensen, Rick Roper, and Bobby Collum. Mr Collum rents from me over in Cotton Creek, but a
ll four of yall should be thinking about finding other work and moving out.”

  “What?” Rick Roper cried. “What? Spot challenges tomorrow and you’re not even waiting to see how we do?”

  “Mr Roper, you’ve played seventeen innings at shortstop this year,” Mister JayMac said, “but you have three times as many errors as Mr Hoey, who’s played over a hundred. You’ve fanned every time you’ve come up to bat.”

  Roper shut up. You could tell Pettus, Jorgensen, and Collum because they sat like glum statues. Roper went into a pathetic hangdog hunker of his own.

  “For room-assignment purposes,” Mister JayMac said, “I’m going to assume that tomorrow at this time the four men whose surnames I’ve called will no longer be around. If any of yall want a head start on a new life, I’ll give you your pay and a small severance check. I’m no heartless monster, gentlemen.”

  “No he aint,” Hoey said. “Ask Jumbo. The boss loant him his car.”

  Mister JayMac looked at Jumbo. “And you, Mr Clerval, why did I have to send Euclid to fetch you?”

  “Sir, I fell asleep. My errand earlier today fatigued me.”

  “What errand was that?” Hoey asked Jumbo.

  “A personal errand. A private matter.”

  “He got his ashes hauled!” somebody shouted.

  “If he did,” Hoey said, “it took a dump truck to do it.”

  “Hush,” Mister JayMac said. Nobody did. “Knock it off! We have room assignments to make and swapping out to do.”

  Heggie, Dobbs, and Ankers got picked for roomies right away, by Knowles, Curriden, and Musselwhite, and the guys identified as culls were thrown out on their ears. No one, though, jumped to take me.

  “Dumbo with Jumbo,” Buck Hoey said. “A perfect match.”

  Dumbo. The nickname the smart-alecks back in Tenkiller had hung on me. Hoey was just like the jerk back home who’d offered to buy me a ticket to Dumbo because, “S a good idea to stay in touch with your fambly, kid.”

  Jumbo studied me with his custardy eyes. “Okay,” he said. “I agree to take Mr Boles into my roost.”

  Jumbo’s apartment was the only third-floor room set aside for boarders. If you could trust Mister JayMac’s wall chart, roost was a great name for it. Every guy at the meeting looked back and forth between Jumbo and me. Cripes. He was the kind of joker you have bad dreams about, and Mister JayMac was going to let him take me upstairs to his… roost.

  8

  I’d left my duffel and my bat in the kitchen. When I went to get them, Curriden and Parris, on KP that week, followed me in and said I should start scrubbing dishes. I glared. Pro ballplayers, scrubbing dishes? Why couldn’t Kizzy do them? Getting thrown into Jumbo Clerval’s dutches had soured my mood, but I still couldn’t see why Mister JayMac’d pay a skinny old female shine just to cook and slouch around. Hadn’t he also hired her as a housekeeper? Why have colored help if your paid white ballplayers had to pitch in to help the help?

  Kizzy read my mind. “Danl Bowes, I cooks and cooks. Aint nobody in this house goes hongry. You hongry?”

  Nowhere like. If I’d taken another crumb, I’d’ve burst like a ripened pimple. I shook my head.

  “Then you best git it in yo head to hep. Else I’m gone, off to do fo folks what’ll preciate it.” She poked me with a finger like a voodoo bone. “Hear what I say, Danl Bowes?”

  This time I nodded. I heard her.

  Parris said, “You run off Kizzy, Boles, you might as well be dead. Word gets round you chased her, you will be dead.”

  “I loves to cook,” Kizzy said, “but hates to mess wi the pots and pans, the spills and overbiles that come wi a fixin bringe. When Mister JayMac stole me from Mrs Lullworth’s in ’thuddy-eight, he say I don’t have to mess wi aw that truck again. So I won’t, Danl Bowes, I gots me options.”

  “You go on now,” Curriden told her. “Quip and me and this rude boy here’ll finish up.”

  Kizzy rinsed-“rinched,” she said-her hands off, gathered her stuff up, and limped to the porch door off the kitchen. She sported a flapper’s hat from the roaring twenties and a picnic basket-size handbag. She looked back at us. “Mo pie in the Frigidaire. Yall gits hongry, go to it.” And she left in a slicked-up Model T, its gas coupons courtesy of Mister JayMac.

  “Too damned uppity for her own good, all right,” Curriden said when she’d gone. “But who’s going to tell her?”

  Parris got Junior Heggie to come down to help me scrub pots and towel-dry plates. The sink had been installed for a person no more than five feet tall. I could see why Curriden had wanted to hand the dishwashing chores on to a rookie. It killed me to stoop over that basin, and Curriden had a good half foot on me.

  By the time Heggie and I finished, the team meeting had long since broken up. The guys who lived in Cotton Creek-Hoey, Nutter, Sloan, and four others-had ridden back to the old mill district in Mister JayMac’s Caddy. He’d chauffeured them himself, eight men packed like sardines into his two-seater, with Hoey, according to one report, perched on Norm Sudikoff s lap like Charlie McCarthy on Edgar Bergen’s.

  “See there,” Parris told me when we’d heard this story, “Hoey’s a dummy too.”

  Jumbo waited in the parlor. Three of Mister JayMac’s culls sat with him looking glum and confused. (A fourth, Bob Collum, had returned to Cotton Creek with Hoey and pals, probably to tell his wife some dicey times lay ahead.) When I came in, the culls looked up at me like I was their hangman.

  “This way to our room,” Jumbo said. He ducked into the foyer and lumbered for the stairs. I wanted to follow him about as much as I wanted rheumatic fever.

  One fella got up from the card table he’d been sitting at and stopped me: Roper, a rangy player with eyes like tenpenny nailheads and a foul cigarette stink on his breath. Just then, though, I couldn’t put a name to his face. (One convenient thing about being a dummy-you can forget other folks’ names without them realizing it.)

  Roper dropped a long arm over my shoulder. “If you’re any good atall, Boles,” he said, talking into my ear, “I’m history. Spot challenges tomorrow, but Mister Jesus JayMac’s already throwed me out. I roomed with Muscles, but he’s already showing that Ankers kid my half of the premises. Is that fair?”

  I couldn’t shake my head. Roper’s hand’d clamped the back of my neck-it felt like a claw.

  “We’re subs, scrubs, third-stringers,” he said, yanking my head around, to look at Pettus and Jorgensen. “Expendables. You and them other wet-eared recruits have done for us. So I hope yall’re worth it, us getting booted.” He finally let go.

  Pettus and Jorgensen eyed me from the card table. Even before being dropped from the club, they’d been semievicted from their rooms.

  Where would Pettus and Jorgensen sleep? On sofas? In musty old chairs? I felt sorry for them. They looked sledgehammered, like heifers about to crash. I didn’t feel that sorry for Roper. He wanted to blame me for the whole room-and-roster shuffle, but I felt no guilt-I hadn’t bombed Pearl Harbor either.

  The real culprit was the war itself. CVL teams made do in ’43 with twenty-man rosters; marginal guys over that number had to face the blade. In most CVL towns, a twenty-man roster gave management a payroll that didn’t chew up the season’s gate. It also squared pretty well with the manpower needs of the Selective Service Acts and each club’s search for usable talent.

  “Dick Roper’s my name,” Roper said. “I may have to leave this bunch of shitasses, but yall’ll hear from me again.”

  (Actually, we did. He got drafted later that summer-one of the reasons Mister JayMac released him, I imagine, and fought in Europe with the Ninth Army. Today he’s a U. S. Congressman from a district in western Georgia, a born-again shill for the national gun lobby.)

  Jumbo came back from the foyer to get me. Roper retreated to the card table and his cast-off buddies. If Jumbo felt sorry for them, he didn’t show it. He took my bag-in his hand, it resembled a sack of marbles-and made for the stairs again. Following him, I knew he rear
ed up to seven feet, maybe seven-two. In Tenkiller, I’d never seen anybody even close to that size. Six foot took the cake. In fact, Lon Musselwhite was the biggest man I’d ever seen until Jumbo came along, and I hadn’t seen Muscles until just that morning.

  Anyway, I had my doubts about soldiering up the stairs behind Jumbo. It reminded me of beanstalk climbing. Fee-fi-fo-fum. The steps creaked. Once we’d reached the second floor and the steps to the third, the house-with its mildewed wainscoting, wavy picture molding, and uneven hardwood floors-had started to seem as echoey and crooked as a fairy-tale castle.

  We finally hit the third floor. A T-shaped hall divided it. We went down the crossbar to the house’s southwest side. Jumbo keyed open his door and nodded me in. Not counting the kitchen, this was the hottest room in McKissic House I’d yet visited, the stiflingest by far. Jumbo didn’t say two words, just pointed me to the corner under a gable roof. He dragged over a canvas cot for me to stow my gear under and to sleep on: an Army cot, bought or liberated from Camp Penticuff. Jumbo broke it open and set it up for me.

  No need for blankets, but I’d’ve looked with favor on a pillow and a sheet. I didn’t relish undressing in front of Jumbo, but because I usually slept in my skivvies, a showdown would eventually come-unless I copped out and slept in my clothes. The heat nixed that notion. My first bad dream, even one of Aleutian snows and icy Marsden matting, would trigger a killing fever attack. But I couldn’t tell Jumbo how I felt, what I wanted, why I ached to cry, and he didn’t ask. At least my smelly cot sat next to a window and an outside fire escape. But Jumbo’d probably let me camp there because he was too tall to move easily under the gable’s ceiling.

  Jumbo had a bed with white iron bedposts, two sets of springs laid side by side, and a couple of rectangles of scrap plywood on the springs. The setup didn’t look comfy, granted, but it had my cot beat all the way to the nearest mattress factory. Well, okay. Jumbo had let me into his room. He was the landlord, I was the tenant. But why couldn’t I have a bed too? After all, McKissic House didn’t shelter convicts or street bums.