Brittle Innings

by Michael Bishop

  Junior stood next to a gingerbreaded-up cash register flirting with the clerk. My eyes had to adjust. When they did, I looked around. Six double shelves ran front to back. A soft-drink cooler with ice water in the bottom and metal stalls for the bottles stood opposite the cash register. Two creaky overhead fans turned. The store had a pressed-tin ceiling with design squiggles in the stamped-out squares. The smells of damp sawdust and wrapped cold cuts hung in the air. At last, I could see to read a homemade sign nailed to a shelf near the cash register:

  PLEASE!!! COUNT YOUR

  CHANGE AND EXAMINE

  YOUR POINT BOOK

  BEFORE LEAVING WITH FOOD ITEMS.

  MISTAKES CAN’T BE FIXED

  LATER!!!

  Every Hellbender player who lodged at McKissic House had given his ration book (War Ration Book Two) to Kizzy, through Mister JayMac, so she could shop for the whole house. Only team members with their own places got to keep their books. So if you wanted a snack, you couldn’t buy rationed items. You had to get junk food-soda, cupcakes, and such, from companies that’d already justified their sugar allotments-and you bought it with coin, not coins and stamps. But I had no coin, and it looked like all I’d be able to do was shuffle and covet.

  “Danny!” Junior Heggie called. “Danny, git yore tail over here and meet this spitfire pixie!”

  I angled back to the cash register. The clerk behind it was a girl with a fox’s face, reddish-blond hair, and a costume-jewelry cluster, a kind of exploded pearl, on one ear. She wore a khaki shirt with a single set of captain’s bars on one collar and a pair of rolled-up blue jeans. She didn’t reach five feet. She looked twelve, but the earring and her hipshot stance told you twelve underestimated it. Well, maybe the earring didn’t. Girls will do a lot as preteens to make themselves look older, but wearing Papa’s shirt isn’t usually one of them, so you knew this pixie had a grudge on, a war orphan’s crow to pick. Her daddy was overseas, and don’t you forget it, buster.

  “Who’s this?” she said. “Ichabod Crane in a baseball suit?”

  “He don’t talk,” Junior said. “Name’s Danny Boles. He’s from Oklahoma, Plays a whangdoodgle shortstop.”

  “Whynt you talk, Okie? Explain yoresef.”

  The sunburn from our workout probably hid my blush.

  Junior got mad. “You half-wit! I said he don’t talk, and he don’t. It’s an affliction. Leave him be.”

  “Folks come in here to buy junk, not to sashay about going, ‘Mmmm,’ ” she said, mocking an uppity window shopper.

  “You deaf?” Heggie said. “He cain’t talk. I done told you.”

  “Take your Twinkie, son, and put it where your mama won’t ever find it.” A genteel little piece, passing out Suthren hospitality.

  Junior like to gagged. We had our speechlessness in common.

  “What a man,” the girl said. “Absodamnlutely flusterated if a female don’t drop down P.D.Q. to kiss his shoe.” She looked at me. Her next words weren’t so smart-alecky. “Like a person who cain’t talk, cain’t talk. Like yo’re no different from a box of laundry soap.”

  “I didn’t say he wasn’t no different from a box of laundry soap,” Junior said. “I uz jes trying to-”

  “For sweet pity’s sake,” the girl cried, “will you have the decency to hush? Yo’re a disgrace to yore sex-a ballplayer’s commonest failing.”

  Creighton Nutter came back into the store. He grabbed a pack of cigarettes, the last pack of Regents, and paid the girl from a coin pouch looped through his belt. Junior muttered something-bitch, I think-and brushed past Nutter onto the sidewalk, as flusterated as the girl’d accused.

  “Ah, you’re being neighborly again here at your Neighborly Market,” Nutter said. “Swell.”

  “Mister Creighton, take a leap,” she said.

  “She can’t stand ballplayers,” Nutter told me. “Or thinks she can’t. In her view, we should all be in the Army.”

  “Not you,” she said. “Yo’re too old. You’d git ten jokers round you and blow em all up by accydent.”

  “Miss Pharram,” Nutter said, “allow me to present to you Danny Boles. Mr Boles, the fair Miss Phoebe Pharram.”

  “You think I want to know this skinny pill?” Phoebe said.

  “Calm down,” Nutter said. He yanked the pull on his Regents, tapped out a cigarette, and lit up. Smoke whirled away in the downdraft from an overhead fan. “Phoebe here is Mister JayMac’s great niece, daughter of his late brother Jude’s child, LaRaina. Hitch and Shirleen are her paternal grandparents, and by a special arrangement with the team, their Neighborly Market allows us Hellbenders to buy on credit. Get what you want and Phoebe will record your purchases in a ledger set aside for us.” He took a deep drag on his cigarette, blew the smoke at Phoebe, and elbowed out, letting the screen slam like the neck-snapper on a mouse trap.

  “I hate the name Phoebe!” Phoebe yelled after him. “I pee on it!” Somebody on the sidewalk giggled. “I hate all first and last names what start with the same letters!”

  I stood there awed, drinking her in.

  “Call me Skeeter,” she told me. “I hate the name Phoebe, and I shore as Shirleen don’t answer to bitch.”

  Of course, I would think of her then and always as Phoebe. Skeeter cut this feisty little girl down to something you went to a lot of trouble to swat. Besides, back then, girls who talked like Phoebe were about as plentiful as cow bells in an Episcopal choir.

  “Cripes, Ichabod.” My admiration chapped her. “Bring me somepin to write up in this ledger. Or clear out.”

  I hustled to get an orange soda from the cooler and a Baby Ruth from the candy aisle. I brought them over to Phoebe, who turned to take inventory of the cough-drop boxes, poker chips, and clip combs on the shelf behind her. I rolled the bottom of my soda bottle on the glass countertop.

  “Yeh?” she said, not looking around.

  I waited. Phoebe ignored me. I fidgeted. It might be nearly time for our practice to resume. I used my soda bottle like a bell clapper, ringing it against the fancy metal register. She spun around. Her eyes, a marbly grayish green, jumped like hard-thrown jewels.

  “Watch it, Ichabod.” She came to the counter, grabbed my drink and candy bar, pulled a book out from under the counter, and wrote down all the needed info-everything but my name. She’d heard my name twice, but’d already forgotten it. She saw me looking, waiting for her to finish up.

  “Okay,” she said. “What gives here, Ichabod?”

  I pounded my fist on the countertop. Phoebe blinked. Her face turned fish-belly pale, then her eyes flared again. Even an Army.45 wouldn’t’ve scared her for long. It embarrassed her not to remember my name, though, and I couldn’t tell her because… well. Mexican standoff.

  I charged around the counter, yanked the “Big Red” Parker Duofold pen from her, and bent over the ledger to scribble my own name in. The Duofold was a clumsy near-antique, and I wrote my John Hancock just like Hancock, gig: DANIEL HELVIG BOLES. Then I went back out front, grabbed a pack of Camels, and had Phoebe add them to my tab. Rustled some matchbooks from a box, took my soda bottle by the neck, scooped up my Baby Ruth, and headed out the door afraid I might drop something and wind up looking a cluck.

  “Hey, wait a sec.” I stopped and looked back at Phoebe. “Sorry I called you Ichabod. Nobody likes a name dropped on em like a peed-on blanket.”

  She had that right. I banged outside and sat down on the curb next to Nutter, now puffing away like a factory.

  “Camels,” Nutter said, seeing my pack. “ ‘They don’t tire my taste. They’re easy on my throat. They suit me to a T.’ If we smoked sandpaper dust, their ads’d say the same thing.”

  I drank my orange soda, I ate my candy bar, I smoked a Camel. I thought I heard an adult-Hitch? Shirleen?-talking to Phoebe. Good. A high-strung gal that age didn’t need to be tending a whole store all by herself. Wasn’t safe.

  12

  Darius’d driven us all to practice that morning in the Brown Bomber, then
disappeared. Now he showed up in spikes, knickers, and a long-johnish jersey that didn’t hide the ropy muscles in his upper body. His arms looked like weight-lifting eels. He snapped off warm-up tosses to Dunnagin.

  Now, even in Tenkiller I’d heard of Satchel Paige. By ’43, five years before he joined the majors with the Cleveland Indians, Paige was already a legend-for pitching in the Negro leagues and on barnstorming tours. Folks said he threw an invisible fastball. Paige would sometimes call in his fielders and retire the opposing side on strikeouts. No one’d ever come closer to unhittableness than Satchel Paige. A Negro sports-writer in Kansas City had called his right arm a “bronze sling-shot.”

  Other black ballplayers had talents like Paige’s, but Paige had charisma and got the ink, so far as any colored player got it back then. And so you’ve never heard of Hilton Smith, a hurler for the Kansas City Monarchs who-from ’40 to ’46-may’ve been the greatest pitcher in the world. In ’41, Stan Musial and Johnny Mize hit against Smith in an exhibition-tried to hit against him-and both claimed never to’ve seen a better curve.

  Darius Satterfield, who couldn’t play in the CVL because his skin shaded out too dark, had downhome Satchel Paige-Hilton Smith stuff, an eye-boggling arsenal of pitches. Just watching him warm up, I knew I’d never faced anyone like him. No one. Darius threw like a kicking mule or a jinking hare, depending on the need, but was the only player on the field Mister JayMac didn’t call mister.

  Several Hellbenders had trouble with Darius’s role-not his bus driving, or bag toting, or his trainer’s work on sore arms and legs (good nigger work, with tradition behind it). What bothered some of the fellas-not Hoey, though, or Dunnagin, or most of the starters, whether Dixie-born or imports like me-was playing ball with him. As if the ball flying from Darius’s hand to their bats or gloves would weave a bit of Africa into their own skins.

  The most sickening get-that-nigger-off-the-field cry-babies on our team were Trapdoor Evans, Jerry Wayne Sosebee, Norm Sudikoff, Turkey Sloan (a little surprisingly), and, it turned out, Philip Ankers. They wanted Darius for a pack mule, not a teammate, and all that kept them from niggering him to death or threatening to bolt to a team with a “real white man” for a manager was Mister JayMac himself. He’d outright bench them. He’d let them know any traitor to the Hellbenders would never play in Alabama or Georgia again, if he could help it. In fact, if the troublemakers were young and fit, Mister JayMac would threaten them back, usually with pulling strings to put them into uniforms, so they could go after Nips and Huns instead of Negro Americans.

  Dixie had laws against blacks and whites playing each other in organized sports. Laws that prevented all-star squads of colored barnstormers from showing up in small Alabama and Georgia towns and challenging the local white heroes, something they did profitably in Wyoming, say, or Kansas. First, they’d’ve had no place to stay, except in Negro homes or their own touring cars. Second, it’d’ve bruised the whiteys’ egos to get skinned by coons in front of their neighbors. Third, everybody-whites and coloreds alike-seemed to understand if white folks let down their guard in something as human as baseball, they might drop it elsewhere too.

  Black ballplayers played in the South for professional clubs in Atlanta, Memphis, Birmingham, and Jacksonville, and on Army teams on posts like Fort Benning, Fort Stuart, and Camp Penticuff. But even on these bases, they played other coloreds. Forget the war. Never mind that Americans of every shade wore one-color-fits-all khaki. Whites would go see blacks play each other because they put on a bang-up show, but at Atlanta ’s Ponce de Leon Park, whites bought tickets at separate entrances and sat in bleacher sections off limits to the nigger hoi polloi.

  Darius didn’t play in the CVL, but he sure as heck took part in practices and intrasquad games at McKissic Field. He served as a lieutenant commander to Mister JayMac, except he didn’t very often come up and tell you to do something. He sort of hinted you should do it. He asked if you wanted help getting a hitch out of your swing or a sad double clutch out of your throws to first. Mostly, Darius kept his mouth shut and taught by showing. Usually, when he led a practice, everyone accepted the sham that even though Mister JayMac had deputized Darius as his stand-in, he could have tapped almost anybody else on the squad.

  Anyway, Mister JayMac had ordered a scrimmage, first stringers versus recruits and scrubs, and Darius had drawn the pitching start for the regulars. The regulars also got to be home team. Us rookies and scrubs had to use the visitors’ dugout and give up the advantage of last at bats. I didn’t like it, but so what?

  Creighton Nutter pulled me into our dugout, where Mister JayMac had tacked up lineups for both teams. Nutter’d been appointed our manager. Mister JayMac would run the A squad. He seemed to want us underdogs in a snugged-up croker sack from the get-go. Nutter studied our lineup. By rights he should’ve drawn up our batting order, but Mister JayMac had done it for him.

  “Damn,” Nutter said. “We’ve got two pitchers at players’ spots and a baby on the mound. Thank God for empty bleachers.”

  I read the lineup too. Mister JayMac had me batting first. I wouldn’t get to watch another hitter against Darius before I had to face him myself.

  “Get on up here, Mr Boles!” Mister JayMac yelled. He wore a chest protector and a mask, ready to ump as well as to manage. That seemed unfair, but when he sent Parris, one of our boys, out to call the bases, I relaxed a little.

  I rummaged up my Red Stix bat, crossed to the batter’s box, swung it a few times. Its barrel shone red in the sun.

  “You drop that thing in a vat of Mercurochrome, Dumbo?” Hoey yelled from short.

  At third Curriden gave an egg-sucking grin. “My pecker’s about that color when it gets angry.”

  “And you wish it was that big,” Dunnagin said from his crouch behind the plate.

  A bit more hoohah over my imported timber before Mister JayMac snarled, “Batter up!”

  I dug in against Darius with a catch in my heartbeat. My first pitch in my first at-bat as a hired pro. It came out of Darius’s shoulder-dipping windup so hard I hardly even saw it. I just heard it go thwaap! in Dunnagin’s mitt.

  “Strike one, Mr Boles,” Mister JayMac said.

  Hoey and the other infielders chattered away, badmouthing me: “You couldn’t hit the floor if you fell off a stepladder, Boles!” “Cmon, Dumbo, make like the Dorsey brothers and swing!” “Whassa madder, rookie? All the blood in you go into that stupid bat!”

  Darius got me on four pitches, two quick strikes (the second one swinging), a teaser high for a ball, and a peppy slider on the outside corner I lunged at like a beginner with a bayonet. I jammed my bat into the ground to keep from eating a pound of red Georgia clay.

  The jeering stopped: I was history.

  Junior and Dobbs went down too, Junior on an excuse-me nibbler back to Darius, Skinny on three air-pummeling cuts that would’ve unsocketed almost anybody else’s shoulder. Seven pitches and side out. Things looked bleak for us Mudville boys.

  “Pingless wonders,” Muscles said, trotting in from left after tossing his glove down. “Way to go, Darius.”

  Philip Ankers took the mound for us, the B squad. A fifteen-year-old hurling against good journeymen players and cagey retreads. Nobody on A squad was less than thirty but Knowles, a twenty-something 4-F with the same million-dollar problem that’d kept both Mariani and Frank “I’ll Never Smile Again” Sinatra out of the Army, a punctured eardrum. But Ankers looked older than Knowles, with his greasy beard and the body of a pit bull.

  In his first time out, Ankers had to face Hoey, Charlie Snow, and Muscles. He looked to have just two pitches: a fastball and a fadeaway. Today you’d call a fadeaway a screwball or a scroogie, and it’s not usually a pitch high schoolers master. Somehow, Ankers had. He’d start it off like a speedball, but finger-lip it. Just as it got to a righthand hitter it jerked in and dropped away. With that pitch, he made Hoey and Snow look like amateur-night contestants. They both rolled out to the infield. Musselwhite, though
, muscled one to the right-field wall for a triple because Ankers slipped up and threw him a fastball low and inside. Muscles batted left, and that was the perfect pitch for him to cream. Ankers learned from his mistake. From then on, he threw nothing but fadeaways and teaser fastballs.

  Jumbo was batting cleanup, but Jumbo couldn’t clean Muscles off third. Ankers kamikazied him with dipsy-doodle junk, mostly fadeaway variations. Jumbo took a couple, fouled off a couple, and ended up missing a pitch-like Muscles, he batted left-that tailed away to the outside corner. This swing dumped him on his rear, a fall that seemed to shake the whole infield. I thought it might take a crane to hoist him up again, but he rolled over to all fours and got slowly to his feet.

  The game went on like that. Darius made us B-squad boys look like stooges; Ankers wriggled out of every potential trap with a killer fadeaway. In fact, by the fourth inning, Sloan’d started calling him Fadeaway. It stuck. Ankers became Fadeway for ever after.

  Goose eggs stacked up. Noon yawned like an oven. Each time Ankers escaped another A-squad wrecking crew with his shutout unblemished, Mister JayMac waved his regulars onto the field and yelled “Batter up!” at us scrubs. He looked to be steam-cleaning his gear from the inside out.

  “We won’t git no rest,” Norm Sudikoff griped, “till the bastid has him a five-alawm heat stroke.”

  I wondered about that. Should a rookie like Ankers pitch more than five hard-throwing innings? Come our next CVL game, would us Hellbenders have the bounce of boiled spaghetti? And how many times would Darius make me look like a fool? Coming to my third at bat in the top of the seventh, I’d struck out swinging and a second time counting the stitches on a goofer that’d dropped through the strike zone.

  Now I felt semipanicked. Guessing what Darius planned to throw would pickle your brain. Because you couldn’t guess, you had to watch and react. So far I’d watched and reacted a lot less well than I’d just watched.

  “It’s the old red-stick wagger,” Hoey welcomed me. “Wave that baton, maestro. Conduct yourself back to the bench.”