Brittle Innings

by Michael Bishop

  Before we could get in the Caddy, a hefty man in overalls and a frowzy woman in a print dress came over. Their clothes seemed to have as much dust as cotton in them.

  “Jordan McKissic?” the man said. “Thass you, aint it?

  “It is. How may I help you?”

  “Show him, Sue Beth.”

  The woman-Sue Beth-pushed a paper under Mister JayMac’s nose. He retreated a step.

  “S from the War Department,” the man said. “Hit us a coupla days back. It’s our Donnie.”

  “He aint coming home,” the woman said. “He done got kilt in North Africa.”

  “I’m sorry,” Mister JayMac said. “A terrible thing.”

  “You oughta be,” the woman said. “You done for him. You took him when he coulda had him-shoulda had him-a heping-job zemption. Eye-talians didn’t kill our Donny. You did it with a stinkm fountain pen.”

  Mister JayMac said, “Please, folks, tell me yall’s names.”

  “The Crawfords,” the man said. “Ira and Sue Beth. Little people, ordinary folk. Ordinary!” Crawford didn’t exactly shout, but his kettle-drum voice carried. Some loitering fans began ambling towards us.

  “Donnie never shoulda gone!” Sue Beth Crawford did shout. “And you damn-all know it too!”

  “Mrs Crawford, God bless your martyred son,” Mister JayMac said. “I’m sorry every American boy who dies has to make that sacrifice.”

  “Yessir,” Ira Crawford said. “But the draft board had its quota to fill so you thew our innosunt young un in.”

  “Every boy in the hopper’s innocent in one way or another. Thank God we don’t yet have an army of criminals and cynics.”

  “Yore precious ballplayers don’t go!” Crawford accused.

  “Not one Hellbender comes from here,” Mister JayMac said. “They’re too young or old, or their local draft boards exempted them. I pulled no strings for any player.”

  “Mebbe you did, mebbe you didn’t,” Ira Crawford said. “But you cain’t say the same bout thatere black nigger. How come he aint on bivouac someres?”

  Darius heard this-he had to’ve-but he opened the Caddy’s rear door and helped Phoebe and Miss LaRaina in.

  “Mr Crawford, federal law forbids inducting Negroes in greater numbers than they appear in the general population. Hothlepoya County has almost as many coloreds as whites so we take more than most boards, but a limit exists.”

  “Hog slop,” Ira Crawford said.

  “Look, even if we loaded the Army with coloreds, they’d end up in service units-the quartermaster corps and such. They probably wouldn’t fight and die like you and the missus seem to want em to.”

  Near the big Caddy, you could’ve heard a cricket poot. Sue Beth started to cry, Ira cursed. They joined hands and walked back through the dusty lot to a dented Ford pickup loaded down with feed sacks.

  “I am sorry about your son!” Mister JayMac called out.

  “I bet,” said somebody unseeable in the crowd.

  The Crawfords slammed opposite doors and rattled away in their spavined pickup.

  “Git in, sir,” Darius said. “I’ll drive yall to the Royal.” He meant the Royal Hotel, a place with a restaurant supposedly even better than the Oglethorpe’s.

  Off we rode. Mister JayMac sat next to Darius, brooding. Miss LaRaina jabbered away, happy that the Hellbenders had won and made a move in the standings.

  17

  In the Chamberlain’s room at the Royal Hotel, we all had prime rib-except Darius, who ate beef soup and French bread in the kitchen. (Judging by the fruity smell on his breath after, he’d also tossed back some of the house wine.) Mister JayMac’s mood improved. Miss LaRaina was his “date.” Phoebe, going by age and seating arrangements, was mine.

  Talk ran from baseball to a possible invasion of Sicily to Phoebe’s plans for her senior year at Watson High. I learned that in Georgia the senior year was only a student’s eleventh of public schooling. (Not until after the war did Georgia create a twelfth year.) That made me-next to crackers Ankers, Heggie, and Dobbs-nearlybout a college man.

  “S a bother you cain’t talk,” Phoebe finally said to me. “You shore this condition aint some sort of numbskull play for sympathy?”

  “Be nice, Phoeb,” Miss LaRaina said. “And purge yourself, please, of those irritating cain’ts and aints.”

  “I cain’t,” Phoebe said. “It aint in the cards. And I’m bout as nice as Mr Boles deserves.”

  Mister JayMac changed the subject. “You talked when I met you. You stammered, but you talked. What happened?”

  “Smart, Uncle JayMac,” Miss LaRaina said. “You’ve asked him to tell you what rendered him speechless.”

  “Taint a silly thing to ast if he’s faking,” Phoebe said. “It makes tons o sense.”

  I’d’ve liked to tell Mister JayMac that what’d struck me dumb was seeing Miss LaRaina jaybird nude on the stairs, but that sequence of events didn’t exactly gibe. Everyone stared at me, though, like I might talk; and if my tongue’d worked, I’d’ve given them the Gettysburg Address just to be polite. In fact, I tried to talk: a gargle, a gag, a hack.

  Which disgusted Phoebe. “Dogs,” she said. In my inside jacket pocket I had the small notebook Jumbo’d given me. I pulled it out. Mister JayMac saw me patting my pockets for something to write with and reached me his fountain pen. (The one he’d used on Donnie Crawford’s draft papers?)

  I opened my notebook and thought. What could I tell these people? I couldn’t tell them about Sergeant Pumphrey. Hell, I couldn’t even think about that. I probably didn’t think about it. I had no mental picture of Pumphrey at all-the man didn’t exist for me in Highbridge.

  So I printed: On the train from Tenkiller I had a had dream. My daddy flew at me in a plane. A long metal runway rolled at me and knocked me down. When I woke up I couldn’t talk. I tore out the sheet of paper and passed it across the table to Mister JayMac.

  “Some dream,” he said.

  “Read it to us,” Miss LaRaina said, and he did.

  “Gimme,” Phoebe said. Mister JayMac handed the ripped-out page to her, and she read it aloud right after him, making my dream sound like a comedy film. “Then it aint physical,” she said. “It’s jes head-stuff. If you wanted to bad enough, you could talk.”

  I took the page away from Phoebe, flipped it over, and printed: It wasn’t head stuff once. My daddy smacked me in the throat when I was 12. Took me 2 yrs to learn to talk again.

  I gave the page to Mister JayMac, who read it aloud for Phoebe and Miss LaRaina. From then on, that’s how I talked, scribbling my messages and passing them on to Mister JayMac to read out.

  “Your daddy must’ve been a prince,” Miss LaRaina said.

  I loved him. He taught me how to play ball.

  “A man who teaches his boy to play ball cain’t be a total jackass, can he, Uncle Jay?” Phoebe said.

  “I know your opinion of baseball players, child,” Mister JayMac said. “How do you want me to interpret your question?”

  “No sarcasm meant,” Phoebe said. “Not a hair.”

  “There are nicer words than jackass,” Miss LaRaina told Phoebe.

  “Like prince,” Phoebe said. “I spose.”

  Miss LaRaina gave Phoebe a razor-sharp stare, then turned to me again. “Is your daddy still alive? If so, where is he?”

  Alive. A guy on the train (Pumphrey! I refused to think) said he’s in Alaska working on planes.

  “Working on them or flying them?” Miss LaRaina said. “In your dream, you saw him flying a plane.”

  But I’d written what I meant. I nodded at Mister JayMac, and he read my last message again. Forget that in my dream Dick Boles had flown a P-40 Warhawk. I wrote:

  I dreamed baseball on a steel runway-in the Alooshans. Me vs. a air force ground crew. Baseball in the snow.

  “Well, it guv you laryngitis,” Phoebe said.

  “Young Mr Boles lives, breathes, and dreams baseball,” Mister JayMac told the women.

&nbs
p; Miss LaRaina leaned over the linen-and-lace tablecloth: “You share a room with Jumbo Hank Clerval, I’ve been told. How do you like that? What kind of man is he?”

  A big man. I like it fine.

  Phoebe and Mister JayMac laughed. Miss LaRaina, though, kept studying me, like I knew more than I’d written.

  “Mama, Mr Clerval’s a big, smart man,” Phoebe said.

  “He reads books and wallops long homers. What else do you need to know? Why do you think you need to know it?”

  “Mr Clerval incites curiosity,” Miss LaRaina said to me. “He has mystery. He’s also-well, hideous, one could say.”

  “A man has awful little control over the face God chooses to bestow upon him,” Mister JayMac said.

  “Neither does a woman,” Miss LaRaina said. “Which doesn’t stop her from trying.” She kept looking at me. I had the key, she seemed to think, to the mystery of Jumbo Hank Clerval. I could make use of what I knew to reveal him to her. Except I couldn’t. I still didn’t know what made Fadeaway Ankers tick, much less my brooding highbrow galoot of a roomy.

  Poitely I wrote: He’s a vejiterran. He snores. He gave me this notebook. (Vejiterran-like he came from Vejiterra, a planet in some flaky Flash Gordon universe.)

  Mister JayMac, Miss LaRaina, and Phoebe all laughed, and I got self-conscious about my spelling and my sloppy printing. I decided to sit tight as Tarbaby from then on-nothing out of my mouth, nothing more from Mister JayMac’s pen. I passed it back to him. Miss LaRaina didn’t notice.

  “How do you suppose it’d feel to kiss him?” she said.

  Phoebe moved like somebody’d shot a jolt of current through her. Our silverware jumped, our glasses shook. Phoebe’s face turned red. Anger? Shame? A cocktail of them both?

  “Mama!” she cried. “That’s vile!”

  “Why? Because Mr Clerval doesn’t resemble Clark Gable?”

  Phoebe looked down. “No, Mama. You’ve a husband in Europe in the war.”

  “Goodness, girl, I was speaking hypothetically. Don’t blow a gasket. Tell me, Daniel: Is it wrong for a married woman to ask a hypothetical question about kissing another man?”

  Mister JayMac said, “I’d venture, LaRaina, that it’s not so much wrong as unwise. Thought precedes action.”

  “In many cases, it follows. I speak from both experience and observation,” Miss LaRaina said.

  “Scuse me,” Phoebe said. She got up-she almost knocked her chair over-and wove her way through a jungle of fancy-set tables to the restroom. The Chamberlain’s Room had filled with customers. The noise level was so high you could’ve raved on about bomber production in Marietta without drawing a warning from a plainclothes OSI man. During the war, you expected such crowds. Movie theaters, bistros, and restaurants ran at full throttle. People had money, and worries to chase.

  “Phoeb’s awfully touchy this evening,” Miss LaRaina said. She lit a cigarette.

  “She loves her daddy,” Mister JayMac said.

  “So do I.” The smoke around Miss LaRaina’s face and shoulders swirled dreamily. It made her green eyes look shady and then as bright and hard as holly leaves.

  “Yes,” Mister JayMac said, “but do you stay busy enough?”

  That got Miss LaRaina’s goat. “My lord, Uncle, I’m still the secretary of the Officers’ Wives’ Club at Camp Penticuff. I chair two different fund-raising committees of the Highbridge Women’s Club. I helped organize your last three war drives at the ballpark. I read books. I go to movies. I write Luther cheerful letters. I’m also a mother.”

  “I haven’t forgotten. You shouldn’t either.”

  Miss LaRaina blew out a stream of smoke like a genie from an Arabian lamp. Get me out of here, I wished. My fidgets pulled Miss LaRaina’s attention.

  “Your all-knowing boss thinks I’m a neglectful mother, Daniel.”

  “No, LaRaina,” Mister JayMac said. “It’s just that-”

  She cut him off. “Actually, he fears I may be a… a bad example. Is that it, Uncle?”

  “The times’re out of joint, LaRaina. The climate’s at once permissive and judgmental. For your sake, as well as Phoebe’s, you should try to hold your reputation as wife and mother above reproach.”

  “Ah,” Miss LaRaina said. “Caesar’s wife.”

  “If the analogy fits.”

  “ ‘Do as I say and not as I do.’ ” Miss LaRaina stubbed out her quarter-smoked cigarette in an ashtray, grinding it like a woman with a grudge.

  “LaRaina,” Mister JayMac said.

  “He hates it. I’m often as enamored-hypothetically-of the players he imports as he is. What can I say, Daniel? I like men. I’m young yet. All my hormones work.”

  “You’ve said a good deal too much.” Mister JayMac didn’t raise his voice: he might’ve just said, It’s raining out.

  “Uncle Jay understands hormones,” Miss LaRaina said. “Even though he was born during the Trojan War, his flare up in all their ancient splendor at least twice a week.”

  I wanted out of there bad. A spaniel that strays into a family argument gets its butt kicked.

  Darius dropped off Miss LaRaina and Phoebe at their house in Cotton Creek and drove Mister JayMac and me home to McKissic House.

  I felt nothing but relief getting back upstairs with Jumbo, even in our stifling attic room.

  “Good evening,” he said, then went back to reading Willkie’s One World. Because he’d nearlybout finished it, he didn’t say another word to me until bedtime.

  “Good night, Daniel.”

  Believe me, I’d appreciated his silence up till then.

  18

  In the second week of June, we went on the road against Quitman and Marble Springs and played good ball.

  We didn’t sweep either series, though. That next Saturday, we split a doubleheader against the Seminoles, losing the opener on a squeeze bunt RBI in the bottom of the twelfth. Talk about peeved! We revved for revenge in the so-called nightcap (so-called because the sun never had a chance to set) and shellacked them three to zip in about ninety minutes. We got some nutritious shuteye that night and ambushed the poor saps again on Sunday.

  At the end of my first road trip, we had fourteen wins and ten losses. Because Opelika and LaGrange had been playing like drunken Looney Tune characters, the pennant race tightened. We had a homestand against Eufaula and a big road trip against the Orphans and the Gendarmes scheduled at the end of the next week. I got a glow on thinking about it. Wins in those games could say a lot about that summer’s final standings.

  Now, some pro leagues, including the Negro bigs, liked to play a split season because they always had more personnel changes than the two white major loops. At summer’s end, they had two pennant winners, a first- and a second-half champeen, and a playoff to decide the overall victor. Mister JayMac’s wartime philosophy-and he had a lot of say in the CVL-was simple: Since no team’d get more than a half dozen new guys once play started, we should pull one hard-fought season with the guys on board. If one team ran away with it, attendance might falter, but that summer we had balance at the top and lots of jockeying around during the dog-day swelter. So the fans never jumped ship. Even bunglers like the Boll Weevils, the Linenmakers, and the Quitman Mockingbirds drew crowds when Highbridge and the other top teams came to town.

  On the road, we traveled in the Bomber, with Darius at the wheel and Mister JayMac in the catbird seat behind him. In other towns, the boss depended on taxies for transportation, or obliging locals with cars, or his own sore feet. But because he had a lot of friends around south Georgia, you seldom saw him walking. Sometimes he’d hijack the Bomber. Ration stamps for gas never posed him a problem.

  Hellbender players didn’t stay in motor courts or hotels-with the exception, of course, of Hank Clerval. Jumbo wanted lodgings in commercial hostelries, and he got his way because, well, he could play. Also, he cowed even Mister JayMac, who still didn’t care for Jumbo’s taste for private rooms-his arrangements with locals to board his players were thriftie
r than running a hotel tab. I benefited from Jumbo’s stand because I got to stay with him in hotels. Or I guess I did. Maybe I just lost my chance to meet some charming folks. But whether in Highbridge, Quitman, or Marble Springs, where we shared a beat-up cabin in a motor court near Seminole Park, I often felt like a cockroach, a bug underfoot. Jumbo seemed more at home in these places than I did.

  With a draw on my first paycheck (I never told anybody a soldier on the train had stolen my money), I’d bought a used radio, but Jumbo didn’t like me to play it, not even to catch up on war news. He preferred books to radio programs. He thought war, even news about it, “uncivilized.” When I turned on my set in our motel, he clomped around his mat and clicked it off, the scars at his lip corners glowing like coals.

  “The hostilities of nations revolt me. They prey upon and increase the petty insecurities of men.”

  Unlike baseball, I thought.

  But, hey, what a speech. Jumbo belonged in politics. He should run for dogcatcher. If he nixed public appearances and ran a radio campaign, he might even win.

  I sat there on my cot, scared and angry. Couldn’t he’ve just asked me to turn the radio down? Somehow, though, he picked up on how bad he’d browned me off.

  “I’m a pacifist, Daniel. Even had I not been too tall for the services, conscience would have required me to resist my own induction. Frankly, I would have run away.”

  This speech didn’t bleach the blackness out of my mood. At my first team meeting, he’d labeled bad ballplayers traitors. Now he was talking lily-livered trash.

  “My only citizenship, if I possess one, is Swiss. In both war and peace, Switzerland remains neutral.” Jumbo lumbered back to his bed. Outside, a thousand cicadas whirred.

  Bus trips aboard the Bomber would fag you out faster than a boulder-pushing contest. The speed limit was thirty-five miles per hour. That turned a trip to Cottonton, our farthest pull, into a five-hour fatigue fest. Mister JayMac tried to avoid travel on game days, but if we had two series on the same road trip, he couldn’t arrange off-day travel. Usually, though, CVL schedule makers set it up so back-to-back away series occurred against teams just two or three hours apart. On my first road trip, we lost to Quitman on Friday night and left town at nine the next day to get to Marble Springs by noon, two hours before the twin bill we split there. The ride’d drained us so bad, we did great not to drop both games.