Brittle Innings

by Michael Bishop

  Anyway, when I learned about these set-your-own-hours defense jobs, I understood why nobody at Monday morning’s Rolling Assizes had seconded Sosebee’s charge Jumbo’d received special treatment. Every Hellbender got special treatment. Some looked a little more equal than others in getting it, but hardly anybody had to poach his own eggs-if you know what I mean. Players in the bigs and even a few blue-chip Negro stars might make more money than we did, but Highbridge had earned itself a dead-on nickname: Sittin’ Pretty City.

  It did surprise me nobody’d reraised the point about Mister JayMac’s loaning Jumbo his Caddy. Loaning a car was personal-in a way flexing your long-term political clout could never be. Loaning your car meant you trusted the loanee. If he didn’t qualify for gas stamps, you even had to bend or play peekaboo with the law.

  On Thursday, Jumbo borrowed Mister JayMac’s Cadillac again, and Mister JayMac lent it to him. At two in the afternoon, the Caddy’s keys changed hands in the parlor, just as Fadeaway, Junior, Skinny, and I were about to start another poker marathon.

  “Home before dark,” Mister JayMac told Jumbo. “We’ve got those pesky Mudcats tomorrow. You’ll need some rest.” And he stalked on out of the house.

  Jumbo squeezed the car keys in his fist and lumbered up the stairs towards our room. I deserted my poker buddies to go after him, but Jumbo took two or three steps at a time and got there ahead of me. Inside, he stood holding the box of used baseballs I’d always wondered about.

  “I have a sick relative in Alabama,” he said. “I meant to take these to him on my last trip, but, well…”

  Your sick relative likes old baseballs? I thought.

  “A project,” Jumbo said, hefting the box. The lumps on his face flushed, then faded to their old chalky hues at different speeds. “Excuse me, Daniel.” I got out of his way.

  Jumbo carried the box downstairs, put it into the back seat of Mister JayMac’s Caddy, and drove away. His body seemed to fill the front seat, like a Thanksgiving Day float.

  He got back about five hours later, looking empty-eyed and blue. He went straight upstairs and lay down. I carried him some iced tea and a pan of vegetables, but found him lying in a kind of trance, not quite sleeping but not quite keyed to the outer world either. He didn’t eat or drink a thing.

  Jumbo seemed okay again in the morning. (At breakfast, he wolfed down fruit, pancakes, and juice.) But I’d had a hard night. My weird-ass roomy’d lain only feet away with his eyes like yellow slits and his meaty paws squeezing the coverlet. I stumbled around all morning like a codeine junkie. My first game against Eufaula loomed.

  Damn you Jumbo, I thought, I’m gonna play like a zombie.

  Well, I did. The Mudcats finned us. They just cut us up. We lost that Friday, nine to one. Mister JayMac cleared the bench looking for somebody who could do even a splinter’s worth of damage against their pitcher, Jimmy Becker. Nobody could. By the seventh inning, even Muscles and Charlie Snow’d come to the bench, replaced by Burt Fanning, a utilityman, and Quip Parris, a pitcher. Hoey’d gone in for me at short, Knowles’d taken Junior’s place at second. Our fans had set up catcalling clubs or gone home in a snit.

  “Fair-weather friends,” Muscles said.

  “They’re entitled,” Snow said. “They don’t pay their money to watch us crap our pants.”

  Snow, I noticed, had a strange purple bruise on the inside of his forearm, maybe from running into the wall in the third inning for a home run that’d barely cleared-a long, fragile injury, like a lavender-blue snake with a fringe of back hairs and another of veiny feet. For some reason, I reached over and touched it. Lightly. He pulled back so quick you’d’ve thought I’d jabbed him with a cattle prod.

  “Lay off, Boles.”

  What the devil. Snow ranked with Musselwhite, Curriden, Nutter, and Dunnagin as one of the Hellbenders’ toughest characters. In Army uniforms, I sometimes thought, those five guys could easily chase the Huns out of North Africa.

  I don’t know where I got the grit, but I pulled Snow’s hand towards me the better to see his snake bruise. Boy, he must’ve really collided with that headache-powder sign out there. Snow seldom hit the wall. Even right up against it, he always timed his leap to avoid rebounding in a drop-dead roll. No mad Pete Reiser heroics for Snow. He didn’t need em. He always got a good jump on long flies and measured his distances.

  “It’s not from today,” Snow told me, a little friendlier. “And it aint as bad as it looks. Let go.”

  I let go.

  “My men kin’ve always bruised easy. Stupid, but it kept me out of the Army, bruising easy. So I’m careful. Mostly.”

  “If you bruise that easy, Charlie,” Muscles said, “you’re an idiot to play ball.”

  “At least I don’t box.”

  Mister JayMac walked by. “Anybody who plays like Charlie-Mr Snow-would be an idiot not to play.” He strolled on past, pacing, flusterated, out of sorts.

  Snow, I learned, wore a strip of sponge in the palm of his fielder’s glove. He also wore hip pads, cloth cushions inside his shoes, sliding pads, and a sleeveless jersey under his flannel shirt-all to help prevent bruising. People thought of Snow as stocky because, dressed like that, he looked stocky. Out of uniform, though, he wasn’t much thicker in the chest and butt than Dobbs or me. Batting hurt him more than any other part of the game. The shock to his hands and forearms when he banged out another hit would always raise a bruise. He worked to reduce the harm by growing calluses on his palms and trying to smack every pitch on the bat’s sweet spot.

  A pox on us, we also blew the second game of our four-game series with Eufaula, the opener of Saturday’s twin bill. Between games, Mister JayMac said, “Win-win, lose-lose, win-win, lose-lose! Damn the pattern yall’ve fallen into!”

  “We got a win-win coming tonight and tomorrow,” Hoey said. “Want us to break the pattern?”

  “Ha ha,” said Mister JayMac. “Not until we get to Opelika on Wednesday.”

  Funny thing, we didn’t break our pattern. We beat Eufaula in Saturday’s nightcap and again on Sunday afternoon. Then, in Opelika, we lost two straight to the Orphans (with no parent club in the bigs and no home field until 1941, they’d played every game up till then as roadies, or “orphans”), then beat em in the nightcap of a rare Thursday-evening twin bill.

  The next night, in LaGrange against the Gendarmes, we broke our two-up, two-down jig by losing. That made us seventeen and fifteen on the season, and nine and seven for June-a winning record, but only just.

  “God!” Mister JayMac exploded after the loss. “That gets yall out of your rut-it puts us in a hole instead.”

  The two weekend series against Opelika and LaGrange, our biggest CVL rivals, could’ve given us momentum. Instead, we lost each series two games to one and slunk home to change our splints and savor the home cooking of the fans at McKissic Field.

  20

  On the Monday before a trip to Opelika and LaGrange, Jumbo came upstairs to find me writing down my stats from the Eufaula series and weighing them against my teammates’. It embarrassed me for him to see me doing this-I still had a sky-high batting average and came down harder on my teammates than on myself. I couldn’t quibble with Jumbo’s stats, though. He’d played great on the road-my notebook said so.

  “Daniel.”

  I slammed my notebook shut on my knees.

  “Some of my library books fall due this week. Go with me to return them.” Jumbo packed a laundry bag with books.

  I turned an imaginary steering wheel. Would we drive? Jumbo smiled, sort of, and walked two fingers over the quilt on his mattress. Uh-uh, I thought.

  “Please come. The heat here’s barbarous and the light at your cot poor.”

  The heat everywhere in Highbridge was barbarous-unless you went to a refrigerated movie show or bowling alley. A walk to the library in Alligator Park would push our temperatures to sunstroke levels. On the other hand, an invite from Jumbo came round about as often as Halley’s comet.

  “I
’ll help you acquire a library card,” Jumbo said. “I’m on very good terms with Mrs Hocking, the librarian.”

  I agreed to go. And, yes, we walked.

  In the farmer’s market, people shouted at Jumbo: “Way to gig them Mudcats, Jumbo!” and “Hit me a rainmaker gainst them lousy Gendarmes!” And so on.

  A man at a produce stall asked Jumbo to autograph one of his watermelons with a grease pencil. He took my signature on a big yellow squash, but only after Jumbo told him my batting average and sold me as a future big leaguer.

  Three colored boys-one turned out to be Euclid -dogged our heels all the way to the edge of Alligator Park, where Negroes seemed to be forbidden unless they were using hedge clippers or pushing a pram with a pink-skinned kid in it.

  The Alligator Park branch of the Highbridge library system was a red brick building not far from the church Mister JayMac, Miss Giselle, and a few of the Hellbenders sometimes attended. It had a pot-bellied white portico and windows separated by rose trellises or well-trimmed snowball shrubs. In Tenkiller, this branch would’ve held every book in town-maybe the whole county-with space left over for a LaSalle showroom.

  Mrs Hocking surprised me too. She didn’t have blue hair or a squint or blocky black shoes with ankle straps. She had a pretty face, a plumpish body with flying-squirrel flaps on her upper arms, and a smile that made my own mouth muscles ache. I guessed her age as fifty-plus. She greeted Jumbo like he was an electrocuted loved one brought back to life-I mean, she was overjoyed.

  “It’s so good to see you, Mr Clerval! One of the titles you asked me to put on reserve has just come in! Now I won’t have to send you a postal notice!”

  Despite being on very good terms with Mrs Hocking, Jumbo looked startled. He unpacked his books on the central desk and kept his mouth shut, a rebuke for all the fuss.

  Mrs Hocking’s young assistant hovered at the far end of the desk, eyeballing Jumbo and me the way she would’ve a couple of prison escapees.

  “But you’ve only had these books out once!” Mrs Hocking thumbed through her card bin. “You could’ve renewed them!”

  “Yessum,” Jumbo said. “But to what end?”

  “Why, to give yourself time to read them all.”

  “I have read them all.”

  “Oh. Then you’re an awfully resourceful reader. You must have formidable powers of concentration.”

  “Which of my reserve titles has come in?”

  “Why, uh, this one, Mr Clerval.” Mrs Hocking picked a small book out of a nearby stacking cart. “It’s very popular just now. Mr Salmon, its last reader, checked it out two days ago and brought it back just this morning. Perhaps you and he should meet. You have much in common, including-”

  “Please, Mrs Hocking, hold it for me here until I’ve made my other selections.”

  “Of course. Pleased to. Let me know if Margaret or I can be of any further assistance.”

  “My friend Daniel would like his own card.”

  “All right. Does he reside in Highbridge or in Hothlepoya County?”

  “Like me, he’s a Hellbender,” Jumbo said. “His stay here will certainly outlast August,”

  “Then he’s not a resident?”

  “His mailing address, like mine, is McKissic House on Angus Road. For the next two and half months.”

  “Yes, but, it appears that-”

  “What length of residency entitles one to a card?” Jumbo’s voice boomed through the building. Folks in the stacks looked over at us. A little boy grabbed his mother’s skirts.

  “What we must do is issue a temporary card,” Mrs Hocking said gaily. “If Margaret lists you as one local reference, Mr Clerval, whom may we designate as the other?”

  “Mr Jordan McKissic.”

  “Certainly. Very good. Here, Margaret. Help this young man fill out the application. Begin with his name and-”

  “His name is Daniel Boles,” Jumbo said, already turning toward the nonfiction shelves. “B-O-L-E-S. Complete the form as far as possible without us.”

  “Of course. Of course.” Mrs Hocking waved us away. “Browse to your hearts’ content.”

  In the philosophy and psychology sections, Jumbo put his hands on my shoulders and tried to whisper:

  “Inside, Daniel, Mrs Hocking feels much as her assistant Margaret does-unquiet, frightened. I realize that now. Her overfriendliness shows the truth. She hopes to hide from both me and herself the extent to which I repel her.”

  Uh-uh. Jumbo needed to believe Mrs Hocking really did like him for himself.

  “I’m correct in this,” he whispered. “From her behavior, I should have deduced her attitude before.” He let go of me to prowl the stacks, mouthing titles and authors’ names, tiptoeing around other patrons like a gigantic reshelver.

  With our arms full of books, we returned to the main desk and spilled them out like hodcarriers dumping bricks. Mrs Hocking added Jumbo’s reserve book to the pile, and I completed the card application her assistant had started.

  “Isn’t that more than ten?” Mrs Hocking stamped away.

  “Eleven, with the reserve book,” Jumbo said. “But you may put that one on Daniel’s card.”

  “I’m afraid we-” Mrs Hocking began to say. “Very good,” she said instead. “He may even benefit from reading it, should you finish it quickly enough to pass it on, Mr Clerval.” She bustled and stamped. “Good day, gentlemen. Give our rivals in your baseball matches glorious what-for.”

  “Thanks,” Jumbo said. “You’re more than kind.” He shoved our loot into his satchel and led me out the door.

  Outside, I looked at him with real disappointment. He’d just called Mrs Hocking “more than kind.” But if he’d sized her up correctly in the stacks, that was a lie.

  “She desires to be a friend,” Jumbo replied to my look, “even if the natural impulse to that state eludes her. I spoke to her desire, not to the canker of her predisposition.”

  That had a highfalutin ring to it, but it nailed me anyway. If Jumbo wanted to fledge Mrs Hocking’s better angel, he had to have leave to appeal to it.

  At the farmer’s market, we bought pears from a pavilion vendor and sat on the concrete platform to eat them. Stacks of produce-turnip greens, unshucked early corn, plump tomatoes in bushel baskets-more or less hid us from autograph seekers. I ate my pear first, then took my notebook from my shirt pocket and wrote out a question:

  What book did you reserve?

  Jumbo dug through his bag and found it. He dropped it into my lap. I wiped my sticky hands on my pants so I could handle the volume: On Being a Real Person by Harry Emerson Fosdick, a self-help thing by this famous New York clergyman.

  “ ‘The central business of every human being is to be a real person,’ ” Jumbo said. “Mr Fosdick’s opening sentence.”

  Back then, Fosdick’s line didn’t impress me at all. All I could think of was Fearless Fosdick, the cartoon defective Al Capp had created in Li’l Abner to send up Dick Tracy. Fearless Fosdick strolled around with bullet-hole windows in him-they never seemed to bother him much. Anyway, I imagined this Harry Emerson Fosdick guy sitting at his typewriter with bullet holes in him, banging out On Being a Real Person despite looking like a wounded cartoon character himself.

  I wrote Fearless Fosdick? on a notebook page and handed it to Jumbo, whose expression reminded me of the look you see on a baby’s face when it’s trying to load up a diaper.

  “I believe this Mr Fosdick”-he tapped the book-“is more fearless than most acknowledge. It takes… balls to write a treatise on achieving authentic identity.”

  We set out again for McKissic House. I carried the book bag, and Jumbo walked along reading Fosdick’s best-seller. In his hands, it looked no bigger than a match book.

  21

  In Tenkiller, mama’d practically had to drive a steam shovel into my bedroom in the mornings to chase me out of bed and off to school. In Highbridge, though, I loved the morning, especially the early morning. I got up before Darius prowled throug
h calling, “Rise and shine!” I woke to some strange internal chime, and I moved. Maybe I just wanted to scrub my face and pull on my clothes without Jumbo’s spooky yellow eyes tracking the whole business. Maybe I just wanted to escape the killer summer heat in the brief moments before the milk wagons clattered.

  Anyway, on the Tuesday morning of our road trip to Opelika, I crept downstairs and smelled bacon frying, biscuits baking, oranges set out to be halved and squoze. Kizzy’d taken over the kitchen already. With her spoons, whisks, and wood-stoked ovens, she was scraping the last fresh edge off the morning. A small price to pay-the mean-as-a-rattler heat would stick its fangs into us by ten or eleven anyway. I sat on a stool next to Kizzy’s biscuit-making counter and claimed dibs on the first biscuit out.

  “Don’t jes set, Mister Danny.” Kizzy mopped her forehead with the back of one hand. “Miss Giselle comes, you gon find yosef to work mighty quick.”

  Phaugh. Kizzy liked me. Over the past weeks, we’d become good buddies. I helped her mornings, even before Darius came in from the carriage house or Miss Giselle from the bungalow. My dummyhood may’ve played a part in our friendship too. Kizzy used me as a tattletale-safe soundingboard. I didn’t echo. I absorbed.

  With one flour-dusted oven mitt and a knotty black forearm, Kizzy fetched her first biscuit tray out and banged it down. “Go on. Burn yo greedy fingers gifting it.” I obeyed, right down to getting burned, but juggling that first biscuit made me happy. The sky hadn’t even begun to redden, and I had me an edible treasure.