Brittle Innings

by Michael Bishop

  “Daniel, you’re looking fit as a soldier,” Miss Tulipa said in the gazebo near Hellbender Pond. “Isn’t he, Clyde?”

  “Yes,” the colonel said. “He should be a soldier.”

  After breakfast, Darius had fetched me to the gazebo as a neutral meeting spot. The Elshtains hadn’t wanted to intrude on the players’ lodgings, and no player, Darius said, had set foot in Mister JayMac’s house since its construction in the first year of CVL play-not even such suspected favorites as Hoey, Muscles, Snow, or my illustrious roomy, Jumbo Clerval.

  Not Jumbo, I’d wanted to tell Darius: Henry.

  “Your mama’d beam to see you doing so well,” Miss Tulipa said. “How’s your laryngitis?”

  To that point, I’d got by with nods and head shakes, grins and foot-shuffling. Shy fellas aren’t expected to talk much. Now, though, I had to continue my charade or fess up through a note or sign language. A bad case of laryngitis could dog you for quite a while, couldn’t it? I rubbed my throat and sadly shook my head.

  “Pobrecito,” Miss Tulipa said. “What a trial for you.”

  “I doubt it’s that vast a trial,” Colonel Elshtain said. “You’re simply imagining yourself in the lad’s predicament.”

  Miss Tulipa looked the colonel hard in the eye. “At the moment, dear, I’m imagining you in his predicament.”

  “If you successfully wish laryngitis on me, Tulipa, we’ll have a damnably hard time singing ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’ in rounds on our drive home.”

  That made Tulipa smile. “ Clyde, go get Daniel’s gift from his mother from the car, would you?”

  Colonel Elshtain clicked his heels-maybe sarcastically-and left to do as bid.

  “Your mama misses you hugely,” Miss Tulipa said. “Good heavens!” A truly bizarre shape had begun to glide out of a tree-lined inlet of Hellbender Pond, and she put a hand to her heart like a movie actress who’s supposed to’ve seen a ghost or a moody mental figment of some sort. Then I reduced the shape on the pond to something familiar.

  On a page from the little notebook I carried, I printed, Its just Henry my roomate in his kyyak.

  Henry paddled his kayak out of the inlet towards us. His upper body came out of its manhole like a smokestack on an ocean liner. He almost seemed to be wearing the kayak, and it sat so low in the pond, with mosquitoes and noseeums haloing him, you feared it about to swamp or roll. It didn’t, and Henry dipped his double-bladed paddle this way and that with the same hefty grace he swung a clutch of bats in the on-deck circle. He nodded-but didn’t wave or smile-as the kayak slid by. Then he sculled it towards the far shore and headed into a flock of domestic ducks paddling out to meet him. He balanced his paddle on the prow and bombarded the ducks with handfuls of old cornbread.

  Miss Tulipa couldn’t get over the sight. “That’s one of those, uh, Eskimo-ish boats, isn’t it?”

  I nodded, then tapped a cigarette out of my pack. Before thinking to offer Miss Tulipa one, I’d already lit up. She stared dazedly across the water like a whaler’s wife yearning after her long-gone hubby-then looked back at me with a funny goggle of disappointment.

  “Good Lord, Daniel, what’re you doing?”

  I wanted to say, If I’m old enough to earn my own money, I’m old enough to smoke, but my youth wasn’t Miss Tulipa’s primary objection. She snatched the cigarette, flipped it to the gazebo’s decking, and ground it out with the toe of an ankle-strap Wedgie.

  “You must have mayonnaise for brains, and it’s gone bad in the sun. Nobody with laryngitis has any more business smoking than a TB patient. Do you intend to grow polyps on your vocal cords? To make your condition chronic?”

  It’s already chronic, I thought, but I acted contrite and sheepishly shook my head.

  Colonel Elshtain returned from the Hudson with my gift from Mama. She’d wrapped it in birthday paper, but the gift’s shape told me it was either 1) a fishing pole, 2) an ax handle, or 3) a baseball bat. If pressed to guess, I’d’ve marked 3) with the smart-alecky confidence of a guy with a crib sheet.

  In fact, Mama had sent me a bat, another Red Stix model. I peeled it free of its paper and swung it a few times. Swinging it gave me a peculiar heart twinge.

  “Coach Brandon wanted you to have it,” Miss Tulipa said. “He gave it to your mama as soon as he learned you never got to use the first one in a real CVL game.” With a tender smugness, Miss Tulipa watched me swing the red stick. “Doesn’t Daniel look like a hitter, Clyde?”

  “He is a hitter-his average proves it. But what he most looks like to me is a combat infantryman.”

  “Behave yourself, Clyde.”

  Out on the water, a duck settled on Henry’s shoulder. He fed it by hand. The ducks on the pond flapped and quacked like unbribed city councilmen.

  “We look forward to seeing you play at shortstop.” Miss Tulipa stepped inside the arc of my biggest swing and kissed me on the forehead. “That’s from your mama.”

  A clatter arose from the pond. Two or three of Henry’s ducks, including a green-capped mallard, beat their way aboard the kayak and assaulted Henry himself.

  “Don’t be greedy!” he yelled. “Monsters!”

  The mallard got to Henry’s head and began to tread him with the zest of a feathered Romeo. In self-defense, Henry knocked the mallard into a side-spin, grabbed his paddle, and purposely rolled his kayak. The ducks scattered, veering off towards the far shore or gooney-bird-walking the ruffled cocoa scum to what their BB-shot brains assumed a safe distance. Henry, with pure upper-body strength and the torque on his paddle, righted the kayak in a fountain of glittery spray.

  Impressive. Colonel Elshtain gave Henry a half-bow and very lightly applauded his feat.

  “Care to join me?” Henry called, hair and face dripping and the kayak itself streaming.

  “Only as spectators this afternoon!” the colonel shouted back.

  “Ah, but the water wonderfully refreshes one on a day of such oppressive heat.” Henry paddled towards the chokegrass and red-clover lawn stretching from the gazebo to the water.

  “This afternoon,” Miss Tulipa said to me, “get a hit or two for your dear friends from Tenkiller.” That request made, she and the colonel retreated to their sister-in-law’s house before Henry could reach the shore.

  35

  The game that Saturday, the first of a three-game series with Opelika, started at five. A Fourth of July twin bill, with a barbecue in the parking lot as a special attraction, would conclude the series on Sunday. Anyway, after beaching his kayak and upending it on a pair of sawhorses near the buggy house, Henry dressed out and walked with me to McKissic Field about three hours in advance of the game.

  Already, three funeral-home tents covered the barbecue pits dug on the south side of the stadium. At least a dozen workers-some black, some white-stoked the pits with hickory, oak, and charcoal. Meantime, the headless carcasses of three slick porkers sizzled in the pits, and a smell a thousand times more tempting than the one from Goober Pride rose above the canopies and the gunk-encrusted Brunswick-stew pots.

  “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” Henry said. “Unfortunately, I’ve never been able to abide pork.”

  Maybe so, I thought, but when you were with the Oongpekmut, you ate walrus, seal, sea lion, and beluga flesh. None of that fishy offal could’ve smelt half as good as our barbecue.

  The closer we got to the stadium, though, the odder Mister JayMac’s preparations for the Fourth began to seem. Carpenters had built ramps from the parking lot to the concessions area and from there to the box seats behind our dugout. Just out of Tenkiller, Oklahoma, I’d never seen a boardwalk in my life-rickety piers didn’t convey the same flavor-but, looking back, I’d say these ramps had a lot in common with a promenade among the dunes at a beach resort. Mister JayMac’s workers had used sheets of plywood instead of abutting planks, though, and the crowd’s footfalls echoed like the hooves of cattle. Is this a ballpark or a lumberyard? I wondered as Henry and I entered. You could still hear hammering, and the who
le deal seemed such a helter-skelter rush job it mystified-and irritated-almost everybody.

  Mister JayMac met us near the batting cage.

  “What’s going on?” Henry asked, nodding at the ramps and at the place where the carpenters had built a barricade and hung a sign: NO UNAUTHORIZED PERSONS BEYOND THIS POINT.

  “Temporary renovations,” Mister JayMac said.

  “Why would you wish to renovate temporarily, sir?”

  “That’s none of your damned business.”

  Henry looked stricken. “Pardon me,” he said sincerely.

  “Loose lips sink ships,” Mister JayMac said. He rolled out the bromide as a kind of half-assed apology, but quickly turned on me. “Well, I see Tulipa’s given you your bat, Mr Boles. And a handsome, gaudy piece of timber it is. Too bad you won’t have a chance to break it in today.”

  My surprise showed on my face.

  “Put it in that rack,” Mister JayMac said, pointing to the dugout. When I’d racked my bat, he said, “And put your fanny to that plank.”

  I sat down.

  Henry, embarrassed for me, trotted out to right field to play long toss with Knowles.

  “You don’t play today, Mr Boles,” Mister JayMac continued, coming into the dugout. “You broke curfew. You pulled a jilt on my grandniece, who went to no little trouble to fix you dinner. Breaking curfew gets you benched. Jilting Phoeb earns you my contempt. Have you two strong words to say in your own pitiful defense?”

  I shook my head.

  “Good. Because even if you could say it, Mr Boles, I wouldn’t care a good rip to hear it. Care to know the third reason you’ve forfeited a chance to play before Tulipa and her husband, folks who’d carry eye-witness word of your exploits to your mother?”

  I just stared.

  “No, I don’t imagine you would. Nonetheless, Mr Boles, you shall know it. In company with three men who should know better, and who therefore bear a greater culpability for this transgression than you, you did visit a section of Highbridge off-limits to every Hellbender.”

  I just stared.

  “Mr Curriden will not start at third today, nor come in at any time as a substitute. Mr Parris won’t pitch today, either as starter or reliever. Nor will Mr Mariani. Four players out, owing to the reckless egotism of a man I trusted and the sheeplike complicity of his stooges in crime. I begin to see how a hateful guttersnipe with a Charlie Chaplin mustache could seduce even the nation of Goethe.”

  I lowered my head and shifted my butt.

  “At four o’clock, Phoebe will be across the street at Hitch and Shirleen’s. Go see her. Find a way to excuse yourself and make her feel a bit better, then return to watch your teammates play one of the CVL’s three best clubs-even if they must do it with sixteen men instead of twenty.”

  Mister JayMac handed me a lineup. He had Buck Hoey at short, Junior Heggie at third for Curriden, and Lamar Knowles at second for Junior. His starting pitcher-a bigger surprise than his substitutions and position shifts-was Pete Haystack Hay (“His butt goes by bulk”), who ordinarily came in as a late-inning fireman because his lack of stamina after eight or nine batters disqualified him as a starter. Sosebee and Nutter would have to carry the load when Hay surrendered to the hook; we had no other pitchers available because Ankers was scheduled to pitch Sunday.

  “Uncle Jay said you’d slither over,” Phoebe said when I went to see her. “I figgered you’d sooner answer a altar call buck-naked, but, glory be, here you are.”

  Because of the pending game, Hitch & Shirleen’s Neighborly Market had more than its usual share of customers. Hitch had hightailed it somewheres, but Shirleen was showing an old woman how to use her ration book, and a crew of burrheaded kids hung over the edge of the drink cooler like maybe it held a school of bait minnows. Phoebe and I would’ve had more privacy in the grandstands across the street. Literally.

  “Well, Ichabod, s good to know you didn’t jes skip town,” Phoebe said for the entire premises to hear. “Sorry. I say Ichabod? I meant Boles. I git em mixed up sometimes, Boles n Ichabod, they sound so much alike.” Before I could react in any way to that, Phoebe spoke to the kids at the soft-drink box: “Yall git you a soda or drop that lid! Yo’re letting the cool out, wasting juice!”

  The kids dropped the lid-wham!-and filed past me out the door. One little boy gave my ball uniform a quick second look, but the sight of it conjured no lasting magic for him.

  I went to the glass countertop, my ear lobes as angry as infected tonsils, to make peace with Phoebe. She, though, had no hankering for easy terms.

  “Don’t stand there. I’m gonna have to ring something up. Yo’re blocking my register.” I took a step back. “Lord, boy, why’re you wearing them spikes? Think it’s okay to pock-mark our noleum?” The Neighborly Market’s only linoleum ran between the shelf aisles; the heavy-traffic area next to the register and the drink cooler was unpainted concrete. “Take em off, Boles.” I’d never taken my ball shoes off in the market, and I’d visited it almost a dozen times since my first visit. “I’m not kidding, Boles.”

  So I leaned into the counter and took off my spikes. This dropped me a half inch or so, but it still didn’t let Phoebe stand nose to nose with me, more like nose to Adam’s apple. On the other hand, emotionally I’d stepped into a trench and she’d climbed onto an awards stand. The cold concrete bit through my sanitaries.

  “Go to the milk locker.” Phoebe nodded towards the rear of the register aisle. “Go on. I mean it.” I padded down the aisle to the milk locker. “Open it.” I did. “Yore supper’s on the shelf next to the aiggs. Take it out and bring it up here.” I saw a white china plate covered with wax paper, tied like a Christmas package with a cross of twine. I took the plate out of the locker and returned to the front counter with it. “They’s you a stool right there,” Phoebe said, nodding at a stool behind the counter, down from the register. “Set down there and eat. I hate for you to have to miss yore supper. Go on. I aint kidding. What I fixed for you last night, Boles, is too good to waste.”

  I squeezed into the behind-the-counter space and sat down on the stool. Phoebe slapped a tin fork onto the countertop and roughly rang up the groceries of a woman who eyed me like I’d just answered an altar call naked. I untied the string holding the wax paper on the plate and found myself staring at a cold fried-chicken breast, a scoop of cold, semifurry mashed potatoes, and twenty or so green beans wearing sleeves of milky grease.

  “Eat,” Phoebe said. “Eat.”

  I picked up the fork.

  “Oh, I suppose you want something to drink. Mrs Nagy, would you git Boles here a strawberry soda. He don’t really like em much, but neither do I.” Mrs Nagy fetched me a soda from the cooler. “Pop its cap off for him, please.” Mrs Nagy obliged, using her wet hand and sliding it across to me like a bomb needing quick disposal. Phoebe sacked her purchases, and Mrs Nagy skedaddled with a scowl.

  “Now eat,” Phoebe said.

  The chicken had meatiness and taste. I like cold chicken. But the potatoes gagged me the way whipped clay would’ve, and the green beans, under all their grease, had more strings than a textile loom. I forced beans and potatoes down, string by string and lump by lump. The soda helped.

  “Now tell me you liked it,” Phoebe said.

  I nodded that I had. In the case of the chicken, at least, I didn’t nod a lie. Phoebe took my fork and plate away from me and stowed them on a shelf at my back.

  “Now say yo’re sorry, and mean it down to yore toe bones.”

  I nodded my agreement to this too.

  “That jes don’t git it.” Phoebe put a stubby pencil and a used envelope in front of me. “Tell me right.”

  I wrote on the envelope back: Phoebe I’m sorry. Really.

  “Tell me you won’t pull that kind of jackass stunt again.”

  I scrawled, It wont happen again-promise promise promise! She took the envelope and read the message-a couple of times, a half dozen. Pretty soon she was staring through the words to her own dis
appointment and humiliation of the night before. A glazed-over sort of trance.

  “Okay,” she said, snapping back. “Pology accepted.”

  I breathed again, but the meal she’d fixed for me rested in my stomach like a bag of fractured bricks.

  “Gramma Shirleen,” Phoebe called, “cmup here n tell this whangdoodle shortstop he aint God’s gift to Highbridge! Fore his head grows so big it swallows his ears!”

  36

  We lost Saturday’s game against Opelika. Buck Hoey didn’t get a hit. Junior, at third, made two errors throwing the ball all that unaccustomed way across the infield. Pete Hay pitched six innings, but left trailing the Orphans five to aught, with the visitors playing too heads-up for us to creep back into it.

  “Criminy!” Curriden shouted from the dugout when Junior made his second error. “Tkink! This aint the lousy sand-lots!”

  “Wish you’d thought before your little trip to Penticuff Strip last night.” Mister JayMac passed in front of Curriden, who promptly shut up.

  Opelika ’s at bat went on and on. When we finally got our third out, Mister JayMac eased over and put a hand on my knee. “A fine thing for Colonel Elshtain and my sister to see on one of their rare visits to Georgia. Another loss to Opelika and a sorry-ass performance to boot. Tomorrow, Mr Boles, you’ll start both games at short. Plan on leading us to an uplifting Fourth of July victory. I won’t have Tulipa telling your mama that her son, owing to his bad judgment and selfishness, spent Independence Day in a state of bench bondage.”

  “Two uplifting victories,” Darius said from his perch down the bench. “Cain’t let these fellas settle for jes one, sir.”

  “Absolutely not.” Mister JayMac seemed almost cheery, like he’d expected us to lose this one, like losing it would keep us from losing on the Fourth. He clapped his hands in a boosterly way as the Hellbenders dragged in for another go at the Orphan pitcher, Lester Affleck.