Brittle Innings

by Michael Bishop

  Mariani pitched the first game, and I started at short. Pregame ceremonies included a War Bonds spiel by a wounded vet, Mister JayMac’s welcome, and the colored accordionist Graham Jackson playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” as a black choir, dressed in phony plantation garb, sang the lyrics.

  The President and his party hadn’t arrived yet; and few folks in the stands understood we expected such a distinguished visitor and sports fan, one of the men who’d kept pro baseball from shutting down for the war. Still, Mister JayMac refused to delay the doubleheader’s start.

  Bottom of the first, I poked one down the right-field line with my new Red Stix bat. It felt good, that double, almost like it wiped from my past everything that’d happened on Friday night: my gin binge, the trip to The Wing & Thigh, my no-show at Phoebe’s house, and Henry’s cavalry-to-the-rescue routine. Charlie Snow drove me home with a single up the middle. In our first at bat, in fact, we sent another six men to the plate and scored two more runs.

  Between innings, I heard sirens screaming just outside the stadium. They came closer and closer, eking up higher in pitch and volume until yard dogs began to howl and many people in the stands covered their ears.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Frye announced over the PA system, “it’s the one hundred and sixty-seventh anniversary of this great nation, but the first time ever that the President of the United States has attended a baseball game in Highbridge or any other CVL city. All rise!” As if FDR was a judge and McKissic Field a courtroom.

  I’d already made my way to my shortstop position. When our old military-band recording of the national anthem began to play, I didn’t have to rise. The fans, though, buckled upward en masse, craning their necks trying to catch sight of the most famous man-forget John D. Rockefeller or Clark Gable-in the whole United States. The sirens outside the stadium stopped about the time the anthem’s rockets began to glare red and its bombs to burst in air.

  Then, because the President hadn’t made his entrance by song’s end, Frye played it again. And a third time, with folks forgetting proper hand-over-heart protocol, before a guard of uniformed Marines and helmeted soldiers marched in over the brand-new ramp system. Behind them, some wheelchair outriders in suits appeared at the top of a plywood slope. They ushered in the waving President, a man until then bashful of exposing himself in such an “unmanly” state. On that Fourth, though, he rode, head high, to the caged box seat behind our dugout. Once the military guard’d peeled off, in fact, I could see the Prez as well as, or better than, anybody else in the park.

  I couldn’t believe it. Me, a kid from nowhere, standing maybe fifty yards from the only three-term chief executive in the history of our land. My nape hairs did the Wave decades before that cheer even got invented.

  Know what kept rippling through my gray matter, though? He didn’t see my first hit. What if I don’t get another?

  Except for the smudges under his eyes and the dents in his cheeks, Mr Roosevelt looked spiffy, a lot like Francis X. Bushman or some other silent-screen actor. Cool white linen suit, dapper straw snapbrim, fluffy polka-dot bow tie.

  Someone’d rigged a microphone at chest height-for a fella in a wheelchair, that is-and the President’s primary pusher-a Secret Service agent?-slipped him up to it. Ball-players and fans alike’d started cheering. The cheering swelled until it swamped the “home of the brave” finale of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The Prez met the hullabaloo with head nods, his arms in the air like those of some raptured Holy Roller, his smile as wide as Tennessee.

  The President’s “private” box filled up: military guards and Secret Service men, a bigwig or two from FDR’s staff, and, to my hefty surprise, Colonel and Mrs Elshtain, Miss Giselle, and LaRaina and Phoebe Pharram. In his shirt sleeves, Mister JayMac himself climbed up on our dugout’s tarpapered roof and walked over to the Chief to shake his hand and welcome him to Highbridge.

  Amid this tumult, Colonel Elshtain stood in the box rocking up and back on his toes and smirking like a Siamese with a goldfish tail showing between its lips. No wonder “The Battle Hymn of the Repugnant” hadn’t amused him.

  The cheering didn’t die. Coloreds and whites alike cheered FDR, the coloreds from the bleachers seats or in their spots as groundskeepers, custodians, and snack vendors. A few people-mostly women-cried. The war’d turned FDR into a god for many folks, even conservative whites. The blacks liked him because his missus spoke out for fairness and entertained Negro leaders in the White House.

  The President quieted us with some calm-down hand gestures and an attempt to use the mike: “Ladies and gentlemen, if you please…” That wide chin-up smile again. “By gosh, this is a splendid reception, and I’m delighted to be here. Indeed, my apologies for interrupting your game, coming in like the Caliph of Baghdad. Goodness knows, today we celebrate American independence, not the bondage of our national pastime to my holiday travel schedule.”

  He talked on like that for a minute and then gave up the mike to Mister JayMac, who summoned Graham Jackson and the plantation singers-favorites of FDR’s from his stays at Cason Callaway’s Blue Springs -back to perform “The Star-Spangled Banner” again. That made five times we’d heard it in forty minutes, but our fans shouted “Play ball!” afterwards as loudly as they had every other time.

  Mr Roosevelt bumped up to the mike again: “Later today, ask your neighbors if they heard about the accident here at McKissic Field. When they say, ‘I’m afraid I haven’t,’ tell em, ‘An Opelika player leaned on his bat so long waiting for the game to resume that termites ate the handle out and he fell and broke his back.’ ” The President threw back his head and guffawed, then leaned again into the mike: “I love it! Don’t you just love it!” They surely did. We all did. Even the Orphans broke up, slapping one another on the back and catcalling Max Delaney, the hitter in the on-deck circle.

  “If Delaney had an ounce of sense, he’d fall down and grab his back,” Curriden told me. “But the palooka aint got roach shit for brains.”

  The Orphan manager, Lou Ed Dew, tried to convince Happy Polidori, the plate umpire, to scrap the first inning and start us over again. He seemed to think the CVL rule book forbid the playing of anything but a full nine-inning game after “The Star-Spangled Banner.” I edged closer to the Orphan dugout to pick up the details of this bizarre squabble.

  “I don’t recollect that rule, Lou Ed,” Polidori said.

  “It’s in there,” Lou Ed Dew said. “I’m pritty shore. I’d bet money. I think I would.”

  “Would you be as certain if the Orphans’d scored three runs in the first instead of the other way round?”

  “Shore. Shore I would.”

  “That’d be about the foolishest rule ever devised by man then,” Polidori said. “A team could hire a band to play the ‘Banner’ ever time its boys had a bad inning out to field and guv up a run or six. I mean, musicians for the Boll Weevils or the Linenmakers’d get rich.”

  “Check the book, Polidori. Check the book!”

  “I don’t have to.” Polidori lowered his mask and walked away from Lou Ed Dew. “Play ball! I mean, Resume play!”

  Dunnagin took a fresh ball from Polidori and trotted with it over to Mr Roosevelt’s box. “Sir, would you be willing to throw out the”-he pretended to count in his head-“the sixth or seventh ball of this game?”

  “Would I?” FDR said. “By gosh, Mr Dunnagin, I’d regard it as churlish-a missed opportunity-to refuse.”

  Dunnagin flipped the ball to Mister JayMac and backed up about twenty paces. Mister JayMac handed the President the horsehide, and FDR rubbed it up like a New Englander shaping a snowball. He winked over one shoulder at Miss Giselle, then tossed the ball to Dunnagin, who reacted like Mr Roosevelt’d set his palm on fire. Then he thrust the ball up in the air. Our fans cheered their noggins off again. The organist cranked up a rowdy version-a really rowdy version-of “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.”

  “Thow it to your pitcher,” Polidori told Dunnagin.<
br />
  “This baby’s going home with me,” Dunnagin said. “One day a kid of mine might like to have it.”

  “The league’ll have to fine you for misappropriating CVL property,” Polidori said. “The league’ll-”

  “Screw the league,” Dunnagin said. “Toss Mariani a fresh ball, Mr Ump.”

  The game did resume. We Hellbenders played inspiredly, in the field and up to bat. I had two more hits in our opener, neither for extra bases, and fielded like FDR’s predecessor in office, a Hoover: thwup, thwup, thwup! I just sucked em up and howitzered em over to Henry.

  It wasn’t close, but the President enjoyed himself. He knew Mister JayMac and Miss Giselle, he knew the Elshtains, he had field-level box seats behind the dugout. He had a Co-Cola, a bag of peanuts, and another Co-Cola. I wouldn’t swear to it, but he may’ve doctored that second Coke with a tot of something spiritous. A regular fella, for a Harvard man and a three-term president. It was pretty much a wonderwork I played as decent as I did, I spent so much time eyeing him sidelong and watching in literal dumfoundment how sprightly and pretty Miss Giselle-with her belief in, and hatred of, the so-called Eleanor Clubs-looked bantering with him.

  In the bottom of the eighth, Henry, with only one hit to that point, polewhacked a curve off the fourth Orphan pitcher: a flabbergasting blast that cleared the outfield wall, the bleacher seats behind the wall, the parking lot outside, maybe even the Panhandle-Seminole Railway tracks slashing southeast to Camp Penticuff. People stood up to watch the ball soar. In the brief silence that fell over nearly every onlooker there, FDR’s high-tone tenor sounded in his open mike and vibrated in every speaker on the field:

  “Swear to God, Clyde, that’s the most monsterish home run I’ve ever seen! Who is that fella?”

  “Jumbo!” the crowd answered. “Jumbo! Jumbo! Jumbo!”

  Henry trotted the bases, running on stems he’d hack-sawed a foot shorter during the second presidency of Cleveland, listing in his trot like a man on a unicycle.

  “Well, Jumbo my chum, congratulations,” said the President, this time deliberately using the mike. “I haven’t seen a shot carry that far since the U.S.S. Enterprise showed off her guns for me.”

  Laughter. Applause. Henry crossed the plate, circled back to our dugout, and tipped his cap to Mr Roosevelt.

  At some point during the twin bill’s intermission, FDR and his friends pulled out and rumbled over our highway of ramps to the parking lot. People saw him leaving, of course, but the Fourth of July hoopla on the field-an Army glee club, a quilt raffle-more or less covered his exit.

  “I didn’t realize he couldn’t walk,” Sudikoff said between the two games.

  “He can,” Nutter said. “With braces. But nobody wants to clack as far as he’d’ve had to in a set of leg braces.”

  “I jes never realized,” Sudikoff said.

  “You weren’t supposed to,” Nutter told him.

  We took the second game too, although this one evolved into a pitching duel between Fadeaway Ankers and a clever ex-major leaguer known as Smiley Clough. The game ended three to one. Lou Ed Dew probably wished Mr Roosevelt had watched it instead of our scalp-em-bald romp in the opener. Aboard the Brown Bomber, riding back to McKissic House, I kept hearing FDR say, “Swear to God, Clyde, that’s the most monsterish home run I’ve ever seen!” You could tell from that remark how he’d become president; he just had an instinct about him.

  38

  Angus Road and the McKissic House estate had guards-Camp Penticuff MPs and specially assigned soldiers in battle dress-posted all around them.

  Darius drove us past this armed picket line and up the curving drive to the boardinghouse, then along the grassy track between the boardinghouse and the wood-shingled carriage house, then past that garage straight down the clovery slope towards Hellbender Pond. Every player on the team was aboard the bus, not just McKissic House tenants.

  The pond’s grassy bank boasted three open-sided tents with striped roofs and several trestle-legged picnic tables set out under them. A bank of big electric fans, powered by a noisy gas-powered generator, flanked the tents to keep us picnickers cool and mosquito-free. FDR and his party had already claimed one of these tents, and Marines or a Secret Service detail had furnished it with dining-room chairs and the back seat of the President’s touring car, which they’d removed and set in front of a table draped with a linen cloth and laid with china and crystalware.

  Kizzy and a rail-thin part-time butler had put out barbecue and Brunswick stew from the pits at the ball field-also cole slaw, pickles, olives, deviled eggs, and suchlike fixings-but not on FDR’s table. He had a basket packed with fried chicken, California wine, and French bread. He didn’t like the vinegary tang of Suthren-style barbecue.

  Darius parked not far from the tents, but kept his hand on the door lever, holding us in. “Yall knew Mister JayMac had a to-do planned out here. He jes didn’t know if the President tended to stay fo it. Looks like he has. Last thing Mister JayMac told me, if Mister Franklin stayed, was to ast yall to behave yosefs and do ol Highbridge proud.”

  Fadeaway Ankers said, “What would do old Highbridge proud is not have a uppity woolhead telling grown white men what to do. Jesus.”

  Wham. Everybody on the Bomber went tight-jawed. Darius’d spoken by way of the rearview, about as boy-humble as he had it in him to be. Now he cut his eyes to one side, and all the rest of us Hellbenders could see of him in the mirror was the top of his head.

  “As good as you throw,” Charlie Snow told Fadeaway, “you still aint made it to grown yet. And Darius wasn’t telling nobody nothing, he was passing a message.”

  You expected Charlie Snow to field his center-field spot like a two-legged whitetail and to clutch-hit the team out of jams, but you didn’t expect him to open his mouth a passel, and ordinarily he obliged your expectations.

  “I jes chunked a three-hitter at Opelika,” Fadeaway said. “How much more grown can a fella git?”

  “Arm’s mature,” Snow said. “Head’s a baby.”

  Muscles got up. “And the rest of us’re tired of listening to this hoo-hah. Let’s party with the President. Just mind your p’s and q’s, dammit!”

  Darius levered the door open, and we began filing off the bus.

  Off the Bomber, we edged towards the tents. Nobody had the nerve or the bumpkin grace to angle towards FDR’s roadster sofa and Park Avenue table setting, though. At the same time, no one could resist glancing over that way and trying to imagine what the President of the United States had to discuss with the McKissics, the Elshtains, or Miss LaRaina and Phoebe. Once or twice, the Great Man smiled and nodded or wagged his cigarette holder in a folksy greeting.

  As Fadeaway sauntered around the Bomber’s nose with Evans and Sosebee, Darius put a hand on his shoulder. When he saw who’d touched him, Fadeaway’s nose wrinkled, and he triggered himself for curses, maybe even fisticuffs.

  “Tell me what you think woolhead means.” Darius’s voice wasn’t much below its normal volume, but the generator and the box fans kept the other picnickers from hearing.

  “Lemme tell you what uppity means,” Fadeaway said. “You could learn two new words jes by looking in a mirror.”

  “I know more words than you got memories,” Darius said. “What woolhead means, Mister Ankers, is you aint got the belly to speak out nigger, or the class to call my name.”

  Quickly and quietly, Sosebee grabbed Fadeaway’s arms from behind. “Easy, kid. Remember who-all’s here.”

  “Remember this instead,” Darius said. “If it got figgered on sense and soundness stead of what it is, you’d come up the biggest nigger in town. Watch I don’t whup yo red ass black.” He stood glaring at Fadeaway when most folks, delivered of such a squelch, would’ve swaggered away.

  Henry leaned over his shoulder. “Enough, Mr Satterfield. This is no time for a physical collision.”

  “Sho,” Darius said. “Clision time jes never quite comes round, do it?” He pocketed his hands, backed awa
y from the players stalled in front of the Bomber, and hiked up the slope to his apartment.

  “Hey!” Kizzy called from one of the tents. “You, Darius, don’t you want no victuals?”

  He just kept walking.

  “Uppity nigger,” Fadeaway said under his breath.

  Henry and I and the other Hellbenders ate. The family men had their families there, and more than a few-Buck Hoey and his boys, Charlie Snow and his childless wife, Turkey Sloan and his freckle-faced teenage daughter-ventured out on the pond in johnboats to fish.

  At Mister JayMac’s prompting, Henry removed his kayak from the sawhorses near the buggy house, fetched it down to the pond under one arm, and demonstrated for the President how a man his size-the swatter of a “monsterish” home run-could paddle to and fro among the anglers’ boats with hardly a telltale ripple and not even one fish-disturbing splash. By this time, Mister JayMac’d coaxed me into the heart of FDR’s picnic circle, with the Elshtains, the Pharram females, and a few fussy suit types from D.C. All eyes followed Henry’s silken progress over the pond’s cocoa scum.

  “Astonishing so large a man can move with that agility,” FDR said. “How’d he come by the kayak?”

  “He says he built it,” Mister JayMac said. “And I’ve no cause to doubt him. Look how he handles it.”

  “Indeed, if I could handle Congress half so well, I’d sleep more and haggle less with the likes of Senator George. God knows, I envy Mr Clerval’s finesse with the big stick, whether a ball bat or a kayak paddle.”

  Mr Roosevelt had plenty of finesse with words. I milled about close enough to his car-seat divan to catch a lot of what he said, but the Elshtains and Miss LaRaina monopolized the time he didn’t give to the McKissics.

  I marveled at Miss Giselle. With a glint in her eye, she watched Henry kayak and chatted with the President. How could she lap Mr Roosevelt in such honey-tongued politeness when his wife’s Christian name gagged her like ammonia ice?