Brittle Innings

by Michael Bishop

  “It’s my view Mussolini’s doomed,” Colonel Elshtain broke into their stateside chitchat. “Even he must know it. The air strike on Rome last month had to’ve told him so.”

  “Il Duce’s an evil man,” Miss Giselle said, “but must we destroy the Holy See to uproot him? Is it necessary, sir, to bomb to rubble both the Vatican and the monuments of Rome to unseat this petty despot?”

  “Not at all,” FDR said. “Nor shall we do so. I’ve urged the Vatican to try to get him to declare Rome an open city-to remove all military bases and personnel in and about Rome to the countryside, and to desist from using the city’s railroad facilities as reprovisioning conduits for either Hitler’s boys or the Italian infantry. If Benito listens to reason, Rome survives unscathed. If not, well, to my mind there’s not one Roman statue or one relic in the Vatican worth the blood of a single American soldier.”

  Phoebe pulled me away from the presidential divan. We stalked along the pond, under the long banana-green fingers of a weeping willow, and through a hand-grenade scatter of cones from a magnolia tree farther up the bank. A quartet of Hellbenders-Sosebee, Dunnagin, Hay, and Parris-crooned “The Music Goes Round and Round,” “If I Didn’t Care,” and “Making Whoopee,” among other corny numbers, a capella. The clang of horseshoes in a pair of facing pits near the buggy house echoed like anchors bumping a ship’s hull.

  “Bravo!” the President cried after one of the quartet’s songs. “Splendid, gentlemen!”

  “I guess he’s all right,” Phoebe said, nodding downslope at the President’s tent. “For a New York swank.”

  He seemed all right to me. I didn’t know you could, or even should, try to find fault with the President. Which was why Sloan’s snotty poem aboard the Bomber had made such an impression on me. To me, FDR was like a king. For the biggest part of my life, no one else had held his office.

  “I know where you went the other night when you didn’t show up for dinner,” Phoebe said. “Penticuff Strip.”

  I looked at my shoes. Her great-uncle knew where I’d spent Friday evening. So did most of my teammates. At a picnic, you just naturally overheard allegations, brags, gossip.

  “Actually, it uz worse than that,” Phoebe said. “The Wing and Thigh, a chicken place n chippy house.”

  The quartet crooning for FDR had just eased in to “Making Whoopee,” a wink-and-slink version with lots of eye rolling and so on. I turned red from Phoebe’s remark and from the risqué gist of the song. What’d Phoebe know about a chippy house, for God’s sake? For that matter, what did I?

  “You lose your cherry?”

  I looked at her like she’d asked me if I’d been conceived and delivered a bastard.

  “I ast, Did some low woman on the Strip git yore cherry?”

  The urge hit me to walk away. But a sudden and ripening hunch that walking away would cut me off from Phoebe forever reversed it. I had to answer her, and answer straight, so I shook my head, thankful my dummyhood spared me the mess-and also the tail-tucking-of going into detail.

  “You swear?”

  I nodded. Curriden’s money’d bought me nothing but a knot on the head and a broken chain of shameful memories.

  “If that’s true, Daniel Boles, you better kiss me.”

  It’d been true my whole acne-plagued adolescence, but no young female’d ever hinted that my intact cherry entitled me to a Public Display of Affection. Well, semipublic: the branches of that magnolia half-hid us from the merrymakers by the pond.

  Phoebe put her hands on my skinny flanks and reached up on her toes to give me a kiss. I bent to get it. It tasted a little like barbecue sauce and Nehi creme soda, but more like the kitten breath and the dreamful hunger of a fifteen-year-old girl with more heart than slickness. I liked that kiss. It fed, or seemed to feed, almost all of Phoebe into me, the fizzy soda of her hunger, her mouth, her eyes, her breast buds, her armpits, even the commonplace mystery of her sex. I grabbed her and drove the kiss on-harder, more acrid-sweet, ever more puzzlesome to us both.

  Tiptoe to keep it going, Phoebe snapped off a blue-darter of a fart. The kickback shoved her teeth into mine with a lightninglike click. The kiss ended then, but I’d lived years since it began, and that little poot, instead of rendering our kiss vile or comical, opened the moment out for me in a funny way. It was like Phoebe’d handed me her diary or walked into my bedroom without a stitch of clothing. I felt singled out, honored, and it befuddled me-expelled me back into the numbing hurly-burly of my Hellbender teammates-when she broke free and hugged herself.

  “What you gonna do? That goopy Brunswick stew. I eat two spoonfuls and that happens.”

  I moved to comfort her-not that she needed comforting, more like distracting-and to thieve another kiss. But Mister JayMac, or somebody else with a gale-force pucker, whistled, and Phoebe dragged me by the hand out from under the magnolia’s brittle awning into the spread-out bruise of a Fourth of July sunset.

  “Yall get down here!” Mister JayMac called. “Pronto!”

  The President’s flunkies, and some ballplayers, had packed his touring car, reinstalling the back seat so he and his party could return to Warm Springs for the night. Next day, he’d fly to Washington to jump back into harness as commander-in-chief; then, the coming Friday, while the Hellbenders played the first of a four-game set against the Linenmakers, U.S. and British paratroopers would jump into Sicily to lay the groundwork for an Allied invasion of Italy.

  Side by side-but not hand in hand-Phoebe and I ambled downslope to the President’s open-topped car. Motorcycles straddled by MPs already flanked it, and soldiers in helmets and battle fatigues-right out of a March of Time newsreel-held sentinel posts all along a snaky line from the pond to McKissic House to Angus Road. The Elshtains, Miss LaRaina, and the McKissics stood beside the car speaking their good-byes.

  Below one of the tents, near the water, a fistfight broke out. Ballplayers and MPs rushed toward the mayhem. Grown men shouted like hooligans. Kids on the grounds hurried to find a sane adult to shield them from whatever’d begun to happen. The two men fighting locked each other around the neck and bent at the waist like recruits doing a peculiar type of calisthenics. They grappled, they fell down, they thrashed like freshly dug earthworms.

  “Bust his lip for him, Muscles!”

  “Come on, Reese!”

  “Hit him! Hit him! Hit him!”

  The grapplers-Musselwhite and Curriden-got to their feet again, staggered to the pond’s verge, toppled, rolled into the water, came back up streaming and sputtering and wrestling, a pair of our best players-fellas right up there with Snow and Clerval-acting like infantile yahoos. The splashing and cursing continued so long and loud it even began to embarrass the President’s security people, who’d positioned themselves around his touring car like bank guards around a Wells Fargo wagon. At last, four MPs slogged into the water to put an end to the fracas. One of them, for his trouble, caught a knee in the groin, and the rest went into a domino drop that prompted even some of their buddies to hoohah.

  “Hey!” Turkey Sloan shouted. “You’re scaring the fish!”

  Henry appeared in the hullabaloo near the water. Chinese lanterns strung among the tents flickered in a breeze-blown dance behind him. He elbowed his way to the pond’s edge, waded in like Gulliver, and collared Muscles and Curriden without getting pulled to his knees himself. He dragged the lummoxes to shore, one to a hand, like a fisher bringing in a pair of salmon-freighted nets. He kept coming in with them until, side by side on their hands and knees, they gasped on the grass just below the farthest tent.

  “There are combats enough about this planet,” Henry said. “Doesn’t the significance of this occasion”-gesturing toward FDR-“inspire you to at least a mean civility? I am shamed for every Hellbender here.”

  Curriden and Muscles gasped and sputtered.

  Beside FDR’s car, Mister JayMac said, “Sir, he speaks for me too. I hope you’ll forgive-”

  “Forget it, Jay,” Mr Roosevelt said. �
�Boys will be boys. High spirits and high stakes are a volatile mix, eh? We’re all susceptible to a bout of intemperance these days.”

  “They’re out of Wednesday’s game against Cottonton,” Mister JayMac said.

  “Not on my account, I hope. I’m inclined to believe their infra-dig donnybrook reflects a long and vexing day. Go easy. Roll out the velvet.”

  “They’re suspended. You wouldn’t hang a medal around an erring battle captain’s neck either, sir.”

  “Hear, hear,” Colonel Elshtain said.

  FDR laughed. Surprisingly, he caught sight of Phoebe and me. “Ah, Miss Pharram, Mr Boles, fine evening for a stroll. I bid you a pleasant farewell.”

  Colonel Elshtain said, “Mr President, if you would.” He and Miss Tulipa traded a look, and FDR regarded me like I was a kid hospitalized with tuberculosis. My stomach did a sudden trout flop. My fingers chilled blue.

  “You played sharp as a blade today, Daniel,” Mr Roosevelt told me. “You’ve a splendid future ahead of you.”

  I offered a strangled croak, trying not to look like a dumb orangutan.

  “It’s all right. Your friends have told me of your handicap. Please regard it as a species of bond between us, different as our individual problems may appear.” FDR nodded at the colonel. “Very well. Let him in. I’m not going to do this in front of an admiring bog.”

  Let who in? Do what in front of whom?

  Colonel Elshtain opened the car’s rear door and nodded me in. “The President has something to tell you, Daniel. Ride down to the front gate with him.”

  Me? I hung there doubt-riddled and confused.

  “Go on,” Phoebe said. “He won’t bite.”

  FDR thought that hilarious. “What big teeth I have, he’s thinking. What a set of choppers. Well, Miss Pharram’s right-I hardly ever bite a potential Democratic voter.” He sobered pretty quick. “Hop in, Daniel.”

  With everyone looking-even Muscles and Curriden, both like unrecognizable bog monsters-I climbed in next to FDR, behind a black chauffeur and a Secret Service agent dressed to the Beau Brummel nines. The President gave me a nod, and we drove up the slope past Darius’s apartment and McKissic House and down one leg of the circular drive to Angus Road. Fireflies winked as we purred through the summer evening.

  “Colonel Elshtain asked me to break this news to you as a favor for past services skillfully rendered,” the President said. “He seemed to think its coming from me might soften it. I doubt that. All I can do is leaven the inevitable pain with an expression of our nation’s sincerest gratitude.”

  Inevitable pain? What the hell?

  The President fished a piece of paper-a telegram?-from an inside pocket of his linen coat. “My goodness, that’s clumsy. Forgive me.” He opened the paper out and studied it for a moment. “Daniel, your father died in the Aleutian Islands, on the sixteenth of June, not too long after the Fourth Infantry had retaken Attu from the Japanese. He’d flown to Attu with some Eleventh Air Force personnel from Umnak; they arrived in the wake of mopping-up exercises, and on an expedition of some sort to the interior, your father, Richard Oconostota Boles, and four other brave Americans died.” The President handed me the telegram. “That presents the unadorned facts, Daniel. The details I have from Colonel Elshtain, who himself has them from an officer in Graves Registration with the Alaska Command. In any event, your father died an honorable death in the service of his country.”

  I held the telegram. We’d reached the front gate. The limousine, with its escort vehicles and outriders, stopped and idled. A mockingbird meowed from a pine across the road. I saw myself receiving this sorry news like somebody watching a film might follow an overhead shot of a motorcade and eavesdrop on the mutterings of a make-believe president. But FDR sat close enough to touch, and the crumbs from a loaf of French bread had funneled together in a fold of the removable seat’s dove-gray upholstery.

  “I hear your parents lived apart these past few years,” FDR said. “On the other hand, a child’s affection for a parent seldom dies utterly after an estrangement, and I imagine-indeed, I hope-you still recall your father with a measure of fondness. I’m deeply honored, and likewise deeply sorry, to be the messenger of your pain.”

  I couldn’t cry. You don’t sob-not, at least, if you’re a seventeen-year-old pro ballplayer-in the presence of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The gist of what he’d said didn’t corkscrew immediately into me anyway, and memories of my dad crowded fast and thick. I gave the Prez a nod, opened my door, and got out.

  “A lift back up to the house?” he said.

  Uh-uh. My surroundings had gone all blurry and foreign, I could’ve been standing on a twilit African mud flat.

  “A privilege to’ve made your acquaintance, Daniel.”

  I may’ve raised my head, or not. I turned and trudged back up the lawn towards McKissic House. FDR and his crew processed off the grounds, into the honeysuckle drench of the evening.

  Phoebe met me halfway, on a dead run. I handed her the telegram. She didn’t read it. Someone’d already told her what it said. She lifted her hands. She walked in a half circle. She threw herself at me, like I was a tackling dummy, and clung to me in a glut of rainy griefs. I hugged her back.

  “Phoebe,” I said.

  39

  More than a month had passed between my buggery by Pumphrey and word of Dick Boles’s death. Call that month a fugue of dummyhood. No one in Highbridge, except Mister JayMac, had known me as anything other than a mute. So it sometimes seemed to me, and probably to others, my affliction had existed from childhood and would go into the grave with me-to everlasting muteness. Ha.

  On the other hand, just getting Phoebe’s name out didn’t open the door for a whole stifled dictionary of yawps. My old friend the stammer rode half the words I did say, maybe more. Besides, I’d cast off the habit of talking. Silence seemed easier sometimes, nobler others, and sometimes just happily worrisome for the persnickety folks who wanted either answers or explanations out of me. If my tongue didn’t hurry to comply with the speech signals from Language Central, well, I didn’t sweat it. People talk too much anyhow. I prove that with my throat mike and these damned interviews.

  “Danny can talk,” Phoebe announced, leading me back to the others. “He said my name.”

  Miss Tulipa embraced me. Then Miss LaRaina hugged me. Kizzy appeared-she rocked me to and fro with her forehead hard on my breastbone. Even Miss Giselle clocked in with a flurry of shoulder pats. Mister JayMac, the colonel, and the Hellbenders haunted the edges of my loss like clueless border guards.

  “Such a trauma,” Miss Tulipa said. “Such a trauma to overcome your laryngitis.”

  “You gots to be strong,” Kizzy said, her braids like spun-metal snakes in my hands. “Mr Roozerfeld never told you that sadness to have you go lint-simple, Danny Bowes.”

  I pushed Kizzy far enough back to gaze into her face. “I d-d-don’t c-care. I’m gl-glad my d-d-daddy’s dead.”

  “A kid of the new school,” Hoey said from nearby. “A real lover of the fifth commandment.”

  I found Hoey’s silhouette among all the others and glared at him. “Sc-scr-screw you.” Nobody whooped or laughed. In those days, you didn’t talk dirty in the presence of ladies, even if one was a woman of color and another had at best only a slippery claim on the title. So my retort to Hoey shocked the fellas as much as it did the gathered womenfolk, my champions and my comforters. Maybe only Phoebe appreciated the hasseled defiance of it, and maybe she shouldn’t have. Everyone made allowances, though-not counting Hoey, I guess-and I got back to my room without being tarred and feathered.

  Upstairs, Henry let me be. Huddled on my bed with our basket fan chasing fever chills down my arms and legs, I told myself even doing his duty to God and country hadn’t saved my father from hellfire. Anyone could reckon why. He deserved it, frying forever. He’d hurt Mama bad and just about destroyed me, skipping out. He deserved a million-year broil in Beelzebub’s furnace.

  Then I remem
bered Tenkiller’s abandoned icehouse, and Sparrow Alley, and the Boles & Son Jes-for-Fun Oklahoma World See-ries, and the sump of my bitterness started to evaporate. Did Satan grant pardons? Reprieves? Weekend furloughs?

  The Hellbenders’ record on July 5, 1943, was twenty-two wins, seventeen losses; we’d played one game past the season’s official midpoint. We’d split our last six games with Opelika, who still had a game or two on us, the result of a fast getaway in May. And the Gendarmes, who’d beaten us two out of three in an away series at the end of June, still led the league.

  In a meeting on Tuesday afternoon, Mister JayMac assessed the situation and told us what to do to ready ourselves for a successful stretch run: “Tomorrow morning, gentlemen, we go on the road to play the Boll Weevils and the Linenmakers. The next week they come here. These fellas play baseball like the Flying Tigers dance Swan Lake. If they beat us, we’ll deserve our enmirement in third or fourth place. Yesterday we whipped Lou Ed Dew’s hotshot Orphans twice. Congratulations. Thank God you didn’t disappoint Mr Roosevelt, gentlemen.”

  “Thank God we didn’t disappoint you,” Buck Hoey said.

  “Amen!” amen’d a chorus of Hellbenders.

  “But this is no time to suppose that jes because we’ve got our percherons harnessed and our wagon on track, we’re going to roll over everybody else like they were dust chickens. Uh-uh. So I am deeply perturbed that Mr Curriden and Mr Musselwhite, team heroes, elected by their off-the-field performance last night to sit out Wednesday’s contest against the Boll Weevils. Their absence from the lineup-nor do I mean to disparage or demoralize their replacements-could well cost us that game and deny us the psychological momentum to make the entire road trip a success. The rest of yall’ll jes have to gird up your loins in resolute and selfless compensation.”

  “Why don’t you jes let em play?” Norm Sudikoff said. “It was only a kind of tiff.”

  “A tiff! Howso a tiff, Mr Sudikoff?”

  “I mean, it looked like a all-out war, but only because they’re such bruisers to begin with. A ant boxin another ant don’t quake the ground like a couple of rhinos would. So, you know, jes let em play on Wednesday.”