Brittle Innings

by Michael Bishop

  “Leave him be, Ted. He’s wore out.”

  “Won’t hurt him to write his name, Pa,” Teddy said. “I got bout ever other ’Bender’s graph. I need Mr Boles’s to have em aw.”

  “You don’t need a fritty thing, snip,” Hoey said.

  “Look, Pa. He don’t mind.”

  I’d yanked the program back to resume scrawling DANNY BOLES on it.

  “You back-talking me, Ted? You defying my say-so?”

  “Nosir, I’m ony asting him to-”

  “Well, don’t! You hear me! DON’T!” Hoey reclaimed the program and tore it to bits. “Stop that nancy-boy bawling, Ted! STOP IT!” He grabbed Ted’s upper arm and jerked him this way and that trying to make him stop crying, which worked about as well as kicking a dog draws it to you. Teddy got louder-not defying Hoey, just giving in to his hurt-and Hoey boxed his ear: wham! wham! wham! wham! WHAM!

  Henry caught Buck Hoey’s wrist and twisted it back on him. “You don’t wish to do that,” he said. “You fail to project the psychological repercussions.”

  “So you’re my lousy self-appointed bug doctor, eh?”

  Hoey shook off Henry’s grip and stepped sideways to slap Ted again. Then he back-pedaled to the dugout, scolding Ted and loudly cussing out Henry and me. Ted’s ear blazed like a night-light, carbuncle red, and the hand print throbbing on his face made him look like a war-painted Comanche.

  Henry knelt to comfort Ted, and I stood there with my eyes closed, a cascade of old Life magazine covers rampaging on the screen of my memory.

  Anyway, the deeper into July we went, the more time Hoey spent riding the bench or pacing his coaching box. Me, I played every game day, and I played in overdrive. I dove for grounders, stole bases, chased down pop-up fouls behind third, ran out bunts, legged long singles into doubles, and bowled over or slid under catchers twice my size on shallow sacrifice flies. I wore out my uniform pants, four pairs of sanitary stockings, and, in an away series against Marble Springs, my baseball shoes.

  After hook-sliding around the Seminole shortstop’s tag and asking for time, I got up to find the toe spikes on my shoe torn from the sole and a gaping rip in the side panel. The other shoe looked almost as bad. I could never run on those dislodged spikes. Two steps would sprain my ankle or twist a knee. I showed the base umpire, Jake Schact. Mister JayMac came out to assess the damage, and the Seminole crowd booed as he crossed the infield in his street clothes and again when Hoey trotted over from the first-base coaching box to make it a three-party powwow.

  “Don’t put on a stall,” Schact told Mister JayMac.

  “Who’s stalling? We’re out of shoes.”

  “ ‘Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without’ ”-a wartime motto that Schact quoted. “And hurry it up.”

  Unless you had an illegal hoard, there was no sure or cheap way to replace rationed items, and Uncle Sam rationed shoes, even baseball shoes. We might’ve had an extra pair in my size in Highbridge, but in Marble Springs the spare-pair cupboard stood Mother Hubbard bare. Mister JayMac looked hard at my shoes and then just that hard at Hoey’s.

  “What size do you wear, Mr Boles?”

  “N-n-nines.”

  “And you, Mr Hoey?”

  “Criminy,” Hoey said. “Jesus.”

  “What size?”

  “Nines.” (The kind of confession you get from a fella when you put him in a room with a blackjack crew.)

  “Give him yours, Mr Hoey.”

  “Here?”

  “Here and now.”

  Hoey sat on one half of the bag removing his spikes. I sat on the other half unstringing mine.

  “Should I give him my jock too?”

  “Please, Mr Hoey. Don’t provoke a display of female ardor beyond your capacity to quench.”

  The Seminole crowd whooped like picture-show Indians, ready for the game to resume. Hoey, though, had to walk back to the coaching box in his stirrup socks and clay-stained saintaries. Between innings, he put on a pair of street shoes. It took me a week to find my own replacements, though, and for that week, Hoey wore a pair of boot-blacked slippers. From a distance, they looked like the real things and kept fans from ragging him, but this episode, on top of everything else, guaranteed I’d stay at the top of Hoey’s shit list forever.

  Thank God Phoebe cared for me. Thank God I had Henry for a protector.

  42

  My Second Life (continued)

  … I heard shouts, laughter, and a mechanical sort of hooting. Together, these noises enticed me from the woods, where I had made a shelter of evergreen boughs, and onto the verge of an open fold. Here I saw a great many men standing about in like-tailored coveralls and startling red blouses, the blouses identical but for the different numerals in white on their backs. One player, running towards me to retrieve a spherical object struck over his head, showed across the front of his crimson blouse the word POINSETT. He and his comrades, each with this same designation on their chests, had embarked upon a sporting contest against some green-clad men wearing across their shirts the epithet BRAGGADOCIO.

  From considerably greater distances, I had seen, and given a prudent berth, games of this raucous sort before. The Caucasian natives of the continental hinterlands-by now I had made my way to northeastern Arkansas-called their pastime “base ball,” but it had affinities to ball-and-stick children’s games that I had encountered everywhere from Switzerland to eastern Siberia. The rural version of this sport fascinated me, less for its regulated intricacies than for its ability to assemble and amuse many diverse persons.

  In any event, I emerged from the woods.

  On the outskirts of Poinsett, Arkansas, a hundred or more spectators had gathered about the ill-marked field (known locally as the Strawberry Diggings) on foot, in mule- or ox-drawn wagons, in surreys, and even in self-propelled “Model T’s.” The drivers of these last vehicles, sometimes called automobiles and sometimes Fords, would pull their movable windshields down to preserve the glass from balls bludgeoned foul by the teams’ various batsmen.

  Whenever those watching approved a development in the game, the spectators on foot or in wagons would whistle, cheer, applaud, and stamp their feet. Those in Model T’s would sound the signalling devices in their conveyances to produce a festive cacophony. Perhaps this continual hubbub should have warned me off; instead, it drew me, as a lamp does a moth.

  The ball being pursued by the unsuspecting Poinsett outfielder rolled to my feet. I stooped to pick it up and greatly agitated the man. His eyes, under the narrow bill of a striped cap, grew wide, then hard. I tossed the ball to him. He caught it in a thin glove from which the tips of his naked fingers protruded like pale sausages. The cheers and honking from the devotees swelled in volume and in anxiousness. “Thanks,” said the man. Turning, he threw the ball in a low arc to a teammate at one congested corner of the “diamond.” This disciplined heave and its skillful reception by a teammate excited the local enthusiasts to even louder approbation. I moved back into the shelter of the woods-to watch the remainder of the contest from this vantage, without detection by the spectators or further intrusion of myself into the game.

  Afterwards, the man to whom I had tossed the ball ventured alone to the edge of the evergreen stand. “Sir,” he said, “if still here, please shew yourself.” I did, but my fulfillment of his request evoked his silent wariness. He had above-average height and strength, but I stood three hands taller and cast him in darkling shadow. “Don’t be afraid,” I said. “I intend neither you nor your friends any harm.” These words clearly ameliorated his mood. He slipped from out my shadow and appraised me with a look of most welcome sympathy.

  “That out you he’ped me git,” he said in his rude dialect, “was shore a big un. Jes’ then, Mister, the game teetered more t’ards them than us, but Flexner’s tag at third settled them Braggadocio’s boys’ hash and skinned us through the tight. So thanks again. ’Thout yore he’p, I’d’a lost two weeks’ wages at Griscom’s dentistry office to Bruno Shaler.�
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  “It was my pleasure,” said I, and the timbre of my voice occasioned him another instant of unease. He quickly recovered and questioned me on my knowledge of base ball and my best self-assessment of my plying skills. I owned that my knowledge derived solely from observation; further, any talent I might possess was that of an awkward tyro.

  “If you could hit jes’ a quarter lick yore size, you could take the Poinsett Redbirds to a state championship,” he said. “How’dyou like a weekday job at Griscom’s? Let me th’ow you a few and see what befaws, aw right?”

  The name of this outfielder and dentistry-office factotum was Jimmy Brawley. Jimmy proceeded to test my abilities and to lesson me in the rudiments of the pastime and sport to which he devoted most of his Saturday and Sunday afternoons. When he experimentally pitched to me, at first lobbing the ball, then hurling it with an uncouth ferocity, I excited his admiration by launching seven of these latter pitches almost to the trees. My bat was a modified wagon tongue that Jimmy had held back for me from the equipment of his departed companions. He also had a leather-wrapped india-rubber ball that he delivered from a slat laid down as the pitcher’s mark. Finally, I propelled the ball into the very treetops of the woods wherein I had sheltered, and neither Jimmy nor I could recover it.

  My impromptu tryout ended on that account, but Jimmy wrung from me through importunate flattery a commitment to appear in the Diggings for a weekday-evening practice.

  “Tomorrow,” said he.

  “Perhaps. I hardly trust my base-ball instincts, nor yet, Mr Brawley, my-”

  “Jimmy,” he told me. “None of that’ere mister rig-a-roo. Makes me sound I’m awready a laid-out stiff.”

  “Nor, Jimmy, do I trust my ability to secure favour equal to your own among your colleagues and supporters. It has ever been thus with me. I offend by my appearance. I go down to dust an outcast because my body incites not only revulsion but also a wholly unwarranted fear.”

  “If you pound ’er to the treetops wunst or twicet a game, Sonny Man, you could look like a shaved-butt coyote and nobody roundabouts Poinsett’d give a stale tea cake.”

  For nearly a week, I remained unperceived in the pine stand. At night, however, I betook myself to the diamond on the Strawberry Diggings with a burlap sack of pine cones and a stout bough with which to launch them. For hours I practiced. The flanged configuration of the surface of the cones, along with their relative lack of density, prevented me from propelling them far beyond the fan of the infield, but the persistence with which I drilled instilled in me, over time, great confidence. I decided to accept Jimmy’s challenge.

  When I first shewed myself to the Poinsett Redbirds on a practice afternoon, Jimmy introduced me to the players and to their manager, Almont Rattigan. Against even the team’s best hurler, I batted surprisingly well, but fielded so ineffectually that Rattigan despaired of ever employing me, because of the liability I would pose on defense. The less kind or more ignorant Redbird players referred to me as Flatfoot, Lame Ox, Dropper, and Stoopnot. Mr Rattigan advised me to quit base ball for coal mining, but Poinsett had no mines.

  Jimmy sought virtually alone to retrieve me from incompetence afield and disfavor among his teammates. With old leather-wrapped balls, then with a crate of mail-order Spaldeens, he tried my limited skills and augmented them through repetition until only my lameness debarred me from excellence as a fielder. This handicap-the consequence, I knew, of my own efforts to humanise my monstrous physique-I overcame through application, diligence, and a style of chicanery in my self-positioning that the other Redbird fielders later strove to emulate themselves. When I could find no one with whom to practise, Jimmy advised, I should take myself to the vacant lot behind Criscom’s dentistry office and catapult a Spaldeen at its foundation for as long as I could catch the rebounds. So much did I improve, through devotion to this regimen, that within a week Rattigan had fitted me with an outsized uniform and deployed me in vital town-team contests against Lepanto and Frye’s Mill…

  From before the Great War to the acme of the American Depression, I changed my residence at least once a year. I eschewed a permanent home and also the inevitability of my neighbours’ snoopery for a transient life and the qualified privacy that mobility affords. I played town-team ball in Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Missouri, Kentucky, Alabama, Texas, and Florida’s panhandle. I chose towns far enough apart from one another to prevent old acquaintances or teammates from a prior affiliation from chancing upon me. At intervals, I curtailed my participation for a year, two years, perhaps even three, though I honed my skills even during these sabbaticals. Some towns, when I played, gave me a monthly stipend-$30 was the most munificent-and a sinecure such as sidewalk sweeping or crate handling that did not monopolise my evenings or weekends. I purposely shunned human entanglements, such as that I had enjoyed with Kariak in Oongpfk, and behaved myself both on and off the field with as much sobriety and honour as I could, given the transient nature of my allegiances and my wish to hold myself emotionally aloof from my teammates, as well as from the communities that supported us.

  Why did I live? In the middle 1930s, with bread lines commonplace and unemployment an evil contagion even in the remotest hamlets, I no longer regarded my absorption into human society as a productive citizen as my foremost aim. Playing ball, I realised, had become an end in itself, not a means of such absorption. What now infused meaning into my days, whether in Donigal, Missouri, or in Hurricane, Alabama, derived less from tiresome social intercourse than from the galvanising physical sensations of hitting a ball hard and far, and of throwing it with exactitude. Once I had wanted a spiritual sharer, but now, drunk with the restored robustness of my borrowed body, I wanted only faceless teammates and unending occasions to exercise my intellectual and animal fatuities playing baseball…

  In the summer of 1940, I had a janitorial sinecure with a school in Hurricane, up the Tensaw River from Mobile Bay, and the guarantee of at least two town-team games a weekend. The part-owner of a minor-league club in Mobile itself, having heard of my batting prowess, sought me out. Despite the evident distress that my appearance caused him, he bestowed many flowery compliments and offered money, women, and alcohol as inducements to leave the Hurricane Hurricanes in favour of the Mobile Tarpons. Because I had no use for these offers and hated his protestations of high esteem, I declined. He departed from me both confounded by my gentlemanly refusals of his overtures and angry with me for seeing through his dissimulations.

  Soon thereafter, Mr Jordan McKissic of the Highbridge Hellbenders of the Chatahoochee Valley League came to watch me play. A teammate told me of his presence in the stands and informed me heatedly that only an “addlepate” would decline a second invitation to a higher level of play. He seemed sensible of the townwide conviction that although I had graciously shown my loyalty to the Hurricane nine, I had also manifested irrefutable proof of my foolish lack of self-regard. Should I reject another attractive offer, he supposed, every other member of our club would inherit the taint of my simplicty, and the name Hurricaner would soon stand synonymous with ninny, simpleton, or dolt. I ignored this counsel and performed as I always performed; that is to say, with intensity, diligence, and positivity. Indeed, I led the Hurricane Hurricanes to victory.

  Afterwards, Mr McKissic and I conferred. He did not recoil from me. His smile had no falsity, his words no ulteriority. His offer of a regular emolument, along with room and board, veiled no improper inducements or counterweights. His proposal tempted me, but the glare of playing in a larger city, with a major-league affiliate, subverted even the happy impression that Mr, McKissic’s sincere demeanour and speech had forged. Neither riches nor glory held any irresistible allure for me; I could fulfill my inbred need for athletic self-expression in an unfenced meadow as well as in a lighted stadium.

  “I disagree,” said Mr McKissic. “You’ll never realise your full capacities as an athlete until you play against men as good as, or perhaps even better than, you. A home run against J
oe Blow of the Fairhope Shrimpers proves a good deal less than does a home run against Sundog Billy Wallace of the Gendarmes. By the same token, a home run against Billy pales next to one off Rapid Robert Feller of the Cleveland Indians.”

  This line of argument found a sympathetic resonance in me. “Then, sir,” I said, “I should try to play for a nine that periodically meets Mr Feller’s club.”

  “But the only way to reach such a nine, Mr Clerval, is through a training league such as the CVL.”

  To what summit of expertise could I aspire? Glory, though some may dispute this assertion, did not beckon me. Rather, curiosity about the range of my talents filled my thoughts, calling me to some practical resolution of the question. In this way, Mr McKissic nearly secured my defection to the Hellbenders. Mulling a host of maddening factors, I said nothing, inadvertently prejudicing him to conclude that I would respond negatively.

  “Tell me what you want, Mr Clerval,” said he. “If it isn’t against my principles or terribly outlandish, I just might give it to you.”

  I catalogued and sorted through my wants. It scarcely took a minute, but this minute protracted Mr McKissic’s anxiety to the utmost extent of its elasticity.

  “For pity’s sake, Mr Clerval, say something!”

  “Occasional use of your automobile and instruction in its operation,” said I.

  “My automobile? And lessons in how to drive it?”

  “Just so,” I said. “Those are my conditions.”

  “All right. Done.”

  But I finished that season with the Hurricanes, as I had earlier pledged to do, and soon forgot the compensatory pledges of the Hellbenders’ owner.

  The following summer, though I greatly wanted to play, I determined that my small fame in the Mobile Bay area had so far overthrown my anonymity that I must resign for a time from public view to reestablish it. I did so, passing the time through closeted reading and contemplation.