Brittle Innings

by Michael Bishop

  “Yall sit right there,” he said. “Pretend to rest.” He meant on a moss-grown bench. Henry and I sat down on it.

  “Where’ve you b-been?” asked.

  Darius, maybe ten feet away, laid his cheek against the scabbed bark of the pecan. He hugged it like a person. “I’ve done signed on with Mister Cozy and the Splendid Dominicans,” he said. “We play in Lake City tomorrow. Next summer I could be wi the Memphis Red Sox or the KayCee Monarchs. Playing, Mister Henry-not jes driving a bus. Playing.”

  “Mister JayMac will find you,” Henry said.

  “Why? Why’d he want to do that? Sides, I’m gon change my name and play a lot more spots than jes pitcher.”

  “What about Euclid?” Henry said.

  The question gave Darius pause. Me too. I hadn’t even thought of Euclid, Darius’s supposed little brother, and his’d been the first Hellbender face I’d seen upon arriving in town. Home games, Euclid acted as our bat boy, the only Negro kid in that position in the league. He didn’t go on the road with us (not counting his stowaway trip to Cottonton) because Mister JayMac had no control over his treatment in other cities. Euclid had a regular presence around McKissic Field, though, and split his time between Darius’s apartment and a trim little house near the farmer’s market where his mother-Darius’s mother, the onetime brown-sugar fancy woman of Mister JayMac-lived.

  But Euclid had no McKissic blood in his veins. His mama, Detta Rae Satterfield, had conceived him with an official of the Railway Porters’ Union from Atlanta, a man as long gone from Detta Rae as Darius’s daddy and not a whit more missed. Just in her forties at Euclid’s making, she’d planned the child as the apple of her early dotage-but the manchild’s inbred rambunctiousness wearied her, and she’d begged both Darius and Mister JayMac to take him off, to act as stopgap providers and sponsors. They’d more or less agreed, with the understanding Darius would do the biggest part of the guardian work.

  “Euclid’s got his mama,” Darius said. “Got Mister JayMac and a house full of white big brothers.”

  “Have you told him you’re leaving?”

  “Lord, Mister Henry, I haven’t had the chance. He’s gon be awright, though, if he jes git told I’m out there pitchin and hitting. You see him, Mister Henry, tell him that. Let him know I aint gone off to dodge him, I’m doing it to grab my life back from the ol McKissic yoke.”

  “I’ll tell him,” Henry said. “Now, though, that yoke will rest even more heavily on him.”

  “He’s awready got a yoke-his black hide-he won’t shuck off this side of dying,” Darius said.

  A brown thrasher rattled about in the underbrush five or six feet from Darius, fluffing out the flecked white vest of its chest and tossing twigs and pine straw around.

  “I’m deeply sorry bout Mr Snow,” Darius said. “He wasn’t no showboat. He had this easy stillness that spoke straight through everbody else’s jive and moonshine. That’s why I come today. To say good-bye-to Mr Snow and likewise to yall, if I could manage it.”

  “You m-managed,” I said.

  “Some stuff awready packed in a bag on my closet shef,” Darius said. “Mister Henry, could you fetch it out here after yall’s game tonight and set it on that bench? You could, I’d pick it up round midnight.”

  “Is your apartment locked?”

  “Nosir. Aint never been.”

  “Then I’ll do it,” Henry said. “But what impels you to venture forth from McKissic House now?”

  Darius seemed surprised. “Why, Mister Cozy ast me, he’s giving me a chanst at something I awways wanted a chanst at.”

  “But you could’ve taken flight long ago.”

  The interlocked wheels of the pecan leaves above Darius winched his gaze upwards. He searched all that lacy green for an answer. Then he squatted and trailed his fingers in the pine-straw mulch lapping his shoes. The sheer worn-outness of his hunker got to me.

  “Better late than no time,” he finally said, peering at us up from under. “But why now? Good question, Mister Henry. I think it’s cause my life’s done crept into its brittlest part, like unto them innings when the whole thing could go either way-depending on jes when the crucial bonecrack happen, and to whom. I awmost waited past the snappin point. Mebbe I did. But if I beat it now, mebbe I’ll git past my brittle innings and play on through to a stretch that’ll heal me, that won’t jes shake me down to splinters and shards.” Then he sounded angry and near tearful at once: “Don’t give me no grief for coming so tardy to a notice of how damn feeble and rickety I’d got. Jes don’t. I’m moving now, aint I? I’m laying grease in my joints, oiling up for tomorry?”

  Henry said, “So it would appear.”

  “Then don’t yall chide me for what I cain’t nowise fix.”

  “Darius, we don’t,” I said.

  “And fetch me that suitcase, hear? They’s cash money in it, some clothes, a packet of eelskins.” Eelskins?

  “Have no fear,” Henry said. “The deed is accomplished.”

  “One other thing,” Darius said. “You still holding them fifty dollars what got bet on our game out to Penticuff, Mister Henry?”

  “I believe I am,” Henry said, surprised.

  “Well, I won that bet. I heard it said so over them PA speakers round the field. Anyhow, I could use the money.”

  Henry took his wallet from inside his jacket.

  “Don’t open it,” Darius said. “I could use it, but seeing how that game ended, hexed by them damn bats and dimmed by Mr Snow’s dying, I cain’t take it. Give it to Mr Snow’s missus. Say it’s a token from a admirer.”

  “Very well,” Henry said. “I will.”

  “God bless yall. And bye.”

  Darius saluted and backed off. He rattled the underbrush-the blackberry vines, the pine straw, the tiny white violets-less noisily than the pesky brown thrasher still goofing around in there.

  47

  Laying Charlie Snow to rest did something kindlesome for us Hellbenders. We won that evening’s game against Quitman. We won it big, about as big as they’d beaten us the night before. Win one for the Gipper-except Mister JayMac never trotted out a phony-baloney Knute Rockne ploy like that; he simply said our whole season would fall in ruins if we gave away any more games to outright inferiors, namely, Quitman, Lanett, Marble Springs, and Cottonton.

  After the game, back at McKissic House, Henry sent me over to Darius’s apartment to get Darius’s suitcase. He figured he’d have a harder time than me sneaking down two flights of stairs and over the crushed seashells in the Brown Bomber’s garage to pull off our mission. This wasn’t a con on his part, just smart planning, but I still resented having to do myself what Henry’d promised Darius in the cemetery. So I snuck with a foolish what-the-hell orneriness.

  I clomped up the stairs in the garage and twisted the knob on the door at the top of the landing. The Bomber slept below me like a hibernating metal bear. The apartment door creaked ajar, and I pushed my way inside. I couldn’t turn on a lamp for fear someone in McKissic House would notice, and I hadn’t had the wit to bring along a flashlight. I ran smack into a wicker rocker, cursed like crazy, and wound up with a small welt on my knee. I felt my way from the chair to a tomato-crate table and from there to another door.

  I’d come to a bathroom, with a commode and a bowl-sized sink with naked pipes. I waved my hand until it brushed a string, which I pulled. A light bulb popped on, lifting sink, toilet, and water-stained walls into the glare of old porcelain and scabby green paint.

  A pair of mahogany-colored cockroaches scuttled.

  I backed out and pulled the door to. A yellow crack showed from floor to lintel. I could navigate by the pale seepage without much fear someone outside would spy the light and sprint upstairs to waylay me.

  The main living area-with a bed, the rocker, a metal stool, a pair of upturned crates, and a cardboard chifforobe-had only one true closet. Darius’s suitcase lay in it on a shelf two feet above my head. Worse, the case’s handle faced the rear wall. I dr
agged the stool over and climbed up on it on my knees to reach the suitcase.

  “Whachu doin?”

  I swung around. The stool’s slippery seat almost launched me to the floor. I grabbed the doorjamb and hung on. Then I spotted Euclid. Euclid lay on the bed, propped on one elbow in his Hellbenders uniform-capless, shoeless, goggle-eyed. He’d scared the holy bejabbers out of me.

  “Whachu doin, Danny Bowes?”

  “Cr-crimmy, Euclid.”

  He just stared. Why hadn’t he greeted or jumped me at the very beginning? I felt like a burglar.

  For the past two evenings at the ballpark, Euclid’d served as bat boy, never once asking why Darius’d disappeared or where he’d gone. But Euclid seldom had much to say. He racked bats, toted balls, chased down nearby fouls, and guarded the team’s equipment and medical supplies. He lurked like a ghost at the murky edges of our sight. He’d get Technicolor real only when Sosebee and Evans threw tizzies when they fanned or muffed a fielding chance. They’d lambaste Euclid for | screwing with their equipment or just for coming between them and a kickable canvas bag at the height of their fury.

  “What’re you d-doing here, Euclid?”

  “I ast you fuss.”

  “Yeah, you did.” I swung around on my knees toward the closet shelf. “D-Darius sent me for this.” Reaching for the suitcase, I explained what’d happened at Camp Penticuff-an away game despite the camp’s nearness and thus a day off for Euclid-and in the cemetery after Charlie Snow’s funeral. I unwedged the suitcase and stepped off the stool. I walked to the bed and set the case down at Euclid’s gamy feet.

  “Lemme take it him,” he said.

  “It’s heavy.”

  “Ain so heaby. N I sho nough strawn.”

  “Okay. If you really don’t m-mind.”

  Euclid didn’t mind. What I saw as a crushing chore, he saw as a privilege, an adventure. He put on some grungy sneakers, hoisted the suitcase off the bed, and led me out of the room to the landing.

  Down the steps he lurched, through the hydrangea and azalea shrubs next to the buggy house, both hands on the suitcase’s plastic handle and his feet as wide apart as those of a man swinging an ax. It’d take him forty minutes, if not longer, to make it to Alligator Park, but he’d get there, sparing me and Henry the trip and giving Darius the chance to tell him good-bye in person.

  Back in McKissic House, I told Henry of our good fortune. He lay aside a copy of Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Nature and Destiny of Man and studied me like I’d strangled a baby with its own burp cloth. “He’ll beseech Mr Satterfield to take him along, Daniel, and Mr Satterfield will be obliged to refuse the boy.”

  “Not n-n-necessarily.”

  “I would wager a month’s remuneration.” Henry rose on his legs with an “Oof!” and a sigh. “And when he comes back, he’ll be angry or inconsolable.”

  “Somebody had to go.”

  Henry shuffled to our open window and ducked through it to the awningless fire stairs. He sat on the top step, a shoulder against the wall, and stared across the silvery okra stalks, elephant-eared squash plants, pole beans, and tomato vines in the victory garden between McKissic House and Mister JayMac and Miss Giselle’s Spanish-style bungalow. His presence out there, bookless and mum, hurled waves of reproach back at me through the dingy clapboards-but I didn’t much care.

  I went to bed.

  Two or three hours later, I awoke to house-settling noises and the scarflike strokings of a midsummer breeze. Something-anxiety, instinct-made me lift my head. Even in the dark I could tell Henry hadn’t reentered the room. The window still gaped open. I tried to see through it to the fire stairs, but all that swung into focus was shaggy black treetops and a milky freckling of stars. No Henry.

  “Henry?” I said. “Henry?”

  Maybe he’d squeezed back inside earlier and gone down the hall to the lavatory. Not likely, though; his book stood tented on his bed just where he’d left it, I crawled to the foot of my bed and peered out the window.

  After a while, I stepped through the window in my skivvies and stood there gazing on the litter below (empty paint cans, a shiny old wash basin, cigarette packages, candy-bar wrappers, a set of rusty bicycle pedals) and at the plants (sun-flowers, morning glories, pokeweed, mimosa fronds) sprouting from the debris or hugging the house’s foundation. No Henry. Briefly, I was tempted to climb onto the upper railing of the fire stairs and leap out into the night like a Mexican cliff diver. I resisted the urge-it wasn’t hard-and monkeyed my way back inside for a smoke.

  Henry didn’t come back and didn’t come back. I stubbed out my cigarette and lay down again. Next thing I knew, dawn-or something pretty dose to it-had skinned up to my pillow. My eyelids sprang open, and I kipped over to the window.

  Three or four steps below me, Henry sat with his head down and his shoulders bent over his knees. I drummed the sill. He turned his head to track my drumming. For some reason, he’d set up a turtledovish coo that shook his lips and the cordlike wattles of his throat.

  “Henry, where you been all n-night?”

  “Here. Taking the air.”

  A lie. A lie! Which, just then, seemed a shiftier and more insulting concealment than the whole screwy rigmarole of the kayak, the journal, and the Robert Walton letters. Why would Henry lie to me?

  You h-haven’t either, I started to say, stammering even in my thoughts. But a long, pale, ratlike snout twisted out of Henry’s bosom and I couldn’t stammer a word.

  The snout belonged to a possum. Henry had a full-grown possum in his lap. I climbed out to see it better, and Henry leaned back to oblige me.

  The possum didn’t appreciate my visit. It showed me its sharp little teeth, like a cat silently hissing. Its ears looked like grayish black leaves that a hungry caterpillar’d notched, its tail like a hard white rubber cable smudged with pencil erasures. It had black or white whiskers bristling from its snout, even from beside its beady black eyes. It would’ve won a beauty contest only if the judges included several other possums, and maybe not even then.

  “Possums are st-stupid,” I said. “Brains the size of p-potato bugs.” I took another step or two down. The possum showed me its teeth again.

  “Perhaps a little larger than that,” Henry said.

  I waved my hand at the possum. It flinched away, its pink ball of a nose wrinkling in anger or fear. Henry stroked its back and made the same cooing noises I’d heard from bed. His concern for the beast irked me. I reached out and flicked it on the nose.

  “Daniel!”

  The possum flinched and jumped from Henry’s lap. It scurried down the steps to escape me, but its short legs and the gaps between the steps combined to send it scooting out of control. For a second or so, I feared it’d shoot out into the dark and drop like a furry bomb into the rubbish and weeds-but after it’d bounced three or four steps, its head and forelegs wedged between two balusters and its pink finger-claws went to work to pull it through the gap and back onto the next step down. From there, it waddled all the way down and off into the cover of our victory garden.

  “You might have killed her,” Henry said.

  “You lied to me. You weren’t s-sitting here all night. You couldn’t’ve b-been.”

  “I took a walk around Hellbender Pond. I met Pearl. I brought her up here with me to enjoy the view.”

  “P-Pearl?”

  “The poor creature whose life you just placed in jeopardy. She had babies-pups-kittens-whatever one calls the offspring of that marsupial. You placed them all in jeopardy.”

  “I didn’t see any b-b-babies, Henry.”

  “Still, she has five or six. They ride in her pouch. That belly-flop may have injured or killed them.” He climbed to the window and ducked through it like King Kong squeezing through a slit in a detergent box.

  Henry’s anger kept me from asking him more about his lie. Surely it hadn’t taken him all night to walk around the pond and bring a possum up the fire stairs. But, if it had, I’d called him a liar and shown m
yself a scapegoating petty brute.

  Later that day, before our final game with Quitman, Mister JayMac came into the dining room. He had Euclid with him, a scared ragamuffin in a one-armed headlock, and he addressed us with the poor kid helpless in front of him. With his free hand, Mister JayMac knuckled Euclid’s hair… softly. You got the feeling, though, a sudden move from Euclid would turn that soft touch into a hurtful grind.

  “Darius has been gone for almost three days,” Mister JayMac said. “Have any of yall laid eyes on him since Tuesday?”

  I glanced down the table to where Henrv sat, a mound of squash, collards, fried eggplant slices, and popcorn okra piled on his dinner platter. He caught my glance and barely visibly shook his head.

  “How bout Euclid there?” Sosebee asked. “Does that little picaroon know anything?”

  “Claims he doesn’t,” Mister JayMac said. “Could be lying. But for now I’m not asking Euclid, I’m asking yall.”

  “Darius don’t check in and out with us,” Trapdoor Evans said. “Why should we know moren the boy?”

  “All right, then,” Mister JayMac said. “From this moment on, I regard Darius Satterfield as AWOL.”

  “As what?” Fadeaway Ankers said.

  “Absent without leave,” Muscles said. “AWOL.”

  “As if our team were like unto the Army?” Henry said Army the way a Holy Roller would say Episcopalian.

  “Insofar as I require that sort of dedication, yes,” Mister JayMac said. “Furthermore, it appears Darius has deserted us.”

  “Which reminds me.” Fadeaway looked at Henry. “You’ve still got our bet money, Jumbo. We’d like it back.”

  “You lost the wager. The money is no longer yours.”

  “Well, it was never yours, Jumbo. So pass it on back to us fellas it rightfully belonged to.”

  “You lost the wager,” Henry repeated. “The money shall go to Charlie Snow’s widow.”