Brittle Innings

by Michael Bishop

“On whose authority did you decide that?” Mister JayMac said. “Vera Jo’s being well taken care of, I can assure you.”

  On whose authority? I looked at Henry again. Would he confess we’d spoken to Darius after the funeral yesterday?

  “Do you believe, sir, that the funds of a lost wager should go back into the pockets of those who haughtily wagered them? I do not, even as I deplore the impulse to gamble.”

  Mister JayMac looked stymied. When Euclid began to fidget, he pulled his forearm tighter under Euclid’s chin, and the boy steadied down again. “How many of yall object to giving the fifty to Mrs Snow?”

  “Jeez,” Fadeaway said. “I shore aint crazy bout it.”

  “Okay by me,” Evans said sullenly.

  Jerry Wayne Sosebee said, “Let her have it. A widow’s a widow. Bible says to care for em.”

  “I’ll give the money to her.” Henry didn’t specify how or when, but nobody thought to call him on that because when Henry gave his word, you could trust him on it-which made me recall, and regret again, the possum-on-the-steps business.

  Mister JayMac let go of Euclid, who rubbed his neck. “Eyes out for Darius. Anybody sees him, let me know. Meanwhile, I’ve put a new lock on his apartment. Somebody, possibly even Darius himself, visited the place last night and made off with some of his belongings. Euclid says it wasn’t him. Anyway, yall stay out of there. It’s off-limits.”

  Just like The Wing & Thigh, I thought.

  “If he’s not at his mama’s, Euclid can sleep on the kitchen porch. Show him some courtesy when he’s out there.”

  “Will do,” Muscles said, speaking as our captain.

  “LaGrange beat the Seminoles again last night,” Mister JayMac said, changing the subject. “We’re still three back. We’ve got to beat Quitman again to make our weekend series against the Gendarmes profitable-to rebound completely from our deficit.”

  “N I go?” Euclid said.

  Mister JayMac waved at him like he would’ve a buzzing June bug, and Euclid banged into the kitchen. The balloon of worry inside me deflated a little; I could breathe again. Euclid, pressed hard enough, might’ve spilled the news of my midnight visit to the buggy-house apartment.

  “Any yall looked at our schedule beyond this weekend?” Mister JayMac asked.

  “We play LaGrange again next week,” Muscles said. “Two games away before we hit Cottonton for three more.”

  “If we lose to the ’Birds tonight and play like slew-foots against the Gendarmes, we could be eight or nine games out of first by Thursday night-with less than a month to play.”

  “Accentuate the positive, sir,” Muscles advised. “We also play the Gendarmes our last three homies of the season.”

  “If we’re down eight or nine by Friday night, that last series won’t mean mouse-scat, Mr Musselwhite.”

  “Nosir, I guess not.” Everybody sat quiet while we mulled the crucialness of our next few games-crunch time, today’s sports hacks’d call it. Then Muscles said, “We’re sure going to miss Charlie, Mister JayMac.”

  “If you’re alibing in advance, you’d better-”

  “I try not to alibi,” Muscles said, barb-sharp. “Alibi or no alibi, we’re going to miss Charlie a lot.”

  “We’ve got a roster spot to fill,” Dunnagin said. “We can’t play our next dozen or so games with nineteen guys when LaGrange and everybody else have twenty.”

  “I’m working on that.” Mister JayMac banged through the door into the kitchen. The rest of us went gratefully back to eating, and Kizzy came in with three hot peach pies on a big lacquered dowel rack.

  We beat Quitman again. Henry hit two glowing, cometlike homers, but I had a measly single in five plate appearances and didn’t score a run.

  That night, Henry heard me crying and sat up. “You did well, Daniel. Not once did you strike out. The Hellbenders won. No need for tears.”

  “S nothing to do with the d-d-damned game.”

  “Then what provokes this despondency? Mr Snow’s death? Mr Satterfield’s departure? Euclid’s bereavement?”

  Who wouldn’t’ve been depressed? I sure had causes enough.

  “Tell me,” Henry prompted.

  “My f-f-father,” I said. And that was so. Partly so, anyway. Maybe more than partly.

  48

  Next morning, early, I sloughed downstairs and sat in a rocker on the porch facing Angus Road-to take the air and clear the dustbunnies out of my head. The lawn lay fresh-mown and dewy. A gray catbird tiptoed over the clippings looking for crickets, grubs, earthworms. I’d watched it for maybe ten minutes, occasional jays or mockingbirds swooping down to inspect the lawn too, when a figure on a bicycle came through the gate and pedaled up the drive towards McKissic House.

  The rider wore a split-seam khaki skirt, bobby sox, and a pair of black and white shoes that kids after the war called squad cars. She stood off her seat to get more traction, and her bike squeaked and clattered, swaying from side to side like a boat in a heavy chop. The rider on that contraption was Phoebe. She dropped her bike like a hot rivet and bounded up the porch steps.

  “Danny, you seen Miss LaRaina?”

  The question-at six-thirty in the morning, even a Saturday morning-seemed damned abrupt.

  “My mother,” she added.

  I’d known what she meant, I just hadn’t expected to speak to anyone so early. I shook my head.

  “Does that mean you aint seen her or you don’t think she’s here or you jes don’t plan to talk to me?”

  “I haven’t s-seen her.”

  “Ya think she’s here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Listen. She hadn’t come home by the time I went to bed last night, and she wasn’t to home this morning either. Her bed leaves me clueless cause she hardly ever makes it anyways.”

  The tic under Phoebe’s bloodshot eye took me aback.

  “Think she took the starch out of Musselwhite last night? Or Curriden? Or whoever the hell happened to ask her home?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Phoebe paced the high concrete. I’d seen her upset before, but never this unhinged. She stopped, hands on hips.

  “Well, should I go in there yelling ‘Mama, oh Mama, please come home’?”

  “I don’t know. You’d probably sc-scare up a few guys in their sk-skivvies.”

  “Oh joy. Smelly men in their dingy unmentionables.”

  “We all sh-shower, Phoebe.”

  Phoebe cocked her head funny. “You didn’t talk to me at Mr Snow’s funeral-not even a piddlin ‘Hi!’ ”

  “I nodded at you. It was a f-funeral, not a ice-cream social.”

  “You know, you were a damn sight sweeter when you couldn’t talk-pliter, more charmin.”

  “Phieuw!”

  Phoebe ignored my disgust. “So you don’t think it’d do for me to stomp upstairs calling for my mama?”

  “Nome, I don’t.”

  Suddenly-really suddenly-Phoebe knelt in front of me and gripped my thighs with her small, tough-looking hands. “Take me off from here, Danny. Carry me home.”

  So I did. I pedaled that doddery bike with Phoebe perched shakily on its handlebars, her dress yanked up to her sunny red knees. Not once in the whole trip did I put my fanny to the bike’s liver-shaped and liver-tinted seat cushion, but we never spilled, and Phoebe invited me in for a Co-Cola.

  “No thanks. I haven’t had br-breakfast.” I was nervous and wanted to get back.

  “Spose I said a cherry Coke, Danny? Would a cherry Coke make you forgit Kizzy’s cantaloupes n biscuits?”

  Somehow, coaxed along, I wound up in the living room of the Pharrams’ boxy little rental house. I knew-as well as, if not better than, Phoebe did herself-she was playing me like a gill-snagged trout, but neither of us knew when she’d yanked or where I’d land. We looked at each other a minute.

  Then, like a kid at a pool getting rid of her coverup, Phoebe took off her blouse, showing me a bra-a brassiere!-more like a thin bandage than the
double-barrelled slingshot I’d’ve expected. She looked frail, wounded almost, in that bandanna, sort of like the piper kid in that famous painting of a Revolutionary War fife-and-drum group. Then Phoebe’s hands fidgeted behind her back, and the bandage fell away. At least three guys on the Hellbenders-Fanning, Sudikoff, and Hay-had bigger bosoms than Phoebe, but the sight of hers-pear-shaped and jaunty-awed me the way a sunset would a man healed late in life of blindness.

  Phoebe took my hand and led me to her bedroom, where her bed, unlike her mama’s, had a made-up spread and a pretty folded quilt across its foot. She turned the spread all the way back, the pears on her chest hardly growing even when she leaned over to turn it. But how blessed I felt looking at em.

  “Now you,” Phoebe said, facing me straight on.

  “What do you w-want to d-d-do?”

  “Jes what they do at The Wing n Thigh.” She thought for a moment. “With lusty passion.”

  “We’re not m-married. And I thought you wanted a s-s-sojer to, uh, d-do you first.”

  “Married! I bet most human sex’s got zero to do with that n not much with love. A place like The Wing n Thigh tells me so. And so does my ever-lovin mama, thout sayin a word.” Phoebe’s voice softened. “I care for you, boy. S no fault of yores you aint a sojer. Take off yore shirt.”

  I did. My chest caved to the breastbone, gooseflesh broke out on me like prickly heat.

  “More,” Phoebe said. “S yore turn to keep it all goin. If you care for me too.”

  There was a desk beside Phoebe’s truckle bed, with an old Royal typewriter on it and a photograph of Captain Luther Trent Pharram in his uniform and service cap. I sat down in the desk chair so I couldn’t see the ferret-eyed captain, and I untied my shoes. Not much is more ridiculous-looking than a grown man with his shoes on and his pants around his ankles. As I heeled off my shoes, Phoebe headed doorwards in her squad cars.

  “Where you going?”

  “For a French letter, Danny. Mama keeps em in the drawer nex her bed.”

  “I d-don’t read French.”

  “Goodness, you won’t-parlay vooz-have to. Be skinny by the time I git back. Even with Miss LaRaina in heat half the damn time, we prolly aint got all day.”

  Not much of what Phoebe’d just said made a hoohah of sense to me. French letter. Parlay vooz. Besides, I was skinny even when I wasn’t. I recalled from Tenkiller creek dipping just what she’d meant to imply, though, and shed my pants and undershorts. For the looks of it, more than anything else, I also rolled down and ditched my socks.

  When Phoebe returned, she wore nothing but a pair of satiny green panties. She hardly had any more hips than I did, but I thought her sexier than a thousand Venuses on a thousand pearly half shells. A bird and her bush are worth two out of hand. Me, I cupped my hands over my lap. That wasn’t hard because I wasn’t either. So far, the circumstances of our tryst-the early hour, the unfamiliar bedroom, the funny out-of-whackness of Phoebe’s behavior-had flustered more than aroused me. I kept waiting for an ashtray to bang down on my head.

  “I may look right boyish, Daniel, but I already work like a woman. You gonna have to put this on.”

  “What?”

  “The French letter.” She held up a bronze packet about the size of a fifty-cent piece, only thicker. Straight off, I knew what it was. We had them in Oklahoma too.

  “That’s a rubber.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s a right tatty name for it. But call it how you like, you still got to put it on.”

  For the first time since this whole freaky episode’d begun, I blushed. The blush scalded me down from my ears, face, and throat, to my chest, upper arms, and belly, like a head-first dunk in a turpentine bath. I didn’t move.

  Phoebe said, “You want to do this or not?”

  “I d-dunno. D-d-do you?”

  “Why in a pig’s eye you spose I had you bike me home? Whym I standing her nearlybout birthday new?”

  “Phoebe, I dunno.”

  My reply teed her off, but she didn’t back down an inch from the vengeance she had in mind. (Not a vengeance on me, now, but through me.) She curled her finger into the waist band of her panties, rolled them down her hips and legs, and stepped clear. I stared. No weedy triangle between her legs, just a crooked, reddish diamond with pale flesh showing around it so the tuft itself stood out in relief-as pretty, and as damaged-looking, as a Special Service Force patch with a bunch of pulled threads. I stared at it, trembling.

  “Show me,” she said. “It’s not fair for this to work jes one way.”

  I moved my hands. Phoebe knelt with the rubber, which she’d popped from its case. I wasn’t feeling horny, though, just bossed and misplaced. Phoebe examined me, tilting her head to one side and then the other.

  “No offense, Danl, but they sort of remind me o turkey wattles-the beak n the wattles, you know.”

  I looked: veiny pink wattles and a small spongy beak. My groin hair was lighter and sparser than Phoebe’s, my bashful equipment as useless as a tissue-paper doorknob. Never in my life had I felt so exposed and ashamed.

  “Howm I going to git this on you? It’s sorta like wrapping a pipe cleaner with a rubber band.” Phoebe touched. “Oh!” she said, “lookit the little booger grow.”

  We wound up on her bed. We worked to fit, then to please each other the way grownups’re supposed to do. Phoebe’s body resisted even though she tried to make it stop. Her face-her damped lips, her wide eyes-showed the strain of her fight. I fought too-to stay off the crushable basket of her ribs, to stay hard, to slide in her dryness, to keep from running away.

  “Why do people do this?” Phoebe said.

  “To make other people,” I said. (Just then, I couldn’t imagine pleasure entering the equation.)

  “I’d as lief adopt. Or… or die childless.”

  A breeze drifting through the room dried the sweat my backside. I shivered, and shivered again.

  “Don’t!” Phoebe cried. Then: “There’s got to be a better way. Ungh. To make other people. Ungh. Got to. Unnggh!”

  I came, not very pleasingly for Phoebe, or me, or the good name of screwing in general. I hadn’t had a more interesting morning before breakfast since arriving in Highbridge, or maybe since my own original birthday, granted-but interesting isn’t the same as delightful, and I wondered if maybe Henry’s creator hadn’t hit upon something smart and useful after all, in sexless parenthood.

  Phoebe sort of slipped away from the kiss I tried to plant on her cold forehead. I got up, gathered my clothes, and went into the bathroom to lose the drooping rubber, scrub myself up, and get dressed again. When I returned to Phoebe’s bedroom, she lay right where I’d left her-except she’d pulled the sheet over her bosoms and masked her eyes with one freckled forearm. Why hadn’t we set each other smoldering? You usually get some smoke, maybe even a fire, when you rub two sticks together.

  “Okay,” she said, not looking at me. “Now tell everbody. Ever Hellbender, ever rival player, ever idjit fan.”

  “I won’t tell anybody.”

  Phoebe sat up, keeping herself covered. “I’m telling you to tell, Danny. I want you to.”

  “Gentlemen d-d-don’t.”

  “Crap-doodle. Gentlemen don’t eat at The Wing n Thigh.”

  “I d-didn’t either.” Phoebe and I’d bumped into different dead ends of the same alley maze. “Besides, Mister JayMac’d k-k-kill me, Phoeb.”

  “Tote yore sorry sef out of here, you mollycoddle! Git! I hope I never see you-or another slimy willie-long’s I live!” She didn’t cry, but her bottom lip pooched out and rolled over on itself like a chimpanzee’s.

  I turned, walked through the house, and yanked open the screen door giving onto the porch.

  “You drip!” Phoebe yelled after me. “Tell em all-tell everbody-how you come over n jazzed me!”

  I lurched on outside and kicked Phoebe’s bike. Then I walked back to McKissic House through Cotton Creek, past a corner of Alligator Park and then row after row of stalls
at the barely stirring farmer’s market.

  49

  That Saturday afternoon we had a doubleheader against the Gendarmes, with one game to follow on Sunday, and a two-game series to begin on Wednesday in LaGrange. Five games in seven days against the league leaders, with no more crack at catching them until a three-game homestand at the fag end of August.

  “It’s do or die,” Vito Mariani said in the clubhouse before Saturday’s opener.

  “ ‘Do or die,’ ” Turkey Sloan mocked. “ ‘Do or die.’ Lordy, s that the Eye-talian gift of gab?”

  “It is do-or-die time,” Mariani said. “We lose even one today, Turkey, we make up no ground at all.”

  “You can’t inspire these downhome worldlies with clichés-with bromides and bushwah.”

  “I shouldn’t have to inspire em at all,” Mariani said. “That’s Mister JayMac’s job. But he aint even here.”

  “ ‘Do or die.’ ” Turkey Sloan shook his head. “Gentlemen, forgive poor Vito. He should’ve said-he could’ve said-‘Excel or expire,’ ‘Put up or perish,’ or ‘Suck it in or succumb,’ but all that twitched his low-grade dago brain was ‘Do or die.’ ”

  “Shut up, Sloan,” Creighton Nutter said, “or I’ll dock you a day’s pay for pointless jibber-jabber.”

  Not hush, but shut up. Mister JayMac’d left town to find a replacement for Charlie Snow. In his absence, by decree and appointment, Nutter was acting Hellbender manager-with full power to play us where he liked, use his own dugout strategies, and, if needed, fine our bunglers, layabouts, and hooligans. Sloan shut up. He knew Nutter’d gig him in a minute.

  Well, whether you like Mariani’s “Do or die” or Sloan’s “Suck it in or succumb,” we lost our opener to the Gendarmes and dropped four games off the pace. Roric Gundy pitched nine innings for our visitors, yielding just three hits and one run. He no longer telegraphed his curveball-someone’d finally cautioned him about the telltale flaw in his windup. I struck out twice, remembering Phoebe nude on her knees and her parting cry, “Tell everybody how you come over here n jazzed me!”

  With Jerry Wayne Sosebee on the mound and better hitting, we won the afternoon’s second game and finished three games back, just where we’d begun it. We’d missed Charlie Snow’s presence, though-his whip-quick wrists and reliability at the plate. I also missed seeing either Phoebe or Miss LaRaina in the stands. Had they ducked out on me at this bend in the season? Or galloped off into the boonies with Mister JayMac on his hush-hush, do-or-die talent search?