Brittle Innings

by Michael Bishop

  “Can it,” Lamar Knowles said. “The game’s over.”

  For some reason, everybody canned it. We all showered and dressed in a starched and testy silence.

  On Saturday afternoon, calmer and better rested, we drubbed the Mudcats with a barrage of extra-base hits and a sideshow of stolen bases. Meanwhile, the Mockingbirds beat the Gendarmes. These results locked us and the ’Darmes in another first-place tie, our second of the month. We just had to keep the heat on Emmett Strock and his gang.

  Eufaula’s manager, Grover Traffley, worked to stymie our momentum. He called on Zaron Childs, on one day’s rest, to face us again. Childs yielded nine hits, but only three runs, and the Mudcats beat us by scraping up a patchy rally in the top of the ninth and holding us scoreless in our final at bat. Naturally, the Gendarmes beat the ’Birds again, and we fell a game off the lead with eight games left, our last three a shoot-em-up showdown at McKissic Field.

  Henry went out the window. He figured me dead to the world, but I heard him. The heat’d come down so pitiless on Highbridge that, before lying down, I’d yanked my sheets off my bed, carried them down the hall, and soaked them in cold water in the shower stall. Then I’d spread them on my mattress, stripped naked, and stretched out on them across from our fan. Doing all that had miffed Henry, but he’d’ve never admitted it, even if I’d driven bamboo slivers under his fingernails. Me, I didn’t care. Somehow or other, I had to get cool.

  Anyway, I heard him when he went out. Without even trying, a guy Henry’s size could make a window-sash weight bump in its groove. He took up so much space that, when he left, you felt a Henry-shaped pocket in the air. I sat up, my chest already dry as talc, my backside still damp from the clammy sheets.

  Had Pearl the opposum come back? I crept over and peered out. Henry’d already reached the fire stairs’ second-floor landing. I ducked back inside and pulled on a pair of jeans, nearly zippering my cock in my rush to follow him.

  “It aint Pearl,” I told myself on the fire stairs. “Not even Henry’d give up this much sleep to befriend a possum.” A judgment I right quick proved.

  Henry’d angled off into the pole-bean rows making up one corner of the victory garden between McKissic House and the bungalow behind it. I crept barefooted down the fire stairs and over the grass after him. A craggy chunk of moon silvered the garden, and Henry’s head and chest poked up so high I could see him picking his way even among the curling vines. Although he’d sworn a few days back he seldom lied, I knew he’d lied to me at least once. Also, his old impersonation of a human being was a Big Lie, one he ached to make true.

  Anyway, creeping through velvety squash leaves, I half expected Miss LaRaina to spring up like Ruth amid the corn, a gleaner of leftover male hungers come to feed not only her weird Elimelech’s appetite but also her own. So it dumfounded me when the voice I heard talking to Henry belonged not to Phoebe’s wayward mama, but to Mister JayMac’s porcelain-pretty wife, Miss Giselle.

  “Why here?” she said. “Darius’s old apartment would’ve been more private.” Leaves hid the woman from me, but even lying belly down with my cheek on a root-laced mass of clay, I knew her voice.

  “Just so.” Henry’s voice was a gentle bassoon. “Discovery there would mean disgrace for us. Discovery here would afford us yet some hope of preserving our reputations.”

  “But it isn’t very amenable to… to play.” Miss Giselle laughed, girlishly. I couldn’t remember hearing her laugh before, and the feel of it sent a troop of caterpillars marching pleasantly down my spine.

  “Giselle, we mustn’t proceed on this precipitant course.”

  “How you talk. I love how you talk.” In fact, Henry’s protest tickled the stew out of Miss Giselle. She laughed a little harder, pulling herself to Henry’s chest. “You sound like somebody out of a Brontë book.”

  “On the road, I have few other-”

  “Shhh. You can find a happier line to jilt me with than, ‘We mustn’t proceed on this precipitant course.’ How about ‘To go on as we have would be curtains for us both’?” She laughed again, but I didn’t know why.

  “It frightens me, this series of trysts,” Henry said. “We expose to heartbreak even those from whom we hide.”

  “Hide? Who’s hiding?”

  “Don’t torment me. Neither tease nor quibble.”

  For a moment, Miss Giselle and Henry stopped talking. I heard them hug, her crinoline against his T-shirt, and wriggled to see past the squash leaves and coiling bean vines to their meeting place-but with no luck. Then Miss Giselle said, “Come with me, big fella,” chuckling, and I could hear them rustling through the garden again. I rose to my knees and crawled hard myself. They went even faster, rattling foliage and snapping stalks, so I penguin-waddled after.

  Following them got trickier the farther into the garden we went. Tomato plants and other knee-high crops began to replace the beans and walls of tasseled sweet corn that’d shielded me earlier. I could see better, but so could my prey and then-WHOOSH!-the stalks in the next garden section got taller, a copse of leafy half-pikes. The lovers vanished into it like Hansel and Gretel into an enchanted wood. Henry sank beneath the okra stalks, and Miss Giselle eased into his lap.

  “And why have you led me here?” Henry said.

  “To rekindle your ardor,” Miss Giselle said. “Forget all musts and shoulds. Behold the okra and read my mind.”

  I edged nearer. The okra leaves shivered. The gouged profile of the moon spilled a soft pewter on their stalks and seamed pods. The pods stood up or out, like tapered hard-ons. If leprechauns could reach the height and hot-bloodedness of men, this was how their members would look in the real world: a forest of tender, silver-green pricks.

  “Long have I desired to free myself of animal compulsion,” Henry said. “Until you, I believed I had.”

  “Well, I want to enslave myself to it. Don’t let cowardly scruple send me back to my dry, dry marriage.”

  “You seek revenge for infidelity and neglect?”

  “Well, sure. But more of what I want has to do with… holding and being held. Riding your body to places I didn’t believe I could visit anymore.”

  “I am a monster. A freak. The caprice of a tortured man’s vanity.”

  “Henry, you’re beautiful.”

  “I should offer you that homage.”

  “Holding me, you do. I feel it from the inside out.”

  “Even when I cry, ‘Kariak!’ ”

  “Cry what you like. I can’t reproach a man whose emotional faithfulness to his only wife has outlasted her death.”

  “No. But we must end this deceit, this betrayal of both Mister JayMac and our better selves.”

  “This sweet deceit. Call it sweet.”

  “Don’t torment me. Neither tease nor quibble.”

  “Shhhh. Look here.” Miss Giselle grabbed an okra stalk.

  “Don’t. It will produce an insupportable itch.” He meant that the prickly hairs on the okra pods would.

  “I have you for that. Here.” Miss Giselle snapped off a pod several inches long. “Kizzy or Euclid or a boarder should have picked this one already. They’re tenderest-unlike you-when smaller. See. This one has a horny rind.”

  Henry took the pod and flung it away. It whirled through the okra forest and struck me on the neck. I touched my grated skin and ducked even closer to the ground.

  “Do you like gumbo?” Miss Giselle said. “The clear sweet ooze of the pod? The way it thickens and quickens?” Sitting on Henry’s knee, she kissed him on the forehead.

  “But we make nothing together,” Henry whispered. “I have lifeless seed and you a desolated womb.”

  “We make each other happy.” Miss Giselle shifted so her hands clutched his shoulders and her hips rose and fell to an unforced rhythm. I lay on the blush-fed thumping of my heart.

  “GOD!” Henry shouted, a thunderclap. I expected McKissic House to empty, our teammates to come pouring out to see what’d happened. I didn’t dare move. Henr
y’d know me for a snoop, and Miss Giselle would have me booted off the team.

  After a time, Henry and Miss Giselle moved again, crinoline on cotton. I hugged the earth.

  “Take me to Darius’s old place. You can’t leave me now.”

  “But the possibilities of discovery, scandal, disgrace-”

  “Now, Henry. Now!”

  Henry gathered up Miss Giselle. He carried her through the okra, tomatoes, squash, beans, sweet peas, cucumbers, and corn towards the Bomber’s garage and the room above it where Miss Giselle’s faithless husband’s bastard son had lived and grieved the biggest part of his resentful adulthood.

  As soon as they’d gone, I crept quietly back to McKissic House.

  Two hours later Henry came to bed. I pretended sleep. He pretended to believe it. But for an hour or more, he sat on his mattress with his arms around his knees, a gray hulk in our cramped and steamy room.

  53

  Playing ball, you forgot the war. Riding the Brown Bomber, you read the papers or talked about it. The fact my dad’d died in the Aleutians made me listen up to any news from the Akskan theater.

  On a road trip to Lanett, I read a story in the Highbridge Herald about Allied forces invading the island of Kiska, only to find-after taking beaucoups of casualties in the bedlam and fog:-the Japs’d already evacuated it. In other words, we’d defeated an enemy no longer there. The press called it the “blunder at Kiska.” Nobody could figure how, or when, the Japs’d managed to pull their otherwise doomed troops off the island. I showed this story to Henry, who’d been riding with his head lolling against the window and his hands twitching in his lap. He read it and handed the paper back.

  “Stupid,” I said. “We let em get away.”

  “The resourcefulness of the Japanese spared thousands from the maw of death. Why do you long to glut it?”

  “They’re Japs, Henry-bloodthirsty, conniving m-monkeys.”

  “A few may deserve your censure. Many more do not. War homogenizes the good and the bad. I can only applaud those who escaped. Had the Allies shown a like wit, resisting panic and withholding their fire, no one would have died.”

  “That’s crap,” I said. “The Japs left mines and b-booby traps behind.” The newspaper said over a hundred men on the destroyer Abner Read were hurt or drowned when their ship hit a mine. How could Henry side with the lousy Japs?

  Henry said nothing.

  Dunnagin leaned over our seat back. “How’d they manage to get away so clean? The Japs?”

  “Alaskan foes-Aleutian fogs-swirl and deceive,” Henry said. “The Japanese used them, and the capriciousness of fate, to avert many deaths.”

  “You mean they got lucky,” Dunnagin said.

  “Perhaps everyone got lucky.”

  “Cept them poor guys on the Abner Read and the d-dogfaces blown to srn-smithereens by b-b-booby traps!”

  Henry grunted. The war that’d once appalled, now just seemed to bore him. He let his head loll against the window again, where it was buffeted by Sudikoff’s herky-jerky driving and maybe by troubling thoughts of Miss Giselle. No wonder he couldn’t hold the war on a front burner.

  Three seats ahead of us, Bebout leapt up and had some sort of weird schizo fit. Waving one arm, he baptized everyone around him with spastic finger flicks, like a holy-roller on speed.

  “Norman!” he yelled. “NORMAN!”

  Sudikoff was driving. “What?” he shouted back. “What?”

  Bebout went into a long nonsensical spiel about the angel Gabriel and his brother Woodrow and who-knows-what-else? I’d never heard anything like it.

  Sudikoff said, “Cain’t yall git that joker to shuddup? If you don’t, I’m like to have a accident.”

  Mister JayMac came back to Bebout, put an arm around him, and eventually got him quieted down.

  “The guy’s a walking Looney Toon,” Curriden said. “I think he’s snapped.”

  Bebout rested easy the last thirty miles of our ride-but in Lanett, getting off the Bomber, he dumped a tin of Wedowee Snuff into Larnar Knowles’s shirt pocket and patted it, like a mama giving her son a fresh handkerchief. Lamar took it as a joke, thank God, and the incident blew over.

  Still, a lot of us worried Bebout would have one of his spells during a game. Thank goodness, though, a ballpark and playing ball seemed to calm and invigorate him at the same time-and, except for Henry, he played as well as any of the rest of us against the Linenmakers.

  On Thursday and Friday evenings, despite a lot of noisy support from the Lanett crowds, the Linenmakers couldn’t stay with us. We beat them seven to two and thirteen to zip. Henry had three home runs in the series-his concentration during this road trip rarely faltered-and twelve RBIs. He now had thirty-nine homers on the year and led his nearest competitor in that department-Lon Musselwhite, who had a solo shot on Friday-by a dozen and a half.

  Given that the CVL season had only half the number of games played by the majors, Henry had a better home-run percentage than Ruth’d had in his top three seasons with the Yankees. In the bigs, with the same homer percentage he’d had in Highbridge, Henry would’ve hit eighty-two! Even Lanett’s fans cheered when the third of his blasts sailed over the right-field wall into an egret-lined branch of the Chattahoochee.

  In the same series, I did okay myself-seven hits in eight at bats. Every time Henry walloped a fence-clearer, I trotted home ahead of him. In fact, all of us feasted on Linenmaker pitching, and when we left on Saturday morning for Opelika, we rolled out with a certain greedy regret. Our second victory in Lanett, coupled with a rare Gendarme loss to the Boll Weevils, had lifted us into another first-place tie.

  Lou Ed Dew, manager of the Orphans, had his team loaded for Hellbender. They’d dropped six games back and could finish in a tie for first only if they won all six of their remaining games while we and the Gendarmes booted ours. In other words, the Orphans had no chance-we concluded our season with three home games against LaGrange. Either the Hellbenders or the Gendarmes would win the pennant. The Orphans still had a shot at second, though, and a chance to scuttle our dreams before we returned home. Lou Ed Dew meant to scuttle em.

  That weekend series-a doubleheader on Saturday and a singleton on Sunday afternoon-turned prickly as soon as the Orphans’ ace, Smiley Clough, took the mound. He threw high and tight at least once a batsman, a whistling low-bridger loosed with an oops-I-didn’t-mean-to-do-that smirk. You didn’t know whether to go after Clough with your bat or to sympathize with his control problems. Time we realized he needed his skull cracked and his smirk rubbed south, Clough had a deuce-to-zip lead and a breaking ball Nutter swore took its unhittable kink from a smear of KY jelly. Whatever, Clough went the full nine innings and shut us out.

  The second game of the twin bill didn’t go much better. Dew had scared up a gangleshanks kid from the Florida pan-handle to pitch for him, a kid named Marion Root. Root threw a sidearm speedball that shrunk a fraction of an inch for every foot it covered to the plate. By the time it reached us, it looked like a petrified hummingbird’s egg.

  ROOT FOR ROOT said a banner in the outfield. Orphan fans did, and he carried a two-hitter into the ninth.

  Luckily, so’d our own sodbuster ace, Fadeaway Ankers, and in our last bat before extra innings, Henry polewhacked a Root hummingbird egg all the way to Sea Island, scoring himself and Worthy Bebout, who’d taken a sidearm fastball in the ribs swinging for the bleachers. We held on in the bottom half of the inning for a two-to-goose-egg win. The split kept us in a tie for first with LaGrange.

  That night Henry told me Marion Root’d go up to the bigs. Not only that, Henry said, but Root would make a reputation for himself the equal of Bob Feller’s or Johnny Vander Meer’s. Not long after he’d pitched against us, though, Root reported for induction into the Army and spent the next seventeen weeks at the Infantry Replacement Center at Camp Wheeler near Augusta. He died the next winter at Anzio with the U.S. 45th Division, two weeks after going overseas.

  Sunday’s game again
st Opelika deserves no commemoration. We lost it. The score was sixteen to three, and none of our runs was earned. No excuses-the Orphans wrapped, waxed, and shellacked us.

  One truly screwy thing did happen in the bottom of the eighth. On an easy liner to center, Bebout cried, “Woodrow! Woodrow, you take it!” and dropped to his knees. The ball carried over Bebout’s head, allowing two runners to score and the hitter to reach third as Skinny hurried to chase it down.

  “What the hell was that?” Curriden yelled at Bebout.

  “He missed it!” Bebout shouted. “My sorry brother flat-out missed it!”

  Amazingly, the Gendarmes lost to the Eufaula Mudcats in the Prefecture. The entire season, then, boiled down to our final three games against them at McKissic Field.

  54

  Almost every day the Herald featured the Hellbenders in the right-hand column on its sports page. Once they ran a photo of me-my bleached-out face and chest above the inky smudge of my knickerbockers-under the headline “Tenkiller Speedster Hopes to Help / Our Hellbenders Lug the Bunting.”

  A husky spinster lady who used the byline O. A. Drummond had written the piece, with more appeal to front-office press releases than to interviews or personal reporting. You often saw Miz Drummond at the stadium, dressed, even in the dog-days humidity and glare, like a fox-hunting freak: knee-high boots, tweed skirt, puff-sleeved blouse, snap-brim tweed hat. She never visited the clubhouse-the Hellbenders would’ve hooted her out in a skink’s eyeblink-but always sat at a typewriter in the press box, three chairs from Milt Frye.

  Anyway, I’d sent a copy of Miz Drummond’s story to Mama and folded another copy into my wallet as a pick-me-up after a poor performance. Not long after getting my vocal cords back, I’d gone to Double Dunnagin with my ratty clipping and showed it to him.

  “Whattuz l-l-lug the b-b-bunting m-mean?”

  “To win the pennant, kid.”

  “So why d-didn’t sh-she say s-s-so?”