“Whadda. Yall. Think. Bout. That?”
Nearly everybody on hand went loopy. Cow bells. Hooting. Clapping. Ooga horns. You’d’ve thought FDR’d just announced the unconditional surrender of Hitler and Tojo.
In our dugout, Henry peered gloomily down the bench at Mister JayMac. “Who chose this ill-timed moment to divulge our good fortune?”
“It wasn’t I,” Mister JayMac said.
“Atta way a go!” Lamar Knowles told Henry and me. “I knew it. Didn’t I tell you, Danny? Didn’t I?”
Several other guys, including even Sosebee and Evans, came over to congratulate us.
The crowd rioted in place. Pretty soon we could hear it chanting, “Jumbo and Dumbo! Send em out PRONTO!”
Henry waved his arm in disgust. The crowd’d seemed to’ve forgotten the game in the hullabaloo of Frye’s announcement, and the Gendarmes had another reason, like they needed it, to come after us like rabid badgers.
“Hush em up!” Mister JayMac shouted down the bench at Henry and me. “Get out there and tip your caps!”
Henry and I, the Mutt and Jeff of the CVL, clambered onto the field to greet the misplaced huzzas of our fans. We tipped our caps. The fans stamped their feet, whistled, or stood to cheer. From their own dugout or their places on the field, the Gendarmes squinted and frowned.
Henry raised his arms. “ENOUGH!” His bellow silenced the crowd. “We have work yet to do! This display bids fair to undo our enterprise!” He put his cap back on and galumphed grimly back to our dugout, with me more or less in tow and the crowd stunned into mass catatonia.
“Great,” Mister JayMac said, scowling. “Jes great.”
“Loose lips sink ships,” Henry said. “But no one in this organization could see that prophylactic slogan’s application to the situation here.”
“I didn’t authorize the announcement,” Mister JayMac said. He called Euclid over. “Go up there and ask Mr Frye who told him about the call-up. You got me?”
“Yessuh.” Euclid shot out of the dugout and hustled up the steps to the press box.
“Cmon!” Mister JayMac yelled. “Draw a line under what Milt Frye jes blabbed to the world! Grab the flag!”
So happened, Henry had the lead-off spot against Sundog Billy in the bottom of the seventh. First pitch, he smacked it like a Bobby Jones tee shot. The snap of his bat was like a molar cracking on a jawbreaker. Everybody rose, even us guys in the dugout. If this was a balata ball, a big league cull, Henry’d just launched it into low earth orbit, a pre-Sputnik Sputnik.
The score stood four to three, Hellbenders.
Curriden fanned, as Wallace bore down. Heggie one-hopped a nubber to the second baseman for our second out. Euclid came back into the dugout. Henry buttonholed him even before Mister JayMac could get over to him.
“And what did you discover?”
“What did Mr Frye say?” Mister JayMac chimed in.
Euclid stood dwarfed by the two men. He kept his eyes on the tobacco-stained concrete floor.
“Speak up, Euclid!” Mister JayMac said.
“Say Miz Giselle tol him,” Euclid whispered.
“Holy fire! How’d she even know?”
“She overheard,” Henry said. “And this is my recompense.”
“Your what?”
Henry waved off the question and sat back down next to me as Euclid slunk back to his own roost next to Bebout. Dunnagin ended the inning by skying a hard-hit but shallow fly to Nugent in center. We had a one-run lead and two more Gendarme at bats to survive. We survived the first un, but couldn’t up our lead in our own trip to town.
In the top of the ninth, Fadeaway suckered Jim Keating, a pinch hitter for Wallace, on a third-strike sinker into the dirt. Dunnagin trapped it with his mitt and swiped it across Keating’s backside for a quick-thinking assist on the putout. One down. Two outs to the CVL championship. The crowd sounded like the ocean in a hurricane swell.
Buck Hoey came to the plate. Bingo! A blue darter into left center, right over my head. Hoey rounded first like he had it in mind to keep on coming. Musselwhite rifled the ball in to me, though, and Hoey retreated to first, mumbling something that got a weird grin from Henry, a half-innocent, half-psycho grin.
Nugent came up. He hadn’t had a good night, but he led Strock’s boys in hitting, with an average approaching.330. I expected Mister JayMac to signal Fadeaway to walk him, to get to the slumping Jed Balmore, LaGrange’s second baseman, but Mister JayMac refused to put the go-ahead run on base this late in the game. He wristed a paint-brushing gesture at Fadeaway, a sign to paint the plate’s corners-to give Nugent nothing in the fat of the strike zone.
Craftily, Nugent worked the count to three and two. He fouled off four pitches that plate umpire Grayson Dover-Mister JayMac’d pulled strings to keep Polidori out of this series-might’ve retired Nugent on, otherwise. Then, Fadeaway’s tenth pitch, Nugent hit a low, twisting shot at Junior between first and second, almost on the outfield grass.
On the pitch, Hoey’d broken for second. He had to leap Nugent’s ground-hugger to avoid putting himself out, but his skip step didn’t slow him. As I ran to cover second, Junior bobbled the roller, got his grip again, and whipped a sidearm throw towards second in the hope, the near certainty, I’d get there in time to catch it, toe-kick the bag, and fire to Henry for a game-ending double-play.
Junior-to-Dumbo-to-Jumbo. A riff on the famous Dumbo-to-Junior-to-Jumbo combo.
Hoey was barreling. I picked off Junior’s stinger at belt height. Hoey slammed the dirt and slid towards me feet first, cleats high. His spikes looked big, a grizzy’s fangs ready to tear. When I kicked second, one of Hoey’s shoes bit me in the groin and ripped into my left inner thigh. I began to fall. Little Cuke Gordon’d planted himself to see the force, and he twisted his face as he thumbed Hoey out. Falling, I sidearmed the ball to Henry as hard as I could and watched in agony as his glove hand reached damn-near halfway down the base path to meet it. His right leg strained back towards first to close the double-play circuit.
An instant before Nugent’s foot hit the bag, the ball went thwack! in Henry’s mitt, and Little Cuke threw his arm up in another show-boaty gotcha! Even face-down in the clay, I had to admire the guy’s dramatic flair.
The game was over. The Hellbenders-my Hellbenders-had won. Our fans bounced up and down, do-si-do’d in the aisles, yodeled rebel yells, howled like wolves.
Then I stopped noticing because every part of me below my waist on my left leg seemed to’ve caught fire. I rolled to my back. It wasn’t quite five in the afternoon, but the sky looked black and I saw stadium’s lights blazing against that blackness, two dozen or so tall fuzzy haloes, shrinking and bloating. Stars swam into the blackness between the haloes, and my head bloated along with them, like someone’d jammed a hissing air hose into my ear. The fire in my leg got hotter, my skin crisped like a burning paper sack, a mayhem of fluids seeped into the clay.
Buck Hoey’s face blocked the haloes and the stars. “Nice play, Dumbo.” A pair of baseball shoes fell out of the sky and bounced on my stomach. “Wear these in the bigs, kid. If you ever really get there.”
Hoey vanished.
Where Hoey’d stood, the sky ran afternoon blue again. I pushed the shoes off my belly and doubled over, clutching my leg and making a noise that opened into a scream. Or maybe I didn’t scream, for some of our fans-GIs, teenagers, feisty little boys-had scrambled onto the field to run about waving caps and souvenir pennants. They swung one another around like square dancers. None of them seemed to hear me. The National Anthem played scratchily, blaring through the PA system, but I guess nobody could hear it either. Junior Heggie knelt beside me, with Henry right behind him, and then, better late than never, Mister JayMac showed-dogged, I imagine, by memories of Charlie Snow’s last day.
“Daniel!” Mister JayMac cried. “Daniel, can you stand?”
Uh-uh. I thought maybe I was screaming again-a scream ricocheted between my ears-but Henry waved his arm at somebody nea
r the clubhouse.
“A canvas litter for Daniel!” he shouted. “Immediately!”
I passed out-into dry-ice fog and a field of parka-clad ballplayers frozen against the brittle light pulsing without letup through the grayness.
56
Not until the next morning did I come around.
I lay flat-out in bed in a private room in the Hothlepoya County Hospital. A private room meant Mister JayMac, using his political clout and the full power of his checkbook, had sprung for my treatment with almost everything he had to spring with. Charlie Snow’d died on him. Danny Boles wouldn’t.
A bearded man in a white lab coat introduced himself to me as Dr Nesheim. He straddled a chair next to my bed, his arms on the chair back and his chin on his clasped hands. “Woozy? Take your time. You’ve got beaucoups of time.” Buck Hoey, I learned, had done for me. With one set of spikes, he’d shattered my right kneecap; with the other, torn the muscles of my left inner thigh. Then, throwing to Henry, I’d fallen, and fallen wrong, and done something very, very bad to my hip.
“Want me to sweeten the news for you, son, or would you rather take it all in one nasty gulp?”
One nasty gulp? How much more nastiness did this man want me to gag down?
Even so, I said, “One nasty gulp.”
“The orthopedic details of your injuries probably don’t matter much to you right now,” Dr Nesheim said. “But they’re severe.”
“How severe?”
“You won’t be able to play ball again.”
“Our season’s over. What about next year?”
“Not likely, Danny. That fella who spiked you, he’s pretty much undercut your hopes of fame in the majors. Rehabilitation is going to be long, painful, and… well, incomplete.”
“I’m a ballplayer! A shortstop! That’s what I am!”
“That was something you did, son. Now you’re going to have to redefine yourself in quite different terms.”
“I’m a ballplayer,” I said.
Dr Nesheim said, “The only consolation I can give you-if it will console-is, you won’t have to worry about the draft or going off to war. Not as a dogface or swabbie, anyway. Uncle Sam won’t want you any more than the Phillies do.”
I was two and a half months shy of eighteen. I put my arm over my face and cried. Dr Nesheim patted me on the arm and left. I didn’t fault him. He seemed a decent enough joe-he’d given it to me in one nasty gulp, a dose of Epsom salts for the only life plan I’d ever made for myself. I didn’t believe I couldn’t use that plan anymore… and I did believe. The way my lower body felt like a sack full of broken glass told me all I needed to know about the reliability of Dr Nesheim’s prognosis.
Hoey’d gotten back at me for beating him out at shortstop, for taking away a pair of his baseball shoes, for my role in his ejection from a big game in LaGrange, and for greasing the duckboards of his late-season trade to the Gendarmes. Yessir, he’d decommissioned my wagon.
I spent the last two days of August and most of September in the Hothlepoya County Hospital. Between them, the Hellbenders and the Phillies paid for my stay. Mama and I could’ve never managed the bills. Deck Glider, Inc., had no medical plan for its line workers and mid-level managers, and even with a bonus for helping Mister JayMac’s club to the CVL pennant, I hadn’t cleared half a grand that summer.
During my first two days in the hospital, everyone on the team, except Henry and Mister JayMac, visited me. Even Trapdoor Evans and Turkey Sloan came by-with Sosebee, Ankers, and Sudikoff-to wish me a fast recovery and to laud me for turning the last double play of the year. Henry hadn’t come, I figured, because he’d had to report to the Phillies, and their front office’d wired him money for a tram ticket, probably in a first-class Pullman. No one else told me different-not at first anyways.
The visitor I most appreciated on Monday, though, was Phoebe. She came late in the day with Miss LaRaina, bringing a small box of Baby Ruth candy bars, a bouquet of crape myrtle and hydrangeas, and several tattered Saturday Evening Posts. Miss LaRaina sat subdued-almost prim-by my bed, but Phoebe twirled a finger in a stray lock on my forehead and smoothed back the hair at my temples.
“How you feelin, Ichabod?”
“Rotten. Howm I sposed to feel?”
“With yore fingers, or yore toes, or yore nose. Or yore… whatever.”
“Phoebe,” Miss LaRaina said tiredly.
“Mama’s doing better, guy. She’s seeing this really sweet Army nutpick out to the camp.”
Nutpick?
“Phoebe,” Miss LaRaina said again.
“Well, he’s helped, yore kindly dome doctor has. He’s got you to relax, to think some bout Daddy n me, to spend a little time to home.”
“I never didn’t think about yall, Phoebe. But I suppose I did think about myself more, and the terrible unfairness of my place in this dreadful war.”
Terrible unfairness.
“But Danny doesn’t want to hear this,” Miss LaRaina said. “We came to be mood lifters, angels of mercy, not a tear-jerker episode of ‘Captain Pharram’s Family.’ ” She tapped a cigarette from a pack of Luckies. “Mind if I smoke, Danny? Keeps my hands busy and sort of rebraids my frazzled nerves.”
“Not if I can have one too,” I told her.
Phoebe took a cigarette from her mother, stuck it between my lips, lit me up. I bathed my lungs in smoke and blew out a whole stack of wobbly airborne doughnuts. The quick high the smoke gave me-the sensation of floating-lifted my mind away from the throb in my hip, the burn in my groin. Tobacco, the opium of the people.
“How come Mister JayMac aint been by?”
The silence spilling from Phoebe and her mama came down in deafening Niagara Falls torrents.
“How many top-heavy nurses been in here to jab needles in yore butt?” Phoebe suddenly asked me.
“Five or six. They can’t stay away. I lose count.”
“Phoebe,” Miss LaRaina said tiredly.
“Oh, cmon, Mama. Yore doctor said to behave responsibly, not to chain yoresef to a church pew.”
“Phoebe, I’d appreciate it if-”
I blew a smoke ring and cut Miss LaRaina off. “How come Mister JayMac hasn’t visited me?”
Phoebe and her mama did that hurry-not-to-answer thing they’d already done once. Like Mariani coiling a spaghetti strand around a fork tine, Phoebe spiraled my forelock around her finger. The ash on Miss LaRaina’s cigarette, meanwhile, grew like Pinocchio’s nose. This time I waited.
“We’ve all suffered an unexpected loss,” Miss LaRaina said. “You see, Miss Giselle is dead. She died either quite late last night or very early this morning.”
“Cripes. Did Mister JayMac shoot her?” (For telling Frye to announce our call-up? For going the carnal hanky-panky route with Henry? And, if the second, how had Mister JayMac found out?)
“Uh-uh,” Phoebe said. “Miss Giselle kilt herself.”
“How? Why?” I may’ve known the answer to at least one of those questions, but I needed to hear it said. No, I needed a denial, a lie that didn’t impeach my roommate. Now, too, I began to understand the bouts of dumbness that’d fallen on Phoebe and Miss LaRaina when I mentioned Miss Giselle or asked about Mister JayMac. Someone’d told them not to drop any more bad news on me than Dr Nesheim already had.
“What about Henry? Is Henry all right?”
Another uh-oh look between Phoebe and her mama.
“What’s happened to him?” I demanded.
“He’s fine,” Miss LaRaina said quickly. “He’s just-fine.”
“Uh-uh,” I said. “I’m owed some truth. Let’s have it.”
“Listen to him, Mama,” Phoebe said. “He’s done got shut of his stutter. Completely, nearlybout.”
“Phoebe, it’s either completely or it aint,” I said.
“Why, you’re right,” Miss LaRaina said. “He’s become a regular Demosthenian.” They marveled over me.
“Tell me what’s happened to Henry, blast it.”
&nbs
p; Miss LaRaina said, “Once he knew how bad Buck Hoey’d hurt you, he left and got just sloppy drunk over it.”
“Yesterday was Sunday,” I said. “And Henry don’t drink.”
“Ordinarily, no,” Miss LaRaina said, “but this spiking business unnerved him, and I’ve never known a Hellbender who wanted a bottle not to find one. Reese-Mr Curriden-always had two or three hidden in his room. He’d distribute too. Hoarding’s not his way, even in a whiskey drought.”
“Mama,” Phoebe said, looking at her feet.
“It’s all right, child. Major Blumlein said to own up to my trespasses, not to cache them under a lamp-stand.”
“He didn’t tell you to parade em in front of Daddy.”
“Your daddy isn’t here.” Miss LaRaina surveyed my room. “That young man there answers to Danny, not Daddy, and I assume him chivalrous enough to keep his own counsel.” She blew smoke sidelong, holding her cigarette Bette Davis style. “Are you?” she asked me.
“Yessum.”
“Well, then. Henry sends his regrets.”
“Will he visit me before he leaves for Philly?”
“That’s probably up to him and the railway timetable.” Miss LaRaina smiled and took another sexy drag on the nub of her Lucky. She caught a knuckle’s length of falling ash in one palm and dumped it in the terra-cotta pot of crape myrtle and hydrangea blossoms at her feet.
We talked another ten or fifteen minutes, mostly about Miss Giselle-her generosity, her loving-kindness, her sacrifices for Mister JayMac and the Hellbenders. Then Miss LaRaina said I looked peaked. She and Phoebe had better go. The staff didn’t want me overtaxed.
“Then tell em to write their congressmen,” I said. “Look, I’m strong enough for yall to stay.”
“Not if we fuss,” Miss LaRaina said. “Fussin’ll lay you down faster than a mile-long footrace.”
Brittle Innings Page 45