Brittle Innings

10

At practice that morning, I backed up Buck Hoey at shortstop. Heggie backed up Lamar Knowles at second. Skinny Dobbs birddossed Trapdoor Evans in right field. Philip Ankers, who’d probably learned to pitch chunking clods at cows, went down to the bullpen to warm up with our second-string catcher, Nyland “ Turkey ” Sloan.

“S only me you’ve got to get by, Dumbo,” Hoey said as we stood in the infield watching Mister JayMac hit fungoes to the outfield. I gave Hoey a look. “Roper’s gone. Roper, Pettus, Jorgensen-they all took Mister JayMac’s offer of back pay, railway tickets, and severance pay. So did Bob Collum. Mister JayMac’s savvy. He knows everybody’s skills and limitations. Yours too, Dumbo. So I hope he’s right.”

From right, Dobbs threw one in like a bazooka shot to Dunnagin at home plate-a no-hopper, the kind of dead-on-target throw you don’t see twice all year.

“S too soon to showboat, Mr Dobbs!” Mister JayMac yelled. “You ruin that arm, I’ll unsocket the other, jes to keep em a matched set.”

“Yessir!” Dobbs yelled back. “Sorry, sir!”

“My wife and Collum’s wife’re big pals,” Hoey said. “Now the Collums’re leaving. Looks like Mister JayMac may’ve guessed right on Dobbs, though. Collum never threw like that. What about you? Did he guess right on you? Or am I gonna send you home with a dent in your cup and mud on your face?”

I pretended to watch the fielders catching and throwing in. In fact, I did watch em, them and Mister JayMac.

In refusing to wear baseball duds, Mister JayMac set himself apart from most other managers. He dressed like a man off for a scrambled dog at the corner drug store, casual but neat. Today, he wore beat-up spikes instead of street shoes. The dirt around home was loose, and hitting fungoes from there required purchase.

Seeing Mister JayMac at a flip chart, you’d’ve figured him for a manager who’d ride the bench with a bourbon bottle in a paper sack. But I’d seen him throwing hard yesterday, and today he was smacking the ball. He’d even step in front of his catcher to pick off one-hop throws from the outfield. He liked his players to put out. “Exert!” he’d yell. “Sweat! Dive!” He liked leaping grabs, all-out tumbles, flamethrower pegs to first or home.

Even in his linen pants, dirt spilling from his cuffs, Mister JayMac was something. Trying out for him, I busted my tail. So did Junior at second and Dobbs in right. Not only did we want to earn ourselves starting spots, we also wanted to please-really please-Mister JayMac.

At the three challenge spots, three rookies against three old hands, we had us three battle royals. Mister JayMac tested every pair of rivals, turn by turn. He’d say, “Men on first and third, one out, Boles and Heegie up,” or, “Bottom o the ninth, tie score, runner on second, Hoey and Knowles up,” toss the ball up, feint one way, and fungo it another, with such a skitter on it you’d be lucky not to catch it in your teeth.

I had my championship year on the Red Stix going for me. Even more important, I had a history of hundreds of thousands of fielded ricochets from the wall of Tenkiller’s icehouse. I don’t think even Buck Hoey, a career minor leaguer, had handled more chances than me. Eight or nine a game tops it out for a shortstop, with a few hundred to a thousand more chances in spring training. Hoey had talent and more experience in actual game situations, but I had talent too and I’d practiced more-a hundred years as an all-star vet of Ye Olde Icehouse Loop. Off the field, I lacked confidence, but I had so much sass on it, you could’ve given half of mine to Stepin Fetchit and made him swagger like Mussolini. Swear to God.

Today, back from whatever errand he’d run yesterday, Jumbo owned first base. His backup was Norm Sudikoff, a married guy renting one of the boss’s Cotton Creek mill houses. Jumbo had Sudikoff behind him all day, but Mister JayMac waved Sudikoff into action only every fourth or fifth time he fungoed to the infield. Mostly, Sudikoff stood twenty yards behind the bag, in foul territory, while Jumbo put on a fielding clinic.

Standing or striding, Jumbo was a disjointed wreck. His shoulders, elbows, knees, and head jutted weirdly. Slouching from here to there, he looked a step away from unhinging and falling apart. His physique and his hitch-along gait gave him a brittle, palsied look.

On the field, though, Jumbo sparkled. He played a deep first base, on the edge of the outfield grass. (Not even Howie Gooch, who’d had better range than any other high school player I’d ever seen, had played so deep.) This gave Jumbo extra time to catch hard-hit shots to either side, even if the pitcher sometimes had to cover the bag for the putout.

Vito Mariani-Speedy himself-fielded the pitcher’s spot. Each time Mister JayMac sent a runner to first after rapping out an alley-seeking fungo to Jumbo, Jumbo and Manani would team to nip the runner by a step or two. Red dust would geyser up. My heart would stagger at the sheer loveliness of their execution and the thrill of the race to the bag.

But Jumbo didn’t always toss to Mariani. Sometimes he’d short-hop the ball, wave Mariani off, and pelt across the bag, all windmilling elbows and knees, before the runner’d even come out of the blocks. He had the headlong out-of-control velocity of a runaway locomotive. Scary.

“He can’t walk,” Hoey told me after one of these plays, “but he sure can jump and run.” Jumbo also had a never-miss lobster pincer in his glove and an arm like a catapult. Once, after Mister JayMac had put an invented runner on third with less than two outs, Jumbo’d almost knocked Dunnagin silly with a blistering throw home.

In the challenges at second and short, Jumbo played no favorites. He’d rumble to the bag, shift instinctively for the throw, and pick it out of the air or scoop it up from the dirt, to hell whether you were vet or rookie. His acrobatics at first made every player throwing to him look like an all-star. Not much got by him.

Sudikoff, by comparison, was a graceful second-rater. He had style around the bag and an easy way of carrying himself, but he’d screw up. Throws in the dirt were his comeuppance-he couldn’t come up with them. On some chances, he’d look like a matador doing a cape twirl, nifty and elegant as you please, but the ball’d scoot past him and roll to the seats. Sudikoff put on an act, Jumbo a bona fide show.

At second, Junior Heggie et Lamar Knowles’s lunch. The kid from Valdosta backhanded screamers up the middle, twisted like a gill-hung bass, and threw back over his shoulder without a spike in the ground to push off of or anything but desire on the ball to get it to first. He et Knowles’s lunch.

I did okay, but I didn’t eat Hoey’s lunch. My steadiness had him hassled, though. Mister JayMac’d gone out to Oklahoma to recruit a new shortstop, so Hoey saw himself on his knees under a guillotine blade. If I made a play, he had to. If I knocked a darter out of the air, pounced on it, and got back on my feet to nip the runner, he had to match my heroics. Mostly, he did. But the heat-from the sun, from Mister JayMac-made him snippish and petty. He tried to rag me into misplays. He asked me how far I reckoned beginner’s luck would carry a dumb-fart Okie in the CVL. It irked him I couldn’t answer. He’d’ve enjoyed an insult-slinging free-for-all.

“You’re a showboat, Dumbo. I’d tell Mister JayMac to stick one in your ear, but that’d be too easy.”

Hoey was scared. About Dunnagin’s age, he’d never spent six minutes, much less six seasons, in the bigs. With time out between ’36 and ’40 peddling Ohio real estate, his whole career had played out in the minors: the Carolina League, the Southern Association, the Appalachian League, the Sally League. A wife and four pre-Pearl Harbor rug rats’d kept him out of the Army, but a smidgen less talent than he needed, or bad luck, had kept him out of the bigs. The worry in Hoey’s good-looking mug came through loud and clear. I wanted to outplay the jerk, but I didn’t want to unemploy him. How would he tell Mrs Hoey? How would he feed his rug rats?

“Yall get in here!” shouted Mister JayMac, red-faced and sweaty. He’d soaked his shirt out. His T-shirt showed through like a filmy corset. His trousers were sopped, from waist to thigh, like he’d sat down in a wash tub. We circled him on the infield grass, amazed by his energy, just like he wanted us to be. You had to hand it to him, though. He didn’t huddle in the dugout with a jar of white lightning and a hand-held Jesus fan from Stiffslinger & Sons’ Christian Mortuary.

“How’d we do?” Reese Curriden said. Curriden’d played third, with relief from Burt Fanning, and he’d done fine. You just had to hope he didn’t go down with a sprung hamstring. A pitcher or a utilityman would have to replace him, and no sub could do it. The Hellbenders weren’t exactly the Georgia Light and Power Company. Like most other CVL clubs, we had a shortage of utilitymen.

“Better than yesterday,” Mister JayMac said. “Yall seem to’ve remembered what this”-he held up a dirty baseball-“is for, after all. Praise Saint Doubleday.”

“Screw Saint Doubleday,” Buck Hoey said. “Who’s starting where the next time we play for keeps?”

“Whoa,” Mister JayMac said. “I got to see how my rookies measure up in the hitting department.”

“Look at our box scores,” Hoey said. “Check our averages. Knowles and me didn’t fall off a milk wagon three hours ago. It’s too damned hot for this chickenshit.”

“So they say out to Camp Penticuff too,” Mister JayMac said. “Except it isn’t, not for Army recruits. Men’s lives hang in the balance. Likewise this team’s.”

“I meant my chickenshit remark respectfully, sir.”

Everybody laughed.

“A queer bit of English on it then,” Mister JayMac said.

“Should Trapdoor, Lamar, and I start pounding the pavement for defense jobs and new housing?” Hoey said.

“No one here today’s in danger of the ax. Only my next lineup’s in doubt. We’ll play an exhibition so I can decide.”

“Now?” Peter Hay said.

The other ballplayers called Hay Haystack. He had yellow hair and waddled like a haywagon. Mister JayMac always had him running, but he could pitch and that kept him on the squad. As soon as he said, “Now?” a half dozen Hellbenders linked arms and spieled:

“Huge Peter Haystack,

Please move your hulk.

Your gut goes by flat car,

Your butt goes by bulk.”

Hay just grinned and pounded a fist on Turkey Sloan’s head, mashing his cap in.

Sloan’d started the chant. He’d got half the team to join in by waving his arms like a chorus leader. Mister JayMac let it happen, seeing it as a tension-breaker.

Turkey Sloan backed Double Dunnagin at catcher and handled most bullpen chores. Turkey didn’t mean, back then, what it does now-a brainless jerk, like a turkey that lifts its head to watch it rain and ends up drowning. Sloan’d got his nickname because he caught, and ballplayers at the turn of the century, thinking home plate looked like a serving plate at Thanksgiving, started calling it the turkey.

Anyway, Sloan had a catcher’s body build-big shoulders, big thighs, and a teddy bear’s friendly mug. He also had brains. He’d written the “Huge Peter Haystack” rhyme, among others, and the team saw him as its unofficial poet laureate. A weakness for Mother Goose doggerel and a lot of time on his hands had helped him claim the title.

I glanced around.

The only other guy not laughing was Jumbo. He squinted at us like a scowling Jehovah. You figured he’d been born during a Puritan sermon with a dirge as background. You figured if he ever told a joke, it’d start with “Inasmuch as” or something else lawyerly.

“No, Mr Hay, not now,” Mister JayMac said when everybody’d quieted down. “In”-he checked his watch-“forty minutes. Take a break.”

Players cheered, like kids let out for recess.

Hoey said, “Hey. Who’s gonna be playing who? The regulars versus the rubes?”

“With that breakdown,” Mister JayMac said, “some of yall’d have to play yourselves.”

“All right, then. Who’s pitching for who?”

Mister JayMac held us there on hooks. He didn’t want to tip his hand yet.

“Fess up, Mister JayMac,” Parris said. “What’s forty minutes gonna mean? Announce your pitchers.”

“Tell us!” a whole slew of players cried.

Mister JayMac made calming motions. “Easy. Don’t herniate yourselves. The rookies and their pals will play behind-”

“Ankers!” Hoey said.

“Astute deduction.” Mister JayMac smiled like a kindly grandpa with a bandolier full of machine-gun ammo.

“And who for us?” Hoey said. “Who for us?”

I wanted to know too. Which pitcher, after our break, would I have to step in against? Quip Parris? Nutter, the ex-big leaguer? Mariani? Or Dunnagin’s roomy, Jerry Wayne Sosebee? They all looked tough, even the Eye-talian, a 4-F punctured-eardrum.

But Mister JayMac said, “Darius Satterfield.”

“You’re kidding,” Hoey said gleefully.

“Darius Satterfield,” Mister JayMac repeated.

Hoey shadow-boxed a tornado of noseeums. “Hot dog!”

Sudikoff, doomed to play with rookies, cried, “Jesus, why you wanna throw that speedballin nigger at these new boys?”

“At you, you mean.” Even with his spikes in red Georgia clay, Hoey walked on a bed of cumuli, giddy as hell.

Showily, Mister JayMac checked his watch. “Yall’re down to thirty-six minutes. Be back at ten-fifteen. Nickel-a-mmute fine for latecomers.”

“Don’t sound so fine to me,” Quip Parris said.

“Beat it!” Mister JayMac said.