Brittle Innings

11

Most Hellbenders stumpled to the clubhouse to shoot a jet from the water cooler up their noses or to lie down on the concrete. Muscles, Curriden, and Charlie Snow, gluttons for punishment, played a game of pepper in some outfield shade.

A small crew-including Junior and Mariani, Junior’s new roomy-crossed a tree-lined street to a row of pretty shops. Junior was a rookie too, so I followed these guys. Oaks, elms, and sycamores strained a kind of surf music through their leaves. Behind the shops, you could see folksy neighborhood stuff: tool sheds, a dog house, an automobile up on blocks, a loaded clothes line, lots of victory-garden plots. One garden had a fort of bamboo staves and a web of strings for pole beans to vine around and tomato plants to lean against. The street seemed human, a harbor in Highbridge’s angry summer dazzle.

One store in the row was a ma-and-pa grocery. Over its door, a metal sign with glossy red letters as tall as shovel blades said HITCH & SHIRLEEN’S NEIGHBORLY MARKET. Two Coca-Cola ads flanked this sign, and paper scrolls in the windows advertised Fancy Pink Salmon, Dixie Crystals Pure Cane Sugar, and Campbell ’s Vegetable Soup, for cash plus ration points. Even after the other Hellbenders’d gone inside, I stood on the curb. How would I ask for what I wanted? If I pointed, I’d look like a moron or a stuck-up creep.

But, hey, I didn’t have two cents on me. Baseball togs don’t have change pockets, per se, and I’d left McKissic House outfitted for ball, not a market trip. Four guys came out with Cokes and Twinkies and sat on the curb in shifting patches of shade. Sheepishly, I spiked past them and went inside. Dobbs toasted me with his bottle.

Junior stood next to a gingerbreaded-up cash register flirting with the clerk. My eyes had to adjust. When they did, I looked around. Six double shelves ran front to back. A soft-drink cooler with ice water in the bottom and metal stalls for the bottles stood opposite the cash register. Two creaky overhead fans turned. The store had a pressed-tin ceiling with design squiggles in the stamped-out squares. The smells of damp sawdust and wrapped cold cuts hung in the air. At last, I could see to read a homemade sign nailed to a shelf near the cash register:

PLEASE!!! COUNT YOUR

CHANGE AND EXAMINE

YOUR POINT BOOK

BEFORE LEAVING WITH FOOD ITEMS.

MISTAKES CAN’T BE FIXED

LATER!!!

Every Hellbender player who lodged at McKissic House had given his ration book (War Ration Book Two) to Kizzy, through Mister JayMac, so she could shop for the whole house. Only team members with their own places got to keep their books. So if you wanted a snack, you couldn’t buy rationed items. You had to get junk food-soda, cupcakes, and such, from companies that’d already justified their sugar allotments-and you bought it with coin, not coins and stamps. But I had no coin, and it looked like all I’d be able to do was shuffle and covet.

“Danny!” Junior Heggie called. “Danny, git yore tail over here and meet this spitfire pixie!”

I angled back to the cash register. The clerk behind it was a girl with a fox’s face, reddish-blond hair, and a costume-jewelry cluster, a kind of exploded pearl, on one ear. She wore a khaki shirt with a single set of captain’s bars on one collar and a pair of rolled-up blue jeans. She didn’t reach five feet. She looked twelve, but the earring and her hipshot stance told you twelve underestimated it. Well, maybe the earring didn’t. Girls will do a lot as preteens to make themselves look older, but wearing Papa’s shirt isn’t usually one of them, so you knew this pixie had a grudge on, a war orphan’s crow to pick. Her daddy was overseas, and don’t you forget it, buster.

“Who’s this?” she said. “Ichabod Crane in a baseball suit?”

“He don’t talk,” Junior said. “Name’s Danny Boles. He’s from Oklahoma, Plays a whangdoodgle shortstop.”

“Whynt you talk, Okie? Explain yoresef.”

The sunburn from our workout probably hid my blush.

Junior got mad. “You half-wit! I said he don’t talk, and he don’t. It’s an affliction. Leave him be.”

“Folks come in here to buy junk, not to sashay about going, ‘Mmmm,’ ” she said, mocking an uppity window shopper.

“You deaf?” Heggie said. “He cain’t talk. I done told you.”

“Take your Twinkie, son, and put it where your mama won’t ever find it.” A genteel little piece, passing out Suthren hospitality.

Junior like to gagged. We had our speechlessness in common.

“What a man,” the girl said. “Absodamnlutely flusterated if a female don’t drop down P.D.Q. to kiss his shoe.” She looked at me. Her next words weren’t so smart-alecky. “Like a person who cain’t talk, cain’t talk. Like yo’re no different from a box of laundry soap.”

“I didn’t say he wasn’t no different from a box of laundry soap,” Junior said. “I uz jes trying to-”

“For sweet pity’s sake,” the girl cried, “will you have the decency to hush? Yo’re a disgrace to yore sex-a ballplayer’s commonest failing.”

Creighton Nutter came back into the store. He grabbed a pack of cigarettes, the last pack of Regents, and paid the girl from a coin pouch looped through his belt. Junior muttered something-bitch, I think-and brushed past Nutter onto the sidewalk, as flusterated as the girl’d accused.

“Ah, you’re being neighborly again here at your Neighborly Market,” Nutter said. “Swell.”

“Mister Creighton, take a leap,” she said.

“She can’t stand ballplayers,” Nutter told me. “Or thinks she can’t. In her view, we should all be in the Army.”

“Not you,” she said. “Yo’re too old. You’d git ten jokers round you and blow em all up by accydent.”

“Miss Pharram,” Nutter said, “allow me to present to you Danny Boles. Mr Boles, the fair Miss Phoebe Pharram.”

“You think I want to know this skinny pill?” Phoebe said.

“Calm down,” Nutter said. He yanked the pull on his Regents, tapped out a cigarette, and lit up. Smoke whirled away in the downdraft from an overhead fan. “Phoebe here is Mister JayMac’s great niece, daughter of his late brother Jude’s child, LaRaina. Hitch and Shirleen are her paternal grandparents, and by a special arrangement with the team, their Neighborly Market allows us Hellbenders to buy on credit. Get what you want and Phoebe will record your purchases in a ledger set aside for us.” He took a deep drag on his cigarette, blew the smoke at Phoebe, and elbowed out, letting the screen slam like the neck-snapper on a mouse trap.

“I hate the name Phoebe!” Phoebe yelled after him. “I pee on it!” Somebody on the sidewalk giggled. “I hate all first and last names what start with the same letters!”

I stood there awed, drinking her in.

“Call me Skeeter,” she told me. “I hate the name Phoebe, and I shore as Shirleen don’t answer to bitch.”

Of course, I would think of her then and always as Phoebe. Skeeter cut this feisty little girl down to something you went to a lot of trouble to swat. Besides, back then, girls who talked like Phoebe were about as plentiful as cow bells in an Episcopal choir.

“Cripes, Ichabod.” My admiration chapped her. “Bring me somepin to write up in this ledger. Or clear out.”

I hustled to get an orange soda from the cooler and a Baby Ruth from the candy aisle. I brought them over to Phoebe, who turned to take inventory of the cough-drop boxes, poker chips, and clip combs on the shelf behind her. I rolled the bottom of my soda bottle on the glass countertop.

“Yeh?” she said, not looking around.

I waited. Phoebe ignored me. I fidgeted. It might be nearly time for our practice to resume. I used my soda bottle like a bell clapper, ringing it against the fancy metal register. She spun around. Her eyes, a marbly grayish green, jumped like hard-thrown jewels.

“Watch it, Ichabod.” She came to the counter, grabbed my drink and candy bar, pulled a book out from under the counter, and wrote down all the needed info-everything but my name. She’d heard my name twice, but’d already forgotten it. She saw me looking, waiting for her to finish up.

“Okay,” she said. “What gives here, Ichabod?”

I pounded my fist on the countertop. Phoebe blinked. Her face turned fish-belly pale, then her eyes flared again. Even an Army.45 wouldn’t’ve scared her for long. It embarrassed her not to remember my name, though, and I couldn’t tell her because… well. Mexican standoff.

I charged around the counter, yanked the “Big Red” Parker Duofold pen from her, and bent over the ledger to scribble my own name in. The Duofold was a clumsy near-antique, and I wrote my John Hancock just like Hancock, gig: DANIEL HELVIG BOLES. Then I went back out front, grabbed a pack of Camels, and had Phoebe add them to my tab. Rustled some matchbooks from a box, took my soda bottle by the neck, scooped up my Baby Ruth, and headed out the door afraid I might drop something and wind up looking a cluck.

“Hey, wait a sec.” I stopped and looked back at Phoebe. “Sorry I called you Ichabod. Nobody likes a name dropped on em like a peed-on blanket.”

She had that right. I banged outside and sat down on the curb next to Nutter, now puffing away like a factory.

“Camels,” Nutter said, seeing my pack. “ ‘They don’t tire my taste. They’re easy on my throat. They suit me to a T.’ If we smoked sandpaper dust, their ads’d say the same thing.”

I drank my orange soda, I ate my candy bar, I smoked a Camel. I thought I heard an adult-Hitch? Shirleen?-talking to Phoebe. Good. A high-strung gal that age didn’t need to be tending a whole store all by herself. Wasn’t safe.