Brittle Innings

12

Darius’d driven us all to practice that morning in the Brown Bomber, then disappeared. Now he showed up in spikes, knickers, and a long-johnish jersey that didn’t hide the ropy muscles in his upper body. His arms looked like weight-lifting eels. He snapped off warm-up tosses to Dunnagin.

Now, even in Tenkiller I’d heard of Satchel Paige. By ’43, five years before he joined the majors with the Cleveland Indians, Paige was already a legend-for pitching in the Negro leagues and on barnstorming tours. Folks said he threw an invisible fastball. Paige would sometimes call in his fielders and retire the opposing side on strikeouts. No one’d ever come closer to unhittableness than Satchel Paige. A Negro sports-writer in Kansas City had called his right arm a “bronze sling-shot.”

Other black ballplayers had talents like Paige’s, but Paige had charisma and got the ink, so far as any colored player got it back then. And so you’ve never heard of Hilton Smith, a hurler for the Kansas City Monarchs who-from ’40 to ’46-may’ve been the greatest pitcher in the world. In ’41, Stan Musial and Johnny Mize hit against Smith in an exhibition-tried to hit against him-and both claimed never to’ve seen a better curve.

Darius Satterfield, who couldn’t play in the CVL because his skin shaded out too dark, had downhome Satchel Paige-Hilton Smith stuff, an eye-boggling arsenal of pitches. Just watching him warm up, I knew I’d never faced anyone like him. No one. Darius threw like a kicking mule or a jinking hare, depending on the need, but was the only player on the field Mister JayMac didn’t call mister.

Several Hellbenders had trouble with Darius’s role-not his bus driving, or bag toting, or his trainer’s work on sore arms and legs (good nigger work, with tradition behind it). What bothered some of the fellas-not Hoey, though, or Dunnagin, or most of the starters, whether Dixie-born or imports like me-was playing ball with him. As if the ball flying from Darius’s hand to their bats or gloves would weave a bit of Africa into their own skins.

The most sickening get-that-nigger-off-the-field cry-babies on our team were Trapdoor Evans, Jerry Wayne Sosebee, Norm Sudikoff, Turkey Sloan (a little surprisingly), and, it turned out, Philip Ankers. They wanted Darius for a pack mule, not a teammate, and all that kept them from niggering him to death or threatening to bolt to a team with a “real white man” for a manager was Mister JayMac himself. He’d outright bench them. He’d let them know any traitor to the Hellbenders would never play in Alabama or Georgia again, if he could help it. In fact, if the troublemakers were young and fit, Mister JayMac would threaten them back, usually with pulling strings to put them into uniforms, so they could go after Nips and Huns instead of Negro Americans.

Dixie had laws against blacks and whites playing each other in organized sports. Laws that prevented all-star squads of colored barnstormers from showing up in small Alabama and Georgia towns and challenging the local white heroes, something they did profitably in Wyoming, say, or Kansas. First, they’d’ve had no place to stay, except in Negro homes or their own touring cars. Second, it’d’ve bruised the whiteys’ egos to get skinned by coons in front of their neighbors. Third, everybody-whites and coloreds alike-seemed to understand if white folks let down their guard in something as human as baseball, they might drop it elsewhere too.

Black ballplayers played in the South for professional clubs in Atlanta, Memphis, Birmingham, and Jacksonville, and on Army teams on posts like Fort Benning, Fort Stuart, and Camp Penticuff. But even on these bases, they played other coloreds. Forget the war. Never mind that Americans of every shade wore one-color-fits-all khaki. Whites would go see blacks play each other because they put on a bang-up show, but at Atlanta ’s Ponce de Leon Park, whites bought tickets at separate entrances and sat in bleacher sections off limits to the nigger hoi polloi.

Darius didn’t play in the CVL, but he sure as heck took part in practices and intrasquad games at McKissic Field. He served as a lieutenant commander to Mister JayMac, except he didn’t very often come up and tell you to do something. He sort of hinted you should do it. He asked if you wanted help getting a hitch out of your swing or a sad double clutch out of your throws to first. Mostly, Darius kept his mouth shut and taught by showing. Usually, when he led a practice, everyone accepted the sham that even though Mister JayMac had deputized Darius as his stand-in, he could have tapped almost anybody else on the squad.

Anyway, Mister JayMac had ordered a scrimmage, first stringers versus recruits and scrubs, and Darius had drawn the pitching start for the regulars. The regulars also got to be home team. Us rookies and scrubs had to use the visitors’ dugout and give up the advantage of last at bats. I didn’t like it, but so what?

Creighton Nutter pulled me into our dugout, where Mister JayMac had tacked up lineups for both teams. Nutter’d been appointed our manager. Mister JayMac would run the A squad. He seemed to want us underdogs in a snugged-up croker sack from the get-go. Nutter studied our lineup. By rights he should’ve drawn up our batting order, but Mister JayMac had done it for him.

“Damn,” Nutter said. “We’ve got two pitchers at players’ spots and a baby on the mound. Thank God for empty bleachers.”

I read the lineup too. Mister JayMac had me batting first. I wouldn’t get to watch another hitter against Darius before I had to face him myself.

“Get on up here, Mr Boles!” Mister JayMac yelled. He wore a chest protector and a mask, ready to ump as well as to manage. That seemed unfair, but when he sent Parris, one of our boys, out to call the bases, I relaxed a little.

I rummaged up my Red Stix bat, crossed to the batter’s box, swung it a few times. Its barrel shone red in the sun.

“You drop that thing in a vat of Mercurochrome, Dumbo?” Hoey yelled from short.

At third Curriden gave an egg-sucking grin. “My pecker’s about that color when it gets angry.”

“And you wish it was that big,” Dunnagin said from his crouch behind the plate.

A bit more hoohah over my imported timber before Mister JayMac snarled, “Batter up!”

I dug in against Darius with a catch in my heartbeat. My first pitch in my first at-bat as a hired pro. It came out of Darius’s shoulder-dipping windup so hard I hardly even saw it. I just heard it go thwaap! in Dunnagin’s mitt.

“Strike one, Mr Boles,” Mister JayMac said.

Hoey and the other infielders chattered away, badmouthing me: “You couldn’t hit the floor if you fell off a stepladder, Boles!” “Cmon, Dumbo, make like the Dorsey brothers and swing!” “Whassa madder, rookie? All the blood in you go into that stupid bat!”

Darius got me on four pitches, two quick strikes (the second one swinging), a teaser high for a ball, and a peppy slider on the outside corner I lunged at like a beginner with a bayonet. I jammed my bat into the ground to keep from eating a pound of red Georgia clay.

The jeering stopped: I was history.

Junior and Dobbs went down too, Junior on an excuse-me nibbler back to Darius, Skinny on three air-pummeling cuts that would’ve unsocketed almost anybody else’s shoulder. Seven pitches and side out. Things looked bleak for us Mudville boys.

“Pingless wonders,” Muscles said, trotting in from left after tossing his glove down. “Way to go, Darius.”

Philip Ankers took the mound for us, the B squad. A fifteen-year-old hurling against good journeymen players and cagey retreads. Nobody on A squad was less than thirty but Knowles, a twenty-something 4-F with the same million-dollar problem that’d kept both Mariani and Frank “I’ll Never Smile Again” Sinatra out of the Army, a punctured eardrum. But Ankers looked older than Knowles, with his greasy beard and the body of a pit bull.

In his first time out, Ankers had to face Hoey, Charlie Snow, and Muscles. He looked to have just two pitches: a fastball and a fadeaway. Today you’d call a fadeaway a screwball or a scroogie, and it’s not usually a pitch high schoolers master. Somehow, Ankers had. He’d start it off like a speedball, but finger-lip it. Just as it got to a righthand hitter it jerked in and dropped away. With that pitch, he made Hoey and Snow look like amateur-night contestants. They both rolled out to the infield. Musselwhite, though, muscled one to the right-field wall for a triple because Ankers slipped up and threw him a fastball low and inside. Muscles batted left, and that was the perfect pitch for him to cream. Ankers learned from his mistake. From then on, he threw nothing but fadeaways and teaser fastballs.

Jumbo was batting cleanup, but Jumbo couldn’t clean Muscles off third. Ankers kamikazied him with dipsy-doodle junk, mostly fadeaway variations. Jumbo took a couple, fouled off a couple, and ended up missing a pitch-like Muscles, he batted left-that tailed away to the outside corner. This swing dumped him on his rear, a fall that seemed to shake the whole infield. I thought it might take a crane to hoist him up again, but he rolled over to all fours and got slowly to his feet.

The game went on like that. Darius made us B-squad boys look like stooges; Ankers wriggled out of every potential trap with a killer fadeaway. In fact, by the fourth inning, Sloan’d started calling him Fadeaway. It stuck. Ankers became Fadeway for ever after.

Goose eggs stacked up. Noon yawned like an oven. Each time Ankers escaped another A-squad wrecking crew with his shutout unblemished, Mister JayMac waved his regulars onto the field and yelled “Batter up!” at us scrubs. He looked to be steam-cleaning his gear from the inside out.

“We won’t git no rest,” Norm Sudikoff griped, “till the bastid has him a five-alawm heat stroke.”

I wondered about that. Should a rookie like Ankers pitch more than five hard-throwing innings? Come our next CVL game, would us Hellbenders have the bounce of boiled spaghetti? And how many times would Darius make me look like a fool? Coming to my third at bat in the top of the seventh, I’d struck out swinging and a second time counting the stitches on a goofer that’d dropped through the strike zone.

Now I felt semipanicked. Guessing what Darius planned to throw would pickle your brain. Because you couldn’t guess, you had to watch and react. So far I’d watched and reacted a lot less well than I’d just watched.

“It’s the old red-stick wagger,” Hoey welcomed me. “Wave that baton, maestro. Conduct yourself back to the bench.”

I dug in. Darius threw me some chin music for a ball, but the pitch did what he wanted, moved me off the plate. Next, a curve on the outside corner, just beyond my swing, for a called strike. I edged up a little. The next pitch jammed me, a hundred-mile-an-hour bullet. I swung in self-defense. The ball hit my bat handle and nubbed out between Hoey and Curriden on a half dozen skittering hops.

Contact! On my follow-through, the bat’s barrel had splintered like kindling, helicoptered into the outfield, and landed on the grass. My broken bat had gone farther than the ball. I ran with five inches of bat handle in my fist. My hands and forearms stung from the vibes. Hoey made a grab in the hole and threw off-balance to Jumbo. Parris, umpiring at first, signaled me safe, and not one A-squad player yelped, not even Hoey.

Darius came down off the mound and ambled over to take Jumbo’s flip-back. “Danl,” he said, about twenty feet away, “I reckon you could outrun the word God.”

It took me a minute, standing there winded, to realize he’d complimented me.

But not much happened after my scratch hit. Junior struck out, and Dobbs blooped one to Knowles at second.

Sudikoff came up. He had bulk, but Darius owned him. If I wanted to get around the bases, I’d have to shove myself along and hope a passed ball, a wild pitch, or an error on an infield grounder assisted me. But despite his praise, Darius didn’t seem to think I’d steal. He pitched from a full wind-up, not a stretch. It worked because, after his second pitch to Junior, he whipped the return throw from Dunnagin over to Jumbo and nearlybout picked me off.

On his first pitch to Sudikoff, though, I got a decent lead and broke for second the moment Darius twisted into his wind-up. Bless his heart, Sudikoff lunged at an obvious ball, missing it by a foot or better, to help me out, and I did a quick down-and-up slide into second, where Hoey knelt for a throw that never came.

I’d stolen on Darius, not Dunnagin, and when Darius had the ball again, he walked over and peered at me like I was a channel cat with legs.

“Like I say,” he said.

On his next offering to Sudikoff, I edged off second and darted for third as soon as his motion home committed him to throw. I barreled. Sudikoff laid off a low fastball-he’d already swung at one for me-and Dunnagin, uncoiling from his crouch, leapt in front of the plate and fired the ball to Curriden at third.

All my B-squad teammates popped up from our bench to watch me slide. The peg from home had me nailed, but my toe hooking the corner of the base got under Curriden’s tag.

Nutter, coaching third, gave the safe sign. Mister JayMac, out from behind the plate, agreed. A cheer went up from the B-squad bench, the A-squad boys groaned.

Darius sashayed over, loosy-goosy, to get the ball from Reese Curriden. He gave me a smirk. The smirk didn’t seem to be at me, though, but for me. “G, O, D,” Darius said. From then on, he pitched from the stretch. I’d’ve been nuts to try to steal home on him, or on a catcher as smart as Dunnagin. Anyway, I had no chance. Darius got Sudikoff on strikes, the third one a swing a herd of chiropractors could’ve retired to Bermuda on.

Sudikoff flung his bat away. “Pesky damned nigger.”

Darius had to’ve heard him, but he strolled to the A-squad dugout with his back straight and his head up and spoke not a word.

Just about then, I saw somebody in the bleachers behind our dugout: Phoebe Pharram, Mister JayMac’s great-niece.

My first thought-pretending not to see her-was, Did she see my hit? Did she see me steal second? Did she see me slide into third like the great Mike “King” Kelly?

Dumb. Phoebe was jail bait and blood kin to my boss. Why in Cupid’s name would she take a bead on me anyway? “Ichabod,” she’d called me-the high-pockets drip in an old American short story. Besides being a drip, I couldn’t talk. For God’s sake, my nickname was Dumbo.

The game goose-egged on.

But in the bottom of the eighth, Jumbo rambowed one off Fadeaway over the right-field wall, and Fadeaway fell apart, yielding four more quick runs on a series of walks and hits, including a triple by Darius.

Fadeaway slapped his glove against his leg. His face got this weird stove-in look. He began blubbering. Mister JayMac went out to the mound.

“That hulksome galoot!” Fadeaway nodded in at Jumbo. “Him and that biggity damned nigger!”

“Shut up and sit down.” Mister JayMac put Quip Parris in for Fadeaway. Parris retired the next three batters. Darius trotted home on Hoey’s sacrifice fly, though, and at the end of eight full innings the score stood six to zip.

That was the final score, although in the top of the ninth I sent Charlie Snow to the wall for a long out, the best hit ball of the game against Darius.

At the end, Darius shone with sweat. It encased and oiled him. I could see him pitching another nine, eighteen, maybe even twenty-seven innings-without grouse or twinge. Darius shone like a jewel.