Brittle Innings

15

Mister JayMac called our first Friday home game against Lanett Scrap Metal Collection Drive Night. Every kid under eighteen who brought a pound of scrap metal-a shovel blade, a bag of spent cartridges, a hoard of old soup cans-got in free. Ushers collected the scrap, and businessmen-volunteers turned it over to the War Production Board.

Anyway, the stands rocked, a lot of the crowd teenagers or soldiers from Camp Penticuff. It being wartime, GIs got in for half price, paying fifty cents for baseline seats and watching the skirts closer than they did the game. Milt Frye, the PA announcer, told us attendance stood at over three thousand, a better than decent turnout even if beaucoups of our admissions had “paid” for their seats with scrap metal.

CVL teams staged most games on weekends. Sometimes you’d have a series start on Thursday or Wednesday evening, but you could always count on open Mondays and Tuesdays, as travel days or as make-up days for rainouts.

In the clubhouse, Mister JayMac announced his starting lineup. Not a rookie in it. Junior, Skinny, and I would ride the bench until somebody got hurt or one of us was needed for strategic reasons. Fadeaway wouldn’t play at all-Mister JayMac planned to start him on Sunday.

“That’s just two days’ rest,” Fadeaway said.

Everybody gaped like he’d just decided not to join the bucket brigade at an orphanage fire.

“Way I figure it, it’s three,” Mister JayMac said. “Hell, son, you’re fifteen, aren’t you?”

“Yessir.”

“Then your recovery time for both pitching and screwing’s bout as fast as it’ll ever be, and I didn’t recruit you to screw. You gonna pitch when I ask you to or jes when you feel like it?”

“When you ast me to.”

“Good,” Mister JayMac said. “Stop pouting.”

Twilight crept over the field. The electric pole lights came on, bright as day. That summer, no one worried about a Nazi U-boat swimming up the Chattahoochee to knock out a riverside shipyard or a lone supply barge. Under the lights, McKissic Field looked like a wonderland: green grass, shiny signs, the gauzy ghosts of cigar and cigarette smoke curling everywhere. Even the tiresome smell of burnt peanuts couldn’t douse my wonder. When Mrs Harry Atwill, the organist, played “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” I got shivers. It seemed the sky would split open, like a milkweed pod, and an air force of seraphim drift down to mingle with the crowd like Mardi Gras partiers.

Creighton Nutter pitched that night, and if he hadn’t had his stuff, Highbridge would’ve lost. Our regulars played like cripples. They missed signs, booted grounders, misplayed easy flies, overthrew cutoff men, and so on. In the fourth inning, our fans began to catcall us. They singled out Trapdoor Evans for abuse after he turned a basket catch into a thump to the groin that left him writhing on the grass. Charlie Snow dashed over from center to pick up the ball and throw it in.

“Ball-less Evans!” a row of soldiers chanted. “Ball-less Evans!”

Over the PA system, Milt Frye said, “Steady now, folks. Your management has great regard for our military, but we won’t tolerate smut from any quarter.”

“Ball-less, ball-less, ball-less Evans!” the GIs chanted. Frye’s scolding didn’t faze them a bit, and when he barked, “Those persisting in immature hooliganism, even men in uniform, will be removed,” a whole row of them turned towards the press box and shot it a rippling sequence of birds that would’ve won a drill competition at Camp Penticuff. But, truth to tell, no spectacle was grosser that night than our Hellbender regulars. Even folks with kids had more kindly feelings for the GIs than they did for our stumblebums.

Going into our final at bat, after playing like blind men, we were down just one run. Nutter’d kept us in it, pitching smart and refusing to rattle even when his fielders performed like dancing hippos. The shock of the night-a blow to Mister JayMac’s strategy of letting us humiliate ourselves at home-came when we somehow won the game, three to two.

It wasn’t pretty. Or just. But so what?

The win put us at eight-and-eight on the season. Opelika, Eufaula, and Cottonton lost that same night-to Quitman, Marble Springs, and LaGrange respectively-so we picked up a full game on both the Orphans and the Mudcats and broke a fourth-place tie with the Boll Weevils. But it still teed me Mister JayMac had held us rookies out, especially with his starters sucking wind like they had.

“What would our starters have to do to pit the boss to give us new boys a chanst?” Junior asked Skinny Dobbs.

“Lose,” Skinny said. “Them buggers got to lose.”

Actually, Skinny’d got that wrong. We played our next game against Lanett at five on Saturday afternoon. The league’s schedule makers had decreed a number of twilight weekend games, to go on without lights. A nagging drought’d dogged the South for years, crimping its ability to make electric power. Day and twilight games eased demand. That was good. War plants-shipyards, torpedo factories, assembly lines-had to run around the clock. You could squeeze a whole game in between five and sunset, if you didn’t go to extra innings.

Anyway, just before we dressed out for the second game in the Lanett series, Darius came into the locker room and read the lineup to us:

“Batting first, playing shortstop, Danl Boles…” He went on from there, but the only other items to get my interest came in the seventh and eighth spots, where Junior and Skinny would bat, Junior playing second base and Skinny taking over from Trapdoor Evans in right.

“Is this a joke?” Buck Hoey asked Darius. “I hit one for three last night. Nobody else did better.”

“Mr Curriden did,” Darius said. “If you hadn’t walked up his backside on that pop-up, he mighta done even better. That knot on yo fohead go down yet?”

“Easy, Darius,” Hoey said. “You’re treading thin ice.”

Darius rubbed his oxford’s toe across the concrete floor. “Aint no ice in here atall. Was, you could put it on that knot you got.”

“Read it again,” Junior said.

So Darius read the afternoon’s starting lineup again. My body began to hum, like a tuning fork. Saturday, June 5th, 1943. Soon, I’d actually start at short on a pro ball club.

“I can’t believe Mister JayMac wants me on the bench,” Hoey said. “I’ve got a nine-game hitting streak going.”

Darius popped the lineup card with his knuckles. “Nothing here say the change got to last fo awways, Mr Hoey.”

That drilled a nerve with me. If I booted a chance, or fanned with runners in scoring position, Hoey’d most likely have his job back tomorrow.

“So whatn hell we sposed to do!” Evans asked Darius.

“How bout rest?” Darius said. “Seems logical to me.”

“The hell with that,” Hoey said.

“Well, capn, Mister JayMac wants you to coach first.”

Vito Mariani was scheduled to pitch. “Buck up, Buck. I’ll set em down so fast you won’t have enough bench time to rub the nap off your pants.”

Darius left. Hoey stared at the floor. Knowles, the deposed second baseman, went over to Junior and put a hand on his shoulder.

“Tear em up, kid,” he said.

The game wasn’t a laugher, but the Linenmakers never really got close either. Kitchen Fats for Victory Night followed Friday’s Scrap Metal Collection Night, and although nobody got in free for bringing in hamburger grease or bacon drippings, Milt Frye and three usherettes saw to it every fan who turned in a can of solidified fat got his or her name put in a drum for a drawing during the seventh-inning stretch. Top prize was a weekend for two in Atlanta, with a room at the Ponce de Leon Hotel. Anyway, the drawing seemed to mean as much to the civilians in the stands as the ball game did.

You could smell the rancid kitchen fats everyone’d brought in. The idea was that munitions factories would melt down the drippings to extract their glycerin, then use it to make bombs or howitzer shells. Kitchen Fats for Victory. After the war, though, I heard we’d used it to make soap. Dirty dogfaces have low morale, and the services needed our kitchen fats for soap. But asking civilians to turn in fats for soap didn’t sound romantic. Or sanitary. So the government told the public our used grease would go to make devices for blowing people up, and wham! the home front got with the program.

Anyway, I went three for four. A squib behind second base was my first safe bingle in money ball. A row of GIs gave me a standing O-out of sheer relief the Hellbenders wouldn’t stink worse than the stadium did, like we had last night. They loved it I could put wood on the ball.

Hoey, coaching first, sauntered over to me as I returned to the bag after making my turn. The center fielder’d just faked a throw behind me, a threat I hadn’t much credited.

“Don’t let the cheers go to your head. Those guys’d cheer a little old lady tripping on a popcorn box.”

I watched Charlie Snow, a super hitter, settle in and tap his spikes with a Louisville Slugger he’d lathed into the shape of a skinny champagne bottle.

“Me, I’d be ashamed to reach base with a dying gull like the one you goofy-bunted out there,” Hoey said.

I shrugged. My batting average was a perfect thousand-at least for now.

“Watch O’Connor’s pick-off move. Get tagged out here and you might as well’ve gone down swinging.”

“Back in the coach’s box,” the umpire Happy Polidori told Hoey, “and leave the poor kid be.”

“Up yours, Polidori. It’s my job to give advice to kids with marshmallows for brains.”

“Move it,” Polidori said. “Your body, not your mouth.”

With no go-ahead from anyone, I stole second on O’Connor’s first pitch. The GIs came to their feet, whooping. Lanett’s catcher didn’t even try to throw me out. I lifted a hand to Hoey-to show him I hadn’t hurt myself, not to mock him-but he kicked up a cloud of red dirt, p.o.’d.

Snow hit a long single to right. I came home. The whole rest of the game went like that. We ended up winning eight to three-no laugher, as I say, but no knuckle-whitener either. My other two hits were a bunt toward first and a high bounder off the pitcher’s rubber. Hoey badmouthed them too, calling them luck, saying the next time I went to church I should drop a C-note in the plate. It almost, not quite, relieved me when the Linenmaker right fielder ran down my longest clout of the day and webbed it against the Belk-Gallant sign for the game’s second-to-last out.

Hoey applauded this catch. He liked seeing me robbed of a four-for-four outing on a ball I’d flat-out creamed.

At shortstop, though, I did manage a perfect day. Despite his earlier brag, Mariani didn’t pitch well. Junior and I consistently got him out of jams by turning double plays or knocking down potential RBI rollers. On our double plays, we clicked like castenets.

“For the fourth time today,” Milt Frye told us all, “your double-play combo was Boles-to-Heggie-to-Clerval, tying a team record set back in ’39.”

Whistles, applause, foot-stomping. Mrs Atwill swung into an up-tempo version of “I Get a Kick Out of You.”

“Danny Boles hails from Tenkiller, Oklahoma,” Frye said. Then, stretching it: “Boy’s got a few quarts of Cherokee blood, making him the first uprooted Injun to find his way back South on the Trail of Cheers.” Frye said Junior Heggie, a Georgia boy from Valdosta, deserved some applause too, and Hoey’s spit probably turned to battery acid in his mouth.

After the game, a scratchy recording of the National Anthem blasted through the speakers. I stood on our dugout’s top step with my cap over my heart listening to the boozy chorusing of our remaining fans. Mister JayMac had to order the field lamps snuffed to get them to leave.

In the clubhouse, Lamar Knowles told Junior and me if we kept it up, Boles-to-Heggie-to-Clerval would become as famous in the CVL as Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance was in the bigs. He wasn’t kissing tail either-he meant it. Junior’d taken his starting job, and Knowles could’ve moped or cried beginner’s luck, but he didn’t. My respect for him hitched right up the pole.

After we’d showered, Mister JayMac came in and said the most important thing about the evening’s game wasn’t breaking in some jittery rookies or tying the old club double-play mark, but that for the first time since our season opener on May the 7th, the Hellbenders had a winning record.

“Tonight, gentlemen, we stand nine and eight. That’s good: a winning percentage of about.530. But it won’t take this or any other pennant. Beat these loom-operating yokels one more time, tomorrow, and we’ll head down to Quitman on Wednesday to pluck the Mockingbirds three out of three. Opelika lost again tonight, and LaGrange is in another extra-innings brawl with Cottonton.

“Keep scratching and clawing, gentlemen. By the end of August, we should be at the king-rooster top of the whole CVL cock pile.”

Everybody slapped backs and hurrahed.

Hoey said, “Who starts at short tomorrow?”

That turned our jazz-band parade through an empty swimming pool into echoey silence.

Mister JayMac said, “Given our performance in our past two games, who do you think should start tomorrow?”

“Given my performance over the past sixteen games, I don’t think that’s a fair question. Sir.”

“Perhaps we should vote on our lineups every day. Ask team members to judge the fairness of my decrees.”

Hoey shut up. He could win this debate only with a pistol or a hypnotist’s help. Everyone but Evans, Sloan, and a couple of others wanted him to clam up. He’d turned our victory party into a nitpicky postmortem.

“Good,” Mister JayMac said. “Curfew tonight’s one A.M. No, to hell with that. Be in bed by midnight and sleep late tomorrow.” He left.

Oh yeah. In that night’s game, Jumbo didn’t have a hit, but he’d sucked up every chance at first smarter than a Hoover and played his monster heart out. So if Buck Hoey was ammonia under our noses, Jumbo was honeysuckle and mint.