Brittle Innings

16

That night-three or four in the morning-I had a powerful urge to pee. Kizzy’d set metal pitchers of lemonade all over the parlor after our game, and I’d drunk gallons of it. I’d sweated away a lot, but about a quart still ached for release, so I got up, tiptoed past Jumbo’s bed, and bumbled down the hall to the third-floor John. Weird thing: When I got there, light showed in the cracks around the door, the knob wouldn’t turn, and I could hear a rough drizzle on tin.

It wasn’t Jumbo. He’d been in bed, a forbidding ridge of lumps and gulleys wheezing dreamily. Somebody from downstairs had come upstairs. Why? Had Sosebee organized a crap shoot up here? It teed me off. Where’d this Hellbender palooka get off hijacking our shower?

My bladder was a pulled-pin bomblet. I needed relief. I didn’t have time for the jerk in the shower to finish up, towel down, and let me in. I’d flood the hall first. I looked for alternatives: open windows, flower pots, umbrella stands. But nothing presented itself. I had just one option, to creep downstairs and check out the bathroom on Dunnagin, Junior, and everybody else’s floor. So down I went. Each step on that narrow staircase threatened to trigger me. If I went off, I’d turn the steps into a waterfall and drown my teammates in their beds-everyone in McKissic House but Jumbo and the skinnydipper in our shower.

I kept my bladder dammed and reached the second floor. Nobody was in its bathroom. Nobody. I dashed in and drained off my pain. My physical pain. It still irked me some unknown soul had stolen our bathroom. The one down here had four times the square footage and more soap and toilet paper. Why would another lodger sneak upstairs to ours?

For privacy, maybe. Somebody on the second floor didn’t want spectators while he showered.

I started back upstairs. As I groped my way up, somebody else groped down, and I froze at the bottom of the chute. The person coming down looked suspiciously-deliciously-like a woman. By the glow of an electric sconce on the wall, I could see that although the woman had some age on her-late thirties, early forties-she was a looker, maybe even something of a vamp.

She had on a towel. Anyway, she sort of had it on.

Obviously, she hadn’t expected to meet anyone. She didn’t scram, though. She cockedher head and smiled, her strawberry hair pulled back from her forehead and swept over her shoulder in a damp strand. She clutched that strand and kept her towel from slipping with the same hand, her left. I know it was her left because she had a wedding band on it.

“Mr Boles-our brand-new whangdoodle shortstop.”

My shorts covered more than a bathing suit would’ve, but I blushed. If I’d rubbed myself with horse liniment, I couldn’t have felt any hotter or glowed any brighter.

“Relax, kiddo. I’ll let you by.” The woman laughed. “Two ships passing in a tight.” She pressed herself, towel and all, against the wall. “Climb on past, handsome.”

I climbed with my head down. Shadows moved around us, but the amber sconce gave the woman’s shins, arms, and breastbone the gleam of knife blades. Head high, I’d’ve stared straight up her towel into the valley of the shadow. As I climbed, I quaked. Stand me, any day, in the batter’s box against a guy with a ninety-miles-per-hour speedball.

On the very same step as the woman, I brushed her hand and something damp landed on my instep. Her towel had fallen. I reached down to get it. My brain had shut off. My bumpkimsh chivalric instincts had kicked in. When I straightened again, I was gazing on her nakedness, breathing the scented glycerin of Palmolive. I froze. I got dizzy. I felt like a statue on a revolving lazy Susan.

“Thanks.” She didn’t hurry to rewrap. “Predate it.”

I shut my eyes and dropped to my knees. In a darkness of my own concoction, I walked on them to the top of the stairs. When I got there and nerved up to look back down, the woman’d started moving again. The towel wrapped her from midback to just below the pretty half moons of her fanny. I peeked. When she reached the second floor and angled out of sight, I crept back down and peeked again. She sashayed to a room at the far end of the hall and tapped on the door. Curriden opened it and pulled her inside.

Skinny Dobbs roomed with Curriden. Did this woman whore for a living? Had Curriden and Skinny hired her for an orgy? Did an early morning of sweaty sex qualify as an orgy if more than two folks got in on it? Hold it. Maybe Curriden and the woman were secretly married. Bingo. The woman’d worn a ring. She looked about the right age to be Curriden’s old lady. But if so, why didn’t they live in Cotton Creek like all the other married Hellbender couples?

As I watched, the woman came out of Curriden’s room wearing a polka-dot white-on-red dress and a big wheel-brimmed hat with ribbons. She had a straw handbag. She toted her high heels by their straps. She ran on her toes to the other staircase and tripped down its steps. She’d vamoosed before I could draw any conclusions except she was stunning and really knew how to wear clothes. (She also knew how not to wear them.) And she knew I played a “whangdoodle shortstop.” That gave me pause-not that she liked my play, but the phrase itself.

I didn’t move. Mostly, I didn’t move. An old friend found the door of my shorts and poked his head through for a one-eyed look around. I was about to ease my old pal when Skinny Dobbs came up the main staircase shuffling like a drunk. He crossed to his and Curriden’s room. He didn’t have a hangover, he just hadn’t slept much. My old pal collapsed in wrinkles. On her way out, Curriden’s wife had probably told Dobbs, sleeping on a parlor sofa, he could slink back to his room-her and Reese’s conjugal visit was over.

I crept back upstairs, with a side trip to the steamed-up John, and sacked out again. Didn’t get much shuteye, though. I kept seeing that lady jaybird-nude on the stairs.

The CVL, I learned, had started playing Sunday games in its very first season. People called Dixie the Bible Belt. Even at midweek, street preachers in Highbridge could work up a powerful rant and a healthy amening crowd. Nobody opposed Sunday baseball, though. It took place after church and ranked right up there with God, flag, motherhood, and hunting.

Fadeaway Ankers started the final game of our series against Lanett-on either two or three days’ rest, depending on whether you figured it like Fadeaway or Mister JayMac. During his warm-ups, he grinned and preened and threw screaming BBs, like he enjoyed being out there, which, I guess, he did. He wanted his first Linenmaker hitter bad as a starveling bluetick wants its next soup bone. And he struck him out.

Mister JayMac had tapped me, Junior, and Skinny to start too. Unofficially, it was Rookies’ Day. Officially, it was War Bonds Day.

In the outfield, groundskeepers had hung War Bonds banners over some of the biggest signboards, with the okay of the companies whose ads they hid:

IT’S TEN MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT!

WAKE UP, AMERICANS…

YOUR COUNTRY’S MOST FATEFUL HOUR IS NEAR!

DON’T BE TIGHTER WITH YOUR MONEY THAN

WITH THE LIVES OF YOUR SONS!

MONEY TO PAY FOR THE WAR, YES;

BUT NONE AT ALL FOR FRILLS IN THE

CIVIL OPERATIONS OF ANY OF OUR GOVERNING BODIES.

THAT IS THE EDICT OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.

Neither Skinny nor Curriden looked at full speed. Even though Curriden hadn’t gotten up for church, he could barely haul his ass around. That gal in the towel might as well’ve strapped an icebox to his back, he had so little vim. Skinny looked sharper; he could run and throw. Sometimes, though, he stopped dead and opened his eyes so wide he seemed to be trying to breathe through his eye balls.

“What ails you two?” Mister JayMac asked after our second at bat. “Yall stay up last night herding woolyboogers? I swan, Mr Curriden, with some rouge on your cheeks, you’d look like a dead man.” He put Hoey at third for Curriden and Evans into right for Skinny.

When he did, Hoey said, “Why don’t you move Dumbo over to third and let me pick up where I left off Friday? Sir.”

Mister JayMac just looked at him, his eyes as dead blue as an old lady’s hair rinse. From then on, though, Hoey played next to me at Curriden’s spot, never making an error. None of the right-handed Linenmakers could pull Fadeaway’s scroogie, and none of their lefties ever hit to third.

The game was a walkover. I rapped my first extra-base hit, a triple off the EDICT OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE banner, and a single too. Every other Hellbender, Hoey and Evans excepted, got good wood too, and when Fadeaway’d finished pitching the sixth, Mister JayMac lifted him for Sosebee.

“That’s plumb stupid!” Fadeaway shouted in the dugout when he realized what’d happened. “I got a three-hitter going!”

“Relax, Mr Ankers,” Mister JayMac said. “All you can do if you stay in is lose it.”

“My daddy taught me to finish what I start.”

Parris said, “He shoulda taught you a little respect for-”

Mister JayMac made a hush-up gesture at Parris. “You like to finish what you start, Mr Ankers?”

“Damn right!”

“Then I want you to know you started six innings. You’ve jes finished em. A helluva fine job you did for us too, start to finish.”

Fadeaway looked confused, a bird dog thrown off the scent. Then Mister JayMac’s “reasoning” sunk in, and he bought it, the whole bolt. He strolled along the bench and sat down next to Haystack with a hambone-licking smirk on his face.

“You won’t lose,” Haystack said. “You’ll either win or get a no-decision if Sosebee fucks up. You’re sitting pretty.”

“I don’t sit no other way,” Fadeaway said.

Sosebee’s stuff didn’t sizzle, but the Linenmakers couldn’t hit a raindrop in a south Georgia thunderstorm. At game’s end, the scoreboard read 13-0. The crowd whooped so loud we could hardly hear the recording of the National Anthem.

Afterwards, Mister JayMac cornered me in the dugout. “You youngsters’ve come along jes fine, Mr Boles. My sister Tulipa is a bred-in-the-bone baseball gal, but she never scouted me a kid worth leftover pot liquor till she stumbled on you. You’re hitting.750 after two games, and you play short as good as anybody, including Ligonier Hoey.” Ligonier was Buck Hoey’s real first name-he came from a town in Pennsylvania called Ligonier. So he went by Buck.

“Grab a shower and meet me under the grandstand in your street togs,” Mister JayMac said. “Dinner’s on me tonight.”

Why not Fadeaway, Junior, and Skinny too? I thought. Why not Jumbo, for that matter? He’d had another long home run and another errorless day at first. Did proving the shrewdness of Miss Tulipa’s judgment entitle you to dine every Sunday evening with the boss?

I met Mister JayMac in the concessions area. He stood next to Homer’s tank, talking to two people-females?-half-hidden by girder shadows. One of the females, I saw, was Phoebe. The other had to be her mama, the daughter of Mister JayMac’s dead brother. Made sense, I guess, but my heart double-clutched-I hadn’t seen Phoebe at any of our recent games-and my hands turned cold as ice tongs.

“Ah, Mr Boles!” Mister JayMac shouted. “Got some ladies here I’d like you to meet!”

I sauntered over. Phoebe was Phoebe, of course-but tonight she had on a dress instead of blue jeans, and a pair of tiny gold earrings instead of one gaudy exploded pearl. In her open-toed heels and her wide-brimmed straw hat, she looked like a miniature woman. Her mother… well, I reddened. My eyes glanced down to flit over the candy wrappers and dirty popcorn around the base of the aquarium.

“Mrs Luther Pharram, better known around here as LaRaina, and her lovely daughter Phoebe,” Mister JayMac said. “Ladies, Mr Daniel Boles-Mr Boles, Mrs Pharram and Phoebe.”

Not too long ago, LaRaina Pharram and I’d bumped into each other between the second and third floors at McKissic House, only she’d worn a towel and I’d worn shorts and an all-over blush. My blush’d come back, prickly as radioactive shellac. Miss LaRaina, despite the damage she’d wreaked on Curriden and Skinny, looked bright-eyed and amused. Every time I glanced up, she gave me a batted eyelash-mockery-and a smile halfway between a grin and a pout.

We have a secret, her grin-pout said. Aren’t you glad you can’t tell my uncle? “Sorry, Uncle JayMac,” LaRaina Pharram said aloud, “but I can’t call this handsome fella Mr Boles.”

Handsome! More mockery. I wanted not to like this woman-she had a husband overseas, she’d spent the night playing slip-skins with a ballplayer, she’d gotten a big kick out of my embarrassment, and now she was making mock of me-but I still felt more or less kindly toward her.

Mister JayMac said Miss LaRaina could call me Daniel, if she liked, but he’d stick to Mr Boles.

“My, such a fuddy-duddy,” Miss LaRaina said.

Phoebe’d picked up on my jitters, and my behavior struck her as rude or immature. Her pretty lips seemed to’ve wrapped themselves around a sour lemon drop.

“So how’s Miss Giselle?” she suddenly piped, then went back to sucking her make-believe candy.

“Fine,” Mister JayMac said. “Now. Where would you gals advise taking our hero for a victory supper?”

“Ast him where he’d like to go,” Phoebe said.

Mister JayMac said, “But he’s ignorant of his choices.”

“Ast him what he’d like to eat,” Phoebe said. “American, Eye-talian, Chinese.”

Mister JayMac lifted an eyebrow at me. At that moment, I had all the appetite of a spooked cat. I was trying to adjust to Miss LaRaina’s presence and cooling down from nine innings of sticky twilight baseball.

“The Live Oak Tea Room at the Oglethorpe,” Miss LaRaina suggested.

Phoebe looked at me. “Thass a nice place.”

“The Linenmakers booked rooms at the Oglethorpe,” Mister JayMac said. “The tea room’s going to swarm with em.”

Miss LaRaina smiled at her uncle. “I know.”

Mister JayMac’s jaw tightened. “Have a care,” he said. “For decency. For your daughter.”

“Phoebe’s not likely to put the mash on a Linenmaker. She hates ballplayers.”

“Not awluvem,” Phoebe said.

You could’ve fooled me. The pinched V between her eyebrows and the pucker of her mouth didn’t say fondness, not in any language I knew.

“The Oglethorpe Tea Room is out,” Mister JayMac said.

“Corporal John’s over on Penticuff Strip?” Miss LaRaina said. “It’s got an attractive clientele.”

“Absolutely not.”

“A joke. It’s closed today anyway. Sunday sure limits a body’s choices here in Highbridge.”

Mister JayMac herded us into the parking lot, where Darius had pulled the Caddy as close as he could to the main gate, given the fans still about. Darkness’d just begun to settle, and several groups of people smoked and gabbed in the parking lot. Dance music drifted from a radio through an open car window. Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller.

Before we could get in the Caddy, a hefty man in overalls and a frowzy woman in a print dress came over. Their clothes seemed to have as much dust as cotton in them.

“Jordan McKissic?” the man said. “Thass you, aint it?

“It is. How may I help you?”

“Show him, Sue Beth.”

The woman-Sue Beth-pushed a paper under Mister JayMac’s nose. He retreated a step.

“S from the War Department,” the man said. “Hit us a coupla days back. It’s our Donnie.”

“He aint coming home,” the woman said. “He done got kilt in North Africa.”

“I’m sorry,” Mister JayMac said. “A terrible thing.”

“You oughta be,” the woman said. “You done for him. You took him when he coulda had him-shoulda had him-a heping-job zemption. Eye-talians didn’t kill our Donny. You did it with a stinkm fountain pen.”

Mister JayMac said, “Please, folks, tell me yall’s names.”

“The Crawfords,” the man said. “Ira and Sue Beth. Little people, ordinary folk. Ordinary!” Crawford didn’t exactly shout, but his kettle-drum voice carried. Some loitering fans began ambling towards us.

“Donnie never shoulda gone!” Sue Beth Crawford did shout. “And you damn-all know it too!”

“Mrs Crawford, God bless your martyred son,” Mister JayMac said. “I’m sorry every American boy who dies has to make that sacrifice.”

“Yessir,” Ira Crawford said. “But the draft board had its quota to fill so you thew our innosunt young un in.”

“Every boy in the hopper’s innocent in one way or another. Thank God we don’t yet have an army of criminals and cynics.”

“Yore precious ballplayers don’t go!” Crawford accused.

“Not one Hellbender comes from here,” Mister JayMac said. “They’re too young or old, or their local draft boards exempted them. I pulled no strings for any player.”

“Mebbe you did, mebbe you didn’t,” Ira Crawford said. “But you cain’t say the same bout thatere black nigger. How come he aint on bivouac someres?”

Darius heard this-he had to’ve-but he opened the Caddy’s rear door and helped Phoebe and Miss LaRaina in.

“Mr Crawford, federal law forbids inducting Negroes in greater numbers than they appear in the general population. Hothlepoya County has almost as many coloreds as whites so we take more than most boards, but a limit exists.”

“Hog slop,” Ira Crawford said.

“Look, even if we loaded the Army with coloreds, they’d end up in service units-the quartermaster corps and such. They probably wouldn’t fight and die like you and the missus seem to want em to.”

Near the big Caddy, you could’ve heard a cricket poot. Sue Beth started to cry, Ira cursed. They joined hands and walked back through the dusty lot to a dented Ford pickup loaded down with feed sacks.

“I am sorry about your son!” Mister JayMac called out.

“I bet,” said somebody unseeable in the crowd.

The Crawfords slammed opposite doors and rattled away in their spavined pickup.

“Git in, sir,” Darius said. “I’ll drive yall to the Royal.” He meant the Royal Hotel, a place with a restaurant supposedly even better than the Oglethorpe’s.

Off we rode. Mister JayMac sat next to Darius, brooding. Miss LaRaina jabbered away, happy that the Hellbenders had won and made a move in the standings.