Brittle Innings

22

On the way to Opelika on Wednesday, the Brown Bomber had a blowout, and Jumbo bruised his thighs supporting the bus’s front bumper when the jack slipped. We lost our game against the Orphans that night and split with them in a doubleheader on the following day.

As we rolled into LaGrange on Friday, the air had a silken, sluggish feel. Its taste, falling from a sky more dirty-cream than blue, had a heavy rain tang. You don’t forget that taste, its dust-laying potential grabs you even at the crazy-making height of a drought.

“Bless it,” Mister JayMac said, “I don’t want a rainout.”

“Sir, if we uz primed to lose again, it’d be a blessing,” Fanning said. “For everbody.”

Mister JayMac whirled on him. “If us losing tonight would guarantee bumper crops, I’d still rather win and swallow the consequences than lose this one and wax fat!”

Darius and a few of us others dragged suitcases and duffels out of the Bomber’s luggage bins and passed them around to the guys they belonged to. Some Hellbenders walked to the houses of their host families. Others got picked up in fancy cars and driven there.

Jumbo and I, like Mutt-and-Jeff drummers, hiked through town to the Lafayette Hotel. The desk clerk wore a white shirt and the kimono-swirled vest of a blackjack dealer. He had an Army recruit’s haircut, though, and didn’t at first answer Jumbo’s questions about our reservations because we’d spooked him barging in. New there, he had a nellyboyish way about him that may’ve explained how he’d sidestepped the draft.

“ClerVALL,” he said finally, flipping through his book. “ClerVALL, -VALL, -VALL. Mmmmmm. That’s French, isn’t it?”

“With one -vall, it could be,” Jumbo said. “My father hailed from Switzerland.” The boom in his voice startled the clerk crapless all over again.

“Oh, yes,” he managed. “Yall’re ballplayers. Hellbenders, no less. Room 322. Mr Suiter has you down for three nights.”

“Key, please,” Jumbo said.

“Do you play when it rains?” the clerk asked. “Or is that, ah, football?”

“Football,” Jumbo said.

“Then yall may get a rest this weekend. Storms’re coming-tonight, tomorrow, who knows? Swell view of Lafayette Square from the third floor. Hope yall enjoy.”

We trudged the stairs because the elevator didn’t work. Our room had two single beds, a chest of drawers with a metal basin and a china pitcher on top of it, and ugly water-stained wallpaper: chrysanthemums, over and over.

As per usual, Jumbo dragged a length of clothesline from his suitcase and rigged a curtain out of it and the grass mat he’d also packed. Ouch. I thought we’d built an iffy sort of bond, a truce with doorways in it. For now, though, he didn’t draw the mat across its string.

Instead, he dumped his books onto the tufted bedspread of the bed nearer the door, then lined the books by height along the baseboard there. He’d finished On Being a Real Person our first night in Opelika. Now, he eeny-meeny-minied his books and wound up with Saroyan’s The Human Comedy. He lowered himself to his bed, twanged the bedsprings getting comfortable, and flapped the cover open.

Me, I lay down for a nap.

While Jumbo read, I felt the lonely afternoon grumbles of thunder tremble my blood and tug at the horizons. I slept, but the thunder seemed even closer than Jumbo’s raspy breathing, proof Mister JayMac’s dreaded rainout had marched to the very edge of town.

“Let’s go.” Jumbo’s hand shook me. I jarred awake, muzzy and sweat-doused, thinking I’d lain down in Tenkiller and awakened to a loudspeaker broadcasting tornado news. Jumbo’s yellow eyes bored a hole in my heart and dripped the tough waxy fact of LaGrange into it. Home was far away.

Two hours before game time, Jumbo and I suited up in the hotel and strolled to the ballpark in our street shoes, our spikes slung around our necks like ice skates. Folks boggled at us, but we ignored their boggling. Most knew a Gendarme-Hellbender showdown loomed, and some recognized Jumbo from last year’s games.

By the weekend of our first series with the Gendarmes, every smart fan in the Chattahoochee Valley knew this year’s flag belonged to Highbridge, LaGrange, or Opelika. Eufaula, despite splitting a four-game series with us a week ago, had had a rotten month. Now LaGrange and Opelika shared first place with identical eighteen-and-thirteen records. We were a game back, at seventeen and fourteen.

Nothing unusual about the tightness of the race or the fever in the streets-banners in store windows, rosin-potato vendors in front of the stadium peddling spuds from iron cauldrons black as pitch. One man’d parked his jalopy pickup out front, with a tailgate sign reading UN-BRELLAS-50 Sents and rifle stacks of umbrellas-rough-carved handles, polka-dot fabric panels-in its load bed.

“Git you a un-brella!” he yelled from the pickup. “Git ready for a Dixie dirtsoaker! Buy from me!”

A guard let Jumbo and me in through a player gate, and we walked to the visitors’ quarters. You felt like a hometowner in that locker room, though. It had benches the color of ripe wheat, spanking-new lockers, and shower fixtures as coppery bright as new-minted pennies. No stale sweat smell. No mildew or fust. (The toilet stalls had doors!)

Jumbo and I put on our spikes and finally wound up in the outfield. A few early-bird fans gave us thumbs-down signs and catcalled. Loosening up, I admired the clean dark-green fence panels, the press box behind home plate, the light batteries set around us like humongous electric sunflowers.

Jumbo and I played long toss, throwing pop-ups that seemed ready to vanish into the blue at the heart of the surrounding cloud attack. Thunder went on mumbling. Polka-dot umbrellas sprouted around us like toadstools, the air smelled moist, the temperature dropped into the low eighties.

Mister JayMac showed up a half hour before game time and hit us infield.

“Pray for a rainout!” a fan shouted. “You suckers!”

Mister JayMac called all his starters in. He gave Little Cuke Gordon, the head umpire, his lineup card. He told us to come out swinging against Sundog Billy Wallace-because “If you cannonade Sundog early, he’ll buckle.”

“He’s greatly chasable,” Mister JayMac said. “The longer he hangs around, though, the guttier he feels. You’ll have to skin Satan to uproot him.”

Unexpected trouble with the PA system, or scoreboard crew, or something. Emmett Strock, the Gendarme manager, came over to tell Mister JayMac it might be another twenty minutes before Little Cuke could shout, “Play ball!” Would we like to take a few more minutes of infield?

“Criminy,” Mister JayMac said. “What a charade. Anybody wants more warm-up time, hit the field!”

Junior and I sprinted out. Curriden ambled over to third, a papa dog behind his puppies. Dunnagin trotted to the plate to catch in, and Darius, to the surprise of the whole crowd, followed him over to rap out fungoes. Jumbo didn’t take first, though. He sent Sudikoff out and vanished into the dugout. I figured he didn’t feel too well himself, a result of Tuesday’s accident and a big dip in the barometer reading.

Even so, Junior and I gave the crowd an eyeful, pirouetting around second, and Jumbo’s weird disappearance slipped from our minds.

“Five minutes to game time!” Little Cuke Gordon shouted to both benches. “No more delays!”

We trotted in. The Gendarmes trotted out. Jumbo wasn’t in our dugout, he’d up and melted on us. If he didn’t show up before Wallace threw his first pitch, we’d have to pinch hit for him, losing him for the entire game. Mister JayMac grabbed me and wrung my arm like a wet shirt sleeve.

“Find Clerval. He’s batting fifth, so hurry!”

I knew my way around the Prefecture about as well as I did King Tut’s tomb, and in that stadium, in my Highbridge uniform, I felt about as welcome as a colored at a cross burning. Jumbo wasn’t in the locker room. I banged out into a hallway leading to the concession stands and ticketstiles. I spike-walked through these areas, but still no Jumbo.

The Gendarmes got their balky PA system working-if it’d ever balked. A voice like a woodwind reed began to announce the starting lineups. Jiminy! What if I didn’t make it back before Wallace stepped to the rubber? Mister JayMac’d lose two prime players to the same damnfool wild-goose chase.

Behind a hotdog booth, I climbed a ladder towards the top of the grandstands and the press box. Up there, I’d be able to scan every inch of the stadium. Climbing in spikes scared me-they kept slipping off or catching on the ladder rungs-but I monkeyed up em as fast as I could. The evening sky opened out, and the alleyway under me narrowed like a pit.

Once on the roof, an acre of salty gravel stuck in asphalt, I didn’t have to scan anything. Jumbo stood near the pole of the central battery of lights. Behind him, thunderheads reared against a pink wash of sky, like trout blood thinned in a basin of water. Charged dust hung in the air, the streaks of hanging dust like a battle line of angels. Take away the thunderheads, though, and the dark hadn’t begun to settle yet; meanwhile, the breeze skating across the mock-beach of the roof carried on it the smells of old bark and minty pigleaf.

Jumbo had his back to this wind, his hair lifted and flew. He’d spread his arms, like an angel on the brink of soaring, or like somebody crucified.

Somewhere, a groundskeeper yanked a switch. All the lamps above Jumbo, eye after stinging eye, leapt on. Facets. Dozens of facets. They mirror-blazed like the compound eyes of a giant dragonfly. Brilliant. The blaze left me with shivering mother-of-pearl oyster shells at the back of my walloped eyeholes.

It seeped into me again-sight-in a slow-motion flash. But, lordy, Jumbo: His eyes turned silver. Then copper. Then gold. Then glassy amber, like a startled cat’s. His body jerked, rejerked, and jitterbugged without a single motion of either foot-like he’d convulsed from the knees up. His arms stiffened and flopped, and did it again, the way a man in the chair at Reidsville would twitch when our paid executioner got the go-ahead and slapped him a scorching jolt.

Thunders cracked over the stadium. People gasped a long “Ooooooh,” crooning their amaze over a fireworks show. Then, whatever’d happened to Jumbo-his rooftop recharging-stopped happening. It cycled itself through. It ended and let him go, and Jumbo lurched a stagger step towards me. And another. I wanted to scuttle crabwise back over the roof and down. But I leaned into the wind, grabbed the front of Jumbo’s shirt, and yanked him step by step to the ladder.

I waved Jumbo onto it. Its tubes shifted as soon as he’d climbed on. Him first, me second. Me going first would’ve been too much like Jack rushing in terror down the beanstalk ahead of the giant. What if Jumbo slipped? Falling, he’d strip me off too and ride me to a screaming marriage with the concrete. So Jumbo went first, and I pecked along after him, spiking his head softly every time he froze up.

Anyway, we made it down and clattered into our dugout only moments before Little Cuke Gordon cried, “Play ball, dammit!”

Mister JayMac had me leading off again, so I hurried to set myself in the batter’s box, still juiced from my escapade and stunned weak-kneed by the nearness of disqualification. Then Sundog Billy did ego surgery on me with his major league curve, striking me out on five pitches.

The storm-with all its rumblesome witchery-divided and drifted in lightning-figured banks around the Prefecture. Like the Red Sea parting. A miracle of sorts.

With that split storm chewing at the town’s edges, Jumbo played like a man on fire, his best game so far on this road trip: a pair of solo shots and a two-bagger off the right-field wall. But, Jumbo’s blasts aside, we blew that game and wound up two full games behind the Gendarmes, with no report yet on how Opelika’d fared.

In the clubhouse, Mister JayMac said we had to win both Saturday’s and Sunday’s games. If we did, we’d leave town tied with the Gendarmes for first. If we split them, we’d gain no ground. And if we lost em both…

Me, I really had the blues. Despite everybody-but-Jumbo’s dead bats, we’d gone into the last half-inning locked at two all. Then, with two outs and a chance at an extra at bat, I’d pumped a throw over Jumbo, sending three guys in the stands bailing for cover. My error let Fat Boy Fortenberry, a pinch hitter, score the winning run from second. Fortenberry! With his love handles, basset-hound gait, and asthma wheeze.

Hoey came over to console me: “Couldn’t cut the mustard, could you, Dumbo? Shows what you’re really made of-Twinkie filling.”

I shucked my gear and ducked into the shower room. Jumbo scrammed, and no one under the spigots said “Boo!” to me. As I dressed, the only guys to say, “Don’t worry bout it, you’ll pop em tomorrow,” were Knowles and Dunnagin.

Dunnagin gripped my shoulder as I buttoned my shirt. “If we’d put a few runs up, one flubbed throw wouldn’t’ve meant nada. This bunch still owes you. Boot away five or six more, and Hoey might have a case.”

I footed it alone from the stadium to the Lafayette. The storms that’d missed the city had regrouped. You heard them bellyaching above the copses of magnolias and yaupon holly southwest of the ballpark. Sheet and candle-wick lightning flickered on the diamond-cut tops of those trees. Snaky cloud tentacles reached into the sky over LaGrange and fanned long fringes of blackness into the gaps behind them.

Even before I’d turned onto the square facing our hotel, it’d begun to rain. It bucketed down.

Upstairs in room 322, Jumbo sprawled on the floor, doing Army-style crossover toe touches. The room had a thin carpet, and it and every other piece of fiber near him, including the mat he’d strung, reeked with his body odor. Why the exercise? He’d just played every inning of a killer game.

Jumbo nodded at me, but kept working. “I’m discharging an excess of energy. Otherwise, I won’t be able to sleep.” Then he stopped. “You’re drenched, Daniel.”

I sneezed. Outside, heaven’s waterworks emptied into the gutters. I shed my clothes, dried myself, and wrapped a bed sheet around me. I took down the grass mat dividing our room, rolled it up, slid it under Jumbo’s bed, and flopped down on my own. I faced away, clenching like a rolypoly. For the first time since Tenkiller, I shivered with cold, not fear.

Jumbo didn’t say anything. After a while, he got up and shuffled down the hall to the men’s bath. When he returned, he shut the light and lay down on the other bed-without a word, but also without trying to hang his curtain again.