Brittle Innings

25

Mister JayMac dropped by our room at eight the next morning to tell us the Gendarmes’ owner, Mr John Sayigh, wanted to play a doubleheader that afternoon to make up for yesterday’s rainout. The weather report-sunny with high cumulus-promised us a shot at it.

“What of the field?” Jumbo asked.

“The groundskeepers got a tarp over the infield on Friday night. Outfield’s pretty scjuishy, though, and it’ll take some doing to firm up some spots where the tarp didn’t do its job. Mr Sayigh suggests volunteers from both our clubs show up at the park within the next hour or so to tackle the drying-out.”

“Yessir.”

“Begging your pardons, but both you fellas look like you could use some drying out too. Didn’t go honky-tonking last night, did you? A little arm-wrasslin with John Barleycorn?”

“We went to a movie,” Jumbo said.

Three movies, I thought.

Mister JayMac turned to me. “Didn’t you sleep? You look about as peaked as I’ve ever seen you.”

“He’ll look swell after some labor on Mr Sayigh’s field,” Jumbo said.

“Let me stress,” said Mister JayMac, frown lines between his eyes, “that neither Mr Sayigh nor I expect anyone to work who’d rather idle the morning away or go to worship services. In fact, if you don’t want to assist with field repairs, I’d like yall to come with me to church.”

“We’ll assist,” Jumbo said.

“All right. If everything goes well, today’s opener will start at two. The Gendarmes’ front office plans to announce the time over the radio and pass out flyers to folks leaving church. I expect a good crowd.”

“Yessir,” Jumbo said.

I found the empty hide of the stuffed goat the desk clerk’d brought me yesterday and handed it to Mister JayMac.

“What’s this?” he said.

“A toy,” Jumbo said. “Please return it to Mr Hoey, who must have sent it to our room in an unfortunate mix-up.”

“Looks a little the worse for wear,” Mister JayMac said. It did. That goat was dishrag-limp. Mister JayMac turned the empty skin over in his hands and said good-bye. I halted him again and gave him the goat’s picked-off eye buttons. Mister JayMac wrinkled his forehead and left.

Jumbo and I suited out in our flannels, splurged on a taxi, and rode to the Prefecture. True to Mister JayMac’s word, a half dozen groundskeepers’d beaten us to the task. With rakes, brooms, zinc buckets, wooden drags, and burlap bags of sand or sawdust, they struggled to repair the field. Jumbo and I went to work with three other Hellbenders-Dunnagin, Knowles, and Sudikoff-and maybe ten of the Gendarmes. Most of the guys treated this shit detail as a party, cracking wise and singing in rounds. It went okay.

Nowadays, you’ve got beaucoups of ways to dry out a field. You can sprinkle this more or less new-fangled chemical product called Diamond Dry around and let it absorb the water. You can vacuum up standing puddles with a machine. Or pour gasoline on the wet spots, flip a match in, and boil some of the moisture away. (Course, you can also burn down your ballpark.) Hell, nowadays you can hire a helicopter to hover over the swamp like a flying blow-dryer.

Back then, though, nobody’d heard of Diamond Dry or outdoor vacuums. Because of rationing and the hazard to your stands, no one would’ve thought of using gasoline. Helicopters? Ha! Not until ’39 did Sikorsky-first name, Igor-make one of those ungainly contraptions fly.

So you used other methods. You helped your grounds-keepers by wielding brooms to spread the water out, by forming bucket brigades to scoop it up and dump it elswhere, and by digging runoff trenches. That Sunday morning, some of us swept, some of us bailed, some of us scattered sawdust or hay around. By noon, Jumbo and I’d burnt our energy reserves down to fumes, but our labors guaranteed a game or two that afternoon, and the wives of some of the Gendarme players brought us a covered-dish dinner. Jumbo ate for the first time since his rooftop juicing on Friday night: creamed sweet corn, snap beans, yellow-squash casserole, tomato slices, popcorn okra, and creamed potatoes. The food was lukewarm, the women’d toted it so far, but it tasted like manna to me, even the meat dishes Jumbo wouldn’t let himself touch.

That afternoon, our restoking didn’t seem to help that much-not at first, anyway. Jumbo and I played like kittens overdosed on catnip. Ordinarily, Mariani pitched like a street fighter, nicking the edges of home plate, stalking around the mound with his teeth gritted and his eyes afire, throwing heat when the batter expected finesse, and vice versa. None of these tactics worked for Mariani in the opener. The Gendarmes boarded him like fleas on a long-haired spaniel, then roughed up Parris and Hay in relief roles. We lost the opener, six to two, and fell two games behind LaGrange. Another loss’d shake us hard. It could take two weeks, even a full month, to regain the ground we’d given up, if we could regain it at all. Gendarme fans, especially the coloreds in the outfield bleachers, carried on like their boys’d already snatched the CVL pennant out of Mister JayMac’s pocket. I felt sure that some of the raucous crew at last night’s monster flicks were tap-dancing and thigh-slapping out there.

In the dugout between games, Hoey sidled up and sat down next to me. He popped me with some sort of rag, then dropped it over my thigh and leaned back.

“Hear you got a telegram from Mama yesterday.”

The rag on my thigh was the toy goat I’d gutted.

“Hearing from Mama didn’t inspire you to new heights of glory on the ball field today, Dumbo.”

I flipped the fake goat skin out onto the infield grass.

“Looky there-flies almost as well as your namesake, don’t it?” Hoey squeezed my knee. “Maybe Mama’s words weren’t meant to inspire, maybe they were meant to sting.”

“Lay off the boy,” Double Dunnagin said.

Hoey ignored him. “You were a regular sojer boy up at the plate in that last one.”

If I hadn’t gone aught for three, with a deliberate walk in the eighth to load the bases and set up a rally-killing double play, I might’ve figured his remark for praise. What it meant was, I’d stood in the batter’s box like a soldier at attention, never taking my bat off my shoulder. It never crossed Hoey’s mind-or Sloan’s, or Evans’s, or Sosebee’s-he and his wiseacre chums had slid a banana peel under my confidence.

Mister JayMac came into the dugout. “This game’s do or die. And I don’t expect Darius to drive a load of stiffs back to Highbridge. Yall follow?”

“Yessir,” four or five guys more or less mumbled.

“In the debacle jes past,” Mister JayMac said, “yall played worse n I ever thought you could. Play up to your potential, not down to your shortcomings, and we’ll escape with our limbs intact and our hopes alive. Need I say more?”

“NOSIR!” most of the team shouted.

“All right. I’m deferring here and now to Darius, who has some interesting intelligence for you.”

“Nother nigger nugget,” Fadeaway told Sosebee. Mister JayMac didn’t hear. Otherwise, Fadeaway would’ve spent the evening hand-washing our jocks.

“Gundy’s pitching this game,” Darius told us, sitting on the dugout ledge with his hands hanging between his legs like dark plumb bobs. He avoided eye contact. “I’ve seen him pitch befo, and I’ve watched his warm-ups.”

Where, I suddenly wondered, had Darius spent the night? In the Brown Bomber? At a cousin’s or an in-law’s somewhere in or around LaGrange? I couldn’t’ve told you.

“Gundy tips his curve,” Darius said.

“Tips it?” Sloan said. “My, my. Usually, you’ve got to be in the batter’s box to tip one. Gundy must be faster than the word God to tip one of his own pitches.”

“Mr Sloan, that’s enough,” Mister JayMac said.

“Gundy telegraphs his curve.” Darius looked Sloan in the eye, and Sloan started picking lint off his sleeve. “He’ll thow you a fastball, a change, or a knuckler out of his glove-ever time, no surprises. You got to figure which it is as it’s riding in. I cain’t hep you there. But if you cain’t tell a knuckler’s dip-dip-shimmy-shimmy from a fastball’s straight-in zip, they’s eye doctors you should visit.”

“Unless you’re a pitcher,” Hoey said. “Nothing scares a hitter worse than a half-blind moundsman.”

Darius smiled. “True nough. But Gundy’s curve, now-he’s gon tip you to it sho as sunrise, gon take the ball to a place back of and under his right butt cheek and twiddle it there till he’s got his grip. If Gundy drops his ball hand behind him, yall’re gon see a curve-ever time.”

“That could be a ruse,” Nutter said. “When he goes back to his glove for the windup, he could regrip. A hitter thinking curve and lunging at something else would look a fool.”

“Mr Nutter, you’ve been to the bigs,” Darius said. “You know sech things. Gundy aint been up and most prolly never gon to be. In this business, he’s as perdictable as a hell-fire sermon, and nobody on the Darmes, not even Mr Strock, yet had the sense to cotch him out on it n jerk him straight.”

“Anything else, Darius,” Mister JayMac said.

“Nosir. Important thing is, study where his ball hand goes fo he winds, then cat-pounce any curve in the zone.” He slipped off the dugout ledge and glided away.

If any other CVL team had had a colored scout, management would’ve milked him of his skinny and passed it on without telling where it’d come from. Mister JayMac took another tack, whether from social conscience or from some sort of weird snag Darius had him in, I couldn’t say just then.

Fadeaway pitched the second game. He blanked the Gendarmes through six, using a fadeaway and a perky fastball to bumfuzzle Mr Strock’s gang and keep the homies solemn as a surgeon at a recent patient’s burial. Meanwhile, the rest of us teed off on Gundy’s telegraphed curve. We also managed to decipher most of his other pitches before they reached the plate.

Gundy, shell-shocked to near zombiehood after less than four innings, trudged to the showers to a concert of boos. We picked up on his reliever where we’d finished with Gundy, the rhythm of hitting in us like a boogie-woogie tune, the ‘Darmes’ dashed hopes-for a sweep-making them more stumblebummish the longer the game went on.

Even the run they got in the seventh, a rain-bringing Ed Bantling pop-up the wind pushed into the right-field stands, didn’t set them afire. His homer struck even Bantling as flukish. He trotted to second backwards, watching the ball rise and rise, in unreal stages, like a Ping-Pong ball on an air-hose jet, until it finally stopped bounding higher and fell on a sudden slant into the bleachers. As he crossed the plate, Banding had begun to laugh, but more like a soldier who’s barely escaped a bullet than one who’s just lobbed a mortar right on the enemy.

And for good reason too. We beat LaGrange thirteen to one and saved ourselves the embarrassment of going home on a losing streak.