Brittle Innings

35

The game that Saturday, the first of a three-game series with Opelika, started at five. A Fourth of July twin bill, with a barbecue in the parking lot as a special attraction, would conclude the series on Sunday. Anyway, after beaching his kayak and upending it on a pair of sawhorses near the buggy house, Henry dressed out and walked with me to McKissic Field about three hours in advance of the game.

Already, three funeral-home tents covered the barbecue pits dug on the south side of the stadium. At least a dozen workers-some black, some white-stoked the pits with hickory, oak, and charcoal. Meantime, the headless carcasses of three slick porkers sizzled in the pits, and a smell a thousand times more tempting than the one from Goober Pride rose above the canopies and the gunk-encrusted Brunswick-stew pots.

“Yankee Doodle Dandy,” Henry said. “Unfortunately, I’ve never been able to abide pork.”

Maybe so, I thought, but when you were with the Oongpekmut, you ate walrus, seal, sea lion, and beluga flesh. None of that fishy offal could’ve smelt half as good as our barbecue.

The closer we got to the stadium, though, the odder Mister JayMac’s preparations for the Fourth began to seem. Carpenters had built ramps from the parking lot to the concessions area and from there to the box seats behind our dugout. Just out of Tenkiller, Oklahoma, I’d never seen a boardwalk in my life-rickety piers didn’t convey the same flavor-but, looking back, I’d say these ramps had a lot in common with a promenade among the dunes at a beach resort. Mister JayMac’s workers had used sheets of plywood instead of abutting planks, though, and the crowd’s footfalls echoed like the hooves of cattle. Is this a ballpark or a lumberyard? I wondered as Henry and I entered. You could still hear hammering, and the whole deal seemed such a helter-skelter rush job it mystified-and irritated-almost everybody.

Mister JayMac met us near the batting cage.

“What’s going on?” Henry asked, nodding at the ramps and at the place where the carpenters had built a barricade and hung a sign: NO UNAUTHORIZED PERSONS BEYOND THIS POINT.

“Temporary renovations,” Mister JayMac said.

“Why would you wish to renovate temporarily, sir?”

“That’s none of your damned business.”

Henry looked stricken. “Pardon me,” he said sincerely.

“Loose lips sink ships,” Mister JayMac said. He rolled out the bromide as a kind of half-assed apology, but quickly turned on me. “Well, I see Tulipa’s given you your bat, Mr Boles. And a handsome, gaudy piece of timber it is. Too bad you won’t have a chance to break it in today.”

My surprise showed on my face.

“Put it in that rack,” Mister JayMac said, pointing to the dugout. When I’d racked my bat, he said, “And put your fanny to that plank.”

I sat down.

Henry, embarrassed for me, trotted out to right field to play long toss with Knowles.

“You don’t play today, Mr Boles,” Mister JayMac continued, coming into the dugout. “You broke curfew. You pulled a jilt on my grandniece, who went to no little trouble to fix you dinner. Breaking curfew gets you benched. Jilting Phoeb earns you my contempt. Have you two strong words to say in your own pitiful defense?”

I shook my head.

“Good. Because even if you could say it, Mr Boles, I wouldn’t care a good rip to hear it. Care to know the third reason you’ve forfeited a chance to play before Tulipa and her husband, folks who’d carry eye-witness word of your exploits to your mother?”

I just stared.

“No, I don’t imagine you would. Nonetheless, Mr Boles, you shall know it. In company with three men who should know better, and who therefore bear a greater culpability for this transgression than you, you did visit a section of Highbridge off-limits to every Hellbender.”

I just stared.

“Mr Curriden will not start at third today, nor come in at any time as a substitute. Mr Parris won’t pitch today, either as starter or reliever. Nor will Mr Mariani. Four players out, owing to the reckless egotism of a man I trusted and the sheeplike complicity of his stooges in crime. I begin to see how a hateful guttersnipe with a Charlie Chaplin mustache could seduce even the nation of Goethe.”

I lowered my head and shifted my butt.

“At four o’clock, Phoebe will be across the street at Hitch and Shirleen’s. Go see her. Find a way to excuse yourself and make her feel a bit better, then return to watch your teammates play one of the CVL’s three best clubs-even if they must do it with sixteen men instead of twenty.”

Mister JayMac handed me a lineup. He had Buck Hoey at short, Junior Heggie at third for Curriden, and Lamar Knowles at second for Junior. His starting pitcher-a bigger surprise than his substitutions and position shifts-was Pete Haystack Hay (“His butt goes by bulk”), who ordinarily came in as a late-inning fireman because his lack of stamina after eight or nine batters disqualified him as a starter. Sosebee and Nutter would have to carry the load when Hay surrendered to the hook; we had no other pitchers available because Ankers was scheduled to pitch Sunday.

“Uncle Jay said you’d slither over,” Phoebe said when I went to see her. “I figgered you’d sooner answer a altar call buck-naked, but, glory be, here you are.”

Because of the pending game, Hitch & Shirleen’s Neighborly Market had more than its usual share of customers. Hitch had hightailed it somewheres, but Shirleen was showing an old woman how to use her ration book, and a crew of burrheaded kids hung over the edge of the drink cooler like maybe it held a school of bait minnows. Phoebe and I would’ve had more privacy in the grandstands across the street. Literally.

“Well, Ichabod, s good to know you didn’t jes skip town,” Phoebe said for the entire premises to hear. “Sorry. I say Ichabod? I meant Boles. I git em mixed up sometimes, Boles n Ichabod, they sound so much alike.” Before I could react in any way to that, Phoebe spoke to the kids at the soft-drink box: “Yall git you a soda or drop that lid! Yo’re letting the cool out, wasting juice!”

The kids dropped the lid-wham!-and filed past me out the door. One little boy gave my ball uniform a quick second look, but the sight of it conjured no lasting magic for him.

I went to the glass countertop, my ear lobes as angry as infected tonsils, to make peace with Phoebe. She, though, had no hankering for easy terms.

“Don’t stand there. I’m gonna have to ring something up. Yo’re blocking my register.” I took a step back. “Lord, boy, why’re you wearing them spikes? Think it’s okay to pock-mark our noleum?” The Neighborly Market’s only linoleum ran between the shelf aisles; the heavy-traffic area next to the register and the drink cooler was unpainted concrete. “Take em off, Boles.” I’d never taken my ball shoes off in the market, and I’d visited it almost a dozen times since my first visit. “I’m not kidding, Boles.”

So I leaned into the counter and took off my spikes. This dropped me a half inch or so, but it still didn’t let Phoebe stand nose to nose with me, more like nose to Adam’s apple. On the other hand, emotionally I’d stepped into a trench and she’d climbed onto an awards stand. The cold concrete bit through my sanitaries.

“Go to the milk locker.” Phoebe nodded towards the rear of the register aisle. “Go on. I mean it.” I padded down the aisle to the milk locker. “Open it.” I did. “Yore supper’s on the shelf next to the aiggs. Take it out and bring it up here.” I saw a white china plate covered with wax paper, tied like a Christmas package with a cross of twine. I took the plate out of the locker and returned to the front counter with it. “They’s you a stool right there,” Phoebe said, nodding at a stool behind the counter, down from the register. “Set down there and eat. I hate for you to have to miss yore supper. Go on. I aint kidding. What I fixed for you last night, Boles, is too good to waste.”

I squeezed into the behind-the-counter space and sat down on the stool. Phoebe slapped a tin fork onto the countertop and roughly rang up the groceries of a woman who eyed me like I’d just answered an altar call naked. I untied the string holding the wax paper on the plate and found myself staring at a cold fried-chicken breast, a scoop of cold, semifurry mashed potatoes, and twenty or so green beans wearing sleeves of milky grease.

“Eat,” Phoebe said. “Eat.”

I picked up the fork.

“Oh, I suppose you want something to drink. Mrs Nagy, would you git Boles here a strawberry soda. He don’t really like em much, but neither do I.” Mrs Nagy fetched me a soda from the cooler. “Pop its cap off for him, please.” Mrs Nagy obliged, using her wet hand and sliding it across to me like a bomb needing quick disposal. Phoebe sacked her purchases, and Mrs Nagy skedaddled with a scowl.

“Now eat,” Phoebe said.

The chicken had meatiness and taste. I like cold chicken. But the potatoes gagged me the way whipped clay would’ve, and the green beans, under all their grease, had more strings than a textile loom. I forced beans and potatoes down, string by string and lump by lump. The soda helped.

“Now tell me you liked it,” Phoebe said.

I nodded that I had. In the case of the chicken, at least, I didn’t nod a lie. Phoebe took my fork and plate away from me and stowed them on a shelf at my back.

“Now say yo’re sorry, and mean it down to yore toe bones.”

I nodded my agreement to this too.

“That jes don’t git it.” Phoebe put a stubby pencil and a used envelope in front of me. “Tell me right.”

I wrote on the envelope back: Phoebe I’m sorry. Really.

“Tell me you won’t pull that kind of jackass stunt again.”

I scrawled, It wont happen again-promise promise promise! She took the envelope and read the message-a couple of times, a half dozen. Pretty soon she was staring through the words to her own disappointment and humiliation of the night before. A glazed-over sort of trance.

“Okay,” she said, snapping back. “Pology accepted.”

I breathed again, but the meal she’d fixed for me rested in my stomach like a bag of fractured bricks.

“Gramma Shirleen,” Phoebe called, “cmup here n tell this whangdoodle shortstop he aint God’s gift to Highbridge! Fore his head grows so big it swallows his ears!”