Brittle Innings

38

Angus Road and the McKissic House estate had guards-Camp Penticuff MPs and specially assigned soldiers in battle dress-posted all around them.

Darius drove us past this armed picket line and up the curving drive to the boardinghouse, then along the grassy track between the boardinghouse and the wood-shingled carriage house, then past that garage straight down the clovery slope towards Hellbender Pond. Every player on the team was aboard the bus, not just McKissic House tenants.

The pond’s grassy bank boasted three open-sided tents with striped roofs and several trestle-legged picnic tables set out under them. A bank of big electric fans, powered by a noisy gas-powered generator, flanked the tents to keep us picnickers cool and mosquito-free. FDR and his party had already claimed one of these tents, and Marines or a Secret Service detail had furnished it with dining-room chairs and the back seat of the President’s touring car, which they’d removed and set in front of a table draped with a linen cloth and laid with china and crystalware.

Kizzy and a rail-thin part-time butler had put out barbecue and Brunswick stew from the pits at the ball field-also cole slaw, pickles, olives, deviled eggs, and suchlike fixings-but not on FDR’s table. He had a basket packed with fried chicken, California wine, and French bread. He didn’t like the vinegary tang of Suthren-style barbecue.

Darius parked not far from the tents, but kept his hand on the door lever, holding us in. “Yall knew Mister JayMac had a to-do planned out here. He jes didn’t know if the President tended to stay fo it. Looks like he has. Last thing Mister JayMac told me, if Mister Franklin stayed, was to ast yall to behave yosefs and do ol Highbridge proud.”

Fadeaway Ankers said, “What would do old Highbridge proud is not have a uppity woolhead telling grown white men what to do. Jesus.”

Wham. Everybody on the Bomber went tight-jawed. Darius’d spoken by way of the rearview, about as boy-humble as he had it in him to be. Now he cut his eyes to one side, and all the rest of us Hellbenders could see of him in the mirror was the top of his head.

“As good as you throw,” Charlie Snow told Fadeaway, “you still aint made it to grown yet. And Darius wasn’t telling nobody nothing, he was passing a message.”

You expected Charlie Snow to field his center-field spot like a two-legged whitetail and to clutch-hit the team out of jams, but you didn’t expect him to open his mouth a passel, and ordinarily he obliged your expectations.

“I jes chunked a three-hitter at Opelika,” Fadeaway said. “How much more grown can a fella git?”

“Arm’s mature,” Snow said. “Head’s a baby.”

Muscles got up. “And the rest of us’re tired of listening to this hoo-hah. Let’s party with the President. Just mind your p’s and q’s, dammit!”

Darius levered the door open, and we began filing off the bus.

Off the Bomber, we edged towards the tents. Nobody had the nerve or the bumpkin grace to angle towards FDR’s roadster sofa and Park Avenue table setting, though. At the same time, no one could resist glancing over that way and trying to imagine what the President of the United States had to discuss with the McKissics, the Elshtains, or Miss LaRaina and Phoebe. Once or twice, the Great Man smiled and nodded or wagged his cigarette holder in a folksy greeting.

As Fadeaway sauntered around the Bomber’s nose with Evans and Sosebee, Darius put a hand on his shoulder. When he saw who’d touched him, Fadeaway’s nose wrinkled, and he triggered himself for curses, maybe even fisticuffs.

“Tell me what you think woolhead means.” Darius’s voice wasn’t much below its normal volume, but the generator and the box fans kept the other picnickers from hearing.

“Lemme tell you what uppity means,” Fadeaway said. “You could learn two new words jes by looking in a mirror.”

“I know more words than you got memories,” Darius said. “What woolhead means, Mister Ankers, is you aint got the belly to speak out nigger, or the class to call my name.”

Quickly and quietly, Sosebee grabbed Fadeaway’s arms from behind. “Easy, kid. Remember who-all’s here.”

“Remember this instead,” Darius said. “If it got figgered on sense and soundness stead of what it is, you’d come up the biggest nigger in town. Watch I don’t whup yo red ass black.” He stood glaring at Fadeaway when most folks, delivered of such a squelch, would’ve swaggered away.

Henry leaned over his shoulder. “Enough, Mr Satterfield. This is no time for a physical collision.”

“Sho,” Darius said. “Clision time jes never quite comes round, do it?” He pocketed his hands, backed away from the players stalled in front of the Bomber, and hiked up the slope to his apartment.

“Hey!” Kizzy called from one of the tents. “You, Darius, don’t you want no victuals?”

He just kept walking.

“Uppity nigger,” Fadeaway said under his breath.

Henry and I and the other Hellbenders ate. The family men had their families there, and more than a few-Buck Hoey and his boys, Charlie Snow and his childless wife, Turkey Sloan and his freckle-faced teenage daughter-ventured out on the pond in johnboats to fish.

At Mister JayMac’s prompting, Henry removed his kayak from the sawhorses near the buggy house, fetched it down to the pond under one arm, and demonstrated for the President how a man his size-the swatter of a “monsterish” home run-could paddle to and fro among the anglers’ boats with hardly a telltale ripple and not even one fish-disturbing splash. By this time, Mister JayMac’d coaxed me into the heart of FDR’s picnic circle, with the Elshtains, the Pharram females, and a few fussy suit types from D.C. All eyes followed Henry’s silken progress over the pond’s cocoa scum.

“Astonishing so large a man can move with that agility,” FDR said. “How’d he come by the kayak?”

“He says he built it,” Mister JayMac said. “And I’ve no cause to doubt him. Look how he handles it.”

“Indeed, if I could handle Congress half so well, I’d sleep more and haggle less with the likes of Senator George. God knows, I envy Mr Clerval’s finesse with the big stick, whether a ball bat or a kayak paddle.”

Mr Roosevelt had plenty of finesse with words. I milled about close enough to his car-seat divan to catch a lot of what he said, but the Elshtains and Miss LaRaina monopolized the time he didn’t give to the McKissics.

I marveled at Miss Giselle. With a glint in her eye, she watched Henry kayak and chatted with the President. How could she lap Mr Roosevelt in such honey-tongued politeness when his wife’s Christian name gagged her like ammonia ice?

“It’s my view Mussolini’s doomed,” Colonel Elshtain broke into their stateside chitchat. “Even he must know it. The air strike on Rome last month had to’ve told him so.”

“Il Duce’s an evil man,” Miss Giselle said, “but must we destroy the Holy See to uproot him? Is it necessary, sir, to bomb to rubble both the Vatican and the monuments of Rome to unseat this petty despot?”

“Not at all,” FDR said. “Nor shall we do so. I’ve urged the Vatican to try to get him to declare Rome an open city-to remove all military bases and personnel in and about Rome to the countryside, and to desist from using the city’s railroad facilities as reprovisioning conduits for either Hitler’s boys or the Italian infantry. If Benito listens to reason, Rome survives unscathed. If not, well, to my mind there’s not one Roman statue or one relic in the Vatican worth the blood of a single American soldier.”

Phoebe pulled me away from the presidential divan. We stalked along the pond, under the long banana-green fingers of a weeping willow, and through a hand-grenade scatter of cones from a magnolia tree farther up the bank. A quartet of Hellbenders-Sosebee, Dunnagin, Hay, and Parris-crooned “The Music Goes Round and Round,” “If I Didn’t Care,” and “Making Whoopee,” among other corny numbers, a capella. The clang of horseshoes in a pair of facing pits near the buggy house echoed like anchors bumping a ship’s hull.

“Bravo!” the President cried after one of the quartet’s songs. “Splendid, gentlemen!”

“I guess he’s all right,” Phoebe said, nodding downslope at the President’s tent. “For a New York swank.”

He seemed all right to me. I didn’t know you could, or even should, try to find fault with the President. Which was why Sloan’s snotty poem aboard the Bomber had made such an impression on me. To me, FDR was like a king. For the biggest part of my life, no one else had held his office.

“I know where you went the other night when you didn’t show up for dinner,” Phoebe said. “Penticuff Strip.”

I looked at my shoes. Her great-uncle knew where I’d spent Friday evening. So did most of my teammates. At a picnic, you just naturally overheard allegations, brags, gossip.

“Actually, it uz worse than that,” Phoebe said. “The Wing and Thigh, a chicken place n chippy house.”

The quartet crooning for FDR had just eased in to “Making Whoopee,” a wink-and-slink version with lots of eye rolling and so on. I turned red from Phoebe’s remark and from the risqué gist of the song. What’d Phoebe know about a chippy house, for God’s sake? For that matter, what did I?

“You lose your cherry?”

I looked at her like she’d asked me if I’d been conceived and delivered a bastard.

“I ast, Did some low woman on the Strip git yore cherry?”

The urge hit me to walk away. But a sudden and ripening hunch that walking away would cut me off from Phoebe forever reversed it. I had to answer her, and answer straight, so I shook my head, thankful my dummyhood spared me the mess-and also the tail-tucking-of going into detail.

“You swear?”

I nodded. Curriden’s money’d bought me nothing but a knot on the head and a broken chain of shameful memories.

“If that’s true, Daniel Boles, you better kiss me.”

It’d been true my whole acne-plagued adolescence, but no young female’d ever hinted that my intact cherry entitled me to a Public Display of Affection. Well, semipublic: the branches of that magnolia half-hid us from the merrymakers by the pond.

Phoebe put her hands on my skinny flanks and reached up on her toes to give me a kiss. I bent to get it. It tasted a little like barbecue sauce and Nehi creme soda, but more like the kitten breath and the dreamful hunger of a fifteen-year-old girl with more heart than slickness. I liked that kiss. It fed, or seemed to feed, almost all of Phoebe into me, the fizzy soda of her hunger, her mouth, her eyes, her breast buds, her armpits, even the commonplace mystery of her sex. I grabbed her and drove the kiss on-harder, more acrid-sweet, ever more puzzlesome to us both.

Tiptoe to keep it going, Phoebe snapped off a blue-darter of a fart. The kickback shoved her teeth into mine with a lightninglike click. The kiss ended then, but I’d lived years since it began, and that little poot, instead of rendering our kiss vile or comical, opened the moment out for me in a funny way. It was like Phoebe’d handed me her diary or walked into my bedroom without a stitch of clothing. I felt singled out, honored, and it befuddled me-expelled me back into the numbing hurly-burly of my Hellbender teammates-when she broke free and hugged herself.

“What you gonna do? That goopy Brunswick stew. I eat two spoonfuls and that happens.”

I moved to comfort her-not that she needed comforting, more like distracting-and to thieve another kiss. But Mister JayMac, or somebody else with a gale-force pucker, whistled, and Phoebe dragged me by the hand out from under the magnolia’s brittle awning into the spread-out bruise of a Fourth of July sunset.

“Yall get down here!” Mister JayMac called. “Pronto!”

The President’s flunkies, and some ballplayers, had packed his touring car, reinstalling the back seat so he and his party could return to Warm Springs for the night. Next day, he’d fly to Washington to jump back into harness as commander-in-chief; then, the coming Friday, while the Hellbenders played the first of a four-game set against the Linenmakers, U.S. and British paratroopers would jump into Sicily to lay the groundwork for an Allied invasion of Italy.

Side by side-but not hand in hand-Phoebe and I ambled downslope to the President’s open-topped car. Motorcycles straddled by MPs already flanked it, and soldiers in helmets and battle fatigues-right out of a March of Time newsreel-held sentinel posts all along a snaky line from the pond to McKissic House to Angus Road. The Elshtains, Miss LaRaina, and the McKissics stood beside the car speaking their good-byes.

Below one of the tents, near the water, a fistfight broke out. Ballplayers and MPs rushed toward the mayhem. Grown men shouted like hooligans. Kids on the grounds hurried to find a sane adult to shield them from whatever’d begun to happen. The two men fighting locked each other around the neck and bent at the waist like recruits doing a peculiar type of calisthenics. They grappled, they fell down, they thrashed like freshly dug earthworms.

“Bust his lip for him, Muscles!”

“Come on, Reese!”

“Hit him! Hit him! Hit him!”

The grapplers-Musselwhite and Curriden-got to their feet again, staggered to the pond’s verge, toppled, rolled into the water, came back up streaming and sputtering and wrestling, a pair of our best players-fellas right up there with Snow and Clerval-acting like infantile yahoos. The splashing and cursing continued so long and loud it even began to embarrass the President’s security people, who’d positioned themselves around his touring car like bank guards around a Wells Fargo wagon. At last, four MPs slogged into the water to put an end to the fracas. One of them, for his trouble, caught a knee in the groin, and the rest went into a domino drop that prompted even some of their buddies to hoohah.

“Hey!” Turkey Sloan shouted. “You’re scaring the fish!”

Henry appeared in the hullabaloo near the water. Chinese lanterns strung among the tents flickered in a breeze-blown dance behind him. He elbowed his way to the pond’s edge, waded in like Gulliver, and collared Muscles and Curriden without getting pulled to his knees himself. He dragged the lummoxes to shore, one to a hand, like a fisher bringing in a pair of salmon-freighted nets. He kept coming in with them until, side by side on their hands and knees, they gasped on the grass just below the farthest tent.

“There are combats enough about this planet,” Henry said. “Doesn’t the significance of this occasion”-gesturing toward FDR-“inspire you to at least a mean civility? I am shamed for every Hellbender here.”

Curriden and Muscles gasped and sputtered.

Beside FDR’s car, Mister JayMac said, “Sir, he speaks for me too. I hope you’ll forgive-”

“Forget it, Jay,” Mr Roosevelt said. “Boys will be boys. High spirits and high stakes are a volatile mix, eh? We’re all susceptible to a bout of intemperance these days.”

“They’re out of Wednesday’s game against Cottonton,” Mister JayMac said.

“Not on my account, I hope. I’m inclined to believe their infra-dig donnybrook reflects a long and vexing day. Go easy. Roll out the velvet.”

“They’re suspended. You wouldn’t hang a medal around an erring battle captain’s neck either, sir.”

“Hear, hear,” Colonel Elshtain said.

FDR laughed. Surprisingly, he caught sight of Phoebe and me. “Ah, Miss Pharram, Mr Boles, fine evening for a stroll. I bid you a pleasant farewell.”

Colonel Elshtain said, “Mr President, if you would.” He and Miss Tulipa traded a look, and FDR regarded me like I was a kid hospitalized with tuberculosis. My stomach did a sudden trout flop. My fingers chilled blue.

“You played sharp as a blade today, Daniel,” Mr Roosevelt told me. “You’ve a splendid future ahead of you.”

I offered a strangled croak, trying not to look like a dumb orangutan.

“It’s all right. Your friends have told me of your handicap. Please regard it as a species of bond between us, different as our individual problems may appear.” FDR nodded at the colonel. “Very well. Let him in. I’m not going to do this in front of an admiring bog.”

Let who in? Do what in front of whom?

Colonel Elshtain opened the car’s rear door and nodded me in. “The President has something to tell you, Daniel. Ride down to the front gate with him.”

Me? I hung there doubt-riddled and confused.

“Go on,” Phoebe said. “He won’t bite.”

FDR thought that hilarious. “What big teeth I have, he’s thinking. What a set of choppers. Well, Miss Pharram’s right-I hardly ever bite a potential Democratic voter.” He sobered pretty quick. “Hop in, Daniel.”

With everyone looking-even Muscles and Curriden, both like unrecognizable bog monsters-I climbed in next to FDR, behind a black chauffeur and a Secret Service agent dressed to the Beau Brummel nines. The President gave me a nod, and we drove up the slope past Darius’s apartment and McKissic House and down one leg of the circular drive to Angus Road. Fireflies winked as we purred through the summer evening.

“Colonel Elshtain asked me to break this news to you as a favor for past services skillfully rendered,” the President said. “He seemed to think its coming from me might soften it. I doubt that. All I can do is leaven the inevitable pain with an expression of our nation’s sincerest gratitude.”

Inevitable pain? What the hell?

The President fished a piece of paper-a telegram?-from an inside pocket of his linen coat. “My goodness, that’s clumsy. Forgive me.” He opened the paper out and studied it for a moment. “Daniel, your father died in the Aleutian Islands, on the sixteenth of June, not too long after the Fourth Infantry had retaken Attu from the Japanese. He’d flown to Attu with some Eleventh Air Force personnel from Umnak; they arrived in the wake of mopping-up exercises, and on an expedition of some sort to the interior, your father, Richard Oconostota Boles, and four other brave Americans died.” The President handed me the telegram. “That presents the unadorned facts, Daniel. The details I have from Colonel Elshtain, who himself has them from an officer in Graves Registration with the Alaska Command. In any event, your father died an honorable death in the service of his country.”

I held the telegram. We’d reached the front gate. The limousine, with its escort vehicles and outriders, stopped and idled. A mockingbird meowed from a pine across the road. I saw myself receiving this sorry news like somebody watching a film might follow an overhead shot of a motorcade and eavesdrop on the mutterings of a make-believe president. But FDR sat close enough to touch, and the crumbs from a loaf of French bread had funneled together in a fold of the removable seat’s dove-gray upholstery.

“I hear your parents lived apart these past few years,” FDR said. “On the other hand, a child’s affection for a parent seldom dies utterly after an estrangement, and I imagine-indeed, I hope-you still recall your father with a measure of fondness. I’m deeply honored, and likewise deeply sorry, to be the messenger of your pain.”

I couldn’t cry. You don’t sob-not, at least, if you’re a seventeen-year-old pro ballplayer-in the presence of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The gist of what he’d said didn’t corkscrew immediately into me anyway, and memories of my dad crowded fast and thick. I gave the Prez a nod, opened my door, and got out.

“A lift back up to the house?” he said.

Uh-uh. My surroundings had gone all blurry and foreign, I could’ve been standing on a twilit African mud flat.

“A privilege to’ve made your acquaintance, Daniel.”

I may’ve raised my head, or not. I turned and trudged back up the lawn towards McKissic House. FDR and his crew processed off the grounds, into the honeysuckle drench of the evening.

Phoebe met me halfway, on a dead run. I handed her the telegram. She didn’t read it. Someone’d already told her what it said. She lifted her hands. She walked in a half circle. She threw herself at me, like I was a tackling dummy, and clung to me in a glut of rainy griefs. I hugged her back.

“Phoebe,” I said.