Brittle Innings

39

More than a month had passed between my buggery by Pumphrey and word of Dick Boles’s death. Call that month a fugue of dummyhood. No one in Highbridge, except Mister JayMac, had known me as anything other than a mute. So it sometimes seemed to me, and probably to others, my affliction had existed from childhood and would go into the grave with me-to everlasting muteness. Ha.

On the other hand, just getting Phoebe’s name out didn’t open the door for a whole stifled dictionary of yawps. My old friend the stammer rode half the words I did say, maybe more. Besides, I’d cast off the habit of talking. Silence seemed easier sometimes, nobler others, and sometimes just happily worrisome for the persnickety folks who wanted either answers or explanations out of me. If my tongue didn’t hurry to comply with the speech signals from Language Central, well, I didn’t sweat it. People talk too much anyhow. I prove that with my throat mike and these damned interviews.

“Danny can talk,” Phoebe announced, leading me back to the others. “He said my name.”

Miss Tulipa embraced me. Then Miss LaRaina hugged me. Kizzy appeared-she rocked me to and fro with her forehead hard on my breastbone. Even Miss Giselle clocked in with a flurry of shoulder pats. Mister JayMac, the colonel, and the Hellbenders haunted the edges of my loss like clueless border guards.

“Such a trauma,” Miss Tulipa said. “Such a trauma to overcome your laryngitis.”

“You gots to be strong,” Kizzy said, her braids like spun-metal snakes in my hands. “Mr Roozerfeld never told you that sadness to have you go lint-simple, Danny Bowes.”

I pushed Kizzy far enough back to gaze into her face. “I d-d-don’t c-care. I’m gl-glad my d-d-daddy’s dead.”

“A kid of the new school,” Hoey said from nearby. “A real lover of the fifth commandment.”

I found Hoey’s silhouette among all the others and glared at him. “Sc-scr-screw you.” Nobody whooped or laughed. In those days, you didn’t talk dirty in the presence of ladies, even if one was a woman of color and another had at best only a slippery claim on the title. So my retort to Hoey shocked the fellas as much as it did the gathered womenfolk, my champions and my comforters. Maybe only Phoebe appreciated the hasseled defiance of it, and maybe she shouldn’t have. Everyone made allowances, though-not counting Hoey, I guess-and I got back to my room without being tarred and feathered.

Upstairs, Henry let me be. Huddled on my bed with our basket fan chasing fever chills down my arms and legs, I told myself even doing his duty to God and country hadn’t saved my father from hellfire. Anyone could reckon why. He deserved it, frying forever. He’d hurt Mama bad and just about destroyed me, skipping out. He deserved a million-year broil in Beelzebub’s furnace.

Then I remembered Tenkiller’s abandoned icehouse, and Sparrow Alley, and the Boles & Son Jes-for-Fun Oklahoma World See-ries, and the sump of my bitterness started to evaporate. Did Satan grant pardons? Reprieves? Weekend furloughs?

The Hellbenders’ record on July 5, 1943, was twenty-two wins, seventeen losses; we’d played one game past the season’s official midpoint. We’d split our last six games with Opelika, who still had a game or two on us, the result of a fast getaway in May. And the Gendarmes, who’d beaten us two out of three in an away series at the end of June, still led the league.

In a meeting on Tuesday afternoon, Mister JayMac assessed the situation and told us what to do to ready ourselves for a successful stretch run: “Tomorrow morning, gentlemen, we go on the road to play the Boll Weevils and the Linenmakers. The next week they come here. These fellas play baseball like the Flying Tigers dance Swan Lake. If they beat us, we’ll deserve our enmirement in third or fourth place. Yesterday we whipped Lou Ed Dew’s hotshot Orphans twice. Congratulations. Thank God you didn’t disappoint Mr Roosevelt, gentlemen.”

“Thank God we didn’t disappoint you,” Buck Hoey said.

“Amen!” amen’d a chorus of Hellbenders.

“But this is no time to suppose that jes because we’ve got our percherons harnessed and our wagon on track, we’re going to roll over everybody else like they were dust chickens. Uh-uh. So I am deeply perturbed that Mr Curriden and Mr Musselwhite, team heroes, elected by their off-the-field performance last night to sit out Wednesday’s contest against the Boll Weevils. Their absence from the lineup-nor do I mean to disparage or demoralize their replacements-could well cost us that game and deny us the psychological momentum to make the entire road trip a success. The rest of yall’ll jes have to gird up your loins in resolute and selfless compensation.”

“Why don’t you jes let em play?” Norm Sudikoff said. “It was only a kind of tiff.”

“A tiff! Howso a tiff, Mr Sudikoff?”

“I mean, it looked like a all-out war, but only because they’re such bruisers to begin with. A ant boxin another ant don’t quake the ground like a couple of rhinos would. So, you know, jes let em play on Wednesday.”

Mister JayMac stared at Sudikoff the way a rube at a county fair ogles the bearded lady, wonderingly. “If I had the guts, Mr Sudikoff, I’d bench them both for the whole road trip and leave them here to do scut work. But I lack em, I lack em.”

“Well, sir, they’d probably only fight if you left em here without any supervision,” Sudikoff said.

“My rationale for taking them with us, Mr Sudikoff-”

“Sir?”

“Hush, please. I’ve got something important to do here.” He looked at me. “Gentlemen, let me reintroduce you to Daniel Boles. Mr Boles, please rise.”

I stood up.

“Would you like to greet your teammates?”

“Huh-hello,” I said.

Henry and Double Dunnagin led the room in a rapid clatter of applause. I smiled and bowed.

Cottonton’s ballpark, The Fields, looked like what the locals’d named it, a big seashell fan of graded earth with no fences, no lights, no grass, and no clear-cut boundary with the cotton-growing acreage next to it. The Boll Weevils had a chicken-wire backstop, termite-gnawed bleachers along the baselines, and a shingled crate on telephone-pole pilings for a press box. As Mister JayMac had said in my first team meeting in Highbridge, a live goat’d once figured in a close decision at third. Even in Oklahoma, I’d seen boondocky high schools with better facilities than the Weevils had.

But sometimes they drew decent crowds-from whistle-stop and cotton-ginning communities all over the county. You could get four or five hundred people in the stands, even on a week night: farmers, railroad workers, gin operators, feed-and-seed merchants, beauticians, kids. Clem Eggling, a gin operator with a thousand acres of prime Alabama farmland, owned the club and at age forty-six still sometimes caught the opening game of a twin bill. He made his money scrimping on groundskeeping costs, salaries, and ballpark goodies. Watery lemonade, boiled eggs, and culled peanuts dominated the items at his refreshment stands, and you couldn’t get ice-shaved, cubed, or melting-unless you hauled it in yourself in an expensive refrigerated truck.

On Wednesday, with Muscles and Curriden out, we lost to the lowly Weevils by six runs. Hoey took Curriden’s spot at third, and Evans and Fanning subbed about four innings each in left field for Musselwhite. They fielded their places okay, but every Hellbender except Charlie Snow’d forgotten how to hit, and the loss, again except for Snow’s bang-up play, qualified as a disconcerted team effort. Hard to say if Miss LaRaina’s rivals in the lineup would’ve made a whit of difference. The Boll Weevil’s pitcher, Hub Sisti, had us muttering to ourselves all evening.

In Cottonton, Henry and I stayed in a truckstop court called Edweena’s Comfy Cabins. If Cottonton’d ever had a hotel for farm-equipment suppliers and haberdashery drummers, it’d long since closed. Edweena’s Comfy Cabins got our business by default. Mister JayMac seldom had us leave Highbridge for an away series against the Weevils until the morning of our first game. That strategy ran the risk of a forfeit, if the Brown Bomber’s transmission dropped out, but it cut back our dependence on local lodgings. Henry and I had our ready-made digs, of course, but Cottonton natives willing to house enemy ballplayers didn’t run that deep or that trustworthy. Mister JayMac had to squeeze eighteen guys into three semi-friendly houses, and on our last road trip there in ’43, he negotiated the use of an empty jail cell, a bus-station pew at Harshanay Drugs, and two more Comfy Cabins-to keep from returning to the home of Weevils fans upset by our one-sided romps over every Cottonton hurler but Hub Sisti.

Darius remained the odd man out. He knew coloreds in other CVL towns, but didn’t seem to know any here. He could’ve had a black family put him up a night or two just by asking. Darius had a certain status. Driving the Bomber, doing for twenty or so ballplayers, made him a figure of some glamour. But Darius wouldn’t play on his league connections. Wouldn’t sweet-talk, trash-talk, or kowtow. Wouldn’t even ask outright and humbly, one downtrodden colored to another, for a cleanly place to lay his head. Pride and a festering resentment of Mister JayMac stymied him.

Not long after Hub Sisti’d shut us out, I stood in the open door of the Comfy Cabin called Gladiola Delight ruing my third hitless game in twenty-four starts. You could smell the DDT on the cotton plants across the road, and the used-washcloth odor of the linens in Gladiola Delight. Other Comfy Cabins were named Begonia Bliss, Daisy Dream, Marigold Manor, and Chrysanthemum Heaven. They all looked and smelled the same, though, and the only flowers in their rotting window boxes were dandelions and morning glories.

As I stood there, the Bomber growled past on the blacktop from The Fields, where we’d played our last two innings in the dusk. It headed into the empty landscape north of town.

“D-Darius,” I said.

“Looking for a place to sleep unmolested,” Henry said from behind a book. “The poor slob.” That was Henry’s shaky grasp of American slang. He meant chap, or bugger, or joe, not slob, but I knew that.

“Back l-l-later.” Before Henry could call out a question, I’d trotted to the blacktop. I hiked along it in the dark behind the twin embers of the bus’s taillights. Darius drove slow, maybe to keep a redneck cop from halting him, maybe to give himself a better chance to find a hidden parking place for the night-so those taillights stayed visible for a long time. I followed them easily. I lost ground, of course, but the road’s straightness kept the bus in view. Sometimes I could even hear its gears shifting, a sound like rocks bumping down a metal chute.

A mosquito came out of the cotton after me. Two or three damn mosquitoes. A blood-sucking platoon of em. Water lay oily in one shadowy ditch, a breeding ground. The blacktop gave way to gravel. The bigger pieces of gravel-fist-sized rocks-threw me off-stride. I had to find a tire rut and walk in it like a man in a narrow trench. Off to the west, the long charcoal profile of some eroded hills told me I hadn’t walked into the unbounded landscape of a nightmare. And a glance to my rear revealed the untidy lamp-lit boxes of Edweena’s Comfy Cabins. I could go back if I had to.

Suddenly, the Brown Bomber’s taillights jinked out of view and its hippoish side appeared in silhouette: a black rectangle with windows into a bigger blackness. Sound of rocks sliding on tin. The bus’s nose, behind its headlights, kept moving downward until a berm of earth and night had eaten the lights and swallowed the entire bus. Now I had no floating embers to follow and no sure way to recognize Darius’s turnoff when I came to it.

I kept walking. The DDT smell and the edgeless blackness all around me made me think I’d traipsed into the limbo where sick or worried people go when they filch a wink or two of shuteye from their pain. Nowhere. I groped along, though, and came to the side road, a dirt trail, where Darius’d vanished. Every step down this trail sent a lightning bolt up my spine. Shrubbery clustered near, and some sort of tree, an orphan plum or holly, grew up from the inlet of a cotton field, shielding most of the Bomber but its hood. I’d’ve never found the bus at the bottom of this cut without tracking it from my cabin’s very doorstep. I went up to the Bomber and banged on its side.

Behind me, a revolver’s hammer clicked. A gun barrel poked me in the neck.

“Tell me fast what the hell you want.”

“Darius.” (No stammer.)

“Jesus, Danl, that you?” The pistol barrel stopped poking me. “Man, you coulda got kilt. What you doing here?”

After saying his name, I couldn’t get another clear word out. Darius cursed and forced me up into the Bomber, whose engine was still cooling, popping and ticking. He prodded me down the main aisle to the long seat at the back.

“This spot’s yo favorite. Anyway, it’s somebody’s. Sit.”

Somehow, in that blackness, Darius seemed solider than me. I was a ghost, my skin and bones leached out and water-thin. Without his hand around my upper arm, I’d’ve vaporized into the stars like some kind of pale gas.

“Sorry bout the gun. I uz taking a leak when you hit the road and come slapping down. Nigh on to scairt the piss back into me, white boy.”

That was funny, I guess, but I couldn’t laugh. Darius showed me his piece again, a snub-nose with a mother-of-pearl handle. He held it not to threaten, but to give me a chance to admire the way it shone in the cloudy starlight slanting in.

“They come to neck-burn me, Danl, well, I send a few on ahead befo I have to tap-dance air.” He pocketed the revolver in his khaki work pants. “Whatn hell you want?”

“You sl-sleep here?”

“On the Bomber? Sho. Better than a Comfy Cabin any day but Christmas. Plenty of beds to pick from. No loud radios playing. Hot and hot running breezes. Yeah, I sleep here.”

“Out in the c-country?”

“I like my privacy.”

“What about over in Quitman? Or L-Lanett?”

“What are you anyways, official Hellbender bed-checker? Or you jes want to thow yo pity at me?”

My tongue rolled up behind my top front teeth and stuck like a wet cabbage leaf.

“Suppose I thow it back, Danl? Daddy dead. Yo mouth don’t work. Rooming with old Mumbo-Jumbo Clerval. How you like my pity dripped on you like sorghum?”

Not much. Turnabout maybe represented fair play, but it mocked my Christian concern for Darius by putting my own dumb mug in the mirror he held up. He hummed something bluesy and reached a paper sack out from under our seat. The sack held a bottle. Pray God it isn’t sloe gin, I thought.

Darius swigged, wiped his mouth, and offered me a pull. It stank like sour-mash whiskey, the cheapest and strongest kind. I shook my head.

“Lissen, Danl. In nearlybout every CVL city but Cottonton, I know womens. Who give me rest, and take it too, and give it back again. Only in this redneck town do I got to park in the boonies to nab my Z’s. Some ways, though, it’s a relief. It’s peaceful.” He swigged again. “The part that aint, aint got nothing to do with where I sleep. It got to do with how I live. Only times I live jes like I want, I’m sleeping, and where I do it don’t strip it down to”-jabbing his chin at the snow-blanket mirage of the nearby cotton-”to that, to what you can see out a window or pint to on a map.”

I said, “Y-yeah,” and got up. Darius didn’t try to stop me. I’d trespassed his private property, even if it moved with him like the dusty shell of a turtle.

“Better foot it back. I done found my spot, and toting you back’s like to stir some pleecemans to hassle me out of here.”

I laddered up the aisle, plucking each seat back to keep from falling over.

“Shhhhhhh,” Darius shushed me. Loud.

Did he really think Clem Eggling or some other clay-footed rube out here in deepest Alabamastan was going to hear me? I glanced back through the gloom. Darius toasted me with his bottle and canted his head to one side.

“Look down. And hush yo plinking. You gon wake the boy.”

I looked. A good-size bundle lay on a seat about midway along the bus, a lumpy smudge on the cushion. It breathed. I squatted for a closer study: Euclid, Darius’s half brother and our sometime batboy, depending on if the away park in question would let him fetch for us. Ordinarily, Mister JayMac made him stay in Highbridge. The only way I could imagine him getting to Cottonton was by stowing away in the luggage bin. Tonight, Euclid slept like a rain-ripened bag of concrete mix, heavy and hard,

“Tuckered,” Darius said. “Prostrated by his ride over.”

No kidding. But Euclid’s being huddled there cheered me. Darius had some company, a pick-me-up warmer than his whiskey and not quite so dire as his handgun.

“Anything happen to me,” Darius said, “that boy got to git past it to his own tomorry. Remind him o that, Danl.”

Remind him? What could happen to Darius? He could drink himself to a retching stupor. He could use his pistol to take a core sample of his own gray matter. That scared me-not the first notion, but the second. A barn owl hooted from somewhere off-road, and the tremolo of its call echoed through the bus like a sighing brake. How could I leave?

“Go on. You done misunderstood me. I’m okay. Got me no-hitters to thow, homers to knock. Jes cain’t figger out where. Anyways, git!” I climbed down into the velvety dust. Darius slid over to an open window and peered out at me.

“Quip hadn’t no sass on his speedball tonight. Too bad. Mine a turned them Weevil bats to dick sponge. Everybody knows it, but aint nobody gon let it happen.”

“G-g-good night,” I said.

Darius had parked behind a full-blown holly. The needle tips of its glossy leaves pricked me as I squeezed past it to the path up to the main road. A bauble of moon-varnished blood erupted on one thumb, and I sucked it as I walked.

Darius didn’t shoot himself or Euclid. He didn’t drive the Bomber off to Birmingham to cadge a tryout with the Black Barons or to Moton Field near Tuskegee in hopes of becoming a replacement flyer in the air squadron commanded by Benjamin O. Davis, Jr. He showed up at The Fields the next afternoon at three and spent about twenty minutes briefing our regulars on how to hit the Boll Weevil starting hurler’s best pitch, a forkball. We hit it. We hit it so often Eggling yanked the guy by the fourth.

After that, all the homies in Cottonton’s open-sided flea box hung around less to root their Weevils on than to watch our starters, even Curriden and Musselwhite, put on a power-hitting show that made their fielders wish Eggling had anted up enough cash money for a fence-to spare them the shame of chasing down balls that in any other CVL park would’ve been ground-rule home runs. To compensate, they started playing deeper and deeper, but guys like Junior, Skinny, Dunnagin, Snow, and me countered by dropping Texas leaguers in front of them like mortar shells.

We whipped Cottonton by fourteen runs, to achieve a split, and drove to Lanett the next morning for a four-game weekend series-with Euclid out of the luggage bin and in a front seat across from Mister JayMac. (He got chewed out for stowing away, though-royally chewed out.) At Chattahoochee Field, the Linenmakers, even though last in league standings, played us tough as cross-tie spikes. We split with them too, winning on Friday night, dropping both ends of a Saturday twin bill, and nosing by them on Sunday on Henry’s home run, his twenty-eighth of the season, twelve more than the next guy, Lon Musselwhite, a teammate, and Ed Bantling, the Gendarme catcher.

Mister JayMac publicly thanked Henry during one of our Rolling Assizes for salvaging the road trip. Even so, he had Muscles fine every relief pitcher, pinch hitter, and starter who’d contributed to Saturday’s fiasco against Lanett. The only Hellbenders to escape fines were Snow, Nutter, Dobbs, and Henry. Even the Honorable Judge Lionel K. Musselwhite had to dig into his coin purse for a quarter, for turning a long fly ball into a triple by overrunning it and denting a signboard.

“Needless and catastrophic showboating,” prosecutor Buck Hoey called the play. “You let in two runs and bunged up your shoulder to boot. The captain ought to set us something other than a bad example.” You got the idea Hoey was disguising a reference to the dustup on Hellbender Pond between Muscles and Curriden. Anyway, nobody on the Bomber voted for clemency.

Darius didn’t say two words from his seat up front, and I couldn’t help wondering what kind of fine he’d draw for packing a concealed pistol. More than a quarter, I’d bet. In some places down here, he could’ve wound up decorating a tree just for leaving his fly at half-mast.