Brittle Innings

41

That same week, we had two home games against Lanett and three against Cottonton. We won the first four, but dropped our Sunday finale to the Weevils by a single run. Hub Sisti pitched against us, and Muscles afterwards claimed Sisti had Vander Meer blood, even if hts name sounded Eye-talian.

The night before, I’d eaten dinner at the Pharram house in Cotton Creek, a clapboard box with blue shutters, porcelain knickknacks in the open boxes of its wooden porch columns, and an old-fashioned swing on the porch itself. Miss LaRaina and Phoebe had lived in the officers’ housing out to Camp Penticuff before Captain Pharram’s assignment overseas, but now they rented this place from Mister JayMac. Unless they’d done an all-out tidy-up for me, the Pharram women seemed to keep that house as trim and eye-fetching as a Fabergé egg.

All in all, a nice date. Phoebe’d given me a rain check for the night Curriden abducted me to The Wing & Thigh. She fixed exactly what she’d fixed then: fried chicken, snap beans, mashed potatoes. Only this time, I got to eat it hot.

“More tea?” Phoebe said. “More biscuits?”

“Sh-sure,” I said.

“I’m so proud you can talk,” Miss LaRaina said. “I feared yall’s babies wouldn’t be able to.” Phoebe folded her napkin and retreated head-up to the kitchen. “A joke. And the girl flies to Tokyo.”

Phoebe returned, opened out her napkin, and laid it across her lap. “Mama, heredity don’t work that way. Acquired traits don’t pass. Don’t hammer us with sech nonsense.”

Miss LaRaina flicked her fingers at her plate. Deep in her mouth, she made noises like bomb explosions. Phoebe pretended her mama didn’t exist.

“I forgot yore tea,” she told me formally. “I forgot yore biscuits.” She went to get them.

The next night, Phoebe and I rode into town to see Abbott and Costello in Hit the Ice at the Exotic and almost laughed our fannies off. On the taxi ride home, I wanted to smooch her silly, to spaniel-crawl her tit-wren body, but the driver kept checking out the rearview and blithering about that afternoon’s loss to Hub Sisti.

In Cotton Creek, I asked him to wait and walked Phoebe to her doorstep.

There, under the pecan boughs, we kissed for the first time since Mr Roosevelt’s visit, pushing in to each other. We took so long about it the cabby gave a crabby beep on his horn. His meter kept clicking the coins in my pocket into his, of course, but he wanted sleep worse than he did a fat fare.

Phoebe broke from me. “Gnight, Danny.”

I smiled.

“What is it?” she asked me.

“This time you didn’t f-fart.”

“This time I didn’t eat no Brunswick stew,” she said, like that put me in my place. She banged through the screen door. On the porch, a skinny shadow, she hunched her shoulders and gave me a finger-wave toodle-do.

Phoebe might like me, but Buck Hoey didn’t. He didn’t try to disguise his feelings-from me, his teammates, or his wife. He didn’t like it I’d “stolen” his position. (Who would?) He didn’t like my looks. (Neither did I, but the willingness of Henry, Kizzy, and the Pharrams to tolerate em’d almost broken me of cringing away from mirrors.) And he really didn’t like me doing so well at bat and in the field-because he, Turkey, and Trapdoor couldn’t go on accusing me of being a fuckup and a goat. I led every ’Bender but Snow in batting, and Snow led the CVL. With my lead-off slot and on-base percentage, I’d’ve probably led the league in runs scored except for missing the season’s first fifteen games.

Hoey didn’t hit or field that badly, but had serious weaknesses in some fundamentals: executing the hit-and-run, bunting, flipping underhand to second on double-play chances, and, if coaching, keeping his signals straight. Nowhere, though, was there a feistier wiseacre in baseball, except for the Dodgers’ Leo Durocher, and most Highbridgers would’ve bet on Hoey in a dirt-kicking and insult-flinging contest between the two. I would have.

Hoey’d dodged the Army because his status as a father put him in the sixth lowest draft category: Married Men With Children But Without a Contributing Job. Three of his kids-Matt, Carolyn, and Ted-had come before Pearl Harbor. His age, thirty-five or so, and some stress-related back twinges’d also played a part in saving him from an infantry platoon. Linda Jane, Hoey’s Alabama-born wife, and all four kids, including a toddler named (hold on) Danny, came out to nearly every home game. Hoey always worked his two older boys into warm-up pepper games, which made you think Uncle Sam’d done right allowing him to stay home to help raise his brood.

Matt and Ted, about ten and seven I’d guess, didn’t seem to hate my guts. Much as he disliked me, Hoey hadn’t spoon-fed his bitterness into his sons’ gap-toothed mouths. They let me hit them pepper fungoes. More than once, they waved to me from the grandstand when they caught my eye at shortstop. (Linda Jane, on the other hand, always wrinkled up her nose at me like she’d chanced upon a supermessy roadkill, a polecat, say, or an armadillo.) Early on, it’d impressed the boys I couldn’t talk; and it tickled them, every day I played, that their baby brother and I had the same first name. So they never tossed any smart-ass digs my way.

In fact, after our Saturday doubleheader against the Boll Weevils, Matt jumped onto the field from the Hoeys’ box seats and sprinted out to see me. I mean, that humdinger of a kid intercepted me. He stuck a program and a pencil under my nose. “Sign it, wouldja, Mr Boles? Yo’re the best danged Mile ’Bender they’s ever been!”

“Teddy!” his mother called from her box. “Teddy, you git on back up here!”

“I wisht I could play like you. I wisht I could.” I took his program and began to write my name across the top of it. Buck Hoey slipped in next to his son and yanked the program away.

“Leave him be, Ted. He’s wore out.”

“Won’t hurt him to write his name, Pa,” Teddy said. “I got bout ever other ’Bender’s graph. I need Mr Boles’s to have em aw.”

“You don’t need a fritty thing, snip,” Hoey said.

“Look, Pa. He don’t mind.”

I’d yanked the program back to resume scrawling DANNY BOLES on it.

“You back-talking me, Ted? You defying my say-so?”

“Nosir, I’m ony asting him to-”

“Well, don’t! You hear me! DON’T!” Hoey reclaimed the program and tore it to bits. “Stop that nancy-boy bawling, Ted! STOP IT!” He grabbed Ted’s upper arm and jerked him this way and that trying to make him stop crying, which worked about as well as kicking a dog draws it to you. Teddy got louder-not defying Hoey, just giving in to his hurt-and Hoey boxed his ear: wham! wham! wham! wham! WHAM!

Henry caught Buck Hoey’s wrist and twisted it back on him. “You don’t wish to do that,” he said. “You fail to project the psychological repercussions.”

“So you’re my lousy self-appointed bug doctor, eh?”

Hoey shook off Henry’s grip and stepped sideways to slap Ted again. Then he back-pedaled to the dugout, scolding Ted and loudly cussing out Henry and me. Ted’s ear blazed like a night-light, carbuncle red, and the hand print throbbing on his face made him look like a war-painted Comanche.

Henry knelt to comfort Ted, and I stood there with my eyes closed, a cascade of old Life magazine covers rampaging on the screen of my memory.

Anyway, the deeper into July we went, the more time Hoey spent riding the bench or pacing his coaching box. Me, I played every game day, and I played in overdrive. I dove for grounders, stole bases, chased down pop-up fouls behind third, ran out bunts, legged long singles into doubles, and bowled over or slid under catchers twice my size on shallow sacrifice flies. I wore out my uniform pants, four pairs of sanitary stockings, and, in an away series against Marble Springs, my baseball shoes.

After hook-sliding around the Seminole shortstop’s tag and asking for time, I got up to find the toe spikes on my shoe torn from the sole and a gaping rip in the side panel. The other shoe looked almost as bad. I could never run on those dislodged spikes. Two steps would sprain my ankle or twist a knee. I showed the base umpire, Jake Schact. Mister JayMac came out to assess the damage, and the Seminole crowd booed as he crossed the infield in his street clothes and again when Hoey trotted over from the first-base coaching box to make it a three-party powwow.

“Don’t put on a stall,” Schact told Mister JayMac.

“Who’s stalling? We’re out of shoes.”

“ ‘Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without’ ”-a wartime motto that Schact quoted. “And hurry it up.”

Unless you had an illegal hoard, there was no sure or cheap way to replace rationed items, and Uncle Sam rationed shoes, even baseball shoes. We might’ve had an extra pair in my size in Highbridge, but in Marble Springs the spare-pair cupboard stood Mother Hubbard bare. Mister JayMac looked hard at my shoes and then just that hard at Hoey’s.

“What size do you wear, Mr Boles?”

“N-n-nines.”

“And you, Mr Hoey?”

“Criminy,” Hoey said. “Jesus.”

“What size?”

“Nines.” (The kind of confession you get from a fella when you put him in a room with a blackjack crew.)

“Give him yours, Mr Hoey.”

“Here?”

“Here and now.”

Hoey sat on one half of the bag removing his spikes. I sat on the other half unstringing mine.

“Should I give him my jock too?”

“Please, Mr Hoey. Don’t provoke a display of female ardor beyond your capacity to quench.”

The Seminole crowd whooped like picture-show Indians, ready for the game to resume. Hoey, though, had to walk back to the coaching box in his stirrup socks and clay-stained saintaries. Between innings, he put on a pair of street shoes. It took me a week to find my own replacements, though, and for that week, Hoey wore a pair of boot-blacked slippers. From a distance, they looked like the real things and kept fans from ragging him, but this episode, on top of everything else, guaranteed I’d stay at the top of Hoey’s shit list forever.

Thank God Phoebe cared for me. Thank God I had Henry for a protector.