Brittle Innings

53

Playing ball, you forgot the war. Riding the Brown Bomber, you read the papers or talked about it. The fact my dad’d died in the Aleutians made me listen up to any news from the Akskan theater.

On a road trip to Lanett, I read a story in the Highbridge Herald about Allied forces invading the island of Kiska, only to find-after taking beaucoups of casualties in the bedlam and fog:-the Japs’d already evacuated it. In other words, we’d defeated an enemy no longer there. The press called it the “blunder at Kiska.” Nobody could figure how, or when, the Japs’d managed to pull their otherwise doomed troops off the island. I showed this story to Henry, who’d been riding with his head lolling against the window and his hands twitching in his lap. He read it and handed the paper back.

“Stupid,” I said. “We let em get away.”

“The resourcefulness of the Japanese spared thousands from the maw of death. Why do you long to glut it?”

“They’re Japs, Henry-bloodthirsty, conniving m-monkeys.”

“A few may deserve your censure. Many more do not. War homogenizes the good and the bad. I can only applaud those who escaped. Had the Allies shown a like wit, resisting panic and withholding their fire, no one would have died.”

“That’s crap,” I said. “The Japs left mines and b-booby traps behind.” The newspaper said over a hundred men on the destroyer Abner Read were hurt or drowned when their ship hit a mine. How could Henry side with the lousy Japs?

Henry said nothing.

Dunnagin leaned over our seat back. “How’d they manage to get away so clean? The Japs?”

“Alaskan foes-Aleutian fogs-swirl and deceive,” Henry said. “The Japanese used them, and the capriciousness of fate, to avert many deaths.”

“You mean they got lucky,” Dunnagin said.

“Perhaps everyone got lucky.”

“Cept them poor guys on the Abner Read and the d-dogfaces blown to srn-smithereens by b-b-booby traps!”

Henry grunted. The war that’d once appalled, now just seemed to bore him. He let his head loll against the window again, where it was buffeted by Sudikoff’s herky-jerky driving and maybe by troubling thoughts of Miss Giselle. No wonder he couldn’t hold the war on a front burner.

Three seats ahead of us, Bebout leapt up and had some sort of weird schizo fit. Waving one arm, he baptized everyone around him with spastic finger flicks, like a holy-roller on speed.

“Norman!” he yelled. “NORMAN!”

Sudikoff was driving. “What?” he shouted back. “What?”

Bebout went into a long nonsensical spiel about the angel Gabriel and his brother Woodrow and who-knows-what-else? I’d never heard anything like it.

Sudikoff said, “Cain’t yall git that joker to shuddup? If you don’t, I’m like to have a accident.”

Mister JayMac came back to Bebout, put an arm around him, and eventually got him quieted down.

“The guy’s a walking Looney Toon,” Curriden said. “I think he’s snapped.”

Bebout rested easy the last thirty miles of our ride-but in Lanett, getting off the Bomber, he dumped a tin of Wedowee Snuff into Larnar Knowles’s shirt pocket and patted it, like a mama giving her son a fresh handkerchief. Lamar took it as a joke, thank God, and the incident blew over.

Still, a lot of us worried Bebout would have one of his spells during a game. Thank goodness, though, a ballpark and playing ball seemed to calm and invigorate him at the same time-and, except for Henry, he played as well as any of the rest of us against the Linenmakers.

On Thursday and Friday evenings, despite a lot of noisy support from the Lanett crowds, the Linenmakers couldn’t stay with us. We beat them seven to two and thirteen to zip. Henry had three home runs in the series-his concentration during this road trip rarely faltered-and twelve RBIs. He now had thirty-nine homers on the year and led his nearest competitor in that department-Lon Musselwhite, who had a solo shot on Friday-by a dozen and a half.

Given that the CVL season had only half the number of games played by the majors, Henry had a better home-run percentage than Ruth’d had in his top three seasons with the Yankees. In the bigs, with the same homer percentage he’d had in Highbridge, Henry would’ve hit eighty-two! Even Lanett’s fans cheered when the third of his blasts sailed over the right-field wall into an egret-lined branch of the Chattahoochee.

In the same series, I did okay myself-seven hits in eight at bats. Every time Henry walloped a fence-clearer, I trotted home ahead of him. In fact, all of us feasted on Linenmaker pitching, and when we left on Saturday morning for Opelika, we rolled out with a certain greedy regret. Our second victory in Lanett, coupled with a rare Gendarme loss to the Boll Weevils, had lifted us into another first-place tie.

Lou Ed Dew, manager of the Orphans, had his team loaded for Hellbender. They’d dropped six games back and could finish in a tie for first only if they won all six of their remaining games while we and the Gendarmes booted ours. In other words, the Orphans had no chance-we concluded our season with three home games against LaGrange. Either the Hellbenders or the Gendarmes would win the pennant. The Orphans still had a shot at second, though, and a chance to scuttle our dreams before we returned home. Lou Ed Dew meant to scuttle em.

That weekend series-a doubleheader on Saturday and a singleton on Sunday afternoon-turned prickly as soon as the Orphans’ ace, Smiley Clough, took the mound. He threw high and tight at least once a batsman, a whistling low-bridger loosed with an oops-I-didn’t-mean-to-do-that smirk. You didn’t know whether to go after Clough with your bat or to sympathize with his control problems. Time we realized he needed his skull cracked and his smirk rubbed south, Clough had a deuce-to-zip lead and a breaking ball Nutter swore took its unhittable kink from a smear of KY jelly. Whatever, Clough went the full nine innings and shut us out.

The second game of the twin bill didn’t go much better. Dew had scared up a gangleshanks kid from the Florida pan-handle to pitch for him, a kid named Marion Root. Root threw a sidearm speedball that shrunk a fraction of an inch for every foot it covered to the plate. By the time it reached us, it looked like a petrified hummingbird’s egg.

ROOT FOR ROOT said a banner in the outfield. Orphan fans did, and he carried a two-hitter into the ninth.

Luckily, so’d our own sodbuster ace, Fadeaway Ankers, and in our last bat before extra innings, Henry polewhacked a Root hummingbird egg all the way to Sea Island, scoring himself and Worthy Bebout, who’d taken a sidearm fastball in the ribs swinging for the bleachers. We held on in the bottom half of the inning for a two-to-goose-egg win. The split kept us in a tie for first with LaGrange.

That night Henry told me Marion Root’d go up to the bigs. Not only that, Henry said, but Root would make a reputation for himself the equal of Bob Feller’s or Johnny Vander Meer’s. Not long after he’d pitched against us, though, Root reported for induction into the Army and spent the next seventeen weeks at the Infantry Replacement Center at Camp Wheeler near Augusta. He died the next winter at Anzio with the U.S. 45th Division, two weeks after going overseas.

Sunday’s game against Opelika deserves no commemoration. We lost it. The score was sixteen to three, and none of our runs was earned. No excuses-the Orphans wrapped, waxed, and shellacked us.

One truly screwy thing did happen in the bottom of the eighth. On an easy liner to center, Bebout cried, “Woodrow! Woodrow, you take it!” and dropped to his knees. The ball carried over Bebout’s head, allowing two runners to score and the hitter to reach third as Skinny hurried to chase it down.

“What the hell was that?” Curriden yelled at Bebout.

“He missed it!” Bebout shouted. “My sorry brother flat-out missed it!”

Amazingly, the Gendarmes lost to the Eufaula Mudcats in the Prefecture. The entire season, then, boiled down to our final three games against them at McKissic Field.