Brittle Innings

8

I’d left my duffel and my bat in the kitchen. When I went to get them, Curriden and Parris, on KP that week, followed me in and said I should start scrubbing dishes. I glared. Pro ballplayers, scrubbing dishes? Why couldn’t Kizzy do them? Getting thrown into Jumbo Clerval’s dutches had soured my mood, but I still couldn’t see why Mister JayMac’d pay a skinny old female shine just to cook and slouch around. Hadn’t he also hired her as a housekeeper? Why have colored help if your paid white ballplayers had to pitch in to help the help?

Kizzy read my mind. “Danl Bowes, I cooks and cooks. Aint nobody in this house goes hongry. You hongry?”

Nowhere like. If I’d taken another crumb, I’d’ve burst like a ripened pimple. I shook my head.

“Then you best git it in yo head to hep. Else I’m gone, off to do fo folks what’ll preciate it.” She poked me with a finger like a voodoo bone. “Hear what I say, Danl Bowes?”

This time I nodded. I heard her.

Parris said, “You run off Kizzy, Boles, you might as well be dead. Word gets round you chased her, you will be dead.”

“I loves to cook,” Kizzy said, “but hates to mess wi the pots and pans, the spills and overbiles that come wi a fixin bringe. When Mister JayMac stole me from Mrs Lullworth’s in ’thuddy-eight, he say I don’t have to mess wi aw that truck again. So I won’t, Danl Bowes, I gots me options.”

“You go on now,” Curriden told her. “Quip and me and this rude boy here’ll finish up.”

Kizzy rinsed-“rinched,” she said-her hands off, gathered her stuff up, and limped to the porch door off the kitchen. She sported a flapper’s hat from the roaring twenties and a picnic basket-size handbag. She looked back at us. “Mo pie in the Frigidaire. Yall gits hongry, go to it.” And she left in a slicked-up Model T, its gas coupons courtesy of Mister JayMac.

“Too damned uppity for her own good, all right,” Curriden said when she’d gone. “But who’s going to tell her?”

Parris got Junior Heggie to come down to help me scrub pots and towel-dry plates. The sink had been installed for a person no more than five feet tall. I could see why Curriden had wanted to hand the dishwashing chores on to a rookie. It killed me to stoop over that basin, and Curriden had a good half foot on me.

By the time Heggie and I finished, the team meeting had long since broken up. The guys who lived in Cotton Creek-Hoey, Nutter, Sloan, and four others-had ridden back to the old mill district in Mister JayMac’s Caddy. He’d chauffeured them himself, eight men packed like sardines into his two-seater, with Hoey, according to one report, perched on Norm Sudikoff s lap like Charlie McCarthy on Edgar Bergen’s.

“See there,” Parris told me when we’d heard this story, “Hoey’s a dummy too.”

Jumbo waited in the parlor. Three of Mister JayMac’s culls sat with him looking glum and confused. (A fourth, Bob Collum, had returned to Cotton Creek with Hoey and pals, probably to tell his wife some dicey times lay ahead.) When I came in, the culls looked up at me like I was their hangman.

“This way to our room,” Jumbo said. He ducked into the foyer and lumbered for the stairs. I wanted to follow him about as much as I wanted rheumatic fever.

One fella got up from the card table he’d been sitting at and stopped me: Roper, a rangy player with eyes like tenpenny nailheads and a foul cigarette stink on his breath. Just then, though, I couldn’t put a name to his face. (One convenient thing about being a dummy-you can forget other folks’ names without them realizing it.)

Roper dropped a long arm over my shoulder. “If you’re any good atall, Boles,” he said, talking into my ear, “I’m history. Spot challenges tomorrow, but Mister Jesus JayMac’s already throwed me out. I roomed with Muscles, but he’s already showing that Ankers kid my half of the premises. Is that fair?”

I couldn’t shake my head. Roper’s hand’d clamped the back of my neck-it felt like a claw.

“We’re subs, scrubs, third-stringers,” he said, yanking my head around, to look at Pettus and Jorgensen. “Expendables. You and them other wet-eared recruits have done for us. So I hope yall’re worth it, us getting booted.” He finally let go.

Pettus and Jorgensen eyed me from the card table. Even before being dropped from the club, they’d been semievicted from their rooms.

Where would Pettus and Jorgensen sleep? On sofas? In musty old chairs? I felt sorry for them. They looked sledgehammered, like heifers about to crash. I didn’t feel that sorry for Roper. He wanted to blame me for the whole room-and-roster shuffle, but I felt no guilt-I hadn’t bombed Pearl Harbor either.

The real culprit was the war itself. CVL teams made do in ’43 with twenty-man rosters; marginal guys over that number had to face the blade. In most CVL towns, a twenty-man roster gave management a payroll that didn’t chew up the season’s gate. It also squared pretty well with the manpower needs of the Selective Service Acts and each club’s search for usable talent.

“Dick Roper’s my name,” Roper said. “I may have to leave this bunch of shitasses, but yall’ll hear from me again.”

(Actually, we did. He got drafted later that summer-one of the reasons Mister JayMac released him, I imagine, and fought in Europe with the Ninth Army. Today he’s a U. S. Congressman from a district in western Georgia, a born-again shill for the national gun lobby.)

Jumbo came back from the foyer to get me. Roper retreated to the card table and his cast-off buddies. If Jumbo felt sorry for them, he didn’t show it. He took my bag-in his hand, it resembled a sack of marbles-and made for the stairs again. Following him, I knew he reared up to seven feet, maybe seven-two. In Tenkiller, I’d never seen anybody even close to that size. Six foot took the cake. In fact, Lon Musselwhite was the biggest man I’d ever seen until Jumbo came along, and I hadn’t seen Muscles until just that morning.

Anyway, I had my doubts about soldiering up the stairs behind Jumbo. It reminded me of beanstalk climbing. Fee-fi-fo-fum. The steps creaked. Once we’d reached the second floor and the steps to the third, the house-with its mildewed wainscoting, wavy picture molding, and uneven hardwood floors-had started to seem as echoey and crooked as a fairy-tale castle.

We finally hit the third floor. A T-shaped hall divided it. We went down the crossbar to the house’s southwest side. Jumbo keyed open his door and nodded me in. Not counting the kitchen, this was the hottest room in McKissic House I’d yet visited, the stiflingest by far. Jumbo didn’t say two words, just pointed me to the corner under a gable roof. He dragged over a canvas cot for me to stow my gear under and to sleep on: an Army cot, bought or liberated from Camp Penticuff. Jumbo broke it open and set it up for me.

No need for blankets, but I’d’ve looked with favor on a pillow and a sheet. I didn’t relish undressing in front of Jumbo, but because I usually slept in my skivvies, a showdown would eventually come-unless I copped out and slept in my clothes. The heat nixed that notion. My first bad dream, even one of Aleutian snows and icy Marsden matting, would trigger a killing fever attack. But I couldn’t tell Jumbo how I felt, what I wanted, why I ached to cry, and he didn’t ask. At least my smelly cot sat next to a window and an outside fire escape. But Jumbo’d probably let me camp there because he was too tall to move easily under the gable’s ceiling.

Jumbo had a bed with white iron bedposts, two sets of springs laid side by side, and a couple of rectangles of scrap plywood on the springs. The setup didn’t look comfy, granted, but it had my cot beat all the way to the nearest mattress factory. Well, okay. Jumbo had let me into his room. He was the landlord, I was the tenant. But why couldn’t I have a bed too? After all, McKissic House didn’t shelter convicts or street bums.

“You’ll adjust,” Jumbo said. “After a time, the heat becomes bearable.”

Wham! it hit me: my rookie status, the attic room, the hideous galoot I had to live with. I broke down and sobbed, like I had on the train. Anywhere else, with anybody else, I’d’ve tried to hide how trampled on and scared I felt. Jumbo, though, I let watch.

Then I reached under my cot, pulled my Red Stix bat out of my bag, and stood there glaring and wringing the bat’s handle. I didn’t plan to clobber Jumbo-he’d’ve clobbered me back, I thought-just to squeeze out some sawdust to catch my tears in.

Jumbo had a dust-clogged revolving fan with a metal safety basket. It rested on a pitcher stand between his bed and my cot. He turned the fan toward me and switched it on. It buck-danced around, moving muggy air. If he’d hoped the fan would improve my mood, it didn’t.

I continued to cry.

In his frock coat and patched trousers, like a hulking Abe Lincoln in a Mathew Brady photograph, Jumbo sat down on his bed. He didn’t seem to be sweating, just steaming comfortably from the inside. He gave off a clayey smell, a smell with a soothing edge to it but also a buzzing persimmonish feel; not a sick-making smell, but a different one.

Crying, I noticed Jumbo’d done a few things to make his attic homey. Semihomey. Shelves lined the wall behind his bed, pine planks he’d made into a bookcase with the aid of several large cans of Joan of Arc red kidney beans. He’d used these cans the way folks today use cinderblocks, as braces between the shelves. He’d stacked them eight cans high, in three columns, two cans per column between each shelf.

Books glutted the shelves. Over them he had this William Blake reproduction of Adam and Eve being kicked out of Eden by angels with fiery swords. It looked like Jumbo had cut the picture out of a magazine-Life?-and glued it to a piece of cardboard with a mat of green construction paper but no glass. Then he’d hooked it on a loop of wire to a nail in the wall.

Anyway, the books, the fan, and the magazine picture didn’t do much to hide the fact he lived in a grungy third-story oven. Now I lived in it with him.

In the old days, English noblemen with crazy wives or daughters stashed their women in attics like this one and hid the keys in old ships’ trunks.

Say something, I thought. Say something, you lummox.

But he didn’t. He didn’t even shed his stupid coat. He sat there, sorry or maybe embarrassed for me, miffed at himself for agreeing to take me in. I slammed past his bed into the hall, Jumbo didn’t try to stop me. Either he didn’t care to risk my anger or my leaving didn’t exactly crush him.

I stumbled down the stairs. On the second floor, some players, including Heggie and Dobbs, stood around in the hall, the doors to their bedrooms open. I startled them. Sure I did-a nutso-looking kid with a bat trying to find something to break.

Double Dunnagin flapped out of his room in shower thongs and a bathrobe. He copped in a wink how I was primed to let go of my wayward, ornery pain.

“Hey there, Danny. Swell bat.”

“Get him off the hall with that thing!” Mariani yelled. “The twerp’s gone round it.”

Dunnagin came over. He asked to see the bat. I pulled it back, cocking it. Everybody else on the hall-Mariani, Parris, Heggie, Dobbs, Knowles, Curriden-had shut up. Dunnagin kept smiling, kept coming on. He said he understood how arriving in Highbridge on a steamy day and getting paired off with Jumbo could “tetch a fella.” He took my elbow, even though I could’ve knocked his head off with one swing, and steered me into his room. His roomy, a pitcher name of Jerry Wayne Sosebee, bridled to see me.

“For God’s sake, Double,” he said, “don’t bring the crazy kid in here. I’m trying to balance my checkbook.”

But Dunnagin, without even wrenching my bat away, had already closed the door. Sosebee stood up. He wore nothing but a pair of khaki boxer shorts and eyed me like I’d brought cholera. His side of the room-a room twice as big as Jumbo’s hotbox-boasted photos of family members, pets, a Ford sedan on blocks. He’d papered the wall next to his bed with Varga girl pinups from Esquire. Even half unglued, I ogled them.

“The guy’s whackers,” Sosebee said.

“Seems healthy enough to me,” Dunnagin said.

“Get him out. Jesus H. Christ.”

Dunnagin shuffled on a pair of trousers and a T-shirt, flipped Sosebee a salute, and led me down the stairs and out of the house.

Tiptoeing through the rows of a victory garden, he pulled me along by the barrel of my bat. We crossed a stretch of lawn below the garden and Mister JayMac’s bungalow and ended up in a gazebo near a good-size pond.

In Tenkiller, the Elshtains had a gazebo. In his carpentry days, my dad’d built a few for townies with big yards and a need to show their money. Down South, gazebos sprout like toadstools. I don’t know why. They make little sense-moronic structures with roofs but no walls, more for show than everyday use. But Dunnagin pulled me up the steps of this one and made me put my keister on a bench inside it. I held my bat between my knees, where it jutted up like a bodacious hard-on. Dunnagin laughed. I set it down and rolled it under my bench with my foot.

“Thanks,” Dunnagin said. He began to pace. It wasn’t quite dark yet. Only a couple of stars twinkled. You could smell these typical Hothlepoya County smells drifting in from town or from the countryside and colliding with each other. One smell was of plowed earth, like rotting burlap. Heavier, though, was the sweet, starchy fragrance from the Goober Pride peanut butter factory. Back then, these stinks haunted Highbridge, especially the trackside factory districts. In residential neighborhoods where Dutch elms, maples, and oaks could filter some of the peanutty stench out of the dead air, it dropped to tolerable levels. Nowadays, I can’t catch a whiff of it without thinking first of gazebos and second of Highbridge.

“Don’t panic, Danny,” Dunnagin said, pacing barefoot in front of me. He had his hands in his back pants pockets. Plenty of room there-he hardly had any fanny at all. “Jumbo hasn’t killed anybody yet. He looks like death blown up to dirigible size and painted battleship gray, but, I mean, hey, he’s human, isn’t he?”

Was he? I didn’t know.

“He doesn’t have a social knack as well developed as his vocabulary, I admit it, but that shouldn’t shake you-you’re not exactly a social lion yourself, I wouldn’t think, and even Harpo has a bigger vocabulary than you do.” He squeezed the bulb of an imaginary airhorn: Beep, beep.

“Look,” Dunnagin went on, “you should feel flattered he took you. Clerval had the only private room in McKissic House.” Dunnagin stopped pacing. I had my eyes on his feet. He didn’t start talking again until I raised my sights to his face. “Mister JayMac assigned that attic room to Clerval last year, his first on the club, and I’d’ve figured him about as ready to take on a roomy as Hitler to show up at a kosher gig in Miami. So you should feel honored. Chosen, even.”

My eyes grew hubcap round. I did feel chosen, I just didn’t know for what.

“Yeah, he’s big. Six-ten, seven, maybe seven-two. Hard to say. He sort of slouches. Taller than Howie Schultz, though. Schultz, the kid who plays first for Brooklyn. Sportswriters call him The Steeple. Got nixed for military service for being too tall. S one reason Mister JayMac hurried to sign Clerval-the Army wouldn’t come calling. A better reason is, Clerval’s a good country player. A bit slow, not a lot of range, but a champ at digging out bad throws and snagging tosses that’d sail slap over anybody else’s head. He’s also good at catching darters right back at him and shots down the foul line that might drop in for extra-base hits.”

I pulled my bat out from under the bench. I rolled its handle back and forth between my palms.

“Yeah, he can hit. Sort of. Last year his batting average hovered around.220 or so-poor for the minors, fatal for a guy with big-league ambitions. But he’s got a scary knack for making the hits he does get count. He’s slammed fence busters in spots that’d’ve killed us if he hadn’t come through. Killed us. So Mister JayMac gave him his own room. He’s valuable even if he isn’t quite bigs material.”

Dunnagin took my bat and sighted along it at the evening star. Then he swung it a few times. Me, I swatted mosquitoes, a swarm from the shallows of Hellbender Pond.

“Here.” Dunnagin handed the bat back to me. “Cigarette?” He shook a couple out of his pack, stuck one in my mouth, and lit me up. “Sometimes the smoke’ll run the bastards off.” He meant the mosquitoes. “Soothe your nerves too.”

I took an awkward puff. Back in Tenkiller, Coach Brandon had hated the habit. Called cigarettes wind-robbers. Sharing one with Dunnagin felt a lot like breaking training.

“Old Golds,” Dunnagin said. “They got this apple honey stuff in em to keep their tobacco moist.”

I couldn’t taste any “apple honey,” but I kept smoking. In a minute or two, I had a coughing fit. Dunnagin didn’t notice.

“Around the loop, players started calling Clerval Jumbo. He tolerates it. Just don’t call him Goliath, Behemoth, or Whale. He hates Whale. Call him that, it’s like you’re knocking not only him but all the whales in the seas. Jumbo’s okay, though, because it’s fairly neutral. It just means he’s big, which he’d be a blind fool to deny.”

I kept coughing; a fuse sizzled straight down my tongue.

“No idea how old Clerval is,” Dunnagin said. “Thirty? Maybe thirty-five or -six. He sometimes limps around like a crip. Other times, he’s light on his feet as Astaire. Even DiMaggio’d die for Clerval’s swing on his good days. I sure would.”

With one hand I smoked. With the other I scratched a mosquito bite on my shin. Blood stained my pants cuff, and flesh rode under my fingernails.

“Did you see him eating tonight?” Dunnagin asked me. “Take a look at him and you’d assume he’s a meat-eating barbarian. Nosir. He’s a vegetarian, a strict one. Won’t touch chicken or eggs. Eats a ton of produce a week, though. And Goober Pride peanut butter. Practice mornings, game days, he devours half a jar. Good thing he’s near the source, eh?” Dunnagin rubbed his chin. “Come on. I’ll walk you back up. Clerval won’t bite. He only bites vegetables.”

I let Dunnagin lead me back to the house and up the stairs to Jumbo’s room. Dunnagin knocked.

“Hank, is it okay if young Boles here comes back in?”

The door swung open. Jumbo stood framed in it from the chest down. He bent at the knees and peered at us sideways.

“Come in, Mr Boles.”

“See you tomorrow,” Dunnagin said. He did a swami’s farewell, touching his forehead and chin and rolling his hand over. Then he beat it back down the stairs.

Jumbo had changed our room. A divider-a loosely woven grass mat-hung between his bed and my cot. He’d also put a quilt and a feather pillow on my cot and set up his revolving fan at the edge of the grass curtain so that it blew into his half of the room through part of its arc and into my half for the other. It moved hot air around, but also kept mosquitoes from drilling us like Texas oil fields.

“I intend to read a while. Tell me if the lamp disturbs you.” Jumbo ducked behind the mat, where his shadow hung, scaring the Tenkiller crap out of me. I sat down on the quilt he’d rustled up and stared at his lumpy silhouette.

Dunnagin’s efforts to calm me didn’t calm me now I was back in Jumbo’s room. I heeled off my shoes thinking he was about to rip down the mat, grab me by the earlobes, and dump me out the window. Jumbo never did that, but sometimes his head would seem to turn my way and stare at me through the weave, his eyes-I imagined-leaking a thin yellow lava.

I lay down in my clothes. Mama Laurel, the Elshtains, Coach Brandon, Franklin Gooch, and everyone else in Tenkiller might as well’ve rocketed off to Mars. At last I slept. Later, I awoke in darkness. The fan still bumped away, and Jumbo still breathed over its whirr in deep, even gasps. Gasping myself, I went under again…