A Moment in the Sun (29 page)

“If they hadn’t grabbed it, it would’ve rolled for a triple!”

The umpire is in military uniform. He taps his second lieutenant’s bar. “All decisions final.”

Jacks returns to second with the white side of the field catcalling after him. Horace Bell from B Company is up now, the swiftest of their runners but not much with the bat. Jacks sees the 12th infield playing back, and signals for a bunt.

“Good look now!” he calls, catching Bell’s eye and tugging twice on his cap. “Wait for your pitch.”

But the curve snaps in on his hands and hits the neck of the bat before he can pull it back, popping up easily to the catcher.

Jacks calls time again and has them wake up Sergeant Lumbley, who has been snoozing in the shade under the bench. Lum can’t run any more on account of the bullet he took in the knee during a scrap in Bozeman, but he can grit his teeth and march the boots off most of the boys. And with a hickory club in his hands, well—

The big sergeant steps up to the plate, a pattern of field grass dented into one side of his face, squinting sleepily and looking around the bases. He hasn’t been awake enough to know what stuff the pitcher has got, but with Lum it’s never mattered much.

“Strike this darky out!” hollers one of the locals and Lum turns to stare at him as the first pitch sails over for a strike. The crackers laugh.

Lum turns his sleepy gaze back to the pitcher then and knocks the next one over the left fielder’s head and it just rolls and rolls, rolls so far that two runs score and he is able to quick march all the way to third before they get the ball back in. Jacks sends a runner to take his place and Lum returns to the bench, rubbing his eyes.

“We ahead or behind?” he asks.

“Tied.”

“What inning?”

“Top of the eighth.”

“Damn.” He looks up at the sun. “This day done slip by me.”

Shavers bounces out and they take the field, Jacks walking out next to his pitcher.

“Can you do this?”

Too Tall spits tobacco. “I’ll keep it low.”

The first batter up for the 12th is a pinch-hitter too, a long-limbed drink of water who has been corked black wherever his skin shows out from the uniform. The crackers behind the catcher think this is a riot, and the boy coons it up, dragging the bat to the plate, dangling his loose limbs like rubber, turning to doff his cap, revealing a shock of yellow hair, and bow to the ladies who cover their mouths as they giggle.

“Send one to the moon, Rastus!” calls the sheriff through cupped hands.

“I sho’ly do mah best, sah!” he answers, bugging his eyes wide. He walks with his buttocks stuck out and arched high, and waggles them to great amusement as he settles in at the plate.

“Send me the sauce, Boss!” he calls to Coleman.

It is bad enough down here in this shithole Georgia not knowing if there’s going to be a war or not or if there
is
will they be allowed to go and wearing the damn woolen tunics in this heat while you drill and then what’s supposed to be your own people who you are fighting for treating you like dirt every time you wander off the reservation.

Jacks sees it coming.

Jacks sees it coming in the way Coleman holds his body. In the way he grips the ball, but he just stands at his position and says nothing.

Too Tall sends one upstairs and the blackface boy hits the dirt.

It is dead quiet for a long moment.

“Ball one!” calls the second lieutenant, and gives Jacks a look.

The crackers and a good number of the boys from the 12th are screaming as he walks to the mound this time, faces red, a few stepping across the lime onto the infield to make their threats. He hears nigger this and nigger that, something about when the sun goes down. The 12th are regulars, a good outfit, but the pastel ladies are here now and it changes everything. Both the colonels are standing up in the bleachers, looking concerned.

Jacks takes the ball from Too Tall. “You don’t really have nothin left, do you?”

“Spose not,” the pitcher says, turning to spit tobacco, face a mask as the crackers shout. “If I still had it, I’d of tore that boy’s head off.”

“You walk straight for the middle of our fellas over there, keep your eyes to yourself.”

“I can get these bastards out.”

“You done enough today, Trooper. Nice job.”

The private walks extra slow to the waiting wall of blue shirts, tucking his glove under his arm and seeming not to notice his life is being threatened by the mob on the other side. Jacks waves for Hooks to go in at center, and brings Scott in to take the mound. The word is that the Carolina boy can throw it some, and at this point he wishes Colonel Burt would step down and run the damn team like he did when they played the railroaders in Missoula.

“Get us through this inning alive,” Sergeant Jacks says to Scott as he hands the ball over, looking him hard in the eye. “You know what I mean.”

The boy, Royal is his name, gives him a big grin. “Sure thing, Sergeant.”

He takes his time getting ready, strolling over to say something to Corporal Ponder at third base and giving him his glove. Ponder trots to the bench, whispers something to the one they call Mudfish, and returns with a different one. The crowd, impatient, are shouting for action as Scott puts this one on. He winks to the second lieutenant.

“My pitching glove,” he says.

He asks for a couple warm-up throws then, which brings a new howl of protest from the white side, and proceeds to out-coon the batter, windmilling his arm in an elaborate windup, catching the return throws behind his back like the boys do when they’re just fooling among themselves. The white folks aren’t sure what to make of it, and neither is his own side, but the burned-cork boy looks a little embarrassed now, waiting to take his turn.

“Batter up!” calls the second lieutenant. Jacks crouches and pounds his glove.

Scott rears back and throws hard overhand—only he doesn’t let go of the ball, instead wheeling off the mound and striding over to the bench, the 12th men and the locals catcalling again as he gets his original glove back from Mudfish.

“Sorry, sir,” he calls to the umpire as he takes the mound again. “Just didn’t feel right.”

The minstrel boy digs in, looking pissed off to have the attention of the crowd pulled away from his antics.

“You aint gonna need a glove if you’ll throw me that thing,” he calls. “You gonna need bi
noc
ulars to follow where it’s goin!”

“Comin right up,” smiles Scott, and goes into his windmilling wind-up.

The pitch he lobs in is so fat Jacks could run to the sidelines, grab a bat, and still get to the plate in time to hit it. The white boy in the blackface takes a mighty swing, connecting with it square over the plate—but instead of a crack of wood there is a heavy, soggy
THOOMP!
, the ball flying apart into a hundred little bits that spray outward like a fireworks explosion. Jacks is hit on the shoulder with a piece of it, a wet scrap of orange, the peel made white with lime from the basepaths.

People are stunned at first, minds taking a moment to grasp the phenomenon. Then the whole 25th falls out laughing, whacking each other on the back and miming the batter’s dumbfounded reaction. Even a few of the white folks join in, the white ladies clapping their little gloved hands with delight. The second lieutenant, though, is not smiling as he steps to the mound.

“Let’s cut out the nigger show and play ball.”

“Nigger show is at the plate, sir,” Scott tells him, nodding toward the batter, who is looking sheepish and still picking flecks of orange off his front.

“You gonna get serious,” says the officer, “or do I call a forfeit?”

“Yes, sir.” Corporal Ponder tosses Scott the real ball. “I will seriously strike this coon out.”

And proceeds to put the side down with only nine pitches—in-shoots and drop-offs, fast balls that seem to hop at the last moment and a big roundhouse curve that starts out heading halfway between home and third before hooking back over the heart of the plate, the regiment whooping louder after every strike. The last man to whiff slams his bat down in frustration and Jacks hurries to join Scott as they leave the field.

“Don’t smile, don’t wave your hat,” he says. “Just walk off.”

Of course Scott is the first batter up to begin the ninth. The pitcher gives him a long look and then throws a steaming fastball into his ribs. There is a sound like the orange exploding and Scott drops to his knees and then it is very quiet again.

If this was two white teams or two colored teams it would just be base ball, part of the game, and if there was a fight with nobody sent to the hospital they’d all meet after at the canteen to compare bruises over beer and pretzels. But instead Jacks and Mingo Sanders have to grab Cooper to keep him from running across the field and the officers are out of the bleachers waving their arms to keep the regiments apart and the crackers are asking Scott if he thinks he’s so damn smart now and when the whistles start blowing Jacks thinks it’s the provost guard come to make some arrests. But there is Colonel Daggett with a quartet of majors around him, marching up onto the mound, and in a flash the junior officers and noncoms have their people in formation, base-ball uniforms scattered among the blue, the 25th formed on the third-base side of the field and the 12th on the first, and Daggett waits till even the civilians are on their feet and silent before he speaks.

“I’ve just received a wire from Washington,” he says, “and it applies to both regiments present. We have orders to break camp, pending transport to Tampa. The Congress has voted and it is
on
, gentlemen.”

A cheer erupts on both sides of the field. Hats fill the air. The ladies in the bleachers spin their parasols in excitement.

The game has begun.

THE YELLOW KID

WAR!
is the one word the Yellow Kid can read. The rags have been hustling the
WAR!
for months, and now here is Specs passing it out in the day’s first special edition behind the
Journal
building. Specs has got an ink smudge on one of the lenses of his cheaters, ink all over his hands.

“By the time you little bastids unload this batch,” he says, “we’ll be ready with another extra.”

The Yellow Kid elbows in, slaps down a quarter’s worth of pennies and Specs slams a bundle of fifty against his chest, nearly knocking him over.

“Watch it, four-eyes!”

“Yer lucky I let you have em, you little Chiney piece a shit.”

Just because there is
WAR!
doesn’t mean their daily battle with the circulation gink is off.

“He aint Chiney yella,” explains Ikey for the hundredth time as he grabs his bundle, “he’s
sick
yella.”

“Yer both a friggin disease. Get outta here and sell those papers.”

They run around the building, shouting “
WAR!
Congress declares
WAR!
” and selling a few on their way.

“The Chief gotta be shittin himself,” says Ikey, pausing on the corner of William Street to adjust his load. They’ve seen him arriving late at night a couple times, Boy Willie himself pulling up in his hack with the white horse and his two sweet babies who look like the Riccadonna Sisters in the
Hogan’s Alley
comic he stole from the
World
, one on either side, fresh from some uptown theater or lobster palace. Big smooth-faced character in his glad rags
.
As far as they can figure he runs the dogwatch shift at his
Journal
dressed just like that, still in his silk top hat and swallow-tail coat. He always calls hello but never throws any mazuma their way.

“Willie been peddlin this yarn hard all year,” says Ikey. “Gonna be bigger than Corbett and Jeffries!”

They step out into Newspaper Row and the Yellow Kid takes the north side. They are at the center of the whole friggin works here. There is the tallest building, the
World
with its gold dome towering above, the glass boxes of the Electro Monogram out front swiveling to tell the folks that it is
WAR!
with the Tryon Building behind where the
Staats Zeitung
used to roll and the
Sentinel
and the mick
Freeman’s Journal
still do and then the
Tribune
Building with its clock tower showing that it’s nearly noon, the Yellow Kid better with the numbers and the hands of time than with letters, then the
Times
and the
Sun
behind it on Nassau, all of them flying their own flags along with the Stars and Stripes or even hoisting some kind of Cuban banner like Boy Willie’s paper, and then there’s the construction on the Park Row Building, already got the four giant Amazons with their giant stone melons up front and just across Ann Street the St. Paul Building is racing it story by story, both of them sposed to top the
World
by a good eighty feet when they’re done say the birds who bring the tours past and “
WAR!
” cries the Yellow Kid, waving a rag to display the scarehead, “Congress Declares
WAR!
” stepping over into the park in front of City Hall, geezers snatching papers and flipping him their pennies on the way in and out of the building. The Kid tries the can’t-find-change-for-a-nickel dodge on one old whitehair with a pair of muttonchops halfway out to his shoulders but the geezer is wise to it and waits with his palm out, the cheap bastid.

The Yellow Kid’s corner, by common understanding, is at Broadway and Warren where the omnibuses stop at the park and you can sell to the top-hat crowd heading for the Astor Hotel, with Graub’s restaurant, where the builders go if they haven’t brought their lunch, on one side of Warren and Donnegan’s, which is the reporters’ favorite gin mill, on the other. A hell of a location. But because today there is
WAR!
he can make a quick run through City Hall Plaza with the horse trolleys turning around and the noise and the dust and the drays pulling up with stone for the new buildings or the new bridge over to Brooklyn to the east and the Tammany hacks and city clerks coming and going and boys hawking the
Journal
and the
Sun
and the
World
and the
Times
and the
Herald
and the
Trib
and the
Telegram
and the
Telegraph
and the
Daily News
and the
Mail and Express
and the
Star
and even one poor clueless little street rat trying to pawn off day-old copies of the
Weekly Post
, just don’t stop moving and there’s no trespass, before he takes up position on his own spot.