Brittle Innings (16 page)

Jumbo stood up. “I confront my accuser.”

Sosebee’s jowly gills went ashy-gray, but he kept facing Jumbo across five seat backs. He didn’t sit.

“Mr. Sosebee must speak for others too,” Jumbo said. “How many agree that Mr. JayMac’s kindnesses to me have undone your good will or degraded the quality of your play?”

No one answered.

“A fair question,” Mister JayMac said. “Do any of you play sloppy ball because Jumbo gets commercial rooms on the road?”

“I resent the special treatment,” Trapdoor Evans allowed. “I don’t play any worse for it, though.”

“It’d be hard for you to play any worse than you did this past weekend,” Buck Hoey said.

“An honest admission,” Mister JayMac said. “Give credit.”

That remark—praise instead of a lynching—opened some more guys’ mouths. Sloan, Sudikoff, and Fanning all spoke up—not malcontents, exactly, but ballplayers who always looked outside themselves for Christs to hang on trees.

Jumbo said, “Last year I lodged alone, both in Highbridge and on the road. By nature I’m a solitary person, and Mister JayMac saw that I could tolerate the compelled camaraderie of our sport, or of any joint human enterprise, for only so long. I did not
demand
this favor. I asked it humbly and received it most gratefully.”

“He speaks true,” Mister JayMac said.

Sosebee kept standing: Jumbo was answering his charge. He looked less hepped than before, though. His skin had turned ashy-gray. Sweat showed in loops under the arms of his shirt.

“I would have agreed to the lodgings that Mister JayMac arranges for us,” Jumbo said, “except that small children and a great many female adults find mine a fearsome presence. I also discomfit not a few men. I didn’t wish to test the hospitality of Mister JayMac’s host families by presenting myself to them as a guest. I had no wish to burden them.”

“He still speaks true,” Mister JayMac said.

“Once last year, I might add, an innkeeper in Eufaula refused me a room because my appearance . . . offended him. I made no clamor. I simply went elsewhere.”

“So why’d you accept Dumbo as a roomy this season?” Jerry Wayne Sosebee asked.

“It was time,” Jumbo said.

“And Dumbo’s as close to nobody as Jumbo could get without taking nobody,” Hoey said.

“I assure Mr. Sosebee that Daniel cannot talk,” Jumbo said, “but I reject the slur that his inability to speak renders him a cipher.”

“Translation!” Hoey shouted. “Translation, please!”

Jumbo put one big raw hand on his chest. “Mr. Sosebee, if you still feel that I must relinquish the privileges I enjoy, I have a compact to propose. A
deal
.”

“What deal?” Sosebee said.

“I will come down to the second floor of McKissic House if you will take me as your roommate.”

Sosebee looked at Jumbo, then at Mister JayMac. No one wanted to give him any help. “Never mind,” he said. “Forgit it.” He lowered himself back to his seat. Either he or the seat cushion sighed like a bellows.

“Mr. Sosebee,” Muscles said, “the court fines you two bits for trying to initiate a meritless proceeding. Case closed! Court adjourned!”

So ended that morning’s Rolling Assizes.

Forty minutes later, we hit the outskirts of Highbridge, gagged on the sweet stinks of the Goober Pride peanut butter factory, and waved at a gaggle of colored young uns waving like mad at us. Their heroes had come home.

19

H
alfway through June, I’d played in—actually played in—seven straight games. Hoey got into our games, if he got in at all, as a pinch hitter or a late-innings sub. On my first road trip, I’d had two off games in a row, the loss on Friday night to Quitman and the loss of the twin-bill opener against Marble Springs on Saturday afternoon. Mister JayMac put Hoey in for me in the seventh inning of the loss to the Seminoles, but I felt sure he hadn’t won the job back. And he hadn’t. I played every inning of our next two games, strong wins, and got more hits than any other Hellbender but Charlie Snow, who’d slipped into such a groove that his bat fired off hits with the lickety-split golly-wow of a machine-gun.

Hoey didn’t cotton to my success, but he did stop hazing me as a flash-in-the-pan. He had to. My stats were radioactive. Of course, my statistics didn’t stay that bright all season—nobody’s could’ve—but they told every skeptic I could play. In the long run, I’d even help the bench riders, malcontents, and jerks who didn’t like me.

Up to a point, anyway.

Hoey’s living arrangements made it hard to read his changing feelings about me. He had a wife, a family, a house of his own. At our workouts he gave me tips—how to set up against certain hitters, how to flip the ball to Junior to speed his crossover pivot on double plays, how to drag bunt for a safety instead of just a sacrifice. He didn’t teach me like a man voluntarily passing on these skills—more like somebody with six months to live tying a ribbon round his life. Did he badmouth me at home? His kids didn’t act like he did. They didn’t blink at me like I was messy roadkill, a polecat, say, or an armadillo.

Back from that first road trip, I sat down to write Mama a letter and to send her some money. (Jumbo was reading.) I ought to’ve written her sooner, but how could I say a soldier’d buggered me and I’d gone dummy again? Long-distance calls were out (Uncle Sam asked you to keep the lines open for servicemen and emergency messages), and I didn’t relish trying to explain my roomy was an ogre of a pacifist.

My first letter home:

Dear Mama,

Sorry not to write before now but Im fine. You know that already I think. If my train had recked or somebody had killed me in ball practice by mistake youdve got a telegram saying I was dead. I know you havent. People here seem nice, more or less. My roomate reads alot. Im batting over 500 and starting nearlybout every game. Hows work? Use this money for yourself. Next time I write Ill send more.

Love, Danny

I’d already had three letters from Mama, one mailed the day I left Tenkiller. It came the day we squeaked by Lanett, three to two. Everyone boarding in McKissic House got mail in care of its Angus Road address, but Miss Giselle sorted through it and slipped the right letters into the right cubby-holes at our post-office wall in the foyer. Mama’s letters—she never wrote more than a page—made me homesick and kept me going at the same time. I sent her clippings, to make up for the fact my notes never ran longer than a Listerine label.

One of Mama’s letters—I still have them—complained about a recent act of Congress:

Those co-kniving gasbags in Washington have done come up with a legal crime called PAY AS YOU GO. They ask your boss to figure about how much you would owe in taxes at the end of a year, and they order him to hold back enough each month to cover it. It’ll tell in our paychecks, this BILL will. Money I used to get won’t be there any more. They say its to keep us from feeling poleaxt come taxing time, but why let these THIEVES IN SUITS fiddle with our pay, just to keep us working fokes “ahead of the game”? It’s butt-in-skee, if you ask me, uppity and dictatorlike. Watch out, Danny, their going to get you to. Old FDR turns redder every year. By the time this DAMN WAR ends, look for a Hammer & Cycle right in the middle of the Stars & Stripes.

In mid-June, we had a four-day layoff between our win over the Seminoles in Marble Springs and our first home game with the Eufaula Mudcats on Friday. A part of one of those days we used to travel, but the other three, Tuesday through Thursday, felt like holidays. Practice in the A.M.’s at McKissic Field, then drowsy hot afternoons and radio-filled evenings.

Junior taught me to play poker, and he, Fadeaway, Skinny, and I would lock up in cutthroat five-card stud, with piles of buttons (supplied by Kizzy) for chips and pitchers of lemonade for refreshment (likewise). If a game seemed about to turn into a fistfight, Miss Giselle’d threaten us with fines or room arrest. She seldom had to threaten twice. Once, though, Skinny accused Fadeaway of palming an ace and left the table to find a bat to rehabilitate Fadeaway with. Miss Giselle grabbed Skinny on his way back into the parlor, wrassled the bat away from him, and sent him upstairs.

Several of the older Hellbenders worked at defense jobs on a part-time basis, punching in from one to three times a week in the early afternoons of days we didn’t have games or mandatory team meetings. They’d pull eight-hour second shifts and get back to their homes or to McKissic House around midnight, limp as boiled asparagus and almost as pale. Moonlighters included Muscles, Curriden, Hay, Nutter, Sudikoff, and Dunnagin. They had special arrangements with either the local torpedo factory, Foremost Forge, or our duck-board manufacturer, Highbridge Box & Crate. Mister JayMac pulled a double handful of strings for them—not to keep them out of the draft, as Ira Crawford had accused, but to find them war work that didn’t interfere with their ballplaying.

Anyway, when I learned about these set-your-own-hours defense jobs, I understood why nobody at Monday morning’s Rolling Assizes had seconded Sosebee’s charge Jumbo’d received special treatment. Every Hellbender got special treatment. Some looked a little more equal than others in getting it, but hardly anybody had to poach his own eggs—if you know what I mean. Players in the bigs and even a few blue-chip Negro stars might make more money than we did, but Highbridge had earned itself a dead-on nickname: Sittin’ Pretty City.

It did surprise me nobody’d reraised the point about Mister JayMac’s loaning Jumbo his Caddy. Loaning a car was personal . . . in a way flexing your long-term political clout could never be. Loaning your car meant you trusted the loanee. If he didn’t qualify for gas stamps, you even had to bend or play peekaboo with the law.

On Thursday, Jumbo borrowed Mister JayMac’s Cadillac again, and Mister JayMac lent it to him. At two in the afternoon, the Caddy’s keys changed hands in the parlor, just as Fadeaway, Junior, Skinny, and I were about to start another poker marathon.

“Home before dark,” Mister JayMac told Jumbo. “We’ve got the Mudcats tomorrow. You’ll need some rest.” And he stalked on out of the house.

Jumbo squeezed the car keys in his fist and lumbered up the stairs towards our room. I deserted my poker buddies to go after him, but Jumbo took two or three steps at a time and got there ahead of me. Inside, he stood holding the box of used baseballs I’d always wondered about.

“I have a sick relative in Alabama,” he said. “I meant to take these to him on my last trip, but, well . . .”

Your sick relative likes old baseballs?
I thought.

“A project,” Jumbo said, hefting the box. The lumps on his face flushed, then faded to their old chalky hues at different speeds. “Excuse me, Daniel.” I got out of his way.

Jumbo carried the box downstairs, put it into the back seat of Mister JayMac’s Caddy, and drove away. His body seemed to fill the front seat, like a Thanksgiving Day float.

He got back about five hours later, looking empty-eyed and blue. He went straight upstairs and lay down. I carried him some iced tea and a pan of vegetables, but found him lying in a kind of trance, not quite sleeping but not quite keyed to the outer world either. He didn’t eat or drink a thing.

Jumbo seemed okay again in the morning. (At breakfast, he wolfed down fruit, pancakes, and juice.) But
I’d
had a hard night. My weird-ass roomy’d lain only feet away with his eyes like yellow slits and his meaty paws squeezing the coverlet. I stumbled around all morning like a codeine junkie. My first game against Eufaula loomed.

Damn you, Jumbo, I thought, I’m gonna play like a zombie.

Well, I did. The Mudcats finned us. They just cut us up. We lost that Friday, nine to one. Mister JayMac cleared the bench looking for somebody who could do even a splinter’s worth of damage against their pitcher, Jimmy Becker. Nobody could. By the seventh inning, even Muscles and Charlie Snow’d come to the bench, replaced by Burt Fanning, a
utilityman
, and Quip Parris, a
pitcher
. Hoey’d gone in for me at short, Knowles’d taken Junior’s place at second. Our fans had set up catcalling clubs or gone home in a snit.

“Fair-weather friends,” Muscles said.

“They’re entitled,” Snow said. “They don’t pay their money to watch us crap our pants.”

Snow, I noticed, had a strange purple bruise on the inside of his forearm, maybe from running into the wall in the third inning for a home run that’d barely cleared—a long, fragile injury, like a lavender-blue snake with a fringe of back hairs and another of veiny feet. For some reason, I reached over and touched it. Lightly. He pulled back so quick you’d’ve thought I’d jabbed him with a cattle prod.

“Lay off, Boles.”

What the devil. Snow ranked with Musselwhite, Curriden, Nutter, and Dunnagin as one of the Hellbenders’ toughest characters. In Army uniforms, I sometimes thought, those five guys could easily chase the Huns out of North Africa.

I don’t know where I got the grit, but I pulled Snow’s hand towards me the better to see his snake bruise. Boy, he must’ve really collided with that headache-powder sign out there. Snow seldom hit the wall. Even right up against it, he always timed his leap to avoid rebounding in a drop-dead roll. No mad Pete Reiser heroics for Snow. He didn’t need em. He always got a good jump on long flies and measured his distances.

“It’s not from today,” Snow told me, a little friendlier. “And it aint as bad as it looks. Let go.”

I let go.

“My male kin have always bruised easy. Stupid, but it kept me out of the Army, bruising easy. So I’m careful. Mostly.”

“If you bruise that easy, Charlie,” Muscles said, “you’re an idiot to play ball.”

“At least I don’t box.”

Mister JayMac walked by. “Anybody who plays like Charlie—Mr. Snow—would be an idiot
not
to play.” He strolled on past, pacing, flusterated, out of sorts.

Snow, I learned, wore a strip of sponge in the palm of his fielder’s glove. He also wore hip pads, cloth cushions inside his shoes, sliding pads, and a sleeveless jersey under his flannel shirt—all to help prevent bruising. People thought of Snow as stocky because, dressed like that, he
looked
stocky. Out of uniform, though, he wasn’t much thicker in the chest and butt than Dobbs or me. Batting hurt him more than any other part of the game. The shock to his hands and forearms when he banged out another hit would always raise a bruise. He worked to reduce the harm by growing calluses on his palms and trying to smack every pitch on the bat’s sweet spot.

A pox on us, we also blew the second game of our four-game series with Eufaula, the opener of Saturday’s twin bill. Between games, Mister JayMac said, “Win-win, lose-lose, win-win, lose-lose! Damn the pattern yall’ve fallen into!”

“We got a win-win coming tonight and tomorrow,” Hoey said. “Want us to break the pattern?”

“Ha ha,” said Mister JayMac. “Not until we get to Opelika on Wednesday.”

Funny thing, we
didn’t
break our pattern. We beat Eufaula in Saturday’s nightcap and again on Sunday afternoon. Then, in Opelika, we lost two straight to the Orphans (with no parent club in the bigs and no home field until 1941, they’d played every game up till then as roadies, or “orphans”), then beat em in the nightcap of a rare Thursday-evening twin bill.

The next night, in LaGrange against the Gendarmes, we broke our two-up, two-down jig by
losing.
That made us seventeen and fifteen on the season, and nine and seven for June—a winning record, but only just.

“God!” Mister JayMac exploded after the loss. “That gets yall out of your rut—it puts us in a hole instead.”

The two weekend series against Opelika and LaGrange, our biggest CVL rivals, could’ve given us momentum. Instead, we lost each series two games to one and slunk home to change our splints and savor the home cooking of the fans at McKissic Field.