Brittle Innings (20 page)

He gave the notebook back to me and closed his eyes. I sat down on my bed and read his answers over and over again, like he’d written them in an alphabet with hundreds and hundreds of meanings in every letter.
Too many places to list
,
No
, and
Only my “birth
,
”
I figured, put into code his whole mysterious biography. Why had he put
birth
in quotation marks? After our evening together, I was afraid I knew.

25

M
ister JayMac dropped by our room at eight the next morning to tell us the Gendarmes’ owner, Mr. John Sayigh, wanted to play a doubleheader that afternoon to make up for yesterday’s rainout. The weather report—sunny with high cumulus—promised us a shot at it.

“What of the field?” Jumbo asked.

“The groundskeepers got a tarp over the infield on Friday night. Outfield’s pretty squishy, though, and it’ll take some doing to firm up some spots where the tarp didn’t do its job. Mr. Sayigh suggests volunteers from both our clubs show up at the park within the next hour or so to tackle the drying-out.”

“Yessir.”

“Begging your pardons, but both you fellas look like you could use some drying out too. Didn’t go honky-tonking last night, did you? A little arm-wrasslin with John Barleycorn?”

“We went to a movie,” Jumbo said.

Three movies, I thought.

Mister JayMac turned to me. “Didn’t you sleep? You look about as peakéd as I’ve ever seen you.”

“He’ll look swell after some labor on Mr. Sayigh’s field,” Jumbo said.

“Let me stress,” said Mister JayMac, frown lines between his eyes, “that neither Mr. Sayigh nor I expect anyone to work who’d rather idle the morning away or go to worship services. In fact, if you don’t want to assist with field repairs, I’d like yall to come with me to church.”

“We’ll assist,” Jumbo said.

“All right. If everything goes well, today’s opener will start at two. The Gendarmes’ front office plans to announce the time over the radio and pass out flyers to folks leaving church. I expect a good crowd.”

“Yessir,” Jumbo said.

I found the empty hide of the stuffed goat the desk clerk’d brought me yesterday and handed it to Mister JayMac.

“What’s this?” he said.

“A toy,” Jumbo said. “Please return it to Mr. Hoey, who must have sent it to our room in an unfortunate mix-up.”

“Looks a little the worse for wear,” Mister JayMac said. It did. That goat was dishrag-limp. Mister JayMac turned the empty skin over in his hands and said good-bye. I halted him again and gave him the goat’s picked-off eye buttons. Mister JayMac wrinkled his forehead and left.

Jumbo and I suited out in our flannels, splurged on a taxi, and rode to the Prefecture. True to Mister JayMac’s word, a half dozen groundskeepers’d beaten us to the task. With rakes, brooms, zinc buckets, wooden drags, and burlap bags of sand or sawdust, they struggled to repair the field. Jumbo and I went to work with three other Hellbenders—Dunnagin, Knowles, and Sudikoff—and maybe ten of the Gendarmes. Most of the guys treated this shit detail as a party, cracking wise and singing in rounds. It went okay.

Nowadays, you’ve got beaucoups of ways to dry out a field. You can sprinkle this more or less new-fangled chemical product called Diamond Dry around and let it absorb the water. You can vacuum up standing puddles with a machine. Or pour gasoline on the wet spots, flip a match in, and boil some of the moisture away. (Course, you can also burn down your ballpark.) Hell, nowadays you can hire a helicopter to hover over the swamp like a flying blow-dryer.

Back then, though, nobody’d heard of Diamond Dry or outdoor vacuums. Because of rationing and the hazard to your stands, no one would’ve thought of using gasoline. Helicopters? Ha! Not until ’39 did Sikorsky—first name, Igor—make one of those ungainly contraptions fly.

So you used other methods. You helped your groundskeepers by wielding brooms to spread the water out, by forming bucket brigades to scoop it up and dump it elsewhere, and by digging runoff trenches. That Sunday morning, some of us swept, some of us bailed, some of us scattered sawdust or hay around. By noon, Jumbo and I’d burnt our energy reserves down to fumes, but our labors guaranteed a game or two that afternoon, and the wives of some of the Gendarme players brought us a covered-dish dinner. Jumbo ate for the first time since his rooftop juicing on Friday night: creamed sweet corn, snap beans, yellow-squash casserole, tomato slices, popcorn okra, and creamed potatoes. The food was lukewarm, the women’d toted it so far, but it tasted like manna to me, even the meat dishes Jumbo wouldn’t let himself touch.

That afternoon, our restoking didn’t seem to help that much—not at first, anyway. Jumbo and I played like kittens overdosed on catnip. Ordinarily, Mariani pitched like a street fighter, nicking the edges of home plate, stalking around the mound with his teeth gritted and his eyes afire, throwing heat when the batter expected finesse, and vice versa. None of these tactics worked for Mariani in the opener. The Gendarmes boarded him like fleas on a long-haired spaniel, then roughed up Parris and Hay in relief roles. We lost the opener, six to two, and fell two games behind LaGrange. Another loss’d shake us hard. It could take two weeks, even a full month, to regain the ground we’d given up, if we could regain it at all.

Gendarme fans, especially the coloreds in the outfield bleachers, carried on like their boys’d already snatched the CVL pennant out of Mister JayMac’s pocket. I felt sure that some of the raucous crew at last night’s monster flicks were tap-dancing and thigh-slapping out there.

In the dugout between games, Hoey sidled up and sat down next to me. He popped me with some sort of rag, then dropped it over my thigh and leaned back.

“Hear you got a telegram from Mama yesterday.”

The rag on my thigh was the toy goat I’d gutted.

“Hearing from Mama didn’t inspire you to new heights of glory on the ball field today, Dumbo.”

I flipped the fake goat skin out onto the infield grass.

“Looky there—flies almost as well as your namesake, don’t it?” Hoey squeezed my knee. “Maybe Mama’s words weren’t meant to inspire, maybe they were meant to
sting
.”

“Lay off the boy,” Double Dunnagin said.

Hoey ignored him. “You were a regular sojer boy up at the plate in that last one.”

If I hadn’t gone aught for three, with a deliberate walk in the eighth to load the bases and set up a rally-killing double play, I might’ve figured his remark for praise. What it meant was, I’d stood in the batter’s box like a soldier at attention, never taking my bat off my shoulder. It never crossed Hoey’s mind—or Sloan’s, or Evans’s, or Sosebee’s—he and his wiseacre chums had slid a banana peel under my confidence.

Mister JayMac came into the dugout. “This game’s do or die. And I don’t expect Darius to drive a load of stiffs back to Highbridge. Yall follow?”

“Yessir,” four or five guys more or less mumbled.

“In the debacle jes past,” Mister JayMac said, “yall played worse n I ever thought you could. Play up to your potential, not down to your shortcomings, and we’ll escape with our limbs intact and our hopes alive. Need I say more?”

“NOSIR!” most of the team shouted.

“All right. I’m deferring here and now to Darius, who has some interesting intelligence for you.”

“Nother nigger nugget,” Fadeaway told Sosebee. Mister JayMac didn’t hear. Otherwise, Fadeaway would’ve spent the evening hand-washing our jocks.

“Gundy’s pitching this game,” Darius told us, sitting on the dugout ledge with his hands hanging between his legs like dark plumb bobs. He avoided eye contact. “I’ve seen him pitch befo, and I’ve watched his warm-ups.”

Where, I suddenly wondered, had Darius spent the night? In the
Brown Bomber
? At a cousin’s or an in-law’s somewhere in or around LaGrange? I couldn’t have told you.

“Gundy tips his curve,” Darius said.

“Tips it?” Sloan said. “My, my. Usually, you’ve got to be in the batter’s box to tip one. Gundy must be faster than the word God to tip one of his own pitches.”

“Mr. Sloan, that’s enough,” Mister JayMac said.

“Gundy
telegraphs
his curve.” Darius looked Sloan in the eye, and Sloan started picking lint off his sleeve. “He’ll thow you a fastball, a change, or a knuckler out of his glove—ever time, no surprises. You got to figure which it is as it’s riding in. I cain’t hep you there. But if you cain’t tell a knuckler’s dip-dip-shimmy-shimmy from a fastball’s straight-in zip, they’s eye doctors you should visit.”

“Unless you’re a pitcher,” Hoey said. “Nothing scares a hitter worse than a half-blind moundsman.”

Darius smiled. “True nough. But Gundy’s curve, now—he’s gon tip you to it sho as sunrise, gon take the ball to a place back of and under his right butt cheek and twiddle it there till he’s got his grip. If Gundy drops his ball hand behind him, yall’re gon see a curve—ever time.”

“That could be a ruse,” Nutter said. “When he goes back to his glove for the windup, he could regrip. A hitter thinking curve and lunging at something else would look a fool.”

“Mr. Nutter, you’ve been to the bigs,” Darius said. “You know sech things. Gundy aint been up and most prolly never gon to be. In this business, he’s as perdictable as a hell-fire sermon, and nobody on the Darmes, not even Mr. Strock, has had the sense to cotch him out on it yet n jerk him straight.”

“Anything else, Darius,” Mister JayMac said.

“Nosir. Important thing is, study where his ball hand goes fo he winds, then cat-pounce any curve in the zone.” He slipped off the dugout ledge and glided away.

If any other CVL team had had a colored scout, management would’ve milked him of his skinny and passed it on without telling where it’d come from. Mister JayMac took another tack, whether from social conscience or from some sort of weird snag Darius had him in, I couldn’t say just then.

Fadeaway pitched the second game. He blanked the Gendarmes through six, using a fadeaway and a perky fastball to bumfuzzle Mr. Strock’s gang and keep the homies solemn as a surgeon at a recent patient’s burial. Meanwhile, the rest of us teed off on Gundy’s telegraphed curve. We also managed to decipher most of his other pitches before they reached the plate.

Gundy, shell-shocked to near zombiehood after less than four innings, trudged to the showers to a concert of boos. We picked up on his reliever where we’d finished with Gundy, the rhythm of hitting in us like a boogie-woogie tune, the Darmes’ dashed hopes—for a sweep—making them more stumblebummish the longer the game went on.

Even the run they got in the seventh, a rain-bringing Ed Bantling pop-up the wind pushed into the right-field stands, didn’t set them afire. His homer struck even Bantling as flukish. He trotted to second backwards, watching the ball rise and rise, in unreal stages, like a Ping-Pong ball on an air-hose jet, until it finally stopped bounding higher and fell on a sudden slant into the bleachers. As he crossed the plate, Bantling had begun to laugh, but more like a soldier who’s dodged a bullet than one who’s just lobbed a mortar right on the enemy.

And for good reason too. We beat LaGrange thirteen to one and saved ourselves the embarrassment of going home on a losing streak.

26

J
umbo and I spent one more night in the Lafayette Hotel. He slept like a dead man, hardly breathing or moving. Despite my bad night the night before, the day’s excitement—along with a nagging fidgetiness about those three Karloff flicks—had me keyed so tight I couldn’t unwind. I flopped around like an epileptic, then got up and paced, mentally replaying every inning of Sunday’s second game.

Well, why not? My play in that game qualified as one of my best performances yet. No errors, an unassisted double play, and five hits in six plate appearances, with a double down the line, and four runs scored. Hoey hadn’t congratulated me, though. He’d spent the afternoon either riding the bench or squatting in a coach’s box glumly clapping his hands. Once, I’d seen him and Turkey Sloan with their heads together in the dugout. Plotting their next toy purchase? Writing another rhymed telegram? How, I wondered, had I managed to make such an enemy of the guy? How could I turn him from a menace into a friend, or at least a neutral?

Around three in the morning, I stopped pacing and looked at Jumbo. He worried me too. A few hours ago he’d powered two Roric Gundy curves and a low-and-away fastball from Gundy’s reliever out of the Prefecture. Those shots’d given him five home runs for the series, tying a CVL record held by a former Opelika Orphan now in the Marines. This morning, though, he seemed a coma victim, too fagged to’ve performed the feats just listed.

I leaned over him. The quarter moons of orangish-yellow under his lids looked sicklier than usual. I picked up his clammy wrist. I guess he had a pulse, but maybe I’d plugged into the throbbing feedback of my own. The pale light leaking into our room from the streetlamps outside gave Jumbo’s still body a gorgeous creepiness. I returned to my bed and sat there watching him. A little later, I eased over onto my side and fell asleep.

Jumbo woke me before dawn, and the Hellbenders assembled in the Prefecture’s parking lot around eight to board the team bus and return to Highbridge.

Riding home, I stayed awake, jostled by the lurch and sway of the
Bomber
’s worn-out chassis and picked at more or less good-naturedly by my teammates. On Highbridge’s northwestern outskirts, though, I slumped against my window and escaped into a dream-addled sleep. . . .

“—
more in tarnation could you want?
”

“
A life, Mister JayMac. My own life.
”

Voices—two voices—dragged me wincing and blinking out of the pit of my stupor. I lay on the split upholstery of one of the
Brown Bomber
’s rearmost seats. Jumbo had deserted me. As quietly as I could, I peeked over the back of the seat in front of mine. Every Hellbender, not just Jumbo, had left the
Bomber
—some time ago if the absence of travel kits, ball gloves, and snack wrappers meant anything.

In fact, the darkness of the bus’s interior, the coolness of its metal floor, and the murky shade surrounding our bus told me Darius’d driven it into the garage of the buggy house beside McKissic House. Now, he and Mister JayMac faced each other across its aisle up front. Neither knew I was still aboard.

Maybe I should’ve coughed or sashayed nonchalantly up the aisle, but it shamed me to’ve fallen so hard asleep I hadn’t noticed our arrival or heard Jumbo, Junior, Dunnagin, and all the others getting off. More than likely, they’d crept off the bus as tiptoey as elves, just to see how I’d react to waking up alone after they’d all gone inside.

Anyway, instead of showing myself, I hunched down out of sight and held my breath.

“You have a life here,” Mister JayMac said. “You have a damn fine life here. Even an enviable one, I’d say.”

“You might believe that,” Darius said, “but I cain’t.”

“Would you rather be in an all-Negro unit in New Guinea building runways and taking atabrine to stave off malaria?”

“Nosir, I’d rather—”

“That stuff makes your ears ring. Turns the whites of your eyes custard-yaller. You’d
have
to take it, though, because the Army’s precious
quinine
supplies go to their All-American Caucasian boys.”

“Mebbe they’d give me half atabrine and half quinine. Jes one ear’d ring, jes one eye turn yaller.”

Mister JayMac didn’t seem to hear Darius’s reply. He said, “Or how’d you like to be in a colored regiment pick-axing away at the Alcan Highway in subzero temperatures?”

“I know a man doing that. He’s proud to do it, he can pint to that road and say he holp to build it.”

“He’s got a frozen tail, trench foot, and frost bite. I kept you out of that. Saved your hide for better things.”

“Leastwise, for
other
things.”

I pulled myself up again and peered over the seat. Mister JayMac had a flask of whiskey and a brown ceramic coffee mug. Darius had a mug. Mister JayMac tilted his flask and shared out generous sloshes of liquor. Its yeasty sweet-tart smell filled the bus.

They’d already shared at least a mug each. Knee to knee up there, they seemed close to exploding. Only Mister JayMac’s bosshood and Darius’s role as a black hired hand kept them from pitching into donnybrook. The wrong word, the sass of an eye, or one more slug of hooch might yet shove them to it.

“Doesn’t playing baseball beat the likely alternatives?”

“I don’t play baseball. I drive a bus. I step n fetch.”

“Nobody but you and me may know it, but you’re a grand sight more than a glorified chauffeur and houseboy. You’re the de facto assistant manager of a contending CVL baseball team.”

“De facto,” Darius said.

“It means—”

“I know what it means. Hardly means doosquiddy. Means I’m a nigger with a big-shot friend.”

Mister JayMac sipped at his mug. After a while, he said, “A life? A life you say. What does
that
mean? Just what do you want that the world—this world, not some pie-in-the-sky pipedream—is ever gonna let you have?”

“A tryout with the Atlanta Black Crackers. Or the Kansas City Monarchs. Or the Jacksonville Red Caps.”

“Are you asking my
permission
to leave Highbridge to play with some run-on-a-shoestring colored squad?”

Darius stared out the window over Mister JayMac’s head, at a rotting harness on the wall of the old buggy house.

“If you leave,” Mister JayMac said, “I’ll see to it your number comes up. I’ll see to it you get tracked down fast and straightaway inducted.”

“That’d be bettern this glorified chauffeur and houseboy job I got now,” Darius said.

“
Assistant manager!
” Mister JayMac stood up and purposely sloshed the whiskey in his mug on the
Bomber
’s steering wheel. He didn’t let go of his mug, but only because he’d tangled his middle finger through its handle. “The only colored assistant manager of a pro white ball club in the whole United States, south or north, east or west, de facto or otherwise, and you want to play with a bunch of unlettered darkies who never know from year to year how many games their season’s gonna have or even if their ballclub’s got the financial stuffing to last a month. Right?”

“I want to play where the Powers That Be gon let me, Mister JayMac. That’s all.”

“
I
let you, I let you when I can. But, Darius, I’ll see you in battle dress before I’ll let you sign with an uppish bunch of Ethiops who’re just as lief to file for bankruptcy as to play ten games back to back. How does Private Satterfield grab you?”

“Fine.”

“Fine? What do you mean, fine?”

“If I cain’t play baseball, how bout gitting me sent to the Tuskegee Army Airfield? Or to Shorter Field? Or mebbe to Dale Mabry Field down to Tallahassee?”

Mister JayMac laughed. “Got your sights set high, don’t you? Well, hear the straight skinny, Darius. The only place monkeys get to fly in combat is in
The Wizard of Oz
.”

Darius chug-a-lugged his whiskey and gave his mug to Mister JayMac, who set it and his own mug on the dash. He looked ready to climb down and stalk to the house. Darius got up and swung himself into the driver’s seat. He gripped the wheel, then lifted his fingers from the wet-paint tackiness of the heavy liquor coating it.

“What you forgit, Mister JayMac, is monkeys come in more colors than one. Some got two-toned souls.”

Mister JayMac slammed his hand down on the dashboard. The mugs there jumped, but didn’t fall or break.

“Darius, don’t leave.”

Darius took his handkerchief and wiped the steering wheel, then his hands. “A different color monkey probably wouldn’t want to.”

“Don’t,” Mister JayMac said. Did he mean don’t leave or don’t talk that way or both? Darius stayed mum. Mister JayMac banged the door open, leapt out, and strode through the sawdust and pulverized shell litter on the floor.

I ducked to keep him from seeing me as he came past the bus’s rear. Behind me, he creaked the tin-plated door open and eased through this crack into the yard. The door rattled shut again, but the light that’d fanned in, a burst of white-orange sunlight and a storm of dancing motes, told me I hadn’t slept the whole day away.

Darius kept sitting behind the wheel. I couldn’t get off without him seeing me, and the talk I’d overheard didn’t incline me to show myself. Mister JayMac’d call me a filthy sneak, and Darius’d take me for a whitebread spy. So I lay low and waited for Darius to move.

Problem was, my pocketknife slipped from my pants and hit the floor with an echoey clunk and a metallic bang. It hit on its end, then toppled over on its side.
Clunk-bang!

“Who’s back there?” Darius said.

I bit my bottom lip.

“Mice? Nazis? Cmon out, whoever you are.”

I sat up. Darius stared at me in the slanted rectangle of the rearview.

“Jumping Jesus,” he said. “What’re you doing back there, Danny boy?”

My shrug didn’t explain much, I guess.

“Git,” Darius said. “Leave me be.”

I picked up my pocketknife and other gear, and pussy-footed up the aisle, half expecting Darius to swat all my stuff out of my hands, push me down, and tell me how only creeps did what I’d just done. He kept sitting, though. He didn’t look at me, not even a glance in the rearview.

I got off the bus. Its baggage holders stood empty. Jumbo must’ve carried my bag upstairs. He must’ve enlisted everyone else’s help—everyone’s but Mister JayMac’s and Darius’s—to play a joke on me. Ha ha. As I left the garage, Darius stayed slouched behind the steering wheel: hollow-eyed, hair-trigger, mute.