Brittle Innings (37 page)

45

M
ister JayMac wanted Darius to drive us to the infirmary, but he was nowhere to be found. So Major Dexter, who’d finally shed his umpire’s gear, offered to drive us around the field and through the T-square grids of the camp’s Quartermasters’ 700-series buildings to the infirmary.

“I can’t leave Darius out here,” Mister JayMac told Major Dexter. “Yall wouldn’t enlist him, would you?”

“This is a training camp, not a recruitment station.”

“I know what it is, Major. I asked if somebody out here’d accept his papers and put him in uniform.”

“Not if you don’t want us to, Mr. McKissic.”

“Well I don’t.”

“Then you’ve nothing to worry about, sir.”

“If yall find him out here later, will you truss him up and hold him till I can fetch him home?”

“Yessir.”

“Well you’d better.”

Major Dexter climbed aboard the
Brown Bomber
and took us on a quick rickety jaunt to the infirmary.

The infirmary looked like every other bleached crackerbox structure at the camp, except it had a concrete loading dock for ambulances and supply trucks. It roosted across the road from an asphalt lot next to the Quartermaster Depot. When we arrived, Henry stood under the dock’s shake-shingled awning staring across the road at ten columns of ten men each standing in that lot in rubber sheaths—sacks, I guess—as smooth as lamb’s skin but as black as auto tires.

An NCO in a wide-brimmed hat stood in front of this whacko detail (buckra and buffalo together, whites and blacks, but more paleskins than coloreds) shouting, “Hop it, gentlemen, hop it!” so the bodies in those sacks pogoed with a floppy sighing sound—like the painful inflation of a hundred huge balloons with a hundred wheezing bicycle pumps. I beheld this show in rubbernecking disbelief.

General Holway’s command car had apparently come and gone, and when the
Bomber
pulled into the ambulance dock, Henry paid us no heed. He kept staring across the road, at the encondomed GIs hopping there like big vulcanized fleas. Or maybe he was staring beyond them, to the ball field where Charlie Snow’d leapt, snarled his spikes, and crumpled headlong. In fact, Henry didn’t give a cold hoot about the jumpingjacks across “K” Street. Mister JayMac rushed past Henry into the infirmary to see about his center fielder.

Muscles asked Major Dexter, “What in Uncle Sam’s army’s going on over there—a punishment detail?”

“Nosir, they’re volunteers.”

“For what, sunstroke?”

“Nosir, a Quartermaster experiment to test the resistance of GI clothing to the natural corrosives in human sweat. Our men in Alaska, the Pacific, North Africa, even here at home, need reliable clothes, and our scientists need reliable data.”

“Lord God,” Muscles said, “they’ll fall out in this heat.”

“They’ll fall out only when they’ve received the order to fall out,” Major Dexter said.

“I meant they’ll
faint
.” Muscles replied. “They won’t need an order to do it. No wonder yall’ve stuck em across from the infirmary—save you a few steps.”

“Mr. Musselwhite, they’re wearing shorts in those sacks, just their skivvies, not full battle dress.”

“I don’t follow this, Major, not atall.”

“We’re collecting sweat. The sweat that pools in those sacks we gather into vials. Later, we apply it—the sweat, I mean—to the various fabrics proposed for use in GI clothing. The Quartermaster Corps’ scientists measure its effects on the fabrics in question.”

I wondered what the hell Mister JayMac’d found out about Snow, and just then he came out of the infirmary with a major in a white coat. Mister JayMac and the major spoke to Henry on the emergency platform. After they’d talked, Mister JayMac slumped against the wall and put his face in his hands. Henry came to the bus. He placed his hands on its roof, just above the door, and arched his body over the gap between the bus and the concrete platform.

When Major Dexter levered open its door, Henry spoke so we all could hear. “Mr. Snow has just passed.” (
Passed
.) Then Henry sort of hung there, bridging the
Bomber
to the squat ashen building in which our dead teammate lay.

Charlie Snow, R.I.P.

“It would’ve pissed him off to’ve quit with a whole inning left to go,” Turkey Sloan said.

“Anyone here who thinks they know exactly how Charlie felt and thought doesn’t know the first thing,” Muscles said. “Anyway, we have to do what our own consciences say, not what we think the dead would have us do.”

“Spose they overlap?” Buck Hoey said.

Henry shoved himself away from the bus, strode across the dock to Mister JayMac, and led him into the infirmary, into the cheapjack corridors of Snow’s last passage. I began to cry.

Across the road, the NCO directing the volunteer jumping jacks in their rubber sacks shouted, “. . . two, three,
halt!
” All the paid perspirers stopped on cue; four or five of em dropped to the asphalt from fatigue or fever.

“Rise from your knees and hoist your sack along with you!” the NCO shouted. “Don’t spill a drop!”

The sergeant’s voice rang in me the way my mother’s or FDR’s or Jimmy Durante’s would—I recognized it. It had the familiarity of a sadistic high school teacher’s. The sergeant pulled his hat off, wiped his neck and forehead, and pivoted towards the
Bomber
with a heated, curious face, amazed that till now he hadn’t even noticed our bus.

I recognized the topkick. I’d seen him—briefly—in an upstairs cubicle of The Wing & Thigh on Penticuff Strip, the startled mug of a guy caught out on secret holiday. I’d seen that face somewhere else too—namely, aboard the train that’d brought me from Tenkiller to Highbridge. The face belonged to my ravager in the Pullman car lavatory, Sergeant Pumphrey. I got on my knees on my seat and stuck my head through the window facing the parking lot.

“You filthy bugger!” I cried. “You filthy damn bugger!” No stammer, just outrage.

“For mercy’s sake, Boles, mind your manners,” Curriden said. “We’re guests out here.”

“You thief!” I shouted. “You p-p-pervert!”

A hundred dripping men in a hundred rubber sacks looked from Pumphrey to the
Brown Bomber
and back again. Pumphrey, DI hat in hand, gaped at me hanging out my window, nothing in his flat muddy eyes but bewilderment and a dull lack of awareness. He just didn’t know me, either from the train or from The Wing & Thigh.

“P-P-Pumphrey, you sh-sh-shitass, you owe me f-f-f-fifty b-bucks!” I shouted at him. “You owe me . . .” Because I didn’t know how to figure the finer, or cruder, points of his debt, I couldn’t say what he owed. I finished, “
Pumphrey, you owe me!
”

Pumphrey put his hat back on and adjusted its chin strap. He pointed a finger at me. “Go easy, kiddo. Wrought up that way, you run a real ugly mouth.”

But I’d abandoned the window. I hurried up the
Bomber
’s aisle and out its open door. No one had the sense or the speed to stop me. I rounded the bus’s front end, trotted across “K” Street, and got right in Pumphrey’s face. He’d magically conjured, or freed from a canvas belt, a weapon—a billy or a swagger stick—and as I neared him, I eyed that stick as a part of the man needing amputation.

“Fifty dollars!” I screeched. “Fifty dollars and my voice back!”

“Your voice back?” Pumphrey spread his arms, crouched, and waggled his swagger stick. I had the feeling everybody near enough to see me had begun to think me utterly deranged. “You stole my voice,” I ranted. “You poked it down so f-f-f-far I can’t find it. Give me back my voice!” I feinted this way and that, and Pumphrey moved in agitated reaction to my feints, his baton swinging like a hand-held mine detector.

“This kid’s nutso,” Pumphrey told his troops. “Totally nutso.”

I liked him thinking so. I rushed him, grabbed his baton, and yanked. Pumphrey clung hard to the stick, but my tugging laid him out in a full belly sprawl, one arm towards me as his last prideful link to the baton.

I skipped backwards. With each skip, I’d kick Pumphrey in the chin with the toe of my baseball shoe. A few GIs gasped, but most whistled and whooped. “My voice, yall’re my v-voice!” I yelled. I dragged Pumphrey towards me, I shook him like a dog with a fetch stick clamped in its jaws.

The sweat gatherers cheered. Every time Pumphrey got a hand or a knee under him, I stretched him out with another savage jerk, and the sweaty GIs shouted like one happy person. If my well-timed jerks didn’t keep him down, I’d jump in and kick him in the throat. The troops cheered these kicks even more loudly than they did my stick-twisting and towing.

All of this’d happened so fast the Hellbenders hadn’t had a chance to drag me off. But now Curriden cried, “Boles, you’re gonna get every last one of us tossed in the stockade!” He was out of the bus, ten feet behind me—with another five or six players behind him for emotional bracing. “Jeez, kid,
stop it!
”

But the dogfaces’d shifted into root-for-the-upstart mode, whistling shrilly and grunting. I dodged my teammates and dragged Pumphrey in elbow-scraping zigzags. He flinched his head from side to side to escape my baby kicks. I spat at him, hawking up bile. He was my prom partner, this decorated s.o.b. with the chevrons on his sleeves, and I could’ve danced all afternoon with him. Pumphrey stopped me, though. He let go.

I scuttled backwards a few steps and crashed down on my butt. The sweat collectors gasped, then guffawed. Such fickle fans. Such readiness to turn. I had the swagger stick, but Pumphrey leapt forward and flung the heel of his fist into my mouth. Hoey, of all people, scrambled between Pumphrey and me, and Curriden saved my skull by grabbing my arm and slinging me behind him like a sack of onions. The other Hellbenders passed me along from one to the other until a good fifteen yards and four or five teammates separated me from the bloodied Pumphrey.

“That boy has a canary circus in his head,” Pumphrey said. “He wants his kidneys pulled out through his dick.”

“You took my voice!” I told Pumphrey from behind Dunnagin.

“What does that mean? Listen at you, punk. You’re loudern a cannon crump and you say I took your voice.”

“My voice and f-fifty goddamn b-b-bucks.”

“He’s tetched. One daft sumbitch.”

“No I’m not,” I said. “
‘I’m Popeye the Sailor Man. I’m strong to the finish, cause I eat my spinach. I’m P-P-Popeye the Sailor Man.’
”

“
‘Toot-toot,’
” said Turkey Sloan.

Pumphrey looked dazed, sledgehammered almost.

“Tenkiller,” I said. “
Tenkiller!
” I swung from Dunnagin to Nutter to Muscles to Curriden, the better to see Pumphrey’s face, the face from the train, the face from the cathouse. The muscles in his face worked from anger to emptiness to puffy chagrin. “If you don’t have my money,” I said, “take back what you said about my f-f-father.”

Pumphrey back-pedaled. “The boy’s fevered. Get him to a medic,” nodding at the infirmary, “fore somebody hotter-headed than me grabs up a .45 and plugs him.”

“I’ll shoot you first!” I yelled at Pumphrey, pointing my index finger and cocking my thumb. “
Bang!
”

The dogfaces hopped into a kind of formation while my pals nudged me away from another face-off with Pumphrey, working me around the
Bomber
’s nose and back inside. They pushed me into a seat on the infirmary side. Curriden wedged in next to me, forcing me into a scrunch over the tire well.

“We’re damned lucky MPs didn’t show up and run us in as goldbricking troublemakers,” he said.

“Miserable pricks,” I said.

“What in hell got into you? The logjam break? You talked damned near as much as Kaltenborn.”

Henry and Mister JayMac came out of the infirmary and reboarded the
Bomber
. Mister JayMac faced us from upfront, while across “K” Street a hundred human sausages, black sack after black sack, hippity-hopped off the oiled lot and up a wooden ramp into the Quartermaster Depot.

Mister JayMac took off his jacket, showing us a dress shirt blotched with heat sweat, grief sweat, anxiety sweat.

“Charlie Snow died in there. He didn’t want to, no more than you or I would, but he played every day knowing it could happen and taking as much care as he could not to let it. His luck—usually he had God’s own guardian-angelic grace—well, his luck took the day off. It decamped with Darius. We’ve lost Mr. Snow, and the squeeze in my guts tells me Darius has also cut his ties to us. It suggests to me, gentlemen, that—”

“Darius aint dead, is he?” Trapdoor Evans said.

“No,” Mister JayMac said. “He’s jes absconded, high-tailed it who knows where.”

“Then he could come back,” Evans said. “Charlie won’t. He aint got the option. So I don’t know whyn hell you got to cry over Darius atall. It’s Charlie that died, sir, and it uz Charlie carrying us to another CVL pennant.”

“True enough,” Mister JayMac said. Then he said, “Endicott Mortuary in Highbridge will pick up Mr. Snow’s body later today and prepare it for burial at noon Thursday, five hours before the second game of our Quitman homestand. Mr. Musselwhite will move to center. Mr. Evans, you’ll start in left until I decide you need spelling or outright replacement. I expect everybody aboard this bus, not counting Major Dexter, to be at both the funeral and the interment. Henry will drive us home. Complete silence, please, till we get there.”

46

Q
uitman’s Mockingbirds hit Highbridge for a three-game series, one game an evening from Wednesday through Friday. The day after Darius left, the day after we lost to Mister Cozy’s gang, the day after Charlie Snow died out to Camp Penticuff, the Mockingbirds flew in our faces for nine straight innings. Hit after merciless hit. Slash-and-burn base running that bled our will and gave our fed-up fans so many chances to catcall that fatigue set in. Eventually, any stray breeze creaking through the bleachers made more noise than our fans.

In fact, in the middle of the seventh, when Milt Frye asked for “yore prayers in memory of the brilliant Charlie Snow,” the stadium went stone dead. None of our fans had known until then he’d died; their earlier calls to put him into the game, given Trapdoor’s play, had made perfect sense. Now a silence like surrender took hold. We’d dropped several runs behind, our star had mysteriously “passed on,” and a mood of such cobalt blueness had hit our dugout we all felt sick to heart.

Our loss to the Mockingbirds, we learned the next morning, had dropped us three games behind the LaGrange Gendarmes, who’d beaten Marble Springs on the road. The Gendarmes would roll into town Saturday for a double-header, and a singleton on Sunday afternoon. If we lost another game or two to losers like the patched-together ’Birds, the Gendarmes might haul down 1943’s CVL pennant before we could gear back up to stop em.

On Thursday, every Hellbender on the roster attended Charlie Snow’s funeral at the Alligator Park Methodist Church. Local fans overran the lawn. Most couldn’t get inside because pews were reserved for team members, their families, and a perfumed army of Snow’s female cousins, who’d just arrived from Richland, Georgia, his hometown. Even a few Mockingbirds, admirers of Snow’s style, showed up, and Mister JayMac, who’d put together and was maybe even paying for Snow’s obsequies, showed these ’Birds to some ladder-back chairs behind the main body of pews.

Besides the big female cousins (blonde middle-aged women in veils and pastel print dresses), the only other relative there to mourn Charlie Snow was his wife, Vera Jo, an ex-cocktail waitress he’d married in Cheyenne, Wyoming, in 1931. They had no kids. After the service, I heard the weeping Vera Jo tell Miss Giselle, who’d snugged Vera Jo up next to her for the walk to the cemetery, that Charlie’d refused to let her have a baby for fear it’d come a hemophiliac boy. Bleeders, he’d felt, had too briary a path to walk in this life; he couldn’t see helping to bring another one into it.

“I ast him, ‘Charlie, would you trade all you’ve got in the way of love and talent for everlasting nothingness?’ But he said, ‘I’m here; I have to make do. The never-was aint, and don’t. Why take the never-was and afflict it?’ He couldn’t see no other side. Now I wish I’d had me a whole troop of little bleeders to ease the long nevermore he’s gone off to.”

Vera Jo wept, Miss Giselle hugged her, and the cemetery, set about with water oaks, sycamores, and pecan trees, filled nigh to overflowing with repiners.

Muscles, Curriden, Sosebee, Hay, Sudikoff, and Dunnagin lowered Charlie Snow’s casket into the grave on harnesses of fresh yellow rope. The preacher held his Bible over his head and spoke a final benediction. The crowd broke up and threaded back into the sweltering daylight beyond the cemetery. Henry and I, who’d stood poker-spined near the pecan grove behind Snow’s burial plot, likewise started to leave.

“Psssssst,” hissed the pecan grove. “Psssssst.”

We turned, Henry and I. A shadow in amongst the dog-eared green whorls of the hanging pecan branches beckoned to us, pulling back as it did. Park gardeners had carpeted the grove with pine straw and trenched it with banks of white violets and carefully pruned blackberry hedges, a retreat for the sorrowful. Some anonymous soul’d even placed some slab benches in there for the bereaved to perch their tails on.

Anyway, the crouched shadow in that chapel of pecan-bough whorls beckoned to us again.

“It’s Darius,” I told Henry in pure amaze.

We crept away from the other departing mourners through a break in the pecan grove. Darius, wary as a fox, had gone even deeper into it, at last turning himself at bay alongside the scabby bole of a tree not much thicker through the trunk than he was through the chest. Beside that pecan, he raised a hand to halt us.

“Yall sit right there,” he said. “Pretend to rest.” He meant on a moss-grown bench. Henry and I sat down on it.

“Where’ve you b-been?” I asked.

Darius, maybe ten feet away, laid his cheek against the scabbed bark of the pecan. He hugged it like a person. “I’ve done signed on with Mister Cozy and the Splendid Dominicans,” he said. “We play in Lake City tomorrow. Next summer I could be wi the Memphis Red Sox or the KayCee Monarchs. Playing, Mister Henry—not jes driving a bus. Playing.”

“Mister JayMac will find you,” Henry said.

“Why? Why’d he want to do that? Sides, I’m gon change my name and play a lot more spots than jes pitcher.”

“What about Euclid?” Henry said.

The question gave Darius pause. Me too. I hadn’t even thought of Euclid, Darius’s supposed little brother, and his’d been the first Hellbender face I’d seen upon arriving in town. Home games, Euclid acted as our bat boy, the only Negro kid in that position in the league. He didn’t go on the road with us (not counting his stowaway trip to Cottonton) because Mister JayMac had no control over his treatment in other cities. Euclid had a regular presence around McKissic Field, though, and split his time between Darius’s apartment and a trim little house near the farmer’s market where his mother—Darius’s mother, the onetime brown-sugar fancy woman of Mister JayMac—lived.

But Euclid had no McKissic blood in his veins. His mama, Detta Rae Satterfield, had conceived him with an official of the Railway Porters’ Union from Atlanta, a man as long gone from Detta Rae as Darius’s daddy and not a whit more missed. Just in her forties at Euclid’s making, she’d planned the child as the apple of her early dotage—but the manchild’s inbred rambunctiousness wearied her, and she’d begged both Darius and Mister JayMac to take him off, to act as stopgap providers and sponsors. They had more or less agreed, with the understanding Darius would do the biggest part of the guardian work.

“Euclid’s got his mama,” Darius said. “Got Mister JayMac and a house full of white big brothers.”

“Have you told him you’re leaving?”

“Lord, Mister Henry, I haven’t had a chance. He’s gon be awright, though, if he jes git told I’m out there pitchin and hitting. You see him, Mister Henry, tell him that. Let him know I aint gone off to dodge him, I’m doing it to grab my life back from the ol McKissic yoke.”

“I’ll tell him,” Henry said. “Now, though, that yoke will rest even more heavily on him.”

“He’s awready got a yoke—his black hide—he won’t shuck off this side of dying,” Darius said.

A brown thrasher rattled about in the underbrush five or six feet from Darius, fluffing out the flecked white vest of its chest and tossing twigs and pine straw around.

“I’m deeply sorry bout Mr. Snow,” Darius said. “He wasn’t no showboat. He had this easy stillness that spoke straight through everbody else’s jive and moonshine. That’s why I come here today. To say good-bye—to Mr. Snow and likewise to yall, if I could manage it.”

“You m-managed,” I said.

“Some stuff awready packed in a bag on my closet shef,” Darius said. “Mister Henry, could you fetch it out here after yall’s game tonight and set it on that bench? You could, I’d pick it up round midnight.”

“Is your apartment locked?”

“Nosir. Aint never been.”

“Then I’ll do it,” Henry said. “But what impels you to venture forth from McKissic House now?”

Darius seemed surprised. “Why, Mister Cozy ast me, he’s giving me a chanst at something I awways wanted a chanst at.”

“But you could’ve taken flight long ago.”

The interlocked wheels of the pecan leaves above Darius winched his gaze upwards. He searched all that lacy green for an answer. Then he squatted and trailed his fingers in the pine-straw mulch lapping his shoes. The sheer worn-outness of his hunker got to me.

“Better late than no time,” he finally said, peering at us up from under. “But why now? Good question, Mister Henry. I think it’s cause my life’s done crept into its brittlest part, like unto them innings when the whole thing could go either way—depending on jes when the crucial bonecrack happen, and to who. I awmost waited past the snappin point. Mebbe I did. But if I beat it now, mebbe I’ll git past my brittle innings and play on through to a stretch that’ll heal me, that won’t jes shake me down to splinters and shards.” Then he sounded angry and near tearful at once: “Don’t give me no grief for coming so tardy to a notice of how damn feeble and rickety I’d got. Jes
don’t
. I’m moving now, aint I? Ain’t I laying grease in my joints, oiling up for tomorry?”

Henry said, “So it would appear.”

“Then don’t yall chide me for what I cain’t nowise fix.”

“Darius, we don’t,” I said.

“And fetch me that suitcase, hear? They’s cash money in it, some clothes, a packet of eelskins.”
Eelskins?

“Have no fear,” Henry said. “The deed is accomplished.”

“One other thing,” Darius said. “You still holding them fifty dollars what got bet on our game out to Penticuff, Mister Henry?”

“I believe I am,” Henry said, surprised.

“Well, I won that bet. I heard it said so over them PA speakers round the field. Anyhow, I could use the money.”

Henry took his wallet from inside his jacket.

“Don’t open it,” Darius said. “I could use it, but seeing how that game ended, hexed by them damn bats and dimmed by Mr. Snow’s dying, I cain’t take it. Give it to Mr. Snow’s missus. Say it’s a token from a admirer.”

“Very well,” Henry said. “I will.”

“God bless yall. And bye.”

Darius saluted and backed off. He rattled the underbrush—the blackberry vines, the pine straw, the tiny white violets—less noisily than the pesky brown thrasher still goofing around in there.