Brittle Innings

by Michael Bishop

  “Cause she’s a writer and lug the bunting’s more poetic You oughta be asking Sloan.”

  By the end of August, though, we’d put ourselves in a place to lug the bunting, for real, and Miz Drummond’s daily squib for the Herald was plugging the final LaGrange series like the next Joe Louis bout-twice on the front page, next to wire reports about U. S. naval operations around New Guinea and the Solomons. Highbridge had pennant fever. If FDR wanted the CVL and Mister JayMac’s club to boost the morale of our locals, well, we were doing a bang-up job. Even a runt like Trapdoor Evans-speaking talentwise-couldn’t walk through the farmer’s market without drawing autograph hounds.

  Henry didn’t borrow Mister JayMac’s Caddy on any of our off days leading up to Friday’s game. Far as I could tell, he didn’t once rendezvous in the victory garden or in Darius’s old room with Miss Giselle. He slept in his own bed, getting six or seven hours of shuteye a night. He read two very brainy books Anatole Maguin’s The Pariah and Victor-René Durastante’s Self-Evolution and Self-Extinguishment. (I jotted the titles down in my notebook.) He’d focus on two pages at once, close his eyes like a camera shutter, and then page forward again-a method I hadn’t seen him use before, like maybe he wanted to speed up his reading to beat the end of the season.

  “Those any g-good?” I asked him about his books.

  “Provocative. I wish I had them in the original French, but Mrs Hocking could get them only in these somewhat clumsy translations.” He finished the shorter book-the Maguin-in an hour, but spent most of one afternoon on the Durastante.

  What Henry did Thursday and Friday, I don’t know. I took Phoebe to a matinee at the Exotic on Thursday (Above Suspicion with Joan Crawford and Fred MacMurray) and spent my entire Friday-until going to the ballpark-clerking with her at Hitch & Shirleen’s.

  We didn’t moon over each other, or try to smooch, or even spend much time holding hands. We just hung around and talked, or hung around and didn’t talk, and that horrible morning in her house over to Cotton Creek fell further into our pasts, like it’d happened in ’38 to somebody else. When Phoebe had to wait on a customer or ring up a sale, I sat on a stool behind the counter and struggled to read The Pariah.

  “That any good, Ichabod?”

  “I d-dunno. Not much happens. This Frenchie in Senegal lives for a year in the basement of a government b-b-building, and nobody knows he’s there. Or’d c-care if they did.”

  “Sounds a lot like Mr Bebout.”

  “Henry l-liked it.”

  “Well, Henry’s a genius. A certified aigghead.”

  What could I say to that?

  “He’s the nicest ugly man I ever knew,” Phoebe said. “But put up that stupid book and talk to me.”

  So I did.

  No one could say Buck Hoey’d fueled a late-season surge by the Gendarmes because they’d played well all season. On the other hand, Hoey almost singlehandedly kept the ‘Darmes’ juices flowing in August-by his bullyragging, drive, and sheer revengeful orneriness. He wanted his new club to beat his old club so bad Emmett Strock would’ve had to shoot him to keep him off the field. In fact, the Hoey-for-Fortenberry-plus-cash trade quickly began to look like the worst player swap Mister JayMac’d ever engineered.

  You see, Strock put Hoey on third base, for Binkie Lister, where he didn’t have to cover so much infield as he did at short. That move, along with Hoey’s natural grit and his ill will towards his former boss, gave him the energy to raise his batting average sixty points. He also began using what he knew about the windups and body talk of CVL pitchers to steal bases (not really like him) and his Durocherlike talent for hurling insults to gig rival batters from his spot at third (exactly his style). He got under the skin of hitters, who rewarded his obnoxiousness by losing their cool and wasting their at bats. As a result (we heard), the same Buck Hoey who’d once launched a barrage of Burma-Shave jars in the Prefecture had become the darling of LaGrange. Even Binkie Lister, reduced to a backup role, liked Hoey; and Cliff Nugent, the ‘Darmes’ biggest star, recognized Hoey’s value and didn’t begrudge him his popularity.

  Luckily, we had the Gendarmes at McKissic Field, where, what with the neck-to-neckness of the pennant race and all the rabble-rousing feature stories about us in the Herald, we also had a sellout. An oversell, in fact.

  I dressed out in a stock room at Hitch & Shirleen’s, across the shady street from the ballpark. Fans began to arrive four or five hours before the game’s scheduled 7:30 P.M. starting time. Whites and coloreds, GIs and civs, occupied the stadium like a celebrating army.

  Some of these folks spilled into Hitch & Shirleen’s looking for Co-Colas, sweet cakes, chewing gum, tater chips, you name it, at cheaper prices than they’d get them for at the stadium’s concession stands. Phoebe’s daddy’s folks returned to help her handle the extra customers, and I walked across the busy street on my spikes for our pregame meeting at six-thirty. Autograph seekers and advice givers orbited me like gnats. It took fifteen minutes to cover a hundred yards, and I heard some fans from LaGrange grousing that ticketsellers at a couple of gates had turned them away.

  “F yall want to see this one,” a man said, “we may have to buy some nigger seats, it’s all that’s left.”

  Inside, the stadium seemed to’ve inflated like a balloon. It creaked and wobbled and bulged. And our het-up Hellbender crowd carried us through that killer series’ opener, boosting us to a foot-stamping win. Nutter hurled a tidy five-hitter, and Henry blasted a seventh-inning home run that may’ve come down in the Himalayas, with Yours Truly on board by way of a bunt single. Hoey didn’t do diddly in the game. On my trot towards third base, I didn’t even look at him.

  “Nother pissant hit,” I heard him say. He meant my bunt, not Henry’s homer, but I said, “Too bad it cleared the fence,” and jogged home with the only score that really mattered in that game. Behind me, Hoey chewed his vinegary cud.

  An inning and a half later, when I stabbed a liner to my right for the game’s final out, fans poured onto the field, and a brigade of GIs marched to Penticuff Strip singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” and so many off-color jody chants that fistfights with offended Good Ol Boys broke out.

  The win put us a full game up, with only two to play.

  In the clubhouse, Mister JayMac said, “Win tomorrow, and that’s it. Except for our honor, I wouldn’t much care if yall shanked Sunday’s game. The ’Darmes could take their cheap win and ride home crying.”

  “Amen!” said Jerry Wayne Sosebee.

  “So win tomorrow and wrap er all up.”

  “Win tomorry!” everybody shouted. “Win tomorry!”

  Mister JayMac collared me on my way to the showers and dragged me over to Henry. “Yall meet me out to the gazebo exactly an hour from now, hear?”

  “Yessir,” we both said. Mister JayMac vanished into the echoey pandemonium of the understands. Henry and I looked at each other. Then Henry ducked out of the locker room in his uniform-to walk back to McKissic House.

  “Gentlemen, jes a few minutes of your time.” Mister JayMac paced the springy flooring of his gazebo on Hellbender Pond while Henry and I sat next to each other on a bench against one of its walls. Mosquitoes whined, and ghostly patches of steam rose from the smoky mirror of the water, the stars overhead as sharp as buffed-up fork tines. “Does either of yall have any idea what I’m about to say?”

  “Sir-” Henry began.

  “Hold on now. Actually, you see, I’d prefer to break the news, even if you have a hunch about it, Mr Clerval.”

  Henry’d gone stiff as a cigar-store Indian. His hip next to mine felt like a curved plank of hickory. He feared, I suddenly realized, Mister JayMac had heard from Miss Giselle’s own mouth the damnable story of their affaire de coeur, and other body parts. Henry had a hand on one knee, and that hand began to twitch-the only movement except for his breathing I’d noticed so far. Me, I suspected a wholly different reason for our interview with Mister JayMac.

  “Few would admit y
ou fellas are a sight for sore eyes,” he said, “but yall’ve been that to me-even if sometimes I rode you damnably hard and put you up wet.”

  “Kizzy keeps us in fresh towels,” Henry said.

  Mister JayMac raised an eyebrow. “Listen. The Phils want yall for the rest of this season. Freddy Fitzsimmons prevailed upon Mr Cox to get him some top-notch help from the minors, and the help he wanted was a coupla fellas from this lowly Class C organization. Yall’ll catch a train out of Highbridge on Tuesday and report to the Phillies soon as you get there, likely for some serious playing time.”

  “Hot dog!” I said. “Hot diggety dog!”

  “Great joy.” Henry gripped his knee to keep his hand from twitching. “Great, unexpected joy.”

  “Unexpected? Henry, a man with forty-plus homers should be asking what kept him stuck at this level until now.”

  Henry said, “Very well. What did?”

  “I did. The Phils weren’t going nowhere, but we looked to be. God forgive me, Mr Clerval, but I kept you here. I made Fitzsimmons cool his heels.”

  “Then God forgive you indeed.”

  “Yall could even start. Jimmy Wasdell, Philly’s first baseman, has only two or three homers all year, and Gabby Stewart’s hitting about.200 and trading out at shortstop with Charlie Brewster, no Ruch himself. In other words, yall could actually claim those starting spots.”

  “Hot dog!” I got up and did a jig. When I’d finished, Mister JayMac looked out across the pond.

  “Don’t know what I’ll do to replace you next year, but yall’re on your way. The Phillies may be too. Jes don’t forget who gave you your shot when you start exercising the scoreboard riggers at Shibe Park.” Mister JayMac stumped down the steps, as if to hike across the lawn to his bungalow.

  “Sir!” Henry said.

  Mister JayMac turned around.

  “Why did you apprise us of our promotions tonight?”

  Mister JayMac said, “You mean, before we’ve clinched? I guess it’s because I can never deny myself any small pleasure. I like my dessert first. I flip to the back of murder stories to see who done it. A long-standing vice.”

  “If we don’t clinch tomorrow,” Henry said, “you will berate yourself for breaking the news so soon.”

  “Probably. Almost certainly.”

  “Then make no general announcement until the pennant is in our grasp. Danny and I will remain discreet as well.”

  “Excellent,” Mister JayMac said. “Yall get some sleep.” He angled away from us, a shadow in rumpled seersucker. Frogs croaked, fireflies blinked, and the smell of scorched peanuts drifted through the gazebo, oiling the hot night and the steamy surface of the water.

  “A dream fulfilled,” Henry said thoughtfully. “A chance to prove myself against the best.”

  I pulled Henry off the bench by his shirt front. He had to duck his head to keep from bumping it. “B-big leaguers,” I said. “You and me.”

  Henry lifted me to his chest, squeezed my puny bones. In that cockeyed bandbox, he solemnly waltzed me around, swinging me a foot or so off the floor, wagging me like the bob in a grandfather clock. He smelled of soap, rubbed baseballs, and wet clay. I let him drag-waltz me, step-step, step-step, frogs and cicadas chorusing like bullroarers and pennywhistles. At last Henry put me down.

  “He’d have t-to admit I could p-pl-play,” I said.

  “Who?” Then Henry understood and laid his hand on my head like a priest giving a blessing.

  ***

  Miss Giselle stood at the foot of the gazebo’s steps, a phantom in a pale organdy gown, white or trout-fin blue. Maybe it was a dressing-gown, maybe her thirty-year-old ballroom getup. Anyway, I sort of boggled. A damped-down glowworm sheen seeped from her. The helmet of her silvery hair shone dully too. She looked old, Miss Giselle did-not old-old, in face and body, but like she’d been shipped forward to us from a temple in Thebes, say.

  “Congratulations, Henry.”

  Henry nodded a wary thank-you.

  “Up to Philadelphia, away from Highbridge.”

  “I’m g-g-goin. Good night.”

  “Stay here, Daniel,” Miss Giselle said. “Who knows what I’ll do if you leave?”

  “Go in, Giselle,” Henry said. “It’s late. The air feels humid and plaguey.”

  “Plaguey. Only you’d say plaguey and mean what you mean, but the air’s just fine. I like it.”

  “Giselle, this charade must not persist.”

  “If you leave, I leave too. I see no charade, but a union that only days ago you also believed in.”

  “Woman, please, we do ourselves no glory, protracting this deception, indulging what cannot be.”

  “Ha.” Miss Giselle quoted from a book that Henry knew: “ ‘Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded.’ ”

  “You say a lie, as once I ignorantly lied to myself. The truth is that bliss eludes the mass of us. Go back in.”

  “Get me to a nunnery, eh? And how have you come to regard yourself as one of ‘us’? The ‘mass of us’? You’re a murderer, Henry. Hell’s tortures are too mild for this… sniveling rejection you shy at me, you wretched devil!”

  Henry sat down again. “Don’t,” he said, so softly it was almost a message to himself. “Whence did I come? What is my destination?”

  “Philadelphia,” Miss Giselle mocked. “Say we’re finished-mince no words-and I’ll go inside. You’ll never lay eyes on me again. Just look me in the face and say it.”

  “That painful act I’ve already accomplished.”

  “If you meant it, you can do it again.”

  Henry sadly shook his head. “Our furtive meetings must cease. You may not accompany me when I leave.”

  “Then you’ve slain me, Henry. Slain me.”

  Henry’s face was so moony white it seemed to reflect the trout-fin blue of Miss Giselle’s gown. Miss Giselle sent him a bitter kiss off the back of her hand and pivoted in the shadowy grass. Henry watched her stride away.

  “Fornication-filth and incest.” Henry didn’t mean to be funny, and I couldn’t laugh at him because his whole body had shaken with the blurting of those curses.

  “What’ll she do?” I asked him.

  His very skin sagged on him. “Forget me. Devote herself anew to the licensed desiderata of her husband.”

  I didn’t know what that meant, but the grief in Henry’s voice was plain enough. It quirked my own upbeat mood about our call-up. When we returned to McKissic House, his slumped shoulders vexed me every step of the way. I wanted to do a maypole dance around him. Instead I dragged myself to bed, in a house already dark and snore-riven. And Henry paid no heed to Christ’s advice to set all anxiety aside.

  On Saturday, the Gendarmes humiliated us. I don’t remember the score, and I’ve struggled for years to forget my two muffs at shortstop. Buck Hoey led the charge against us, with four hits in five tries and an incredible catch in the eighth of a real stinger off the bat of Worthy Bebout. Hoey’s catch killed our only feeble whack at a rally.

  “Tied,” Mister JayMac told us, like we didn’t know we’d bungled our chance to coast. “Any need to explain what yall’ll have to do tomorrow, gentlemen?”

  “Excel or expire,” Manani said. “Put up or perish.”

  “Cripes,” Turkey Sloan said. “Knock it off, Vito.”

  “Suck it in or succumb.” Manani caught Sloan’s gaze and held it like a carrier gunner lining up a Zero in his cross hairs. “Do or die.”

  Suddenly, “Do or die” no longer struck even Turkey Sloan as the hackneyed saw of a low-grade dago brain.

  55

  On Sunday afternoon, the Gendarmes played us tough again. Their ace, Sundog Billy Wallace, dueled our rookie star, Fadeaway Ankers. Neither had his best stuff, but Wallace was always a scrapper and Fadeaway’d learned from Dunnagin how to pitch when his speedball had taken a holiday. By the middle of the fourth, the scoreboard read three to three.

  Buck Hoey’d picked up right where he’d finished yes
terday’s game. Nothing existed for him but himself, the ball, the bases, and the base paths. He didn’t bullyrag or chatter, he just centered himself and played.

  In the top of the fifth, at first again on his third single of the day, Hoey took a crouching lead, broke on Fadeaway’s move to the plate, and geysered up out of his slide, after hooking around my tag, in a swirl of red dust. He called time to brush himself off, and when he did, I touched him on the hip with the web of my glove, a half-hearted effort to get the base ump to throw a thumb at him. No go. Because of the timeout, the fact Hoey stood off the bag slapping red-orange dust from his pants didn’t mean cracklin bread.

  My meaningless tag got Hoey’s attention, though. He cocked awake and jabbed me in the gut with his finger.

  “Uh-uh-uh,” said the base ump, Little Cuke Gordon. “Hands to yoresef, Hoey.”

  “S just a love poke. Only one Dumbo’s gotten all season. Less, of course, Jumbo’s buggering him.”

  “Put a lid on it, Hoey, or clean it up.”

  “Christ, Gordon, you sound like a bluenose.” Hoey returned to second. “And, Dumbo, you poor gazoonie,” he said, kicking some dirt at me with the side of his shoe, “tell Mister JayMac he lost Highbridge a pennant the day he dealt me. Tell him it was a damned stupid thing to do.”

  I flipped the ball back to Fadeaway and returned to my spot at short. The only way to deal with an asshole, I thought, was to wipe it-which us Hellbenders intended to do on the field. Hoey, meanwhile, tunneled into himself again, taking his lead, daring Fadeaway to pick him off. No need. The next hitter up fouled out to Curriden, ending the inning.

  Later, during the seventh-inning stretch, with our organist playing a medley of show tunes and Cokesbury hymns, Milt Frye spoke out over the PA system: “S a great time to visit our concession stands. Slaw dogs, nickel Co-Cola, boiled peanuts, and, one of yall’s favorites, Cracker Jacks. Patriotic Cracker Jacks-a prize in ever box, not a one made in Japan…

  “I’ve jes got some big news for immediate release. Namely, two of our worthiest ’Benders-though I don’t mean Mr Bebout-have earned train tickets to Canaan. Yessir. Come Tuesday, Jumbo Hank Clerval and Battlin Danny Boles will be bona fide big leaguers. The Phils need help, and these fellas’re gonna go up to provide it. We know what they can do. Now them pitiful long-sufferers in the City of Brotherly Love’re gonna find out too.