Brittle Innings

by Michael Bishop

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “To ward off ills otherwise sure to follow,” Henry said. “I am entitled to my superstition.”

  ***

  On Friday morning, I stood on the blacktop on my crutches, my duffel at my feet and Henry hidden in a nearby pine copse. It wouldn’t’ve done for him to ogre around in broad daylight. I was waiting for a chance to thumb a ride into Troy. In Troy, I planned to connect with my train out of Highbridge and to ride it to Memphis, where another carrier would pick me up and haul me across Arkansas to Oklahoma.

  I had a pasteboard sign-TROY OR BUST-around my neck, and a stoic look on my farm-boy face. The ban on pleasure driving and the absence of cars made me begin to think I’d do better to set off crutching it, but finally a truck-loaded down, as my luck required, with dozens of stacked crates of live chickens-came grinding towards me from the southeast. The middle-aged driver pulled over and waved me towards his passenger side. He saw my crutches and got down to help me.

  “You a wounded sojer, kiddo?”

  His hair-the color of fresh-made doughnuts-rose in a greasy pompadour from his forehead, and his ratty pin-striped shirt lacked its top two buttons. He’d rolled its sleeves up to his elbows, where the twisted-over cuffs gave it a funny space-suitish look. I didn’t want to lie so I lied not to lie, if you can follow my logic. I tapped my throat with one finger and lifted one of my crutches.

  “Awright then. Climb on up.”

  We stuttered off, the reek of doomed chickens hanging over that truck like a moving canopy. The driver told me his name, who he worked for, how many kids he had, how much he admired and respected young fellas like myself who’d sacrificed life and limb to fight the Nips and the Huns. By the time we hit Troy, he’d invented an Army unit for me, a romantic battle or two, five or six heroic wounds, and a faithful sweet-heart back home in… well, wherever I was from.

  He drove me straight to the train station. He helped me down, carried my bag inside, and, at the ticket counter, shook my hand with a solemn, prime-the-pump rhythm. When he let go, I found a dollar in my palm.

  “Nothin can repay yall for yore wounds, kiddo, but that’s, well, that’s a… a token. Okay?”

  I nodded.

  The trains from Troy to Memphis and from Memphis to Oklahoma teemed with young guys in uniform. I was dressed in civvies, and everybody aboard naturally assumed-correctly-I’d hurt myself in a frivolous schoolboy game, not in the training camps of Georgia or on the battlefields of Europe. So the dogfaces ignored me, and I felt lucky, privileged even, to be ignored.

  Mama Laurel, Miss Tulipa, and Colonel Elshtain met me at the station in Tahlequah. On first catching sight of me, Mama commenced to cry her eyes out. She grabbed me and pulled me to her, my crutches be damned. She clung to me like a burr, then shoved me out to arm’s length and gave me a sappy smile.

  “At least you won’t have to go off to war,” she said. “At least you won’t have to die.”

  “Mama, I done already done both.”

  Colonel Elshtain sniffed, but Mama and Miss Tulipa hugged me, flooding me with the stinks of woman sweat, prairie grime, and drugstore gardenia water.

  I liked it.

  61

  The CVL shut down at the end of the 1943 season. Mister JayMac hadn’t wanted it to, but only three of the league’s eight teams had turned a profit that summer-the Hellbenders, the Gendarmes, and the Orphans. The other five clubs had taken a bath. Mister JayMac might still’ve willed the loop to go on, but the loss of Hank Clerval and myself, along with Darius’s vamoosement and Miss Giselle’s self-pyrotechnics, had yanked the heart right out of him. When the owners met in Highbridge after the Yankee-Card World Series, they voted five to three to suspend the CVL until the war ended and able-bodied prospects again came into the talent pool. Mister JayMac’s vote counted twice-maybe three times-as much as any other owner’s, but you can’t force five smart men to bleed themselves bankrupt and so he had to bow to majority rule.

  Over the winter, the Phillies, the Hellbenders’ big-league holding company, tried to spruce up their image-the elite of Philadelphia’s professional losers?-by sponsoring a contest to change their nickname. (What the hell was a Phillie anyway?) Thousands of people sent in entries, and Mrs John L. Crooks, a caretaker along with her husband of the local Odd Fellows Grand Lodge, won. Her suggestion was Blue Jays. This was more than thirty years before Toronto organized an American League club with that name, and the Phillies played under it for only a season. They also lost their young, wise-ass owner that winter when Commissioner Landis kicked William Cox out of baseball for betting cold cash on his own team.

  Anyway, when Mister JayMac learned of the name change, he told Miss Tulipa in a letter he thanked God for the CVL’s decision to pack it in. “A blue jay isn’t a ballplayer,” he wrote. “It’s a defecating, marauding, squawking pest in a fowl’s deceitful glad rags, and I wouldn’t want a player of mine to have to bear that epithet, not to mention the tatty costume they’re like to design for it.” Phillies, though, he could live with, even if it meant something squishy like, well, humanitarian.

  When I got home, Tenkiller seemed downright boring. I passed most of one day studying a pair of prewar Texaco road maps and underlining names-Muskogee, Eufaula, Cherokee-with sound-alikes back among the counties and towns of the CVL. Trail of Tears connections. Well, I had some links to it of my own. Mostly, that fall, I laid or limped about, taking in “Life Can Be Beautiful,” “Stella Dallas,” and other suchlike day-time crap on the radio.

  Eventually, I tossed my crutches, but when I walked, I hitched around like a man with a fresh load in his drawers. No one hired me to bale hay, dehorn cattle, or set up wildcat rigs over in Stillwell. To Mama Laurel’s disgust, and even my own, I loafed. Tenkillerites knew I was loafing too; the town was too small for anybody local to suppose I was a poor wounded GI wrestling with the afterclaps of combat. I didn’t pretend to that condition either. Some of my Red Stix pals had entered the services, and I respected their sacrifice too much to try to siphon off any of their glory, potential or real.

  By December, a family friend had helped me get on as a clerk at Funderburke’s Penny & Nickel Emporium, a notions and stationery shop where I could move at my own pace and had no heavy lifting to do. Deck Glider, Inc., ran full tilt, of course, but every job there had someone in it and a whole queue of applicants standing by. My salary at Funderburke’s fell ten or twelve bucks a week shy of the minimum janitorial salary at Deck Glider, but at least I had a job and folks stopped looking at me with pity or contempt.

  I got a couple of letters from Phoebe that fall and a homemade Christmas card at Christmas. (She’d made the card out of construction paper and carefully scissored magazine photos-Santa Claus standing outside the Bethlehem stable with Oveta Gulp Hobby of the WACs, Alan Ladd, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the starting lineup of the ’43 Yankees.) The second of her two letters read this way:

  Dear Ichabody Beautiful (alias Daniel Boles),

  How are things in Oklahoma. OK, I hope. I’d tell you to keep an eye out for injuns but you ARE one, sort of-an injun not a eye, but we’re all eyes to ourselves, aren’t we? (Eye = I, if you can’t shred my wheat without a scorecard.) Sorry. School’s started here, and I hate it. I’m blinkng away sand ten seconds after Mrs Camson opens her mouth. My I’s turn to ZZZZZ’s.

  Mama keeps on improvng. It helps the Hellbender players have almost all gone home. It also helps Daddy writes more often-I suggested he shd. Letters seem to arrive every week now, even if some cutup in the S.O.S. or whatever has censored parts of them all with scissors.

  A senior boy here named Hal Frank Kimball thinks he likes me. He has one eyebrow and hormone hickeys. My girlfriend Sunny Ruth Grimes says he’s AWOL-A Wolf On the Loose. When he comes paddng around, I ice up or shove in my clutch. Now don’t get yr ego or yr dander up, Daniel, but I am waitng for YOU.

  No jump the gun panic, please. I’m NOT in a family surcumstance. No rabbit died. On the other hand,
I never want to do the aweful thing we illeegly did until we do it again together-licensed and sanctified. That wld have to be better, wldn’t it? God, I hope so. In the meantime, keep the tool cool, OK?

  Uncle Jay has been in a 2 maybe a 3 month mope. You shd drop him a line. You shd drop ME a letter. I promise to catch it.

  Yr patient little BB, Phoebe

  P.S. If you buy every word in my billydoo, yr a real smack. Read between the lines and hit the ones that count.

  P.P.S. Homer says hello.

  Phoebe and I married in the early summer of 1947, the year the CVL started back up. (Her daddy, long home from the war, gave her away.) The Blakely Turpentiners replaced the Marble Springs Seminoles in Georgia, and the Roanoke Rebs took over for the Cottonton Boll Weevils in Alabama.

  But I jump ahead of myself.

  In the spring of ’44, I’d hobble out of Funderburke’s every afternoon and watch the Red Stix play or practice. I watched the players who came into town as closely as I did my ex-high school teammates. I noticed things-sneaky foot speed, an unhittable specialty pitch, hidden room for improvement-that other baseball folks, not exempting Coach Brandon and Miss Tulipa, couldn’t see, and I wrote letters to Mister JayMac recommending a half dozen players-a couple of locals and four unscouted visitors-as guys to watch. Mister JayMac followed up, and after the war three of my first six picks wound up playing full- or part-time in the National League, two with the Phillies and one with Brooklyn.

  Early in May, Coach Brandon got word a barnstorming team of Negro all-stars called the American-Afrique Something-or-Others had an official invitation to play an infantry team at Camp Gruber, a training post eighteen miles southeast of Muskogee. Coach Brandon had a drill instructor friend who could get us a pass onto the post to see the game, if we wanted it. A memory clip of the Splendid Dominican Touristers ran in my head-old Turtlemouth Clark pitching, Tommy Christmas chasing down long flies in center, our own Charlie Snow falling over the fence and fatally hemorrhaging, with Oscar Wall’s game-winning drive in his glove-and I told Coach Brandon, Yep, I’d go, especially since it was a Sunday contest and I didn’t have to work.

  The game itself was the damndest exhibition I ever saw. The American-Afrique Zanies-that was their nickname-came out onto the field in clown costumes, all tricked out with pompons, face paint, big shoes, and fright wigs. They warmed up in these outfits, they even played the Army squad in them. They pranced and tomfooled around like circus performers. But despite their shenanigans, they still managed to rap the Army boys something like sixteen to zip. A walkover. The only thing making it bearable for us fans was the GIs’ realization that the Freakies (as a few guys started calling them) could’ve beaten them in suits of armor. These decent dogfaces saved the game. They acknowledged the Zanies’ talents without giving up on themselves or letting the coloreds push their lead up into the twenties or thirties.

  I also got a kick out of the PFC announcing the game: “Now pitching for the Zanies, Whim-Wham? Dinkum-Do to center? And taking over at shortstop, Gumbo Giddyup?”

  Three innings into the game, I figured out the Zany playing right field and going by the name Cuffy was none other than Darius Satterfield. His clown suit couldn’t hide his muscular lankiness. The greasy white makeup melting on his cheek bones and the green and purple wig raying out from his head like a crown of vat-dyed yarn-well, that crap kept me from making a positive ID for an inning or three, but it couldn’t blind me forever to the smoothness of Cuffy’s play or the whiplash grace of his hitting.

  I wanted to wade down the bleacher tier and pull Darius aside for a chat, but I never got within a hundred feet of him till the same ended and he sat under an awning of the barracks building provided as the Zanies’ locker room. While Coach Brandon talked to his DI buddy, I limped into Darius’s line of sight. When he saw me, his eyeballs gave me a bounce and his hand snapped up like it meant to hold me at bay.

  “Danl Boles. Sweet gentle Jesus.”

  “What happened to the Splendid Dominicans, Darius?”

  He studied me real good. “You look kinda puny, hoss. What happened to you?”

  I gave him the short version and pressed my own question.

  “Us Dominicans ran out of gas. Coupons. Working capital. Also goodwill. Mister Cozy got us all back to KayCee with him, but we had creditors galore and jes dropped apart. So I’m here today and mebbe tomorry as”-spreading the balloon sleeves of his arms-“a damn ol American-Afrique Zany.”

  “Mister JayMac’d love to see you back in Highbridge.”

  “Well, he aint big enough to beat me no mo, and I aint big enough to let him try.” He pulled off his wig and used it to daub at the sweat-runneled grease on his face. “Sorry bout yo setback, Danl. Real, real sorry.”

  “He’s your daddy. At least you got one. Miss Giselle’s dead and he needs you.”

  “I heard that, bout po Miss Giselle. But Mister JayMac needs me like a hound needs another tic.”

  “You gonna stay with these… Zanies?”

  “Nosir. Gonna quit em and join up. A man cain’t play ball in wartime. I guess his duty lies elsewhere, but the war angles gainst you and it’s a sorry style ball that gits played anyway. Take this turkey strut today.”

  “The wrong team was wearing the clown suits.”

  “Amen.”

  “Still, you should go home. You should let Mister JayMac help you get into a decent unit. You should probably-”

  “Danl, put yo cumulated wisdom in a croker sack with a cow flop and burn it fo a night light. Nice to see you again.”

  Darius strolled around the corner and into the building. I tried to follow him. An MP with a billy and a.45 pistol in an unsnapped leather holster blocked my way: “Zanies only. You a Zany, kiddo?”

  I tried to wait, to meet Darius when he came back out in his civvies with his teammates, but Coach Brandon found me, and took me home, and I never saw Darius again. So far as I know, he never played integrated pro ball, and I sometimes think he died overseas after enlisting-maybe right there at Camp Gruber-under a phony name.

  62

  Three years later I received a registered letter from Seattle, Washington. It contained round-trip airline tickets to Seattle from Tulsa, with stopovers in Denver, Salt Lake City, and Spokane. From Seattle, I had other tickets to Juneau, Alaska, from Juneau to Anchorage, and from Anchorage to Kodiak Island. The packet also contained a money order for two hundred dollars and a note:

  Dear Daniel,

  I have found your father’s grave on Attu Island, at the westernmost extremity of the Aleutian archipelago. Allow yourself two weeks and embark upon a pilgrimage to your sire’s final resting place. I enclose money and tickets to return you to Oklahoma at the conclusion of your valedictory journey. I will meet you at the airfield at Kodiak. You may recognise me by the stalk of wild celery I wear as a boutonniere.

  Faithfully, “J.” H. C.

  Like I’d need some sort of corny sign. Unless he’d cut himself down to a Munchkin’s height or had plastic surgery on his ugly mug.

  Anyway, the idea of a trip scared me. I’d never flown before, and the distance and the layovers terrified me. I broke the news to Mama, though, and told her both who’d sent the tickets and that I planned to go. She knew Henry from a creased team photograph as “that big ugly-gawky fella m the back,” and from my letters home as a pretty decent roommate, and from stories out of Highbridge at the end of the ’43 season as an on-the-lam murder suspect.

  It’d crossed my mind that Mama might take this news and pass it on to Miss Tulipa, or Mayor Stone, or our new county sheriff, but I couldn’t fly off thousands of miles without taking that chance and trusting Mama to trust me.

  “Dick Boles don’t deserve a graveside visitor,” Mama Laurel said. “Nor such a journey from the son he fled.”

  “Even so, I’m going, Mama.”

  “Take the Brownie then. Take some pictures.”

  On my trip, I must’ve smoked a carton-two cartons-of cigarettes in all
those different airports and on the flights themselves. I was twenty years old, almost legally an adult, but because of all my travel, bad meals, and missed sleep, I had an outbreak of schoolboy acne that upped my dependence on tobacco. By the time my umpteenth flight-this one aboard a small Electra prop plane-came down through a tattered fog and landed on Kodiak’s airstrip, I had a lung-crumping cough.

  Henry stood on the edge of the field near the parking lot. No one could miss him, even though he’d separated himself from the other two parties there to greet the plane. As a sure ID, though, he clutched a pale yellow stalk of wild celery in one hand. It also struck me, as I wobbled towards him, his face looked awfully ugly and fearsome that afternoon-most likely because of the ivory labrets, carven like polar bears, he’d inserted in the cheek holes (in Highbridge, mere scar-tissue welts) at the corners of his mouth.

  “Roomy,” I said.

  Henry glanced about him, at the overarching sky and the nearby mountains visible through cloud or fog wisps. “Yes,” he said, “but on clear days it seems even moreso.”

  ***

  A Russian Aleut by the name of Dorofey Golodoff-Henry called him Fego-flew us in a beat-up light aircraft to Nikolski, an Aleut village on Umnak, where my father’d been stationed during the war. Fego lived near Nikolski in a barabara, or dugout sod house, that put me in mind of Henry’s underground hideaway in a branch of Tholocco Creek in Alabama. We spent the night with Fego, a burly Asiatic-looking man with a broad squashed nose and long jet-black hair. I had a couple of inches of height on him, but he out-weighed me by forty pounds or more, even though he moved from room to room in his house with the speed and agility of an otter. For supper, he fed us steamed clams, batter-fried octopus, and a salad of kelp, wild onions, and Fox Islands celery.