Brittle Innings

13

In the clubhouse, Mister JayMac gave Junior, Fadeaway, Dobbs, and me our own lockers. Mine’d belonged to Bob Collum, a popular player axed along with Sweet Gus Pettus, Roper, and Jorgensen. We peeled off the faded masking tape marked with their names and stuck on new strips marked with ours. My locker hunched between Curriden’s and Jumbo’s. Curriden sat next to me removing stirrup socks, then skinning out of his clay-stained sanitaries. Jumbo’d flat-out disappeared.

“You did good out there, Dumbo,” Curriden said. “A leg hit and a liner to the wall.”

I nodded my thanks, silently damning Hoey for hanging that nickname on me again.

“Darius no-hit yall except for that legger,” Curriden said, “so you were the B boys’ heavy artillery today.”

I grinned, sort of, and took off my sweat-sopped shirt. Behind us, a shower ran. Dunnagin stood in it singing “I’m Getting Tired So I Can Sleep,” crooning in a tenor better than half your big-band soloists’. It echoed out to us prettier than a clarinet.

“No one wants to bat against Darius,” Curriden said. “If he uz white and his manager let him pitch every other day, he’d win thirty-five games a year in the CVL. Forty. And you, a bony little dink, lined out to Snow up against the Feen-A-Mint sign. That makes you bout the hittingest thing, ever, against Darius, Dumbo. No crap.”

I looked around. Had Darius and Jumbo gone back to McKissic House in their uniforms? Cripes. Sweaty flannels weigh a ton. And the smell…

Curriden stood up buck naked. “Darius showers on the visitors’ side-else he’d have to wait for us to finish up in here.”

I tapped Jumbo’s locker.

“Jumbo?” Curriden said. “Keeps an extra glove in there. Some sanitaries. Cept for that, he don’t use it at all. Won’t shower here. Foots it back to McKissic House.”

“There’s something wrong with him,” Turkey Sloan said from Fadeaway’s bench. “He’s different from the rest of us.” Sloan looked at me. “Till you come along, sweet cheeks, none of us but him had a private room.”

Something wrong with him? Like what? “I reckon he was born with some oddball deformity,” Sloan said, like he’d just read my mind.

“Or it’s a war injury,” Hoey said. “From the last war. A problem like that guy in the Hemingway book had.”

“The Germans blew his pecker off?” Parris said. “Naw, the poor guy’s an auto-wreck victim-that’s my theory.”

There was an empty lapse in the guessing. Hoey seized Parris and knuckled the crown of his head. “Your theory makes me feel like a heartless jerk.”

Parris weaseled away. “People should feel like what they are-so they don’t wake up thinking they’re Albert Schweitzer. Or Jack Benny.”

“ ‘Oh, Rochester,’ ” somebody said in Benny’s radio voice: “ ‘Oh, Rochester.’ ”

In a gravelly copy of the voice of the colored fella that played Rochester, somebody else said, “ ‘Yes, boss?’ ”

This back-and-forth went on all around me. I couldn’t get into it. Even if I could’ve talked, I’d’ve felt too much like the new kid in the neighborhood.

I went to the farthest spigot in the shower room and faced into it so the other guys in there could see only my skinny backside and jutting ears.

“Listen, Okie,” Mariani said. “Don’t drop the soap. You bend down to fetch it, Norman there starts to get ideas.”

“Screw you, wop,” Sudikoff said.

“Baby, don’t you wish,” Mariani said.

Don’t drop the soap. I flash-backed on Pumphrey and the lavatory on the troop train. As quickly as I could, I finished showering, dressed, and beat it.

Outside, I walked under a bleacher section, part of the concession area behind home plate-a cave for hot-dog stands and program hawkers. Shady. Semicool. All around me, support girders, chain-link gates, and cubbyholes for vendors.

Then I saw Phoebe-beside an aquarium in the main gangway. Coming through the turnstiles from the parking lot, you got funneled past this tank, a yard long and two feet tall, mounted on a belt-high base. Phoebe’d climbed to the tank’s rim on a set of movable wooden steps.

“Hello, Daniel Helvig Boles.” Her voice echoed.

I lifted my hand: How, squaw. Did Mister JayMac use tropical fish to homify his ballpark? Did Phoebe have to feed them?

“Cmere, Boles.” She waved me towards her. “I don’t bite. If yo’re careful, neither does Homer.”

I walked over. Even without a stool, I stood about as high as she did. Water in the tank. A gravel bottom. A thin strip of sunken wood. Some ferns, like seaweed on stalks, poking up from the gravel, hula-dancing in the currents.

“You met Homer yet, Boles?”

I shook my head.

“Well, look,” she said. “Locking’s how you meet him. I won’t pull him out for you to shake his iddy-biddy hand.”

I bent. I stared. The narrow strip of bark hovering above the sand, floating in the tank’s thready green murk, had eyes. One end of the mystery thing resembled a tail.

“There,” Phoebe said. “You’ve just met Homer.”

I kept staring at the critter. It really did look like a piece of bark. With legs. With eyes. Like sombody’d epoxied it out of sycamore cork and pecan twigs.

“Donchu even know what Homer is, Boles?”

I just kept staring at him. It. Whatever it was. I might not know much, but a lunk who tipped his ignorance to a girl was doomed to regret it.

“You don’t know what Homer is,” Phoebe accused.

I tapped my head to show her I’d already safely stored the information. I was a walking Smithsonian Institution.

“Horsefeathers. You don’t know squonk, do you, Dumbo?”

Dumbo! I’d’ve rather she called me Ichabod. If she’d said it again, I’d’ve strangled her.

“Homer’s yore stupid team’s mascot, stupid. A hellbender. You ever heard of a hellbender, Okie boy?”

Phoebe Pharram seemed to want to show me up, like some pitchers will taunt a patsy they’ve just struck out. I stood a frog’s hair away from dumping her into the tank.

“I’ll bet you think a hellbender’s a damned soul who breaks alla Mr Pitchfork’s rules,” Phoebe said.

I stared at her, one eye starting to tic.

“A hellbender. Git it?”

I banged the tank with my fist and headed for the parking lot.

“Wait a minute, Boles!” she called out. “I don’t mean nothing, talking this way. Mostly, it’s other folks giving me what-for, not vicy-versy. Mostly, I jes give back what I’ve awready got. Gits to be a habit. When somebody cain’t or won’t talk, I imagine em giving me what-for before it’s even come. Then I give em it back thout em ever giving it to me to begin with. You git me?”

Funny enough, I did. The explanation almost made sense. I walked back to look at Homer again. My jug ears were reflected in the tank’s glass, but Phoebe kept talking. My looks, or my lack of them, hadn’t scared her off.

“A hellbender’s a quatic salamander,” she said. “I found this un in a creek when I uz nine. Uncle JayMac gave me a dollar for it and put it here in McKissic Field when Highbridge entered the CVL. I feed Homer, change his water out, tote him home when the season’s over. Got a table in my bedroom for his tank. During ball season, though, I keep a typewriter on it and write letters to homesick sojers.”

How thoughty and patriotic. FDR, or Mrs FDR, should give you a medal, Phoebe.

“A corporal and two PFCs’ve awready proposed to me. They think I’m older. I sorta let em spose it. My letters read pretty passionate, I guess.”

The knuckleheaded hussy. I’d’ve laughed, but she had no more sense of humor about herself than I did about me. We both had the teenage disease of raging self-solemnity.

“Baseball’s a mug’s game,” Phoebe lectured me. “Sometimes it’s jes not very nice. Yall do things in front of a thousand folks I wouldn’t do alone in my own bedroom.”

One minute she admitted writing “pretty passionate” letters to servicemen and the next she suggested it embarrassed her to see a ballplayer setting his jock straight.

“We do have one thing in common,” Phoebe said.

Okay, I thought. Don’t keep me in suspense.

“Good reasons for not being in the military-I’m a woman, and yo’re, well, yo’re a dummy.”

Yeah. I put my hands behind my ears and made em flap like a flying elephant’s.

“Anyway, if you didn’t have yore… problem, you’d join the Army. Wouldn’t you?”

Hmmm. In another five and a half months, I’d be eligible for the draft. Maybe my dummyhood was a ploy I’d come up with, subconsciously, to sidestep it.

Dunnagin walked up behind us from the clubhouse. “You’re right, Phoeb. I know I’d rather be out killing Nips than chasing a CVL pennant. It burdens my mind, getting left out of all the fun.”

“Yo’re old, Dunnagin,” Phoebe said. “But not so all-fired old you couldn’t enlist.” She looked more or less pleased to see him.

“If only you knew,” Dunnagin said. “Methuselah’s got nothing on me. If I don’t make it back to the bigs this year, my career’s over. I’ll be yesterday’s papers.”

“You’d be doing more for the Uncle Sam in the Army. And more for yoresef.”

“I’m boosting civilian morale,” Dunnagin said. “I’m boosting player morale. They see me on the field, they think anybody can do it. They go home fortified and hopeful.”

“Shame on you,” Phoebe said.

Dunnagin didn’t look too abashed. “Danny, the Bomber’s about to leave. Hustle it up.”

I nodded, and Dunnagin wandered away.

Phoebe came down off the stair step. In the tank, Homer wriggled, stirring the murk-the first time I’d seen him look like anything other than a spongy piece of bark. Hooray. No ball team wants a dead or paralyzed critter for its mascot.

“Go git yore bus,” Phoebe said. “Yo’re keeping a slew of folks stewing in a real pressure cooker.”

I did a two-fingered salute.

“You do play a whangdoodle shortstop,” she said. “And you can run like a autumn crop fire.”

Unexpected praise. But I still wanted to add, Did you know I can outrun the word God? A local authority told me so today.

My speech problem, thank the Lord, kept my mouth shut.