Brittle Innings

26

Jumbo 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, and mentally replayed 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 I’ve just mentioned.

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 north-western 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 the Bomber 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 the bus’s aisle up front. Neither realized 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-shoestnng 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 Bomber’s 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 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.