Brittle Innings

43

On Tuesday, July 27, the ball field at Camp Penticuff basked red and dusty in the sun. We rode out to it in the Bomber, dressed out in our flannels, more anxious than we’d admit about taking on these Negro barnstormers in front of a hopped-up crowd of colored GIs. We’d just come off a five-game road trip (three wins, two losses), and the Mockingbirds and the Gendarmes would play us three games each at home towards the end of the week. I had the impression, jouncing past the stripped-down barracks and the parched parade grounds, that Muscles, Hoey, Dunnagin, and some of the other Hellbender vets felt we’d bitten off a chaw big enough to choke us.

The stands out here already teemed with khaki-clad black soldiers. They sat or stood in the main grandstand behind the backstop or on portable metal bleachers a maintenance unit had set up beforehand. The sun blazed, slapping the whole sports and training complex like a huge catfish bladder on an unseen stick. The very air seemed to stretch out and pop under the blows. The Bomber pulled up, after the Splendid Dominicans’d already arrived, to some ear-splitting whistles.

“Bout damn time!” yelled somebody sun-sore and antsy.

We parked behind a fleet of ten- or twelve-year-old Buick touring cars, dented and furred with rust; and the Splendid Dominicans ran out onto the field. Until we’d showed, they’d apparently spent their time mingling with the troops: boosting morale. Learning that about em lowered ours. It implied the Dominicans (“These guys’re Dominicans like I’m a Hawaiian,” said Turkey Sloan) hadn’t felt obliged to warm up in advance of our arrival. Two seconds after hitting the field, though, they had a ball whipping around the horn like men born in spikes and caps. I watched them from the Bomber while, outside the fence around the park, Mister JayMac and Darius shook hands with Mr Cozy Bissonette and Major Dexter.

Inside the bus, Fadeaway said, “Cottonton all over again-no dugouts. We’ll bake in this sorry-ass sun.” He had bench time ahead of him, and I almost sympathized. Almost.

In baggy white flannels-shirts with numbers whip-stitched to their backs and the letters SDT sewn to their chests-the Splendid Dominicans didn’t seem much like black supermen. Like us, they had guys built like fire hydrants, flag poles, or haystacks. This one could’ve pruned Azalea hedges in Alligator Park, that one could’ve tonged blocks of ice at the cold plant. No doubt, though, that Cozy Bissonette’s ragtag bunch could hit and hustle.

“All right,” Mister JayMac said from up front. “Pile off.”

“Criminy, we’ll slide out on our own sweat,” Parris said.

We got up and pushed through the aisle, looking for relief-from the heat, from our nerves, from the suspense of taking on these colored unknowns, who, in their own cities, had even more fans than we did in Highbridge.

I saw a few white faces-brass and senior NCOs, company commanders and cowcatcher-jawed topkicks. But the faces of the Negro GIs outnumbered the pasty or sunburnt faces among them fifty-to-one. A dark sea in the stands: beige, caramel, chestnut, shiny bruise-black. Even at a military post deep in the heart of Dixie, those hundreds of young Negro men shook me to my boots. What if they all got loose and we had to wade through their strutting tide?

Darius touched my arm and urged me through a gate onto the field. “See?” he asked. (Or was it “Sea,” like in “body of water”?) When I glanced at him over my shoulder, he gave me an unreadable smile.

The field had a press box, a platform on stilts that may’ve sometimes served as a reviewing stand. A goofy-looking white lieutenant in wire-rimmed glasses sat behind a microphone on the platform. His welcome blared out at us from metal speakers mounted on creosoted poles.

“Men of the First and Second Battalions of the Special Training Regiment of Camp Penticuff, Georgia,” he said, echoes from the speakers overlapping and blurring, “give a soldierly hello to the fine ball clubs that’ve come out here today to entertain you-our sister community’s Highbridge Hellbenders of the Chattahoochee Valley League, and the Splendid Dominican Touristers, some talented barnstormers from the Negro American League! Let em hear you, men!”

A tumult of claps and gospel shouts. The lieutenant broke into it to read lineups, ours first, and each Hellbender player trotted out to line up between second and third base. Oddly enough, the GIs of the Special Training Regiment made as much racket for us as our own fans in Highbridge would’ve.

Then the lieutenant read the starters for Mr Bissonette’s glorified pickup squad. “Batting in the lead-off spot and playing second base, Terris ‘Slag Iron’ Smith!” If that ball field’d had a roof, those colored soldiers would’ve blown it into the Gulf of Mexico. Slag Iron Smith could’ve been every last one of em’s favorite cousin.

I recall the name of every other Dominican Tounster the lieutenant said, each with a road alias cornier by several degrees than any of ours-Rufus “Pepperpot” Cole, Luis “Gumbo” Garcia, Hosea “The Gator” Partlow. Each of their guys got a send-off Highbridge fans would’ve reserved for a regiment of heroes. Don’t think it wasn’t intimidating either.

The Army appointed umpires. No big deal? Ordinarily, maybe not, but Major Dexter’d asked a Negro captain from a Negro tanker unit to call balls and strikes, and a black NCO from his own battalion to patrol the bases. You’d’ve thought, gauging these appointments by the reactions of our biggest in-house bigots, he’d asked Attila the Hun and Vlad the Impaler to do it. Even Mister JayMac, seeing these men on the field, felt it incumbent upon himself to buttonhole Major Dexter and argue for one white ump-on the grounds we’d made dozens of courtly concessions to Mr Cozy’s boys already, including playing them at all, meeting them in front of their enlisted cousins, and using a CVL rest day to come out here. Neither Mister JayMac nor Major Dexter would allow himself the pleasure of ranting or kicking dirt-but the argument drug on. Both teams went to their benches, and the GIs began to get restless. They swayed on their seats and sang out ad-lib Jody chants:

“Left, right, left, right, march yo ass.

All that glitters must be brass!

“Left my home in Tennessee.

Ever DI looks de same to me!

“Why you fellas has to stall?

We come out to watch some ball!

“Jody, Jody, see me sweat.

My po body got a liquid debt!

“Count yo fingers, count yo toes.

Be a year fo one team scohs!”

During these chants, the Dominicans retook the field, but without a ball. They pretended to have one, though. Their pitcher-Turtlemouth Thomas Clark, a crafty s.o.b. once the game got clocking-went into this showboaty boa-constrictor windup and let absolutely nothing fly. A Dominican at the plate with a bat took a swing as broad as Turtlemouth’s windup and drove that whistling air ball into right for a make-believe single.

By this time, the crowd’d stopped chanting. You could even hear the thwock! the bat made hitting the ball. (The catcher’d made it, sticking a finger into his cheek and popping it out like a champagne cork.) Anyway, as the batter ran to first, the right fielder scooped up the ghost liner on two invisible hops and fired absolutely nothing to the shortstop covering second. This man looked the runner back to first, walked the nothing in his hands a few steps towards the mound, and flipped it to old Turtlemouth.

“Hell’re they doing?” Fadeaway said, not trusting his eyes.

“Shadow ball,” Dunnagin told him. “Watch.”

The next batter took a couple of pitches, on both of which Turtlemouth wound himself tighter than the rubber band on a model airplane’s propeller. The batter banged his third pitch-thwock!-an air-ball knuckler, to the shortstop, Pepperpot Cole. Cole flung himself down, trapped absolutely nothing under his scrap of a glove, retrieved it, and zipped it to the second baseman, Slag Iron Smith, who caught this nothing at belt height. The runner from first tried to take Smith out of the play, but Slag Iron pivoted, leapt like a deer, and threw absolutely nothing to first.

A peg in the dirt. The first baseman yanked it out of the dust like a man cracking a whip, and spun around to call the batter out as the runner somersaulted over the bag. Then the first baseman started the ghost ball around the horn in honor of the phantom double play.

The GIs loved it. You’d’ve figured them at a county-fair strip show, they whooped so shrill and sassy.

“Hard to make that kinda stuff look real,” Dunnagin said. “You’ve got to have your timing down.”

Mister JayMac finally got the Negro captain assigned to home plate moved to the base paths, along with the black DI from the First Battalion of the Special Training Unit. The major himself went behind the plate. That way, the foul lines had an ump each. If a wronged Hellbender needed to dispute a call at the plate, he wouldn’t have to test the will of a racial and social inferior. Mister JayMac, as I heard later, had used “whitemail” to get his way-he’d threatened to take us Hellbenders home.

Another problem remained. Which team qualified as visitors and which as homies? Mister JayMac wanted the advantage of last bats. So did Mister Cozy. They both went out to Major Dexter-sweating in his chest protector, birdcage, and shin guards-to present their cases. Mister JayMac said no team named Dominican Touristers could be a home team, barnstormers were visitors by definition, and Camp Penticuff lay within hailing distance of Highbridge. Thus, the Hellbenders, even in our away flannels, deserved home-field advantage.

Mister Cozy said this exhibition had begun in his head, his Dominicans had reached the ball field first, and if either team had the local crowd on its side, well…

“Flip a coin,” Mister JayMac said.

“Okay by me,” Mister Cozy said. “Do it.”

Major Dexter flipped a coin, it landed tails, and the Splendid Dominicans took the field with last bats in their baggy pockets and grins on their faces.

“Please stand for the National Anthem,” said the lieutenant at the press-box mike. Camp Penticuff’s flag pole, with the Stars and Stripes hanging limp in the sultry afternoon, grew out of a pile of stones on a hillock two parade grounds beyond the left-field fence. We flapped our caps over our hearts, and a black trumpeter with one stripe on his sleeve marched up into the press box and blew the clearest “Star-Spangled Banner” I’d ever heard, a cross between high-church music and Harry James. As soon as he hit those “home of the brave” notes, the GIs started a cheer that echoed in chilling sweeps to the barracks, the PX, the main gate.

I dug into the batter’s box while this unnerving roar went on. Turtlemouth Clark looked past me for his catcher’s sign like I wasn’t there. My Red Stix bat caught some libel from the crowd-“Hey, you gon hit with a Tootsie Pop stick?” “Boy from Californy, got him a bitty redwood bat.”-but Mister Cozy’s boys didn’t blink. I could’ve walked up there with a blue shillelagh without goading them to curl a lip. No more shadow ball, the life-or-death horsehide only.

Turtlemouth Clark wound up-except now, he hardly had a windup at all, just a quick pat-a-cake at his chest with glove and ball. Out of this business, he attacked me with sidearm smoke. His pitch had me looking for a doorway in the clay, to escape having a Fearless Fosdick hole drilled through me. I leapt at least four feet backwards.

“Steeeeeee-rike!” Major Dexter cried.

The Special Training soldiers laughed a load of wrinkles into their khakis. But I deserved it. I reset myself with a throb in my head and crushed chili peppers in my cheeks.

“Mebbe you’ll see the nex one,” the catcher said.

Before Turtlemouth could go into his stingy game windup, I called time and walked aside.

“Batter up,” Major Dexter said. “Now!”

I stepped back in. Turtlemouth struck me out, but put a couple of Band-Aids on my stigma by also whiffing Charlie Snow and Lon Musselwhite-to the noisy delight of the troops. Snow made him unleash seven pitches before chasing a sidearm change, but Muscles, like me, took three wild cuts at three stuttering speedballs and slunk back to the dugout mumbling about the legality of Turtlemouth’s delivery.

When Darius took the mound for us, a murmur spiced with a few profanities lapped the stands. If Darius heard, he made no sign, just cycled through his warm-up tosses to Dunnagin, then stepped back to let us infielders throw the ball around. Once in the field, Darius didn’t give a cucumber pip what color his opponents were; he wanted them out, the scairter the better, his whole devotion to the uniform on his back. In this case, our dingy Hellbender ash-browns.

In the bottom of the first, Darius matched Turtlemouth’s strikeout feat, and we had us a pitched battle-literally-of K’s and O’s, connipted hitters tossing away their bats after fruitless trips to the box.

Oh, a couple of fellas hit the ball. Charlie Snow tagged one on a pearl-bright clothesline right to the center fielder, and Henry cracked a pop-up that Turtlemouth himself, waving everybody else off, caught at shoe-top height from a ridiculous outhouse squat, a basket catch two inches from the ground. The crowd gobbled up this showboating like peanuts.

In the top of the fourth, I drew a walk-the first hitter on either team to reach base. It seemed near lunatic, but I wondered if Turtlemouth had put me on on purpose, just to wake the crowd. The four balls he’d shown me had all thwapped in too high to hit, too high even to lunge for.

Buck Hoey, in his boot-blackened bedroom slippers, left his coaching box to talk to me.

“What’d you do to deserve a free pass? Promise to suck him off after the game?”

“Up yours,” I said as plainly as I could.

“Think you can steal on the shine, Dumbo? We need a runner in scoring position.”

Sure I did. I always thought so.

“Play ball,” said the colored officer umpiring first.

Hoey ignored him. “Try to draw a throw. See what kind of move to first he’s got. Then watch for a pitchout. Waxahachie Beckland has the second best slingshot on this club.”

Waxahachie Beckland was the catcher, Turtlemouth’s battery mate. Hoey wanted me to measure my lead against both men and mind my p’s and q’s. He sashayed back into his coaching box.

I drew one throw from Turtlemouth. He had only a so-so pickoff move. (Or he showed me only a so-so pickoff move.) I got back to first a full second ahead of his toss. On his first throw to the plate, though, Turtlemouth pitched out to Beckland. If I’d broken for second, Beckland would’ve gunned me down by a yard or more.

“Way to go, Dumbo,” Hoey said. “Watch em again.”

I felt pretty smug about drawing a throw from Turtlemouth and then hoodwinking him and his catcher into pitching out to Snow. They expected me to steal. Mister Cozy and his boys had done their homework; they knew I could outrun the word God, they respected my foot speed. I lengthened my lead, feinting once or twice with my upper body.

Turtlemouth showed me the whites of his eyes, but didn’t tumble to my feints. He threw to the plate again, another pitchout. I strolled back to first and kicked the bag. The Dominican battery mates looked like fools. They’d risked two straight pitchouts, for nothing. Even worse, from their point of view, they’d run the count on Charlie Snow, the best hitter in the CVL, to two and zero. Only a madman deliberately put himself in the hole with Snow at bat and me on base.

As I took my fourth lead of this at bat, Hoey caught my eye. Behind his hand, he mouthed, Co. He also cradled his left elbow, our sign to steal. Turtlemouth, he obviously figured, had to throw Snow a strike to keep from moving within a ball of walking him. He and Beckland wouldn’t dare pitch out again. So, of course, they did.

I had a decent jump on Turtlemouth and second base looked stepping-stone close. Before I could belly-slide into it, though, Slag Iron Smith leapt in front of me, caught Beckland’s stinger from home, and let me tag myself out coming head-first into his floppy cold cut of a glove.

Three straight pitchouts. Stupid. Except the strategy’d nailed me dead. On the other hand, Charlie Snow, too surprised to try to queer Beckland’s throw by swinging at the last one, now had three balls on him. Maybe the Dominicans’ ruse hadn’t worked-not, at least, as slick as they’d’ve liked.

Forget that. Cool as ice, Turtlemouth worked the count to three balls and two strikes, then erased Snow on a nibbler back to the mound. He humiliated Muscles with another strikeout and slouched off the field to a standing O.

In the bottom of the sixth, Darius gave up the first two hits of the Camp Penticuff exhibition, back-to-back singles to Gator Partlow and Waxahachie Beckland. Nobody out. Partlow at third, Beckland at first.

“Push done come to shove, eh?” Fadeaway shouted from the bench. “Time to make sure us crackers don’t win our money.”

Mister JayMac went over to Fadeaway and spoke to him.

“Made it look good as you could for as long as you could, I guess!” Fadeaway shouted around the boss.

Mister JayMac got right in front of Fadeaway and quietly chewed the kid from Sea Island to Pensacola. Fadeaway shut up, and Mister JayMac sat back down again.

Darius struck out the third Dominican batter. The fourth hit a grounder to Junior, who snapped it to me for the force at second. I dragged my foot over the bag and threw to Henry at first. We got the runner there by half a step, and the double play wiped out the run that would’ve scored from third if my throw had hit Henry’s mitt a fraction of a second later.

On his way in to the bench, Darius collected the game ball from Henry and ambled straight to Fadeaway. Mister JayMac hurried to interpose himself, but Darius stepped around him and slapped the ball into Fadeaway’s chest.

“You thow, boy. Save yo precious wager.”

“Darius, I’ll pull you when it’s time,” Mister JayMac said.

“I’m sittin,” Darius said. “I jes guv yall six of the best I got. Let this eggsuck boy carry yall from here.”

“Neither of you has a thing to say about it,” Mister JayMac said. “Darius, you pitch.”

“Nosir. I’m gone.”

Major Dexter waddled over in his umpire’s gear. “They need that ball for warm-ups. Toss it back out, please.”

Fadeaway tossed the ball to Turtlemouth Clark. Then he sat back down, his eyes on the clayey dust between his shoes.

Mister JayMac grabbed Darius’s shirt. “This club belongs to me-you pitch because I say you do, nigger!” Despite the crowd noise, everyone on our bench heard this. Mister JayMac heard it himself and looked around.

“So much belongs to you,” Darius said distinctly.

“I’m sorry,” Mister JayMac said. “You’ve held these fellas in check the whole way. Keep on doing it.”

“Nosir. I brung yall far’s I can.” Darius stripped to his ribbed gray undershirt and dropped his Hellbenders blouse into Fadeaway’s lap. Fadeaway pushed it into the dirt, like he would’ve a grungy dishrag.

“Damn it,” Mister JayMac whispered to himself.

Darius walked through a gate and between a pair of bleacher sections towards the Brown Bomber. The soldiers in the stands watched him go with the same sledgehammered curiosity felt by us Hellbenders. Some of the GIs hollered, “Way to sling that baby!” or “Hallelujah!” Darius raised one arm and held it over his head until he’d disappeared from view.

“Batter up!” Major Dexter yelled. “We need a batter!”

In the top of the seventh, Henry jacked Turtlemouth’s first pitch so far over the right-field fence that everyone-everyone-stood up to watch it arc off into infinity.

“Ooooiiiuuuweeoo!” went Lamar Knowles. “Never seen nobody but Jumbo pole em like that!”

His amazed jubilation didn’t extend to the troops. They admired the crunch of Henry’s home run, but not Turtlemouth blowing his shutout or yielding a crucial run this late in the game. In any case, Turtlemouth wiped his forehead and mowed down-like a man with a Catling gun-Reese Curriden, Junior Heggie, and Double Dunnagin.

In the bottom of the inning, Fadeaway swaggered out to pitch. A few disgruntled GIs shot him the razz. They sensed he might have rabbit ears and got on him like cats on a camel cricket: “Fade away, Fadeaway! Oh, fade away, please today, oh, faded ofay, Fadeaway!” And so on. Fadeaway adjusted. He left off strutting and buckled down. In his first inning of work, he allowed one solid single but emerged unscored-on and quietly cocky. It’d taken me six innings to get the strut he’d picked up facing only four Dominican hitters.

In the top of the eighth, Skinny Dobbs, Fadeaway Ankers, and I came up against Turtlemouth-Skinny and I for only the third time, Fadeaway for his first. Skinny and Fadeaway lined and struck out respectively, and Henry stopped me as I started up to the plate.

“I know what you should do,” he said.

“Yeah. H-h-hit it where they aint.”

He took me by the shoulders, gently. “Bunt.”

“B-b-bunt?”

“Push it down the third-base line, Daniel. Mr Clark has a weakness fielding bunts.”

“H-h-how do you kn-know?”

“Mr Clark has an inner-ear problem. I read it in a Negro paper from Birmingham.”

“Inner-ear problem?”

“If you push the ball down the line, Mr Clark will lose his balance trying to retrieve it. With your speed, Daniel, you’ll have a hit.”

I had no quarrel with Henry’s suggestion. In my two at bats, I’d fanned and reached base on a strategic charity ticket. This time, then, I squared around, into the blazing sweep of Turtlemouth’s sidearm curve, and, yielding with the pitch, let the ball plunk off my bat and sprinted.

To improve your chances of legging out a doubtful hit, you lower your head and dig. As Satchel Paige said, you don’t look back; either somebody might be gaining on you or you’ve stolen a second or two from your ultimate time. God save my soul, but I peeked to see how Turtlemouth’d attacked my bunt. When I did, I saw him grab for the ball, wheel around his outstretched arm like a besotted maypole dancer, and topple into the dirt. He underhanded a throw to first as he fell, but the ball-by now I was digging again, burning jet fuel-sailed on him, and his wild throw got me all the way to second.

Turtlemouth, walking back to the mound, paused to consider me on second. He sneezed and rubbed his nose. “Done got there so fast you guv me pneumonia.” He got back into his stance and toed the rubber from a stretch.

Snow brought me home with a double to the right-field gap, making the score two to nothing. Muscles stranded Snow with a wing-shot gull to the left fielder, and the rest of us trotted back out to defend our lead against the cream of Mister Cozy’s batting order. The afternoon’s fractured dazzle hung on us like warm honey, golden and clingy.