Brittle Innings

44

Despite the sunshine, and the peanut scorch drifting over us from town, the rest of that game played out like a wine drunk-some kind of drunk, with the slide-show lurchiness of a bad dream. At shortstop, I watched it all happen, my mouth full of worry flannel.

In the bottom of the eighth, the first bat showed up. I don’t mean baseball bat either. I mean living bat, a flying varmint with tattered wings. Against the rinsed blue of the sky, it seemed so humdrum, as it dive-bombed the field and swerved up from a thousand near collisions, that most of us mistook it for a bird-if we mistook it for anything other than a scudding magnolia leaf. Then more such wheeling varmints swept into view, and I wondered if a pigeon breeder on the roof of a nearby barracks had emptied his dovecotes. But the varmints got thicker and noisier, breaking into squadrons and chirping like airborne crickets, and I knew them for bats, several pesky flights of them. They stirred more breeze than the day did, zooming from the stands to the outfield, and from the fences to the stands, pip-pip-pipping so damned tinnily I started thinking of them as… as pip-squeaks.

In the black half of the eighth, the Dominicans sent up first baseman Gumbo Garcia, center fielder Tommy Christmas, and right fielder Gator Partlow. Fadeaway walked Garcia. The bats blew back and forth overhead like curls of newspaper char from summer’s own chimney. Fadeaway punched Christmas a ticket to first, just like he had Garcia.

Major Dexter’s GIs began to sway and foot-stamp.

Fadeaway struck out Partlow on a slider-slider-speedball setup, and Dunnagin jumped out from behind his third swing and snapped off a bullet to Henry that nailed Tommy Christmas two feet off the bag. Christmas died on his knees, ducking all the stooping bats a-twitter over the field.

The GIs went as dead as a knobbed-off radio station.

Now the Dominicans had two outs and only the melon-footed and heavy-ribbed Garcia still on second. Fadeaway walked third baseman Judd Davies.

“Buckle down!” Mister JayMac shouted, really hacked.

Fadeaway may’ve tried, but on his first pitch to Oscar Wall, the left fielder, Wall reached back, his front leg off the ground, and clobbered Fadeaway’s best scroogie an Alabama ton. He almost seemed to hit it one-handed-his left hand swept away from the bat handle on his follow-through, while the ball itself hurtled up and away, into a cloud of dive-bombing bats.

I could imagine Fadeaway praying, Dear God, let it hit one of them varmints. I prayed too. Only a lucky midair intercept would prevent Wall’s blast from carrying to the fence and tying us at two apiece. And if it cleared the fence, the Dominicans would likely beat us.

The ball didn’t de-head one damned bat. It flew through them, towards Charlie Snow, on a hard, low arc. They veered away from it like they’d’ve dodged any other flying predator, by sonar and stunt-flying. Snow ran under the ever-shifting cloud with his back to the ball, the way DiMaggio and later Mays did, thinking to turn at the last instant and pincer-snatch it.

But the bats broke his concentration. He looked back for the drive too soon and had to dig out again at a hard lope. Everyone could see he’d locked into a collision course with the fence. As the ball dropped, Snow sensed the fence coming. He tried to save his body and make the catch at the same time.

He hurtled, a leg-high effort to hit the fence’s cap rail with the edge of his shoe, grab the ball at belt height behind him, and spring to the grass with his bones unbroken and Darius and Fadeaway’s shutout intact. But his spikes, or the fence, or a crazy skew on Wall’s plummeting drive did him in. A spike snagged. He didn’t bounce off the fence but somersaulted over it, the ball going with him. When he didn’t get up right away, something scary uncurled in my gut.

“Thass a home run,” one of the colored umps said. “He made the catch all right, but his feet never come down fair.”

Garcia, Davies, and Wall all went round the bases. That made the score three to two, the Dominicans’ way. Major Dexter signaled as much.

I began running towards center. So did a bunch of others. Snow still hadn’t untangled from the heap he’d made beyond the fence, and both Muscles and Skinny, our other two out-fielders, clambered over it to see about him. From my lungs to my guts, I had a splintery ache, big as a two-by-four. Beside the chain link in center, I knelt with it, a sinner behind a grid, to ask Muscles how it fared with the beautiful Charlie Snow.

“S bad.” Muscles had grit in his voice, the first rubbings from a square of sandpaper. “S real bad.”

“Throw it in,” Snow said from Shangri-La, somewhere out of this atmosphere. “Hold the sucker to three.”

“Just you hush,” Muscles told him. “S too late for that.”

“Yeah,” said Snow sweetly. “I know.” Heaped there, he hemorrhaged. The wound at his ankle bled like gangbusters. Muscles tried to tourniquet it with his shirt, which seeped through crimson-brown and reeked of sweat and redness in a combo I never want to smell again. The bats peeled off towards their attics. So’d their shadows, moving us out from under an afghan of shifting dapples into a cruel flat burn of sunlight.

Someone-Mister JayMac? Major Dexter?-called for a medic and an ambulance. Gawkers of every stripe and hue appeared.

“Jesus Lord, he’s bleeding to death!” Muscles shouted.

“Hang on, Ch-Charlie,” I told Snow through the fence.

No ambulance arrived, but the camp’s CO, General Gordon Holway, pulled up in a command car with the words THE OLD MAN stenciled on his door over a five-pointed white star. General Holway vaulted out and hustled over to the bleeding Snow.

Go there, do this, call for that, he barked to soldiers and ballplayers alike, and the way guys hurried to do what he said made me feel a little better. By this time, Mister JayMac’d reached Snow too. He stood beside me, his throat pulsing above me like a turkey gobbler’s wattles.

“Hemophiliac!” he said. “Yall’ve got to do something for him damned quick.”

“What?” General Holway squinted up at Mister JayMac out of eyes as narrow and blue as trout gills.

“He’s a bleeder,” Mister JayMac said. “A mildly afflicted bleeder, but a bleeder. His blood don’t clot like it ought.”

General Holway stood up. “A bleeder? And he plays ball? You let him?”

“I have to,” Snow said through papery lips. “Aint nothing for me but to play.”

Henry came up to me and did a side-saddle leap over the fence. He gathered the damaged Charlie Snow into his arms.

“Hospital? Infirmary? Where may we take him?”

“S dangerous to do it that way,” somebody said. “The poor bloke needs a litter and a couple of corpsmen.”

“It’s dangerous to let him lie,” Henry said.

“Put him in my car,” General Holway said. “Let’s move it!”

General Holway, his chauffeur, and Henry all got into the command car, Henry in the back with Snow propped like a smashed doll in the crook of his arm. Off they bounded towards the administrative and services area, a complex of two-story wooden buildings spaced out in rectangles, every building and every street block a twin of all the others.

The chauffeur played the command car’s Klaxon, sounding its raucous bleat every thirty yards or so. The rest of us stood back and watched-Hellbenders, Splendid Dominicans, and some of the GIs in Major Dexter’s Special Training units, a poleaxed crew of gawkers.

Major Dexter approached Mister JayMac. “Your fellas have one more out to get and at least one more trip into town, sir.”

“Game’s over,” Mister JayMac said.

“Why?” Fadeaway Ankers puled, dragging the word out. “You put me in to finish this thang, didn’t you?”

“You’ve jes finished.”

“Then Mister Cozy’s team wins,” Major Dexter said. “Five full innings are a legal game. This one’s nearly gone eight.”

“This game warnt legal to begin with,” Fadeaway said. “We had to sneak out here jes to start it.”

Mister JayMac said, “Hush, boy-o,” like a groom gentling a high-strung horse. Then, in the crush of bodies by the fence, he found Mr Cozy Bissonette and stuck out his hand to him. “A hard-fought game, sir. Your men have skill and moxie. Please tell Mr Clark and Mr Wall, in particular, how much their play impressed us.”

“Predate that,” Mister Cozy said. “Yo center fielder gon come round n play for yall again real soon.”

“He’s most likely going to die,” Mister JayMac said.

Mister Cozy dropped his gaze. “Then God rest his soul, and God bless yall for letting us play with sech a man.”

Out there at the fence, us Hellbenders shook hands with Splendid Dominican Touristers, and vice versa. Fadeaway and a few others didn’t like it much, but the disrespect finishing out would’ve showed Charlie Snow was plain even to them and so they finally shut up.

The Dominicans took their win with gravity. One of em-Tommy Christmas, I think-said to me, “You mighta got us, one mo inning. You sholy might,” and strolled back to the stands with Partlow and Davies, marveling at the grit of Snow’s effort to chase down through a canopy of bats Oscar Wall’s tremendous knock to center.

When it was announced over the PA system the Dominicans’d won, the troops whooped and jitterbugged in the bleachers. I didn’t fault em. In the lingo of deeds, their champions had proclaimed their honor.