Brittle Innings

49

That Saturday afternoon we had a doubleheader against the Gendarmes, with one game to follow on Sunday, and a two-game series to begin on Wednesday in LaGrange. Five games in seven days against the league leaders, with no more crack at catching them until a three-game homestand at the fag end of August.

“It’s do or die,” Vito Mariani said in the clubhouse before Saturday’s opener.

“ ‘Do or die,’ ” Turkey Sloan mocked. “ ‘Do or die.’ Lordy, s that the Eye-talian gift of gab?”

“It is do-or-die time,” Mariani said. “We lose even one today, Turkey, we make up no ground at all.”

“You can’t inspire these downhome worldlies with clichés-with bromides and bushwah.”

“I shouldn’t have to inspire em at all,” Mariani said. “That’s Mister JayMac’s job. But he aint even here.”

“ ‘Do or die.’ ” Turkey Sloan shook his head. “Gentlemen, forgive poor Vito. He should’ve said-he could’ve said-‘Excel or expire,’ ‘Put up or perish,’ or ‘Suck it in or succumb,’ but all that twitched his low-grade dago brain was ‘Do or die.’ ”

“Shut up, Sloan,” Creighton Nutter said, “or I’ll dock you a day’s pay for pointless jibber-jabber.”

Not hush, but shut up. Mister JayMac’d left town to find a replacement for Charlie Snow. In his absence, by decree and appointment, Nutter was acting Hellbender manager-with full power to play us where he liked, use his own dugout strategies, and, if needed, fine our bunglers, layabouts, and hooligans. Sloan shut up. He knew Nutter’d gig him in a minute.

Well, whether you like Mariani’s “Do or die” or Sloan’s “Suck it in or succumb,” we lost our opener to the Gendarmes and dropped four games off the pace. Roric Gundy pitched nine innings for our visitors, yielding just three hits and one run. He no longer telegraphed his curveball-someone’d finally cautioned him about the telltale flaw in his windup. I struck out twice, remembering Phoebe nude on her knees and her parting cry, “Tell everybody how you come over here n jazzed me!”

With Jerry Wayne Sosebee on the mound and better hitting, we won the afternoon’s second game and finished three games back, just where we’d begun it. We’d missed Charlie Snow’s presence, though-his whip-quick wrists and reliability at the plate. I also missed seeing either Phoebe or Miss LaRaina in the stands. Had they ducked out on me at this bend in the season? Or galloped off into the boonies with Mister JayMac on his hush-hush, do-or-die talent search?

On Sunday, ten minutes before game time, Mister JayMac showed up in our dugout with Charlie Snow’s replacement: a thin, pale, twenty-five- or -six-year-old named Worthy Bebout. Bebout had eyes like a Weimaraner’s, hair about that sickly color, and a hand shake as firm as boiled elbow macaroni. His arms hung too far out of his sleeves, and his pants ended too high on his legs, leaving his stirrup socks and sannies exposed and giving him the look of a fannyless stork.

“Mr Bebout hails from Wedowee, Alabama,” Mister JayMac told us. “Played semipro ball with Ipenson Textiles out of Phenix City.”

At Mister JayMac’s urging, Bebout came along the bench to shake hands. (“Ol pasta grip,” Sloan called him later.) He mumbled his hellos, then sat in the dugout’s farthest corner, his knees and shoulders twisted in and his pale face as empty and deadpan as a new-bought skillet.

“How come he’s not in the m-military?” I asked Henry.

Henry shrugged, but most of us thought Bebout’d finagled-or, worse, maybe even deserved-an NP, or “neuropsychiatric,” rejection. He gave off the waves of a serious crazy.

Probably because Mister JayMac was still pulling strings to have him enrolled as a CVL player, Bebout didn’t start our Sunday afternoon game against the Gendarmes. Four innings along, though, Mister JayMac got a go-ahead from the three-man commission that ran the league (just as Mister JayMac, by wile, guile, and noblesse oblige, wanted it to); and he pinch hit Bebout for Trapdoor Evans at the first chance.

The score stood at two each. Bebout responded by swinging so hard at three straight Dink Dewhurst curveballs he almost wrapped himself around his bat. The crowd booed, but Bebout just unwrapped himself and shuffled back to the dug-out wearing a quirky smile. With nearly every other Hellbender watching, Bebout dipped a pinch of snuff from the tin in his back pocket, sucked it into his mouth, and rubbed his upper gum with the first joint of his pinky.

The game went on. In the seventh, Bebout made two super catches, a shoestring grab and a last-second leap-and-snatch to prevent a Gendarme extra-baser off the Feen-A-Mint sign. A couple of minutes later, several of us clustered around him in the dugout to congratulate him.

“S okay,” Bebout said, refreshing his dip from the snuff tin that’d made a raised circle on his hip pocket.

As Skinny stood in to bat, Junior Heggie sat down next to me. “Ever dip snuff, Danl?”

I shook my head. I was a smoker.

“You ever start, don’t bum a pinch from Bebout there.”

“Why not? He t-tight with it?”

“Oh no, he’d give you some all right, but the screwball dips dirt,” he said. “That lil tin in his pocket’s brimful of loose Wedowee dirt! Dirt, by damn!”

Dobbs singled. Quip Parris struck out. I drew a walk. Worthy Bebout came up behind me in Charlie Snow’s old batting slot. The fans cheered him for the catches he’d made, but set themselves for his second CVL at bat with show-me furrows on their brows. No one could forget his debut as a hitter: three torso-twisting swings and no contact.

On Dewhurst’s first pitch, Bebout rippled again. Twirled, dropped his bat, fell on home plate. A groan went up. This at bat looked so much like his first one it gave us a powerful sense of deja vu. Bebout got up, though, and spanked the next pitch-a rolling curve-into the left-field bleachers, and we went on to defeat the Gendarmes five to two, winning the series and moving within two games of first place. So what if Bebout had celebrated his homer by skipping around the bases?

In the clubhouse afterwards, Junior asked Bebout why he dipped dirt.

Bebout took his snuff tin, screwed off the top, and studied its contents-rich black Alabama soil-like he expected to find fishing crickets in it.

“It’s Wedowee loam. Bacca gives you gum rot. Sides, a fella knows you got dirt in yore snuff tin, he aint keen to borry it. Mazes me.”

“What does?” I said.

“Fellas who aint afeared to slide in dirt act like it’s gunpowder when it comes to dippin it.”

Back at McKissic House, Mister JayMac met in the parlor with Worthy Bebout and all fourteen of his current boarders. He had to find a room for Bebout. Problem was, every room on every floor already had at least two guys in it, overcozylike.

“Any yall willing to triple up?” Mister JayMac said.

The parlor scarcely breathed.

“I cain’t have a room to mysef?” Bebout said.

“Think you’re so hotshot you deserve one?” Evans asked him.

“Nosir. Got habits could conflick with whosoever gits’ put with me.”

“Like what?” Curriden said. “You eat live roosters?”

“Nosir. I read my Testaments. I speak to my voices. I talk to my dead brother Woodrow.”

“Cripes,” Curriden said.

“Then jes give me a pup tent outside,” Bebout suggested.

And until he devised his own indoor answer to the problem, the pup-tent solution actually went into effect. He slept on the lawn in a tent from Sunday, August 1, to Thursday, August 12 (minus five days on the road in the homes of some of Mister JayMac’s friends). Then he moved into quarters unlike those of anybody else lodging in McKissic House.

Before that meeting ended, though, he asked Mister JayMac where we’d stowed his “dip fixings.”

“Kitchen porch. Nobody here’ll disturb em.”

Later, fetching a colander for Kizzy, I saw those fixings: a taped cardboard box full of ordinary-looking but fine-grained dirt. On the sides of this box, with a black Crayola, someone had crookedly printed

WEDOWEE SNUFF.