Brittle Innings

50

Early in August, Lamar Knowles knocked on Henry’s and my door. Henry’d missed breakfast and lay in bed, face down, one arm hanging off the mattress. As soon as Lamar saw Henry, he apologized and tried to retreat. He had that morning’s issue of the Highbridge Herald rolled up in one hand, and he bopped himself in the forehead with it for coming up so early.

“C-cmon in,” I said. “It’s not early, Henry st-stayed out awful late, that’s all.” I dragged him in and sat him at my desk; I plopped down on my bed. Fan noise had covered Lamar’s entrance. It would’ve taken a cattle prod to goad Henry awake, and I told Lamar so. That news seemed to reassure him. He opened out his newspaper.

“You try to keep up with our parent club?” he asked.

“The Phutile Phillies?”

“Yessir. No other.”

“Only to n-n-notice they aint doing so great.”

“Well, on Sunday, their owner-president, Mr Cox, canned Bucky Harris as manager and hired Freddie Fitzsimmons. Take a look.” He passed me the sports page.

I read the story. The Phillies had dropped to seventh in the National League standings. This lurch towards the cellar had so irked William D. Cox he’d given the press an eight-page statement accusing Bucky Harris of calling his players “those jerks” and writing them off as losers. Harris had learned of the statement on Sunday evening. On Monday he said if anybody in the Phillies organization qualified as a jerk, it was Cox: “ ‘And he’s an all-American jerk. If I had said any of those things,’ ” the Herald quoted Harris, and Lamar read out loud, “ ‘I certainly would be the first to admit them.’ ”

“Whaddaya think?” Lamar said.

I shrugged. “B-b-business as usual.”

Lamar tapped my knee. “Mebbe so, but the way you and Jumbo been playing, it could mean a heckuva break for yall.”

“Uh-uh,” I said.

“Sure. Look, the Phils’ first baseman and shortstop aint playing worth used ration stamps. In fact, Harris kept switching out different guys at those spots. It could happen, you and your roomy getting a call-up.”

“It could n-n-not happen too. Or it could happen to Henry and not to m-me.”

“Or vice versa. I don’t say this to amp up the pressure, Danny, jes to remind you your play here has two goals, winning us the CVL pennant and training yourself for the bigs. Don’t forget that second one, kid.” When Lamar offered me the paper, I shook my head. “Fitzsimmons might ask the Phils to call yall as replacements for Jimmy Wasdell and Gabby Stewart.”

“Charlie Brewster plays short for the Phillies too,” I said. “So does Babe Dahlgren.”

“Yeah, but Stewart and Brewster’ll be lucky to hit.220 together. Dahlgren plays more first base, subbing for Wasdell, than shortstop. He could use yall’s help.”

Going up to the bigs from a Class C club seemed about as likely as Hitler catching the Holy Spirit and joining the Pentecostals.

“Even if it happened,” Lamar said, “you could end up warming the bench like I do now, or gitting two or three starts in throw-away games towards the end of the season. Still, those games could set yall for starters’ roles next year, specially if this stupid war’s still on.”

“I hope it aint.”

“Well, if it happens, yall’ll deserve it.” Lamar blushed. “It’d tickle me silly.” He stood up and laid the Herald sports page on my desk. “Show that to ol Jumbo Hank. Tell him what I said. If he ever wakes up.”

Later, I showed Henry the paper and told him what Lamar’d told me, that the Phillies’ new manager, Freddie Fitzsimmons, might try to call us up. Henry read the story. His licorice-whip lips curled into a smile. He slapped his craggy knees.

“Wouldn’t that be delicious?”

If I’d ever wondered about Henry’s desire to hop from the CVL to the neon glare of the majors, his behavior now made me see how deeply he’d planted the roots of his hopes. Maybe Lamar’d known Henry better than I had.

On Wednesday night, we played the Gendarmes the opener of a two-game series in the Prefecture. Strock started Sundog Billy Wallace, the ace of his staff, and Sundog Billy, on better than four days’ rest, hurled a flawed masterpiece.

I say flawed because the umping team, with Happy Polidori over at first, blew call after call in the Gendarmes’ favor. If a break could go to the homies, Polidori and his crew made sure it did. During the middle-fifth changeover, a bunch of us discussed the situation.

“These officials will home-cook the flesh from our bones,” Henry said. “We will disintegrate in their pressure cooker.”

“Hit one out to dead center, Jumbo,” Muscles said. “No way they can overrule that kind of shot.”

“Don’t bet on it,” Hoey said. “Plate ump’s likely to say he stepped out of the batter’s box.”

“Knock off the alibiing,” Mister JayMac said from the dugout’s edge, “especially before these guys’ve beaten you.”

“These guys?” Hoey said. “You talking about the Gendarmes or the umps?”

“Hush, Mr Hoey. We’ll win or lose this one based on what we do on the field, not on the umpires’ whims.”

“Trout tripe,” Hoey said. “Mr Sayigh’s promised Polidori and his pal a pipe-job from his lovely A-rab daughters if they gyp us a time or twelve this evening.”

Mister JayMac jabbed a finger at Hoey. “Knock it off. You impugn a friend, slander his kids, defame the character of CVL officials, and degrade yourself. Enough.”

“Yessir,” Hoey said sarcastically.

Creighton Nutter’s pitching kept us in it until the seventh. In the top of that inning, I came up with Skinny Dobbs on first-he’d drawn Sundog Billy’s only walk of the evening-and one out. I laid down a bunt, dropping it off my Red Stix bat as pretty as a biscuit and about as frisky. Ed Bantling scrambled out from behind the plate, Wallace off the mound, and Binkie Lister in from third. Although Lister made the play, his throw to first baseman Harvey Coombs got there a full second too late to turn my infield hit into just another well-placed sacrifice.

Polidori blew the call. Trumpeted it. Tuba’d it. Thumbed me out. Claimed I’d jumped over the bag. Shoot, I’d banged my ankle hitting it.

Hoey, coaching first, exploded. Tore into Polidori like a terrier into a rat’s nest. Jigged before him like a runamok Osterizer. It was like he’d forgotten, now I had my voice back, I could gripe for myself. Then Hoey flat-handed Polidori in the chest and staggered him.

“YOU’RE OUTTA HERE!” Polidori shouted, a hand on his heart.

Hoey wouldn’t leave. He’d gone flaming bonkers. He cursed and snarled, edging around like a cougar on uppers. Nobody-I mean, nobody-could slow his het-up prowl. The crowd leapt to its feet. When they booed, their boos fell like ton upon ton of flapping canvas. It scared me pissless.

Fans started hurling sample jars of Burma-Shave onto the field, heaving the bulk of these samples towards first base. Just before the game, a pair of fast-talking drummers had passed out the samples to every adult male coming in. Now, those jars rained down like porcelain hail. One jar clipped Hoey on the arm. Polidori, Coombs, and I backed deeper into the outfield. Hoey followed after-not to escape the barrage but to keep cursing the hapless Happy Polidori, for the jar that’d hit him had had no more effect than a poppy seed.

The PA announcer scolded the crowd. The police threatened arrests. In the outfield, Hoey continued to fume and storm. Finally, Mister JayMac sent Muscles, Curriden, Fanning, and Sudikoff out there-at some peril, for the crowd started catcalling at once-to subdue Hoey and drag him, thrashing and frothing, if need be, into the clubhouse. This took several minutes because Hoey tried to elude our press-gang, meanwhile heaping dogshit on Polidon’s pedigree.

“You ignorant dago!” Hoey dodged Mister JayMac’s posse. “Your mama bore you purblind on muscatel!”

“You bigot!” Polidori cried. “You froggy bilge mucker!”

Muscles tackled Hoey behind second base. The crowd cheered. Curriden, Fanning, and the others picked him up and, with Muscles gripping his belt, littered him back towards our dugout like a battlefield casualty. I scurried along behind them: Polidori had called me out and wouldn’t change his mind-not in front of these fans, not after blotting up so much of Hoey’s abuse.

Once the cops, the PA announcer, and our rescue squad had restored some order, and the groundskeepers had a wheel-barrow full of Burma-Shave jars, Sundog Billy struck out Heggie to squelch our “rally.” Nutter shut down the ’Darmes after a lead-off single in the bottom half of the inning, and so on and so on, until the bottom of the ninth, with the score locked at two apiece and half the citizenry of LaGrange trying to deafen us with cow bells.

“To hell wi the Hellbenders! To hell with em all! Tonight they go down! Tonight they do fall!”

I felt nose high to a tic’s rump. All the vocal scorn had even begun to get to Nutter. Veteran or no, he could sense the rising heat. He threw two wild pitches in a row and walked the Gendarme shortstop Tucker DeShong. Bang! Mister JayMac lifted Nutter for Vito Mariani, who got the next two batters to pop up. One more out and we went into extra innings.

Cliff Nugent, LaGrange’s center fielder and best clutch hitter, came up. Mariani got two strikes on him and wasted two pitches trying to sucker him into a strikeout. His fifth pitch, a curve, broke on the outer edge of the plate-too close for a man with a couple of strikes to let go by-and Nugent drove it on a dying clothesline into the right-field corner. Foul. Six inches foul. Maybe a foot.

Happy Polidori watched the ball sail over his head and skid on the divoted turf. He faced second base and chopped his right arm down to signal the drive fair. Nugent sped up again, rounded first, and churned for second. Skinny Dobbs couldn’t believe the call, but he chased down the ball, which’d already caromed off the fence in foul territory, and tried to throw it home to keep DeShong from scoring. The throw reached Dunnagin on three feeble hops, too late, and the stands swayed like racketing freight cars.

“Mais oui!” chanted the crowd: “But yes!”

The Gendarmes had beaten us by a run and stretched their lead to three full games. Polidori’d blown the most crucial call in the entire ballgame. Mister JayMac couldn’t protest it because a hundred or more people had jumped the fences to pound their heroes on the backs, and Polidori and his fellow ump had already hurried off the field.

In the clubhouse, Mister JayMac paced a strip of concrete like a badger.

“Home cooking!” Buck Hoey shouted. Because he’d showered after his ejection, he wore civvies, like Mister JayMac. Turkey Sloan’d already given him the partisan Hellbender take on Polidori’s gaffe.

“They stole this one!” somebody yelled.

“Bastids ambushed us!”

“They bought Polidori’s ass, thass what! They bought it!”

“YALL HUSH!” Mister JayMac cried.

We hushed. Mister JayMac had his chin on his breast-bone and his hands fisted in the pockets of his pants. He’d stopped pacing, but one leg jiggled, like the leg of a hound agitated by a belly rub.

“I don’t think Mr Polidori japped us once this evening-till that call on Mr Nugent’s liner to right.”

“He had it in for us all evenin, sir!” Curriden said.

“I asked neither your nor anyone else’s opinion.”

Curriden shut his eyes. All of us wanted to denounce the one-sided calls and the unruly crowd. Hometowning hurt. It’d cost us an important game. But we simply stood in our sweaty smelly funk waiting for the Word.

“Mr Polidori made beaucoups of mistakes,” Mister JayMac said, “but all but the last one stemmed, I believe, from misapprehension and the bullying of the crowd-which, let me remind you, pays its money to supply that ingredient. Rafe Polidori knows his business. Under ordinary circumstances-”

“Mister JayMac,” Muscles said. “Sir, I-”

An upraised hand cut him off. “-he calls em as he sees em, and he usually sees them pretty well. Tonight, gentlemen, what we witnessed in the bottom of the ninth did not signal any blatant Gendarme bribery, but Mr Polidori’s personal response to the shenanigans of Ligonier Hoey two innings earlier.”

“Sir-”

“Don’t interrupt, Hoey.” (Not “Mr Hoey,” just “Hoey.”) “Mr Polidori should be an impartial ajudicator on the ball field, but, like all of us, he consists of flesh, blood, and certain deep-seated prejudices bespeaking the imperfection of his humanity. What was brittle in him snapped when you baited him beyond his God-given level of tolerance.”

“You’re blaming me for the bastid’s call?”

“For precipitating it. Yes I do. Your actions in our half of the seventh stank on ice.”

“I was standing up for Dumbo here. For the Hellbenders.”

“You like to got Mr Boles conked with a shave-cream jar and the game ruled a forfeit against us. Mr Boles escaped a concussion, thank God, but your team, I remind you, lost.”

Nobody spoke.

“Stay tonight and tomorrow with the family putting you up, but don’t report to the Prefecture tomorrow. Read a magazine. Listen to the radio. Don’t show up here. Stay away.”

“Am I suspended?”

“Let me think on that.” Mister JayMac looked us square in the eyes. “Go on and shower.”

Bebout offered Hoey a pinch of Wedowee snuff, to cheer him up, but Hoey knocked Bebout’s tin to the floor.

On Thursday night, without Hoey, we beat LaGrange seven to one behind the pitching of Fadeaway Ankers. The next day we traveled to Cottonton, where we swept a three-game series from the Boll Weevils. Meanwhile, the Gendarmes lost two of three to Opelika, sending us home tied for first with them.

We had almost four full days of rest before our next home game-against the Eufaula Mudcats. During that time, Mister JayMac got busy, mostly over the telephone. On Thursday, Henry took me aside in the parlor to spell out the latest personnel developments as transmitted over the club grapevine.

“Mister JayMac received permission from the Phillies to trade Mr Hoey,” Henry said. “He has done so.”

“Tr-trade Buck Hoey? Where’ll he g-go?”

“Scuttlebutt”-Henry was proud of this word-”Scuttlebutt has it that the Gendarmes have bought him for a handsome sum of cash and a utility player.”

I had a sudden edgy heart thrill. Buck Hoey, gone! The last guy on the club who still called me Dumbo, the only one who remembered-who held a grudge about-the incident that’d resulted in him wearing boot-blacked carpet slippers for a few days. Why, though, had Mister JayMac traded him to a team in a nip-and-tuck pennant race against us?

“Because Mr Sayigh offered him the most lucrative return on his property,” Henry said.

I wondered about Hoey’s family and their rented house. What would happen to Linda Jane? To Matt, Carolyn, Ted, and Danny, my accidental namesake?

“As a concession to the hardship spawned by this trade,” Henry told me, “the Hoeys and their children may stay in their dwelling rent-free until September. Mister JayMac proffered Mr Hoey this compact, and Mr Hoey took it, albeit bitterly.”

“If he’s a Gendarme, he c-can’t live in Highbridge.”

“A gravel-quarry owner in LaGrange who admires Mr Hoey’s aggressive style has refurbished a shotgun hovel only blocks from the Prefecture. Mr Hoey will dwell there rent-free.”

During my talk with Henry, I’d heard a muffled hammering and some other peculiar noises. Suddenly, Worthy Bebout stood in the parlor, a carpenter’s belt cocked on his hips.

“Think Mrs Hoey’d like a man around the house while her hubby’s living away?”

We stared at Bebout, like he’d just asked our opinion of baby eating or nude evangelism. “I mean nuthm smutty. Jes thought she might want to rent the bed space and cook me some meals while our season lasts.”

“Mrs Hoey likely doesn’t have any b-bed space,” I said. “The Hoeys got f-four younguns.”

“Then I reckon I aint been wasting my time.” Bebout picked up a rucksack next to a parlor sofa. “Come see.” McKissic House had a storm and potato cellar you reached through a door set under the staircase to the second floor. Bebout’d spent his morning down there transforming one end of that clayey hole into a bed chamber. Seeing it, Henry and I understood why he’d asked about boarding with the Hoeys. A Spanish dungeon would’ve been cheerier.

“Sorta pneumonia-y,” I said.

“Sorta buggy too.” Bebout yanked the overhead bulb so it threw a splash of light into one corner. Camelback crickets clung to the pocked clay wall and sproinged around the floor. A row of blackened canning jars sparkled on a plank shelf at shin height. The jars held gloopy sludge. I began to quease.

Henry and I beat it out of there as fast as politeness would let us. In the parlor we found Kizzy sprawled in a cushy chair, the hem of her dress hammocked between her legs and a mortuary fan tick-tocking away in her hand. She never used the parlor. She hardly ever sat down.

“Kizzy, you s-sick?” I asked her.

“I zausted, that’s what I am. Used out. Nigger-weary.”

“But why?”

“Bless you, Mister Danny, cause I aint got no hep. Look like the McKissics trying to chase me into a tirement home. Wunst upon a time, I could count on Miss Giselle hauling herself over here to hep do breakfuss. No mo. She aint showed here five days running, and the ony scuse she got is, the heat done prostrate her. Like it’s a e-lixir to me.”

Henry said, “Mrs Lorrows, you should recruit some of us to help.” He kept glancing into the foyer, though, like expecting Bebout to trudge into view with a dug-up cadaver.

“I awready gots me two of you ballplayers a week, but this week’s two is good-fo-nuthin clumses.”

I looked at Henry. “We c-could help, c-couldn’t we?” I liked to cook. Mixing up biscuit dough reminded me of arts and crafts in grade school back in Tenkiller.

But Henry’d already turned away. “I must borrow Mister JayMac’s automobile. I must take a trip.” He waved good-bye with a stiff flapping motion and lurched through the dining room on his way to the McKissics’ bungalow.

“Darius was mo hep than Miss Giselle ever knew,” Kizzy said. “I sho do miss him.”