Brittle Innings

51

Hoey’s replacement from the Gendarmes-I never did learn how much cash money Mr Sayigh had to ante up too-arrived on the Friday before our weekend homestand against Eufaula. Friday the thirteenth, a bad-omen day… if you bought into such malarkey. The replacement player turned out to be Wilbur “Fat Boy” Fortenberry, a bookend, physique-wise, for Pete “Haystack” Hay. Mister JayMac introduced him to us at a breakfast I’d helped Kizzy fix.

“Say it aint so,” Quip Parris said. “The Brown Bomber’s gonna need a new pair of shocks.”

“Don’t fry no mo chicken fo dinner!” Muscles shouted towards the kitchen. “Take Fat Boy here out to the nearest coop and let him inhale-at’ll save everybody time!”

But Fortenberry had only one plump biscuit and two slotted spoonfuls of yellow scrambled eggs before bidding us farewell and riding out to Cotton Creek with Mister JayMac. He had a family-a roly-poly wife and two Fortenberry doughboys-and Mister JayMac had arranged for him to rent Charlie and Vera Jo Snow’s old house.

Henry said not a word, either during Fortenberry’s debut or afterwards when Muscles second-guessed adding a thirty-year-old tub of bear grease to our roster. Henry’d veered off into Cloud-cuckoo-land, like he hadn’t come all the way back from Alabama yet. His business over there yesterday had somehow stalled his swim through the summer. Or else Friday the Thirteenths didn’t agree with him.

Anyway, I spent the morning after Fortenberry’s arrival washing dishes with Sosebee and Fanning and cleaning snap beans for the pregame meal we’d eat at two. Kizzy worked nonstop to turn out this ritual feast. Even married Hellbenders had invitations, although usually only Sudikoff and Hay bothered to come. Mister JayMac almost always ate with us too, but after helping the Fortenberrys settle in, he’d posted home to see about the heat-fatigued Miss Giselle.

Even with Mister JayMac absent, the dining room was louder than a party suite in the Tower of Babel. Pork chops, chicken, country-fried steak. A dozen different vegetables. Four kinds of pies. Given the direction of the wind-south-by-southeast-every person in town must’ve had a saliva buildup.

Suddenly Phoebe burst through the swinging door from the kitchen. I hadn’t seen her for nearly two weeks, and some of the words she’d spoken then still chimed like breaking soda bottles in my memory: “I hope I never see you-or another slimy willie-long as I live!” (Just for instance.)

My appetite died. My inner organs blended themselves into an ebony glop like that trapped in the storm celler’s canning jars. Phoebe probably hadn’t come to testify to my tenderness as a lover. I didn’t know why she’d come, but her presence-to one side of Muscles’s head-of-the-table spot-put everybody, me especially, on notice our meal would cause bigger problems than gas and oversnug belts. She let Muscles finish saying grace, bless her, and Muscles offered her his chair.

“No thank you. I’ve done et. Go on, Muscles, sit back down, okay?” She waited, arms behind her back, until Muscles obeyed her. Dishes began to pass, serving spoons to unload, silverware to glitter. Phoebe wouldn’t meet my eye, or I wouldn’t meet hers, each of us glancing away whenever the other made a feint at contact.

“Well, Missy, what can we do for you?” Muscles said.

“Stay away from my mama. Let her be the decent person she was till Daddy went overseas.”

That riveted everybody’s attention. Silverware stopped clinking, and the radio in the parlor-tuned to a soap opera-sounded a couple of knob twists louder than it had a second ago. Embarrassment settled like a clammy rubber sheet.

“War’s a horrible thing,” Muscles said-consolingly, I guess.

“Men are horrible things,” Phoebe said.

“Careful, mouthy girl,” Evans said. “What’s a titwren of a piece like you know about men anyways?”

“Moren you’d ever figger, Mr Evans.”

Oh God, I thought, she’s come over here to tell everybody about our Saturday-morning folly. She wants Mister JayMac to drop me in creosote, roll me in feathers, and send me back to Oklahoma hanging upside-down from a cane pole.

“Like mother like daughter.” Evans lipped an ugly sneer.

Reese Curriden cracked Evans in the mouth with his elbow. Then he took Evans backwards to the floor, choking him, his thumbs like screw-bolts under Evans’s jaw. Five or six guys stood up, but Henry and I stayed seated, benumbed or maybe just too confused to act. Evans, flat on his back in the toppled chair, waved his hands at his shoulders to show he gave up. Curridan let go just as Muscles was about to drag him off.

“I say, ‘Men’re horrible things,’ and yall jump like red-neck crackers to prove it,” Phoebe said.

Evans stayed mute this time. So did everybody else, and Phoebe walked from Muscles at the table’s head to Henry at its foot, without seeming to care she’d interrupted an important pregame energy-stoker. Some of our fellas-Bebout, Fadeaway, Sosebee-dug in and ate, but most of us waited for a payoff, a backfire loud enough to call Mister JayMac. Phoebe’s eyebrows sparkled with sweat. Her skin shone like a swimmer’s.

“How many of yall’ve cuckolded my daddy?” she said.

Fadeaway lifted his head. “Cold-cocked your daddy?”

“Cuckolded,” Dunnagin told him.

“S what I said, cold-cocked.” Fadeaway spoke around a mouthful of greens. “How many of us’ve knocked her daddy’s lights out? Her question don’t make sense.”

“How many of yall’ve slept with my mama. You Waycross boys got cow flops for brains, Mr Ankers?”

Fadeaway started to rise, but Curriden rose with him, and Fadeaway dropped back into his chair again.

“Gimme a show of hands,” Phoebe said. “All yall who’re guilty as scarlet sin, raise em high.”

“Phoebe,” Muscles said, “this is a bad idea, child. I’ve had some damned bad uns myself, and I know.”

Phoebe jumped all over Muscles. “You could start everbody off, Mr Musselwhite. Whynt you lift yore own hand first? A team capn should set a zample.”

“Phoebe, I-”

“Put your damned ol hand up, Lon K. Musselwhite! You think I want this to take thole rotten weekend?”

Muscles raised his hand. He didn’t do it halfway either. He stuck his arm straight up, a macelike fist bristling at the end. He kept a grum face too. When nobody else at table did anything, Phoebe turned to Reese Curriden.

“You too. You don’t think everbody down at Hellbender Pond on the Fourth figgered you and Mr Musselwhite was tusseling over spare ribs, do you? Git yore hand up.

“Phoebe, a hand in the air here’s sort of like crowing in the rooster room,” Curriden said.

“Yo’re proud of screwing my mama? Of doing dirt to a sojer overseas?”

“Well, Phoebe, some of us’re just called to a different set of arms.”

Evans guffawed. A few other he-manly Hellbenders-Fanning, Parris, Mariani, Fadeaway-giggled like Camp Fire girls walking by a cherub statue. My queasmess took on a lumpy sharpness, like ice cubes shifting in a plastic bag.

“If you aint ashamed, raise yore disgusting hand!” Phoebe stabbed a potato with a serving fork and held it over her head, meaning, Git em up, git em up.

Slowly, Curriden raised his hand. Now he and Muscles made a leery pair, the only two players ready-sort of-to admit they’d abetted Miss LaRaina in her infidelities.

“Who else?” Phoebe said. “Phoebe sees all, Phoebe knows all. Fess up while it’ll still git you right with God n me.” No one joined the hands-up club.

“All right, Mr Musselwhite. All right, Mr Curriden. I forgive yall, you sneaky sonsabitches.”

Forgiveness did it. Suddenly, Dunnagin, Sosebee, and Parris raised their hands, Parris several beats slower than the other two. Five out of fifteen men, a third of the Hellbenders in McKissic House.

“Swell,” Phoebe said. “Any more?”

“Miss LaRaina put the mash on me last season,” Sosebee said. “Before yore daddy’d even got his tail out of town.”

“For God’s sake, Jerry Wayne, shut up,” Dunnagin said.

But Phoebe’d already walked around Henry and laid a hand on his shoulder. Her hand looked like a doily draped over the crown of an armoire. When Muscles disgustedly lowered his arm, so did the other four men. Phoebe didn’t care.

“Hey, Mr Clerval, didn’t Mama vamp you into her bed too? Men’s big as you jes seem to pull her, automatic-like.”

“Then she musta run up on Quip there in the dark,” Worthy Bebout said.

“Can it,” Muscles told Bebout, pretty mildly.

Henry’s blotchy face crawled with embarrassment. “I have always treated your mother with courtesy, Miss Pharram. And she has always reciprocated, in word and deed, my regard for her. I decry this depreciation of her character.”

“Bushwa n Burma-Shave, Mr Clerval. Why do you lie to me? Yo’re her latest throb.”

Henry scraped his chair back and stood up. Phoebe’s hand slipped from his shoulder like a wind-nudged scarf. “I rarely lie,” he said. “Nor do I now. Mrs Pharram and I have never been paramours. Such allegations wound her more deeply than they ever could me; I resent them unequivocally on her behalf. Excuse me. I can hardly eat under these conditions.” He left the dining room and trudged upstairs. Noisily.

Phoebe sat down in his chair without trying to pull it back up to the table. Her feet didn’t reach the floor. “So which one of yall’s seeing my mama now? Or is it one of them rotten creeps out to Cotton Creek?”

“Phoebe, your mama’s got standards,” Muscles said. “She never messes with married men. That reduces the possibility she’ll hurt anyone but herself and her… her friend.”

“Whatm I, Mr Musselwhite? A hank of hair? And what’s my daddy, cannon fodder?”

Kizzy came in. I had the feeling she’d heard everything and bided her time until a chance to play peacemaker came up.

“Hush now, gal. They gon hear you aw the way over to the farmer’s market. Let the mens eat. Come in here with me and have some coconut cream pie.” She eased Phoebe out of Henry’s chair and stepped her back towards the kitchen, hugging Phoebe to her with a flour-dusted arm.

“I don’t like coconut,” Phoebe said. “I told you that bout a zillion times, Kizzy. A zillion n one.”

“Then don’t eat it. Have a slice of my apple instead.”

At the door, Phoebe made Kizzy halt. She turned back towards the table and pierced me with a glittering, green-eyed stare. “Did you tell em, Danny? Did you make shore ever last one of em knew?”

I couldn’t speak.

“Knock it off, Phoeb,” Muscles said. “This is crap.”

“What’s to t-t-tell?” I said. “There’s nothing to tell.”

Phoebe’s eyes seemed to pinwheel a question at me, then a look of understanding, and finally a thank-you-or, at least, a grudging smile.

Kizzy banged her hip into the swinging door and more or less dragged Phoebe through it into a realm of wood-stove heat and Kizzy-made delectables.