Brittle Innings

56

Not until the next morning did I come around.

I lay flat-out in bed in a private room in the Hothlepoya County Hospital. A private room meant Mister JayMac, using his political clout and the full power of his checkbook, had sprung for my treatment with almost everything he had to spring with. Charlie Snow’d died on him. Danny Boles wouldn’t.

A bearded man in a white lab coat introduced himself to me as Dr Nesheim. He straddled a chair next to my bed, his arms on the chair back and his chin on his clasped hands. “Woozy? Take your time. You’ve got beaucoups of time.” Buck Hoey, I learned, had done for me. With one set of spikes, he’d shattered my right kneecap; with the other, torn the muscles of my left inner thigh. Then, throwing to Henry, I’d fallen, and fallen wrong, and done something very, very bad to my hip.

“Want me to sweeten the news for you, son, or would you rather take it all in one nasty gulp?”

One nasty gulp? How much more nastiness did this man want me to gag down?

Even so, I said, “One nasty gulp.”

“The orthopedic details of your injuries probably don’t matter much to you right now,” Dr Nesheim said. “But they’re severe.”

“How severe?”

“You won’t be able to play ball again.”

“Our season’s over. What about next year?”

“Not likely, Danny. That fella who spiked you, he’s pretty much undercut your hopes of fame in the majors. Rehabilitation is going to be long, painful, and… well, incomplete.”

“I’m a ballplayer! A shortstop! That’s what I am!”

“That was something you did, son. Now you’re going to have to redefine yourself in quite different terms.”

“I’m a ballplayer,” I said.

Dr Nesheim said, “The only consolation I can give you-if it will console-is, you won’t have to worry about the draft or going off to war. Not as a dogface or swabbie, anyway. Uncle Sam won’t want you any more than the Phillies do.”

I was two and a half months shy of eighteen. I put my arm over my face and cried. Dr Nesheim patted me on the arm and left. I didn’t fault him. He seemed a decent enough joe-he’d given it to me in one nasty gulp, a dose of Epsom salts for the only life plan I’d ever made for myself. I didn’t believe I couldn’t use that plan anymore… and I did believe. The way my lower body felt like a sack full of broken glass told me all I needed to know about the reliability of Dr Nesheim’s prognosis.

Hoey’d gotten back at me for beating him out at shortstop, for taking away a pair of his baseball shoes, for my role in his ejection from a big game in LaGrange, and for greasing the duckboards of his late-season trade to the Gendarmes. Yessir, he’d decommissioned my wagon.

I spent the last two days of August and most of September in the Hothlepoya County Hospital. Between them, the Hellbenders and the Phillies paid for my stay. Mama and I could’ve never managed the bills. Deck Glider, Inc., had no medical plan for its line workers and mid-level managers, and even with a bonus for helping Mister JayMac’s club to the CVL pennant, I hadn’t cleared half a grand that summer.

During my first two days in the hospital, everyone on the team, except Henry and Mister JayMac, visited me. Even Trapdoor Evans and Turkey Sloan came by-with Sosebee, Ankers, and Sudikoff-to wish me a fast recovery and to laud me for turning the last double play of the year. Henry hadn’t come, I figured, because he’d had to report to the Phillies, and their front office’d wired him money for a tram ticket, probably in a first-class Pullman. No one else told me different-not at first anyways.

The visitor I most appreciated on Monday, though, was Phoebe. She came late in the day with Miss LaRaina, bringing a small box of Baby Ruth candy bars, a bouquet of crape myrtle and hydrangeas, and several tattered Saturday Evening Posts. Miss LaRaina sat subdued-almost prim-by my bed, but Phoebe twirled a finger in a stray lock on my forehead and smoothed back the hair at my temples.

“How you feelin, Ichabod?”

“Rotten. Howm I sposed to feel?”

“With yore fingers, or yore toes, or yore nose. Or yore… whatever.”

“Phoebe,” Miss LaRaina said tiredly.

“Mama’s doing better, guy. She’s seeing this really sweet Army nutpick out to the camp.”

Nutpick?

“Phoebe,” Miss LaRaina said again.

“Well, he’s helped, yore kindly dome doctor has. He’s got you to relax, to think some bout Daddy n me, to spend a little time to home.”

“I never didn’t think about yall, Phoebe. But I suppose I did think about myself more, and the terrible unfairness of my place in this dreadful war.”

Terrible unfairness.

“But Danny doesn’t want to hear this,” Miss LaRaina said. “We came to be mood lifters, angels of mercy, not a tear-jerker episode of ‘Captain Pharram’s Family.’ ” She tapped a cigarette from a pack of Luckies. “Mind if I smoke, Danny? Keeps my hands busy and sort of rebraids my frazzled nerves.”

“Not if I can have one too,” I told her.

Phoebe took a cigarette from her mother, stuck it between my lips, lit me up. I bathed my lungs in smoke and blew out a whole stack of wobbly airborne doughnuts. The quick high the smoke gave me-the sensation of floating-lifted my mind away from the throb in my hip, the burn in my groin. Tobacco, the opium of the people.

“How come Mister JayMac aint been by?”

The silence spilling from Phoebe and her mama came down in deafening Niagara Falls torrents.

“How many top-heavy nurses been in here to jab needles in yore butt?” Phoebe suddenly asked me.

“Five or six. They can’t stay away. I lose count.”

“Phoebe,” Miss LaRaina said tiredly.

“Oh, cmon, Mama. Yore doctor said to behave responsibly, not to chain yoresef to a church pew.”

“Phoebe, I’d appreciate it if-”

I blew a smoke ring and cut Miss LaRaina off. “How come Mister JayMac hasn’t visited me?”

Phoebe and her mama did that hurry-not-to-answer thing they’d already done once. Like Mariani coiling a spaghetti strand around a fork tine, Phoebe spiraled my forelock around her finger. The ash on Miss LaRaina’s cigarette, meanwhile, grew like Pinocchio’s nose. This time I waited.

“We’ve all suffered an unexpected loss,” Miss LaRaina said. “You see, Miss Giselle is dead. She died either quite late last night or very early this morning.”

“Cripes. Did Mister JayMac shoot her?” (For telling Frye to announce our call-up? For going the carnal hanky-panky route with Henry? And, if the second, how had Mister JayMac found out?)

“Uh-uh,” Phoebe said. “Miss Giselle kilt herself.”

“How? Why?” I may’ve known the answer to at least one of those questions, but I needed to hear it said. No, I needed a denial, a lie that didn’t impeach my roommate. Now, too, I began to understand the bouts of dumbness that’d fallen on Phoebe and Miss LaRaina when I mentioned Miss Giselle or asked about Mister JayMac. Someone’d told them not to drop any more bad news on me than Dr Nesheim already had.

“What about Henry? Is Henry all right?”

Another uh-oh look between Phoebe and her mama.

“What’s happened to him?” I demanded.

“He’s fine,” Miss LaRaina said quickly. “He’s just-fine.”

“Uh-uh,” I said. “I’m owed some truth. Let’s have it.”

“Listen to him, Mama,” Phoebe said. “He’s done got shut of his stutter. Completely, nearlybout.”

“Phoebe, it’s either completely or it aint,” I said.

“Why, you’re right,” Miss LaRaina said. “He’s become a regular Demosthenian.” They marveled over me.

“Tell me what’s happened to Henry, blast it.”

Miss LaRaina said, “Once he knew how bad Buck Hoey’d hurt you, he left and got just sloppy drunk over it.”

“Yesterday was Sunday,” I said. “And Henry don’t drink.”

“Ordinarily, no,” Miss LaRaina said, “but this spiking business unnerved him, and I’ve never known a Hellbender who wanted a bottle not to find one. Reese-Mr Curriden-always had two or three hidden in his room. He’d distribute too. Hoarding’s not his way, even in a whiskey drought.”

“Mama,” Phoebe said, looking at her feet.

“It’s all right, child. Major Blumlein said to own up to my trespasses, not to cache them under a lamp-stand.”

“He didn’t tell you to parade em in front of Daddy.”

“Your daddy isn’t here.” Miss LaRaina surveyed my room. “That young man there answers to Danny, not Daddy, and I assume him chivalrous enough to keep his own counsel.” She blew smoke sidelong, holding her cigarette Bette Davis style. “Are you?” she asked me.

“Yessum.”

“Well, then. Henry sends his regrets.”

“Will he visit me before he leaves for Philly?”

“That’s probably up to him and the railway timetable.” Miss LaRaina smiled and took another sexy drag on the nub of her Lucky. She caught a knuckle’s length of falling ash in one palm and dumped it in the terra-cotta pot of crape myrtle and hydrangea blossoms at her feet.

We talked another ten or fifteen minutes, mostly about Miss Giselle-her generosity, her loving-kindness, her sacrifices for Mister JayMac and the Hellbenders. Then Miss LaRaina said I looked peaked. She and Phoebe had better go. The staff didn’t want me overtaxed.

“Then tell em to write their congressmen,” I said. “Look, I’m strong enough for yall to stay.”

“Not if we fuss,” Miss LaRaina said. “Fussin’ll lay you down faster than a mile-long footrace.”

Phoebe kissed me on the forehead. “I’ll be back. Ever day till yo’re out.”

I held Phoebe’s hand briefly before she slipped away, over to the door. “Miss LaRaina, leave me those cigarettes, okay? You can get some more.”

Miss LaRaina walked over and laid her pack on my stomach.

“When’s the funeral?” I asked her. When she just stared at me, like she’d forgotten an earlier part of our talk, I added, “Miss Giselle’s?”

“Oh. Tomorrow, at Alligator Park. A memorial service. No burial. The body’s being cremated.”

“I can’t go,” I said. “I’d like to, but I-” I dropped my cigarette butt in the water glass on my bedside table and watched it fizzle and saturate. Miss Giselle dead. Henry not accounted for. My career an injury-blasted memory. The weight of all this wreckage squeezed tears from me. “Okay. Yall go on. Leave me be.” I fumbled another cigarette out and got Phoebe to light it-to keep her from planting another wet sympathy buss over my eye. She and Miss LaRaina went to the door.

“Matches!” I called after them. “Please.”

Phoebe tossed them onto the bed, not really within easy reach, and then I was alone again.

During September, every day until my release on the twenty-seventh, Phoebe kept her word and came to see me, usually in the afternoon after school. With the end of the CVL season, though, visits from other Hellbenders dwindled to one or two a week, for most of my teammates left Highbridge for their own hometowns or farms, or rode away to take winter-long defense jobs in shipyards, munitions factories, and bomber plants. Nutter, Hay, Sloan, Sudikoff, and Fanning stayed, with jobs at Foremost Forge or Highbridge Box & Crate-but only Nutter ever actually dropped by, usually with newspapers, his motor-mouthed five-year-old Carl, and a fresh-to me, anyway-anecdote about his days with the St. Louis Browns.

Mister JayMac visited me on Sunday afternoons at three o’clock and stayed fifteen minutes, tops. He never mentioned Miss Giselle, Darius, or Henry, but concentrated on asking how I seemed to be healing up and second-guessing Allied command decisions in Italy and the Solomons. By telephone, of course, he’d told Mama Laurel of my injuries, and of their severity, without trying to soft-pedal the truth or to weasel out of the club’s financial obligations-even though my contract didn’t say a word about insuring me for game-acquired or aggravated hurts. He’d’ve paid Mama Laurel’s way to Highbridge, but Mama told him tearfully in one call that coming to see me might make her lose her job. Colonel Elshtain had helped Deck Glider get its military conversion contract, but he didn’t seem to have any leftover pull with the management at the Tenkiller factory, and Mama couldn’t put her job up for grabs by asking for an emergency leave of absence.

“Then don’t come, Mrs Boles,” Mister JayMac told me he’d told Mama. “I’ll take care of Danny jes like he was my own.”

Imagine my gratitude.

Anyway, Mama and I also talked occasionally. I told her to stay on the job and to pray for me. Ordinarily, we talked on Sundays, after Mister JayMac’s humdrum visits, when he sat in a chair near the door, a black arm band on one sleeve and a look of heavy confusion on his booze-swollen face. Sometimes we’d talk, Mama and I, while Mister JayMac, who’d had the phone brought in, sat nearby in his rumpled widower’s weeds and his deep-purple heartache.

“Yessurn, they’re treating me just fine,” I’d say. “Yessum, he is.” What else could I say-though it did pretty much tally with the truth-with Mister JayMac sharing my room?

Nobody brought me a copy of the Highbridge Herald until the Friday of my first week in the hospital. And when Nutter came in with it, he brought me only the sports page, which had a few major-league box scores and a whole section about a GI track meet at Camp Penticuff. I’d already read my Saturday Evening Posts from cover to cover.

“Where’s the rest of this rag? Nobody here’ll give me a copy and you come in with a piddlin snippet.”

“Didn’t think you’d care about anything but the sports,” Nutter said. “After ball season, nothing worth preserving in type happens in this burg.”

“What happened at Miss Giselle’s funeral?”

“Memorial service. The usual. Blather, tears, you know. Remember Charlie Snow’s. Only difference? Afterwards, Mister JayMac took his lady’s ashes home in an urn.”

“Oh.” I changed the subject. “Where’s Henry? He never came to see me, but I look in these here box scores for the Phillies”-I snapped the sports page with my knuckles-“and his name amt here. Where is he?”

“I don’t know.”

“He didn’t go up to the Phillies?”

“Maybe he’s sitting on the bench. Not finding his name in a box score only means he didn’t play in that game.”

I tacked about. “Why doesn’t Hoey come visit me? He owes me that much, the jerk.”

“Cripes, Boles, you’re a pigheaded case. Hoey didn’t-doesn’t-like you. Plus he’s ashamed.”

“I bet.”

“Anyway, he’s not the sort to come creeping in here, hat in hand, to ask forgiveness. Which you already knew.”

On Saturday, I got hold of a newspaper. It had a story clipped from the front page. I asked the nurse on assignment to my room why. She said a staff doctor with a cousin in the Ninth Air Force, headquartered in England, had clipped it for a scrapbook he planned to give his cousin on his return from overseas. Nobody else had a paper to loan either-the hospital tried to keep its premises litter free and to recycle paper products immediately. I believed the hussy. She lied like a front-office flack, and in those days I didn’t know enough to see through the prevaricators the way I do now.

Two days later, about five in the afternoon, another nurse came by and looked in. “Nigger boy out here says he wants to see you. You want to see him?”

Euclid, I thought. “Yessum. Let me see him.”

Euclid came in, eyes cast down, head respectfully hang-dog. He looked dirtier than usual, sweatier-as ragamuffinish in his clothes as anybody could look and still get in the door. The nurse-I could tell-figured she’d just done her unpaid good deed of the day.

“What’s going on, Euclid?”

“Hey, Danbo. Braugh yoo ledder.”

“Where?” I saw no letter. Euclid had his hands clasped in front of him like a recaptured escapee wearing cuffs.

“Heah.” Euclid pulled a manilla packet from under his stained muslin shirt and nearly poked me in the eye with it. I took it from him. He glanced away-at the ceiling, into a corner, at the foot of my bed.

“Who’s it from?” I studied the handwriting on the front of the packet: Daniel Boles. And just that quick, I knew who’d written the letter. “Henry,” I said.

“Yessa. Mister Jumbo say gib it yoo. So I’s done it. Now I gots to go. Bye.”

Euclid hustled out of the room. I opened the packet and spread out the pages inside it in my lap.