Brittle Innings

7

Soon after, every Hellbender, including married fellas from the Cotton Creek district, along with our driver and unofficial team manager, Darius Satterfield, had crowded into the parlor for Mister JayMac’s big meeting.

The only person not there to begin with was Jumbo Clerval, who, like Buck Hoey had charged that afternoon, seemed to have a weird privileged-character status. Well, why not? “When does a gorilla show up for dinner?” “Whenever he damn well feels like it.”

Anyway, the parlor burst with edgy ballplayers, not counting Jumbo. Sweat ran down my sides. Every face in the room, even with a fan creaking overhead, looked greasily sequin-sprinkled. Chairs, footstools, sofa backs, even the floor-players sat or sprawled on any sort of furniture, or surface, they could find.

In wrinkled seersucker trousers and a sweated-out dress shirt, Mister JayMac had worked his way, along with Darius, to the front of the parlor. Darius set up an easel and a book of flip charts to help Mister JayMac explain the Hellbenders and the CVL to Ankers, Dobbs, Heggie, and me. It meant a tedious rehash for the old hands, but nobody squawked. Not even Buck Hoey, who perched on a sofa back to the rear, an expression on his face like, Hey, what a welcome refresher, we’re all so lucky to get the full scoop again.

“Gentlemen, hayseeds, and hangers-on,” Mister JayMac said when Darius had his flip charts ready. “As most of yall know, we play a seventy-seven-game season. Today, after a month of what passes for some of yall as top-notch baseball, we’re a shabby seven and eight, five games back o the Opelika Orphans, a crew I once wouldn’t have reckoned fit to climb a molehill without succumbing to oxygen deprivation. Muscles called them mewling pansies, and we trail them by five. So what does that make us?”

“Pansy chasers,” Buck Hoey said.

Nobody laughed. Like Jumbo, though, Buck Hoey seemed to have a special status; he could rag the boss-some-without getting sent to his room. Anyway, I felt again how hard it would be to take his job away. And if I did, the other guys would probably resent my quick success.

Mister JayMac looked around. “Where’s jumbo? Didn’t he make it back for supper?”

“Like the locust made it to Pharaoh’s Egypt,” Hoey said.

That line did get a laugh.

“So where is he now? What the hell’s he doing?”

“Conferring with Count Tallywhacker,” Hoey said. “That’s why it’s taking him, uh, so long.”

A kind of hesitant edgy laugh this time. Mister JayMac curled his lip the way you would if a whiff of spoiled poultry spilled from your Frigidaire. But he sent Euclid upstairs to fetch Jumbo from his third-floor apartment.

“So looong,” Hoey said as Euclid went by. This time, half a dozen guys whooped like world-champion morons.

“Hush,” Mister JayMac said. I realized then, or gradually over the next few days, that Mister JayMac never said, “Shut up.” I’d heard a lot of “Shut ups” in my short life, so I liked the way he said “Hush” instead.

“Any of yall who’ve been dogging it’d better look sharp,” he said. “We’re taking on some young fellas who can play. I’ve seen em. This isn’t hearsay, but observed fact.”

“High school wonders,” Buck Hoey said.

“Perhaps,” Mister JayMac said. “But I don’t like being tied for fourth place in this league, and I won’t allow us to stay in fourth if good alternatives to mediocrity present themselves. Maybe they already have.”

Euclid came into the parlor ahead of Jumbo Clerval, who, by the looks of him, had “dressed” for the meeting. He wore a humongous pair of wingtip Florsheims, a pair of patched gray pants, and a shiny black frock coat. Euclid played tug to Jumbo’s ocean liner and, as soon as he got the big man among us, tooted on out of the room. Jumbo’s head, capless now, spiked up almost to the picture molding. He slouched against the wall, straight across the doorway from Buck Hoey on the broken-backed sofa. It looked as if Mister JayMac might say something to him, bawl him out even, but he didn’t. He nodded at us four rookies.

“Yall come up here. I want everybody to see you.”

Ankers, Dobbs, Heggie, and I sidled to the front of the room to stand beside the easel. Ankers may’ve been the only one of us not unsettled by the spotlight. When Mister JayMac introduced us, he stepped out and gave a clasped-hands salute, like a boxer greeting a ringside crowd.

“High school graddyiots,” Hoey said.

“Actually, Mr Ankers has only completed his sophomore year,” Mister JayMac said.

The Hellbenders stared at Ankers like he was a sideshow freak. Unless he’d been held back a time or two, he was fifteen years old, a baby with the stubble of a lumberjack.

“All right,” Mister JayMac said, “give these fellas a friendly Hellbender hello. Ready? Hip, hip…”

“Hooray,” the regulars said, without much in it.

Mister JayMac told them to try again. “Hooray!” they said, with maybe an exclamation point. “Again,” he said. They did a third cheer so loud it more or less mocked the idea of hip-hip-hooraying. But Mister JayMac nodded and tapped a pointer on the first page of his chart:

CHATTAHOOCHEE VALLEY LEAGUE / CLASS C PROFESSIONALS.

“Ever last fella here ought to be reminded how damned lucky yall are to be playing ball,” he said. “You could be training as infantry replacements with all the scared puppies out to Camp Penticuff. Or crawling on your guts toward a bunker full of deadeye Jerries or Japs.”

“We could all be dead,” Hoey said.

“You could indeed!”. Mister JayMac roared. “But no, thank God, yall’re privileged to be playing baseball, the national pastime, and getting paid for that hardship to boot!”

“Some of you guys’re getting paid?” Hoey said.

“Can it, Hoey,” Lon Musselwhite said.

“Major league baseball continues on presidential sufferance and the affections of our war-weary citizens. Minor league ball is wounded. Nationwide, the farm system is down to ten training leagues in only seventy cities, and, as I know from my work on the draft board, Uncle Sam needs even more able-bodied men to defeat the foes of democracy abroad.

“Listen up now,” Mister JayMac went on. “The Chattahoochee Valley League, one of the youngest around, is a small-town league, with a pitiful ‘C’ training classification, but we make it in spite of the war because we’re the hardest-playing saps anywhere and flat-out beaucoups of fun to watch. Wouldn’t you agree, Mr Nutter?”

“Yessir.” Creighton Nutter was a married relief pitcher, a balding guy in his late thirties.

“In addition,” Mister JayMac said, “our eight teams are near to one another. The President and the Office of Price Administration appreciate the fact it doesn’t siphon off all that much gas or use up that much tire rubber for one CVL team to travel to another CVL team’s field for a three- or four-game series. Jes last year, the Attorney General said the CVL is the only league he’s ever visited where the National Anthem plays at the end as well as at the start of every contest. A tribute to our national pride. Let me further remind yall that FDR himself views ballplayers as morale boosters and heroes. I concur. At least the good ones are. The bad ones, on the other hand, are-”

“Traitors.” Jumbo’s judgment boomed and echoed.

It stopped Mister JayMac for a second. “Near to,” he said. “Playing the national pastime bad is like spitting on Old Glory. A sorry bungler may not purposely affront the game, but it’s still damnably hard to forgive him.”

“Amen,” Lon Musselwhite said.

Mister JayMac turned to us rookies. “Mr Boles, tell us the locations and names of the eight teams in the CVL.”

My tongue jumped to the roof of my mouth. My eyes cut around like minnows. The last time I’d been in Mister JayMac’s presence, I’d had at least stammering use of my own tongue. He remembered that.

“Tell us one team in the CVL,” Mister JayMac said. “Other than the Hellbenders.”

“Speak up, dummy!” Hoey shouted this out.

Darius, over Mister JayMac’s shoulder, said, “The Boles boy is a dummy, sir. Got no voice.”

Mister JayMac gave me a startled, put-out look. Like he’d asked for swordfish steak and the waiter’d brought him a lousy crawdad. Quick, though, his gaze jumped over to Junior Heggie, and he asked Junior to do the naming I couldn’t.

“The Opelika Orphans,” Junior Heggie said.

“Well, sure,” Mister JayMac said. “Name the other six.”

Junior studied his shoes. He came from the other side of the state. It’d’ve been easier for him to name the last six British prime ministers.

“Darius, the chart,” Mister JayMac said. Darius flipped the top sheet over the back of the easel and showed us a new page. General JayMac, an Allied officer in a secret command post, briefing his staff.

“All right. Look here.” He rapped the chart with the top half of a collapsible pool cue:

CHATTAHOQCHEE VALLEY LEAGUE

Mister JayMac told us something about each franchise: what big league club it belonged to, its strengths and short-comings, and why Highbridge, given our talent, should be in first place.

“Gentlemen, it’s a minor disgrace that after fifteen games we’re tied for fourth behind the Orphans, the Gendarmes, and the Mudcats. It’s a major disgrace we’re tied with that sorry crew from Cottonton. Cottonton! A hole in the road! They’ve got chickens on Main! I once saw a goat-an animal-figure in a call over there!” He banged his pool-cue pointer on the flip chart. It ripped the page listing the CVL’s franchises. “Most of the Weevils are ex-semipros off mill teams. They’re hacks and mercenaries. It’s absurd to be locked in a fourth-place tie with em. Absurd!” The pointer whacked the chart, and all us rookies, except maybe Ankers, flinched.

“Steady down, Mister JayMac,” Darius said.

Mister JayMac steadied. He left off being a high-powered general and became instead a low-key explainer-all Darius’s doing, as maybe only Junior Heggie and I noticed.

“All right. We’ve got ex-major leaguers in this room. I want those men to raise their hands.”

You’d’ve figured that with so many old guys on the team, journeymen players sliding into middle age and past, maybe five or six would’ve had at least a few at bats or some heavy-duty bench time in the bigs. But only two men raised their hands; neither, it did my soul good to see, was Buck Hoey.

“You gentlemen come up here,” Mister JayMac said. He tapped the floor, and two fellas I’d’ve never guessed shuffled to the front of the room. Ex-big leaguers! Even Ankers got excited.

“Huzza!” Hoey called. “Failures! They went up, but they came back down!” Joshing, but not totally. His little barb rang true.

“Failures!” some other guys chanted. “Failures!”

“At least we made it up,” Creighton Nutter said,

“I think you made it all up. You and Dunnagin’s adventures in the bigs’re all in your heads.” Laughter. Musselwhite was captain, but Hoey did his bit as official team comedian.

“In the record books, you mean,” Nutter said.

Nutter and Dunnagin, our former Showmen. Nutter reminded me of the chip-on-his-shoulder second barber in a two-man shop, a fella who argues because he’s sick of playing second fiddle. He had acorn-colored skin, which he’d probably got from a north Georgia farmer with Cherokee blood.

Dunnagin was thirty-eight or -nine, a mick with jet-black hair and eyes as blue as core samples of Canadian sky. His upper body said weight lifter; his legs said whooping crane. At practice that morning he’d worn full catcher’s gear: chest pad, shin guards, birdcage, the works. Even then I’d noticed his shin guards were wider than his thighs. You expected him to tumble over, like a tower of alphabet blocks with a block too many at the top.

“Tell them who you played for, Mr Nutter,” Mister JayMac said, “and what kind of record you compiled.”

“Murder,” Hoey said. “Corrupting female minors.”

Nutter blew off the kibitzing. “In 1927, I pitched in nineteen games for the Boston Braves. Seventy-six innings.”

“Ah, but your record,” Hoey said. “Tell us your record.”

Nutter glanced over at Mister JayMac, who gave him a nod. “I was four and seven with two saves. My ERA was… 5.09.”

Total silence. Hoey may’ve already known Nutter’s record, but most of the other Hellbenders didn’t.

“Four and seven,” said Vito Mariani, himself a pitcher. “Not so hot. That earned run average aint so hot either.”

“Mr Mariani, you have no ERA in the majors at all,” Mister JayMac said. “And there’s not another pitcher in Highbridge today with more big-league victories than Mr Nutter nailed down for the Braves. Give him the respect due him.”

Ankers started clapping, the rest of us joined in. Nutter glued his chin to his chest, but smiled an angry-barber smile, like he disagreed with a customer’s opinion of the New Deal but didn’t want to job his tip by saying so aloud.

“Very well, Mr Dunnagin,” Mister JayMac said, “tell us in what capacity you reached the bigs and how you fared there.”

Dunnagin stood like a Marine at parade rest. “I went up as a puling babe with the St. Louis Browns in 1924. I played reserve catcher and pinch hit for all or parts of the next six seasons.”

“After which the Browns cut you?” Mister JayMac asked.

“Nosir. In 1929, my pa’s business hit an iceberg. I quit the Browns to take care of my folks, God rest them.”

Hoey faked playing a violin. Imagine, though. Dunnagin had played in the majors two years before I was born. He’d held on to a Browns roster spot for six years! And the club hadn’t dumped him for half-assed play. He’d quit to sweep up the debris of a family disaster. Now, a dozen years down the line, he was trying to earn another berth in the bigs.

“Tell the boys your nickname,” Hoey said. His violinist act hadn’t made anybody laugh, so he was trying something else.

“ ‘Double,’ ” Dunnagin said. “My teammates on the Browns called me Double. In my first-ever at bat, against the Yankees, I slapped a two-bagger off Bullet Joe Bush. The ball scooted into the alley between Witt and Ruth. Well, I thought, I’m on my way. Look out, Cobb. Look out, Ruth and Hornsby.”

“Go on, Percy,” Hoey said. “Tell em the rest.”

“Double worked as a nickname later not because I regularly knocked out two-baggers,” Dunnagin said, “but because I had a bad tendency to ground into double plays every time the Browns looked like they might score.” He stared past Clerval into the foyer, where a grandfather clock’d begun to bong.

“Son, you’re modest to a sadistic extreme,” Mister JayMac told Dunnagin. “Tell them about your best year.”

“I hit.330 in 1926,” Dunnagin said, reciting it by rote and looking bored. “In ninety-four at bats, I had two home runs and fourteen doubles. But with more at bats in ’27 and ’28, my average fell off over sixty points both years.”

“Which means he’d’ve still outhit all but three other Hellbender starters here with us this evening,” Mister JayMac said. “A hand for Mr Dunnagin, please.”

This time I led the applause. So what if he’d last put on his catcher’s getup for the Browns the year the stock market crashed? We had a near legend for a teammate, a fella who’d once hit over.300 in the bigs.

“With this leadership,” Mister JayMac said, “we belong in a tie for fourth about as much as Patton and Montgomery belong in a tie for anything with von Arnim and the Eye-talians. (No offense, Mr Mariani.) So look to these men as inspiration and examples. Thank you, gentlemen.”

Nutter and Dunnagin returned to their spots in the parlor. Junior Heggie started to follow, but Mister JayMac halted him with the pointer. “Stay. We’re not quite finished. Darius.” He whacked the chart. Darius folded the franchise sheet over the back of the easel to show us a new page:

CVL STANDINGS

(As of June 3, 1943)

“Remember, gentlemen,” Mister JayMac said, “yall haven’t even played the Gendarmes or Linenmakers yet-one of the best teams and the absolute sorriest. So, mostly, we’ve lost to mediocrities and also-rans. Were I given to worry, I’d be a total ruin. But I’ve long since taken to heart the scriptural counsel that anxious thought adds not a minute to our lives, and I sleep like a babe in swaddling clothes.”

“Jesus,” Hoey said, not exactly reverently.

“Selah,” Mister JayMac said. “I’ve prayed and I’ve rounded up these fresh-faced youths.”

“Glory!” Quip Parris said. “What if they’re bums, sir?”

Mister JayMac smiled. “If yall wanted aiggs, would I foist on you scorpions?”

“Don’t like aiggs,” Burt Fanning said. No one else said a word, not even Buck Hoey.

“And so, gentlemen, I give you Messieurs Ankers, Boles, Heggie, and Dobbs,” Mister JayMac said. “They’ll no doubt irk a few of yall, but I also expect em to be a hypodermic in this team’s draggy ass. Now, give em another Hellbender welcome.”

A smattering of claps. Hoey, Jumbo, and Parris didn’t clap at all. But this time, Mister JayMac didn’t jump all over his men for cold-shouldering us.

He had Darius flip the chart page. Another chart came up. Then another one after that. And so on. A chart showing which CVL teams had ex-big leaguers. A map of Highbridge’s business district, another of the part of town called Penticuff Strip, and even one of Camp Penticuff itself, down to parade grounds, dining halls, obstacle courses, and ball fields. Would we all be inducted if we didn’t pass muster as Hellbenders? Anyway, Darius kept flipping the charts, and the grandfather clock in the foyer kept bonging out the quarter hours.

Finally, blueprints of every floor of McKissic House.

“Okay,” Mister JayMac said. “Who’s rooming with whom?”

The boardinghouse had two rooms for ballplayer-lodgers on the first floor, four on the second story, and a sort of garret nook on the third. Us rookies’d settle in faster, the theory went, if we each had an old hand for a roommate.

“Sir, don’t we need to see who’s gonna get cut before we start assigning roommates?” Sweet Gus Pettus said.

Mister JayMac studied Pettus sorrowfully, his head cocked. “To be fair, yes. But I already know who I think’ll be gone by tomorrow noon. You, Mr Pettus. Also, Charlie Jorgensen, Rick Roper, and Bobby Collum. Mr Collum rents from me over in Cotton Creek, but all four of yall should be thinking about finding other work and moving out.”

“What?” Rick Roper cried. “What? Spot challenges tomorrow and you’re not even waiting to see how we do?”

“Mr Roper, you’ve played seventeen innings at shortstop this year,” Mister JayMac said, “but you have three times as many errors as Mr Hoey, who’s played over a hundred. You’ve fanned every time you’ve come up to bat.”

Roper shut up. You could tell Pettus, Jorgensen, and Collum because they sat like glum statues. Roper went into a pathetic hangdog hunker of his own.

“For room-assignment purposes,” Mister JayMac said, “I’m going to assume that tomorrow at this time the four men whose surnames I’ve called will no longer be around. If any of yall want a head start on a new life, I’ll give you your pay and a small severance check. I’m no heartless monster, gentlemen.”

“No he aint,” Hoey said. “Ask Jumbo. The boss loant him his car.”

Mister JayMac looked at Jumbo. “And you, Mr Clerval, why did I have to send Euclid to fetch you?”

“Sir, I fell asleep. My errand earlier today fatigued me.”

“What errand was that?” Hoey asked Jumbo.

“A personal errand. A private matter.”

“He got his ashes hauled!” somebody shouted.

“If he did,” Hoey said, “it took a dump truck to do it.”

“Hush,” Mister JayMac said. Nobody did. “Knock it off! We have room assignments to make and swapping out to do.”

Heggie, Dobbs, and Ankers got picked for roomies right away, by Knowles, Curriden, and Musselwhite, and the guys identified as culls were thrown out on their ears. No one, though, jumped to take me.

“Dumbo with Jumbo,” Buck Hoey said. “A perfect match.”

Dumbo. The nickname the smart-alecks back in Tenkiller had hung on me. Hoey was just like the jerk back home who’d offered to buy me a ticket to Dumbo because, “S a good idea to stay in touch with your fambly, kid.”

Jumbo studied me with his custardy eyes. “Okay,” he said. “I agree to take Mr Boles into my roost.”

Jumbo’s apartment was the only third-floor room set aside for boarders. If you could trust Mister JayMac’s wall chart, roost was a great name for it. Every guy at the meeting looked back and forth between Jumbo and me. Cripes. He was the kind of joker you have bad dreams about, and Mister JayMac was going to let him take me upstairs to his… roost.