Brittle Innings (3 page)

“I’m their pity project,” Mama said after they’d started this. “A swell game-day friend, but nobody to invite home.”

Colonel Elshtain was management, Mama was labor. Miss Tulipa would climb up into the bleachers wearing lace blouses, peg-topped skirts, and either a velvet beret or a fancy-dan straw hat with peacock feathers. Mama wore coveralls and head scarves.

“
Attaway, Scooter!
” Miss Tulipa would yell. “
Attaway to rap it, punkin!
”

Eventually, the Elshtains
did
ask us to their home, a two-story antebellum job with columns. It’d once been the home of a rich, uprooted Cherokee named Trenton Cass. The Cass Mansion, everybody calls it yet. Mama sported heels, bottled stockings, and her prettiest clingy polka-dot dress. I wore khaki pants, store-bought galluses, and my Sunday tie.

At that special after-church dinner—I can still see it—we had iced-down shrimp for appetizers, bleached asparagus, a rice-and-chicken dish Miss Tulipa called Country Captain, and, for dessert, orange sherbet and blueberries. I don’t know where the Elshtains got the fixings or how many ration points it set em back, but a classier meal I’d never had. I wolfed it all, even the asparagus, a la-di-la vegetable I never liked and haven’t eaten since. (Babe Ruth said asparagus made his urine stink.) They even had wine, but nobody offered me any.

“You can flat-out play,” Miss Tulipa told me over dessert. “How’d you like to help a pro team win a championship?” Her voice was like Coca-Cola: sweet and fizzy, with a sting.

Mama had done most of the talking so far. I looked at her. From the gramophone in the library, just off the dining room, came the scratchy diddle-diddle-diddle of the colonel’s chamber music. Like Miles Standish, I tried to speak for myself.

“I wuh . . . I wuh . . .”

“Take your time, Daniel,” Miss Tulipa said.

“I want to pl-play in the m-m-majors,” I blurted.

Miss Tulipa’s smile sparkled like the cut-glass chandelier over the table. “Why, of course you do.”

“He’s a baby,” Mama said. “He needs a honest job of work.”

The colonel’d already excused himself and wandered into the library, but Miss Tulipa nodded. “Oaks begin as acorns and major leaguers as sandlot players. What you need, Daniel, is seasoning.”

I understood that. Saying I wanted to play in the bigs didn’t mean I expected to start there. So I gawped, a drip with a speech problem. My tongue felt like a folded washrag. Mama saw my panic, the Jell-O wobble of my bottom lip.

“You think he’s good enough to go pro?”

“Laurel, Laurel dear, he’s a
prospect
. Denying him a chance to develop his gifts would be cruel. Suppose DiMaggio had become just another San Francisco fisherman?”

“He’d’ve been a good one, probably.”

“Of course, Laurel. But he’d’ve labored virtually unseen. The loss to our national heritage, ah, incalculable.”

“A lot of ifs and maybes,” Mama said. “Why fret it?”

Miss Tulipa shut up for a bit, then said, “Daniel should sign with the Hellbenders in my old hometown. My brother Jordan”—Tulipa said JUR-dun—“will pay him seventy-five dollars a month, twenty-five more than he’d make as a private in the Army. Jordan’ll also provide lodging and instruction. This rotten old war has just
decimated
the majors. If he does well, Daniel could be wearing big-league flannels sooner than you think.”

Colonel Elshtain, wearing a honest-to-God ascot, wandered back in. “Army pay’s gone up. Daniel’d make
sixty
a month, even as a private. And the benefits that accrue as—”

“Please, Clyde. If you’re trying to recruit him, remember Daniel’s medical condition may preclude his induction.”

“He should have no trouble at all shooting a carbine.”

“You forget his—his
handicap
.”

“Send him to boot camp. To your own Camp Penticuff. The DIs there might well divest him of it.”

Miss Tulipa exploded. “How many young men do you want to ship out as cannon fodder? Do you want to be rid of them all?”

“We’ve more at stake today than a minor league pennant.” The colonel’s lips had blanched like day-old fish bait.

“Given your patriotic fervor,” Miss Tulipa said, “why don’t you have your commission reactivated?”

The colonel lifted his chin. “Perhaps I should.” He returned to his staticky gramophone, sliding a panel door into place between the library and us. You could still hear his music bumbling up and down the scale, though, like drowsy bees.

“Laurel, what do you think?” Miss Tulipa said, turning on the Suthren belle charm. “Would you allow Daniel to sign with Jordan if Jordan agrees he has the talent?”

“Danny’d be a high-school graduate,” Mama said. “He could do whatever he wants.”

I struggled to ask the last question I’d ever ask at the Elshtains’ table. “Which farm s-s-system?”

“Pardon me?” Miss Tulipa said. “Oh. The farm system. The Hellbenders belong to Philadelphia. Does it matter?”

Not much. So far as I knew, no other organization had even scouted the Red Stix. Even so, the name Philadelphia hit me like a concrete medicine ball. Philadelphia had two big-league clubs, the Athletics in the American League and the Phillies in the National. Both clubs reeked. The Athletics had finished last three straight years and the Phillies five. The Phillies had been the only major league club to lose over a hundred games in ’42. If any American city ranked as Loserville, it was Philadelphia.

“Oh,” Miss Tulipa said. “Which team there? The Phillies. Your opportunities with the Phils are boundless.”

Bingo. I had a better chance of ousting Gabby Stewart at short than I did Rizzuto at that spot with the Yankees or Pee Wee Reese in Brooklyn with the Dodgers. Even so, I’d’ve almost rather thrown myself into a Japanese POW camp than go to Philadelphia.

Mama and I left the Cass Mansion, and I comforted myself by remembering that in Highbridge, at least, I wouldn’t be playing for the Phillies, I’d be playing for the Hellbenders, a team supposedly on the rough-and-tumble rise.

2

J
ordan McKissic—Mister JayMac to everyone in Highbridge, as I learned later—came riding into Oklahoma in a Pullman car behind an old steam engine. He planned to watch two Red Stix games, one on a Saturday, one the following Tuesday, and return to Georgia. April of ’43, two weeks before the Hellbenders kicked off their regular season. Mister JayMac came by train because the Office of Defense Transportation had nixed pleasure driving. You could legally call a scouting trip business, but patriotic pols—like the scoundrels LaGuardia had lit into in the paper—wouldn’t admit pro ball deserved that courtesy.

’Forty-three was the year the ODT forbid major leaguers to go South for spring training. Except for the Cardinals, who practiced in St. Louis, ballplayers had to train east of the Mississip and north of the Potomac and Ohio rivers. Wiseguys called this the Landis-Eastman Line, after Baseball Commissioner Landis and the fella heading up the ODT. Mister JayMac was a mucky-muck on the Hothlepoya County draft board, down in Highbridge. To do his part for national defense, he’d left his Cadillac and colored driver at home and faced the blowing coal dust and the jostling hoi polloi on a passenger train.

In Tenkiller, Mister JayMac stayed in the Cass Mansion. I first laid eyes on him on Saturday, when he climbed into the Deck Glider bleachers with Mama and his hosts. He stood out in that crowd. He was pushing sixty—a couple of years younger than I am now—but tall, fit, and dapper. He wore a striped white dress shirt, old-fashioned pleated linen trousers, and a pair of military-pink suspenders. His hair was iron gray, cut close at temples and neck. A salt-and-peppery forelock fell over his forehead like an owlet’s wing. Even from my shortstop position, I could see this terrific blue glint in his eyes: a sharper blue than Miss Tulipa’s, like sapphire dust bonded to a couple of zinc-coated war pennies.

From the stands, Mister JayMac watched me. He watched Toby Watersong, Franklin Gooch, every kid on both teams. Whenever I had the chance, I watched him back. Mister JayMac was the Great Stone Face, perched above the hubbub like a Supreme Court judge, mysterious and cool. Studying.

I had a good game Saturday, thank God, a couple of singles and an unassisted double play at short. Afterwards, I sort of expected Mister JayMac to come down and speak, maybe even to make me a job offer, but he and the Elshtains vanished, off to the Cass Mansion, I guess, without so much as a nod. In the stands, Mama said, Miss Tulipa and the colonel had been as supportive of the team and as complimentary of me as ever, but Mister JayMac had scarcely spoken two words.

“Not my notion of a courtly Suthren gentleman,” Mama said. “Eyes like a starved wolf’s.”

The Red Stix never practiced Sundays, and Mister JayMac didn’t attend church with Miss Tulipa and the colonel. Monday, though, he watched us from the stands on the third-base line, taking in our every wind sprint, pepper game, and half-assed batting-practice bunt. I could feel him studying me, intense and chillylike. The process—letting him gander—reminded me of what a beauty-pageant hopeful has to suffer.

During this workout, I muffed a cozy roller at short, then overthrew Jessie Muldrow at first trying to outgun the runner. Bad. Baaad. At the plate, I swung too hard, topping the ball once and popping it up on my second at bat. Rotten. Not even the Phillies would’ve wanted me. Time I got a third chance to hit, Mister JayMac had vamoosed. I got on base, but with a cheap swinging bunt I legged out from sheer embarrassment. But so what? Mama’d better check with Colonel Elshtain to see if Deck Glider had an assembly-line job for me.

Tuesday afternoon, in a game against Checotah, I forgot the crowd, the bench jockeys in the other dugout, the dogs barking on Cookson Road, everything but the rope-sized seams on every ball floating my way. Don’t know why, but the ball looked big as the moon to me. Hitting or fielding, I couldn’t miss it. For all the effect he had on me, Mister JayMac—up in our stands—could’ve been in the Belgian Congo. I played great. Afterwards, the boys from Checotah got on their bus as low and hollowed-out as dogwood stumps.

Mister JayMac didn’t speak to me after this game, either. Once we’d put it away, I
did
start thinking about him again, my ticket out of Tenkiller. When he still didn’t show up, though, I thought, Nuts to you, mister.

Shortly after supper that evening, Mister JayMac showed up at our stucco house on Cody Street. Five-and-a-half rooms, just big enough for a couch, a pair of beds, a beat-up table, a w.c., and a cheap cathedral radio. It always seemed to smell of hash and eggs.

Mister JayMac didn’t reach six feet, but in a buttermilk coat with awning-sized lapels and pockets, he
filled
our house the way a film actor can sometimes glut a whole movie screen. Mama got a chair from the kitchen and made him sit. Didn’t want him looming. Then, like two kids in a dentist’s waiting room, she and I huddled together on the sofa.

“Ma’am,” Mister JayMac said, “I’d like your son to come with me to Highbridge tomorrow.” He didn’t bother to look at me. He aimed all his magnolia gallantry at Mama. “My club, the Hellbenders, has need of him.”

“So do the Red Stix. Plus, Danny’s got school to finish.”

“Yessum,” Mister JayMac said.

“He’s been going twelve years, nearly,” Mama said. “Why fall shy of a sheepskin by a piddlin two months?”

“Why, indeed? An enlightened attitude,” Mister JayMac said.

“He needs his education.”

“ ‘What sculpture is to a block of marble,’ ” Mister JayMac told Mama,
   
“ ‘education is to the soul.’ Addison.”

“Well, Addison spoke true.”

“Yes he did,” Mister JayMac said. “But there’s education and there’s education. If Danny doesn’t return to Highbridge with me tomorrow, he’ll miss the chance to train with us and the opening month of our season.” He pulled a string-tied packet from inside his coat. “Here’s a contract, Mrs. Boles.” He untied the packet and handed an official-looking form with a clip-on to Mama. “Also a check for seventy-five dollars, his first full month’s pay.” He could’ve dropped a garter snake down my shirt—that kind of thrill went through me. “But, Mrs. Boles, you must countersign my enabling form and let Danny go back with me.” He reached over and tapped the check.

I was a slave who
wanted
to be sold. School was lectures and yawns, girls smirking and wiseacres pulling stupid jokes.

Mama stared down at my clipped-on check. “Coach Brandon says some nigger ballplayers make twice this, maybe.”

“That’s probably true,” Mister JayMac said. “I daresay those players draw better than Danny’s likely to jes yet.”

“Well, he can’t go now anyway,” Mama said. “Even when he can, seventy-five won’t do. That’s coffee-and-cake pay. Danny may jes be starting, but
no
colored boy ought to make more than him.”

My mama, the John L. Lewis of ball agents. All she needed was Lewis’s eyebrows. Mister JayMac ripped up his check, and I almost swallowed my tongue. Smithereened. My whole career.

“Mrs. Boles, you drive a hard bargain.” Mister JayMac took the contract back. “I’ll up his pay twenty-five and send yall a new contract. Forget this one. Mr. Boles,” finally looking at me, “we’ll send you a train ticket. Ride down soon as you’ve got your diploma, hear?”

I tried to answer. “Yessir,” I wanted to say, but it might as well’ve been the Lord’s Prayer in Gullah.

As promised, the revised contract came two weeks later. Mama and I signed it for a notary, with Coach Brandon and the Elshtains as witnesses. Two, three days later, Mr. Ogrodnik announced my good fortune to the student body in the gym. Kids cheered, pretty girls and class-officer types among them. If I’d had the guts, I would have raspberried half the hypocrites there, even though I did like hearing them cheer.

Franklin Gooch said I was a lucky bastard. When we’d won the war, guys like DiMaggio, Williams, and Greenberg would come home and their stay-at-home subs would disappear completely. A real talent, though, would survive.

“You,” Goochie said, “are a real talent.”

Goochie was already eighteen. Early in ’42, his mama’s younger brother had been killed on the cruiser
Houston
in the Battle of the Java Sea. Goochie wanted to take a few Jap scalps in the Marines, but he didn’t begrudge me my shot at a career in pro ball. Envied me, but didn’t call me a feather merchant. He had other kettles of fish to fry. Too bad his goals led him into the hands of a graves-registration crew on Okinawa.