Deep in the Heart of Me (35 page)

"Get your ass down, get your ass down, get your ass down," Ulie shouts at Mefford. "He has that boney ass up every time," Ulie says plopping beside me on the bench. But he's back up just as quick. "Mef I swear I'm coming out there and putting your ass in the dirt," he yells.

He does it for the Negro League. That's what he tells me, and it makes me laugh when he says it because he believes it, believes they somehow care what some kid in State School does.

Baseball. They believe in exercise round here. Like we ain't worked into the ground as it is. But no, some do-gooders want these schools to have teams. So we've got one and Shad's bunkhouse has one, and the two younger bunks each have one. And on Saturdays, we pack in a bus and go play other schools. We have two gloves and four bats and five balls, three with tape and two nearly ready for it.

We read the real games in the newspapers, and we memorize those, well, I do once I look at it, then I repeat it when we lie abed at night. Well, they beg me pretty much and soon as it's lights out and Foley leaves I start in, and you can hear a mouse fart it's so quiet.

They aren't much different than my brothers. Most of them had a hard go or couldn't behave. They don't know why they did what they did if they did anything but be on their own cause there wasn't anyone looking out for them.

So the state picks them up and redeems them. And they are a group. They follow me around all the time. I don't want them, don't want the job, but who else do they have?

So it pulls me out of my own bad mood that I've been in since I got here. I figure I got something to go home to, something so great I'm the luckiest guy here, and that includes the guards, those miserable Joes. So I can put up with this for a while and maybe help someone out.

For one thing, I've definitely improved the shirt factory. That's what I call it. I have set a new standard in that dump. My pockets are neat and sharp, my collars are perfect, and my cuffs are so dandy you can put your elbows on the table and show them off in the fanciest dining rooms, the kind Sobe thought she might miss if she moved onto the farm.

And the barn runs better. We muck out. You don't have to tell us twice. We got a system and Boss likes it fine. We pile that manure in loads the size of a wagon. Dad does it like that at home. If there's no snow we spread it as long as the ground is hard. Come spring it's ready to be plowed under and that ground is so rich you can grow turnips the size of basketballs. Not that anyone wants that exactly.

I got them looking at the cow-shit like it's a commodity. Shit in, shit out. It's progress.

"Why you want this place to do well?" Ulie asks me.

"Because I'm here," I say.

"You got no stake in it," he says. "Look out for yourself."

"Why you drive these boys like you do?" I ask him.

He smiles. "Where I gonna get to yell at White boys like that without getting lynched?" he says.

And we laugh then. We laugh all the time.

Not all the time. Shad has a twist in him you can't work with. We never best them in ball because they got size and age, but we got smarts and speed, but we have no unity. We're just a bunch of independents that don't want to take instructions unless a beating follows.

I can wear that suit all right. That's part what got me in here, always having to see for myself.

So Ulie, a damn fine player in his own right, stays on them, calling them every name ever thought of and a few not ever thought of until he gets disgusted enough to invent them, my favorite being shit-smoker. They end up calling our team that, "Shit-Smokers." I kind of like it.

And I keep trying to show them how to hold a position like my dad showed me with some extra ear twisting behind it.

Trouble is just when we get everybody knowing what to do someone gets put in the hole or gets worked over by a guard and has to nurse something hurt. Then we have to recruit another guy to take his place, and it scatters the whole team again because they are as fragile as barn cats getting chased by a gaggle of my little sisters. I mean they scatter easy.

It's been eight months. Every two weeks my dad comes. Pat and Mike aren't allowed since that first time. Sometimes Joseph comes. Sometimes me and dad argue and I feel bad when he leaves. He fires the lawyer and gets another. He brings me letters. I think they know I get letters, but I do well, like Joseph in the Bible. And they aren't fools. They are greedy bastard sons of bitches, but they know where their bread is buttered so they turn a blind eye, and I get to hear from home.

And I tell the guys, do well, for yourself. Show yourself. Heck with them, show you. When you know, you'll feel solid. When you feel solid, you can survive it. You can survive them.

I'm proud of what I say and how I do. They can't change me. I'm Tonio Clannan.

Top of the season, just when it's going good, I get into it with Shad, and I get thrown in the hole. I can't even get out for visiting. I don't know what Dad will do when they tell him at the gate. Rip it down? This is what we argue about. He wants to come here and be the champion. But he doesn't know the rules. He has to listen to me. And I've told him it's my fight.

He can fight outside, go straight to Washington. But in here, it's my fight.

He's never let me be boss. But he's learning. This is mine. In here is mine. I've told him, bow the knee or don't come back.

I am in the hole, and it's spring, and when they open the door, upstairs I get a whiff of turned over earth and damp fertile soil. It's rich with that manure we piled on all winter. I go to the outside wall and put my hands against it, and I can feel the cold damp trapped in the thick walls, and I think of how it will crumble someday and be part of the soil, and the worms will pulverize it slowly and over time, and the tractors will roar over it and chew it up and spit it out, and seeds will go in, and things will grow, and my hands against it right now are the hands of a sorcerer working a spell and giving it all back to the ground because nothing lasts and this won't either, not this place and not this injustice. Not me. But not them. All that really lasts is what we put in motion until someone comes along and changes it and pray God someone changes this place and all the places like it where devils in skin use people like they are nothing and for what? For nothing.

God claims revenge. God claims it. I'm counting on Him to come through.

There's not a day I don't think of Sobe. There's not a part of a day I don't think of her. I go from having a thought to just having a feeling that she's in the world, in that school, I see her drifting in some big hall, her nose in a book, her hair growing long again. I picture her sitting under a tree, ankles crossed, reading again. She lays back, and she's looking at the sky, and she's counting stars, and there's the moon, the one we share. I wonder how much she thinks of me.

July is hot, and we play ball every night, and we set up a game and the folks from town come to watch, and we play their boys, and we got used spikes the town got together and donated. And they fit us mostly, but some are like clown shoes, but they are tied on tight as can be. So naturally when we start to lose we start to spike. Not me. I know better so I barely do it until the refs show preference. And the rest of them, maybe all of them far as I know, they're stomping those townies every chance they get and those fat as shit, we're pitching the ball at their noses, and we're batting for their eyeballs.

The town boys are starting to bleed, and there is an uproar, and we can't believe it because it's just a little blood. Now come on.

So the game is stopped, and the townies leave, and we're wearing those spikes, and we think we won or something. We showed them not to mess with us.

Boss says we showed them we belong in reform school. We showed them they were wrong to give us their worn out spikes.

And we're glad about it. You'd think we won the pennant instead of reduced rations for the next week.

"Just think of what we could do with new spikes," Ulie says, and we laugh. We always laugh.

Even when we go home and get hit with the strap and thrown in the hole for six days apart cause they figured out it's not punishment to go in together, at night I think I hear Ulie laughing.

See here's what I know, you can't kill a man's soul. He has to sell that.

Now who's in the hole? I ask you that.

It's August when I'm approached. I'm lazing on the bench watching Ulie yell at the ref for calling a guy safe when his foot was six inches off the base. Granted we only have two bases, but we all know where the mark is.

Well, it's that same day, same game after when I'm putting our threadbare gear into a sack I sewed myself when this shadow falls on me, and I look up, and it's this big guy wearing a straw hat, and he asks my name and all my business. I don't say what I'm in for. I just say I got in some trouble back home, and my dad couldn't even get me out of it but before that my nose was so clean it picked up sunshine.

That comes from Ulie. I've no idea what it means.

But this man is persistent, so I get on my feet, and we shake. He's telling me he scouts for the Browns and the Indiana team. He's always looking for boys with talent.

I played a good game, but we lost. We always lose. Between Ulie and me, we nearly win, but they can't hit, and they won't field if they're not in the mood. Usually, they're mad about something. Often the only two we have with potential get thrown out early for cursing the ref.

This guy, Mr. Pennuel asks me if I've heard of the farm system. Well, who hasn't? I don't say that, though. Yes, I've heard of it.

He hands me a card like I'm some townie going home for fried chicken. He says if I show that card I can have a tryout. I think I understand, but when he walks away, I don't know half of what he says so I'm glad for the card.

I do think to call after, "Can he come?" I move the hand holding the card Ulie's way. He's picking up third base.

"He can't tryout," he says.

Well, I know that. But he plans to play for the Negroes, so I'm sure he'd find the whole thing interesting.

He waves and goes his own way, and Boss calls for us to get our asses on the bus.

"What he want?" Boss asks me when I reach the bus.

"He said I played okay," I say.

Boss sneers. "What he give you?"

"Nothing," I say. I never learn. Boss says that before he shoves me onto the bus. I end up falling in the door, and I get up quick and bow and everyone claps. I look back at Boss, and he spits, and he's none too happy about it. If he knew I had opportunity, I already know he'd bring me down to size.

But soon as I'm in my seat I look that card over. If he takes it now, I got all I need in my head.

Ulie gets on, and he makes the kid that just sat next to me move. He tells him what he always says, "We all Negroes in here, boy."

Then he plunks beside me.

"Who was that guy?" he says.

I look up front and see Boss is settled then I hand him the card.

Ulie reads it and looks at me like we've seen Jesus.

What if we have? My dad says the wheel always turns. It may get stuck for a while but it only takes the right kind of breeze or bump, and things start to move and no telling where it goes.

I get out same time I went in, right before Thanksgiving, end of thirty-five. I am fifteen, and I look eighteen. It's my eyes, not that I can stand to look at them for long. But I see it in myself…the change.

I found ways to think about it normal. I made those boys I bunked with like Ebbie and Joseph in my mind. I found ways to understand them. And Shad was Tillo. That's how I thought of him. And Boss was Otto Smith and a couple of the guards were like Belly, just like him and they die in the end, just like Belly, and I killed them a hundred ways in my mind.

I knew milking, but I learned to sew, too. And I made a friend. Did I? Well, he made a friend of me.

"My dad will get you out," I tell Ulie.

"Like he got you out?" he says. He doesn't believe it.

Well, he could have told me the truth at the beginning. His uncle was stealing when he got in trouble. Stealing to eat, and Ulie was with him, also stealing. Ulie had a sentence to finish. Six more months. Then they'd likely keep him until he was eighteen. That's how they did it.

But Dad petitioned to provide him housing and gainful employment until he was an adult. So it looked like in six months he'd come live with us.

"Keep your chin up," I said to him that last day.

"You going straight to that girl who looks like a boy," he says, and he grins. He's never even kissed a girl so I have more experience. He thinks I'll go right to her and make a baby. I tell him he's full of shit. I've got no high ideas about putting a baby in someone. In Sobe. That's the last thing I'd ever do. I just tell him to shut-up, but it's his favorite thing—girls. He talks about girls he saw once, girls he's heard about, girl's he's invented. Titties, he can go on about them forever. He ever gets a real live girl I pity her, I do.

Anyway, calling Sobe that girl who looks like a boy, that joke was about as worn out as most of our equipment. I'd broken down and showed him her picture so he well knew she looked just the way she was supposed to look only better. He always wanted to see her picture, and I forbade it and told him not to mention her again, but that did no good at all. He was in love, too, and I would have choked him if he wasn't such a fool. Didn't matter the girl, he just wanted a sweetheart, and I told him he'd have to go through the work of getting his own. And I didn't say this, but I knew it anyway, look what the hell I'd gone through to get mine!

She'd written regularly. I had a good idea of what school was like and how much she liked it. Loved it in fact. She loved it.

So that's how it was the day Dad drove me home. He'd signed the papers that I'd finished my time, done my bit, and he said to Boss, "You'll be hearing from me. You read, don't you? It's a mighty big man gets his thrills bullying the young."

"Dad," I said. Ulie still had to survive, and he had six months and in here it's a molasses drip, even with the work and baseball. If he got out first and I had to stay on, I'd feel it in a bad way, and Dad isn't thinking of all that. He tries to say it's like being in the army, but it is nothing like the army. There you have some pride at least. Here you're a convict.

I don't look at Boss as we leave. It's upside down I have to be the one to protect him. But like I said, it's Ulie I think of.

So we get in the truck, and Dad and me don't say a thing. He starts the truck and already I'm outside the fence looking in there and already it's completely different. Boys from my bunkhouse straggle back inside. They don't like goodbyes but they ain't good at hellos either.

There's just one left standing—Ulie. He's old as me, and we're about same size. He's maybe got an inch. He lifts one of those big hands and that skinny wrist sticks out of his coat and he waves.

I lift my hand. He doesn't believe I'll be back for him. Well, sometimes he needs to listen.

Dad pulls off, and Ulie goes inside, and I turn around, and it's been him and me forever, and I have to do this, go in the opposite direction, toward my family and what there is of a future once I figure it out.

Dad drives a little, and he stops and says, "Give us a hug," and when I lend myself to him he falls on me and squeezes the shit from me and he cries.