Brittle Innings

It didn’t phase Darius. Back on the second floor, he shouted, “Rise and shine!” Reveille at McKissic House. I felt smug about beating this wake-up call, even as I crippled my throwing hand on a juicer spindle and missed my extra winks.

“When you’re through there, Mr Boles,” Miss Giselle said, “get out the cereal and sweet milk for Mr Clerval. He can’t abide animal protein.”

“He is a picky fella,” Kizzy said.

“I admire that in him,” Miss Giselle said. “It’s unusual to find a cogent particularity in any human male.”

Darius came back into the kitchen. He took a biscuit from one of the baking sheets Kizzy’d removed from the oven, cut it open, and smeared it with strawberry jam.

Miss Giselle looked on with the sourest expression I’d yet seen on her porcelain-pretty face. “Who said you could have that?”

Darius finished eating and licked his fingertips. “Nobody, ma’am. I’ll be eating shortly. Hardly seems a crime to grab a early taste.”

Miss Giselle just looked at him.

Darius tightened his jaw. “Sorry, ma’am.” He stalked out to the screened-in porch. At its door, he said, “After breakfuss, see me fo practice fla

10

At practice that morning, I backed up Buck Hoey at shortstop. Heggie backed up Lamar Knowles at second. Ski

“S only me you’ve got to get by, Dumbo,” Hoey said as we stood in the infield watching Mister JayMac hit fungoes to the outfield. I gave Hoey a look. “Roper’s gone. Roper, Pettus, Jorgensen-they all took Mister JayMac’s offer of back pay, railway tickets, and severance pay. So did Bob Collum. Mister JayMac’s savvy. He knows everybody’s skills and limitations. Yours too, Dumbo. So I hope he’s right.”

From right, Dobbs threw one in like a bazooka shot to Du

“S too soon to showboat, Mr Dobbs!” Mister JayMac yelled. “You ruin that arm, I’ll unsocket the other, jes to keep em a matched set.”

“Yessir!” Dobbs yelled back. “Sorry, sir!”

“My wife and Collum’s wife’re big pals,” Hoey said. “Now the Collums’re leaving. Looks like Mister JayMac may’ve guessed right on Dobbs, though. Collum never threw like that. What about you? Did he guess right on you? Or am I go

I pretended to watch the fielders catching and throwing in. In fact, I did watch em, them and Mister JayMac.

In refusing to wear baseball duds, Mister JayMac set himself apart from most other managers. He dressed like a man off for a scrambled dog at the corner drug store, casual but neat. Today, he wore beat-up spikes instead of street shoes. The dirt around home was loose, and hitting fungoes from there required purchase.

Seeing Mister JayMac at a flip chart, you’d’ve figured him for a manager who’d ride the bench with a bourbon bottle in a paper sack. But I’d seen him throwing hard yesterday, and today he was smacking the ball. He’d even step in front of his catcher to pick off one-hop throws from the outfield. He liked his players to put out. “Exert!” he’d yell. “Sweat! Dive!” He liked leaping grabs, all-out tumbles, flamethrower pegs to first or home.

Even in his linen pants, dirt spilling from his cuffs, Mister JayMac was something. Trying out for him, I busted my tail. So did Junior at second and Dobbs in right. Not only did we want to earn ourselves starting spots, we also wanted to please-really please-Mister JayMac.

At the three challenge spots, three rookies against three old hands, we had us three battle royals. Mister JayMac tested every pair of rivals, turn by turn. He’d say, “Men on first and third, one out, Boles and Heegie up,” or, “Bottom o the ninth, tie score, ru

I had my championship year on the Red Stix going for me. Even more important, I had a history of hundreds of thousands of fielded ricochets from the wall of Tenkiller’s icehouse. I don’t think even Buck Hoey, a career minor leaguer, had handled more chances than me. Eight or nine a game tops it out for a shortstop, with a few hundred to a thousand more chances in spring training. Hoey had talent and more experience in actual game situations, but I had talent too and I’d practiced more-a hundred years as an all-star vet of Ye Olde Icehouse Loop. Off the field, I lacked confidence, but I had so much sass on it, you could’ve given half of mine to Stepin Fetchit and made him swagger like Mussolini. Swear to God.

Today, back from whatever errand he’d run yesterday, Jumbo owned first base. His backup was Norm Sudikoff, a married guy renting one of the boss’s Cotton Creek mill houses. Jumbo had Sudikoff behind him all day, but Mister JayMac waved Sudikoff into action only every fourth or fifth time he fungoed to the infield. Mostly, Sudikoff stood twenty yards behind the bag, in foul territory, while Jumbo put on a fielding clinic.

Standing or striding, Jumbo was a disjointed wreck. His shoulders, elbows, knees, and head jutted weirdly. Slouching from here to there, he looked a step away from unhinging and falling apart. His physique and his hitch-along gait gave him a brittle, palsied look.

On the field, though, Jumbo sparkled. He played a deep first base, on the edge of the outfield grass. (Not even Howie Gooch, who’d had better range than any other high school player I’d ever seen, had played so deep.) This gave Jumbo extra time to catch hard-hit shots to either side, even if the pitcher sometimes had to cover the bag for the putout.

Vito Mariani-Speedy himself-fielded the pitcher’s spot. Each time Mister JayMac sent a ru

But Jumbo didn’t always toss to Mariani. Sometimes he’d short-hop the ball, wave Mariani off, and pelt across the bag, all windmilling elbows and knees, before the ru

“He can’t walk,” Hoey told me after one of these plays, “but he sure can jump and run.” Jumbo also had a never-miss lobster pincer in his glove and an arm like a catapult. Once, after Mister JayMac had put an invented ru

In the challenges at second and short, Jumbo played no favorites. He’d rumble to the bag, shift instinctively for the throw, and pick it out of the air or scoop it up from the dirt, to hell whether you were vet or rookie. His acrobatics at first made every player throwing to him look like an all-star. Not much got by him.

Sudikoff, by comparison, was a graceful second-rater. He had style around the bag and an easy way of carrying himself, but he’d screw up. Throws in the dirt were his comeuppance-he couldn’t come up with them. On some chances, he’d look like a matador doing a cape twirl, nifty and elegant as you please, but the ball’d scoot past him and roll to the seats. Sudikoff put on an act, Jumbo a bona fide show.

At second, Junior Heggie et Lamar Knowles’s lunch. The kid from Valdosta backhanded screamers up the middle, twisted like a gill-hung bass, and threw back over his shoulder without a spike in the ground to push off of or anything but desire on the ball to get it to first. He et Knowles’s lunch.