Brittle Innings

I stared at her, one eye starting to tic.

“A hellbender. Git it?”

I banged the tank with my fist and headed for the parking lot.

“Wait a minute, Boles!” she called out. “I don’t mean nothing, talking this way. Mostly, it’s other folks giving me what-for, not vicy-versy. Mostly, I jes give back what I’ve awready got. Gits to be a habit. When somebody cain’t or won’t talk, I imagine em giving me what-for before it’s even come. Then I give em it back thout em ever giving it to me to begin with. You git me?”

Fu

“A hellbender’s a quatic salamander,” she said. “I found this un in a creek when I uz nine. Uncle JayMac gave me a dollar for it and put it here in McKissic Field when Highbridge entered the CVL. I feed Homer, change his water out, tote him home when the season’s over. Got a table in my bedroom for his tank. During ball season, though, I keep a typewriter on it and write letters to homesick sojers.”

How thoughty and patriotic. FDR, or Mrs FDR, should give you a medal, Phoebe.

“A corporal and two PFCs’ve awready proposed to me. They think I’m older. I sorta let em spose it. My letters read pretty passionate, I guess.”

The knuckleheaded hussy. I’d’ve laughed, but she had no more sense of humor about herself than I did about me. We both had the teenage disease of raging self-solemnity.

“Baseball’s a mug’s game,” Phoebe lectured me. “Sometimes it’s jes not very nice. Yall do things in front of a thousand folks I wouldn’t do alone in my own bedroom.”

One minute she admitted writing “pretty passionate” letters to servicemen and the next she suggested it embarrassed her to see a ballplayer setting his jock straight.

“We do have one thing in common,” Phoebe said.

Okay, I thought. Don’t keep me in suspense.

“Good reasons for not being in the military-I’m a woman, and yo’re, well, yo’re a dummy.”

Yeah. I put my hands behind my ears and made em flap like a flying elephant’s.

“Anyway, if you didn’t have yore… problem, you’d join the Army. Wouldn’t you?”

Hmmm. In another five and a half months, I’d be eligible for the draft. Maybe my dummyhood was a ploy I’d come up with, subconsciously, to sidestep it.

Du

“Yo’re old, Du

“If only you knew,” Du

“You’d be doing more for the Uncle Sam in the Army. And more for yoresef.”

“I’m boosting civilian morale,” Du

“Shame on you,” Phoebe said.

Du

I nodded, and Du

Phoebe came down off the stair step. In the tank, Homer wriggled, stirring the murk-the first time I’d seen him look like anything other than a spongy piece of bark. Hooray. No ball team wants a dead or paralyzed critter for its mascot.

“Go git yore bus,” Phoebe said. “Yo’re keeping a slew of folks stewing in a real pressure cooker.”

I did a two-fingered salute.

“You do play a whangdoodle shortstop,” she said. “And you can run like a autumn crop fire.”

Unexpected praise. But I still wanted to add, Did you know I can outrun the word God? A local authority told me so today.

My speech problem, thank the Lord, kept my mouth shut.

14

On my second evening in McKissic House, I tried to delay entering the hole I shared with Jumbo. Its heat and the idea of huddling on the other side of his throat-tickling grass mat while he slept or read-well, why bother going up? I couldn’t talk to him, of course, and the curtain he’d hung between us said he didn’t much care. Thank God. Maybe he’d taken me on as a roommate because I couldn’t talk.

Back from practice, I washed dishes, sat next to some guys playing hearts, and listened to dance-band music and news reports on the old cathedral Philco. John L. Lewis, said H. V. Kaltenborn, had taken his soft-coal miners out on a strike that had patriots gnashing their teeth. Up in Alaska, the Army’d finished mopping up Jap resistance on Attu, and the Eleventh Air Force kept on bombing the hell out of Kiska. Not caring for cards, I worked on a jigsaw puzzle-the Eiffel Tower-while listening to the radio. Nobody bothered me.

Finally, I had to go up. McKissic House had an eleven o’clock curfew. Rest and regular hours guarded Mister JayMac’s investment in us. He’d fine you for missing curfew.

Anyway, Jumbo lay stretched out on his bed reading. He’d tied back the grass mat divider so a breeze from the window could reach him, if a breeze ever blew up. His fan bumped and shimmied like a stripper in a whalebone corset. From the door I could see into the whole room. What I saw flabbergasted me.

Jumbo had put a big bronze vase of cut flowers-hydrangeas, snowballs, Queen A

“You played well this morning.”

I ducked my head. He’d played well too. He’d knocked a heavy balata ball out of McKissic Field and fielded like a man with some kind of magnet for horsehides sewn into his glove. But his looks made me think of the other players’ guesses about him. Of injury, pain, and death. Up close, I had an aversion to his looks. Well, I was no prize myself.

My reaction to Jumbo reminded me of my reaction as a twelve-year-old to my best friend in Tenkiller after he’d had a sledding accident. My friend’s name was Ke

Ke

Jumbo made me feel the way Ke