Brittle Innings

Several of the older Hellbenders worked at defense jobs on a part-time basis, punching in from one to three times a week in the early afternoons of days we didn’t have games or mandatory team meetings. They’d pull eight-hour second shifts and get back to their homes or to McKissic House around midnight, limp as boiled asparagus and almost as pale. Moonlighters included Muscles, Curriden, Hay, Nutter, Sudikoff, and Du

Anyway, when I learned about these set-your-own-hours defense jobs, I understood why nobody at Monday morning’s Rolling Assizes had seconded Sosebee’s charge Jumbo’d received special treatment. Every Hellbender got special treatment. Some looked a little more equal than others in getting it, but hardly anybody had to poach his own eggs-if you know what I mean. Players in the bigs and even a few blue-chip Negro stars might make more money than we did, but Highbridge had earned itself a dead-on nickname: Sittin’ Pretty City.

It did surprise me nobody’d reraised the point about Mister JayMac’s loaning Jumbo his Caddy. Loaning a car was personal-in a way flexing your long-term political clout could never be. Loaning your car meant you trusted the loanee. If he didn’t qualify for gas stamps, you even had to bend or play peekaboo with the law.

On Thursday, Jumbo borrowed Mister JayMac’s Cadillac again, and Mister JayMac lent it to him. At two in the afternoon, the Caddy’s keys changed hands in the parlor, just as Fadeaway, Junior, Ski

“Home before dark,” Mister JayMac told Jumbo. “We’ve got those pesky Mudcats tomorrow. You’ll need some rest.” And he stalked on out of the house.

Jumbo squeezed the car keys in his fist and lumbered up the stairs towards our room. I deserted my poker buddies to go after him, but Jumbo took two or three steps at a time and got there ahead of me. Inside, he stood holding the box of used baseballs I’d always wondered about.

“I have a sick relative in Alabama,” he said. “I meant to take these to him on my last trip, but, well…”

Your sick relative likes old baseballs? I thought.

“A project,” Jumbo said, hefting the box. The lumps on his face flushed, then faded to their old chalky hues at different speeds. “Excuse me, Daniel.” I got out of his way.

Jumbo carried the box downstairs, put it into the back seat of Mister JayMac’s Caddy, and drove away. His body seemed to fill the front seat, like a Thanksgiving Day float.

He got back about five hours later, looking empty-eyed and blue. He went straight upstairs and lay down. I carried him some iced tea and a pan of vegetables, but found him lying in a kind of trance, not quite sleeping but not quite keyed to the outer world either. He didn’t eat or drink a thing.

Jumbo seemed okay again in the morning. (At breakfast, he wolfed down fruit, pancakes, and juice.) But I’d had a hard night. My weird-ass roomy’d lain only feet away with his eyes like yellow slits and his meaty paws squeezing the coverlet. I stumbled around all morning like a codeine junkie. My first game against Eufaula loomed.

Damn you Jumbo, I thought, I’m go

Well, I did. The Mudcats fi

“Fair-weather friends,” Muscles said.

“They’re entitled,” Snow said. “They don’t pay their money to watch us crap our pants.”

Snow, I noticed, had a strange purple bruise on the inside of his forearm, maybe from ru

“Lay off, Boles.”

What the devil. Snow ranked with Musselwhite, Curriden, Nutter, and Du

I don’t know where I got the grit, but I pulled Snow’s hand towards me the better to see his snake bruise. Boy, he must’ve really collided with that headache-powder sign out there. Snow seldom hit the wall. Even right up against it, he always timed his leap to avoid rebounding in a drop-dead roll. No mad Pete Reiser heroics for Snow. He didn’t need em. He always got a good jump on long flies and measured his distances.

“It’s not from today,” Snow told me, a little friendlier. “And it aint as bad as it looks. Let go.”

I let go.

“My men kin’ve always bruised easy. Stupid, but it kept me out of the Army, bruising easy. So I’m careful. Mostly.”

“If you bruise that easy, Charlie,” Muscles said, “you’re an idiot to play ball.”

“At least I don’t box.”

Mister JayMac walked by. “Anybody who plays like Charlie-Mr Snow-would be an idiot not to play.” He strolled on past, pacing, flusterated, out of sorts.

Snow, I learned, wore a strip of sponge in the palm of his fielder’s glove. He also wore hip pads, cloth cushions inside his shoes, sliding pads, and a sleeveless jersey under his fla

A pox on us, we also blew the second game of our four-game series with Eufaula, the opener of Saturday’s twin bill. Between games, Mister JayMac said, “Win-win, lose-lose, win-win, lose-lose! Damn the pattern yall’ve fallen into!”

“We got a win-win coming tonight and tomorrow,” Hoey said. “Want us to break the pattern?”

“Ha ha,” said Mister JayMac. “Not until we get to Opelika on Wednesday.”

Fu

The next night, in LaGrange against the Gendarmes, we broke our two-up, two-down jig by losing. That made us seventeen and fifteen on the season, and nine and seven for June-a wi

“God!” Mister JayMac exploded after the loss. “That gets yall out of your rut-it puts us in a hole instead.”

The two weekend series against Opelika and LaGrange, our biggest CVL rivals, could’ve given us momentum. Instead, we lost each series two games to one and slunk home to change our splints and savor the home cooking of the fans at McKissic Field.