Michael Bishop: Brittle Innings

When Mama told me how the Hawkins Company had saved her job, she cried. “It’s gonna be Boomer Sooner around here again, Danny. The armed forces need a lot of antitank guns.”

But even after Deck Glider geared up for war work, a core of old hands-native Tenkillerites-set up their hours, or traded off with new workers on other shifts, so they could attend Red Stix home games. The plant ran three shifts. It never shut down. Mama worked days, six days a week. Even so, our field had a bleachers section, behind the backstop, for Deck Glider personnel. Despite her shift, Mama never missed a home game or a single hour of paid labor. She traded off or went in early. And Mama was no crazier for the Red Stix than Mr Neal, the barber, or Tom Davenport, the owner of a wildcat oil company, or anybody else in town. The Red Stix glued that sagebrush community together. Deck Glider and our local churches didn’t even come close…

Sunday mornings, New York ’s Mayor LaGuardia read the funnies to his city’s children over the radio. A station in Muskogee picked up this feed and played it for us dumb Okies and Arkies. I heard him once. I knew LaGuardia’s kisser from Movietone newsreels. I’d seen him conducting civil defense exercises, supervising air-raid wardens and such. He’d wear a white metal helmet, wave his arms, and carry on, reminding me of Lou Costello, the short funny fella in the Abbott and Costello comedy team. Over the radio, he sounded sort of sissyish. How did a fella who looked and sounded like him get to be mayor of New York? Tenkiller’s mayor, Gil Stone, wore yoke-collared shirts, snakeskin boots, and dungarees.

Then I read in the Tulsa World that a crew of politicians wanted to halt major-league ball for the duration. LaGuardia got hot about that. He ripped into the jerks: “Our people don’t mind being rationed on sugar and shoes, but these men in Washington will have to leave our baseball alone!” Hooray for LaGuardia. A guy who stood up for baseball was defending America better than some hot airbag in Congress, maybe even better than a poor dogface on KP down in Alabama or Missisloppi.

Of course, baseball was my meat and drink. Mayor LaGuardia, even if he looked like Lou Costello, at least read the funnies to kids over the radio and gave the antibaseball nuts what-for. I never stopped to think he had three major-league clubs in his own city, that maybe greenbacks and greed had as much to do with his defense of baseball as a love of the game. Or maybe it was just LaGuardia hanging tight with the Yankees’ pinstripe Mafia: DiMaggio, Crosetti, and Rizzuto. Who knows?

Okay, okay. How’d I get from a sagebrush town like Tenkiller to a peanut-growing burg like Highbridge? From the Red Stix to the Hellbenders, a scrappy gang in the low minors? After all, the war emptied the big leagues’ farm systems. The Selective Service Acts, a.k.a. the draft, carried off so many able-bodied young guys it nigh-on to wiped out the minors.

For a couple of reasons, though, I was a candidate for a farm club, if the farm clubs survived.

First off, I played crackerjack ball. As Dizzy Dean used to say, “It aint bragging if you can back it up.” I could. In the twenty games the Red Stix played that spring-a couple were exhibitions-I made only one official fielding error. Even that boot you could’ve argued. Our scorekeeper charged it to me on a hard drive I knocked down and scooped to Toby Watersong for a force at second. Toby had to reach a bit, and he dropped the toss. The error could’ve been mine, it could’ve been his. But Toby’s uncle happened to be keeping score that day. So what? No sweat, I figured. And still do.

You hear a lot about good-field/no-hit players: whizzes at hoovering up grounders and turning double plays, but zilches at the plate. I could hit. That spring I had thirty-six bingers in seventy-five at bats, including a game against a semipro oil-company squad that didn’t count in our division standings. A.480 average, seventy points higher than Ted Williams hit when he became the first major leaguer since Rogers Hornsby to pass.400.

I didn’t lead the Red Stix in batting, though. Franklin Gooch did. Goochie pitched, played center field, and ran like a scorched jackrabbit. He outhit me by over thirty points. Day after he graduated, he enlisted in the Marines. In June of ’45, he died on Okinawa on Kunishi Ridge, shot through the eye by a Jap sniper. I still have the letter Goochie wrote me from the field a month before the sniper got him.

Sorry to stray. But Goochie’s story ties in, sort of. The second reason I was a candidate for the minors, gangbuster stats aside, was I wouldn’t turn eighteen until after the ’43 season. My birthday’s in November. Even though I was single and a high-school grad, I wasn’t yet draft bait. Even at eighteen, I’d probably end up classified 4-F: unfit to serve.

I had a speech problem. Sometimes, I refused to talk. When I did t-t-talk, I st-stammered. Out would come broken phrases, like bursts from a half-jammed machine gun, then nothing. Sometimes the nothing, even when Coach Brandon yelled at me (maybe especially then), stretched on and on. So I sullened my way through school, eyes peeled and hackles up. Almost every other way, physically, I was normal, but my speech problem gave folks the creeps. If the Army docs didn’t find some physical reason for it-a cleft palate was out, and my bruised vocal cords should’ve healed long ago-Mama figured they’d cull me as a borderline nut case. A GI had to have a voice, if only to yell “Lookit!” when an infiltrator chunks a grenade into a buddy’s foxhole.

A third thing put me on the road to Highbridge. A couple that came to all our Red Stix home games was Colonel and Mrs Clyde Elshtain. The colonel’d retired as an Army supply officer to become a big-shot procurement specialist at Deck Glider, Inc. Mama suspected he may’ve tugged a few strings to help the Tenkiller factory get its conversion contract. The real baseball fan of the two, though, was the missus, Tulipa Elshtain. Swear to God, that was her name: Tulipa. At fifty-something, Miss Tulipa still walked and drawled like a Gone With the Wind belle. Even in Oklahoma, she remained a member of the Confederate magic circle. At Red Stix games, though, she’d shed her ladylike ways and whoop and boo like a sailor at a prize fight.

“ Come on, Goochie, give us a four-ply wallop! Drop it into the Mississip! ”

Miss Tulipa and the colonel took to sitting at the top of the Glide Decker bleachers, next to Mama. At the games, they tried to make Mama-the poor, hard-working, abandoned Mrs Boles-feel like their pal and rooting partner.

“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.