Michael Bishop: Brittle Innings

“You can flat-out play,” Miss Tulipa told me over dessert. “How’d you like to help a pro team win a championship?” Her voice was like Coca-Cola: sweet and fizzy, with a sting.

Mama’d done most of the talking so far. I looked at her. From the gramophone in the library, just off the dining room, came the scratchy diddle-diddle-diddle of the colonel’s chamber music. Like Miles Standish, I tried to speak for myself.

“I wuh… I wuh…”

“Take your time, Daniel,” Miss Tulipa said.

“I want to pl-play in the m-m-majors,” I blurted.

Miss Tulipa’s smile sparkled like the cut-glass chandelier over the table. “Why, of course you do.”

“He’s a baby,” Mama said. “He needs a honest job of work.”

The colonel’d already excused himself and wandered into the library, but Miss Tulipa nodded. “Oaks begin as acorns and major leaguers as sandlot players. What you need, Daniel, is seasoning.”

I understood that. Saying I wanted to play in the bigs didn’t mean I expected to start there. So I gawped, a drip with a speech problem. My tongue felt like a folded washrag. Mama saw my panic, the Jell-O wobble of my bottom lip.

“You think he’s good enough to go pro?”

“Laurel, Laurel dear, he’s a prospect . Denying him a chance to develop his gifts would be cruel. Suppose DiMaggio had become just another San Francisco fisherman?”

“He’d’ve been a good one, probably.”

“Of course, Laurel. But he’d’ve labored virtually unseen. The loss to our national heritage, ah, incalculable.”

“A lot of ifs and maybes,” Mama said. “Why fret it?”

Miss Tulipa shut up for a bit, then said, “Daniel should sign with the Hellbenders in my old hometown. My brother Jordan”-Tulipa said JUR-dun-“will pay him seventy-five dollars a month, twenty-five more than he’d make as a private in the Army. Jordan ’ll also provide lodging and instruction. This rotten old war has just decimated the majors. If he does well, Daniel could be wearing big-league flannels sooner than you think.”

Colonel Elshtain, wearing a honest-to-God ascot, wandered back in. “Army pay’s gone up. Daniel’d make sixty a month, even as a private. And the benefits that accrue as-”

“Please, Clyde. If you’re trying to recruit him, remember Daniel’s medical condition may preclude his induction.”

“He should have no trouble at all shooting a carbine.”

“You forget his-his handicap .”

“Send him to boot camp. To your own Camp Penticuff. The DIs there might well divest him of it.”

Miss Tulipa exploded. “How many young men do you want to ship out as cannon fodder? Do you want to be rid of them all?”

“We’ve more at stake today than a minor league pennant.” The colonel’s lips’d blanched like day-old fish bait.

“Given your patriotic fervor,” Miss Tulipa said, “why don’t you have your commission reactivated?”

The colonel lifted his chin. “Perhaps I should.” He returned to his staticky gramophone, sliding a panel door into place between the library and us. You could still hear his music bumbling up and down the scale, though, like drowsy bees.

“ Laurel, what do you think?” Miss Tulipa said, turning on the Suthren belle charm. “Would you allow Daniel to sign with Jordan if Jordan agrees he has the talent?”

“Danny’d be a high-school graduate,” Mama said. “He could do whatever he wants.”

I struggled to ask the last question I’d ever ask at the Elshtains’ table. “Which farm s-s-system?”

“Pardon me?” Miss Tulipa said. “Oh. The farm system. The Hellbenders belong to Philadelphia. Does it matter?”

Not much. So far as I knew, no other organization had even scouted the Red Stix. Even so, the name Philadelphia hit me like a concrete medicine ball. Philadelphia had two big-league clubs, the Athletics in the American League and the Phillies in the National. Both clubs reeked. The Athletics had finished last three straight years and the Phillies five. The Phillies had been the only major league club to lose over a hundred games in ’42. If any American city ranked as Loserville, it was Philadelphia.

“Oh,” Miss Tulipa said. “Which team there? The Phillies. Your opportunities with the Phils are boundless.”

Bingo. I had a better chance of ousting Gabby Stewart at short than I did Rizzuto at that spot with the Yankees or Pee Wee Reese in Brooklyn with the Dodgers. Even so, I’d’ve almost rather thrown myself into a Japanese POW camp than go to Philadelphia.

Mama and I left the Cass Mansion, and I comforted myself by remembering that in Highbridge, at least, I wouldn’t be playing for the Phillies, I’d be playing for the Hellbenders, a team supposedly on the rough-and-tumble rise.

Jordan McKissic-Mister JayMac to everyone in Highbridge, as I learned later-came riding into Oklahoma in a Pullman car behind an old steam engine. He planned to watch two Red Stix games, one on a Saturday, one the following Tuesday, and return to Georgia. April of ’43, two weeks before the Hellbenders kicked off their regular season. Mister JayMac came by train because the Office of Defense Transportation had nixed pleasure driving. You could legally call a scouting trip business, but patriotic pols-like the scoundrels LaGuardia’d lit into in the paper-wouldn’t admit pro ball deserved that courtesy.

’Forty-three was the year the ODT forbid major leaguers to go South for spring training. Except for the Cardinals, who practiced in St. Louis, ballplayers had to train east of the Mississip and north of the Potomac and Ohio rivers. Wiseguys called this the Landis-Eastman Line, after Baseball Commissioner Landis and the fella heading up the ODT. Mister JayMac was a mucky-muck on the Hothlepoya County draft board, down in Highbridge. To do his part for national defense, he’d left his Cadillac and colored driver at home and faced the blowing coal dust and the jostling hoi polloi on a passenger train.

In Tenkiller, Mister JayMac stayed in the Cass Mansion. I first laid eyes on him on Saturday, when he climbed into the Deck Glider bleachers with Mama and his hosts. He stood out in that crowd. He was pushing sixty-a couple of years younger than I am now-but tall, fit, and dapper. He wore a striped white dress shirt, old-fashioned pleated linen trousers, and a pair of military-pink suspenders. His hair was iron gray, cut close at temples and neck. A salt-and-peppery forelock fell over his forehead like an owlet’s wing. Even from my shortstop position, I could see this terrific blue glint in his eyes: a sharper blue than Miss Tulipa’s, like sapphire dust bonded to a couple of zinc-coated war pennies.

From the stands, Mister JayMac watched me. He watched Toby Watersong, Franklin Gooch, every kid on both teams. Whenever I had the chance, I watched him back. Mister JayMac was the Great Stone Face, perched above the hubbub like a Supreme Court judge, mysterious and cool. Studying.

I had a good game Saturday, thank God, a couple of singles and an unassisted double play at short. Afterwards, I sort of expected Mister JayMac to come down and speak, maybe even to make me a job offer, but he and the Elshtains vanished, off to the Cass Mansion, I guess, without so much as a nod. In the stands, Mama said, Miss Tulipa and the colonel had been as supportive of the team and as complimentary of me as ever, but Mister JayMac had scarcely spoken two words.

“Not my notion of a courtly Suthren gentleman,” Mama said. “Eyes like a starved wolf’s.”

The Red Stix never practiced Sundays, and Mister JayMac didn’t attend church with Miss Tulipa and the colonel. Monday, though, he watched us from the stands on the third-base line, taking in our every wind sprint, pepper game, and half-assed batting-practice bunt. I could feel him studying me, intense and chillylike. The process-letting him gander-reminded me of what a beauty-pageant hopeful has to suffer.