“Gentlemen, hayseeds, and hangers-on,” Mister JayMac said when Darius had his flip charts ready. “As most of yall know, we play a seventy-seven-game season. Today, after a month of what passes for some of yall as top-notch baseball, we’re a shabby seven and eight, five games back o the Opelika Orphans, a crew I once wouldn’t have reckoned fit to climb a molehill without succumbing to oxygen deprivation. Muscles called them mewling pansies, and we trail them by five. So what does that make us?”
“Pansy chasers,” Buck Hoey said.
Nobody laughed. Like Jumbo, though, Buck Hoey seemed to have a special status; he could rag the boss-some-without getting sent to his room. Anyway, I felt again how hard it would be to take his job away. And if I did, the other guys would probably resent my quick success.
Mister JayMac looked around. “Where’s jumbo? Didn’t he make it back for supper?”
“Like the locust made it to Pharaoh’s Egypt,” Hoey said.
That line did get a laugh.
“So where is he now? What the hell’s he doing?”
“Conferring with Count Tallywhacker,” Hoey said. “That’s why it’s taking him, uh, so long.”
A kind of hesitant edgy laugh this time. Mister JayMac curled his lip the way you would if a whiff of spoiled poultry spilled from your Frigidaire. But he sent Euclid upstairs to fetch Jumbo from his third-floor apartment.
“So looong,” Hoey said as Euclid went by. This time, half a dozen guys whooped like world-champion morons.
“Hush,” Mister JayMac said. I realized then, or gradually over the next few days, that Mister JayMac never said, “Shut up.” I’d heard a lot of “Shut ups” in my short life, so I liked the way he said “Hush” instead.
“Any of yall who’ve been dogging it’d better look sharp,” he said. “We’re taking on some young fellas who can play. I’ve seen em. This isn’t hearsay, but observed fact.”
“High school wonders,” Buck Hoey said.
“Perhaps,” Mister JayMac said. “But I don’t like being tied for fourth place in this league, and I won’t allow us to stay in fourth if good alternatives to mediocrity present themselves. Maybe they already have.”
Euclid came into the parlor ahead of Jumbo Clerval, who, by the looks of him, had “dressed” for the meeting. He wore a humongous pair of wingtip Florsheims, a pair of patched gray pants, and a shiny black frock coat. Euclid played tug to Jumbo’s ocean liner and, as soon as he got the big man among us, tooted on out of the room. Jumbo’s head, capless now, spiked up almost to the picture molding. He slouched against the wall, straight across the doorway from Buck Hoey on the broken-backed sofa. It looked as if Mister JayMac might say something to him, bawl him out even, but he didn’t. He nodded at us four rookies.
“Yall come up here. I want everybody to see you.”
Ankers, Dobbs, Heggie, and I sidled to the front of the room to stand beside the easel. Ankers may’ve been the only one of us not unsettled by the spotlight. When Mister JayMac introduced us, he stepped out and gave a clasped-hands salute, like a boxer greeting a ringside crowd.
“High school graddyiots,” Hoey said.
“Actually, Mr Ankers has only completed his sophomore year,” Mister JayMac said.
The Hellbenders stared at Ankers like he was a sideshow freak. Unless he’d been held back a time or two, he was fifteen years old, a baby with the stubble of a lumberjack.
“All right,” Mister JayMac said, “give these fellas a friendly Hellbender hello. Ready? Hip, hip…”
“Hooray,” the regulars said, without much in it.
Mister JayMac told them to try again. “Hooray!” they said, with maybe an exclamation point. “Again,” he said. They did a third cheer so loud it more or less mocked the idea of hip-hip-hooraying. But Mister JayMac nodded and tapped a pointer on the first page of his chart:
CHATTAHOOCHEE VALLEY LEAGUE / CLASS C PROFESSIONALS.
“Ever last fella here ought to be reminded how damned lucky yall are to be playing ball,” he said. “You could be training as infantry replacements with all the scared puppies out to Camp Penticuff. Or crawling on your guts toward a bunker full of deadeye Jerries or Japs.”
“We could all be dead,” Hoey said.
“You could indeed!”. Mister JayMac roared. “But no, thank God, yall’re privileged to be playing baseball, the national pastime, and getting paid for that hardship to boot!”
“Some of you guys’re getting paid?” Hoey said.
“Can it, Hoey,” Lon Musselwhite said.
“Major league baseball continues on presidential sufferance and the affections of our war-weary citizens. Minor league ball is wounded. Nationwide, the farm system is down to ten training leagues in only seventy cities, and, as I know from my work on the draft board, Uncle Sam needs even more able-bodied men to defeat the foes of democracy abroad.
“Listen up now,” Mister JayMac went on. “The Chattahoochee Valley League, one of the youngest around, is a small-town league, with a pitiful ‘C’ training classification, but we make it in spite of the war because we’re the hardest-playing saps anywhere and flat-out beaucoups of fun to watch. Wouldn’t you agree, Mr Nutter?”
“Yessir.” Creighton Nutter was a married relief pitcher, a balding guy in his late thirties.
“In addition,” Mister JayMac said, “our eight teams are near to one another. The President and the Office of Price Administration appreciate the fact it doesn’t siphon off all that much gas or use up that much tire rubber for one CVL team to travel to another CVL team’s field for a three- or four-game series. Jes last year, the Attorney General said the CVL is the only league he’s ever visited where the National Anthem plays at the end as well as at the start of every contest. A tribute to our national pride. Let me further remind yall that FDR himself views ballplayers as morale boosters and heroes. I concur. At least the good ones are. The bad ones, on the other hand, are-”
“Traitors.” Jumbo’s judgment boomed and echoed.
It stopped Mister JayMac for a second. “Near to,” he said. “Playing the national pastime bad is like spitting on Old Glory. A sorry bungler may not purposely affront the game, but it’s still damnably hard to forgive him.”
“Amen,” Lon Musselwhite said.
Mister JayMac turned to us rookies. “Mr Boles, tell us the locations and names of the eight teams in the CVL.”
My tongue jumped to the roof of my mouth. My eyes cut around like minnows. The last time I’d been in Mister JayMac’s presence, I’d had at least stammering use of my own tongue. He remembered that.
“Tell us one team in the CVL,” Mister JayMac said. “Other than the Hellbenders.”
“Speak up, dummy!” Hoey shouted this out.
Darius, over Mister JayMac’s shoulder, said, “The Boles boy is a dummy, sir. Got no voice.”
Mister JayMac gave me a startled, put-out look. Like he’d asked for swordfish steak and the waiter’d brought him a lousy crawdad. Quick, though, his gaze jumped over to Junior Heggie, and he asked Junior to do the naming I couldn’t.
“The Opelika Orphans,” Junior Heggie said.
“Well, sure,” Mister JayMac said. “Name the other six.”
Junior studied his shoes. He came from the other side of the state. It’d’ve been easier for him to name the last six British prime ministers.
“Darius, the chart,” Mister JayMac said. Darius flipped the top sheet over the back of the easel and showed us a new page. General JayMac, an Allied officer in a secret command post, briefing his staff.
“All right. Look here.” He rapped the chart with the top half of a collapsible pool cue:
CHATTAHOQCHEE VALLEY LEAGUE
Mister JayMac told us something about each franchise: what big league club it belonged to, its strengths and short-comings, and why Highbridge, given our talent, should be in first place.