“Watch it, Ichabod.” She came to the counter, grabbed my drink and candy bar, pulled a book out from under the counter, and wrote down all the needed info-everything but my name. She’d heard my name twice, but’d already forgotten it. She saw me looking, waiting for her to finish up.

“Okay,” she said. “What gives here, Ichabod?”

I pounded my fist on the countertop. Phoebe blinked. Her face turned fish-belly pale, then her eyes flared again. Even an Army.45 wouldn’t’ve scared her for long. It embarrassed her not to remember my name, though, and I couldn’t tell her because… well. Mexican standoff.

I charged around the counter, yanked the “Big Red” Parker Duofold pen from her, and bent over the ledger to scribble my own name in. The Duofold was a clumsy near-antique, and I wrote my John Hancock just like Hancock, gig: DANIEL HELVIG BOLES. Then I went back out front, grabbed a pack of Camels, and had Phoebe add them to my tab. Rustled some matchbooks from a box, took my soda bottle by the neck, scooped up my Baby Ruth, and headed out the door afraid I might drop something and wind up looking a cluck.

“Hey, wait a sec.” I stopped and looked back at Phoebe. “Sorry I called you Ichabod. Nobody likes a name dropped on em like a peed-on blanket.”

She had that right. I banged outside and sat down on the curb next to Nutter, now puffing away like a factory.

“Camels,” Nutter said, seeing my pack. “ ‘They don’t tire my taste. They’re easy on my throat. They suit me to a T.’ If we smoked sandpaper dust, their ads’d say the same thing.”

I drank my orange soda, I ate my candy bar, I smoked a Camel. I thought I heard an adult-Hitch? Shirleen?-talking to Phoebe. Good. A high-strung gal that age didn’t need to be tending a whole store all by herself. Wasn’t safe.

12

Darius’d driven us all to practice that morning in the Brown Bomber, then disappeared. Now he showed up in spikes, knickers, and a long-johnish jersey that didn’t hide the ropy muscles in his upper body. His arms looked like weight-lifting eels. He snapped off warm-up tosses to Dunnagin.

Now, even in Tenkiller I’d heard of Satchel Paige. By ’43, five years before he joined the majors with the Cleveland Indians, Paige was already a legend-for pitching in the Negro leagues and on barnstorming tours. Folks said he threw an invisible fastball. Paige would sometimes call in his fielders and retire the opposing side on strikeouts. No one’d ever come closer to unhittableness than Satchel Paige. A Negro sports-writer in Kansas City had called his right arm a “bronze sling-shot.”

Other black ballplayers had talents like Paige’s, but Paige had charisma and got the ink, so far as any colored player got it back then. And so you’ve never heard of Hilton Smith, a hurler for the Kansas City Monarchs who-from ’40 to ’46-may’ve been the greatest pitcher in the world. In ’41, Stan Musial and Johnny Mize hit against Smith in an exhibition-tried to hit against him-and both claimed never to’ve seen a better curve.

Darius Satterfield, who couldn’t play in the CVL because his skin shaded out too dark, had downhome Satchel Paige-Hilton Smith stuff, an eye-boggling arsenal of pitches. Just watching him warm up, I knew I’d never faced anyone like him. No one. Darius threw like a kicking mule or a jinking hare, depending on the need, but was the only player on the field Mister JayMac didn’t call mister.

Several Hellbenders had trouble with Darius’s role-not his bus driving, or bag toting, or his trainer’s work on sore arms and legs (good nigger work, with tradition behind it). What bothered some of the fellas-not Hoey, though, or Dunnagin, or most of the starters, whether Dixie-born or imports like me-was playing ball with him. As if the ball flying from Darius’s hand to their bats or gloves would weave a bit of Africa into their own skins.

The most sickening get-that-nigger-off-the-field cry-babies on our team were Trapdoor Evans, Jerry Wayne Sosebee, Norm Sudikoff, Turkey Sloan (a little surprisingly), and, it turned out, Philip Ankers. They wanted Darius for a pack mule, not a teammate, and all that kept them from niggering him to death or threatening to bolt to a team with a “real white man” for a manager was Mister JayMac himself. He’d outright bench them. He’d let them know any traitor to the Hellbenders would never play in Alabama or Georgia again, if he could help it. In fact, if the troublemakers were young and fit, Mister JayMac would threaten them back, usually with pulling strings to put them into uniforms, so they could go after Nips and Huns instead of Negro Americans.

Dixie had laws against blacks and whites playing each other in organized sports. Laws that prevented all-star squads of colored barnstormers from showing up in small Alabama and Georgia towns and challenging the local white heroes, something they did profitably in Wyoming, say, or Kansas. First, they’d’ve had no place to stay, except in Negro homes or their own touring cars. Second, it’d’ve bruised the whiteys’ egos to get skinned by coons in front of their neighbors. Third, everybody-whites and coloreds alike-seemed to understand if white folks let down their guard in something as human as baseball, they might drop it elsewhere too.

Black ballplayers played in the South for professional clubs in Atlanta, Memphis, Birmingham, and Jacksonville, and on Army teams on posts like Fort Benning, Fort Stuart, and Camp Penticuff. But even on these bases, they played other coloreds. Forget the war. Never mind that Americans of every shade wore one-color-fits-all khaki. Whites would go see blacks play each other because they put on a bang-up show, but at Atlanta ’s Ponce de Leon Park, whites bought tickets at separate entrances and sat in bleacher sections off limits to the nigger hoi polloi.

Darius didn’t play in the CVL, but he sure as heck took part in practices and intrasquad games at McKissic Field. He served as a lieutenant commander to Mister JayMac, except he didn’t very often come up and tell you to do something. He sort of hinted you should do it. He asked if you wanted help getting a hitch out of your swing or a sad double clutch out of your throws to first. Mostly, Darius kept his mouth shut and taught by showing. Usually, when he led a practice, everyone accepted the sham that even though Mister JayMac had deputized Darius as his stand-in, he could have tapped almost anybody else on the squad.

Anyway, Mister JayMac had ordered a scrimmage, first stringers versus recruits and scrubs, and Darius had drawn the pitching start for the regulars. The regulars also got to be home team. Us rookies and scrubs had to use the visitors’ dugout and give up the advantage of last at bats. I didn’t like it, but so what?

Creighton Nutter pulled me into our dugout, where Mister JayMac had tacked up lineups for both teams. Nutter’d been appointed our manager. Mister JayMac would run the A squad. He seemed to want us underdogs in a snugged-up croker sack from the get-go. Nutter studied our lineup. By rights he should’ve drawn up our batting order, but Mister JayMac had done it for him.

“Damn,” Nutter said. “We’ve got two pitchers at players’ spots and a baby on the mound. Thank God for empty bleachers.”

I read the lineup too. Mister JayMac had me batting first. I wouldn’t get to watch another hitter against Darius before I had to face him myself.

“Get on up here, Mr Boles!” Mister JayMac yelled. He wore a chest protector and a mask, ready to ump as well as to manage. That seemed unfair, but when he sent Parris, one of our boys, out to call the bases, I relaxed a little.

I rummaged up my Red Stix bat, crossed to the batter’s box, swung it a few times. Its barrel shone red in the sun.

“You drop that thing in a vat of Mercurochrome, Dumbo?” Hoey yelled from short.