She had on a towel. Anyway, she sort of had it on.
Obviously, she hadn’t expected to meet anyone. She didn’t scram, though. She cockedher head and smiled, her strawberry hair pulled back from her forehead and swept over her shoulder in a damp strand. She clutched that strand and kept her towel from slipping with the same hand, her left. I know it was her left because she had a wedding band on it.
“Mr Boles-our brand-new whangdoodle shortstop.”
My shorts covered more than a bathing suit would’ve, but I blushed. If I’d rubbed myself with horse liniment, I couldn’t have felt any hotter or glowed any brighter.
“Relax, kiddo. I’ll let you by.” The woman laughed. “Two ships passing in a tight.” She pressed herself, towel and all, against the wall. “Climb on past, handsome.”
I climbed with my head down. Shadows moved around us, but the amber sconce gave the woman’s shins, arms, and breastbone the gleam of knife blades. Head high, I’d’ve stared straight up her towel into the valley of the shadow. As I climbed, I quaked. Stand me, any day, in the batter’s box against a guy with a ninety-miles-per-hour speedball.
On the very same step as the woman, I brushed her hand and something damp landed on my instep. Her towel had fallen. I reached down to get it. My brain had shut off. My bumpkimsh chivalric instincts had kicked in. When I straightened again, I was gazing on her nakedness, breathing the scented glycerin of Palmolive. I froze. I got dizzy. I felt like a statue on a revolving lazy Susan.
“Thanks.” She didn’t hurry to rewrap. “Predate it.”
I shut my eyes and dropped to my knees. In a darkness of my own concoction, I walked on them to the top of the stairs. When I got there and nerved up to look back down, the woman’d started moving again. The towel wrapped her from midback to just below the pretty half moons of her fanny. I peeked. When she reached the second floor and angled out of sight, I crept back down and peeked again. She sashayed to a room at the far end of the hall and tapped on the door. Curriden opened it and pulled her inside.
Skinny Dobbs roomed with Curriden. Did this woman whore for a living? Had Curriden and Skinny hired her for an orgy? Did an early morning of sweaty sex qualify as an orgy if more than two folks got in on it? Hold it. Maybe Curriden and the woman were secretly married. Bingo. The woman’d worn a ring. She looked about the right age to be Curriden’s old lady. But if so, why didn’t they live in Cotton Creek like all the other married Hellbender couples?
As I watched, the woman came out of Curriden’s room wearing a polka-dot white-on-red dress and a big wheel-brimmed hat with ribbons. She had a straw handbag. She toted her high heels by their straps. She ran on her toes to the other staircase and tripped down its steps. She’d vamoosed before I could draw any conclusions except she was stunning and really knew how to wear clothes. (She also knew how not to wear them.) And she knew I played a “whangdoodle shortstop.” That gave me pause-not that she liked my play, but the phrase itself.
I didn’t move. Mostly, I didn’t move. An old friend found the door of my shorts and poked his head through for a one-eyed look around. I was about to ease my old pal when Skinny Dobbs came up the main staircase shuffling like a drunk. He crossed to his and Curriden’s room. He didn’t have a hangover, he just hadn’t slept much. My old pal collapsed in wrinkles. On her way out, Curriden’s wife had probably told Dobbs, sleeping on a parlor sofa, he could slink back to his room-her and Reese’s conjugal visit was over.
I crept back upstairs, with a side trip to the steamed-up John, and sacked out again. Didn’t get much shuteye, though. I kept seeing that lady jaybird-nude on the stairs.
The CVL, I learned, had started playing Sunday games in its very first season. People called Dixie the Bible Belt. Even at midweek, street preachers in Highbridge could work up a powerful rant and a healthy amening crowd. Nobody opposed Sunday baseball, though. It took place after church and ranked right up there with God, flag, motherhood, and hunting.
Fadeaway Ankers started the final game of our series against Lanett-on either two or three days’ rest, depending on whether you figured it like Fadeaway or Mister JayMac. During his warm-ups, he grinned and preened and threw screaming BBs, like he enjoyed being out there, which, I guess, he did. He wanted his first Linenmaker hitter bad as a starveling bluetick wants its next soup bone. And he struck him out.
Mister JayMac had tapped me, Junior, and Skinny to start too. Unofficially, it was Rookies’ Day. Officially, it was War Bonds Day.
In the outfield, groundskeepers had hung War Bonds banners over some of the biggest signboards, with the okay of the companies whose ads they hid:
IT’S TEN MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT!
WAKE UP, AMERICANS…
YOUR COUNTRY’S MOST FATEFUL HOUR IS NEAR!
DON’T BE TIGHTER WITH YOUR MONEY THAN
WITH THE LIVES OF YOUR SONS!
MONEY TO PAY FOR THE WAR, YES;
BUT NONE AT ALL FOR FRILLS IN THE
CIVIL OPERATIONS OF ANY OF OUR GOVERNING BODIES.
THAT IS THE EDICT OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.
Neither Skinny nor Curriden looked at full speed. Even though Curriden hadn’t gotten up for church, he could barely haul his ass around. That gal in the towel might as well’ve strapped an icebox to his back, he had so little vim. Skinny looked sharper; he could run and throw. Sometimes, though, he stopped dead and opened his eyes so wide he seemed to be trying to breathe through his eye balls.
“What ails you two?” Mister JayMac asked after our second at bat. “Yall stay up last night herding woolyboogers? I swan, Mr Curriden, with some rouge on your cheeks, you’d look like a dead man.” He put Hoey at third for Curriden and Evans into right for Skinny.
When he did, Hoey said, “Why don’t you move Dumbo over to third and let me pick up where I left off Friday? Sir.”
Mister JayMac just looked at him, his eyes as dead blue as an old lady’s hair rinse. From then on, though, Hoey played next to me at Curriden’s spot, never making an error. None of the right-handed Linenmakers could pull Fadeaway’s scroogie, and none of their lefties ever hit to third.
The game was a walkover. I rapped my first extra-base hit, a triple off the EDICT OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE banner, and a single too. Every other Hellbender, Hoey and Evans excepted, got good wood too, and when Fadeaway’d finished pitching the sixth, Mister JayMac lifted him for Sosebee.
“That’s plumb stupid!” Fadeaway shouted in the dugout when he realized what’d happened. “I got a three-hitter going!”
“Relax, Mr Ankers,” Mister JayMac said. “All you can do if you stay in is lose it.”
“My daddy taught me to finish what I start.”
Parris said, “He shoulda taught you a little respect for-”
Mister JayMac made a hush-up gesture at Parris. “You like to finish what you start, Mr Ankers?”
“Damn right!”
“Then I want you to know you started six innings. You’ve jes finished em. A helluva fine job you did for us too, start to finish.”
Fadeaway looked confused, a bird dog thrown off the scent. Then Mister JayMac’s “reasoning” sunk in, and he bought it, the whole bolt. He strolled along the bench and sat down next to Haystack with a hambone-licking smirk on his face.
“You won’t lose,” Haystack said. “You’ll either win or get a no-decision if Sosebee fucks up. You’re sitting pretty.”
“I don’t sit no other way,” Fadeaway said.
Sosebee’s stuff didn’t sizzle, but the Linenmakers couldn’t hit a raindrop in a south Georgia thunderstorm. At game’s end, the scoreboard read 13-0. The crowd whooped so loud we could hardly hear the recording of the National Anthem.
Afterwards, Mister JayMac cornered me in the dugout. “You youngsters’ve come along jes fine, Mr Boles. My sister Tulipa is a bred-in-the-bone baseball gal, but she never scouted me a kid worth leftover pot liquor till she stumbled on you. You’re hitting.750 after two games, and you play short as good as anybody, including Ligonier Hoey.” Ligonier was Buck Hoey’s real first name-he came from a town in Pennsylvania called Ligonier. So he went by Buck.