In a meeting on Tuesday afternoon, Mister JayMac assessed the situation and told us what to do to ready ourselves for a successful stretch run: “Tomorrow morning, gentlemen, we go on the road to play the Boll Weevils and the Linenmakers. The next week they come here. These fellas play baseball like the Flying Tigers dance Swan Lake. If they beat us, we’ll deserve our enmirement in third or fourth place. Yesterday we whipped Lou Ed Dew’s hotshot Orphans twice. Congratulations. Thank God you didn’t disappoint Mr Roosevelt, gentlemen.”
“Thank God we didn’t disappoint you,” Buck Hoey said.
“Amen!” amen’d a chorus of Hellbenders.
“But this is no time to suppose that jes because we’ve got our percherons harnessed and our wagon on track, we’re going to roll over everybody else like they were dust chickens. Uh-uh. So I am deeply perturbed that Mr Curriden and Mr Musselwhite, team heroes, elected by their off-the-field performance last night to sit out Wednesday’s contest against the Boll Weevils. Their absence from the lineup-nor do I mean to disparage or demoralize their replacements-could well cost us that game and deny us the psychological momentum to make the entire road trip a success. The rest of yall’ll jes have to gird up your loins in resolute and selfless compensation.”
“Why don’t you jes let em play?” Norm Sudikoff said. “It was only a kind of tiff.”
“A tiff! Howso a tiff, Mr Sudikoff?”
“I mean, it looked like a all-out war, but only because they’re such bruisers to begin with. A ant boxin another ant don’t quake the ground like a couple of rhinos would. So, you know, jes let em play on Wednesday.”
Mister JayMac stared at Sudikoff the way a rube at a county fair ogles the bearded lady, wonderingly. “If I had the guts, Mr Sudikoff, I’d bench them both for the whole road trip and leave them here to do scut work. But I lack em, I lack em.”
“Well, sir, they’d probably only fight if you left em here without any supervision,” Sudikoff said.
“My rationale for taking them with us, Mr Sudikoff-”
“Sir?”
“Hush, please. I’ve got something important to do here.” He looked at me. “Gentlemen, let me reintroduce you to Daniel Boles. Mr Boles, please rise.”
I stood up.
“Would you like to greet your teammates?”
“Huh-hello,” I said.
Henry and Double Dunnagin led the room in a rapid clatter of applause. I smiled and bowed.
Cottonton’s ballpark, The Fields, looked like what the locals’d named it, a big seashell fan of graded earth with no fences, no lights, no grass, and no clear-cut boundary with the cotton-growing acreage next to it. The Boll Weevils had a chicken-wire backstop, termite-gnawed bleachers along the baselines, and a shingled crate on telephone-pole pilings for a press box. As Mister JayMac had said in my first team meeting in Highbridge, a live goat’d once figured in a close decision at third. Even in Oklahoma, I’d seen boondocky high schools with better facilities than the Weevils had.
But sometimes they drew decent crowds-from whistle-stop and cotton-ginning communities all over the county. You could get four or five hundred people in the stands, even on a week night: farmers, railroad workers, gin operators, feed-and-seed merchants, beauticians, kids. Clem Eggling, a gin operator with a thousand acres of prime Alabama farmland, owned the club and at age forty-six still sometimes caught the opening game of a twin bill. He made his money scrimping on groundskeeping costs, salaries, and ballpark goodies. Watery lemonade, boiled eggs, and culled peanuts dominated the items at his refreshment stands, and you couldn’t get ice-shaved, cubed, or melting-unless you hauled it in yourself in an expensive refrigerated truck.
On Wednesday, with Muscles and Curriden out, we lost to the lowly Weevils by six runs. Hoey took Curriden’s spot at third, and Evans and Fanning subbed about four innings each in left field for Musselwhite. They fielded their places okay, but every Hellbender except Charlie Snow’d forgotten how to hit, and the loss, again except for Snow’s bang-up play, qualified as a disconcerted team effort. Hard to say if Miss LaRaina’s rivals in the lineup would’ve made a whit of difference. The Boll Weevil’s pitcher, Hub Sisti, had us muttering to ourselves all evening.
In Cottonton, Henry and I stayed in a truckstop court called Edweena’s Comfy Cabins. If Cottonton’d ever had a hotel for farm-equipment suppliers and haberdashery drummers, it’d long since closed. Edweena’s Comfy Cabins got our business by default. Mister JayMac seldom had us leave Highbridge for an away series against the Weevils until the morning of our first game. That strategy ran the risk of a forfeit, if the Brown Bomber’s transmission dropped out, but it cut back our dependence on local lodgings. Henry and I had our ready-made digs, of course, but Cottonton natives willing to house enemy ballplayers didn’t run that deep or that trustworthy. Mister JayMac had to squeeze eighteen guys into three semi-friendly houses, and on our last road trip there in ’43, he negotiated the use of an empty jail cell, a bus-station pew at Harshanay Drugs, and two more Comfy Cabins-to keep from returning to the home of Weevils fans upset by our one-sided romps over every Cottonton hurler but Hub Sisti.
Darius remained the odd man out. He knew coloreds in other CVL towns, but didn’t seem to know any here. He could’ve had a black family put him up a night or two just by asking. Darius had a certain status. Driving the Bomber, doing for twenty or so ballplayers, made him a figure of some glamour. But Darius wouldn’t play on his league connections. Wouldn’t sweet-talk, trash-talk, or kowtow. Wouldn’t even ask outright and humbly, one downtrodden colored to another, for a cleanly place to lay his head. Pride and a festering resentment of Mister JayMac stymied him.
Not long after Hub Sisti’d shut us out, I stood in the open door of the Comfy Cabin called Gladiola Delight ruing my third hitless game in twenty-four starts. You could smell the DDT on the cotton plants across the road, and the used-washcloth odor of the linens in Gladiola Delight. Other Comfy Cabins were named Begonia Bliss, Daisy Dream, Marigold Manor, and Chrysanthemum Heaven. They all looked and smelled the same, though, and the only flowers in their rotting window boxes were dandelions and morning glories.
As I stood there, the Bomber growled past on the blacktop from The Fields, where we’d played our last two innings in the dusk. It headed into the empty landscape north of town.
“D-Darius,” I said.
“Looking for a place to sleep unmolested,” Henry said from behind a book. “The poor slob.” That was Henry’s shaky grasp of American slang. He meant chap, or bugger, or joe, not slob, but I knew that.
“Back l-l-later.” Before Henry could call out a question, I’d trotted to the blacktop. I hiked along it in the dark behind the twin embers of the bus’s taillights. Darius drove slow, maybe to keep a redneck cop from halting him, maybe to give himself a better chance to find a hidden parking place for the night-so those taillights stayed visible for a long time. I followed them easily. I lost ground, of course, but the road’s straightness kept the bus in view. Sometimes I could even hear its gears shifting, a sound like rocks bumping down a metal chute.
A mosquito came out of the cotton after me. Two or three damn mosquitoes. A blood-sucking platoon of em. Water lay oily in one shadowy ditch, a breeding ground. The blacktop gave way to gravel. The bigger pieces of gravel-fist-sized rocks-threw me off-stride. I had to find a tire rut and walk in it like a man in a narrow trench. Off to the west, the long charcoal profile of some eroded hills told me I hadn’t walked into the unbounded landscape of a nightmare. And a glance to my rear revealed the untidy lamp-lit boxes of Edweena’s Comfy Cabins. I could go back if I had to.