Inside the bus, Fadeaway said, “Cottonton all over again-no dugouts. We’ll bake in this sorry-ass sun.” He had bench time ahead of him, and I almost sympathized. Almost.
In baggy white flannels-shirts with numbers whip-stitched to their backs and the letters SDT sewn to their chests-the Splendid Dominicans didn’t seem much like black supermen. Like us, they had guys built like fire hydrants, flag poles, or haystacks. This one could’ve pruned Azalea hedges in Alligator Park, that one could’ve tonged blocks of ice at the cold plant. No doubt, though, that Cozy Bissonette’s ragtag bunch could hit and hustle.
“All right,” Mister JayMac said from up front. “Pile off.”
“Criminy, we’ll slide out on our own sweat,” Parris said.
We got up and pushed through the aisle, looking for relief-from the heat, from our nerves, from the suspense of taking on these colored unknowns, who, in their own cities, had even more fans than we did in Highbridge.
I saw a few white faces-brass and senior NCOs, company commanders and cowcatcher-jawed topkicks. But the faces of the Negro GIs outnumbered the pasty or sunburnt faces among them fifty-to-one. A dark sea in the stands: beige, caramel, chestnut, shiny bruise-black. Even at a military post deep in the heart of Dixie, those hundreds of young Negro men shook me to my boots. What if they all got loose and we had to wade through their strutting tide?
Darius touched my arm and urged me through a gate onto the field. “See?” he asked. (Or was it “Sea,” like in “body of water”?) When I glanced at him over my shoulder, he gave me an unreadable smile.
The field had a press box, a platform on stilts that may’ve sometimes served as a reviewing stand. A goofy-looking white lieutenant in wire-rimmed glasses sat behind a microphone on the platform. His welcome blared out at us from metal speakers mounted on creosoted poles.
“Men of the First and Second Battalions of the Special Training Regiment of Camp Penticuff, Georgia,” he said, echoes from the speakers overlapping and blurring, “give a soldierly hello to the fine ball clubs that’ve come out here today to entertain you-our sister community’s Highbridge Hellbenders of the Chattahoochee Valley League, and the Splendid Dominican Touristers, some talented barnstormers from the Negro American League! Let em hear you, men!”
A tumult of claps and gospel shouts. The lieutenant broke into it to read lineups, ours first, and each Hellbender player trotted out to line up between second and third base. Oddly enough, the GIs of the Special Training Regiment made as much racket for us as our own fans in Highbridge would’ve.
Then the lieutenant read the starters for Mr Bissonette’s glorified pickup squad. “Batting in the lead-off spot and playing second base, Terris ‘Slag Iron’ Smith!” If that ball field’d had a roof, those colored soldiers would’ve blown it into the Gulf of Mexico. Slag Iron Smith could’ve been every last one of em’s favorite cousin.
I recall the name of every other Dominican Tounster the lieutenant said, each with a road alias cornier by several degrees than any of ours-Rufus “Pepperpot” Cole, Luis “Gumbo” Garcia, Hosea “The Gator” Partlow. Each of their guys got a send-off Highbridge fans would’ve reserved for a regiment of heroes. Don’t think it wasn’t intimidating either.
The Army appointed umpires. No big deal? Ordinarily, maybe not, but Major Dexter’d asked a Negro captain from a Negro tanker unit to call balls and strikes, and a black NCO from his own battalion to patrol the bases. You’d’ve thought, gauging these appointments by the reactions of our biggest in-house bigots, he’d asked Attila the Hun and Vlad the Impaler to do it. Even Mister JayMac, seeing these men on the field, felt it incumbent upon himself to buttonhole Major Dexter and argue for one white ump-on the grounds we’d made dozens of courtly concessions to Mr Cozy’s boys already, including playing them at all, meeting them in front of their enlisted cousins, and using a CVL rest day to come out here. Neither Mister JayMac nor Major Dexter would allow himself the pleasure of ranting or kicking dirt-but the argument drug on. Both teams went to their benches, and the GIs began to get restless. They swayed on their seats and sang out ad-lib Jody chants:
“Left, right, left, right, march yo ass.
All that glitters must be brass!
“Left my home in Tennessee.
Ever DI looks de same to me!
“Why you fellas has to stall?
We come out to watch some ball!
“Jody, Jody, see me sweat.
My po body got a liquid debt!
“Count yo fingers, count yo toes.
Be a year fo one team scohs!”
During these chants, the Dominicans retook the field, but without a ball. They pretended to have one, though. Their pitcher-Turtlemouth Thomas Clark, a crafty s.o.b. once the game got clocking-went into this showboaty boa-constrictor windup and let absolutely nothing fly. A Dominican at the plate with a bat took a swing as broad as Turtlemouth’s windup and drove that whistling air ball into right for a make-believe single.
By this time, the crowd’d stopped chanting. You could even hear the thwock! the bat made hitting the ball. (The catcher’d made it, sticking a finger into his cheek and popping it out like a champagne cork.) Anyway, as the batter ran to first, the right fielder scooped up the ghost liner on two invisible hops and fired absolutely nothing to the shortstop covering second. This man looked the runner back to first, walked the nothing in his hands a few steps towards the mound, and flipped it to old Turtlemouth.
“Hell’re they doing?” Fadeaway said, not trusting his eyes.
“Shadow ball,” Dunnagin told him. “Watch.”
The next batter took a couple of pitches, on both of which Turtlemouth wound himself tighter than the rubber band on a model airplane’s propeller. The batter banged his third pitch-thwock!-an air-ball knuckler, to the shortstop, Pepperpot Cole. Cole flung himself down, trapped absolutely nothing under his scrap of a glove, retrieved it, and zipped it to the second baseman, Slag Iron Smith, who caught this nothing at belt height. The runner from first tried to take Smith out of the play, but Slag Iron pivoted, leapt like a deer, and threw absolutely nothing to first.
A peg in the dirt. The first baseman yanked it out of the dust like a man cracking a whip, and spun around to call the batter out as the runner somersaulted over the bag. Then the first baseman started the ghost ball around the horn in honor of the phantom double play.
The GIs loved it. You’d’ve figured them at a county-fair strip show, they whooped so shrill and sassy.
“Hard to make that kinda stuff look real,” Dunnagin said. “You’ve got to have your timing down.”
Mister JayMac finally got the Negro captain assigned to home plate moved to the base paths, along with the black DI from the First Battalion of the Special Training Unit. The major himself went behind the plate. That way, the foul lines had an ump each. If a wronged Hellbender needed to dispute a call at the plate, he wouldn’t have to test the will of a racial and social inferior. Mister JayMac, as I heard later, had used “whitemail” to get his way-he’d threatened to take us Hellbenders home.
Another problem remained. Which team qualified as visitors and which as homies? Mister JayMac wanted the advantage of last bats. So did Mister Cozy. They both went out to Major Dexter-sweating in his chest protector, birdcage, and shin guards-to present their cases. Mister JayMac said no team named Dominican Touristers could be a home team, barnstormers were visitors by definition, and Camp Penticuff lay within hailing distance of Highbridge. Thus, the Hellbenders, even in our away flannels, deserved home-field advantage.