I scuttled backwards a few steps and crashed down on my butt. The sweat collectors gasped, then guffawed. Such fickle fans. Such readiness to turn. I had the swagger stick, but Pumphrey leapt forward and flung the heel of his fist into my mouth. Hoey, of all people, scrambled between Pumphrey and me, and Curriden saved my skull by grabbing my arm and slinging me behind him like a sack of onions. The other Hellbenders passed me along from one to the other until a good fifteen yards and four or five teammates separated me from the bloodied Pumphrey.
“The boy has a canary circus in his head,” Pumphrey said. “He wants his kidneys pulled out through his dick.”
“You took my voice!” I told Pumphrey from behind Dunnagin.
“What does that mean? Listen at you, punk. You’re loudern a cannon crump and you say I took your voice.”
“My voice and f-fifty goddamn bucks.”
“He’s fetched. One daft sumbitch.”
“No I’m not,” I said. “ ‘I’m Popeye the Sailor Man. I’m strong to the finish, cause I eat my spinach. I’m P-P-Popeye the Sailor Man.’ ”
“ ‘Toot-toot,’ ” said Turkey Sloan.
Pumphrey looked dazed, sledgehamrnered almost.
“Tenkiller,” I said. “Tenkiller!” I swung from Dunnagin to Nutter to Muscles to Curriden, the better to see Pumphrey’s face, the face from the train, the face from the cathouse. The muscles in his face worked from anger to emptiness to puffy chagrin. “If you don’t have my money,” I said, “take back what you said about my f-f-father.”
Pumphrey back-pedaled. “The boy’s fevered. Get him to a medic,” nodding at the infirmary, “fore somebody hotter-headed than me grabs up a.45 and plugs him.”
“I’ll shoot you first!” I yelled at Pumphrey, pointing my index finger and cocking my thumb. “Bang!”
The dogfaces hopped into a kind of formation while my pals nudged me away from another face-off with Pumphrey, working me around the Bomber’s nose and back inside. They pushed me down in a seat on the infirmary side. Curriden wedged in next to me, forcing me into a scrunch over the tire well.
“We’re damned lucky the MPs didn’t show up and run us all in as goldbricking troublemakers,” he said.
“Miserable pricks,” I said.
“What in hell got into you? The logjam break? You talked damned near as much as Kaltenborn.”
Henry and Mister JayMac came out of the infirmary and reboarded the Bomber. Mister JayMac faced us from the head of the aisle, while across “K” Street a hundred human sausages, black sack after black sack, hippity-hopped off the oiled lot and up a wooden ramp into the Quartermaster Depot.
Mister JayMac took off his jacket, showing us a dress shirt blotched with heat sweat, grief sweat, and what-all.
“Charlie Snow died in there. He didn’t want to, no more than you or I would, but he played every day knowing it could happen and taking as much care as he could not to let it. His luck-usually he had God’s own guardian-angelic grace-well, his luck took the day off. It decamped with Darius. We’ve lost Mr Snow, and the squeeze in my guts tells me Darius has also cut his ties to us. It suggests to me, gentlemen, that-”
“Darius aint dead, is he?” Trapdoor Evans said.
“No,” Mister JayMac said. “He’s jes absconded, high-tailed it who knows where.”
“Then he could come back,” Evans said. “Charlie won’t. He aint got the option. So I don’t know whyn hell you got to cry over Darius atall. It’s Charlie that died, sir, it uz Charlie taking us to another CVL pennant.”
“True enough,” Mister JayMac said. Then he said, “Endicott Mortuary in Highbridge will pick up Mr Snow’s body later today and prepare it for burial at noon Thursday, five hours before the second game of our Quitman homestand. Mr Musselwhite will move to center. Mr Evans, you will start in left until such time as I determine you need spelling or outright replacement. I expect everybody aboard this bus, not counting Major Dexter, to be at both the funeral and the interment. Henry will drive us home. Complete silence, please, till we get there.”
46
Quitman’s Mockingbirds hit Highbridge for a three-game series, one game an evening from Wednesday through Friday. The day after Darius left, the day after we lost to Mister Cozy’s gang, the day after Charlie Snow died out to Camp Penticuff, the Mockingbirds flew in our faces for nine straight innings. Hit after merciless hit. Slash-and-burn base running that bled our will and gave our fed-up fans so many chances to catcall that fatigue set in. Eventually, any stray breeze creaking through the bleachers made more noise than our fans.
In fact, in the middle of the seventh, when Milt Frye asked for “yore prayers in memory of the brilliant Charlie Snow,” the stadium went stone dead. None of our fans’d known until then he’d died; their earlier calls to put him into the game, given Trapdoor’s play, had made perfect sense. Now a silence like surrender took hold. We’d fallen several runs behind, our star player had mysteriously “passed on,” and a mood of such cobalt blueness had hit our dugout we all felt sick to heart.
Our loss to the Mockingbirds, we learned the next morning, had dropped us three games behind the LaGrange Gendarmes, who’d beaten Marble Springs on the road. The Gendarmes would roll into town on Saturday for a double-header, and a singleton on Sunday afternoon. If we lost another game or two to losers like the patched-together ’Birds, the Gendarmes might haul down 1943’s CVL pennant before we could gear back up to stop em.
On Thursday, every Hellbender on the roster attended Charlie Snow’s funeral at the Alligator Park Methodist Church. Local fans overran the lawn. Most couldn’t get inside because pews were reserved for team members, their families, and a perfumed army of Snow’s female cousins, who’d just arrived from Richland, Georgia, his hometown. Even a few Mockingbirds, admirers of Snow’s style, showed up, and Mister JayMac, who’d put together and was maybe even paying for Snow’s obsequies, showed these ’Birds to some ladder-back chairs behind the main body of pews.
Besides the big female cousins (blonde middle-aged women in veils and pastel print dresses), the only other relative there to mourn Charlie Snow was his wife, Vera Jo, an ex-cocktail waitress he’d married in Cheyenne, Wyoming, in 1931. They had no kids. After the service, I heard the weeping Vera Jo tell Miss Giselle, who’d snugged Vera Jo up next to her for the walk to the cemetery, that Charlie’d refused to let her have a baby for fear it’d come a hemophiliac boy. Bleeders, he’d felt, had too briary a path to walk in this life; he couldn’t see helping to bring another one into it.
“I ast him, ‘Charlie, would you trade all you’ve got in the way of love and talent for everlasting nothingness?’ But he said, ‘I’m here; I have to make do. The never-was aint, and don’t. Why take the never-was and afflict it?’ He couldn’t see no other side. Now I wish I had me a whole troop of little bleeders to ease the long nevermore he’s gone off to.”
Vera Jo wept, Miss Giselle hugged her, and the cemetery, set about with water oaks, sycamores, and pecan trees, filled nigh to overflowing with repiners.
Muscles, Curriden, Sosebee, Hay, Sudikoff, and Dunnagin lowered Charlie Snow’s casket into the grave on harnesses of fresh yellow rope. The preacher held his Bible over his head and spoke a final benediction. The crowd broke up and threaded back into the sweltering daylight beyond the cemetery. Henry and I, who’d stood poker-spined near the pecan grove behind Snow’s burial plot, likewise started to leave.
“Psssssst,” hissed the pecan grove. “Psssssst.”
We turned, Henry and I. A shadow in amongst the dog-eared green whorls of the hanging pecan branches beckoned to us, pulling back as it did. Park gardeners had carpeted the grove with pine straw and trenched it with banks of white violets and well-pruned blackberry hedges, a retreat for the sorrowful. Some anonymous soul’d even placed some slab benches in there for the bereaved to perch their tails on.