Read Online Brittle Innings by Michael Bishop - Free Book Online Page B

stand beside Mister JayMac’s place. Never mind how quickly I learned even McKissic Field didn’t equal the Land of Beulah. I mean, it had bumps in the infield, shadowy corners where a fielder could get lost, camelback crickets in the showers, and split benches in the bleacher sections. That morning, though, the old stadium dazzled me.
    Near the third-base line, Darius hurtled a low wall and ambled onto the infield grass. He picked up a catcher’s mitt and waved it at a player lazing around the batting cage. The player—Peter Hay, better known as Haystack, but I didn’t know that then—followed him to the bullpen, where Darius squatted and caught Hay’s warm-up tosses. After a while, Darius pounded his mitt, asking for more heat; he fired Hay’s pitches back harder than Hay’d thrown them. Hay struggled to put more zip into what he was doing. An amazing scene: In a south Georgia ballpark, a black man instructing, even cussing out, an older white player.
    “Nigger gave me that crap, I’d deball him with a spoon.”
    Until then, I hadn’t seen the rookies—three guys in street clothes—in the stands behind me. The kid who’d just spoken hunched between two others about his age, all of them squinting like moles, each about as nervous and mock-tough as the other two. The one who’d spoken wore caked boots and denim overalls; he had a blacksmith’s arms. He also had, several hours ahead of schedule, a five-o’clock shadow.
    “Would you let a nigger boss you thataway?” he asked me.
    I turned half around. I shrugged.
    “You a ballplayer?” he said. “Or jes lost?”
    “The nigger brought him,” one of the other two guys said. “He cain’t be lost.”
    Both these fellas had on cheap jackets and ties. They were taller than the farm boy; next to him, they looked like Esquire models—or like they’d mistaken the day for Sunday and McKissic Field for a concert hall. Their names, I found out later, were Heggie and Dobbs. The farm boy with the stubble was a south Georgia cracker name of Philip Ankers.
    “He’s ugly, though,” Ankers said, looking at me. “Nothing that nigger do or say can stop him being ugly.”
    Maybe these drips were dogfaces on furlough.
    “What’s yore name?” Ankers asked.
    I patted my throat and gargled a few gargles. For safety’s sake, I stayed put, three bleacher rows ahead of him.
    “What is it, Rube? Ya swaller a sock? Or ya jes don’t know yore name?”
    I gave the farm boy a quick up-yours sign, half expecting him and his dime-store clothes-horse buddies to come down and boot the pea-turkey out of me.
    But Ankers laughed and said, “Screw ya, Rube.” His pals chuckled too. When they started watching the practice again, I edged over a few feet so they wouldn’t be right behind me.
    From the mound, Mister JayMac hurled batting practice into a chicken-wire cage. Criminy. Mister JayMac had his health, I guess, but the sight of that old guy unleashing strikes on his own players couldn’t help but get you. He creaked some (not too much), but the dust on his cuffs and the clay on his shoes didn’t faze him. After yanking a swinging strike on a batter, he made the klutz take three laps. No one, Mister JayMac said, should flat-out whiff against him. He wasn’t Bob Feller. Or even Lefty Grove. Thing was, though, not many Hellbenders took Mister JayMac to the outfield, and nobody hit one over the wall off him.
    At Mister JayMac’s orders, players changed in and out, coming in to hit or hustling out to field. Pretty soon, I’d started sizing up the shortstop. The number on his practice flannels, also the team’s away uniforms, was seven. I didn’t expect to move in on this guy unless he produced nothing but air currents at the plate. He could field, and throw, and think. I reckoned him at least twice my age, mid-thirties, maybe older, gray winking at his temples, cowboy creases from his nose to his lip corners. On every pitch, he crouched so low you wondered if he had the