“Get us through this inning alive,” Sergeant Jacks says to Scott as he hands the ball over, looking him hard in the eye. “You know what I mean.”
The boy, Royal is his name, gives him a big grin. “Sure thing, Sergeant.”
He takes his time getting ready, strolling over to say something to Corporal Ponder at third base and giving him his glove. Ponder trots to the bench, whispers something to the one they call Mudfish, and returns with a different one. The crowd, impatient, are shouting for action as Scott puts this one on. He winks to the second lieutenant.
“My pitching glove,” he says.
He asks for a couple warm-up throws then, which brings a new howl of protest from the white side, and proceeds to out-coon the batter, windmilling his arm in an elaborate windup, catching the return throws behind his back like the boys do when they’re just fooling among themselves. The white folks aren’t sure what to make of it, and neither is his own side, but the burned-cork boy looks a little embarrassed now, waiting to take his turn.
“Batter up!” calls the second lieutenant. Jacks crouches and pounds his glove.
Scott rears back and throws hard overhand — only he doesn’t let go of the ball, instead wheeling off the mound and striding over to the bench, the 12th men and the locals catcalling again as he gets his original glove back from Mudfish.
“Sorry, sir,” he calls to the umpire as he takes the mound again. “Just didn’t feel right.”
The minstrel boy digs in, looking pissed off to have the attention of the crowd pulled away from his antics.
“You aint gonna need a glove if you’ll throw me that thing,” he calls. “You gonna need binoculars to follow where it’s goin!”
“Comin right up,” smiles Scott, and goes into his windmilling wind-up.
The pitch he lobs in is so fat Jacks could run to the sidelines, grab a bat, and still get to the plate in time to hit it. The white boy in the blackface takes a mighty swing, connecting with it square over the plate — but instead of a crack of wood there is a heavy, soggy THOOMP!, the ball flying apart into a hundred little bits that spray outward like a fireworks explosion. Jacks is hit on the shoulder with a piece of it, a wet scrap of orange, the peel made white with lime from the basepaths.
People are stunned at first, minds taking a moment to grasp the phenomenon. Then the whole 25th falls out laughing, whacking each other on the back and miming the batter’s dumbfounded reaction. Even a few of the white folks join in, the white ladies clapping their little gloved hands with delight. The second lieutenant, though, is not smiling as he steps to the mound.
“Let’s cut out the nigger show and play ball.”
“Nigger show is at the plate, sir,” Scott tells him, nodding toward the batter, who is looking sheepish and still picking flecks of orange off his front.
“You gonna get serious,” says the officer, “or do I call a forfeit?”
“Yes, sir.” Corporal Ponder tosses Scott the real ball. “I will seriously strike this coon out.”
And proceeds to put the side down with only nine pitches — in-shoots and drop-offs, fast balls that seem to hop at the last moment and a big roundhouse curve that starts out heading halfway between home and third before hooking back over the heart of the plate, the regiment whooping louder after every strike. The last man to whiff slams his bat down in frustration and Jacks hurries to join Scott as they leave the field.
“Don’t smile, don’t wave your hat,” he says. “Just walk off.”
Of course Scott is the first batter up to begin the ninth. The pitcher gives him a long look and then throws a steaming fastball into his ribs. There is a sound like the orange exploding and Scott drops to his knees and then it is very quiet again.
If this was two white teams or two colored teams it would just be base ball, part of the game, and if there was a fight with nobody sent to the hospital they’d all meet after at the canteen to compare bruises over beer and pretzels. But instead Jacks and Mingo Sanders have to grab Cooper to keep him from running across the field and the officers are out of the bleachers waving their arms to keep the regiments apart and the crackers are asking Scott if he thinks he’s so damn smart now and when the whistles start blowing Jacks thinks it’s the provost guard come to make some arrests. But there is Colonel Daggett with a quartet of majors around him, marching up onto the mound, and in a flash the junior officers and noncoms have their people in formation, base-ball uniforms scattered among the blue, the 25th formed on the third-base side of the field and the 12th on the first, and Daggett waits till even the civilians are on their feet and silent before he speaks.
“I’ve just received a wire from Washington,” he says, “and it applies to both regiments present. We have orders to break camp, pending transport to Tampa. The Congress has voted and it is on, gentlemen.”
A cheer erupts on both sides of the field. Hats fill the air. The ladies in the bleachers spin their parasols in excitement.
The game has begun.
THE YELLOW KID
WAR! is the one word the Yellow Kid can read. The rags have been hustling the WAR! for months, and now here is Specs passing it out in the day’s first special edition behind the Journal building. Specs has got an ink smudge on one of the lenses of his cheaters, ink all over his hands.
“By the time you little bastids unload this batch,” he says, “we’ll be ready with another extra.”
The Yellow Kid elbows in, slaps down a quarter’s worth of pennies and Specs slams a bundle of fifty against his chest, nearly knocking him over.
“Watch it, four-eyes!”
“Yer lucky I let you have em, you little Chiney piece a shit.”
Just because there is WAR! doesn’t mean their daily battle with the circulation gink is off.
“He aint Chiney yella,” explains Ikey for the hundredth time as he grabs his bundle, “he’s sick yella.”
“Yer both a friggin disease. Get outta here and sell those papers.”
They run around the building, shouting “WAR! Congress declares WAR!” and selling a few on their way.
“The Chief gotta be shittin himself,” says Ikey, pausing on the corner of William Street to adjust his load. They’ve seen him arriving late at night a couple times, Boy Willie himself pulling up in his hack with the white horse and his two sweet babies who look like the Riccadonna Sisters in the Hogan’s Alley comic he stole from the World, one on either side, fresh from some uptown theater or lobster palace. Big smooth-faced character in his glad rags. As far as they can figure he runs the dogwatch shift at his Journal dressed just like that, still in his silk top hat and swallow-tail coat. He always calls hello but never throws any mazuma their way.
“Willie been peddlin this yarn hard all year,” says Ikey. “Gonna be bigger than Corbett and Jeffries!”
They step out into Newspaper Row and the Yellow Kid takes the north side. They are at the center of the whole friggin works here. There is the tallest building, the World with its gold dome towering above, the glass boxes of the Electro Monogram out front swiveling to tell the folks that it is WAR! with the Tryon Building behind where the Staats Zeitung used to roll and the Sentinel and the mick Freeman’s Journal still do and then the Tribune Building with its clock tower showing that it’s nearly noon, the Yellow Kid better with the numbers and the hands of time than with letters, then the Times and the Sun behind it on Nassau, all of them flying their own flags along with the Stars and Stripes or even hoisting some kind of Cuban banner like Boy Willie’s paper, and then there’s the construction on the Park Row Building, already got the four giant Amazons with their giant stone melons up front and just across Ann Street the St. Paul Building is racing it story by story, both of them sposed to top the World by a good eighty feet when they’re done say the birds who bring the tours past and “WAR!” cries the Yellow Kid, waving a rag to display the scarehead, “Congress Declares WAR!” stepping over into the park in front of City Hall, geezers snatching papers and flipping him their pennies on the way in and out of the building. The Kid tries the can’t-find-change-for-a-nickel dodge on one old whitehair with a pair of muttonchops halfway out to his shoulders but the geezer is wise to it and waits with his palm out, the cheap bastid.