“If we’re down eight or nine by Friday night, that last series won’t mean mouse-scat, Mr Musselwhite.”
“Nosir, I guess not.” Everybody sat quiet while we mulled the crucialness of our next few games-crunch time, today’s sports hacks’d call it. Then Muscles said, “We’re sure going to miss Charlie, Mister JayMac.”
“If you’re alibing in advance, you’d better-”
“I try not to alibi,” Muscles said, barb-sharp. “Alibi or no alibi, we’re going to miss Charlie a lot.”
“We’ve got a roster spot to fill,” Dunnagin said. “We can’t play our next dozen or so games with nineteen guys when LaGrange and everybody else have twenty.”
“I’m working on that.” Mister JayMac banged through the door into the kitchen. The rest of us went gratefully back to eating, and Kizzy came in with three hot peach pies on a big lacquered dowel rack.
We beat Quitman again. Henry hit two glowing, cometlike homers, but I had a measly single in five plate appearances and didn’t score a run.
That night, Henry heard me crying and sat up. “You did well, Daniel. Not once did you strike out. The Hellbenders won. No need for tears.”
“S nothing to do with the d-d-damned game.”
“Then what provokes this despondency? Mr Snow’s death? Mr Satterfield’s departure? Euclid’s bereavement?”
Who wouldn’t’ve been depressed? I sure had causes enough.
“Tell me,” Henry prompted.
“My f-f-father,” I said. And that was so. Partly so, anyway. Maybe more than partly.
48
Next morning, early, I sloughed downstairs and sat in a rocker on the porch facing Angus Road-to take the air and clear the dustbunnies out of my head. The lawn lay fresh-mown and dewy. A gray catbird tiptoed over the clippings looking for crickets, grubs, earthworms. I’d watched it for maybe ten minutes, occasional jays or mockingbirds swooping down to inspect the lawn too, when a figure on a bicycle came through the gate and pedaled up the drive towards McKissic House.
The rider wore a split-seam khaki skirt, bobby sox, and a pair of black and white shoes that kids after the war called squad cars. She stood off her seat to get more traction, and her bike squeaked and clattered, swaying from side to side like a boat in a heavy chop. The rider on that contraption was Phoebe. She dropped her bike like a hot rivet and bounded up the porch steps.
“Danny, you seen Miss LaRaina?”
The question-at six-thirty in the morning, even a Saturday morning-seemed damned abrupt.
“My mother,” she added.
I’d known what she meant, I just hadn’t expected to speak to anyone so early. I shook my head.
“Does that mean you aint seen her or you don’t think she’s here or you jes don’t plan to talk to me?”
“I haven’t s-seen her.”
“Ya think she’s here?”
“I don’t know.”
“Listen. She hadn’t come home by the time I went to bed last night, and she wasn’t to home this morning either. Her bed leaves me clueless cause she hardly ever makes it anyways.”
The tic under Phoebe’s bloodshot eye took me aback.
“Think she took the starch out of Musselwhite last night? Or Curriden? Or whoever the hell happened to ask her home?”
“I don’t know.”
Phoebe paced the high concrete. I’d seen her upset before, but never this unhinged. She stopped, hands on hips.
“Well, should I go in there yelling ‘Mama, oh Mama, please come home’?”
“I don’t know. You’d probably sc-scare up a few guys in their sk-skivvies.”
“Oh joy. Smelly men in their dingy unmentionables.”
“We all sh-shower, Phoebe.”
Phoebe cocked her head funny. “You didn’t talk to me at Mr Snow’s funeral-not even a piddlin ‘Hi!’ ”
“I nodded at you. It was a f-funeral, not a ice-cream social.”
“You know, you were a damn sight sweeter when you couldn’t talk-pliter, more charmin.”
“Phieuw!”
Phoebe ignored my disgust. “So you don’t think it’d do for me to stomp upstairs calling for my mama?”
“Nome, I don’t.”
Suddenly-really suddenly-Phoebe knelt in front of me and gripped my thighs with her small, tough-looking hands. “Take me off from here, Danny. Carry me home.”
So I did. I pedaled that doddery bike with Phoebe perched shakily on its handlebars, her dress yanked up to her sunny red knees. Not once in the whole trip did I put my fanny to the bike’s liver-shaped and liver-tinted seat cushion, but we never spilled, and Phoebe invited me in for a Co-Cola.
“No thanks. I haven’t had br-breakfast.” I was nervous and wanted to get back.
“Spose I said a cherry Coke, Danny? Would a cherry Coke make you forgit Kizzy’s cantaloupes n biscuits?”
Somehow, coaxed along, I wound up in the living room of the Pharrams’ boxy little rental house. I knew-as well as, if not better than, Phoebe did herself-she was playing me like a gill-snagged trout, but neither of us knew when she’d yanked or where I’d land. We looked at each other a minute.
Then, like a kid at a pool getting rid of her coverup, Phoebe took off her blouse, showing me a bra-a brassiere!-more like a thin bandage than the double-barrelled slingshot I’d’ve expected. She looked frail, wounded almost, in that bandanna, sort of like the piper kid in that famous painting of a Revolutionary War fife-and-drum group. Then Phoebe’s hands fidgeted behind her back, and the bandage fell away. At least three guys on the Hellbenders-Fanning, Sudikoff, and Hay-had bigger bosoms than Phoebe, but the sight of hers-pear-shaped and jaunty-awed me the way a sunset would a man healed late in life of blindness.
Phoebe took my hand and led me to her bedroom, where her bed, unlike her mama’s, had a made-up spread and a pretty folded quilt across its foot. She turned the spread all the way back, the pears on her chest hardly growing even when she leaned over to turn it. But how blessed I felt looking at em.
“Now you,” Phoebe said, facing me straight on.
“What do you w-want to d-d-do?”
“Jes what they do at The Wing n Thigh.” She thought for a moment. “With lusty passion.”
“We’re not m-married. And I thought you wanted a s-s-sojer to, uh, d-do you first.”
“Married! I bet most human sex’s got zero to do with that n not much with love. A place like The Wing n Thigh tells me so. And so does my ever-lovin mama, thout sayin a word.” Phoebe’s voice softened. “I care for you, boy. S no fault of yores you aint a sojer. Take off yore shirt.”