Now Darius came over, diamonds winking in the black lamb’s wool of his hair, his coffee-colored skin aglow. “Yall go git on the bus. Sit toards the back. The other mens don’t like rookies crowding em.”
“Who sez?” Ankers said to Darius.
“Ast em,” Darius said. “Be my guest. But ast em on the bus, or yall might have to foot it to Mister JayMac’s.”
Dobbs and Heggie didn’t grumble, but Ankers flicked Darius a lightning storm with his eyes.
On the bus, these guys sat a row or two in front of Euclid, now reading a Plastic Man comic, but I plonked down next to him, not out of any Eleanor Roosevelt fondness for black folk, but because he had my duffel. He paid me no mind, poring over his comic like it was a book of secret codes.
In about twenty minutes, ballplayers started straggling out and climbing aboard, including Darius. Mister JayMac swung up into the seat back of Darius’s. None of his players had tried to sit in it, his reserved spot. They always scattered about here and there, flopping like wore-out bird dogs. Number Seven, the shortstop, came laddering down the aisle and dropped into the long rear seat. He stretched his arms along its back and goggled around.
“Hey, Darius,” he said, “who’re these handsome cats?” He meant the three new Georgia boys.
“I disremember their names, Mr Hoey. Course I’m jes a driver, not a traveling secretary.”
“Oh now, Darius,” the shortstop said, “you’re more n a driver, you’re a Hellbender institution.”
Hands on the wheel, Darius didn’t seem to want any of Hoey’s soft soap and told him so by clamming up. Of all the men who’d practiced that morning, he was the only one still wearing the clothes he’d worked out in. The top of his head showed in the big rectangular mirror just inside the divided windshield, his hair asparkle with sweat.
Mister JayMac grabbed the pole of the driver’s cage and pulled himself up. He sported a string tie and a white linen coat. If we didn’t get rolling soon, his ballplayers would start slinging off enough BTUs to give every last joe aboard a drop-dead case of heat prostration.
“Don’t yall worry who thesere boys are,” he said. “Worry about how piss-poor yall played today.” He paused, more for effect than from tiredness. “I could drum up a half dozen 4-Fs in a TB ward who’d look sharper than yall did this morning. So think, gentlemen, on your many personal deficiencies.”
You could hear Euclid turning comic-book pages.
“Understand?” Mister JayMac said.
“Yessir!” nearly everyone on the Bomber said, like recruits out to Camp Penticuff.
“Meeting in the parlor this evening right after supper,” Mister JayMac said. “I want everybody there. Understood?”
“Everybody?” the infielder named Hoey said. “Even Jumbo?”
“I said everybody.”
“So why wasn’t Jumbo at practice, sir?” Number Seven said. “We could’ve used him at first. His subs made him look like Nijinski. Compared to those galoots, he is Nijinski.”
“Take a leap, Buck!” Norm Sudikoff shouted.
“Jumbo Hank Clerval had some personal business in Alabama to attend to,” Mister JayMac said. “He’ll be at our meeting tonight, Mr Hoey, never you fear.”
Buck Hoey, the shortstop, just wouldn’t let up: “ Alabama? How’d Jumbo get to Alabama?”
“He borrowed my car,” Mister JayMac said,
“Your Caddy?” Hoey said. “How’d Jumbo get to be such a privileged character? Going four for four gainst Marble Springs? Shit-a-load, sir, I once hit for the cycle gainst those palookas, and you never loaned me a car. What’s Jumbo got anyway? Proof of some kinda draft-board hanky-panky?”
The other men on the Brown Bomber ducked; they cowered in their places. The only soul among us not drawn gut-tight with shock and worry, except maybe Hoey, was Euclid. He was paging through Plastic Man for maybe the twentieth time.
“Let it go, Mr Hoey,” Mister JayMac said.
“Jesus,” Hoey started. “You’d think the guy was-”
“Let it go.”
Hoey let it go. Didn’t seem too trodden upon, though. He seemed happy. Mister JayMac sat down. Darius put the bus in gear, and we bumped out of the parking lot onto a boulevard lined with water oaks. Hoey caught my eye and waved at all the browbeaten ballplayers in front of us.
“Ever see such a bunch of pantywaists?” he asked.
I could only look at him. Hoey was the stud I’d have to beat out to become a regular. Worse luck, he was lean, tough, and not to be messed with.
“S matter with you, kid? Cat got your tongue?”
6
Darius drove us to McKissic House, the team boardinghouse where Mister JayMac, for part of everyone’s monthly salary, put up all the single men on his team. In McKissic House, this entire summer, I’d eat my meals and spend my nights when the Hellbenders didn’t have an away game.
Cripes, I thought when our bus growled up the semicircular drive. How great, not to have to wear down my shoe leather looking for a place to rent-especially with Camp Penticuff so close and wartime housing so tight that roomers doubling up with relatives or friends matter-of-factly read the obits to get a jump on likely vacancies.
Because Mister JayMac owned a dozen or more old mill houses in the Cotton Creek area of Highbridge, he’d taken that worry off all his players’ shoulders. Men with wives and kids in town, I learned later, rented these tarboxes from Mister JayMac for at least six months, April through September, his minimum lease. In October, he’d offer his vacant houses to military transients, but with the stipulation they clear out at the end of March so married Hellbenders could reclaim the premises in time for the new season. In a military town with beaucoups of demand for rental properties, he had a high-handed marketing approach, maybe even a greedy-seeming one, but Mister JayMac didn’t care about the money he could make-he could do that renting to either GIs or players-but about the welfare of his immediate employees during each CVL season. So most of us looked at Mister JayMac not as a robber baron but as our very own Daddy Warbucks.
Only two-thirds of the Hellbenders made the trip all the way from McKissic Field to McKissic House. Darius drove first to the Cotton Creek neighborhood, where six men rented houses, and dropped them off. Buck Hoey, the wiseguy shortstop who’d bellyached about the first baseman who hadn’t come to practice, hopped down last, near a blue frame house with more shrubs and a prettier paint job than any house around it. When Hoey got off, I relaxed a bit.
As for McKissic House, it hunkered back from Angus Road, on a woodsy stand of acreage on Highbridge’s southeastern corner, floating among the magnolias and the leafy pecan trees like a man-of-war. It had cupolas, turrets, gables, a widow’s walk, and a pair of outside staircases for fire escapes. It wasn’t Tara, though: no columns. Also, Mister JayMac’s ancestors had built it after, not before, the War Between the States.