“A dime!” the ballplayers all cried. “Ante up! Ante up!”
Jumbo’s yellow eyes darted. Bare feet were okay at Kizzy’s table, I guess, but wearing a cap indoors was a McKissic House no-no. Like you’d been raised in a pigsty. Jumbo yanked it off and pressed it down into his lap, out of sight. His hair was greasy black, with a shock of silver-white in the middle of his lumpy forehead and streaks of nickel-gray around his mangled-looking ears. Cripes, I thought, if you staggered into him on a pitch-black street, the fella’d give you about twelve quick heart attacks. Even the overhead lights and the ragging of his fellow Hellbenders couldn’t hide his weirdness. I was ugly, but this guy’d been put together in a meat-packing plant by clumsy blind men.
Everyone called Clerval Jumbo, including Musselwhite, and Musselwhite towered over half the guys on the team. It was scary, those two big palookas sitting there and Jumbo making Musselwhite look like a midget. I wanted to bolt for my room, but I didn’t have a room yet. About then, a line job at Deck Glider back in Tenkiller didn’t seem so bad a fate.
Although I didn’t get up and run, I had a devil of a time eating. Not Jumbo. He anted up his dime and dug in, paying no attention to the war talk, baseball gossip, and gripes about wages or family problems going on around him. He asked for, or picked off in the passing, every bowl of vegetables on the table. In fact, he wiped out the mashed potatoes, the field peas, the okra, and the squash. He drank a pitcher of water. He inhaled half a wheel of cornbread and a dozen biscuits. He cut one of Kizzy’s banana cream pies in two and knocked back half of it like it was a jigger of hooch. The last to stumble in, he finished chowing down first, then laid his greasy napkin aside and sazed cowlike and content around him.
“Please excuse me,” he said to Muscles in his bassoon of a voice.
“You’re excused.” Musselwhite gnawed on his second or third pork chop. “If there’s an excuse for you.”
Jumbo said, “Gentlemen,” then unfolded upward from his chair. He ducked out clutching his Hellbenders cap and made his way up the foyer staircase. The stairs creaked under him (but not much more than they would’ve for Junior Heggie or me); and he disappeared, leaving behind a fleet of empty bowls, his own slick china plate, and a table of half-amazed men. Not even the old hands, it hit me, had totally adjusted to either his looks or the shows he put on at mealtimes.
“The Great Thunderfoot,” Reese Curriden said.
“Hell, that’s Sudikoff,” Trapdoor Evans said. “Jumbo’s dainty next to Sudikoff. A regular twinkletoes.”
Sudikoff, a married fella, wasn’t there to defend himself. He was chief backup at first base, though: the graceful lummox who’d tried to fill in for Jumbo at practice.
I can’t recall much else about my first sit-down meal in Highbridge, not even if I got a piece of Kizzy’s banana cream pie, a treat renowned countywide. Jumbo’s performance wiped every later impression of that meal right out of my head.
7
Soon after, every Hellbender, including married fellas from the Cotton Creek district, along with our driver and unofficial team manager, Darius Satterfield, had crowded into the parlor for Mister JayMac’s big meeting.
The only person not there to begin with was Jumbo Clerval, who, like Buck Hoey had charged that afternoon, seemed to have a weird privileged-character status. Well, why not? “When does a gorilla show up for dinner?” “Whenever he damn well feels like it.”
Anyway, the parlor burst with edgy ballplayers, not counting Jumbo. Sweat ran down my sides. Every face in the room, even with a fan creaking overhead, looked greasily sequin-sprinkled. Chairs, footstools, sofa backs, even the floor-players sat or sprawled on any sort of furniture, or surface, they could find.
In wrinkled seersucker trousers and a sweated-out dress shirt, Mister JayMac had worked his way, along with Darius, to the front of the parlor. Darius set up an easel and a book of flip charts to help Mister JayMac explain the Hellbenders and the CVL to Ankers, Dobbs, Heggie, and me. It meant a tedious rehash for the old hands, but nobody squawked. Not even Buck Hoey, who perched on a sofa back to the rear, an expression on his face like, Hey, what a welcome refresher, we’re all so lucky to get the full scoop again.
“Gentlemen, hayseeds, and hangers-on,” Mister JayMac said when Darius had his flip charts ready. “As most of yall know, we play a seventy-seven-game season. Today, after a month of what passes for some of yall as top-notch baseball, we’re a shabby seven and eight, five games back o the Opelika Orphans, a crew I once wouldn’t have reckoned fit to climb a molehill without succumbing to oxygen deprivation. Muscles called them mewling pansies, and we trail them by five. So what does that make us?”
“Pansy chasers,” Buck Hoey said.
Nobody laughed. Like Jumbo, though, Buck Hoey seemed to have a special status; he could rag the boss-some-without getting sent to his room. Anyway, I felt again how hard it would be to take his job away. And if I did, the other guys would probably resent my quick success.
Mister JayMac looked around. “Where’s jumbo? Didn’t he make it back for supper?”
“Like the locust made it to Pharaoh’s Egypt,” Hoey said.
That line did get a laugh.
“So where is he now? What the hell’s he doing?”
“Conferring with Count Tallywhacker,” Hoey said. “That’s why it’s taking him, uh, so long.”
A kind of hesitant edgy laugh this time. Mister JayMac curled his lip the way you would if a whiff of spoiled poultry spilled from your Frigidaire. But he sent Euclid upstairs to fetch Jumbo from his third-floor apartment.
“So looong,” Hoey said as Euclid went by. This time, half a dozen guys whooped like world-champion morons.
“Hush,” Mister JayMac said. I realized then, or gradually over the next few days, that Mister JayMac never said, “Shut up.” I’d heard a lot of “Shut ups” in my short life, so I liked the way he said “Hush” instead.
“Any of yall who’ve been dogging it’d better look sharp,” he said. “We’re taking on some young fellas who can play. I’ve seen em. This isn’t hearsay, but observed fact.”
“High school wonders,” Buck Hoey said.
“Perhaps,” Mister JayMac said. “But I don’t like being tied for fourth place in this league, and I won’t allow us to stay in fourth if good alternatives to mediocrity present themselves. Maybe they already have.”
Euclid came into the parlor ahead of Jumbo Clerval, who, by the looks of him, had “dressed” for the meeting. He wore a humongous pair of wingtip Florsheims, a pair of patched gray pants, and a shiny black frock coat. Euclid played tug to Jumbo’s ocean liner and, as soon as he got the big man among us, tooted on out of the room. Jumbo’s head, capless now, spiked up almost to the picture molding. He slouched against the wall, straight across the doorway from Buck Hoey on the broken-backed sofa. It looked as if Mister JayMac might say something to him, bawl him out even, but he didn’t. He nodded at us four rookies.