Sloan’d started the chant. He’d got half the team to join in by waving his arms like a chorus leader. Mister JayMac let it happen, seeing it as a tension-breaker.
Turkey Sloan backed Double Dunnagin at catcher and handled most bullpen chores. Turkey didn’t mean, back then, what it does now-a brainless jerk, like a turkey that lifts its head to watch it rain and ends up drowning. Sloan’d got his nickname because he caught, and ballplayers at the turn of the century, thinking home plate looked like a serving plate at Thanksgiving, started calling it the turkey.
Anyway, Sloan had a catcher’s body build-big shoulders, big thighs, and a teddy bear’s friendly mug. He also had brains. He’d written the “Huge Peter Haystack” rhyme, among others, and the team saw him as its unofficial poet laureate. A weakness for Mother Goose doggerel and a lot of time on his hands had helped him claim the title.
I glanced around.
The only other guy not laughing was Jumbo. He squinted at us like a scowling Jehovah. You figured he’d been born during a Puritan sermon with a dirge as background. You figured if he ever told a joke, it’d start with “Inasmuch as” or something else lawyerly.
“No, Mr Hay, not now,” Mister JayMac said when everybody’d quieted down. “In”-he checked his watch-“forty minutes. Take a break.”
Players cheered, like kids let out for recess.
Hoey said, “Hey. Who’s gonna be playing who? The regulars versus the rubes?”
“With that breakdown,” Mister JayMac said, “some of yall’d have to play yourselves.”
“All right, then. Who’s pitching for who?”
Mister JayMac held us there on hooks. He didn’t want to tip his hand yet.
“Fess up, Mister JayMac,” Parris said. “What’s forty minutes gonna mean? Announce your pitchers.”
“Tell us!” a whole slew of players cried.
Mister JayMac made calming motions. “Easy. Don’t herniate yourselves. The rookies and their pals will play behind-”
“Ankers!” Hoey said.
“Astute deduction.” Mister JayMac smiled like a kindly grandpa with a bandolier full of machine-gun ammo.
“And who for us?” Hoey said. “Who for us?”
I wanted to know too. Which pitcher, after our break, would I have to step in against? Quip Parris? Nutter, the ex-big leaguer? Mariani? Or Dunnagin’s roomy, Jerry Wayne Sosebee? They all looked tough, even the Eye-talian, a 4-F punctured-eardrum.
But Mister JayMac said, “Darius Satterfield.”
“You’re kidding,” Hoey said gleefully.
“Darius Satterfield,” Mister JayMac repeated.
Hoey shadow-boxed a tornado of noseeums. “Hot dog!”
Sudikoff, doomed to play with rookies, cried, “Jesus, why you wanna throw that speedballin nigger at these new boys?”
“At you, you mean.” Even with his spikes in red Georgia clay, Hoey walked on a bed of cumuli, giddy as hell.
Showily, Mister JayMac checked his watch. “Yall’re down to thirty-six minutes. Be back at ten-fifteen. Nickel-a-mmute fine for latecomers.”
“Don’t sound so fine to me,” Quip Parris said.
“Beat it!” Mister JayMac said.
11
Most Hellbenders stumpled to the clubhouse to shoot a jet from the water cooler up their noses or to lie down on the concrete. Muscles, Curriden, and Charlie Snow, gluttons for punishment, played a game of pepper in some outfield shade.
A small crew-including Junior and Mariani, Junior’s new roomy-crossed a tree-lined street to a row of pretty shops. Junior was a rookie too, so I followed these guys. Oaks, elms, and sycamores strained a kind of surf music through their leaves. Behind the shops, you could see folksy neighborhood stuff: tool sheds, a dog house, an automobile up on blocks, a loaded clothes line, lots of victory-garden plots. One garden had a fort of bamboo staves and a web of strings for pole beans to vine around and tomato plants to lean against. The street seemed human, a harbor in Highbridge’s angry summer dazzle.
One store in the row was a ma-and-pa grocery. Over its door, a metal sign with glossy red letters as tall as shovel blades said HITCH & SHIRLEEN’S NEIGHBORLY MARKET. Two Coca-Cola ads flanked this sign, and paper scrolls in the windows advertised Fancy Pink Salmon, Dixie Crystals Pure Cane Sugar, and Campbell ’s Vegetable Soup, for cash plus ration points. Even after the other Hellbenders’d gone inside, I stood on the curb. How would I ask for what I wanted? If I pointed, I’d look like a moron or a stuck-up creep.
But, hey, I didn’t have two cents on me. Baseball togs don’t have change pockets, per se, and I’d left McKissic House outfitted for ball, not a market trip. Four guys came out with Cokes and Twinkies and sat on the curb in shifting patches of shade. Sheepishly, I spiked past them and went inside. Dobbs toasted me with his bottle.
Junior stood next to a gingerbreaded-up cash register flirting with the clerk. My eyes had to adjust. When they did, I looked around. Six double shelves ran front to back. A soft-drink cooler with ice water in the bottom and metal stalls for the bottles stood opposite the cash register. Two creaky overhead fans turned. The store had a pressed-tin ceiling with design squiggles in the stamped-out squares. The smells of damp sawdust and wrapped cold cuts hung in the air. At last, I could see to read a homemade sign nailed to a shelf near the cash register:
PLEASE!!! COUNT YOUR
CHANGE AND EXAMINE
YOUR POINT BOOK
BEFORE LEAVING WITH FOOD ITEMS.
MISTAKES
LATER!!!
Every Hellbender player who lodged at McKissic House had given his ration book (War Ration Book Two) to Kizzy, through Mister JayMac, so she could shop for the whole house. Only team members with their own places got to keep their books. So if you wanted a snack, you couldn’t buy rationed items. You had to get junk food-soda, cupcakes, and such, from companies that’d already justified their sugar allotments-and you bought it with coin, not coins and stamps. But I had no coin, and it looked like all I’d be able to do was shuffle and covet.
“Danny!” Junior Heggie called. “Danny, git yore tail over here and meet this spitfire pixie!”
I angled back to the cash register. The clerk behind it was a girl with a fox’s face, reddish-blond hair, and a costume-jewelry cluster, a kind of exploded pearl, on one ear. She wore a khaki shirt with a single set of captain’s bars on one collar and a pair of rolled-up blue jeans. She didn’t reach five feet. She looked twelve, but the earring and her hipshot stance told you twelve underestimated it. Well, maybe the earring didn’t. Girls will do a lot as preteens to make themselves look older, but wearing Papa’s shirt isn’t usually one of them, so you knew this pixie had a grudge on, a war orphan’s crow to pick. Her daddy was overseas, and don’t you forget it, buster.