That drilled a nerve with me. If I booted a chance, or fanned with runners in scoring position, Hoey’d most likely have his job back tomorrow.
“So whatn hell we sposed to do!” Evans asked Darius.
“How bout rest?” Darius said. “Seems logical to me.”
“The hell with that,” Hoey said.
“Well, capn, Mister JayMac wants you to coach first.”
Vito Mariani was scheduled to pitch. “Buck up, Buck. I’ll set em down so fast you won’t have enough bench time to rub the nap off your pants.”
Darius left. Hoey stared at the floor. Knowles, the deposed second baseman, went over to Junior and put a hand on his shoulder.
“Tear em up, kid,” he said.
The game wasn’t a laugher, but the Linenmakers never really got close either. Kitchen Fats for Victory Night followed Friday’s Scrap Metal Collection Night, and although nobody got in free for bringing in hamburger grease or bacon drippings, Milt Frye and three usherettes saw to it every fan who turned in a can of solidified fat got his or her name put in a drum for a drawing during the seventh-inning stretch. Top prize was a weekend for two in Atlanta, with a room at the Ponce de Leon Hotel. Anyway, the drawing seemed to mean as much to the civilians in the stands as the ball game did.
You could smell the rancid kitchen fats everyone’d brought in. The idea was that munitions factories would melt down the drippings to extract their glycerin, then use it to make bombs or howitzer shells. Kitchen Fats for Victory. After the war, though, I heard we’d used it to make soap. Dirty dogfaces have low morale, and the services needed our kitchen fats for soap. But asking civilians to turn in fats for soap didn’t sound romantic. Or sanitary. So the government told the public our used grease would go to make devices for blowing people up, and wham! the home front got with the program.
Anyway, I went three for four. A squib behind second base was my first safe bingle in money ball. A row of GIs gave me a standing O-out of sheer relief the Hellbenders wouldn’t stink worse than the stadium did, like we had last night. They loved it I could put wood on the ball.
Hoey, coaching first, sauntered over to me as I returned to the bag after making my turn. The center fielder’d just faked a throw behind me, a threat I hadn’t much credited.
“Don’t let the cheers go to your head. Those guys’d cheer a little old lady tripping on a popcorn box.”
I watched Charlie Snow, a super hitter, settle in and tap his spikes with a Louisville Slugger he’d lathed into the shape of a skinny champagne bottle.
“Me, I’d be ashamed to reach base with a dying gull like the one you goofy-bunted out there,” Hoey said.
I shrugged. My batting average was a perfect thousand-at least for now.
“Watch O’Connor’s pick-off move. Get tagged out here and you might as well’ve gone down swinging.”
“Back in the coach’s box,” the umpire Happy Polidori told Hoey, “and leave the poor kid be.”
“Up yours, Polidori. It’s my job to give advice to kids with marshmallows for brains.”
“Move it,” Polidori said. “Your body, not your mouth.”
With no go-ahead from anyone, I stole second on O’Connor’s first pitch. The GIs came to their feet, whooping. Lanett’s catcher didn’t even try to throw me out. I lifted a hand to Hoey-to show him I hadn’t hurt myself, not to mock him-but he kicked up a cloud of red dirt, p.o.’d.
Snow hit a long single to right. I came home. The whole rest of the game went like that. We ended up winning eight to three-no laugher, as I say, but no knuckle-whitener either. My other two hits were a bunt toward first and a high bounder off the pitcher’s rubber. Hoey badmouthed them too, calling them luck, saying the next time I went to church I should drop a C-note in the plate. It almost, not quite, relieved me when the Linenmaker right fielder ran down my longest clout of the day and webbed it against the Belk-Gallant sign for the game’s second-to-last out.
Hoey applauded this catch. He liked seeing me robbed of a four-for-four outing on a ball I’d flat-out creamed.
At shortstop, though, I did manage a perfect day. Despite his earlier brag, Mariani didn’t pitch well. Junior and I consistently got him out of jams by turning double plays or knocking down potential RBI rollers. On our double plays, we clicked like castenets.
“For the fourth time today,” Milt Frye told us all, “your double-play combo was Boles-to-Heggie-to-Clerval, tying a team record set back in ’39.”
Whistles, applause, foot-stomping. Mrs Atwill swung into an up-tempo version of “I Get a Kick Out of You.”
“Danny Boles hails from Tenkiller, Oklahoma,” Frye said. Then, stretching it: “Boy’s got a few quarts of Cherokee blood, making him the first uprooted Injun to find his way back South on the Trail of Cheers.” Frye said Junior Heggie, a Georgia boy from Valdosta, deserved some applause too, and Hoey’s spit probably turned to battery acid in his mouth.
After the game, a scratchy recording of the National Anthem blasted through the speakers. I stood on our dugout’s top step with my cap over my heart listening to the boozy chorusing of our remaining fans. Mister JayMac had to order the field lamps snuffed to get them to leave.
In the clubhouse, Lamar Knowles told Junior and me if we kept it up, Boles-to-Heggie-to-Clerval would become as famous in the CVL as Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance was in the bigs. He wasn’t kissing tail either-he meant it. Junior’d taken his starting job, and Knowles could’ve moped or cried beginner’s luck, but he didn’t. My respect for him hitched right up the pole.
After we’d showered, Mister JayMac came in and said the most important thing about the evening’s game wasn’t breaking in some jittery rookies or tying the old club double-play mark, but that for the first time since our season opener on May the 7th, the Hellbenders had a winning record.
“Tonight, gentlemen, we stand nine and eight. That’s good: a winning percentage of about.530. But it won’t take this or any other pennant. Beat these loom-operating yokels one more time, tomorrow, and we’ll head down to Quitman on Wednesday to pluck the Mockingbirds three out of three. Opelika lost again tonight, and LaGrange is in another extra-innings brawl with Cottonton.
“Keep scratching and clawing, gentlemen. By the end of August, we should be at the king-rooster top of the whole CVL cock pile.”
Everybody slapped backs and hurrahed.
Hoey said, “Who starts at short tomorrow?”
That turned our jazz-band parade through an empty swimming pool into echoey silence.
Mister JayMac said, “Given our performance in our past two games, who do you think should start tomorrow?”
“Given my performance over the past sixteen games, I don’t think that’s a fair question. Sir.”
“Perhaps we should vote on our lineups every day. Ask team members to judge the fairness of my decrees.”
Hoey shut up. He could win this debate only with a pistol or a hypnotist’s help. Everyone but Evans, Sloan, and a couple of others wanted him to clam up. He’d turned our victory party into a nitpicky postmortem.