“Good,” Mister JayMac said. “Curfew tonight’s one A.M. No, to hell with that. Be in bed by midnight and sleep late tomorrow.” He left.
Oh yeah. In that night’s game, Jumbo didn’t have a hit, but he’d sucked up every chance at first smarter than a Hoover and played his monster heart out. So if Buck Hoey was ammonia under our noses, Jumbo was honeysuckle and mint.
16
That night-three or four in the morning-I had a powerful urge to pee. Kizzy’d set metal pitchers of lemonade all over the parlor after our game, and I’d drunk gallons of it. I’d sweated away a lot, but about a quart still ached for release, so I got up, tiptoed past Jumbo’s bed, and bumbled down the hall to the third-floor John. Weird thing: When I got there, light showed in the cracks around the door, the knob wouldn’t turn, and I could hear a rough drizzle on tin.
It wasn’t Jumbo. He’d been in bed, a forbidding ridge of lumps and gulleys wheezing dreamily. Somebody from downstairs had come upstairs. Why? Had Sosebee organized a crap shoot up here? It teed me off. Where’d this Hellbender palooka get off hijacking our shower?
My bladder was a pulled-pin bomblet. I needed relief. I didn’t have time for the jerk in the shower to finish up, towel down, and let me in. I’d flood the hall first. I looked for alternatives: open windows, flower pots, umbrella stands. But nothing presented itself. I had just one option, to creep downstairs and check out the bathroom on Dunnagin, Junior, and everybody else’s floor. So down I went. Each step on that narrow staircase threatened to trigger me. If I went off, I’d turn the steps into a waterfall and drown my teammates in their beds-everyone in McKissic House but Jumbo and the skinnydipper in our shower.
I kept my bladder dammed and reached the second floor. Nobody was in its bathroom. Nobody. I dashed in and drained off my pain. My physical pain. It still irked me some unknown soul had stolen our bathroom. The one down here had four times the square footage and more soap and toilet paper. Why would another lodger sneak upstairs to ours?
For privacy, maybe. Somebody on the second floor didn’t want spectators while he showered.
I started back upstairs. As I groped my way up, somebody else groped down, and I froze at the bottom of the chute. The person coming down looked suspiciously-deliciously-like a woman. By the glow of an electric sconce on the wall, I could see that although the woman had some age on her-late thirties, early forties-she was a looker, maybe even something of a vamp.
She had on a towel. Anyway, she sort of had it on.
Obviously, she hadn’t expected to meet anyone. She didn’t scram, though. She cockedher head and smiled, her strawberry hair pulled back from her forehead and swept over her shoulder in a damp strand. She clutched that strand and kept her towel from slipping with the same hand, her left. I know it was her left because she had a wedding band on it.
“Mr Boles-our brand-new whangdoodle shortstop.”
My shorts covered more than a bathing suit would’ve, but I blushed. If I’d rubbed myself with horse liniment, I couldn’t have felt any hotter or glowed any brighter.
“Relax, kiddo. I’ll let you by.” The woman laughed. “Two ships passing in a tight.” She pressed herself, towel and all, against the wall. “Climb on past, handsome.”
I climbed with my head down. Shadows moved around us, but the amber sconce gave the woman’s shins, arms, and breastbone the gleam of knife blades. Head high, I’d’ve stared straight up her towel into the valley of the shadow. As I climbed, I quaked. Stand me, any day, in the batter’s box against a guy with a ninety-miles-per-hour speedball.
On the very same step as the woman, I brushed her hand and something damp landed on my instep. Her towel had fallen. I reached down to get it. My brain had shut off. My bumpkimsh chivalric instincts had kicked in. When I straightened again, I was gazing on her nakedness, breathing the scented glycerin of Palmolive. I froze. I got dizzy. I felt like a statue on a revolving lazy Susan.
“Thanks.” She didn’t hurry to rewrap. “Predate it.”
I shut my eyes and dropped to my knees. In a darkness of my own concoction, I walked on them to the top of the stairs. When I got there and nerved up to look back down, the woman’d started moving again. The towel wrapped her from midback to just below the pretty half moons of her fanny. I peeked. When she reached the second floor and angled out of sight, I crept back down and peeked again. She sashayed to a room at the far end of the hall and tapped on the door. Curriden opened it and pulled her inside.
Skinny Dobbs roomed with Curriden. Did this woman whore for a living? Had Curriden and Skinny hired her for an orgy? Did an early morning of sweaty sex qualify as an orgy if more than two folks got in on it? Hold it. Maybe Curriden and the woman were secretly married. Bingo. The woman’d worn a ring. She looked about the right age to be Curriden’s old lady. But if so, why didn’t they live in Cotton Creek like all the other married Hellbender couples?
As I watched, the woman came out of Curriden’s room wearing a polka-dot white-on-red dress and a big wheel-brimmed hat with ribbons. She had a straw handbag. She toted her high heels by their straps. She ran on her toes to the other staircase and tripped down its steps. She’d vamoosed before I could draw any conclusions except she was stunning and really knew how to wear clothes. (She also knew how not to wear them.) And she knew I played a “whangdoodle shortstop.” That gave me pause-not that she liked my play, but the phrase itself.
I didn’t move. Mostly, I didn’t move. An old friend found the door of my shorts and poked his head through for a one-eyed look around. I was about to ease my old pal when Skinny Dobbs came up the main staircase shuffling like a drunk. He crossed to his and Curriden’s room. He didn’t have a hangover, he just hadn’t slept much. My old pal collapsed in wrinkles. On her way out, Curriden’s wife had probably told Dobbs, sleeping on a parlor sofa, he could slink back to his room-her and Reese’s conjugal visit was over.
I crept back upstairs, with a side trip to the steamed-up John, and sacked out again. Didn’t get much shuteye, though. I kept seeing that lady jaybird-nude on the stairs.
The CVL, I learned, had started playing Sunday games in its very first season. People called Dixie the Bible Belt. Even at midweek, street preachers in Highbridge could work up a powerful rant and a healthy amening crowd. Nobody opposed Sunday baseball, though. It took place after church and ranked right up there with God, flag, motherhood, and hunting.
Fadeaway Ankers started the final game of our series against Lanett-on either two or three days’ rest, depending on whether you figured it like Fadeaway or Mister JayMac. During his warm-ups, he grinned and preened and threw screaming BBs, like he enjoyed being out there, which, I guess, he did. He wanted his first Linenmaker hitter bad as a starveling bluetick wants its next soup bone. And he struck him out.
Mister JayMac had tapped me, Junior, and Skinny to start too. Unofficially, it was Rookies’ Day. Officially, it was War Bonds Day.