Up to a point, anyway.
Hoey’s living arrangements made it hard to read his changing feelings about me. He had a wife, a family, a house of his own. At our workouts he gave me tips-how to set up against certain hitters, how to flip the ball to Junior to speed his crossover pivot on double plays, how to drag bunt for a safety instead of just a sacrifice. He didn’t teach me like a man voluntarily passing on these skills-more like somebody with six months to live tying a ribbon round his life. Did he badmouth me at home? His kids didn’t act like he did. They didn’t blink at me like I was a messy roadkill, a polecat, say, or an armadillo.
Back from that first road trip, I sat down to write Mama a letter and to send her some money. (Jumbo was reading.) I ought to’ve written her sooner, but how could I say a soldier’d buggered me and I’d gone dummy again? Long-distance calls were out (Uncle Sam asked you to keep the lines open for servicemen and emergency messages), and I didn’t relish trying to explain my roomy was an ogre of a pacifist.
My first letter home:
Dear Mama,
Sorry not to write before now but Im fine. You know that already I think. If my train had recked or somebody had killed me in ball practice by mistake youdve got a telegram saying I was dead. I know you havent. People here seem nice, more or less. My roomate reads alot. Im batting over 500 and starting nearlybout every game. Hows work? Use this money for yourself. Next time I write Ill send more.
Love, Danny
I’d already had three letters from Mama, one mailed the day I left Tenkiller. It came the day we squeaked by Lanett, three to two. Everyone boarding in McKissic House got mail in care of its Angus Road address, but Miss Giselle sorted through it and slipped the right letters into the right cubby-holes at our post-office wall in the foyer. Mama’s letters-she never wrote more than a page-made me homesick and kept me going at the same time. I sent her clippings, to make up for the fact my notes never ran longer than a Listenne label.
One of Mama’s letters-I still have them-complained about a recent act of Congress:
Those co-kniving gasbags in Washington have done come up with a legal crime called PAY AS YOU GO. They ask your boss to figure about how much you would owe in taxes at the end of a year, and they order him to hold back enough each month to cover it. It’ll tell in our paychecks, this BILL will. Money I used to get won’t be there any more. They say its to keep us from feeling poleaxt come taxing time, but why let these THIEVES IN SUITS fiddle with our pay, just to keep us working fokes “ahead of the game”? It’s butt-in-skee, if you ask me, uppity and dictatorlike. Watch out, Danny, their going to get you to. Old FDR turns redder every year. By the time this DAMN WAR ends, look for a Hammer & Cycle right in the middle of the Stars & Stripes.
In mid-June, we had a four-day layoff between our win over the Seminoles in Marble Springs and our first home game with the Eufaula Mudcats on Friday. A part of one of those days we used to travel, but the other three, Tuesday through Thursday, felt like holidays. Practice in the A.M.’s at McKissic Field, then drowsy hot afternoons and radio-filled evenings.
Junior taught me to play poker, and he, Fadeaway, Skinny, and I would lock up in cutthroat five-card stud, with piles of buttons (supplied by Kizzy) for chips and pitchers of lemonade for refreshment (likewise). If a game seemed about to turn into a fistfight, Miss Giselle’d threaten us with fines or room arrest. She seldom had to threaten twice. Once, though, Skinny accused Fadeaway of palming an ace and left the table to find a bat to rehabilitate Fadeaway with. Miss Giselle grabbed Skinny on his way back into the parlor, wrassled the bat away from him, and sent him upstairs.
Several of the older Hellbenders worked at defense jobs on a part-time basis, punching in from one to three times a week in the early afternoons of days we didn’t have games or mandatory team meetings. They’d pull eight-hour second shifts and get back to their homes or to McKissic House around midnight, limp as boiled asparagus and almost as pale. Moonlighters included Muscles, Curriden, Hay, Nutter, Sudikoff, and Dunnagin. They had special arrangements with either the local torpedo factory, Foremost Forge, or our duck-board manufacturer, Highbridge Box & Crate. Mister JayMac pulled a double handful of strings for them-not to keep them out of the draft, as Ira Crawford had accused, but to find them war work that didn’t interfere with their ballplaying.
Anyway, when I learned about these set-your-own-hours defense jobs, I understood why nobody at Monday morning’s Rolling Assizes had seconded Sosebee’s charge Jumbo’d received special treatment. Every Hellbender got special treatment. Some looked a little more equal than others in getting it, but hardly anybody had to poach his own eggs-if you know what I mean. Players in the bigs and even a few blue-chip Negro stars might make more money than we did, but Highbridge had earned itself a dead-on nickname: Sittin’ Pretty City.
It did surprise me nobody’d reraised the point about Mister JayMac’s loaning Jumbo his Caddy. Loaning a car was personal-in a way flexing your long-term political clout could never be. Loaning your car meant you trusted the loanee. If he didn’t qualify for gas stamps, you even had to bend or play peekaboo with the law.
On Thursday, Jumbo borrowed Mister JayMac’s Cadillac again, and Mister JayMac lent it to him. At two in the afternoon, the Caddy’s keys changed hands in the parlor, just as Fadeaway, Junior, Skinny, and I were about to start another poker marathon.
“Home before dark,” Mister JayMac told Jumbo. “We’ve got those pesky Mudcats tomorrow. You’ll need some rest.” And he stalked on out of the house.
Jumbo squeezed the car keys in his fist and lumbered up the stairs towards our room. I deserted my poker buddies to go after him, but Jumbo took two or three steps at a time and got there ahead of me. Inside, he stood holding the box of used baseballs I’d always wondered about.
“I have a sick relative in Alabama,” he said. “I meant to take these to him on my last trip, but, well…”
Your sick relative likes old baseballs? I thought.
“A project,” Jumbo said, hefting the box. The lumps on his face flushed, then faded to their old chalky hues at different speeds. “Excuse me, Daniel.” I got out of his way.
Jumbo carried the box downstairs, put it into the back seat of Mister JayMac’s Caddy, and drove away. His body seemed to fill the front seat, like a Thanksgiving Day float.
He got back about five hours later, looking empty-eyed and blue. He went straight upstairs and lay down. I carried him some iced tea and a pan of vegetables, but found him lying in a kind of trance, not quite sleeping but not quite keyed to the outer world either. He didn’t eat or drink a thing.
Jumbo seemed okay again in the morning. (At breakfast, he wolfed down fruit, pancakes, and juice.) But I’d had a hard night. My weird-ass roomy’d lain only feet away with his eyes like yellow slits and his meaty paws squeezing the coverlet. I stumbled around all morning like a codeine junkie. My first game against Eufaula loomed.
Damn you Jumbo, I thought, I’m gonna play like a zombie.
Well, I did. The Mudcats finned us. They just cut us up. We lost that Friday, nine to one. Mister JayMac cleared the bench looking for somebody who could do even a splinter’s worth of damage against their pitcher, Jimmy Becker. Nobody could. By the seventh inning, even Muscles and Charlie Snow’d come to the bench, replaced by Burt Fanning, a utilityman, and Quip Parris, a pitcher. Hoey’d gone in for me at short, Knowles’d taken Junior’s place at second. Our fans had set up catcalling clubs or gone home in a snit.