Well, why not? My play in that game qualified as one of my best performances yet. No errors, an unassisted double play, and five hits in six plate appearances, with a double down the line, and four runs scored. Hoey hadn’t congratulated me, though. He’d spent the afternoon either riding the bench or squatting in a coach’s box glumly clapping his hands. Once, I’d seen him and Turkey Sloan with their heads together in the dugout. Plotting their next toy purchase? Writing another rhymed telegram? How, I wondered, had I managed to make such an enemy of the guy? How could I turn him from a menace into a friend, or at least a neutral?
Around three in the morning, I stopped pacing and looked at Jumbo. He worried me too. A few hours ago he’d powered two Roric Gundy curves and a low-and-away fastball from Gundy’s reliever out of the Prefecture. Those shots’d given him five home runs for the series, tying a CVL record held by a former Opelika Orphan now in the Marines. This morning, though, he seemed a coma victim, too fagged to’ve performed the feats I’ve just mentioned.
I leaned over him. The quarter moons of orangish-yellow under his lids looked sicklier than usual. I picked up his clammy wrist. I guess he had a pulse, but maybe I’d plugged into the throbbing feedback of my own. The pale light leaking into our room from the streetlamps outside gave Jumbo’s still body a gorgeous creepiness. I returned to my bed and sat there watching him. A little later, I eased over onto my side and fell asleep.
Jumbo woke me before dawn, and the Hellbenders assembled in the Prefecture’s parking lot around eight to board the team bus and return to Highbridge.
Riding home, I stayed awake, jostled by the lurch and sway of the Bomber’s worn-out chassis and picked at more or less good-naturedly by my teammates. On Highbridge’s north-western outskirts, though, I slumped against my window and escaped into a dream-addled sleep…
“-more in tarnation could you want?”
“A life, Mister JayMac. My own life.”
Voices-two voices-dragged me wincing and blinking out of the pit of my stupor. I lay on the split upholstery of one of the Brown Bomber’s rearmost seats. Jumbo had deserted me. As quietly as I could, I peeked over the back of the seat in front of mine. Every Hellbender, not just Jumbo, had left the Bomber-some time ago if the absence of travel kits, ball gloves, and snack wrappers meant anything.
In fact, the darkness of the bus’s interior, the coolness of its metal floor, and the murky shade surrounding the Bomber told me Darius’d driven it into the garage of the buggy house beside McKissic House. Now, he and Mister JayMac faced each other across the bus’s aisle up front. Neither realized I was still aboard.
Maybe I should’ve coughed or sashayed nonchalantly up the aisle, but it shamed me to’ve fallen so hard asleep I hadn’t noticed our arrival or heard Jumbo, Junior, Dunnagin, and all the others getting off. More than likely, they’d crept off the bus as tiptoey as elves, just to see how I’d react to waking up alone after they’d all gone inside.
Anyway, instead of showing myself, I hunched down out of sight and held my breath.
“You have a life here,” Mister JayMac said. “You have a damn fine life here. Even an enviable one, I’d say.”
“You might believe that,” Darius said, “but I cain’t.”
“Would you rather be in an all-Negro unit in New Guinea building runways and taking atabrine to stave off malaria?”
“Nosir, I’d rather-”
“That stuff makes your ears ring. Turns the whites of your eyes custard-yaller. You’d have to take it, though, because the Army’s precious quinine supplies go to their All-American Caucasian boys.”
“Mebbe they’d give me half atabrine and half quinine. Jes one ear’d ring, jes one eye turn yaller.”
Mister JayMac didn’t seem to hear Darius’s reply. He said, “Or how’d you like to be in a colored regiment pick-axing away at the Alcan Highway in subzero temperatures?”
“I know a man doing that. He’s proud to do it, he can pint to that road and say he holp to build it.”
“He’s got a frozen tail, trench foot, and frost bite. I kept you out of that. Saved your hide for better things.”
“Leastwise, for other things.”
I pulled myself up again and peered over the seat. Mister JayMac had a flask of whiskey and a brown ceramic coffee mug. Darius had a mug. Mister JayMac tilted his flask and shared out generous sloshes of liquor. Its yeasty sweet-tart smell filled the bus.
They’d already shared at least a mug each. Knee to knee up there, they seemed close to exploding. Only Mister JayMac’s bosshood and Darius’s role as a black hired hand kept them from pitching into donnybrook. The wrong word, the sass of an eye, or one more slug of hooch might yet shove them to it.
“Doesn’t playing baseball beat the likely alternatives?”
“I don’t play baseball. I drive a bus. I step n fetch.”
“Nobody but you and me may know it, but you’re a grand sight more than a glorified chauffeur and houseboy. You’re the de facto assistant manager of a contending CVL baseball team.”
“De facto,” Darius said.
“It means-”
“I know what it means. Hardly means doosquiddy. Means I’m a nigger with a big-shot friend.”
Mister JayMac sipped at his mug. After a while, he said, “A life? A life you say. What does that mean? Just what do you want that the world-this world, not some pie-in-the-sky pipedream-is ever gonna let you have?”
“A tryout with the Atlanta Black Crackers. Or the Kansas City Monarchs. Or the Jacksonville Red Caps.”
“Are you asking my permission to leave Highbridge to play with some run-on-a-shoestnng colored squad?”
Darius stared out the window over Mister JayMac’s head, at a rotting harness on the wall of the old buggy house.
“If you leave,” Mister JayMac said, “I’ll see to it your number comes up. I’ll see to it you get tracked down fast and straightaway inducted.”
“That’d be bettern this glorified chauffeur and houseboy job I got now,” Darius said.
“Assistant manager!” Mister JayMac stood up and purposely sloshed the whiskey in his mug on the Bomber’s steering wheel. He didn’t let go of his mug, but only because he’d tangled his middle finger through its handle. “The only colored assistant manager of a pro white ball club in the whole United States, south or north, east or west, de facto or otherwise, and you want to play with a bunch of unlettered darkies who never know from year to year how many games their season’s gonna have or even if their ballclub’s got the financial stuffing to last a month. Right?”
“I want to play where the Powers That Be gon let me, Mister JayMac. That’s all.”