“He’s a bleeder,” Mister JayMac said. “A mildly afflicted bleeder, but a bleeder. His blood don’t clot like it ought.”
General Holway stood up. “A bleeder? And he plays ball? You let him?”
“I have to,” Snow said through papery lips. “Aint nothing for me but to play.”
Henry came up to me and did a side-saddle leap over the fence. He gathered the damaged Charlie Snow into his arms.
“Hospital? Infirmary? Where may we take him?”
“S dangerous to do it that way,” somebody said. “The poor bloke needs a litter and a couple of corpsmen.”
“It’s dangerous to let him lie,” Henry said.
“Put him in my car,” General Holway said. “Let’s move it!”
General Holway, his chauffeur, and Henry all got into the command car, Henry in the back with Snow propped like a smashed doll in the crook of his arm. Off they bounded towards the administrative and services area, a complex of two-story wooden buildings spaced out in rectangles, every building and every street block a twin of all the others.
The chauffeur played the command car’s Klaxon, sounding its raucous bleat every thirty yards or so. The rest of us stood back and watched-Hellbenders, Splendid Dominicans, and some of the GIs in Major Dexter’s Special Training units, a poleaxed crew of gawkers.
Major Dexter approached Mister JayMac. “Your fellas have one more out to get and at least one more trip into town, sir.”
“Game’s over,” Mister JayMac said.
“Why?” Fadeaway Ankers puled, dragging the word out. “You put me in to finish this thang, didn’t you?”
“You’ve jes finished.”
“Then Mister Cozy’s team wins,” Major Dexter said. “Five full innings are a legal game. This one’s nearly gone eight.”
“This game warnt legal to begin with,” Fadeaway said. “We had to sneak out here jes to start it.”
Mister JayMac said, “Hush, boy-o,” like a groom gentling a high-strung horse. Then, in the crush of bodies by the fence, he found Mr Cozy Bissonette and stuck out his hand to him. “A hard-fought game, sir. Your men have skill and moxie. Please tell Mr Clark and Mr Wall, in particular, how much their play impressed us.”
“Predate that,” Mister Cozy said. “Yo center fielder gon come round n play for yall again real soon.”
“He’s most likely going to die,” Mister JayMac said.
Mister Cozy dropped his gaze. “Then God rest his soul, and God bless yall for letting us play with sech a man.”
Out there at the fence, us Hellbenders shook hands with Splendid Dominican Touristers, and vice versa. Fadeaway and a few others didn’t like it much, but the disrespect finishing out would’ve showed Charlie Snow was plain even to them and so they finally shut up.
The Dominicans took their win with gravity. One of em-Tommy Christmas, I think-said to me, “You mighta got us, one mo inning. You sholy might,” and strolled back to the stands with Partlow and Davies, marveling at the grit of Snow’s effort to chase down through a canopy of bats Oscar Wall’s tremendous knock to center.
When it was announced over the PA system the Dominicans’d won, the troops whooped and jitterbugged in the bleachers. I didn’t fault em. In the lingo of deeds, their champions had proclaimed their honor.
45
Mister JayMac wanted Darius to drive us to the infirmary, but he was nowhere to be found. So Major Dexter, who’d finally shed his umpire’s gear, offered to drive us around the field and through the T-square grids of the camp’s Quartermasters’ 700-series buildings to the infirmary.
“I can’t leave Darius out here,” Mister JayMac told Major Dexter. “Yall wouldn’t enlist him, would you?”
“This is a training camp, not a recruitment station.”
“I know what it is, Major. I asked if somebody out here’d accept his papers and put him in uniform.”
“Not if you don’t want us to, Mr McKissic.”
“Well I don’t.”
“Then you’ve nothing to worry about, sir.”
“If yall find him out here later, will you truss him up and hold him till I can fetch him home?”
“Yessir.”
“Well you’d better.”
Major Dexter climbed aboard the Brown Bomber and took us on a quick rickety jaunt to the infirmary.
The infirmary looked like every other bleached crackerbox structure at the camp, except it had a concrete loading dock for ambulances and supply trucks. It roosted across the road from an asphalt lot next to the Quartermaster Depot. When we arrived, Henry stood under the dock’s shake-shingled awning staring across the road at ten columns of ten men each standing in that lot in rubber sheaths-sacks, I guess-as smooth as lamb’s skin but as black as auto tires.
An NCO in a wide-brimmed hat stood in front of this whacko detail (buckra and buffalo together, whites and blacks, but more paleskins than coloreds) shouting, “Hop it, gentlemen, hop it!” so the bodies in those sacks pogoed with a floppy sighing sound-like the painful inflation of a hundred huge balloons with a hundred wheezing bicycle pumps. I beheld this show in rubbernecking disbelief.
General Holway’s command car had apparently come and gone, and when the Bomber pulled into the ambulance dock, Henry paid us no heed. He kept staring across the road, at the encondomed GIs hopping there like big vulcanized fleas. Or maybe he was staring beyond them, to the ball field where Charlie Snow’d leapt, snarled his spikes, and crumpled headlong. In fact, Henry didn’t give a cold hoot about the jumpingjacks across “K” Street. Mister JayMac rushed past Henry into the infirmary to see about his center fielder.
Muscles asked Major Dexter, “What in Uncle Sam’s army’s going on over there-a punishment detail?”
“Nosir, they’re volunteers.”
“For what, sunstroke?”
“Nosir, a Quartermaster experiment to test the resistance of GI clothing to the natural corrosives in human sweat. Our men in Alaska, the Pacific, North Africa, even here at home, need reliable clothes, and our scientists need reliable data.”
“Lord God,” Muscles said, “they’ll fall out in this heat.”
“They’ll fall out only when they’ve received the order to fall out,” Major Dexter said.
“I meant they’ll faint.” Muscles replied. “They won’t need an order to do it. No wonder yall’ve stuck em across from the infirmary-save you a few steps.”
“Mr Musselwhite, they’re wearing shorts in those sacks, just their skivvies, not full battle dress.”
“I don’t follow this, Major, not atall.”
“We’re collecting sweat. The sweat that pools in those sacks we gather into vials. Later, we apply it-the sweat, I mean-to the various fabrics proposed for use in GI clothing. The Quartermaster Corps’ scientists measure its effects on the fabrics in question.”