“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.
“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.