In the dugout between games, Hoey sidled up and sat down next to me. He popped me with some sort of rag, then dropped it over my thigh and leaned back.
“Hear you got a telegram from Mama yesterday.”
The rag on my thigh was the toy goat I’d gutted.
“Hearing from Mama didn’t inspire you to new heights of glory on the ball field today, Dumbo.”
I flipped the fake goat skin out onto the infield grass.
“Looky there-flies almost as well as your namesake, don’t it?” Hoey squeezed my knee. “Maybe Mama’s words weren’t meant to inspire, maybe they were meant to sting.”
“Lay off the boy,” Double Dunnagin said.
Hoey ignored him. “You were a regular sojer boy up at the plate in that last one.”
If I hadn’t gone aught for three, with a deliberate walk in the eighth to load the bases and set up a rally-killing double play, I might’ve figured his remark for praise. What it meant was, I’d stood in the batter’s box like a soldier at attention, never taking my bat off my shoulder. It never crossed Hoey’s mind-or Sloan’s, or Evans’s, or Sosebee’s-he and his wiseacre chums had slid a banana peel under my confidence.
Mister JayMac came into the dugout. “This game’s do or die. And I don’t expect Darius to drive a load of stiffs back to Highbridge. Yall follow?”
“Yessir,” four or five guys more or less mumbled.
“In the debacle jes past,” Mister JayMac said, “yall played worse n I ever thought you could. Play up to your potential, not down to your shortcomings, and we’ll escape with our limbs intact and our hopes alive. Need I say more?”
“NOSIR!” most of the team shouted.
“All right. I’m deferring here and now to Darius, who has some interesting intelligence for you.”
“Nother nigger nugget,” Fadeaway told Sosebee. Mister JayMac didn’t hear. Otherwise, Fadeaway would’ve spent the evening hand-washing our jocks.
“Gundy’s pitching this game,” Darius told us, sitting on the dugout ledge with his hands hanging between his legs like dark plumb bobs. He avoided eye contact. “I’ve seen him pitch befo, and I’ve watched his warm-ups.”
Where, I suddenly wondered, had Darius spent the night? In the Brown Bomber? At a cousin’s or an in-law’s somewhere in or around LaGrange? I couldn’t’ve told you.
“Gundy tips his curve,” Darius said.
“Tips it?” Sloan said. “My, my. Usually, you’ve got to be in the batter’s box to tip one. Gundy must be faster than the word God to tip one of his own pitches.”
“Mr Sloan, that’s enough,” Mister JayMac said.
“Gundy telegraphs his curve.” Darius looked Sloan in the eye, and Sloan started picking lint off his sleeve. “He’ll thow you a fastball, a change, or a knuckler out of his glove-ever time, no surprises. You got to figure which it is as it’s riding in. I cain’t hep you there. But if you cain’t tell a knuckler’s dip-dip-shimmy-shimmy from a fastball’s straight-in zip, they’s eye doctors you should visit.”
“Unless you’re a pitcher,” Hoey said. “Nothing scares a hitter worse than a half-blind moundsman.”
Darius smiled. “True nough. But Gundy’s curve, now-he’s gon tip you to it sho as sunrise, gon take the ball to a place back of and under his right butt cheek and twiddle it there till he’s got his grip. If Gundy drops his ball hand behind him, yall’re gon see a curve-ever time.”
“That could be a ruse,” Nutter said. “When he goes back to his glove for the windup, he could regrip. A hitter thinking curve and lunging at something else would look a fool.”
“Mr Nutter, you’ve been to the bigs,” Darius said. “You know sech things. Gundy aint been up and most prolly never gon to be. In this business, he’s as perdictable as a hell-fire sermon, and nobody on the Darmes, not even Mr Strock, yet had the sense to cotch him out on it n jerk him straight.”
“Anything else, Darius,” Mister JayMac said.
“Nosir. Important thing is, study where his ball hand goes fo he winds, then cat-pounce any curve in the zone.” He slipped off the dugout ledge and glided away.
If any other CVL team had had a colored scout, management would’ve milked him of his skinny and passed it on without telling where it’d come from. Mister JayMac took another tack, whether from social conscience or from some sort of weird snag Darius had him in, I couldn’t say just then.
Fadeaway pitched the second game. He blanked the Gendarmes through six, using a fadeaway and a perky fastball to bumfuzzle Mr Strock’s gang and keep the homies solemn as a surgeon at a recent patient’s burial. Meanwhile, the rest of us teed off on Gundy’s telegraphed curve. We also managed to decipher most of his other pitches before they reached the plate.
Gundy, shell-shocked to near zombiehood after less than four innings, trudged to the showers to a concert of boos. We picked up on his reliever where we’d finished with Gundy, the rhythm of hitting in us like a boogie-woogie tune, the ‘Darmes’ dashed hopes-for a sweep-making them more stumblebummish the longer the game went on.
Even the run they got in the seventh, a rain-bringing Ed Bantling pop-up the wind pushed into the right-field stands, didn’t set them afire. His homer struck even Bantling as flukish. He trotted to second backwards, watching the ball rise and rise, in unreal stages, like a Ping-Pong ball on an air-hose jet, until it finally stopped bounding higher and fell on a sudden slant into the bleachers. As he crossed the plate, Banding had begun to laugh, but more like a soldier who’s barely escaped a bullet than one who’s just lobbed a mortar right on the enemy.
And for good reason too. We beat LaGrange thirteen to one and saved ourselves the embarrassment of going home on a losing streak.
26
Jumbo and I spent one more night in the Lafayette Hotel. He slept like a dead man, hardly breathing or moving. Despite my bad night the night before, the day’s excitement-along with a nagging fidgetiness about those three Karloff flicks-had me keyed so tight I couldn’t unwind. I flopped around like an epileptic, then got up and paced, and mentally replayed every inning of Sunday’s second game.
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.