Free My Dog Skip by Willie Morris Page B

face-to-face arrangement with the whites. The scores were chalked up on a blackboard hanging on a red-and-purple wall, and the conversations were carried on in fast, galloping shouts from one end of the room to the other.
    An intelligent white boy of twelve was even permitted, in that atmosphere of heady freedom before anyone knew the name of Mr. Justice Warren or had heard much of the United States Supreme Court, a quasi-public position favoring the Dodgers, who had Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, and Don Newcombe—not to mention, so it wasrumored, God knows how many Chinese and mulattoes being groomed in the minor leagues.
    We often went there to get the scores and absorb the animated repartee, and this unlikely establishment was one of Old Skip's favorite spots in town, ranking right up there with the dump, the fire station, Bozo's grocery, and the Victory garden and tree house in our backyard. Intrigued by its variegated activities, he would accept the raucous affections of the town drunks and petty gamblers as if they belonged to him alone, but when one of them offered him some raw oysters one day, he took a couple of sniffs, made a face, and imperiously went outside to wait for me.
    As I got older and into high school, I was the center fielder for our team. Our coach was nicknamed Gentleman Joe. He always had us pray before a game, and sometimes between innings when the going got rough. His pep talks, back behind the shabby old grandstand of our playing field, drew on such pent-up emotions, being so full of Scripture and things of the holy earth, that I sometimes suspected we were being enlisted not to play baseball but to fight in the Army of the Lord.
    Given this spiritual emphasis, Skip acutely distressed me on this very baseball field one afternoon, in a historic scene more rampant by any measure than the morning he and the other dogs came down the church aisle during Mrs. Stella Birdsongs ill-fated soprano solo. We were playing host to the juggernaut team from the metropolis, Jackson, andthere must have been four or five hundred people in attendance, including the big-city partisans, who condescendingly viewed us as small-town unsophisticates. We were about halfway into the game, and leading it by a score of i-o, when the progress of it was precipitately disrupted.
    The Jackson boys were at bat and I was at my post in center field when out of the corner of my eye I saw Skip himself burst out from under the left-field bleachers and run madly in my direction. The playing field was at least two miles from our house, and how he even knew about the game I will never comprehend, except for his almost psychic propensity, previously cited, for fathoming where in the various venues of town I might approximately be at any particular moment. As he raced onto the field, the base umpire called time and began running angrily after him. Skip came right up to me to offer his salutations. I tried to chase him away.
“Go home!”
I shouted, and when the umpire finally accosted him, he started circling the outfield in widening arcs, then rushed to the infield to pay his respects to Mut-tonhead at shortstop.
    Muttonhead tried to catch him too, but Skip eluded his grasp and ran up to Big Boy on the pitchers mound. By now the whole playing field was in pandemonium, the other umpires joining the chase, and Peewee from second base, and Henjie threw off his catchers mask and went after him, and Gentleman Joe, and Sheriff Raines, and even Rivers Applewhite, who later said she thought she alone could tame the miscreant, and after a while numerous of theenemy players took to the pursuit, losing their caps as they did so. Only my friends and I on that field appreciated how elusive Skip could be when he chose to, but they persisted in the hunt. Four or five of this posse would momentarily surround him, but he would squirm through their legs, or dash away with his world-record speed, while in the grandstand the spectators cheered and