Free Brittle Innings by Michael Bishop

body grease to unravel and make a play. He always did, though, and gracefully: a whangdoodle shortstop.
    The other big thing I recall about that practice is how bad the guys playing first base did. Mister JayMac used at least four fellas there, but not one could handle a first baseman’s glove. That leather claw gave them fits. One fella, Norm Sudikoff, moved pretty as a gazelle, but usually managed to turn a sure out into a misplay. My pal Goochie would’ve given all these goons a clinic.
    Me, I wished I was six or seven inches taller. Then, if I couldn’t beat out Number Seven at short, I might win a starting job from the relay team of jokers yo-yoing in and out at first base. Otherwise, I might spend my whole season on the bench. Growing a half foot fast would help, but I’d do as well to pray for a Hollywood agent to tap me as the next Gary Cooper.
    At noon, practice ended. Darius hadn’t brought me to McKissic Field so much to watch it as to keep from having to make an extra trip from the players’ boardinghouse to the stadium. He’d picked up the other three rookies, Georgia boys all, a couple of hours earlier, when a train from the Atlantic coast had dropped them at Highbridge Station.
    Now Darius came over, diamonds winking in the black lamb’s wool of his hair, his coffee-colored skin aglow. “Yall go git on the bus. Sit toards the back. The other mens don’t like rookies crowding em.”
    “Who sez?” Ankers said to Darius.
    “Ast em,” Darius said. “Be my guest. But ast em on the bus, or yall might have to foot it to Mister JayMac’s.”
    Dobbs and Heggie didn’t grumble, but Ankers flicked Darius a lightning storm with his eyes.
    On the bus, these guys sat a row or two in front of Euclid, now reading a Plastic Man comic, but I plonked down next to him, not out of any Eleanor Roosevelt fondness for black folk, but because he had my duffel. He paid me no mind, poring over his comic like it was a book of secret codes.
    In about twenty minutes, ballplayers started straggling out and climbing aboard, including Darius. Mister JayMac swung up into the seat back of Darius’s. None of his players had tried to sit in it, his reserved spot. They always scattered about here and there, flopping like wore-out bird dogs. Number Seven, the shortstop, came laddering down the aisle and dropped into the long rear seat. He stretched his arms along its back and goggled around.
    “Hey, Darius,” he said, “who’re these handsome cats?” He meant the three new Georgia boys.
    “I disremember their names, Mr. Hoey. Course I’m jes a driver, not a traveling secretary.”
    “Oh now, Darius,” the shortstop said, “you’re more n a driver, you’re a Hellbender institution.”
    Hands on the wheel, Darius didn’t seem to want any of Hoey’s soft soap and told him so by clamming up. Of all the men who’d practiced that morning, he was the only one still wearing the clothes he’d worked out in. The top of his head showed in the big rectangular mirror just inside the divided windshield, his hair asparkle with sweat.
    Mister JayMac grabbed the pole of the driver’s cage and pulled himself up. He sported a string tie and a white linen coat. If we didn’t get rolling soon, his ballplayers would start slinging off enough BTUs to give every last joe aboard a drop-dead case of heat prostration.
    “Don’t yall worry who thesere boys are,” he said. “Worry about how piss-poor yall played today.” He paused, more for effect than from tiredness. “I could drum up a half dozen 4-Fs in a TB ward who’d look sharper than yall did this morning. So think, gentlemen, on your many personal deficiencies.”
    You could hear Euclid turning comic-book pages.
    “Understand?” Mister JayMac said.
    “ Yessir! ” nearly everyone on the Bomber said, like recruits out to Camp Penticuff.
    “Meeting in the parlor this evening right after supper,” Mister JayMac said. “I want everybody there. Understood?”
    “Everybody?”