Brittle Innings Read Online Free PDF Page A

wandered back in. “Army pay’s gone up. Daniel’d make sixty a month, even as a private. And the benefits that accrue as—”
    “Please, Clyde. If you’re trying to recruit him, remember Daniel’s medical condition may preclude his induction.”
    “He should have no trouble at all shooting a carbine.”
    “You forget his—his handicap .”
    “Send him to boot camp. To your own Camp Penticuff. The DIs there might well divest him of it.”
    Miss Tulipa exploded. “How many young men do you want to ship out as cannon fodder? Do you want to be rid of them all?”
    “We’ve more at stake today than a minor league pennant.” The colonel’s lips had blanched like day-old fish bait.
    “Given your patriotic fervor,” Miss Tulipa said, “why don’t you have your commission reactivated?”
    The colonel lifted his chin. “Perhaps I should.” He returned to his staticky gramophone, sliding a panel door into place between the library and us. You could still hear his music bumbling up and down the scale, though, like drowsy bees.
    “Laurel, what do you think?” Miss Tulipa said, turning on the Suthren belle charm. “Would you allow Daniel to sign with Jordan if Jordan agrees he has the talent?”
    “Danny’d be a high-school graduate,” Mama said. “He could do whatever he wants.”
    I struggled to ask the last question I’d ever ask at the Elshtains’ table. “Which farm s-s-system?”
    “Pardon me?” Miss Tulipa said. “Oh. The farm system. The Hellbenders belong to Philadelphia. Does it matter?”
    Not much. So far as I knew, no other organization had even scouted the Red Stix. Even so, the name Philadelphia hit me like a concrete medicine ball. Philadelphia had two big-league clubs, the Athletics in the American League and the Phillies in the National. Both clubs reeked. The Athletics had finished last three straight years and the Phillies five. The Phillies had been the only major league club to lose over a hundred games in ’42. If any American city ranked as Loserville, it was Philadelphia.
    “Oh,” Miss Tulipa said. “Which team there? The Phillies. Your opportunities with the Phils are boundless.”
    Bingo. I had a better chance of ousting Gabby Stewart at short than I did Rizzuto at that spot with the Yankees or Pee Wee Reese in Brooklyn with the Dodgers. Even so, I’d’ve almost rather thrown myself into a Japanese POW camp than go to Philadelphia.
    Mama and I left the Cass Mansion, and I comforted myself by remembering that in Highbridge, at least, I wouldn’t be playing for the Phillies, I’d be playing for the Hellbenders, a team supposedly on the rough-and-tumble rise.

2

    J ordan McKissic—Mister JayMac to everyone in Highbridge, as I learned later—came riding into Oklahoma in a Pullman car behind an old steam engine. He planned to watch two Red Stix games, one on a Saturday, one the following Tuesday, and return to Georgia. April of ’43, two weeks before the Hellbenders kicked off their regular season. Mister JayMac came by train because the Office of Defense Transportation had nixed pleasure driving. You could legally call a scouting trip business, but patriotic pols—like the scoundrels LaGuardia had lit into in the paper—wouldn’t admit pro ball deserved that courtesy.
    ’Forty-three was the year the ODT forbid major leaguers to go South for spring training. Except for the Cardinals, who practiced in St. Louis, ballplayers had to train east of the Mississip and north of the Potomac and Ohio rivers. Wiseguys called this the Landis-Eastman Line, after Baseball Commissioner Landis and the fella heading up the ODT. Mister JayMac was a mucky-muck on the Hothlepoya County draft board, down in Highbridge. To do his part for national defense, he’d left his Cadillac and colored driver at home and faced the blowing coal dust and the jostling hoi polloi on a passenger train.
    In Tenkiller, Mister JayMac stayed in the Cass Mansion. I first laid eyes on him on Saturday, when he