A third thing put me on the road to Highbridge. A couple that came to all our Red Stix home games was Colonel and Mrs Clyde Elshtain. The colonel’d retired as an Army supply officer to become a big-shot procurement specialist at Deck Glider, Inc. Mama suspected he may’ve tugged a few strings to help the Tenkiller factory get its conversion contract. The real baseball fan of the two, though, was the missus, Tulipa Elshtain. Swear to God, that was her name: Tulipa. At fifty-something, Miss Tulipa still walked and drawled like a Gone With the Wind belle. Even in Oklahoma, she remained a member of the Confederate magic circle. At Red Stix games, though, she’d shed her ladylike ways and whoop and boo like a sailor at a prize fight.
“Come on, Goochie, give us a four-ply wallop! Drop it into the Mississip!”
Miss Tulipa and the colonel took to sitting at the top of the Glide Decker bleachers, next to Mama. At the games, they tried to make Mama-the poor, hard-working, abandoned Mrs Boles-feel like their pal and rooting partner.
“I’m their pity project,” Mama said after they’d started this. “A swell game-day friend, but nobody to invite home.”
Colonel Elshtain was management, Mama was labor. Miss Tulipa would climb up into the bleachers wearing lace blouses, peg-topped skirts, and either a velvet beret or a fancy-dan straw hat with peacock feathers. Mama wore coveralls and head scarves.
“Attaway, Scooter!” Miss Tulipa would yell. “Attaway to rap it, punkin!”
Eventually, the Elshtains did ask us to their home, a two-story antebellum job with columns. It’d once been the home of a rich, uprooted Cherokee named Trenton Cass. The Cass Mansion, everybody calls it yet. Mama sported heels, bottled stockings, and her prettiest clingy polka-dot dress. I wore khaki pants, store-bought galluses, and my Sunday tie.
At that special after-church dinner-I can still see it-we had iced-down shrimp for appetizers, bleached asparagus, a rice-and-chicken dish Miss Tulipa called Country Captain, and, for dessert, orange sherbet and blueberries. I don’t know where the Elshtains got the fixings or how many ration points it set em back, but a classier meal I’d never had. I wolfed it all, even the asparagus, a la-di-la vegetable I never liked and haven’t eaten since. (Babe Ruth said asparagus made his urine stink.) They even had wine, but nobody offered me any.
“You can flat-out play,” Miss Tulipa told me over dessert. “How’d you like to help a pro team win a championship?” Her voice was like Coca-Cola: sweet and fizzy, with a sting.
Mama’d done most of the talking so far. I looked at her. From the gramophone in the library, just off the dining room, came the scratchy diddle-diddle-diddle of the colonel’s chamber music. Like Miles Standish, I tried to speak for myself.
“I wuh… I wuh…”
“Take your time, Daniel,” Miss Tulipa said.
“I want to pl-play in the m-m-majors,” I blurted.
Miss Tulipa’s smile sparkled like the cut-glass chandelier over the table. “Why, of course you do.”
“He’s a baby,” Mama said. “He needs a honest job of work.”
The colonel’d already excused himself and wandered into the library, but Miss Tulipa nodded. “Oaks begin as acorns and major leaguers as sandlot players. What you need, Daniel, is seasoning.”
I understood that. Saying I wanted to play in the bigs didn’t mean I expected to start there. So I gawped, a drip with a speech problem. My tongue felt like a folded washrag. Mama saw my panic, the Jell-O wobble of my bottom lip.
“You think he’s good enough to go pro?”
“Laurel, Laurel dear, he’s a prospect. Denying him a chance to develop his gifts would be cruel. Suppose DiMaggio had become just another San Francisco fisherman?”
“He’d’ve been a good one, probably.”
“Of course, Laurel. But he’d’ve labored virtually unseen. The loss to our national heritage, ah, incalculable.”
“A lot of ifs and maybes,” Mama said. “Why fret it?”
Miss Tulipa shut up for a bit, then said, “Daniel should sign with the Hellbenders in my old hometown. My brother Jordan”-Tulipa said JUR-dun-“will pay him seventy-five dollars a month, twenty-five more than he’d make as a private in the Army. Jordan ’ll also provide lodging and instruction. This rotten old war has just decimated the majors. If he does well, Daniel could be wearing big-league flannels sooner than you think.”
Colonel Elshtain, wearing a honest-to-God ascot, 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’d 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.