“That’s probably true,” Mister JayMac said. “I daresay those players draw better than Danny’s likely to jes yet.”
“Well, he can’t go now anyway,” Mama said. “Even when he can, seventy-five won’t do. That’s coffee-and-cake pay. Danny may jes be starting, but no colored boy ought to make more than him.”
My mama, the John L. Lewis of ball agents. All she needed was Lewis’s eyebrows. Mister JayMac ripped up his check, and I almost swallowed my tongue. Smithereened. My whole career.
“Mrs Boles, you drive a hard bargain.” Mister JayMac took the contract back. “I’ll up his pay twenty-five and send yall a new contract. Forget this one. Mr Boles,” finally looking at me, “we’ll send you a train ticket. Ride down soon’s you’ve got your diploma, hear?”
I tried to answer. “Yessir,” I wanted to say, but it might as well’ve been the Lord’s Prayer in Gullah.
As promised, the revised contract came two weeks later. Mama and I signed it for a notary, with Coach Brandon and the Elshtains as witnesses. Two, three days later, Mr Ogrodnik announced my good fortune to the student body in the gym. Kids cheered, pretty girls and class-officer types among them. If I’d had the guts, I’d’ve dynamited half the hypocrites there, even though I did like hearing them cheer.
Franklin Gooch said I was a lucky bastard. When we’d won the war, guys like DiMaggio, Williams, and Greenberg would come home and their stay-at-home subs would disappear completely. A real talent, though, would survive.
“You,” Goochie said, “are a real talent.”
Goochie was already eighteen. Early in ’42, his mama’s younger brother had been killed on the cruiser Houston in the Battle of the Java Sea. Goochie wanted to take a few Jap scalps in the Marines, but he didn’t begrudge me my shot at a career in pro ball. Envied me, but didn’t call me a feather merchant. He had other kettles of fish to fry. Too bad his goals led him into the hands of a graves-registration crew on Okinawa.
3
Tenkiller was a side-track burg. So I caught the train in Tahlequah. Mister JayMac had sent me a ticket.
Colonel Elshtain had a C gas-rationing sticker on the divided window of his automobile, supposedly because his job at Deck Glider had such import to the national defense. Actually, I think, he had buddies in the War Department, who knew folks in the Office of Price Administration. Anyway, that C sticker got Colonel Elshtain all the gas he wanted, and he and Miss Tulipa drove Mama and me to the station in Tahlequah in his 1939 Hudson Terraplane. (That car was a picture of chrome and ivory. It even had a radio.) My only luggage was a duffel full of clothes. The handle of my favorite baseball bat-Coach Brandon had given it to me-stuck out of my bag, and my bag rode in the Hudson ’s trunk. In the back, next to Mama, I felt partly like a rich swell and partly like a murderer riding in style to the gallows.
On the station platform, Mama looked angry enough to spit. In truth, she’d just clamped her lips to keep from crying. I was grateful she was managing so well. No seventeen-year-old kid wants his mama blubbering all over him in public. And that railway depot was crowded. Tahlequah looked like Tulsa.
Recruits in civvies heading for Camp Gruber or Fort Sill. GIs going back to Chaffee, Benning, Polk, or Penticuff after furloughs. Cardboard suitcases and duffels. Parents and girls mingling with the sad-sack soldiers and recruits. All the guys were riding passenger trains, not troop-train expresses, with civilians like me in a near-invisible minority.
Some of the GIs wove back and forth through the redbrick station building. In buddy-buddy groups. Sometimes they’d stop near Mama and me to look me up and down. I was only to scoff at-soldier material like marshmallows are ammo. I could hardly believe I’d have to share a car with these rude and crude dogfaces. The ones with stripes on their sleeves scared the Cherokee piss out of me.
“You puny cur,” Mama said, “don’t forget to write.”
I only stood five-five, but Audie Murphy, who came along later, wound up the war’s most decorated soldier, and he was no bruiser either. Me, I was in tiptop trim. If I could play ball in the Chattahoochee heat, why’d so many of these wiseguy doughboys seem to think I couldn’t charge into Jap artillery fire? Why’d Mama assume I’d steam into vapor under the Georgia sun and never even send her a postcard?
“I can’t watch you leave. Be good. Do good.”
A pair of nuns came up, smiling. Only they weren’t nuns, but pillow-breasted Red Cross gals in habits and wimples. They had a hospital cart loaded with goodies, like stewardesses on a Delta flight. They took me for a recruit. They wanted to give me magazines, Tootsie Rolls, Lucky Strikes.
“He don’t want none,” Mama said. “Thank you.”
The Red Cross nuns toddled off, but the soldiers nearby didn’t. When Mama kissed me on the lips, a good slobbery one, they had a snicker riot. Mama left me with the Elshtains. I hoped the colonel would put the fear of God into those dogfaces by calling them down for crooked gig lines and ungentlemanly public comportment, but he didn’t. Soldiers on furlough were privileged characters, prodigal sons in gaberdine. Rightly so, maybe. They’d sweated out fourteen weeks of basic, and a lot of em, like Goochie, would come home as statistics, battle fatalities, instead of people. Colonel Elshtain understood. He’d served in the Great War, the War to End All Wars, and he understood.
Then the colonel and Miss Tulipa left too, and I was alone with all the trained heroes and smiling Red Cross nuns. A redcap directed us-everybody going my way, at least-to our coaches, and porters with hand trucks stowed our duffels in the proper baggage cars. Anyway, this rail ride from Oklahoma to Georgia gave me a new look at humanity. Time I jumped off that train, I’d’ve sworn the defense of the United States was in the hands of sadistic cretins. Jerks that shot up colored training camps in New York State and Louisiana. Yahoos that, a couple of months later, danced the hat dance on zoot-suiters in L.A. As a civvie, I felt like soft-shelled predator bait too. Forget that my draft status had everything to do with being seventeen and nothing to do with being afraid. Did a wish to cap off the last year of my childhood playing Class C baseball make me a coward?
They packed us aboard that train like cattle. On a mirror in the John, somebody’d taped an “Off the Record” cartoon of a GI in his skivvies standing outside a Pullman lavatory with his shaving gear. He fingers his stubbly jaw. “Great Scott!” he barks. “I must’ve shaved the guy next to me!” Every seat in every coach was taken; every aisle was a logjam.
I got up once, and a sergeant took my place. So I squeezed my way through the clicking coaches till I found the only empty seat in the last five Pullmans. I sat next to a PFC whose head looked like the bowling-ball jaw of the guy in the cartoon. A hulk, with a mug like a skinned Pekingese’s.
“How you know that seat’s not saved?” he asked me.
I wanted to say, “Screw you,” but the snarl in the PFC’s challenge had taken all my sand away. I hadn’t exactly had a quarryful to begin with.
The PFC said, “Nice ears, yokel. Buy em by the yard?”