Brittle Innings Read Online Free Page B

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 had 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,