The Moves Make the Man (3 page)

The whole game pretty much followed the way the first inning went. The Beefy's boys would smack the ball hard here and there, maybe get on base a few times, and the Seven-Up fielders would nail them. Those white dudes could work the leather. They could work the wood, too. The center fielder hit two balls in the creek on the fly and the shortstop whistled four singles past the pitcher into center field. They won the game about fifteen to two.

I could not take my eyes off that shortstop. He was the only kid I had ever seen who seemed to know with every part of himself just what to do on every single play. His feet were always placed just right to go along with his throwing motion or his gloving, his head was always turned the right way, his steps never left him on the wrong foot when he needed to jump or spin. It was a kind of concentration I had never seen except maybe in Bill Russell once when the Celtics came to Raleigh and played an exhibition basketball game against the Knicks. It was like every cell in the shortstop's body was paying attention, and jumping into the right action along with his mind. Usually it's the mind that kind of leaps
ahead and pulls everything else into the act. Not so with this dude.

Another thing was his manners. He could have been the cockiest kid who ever walked. But he was not. He was pleased with the way he played but more than that he looked like he just thought the game was what was really terrific. He never grinned or hooted or anything like that, so I thought he was a little bit of a stiff, but you could see that deep down he was enjoying his whole self, as if he just plain appreciated all the chances baseball gave him. I feel that way with basketball but I never saw it in another kid. So I was interested in this guy.

But I wasn't the only person watching him.

About the second inning this metallic blue car came roaring up the street and screeched to a stop a way down the left field street line. Then this person jumped out and came running up along the line until she was a little bit past third, where she just stopped and kind of took over that spot. There was only a strip of grass maybe five feet wide between the bag and the street, and no other spectator even thought about going in there, because it was practically part of the field and only players were on that side of the street. But this woman didn't seem to notice such things or maybe to care.

She was about the most beautiful woman I ever saw. I think my momma is pretty and stronger-looking than any other person, but this white woman just knocked you in the eye like looking at that painting of a tree hanging over a lake in the state museum which I always stare at when we go there and nearly cry for I don't know what. Her skin was this golden color. Usually I feel sorry for white people because they don't seem to really have any color, they look
plain and pale and like they are missing something. But this woman gave off light right off her face and her arms and everything that showed. Her hair was all flashing too. It was somewhere between blond and brown, a color you never see anywhere, and it was thick and mostly straight and looked like it was the definition of the word hair out of a dictionary but better than words could ever be. Most blacks don't think so much about what hair is except when they see some like this woman's. I could see how the people on the porch around me snatched looks at the woman's hair moving on her head as she jumped and shook, which she did a lot of. They were amazed like me. It was very pretty to see.

The last thing about her looks was her dress. Not just her dress, but actually everything about the way she was gotten up. She wore this black dress with all kinds of style. It looked as natural on her as an apron on my momma. The way it moved on her made some of the people mutter Oh my land and such things, because it looked so graceful.

But she was weird. She was doing very strange things, and she did them right there in front of everybody as if there wasn't anyone else around. She was jumping up and down and hollering in this loud tight voice, waving her arms and clapping very hard every time something happened around that shortstop. Her voice was the main weird thing. It was all wound up and then let go and it nearly escaped from her every time like a wild bird. She was yelling one strange sound the whole time: BIX BIX BIX.

Yes. That shortstop was Bix. And that woman was obviously his momma.

I felt sorry for him, which made me like him even more. It was like he was more adult than she was, the way she yelled and he just kind of ignored her without being unkindly
to her, a couple of times smiling this tight-lip smile very slightly into the air in front of him, for her but not at her, a smile that showed he was aware of her foolishness but also of her admiration and motherly business or whatever it was.

The reason I say whatever it was is that you could see it wasn't just plain old momma's love made her holler. Not just enthusiasm because her boy was making good plays either. There was something else, something she was straining to have or make up for, to Bix and to her too. It was very complicated and I couldn't figure it out clearly but I could see it without doubt. The adults around me on the porch saw it too, and they stopped being entertained by her beauty and her foolishness right fast. After that they looked at her with sort of a pity and a curiosity, and tried not to show any of this to us kids. But I saw it, something unpleasant to see that she couldn't help, like when somebody without an arm takes off his shirt for gym class and you get a look at his stump and it's red and splotchy but of course you can't mind because it's not his fault.

I felt sorry for both of them, even though Seven-Up won.

In the top half of the last inning a big flatbed truck with a metallic green cab rolled up and parked along the third base line. The bed of the truck was sprawled with wooden crates and in the wooden crates were bottles of soft drinks and scattered over the bottles were chunks of ice as big as your hand. It was really very pretty. The bottles were all colors, clear and brown and light green and dark green, and the pop inside was even more colors—red, orange, purple, yellow, green, pink, even blue, which was mint soda and I had never heard of it before. You saw the colors through this chunky blanket of ice that caught the sparkles from the sun which was just getting down there where everything it hits looks better than usual and brighter, and then before you know it it's going to be nighttime. The whole truck was like something out of one of those cartoon movies for kids.

Then another smaller truck with a closed-off back chugged up behind the first. Neither truck moved and nobody came out. They just sat there. You could see the driver of the small truck, a white man with sunglasses, sitting there not watching the last inning, just staring at his hands on the wheel and making a mouth like to whistle, though no one heard
any music. The windows of the big truck in front were smoked and you couldn't see who was in there.

They just sat there, up until the very second that the last out was made, a pop-up to shortstop, Bix taking it in very smoothly trotting to his right. Then, right as soon as the ball was in his glove and the game was over, the horn of the big truck cut loose with a blast knocked your hat off, and it had to cut through the blast twice before everybody realized it was playing the first line of TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALL GAME. While it did this the driver of the small truck jumped out very quickly and slung up the sides of the enclosure over the back of his truck, and what do you know, inside was this sort of grill full of must have been a hundred hot dogs and a hundred hamburgers and a crate of rolls and a crate of potato chips (the crinkled kind, I don't like them, but what the heck you can't complain). The man had put on this floppy white marshmallow of a hat like chefs in the funny papers, and he whipped out this huge round board with a thumb hole like an artist uses for his paints only instead of paints it had little pots of relish and chili and mustard and catsup and chow-chow and what-all set into it and he held a brush in his other hand. You'd get yourself a hot dog and hold it up and he would sling things on it with a very large deal of show, I can tell you, but not a drop would he get on your shirt though you would think so.

TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALL GAME blasted that horn TAKE ME OUT TO THE CROWD. And a crowd it was. That horn called people from all across colored-town to come running and the word went back pretty fast that there were free eats. There was plenty. The first few people who finally went up and took some food stuffed all they could hold into their hands and even pockets like they were
going to get chased off and wanted to take as much as could be. But more dogs and burgers kept appearing on that grill and you could see there was soda enough forever, so people slowed down and the adults ambled over and the kids ate half of a hot dog and decided they wanted a burger and took two bites and threw it down because now they had to have a chili dog and so on, though not much was wasted I must say. Pretty soon there were all kinds of people there, all ages, eating and talking and running around and sucking down the pop. Some kids stole off empty bottles, to take for deposit, and I know the man in the big truck saw them from way up there, but he did not care and not many did it anyway.

I had myself a burger and an orange and half a grape just because it was there, but didn't finish it because really I don't like soda. A bunch of the younger kids ate up a couple of dogs real fast and then wanted to play ball like the bigger boys had just done, and many black little brothers were pestering their big brothers for their Beefy shirts but not many gave, until some of the Seven-Ups took off THEIR shirts and gave them to a little black kid here and there and then the Beefy's had to do it too. The little boys ran out with the shirts flapping around their knees and hats down over their noses and threw the ball and rolled the bat around and yelled things though they had no idea what they were doing. The white boys that had given up their shirts stood around talking with the black boys who had too, but they kept their arms crossed mostly and I saw they were kind of ashamed for having such pale chests, and I felt sorry for them again.

During all of this I walked over to the side of the big green cab and looked up. It was high, but I could see through the open window and there was a man in there, a white man
who wasn't turning gray yet but was almost that age. He was watching everything, looking around taking it all in and smiling very slightly. Every now and then, when he looked in his rearview and saw the line at the grill getting short, he leaned his hand on the horn and called for more to come and chow. I watched him for quite a while, and then I waited for a quiet time after he blew the horn, and called up. He stuck his head out the window and grinned down at me. He asked if I had enough to eat.

I said yes.

He asked did I have enough to drink.

Yes, I said, I did. And very good, too, I said, though I had to remind myself not to mention the crinkly chips. He looked glad and nodded, and then just hung there. I looked up at him. He said, So, what can I do for you?

I asked him if he was the owner of the Seven-Up plant. He said he certainly was.

I asked him if he was having a good time.

Oh yes, he said, and hit the horn. It hurt your ears when you were so close to the truck, and I had to clap my hands over mine. He apologized.

Why do you do it? I said. Why do you put on this big deal?

He looked down at me for a second or two, smiling that slight little smile, and then he stuck his arm out and patted the slogan painted on the side of the truck. I stepped back and read: YOU LIKE IT, IT LIKES YOU.

That's the secret of life, he said.

Or at least the secret of a good cookout, I said. He laughed and said maybe my way of saying it was better, and then he leaned on the horn for so long laughing that I had to hold my ears and get away from the truck but I really did not mind much.

Sometime in the middle of all the excitement I remembered that shortstop Bix. I was not sure whether I wanted to talk to him or just kind of check him out when he wasn't playing ball, but I was curious to see him for sure.

I looked around down in the crowd, but there was too much crowd to see clearly about. I made my way back and climbed up on the porch where I had watched the game from. Nobody was there now but this old granny I had not seen before but everybody had left alone in a rocker in one corner. She paid me no mind, she was busy shaking her head and babbling about all the colors of the soft drinks shining in those bottles out on the flatbed. Red brown green orange yellow, she kept saying, red orange brown yellow green.

I stood and looked around for the Bix boy. I kept an eye peeled for his mom too. She would be easier to spot, and I wouldn't have minded another sight of her anyway.

I have a way I use in crowds sometimes when you are looking for somebody, you let your eyes pick lines and make a square containing a small part of the crowd and you check it out. Then you move on to the next square and take your
peeks. Well, I shot through the crowd twice and saw no sign of that Bix and his black-dress momma.

He was gone. They were gone together. They did not stick around for dogs and burgers and lemon-lime and colored folk.

All of a sudden, I got mad all out of shape, furious. Here one minute I had my gumption up and was just about ready to go talk to a white stranger and ask maybe to learn a few things about baseball—baseball! I hated baseball!—which was a big deal for me. I had worked myself up pretty much, I guess. And then all of a sudden I was left there, and I got angry as a wasp. Everything that had been going in a nice direction inside me turned backward all nervous and meanish, and next thing you know I was grinding my teeth and thinking up ugly things. Pretty little white boy! Had to leave after the game and couldn't stay and eat a crude old burger and make buds with the team he beat. Probably was nice and safe at home right this minute being served a steak and green beans cut slanty-wise by some quiet old colored in a white jacket. That momma would be fondling her pearls with one hand and reaching over once every minute to stroke the boy's lovely hair off his forehead but he wouldn't even look at her, just keep slicing his beef with a silver knife though all she wanted was a little notice. Well, that cracker was going to be no friend of mine! I said to myself and felt all righteous, though lord knows why.

Man, it was so strange the way I latched onto this sudden hate like hate was precious and not by no means to be let go of. I stood there beside that foolish old granny, listening to her go through those colors Orange green my oh my red and brown, and never thought to wonder how foolish I was being coming up so sudden with such ugliness. I just ground
my teeth and looked out to the field where that shortstop had made me almost even dig baseball, and smirked. The hamburger felt pretty hard in my stomach.

In the third square of the crowd I saw my momma and Maurice and the white coach, Mo no doubt going over some fine points of how to avert a crisis with the bases full and a left-handed curveball pitcher on the mound with an orphan at the plate high on airplane glue thinking he is supposed to run to third after he hits the ball and does so. My momma looked bored, and started to look around like she hoped she could find somebody and I knew it was me she was looking for to come save her from Maurice's chatter. But I did not come. I was too mad. I snuck off the porch over the railing behind the granny and lit off for home all by myself.

I was just about home when I heard TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALL GAME TAKE ME OUT TO THE CROWD blaring up through the sky and a couple of little punks come hooting out of their house and start to run to where the song was.

Shut up you old white fool, I yelled. The kids stopped and looked at me and I glared and they scooted back inside and did not come out. Too bad.