The Moves Make the Man (2 page)

The first time I saw Bix was about exactly one year ago. School had just let out, and I was pretty sad as I always am when summer starts. See, I like school. I like fall, I like winter, and spring isn't bad. It never really gets cold in the winter here in Wilmington (North Carolina, there's one in Delaware too) because we are in the South and also we get that Gulf Stream sending in that old warm wind to shore (I have all A's in geography and science too). I do like it when you have to sleep under a weight of blankets and outside you see frost in the shade and everything that has an odor you can smell very clearly, and nothing smells bad.

Most of all, though, I like basketball. In the winter, basketball is the game. Everybody is thinking hoops. Playing hoops too, all over the place—you can get a game anywhere, one on one, three on three half court, five on five full. Indoors, outdoors. Some games split up in the middle and move in or out, if one team shoots better in the breeze. For gym class, you are walking down the hall to get there and from five hundred feet away you can feel it in the bottoms of your feet rumbling through the floors: bammata bammata
bammata bam, twenty dudes dribbling those balls on that old gymnasium wood, baby. Nothing anywhere but the main game of basketball mattering the most. That's winter.

But summer changes it all. Summer comes, and people get all easy and slowed and they nod all the time and smile instead of talking fast like they do in winter. But worst of all, once school lets out, all anybody wants to play is baseball. Baseball! Bunch of dudes in knee pants standing up straight and watching each other do very little. Here, Sir, I am throwing this sphere at you. Thank you, Sir, I believe I shall bop it with this stick. Well struck, Sir, and here it comes; I shall endeavor to catch it with my big fat glove that looks like I got a disease. What a tea party.

No tricks. Baseball is like those redcoats in that Revolutionary War (all A's in history too), standing up and pointing their chins, marching in neat lines, loading up those dumb muskets very calm and up front, with polished boots and polished buckles and all kinds of honor…and getting their ass kicked by the Swamp Fox. Listen, the Swamp Fox had the idea. He used his brain. Running behind bushes with those bent knees, wearing moccasins and muddy buckskin, dangling his hat on the end of a stick and then popping up to flick a knife out from behind his collar, whisssh! I can tell you one thing: that Swamp Fox, if he lived now, he would be a basketball player. Hoops is for the tricksters. You can bet if there was another war today and it was the dudes who played baseball against the ones who pop the double pump reverse spin lay-ups, the baseballers would never know what hit them.

So I hated baseball, for the game it was, and for how it took hoops right out of everybody's life. I especially didn't like the Little League. It was bad enough when all of my
friends would go out to a lumpy old field and pick up sides and whack the ball around. But when adults give them little pretty uniforms and build them little stadiums and put the games on radio and sell soda and candy bars in the stands, then the kids start acting all serious and prissy and like all this attention is the best reason why they ought to play ball. Well, Wilmington is very hip to Little League, or at least to white Little League. There are more than twenty teams. They play doubleheaders four nights a week in these cute little genuine stadiums built just outside town, with lights, scoreboards, announcers, chalk on-deck circles and resin bags, all that crap. Every Friday the paper prints the pictures of four Stars of the Week. On Sunday we get the week's box scores.

The white box scores, that is. The colored league is not nearly as big as the white. Dig, there are probably more left-handed relief pitchers with a missing front tooth and a forkball that breaks left to right in the white league than there are players of all kinds in the black. The black people only get four teams together. They play all their games at Catalpa Park. This park has a baseball diamond and big outfield where there isn't a fence but a creek running the border. Anything hit into the creek, even on the bounce, is a home run. It is a nice place to play, with all those huge catalpa trees wearing long bean earrings on their flappy-ear leaves. The spectators sit on the porches of houses across the street that runs along third base line. You only get refreshments if the person who lives there feels like making lemonade and cornmeal cookies.

The games are pretty bad, even for baseball. Those four teams get pretty tired of playing each other over and over all summer long, especially since the talent (if that's what
you want to call it) is spread around so even. Listen, two years ago every team finished with the same record, twenty-two wins and twenty-two losses, all tied for first and last place at the same time. They had play-offs and every team went two and two.

Let me ask: Would you like baseball if you were me and this is the highest you could hope to go?

Even so, it was a baseball game where I first saw Bix, one year ago. I didn't want to be there, I didn't want to watch, most of all I sure did not want to start liking some flashy white dude with a face like one of those Vienna choir boy singers that I saw in Raleigh two years ago (I got to say they could sing, though). I did not want to like anything or anybody. But Bix got me, baby.

I was there because my brother Maurice was making his bigtime debut as coach of the Beefy's Lunch team. Maurice is five years older than me. He skipped a grade. This fall he goes off to college up north in Massachusetts, on a scholarship because he's so smart (no smarter than Henri and me on the tests, but just older right now). He wants to be a doctor. Not the same doctor who gives you shots and pills, but one who talks a lot and tries to make you think. He'll probably be pretty good. He practiced enough on Henri and me all these years, though we had plenty from our momma and never felt nearly as bad as he liked to make out. Henri and I agreed long ago to let him practice on us. We thought he was practicing to be a father, not a doctor. We even thought at first he was going to marry Momma and take over, but Momma put us right on that one.

Anyway, Maurice was doing his father-doctor-coach thing with the Beefy's Lunch team last summer, and always coming home from practice with his clipboard and statistics and little stories about how Poke Peters struck out six times but the last two times held his head high which showed positive thinking and Manny Abernathy dropped three fly balls in
left field but didn't cry once and wasn't that a step of progress? and so on. Henri, who liked baseball like all the other fools around here, read Maurice's statistic sheet one day and asked Maurice what the initials CA stood for. There was a column underneath them with a space for each boy's name, in between RBI which is runs batted in, and E which is errors. Maurice said CA was Crises Averted. That's Maurice. Momma laughed. She told Henri and me later that the team was coaching Maurice much more than he was coaching them, and it was all right that way.

When the day for the first exhibition game came around, Momma said we had to go and cheer for Beefy's and give our support to old Maurice because he was probably going to fret himself silly. I moaned up a storm because I didn't want to go and watch Manny Abernathy drop fly balls and yet not shed a tear, and Poke Peters whiff but hold his head high, and all of the colored boys averting crises right and left. What a great way to spend a summer evening. But Momma said we had to come. Maurice's team was likely to get creamed and he would need us to cheer for his boys.

The main reason the Beefy's team was set for a creaming was that they were playing the annual exhibition against the white team from the Seven-Up bottling company across town. The Seven-Up team comes every year just before the season and plays one of the black teams at Catalpa Park. Why the Seven-Ups do this nobody knows. No other white team pays any attention to the black league. I used to think it was because the Seven-Ups must be the worst white team and needed to beat up on somebody. I also used to think it must be just because they wanted to primp, in their official uniforms. I still thought so that night, when we went to the game and saw the teams.

I laughed when I saw Maurice's boys down on the field. They looked goofy and proud of it. The team is sponsored by this jolly old fellow named Beefy who owns a lunch counter and tobacco shop in our part of town. The team uniforms are just maroon shirts with gold writing, worn with whatever pants the players' momma didn't care if they tore up. On the front of the shirt is a cartoon of Beefy. Big belly, cigar, eyes all wide and round and smiling like a true fool. On the backs are the numbers, like any team, but not quite. The man who made the shirts used numerals so big he could only fit one digit on the kid-size backs, which is fine if you only have nine players, 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9. But there were fourteen on the team and they all had to have jerseys. So what the man did was, he repeated numbers 1 through 5 but he stuck them on upside down,
, so each kid had his own numeral. Man, the ways niggers think to do things sometimes.

The Seven-Ups had no such silliness on themselves. They were decked out in style. Their suits were thick white flannel with green satin piping down the leg and green satin numbers on the back, 1 through 15 with no 13 for bad luck like elevators in tall buildings. Also the Seven-Up slogan was on their backs: above the numbers in green satin it said YOU LIKE IT, and then below the number it said IT LIKES YOU.

They had those baggy pants with elastic at the knee. They had those stockings with no heels or toes, green with three white stripes. They had black leather shoes with pink rubber cleats. And while I watched their pitcher warm up close by the third base line, I saw they even had nice little stitched holes punched in the flannel beneath their arm, so their little nice sweats could dry right away and no unpleasant odors develop.

The best part, to me, was a mostly orange patch sewed over the heart—it was the label off the Seven-Up bottle, this weird thing I had always studied and never figured out. There is a big white 7 and a little
UP
, which you would expect, though what there is seven of in that drink I will never probably know. But then, off to the side and behind the 7, were these tall, thin silhouettes in dark green of naked people swigging from bottles very gracefully while all these bubbles and streams flowed up around them. I used to look at that label on the bottle whenever I drank a Seven-Up, and I made up all kinds of mysterious half stories about what it all meant but never really got to the magic of it. For a long time I gave up Seven-Up though it was my favorite soda, just because that label bothered me so.

They looked a good deal too fancy. I watched them take infield. They knew what they were doing, but anybody can look good fielding slow rollers hit by a coach whose son is probably the first baseman. Fancy white boys, I thought. Who knows, maybe Maurice's boys will lick them bad?

Then the game started. Maurice's team was up first. Poke spent about three minutes squinting down at Maurice in the third base coach box and finally figured out the signals Maurice was flashing, slapping his head and tapping his right arm and then his left thigh and turning his hat around three times and such as that. What it all meant was, BUNT! Poke laid one down, and beat it out. I'll say this for him, he can fly. The next kid walked. Maurice was busting with pride. He always was saying that it took more brains to take four bad pitches than it did to hit a home run. I always answered that very thing proved baseball was a brainless game, giving more reward for the homer than the walk.

Anyway, the white pitcher didn't look too sharp and I started to think maybe this was Beefy's Lunch's day. The
people around me on the porches were whooping it up a bit, with two base runners and nobody out. It didn't even faze them when the next kid struck out, trying to put the ball in the creek, his helmet falling off after every swing. GET IT WET! all the poor fools screamed. DUNK THAT SUCKER, HOO!

The fourth batter was a kid named Oscar who was Maurice's pride and joy, though whether because he was a slugger or just because he was an orphan who hadn't started yet being a knife murderer at ten was not exactly clear. Anyway, Oscar was big, and he looked mean, and he had a swing even I had to say was very pretty. He took two pitches from that white pitcher, and then he lashed one. I mean, the boy
LASHED
it.

The ball left his bat in a blurry piece of speed you couldn't see for trying. The first you could locate was when it kicked up a spray of dirt just past second base on its way into the outfield and probably clean through the center fielder and all the way into the creek. Every colored there cheered when they saw it, WHOO!

But then out of nowhere the white shortstop whizzed into the picture. He was stretched out full, two feet off the ground, flying like he was shot from a bow and arrow, moving as fast as the ball. WHISH! He snapped his mitt out and snagged that ball ten feet behind second base, and then before he even hit the ground he plucked it out with his bare hand and flipped it backhand to the second baseman, who was standing on the bag. The second baseman went up in a spring over the sliding base runner and whipped a sidearm throw to first that beat Oscar by five feet. BAM BAM BAM a double play and the Seven-Ups trotted in to take their cuts while Poke was still tearing for home not knowing what had hap
pened behind him and the porch fools still rooting, though a bit confused by now.

When we did realize, we clapped again and hooted, but this time it was for those Seven-Ups too. They came to PLAY. And if they wanted to do it in pink rubber cleats, I guess it was okay by me.