The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [132]
“My goodness,” she exclaimed. “Aren’t you Irvin Bobo?”
He looked her up and down. “Do I know you?”
“Why, yes!” she cooed. “I’m the star reporter of the Gazette, and I’ve been to almost every one of your jobs.” She laughed gaily. “‘Jobs’ isn’t the right word, is it?”
He was looking at her closely, and his tiny old eyes in their green shadow showed a spark of recognition. “Yeah, I ’member you! You was that lady jumped up and give me trouble when I was doing my duty on that white man.”
She resisted the impulse to explain to him that he hadn’t exactly been doing his duty when she had given him trouble. “Yes, you scared me,” she confessed. “I thought you were supposed to wait until the warden got back, and you went ahead and pulled the switch. I didn’t realize you were just kidding. Looking back now, I have to laugh.” She did have to laugh, and she laughed, and then she opened her large handbag and took out the quart bottle of James E. Pepper bourbon, wrapped in brown paper. “Remember you offered me a drink?” she asked him. “Well, now I’m going to return the favor.”
“Here’s the pitch,” Bobo told her and directed her eyes toward the field, where a man was winding up his body into a leg-lifted dance. The man threw the ball, and Bobo stood up, yelling, “That was a clean strike, goddammit! ’scuse me.”
She stood alongside him. He was actually shorter than her. “A clean strike, goddammit,” she agreed.
They sat down, and she began unscrewing the cap on the bottle. Irvin Bobo was looking around to see if any neighbors were watching. “We aint supposed to drink in the ballpark,” he informed her. “And I don’t drink anyhow except before I have to do a job.”
“You’ve got two jobs to do tonight,” she reminded him. She brought out of her handbag two small metal jiggers and demonstrated how it was possible to hold and drink one inconspicuously.
In the course of the afternoon Viridis measured out nearly the whole quart of bourbon to Irvin Bobo, retaining only enough in her own jigger to give the semblance of conviviality. She even learned a few things about baseball: the manager has to decide whether to leave a pitcher in even if the pitcher is getting killed.
In the second game of the doubleheader Irvin Bobo began to lose interest, although the Travelers were winning. He tried to watch the field with one eye closed and then the other, but he could not see the field clearly. All he could see was the jigger in his hand, which she kept full. “You called me a monster,” he mumbled.
She asked him what he had said, and he mumbled it again, and she recalled having said that. She patted his knee and left her hand there while she apologized. “I didn’t mean you. I meant that awful boss of yours, Warden Burdell.”
“Yeah, now he was a monster,” Bobo agreed.
“He shouldn’t have tried to make you kill a white man,” she sympathized. “That wasn’t fair.”
“No, it sure wudn’t. Burdell was a bastud.”
“He’s gone,” she reminded him. “Yeager won’t make you kill a white man.”
Irvin Bobo made a sound that, she guessed, was the best approximation of a laugh he could manage. “I gotta choose who they tell me to choose,” he said, or she thought he said, not hearing him clearly. Thinking about his words, she realized that he had not said “choose” but “juice.” I gotta choose who they tell me to choose, she told herself.
The Travelers won the second game of the doubleheader, but Irvin Bobo was past cheering. He was even, she discovered, past standing. She had to hold him up. She hoped he had not driven to the ballpark; he had not, and intended to walk home. It wasn’t far. Less than a mile. She offered to get a taxicab.