Reprinted by permission of Ray Abernathy. Ray's website is available at: http://www.rayabernathy.com
To celebrate the defeat of the Yankees in the American League playoffs and blantantly promote sales of my novel “Dirty Billy,” I am posting excerpts from Chapter 12, wherein a planned trip to an Atlanta Crackers’ game takes a ghastly turn. To read other excerpts, visit my Reading Room; to buy the whole durn book, click on the red dot.
Note: Mary Kay’s older brother is teaching her the fundamentals of betting on foul balls at an Atlanta Crackers baseball game. See previous day’s excerpt./
“Baseball’s a game of percentage plays, you gotta play the percentages.”
“Like never puttin’ the winnin’ run on base?”
“But you gotta translate that kind of thinking to your betting. If you know your players, you’ll never put down for a foul ball on the first pitch. You have to take a calculated risk, and not just throw dimes away.”
“Like bringin’ in a lefty to pitch to a right-handed batter, or walkin’ the number four man if first base is open?”
“Exactly. You have to think just as strategically when it’s about money, honey. You don’t have to know what’s going to happen, nobody can do that. But you can add things up in your head before you take the risk. On foul balls, you don’t bet a three ball, no strike count ’cause the batter will be taking. You bet late, like when there’s a 2-2 count or a 3-2 count and the batter’s protecting the plate. Course if he strikes out, you’re out, so don’t bet foul balls on a pukey hitter, bet ’em on the best.”
I wondered if my oldest Beastly Brother thought throwing five dollar bills at Dale Storm was a percentage play, but I decided to hold the question until a time when I needed it.
If you followed Henry Alonzo’s guidelines, you’d win enough to buy at least two bottles of beer. I don’t mean to say that anybody would sell alcohol to a runty twelve-year-old girl, but if you were a lanky red-headed boy a couple of years older and a head taller, all you had to do was flip some quarters in the right direction and two bottles would slide down the row. Inside Ponce de Leon Park, Mr. Earl Mann ran things the way he wanted to run them because Mr. Earl Mann owned the Crackers, and the park and the fourteen uniformed cops on-duty knew they were being paid to watch the game and not the stands. If a preacher or an alderman complained about the drinking and the wild wagering going on, you could bet a sure thing that pastor or politician wouldn’t see another box seat ticket for a year to come. Billy and I made every game we could, which was usually only about ten times a summer, given our scarcity of dimes for carfare and quarters for beers. Then, on two or three Sundays a season, PaPa Thompson would show up at the back gate fully clothed and carrying his two old Crackers caps, and we’d ride the Number 16 downtown to the Loews Grand Theater, transfer to a Number 10 Peachtree, get off at Ponce de Leon Avenue, and walk a dozen blocks to the ballpark, talking about everything from the box scores from the night before to how my various relatives had died.
“MaMa Thompson died ’cause her kidneys went bad, didn’ she?”
“Yep. She was a tough woman, and real pretty when she was young, but the TB got into her bones and went to her kidneys. You probably don’t remember, but she was bent over like the Hunchback of Notre Dame before she got to where she couldn’t pee, and it just poisoned her to death.”
“How pretty was she?”
“Have you ever seen a jonquil in the spring, just after it’s up and green and there’s a bud swelling, and one morning you go out and the dew’s still on everything, and the bud has just begun to pop, and there’s just a little lace of yellow showing ’round the edge?”
“Yessir, I have.”
“That’s how pretty your MaMa Thompson was, and when she burst open all the way out just after your daddy was born, she looked more like a movie star than any woman I ever met. She got prettier and prettier through three more just like him. Then when she was thirty-five the TB grabbed her and dried her up like a stalk of September corn.”
“And did my Grandpa Morris die of the TB?”
“Nope. He died of a snakebite, but you knew that. Why’d you ask me again?”
“I guess I never figured out what made him do it in the first place.”
“He did it for the same reason anybody who goes to church does things. Folks figure if they can get through handling a lot of snakes, or listening to fifty different preachers over their lifetime, God will eventually have mercy on them and take them home to heaven, where they can ride on roller skates down those streets of gold and eat cotton candy all day long.” (To be coninued)