Brittle Innings

by Michael Bishop

  “Find Clerval. He’s batting fifth, so hurry!”

  I knew my way around the Prefecture about as well as I did King Tut’s tomb, and in that stadium, in my Highbridge uniform, I felt about as welcome as a colored at a cross burning. Jumbo wasn’t in the locker room. I banged out into a hallway leading to the concession stands and ticketstiles. I spike-walked through these areas, but still no Jumbo.

  The Gendarmes got their balky PA system working-if it’d ever balked. A voice like a woodwind reed began to announce the starting lineups. Jiminy! What if I didn’t make it back before Wallace stepped to the rubber? Mister JayMac’d lose two prime players to the same damnfool wild-goose chase.

  Behind a hotdog booth, I climbed a ladder towards the top of the grandstands and the press box. Up there, I’d be able to scan every inch of the stadium. Climbing in spikes scared me-they kept slipping off or catching on the ladder rungs-but I monkeyed up em as fast as I could. The evening sky opened out, and the alleyway under me narrowed like a pit.

  Once on the roof, an acre of salty gravel stuck in asphalt, I didn’t have to scan anything. Jumbo stood near the pole of the central battery of lights. Behind him, thunderheads reared against a pink wash of sky, like trout blood thinned in a basin of water. Charged dust hung in the air, the streaks of hanging dust like a battle line of angels. Take away the thunderheads, though, and the dark hadn’t begun to settle yet; meanwhile, the breeze skating across the mock-beach of the roof carried on it the smells of old bark and minty pigleaf.

  Jumbo had his back to this wind, his hair lifted and flew. He’d spread his arms, like an angel on the brink of soaring, or like somebody crucified.

  Somewhere, a groundskeeper yanked a switch. All the lamps above Jumbo, eye after stinging eye, leapt on. Facets. Dozens of facets. They mirror-blazed like the compound eyes of a giant dragonfly. Brilliant. The blaze left me with shivering mother-of-pearl oyster shells at the back of my walloped eyeholes.

  It seeped into me again-sight-in a slow-motion flash. But, lordy, Jumbo: His eyes turned silver. Then copper. Then gold. Then glassy amber, like a startled cat’s. His body jerked, rejerked, and jitterbugged without a single motion of either foot-like he’d convulsed from the knees up. His arms stiffened and flopped, and did it again, the way a man in the chair at Reidsville would twitch when our paid executioner got the go-ahead and slapped him a scorching jolt.

  Thunders cracked over the stadium. People gasped a long “Ooooooh,” crooning their amaze over a fireworks show. Then, whatever’d happened to Jumbo-his rooftop recharging-stopped happening. It cycled itself through. It ended and let him go, and Jumbo lurched a stagger step towards me. And another. I wanted to scuttle crabwise back over the roof and down. But I leaned into the wind, grabbed the front of Jumbo’s shirt, and yanked him step by step to the ladder.

  I waved Jumbo onto it. Its tubes shifted as soon as he’d climbed on. Him first, me second. Me going first would’ve been too much like Jack rushing in terror down the beanstalk ahead of the giant. What if Jumbo slipped? Falling, he’d strip me off too and ride me to a screaming marriage with the concrete. So Jumbo went first, and I pecked along after him, spiking his head softly every time he froze up.

  Anyway, we made it down and clattered into our dugout only moments before Little Cuke Gordon cried, “Play ball, dammit!”

  Mister JayMac had me leading off again, so I hurried to set myself in the batter’s box, still juiced from my escapade and stunned weak-kneed by the nearness of disqualification. Then Sundog Billy did ego surgery on me with his major league curve, striking me out on five pitches.

  The storm-with all its rumblesome witchery-divided and drifted in lightning-figured banks around the Prefecture. Like the Red Sea parting. A miracle of sorts.

  With that split storm chewing at the town’s edges, Jumbo played like a man on fire, his best game so far on this road trip: a pair of solo shots and a two-bagger off the right-field wall. But, Jumbo’s blasts aside, we blew that game and wound up two full games behind the Gendarmes, with no report yet on how Opelika’d fared.

  In the clubhouse, Mister JayMac said we had to win both Saturday’s and Sunday’s games. If we did, we’d leave town tied with the Gendarmes for first. If we split them, we’d gain no ground. And if we lost em both…

  Me, I really had the blues. Despite everybody-but-Jumbo’s dead bats, we’d gone into the last half-inning locked at two all. Then, with two outs and a chance at an extra at bat, I’d pumped a throw over Jumbo, sending three guys in the stands bailing for cover. My error let Fat Boy Fortenberry, a pinch hitter, score the winning run from second. Fortenberry! With his love handles, basset-hound gait, and asthma wheeze.

  Hoey came over to console me: “Couldn’t cut the mustard, could you, Dumbo? Shows what you’re really made of-Twinkie filling.”

  I shucked my gear and ducked into the shower room. Jumbo scrammed, and no one under the spigots said “Boo!” to me. As I dressed, the only guys to say, “Don’t worry bout it, you’ll pop em tomorrow,” were Knowles and Dunnagin.

  Dunnagin gripped my shoulder as I buttoned my shirt. “If we’d put a few runs up, one flubbed throw wouldn’t’ve meant nada. This bunch still owes you. Boot away five or six more, and Hoey might have a case.”

  I footed it alone from the stadium to the Lafayette. The storms that’d missed the city had regrouped. You heard them bellyaching above the copses of magnolias and yaupon holly southwest of the ballpark. Sheet and candle-wick lightning flickered on the diamond-cut tops of those trees. Snaky cloud tentacles reached into the sky over LaGrange and fanned long fringes of blackness into the gaps behind them.

  Even before I’d turned onto the square facing our hotel, it’d begun to rain. It bucketed down.

  Upstairs in room 322, Jumbo sprawled on the floor, doing Army-style crossover toe touches. The room had a thin carpet, and it and every other piece of fiber near him, including the mat he’d strung, reeked with his body odor. Why the exercise? He’d just played every inning of a killer game.

  Jumbo nodded at me, but kept working. “I’m discharging an excess of energy. Otherwise, I won’t be able to sleep.” Then he stopped. “You’re drenched, Daniel.”

  I sneezed. Outside, heaven’s waterworks emptied into the gutters. I shed my clothes, dried myself, and wrapped a bed sheet around me. I took down the grass mat dividing our room, rolled it up, slid it under Jumbo’s bed, and flopped down on my own. I faced away, clenching like a rolypoly. For the first time since Tenkiller, I shivered with cold, not fear.

  Jumbo didn’t say anything. After a while, he got up and shuffled down the hall to the men’s bath. When he returned, he shut the light and lay down on the other bed-without a word, but also without trying to hang his curtain again.

  23

  The rain hung on all that night and all the next day, but bad weather didn’t much bug Jumbo. He had his books and took a reminiscing kind of pleasure in the storm. Me, I wanted to ask the Lafayette ’s other guests to join me in breaking up our room furniture. The nearer game time drew on the harder the drilling rain fell. Jumbo and I peered into Lafayette Square from our third-story lookout. The elms, the azaleas, and the statue of the square’s namesake seemed on the verge of melting into the Piedmont aquifer.

  At four o’clock, a desk clerk-not the one who’d signed us in-brought word of the game’s cancellation. Mister JayMac had signed the message. He’d added we should eat well, hoard our strength, and get ready for two games on Sunday.

  Never mind Mister JayMac’s instructions. Jumbo didn’t eat or sleep. He looked out the window, paced, or read. Between four-thirty and five, I took a nap, a nap clabbered with war dreams (insects stinging; bullets snapping past), dreams born of the rain’s fizz and snap. When I woke, Jumbo said, “Hello,” and held up a book-not The Human Comedy, or It Is Later Than You Think, but the Harry Emerson Fosdick he’d finished reading in Opelika.

  “Listen,” he said: “ ‘A constructive faith is the supreme organizer of life, and, lacking it,
like Humpty-Dumpty we fall and break to pieces, and the wonder is-’ ”

  I sat up the better to hear him read.

  “ ‘-and the wonder is whether all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can ever put us together again.’ ” Jumbo’s lemon-drop eyeballs rolled up into his forehead, leaving his sockets empty-windowed and spooksome. Blank of eye, he said, “Neither a king nor his horsemen first put us together. We should hardly expect them to reassemble us when the world has destroyed us.” His eyes clicked back. If only they’d seemed to belong to him, their reappearance might have steadied me. They didn’t, though, and if not for the clattering downpour and the shaming sadness of Jumbo’s words, I’d’ve bolted.

  “Perhaps I’ll take more pleasure in Mr Smith’s Life in a Putty Knife Factory,” Jumbo said. He reached over (the galoot had to’ve been double-, maybe triple-jointed) and chose another title from his row of books. Just as he’d thumbed the book open, there came a rapping at our door: Tap, tappa, tap tap; tap tap. You know, Shave and a haircut, two bits.

  “YES?” Jumbo boomed.

  That gave the knocker a start. “Uh… Western Union.”

  “YES?” Jumbo boomed again.

  “Delivery for, uh, ah, it says here, ‘Mr Daniel Boles, shortstop of the Highbridge Hellbenders.’ ”

  I hunched my neck. I’d never had a Western Union delivery in my life.

  “Maybe it’s the bigs, Daniel,” Jumbo said. “Maybe Mr Cox of the Phillies has had his scouts observing you.”

  Then those scouts’d seen me throw away last night’s game. Jumbo’d go up before me, even with his drag-ass base-running.

  “WHOM IS THE MESSAGE FROM?” Jumbo said.

  “Mrs Laurel Boles,” the messenger in the hall said, “of, uh, cripes, I don’t know, somewhere in Oklahoma.”

  Jumbo lifted an eyebrow. “Your mother, Daniel?”

  I’d already started for the door. Mama wrote, but never telephoned or sent packages-she was too frugal.

  The joe in the hall didn’t look like a Western Union guy. In fact, it was the clerk who’d checked us in. I reached for my delivery, whatever it was.

  “Not so fast,” he said, a hand behind his back. The other clutched a sheet of onion-skin paper, which he lifted to chest level. “I must read this to you-a singing telegram that isn’t sung.” He read it in a snotty sing-song, though:

  “My dear darling Daniel,

  My dear dummy child,

  When out in your flannels,

  Don’t throw it wild.

  “I like the ball white, son.

  Why did you soil it?

  What the’Benders had won,

  You flushed down the toilet.

  “Your shame like your words, lad,

  Must stick in your throat.

  So to cuddle at night, kid,

  You’ve got… MY GOAT!”

  Here the clerk pulled a stuffed toy goat, with a furry chin beard, from behind his back and thrust it at me.

  “Telegram’s signed, ‘Laurel Boles, your loving mother,’ ” the clerk said. “Evening.” And before Jumbo could ask him who’d put him up to such a crappy stunt, he tossed his message down and scrammed. I turned and flung that goat at the wall. It burst a belly seam and spilled some stuffing. One of its horns twiddled out of true and flopped like a bird dog’s ear.

  I walked to the window, grabbed the curtains, and began to cry like the rain. Jumbo stepped off his bed, with a rustle of ticking and a drum-brush creak of the springs, and towered at my back. He had no more notion what to do or say than I did. All I knew was, my.432 batting average and my prestidigitation at shortstop didn’t amount to a phony two-bit piece if I was homesick and crammed to my eyeteeth with fury. So Jumbo did something to distract me. He turned me around.

  “Turkey Sloan,” he said. “Turkey Sloan probably wrote the ditty read to us by that… by that shitass impersonator of a Western Union man. Who helped Sloan?”

  Buck Hoey, I thought, my comforter in the locker room.

  “Buck Hoey,” Jumbo guessed. “Evans, Sosebee, and Sudikoff: malcontents, troublemakers.”

  I’d known Hoey was my enemy, but it despunked me to hear a whole list of fellas who wanted to tire-iron me.

  Jumbo read this news in my eyes. “Laugh at them. Laugh with them. Their playfulness”-he nodded at the poem- “may ride on spite, but it yet remains playfulness.” He picked up and looked at the poem. “This has some crude wit, Daniel.” He handed it to me.

  I read it twice, memorizing it against my will, then tore it into confetti and hurled the pieces at Jumbo. He blinked in the face of my conniption, as one scalelike flake landed on and hung from his eyelid.

  “Daniel,” he said. “Daniel.”

  He may’ve meant to calm me, or to chide, but the weirdness of my name on his lips, the puzzle of what it told, lifted my hackles the way the stadium lights had cable-jumped him. I could feel my skin glowing. I reached down and picked up the stuffed goat that’d bounced off the wall. Hissing, I got my fingers into its split seam and gutted it. I popped its eye buttons, dehorned it, twisted its tail off, mangle-snapped its legs. Stuffing flew around us like the insulation blown from an attic when a devil wind’s sprung its roof. Anyway, Sloan and Hoey’s goat lay here and there in pieces, although I still had its whitish silver pelt in my hands. I knelt on the floor, gasping and hammering my fist.

  Jumbo pinched my shoulders and drew me to my feet. His hands fumbled at my shirt, setting it straight, giving me an Army gig line.

  “Let’s talk to that unprincipled clerk.” I let him guide me through the door and down the stairs. At the registration desk, the clerk sat listening to a radio. When he saw Jumbo and me marching towards him, his face seemed to pull across his cheekbones; he looked embalmed and rouged. He clicked off the radio like a man caught lollygagging.

  “Who hired you to play a Western Union man?” Jumbo asked.

  “That’s private information.” The clerk squirmed.

  “No law protects mischief makers. Your allegiance has a vile monetary cast.”

  “Loyalty to those who pay you isn’t a crime. Usually, it’s what they pay you for.”

  “To how many buyers do you extend your loyalty?”

  “That’s no business of yours either.” Squirming more.

  “But if I paid you for it, it could be, yes?” Jumbo closed the Lafayette ’s counter book and leaned over it on one muscular forearm. “YES?”

  The clerk pulled back. “What’d you have in mind?”

  “NOTHING!!!” Jumbo boomed. “We know who paid you. Why should we bribe you for information already in our possession?”

  “Bribe me? Listen-”

  “LaGrange has a movie theater?” Jumbo cut him off in the shank of his huff. “We need the diversion of a film.”

  “A movie theater?” The clerk was confused.

  “I know your city supports at least one.”

  “We have three. The Roxy’s nearest, just down the street.”

  “When does its next feature presentation begin?”

  “Seven thirty,” the clerk said, and Jumbo turned me towards the Lafayette ’s revolving door. “But it’s Saturday, right? The fourth Saturday of the month?”

  “Yes,” Jumbo said.

  “Then yall can’t go there tonight. You wouldn’t want to.”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “Fourth Saturday of the month. It’s nigger night at the Roxy, place’ll be crawling with em.”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “Well, the rain could hold a few of em out. But it’s finally stopping”-he nodded at the lobby’s only window-“and you’d have to declare martial law to keep em out after a day as dull as this un. Why don’t yall try the Cairo or the Pastime? They have colored-only balconies, but yall wouldn’t run slam into the foppery of nigger night.”

  “My profoundest secret”-Jumbo leaned into the clerk’s face-“is that I am an honorary nigger.”

  “A what?”

  “An
d Daniel, whom others paid you to mock, cares less for his seatmates’ color than for the quality of the film.”

  “Okay.” The clerk produced a copy of the LaGrange Daily News. “At the Cairo, Reveille with Beverly . At the Pastime, a Mickey Rooney thing. At the Roxy, a triple bill yall wouldn’t care to-”

  “Hush,” Jumbo said.

  “Yessir,” the clerk said.

  And after a quick bite to eat in the nearby Magnolia Café, Jumbo and I hit the sidewalk, not in a downpour but a tingly drizzle, and walked through the early twilight to the Roxy for a triple feature of some sort.

  24

  It was nigger night at the Roxy for sure. Even the rain couldn’t spoil these folks’ Saturday evening. They’d turned out in chattering, straggle-in mobs. Groups of them clogged the sidewalk under the marquee and stretched around the corner from the box-office window.

  One double file hugged the Roxy’s brick wall in a futile effort to keep the drizzle from beading their hair or soaking their out-for-fun finery. They couldn’t go to the ballpark to watch their Gendarmes bruise the Hellbenders again, but they could catch a delicious scream fest-three classic chillers for the price of one-here at the Roxy. The storm had no power to chain them in their mill houses.

  The Roxy’d thrown LaGrange’s coloreds-and any other soul open-minded enough to wait for a ticket-a horror festival. The marquee told the story:

  FRANKENSTEIN

  BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN

  SON OF FRANKENSTEIN

  * * *

  Boris Karloff as the Bogeyman to End All Bogeymen

  When Jumbo saw the marquee and realized what he’d let himself in for, he had second thoughts. He mumbled something kindly about Reveille with Beverly. But I wanted this triple feature. I’d never seen a one of these films (even though I’d read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in high school), and I hoped the films would shear my mind away from dumbass thoughts of getting back at Hoey and his pals.