“Before you question me, read these letters,” Jumbo said. “All of them.” He placed them on my desk, on the notebook I’d been using when I first heard his footsteps.
I picked up the letters.
Jumbo went to his bookcase and took out a stained volume. “Or reread this. Its text more or less duplicates the texts of Walton’s letters. Where they diverge, the letters represent the more accurate transcription of events.” He gave me the book and took the letters away. “But read the book. Its type is easier on the eye than Walton’s cursive.”
Jumbo tied his letters up again and placed them, along with his journal, into the beaded leather bag. He put the bag in the kayak and the mat into its cockpit, shoved the loaded kayak back under his bed, and abruptly left the room.
29
Reading a book on the sneak has a lot more allure than getting it thrown at you as an assignment. Oliver Twist as a book-report chore will bore you to lip drool. The same pages sampled in the library stacks will rev up your mind and carry you faster than a bullet train to a new world. I’d enjoyed reading Jumbo’s log. Whether I’d like rereading Frankenstein on his outright command was a moot question. I had half a mind to throw his plump little book out the window.
But I started it and ran headlong into the blah-blah-blahs that’d almost stopped me dead in my tracks in high school, junk like “diffusing a perpetual splendor,” “the inestimable benefit which I shall confer on all mankind,” “under your gentle and feminine fosterage,” and so on.
Luckily, the writer-Mary Shelley, Robert Walton, whoever-finally rolled out the cannons and calliopes, adrenaline-rousing stuff about whale-fishers, Russia, dog sledges, and a creature of “gigantic stature” out on the ice-sections that reminded me of Jumbo’s own log, of course, and even of his highfalutm style, but that riveted me to my chair anyway.
Pretty soon, I’d reached Victor Frankenstein’s account of trying to build a creature “about eight feet in height, and proportionately large.” It got to be evening. Jumbo came in and put a cake pan of vegetables and a fork in front of me.
“Eat,” he said.
I noticed that Jumbo’s face-yellow cheeks, watery eyes, bluish black lips-squared with the book’s first description of the monster. But I kept reading and ate without looking at the cake pan or tasting what Kizzy’d fixed.
I read all night. Jumbo may’ve walked the grounds or dozed on a parlor sofa. Who knows? Around four in the morning, he poked his head back in just as the fiend in Frankenstein says, “Polluted by crimes and torn by the bitterest remorse, where can I find rest but in death?”
Yeah, where? I motioned Jumbo in and read the story’s last three paragraphs.
“Well?” he said.
I tossed the book back and paced the room with my hands in my back pockets. I must’ve looked a little like the tormented anatomy student at the height of his project: eyes red-rimmed, hair sweaty, hands as fluttery as quail.
Jumbo had evolved out of the body and the personality of a patchwork thing gimmicked into life by Victor Frankenstein. In the account said to be Mrs Shelley’s, Jumbo’d had no name, just creature, monster, fiend, or demon, and nobody but nobody called him mister or sir. Henry Clerval, the name Jumbo used today, had once belonged to Frankenstein’s best friend, another of Jumbo’s early murder victims. So you had to believe he’d killed, or caused to die, at least five people, including the man who’d created him, and the friend named Clerval.
Thing is, despite Jumbo’s journal and his looks, I still didn’t quite buy that he was the monster. My mind’s eye kept casting back to that ship caught in the ice of the Barents Sea, but the off-chance that Hoey and his pals were trying to con me kept me from tumbling brain over butt to its “truth.”
“I asked you to read my story,” Jumbo said, “because you would understand that the crimes of my youth have had no sequel in this epoch of my life. I require an ally, Daniel.”
I rubbed my upper arms like somebody trying to stay warm in a meat locker. Every lobe of my brain felt more tightly packed than a butterball turkey.
“Practice in four hours,” Jumbo said. “Perhaps we should sleep.” He stretched out on his bed and, in thirty seconds or less, began to snort and wheeze.
My questions sorted themselves into a long, worry-laden file. In Mrs Shelley’s doctored transcription of the deathbed confession of Dr Frankenstein, his creature had been a true monster: eight feet tall. Nobody could look at him without cringing or picking up a stick. “No mortal could support the horror of that countenance,” Frankenstein had said, “a thing such as even Dante could not have conceived.” Which mostly proves Dante never visited Dixie: Jumbo had a fair claim on ugliness, but if you looked, he wasn’t much grottier than some of the folks prowling Kmart of an evening.
Other questions?
Well, the fiend in the “novel” has the agility and stamina of an Olympic athlete. Once, like an ape with vernier jets, he shinnies straight up the face of a small mountain. Jumbo had the upper-body look of a gorilla, but his bad legs wouldn’t let him scale a cliff that fast.
I also had to wonder again about Jumbo’s age. If he and the monster in Mrs Shelley’s “novel” were one and the same, what’d my roommate been doing for the past century and a half? No one that big could hide very long, at least not in a city or a town, and I couldn’t imagine how he’d ended up playing ball in Highbridge.
Finally, how did Jumbo feel about himself and everything that’d happened to him? Dr Frankenstein couldn’t tolerate his critter’s looks. He’d skedaddled soon after mumbo-jumboing awake the graveyard parts he’d used to model the thing. If you bought this Frankenstein foofaraw, Jumbo didn’t actually rate, biologically, as the doctor’s get-but the doctor’d made him, and if you give something life, you’re responsible for helping it out, right? Laws exist against running out on your kids, even against sitting on an alimony check. So Dr F. doesn’t stack up too well against your basic alimony jumper, some of whom have pretty good reasons for missing payments, and a lot of whom love their kids even if they can’t pay. But old Dr F. turned his back on his son-sorry, his creature-then lied to him and tore apart the cut-and-paste Eve beast he’d promised to build him as a way of making up for his fatherly short-comings.
As Jumbo slept, I mulled this stuff. I hiked around the room too keyed up to lie down and rest from nearly ten hours of straight reading. Even in his reddest-eyed condition, Jumbo’s daddy didn’t have much on me…
At practice that morning, Jumbo, Muscles, and I all played like sleepwalkers. My backasswardsness-once, a double-play toss from Junior bounced off my left tit-all went back to my rereading of Frankenstein. Jumbo’s slipshod play had a like explanation. He’d stayed out of our room to let me read.
But Musselwhite’s lousy play puzzled me-till I saw LaRaina Pharram sitting next to Phoebe in the left-field bleachers. Miss LaRaina wore a dress of orange, red, and white, like a lion leaping into a sunset full of cockatoos. She gave Muscles the eye and shifted around so her easel-splash dress whipped about her calves and pulled tight across her thighs. No wonder Muscles couldn’t motor. He’d probably been busier last night than I had.
“Oh, puh-leeze!” Phoebe said a few minutes into this show. “Act yore age, Mama!”
“Mind how you talk,” Miss LaRaina said amiably.
Phoebe got up and stalked all the way from the bleachers to the Hellbender dugout. After talking to Phoebe, Mister JayMac stood on the dugout step and yelled, “LaRaina, go home! You’re distracting the troops!”
“Could’ve fooled me,” Miss LaRaina yelled back. “A flat Coke’s got more fizz than this sorry crew!” But after blowing a kiss off her palm at Muscles (to Reese Curriden’s chagrin), she seized her pocketbook and sashayed out of view.
Finally, Mister JayMac whistled us in. “Yall stink today,” he said. “I doubt you could field a tumbleweed with a tennis net. A few of yall need deodorizing worsen the Highbridge sewage-treatment plant. Go home. Tomorrow’s another day, but it’d
better be bettern this one or I’ll sell yall to Johnny Sayigh and move to Cuba.” He stomped off.
After practice, Phoebe met Jumbo and me in the parking lot at the Brown Bomber. She had on overalls, bebop shoes, and a floppy short-sleeved shirt that made her arms look as snappable as day-lily stalks.
“Come to dinner with Mama and me on Friday after the Marble Springs game,” she said. “Mama said I could ask.”
The invitation surprised me. It confused me a little too. I held the back of my hand to Jumbo’s stomach to ask if Phoebe meant him too.
Phoebe blushed. “I was asking you, Danny,” she said. “It, well, it wouldn’t…” She stared at her bebops.
From the bus, a rude farting sound and ugly laughter.
Jumbo said, “It wouldn’t look good for a bachelor to visit your house while your father’s still abroad.”
“Her daddy’s not a broad!” Turkey Sloan shouted out the nearest window. “He’s a captain!”
“Will you come?” Phoebe asked me.
Ack. I’d already had one dinner with Phoebe and her mama, and it hadn’t exactly gone down like an oyster on a slide of bourbon. Also, when Miss LaRaina wondered what kissing Jumbo would be like, Phoebe’d said, “Mama, that’s vile!” But what, when she’d cried that, had worried her more-the health of her folks’ marriage or the foulness of Jumbo’s looks? She’d really broadcast mixed signals on that one.
“Accept her invitation,” Jumbo said.
Miss LaRaina, at the curb in a gray ’38 Pontiac, mashed her horn-once, twice. Phoebe peered at me, half pleading but more than a smidgen peeved.
“He accepts,” Jumbo said. “Don’t you, Daniel?” His hand seized the back of my skull. Out of Phoebe’s view, he pushed my head forwards and, with a yank on my hair, tugged it back to upright. Then he let go.
“After Friday’s game then,” Phoebe said. “We’ll give you a ride soon’s you’ve showered.” She sort of skipped towards her mama’s smoky old Pontiac.
The Bomber carried us Hellbenders back to McKissic House. A crew of them razzed me about Phoebe, but Darius kept as quiet as a gambler computing blackjack odds.
30
“Here.” Jumbo put his journal on my desk. “You’ve copied the first part of my log in your own hand.” He put my notebook down beside the log. “Continue. Act as my amanuensis, and copy the rest. One day, you can corroborate a story few would otherwise believe.”
Seeing the log and my notebook together embarrassed me, but I opened them and began reading the log where I’d left off, at Jumbo’s resurrection in the ice cave. With his blessing, I copied this new material as I read.
From Remorse to Self-Respect:
My Second Life
At the commencement of my new life, as throughout my old one, bitter cold scant afflicted me. I preferred it to the warmth of summer, responding to it as an assemblage of pistons, flywheels, and cogs responds to lubrication. My chief hindrance lay not in meteorological conditions, but in the body of my dead creator. I felt an obligation to keep it with me as both a macabre talisman and a relic of loathsome veneration. Wheresoever I ventured, I carried Frankenstein with me, initially slung over my shoulder or under my arm, but later arrayed on a sledge dressed with evergreen boughs, a rude travels, that I fastened by a barken harness to my waist and pulled, as a bride goes before her wedding train. Unlike a bride, I sought to deflect attention from my passage and so invariably travelled by night, frequently through thick forests or over rugged terrain. More than once, after a violent spill, I had to retrieve my passenger and lash him more firmly to his carrier.
What thoughts I had-what overriding goal-I cannot fully recall. I understood, I think, that in my second advent I had no more hope of gathering companions or of confounding likely foes than I had known in the unholy year of my first reign. Thus, I wandered the most remote and desolate places of Siberia, eschewing any human contact but availing myself of every chance to study the habits of the strange beings whose lands I traipsed.
As a result, having first mastered a language by eavesdropping on another drilling in French, I quite early added to my repertoire not only English and German, but also the curious Hyperborean tongues of the Kets, the Yukaghirs, the Luorawetians, and the Gilyaks. To these I added the dialects of other peoples scattered about the fjords and inlets of the Arctic Circle, not excluding the two chief dialects of the Innuits, or Esquimaux, across the Chukchi Sea in North America.
During one blizzard I took shelter in a hovel roofed with tundra blocks, chinked with peat moss, and protected on the northeast by gnarled cedars. In the dugout’s only room, the skeleton of a Cossack trapper, who had starved to death, kept me grinning company. I grew fonder of this mute lodger than I had ever been of Frankenstein, for I had no memory of abuse at his hands or of contumely from his lips. The corpses got on well, however, and I rejoiced in their undemonstrative friendship. Neither protested when I took the hovel’s only table as my desk.
Soon afterwards, I coaxed a corroded lamp into operation with oil from a covered bucket. With sufficient light to work by, I began to indite in my counterfeit of Walton’s cursive the texts of his epistles to Mrs Saville. As an icy northern siroc keened over the dugout, I scribbled for hours without respite.
Occasionally I paused to replenish the oil in my lamp or my paper from the stores of the Caliban. Several times, aghast at the indiscriminate rapaciousness of my hunger, I made a meal of stringy dried meat-fish, fowl, or mammal, I neither knew nor cared-purloined from a smokehouse earlier in my travels. Insofar as I knew diurnality, I finished my copy in sixor seven days and slumped across the table in a stupor of exhaustion.
Why such fever-blighted labour? Unless I discharged the obligations of my previous life, I felt, I could never turn the promise of my new incarnation to aught but catastrophe. That way I had already journeyed. I owed the ghost of Captain Walton my gratitude. In trying to tell his sister Mrs Saville of his activities, he had set down in all its grisly particulars the tale of my creation. He had also left a chronicle of my rejection and my subsequent career as a pitiless Fury. This record of my dashed hopes and my shameful crimes would henceforth lesson me. My debt to Walton for producing it demanded that I repay him by sending to Mrs Saville the letters, or legible copies of the letters, comprising that tale. Thus I had determined in the first lucid moments after my lightning-prodded rebirth. Perhaps selfishly, I had also resolved to claim the original documents as my own.
Dispatching even my copies of these epistles to Mrs Saville proved a formidable undertaking. I had sheltered miles from human habitation. No post-road or port was readily accessible. However, the unfortunate Cossack who had excavated the dugout had situated it near a river that hastened turbulently beneath a skin of ice to a bay on the Siberian Sea. With difficulty, I followed this frozen waterway to a bayside settlement, hauling on my travois my desiccated and indurate creator.
This settlement harboured between two glacial cliffs near the cold sea’s jewel-green waters. On the western escarpment, I took up my observations of the mercantile activity below. At night I prowled like a phantom among the rude shops and barracks fronting the water. During my reconnoiterings, I heard a bearded Kit in sealskin leggings call the village Janalach.
A Russian vessel lay at anchor in the bay. Fully rigged and masted, its sails were furled in horizontal cocoons. It had wintered in Janalach. Its captain and sailors patiently awaited the brief Siberian summer and the short-lived retreat of the ice. Cossack seamen and Yakut nomads conferred amid the mud- and slush-defiled streets with Yukaghir traders, a polyglot scene both festive and fraught with disaccord. The sun’s wan eye had thawed not only the harbour ice but also the heretofore frozen hatreds and cupidities of all those gathered there. I witnessed quarrels, cozenings, fisticuffs, and sanguinary mayhem. That Frankenstein had viewed my behaviour as singular and tantamount to depraved began to impress me as a provincial narrowness of vision. Had he never remarked the reprehensible doings of his own kind?
&nb
sp; Soon I became aware that a speculator of Scottish descent had voyaged aboard the Russian ship, the Tamyr Princess, to this bleak coast. The Cossack sailors called him Angus Ross, pronouncing his family name Roos, as if he had ties to their motherland more binding than the crassly mercantile. They also chaffed him about his ruddy face and his unruly muttonchop whiskers. Ross habitually answered with a swearing surliness that they rightly took as bluster. His Russian was of the inept pidgen variety that provoked further ridicule and general merriment. The sailors, it seemed, viewed him as their mascot. He got on better with the Yukaghirs in Janalach than did most of the Russians, however, and, despite his brusqueness, rarely fell into a serious quarrel with anyone.
I once ventured close enough to witness Ross’s dealings with a Yaket clansman working a movable forge in the lean-to of a smithy. The smith converted various metal articles supplied by the sailors-belt buckles, fisk hooks, hatch rings, and so forth-into cooking wares and weapons for his tribespeople, trading animals skins and trinkets for the wherewithal of his craft.
Ross bartered crisply with the Yaket for a set of small metal polar bears. The smith would accept nothing for them, as, I surmised, Ross had known from the outset of their negotiations, but the old pistol wedged in his belt. The works of the pistol had long since rusted, and its trigger would not pull. At last, however, the men made their trade, whereupon the Yaket stoked the engine of his forge and proceeded to work from the flintlock’s barrel a handsome tobacco pipe. Ross watched the process (as did I, albeit clandestinely), with evident appreciation of the smith’s handiwork. Soon, after all, the nomad who acquired the pipe must return to Janalach for tobacco.
Upon quitting the lean-to, Ross walked to a set-apart jumble of boulders near the water. To gloat, perhaps, over his booty, he disposed himself on a rock and arranged his iron figurines upon it between his legs, as a child would deploy a regiment of tin soldiers. I approached Ross from behind, covered his mouth and muttonchops, and impelled him irresistibly to his back; his toys fell like dominos. Ross essayed a scream, which my hand muffled. Additionally, the backwards force I imparted to his chin warned that further struggle would snap his neck. I regretted the subterfuge, but deemed it necessary to quiet him. He subsided beneath me, the horror engendered by my countenance evident in the wildness of his eyes.
Brittle Innings Page 24
