Brittle Innings

by Michael Bishop

  “You’ll adjust,” Jumbo said. “After a time, the heat becomes bearable.”

  Wham! it hit me: my rookie status, the attic room, the hideous galoot I had to live with. I broke down and sobbed, like I had on the train. Anywhere else, with anybody else, I’d’ve tried to hide how trampled on and scared I felt. Jumbo, though, I let watch.

  Then I reached under my cot, pulled my Red Stix bat out of my bag, and stood there glaring and wringing the bat’s handle. I didn’t plan to clobber Jumbo-he’d’ve clobbered me back, I thought-just to squeeze out some sawdust to catch my tears in.

  Jumbo had a dust-clogged revolving fan with a metal safety basket. It rested on a pitcher stand between his bed and my cot. He turned the fan toward me and switched it on. It buck-danced around, moving muggy air. If he’d hoped the fan would improve my mood, it didn’t.

  I continued to cry.

  In his frock coat and patched trousers, like a hulking Abe Lincoln in a Mathew Brady photograph, Jumbo sat down on his bed. He didn’t seem to be sweating, just steaming comfortably from the inside. He gave off a clayey smell, a smell with a soothing edge to it but also a buzzing persimmonish feel; not a sick-making smell, but a different one.

  Crying, I noticed Jumbo’d done a few things to make his attic homey. Semihomey. Shelves lined the wall behind his bed, pine planks he’d made into a bookcase with the aid of several large cans of Joan of Arc red kidney beans. He’d used these cans the way folks today use cinderblocks, as braces between the shelves. He’d stacked them eight cans high, in three columns, two cans per column between each shelf.

  Books glutted the shelves. Over them he had this William Blake reproduction of Adam and Eve being kicked out of Eden by angels with fiery swords. It looked like Jumbo had cut the picture out of a magazine-Life?-and glued it to a piece of cardboard with a mat of green construction paper but no glass. Then he’d hooked it on a loop of wire to a nail in the wall.

  Anyway, the books, the fan, and the magazine picture didn’t do much to hide the fact he lived in a grungy third-story oven. Now I lived in it with him.

  In the old days, English noblemen with crazy wives or daughters stashed their women in attics like this one and hid the keys in old ships’ trunks.

  Say something, I thought. Say something, you lummox.

  But he didn’t. He didn’t even shed his stupid coat. He sat there, sorry or maybe embarrassed for me, miffed at himself for agreeing to take me in. I slammed past his bed into the hall, Jumbo didn’t try to stop me. Either he didn’t care to risk my anger or my leaving didn’t exactly crush him.

  I stumbled down the stairs. On the second floor, some players, including Heggie and Dobbs, stood around in the hall, the doors to their bedrooms open. I startled them. Sure I did-a nutso-looking kid with a bat trying to find something to break.

  Double Dunnagin flapped out of his room in shower thongs and a bathrobe. He copped in a wink how I was primed to let go of my wayward, ornery pain.

  “Hey there, Danny. Swell bat.”

  “Get him off the hall with that thing!” Mariani yelled. “The twerp’s gone round it.”

  Dunnagin came over. He asked to see the bat. I pulled it back, cocking it. Everybody else on the hall-Mariani, Parris, Heggie, Dobbs, Knowles, Curriden-had shut up. Dunnagin kept smiling, kept coming on. He said he understood how arriving in Highbridge on a steamy day and getting paired off with Jumbo could “tetch a fella.” He took my elbow, even though I could’ve knocked his head off with one swing, and steered me into his room. His roomy, a pitcher name of Jerry Wayne Sosebee, bridled to see me.

  “For God’s sake, Double,” he said, “don’t bring the crazy kid in here. I’m trying to balance my checkbook.”

  But Dunnagin, without even wrenching my bat away, had already closed the door. Sosebee stood up. He wore nothing but a pair of khaki boxer shorts and eyed me like I’d brought cholera. His side of the room-a room twice as big as Jumbo’s hotbox-boasted photos of family members, pets, a Ford sedan on blocks. He’d papered the wall next to his bed with Varga girl pinups from Esquire. Even half unglued, I ogled them.

  “The guy’s whackers,” Sosebee said.

  “Seems healthy enough to me,” Dunnagin said.

  “Get him out. Jesus H. Christ.”

  Dunnagin shuffled on a pair of trousers and a T-shirt, flipped Sosebee a salute, and led me down the stairs and out of the house.

  Tiptoeing through the rows of a victory garden, he pulled me along by the barrel of my bat. We crossed a stretch of lawn below the garden and Mister JayMac’s bungalow and ended up in a gazebo near a good-size pond.

  In Tenkiller, the Elshtains had a gazebo. In his carpentry days, my dad’d built a few for townies with big yards and a need to show their money. Down South, gazebos sprout like toadstools. I don’t know why. They make little sense-moronic structures with roofs but no walls, more for show than everyday use. But Dunnagin pulled me up the steps of this one and made me put my keister on a bench inside it. I held my bat between my knees, where it jutted up like a bodacious hard-on. Dunnagin laughed. I set it down and rolled it under my bench with my foot.

  “Thanks,” Dunnagin said. He began to pace. It wasn’t quite dark yet. Only a couple of stars twinkled. You could smell these typical Hothlepoya County smells drifting in from town or from the countryside and colliding with each other. One smell was of plowed earth, like rotting burlap. Heavier, though, was the sweet, starchy fragrance from the Goober Pride peanut butter factory. Back then, these stinks haunted Highbridge, especially the trackside factory districts. In residential neighborhoods where Dutch elms, maples, and oaks could filter some of the peanutty stench out of the dead air, it dropped to tolerable levels. Nowadays, I can’t catch a whiff of it without thinking first of gazebos and second of Highbridge.

  “Don’t panic, Danny,” Dunnagin said, pacing barefoot in front of me. He had his hands in his back pants pockets. Plenty of room there-he hardly had any fanny at all. “Jumbo hasn’t killed anybody yet. He looks like death blown up to dirigible size and painted battleship gray, but, I mean, hey, he’s human, isn’t he?”

  Was he? I didn’t know.

  “He doesn’t have a social knack as well developed as his vocabulary, I admit it, but that shouldn’t shake you-you’re not exactly a social lion yourself, I wouldn’t think, and even Harpo has a bigger vocabulary than you do.” He squeezed the bulb of an imaginary airhorn: Beep, beep.

  “Look,” Dunnagin went on, “you should feel flattered he took you. Clerval had the only private room in McKissic House.” Dunnagin stopped pacing. I had my eyes on his feet. He didn’t start talking again until I raised my sights to his face. “Mister JayMac assigned that attic room to Clerval last year, his first on the club, and I’d’ve figured him about as ready to take on a roomy as Hitler to show up at a kosher gig in Miami. So you should feel honored. Chosen, even.”

  My eyes grew hubcap round. I did feel chosen, I just didn’t know for what.

  “Yeah, he’s big. Six-ten, seven, maybe seven-two. Hard to say. He sort of slouches. Taller than Howie Schultz, though. Schultz, the kid who plays first for Brooklyn. Sportswriters call him The Steeple. Got nixed for military service for being too tall. S one reason Mister JayMac hurried to sign Clerval-the Army wouldn’t come calling. A better reason is, Clerval’s a good country player. A bit slow, not a lot of range, but a champ at digging out bad throws and snagging tosses that’d sail slap over anybody else’s head. He’s also good at catching darters right back at him and shots down the foul line that might drop in for extra-base hits.”

  I pulled my bat out from under the bench. I rolled its handle back and forth between my palms.

  “Yeah, he can hit. Sort of. Last year his batting average hovered around.220 or so-poor for the minors, fatal for a guy with big-league ambitions. But he’s got a scary knack for making the hits he does get count. He’s slammed fence busters in spots that’d’ve killed us if he hadn’t come through. Killed us. So Mister JayMac gave him his own room. H
e’s valuable even if he isn’t quite bigs material.”

  Dunnagin took my bat and sighted along it at the evening star. Then he swung it a few times. Me, I swatted mosquitoes, a swarm from the shallows of Hellbender Pond.

  “Here.” Dunnagin handed the bat back to me. “Cigarette?” He shook a couple out of his pack, stuck one in my mouth, and lit me up. “Sometimes the smoke’ll run the bastards off.” He meant the mosquitoes. “Soothe your nerves too.”

  I took an awkward puff. Back in Tenkiller, Coach Brandon had hated the habit. Called cigarettes wind-robbers. Sharing one with Dunnagin felt a lot like breaking training.

  “Old Golds,” Dunnagin said. “They got this apple honey stuff in em to keep their tobacco moist.”

  I couldn’t taste any “apple honey,” but I kept smoking. In a minute or two, I had a coughing fit. Dunnagin didn’t notice.

  “Around the loop, players started calling Clerval Jumbo. He tolerates it. Just don’t call him Goliath, Behemoth, or Whale. He hates Whale. Call him that, it’s like you’re knocking not only him but all the whales in the seas. Jumbo’s okay, though, because it’s fairly neutral. It just means he’s big, which he’d be a blind fool to deny.”

  I kept coughing; a fuse sizzled straight down my tongue.

  “No idea how old Clerval is,” Dunnagin said. “Thirty? Maybe thirty-five or -six. He sometimes limps around like a crip. Other times, he’s light on his feet as Astaire. Even DiMaggio’d die for Clerval’s swing on his good days. I sure would.”

  With one hand I smoked. With the other I scratched a mosquito bite on my shin. Blood stained my pants cuff, and flesh rode under my fingernails.

  “Did you see him eating tonight?” Dunnagin asked me. “Take a look at him and you’d assume he’s a meat-eating barbarian. Nosir. He’s a vegetarian, a strict one. Won’t touch chicken or eggs. Eats a ton of produce a week, though. And Goober Pride peanut butter. Practice mornings, game days, he devours half a jar. Good thing he’s near the source, eh?” Dunnagin rubbed his chin. “Come on. I’ll walk you back up. Clerval won’t bite. He only bites vegetables.”

  I let Dunnagin lead me back to the house and up the stairs to Jumbo’s room. Dunnagin knocked.

  “Hank, is it okay if young Boles here comes back in?”

  The door swung open. Jumbo stood framed in it from the chest down. He bent at the knees and peered at us sideways.

  “Come in, Mr Boles.”

  “See you tomorrow,” Dunnagin said. He did a swami’s farewell, touching his forehead and chin and rolling his hand over. Then he beat it back down the stairs.

  Jumbo had changed our room. A divider-a loosely woven grass mat-hung between his bed and my cot. He’d also put a quilt and a feather pillow on my cot and set up his revolving fan at the edge of the grass curtain so that it blew into his half of the room through part of its arc and into my half for the other. It moved hot air around, but also kept mosquitoes from drilling us like Texas oil fields.

  “I intend to read a while. Tell me if the lamp disturbs you.” Jumbo ducked behind the mat, where his shadow hung, scaring the Tenkiller crap out of me. I sat down on the quilt he’d rustled up and stared at his lumpy silhouette.

  Dunnagin’s efforts to calm me didn’t calm me now I was back in Jumbo’s room. I heeled off my shoes thinking he was about to rip down the mat, grab me by the earlobes, and dump me out the window. Jumbo never did that, but sometimes his head would seem to turn my way and stare at me through the weave, his eyes-I imagined-leaking a thin yellow lava.

  I lay down in my clothes. Mama Laurel, the Elshtains, Coach Brandon, Franklin Gooch, and everyone else in Tenkiller might as well’ve rocketed off to Mars. At last I slept. Later, I awoke in darkness. The fan still bumped away, and Jumbo still breathed over its whirr in deep, even gasps. Gasping myself, I went under again…

  9

  The next morning, I woke before Jumbo. My mouth felt like it’d been emery-boarded and stuffed with cotton balls. (Dunnagin’s Old Golds?) The mosquito bites on my ankles and finger joints looked like razor nicks, I’d scratched them so hard. I needed a bath.

  I rummaged up a towel and skulked past the mat dividing the room. In the early grayness, Jumbo lay atop his bed-clothes, in extra-large BVDs, a human mountain range-knees, hips, rib cage, shoulders, head. He lay twisted in a way you’d’ve thought impossible for the human form to get into without permanent damage, but his breathing-gentle, gasping snores-said just the opposite. The ugly galoot’d really gone under.

  In sleep, though, Jumbo’s ugliness grew uglier. His body parts didn’t seem to fit. His stringy-haired block of a noggin didn’t belong with the bullish neck and the wide sloping shoulders under it. His proportions were more or less okay, I guess, but the colors and textures of his skin didn’t match up the way you’d’ve expected. It was like someone’d kneaded biscuit dough, cake dough, and a mass of Piedmont clay together without blending them. Even as he snored, Jumbo reminded me of a body, wounded or dead.

  In the bathroom, I got presentable. I didn’t look in on Jumbo again.

  I snuck downstairs to the parlor. Pettus, Jorgensen, and Roper had disappeared.

  No one’d removed the easel and its charts. On the easel I saw a map of Penticuff Strip, with all the honky tonks, tattoo dens, and “horizontal refreshment stations” Mister JayMac had declared off-limits to us, saying hidebound morality didn’t lead him to discourage us from visiting these dives, only his certainty no Hellbender with any sand could venture over there without getting in a brawl.

  “Those Camp Penticuff boys see the Strip as their private party turf,” Mister JayMac’d lectured. “Way they see it, any able-bodied male who shows up there in civvies is a pussy-stealing shirker who needs his balls kicked. If you go, don’t expect me to foot your hospital bills or your hoosegow bail. I’ll cut you loose first. I’ll tell your draft boards you’re ready for basic training and a quick-march slog into combat. Yall got that?”

  “Yessir!” everybody said.

  This morning, though, I thought it awfully dumb or awfully thoughtful of him to leave in plain view a map of all the barrel houses and sin cribs we’d do so well to avoid. I stood there in the bad light trying to memorize that map and its prime attractions: The Hot Spot, Corporal John’s, The Wing and Thigh, Effie McGee’s. I’d worked from the Strip entrance at Market Street to Pawnshop Row, about three quarters along it, when a voice from the dining room whirled me like a caught-out burglar.

  “Up so early,” Kizzy said, “you can hep me git my breakfuss going, Mister Danl.” She waved me toward her with a hand made ghostly by biscuit flour, then banged back through the kitchen door like I’d follow her in on command. Overnight, I’d gone from Mr Bowes to Mister Danl-a step down, I thought. And why’d she singled me out for KP this morning? Hadn’t I done my duty last night?

  My gut told me to do what Kizzy asked-I always did what grownups said. But if I’d stayed in my room like all the other slugabeds, I wouldn’t’ve had to make a decision. Kizzy was stiffing me for my Ben Franklin up-and-at-em ethic. Not fair. So I turned again to Darius’s map of Penticuff Strip.

  The kitchen door swung open. I didn’t even look up. With a finger, I traced the distance from GI George’s Camera Shop to a dancehall called, I swear to God, the Jitterbuggery. “Mr Boles,” a drawly female voice said, “Kizzy just asked for your help. Come at once. Please.” The “please” was a sop to the fact the speaker and I were both white. Confusion held me a second, then I double-timed it. Just inside the kitchen’s doors-boy, it smelled good in there!-the white woman who’d spoken to me was flensing strips from a greasy slab of bacon.

  Seeing bacon startled me. Meat rationing’d begun at the end of March, and Mama and I had tried to support the war effort by eating cold cereals. Goochie had called this “gut patriotism.” He hated cereals for breakfast, meatless chili for lunch, scrambled eggs for dinner twice a week. At McKissic House, though, no one had to sacrifice much.

  “Grease these baking sheets,” the white
woman said. “Then halve and squeeze those oranges, please. The juicer’s over there. At least a pitcher’s worth for starters. See if you can’t strain out those noxious little seeds. A seed in a glass of orange juice is an irritant and a reproof.”

  This woman, at fifty-something, looked several years older than my mama. She wore a floral-print dress, all blue and violet, with a clean white apron over it-like a dairy maid or a Swiss nun. Her hair shone whiter and softer than the slab of pork under her hands, but a beautician had cut it like a girl’s, swept it up high and drawn it back in wings over her ears, with a cameo clasp at the base of her neck. She had pink lips, dark eyebrows, and eyes like blue aggies. To me, she was… the sunrise in an apron.

  Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t develop an instant crush. I just realized a female as striking as this intruder in Kizzy’s kitchen was a bird of paradise. She belonged in a storm of biscuit flour about like Vivien Leigh belonged on her knees with a scrub brush in a public John. Just then I didn’t know much else about her. Maybe she secretly poisoned hummingbird feeders. One thing for sure-she could boss you like a topkick out to Camp Penticuff.

  I started greasing baking sheets while Kizzy measured fresh grounds into a coffee pot the size of a small oil drum. The sun hadn’t risen full yet, but the kitchen had already begun to creak and steam. I felt like a galley slave.

  “I’m Mrs McKissic,” the white woman told me. “Giselle Crouch McKissic. You may call me, as everyone does, Miss Giselle.” She paused in her rapid-fire bacon slicing. “Or could, that is, if you could talk. So you may think of me as Miss Giselle. However, you will probably settle on a private name in tune with your own vulgar tastes and biases. I can’t prevent that, but it betrays your upbringing, Mr Boles.”

  “Mister Danl’s a good boy, ma’am. Jes cain’t talk.”