Brittle Innings

by Michael Bishop

  We finally reached the ticket window, and I handed in my money. Jumbo pushed up right behind me.

  “If you haven’t already seen Frankenstein,” he said, “you may find it a… a primitive dramatic vehicle.”

  Did he want to talk me out of seeing it? The white girl in the booth, with her hair in a kind of mesh oriole’s nest, said, “Ticket money, sir.” Jumbo paid her and shoved behind me into the salty popcorn smells of the lobby.

  In its crush, he said, “Bride of Frankenstein surpasses in quality the film to which it is the sequel, and Son of Frankenstein features Karloff’s last essayal of the role that made him famous and a good performance by Bela Lugosi as Ygor. Should we stay for all three, however, we’ll violate curfew.”

  Jumbo stood out like an ostrich in a parade of penguins. His whisper boomed above even the feisty talk of those black folks, and some of them looked at him like he’d arrived aboard an ambulance.

  At the refreshment stand, I nodded at the Coca-Cola toggle and the glassed-in popcorn popper next to it. Soon as I had my stuff, Jumbo marched me towards the screening room. The seats there’d begun to fill. Folks surged through the lobby and into the auditorium. We slipped in at the back, after two thirds of the crowd’d already gone in, and found seats against the rear wall, under the projection booth. Bodies crammed every nook, teenagers eeled up and down the aisles searching for friends or showing themselves off, and the hoots and cat-calls didn’t fade away until the house lights’d dimmed.

  The curtains over the screen, the royal-purple one and the see-through job behind it, purred aside. Coming attractions, newsreels (mostly war stuff), and a Popeye cartoon that prodded the crowd to talk-back applause.

  Then Frankenstein, with an opening scene-Latin mumblings, peasant faces in a cemetery-that really did slap a chill on everyone’s high spirits. Except for the projector purr and the film’s sound track, all you could hear now were creaking seats, nervous titters, and coughs. Bodies dug up, hanged murderers cut down, the theft of an ABNORMAL brain by the doctor’s stupid helper. Halfway along, the crowd’d really gotten into it. Squeals, shrieks, laughter. Some folks stood up to yell at or plead with the actors on screen.

  “Come on now,” a man told the monster, “you don’t want to do that. Uh-uh. Gon bring you nuthin but misery.”

  “Vile!” somebody else said. “He so vile!”

  “Lawd, cain’t you see he didn’t mean it?”

  “Naw, naw, naw. Go back! Go back!”

  The longer I sat there the queerer I began to feel. I kept sneaking peaks at Jumbo, who sat rigor-mortis still. He didn’t much favor Karloff playing Dr Frankenstein’s critter, or else Karloff s goose-stepping monster didn’t exactly favor Jumbo, but you’d’ve had to be blind not to see a likeness-the lumpish blocks of their heads, the bearishness of their bodies. Still, Jumbo had a suppleness lacking in the other, a sad lopsided quirk of face that made Karloff s monster look regular, even handsome, by comparison. There was a mechanical, a robotlike, quality to the screen thing Jumbo didn’t have. He sometimes lumbered and wrenched, but when he did, it was more like a hurt beast than a broken robot. Anyway, Jumbo’s resemblance to the made-up Karloff didn’t scare me-it embarrassed me into a fever. Even the Roxy’s “iceberg air” didn’t help. How must Jumbo feel, towering there marble hard as the Lincoln memorial, hands clutched like gauntlets to his knees?

  He must’ve had an inkling half the people there, including his own roomy, ’d already compared him in their minds to the bogeyman on screen. And the inkling could have come from a lifetime of overheard slurs and otherwise hard-to-account-for snubbings. I knew such stuff myself.

  Three quarters or more through it, I dropped the thread of Frankenstein. It had no music score, and every little gasp or cushion creak-when folks weren’t sassing the Karloff monster or arguing amongst themselves-slammed me back to the iceberg there-and-then and the sting of my own embarrassment. Lots of scenes limped along on talk.

  But near the end, when the villagers torched the old mill and the monster appeared to burn with it, I found the thread again. I forgot about Jumbo and watched. A respectfulness like awe fixed the audience in a hurricane light, centering us in the hush of its eye. Pity for the monster, and relief it wouldn’t rampage again in this picture, and dread in knowing that, like Christ in a bad suit, it would rise again. To take a wife. The sequel was already spooled.

  “Let’s go.” For the first time since we’d claimed our seats, Jumbo tried to get up. I put both hands on his chest and held him in it. The clock on the square hadn’t chimed nine yet. Even Jumbo couldn’t be that keen on Life in a Putty-Knife Factory. Groaning, he sank back.

  During intermission, folks headed for the lobby to stock up on jujube beads, soda, chewing gum. With the houselights on, they saw Jumbo’s head lolling against the back wall, his eyes squinting like a big iguana’s. They slowed to ogle him or sped up to get past quick.

  Whispers and nudgings cycloned around us, and two or three more seats in our area wound up empty.

  “S a publicity gimmick,” somebody said.

  “S a wounded sojer, home from the war.”

  “Naw, it’s that Hellbender first baseman who poked him a coupla long uns lass night.”

  “Ugh. Somebody done beat him silly with a ugly stick.”

  The houselights blinked, signaling the second show.

  Fewer people came back in, and the empty seats around us multiplied. Jumbo slid down and down, like he hoped to disappear into the spilled Coke gleaming on the floor like gummy blood.

  Bride of Frankenstein began with its loud rum-ta-ta-tum-tum score-music-box tinklings during the opening with Mary Shelley and the bozos made up like Byron and Percy, and mad flourishes every time the monster staggered on or Colin Clive as Dr F. had another headache. By the time Clive got Elsa Lanchester, with her Harpo Marx hairdo, jump-started, Jumbo’s head was no higher over his seat back than mine was over mine. His knees rose out of the chop of the Franz Waxman’s score like islands. It hurt to see him cramped, but with its cockeyed sets and its skinny Dr Praetorius, this movie had its points. How could I leave until the whole silly show’d unsprocketed?

  Bride ended. The houselights came up again. A moviegoer on his way to the lobby stopped and pointed a shaky finger at Jumbo. “You don’t blong here. Yo’re a demon from the crypts and gallows.” The man reeked of a bad peach wine. “Begone, Satan, you damn viper!”

  “Shhh,” somebody said.

  “Don’t yall shush me. This man aint a man, he a debil, got him a snake for a tail.”

  “Ol man, you drunk! Ol man, you a fool!”

  “He’s a white debil. Don’t blong here, don’t blong noeres but hell,” He looked back at Jumbo. “Begone, you damn viper!”

  Two white high school boys seized the man and frog-marched him out of the theater. Jumbo hugged himself and stared up at the star-sprinkled ceiling. One of the kid bouncers came back and peered down the row at him.

  “Sorry bout that, sir. You awright?”

  “Sticks and stones,” Jumbo said.

  “We screen for carriers, but some of these jigs’re jes lousy boozehounds.” He saluted. “Enjoy the last show, sir.”

  “What time is it?”

  The bouncer shot his cuff to check his watch, an old one with a radium-painted dial.

  “Ten-twenty,” he said. “Zat awright?” (Did he plan to have the Roxy dragged by tractor into another time zone if the hour didn’t suit us?)

  “Thank you,” Jumbo said, and the kid left. “Daniel, Mister JayMac’s curfew-”

  The houselights dimmed again. The opening credits for Son of Frankenstein began to roll. I put my hand on Jumbo’s arm-humor me a little longer, I was begging him.

  Next to and in front of us, more empty seats. Only three other people still sat on our row.

  Basil Rathbone played Wolfgang Frankenstein, son of the maker of the first picture’s monster. In one scene, Lugosi as Ygor took Rathbone to the monster’s sleeping body.
<
br />   “Cannot be destroyed. Cannot die. Your father made him live for always,” Ygor said. “Now he’s sick…”

  Jumbo moaned.

  “You mean to imply that that is my brother?” Rathbone asked as they stood over Karloff in his sheepskin vest.

  “But his mother was lightning,” Lugosi said.

  Jumbo’s knees thumped the seat back in front of him. He struggled up like a gorilla trying to burst a steamer crate. “What’ve these celluloid nightmares to do with you?” he boomed at everyone who’d cranked around to look at him.

  “Can that yammering!” somebody shouted back.

  “One more damn drunk,” somebody else said. “A black un and a white un, bofe trouble.”

  The ushers showed up again-startled to find Jumbo, a giant shadow with his head just below the projector window, at the center of the commotion, railing at the film on screen and the blameless folks who’d paid their hard-got money to see it. I tried to lever Jumbo back down.

  “Fie on these blood wallows!” he shouted. “These hymns to corruption! My patience exhausts itself!”

  The ushers exchanged a look. Who’d move first to give him the old heave-ho? Thank God, Jumbo hadn’t gone off on an all-out woozy tear yet. He saw the worried boys.

  “No need to oust me bodily,” he told them. “My friend and I are leaving.”

  “Good riddance,” somebody several rows up said. “Sho hope we can git on wi our blood waller in peace.”

  Jumbo edged aislewards, pulling me with him and apologizing to anyone near enough to hear. A third of the remaining audience clapped when he opened the door to the lobby. That hurt him. Through two whole films, he’d behaved himself. Not until a drunk’d called him a “damn ol viper,” not until the pressure of Mister JayMac’s curfew began niggling him, and not until a slew of scenes into the third movie had he stood up to protest the mayhem and the morbid stuff. Now his fellow moviegoers-some of em, anyway-applauded his exit. The unfairness of that slapped him like a gas-soaked rag. Out in the lobby, I watched shock and hurt ripple over his face in frame-by-frame waves. Rage shook him. He let go of me and turned back towards the theater-to tear out a seat by its floor bolts and hurl it with a roar into the crowd?

  “He’s completely superhuman!” Wolf Frankenstein would say. “The entire structure of the blood is quite different from that of a normal human being!”

  “Come on,” one of the ushers said. “You don’t wanna let a bunch of niggers git under your skin.”

  “You do, they’ll shore change its color for you,” the other usher said. And both ushers laughed.

  Jumbo’s rage drained away. He didn’t rip up a seat. He growled and swung his arm at everyone in a tired wave. He left the hall again and paced the foyer, where the coming-attraction posters shone in glass boxes.

  Together we walked through the muggy air to our hotel. Jumbo stooped as he slouched, but his size still suggested Karloff’s killer hobgoblin. On my first day in Highbridge, I’d figured him for a giant in coveralls. Now, shook up by three movies and the superstitious venom of a wino, I wondered if he was even human.

  Back in our room, I went to bed under his chilly stare, but tonight it seemed one more penalty, along with Sloan’s fake telegram and Hoey’s stuffed goat, for throwing away the first game of our first series against the Gendarmes.

  I couldn’t sleep. From the creakings of his bedsprings and his moans, I assumed Jumbo couldn’t either. He’d said nothing on our walk back from the Roxy and nothing since we’d settled in. A fly on the wall would’ve had a devil of a time figuring out which of us was the dummy. I’d stopped believing that he might strangle me in my bed, but I hated thinking that at the Roxy’s triple bill we’d become unmoored from each other, shoved apart like two boats on a vast, poisoned lake.

  Jumbo made a noise like a cow getting sidetracked in the middle of a low and ending with a snork. I rolled over and switched on my bedside lamp. Shadows leapt onto the walls. Jumbo’d heard me, but he lay facing away, a one-man mountain range. I got out of bed and found my message notebook. With a pencil I printed out a question, two questions, three:

  Where are you from? Really?

  Do you have any living kin?

  Did you ever have an accident that caused you to look the way you do now?

  I took the notebook around Jumbo’s bed and held it so he could read my questions, which he did. Still lying on his side, he crooked his finger for my pencil and notebook, took them from me, and printed:

  Too many places to list.

  No.

  Only my “birth.”

  He gave the notebook back to me and closed his eyes. I sat down on my bed and read his answers over and over again, like he’d written them in an alphabet with hundreds and hundreds of meanings in every letter. Too many places to list, No, and Only my “birth,” I figured, put into code his whole mysterious biography. Why had he put birth in quotation marks? After our evening together, I was afraid I knew.

  25

  Mister JayMac dropped by our room at eight the next morning to tell us the Gendarmes’ owner, Mr John Sayigh, wanted to play a doubleheader that afternoon to make up for yesterday’s rainout. The weather report-sunny with high cumulus-promised us a shot at it.

  “What of the field?” Jumbo asked.

  “The groundskeepers got a tarp over the infield on Friday night. Outfield’s pretty scjuishy, though, and it’ll take some doing to firm up some spots where the tarp didn’t do its job. Mr Sayigh suggests volunteers from both our clubs show up at the park within the next hour or so to tackle the drying-out.”

  “Yessir.”

  “Begging your pardons, but both you fellas look like you could use some drying out too. Didn’t go honky-tonking last night, did you? A little arm-wrasslin with John Barleycorn?”

  “We went to a movie,” Jumbo said.

  Three movies, I thought.

  Mister JayMac turned to me. “Didn’t you sleep? You look about as peaked as I’ve ever seen you.”

  “He’ll look swell after some labor on Mr Sayigh’s field,” Jumbo said.

  “Let me stress,” said Mister JayMac, frown lines between his eyes, “that neither Mr Sayigh nor I expect anyone to work who’d rather idle the morning away or go to worship services. In fact, if you don’t want to assist with field repairs, I’d like yall to come with me to church.”

  “We’ll assist,” Jumbo said.

  “All right. If everything goes well, today’s opener will start at two. The Gendarmes’ front office plans to announce the time over the radio and pass out flyers to folks leaving church. I expect a good crowd.”

  “Yessir,” Jumbo said.

  I found the empty hide of the stuffed goat the desk clerk’d brought me yesterday and handed it to Mister JayMac.

  “What’s this?” he said.

  “A toy,” Jumbo said. “Please return it to Mr Hoey, who must have sent it to our room in an unfortunate mix-up.”

  “Looks a little the worse for wear,” Mister JayMac said. It did. That goat was dishrag-limp. Mister JayMac turned the empty skin over in his hands and said good-bye. I halted him again and gave him the goat’s picked-off eye buttons. Mister JayMac wrinkled his forehead and left.

  Jumbo and I suited out in our flannels, splurged on a taxi, and rode to the Prefecture. True to Mister JayMac’s word, a half dozen groundskeepers’d beaten us to the task. With rakes, brooms, zinc buckets, wooden drags, and burlap bags of sand or sawdust, they struggled to repair the field. Jumbo and I went to work with three other Hellbenders-Dunnagin, Knowles, and Sudikoff-and maybe ten of the Gendarmes. Most of the guys treated this shit detail as a party, cracking wise and singing in rounds. It went okay.

  Nowadays, you’ve got beaucoups of ways to dry out a field. You can sprinkle this more or less new-fangled chemical product called Diamond Dry around and let it absorb the water. You can vacuum up standing puddles with a machine. Or pour gasoline on the wet spots, flip a match in, and boil some of the moisture away. (Course, you
can also burn down your ballpark.) Hell, nowadays you can hire a helicopter to hover over the swamp like a flying blow-dryer.

  Back then, though, nobody’d heard of Diamond Dry or outdoor vacuums. Because of rationing and the hazard to your stands, no one would’ve thought of using gasoline. Helicopters? Ha! Not until ’39 did Sikorsky-first name, Igor-make one of those ungainly contraptions fly.

  So you used other methods. You helped your grounds-keepers by wielding brooms to spread the water out, by forming bucket brigades to scoop it up and dump it elswhere, and by digging runoff trenches. That Sunday morning, some of us swept, some of us bailed, some of us scattered sawdust or hay around. By noon, Jumbo and I’d burnt our energy reserves down to fumes, but our labors guaranteed a game or two that afternoon, and the wives of some of the Gendarme players brought us a covered-dish dinner. Jumbo ate for the first time since his rooftop juicing on Friday night: creamed sweet corn, snap beans, yellow-squash casserole, tomato slices, popcorn okra, and creamed potatoes. The food was lukewarm, the women’d toted it so far, but it tasted like manna to me, even the meat dishes Jumbo wouldn’t let himself touch.

  That afternoon, our restoking didn’t seem to help that much-not at first, anyway. Jumbo and I played like kittens overdosed on catnip. Ordinarily, Mariani pitched like a street fighter, nicking the edges of home plate, stalking around the mound with his teeth gritted and his eyes afire, throwing heat when the batter expected finesse, and vice versa. None of these tactics worked for Mariani in the opener. The Gendarmes boarded him like fleas on a long-haired spaniel, then roughed up Parris and Hay in relief roles. We lost the opener, six to two, and fell two games behind LaGrange. Another loss’d shake us hard. It could take two weeks, even a full month, to regain the ground we’d given up, if we could regain it at all. Gendarme fans, especially the coloreds in the outfield bleachers, carried on like their boys’d already snatched the CVL pennant out of Mister JayMac’s pocket. I felt sure that some of the raucous crew at last night’s monster flicks were tap-dancing and thigh-slapping out there.