Brittle Innings

by Michael Bishop

  However, in more than one disagreement with nearby Innuit, I effected an outcome both just and favourable to Oongpek simply by shewing myself to our would-be adversaries, as the Philistines had no doubt employed Goliath until his fatal contretemps with David. In this way, as well as in the faithfulness of my service to my clans people, I attained to an almost legendary status among the Esquimaux of my circumscribed region.

  “The Hiding Man, Inyookootuk, lives in Oongpek,” hunters would say. “He is a man. He is a bear. He can change back and forth like inyua from the ice days.”

  As the years flew, I observed the effects of time on my clanspeople and friends. Asvek died. Asvek’s wife died. The chief Kegloonek died. Other villagers advanced from youth or middle age into senescence and death. I, on the other hand, did not, but remained, as I always had, a giant of a certain established maturity, ill-featured but neither decrepit nor wizened. Kariak’s parents died. Kariak’s brother drowned in a whaling accident involving an oomiak and a wayward harpoon line. Seal hunters and salmon fishers of the age group that had initiated and taught me fell one by one-like leaves in autumn-to accident, disease, and age.

  That I appeared immune to these natural depredations, continuing youthful in my hideousness, did not go unremarked. Many Oongpekmut, especially those of generations subsequent to mine, regarded my persistence among them as uncanny, perhaps even malignantly so. I watched in dismay as they ineluctably withdrew from me their trust and affections. No one used me ill or commanded me to quit the village, but I soon perceived that what had hitherto existed between me and the industrious Oongpekmut could not last.

  Further, I could no longer tolerate the cold as well as I once had; each succeeding winter seemed to add to the ice in my veins, to diminish my ability to warm myself when blizzards raged and the urine in our collection barrels froze into amber stelea. On my sleeping platform, at the height of the blasting siroc, I dreamt of sunshine, unruffled water, and lizards basking. These images won my reverence even though I could scarcely conceive their origin.

  One day an old man calling himself Kasgoolik appeared in our village. He had journeyed many difficult leagues by dog sledge to tell me something. At length I realised that he was the husband of my former consort, Kariak.

  Kariak, he said, had died.

  Inconsolable in his reemergent grief, he wept to relay this message, which struck me with the accreting weight of an avalanche. I, too, wished to weep-to pound my head on the frozen earth, to rend my garments like a Hebrew. Instead, I sought to console Kasgoolik, who, knowing that I had loved Kariak unflaggingly, with a devotion equal to his own, had travelled all this way to share his grief.

  How strange, he observed, that over forty-five years had passed since Kariak had shared a household with me here in Oongpek. Why, their own first son had vanished nearly thirteen winters ago, carried out to sea on an ice floe and never seen anywhere near his village again.

  This intelligence also desolated me, as if a child of my own loins had disappeared.

  A month later I abandoned Oongpek. If I could not die, then I had “world enough and time” to drink the indilute elixir of life. After one brief stop, I directed my steps southwards, slowly but inexorably out of the Alaskan mists.

  32

  After reading Jumbo’s story, I couldn’t much concentrate on baseball. No, that’s wrong. I dived into baseball like a guy with money worries dives into suicide, to escape what’s about to overwhelm him. I played pretty good in our next five games, but their details come back to me only if I check a box score. On the afternoon of our second game against the Seminoles, I tried to return Jumbo his log. I’d had all the lousy copying work I wanted for a while.

  “Keep it, Daniel.” He stuck his log into the hold of my school desk. “Learn all you can about me.”

  I shook my head, but Jumbo leaned his knuckles on my desk and held its lid in place. Meanwhile, I thought: I don’t want to know any more about you, I already know too much.

  “Copy out the rest of my memoir,” Jumbo said. “Gradually, over our remaining season.”

  Jumbo wanted me for a confessor as well as a friend. A dummy, after all, has a few things in common with a priest-for starters, you can tell either one the worst about yourself with no fear they’ll yak it all over town.

  Anyway, we beat Marble Springs that Thursday and then again on the Friday evening Jumbo gave me his “resurrection memoir.” The box scores say I played fine: no errors in either game, five hits in eight at bats, six RBIs. The same box scores say Jumbo, although a defensive hero, went aught for seven, with a rally-killing roller to the Seminole first baseman on Thursday and a base-running blunder on Friday after reaching first on a walk. Fortunately, Heggie, Snow, Muscles, and I took up the hitting slack. Maybe Jumbo’s uncertainty about what to expect of me, now I knew his amazing personal history, had nagged him, a blackberry seed under the gum.

  After Friday’s game-the better of my two sockdolager nights-I was supposed to go to Miss LaRaina and Phoebe’s for dinner. In front of every rabbit-eared Hellbender aboard the Brown Bomber, Phoebe had invited me. In a way, it qualified as a date, a real date-unlike the dinner at the Royal Hotel with Mister JayMac and the Pharram women.

  Anyway, as soon as I’d showered, Curriden, Manani, and a couple of others-none known to me as an enemy-congratulated me on my game. Curriden had a brown paper sack in one hand and a grin on his handsome kisser. As I knotted my tie, he pushed me down onto a bench and eased in beside me.

  “Know what this is, Boles?” He wagged his paper sack under my nose. I shook my head. “Well, have a look.” He peeled the sides of the sack down to reveal a flask-sized bottle of sloe gin. “And have you a drink too.”

  “He’s underage,” Mariani said.

  “Yeah and Rita Hayworth’s a Campfire Girl.” Curriden pressed his ruby-colored liquor on me again. “Didn’t you see how he played?”

  I took the sack, but twisted the top closed around its neck. Mister JayMac allowed only rubbing alcohol in the locker room.

  “Country’s in a whiskey drought,” Curriden said. “You almost got to be wearing khaki to find a goddamn beer. This stuff’s rare as radium. Take a swig.”

  “You deserve it,” Charlie Snow said. “It aint cheap stuff either, like Old Spud or hanky-filtered Vitalis.”

  Snow’s good word did it for me. If he thought I deserved a snort, I probably did. I peeled the paper down, twisted the cap off, and sipped. My lips began to tingle, but I liked the stuff well enough to take an even bigger hit, which made even the doubtful Mariani say, “Atta way to do er, kid!”

  I recrimped the sack and gave the bottle back to Curriden, my mouth still atingle with the furry bittersweetness of sloe berries. A fire ran from my tongue to my gut.

  “You’re eating with the Pharram ladies tonight, right? Yeah, well,” Curriden said, “you’ve got to give em an hour or so to get set. Meantime, come along with Quip and Vito and me on a little victory jaunt.”

  Phoebe’d said to meet her under the grandstand after the game so Curriden’s plans seemed wrong to me-but maybe he knew something I didn’t.

  “It’s okay, Dum-uh, Danny. We’ll get you to the Pharram place in a hour. Drop you right at their door. Taxi ride’s on me-my gift for what you’ve helped us do, kid.” He looked at the eight or nine Hellbenders still in the locker room. “We’re four games over.500!” he shouted. “Thanks to Dumbo and his hustlin rookie pals!”

  I blushed and took another slug of Curriden’s contraband firewater.

  “Look, Reese,” Parris said. “Same damn color as your gin.”

  My color stayed high. The furry tingle in my mouth caught an elevator and rode to my brain. I wasn’t drunk, but I was already close to tipsy. Even so, when Curriden, Parris, and Mariani whisked me out to the parking lot, skirting the area where Phoebe’d planned to meet me, it felt WRONG. Sure, Curriden’d never had it in for me, and it did seem logical Phoebe’d need some time after the game to get ready. But these rascals h
ad kidnapped me.

  Parris and Mariani had me wedged between them in the back seat of a red-and-white taxi. Curriden sat up front, playing fingertip drumrolls on the dash and giving directions. “The Strip,” I heard him say. “The Wing and Thigh.” The stadium sank away behind us like a three-masted ship going under the concealing arc of the world.

  The streets boogie-woogied with energy. News of our win had run through tony white and run-down colored neighborhoods alike. Our driver, a horse-faced black man, yelled out the window at some of his friends on a street corner: “Gang way! Got me some mighty Hellbenders hyeah! Gang way, yall!”

  “Hush that,” Curriden said. “We’re incognito tonight.”

  What you really mean, I thought, is, it’d embarrass us all to the bottoms of our pocketbooks if Mister JayMac learned of our destination and slapped us all with fines. The tingle in my brain shredded into a dozen throbbing aches.

  We drove past the farmer’s market and crossed the tracks between the business district to the north and the neon-lit part of Penticuff Strip to the south. Our driver hung a right on the eastern side of the tracks. The alley straight ahead-a tunnel of jazzy electric signs and uniformed GIs-opened out like a Mardi Gras party.

  “Jesus, lookit all the sojers,” Mariani said.

  Parris said, “Be nice to em and they’ll let you live.”

  The driver dropped us off in front of an eatery serving fried chicken and cole slaw: The Wing & Thigh. In its window someone’d pasted up movie posters and flyers recruiting farm workers-volunteers-for the fall harvest. Curriden led me, Mariani, and Parris into The Wing & Thigh.

  The place had the length and width of two or three railway coaches, with a counter down one side and ten or twelve tables against the facing wall. In the back, through the smoke eeling over the tables, a shaky staircase rose to a rickety landing; below it, a red EXIT sign glowed over the beaded curtain in the door there. A jukebox blared Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas,” but the smells of boiled turnip greens, pepper sauce, and frying chicken didn’t much remind me of yuletide fixings. It was July, even if just barely.

  “Don’t you want a piece?” Curriden asked me.

  Uh-uh. In another hour, I’d be eating with the Pharrams.

  “Well, I do,” Curriden said. “Order up, Vito.” He handed Mariani a fiver-Diamond Jim Brady tipping the doorman. “Order us three he-man plates, with cole slaw, chips, and iced tea, and give me my change when I get back.”

  “Where you goin?” Parris asked. His sing-song suggested he already knew. “To get Danny his piece?”

  Curriden grabbed my shirt front and pulled me through that beer-sloshed alley, with its stink of vinegar and fry scald, towards the staircase. GIs looked up from their tables, and some of the gals eating chicken with them, as silk-gussied a bunch as I’d ever seen, their fingers shiny with joint fat, winked at me or reached out to pinch my flank. Mama would’ve called em hussies, and I already had a hunch-just a hunch-how The Wing & Thigh had got its name.

  Beyond the door at the top of the landing was another set of stairs, flush with the outside rear wall, that climbed to an access hall right over The Wing & Thigh’s kitchen and serving area. In that hallway, Curriden and I came to a desk manned-womanned, I mean-by a female in an ivory dress with a push-up bodice and an oval cutout that showed her belly button. Don’t ask me to describe her face.

  “Do for you gennelmen?” she said.

  “For Danny Boy here,” Curriden said, “my little brother.”

  To the woman’s right, some paired hooks with number tags on them-like you’d see in a barber shop-ran on a strip of fluted molding nailed up at shoulder height. Each pair of hooks had a woman’s name over it, but four of the names had tags reading “Not Available” on them.

  “ Flossie, Jordan Kaye, Roberta, Sabrina, and Irene are all in this evening,” the woman said.

  “Give him Sabrina,” Curriden said.

  “Here.” The woman handed him No. 26 from the “take” hook under Sabrina’s name. “Payment, please.” Curriden paid. “Now yall may go down the hall to wait.”

  So Curriden and I wove our way down the long corridor. It was furnished with four scummy fish tanks on hospital carts, calendar paintings of old plantation houses, and a worn strip of plum-colored rug. We passed several doors and entered a waiting room-a holding tank, more like-with folding chairs and a low table stacked with magazines.

  Three soldiers sat in this room. No one talked or read a magazine. Two GIs looked bored. One had a nervous jiggle in his leg. Curriden and I sat down next to him. This PFC had a rash of razor nicks under his receding chin. He cut his eyes at us, then smiled real big.

  “Gonna wear her out. Gonna do my steel-driving level best to split er clean in two.”

  The corporal sitting next to him said, “Be lucky he don’t pop a knee before he gets in there.”

  “Ha ha,” said the PFC. “What a kidder.”

  Just then, it sledgehammered me I’d come to a brothel-I mean, I’d taken in all the accouterments, but now I understood Curriden meant to see me through a rite of passage. He caught me by the shirt and pulled me back down.

  Down the hall, a door opened across from one of the fish tanks; a man in khaki strolled towards me to the waiting room, looked in at the five of us, and said, “Number twenty-five for Sabrina. Lady says she’s off at nine, whether her trick is or not.” He checked his watch. “I got eight till.”

  “Sabrina,” the PFC said. “Whoa, that’s me!” He flashed his tag and stood up. For the first time since we’d entered, the floor stopped vibrating. “I’ll do her three times in eight minutes. She’ll be hanging on for dear life.”

  Curriden grabbed the guy’s number and gave him a wadded-up dollar bill. “Pick a gal who don’t get off till later. Life’s too short to rush things.”

  “Hey, gimme my number!”

  “Uh-uh.” Curriden tipped him back into his chair with a soft three-fingered push and led me down the hall to Sabrina. The GI didn’t follow us-he had an extra buck and more sense than to mess with a guy as big and built as Curriden.

  In the bulb-lit fish tank across from Sabrina’s room-all the light in the hall came from these tanks, dapples of cool aquamarine on the walls and floor-the fish swam in hypnotized and hypnotizing schools: fish with stripes or spots, fish with lacy wedding-gown fins and tails, fish with see-through skins and bones aglow like tiny Christmas trees.

  Curriden knocked, the door opened. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a brunette, pale-skinned woman about my own height wearing a yoke-collared shirt with a Johnny Mack Brown bib and pearly buttons for a housecoat. Under that shirt, legs like pruning shears. Red-orange polish on her toe-nails.

  Curriden gave her extra money. “Sabrina, Danny Boles. Danny, Sabrina Loveburn. Vito, Quip, and I’ll be downstairs eating, kid. Have you a time.”

  “I’m off at nine,” Sabrina said as Curriden walked away.

  “Not for what I just gave you, hon. Sides, he’s like to go off fastern a firecracker. Have a heart,”

  “Come in, then,” Miss Loveburn said.

  I stared at her toenails and might not’ve moved at all if a clatter of shoes on the stairs and a barrage of male voices hadn’t goosed me to it. Just as a gang of four soldiers burst through the door at the end of the hall, I stepped into Miss Loveburn’s room. She shut the door. The GIs knocked on every door in the hall, including hers.

  “So yo’re a ballplayer,” she said. “One that don’t talk.” Curriden had told her, maybe even before we showed up.

  I didn’t even try to answer. Her room had a low, narrow bed-more like a couch with no back or arms-a folding chair, a pole lamp, and a door across from the one I’d entered by. Like prairie dogs, the ladies of The Wing & Thigh had at least two exits from their burrows.

  Over Miss Loveburn’s bed hung a glossy oil portrait of a Tahitian or a Samoan maiden in a sarong, with one brown breast showing. The sun going down behind her had exactly the same plump roundness as her
nude breast.

  Miss Loveburn’s violet eyes halted their gaze at the top of my skin. She was semipretty, with the looks of a pissed-off school teacher. If she hadn’t been birthday-suit-skinny under her Johnny Mack Brown shirt, I could’ve imagined her sitting tight-kneed in a Baptist church pew.

  “Give me ballplayers over sojers,” she said. “Especially if they’ve just played a game. Not too many of yall pass up a shower afterwards. A GI, though, you never know about. Some come in smelling like cologne factories, some like geedee goat stalls, pardon my French. If they’ve scrubbed with a clean washrag, yo’re lucky-s bout the best you can hope for, barring a campwide flu and the weekend off.”

  Miss Loveburn let her gaze drill into my skin. “Cmere. This aint something you can do by phone.” She shook her head. “If you don’t talk, of course, bout the only thing you can do by phone is dial it, right? Or listen maybe. You look like a decent nough listener. Cmere. Lemme smell ya.”

  All her talk’d taken most of the scare out of Miss Sabrina Loveburn. I went to her. She put her hands on my shoulders and sniffed me under the chin and around the ears, a dog going over its owner’s trouser legs after a cat’s been by. While she smelled me, I sniffed her hair-wavy burn-brown wool. It smelt of cigarette smoke and talc. I liked it.

  “Not bad,” Miss Loveburn said. “Kinda little kiddyish.” She went from my ears to my breastbone and from there over to my arm pit, sniffing from one spot to another. “Shower or no, yo’re starting to get a smidgen ripe about here.” She slipped her hands under my arms and stood straight up. “What do I expect, huh? A young he-fella cliding wi the climate. S okay, though. You’ll do.”

  She sniffed my mouth. “Smoke already, huh? Shouldn’t.” She lifted my lip, to let the air polish my canines. “Turn these pearlies yeller. Least you don’t chew. Got a little hunger on yore breath, though. You hungry?”