Brittle Innings

by Michael Bishop

  I had a dinner date, but Miss Loveburn wouldn’t let go of my shoulders.

  “Turnabout,” she said. “You say what swampy perfumes come off me bout now. Fair’s fair.”

  To oblige, I smelt her forehead and eyebrows: talc, stale smoke, woman sweat, the oils of long-gone lovers. All pretty faint, nothing too foul. But from the room-from her bed-a rancider smell fanned out: sweat, stained linens, downstairs cooking.

  “But you cain’t say, can you? Never met a dummy before-not sure I believe in em. Lemme see. Open.” She prised up my lip again and got me to open wide, then loosened the knot on my tie and peered into my mouth. “Relax. This is okay. You aint a gift horse, are you? Given who paid, I’m liker to qualify. No looking in mine, though. Fair’s fair, but smart’s smart and wise is wise.” She put the tip of one finger on my tongue. “Lips okay. Tongue okay.” She probed with a finger. I had to warn myself not to chomp down. “Throat okay. Vocal cords, ah, ah, open, keep it open, ah, I cain’t even see em. Someone cut em out? Yank em like burnt-through wiring?”

  I shook my head.

  “Then why this speechlessness, honey? It don’t become a young man of yore achievements.” Miss Loveburn walked me to the bed, where she tugged me to a sitting position on her right hand. Sitting, she lost the coverage till then afforded by the tail of her shirt. I saw the smooth white cables of her thighs, the dark bird-nest tangle at their join. I could feel her warmth. Until that moment, nothing about The Wing & Thigh as a fancy house or Sabrina Loveburn as one of its women had brought me anywhere near horniness, but I reached it sitting there, and she noticed.

  “Spare me yore flusterment, Danny. I’ve raised the dead. For feisty young rams like you, all I’ve got to do’s breathe. Anyhow, nothing happens till I say the word.” I put my hand on Miss Loveburn’s beautiful knee. I leaned into her and nibbled her throat. “Tonight, Danny boy, yore Open Sesame aint Reese’s money or any ol guppy nibbles. You gotta say, ‘Love ya, hon,’ or ‘Shut my mouf.’ Otherwise, it’s no go. I don’t sell to crips-one-arms, hair-lips, dummies-as Reese hissef knows. So tell me you love me, Danl.”

  Ooooi. Mama, God, and the please-and-thank-you morality of Tenkiller meant about as much to me just then as the prose on a mattress tag. I wanted Miss Loveburn under me, her cowboy shirt hiked to her greyhound-lean rib cage, her legs slicing me into smaller and smaller satisfied pieces.

  I love you, I whispered. (I could whisper-Pumphrey hadn’t stolen my ability to whisper.)

  “Loud-talk it!” Miss Loveburn said. “Say it right out!”

  But to do that, I needed a diagram of all the fleshy parts in my throat and instructions for making them twang.

  “Shore it’s a lie. If you loved me, I’d get me to a nunnery. But you have to say it-something-to prove I’m not peddling myself to a draft-dodging crip. Got that?”

  I got it okay, but no matter how hard I tried-curling my tongue, gulping air-I managed only voiceless stammers.

  “Uh-uh. That won’t do.”

  I kept trying, straining like a cur with a bone in its throat. A Nazi would’ve taken pity; a Jap, even. Finally I stopped trying, shoved Miss Loveburn over, and wedged one knee between her legs. Did it count as rape if you tried to have your way with an ass-for-hire who’d taken money and then set conditions that had nothing to do with her price or the exact bedroom yahoo level she’d tolerate?

  “Stop it, Danl! I’m warning you!”

  She raised a knee into my crotch, hard, but the slam was a billiard kiss off one ball. To keep her from using her knee again, I rolled my hips and pubic bone down on her and smoodged a hungry kiss over her lips, chin, and jaw.

  Then a boulder fell out of the sky and crushed the back of my skull into a backasswards sort of headache powder.

  33

  I woke up alone. A folded hand towel cushioned my head, and the weapon Miss Loveburn’d used to brain me-a glass ash tray with a Wing & Thigh decal inside it -rested on my chest like some kind of weird volume knob. I turned it with one shaky hand; pain boomed inside my head from ear to ear.

  Somebody’d moved me from Miss Loveburn’s cubicle to a low couch in a hallway almost exactly like the one with the fish tanks and calendar paintings-except it had only a bare wood floor and exposed ductwork under its ceiling. I sat up and looked around. The doors along this corridor hinted it ran parallel to the one down the other side of The Wing & Thigh’s horizontal-refreshment boxes. I could hear some refreshment going on-thumps, moans, happy cries-beyond the door at the foot of my couch.

  “How you feelin, sweety?” A fortyish woman dressed like a USO hostess-stylish, proper-touched the lump on the back of my head. “You look right chipper, considerin.”

  I winced away. The hurt and bafflement on my face kicked her into den-mother mode. She said her girls-as well trained in self-defense as in bedroom arts-reserved force as an option if impatient Johns tried to “git tough.”

  “Gitting tough undercuts the agreement freely agreed to by both parties with the exchange of our standard fee,” she said. “You tried to git tough. Sabrina could’ve had you dumped in the alley, but it hurt her to think of sech a dummy tenderfoot coming to out back. So you got to sleep off yore mickey”-she nodded at my ashtray-“righ chere, sweety.”

  Five doors away, a beefy-faced man leaned against the wall with his arms crossed and his biceps agleam. He gave me a chin dip and a smile more sorrowful than mean.

  “I’m Fidelia Florida Foxworthy,” the woman said. “Sabrina had some business to tend to elsewhere. We couldn’t leave you where you was layin, sweety, cause Mamie had to take over in there. And we couldn’t take you down to yore pals cause it’s not smart to show off a client with a head knot. So Burley”-she nodded at the bouncer-“told yore pals you’d had sech a fine time with Sabby, you wanted to try out another gal or two at yore own expense.”

  This story panicked me. I brought my wrist up to my ear like a man listening to a watch ticking.

  “I don’t wear one either,” Miss Fidelia said. “Burley, what time you got?”

  The bouncer checked his watch. “Quawduhaffatin.” His voice rolled like a tidal wave of honey.

  My God, I’d missed dinner with Phoebe and her mama! I likely didn’t even have Curriden and his buddies waiting for me. Worse, unless you had an extension from Mister JayMac, curfew on the night before a game was eleven. I’d never get to the Pharrams’ to apologize and back to McKissic House before the clock bonged eleven and my transportation-taxi, hay wagon, bike-turned into a pumpkin!

  I grabbed the nearest door knob and tried to yank open the door attached to it. The door wouldn’t yank.

  “Cain’t go in there, sweety,” Miss Fidelia said. “Mamie’s working. They’re all working. Or better be.”

  I jumped onto the couch, hurried over it, stepped down, and wiggled the next door knob on the row of cubicles. It didn’t budge either. I dashed to the next door and rattled its knob.

  “Burley! Burley, stop him!” Miss Fidelia cried.

  Burley came pelting down the hall after me, Jell-O-wobbly love handles rolling faster than his voice had. I’d just about used up all available knobs before one turned, a door clicked open, and, falling down, I barged into the cubicle behind it, landing crash on a rope rug and scrambling back up as Burley grabbed the door and hit his ear on the jamb when his grip on the knob reversed his momentum.

  On the bed in this room, I just had time to see, a Wing & Thigh gal in a halter top and denim cutoffs using her lipstick tube to transform her client’s moony white butt into a winking Popeye the Sailor. My entrance put an end to this end-directed artwork. The girl screamed and sidearmed her lipstick tube at me. Her John’s Popeye the Sailor face rolled over, popping his Fighting Red cock and balls, color by Tussey Cosmetics, into view along with his face. His eyes bugged out round and white as his ass cheeks, then narrowed again.

  Burley collided with the girl in the halter top as I yanked the far door open and careened into a fish tank on a hospital cart. The cart
rolled a foot or two, but caught on the rug and bucked to a halt. The tank kept going. It crashed down, shattering and spilling ten gallons of algae-ridden liquid murk and two pounds of tropical fish. The rug acted like a blotter, and the beached fish hiccupped along its waterlogged strip like a silver conga line.

  “Stop, you damned liddle peckerwood!” Burley shouted.

  I hopscotched over the crumpled aquarium tank, the fish, the broken glass, beelining it towards the doorkeeper’s desk and the door to freedom.

  “What the hell!” shouted the victim of Popeye interruptus in the hanky-panky cubicle. “What the fuckin hell!”

  I squeezed past the doorkeeper and double-timed it down the stairs. At the landing below Miss Fidelia’s cathouse proper (or improper), I had a choice. I could go through the lefthand door into the eatery, or I could xylophone down the stairs into a storage room with an exit on a service alley. I chose the door back inside-safety in numbers.

  But witnesses or no, Burley clattered into The Wing & Thigh in pursuit. Four dogfaces had chosen that moment to come up the same stairs. I slipped between or edged around them all, then sprinted down the row of crowded tables to the one where I hoped Curriden and friends would still sit sucking marrow from their chicken bones. Ha. I should have hoped Tojo would yield his imperial forces to me personally.

  “Grab that peckerwood!” Burley shouted, jiggling through the crush. “Thatun wid the goddamn ears!”

  A GI on the first floor caught me by the forearm. “Where you goin, Dumbo?” He’d thought up this nickname for me all by himself.

  Burley barreled up and knocked the dogface loopy with a pudgy elbow. “Thanks, Mac.” He took my neck tie in his fist. “ Moron ’s in my custiddy now. You can toodle-oo.”

  Phoebe’d hate me forever. I’d never make curfew. Hell, my life could peter out in a trash-filled alley. Burley began to drag me towards the rear. Folks waved bye-bye as he hauled me past, a guy putting the come-along on a scared terrier.

  “Please be so kind as to unhand my friend.”

  Burley and I turned around. Jumbo stood in the middle of the place in his Abraham Lincoln frock coat and a pair of black trousers large enough to outfit three or four regulation-size groomsmen. His face would’ve stopped Big Ben. It blanched the lip rouge of a half dozen females and sucked in the cheeks of a whole platoon of doughboys.

  “Who the hell’re you?” Burley didn’t quail-I’ll give him that-but his voice pitched itself oddly high.

  “Henry,” Jumbo said. “Henry Clerval.”

  “Henry,” Burley said. “Oh, Henry.”

  “Careful, fella,” a GI told Burley. “S Hank Clerval, the best first baseman in the CVL.” He said this with such respect that CVL almost seemed a vowelless code for Clerval, like YHWH is for Jehovah.

  “I don’t watch it,” Burley said. “Baseball.”

  “Well, he could crack you like an aigg,” the GI said. “He inhales pickaninnies for breakfuss.”

  “That last is a damnable lie,” Jumbo said.

  “Sorry,” the GI said. “Swear to God, sir, I’m sorry.”

  “Henry,” Burley mused. “A simpering Henry.”

  “Let go of Daniel,” Jumbo said, but Burley kept his grip on my tie, which snaked over my shoulder, pulling my head towards him on a hurtful cant. “What has he done to incur your anger or to warrant punishment?”

  The question stumped Burley for a moment. All I’d tried to do was take what Curriden’d paid for (now, though, the memory of my attack on Miss Loveburn filled me with self-shudders) and then flee The Wing & Thigh upon learning the time: attempted rape and a missed dinner engagement.

  “He… he broke a fish tank,” Burley said.

  “You were taking him back upstairs to mend it?”

  “No, I was hauling him out back to kick his scrawny ass,” Burley said. “Does the peckerwood look like a tank mender?”

  “I would think your boss happier with financial restitution than with an injured customer, a lawsuit, and a court order closing this establishment as a leach upon both the pocketbook and the morality of the American soldier.”

  Burley had a brain. He let go of my tie, and I walked with as much dignity as I could muster to Jumbo’s side.

  “Henry is an honorable name,” he said. “Men of the stature of Adams, Longfellow, and Ford have worn it. Another Clerval, an altogether admirable gentleman, gave it to me. Don’t mock or disparage the name Henry.”

  “Nosir,” Burley said seriously. “I won’t.”

  Jumbo-no, Henry-took his wallet from his coat and counted out ten bills. He handed them to me. I gave them to Burley.

  “Is the sum sufficient to replace your broken tank and to restock it with fish?” Henry asked.

  “Yessir. You want a receipt?”

  “No, thank you. These people here”-he gestured at the crowd around us-“will attest to the mutual acceptability of Daniel’s payment. I may assume that, mayn’t I?”

  “Shore,” several chippies and GIs chorused: “You bet.”

  Jumbo-no, Henry!-guided me outside, where Highbridge’s nightly ripoff of Mardi Gras partied past, soldiers on the prowl, hookers come-hithering, con artists flim-flamming, and MPs (the dogfaces called them Miserable Pricks) strutting like tinpot dictators.

  A taxi stood at the curb. Henry put me into it and told the driver, “McKissic House.” We rode. “How did I find you?” he asked as the neon tide of Penticuff Strip lapped the cab’s windshield. “Well, Mr Curriden and his friends arrived back at the boardinghouse without you, after I’d heard that you’d left the stadium in their company. Phoebe telephoned to say you hadn’t yet arrived at her house. One by one, I accosted all three gentlemen last seen with you. Mr Curriden laughed. Mr Parris said you’d slipped away from them early in the evening. Mr Mariani confessed the ulterior motive behind your expedition and told me where they had abandoned you.”

  Abandoned me? Curriden and his pals had deliberately run out on me?

  Henry put a hand on my knee. “So how does it feel to have shed your innocence?” His fingers dug into my knee, nearly to the point of making me scream, then let go.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Others plotted your filthy quest. They victimized you, Daniel, denying you your humanity and also your autonomy as a sentient creature.” About when I thought he’d let me off the hook, he grabbed my leg again. “But you-at length, Daniel, you-took part in your own abasement. What does autonomy mean if not self-sponsorship in the moral arena?”

  I deserved the scolding. Sort of. For a few raw seconds up there in The Wing & Thigh, I’d become an animal; not so much for wanting my libido scratched-hell, that was natural-as for using force to bully my chosen scratcher. I’d put the screws on Sabrina Loveburn to get her to put the screw on me.

  Funny thing. Sitting in that cab and listening to Henry’s harangue, I knew I’d sinned against Miss Loveburn and deserved my ashtray braining. But I resented her for trying to make me talk and then reneging on her contract with Curriden. (You pays your money, you gets your goods.) Shame and bitterness, warring tides.

  “Young Miss Pharram says you stood her up,” Henry went on. “As you might well anticipate, she is wounded, confused, and resentful.” (That made two of us, but Phoebe wasn’t to blame for my state of mind, as I was for hers.) “How do you suppose Miss LaRaina, given Phoebe’s wretchedness, must feel? Equally wretched, of course. Equally ill-used.”

  Away from Penticuff Strip, our cab bumped over the tracks dividing Highbridge. The smell of decaying horse and mule droppings swirled around us, along with the stink of a faraway paper mill and the floating scorch of peanuts from the Goober Pride factory. The streets beyond the tracks wore their late-night shadows like tank camouflage, and the folks creeping among the dapples-no matter their race-reminded me of enemy snipers.

  “Discomfiting Miss LaRaina was Mr Curriden’s principal goal,” Henry told me, his eyes straight ahead. “He harbors no ill will towards you. He may’ve actually supposed a paid visit to
The Wing and Thigh would reward you tangibly for your play for the Hellbenders. On the other hand, he felt no compunction about using you as a pawn in his scheme to hurt Miss LaRaina by hurting her daughter. That the enterprise might injure you and colossally grieve Miss Phoebe meant nothing to him, beyond the turmoil it would inflict on Miss LaRaina. I liked Mr Curriden before this. Tonight, however, his name fills the rift in my heart with salt and ashes.”

  Henry sat mute until our cab turned onto Angus Road.

  “The joke on Mr Curriden is that his spitefulness ranks him in my estimation below such louts as Messieurs Hoey, Sloan, Sosebee, Sudikoff, and Evans. For all their bigotry, they attack directly those who shame or offend them, not blameless third parties with whom they have no quarrel.” A moment later, he said, “The shameless louse.”

  Our cabby drove us right up to the columned front porch of McKissic House. Lights shone in windows upstairs and down, but you still got the feeling that, because we’d arrived a little after Mister JayMac’s official curfew, the house would devour us as soon as we entered.

  Henry paid the taxi fare and tipped the cabby. He more or less frog-marched me up the steps. At the door into the foyer, he stopped and stared down at me.

  “You owe me a sawbuck for that fish tank, Daniel-one debt I don’t intend to forgive.”

  I had no trouble with that. I had the money. Besides, my mind had flown back to a moment in The Wing & Thigh. The face of the man with the Popeye-the-Sailor lipstick cartoon on his keister was a face I knew. What the hell! What the fuckin’ hell! Even the guy’s jangly voice had a familiar edge to it. But where had I met him, and why would he want Popeye’s homely mug scribbled on his butt?

  “Do you hear me?” Henry said.

  I nodded, and we went inside.

  34

  Miss Tulipa and Colonel Elshtain’d arrived in their Hudson Terraplane on Friday afternoon, too late to come to the game against the Seminoles. Miss Giselle had met them and welcomed them into her and Mister JayMac’s bungalow. Their dust-covered vehicle, its tire treads caked with red mud from an Alabama creek bottom, hunkered in front of the place.