Brittle Innings

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Brittle Innings Page 46

by Michael Bishop


  Phoebe kissed me on the forehead. “I’ll be back. Ever day till yo’re out.”

  I held Phoebe’s hand briefly before she slipped away, over to the door. “Miss LaRaina, leave me those cigarettes, okay? You can get some more.”

  Miss LaRaina walked over and laid her pack on my stomach.

  “When’s the funeral?” I asked her. When she just stared at me, like she’d forgotten an earlier part of our talk, I added, “Miss Giselle’s?”

  “Oh. Tomorrow, at Alligator Park. A memorial service. No burial. The body’s being cremated.”

  “I can’t go,” I said. “I’d like to, but I-” I dropped my cigarette butt in the water glass on my bedside table and watched it fizzle and saturate. Miss Giselle dead. Henry not accounted for. My career an injury-blasted memory. The weight of all this wreckage squeezed tears from me. “Okay. Yall go on. Leave me be.” I fumbled another cigarette out and got Phoebe to light it-to keep her from planting another wet sympathy buss over my eye. She and Miss LaRaina went to the door.

  “Matches!” I called after them. “Please.”

  Phoebe tossed them onto the bed, not really within easy reach, and then I was alone again.

  During September, every day until my release on the twenty-seventh, Phoebe kept her word and came to see me, usually in the afternoon after school. With the end of the CVL season, though, visits from other Hellbenders dwindled to one or two a week, for most of my teammates left Highbridge for their own hometowns or farms, or rode away to take winter-long defense jobs in shipyards, munitions factories, and bomber plants. Nutter, Hay, Sloan, Sudikoff, and Fanning stayed, with jobs at Foremost Forge or Highbridge Box & Crate-but only Nutter ever actually dropped by, usually with newspapers, his motor-mouthed five-year-old Carl, and a fresh-to me, anyway-anecdote about his days with the St. Louis Browns.

  Mister JayMac visited me on Sunday afternoons at three o’clock and stayed fifteen minutes, tops. He never mentioned Miss Giselle, Darius, or Henry, but concentrated on asking how I seemed to be healing up and second-guessing Allied command decisions in Italy and the Solomons. By telephone, of course, he’d told Mama Laurel of my injuries, and of their severity, without trying to soft-pedal the truth or to weasel out of the club’s financial obligations-even though my contract didn’t say a word about insuring me for game-acquired or aggravated hurts. He’d’ve paid Mama Laurel’s way to Highbridge, but Mama told him tearfully in one call that coming to see me might make her lose her job. Colonel Elshtain had helped Deck Glider get its military conversion contract, but he didn’t seem to have any leftover pull with the management at the Tenkiller factory, and Mama couldn’t put her job up for grabs by asking for an emergency leave of absence.

  “Then don’t come, Mrs Boles,” Mister JayMac told me he’d told Mama. “I’ll take care of Danny jes like he was my own.”

  Imagine my gratitude.

  Anyway, Mama and I also talked occasionally. I told her to stay on the job and to pray for me. Ordinarily, we talked on Sundays, after Mister JayMac’s humdrum visits, when he sat in a chair near the door, a black arm band on one sleeve and a look of heavy confusion on his booze-swollen face. Sometimes we’d talk, Mama and I, while Mister JayMac, who’d had the phone brought in, sat nearby in his rumpled widower’s weeds and his deep-purple heartache.

  “Yessurn, they’re treating me just fine,” I’d say. “Yessum, he is.” What else could I say-though it did pretty much tally with the truth-with Mister JayMac sharing my room?

  Nobody brought me a copy of the Highbridge Herald until the Friday of my first week in the hospital. And when Nutter came in with it, he brought me only the sports page, which had a few major-league box scores and a whole section about a GI track meet at Camp Penticuff. I’d already read my Saturday Evening Posts from cover to cover.

  “Where’s the rest of this rag? Nobody here’ll give me a copy and you come in with a piddlin snippet.”

  “Didn’t think you’d care about anything but the sports,” Nutter said. “After ball season, nothing worth preserving in type happens in this burg.”

  “What happened at Miss Giselle’s funeral?”

  “Memorial service. The usual. Blather, tears, you know. Remember Charlie Snow’s. Only difference? Afterwards, Mister JayMac took his lady’s ashes home in an urn.”

  “Oh.” I changed the subject. “Where’s Henry? He never came to see me, but I look in these here box scores for the Phillies”-I snapped the sports page with my knuckles-“and his name amt here. Where is he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He didn’t go up to the Phillies?”

  “Maybe he’s sitting on the bench. Not finding his name in a box score only means he didn’t play in that game.”

  I tacked about. “Why doesn’t Hoey come visit me? He owes me that much, the jerk.”

  “Cripes, Boles, you’re a pigheaded case. Hoey didn’t-doesn’t-like you. Plus he’s ashamed.”

  “I bet.”

  “Anyway, he’s not the sort to come creeping in here, hat in hand, to ask forgiveness. Which you already knew.”

  On Saturday, I got hold of a newspaper. It had a story clipped from the front page. I asked the nurse on assignment to my room why. She said a staff doctor with a cousin in the Ninth Air Force, headquartered in England, had clipped it for a scrapbook he planned to give his cousin on his return from overseas. Nobody else had a paper to loan either-the hospital tried to keep its premises litter free and to recycle paper products immediately. I believed the hussy. She lied like a front-office flack, and in those days I didn’t know enough to see through the prevaricators the way I do now.

  Two days later, about five in the afternoon, another nurse came by and looked in. “Nigger boy out here says he wants to see you. You want to see him?”

  Euclid, I thought. “Yessum. Let me see him.”

  Euclid came in, eyes cast down, head respectfully hang-dog. He looked dirtier than usual, sweatier-as ragamuffinish in his clothes as anybody could look and still get in the door. The nurse-I could tell-figured she’d just done her unpaid good deed of the day.

  “What’s going on, Euclid?”

  “Hey, Danbo. Braugh yoo ledder.”

  “Where?” I saw no letter. Euclid had his hands clasped in front of him like a recaptured escapee wearing cuffs.

  “Heah.” Euclid pulled a manilla packet from under his stained muslin shirt and nearly poked me in the eye with it. I took it from him. He glanced away-at the ceiling, into a corner, at the foot of my bed.

  “Who’s it from?” I studied the handwriting on the front of the packet: Daniel Boles. And just that quick, I knew who’d written the letter. “Henry,” I said.

  “Yessa. Mister Jumbo say gib it yoo. So I’s done it. Now I gots to go. Bye.”

  Euclid hustled out of the room. I opened the packet and spread out the pages inside it in my lap.

  57

  I write to you with considerable difficulty, Daniel, for I must labour both to express myself in an apposite idiom and to justify actions which might otherwise seem grotesque, if not monstrous. What I have done, however, I own as products, albeit misshapen and disfigured ones, of my finer sentiments-kindness, regard, love-rather than of mere destructive egotism. In allowing outrage to deform my nobler affections in one case, I grievously erred. But in the other I sought only to reaffirm justice and the existing social order, not to instigate ruin and spiritual desolation.

  In the wake of your departure via ambulance to the county hospital, Daniel, I repaired on foot to McKissic House and took a shower. From Musselwhite I learned that your injuries would debar you from accompanying me to Philadelphia; would, indeed, prevent you from playing baseball at any professional level again. This news induced in me a bleak lethargy-the blues, Darius would baptise my psychological complaint-and likewise a vehement choler akin to the fury I had so often known as Victor Frankenstein’s foresworn handiwork.

  For two hours, my lassitude held my wrath in check; then, thinking on your love of
our sport and your cruel abstraction from it, I recalled that just as Michelangelo had said, “It is only well with me when I have a chisel in my hand,” you had once averred that you felt most alive when wearing a fielder’s glove or gripping a bat.

  This recollection goaded me from bed. I believe I may have howled. I forsook the still, hot rooms of McKissic House. I quitted the equivocal revelry of my teammates (men somewhat more enkindled by our victory than abashed by your ill fortune) and directed myself through the twilight to Cotton Creek Street and the clapboard dwelling of Linda Jane Hoey and her four children. It had occurred to me that Ligonier Hoey, unlike other Gendarmes, had a local home to which to retire. There his wife and helpmeet would welcome him, commiserate over his season-ending loss, and absolve him with laughter and kisses of any complicity in your becripplement. This conjectural domestic scene, so tender and so unjust, heaped faggots on my rage.

  As I strode, dogs of all types-spaniels, blueticks, rodent-faced mongrels-left their porches to defend their shabby fiefdoms and harry my passage. Heedless, I strode on, preparing myself for a head-to-head affray with the miscreant I had once counted teammate and friend. When a hound of umber eye summoned the brass to bite my heel, I twisted it up from the walk by its hackles, and flung it simpering into a pack of like-minded dogs trailing me along a holly row. The cur landed amidst its kindred, scattering them in girning panic. At length it scrambled lamely away into the shrubbery. I continued, impervious to the cruelty of my act and the mayhemic dimensions of my humour.

  In the spacious confines of Alligator Park, I slowed my step, intuitively detecting a hint of what could lie in wait not only for my prey but also for me. I spoke one word aloud: “Atonement.” The silhouetted planks of some teeter-totters, primitive machines for the fabrication of joy, calmed me with their offset diagonals. I must bank the coals of my anger, I reasoned, and confront Hoey as one sane and well-intentioned being to another. When I knocked on his door, his youngest son-your fortuitous namesake, Daniel-opened it and gazed up at me as if from a trench.

  “Jumbo’s here!” he shouted. “The biggest man in the world! The mostest homers in a season!”

  Linda Jane Hoey appeared behind young Daniel, wearing a look of commingled charity and exasperation, as if a black-sheep uncle had intruded on a private celebration. I was not beloved of Mrs Hoey; my size and mien discomfited her. At every home game, she had held herself and her children frostily aloof, fearing perhaps that, if vexed, I would treat of her offspring as I had just treated of that vile dog. Before I could ask for her spouse, exasperation decided Mrs Hoey’s rejoinder to my unsolicited appearance.

  “Buck’s family needs him tonight, Mr Clerval, and he needs us. What do you want?”

  “Only a word or two. Let me see your husband and I will quit your neighbourhood as soon as we settle between us a certain important matter.”

  “What matter?”

  Whereupon, quite like an immaterial phantom, Ligonier Hoey disclosed himself and pulled both Linda Jane and young Daniel from the door. Barefooted, he stood before me, his chin outthrust-how must I put this?-gladitorially.

  “Do for you, Clerval? Pretty late to drop by on a social call. I’m not much in the mood.”

  “I scarcely wonder,” I said. “In trying to thwart our final double play, you acted with undue aggression. I fear you meant fo inflict injury.”

  “Didn’t!” young Daniel said loudly. “Didn’t either!”

  Hoey commanded his wife to withdraw along with young Daniel. When she had obeyed, be said, “Screw you, Jumbo. My motto’s play full out and don’t cry in your beer if you draw to a busted flush.”

  “To date, playing full out hasn’t resulted in your utter incapacitation,” I observed.

  “Look, what do you want? Crocodile tears? A written apology?”

  “Buck, your dinner’s getting cold!” Mrs Hoey called. “Can’t you discuss your problem later?” The brunt of this plaintive inquiry was meant, I felt, for me.

  “I have no later here in Highbridge,” I told him. “On Tuesday I leave for Philadelphia.”

  “Congratulations,” Hoey said churlishly. “Rub it in.”

  “What I want includes not only an acknowledgement to your hapless victim-”

  “Hey, Dumbo was hopeless-I mean, hapless-long before I got to him.”

  “-of your crime against him, but, yes, a written apology for the Herald, and monetary reparations for his blasted career.”

  “Buck! Buck, come onnn!”

  The miscreant shouted over his shoulder: “For God’s sake, woman, let us talk! We’re going for a walk to hash it out!” He stepped onto the porch with me and pulled the door to with an emphatic bang. I could not determine if be harboured more asperity for me or for his wife.

  We walked side by side into Alligator Park. The dogs that had beset me earlier shunned us now, barking only tentatively. Hoey and I ended in the playground where the shadows of teeter-totters still laid an incongruous calm upon me. For an instant I believed that Hoey and I would discover not only an accord about his guilt but also a cure, Daniel, for your disability. We stood beside a metal slide-recreational equipment that had escaped scrapmetal requisitioning-weighing our provisional arguments,

  “In any championship game, a real competitor goes for broke,” Hoey said. “He brawls for every advantage. I won’t apologise for that, Jumbo. You’ve got no right to ask me to.”

  “Limits exist,” I said. “Today, however, to salve your lacerated pride, you robbed Daniel Boles of any chance of realising the most important goal of his life.”

  “Jesus, I didn’t notice you dogging it. You powdered one off Sundog Billy. You stretched like fucking Plastic Man to take Dumbo’s last throw.”

  “In neither case did I cripple a rival. Or strive to inflict any wound more distressing than defeat.”

  “Horseshit.”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “I said, Horseshit.”

  “Your dogged refusal to admit culpability pisses me off. Continue thus and I may well have cause to thrash you an inch shy of extinction.”

  “You’d like to beat the shit out of me?”

  “You’ve proved yourself conscienceless.”

  “Listen at you. Hank Clerval, the pacifist, wants to whip my brains into a meringue.”

  “I do. I do indeed.”

  Hoey regaled me with a contemptuous fleer. “Well, try it, you highfalutin tower of Jell-O. You hypocrite. You’re no better than me, Jumbo-not deep down anyways, where the stinking rats of envy screw.”

  “I ache for Daniel, for all the acne-ridden soldiers. I despair of their futures.”

  “Worry about your own. Them guys in the bigs’ll eat a lummox like you alive. And you’re so ugly, even success up there won’t guarantee you any nookie. Zat why you’re upset I put my spikes in Dumbo’s jewels? Fraid you’re gonna have to get you a new little gal-boy?”

  “Have a care.”

  “Or is it the other way round? You’re a real pirate’s chest of secrets. The crap we don’t know about you, why, it’d fill an encyclopedia.”

  Hoey anticipated neither the fury of my outrage nor my lunge. My left hand encircled his neck, compressed his topmost vertebrae towards his Adam’s apple, and dragged him over to a pair of shaggy sycamores on afar margin of the playground. Hoey fought, but I had effected a one-handed cloture of his windpipe, which muffled his protests and vitiated his exertions. A leopard caching a springbok-so imagine me as I clambered into the larger of the sycamores and wedged Hoey between two of its branches. My conscience had left me, nor did it soon return.

  “You sonuva b-b-bitch.” Hoey’s hiccoughing speech prompted first a remembrance of your stammer, Daniel, and then a brilliant inner movie of Hoey’s hateful slide. So much the better for the indemnification I meant to extract, so much the more agonising for your petty tormentor.

  Bracing Hoey in place, I removed his belt and secured his bands behind him. Because he strove to curse and bite me. I we
dged his own soiled handkerchief into his mouth. We swayed together, sixteen feet above the indurate swell of earth from which the tree columned and spread. I hooked one leg about a stout upper branch, seized Hoey by the shoulders, and hurled him downwards with the same authority and force that Jehovah God launched Lucifer and his minions from Heaven.

  The bones in Hoey’s legs splintered with a firelike crackling. He writhed on the ground like a broken-backed squirrel. With a great eructation of wind and blood, Hoey expelled the gag I had fashioned for him and began both to curse me and to cry for help.

  Not to have killed him pleased me. I brachiated from one bough to a lower one, released it, and struck the ground astraddle the man who had hectored you all season, the jerk who, just that afternoon, had gratuitously ended your career. “You s-sonuva,” he continued to curse. “You s-s-sonuva…” His lips were foam-flecked; his eyes, like glowing dimes. My fury had not yet expended itself, nor, listening to Hoey’s unrepentant curses, did I feel that I had yet satisfactorily avenged you. I took Hoey’s tongue between two fingers and wrenched it bleeding from his mouth. His eyeballs started from his head, his back arched, and an uncouth groan broke from his larynx. I retrieved the handkerchief that he had spit from his mouth and pushed it back into that unlovely cavity-to stanch the flows of blood and wordless bawling vituperation.

  Your nemesis’s tongue in hand, I stood up and gloated over his devastation. “Fuck you,” I told his writhing form. “Fuck you sempitemally.” The jaundiced sclera of Hoey’s eyes circumvolved back so that the veins in them seemed a macabre reflection of the veins in the dead-calm leaves of our sycamore canopy. A pang of doubt spasmed in me, and I withdrew from that place, abandoning him, as in my first life I had fled the scenes of crimes now freshly brilliant in memory.

  Leaving Alligator Park, Daniel, I saw the hound that, earlier, I had pitched into its pack fellows. Recognising me, it nevertheless paced me along the walk. Its hackles bristled. Its eyes flashed like the beacon of a lighthouse in the Orkneys. Even in my agitation, I admired the animal for its doggedness. As a memento of my regard, I tossed it the tongue in my hand, and it fell to.

 

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