Brittle Innings

by Michael Bishop

  Behind McKissic House, I found that in my absence, albeit within the past ten or fifteen minutes, chaos had erupted. Mister JayMac’s boarders clustered vigilantly on the grassy skirt of Hellbender Pond as Reese Curriden and Lon Musselwhite paddled a wooden johnboat towards what appeared to be a floating hearth log ablaze in the middle distance.

  “Don’t go too close!” somebody cried.

  “What in hell’re they planning to do?” someone else said. “Slap water at her with their paddles?”

  “What is it? What happened?” I whispered.

  “It’s Miss Giselle in your leather canoe,” Dunnagin said. “She took it out for a little jaunt, then-WHOOSH!-it burst into flames.”

  “She drenched it with gasoline,” Trapdoor Evans said. “Rationed gasoline.”

  I shed my boots and ran into the blood-warm water. The flames from my kayak-indeed, from Giselle McKissic’s shriveling upper body-leapt skywards like a wind-riven wall of marigolds, salvia, azaleas, and red clover. I swam towards that wall. Like the albumen of a thousand bloody egg yolks beaten to a swirl, the reflection of the flames jittered through the water. Daniel, I swam thoughtlessly, insensible to anything that was not my burning kayak, empty of any notion of what I must do when I reached the vessel. At length-quite rapidly, in fact-I overtook the johnboat oared by Muscles and Curriden.

  Curriden shouted, “Henry, don’t go out there!”

  I continued my obsessive Australian crawl. Curriden thrust a paddle into my flank, hoping thereby to dissuade me from my purpose (whatever it might be). When he nudged me again, gouging me in the ribs, I grabbed and twisted the oar blade, drawing him with a prodigious splash into the water. He flailed and gasped, but finally dragged himself back into the johnboat without capsizing it, while I swam on my own headlong way.

  Soon I dropped my legs and dog-paddled, for the heat streaming from the self-immolated Giselle’s funeral barge struck me fully; it threatened to scald even those parts of me ostensibly safe under water.

  “Giselle!” I cried for all but the newborn corpse herself to hear.

  Muscles and Curriden-and my teammates ashore-shouted through the tumult for me to turn aside. Despite the heat and my growing exhaustion, I swam nearer the kayak, trod in place the tepid water, and slapped gout after gout at the horrific sight before me. Giselle piloted my canoe like a dead bride imperfectly cremated, then toppled forward like a released marionette, and, as the flames consumed the last of their fuel, submersed with the kayak. Down she went, resting on a seat of already-burnt woven grass, towards the silt and muck of the pond’s stygian floor.

  Daniel, I took a great breath, and dove. The vacuum established by the flooded hull of the kayak, as it plunged slowly into darkness, imparted itself to my body through the water. I was tugged after, like a fly in the paltry maelstrom of a shower drain. To what dread terminus would that watery engine deliver me?

  Blessedly, I had filled my lungs before going under, and my capacity in this regard eclipses that of human beings conventionally propagated. The night above and the murkiness of the medium through which I swam conspired to blind me; and yet I saw not only filamentous pondwrack and slime-fouled cypress roots, but also the charcoaled body of my erstwhile paramour and the whalebone frame of my kayak. Indeed, descending, I saw the blackened monkey face and the brittle limbs of Giselle McKissic woven into the pond’s liquid papyrus. Or believe I saw them.

  How to extricate the woman from the sinking kayak? I could think of no way. Therefore, I spoke an abashed farewell and faced away from her watery grave to find the world again. The instant I did so the tenebrous vision I had had of that scene, a tableau mayhap illuminated by pond phosphor, ichthyoidal incandescence, and my own remorseful longings, flashed into blackness.

  Why not commit myself forever, I wondered, to that extinguishing medium and die with Giselle? She had taken her life to punish herself for crediting even a transitory happiness, but also to punish Mister JayMac for denying her a permanent one, and me for yielding to her blandishments only to forswear my desperate surrender when conscience unpunctually reasserted itself. (Indeed, in yielding to her appeals, I may have sought to cuckold, belatedly, my creator, for in each union with Giselle I always saw the visage of Elizabeth Lavenza, my creator’s bride, whom I cruelly murdered.) I did not deserve to die with Giselle. She was not my wife, and I had loved her, whether carnally or reverentially, for too brief a time to sleep beside her forever in her aqueous mausoleum.

  I surfaced and swam back to shore. Muscles and Curriden had preceded me. No one had any notion where Mister JayMac had gone or what we should do. Evans averred that Mister JayMac, to celebrate our pennant and also to benumb himself to the burden of Hoey’s crippling assault on you, Daniel, had repaired to the arms of a fancy woman in the Oglethorpe Hotel. Several acceded to the probability of this last speculation.

  Muscles said, “To hell with that. Heggie, call the cops, fire department too. To help bring the body up.”

  “Tomorrow,” Lamar Knowles said. “It’s too blamed dark to grapple for a corpse.”

  “Yeah, well, if Mister JayMac was here,” Muscles said, “he’d set up floodlights and have her out in a hour, tops.”

  “He isn’t here,” Lamar Knowles said.

  Euclid came down from the boardinghouse. He wriggled through the men on the edge of the pond and halted before me, daunted, I think, by my fell and water-lagged aspect.

  “Miz Hoey say you wen ouw wi Mr Hoey. Say Mr Hoey ain come back. Say, do you know wha hopn toom?”

  “No. I don’t.” I pushed through the crowd, all too aware that soon Linda Jane Hoey and the local gendarmerie would discover the injured Hoey and deduce correctly that I had broken his legs and torn his tongue from his mouth. It seemed, Daniel, that the span of my ill-fated liberty among your own kind was ending; likewise, my hopes of finding an accomplishment and thus a meaning in my second life through the instrumentality of baseball. A welter of perplexities gripped me as I entered McKissic House, climbed the stairs, and burst into our garret.

  First, Daniel, through wrath and violence I had nullified all my efforts to atone for the nefariousness of my first life. My brutal treatment of Hoey and my wicked incognizance of the depths of Giselle’s melancholia had evicted me from an unchartered society of human saints in which I had always assumed myself a member. Second, by these acts I had wronged my benefactor, Jordan McKissic, repaying trust with deviltry and throwing down by a type of roundabout homicide his marriage. Third, I had recklessly annulled the investments of both the Hellbenders and the Phillies,for my only choices now were giving up to the civil authorities or fleeing into the night.

  Looking about my portion of our room, I found that Giselle had purloined some of my belongings: notebooks, letters, clothes, souvenirs of the Oongpekmut, etc. “Part of you I take with me” read a note on my bed. Indeed, these items she had perversely-aye, and poignantly-included in her self-immolation and her submersion. All were destroyed; their char drifted through the trash and bacteria in the pond, or lay sodden and lost in its ebony bottom ooze. I recalled the grinding wretchedness of my worst days, whether as Frankenstein’s bewildered get or as the heartsick widower of Kariak.

  I wept, Daniel. Weeping, I folded into a bag those clothes that Giselle had not taken. I advanced upon the stairs. I heard the downstairs telephone ring. I heard someone seize the instrument and speak. Momentarily, this person-Vito Mariani?-cried out to the Hellbenders in the parlor, “They found Hoey in Alligator Park, but he’s dead, you guys! Poor ol Bucko’s dead!”

  I hurried down both flights of stairs and quietly let myself out. Then I betook myself through the most sparsely populated regions of town-school yards, alleyways, pine copses-until it seemed unlikely that either my team-mates or the police would catch me and remand me to prison.

  For all these reasons, Daniel, I have not visited you, nor reported to the club in Philadelphia. In my fugitive state, several agonies continually plague me, chief among them the murder-or m
urders-that I have committed. Also of scourging primacy are the heinous crimes inflicted upon the Hoeys and upon you, Daniel, as my comrade in hope. I might better have avenged you, I see now, by acquitting myself well in the major leagues than by savaging the man who debarred your own elevation there.

  I am on the lam. This self-concealing style of life is not unfamiliar to me. Many years ago, I practiced it in the waste tracts of Alaska, becoming a creature of legend to the whites who journeyed through. Thus, the Oongpekmut called me Inyookootuk, the Hiding Man. I am again become Inyookootuk. In this role, my size notwithstanding, I have twice returned to Highbridge to befriend Linda Jane Hoey and her children, as I befriended the cottagers De Lacey in my first life. I leave canned food items on her threshold and chopped wood for her stove or fire grates in a box out back. These pathetic kindnesses do not redeem my crime or return the Hoeys’ dead provider; I draw from them, however, a selfish consolation.

  In our minds, as well as in our acts, we all struggle for self-absolution. I do not believe in my maker, Daniel, for he did not believe in me. The God you worship seems at an unbridgeable remove. I would ask his forgiveness, but, as much as I wish to, I cannot regard myself as either his child or his ward. Therefore, sireless and alone, I devise salvific mental stratagems for myself, arcane apologia to justify and remit my sins. In the case of Hoey’s murder, I have settled upon two mitigating circumstances, the second more compelling than the first. How, you may ask, have I slipped the bonds of the Sixth Commandment?

  – I had no intent to kill Ligonier Hoey.

  – Retribution is a portentous duty, but a more noble one than vengeance.

  You see, Daniel, in doing what I did, I sought less to injure Hoey (although harm was required) than to uphold you. Unhappily, the mechanism of this advocacy converted deliberate harm to unexpected death. Never, though, did I seek to extract it.

  Does my argument appear a self-deluding sophistry? Perhaps it is. But oh! Daniel, I know that the murders of my original incarnation were but the fleeting aberrancies of a gentle nature twisted by others-chiefly, my hedging maker-into an alien cruelty. Then, rejected and despised, I killed five times for revenge. In this much longer incarnation, by many accepted and by many others acclaimed, I have killed but once, Daniel, and then, unintentionally, for love. Does this not prove that I have undergone an evolution worthy of your regard? Am I not your friend?

  Faithfully,

  Henry

  P. S. This message comes to you by my evangel Euclid, whom, on my most recent visit to Highbridge, I found at his mother’s house. When you have read it, and digested all its implications, I beseech you to destroy it, preferably by flame. Fear not, however. We will meet again.

  58

  Like a rescue worker scratching through tornado wreckage, I reread Henry’s letter. Although Miss LaRaina’d left me some matches, and a wastebasket sat near enough to drop the packet in and burn it without setting the whole hospital afire, I put the letter back in its envelope and slid it under my mattress. What lies I’d been spoonfed, what mealy-mouthed crapola.

  “Nurse!” I yelled. “NURSE!”

  By the luck of the shift, I got the same slick honey who’d told me a doctor’d scissor-clipped the Saturday Herald so his Army Air Corps cousin could read the clip. Baloney. Bohunk Choctaw. Anyway, she came in with her boyish perky flip-do and her creamy butt-hugger of a uniform-looking cute, looking put upon-and eyeballed me like I was a bedrid stink beetle.

  “You don’t have to shout, Danny. Push yore call button.”

  “Miss Giselle burnt herself up. Henry threw Buck Hoey out of a tree. Hoey croaked. Henry’s scrammed. The Herald’s run it all, but yall’ve pulled a damn ol hush-it-up on me.”

  “Darlin, who you been talkin to?”

  “Why in hell’d you try to keep it from me?”

  “Talk that way, I’ll have to fetch some FiSoHex and scrub yore naughty mouf out.”

  “Hells and damns you scrub. Flat-out lies you suck like Life Savers.”

  That raised her dander. “I do as I’m told.” She flounced back to corridor headquarters.

  When Phoebe came in, I waylaid her the same way. I stormed and bellyached. She drank in my rant as much through her eyes as her ears and squinted with tomboy skepticism.

  “Well?”

  “I liked you better tongue-tied.”

  “I liked you better on the up and up, playing straight and letting the chips-”

  “You mean the ch-ch-chips.” She ratcheted like a slipped bicycle chain. “Look, relax. Uncle JayMac, grief-struck like he was, and still is, didn’t want to dump any more on you than you’d awready got. Is that a crime?”

  “But yall lied!”

  “Who squealed, Ichabod? Who told you?”

  Well, I knew enough to shut up. Standing on the foredeck loudly denouncing liars, I knew enough to lie. “I ast this guy limping past my door with Saturday’s paper if I could see it. He let me s-s-see it.”

  During September, I had two follow-up operations, physical therapy with support bars and crutches (reminding me of Henry’s reconditioning efforts in Missouri, after his self-directed height-reduction surgery), several sessions with an imported Camp Penticuff nutpick, and more time to brood and dismalize than a stalled front-line regiment with trench foot. I filled in the time by writing Mama Laurel letters and reading a long downbeat novel about a young British doctor with a clubfoot.

  When I could hobble about on crutches, Dr Nesheim released me. I spent my last two days in Highbridge in my old attic room at McKissic House. Everything Henry’d brought to furnish or decorate it was gone: the bed with its plywood bracing, the homemade bookcase, the woven-grass divider, the matted photo of a William Blake drawing, everything. Mister JayMac’d wanted to stick me in a downstairs room until my departure for Tenkiller, to spare me the pain of climbing and descending, but I wanted no other room, even when I saw how changed-how naked, emptied out, and big-its stripping had left it. I said my struggles up and down the stairs would be therapeutic.

  “Clerval snuck in to get the smaller items, we think,” Mister JayMac told me on Monday. “They were gone when Curriden and I dismantled the bed and the book shelves.” (Once gone, I noticed, Hellbenders ceased to qualify as misters.)

  “Henry stole his own stuff?”

  “That’s a contradiction in terms, Mr Boles. However, as a fugitive from justice and a lodger in arrears, he trespassed to retrieve it-a trick he may’ve learned from Darius.”

  “He didn’t mean to kill Hoey,” I said. “I mean, killing just wasn’t Henry’s way.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t’ve blamed him if he had. What I find hardest to take is him forsaking the near-accomplished dream-the stupidity that compelled it.”

  “He loved me,” I said.

  A muscle beside Mister JayMac’s eye twitched. “Neither Clerval nor anyone else has touched your notebooks. Your gear is all jes as you left it. Cept Kizzy washed and flat-ironed your Hellbender blouse and a whole pancake stack of skivvies.”

  How did Mister JayMac even know about my notebooks-there in my knife-gouged school desk, with its inked-in scratches and doodles-if they hadn’t been touched?

  And, I understood, my notebooks now probably contained the only copy of “From Remorse to Self-Respect: My Second Life” in existence anywhere. Henry’s original had gone to carbon during Miss Giselle’s suicide. I ran my fingers over the desk’s oaken lid, but didn’t try to peek inside its book compartment.

  Mister JayMac went to the window by the fire stairs. He gazed out over the victory garden and down the hand-mowed slope past his gazebo to Hellbender Pond. It’d been a rain-starved September; the corn’d turned to brown-paper spindles, and the grass had yellowish heat circles of different sizes-accursed fairy rings-singed into it in overlaps and stand-alone compass loops.

  “Why do you suppose Giselle did that, Danny?” He had his back to me. “Had I hurt her that bad?”

  Well, I could only stare.

  “Cat
got your tongue again, Mr Boles?”

  “Nosir. It’s a hard question.”

  “She really did care for me. I wouldn’t see it.”

  “She probably cared a lot,” I said. “Caring too much can chase you furious.”

  Mister JayMac turned around. “As if you knew jackshit about it.” His gaze drifted to the faded place where Henry’s only matted picture had hung.

  “Jackshit, jillshit-I thought you hated potty talk, sir.”

  “I’ll have Euclid bring you up a fan, this hotbox could use one.” He left, shutting me up in that hotbox alone. I could hear him clippity-clopping to the landing below.

  Twenty or so minutes later, Euclid came up with a fan about five years older than Henry’s old model.

  “Where’d Henry go after he gave you that letter, Euclid? How’d he look? Have you told anybody else you saw him?”

  “Nobody buh you.”

  “Okay, okay. Answer my other questions.”

  Euclid was sneaking into puberty. His jaw had widened, his chest had a new fullness. In his threadbare linen shirt, glossy hardware-store britches, and floppy-soled shoes, he set the fan on the floor and plugged it in.

  “Come like a robber when Detta Rae honky-tonkin,” he said. “Tol me gib you the ledder. Took off same way he come. Look big n scairy, thass how he look.”

  “Where’d he come from? Where’d he go?”

  “How you spec me to know? Come from hell, Danbo. Went the same place Darius done gone.”

  “The same place Darius…?” But Euclid just switched on the fan, which bumped around the floor like a wind-up frog, and left. Henry’s midnight visit had scared the Georgia bejabbers out of him.

  I crutched over to my bed and sat down. I had a ticket back to Oklahoma in my pocket. I’d leave on Friday, first day of October. What would I do in Tenkiller when I got there, though? It crossed my mind my most profitable option might be standing in front of the Cherokee Feed Store cadging dimes from home folks who mistook me for a wounded soldier…