Brittle Innings

by Michael Bishop

  59

  One night later, rain. It wet the grass, the victory garden, the crazy whirr of the crickets. Earlier in the evening, I’d moved my fan to the window, and a fresh breeze a little after midnight made me reach down and rumble for a sheet-a first for me that summer (unless, of course, the sheet’d already been soaked in cold water). Then the fan spun moisture into the room, spitting icy droplets at my face and pillow.

  The rain’d sharpened and picked up. It rattled the tin on the attic gables and cascaded down the fire stairs like some sort of stepping-stone waterfall. The gutters under the eaves clattered and gushed.

  I sat up. A pitchfork of lightning jabbed down on the house’s Alabama side. Through the window I could see, just for a sec, the thrashing corn in the victory garden, the thrashing magnolias and sycamores near the pond, and the skeleton of the gazebo. Then, noisy blackness. Then another many-fingered electric claw-right behind a coal-chute judder of thunder-grabbed for the corn, the trees, the gazebo, the pond. I saw a figure in a canoe on the rain-whipped water, Miss Giselle’s ghost, or maybe just a floating pecan bough torn off its trunk by the storm.

  My fan stopped prowling on the windowsill, its propellers creaked to a stall. The storm’d knocked our power out. To make sure, I reached up, shivering, and groped for the switch on the pole lamp beside my bed.

  Thwick!

  The dark dragged itself out like an endless roll of funeral bunting. McKissic House, probably half of Highbridge, was kilowattless. Yow. In town, you could usually get light with a finger flip, but now-torrents washing the factory district’s cobblestones, the peanut fields outside town, and the barracks at Camp Penticuff-nothing but clattering blackness. I huddled on my bed, scairt numb.

  Thunder grumbled, more lightning cracked: God Himself homering to the seats over the universe’s edge. The crowd-which existed the way the dead exist-roared. The rain and the noise shook me; twinges beset my rebuilt knee, my jammed hip, the scars on my thigh. I prayed to Almighty God, and to my not quite so omnipotent mother.

  A shape hovered into view on the topmost landing of the fire stairs; it filled the square of my window and bent there in silhouette like a shadow on a black-plastic movie screen. A horror movie. When the figure poked its head in the window and accidentally knocked my fan to the floor, I recognized it as Henry. A whole series of branching lightning strokes-like phosphorescent tuber roots, or a sky-size X-ray of nerve cells-lit up his crooked face from the sides. He grinned in his glum, turned-funny way.

  Henry’s greasy hair lay plastered to his skull like Johnny Weissmuller’s after a fierce swim through a jungle lagoon. His eyes blinked yellow. His skin shone yellow. His teeth had the nicotine gleam of tobacco-stained store-boughts.

  Maybe, I thought, our palship and his long letter aside, he’d come back to kill me-my reward for beating out Buck Hoey at short, getting Hoey traded, and setting up the conditions that’d prodded Henry into throwing Hoey out of a tree and then yanking his tongue out. I’d snarled the long comeback Henry’d engineered after his nightmare march through Europe, over a century and a half ago.

  “Daniel”-whispering-“Daniel, may I come in?”

  “Sure. Where’ve you been? What’re you doing?”

  Henry’s Sunday-go-to-meeting shirt and his muddy coveralls were sodden, but he climbed over the sill anyway and stepped on the fan he’d already knocked to the floor. In the middle of the room, he held his arms out and let the water drenching his sleeves drip in shimmery membranes to the floor.

  “Didn’t I promise you we would meet again?” The emptiness of our room-or his half of the room-quieted him, even though he’d helped to empty it.

  “Henry, whaddaya want? They’ll catch you here, you’ll end up in the pokey.”

  “No jail in Highbridge can hold me.”

  “Why’d you have to kill Hoey? It was bad enough, what Hoey did to me.”

  “My letter… I didn’t mean to kill him, but to avenge you. In the end, I left him speechless.”

  “A funny word for dead, Henry.”

  “Come away with me-not for long. A few days only. To see where I’ve sequestered myself.”

  “I’m going home. I’ve got a ticket.”

  “Some possess tickets for that destination. Some do not.”

  These words lit up the inside of my skull. Henry’d left Hoey “speechless” out of regard for me, a pissed-off sense of abraded justice. He’d been my roommate. I could barely see him, a rain-soaked thing in the dark, but I used my crutches to stump over to him to give him a hug. My hands around his back got no closer than the rock-hard dimples on either side of his spine. He was too lean for love handles and too knurled for comfort, but I clove to him anyway, my crutches tumbled to the floor.

  The bulb in my pole lamp pinged on, stinging our eyes. The fan Henry’d knocked to the floor began bumbling around. Henry looked twice as big in the light, and the fan sounded ten times as loud. Henry, still hugging me, pulled the fan’s plug and switched off the lamp.

  “Come, Daniel. Escape with me.”

  “I don’t need to. This aint my prison, and I haven’t done anything to run from the police for.”

  My reasoning didn’t impress Henry. Even in the dark, he found my duffel and slapped it into my hands. “Pack.” He helped me, piling clothes from my cardboard chifforobe onto the bed. Neatly. It made me realize he had owl eyes, two built-in nightscopes. I began to pack. “Don’t forget your notebooks. They belong at the bottom, shielded and snug.” So I dug them out of the school desk beside my bed. Henry took them and put them at the bottom of my bag with one easy plunge of his arm. I piled my clothes in on top, and my ball gear in on top of my duds, and faced Henry with my duffel slung GI- or maybe Santa-style over my shoulder, a crutch in one arm pit.

  “Out the window, Daniel. Into the rain and the bemusing tangles of the night.”

  I couldn’t reply to such poppycock. I did a one-footed crutch-supported hop to the window. To my amazement, Euclid stood drenched on the fire-exit landing, waiting to take my bag and tote it down the slick wet stairs.

  “Euclid!”

  “Shoo,” he said. “Shoo-shoo. Keep yo mouf cloh n gid on ouw. Me, I gots to come on back fo dawk.”

  We tip-toed-or, in my case, crutch-stumped-down the fire stairs in straggly single file, hurrying like the stoop-backed targets of a stoning. Down, we piled into a blue Studebaker Euclid said belonged to his mama, Detta Rae Satterfield. It had a “C” gas-rationing sticker on the windshield (like Colonel Elshtain’s Hudson Terraplane), but I couldn’t figure why, and didn’t have the sand to ask. Henry scrambled into the back seat with my duffel. I arranged myself up front, on the wide divan-like seat with Euclid. He’d propped himself on a cushion as near the steering wheel as he could get.

  Believe me, a fourteen-year-old chauffeur did nothing to boost my confidence in Henry’s getaway plan.

  Euclid backed us around McKissic House-not past the buggy house, but the other way-then drove straight through downtown Highbridge to the steel and concrete span that’d given the town its name. To my surprise, Euclid did all right, weaving only a bit. He let Henry tell him where to turn and how fast to go, and we never made more than thirty miles per hour on our entire seventy-some-odd-mile trip into eastern Alabama.

  Because of the downpour and wartime speed limits, our destination-not home, but Henry’s hideaway and shrine-lay almost three hours away. It’d take Euclid that long again to return the Studebaker to his mama’s. If the highway patrol-an irritable crew, what with all the restrictions on driving-stopped him for a license check, he’d probably catch a hiding mean enough to turn his skinny brown butt eggplant-purple.

  “There!” Henry barked after our spooky, kidney-jouncing ride. “Halt there, Euclid!”

  Euclid halted. All I could see in the 3:30 A.M. drizzle was wet pasturage, some forlorn pines, and a rugged grid of reddish gulleys between the road and one weedy field.

  “Nigh.” Euclid dropped us off at this unpromising-loo
king bump in the blacktop. “Yall behay, heah?”

  60

  Henry led me into the roadside brush: the blackberry vines, the pokeweed, the mimosa seedlings, the no-name stickery shrubs that snagged your cuffs and sent macelike burrs to hitchhike your socks. The rain’d slackened, thank God, but our shoes sank-often with sucking PLOOPs-both in the jumbled vegetable mulch and Alabama’s oozy pasta-sauce clay. I began to think I’d gone off my nut to ride to this muddy natural chessboard of weedy rubbish and cut-bank arroyos, especially with a set of crutches. I had a train ticket back to Oklahoma-so why’d I let Henry pied-piper me to the redneck boonies? “Where we goin, Henry? Henry!”

  He just forged ahead, a driven upright bundle of backwoods energy-like a bear, or a Sasquatch, or a mad semi-human spawn of the land. The rain, more drizzle now than gullywasher, held all nasty winged insects out of the air, but the fight to keep up without sinking kept me from relishing their absence.

  “HENRY!”

  He looked back. “A dry side-channel of Tholocco Creek-our destination. We’re nearly there.”

  The “dry” side-channel, when we reached it, had water in it-not a full beck’s worth, but enough to put a cold squelch under your toes.

  Anyway, squelching along in this tall gully, Henry led me to his hideaway: an earthen house tunneled into the bank of a drought-emptied creek. This shelter may’ve begun as a small cave, but, if so, Henry’d dug it out deeper and wider over the past two years, honeycombing the red earth with chambers. He’d also covered the creekbed doors with wild azalea, Allegheny hawthorne, and pine boughs. Nutlets from the hawthorne floated in the runoff sluicing down the cut. We waded into the earth house’s flooded entrance, then replaced the damp foliage that’d hidden it. A second chamber lodged higher and drier, and in that room, with coffee-can lanterns to see by, we spent most of the rest of the night.

  Henry sat braced against one wall with his knees drawn up to his chin. I sat shivering on my duffel, my crutches stacked in front of me.

  “Why have I brought you to this dank retreat?” Henry said. “I don’t doubt you must wonder.”

  After looking around-at the coffee tins, the mats, the baseball equipment used for ornament-I said, “You could’ve given ol Worthy Bebout some decorating tips.”

  “I did.”

  “Well, he must not’ve listened.” Why’d Henry brought me here? Despite its homey touches, it would have been a fine place for him to crack open my skull with a rock and feast on my brains with his fingers-if he’d been a meat-eater. Even in his eighteenth-century reign of error, though, he’d liked nuts and berries better than animal flesh, and his time among the Oongpekmut had corrupted his vegetarianism only a bit. But for the chill on my body, the clammy damp of my clothes, I might’ve enjoyed the coziness of Henry’s Tholocco Creek warren, his coffee-can lanterns throwing shadows around, the mizzle outside hardly even hearable.

  “Your father deserted you, Daniel, as mine did me. He fled from and forgot you, as my maker fled from and sought to forget me. Your sire-as did mine-renounced any part in your making and defaulted on his obligation to educate you.”

  “Dick Boles taught me how to play ball.”

  Henry shut up. He’d caught himself up in a riff of jazzy comparisons, though, and my tribute stunned him. He shook off the stun: “No small thing. No inconsequential pedagogy.”

  “But what were you driving at?”

  “Recently, your father died. You may have smoldered these past several years with unspoken anger, but you have not yet mourned your father-as I, early in my second life, grudgingly mourned Victor Frankenstein.”

  “So?”

  “So the process must eventually occur in you too, Daniel, or much of what hereafter befalls you, or occurs as a result of your own enterprise, will curdle on your palate.”

  “All right. How do you do it?”

  The question caught him off-guard. “Do what?”

  “Mourn.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Oh.” He crawled away from the wall and nodded into a farther chamber. “Follow.” And he led me on a duck-walking tour that took us to a kind of dug-out viewing room. Here, when he set down the candle holder he’d brought, I saw a peculiar human shadow-like a straitjacketed Egyptian king-stretched out on the chopped-down shipping crate of an upright piano.

  When Henry lifted his candle to show me the makeshift bier, I saw these words stenciled on the crate: MENDELSSON / Ship to 486 Mims Street / Opp, Ala. The letters danced in the candle flicker. The figure atop the crate resembled a mummy. It was a mummy. And it would’ve been the strangest mummy I’d ever seen, even if I’d never seen one before-which, as any fool could guess, I hadn’t. And forget that that mummy embodied the remains of a whacko Swiss chemist a century and a half dead.

  I leaned into my crutches and reached out to touch the corpse-it looked barely five and a half feet from soles to crown-of Henry’s creator. The wrapper encasing it was a patchwork of smooth white pieces of horsehide-beaucoups of scraps stitched together with thousands of S-shaped seams. Henry’d made the sleeping jacket from the scrubbed, rubbed, and flattened skins of discarded CVL baseballs. Some of these horsehides were smudged with infield dirt, or pocked with bat marks, or roughened like old suede-but the shroud as a whole, under Henry’s lantern, shone ivory. The lovely weirdness of it made my nape hairs tingle.

  “Out of Alaska, Daniel, I trekked into Washington with my dead creator (newly retrieved from a volcanic cave miles from Oongpek) slung over my shoulders. I bore him much as Aeneas bore his aged father, Anchises, out of the burning shell of Troy.” Henry closed his eyes. “Sang that hero,

  ‘Come then, dear father, up onto my back.

  I will bear you on my shoulders-you will be

  No burden to me at all, and whatever befall us,

  One and the same peril will face us both,

  And there will be one and the same salvation!’ ”

  Henry opened his eyes. “Of course, as I came southward through the American Northwest, a thaw set in. Limbs once as firm as stone lost their durity, tending towards a malleable and aromatic decay. I confined them in the skins of animals-a dead elk the vultures had not yet begun to pick, a bison felled by drought-and remade Frankenstein’s protective case each time I moved. During my last off-season with the Hellbenders, I made the sheath you see here. Denuding each ball and laying out its leathern wings wanted tedious labor. The needle-hooks I broke were virtually uncountable.”

  Henry gave his father an admiring look. “Don’t you think he makes a handsome long pig, even though we feast on him only through our eyes?” He seemed to expect an “Amen!”

  “Sure,” I said. And Henry’s stitched-up daddy definitely was a sight.

  “Kneel here, Daniel.”

  I obeyed, mostly because the ceiling pressed so low that kneeling under it, even with my injuries, came easy. I propped my crutch against the piano crate.

  “Take my father as your own. Revile him for his paternal failings, or grieve in silence for your heretofore unwept loss. Or do both together. Sometimes we must rage in order to reflect, inveigh in order to vindicate.”

  As I knelt there, Henry blundered softly out. In a way, taking Henry’s daddy for my own and treating him to a prayer of curses may have helped some. In another way, it didn’t seem to help at all. After a while, my brain’d turned into a shifting globe of axle grease. I leaned my head against the crate and tried to let go of the whole sad jam-up inside me.

  Nothing came.

  Out of politeness, or maybe pity, I stayed with Henry for two more days. Sleeping in a bunker a couple of dozen feet from his horsehide-jacketed daddy gave me an even creepier feeling than rooming with Henry had. It worried me I had a train ticket home, but Henry had only this creek-bank hole in the ground, fancy as it was, and no real prospects for a better life.

  “What’re you gonna do?” I asked him on Wednesday night.

  “I continue to owe Buck Hoey’s widow and children a debt.”

 
“You can’t creep around Highbridge trying to do them daily good turns. You’ll get caught.”

  “I wish to redeem the crime-nay, the condign retribution-that befell Hoey and prompted his family’s current suffering.”

  “But you never meant to kill him.”

  “Perhaps I did. I meant to do… great harm.”

  “Well, you’re a big son of a gun, and trying to fix broken glider chains, or drop off bags of groceries, or cut wood for em-Henry, it just aint gonna do.”

  “My recidivism condemns me utterly.”

  That remark-the way he sat, his head in his hands-worried me. I could see him quitting, flinging himself off a cliff, even if the act maimed rather than croaked him. What a cross. He was suicidal, but couldn’t die.

  I rummaged in my bag and found the letter he’d written me. I quoted from it: “ ‘In this much longer incarnation, by many accepted and by many others acclaimed, I have killed but once, Daniel, and then for love.’ ” Henry didn’t even look up. “Not for revenge, you said. For love. Evolution you call it here.”

  “Sophistries. Carrion comfort.”

  “So what’re you gonna do?”

  “What I must.” Henry lifted his head. “Continue. Begin anew and continue.”

  “Turn yourself in. Then maybe you’ll see justice done.”

  “Justice? I came to consciousness, Daniel, in its cynical and selfish abrogation.”

  “You’ve seen it done. We won the pennant, didn’t we? You and I got called up.”

  Henry stared at me like I’d just proposed to end the war by sending the Japs my mama’s favorite oatmeal-cooky recipe. Then he smiled-I think-and shook his head.

  “Daniel, the electric chair would merely recharge me. Your species cursed and harassed me during my first career on this earth. It owes me one, I think.”

  Henry ate hawthorne nuts from a stoneware cereal bowl. I cracked some early wild pecans we’d gathered. Outside, the call of a shivering Alabama screech owl echoed over the empty channel of the Tholocco. Henry pulled off his left shoe and turned it upside down next to his cereal bowl.