Brittle Innings (10 page)

“Look,” Dunnagin went on, “you should feel flattered he took you. Clerval had the only private room in McKissic House.” Dunnagin stopped pacing. I had my eyes on his feet. He didn’t start talking again until I raised my sights to his face. “Mister JayMac assigned that attic room to Clerval last year, his first on the club, and I’d’ve figured him about as ready to take on a roomy as Hitler to show up at a kosher gig in Miami. So you should feel honored. Chosen, even.”

My eyes grew hubcap round. I did feel chosen, I just didn’t know for what.

“Yeah, he’s big. Six-ten, seven, maybe seven-two. Hard to say. He sort of slouches. Taller than Howie Schultz, though. Schultz, the kid who plays first for Brooklyn. Sportswriters call him The Steeple. Got nixed for military service for being too tall. S one reason Mister JayMac hurried to sign Clerval—the Army wouldn’t come calling. A better reason is, Clerval’s a good country player. A bit slow, not a lot of range, but a champ at digging out bad throws and snagging tosses that’d sail slap over anybody else’s head. He’s also good at catching darters right back at him and shots down the foul line that might drop in for extra-base hits.”

I pulled my bat out from under the bench. I rolled its handle back and forth between my palms.

“Yeah, he can hit. Sort of. Last year his batting average hovered around .220 or so—poor for the minors, fatal for a guy with big-league ambitions. But he’s got a scary knack for making the hits he does get count. He’s slammed fence busters in spots that’d’ve killed us if he hadn’t come through. Killed us. So Mister JayMac gave him his own room. He’s valuable even if he isn’t quite bigs material.”

Dunnagin took my bat and sighted along it at the evening star. Then he swung it a few times. Me, I swatted mosquitoes, a swarm from the shallows of Hellbender Pond.

“Here.” Dunnagin handed the bat back to me. “Cigarette?” He shook a couple out of his pack, stuck one in my mouth, and lit me up. “Sometimes the smoke’ll run the bastards off.” He meant the mosquitoes. “Soothe your nerves too.”

I took an awkward puff. Back in Tenkiller, Coach Brandon had hated the habit. Called cigarettes wind-robbers. Sharing one with Dunnagin felt a lot like breaking training.

“Old Golds,” Dunnagin said. “They got this apple honey stuff in em to keep their tobacco moist.”

I couldn’t taste any “apple honey,” but I kept smoking. In a minute or two, I had a coughing fit. Dunnagin didn’t notice.

“Around the loop, players started calling Clerval Jumbo. He tolerates it. Just don’t call him Goliath, Behemoth, or Whale. He
hates
Whale. Call him that, it’s like you’re knocking not only him but all the whales in the seas. Jumbo’s okay, though, because it’s fairly neutral. It just means he’s big, which he’d be a blind fool to deny.”

I kept coughing; a fuse sizzled straight down my tongue.

“No idea how old Clerval is,” Dunnagin said. “Thirty? Maybe thirty-five or -six. He sometimes limps around like a crip. Other times, he’s light on his feet as Astaire. Even DiMaggio’d die for Clerval’s swing on his good days. I sure would.”

With one hand I smoked. With the other I scratched a mosquito bite on my shin. Blood stained my pants cuff, and flesh rode under my fingernails.

“Did you see him eating tonight?” Dunnagin asked me. “Take a look at him and you’d assume he’s a meat-eating barbarian. Nosir. He’s a vegetarian, a strict one. Won’t touch chicken or eggs. Eats a ton of produce a week, though. And Goober Pride peanut butter. Practice mornings, game days, he devours half a jar. Good thing he’s near the source, eh?” Dunnagin rubbed his chin. “Come on. I’ll walk you back up. Clerval won’t bite. He only bites vegetables.”

I let Dunnagin lead me back to the house and up the stairs to Jumbo’s room. Dunnagin knocked.

“Hank, is it okay if young Boles here comes back in?”

The door swung open. Jumbo stood framed in it from the chest down. He bent at the knees and peered at us sideways.

“Come in, Mr. Boles.”

“See you tomorrow,” Dunnagin said. He did a swami’s farewell, touching his forehead and chin and rolling his hand over. Then he beat it back down the stairs. Jumbo had changed our room. A divider—a loosely woven grass mat—hung between his bed and my cot. He’d also put a quilt and a feather pillow on my cot and set up his revolving fan at the edge of the grass curtain so that it blew into his half of the room through part of its arc and into my half for the other. It moved hot air around, but also kept mosquitoes from drilling us like Texas oil fields.

“I intend to read a while. Tell me if the lamp disturbs you.” Jumbo ducked behind the mat, where his shadow hung, scaring the Tenkiller crap out of me. I sat down on the quilt he’d rustled up and stared at his lumpy silhouette.

Dunnagin’s efforts to calm me didn’t calm me now I was back in Jumbo’s room. I heeled off my shoes thinking he was about to rip down the mat, grab me by the earlobes, and dump me out the window. Jumbo never did that, but sometimes his head would seem to turn my way and stare at me through the weave, his eyes—I imagined—leaking a thin yellow lava.

I lay down in my clothes. Mama Laurel, the Elshtains, Coach Brandon, Franklin Gooch, and everyone else in Tenkiller might as well’ve rocketed off to Mars. At last I slept. Later, I awoke in darkness. The fan still bumped away, and Jumbo still breathed over its whirr in deep, even gasps. Gasping myself, I went under again. . . .

9

T
he next morning, I woke before Jumbo. My mouth felt like it’d been emery-boarded and stuffed with cotton balls. (Dunnagin’s Old Golds?) The mosquito bites on my ankles and finger joints looked like razor nicks, I’d scratched them so hard. I needed a bath.

I rummaged up a towel and skulked past the mat dividing the room. In the early grayness, Jumbo lay atop his bed-clothes, in extra-large BVDs, a human mountain range—knees, hips, rib cage, shoulders, head. He lay twisted in a way you’d’ve thought impossible for the human form to get into without permanent damage, but his breathing—gentle, gasping snores—said just the opposite. The ugly galoot’d really gone under.

In sleep, though, Jumbo’s ugliness grew uglier. His body parts didn’t seem to fit. His stringy-haired block of a noggin didn’t belong with the bullish neck and the wide sloping shoulders under it. His proportions were more or less okay, I guess, but the colors and textures of his skin didn’t match up the way you’d’ve expected. It was like someone’d kneaded biscuit dough, cake dough, and a mass of Piedmont clay together without blending them. Even as he snored, Jumbo reminded me of a body, wounded or dead.

In the bathroom, I got presentable. I didn’t look in on Jumbo again.

I snuck downstairs to the parlor. Pettus, Jorgensen, and Roper had disappeared.

No one’d removed the easel and its charts. On the easel I saw a map of Penticuff Strip, with all the honky tonks, tattoo dens, and “horizontal refreshment stations” Mister JayMac had declared off-limits to us, saying hidebound morality didn’t lead him to discourage us from visiting these dives, only his certainty no Hellbender with any sand could venture over there without getting in a brawl.

“Those Camp Penticuff boys see the Strip as their private party turf,” Mister JayMac’d lectured. “Way they see it, any able-bodied male who shows up there in civvies is a pussy-stealing shirker who needs his balls kicked. If you go, don’t expect me to foot your hospital bills or your hoosegow bail. I’ll cut you loose first. I’ll tell your draft boards you’re ready for basic training and a quick-march slog into combat. Yall got that?”

“Yessir!” everybody said.

This morning, though, I thought it awfully dumb or awfully thoughtful of him to leave in plain view a map of all the barrel houses and sin cribs we’d do so well to avoid. I stood there in the bad light trying to memorize that map and its prime attractions: The Hot Spot, Corporal John’s, The Wing and Thigh, Effie McGee’s. I’d worked from the Strip entrance at Market Street to Pawnshop Row, about three quarters along it, when a voice from the dining room whirled me like a caught-out burglar.

“Up so early,” Kizzy said, “you can hep me git my breakfuss going, Mister Danl.” She waved me toward her with a hand made ghostly by biscuit flour, then banged back through the kitchen door like I’d follow her in on command. Overnight, I’d gone from Mr. Bowes to Mister Danl—a step down, I thought. And why’d she singled me out for KP this morning? Hadn’t I done my duty last night?

My gut told me to do what Kizzy asked—I always did what grownups said. But if I’d stayed in my room like all the other slugabeds, I wouldn’t’ve had to make a decision. Kizzy was stiffing me for my Ben Franklin up-and-at-em ethic. Not fair. So I turned again to Darius’s map of Penticuff Strip.

The kitchen door swung open. I didn’t even look up. With a finger, I traced the distance from GI George’s Camera Shop to a dancehall called, I swear to God, the Jitterbuggery.

“Mr. Boles,” a drawly female voice said, “Kizzy just asked for your help. Come at once. Please.” The “please” was a sop to the fact the speaker and I were both white. Confusion held me a second, then I double-timed it. Just inside the kitchen’s doors—boy, it smelled good in there!—the white woman who’d spoken to me was flensing strips from a greasy slab of bacon.

Seeing bacon startled me. Meat rationing’d begun at the end of March, and Mama and I had tried to support the war effort by eating cold cereals. Goochie had called this “gut patriotism.” He hated cereals for breakfast, meatless chili for lunch, scrambled eggs for dinner twice a week. At McKissic House, though, no one had to sacrifice much.

“Grease these baking sheets,” the white woman said. “Then halve and squeeze those oranges, please. The juicer’s over there. At least a pitcher’s worth for starters. See if you can’t strain out those noxious little seeds. A seed in a glass of orange juice is an irritant and a reproof.”

This woman, at fifty-something, looked several years older than my mama. She wore a floral-print dress, all blue and violet, with a clean white apron over it—like a dairy maid or a Swiss nun. Her hair shone whiter and softer than the slab of pork under her hands, but a beautician had cut it like a girl’s, swept it up high and drawn it back in wings over her ears, with a cameo clasp at the base of her neck. She had pink lips, dark eyebrows, and eyes like blue aggies. To me, she was . . . the sunrise in an apron.

Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t develop an instant crush. I just realized a female as striking as this intruder in Kizzy’s kitchen was a bird of paradise. She belonged in a storm of biscuit flour about like Vivien Leigh belonged on her knees with a scrub brush in a public John. Just then I didn’t know much else about her. Maybe she secretly poisoned hummingbird feeders. One thing for sure—she could boss you like a topkick out to Camp Penticuff.

I started greasing baking sheets while Kizzy measured fresh grounds into a coffee pot the size of a small oil drum. The sun hadn’t risen full yet, but the kitchen had already begun to creak and steam. I felt like a galley slave.

“I’m Mrs. McKissic,” the white woman told me. “Giselle Crouch McKissic. You may call me, as everyone does, Miss Giselle.” She paused in her rapid-fire bacon slicing. “Or could, that is, if you could talk. So you may
think of me
as Miss Giselle. However, you will probably settle on a private name in tune with your own vulgar tastes and biases. I can’t prevent that, but it betrays your upbringing, Mr. Boles.”

“Mister Danl’s a good boy, ma’am. Jes cain’t talk.”

“I know he can’t talk,” Miss Giselle said, “but he can think. Not well, necessarily, but freely, unimpeded by any human concern for the feelings of his elders. Muteness affords an awfully convenient armor against self-revelation. Perhaps we should all aspire to it.”

“You thinking way too much, ma’am,” Kizzy said. “Thisere boy’s awright.”

“A judgment based on only half a day’s experience?”

“Yessum. That’s aw I gots.”

Miss Giselle said, “Enough greasing, Mr. Boles. Lard and butter are rationed. Do you wish to run us out?” Impossible, I thought. This kitchen seemed to have reserves of everything from tabasco sauce to oatmeal. “To the juice, please. A herd will soon be gathering.”

I went to the juicer. It looked like a glass Ku Klux Klan hat, with a moat around it. I halved oranges and mashed out juice. Kizzy hummed radio melodies—“Paper Doll” and “Pistol Packin Mama,” not corny spirituals or big-city blues. Miss Giselle cracked eggs into a big mixing bowl and whipped them into a froth with a long-handled spoon.

Darius came in from his room above the carriage house. “Kizzy, Miss Giselle, Mr. Boles.” He waited.

“Yes,” Miss Giselle said. “You may roust them out.”

Darius banged out of the kitchen and into the foyer. “Rise and shine!” He climbed. “Rise and shine, gentlemens. You don’t eat now, you don’t eat till noon! Rise and shine!” I heard him pounding on doors. “Rise and shine!” He climbed to the third floor. “Don’t eat now, you don’t eat till noon!”

Somebody yelled, “Damn, man! You’re the loudest nigger in the whole brought-low Confederacy!”

It didn’t phase Darius. Back on the second floor, he shouted, “Rise and shine!” Reveille at McKissic House. I felt smug about beating this wake-up call, even as I crippled my throwing hand on a juicer spindle and missed my extra winks.

“When you’re through there, Mr. Boles,” Miss Giselle said, “get out the cereal and sweet milk for Mr. Clerval. He can’t abide animal protein.”

“He
is
a picky fella,” Kizzy said.

“I admire that in him,” Miss Giselle said. “It’s unusual to find a cogent particularity in any human male.”

Darius came back into the kitchen. He took a biscuit from one of the baking sheets Kizzy’d removed from the oven, cut it open, and smeared it with strawberry jam.

Miss Giselle looked on with the sourest expression I’d yet seen on her porcelain-pretty face. “Who said you could have that?”

Darius finished eating and licked his fingertips. “Nobody, ma’am. I’ll be eating shortly. Hardly seems a crime to grab a early taste.”

Miss Giselle just looked at him.

Darius tightened his jaw. “Sorry, ma’am.” He stalked out to the screened-in porch. At its door, he said, “After breakfuss, see me fo practice flannels, Danl. Tell them other new fellas the same.” He went on down the steps. The screen door banged to like a mine going off.