Brittle Innings (22 page)

I stopped copying. If Jumbo had written this sensational stuff, he was laying claim to a sideways sort of kinship to a European scientist named . . . well, Frankenstein. He’d also confessed to an unspecified murder or murders: “
I had slain before
.” That thrilled me. I mean, it’d taken me nearly a month to persuade myself Jumbo, despite his size and looks, meant no one, least of all me, any harm. And now I’d just read four words in his own hand that shot down all my hard-earned notions of his harmlessness.

I lit a cigarette. The butts of a couple of others lay smoldering in the ashtray on my desk. My tongue tasted like a charred wedge of bologna.

Then a calming thought occurred, a thought that made more sense than tagging Jumbo the mad golem of an eighteenth-century anatomy student and chemist by the name of Frankenstein: Jumbo was writing a book, a novel. His bulk and his lopsided face had led him to see himself in Karloff’s screen monster—which he really didn’t much resemble—and to write an original story featuring himself in the monster’s role. That theory tied up a few of my frayed nerves.

I went back to reading and copying:

With Frankenstein’s corpse as freight, I struck out from Walton’s ship towards the south. In the long dusk at that latitude, directions were hard to verify. Still, both the rush of ice-capped sea currents and the benison of fuller sunlight told me that I had intuited my course aright. Even the lovely gyre-making of a raptor, shadowed on the snow, seemed to approve my migration route. Oddly, I had no idea what my destination must be or why I had undertaken this grueling journey; a month or more ago, I had thought to end all my journeyings in the swift uprush of a funeral blaze.

Almost insensate, I trudged the whiteness. I steered by the low-riding sun on a southeasterly oblique that at length brought me off the ice onto a vast range of undulant snow. I scarcely paused, either to moisten my parched lips or to poke beneath the glacial crust for a root or tuber with which to propitiate the gods of hunger. Whenever I chanced near crude fishing villages or inland settlements, I took pains to avoid confrontation with the inhabitants. I fled men as the tundra wolf does.

Indeed, I had for companions on one leg of my journey a pack of wolves. They trailed alongside, eager for me to stumble under the dead Frankenstein and so succumb to their fangs. Once, half exasperated, half exultant, I stooped and compacted a missile of ice. Immediately, I dispersed the pack by hurling this frozen shot into its ranks. It slew—yea, nearly decapitated—one lean but shaggy animal, the example of whose demise vividly impressed itself upon the others.

One morning, after a rare surrender to the call of sleep, I awoke to find myself and the inert nearby form of my creator surrounded by reindeer. These lithe beasts browsed that terrain as if he and I had inextricably melded with it. No alarm, or even skittishness, did we provoke in them, not even when I arose from my bed of snow and once more lay my father’s corpse over my shoulder. For miles, it seemed, I trudged with these deer, migrant with them, a fallen seraph among the ice waste’s ghostly kine.

An unexpected change in the weather at last effected our separation from the herd. A wind of gale proportions blasted ice grains across the snowscape. I howled into this howling. Land forms but an arm’s length away shewed as blurred geometries. I flailed at them, for I wished both contact and certainty. Between the roaring gusts, I sometimes thought I saw fantastic cliffs, as white as milk and evanescent as truth.

At length I came to those ill-seen ramparts. Like a thousand panpipes the storm whistled, even as snow sleeted in interthreaded sheets. A channel in the rock led me blindly upwards. Had I known the precariousness of my ascent, with a corpse as entrammeling cargo, I would have thrown myself upon the nearest rock face and clung to it like an apperceptive lichen. Fortunately perhaps, I had no such understanding of the danger and so proceeded with the singlemindedness of a zealot.

It would have eased my task to drop Frankenstein and struggle on alone, but a stubborn scrupulosity prevented me; a perversity, many might accuse, for at some point on my trek I had resolved to recompense myself upon this man, who had so aggrieved and hurt me, by tearing his heart from his breast. I intended to feed that cold organ, piece by bitter piece, to the hawks of the Kara Sea, and no hardship met on my way could turn me from this aim.

The passion of my will notwithstanding, I weakened. The wind’s howling, combined with the unrelenting sting of ice and blasted rock, vitiated my strength. Fatigue came. In time, groping along a narrow ice ledge, I chanced upon a crevasse, a doorway into shelter. I crawled in, dragging my passenger with me. Here I obtained to a peacefulness in which I had nearly lost faith. Here, indeed, I slept.

Let me rather indite that like a peltless bear, I hibernated. How long I lay thus stupefied, wrapped about my sire’s body, I cannot tell. Somewhere in that sleep, I drifted so near the ivory reef of extinction that I dreamt myself moored to it. The deepest flint of my awareness now took as dead the foundered body that it had once animated. That iota’s last spark guttered towards darkness. Insofar as consciousness remained to me, it exulted in the nearness of its extinguishment.

Time passed. More time succeeded to this. Then, to my initial dismay and bewilderment, my shelter’s roof fell in—clamourously, precipitously—and a myriad spectacular figures of lightning revived me to the long heartache of the world. Precisely how this revival occurred, I cannot relate. Why it should have happened capsulates a mystery even more recondite. Lightning, thunder, biting sleet—meteorological phenomena seldom seen in train—assaulted my cavern, quickening in me the blood-borne engines of life. Although Frankenstein, my author, of course continued dead, I had reluctantly arisen. The outcome of this fleer at mortality lay hidden in the ice rains of the night and the unforeseeable weathers of tomorrow. . . .

I’d been copying Jumbo’s words—if they were his words—for nearly three hours. Boy, could he spin it out! His story had a raw power. So did his old-timey sentences. I stopped at “unforeseeable weathers of tomorrow” because those words ended the first section of his journal. Thumbing ahead, the less I thought it all an opera-sized fiction and the more I figured it a record of a man’s—an artificial person’s—long and peculiar life.

In fact, the next section of the journal had a title, “From Remorse to Self-Respect: My Second Life.”

By now I’d smoked seven cigarettes and sweated through my T-shirt. Jumbo didn’t just look like a monster, the victim of a crazed pituitary—he
was
a monster, the handmade stepson of a scientist whose name had become a synonym for . . . well, for Hollywood jeepery-creepery. Mister JayMac had given me to room with an inhuman critter who’d killed, cursed life, and stalked his shook-up maker to a packet ship in the Barents Sea. I was
living with
the thing!

Suddenly, in that hot attic: an icicle to the heart.

I heard Jumbo on the stairs. Despite his size, he didn’t have a heavy footfall, but the steps from the second floor to the third, if hit just right (or just wrong), creaked like a mast rigging, and Jumbo sometimes hit them so as to warn me he was on his way. Pretty thoughty. He didn’t want to catch me whacking off to a Varga girl, I guess. Or maybe he just hoped I’d reverse the favor. Anyway, I should’ve hurried to slide his stolen letters back into his journal, and his journal back into the bag, and the bag back into his kayak, and the kayak back under his bed, so he wouldn’t catch me snooping.

But I didn’t. A funny feeling grabbed me, and I convinced myself my snooping didn’t weigh a sou against the cruddy deception he’d worked on my teammates and me. Especially me. He’d tried to pass as a human being—
On Being a Real Person
, what a joke!—when he actually had blood lines similar to a can of Spam’s.

I put his letters in the journal, his log in the leather bag, and his bag in the kayak, but I left the kayak out from under the bed, a slap at his dishonesty.

Jumbo came in. “Hello, Daniel. It’s infernally hot up here. Why aren’t you—?” He saw the kayak. He saw that I hadn’t even bothered to replug its manhole with his grass mat, and he shot me a look. I shot it right back, cheeky as rip, condemning him for a liar.

Jumbo sighed and removed his ivory-tied leather bag from the kayak. He eased his marbled log book out of the bag. The letters fell out. The looseness of the ribbon holding them together—it unraveled as they fell—told Jumbo what he wanted to know: I’d eyeballed the contents. He made no move to pick up the letters.

Instead, he opened the log. He held it in one hand, like a hymnal, and licked his index finger so he could page through it. He turned three or four pages. He squinted at the book’s gutter, sniffed it, and made a face—which was sort of like Quasimodo pulling on a Halloween mask. Then puffed into the log and blew a scatter of cigarette ashes at me.

He knew. I knew. We both knew.

“Ah,” Jumbo said. He sat down on the edge of his bed and stared past me out the window.

Maybe I should’ve run for cover. An inhuman fiend had caught me red-handed—well, pink-handed—rummaging through his stuff. It stood to reason he’d want to wreak bone-crushing havoc on my person.

I couldn’t get scared. I’d lived with Jumbo a month. I’d trusted him enough as a teammate to make dozens of long throws across the infield to him. I’d eaten with him and listened to his manateelike gasps as he slept. He was my roomy. Besides, the idea of an inhuman fiend compiling private papers sort of contradicted itself. Most inhuman fiends don’t write memoirs. If they do—
Mein Kampf
, say, or
The Enemy Within
—they don’t often refer to themselves as fiends, demons, abominations, ogres, or wretches.

“You made excellent use of your afternoon, I see.” Jumbo put his log on his knees and flipped on through it. “You don’t disappoint me. I had hoped your curiosity would prompt you to this. Like nearly everyone else, Daniel, I yearn for a kindred spirit. A friend.”

Pardon me? Had Jumbo just implied that because I’d snooped on him, he’d now regard me as a friend?

“I
wanted
you to find the kayak,” he said. “And hoped that it would lead you to examine it further, even to the point of unloading it. I feared only that a superstitious scruple would prevent you from ransacking my belongings for their secrets.”

A scruple like honesty?

“Your activity this afternoon greatly relieves me. Now I don’t have to hide my origins or lie about myself. Thank you, Daniel, for having more curiosity than character.”

You’re welcome, I thought.

Was Jumbo pummeling me with sarcasms? He didn’t seem to be. He tapped the log in his lap. “How far did you read?”

I shrugged.

Jumbo set the log aside and stood. “The Karloff festival in LaGrange was a lucky event. Despite the pain those films often give me, I took you because I’d decided—
almost
decided—to reveal my true identity to you. The
Frankenstein
trilogy highlights the similarities and the differences, of bearing and behavior, between Karloff’s impersonation of a monster and my daily burlesque of a human being. On line there, I almost lost my nerve and tried to dissuade you from going in, but, happily, you insisted. My nerve failed me again inside the theater, but you prevailed there too. Tell me, then—did those films in any way prompt today’s meddling?”

I shrugged again.

But Jumbo had neared the truth. Since attending the Roxy, I’d allowed all my shapeless doubts about him to gel into one fat suspicion.

He paced. “Those movies corrupt events more accurately portrayed in the epistolary writings of Robert Walton.” He picked up the letters from the floor and went on pacing. “The world knows these events, however, as the first novel of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, wife of the English poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley. Daniel, have you ever read the text published as her novel
Frankenstein
?” I felt like I was listening to several different radios at the same time: too much information raining down. “
Have you?
” For the first time since returning to our room, Jumbo scared me.

I nodded because I had.

“Excellent. You apprehend that I am the ogre whose origins receive such injudicious, even libelous, treatment in the first Karloff film.” He shook the letters. “The fiend whose true history discloses itself here. Did you peruse these pages or only my journal?”

I nodded at the journal on his bed. I couldn’t explain that I’d skimmed Walton’s first four letters before . . . well, copying out the opening entry in his log.

“Before you question me, read these letters,” Jumbo said. “
All
of them.” He placed them on my desk, on the notebook I’d been using when I first heard his footsteps.

I picked up the letters.

Jumbo went to his bookcase and took out a stained volume. “Or reread this. Its text more or less duplicates the texts of Walton’s letters. Where they diverge, the letters represent the more accurate transcription of events.” He gave me the book and took the letters away. “But read the book. Its type is easier on the eye than Walton’s cursive.”

Jumbo tied his letters up again and placed them, along with his journal, into the beaded leather bag. He put the bag in the kayak and the mat into its cockpit, shoved the loaded kayak back under his bed, and abruptly left the room.

29

R
eading a book on the sneak has a lot more allure than getting it thrown at you as an assignment.
Oliver Twist
as a book-report chore will bore you to lip drool. The same pages sampled in the library stacks will rev up your mind and carry you faster than a bullet train to a new world. I’d enjoyed reading Jumbo’s log. Whether I’d like rereading
Frankenstein
on his outright command was a moot question. I had half a mind to throw his plump little book out the window.

But I started it and ran headlong into the blah-blah-blahs that’d almost stopped me dead in my tracks in high school, junk like “diffusing a perpetual splendor,” “the inestimable benefit which I shall confer on all mankind,” “under your gentle and feminine fosterage,” and so on.

Luckily, the writer—Mary Shelley, Robert Walton, whoever—finally rolled out the cannons and calliopes, adrenaline-rousing stuff about whale-fishers, Russia, dog sledges, and a creature of “gigantic stature” out on the ice—sections that reminded me of Jumbo’s own log, of course, and even of his highfalutin style, but that riveted me to my chair anyway.

Pretty soon, I’d reached Victor Frankenstein’s account of trying to build a creature “about eight feet in height, and proportionately large.” It got to be evening. Jumbo came in and put a cake pan of vegetables and a fork in front of me.

“Eat,” he said.

I noticed that Jumbo’s face—yellow cheeks, watery eyes, bluish black lips—squared with the book’s first description of the monster. But I kept reading and ate without looking at the cake pan or tasting what Kizzy’d fixed.

I read all night. Jumbo may’ve walked the grounds or dozed on a parlor sofa. Who knows? Around four in the morning, he poked his head back in just as the fiend in
Frankenstein
says, “Polluted by crimes and torn by the bitterest remorse, where can I find rest but in death?”

Yeah, where? I motioned Jumbo in and read the story’s last three paragraphs.

“Well?” he said.

I tossed the book back and paced the room with my hands in my back pockets. I must’ve looked a little like the tormented anatomy student at the height of his project: eyes red-rimmed, hair sweaty, hands as fluttery as quail.

Jumbo had evolved out of the body and the personality of a patchwork thing gimmicked into life by Victor Frankenstein. In the account said to be Mrs. Shelley’s, Jumbo’d had no name, just
creature
,
monster
,
fiend
, or
demon
, and nobody but nobody called him
mister
or
sir
. Henry Clerval, the name Jumbo used today, had once belonged to Frankenstein’s best friend, another of Jumbo’s early murder victims. So you had to believe he’d killed, or caused to die, at least five people, including the man who’d created him, and the friend named Clerval.

Thing is, despite Jumbo’s journal and his looks, I still didn’t quite buy that he was
the
monster. My mind’s eye kept casting back to that ship caught in the ice of the Barents Sea, but the off-chance that Hoey and his pals were trying to con me kept me from tumbling brain over butt to its “truth.”

“I asked you to read my story,” Jumbo said, “because you would understand that the crimes of my youth have had no sequel in this epoch of my life. I require an ally, Daniel.”

I rubbed my upper arms like somebody trying to stay warm in a meat locker. Every lobe of my brain felt more tightly stuffed than a butterball turkey.

“Practice in four hours,” Jumbo said. “Perhaps we should sleep.” He stretched out on his bed and, in thirty seconds or less, began to snort and wheeze.

My questions sorted themselves into a long, worry-laden file. In Mrs. Shelley’s doctored transcription of the deathbed confession of Dr. Frankenstein, his creature had been a true monster: eight feet tall. Nobody could look at him without cringing or picking up a stick. “No mortal could support the horror of that countenance,” Frankenstein had said, “a thing such as even Dante could not have conceived.” Which mostly proves Dante never visited Dixie: Jumbo had a fair claim on ugliness, but if you looked, he wasn’t much grottier than some of the folks prowling Kmart of an evening.

Other questions?

Well, the fiend in the “novel” has the agility and stamina of an Olympic athlete. Once, like an ape with vernier jets, he shinnies straight up the face of a small mountain. Jumbo had the upper-body look of a gorilla, but his bad legs wouldn’t let him scale a cliff that fast.

I also had to wonder again about Jumbo’s age. If he and the monster in Mrs. Shelley’s “novel” were one and the same, what had my roommate been doing for the past century and a half? No one that big could hide very long, at least not in a city or a town, and I couldn’t imagine how he’d ended up playing ball in Highbridge.

Finally, how did Jumbo feel about himself and everything that’d happened to him? Dr. Frankenstein couldn’t tolerate his critter’s looks. He’d skedaddled soon after mumbo-jumboing awake the graveyard parts he’d used to model the thing. If you bought this
Frankenstein
foofaraw, Jumbo didn’t actually rate, biologically, as the doctor’s get—but the doctor’d made him, and if you give something life, you’re responsible for helping it out, right? Laws exist against running out on your kids, even against sitting on an alimony check. So Dr. F. doesn’t stack up too well against your basic alimony jumper, some of whom have pretty good reasons for missing payments, and a lot of whom love their kids even if they can’t pay. But old Dr. F. turned his back on his son—sorry, his creature—then lied to him and tore apart the cut-and-paste Eve beast he’d promised to build him as a way of making up for his fatherly shortcomings.

As Jumbo slept, I mulled this stuff. I hiked around the room too keyed up to lie down and rest from nearly ten hours of straight reading. Even in his reddest-eyed condition, Jumbo’s daddy didn’t have much on me . . . .

At practice that morning, Jumbo, Muscles, and I all played like sleepwalkers. My backasswardsness—once, a double-play toss from Junior bounced off my left tit—all went back to my rereading of
Frankenstein
. Jumbo’s slipshod play had a like explanation. He’d stayed out of our room to let me read.

But Musselwhite’s lousy play puzzled me—till I saw LaRaina Pharram sitting next to Phoebe in the left-field bleachers. Miss LaRaina wore a dress of orange, red, and white, like a lion leaping into a sunset full of cockatoos. She gave Muscles the eye and shifted around so her easel-splash dress whipped about her calves and pulled tight across her thighs. No wonder Muscles couldn’t motor. He’d probably been busier last night than I had.

“Oh, puh-
leeze!
” Phoebe said a few minutes into this show. “Act yore age, Mama!”

“Mind how you talk,” Miss LaRaina said amiably.

Phoebe got up and stalked all the way from the bleachers to the Hellbender dugout. After talking to Phoebe, Mister JayMac stood on the dugout step and yelled, “LaRaina, go home! You’re distracting the troops!”

“Could’ve fooled me,” Miss LaRaina yelled back. “A flat Coke’s got more fizz than this sorry crew!” But after blowing a kiss off her palm at Muscles (to Reese Curriden’s chagrin), she seized her pocketbook and sashayed out of view.

Finally, Mister JayMac whistled us in. “Yall stink today,” he said. “I doubt you could field a tumbleweed with a tennis net. A few of yall need deodorizing worsen the Highbridge sewage-treatment plant. Go home. Tomorrow’s another day, but it’d better be bettern this one or I’ll sell yall to Johnny Sayigh and move to Cuba.” He stomped off.

After practice, Phoebe met Jumbo and me in the parking lot at the
Brown Bomber
. She had on overalls, bebop shoes, and a floppy short-sleeved shirt that made her arms look as snappable as day-lily stalks.

“Come to dinner with Mama and me on Friday after the Marble Springs game,” she said. “Mama said I could ask.”

The invitation surprised me. It confused me a little too. I held the back of my hand to Jumbo’s stomach to ask if Phoebe meant him too.

Phoebe blushed. “I was asking you, Danny,” she said. “It, well, it wouldn’t . . .” She stared at her bebops.

From the bus, a rude farting sound and ugly laughter.

Jumbo said, “It wouldn’t look good for a bachelor to visit your house while your father’s still abroad.”

“Her daddy’s not a broad!” Turkey Sloan shouted out the nearest window. “He’s a captain!”

“Will you come?” Phoebe asked me.

Ack. I’d already had one dinner with Phoebe and her mama, and it hadn’t exactly gone down like an oyster on a slide of bourbon. Also, when Miss LaRaina wondered what kissing Jumbo would be like, Phoebe’d said, “
Mama, that’s vile!
” But what, when she’d cried that, had worried her more—the health of her folks’ marriage or the foulness of Jumbo’s looks? She’d really broadcast mixed signals on that one.

“Accept her invitation,” Jumbo said.

Miss LaRaina, at the curb in a gray ’38 Pontiac, mashed her horn—once, twice. Phoebe peered at me, half pleading but more than a smidgen peeved.

“He accepts,” Jumbo said. “Don’t you, Daniel?” His hand seized the back of my skull. Out of Phoebe’s view, he pushed my head forwards and, with a yank on my hair, tugged it back to upright. Then he let go.

“After Friday’s game then,” Phoebe said. “We’ll give you a ride soon’s you’ve showered.” She sort of skipped towards her mama’s smoky old Pontiac.

The
Bomber
carried us Hellbenders back to McKissic House. A crew of them razzed me about Phoebe, but Darius kept as quiet as a gambler computing blackjack odds.