Brittle Innings (45 page)

“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 manila 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. 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—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 to 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,
hap
less—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 he 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 children’s slide—recreational equipment that had escaped scrap-metal 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 a far 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 wedged 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 sempiternally.” 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.

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.