Brittle Innings (19 page)

Jumbo didn’t say anything. After a while, he got up and shuffled down the hall to the men’s bath. When he returned, he shut the light and lay down on the other bed—without a word, but also without trying to hang his curtain again.

23

T
he rain hung on all that night and all the next day, but bad weather didn’t much bug Jumbo. He had his books and took a reminiscing kind of pleasure in the storm. Me, I wanted to ask the Lafayette’s other guests to join me in breaking up our room furniture. The nearer game time drew on the harder the drilling rain fell. Jumbo and I peered into Lafayette Square from our third-story lookout. The elms, the azaleas, and the statue of the square’s namesake seemed on the verge of melting into the Piedmont aquifer.

At four o’clock, a desk clerk—not the one who’d signed us in—brought word of the game’s cancellation. Mister JayMac had signed the message. He’d added we should eat well, hoard our strength, and get ready for two games on Sunday.

Never mind Mister JayMac’s instructions. Jumbo didn’t eat or sleep. He looked out the window, paced, or read. Between four-thirty and five, I took a nap, a nap clabbered with war dreams (insects stinging; bullets snapping past), dreams born of the rain’s fizz and snap. When I woke, Jumbo said, “Hello,” and held up a book—not
The Human Comedy
, or
It Is Later Than You Think
, but the Harry Emerson Fosdick he’d finished reading in Opelika.

“Listen,” he said: “ ‘A constructive faith is the supreme organizer of life, and, lacking it, like Humpty-Dumpty we fall and break to pieces, and the wonder is—’ ”

I sat up the better to hear him read.

“ ‘—and the wonder is whether all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can ever put us together again.’ ” Jumbo’s lemon-drop eyeballs rolled up into his forehead, leaving his sockets empty-windowed and spooksome. Blank of eye, he said, “Neither a king nor his horsemen first put us together. We should hardly expect them to reassemble us when the world has destroyed us.” His eyes clicked back. If only they’d seemed to belong to him, their reappearance might have steadied me. They
didn’t
, though, and if not for the clattering downpour and the shaming sadness of Jumbo’s words, I’d’ve bolted.

“Perhaps I’ll take more pleasure in Mr. Smith’s
Life in a Putty Knife Factory
,” Jumbo said. He reached over (the galoot had to’ve been double-, maybe triple-jointed) and chose another title from his row of books. Just as he’d thumbed the book open, there came a rapping at our door:
Tap, tappa, tap tap . . . tap tap
. You know
, Shave and a haircut, two bits
.

“YES?” Jumbo boomed.

That gave the knocker a start. “Uh . . . Western Union.”

“YES?” Jumbo boomed again.

“Delivery for, uh, ah, it says here, ‘Mr. Daniel Boles, shortstop of the Highbridge Hellbenders.’ ”

I hunched my neck. I’d never had a Western Union delivery in my life.

“Maybe it’s the bigs, Daniel,” Jumbo said. “Maybe Mr. Cox of the Phillies has had his scouts observing you.”

Then those scouts’d seen me throw away last night’s game. Jumbo’d go up before me, even with his drag-ass base-running.

“WHOM IS THE MESSAGE FROM?” Jumbo said.

“Mrs. Laurel Boles,” the messenger in the hall said, “of, uh, cripes, I don’t know, somewhere in Oklahoma.”

Jumbo lifted an eyebrow. “Your mother, Daniel?”

I’d already started for the door. Mama wrote, but never telephoned or sent packages—she was too frugal.

The joe in the hall didn’t look like a Western Union guy. In fact, it was the clerk who’d checked us in. I reached for my delivery, whatever it was.

“Not so fast,” he said, a hand behind his back. The other clutched a sheet of onion-skin paper, which he lifted to chest level. “I must read this to you—a singing telegram that isn’t sung.”

He read it in a snotty sing-song, though:

“My dear darling Daniel,

My dear dummy child,

When out in your flannels,

Don’t throw it wild.

“I like the ball white, son.

Why did you soil it?

What the ’Benders had won,

You flushed down the toilet.

“Your shame like your words, lad,

Must stick in your throat.

So to cuddle at night, kid,

You’ve got . . . MY GOAT!”

Here the clerk pulled a stuffed toy goat, with a furry chin beard, from behind his back and thrust it at me. “Telegram’s signed, ‘Laurel Boles, your loving mother,’ ” the clerk said. “Evening.”

And before Jumbo could ask him who’d put him up to such a crappy stunt, he tossed his message down and scrammed. I turned and flung that goat at the wall. It burst a belly seam and spilled some stuffing. One of its horns twiddled out of true and flopped like a bird dog’s ear.

I walked to the window, grabbed the curtains, and began to cry like the rain. Jumbo stepped off his bed, with a rustle of ticking and a drum-brush creak of the springs, and towered at my back. He had no more notion what to do or say than I did. All I knew was, my .432 batting average and my prestidigitation at shortstop didn’t amount to a phony two-bit piece if I was homesick and crammed to my eyeteeth with fury. So Jumbo did something to distract me. He turned me around.

“Turkey Sloan,” he said. “Turkey Sloan probably wrote the ditty read to us by that . . . by that shitass impersonator of a Western Union man. Who helped Sloan?”

Buck Hoey, I thought, my comforter in the locker room.

“Buck Hoey,” Jumbo guessed. “Evans, Sosebee, and Sudikoff: malcontents, troublemakers.”

I’d known Hoey was my enemy, but it despunked me to hear a whole list of fellas who wanted to tire-iron me.

Jumbo read this news in my eyes. “Laugh at them. Laugh
with
them. Their playfulness”—he nodded at the poem— “may ride on spite, but it yet remains playfulness.” He picked up and looked at the poem. “This has some crude wit, Daniel.” He handed it to me.

I read it twice, memorizing it against my will, then tore it into confetti and hurled the pieces at Jumbo. He blinked in the face of my conniption, as one scalelike flake landed on and hung from his eyelid.

“Daniel,” he said. “Daniel.”

He may’ve meant to calm me, or to chide, but the weirdness of my name on his lips, the puzzle of what it told, lifted my hackles the way the stadium lights had cable-jumped him. I could feel my skin glowing. I reached down and picked up the stuffed goat that’d bounced off the wall. Hissing, I got my fingers into its split seam and gutted it. I popped its eye buttons, dehorned it, twisted its tail off, mangle-snapped its legs. Stuffing flew around us like the insulation blown from an attic when a devil wind’s sprung its roof. Anyway, Sloan and Hoey’s goat lay here and there in pieces, although I still had its whitish silver pelt in my hands. I knelt on the floor, gasping and hammering my fist.

Jumbo pinched my shoulders and drew me to my feet. His hands fumbled at my shirt, setting it straight, giving me an Army gig line.

“Let’s talk to that unprincipled clerk.” I let him guide me through the door and down the stairs. At the registration desk, the clerk sat listening to a radio. When he saw Jumbo and me marching towards him, his face seemed to pull across his cheekbones; he looked embalmed and rouged. He clicked off the radio like a man caught lollygagging.

“Who hired you to play a Western Union man?” Jumbo asked.

“That’s private information.” The clerk squirmed.

“No law protects mischief makers. Your allegiance has a vile monetary cast.”

“Loyalty to those who pay you isn’t a crime. Usually, it’s what they pay you
for
.”

“To how many buyers do you extend your loyalty?”

“That’s no business of yours either.” Squirming more.

“But if I paid you for it, it could be, yes?” Jumbo closed the Lafayette’s counter book and leaned over it on one muscular forearm. “YES?”

The clerk pulled back. “What’d you have in mind?”

“NOTHING!!!” Jumbo boomed. “We
know
who paid you. Why should we bribe you for information already in our possession?”

“Bribe me? Listen—”

“LaGrange has a movie theater?” Jumbo cut him off in the shank of his huff. “We need the diversion of a film.”

“A movie theater?” The clerk was confused.

“I know your city supports at least one.”

“We have three. The Roxy’s nearest, just down the street.”

“When does its next feature presentation begin?”

“Seven thirty,” the clerk said, and Jumbo turned me towards the Lafayette’s revolving door.

“But it’s Saturday, right? The fourth Saturday of the month?”

“Yes,” Jumbo said.

“Then yall can’t go there tonight. You wouldn’t
want
to.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“Fourth Saturday of the month. It’s nigger night at the Roxy, place’ll be crawling with em.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“Well, the rain could hold a few of em out. But it’s finally stopping”—he nodded at the lobby’s only window—“and you’d have to declare martial law to keep em out after a day as dull as this un. Why don’t yall try the Cairo or the Pastime? They have colored-only balconies, but yall wouldn’t run slam into the foppery of nigger night.”

“My profoundest secret”—Jumbo leaned into the clerk’s face—“is that I am an
honorary
nigger.”

“A what?”

“And Daniel, whom others paid you to mock, cares less for his seatmates’ color than for the quality of the film.”

“Okay.” The clerk produced a copy of the LaGrange Daily News. “At the Cairo,
Reveille with Beverly
. At the Pastime, a Mickey Rooney thing. At the Roxy, a triple bill yall wouldn’t care to—”

“Hush,” Jumbo said.

“Yessir,” the clerk said.

And after a quick bite to eat in the nearby Magnolia Café, Jumbo and I hit the sidewalk, not in a downpour but a tingly drizzle, and walked through the early twilight to the Roxy for a triple feature of some sort.

24

I
t was nigger night at the Roxy for sure. Even the rain couldn’t spoil these folks’ Saturday evening. They’d turned out in chattering, straggle-in mobs. Groups of them clogged the sidewalk under the marquee and stretched around the corner from the box-office window.

One double file hugged the Roxy’s brick wall in a futile effort to keep the drizzle from beading their hair or soaking their out-for-fun finery. They couldn’t go to the ballpark to watch their Gendarmes bruise the Hellbenders again, but they could catch a delicious scream fest—three classic chillers for the price of one—here at the Roxy. The storm had no power to chain them in their mill houses.

The Roxy’d thrown LaGrange’s coloreds—and any other soul open-minded enough to wait for a ticket—a horror festival. The marquee told the story:

FRANKENSTEIN

BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN

SON OF FRANKENSTEIN

* * *

Boris Karloff as the Bogeyman to End All Bogeymen

When Jumbo saw the marquee and realized what he’d let himself in for, he had second thoughts. He mumbled something kindly about
Reveille with Beverly
. But I wanted this triple feature. I’d never seen a one of these films (even though I’d read Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
in high school), and I hoped the films would shear my mind away from dumbass thoughts of getting back at Hoey and his pals.

We finally reached the ticket window, and I handed in my money. Jumbo pushed up right behind me.

“If you haven’t already seen
Frankenstein
,” he said, “you may find it a . . . a primitive dramatic vehicle.”

Did he want to talk me out of seeing it? The white girl in the booth, with her hair in a kind of mesh oriole’s nest, said, “Ticket money, sir.” Jumbo paid her and shoved behind me into the salty popcorn smells of the lobby.

In its crush, he said, “
Bride of Frankenstein
surpasses in quality the film to which it is the sequel, and
Son of Frankenstein
features Karloff’s last essayal of the role that made him famous and a good performance by Bela Lugosi as Ygor. Should we stay for all three, however, we’ll violate curfew.”

Jumbo stood out like an ostrich in a parade of penguins. His whisper boomed above even the feisty talk of those black folks, and some of them looked at him like he’d arrived aboard an ambulance.

At the refreshment stand, I nodded at the Coca-Cola toggle and the glassed-in popcorn popper next to it. Soon as I had my stuff, Jumbo marched me towards the screening room. The seats there’d begun to fill. Folks surged through the lobby and into the auditorium. We slipped in at the back, after two thirds of the crowd’d already gone in, and found seats against the rear wall, under the projection booth. Bodies crammed every nook, teenagers eeled up and down the aisles searching for friends or showing themselves off, and the hoots and cat-calls didn’t fade away until the house lights dimmed.

The curtains over the screen, the royal-purple one and the see-through job behind it, purred aside. Coming attractions, newsreels (mostly war stuff), and a Popeye cartoon that prodded the crowd to talk-back applause.

Then
Frankenstein
, with an opening scene—Latin mumblings, peasant faces in a cemetery—that really did slap a chill on everyone’s high spirits. Except for the projector purr and the film’s sound track, all you could hear now were creaking seats, nervous titters, and coughs. Bodies dug up, hanged murderers cut down, the theft of an ABNORMAL brain by the doctor’s stupid helper. Halfway along, the crowd’d really gotten into it. Squeals, shrieks, laughter. Some folks stood up to yell at or plead with the actors on screen.

“Come on now,” a man told the monster, “you don’t want to do that. Uh-uh. Gon bring you nuthin but misery.”

“Vile!” somebody else said. “He
so
vile!”

“Lawd, cain’t you see he didn’t mean it?”

“Naw, naw, naw. Go back! Go back!”

The longer I sat there the queerer I began to feel. I kept sneaking peaks at Jumbo, who sat rigor-mortis still. He didn’t much favor Karloff playing Dr. Frankenstein’s critter, or else Karloff’s goose-stepping monster didn’t exactly favor Jumbo, but you’d’ve had to be blind not to see a likeness—the lumpish blocks of their heads, the bearishness of their bodies. Still, Jumbo had a suppleness lacking in the other, a sad lopsided quirk of face that made Karloff’s monster look regular, even handsome, by comparison. There was a mechanical, a
robot
like, quality to the screen thing Jumbo didn’t have. He sometimes lumbered and wrenched, but when he did, it was more like a hurt beast than a broken robot. Anyway, Jumbo’s resemblance to the made-up Karloff didn’t scare me—it embarrassed me into a fever. Even the Roxy’s “iceberg air” didn’t help. How must Jumbo feel, towering there marble hard as the Lincoln memorial, hands clutched like gauntlets to his knees?

He must’ve had an inkling half the people there, including his own roomy, ’d already compared him in their minds to the bogeyman on screen. And the inkling could have come from a lifetime of overheard slurs and otherwise hard-to-account-for snubbings. I knew such stuff myself.

Three quarters or more through it, I dropped the thread of
Frankenstein
. It had no music score, and every little gasp or cushion creak—when folks weren’t sassing the Karloff monster or arguing amongst themselves—slammed me back to the iceberg there-and-then and the sting of my own embarrassment. Lots of scenes limped along on talk.

But near the end, when the villagers torched the old mill and the monster appeared to burn with it, I found the thread again. I forgot about Jumbo and watched. A respectfulness like awe fixed the audience in a hurricane light, centering us in the hush of its eye. Pity for the monster, and relief it wouldn’t rampage again in this picture, and dread in knowing that, like Christ in a bad suit, it would rise again. To take a wife. The sequel was already spooled.

“Let’s go.” For the first time since we’d claimed our seats, Jumbo tried to get up. I put both hands on his chest and held him in it. The clock on the square hadn’t chimed nine yet. Even Jumbo couldn’t be that keen on
Life in a Putty-Knife Factory
. Groaning, he sank back.

During intermission, folks headed for the lobby to stock up on jujube beads, soda, chewing gum. With the houselights on, they saw Jumbo’s head lolling against the back wall, his eyes squinting like a big iguana’s. They slowed to ogle him or sped up to get past quick.

Whispers and nudgings cycloned around us, and two or three more seats in our area wound up empty.

“S a publicity gimmick,” somebody said.

“S a wounded sojer, home from the war.”

“Naw, it’s that Hellbender first baseman who poked him a coupla long uns lass night.”

“Ugh. Somebody done beat him silly with a ugly stick.”

The houselights blinked, signaling the second show. Fewer people came back in, and the empty seats around us multiplied. Jumbo slid down and down, like he hoped to disappear into the spilled Coke gleaming on the floor like gummy blood.

Bride of Frankenstein
began with its loud rum-ta-ta-tum-tum score—music-box tinklings during the opening with Mary Shelley and the bozos made up like Byron and Percy, and mad flourishes every time the monster staggered on or Colin Clive as Dr. F. had another headache. By the time Clive got Elsa Lanchester, with her Harpo Marx hairdo, jump-started, Jumbo’s head was no higher over his seat back than mine was over mine. His knees rose out of the chop of the Franz Waxman’s score like islands. It hurt to see him cramped, but with its cockeyed sets and its skinny Dr. Praetorius, this movie had its points. How could I leave until the whole silly show’d unsprocketed?

Bride
ended. The houselights came up again. A moviegoer on his way to the lobby stopped and pointed a shaky finger at Jumbo. “You don’t blong here. Yo’re a demon from the crypts and gallows.” The man reeked of a bad peach wine. “Begone, Satan, you damn viper!”

“Shhh,” somebody said.

“Don’t yall shush me. This man aint a man, he a debil, got him a snake for a tail.”

“Ol man, you drunk! Ol man, you a fool!”

“He’s a white debil. Don’t blong here, don’t blong noeres but Hell.” He looked back at Jumbo. “Begone, you damn viper!”

Two white high school boys seized the man and frog-marched him out of the theater. Jumbo hugged himself and stared up at the star-sprinkled ceiling. One of the kid bouncers came back and peered down the row at him.

“Sorry bout that, sir. You awright?”

“Sticks and stones,” Jumbo said.

“We screen for carriers, but some of these jigs’re jes lousy boozehounds.” He saluted. “Enjoy the last show, sir.”

“What time is it?”

The bouncer shot his cuff to check his watch, an old one with a radium-painted dial.

“Ten-twenty,” he said. “Zat awright?” (Did he plan to have the Roxy dragged by tractor into another time zone if the hour didn’t suit us?)

“Thank you,” Jumbo said, and the kid left. “Daniel, Mister JayMac’s curfew—”

The houselights dimmed again. The opening credits for
Son of Frankenstein
began to roll. I put my hand on Jumbo’s arm—humor me a little longer, I was begging him.

Next to and in front of us, more empty seats. Only three other people still sat on our row.

Basil Rathbone played Wolfgang Frankenstein, son of the maker of the first picture’s monster. In one scene, Lugosi as Ygor takes Rathbone to the monster’s sleeping body.

“
Cannot be destroyed. Cannot die. Your father made him live for always
,” Ygor said. “
Now he’s sick
. . . .”

Jumbo moaned.

“
You mean to imply that that is my brother?
” Rathbone asks as they stand over Karloff in his sheepskin vest.

“
But his mother was lightning
,” Lugosi says.

Jumbo’s knees thumped the seat back in front of him. He struggled up like a gorilla trying to burst a steamer crate. “What’ve these celluloid nightmares to do with you?” he boomed at everyone who’d cranked around to look at him.

“Can that yammering!” somebody shouted back.

“One more damn drunk,” somebody else said. “A black un and a white un, bofe trouble.”

The ushers showed up again—startled to find Jumbo, a giant shadow with his head just below the projector window, at the center of the commotion, railing at the film on screen and the blameless folks who’d paid their hard-got money to see it. I tried to lever Jumbo back down.

“Fie on these blood wallows!” he shouted. “These hymns to corruption! My patience exhausts itself!”

The ushers exchanged a look. Who’d move first to give him the old heave-ho? Thank God, Jumbo hadn’t gone off on an all-out woozy tear yet. He saw the worried boys.

“No need to oust me bodily,” he told them. “My friend and I are leaving.”

“Good riddance,” somebody several rows up said. “Sho hope we can git on wi our blood waller in peace.”

Jumbo edged aislewards, pulling me with him and apologizing to anyone near enough to hear. A third of the remaining audience clapped when he opened the door to the lobby. That hurt him. Through two whole films, he’d behaved himself. Not until a drunk’d called him a “damn ol viper,” not until the pressure of Mister JayMac’s curfew began niggling him, and not until a slew of scenes into the third movie had he stood up to protest the mayhem and the morbid stuff.

Now his fellow moviegoers—some of em, anyway—applauded his exit. The unfairness of that slapped him like a gas-soaked rag. Out in the lobby, I watched shock and hurt ripple over his face in frame-by-frame waves. Rage shook him. He let go of me and turned back towards the theater—to tear out a seat by its floor bolts and hurl it with a roar into the crowd?

“
He’s completely superhuman!
” Wolf Frankenstein would say. “
The entire structure of the blood is quite different from that of a normal human being!
”

“Come on,” one of the ushers said. “You don’t wanna let a bunch of niggers git under your skin.”

“You do, they’ll shore change its color for you,” the other usher said. And both ushers laughed.

Jumbo’s rage drained away. He didn’t rip up a seat. He growled and swung his arm in a tired wave. He left the hall again and paced the foyer, where the coming-attraction posters shone in glass boxes.

Together we walked through the muggy air to our hotel. Jumbo stooped as he slouched, but his size still suggested Karloff’s killer hobgoblin. On my first day in Highbridge, I’d figured him for a giant in coveralls. Now, shook up by three movies and the superstitious venom of a wino, I wondered if he was even human.

Back in our room, I went to bed under his chilly stare, but tonight it seemed one more penalty, along with Sloan’s fake telegram and Hoey’s stuffed goat, for throwing away the first game of our first series against the Gendarmes.

I couldn’t sleep. From the creakings of his bedsprings and his moans, I assumed Jumbo couldn’t either. He’d said nothing on our walk back from the Roxy and nothing since we’d settled in. A fly on the wall would’ve had a devil of a time figuring out which of us was the dummy. I’d stopped believing that he might strangle me in my bed, but I hated thinking that at the Roxy’s triple bill we’d become unmoored from each other, shoved apart like two boats on a vast, poisoned lake.

Jumbo made a noise like a cow getting sidetracked in the middle of a low and ending with a snork. I rolled over and switched on my bedside lamp. Shadows leapt onto the walls. Jumbo’d heard me, but he lay facing away, a one-man mountain range. I got out of bed and found my message notebook. With a pencil I printed out a question, two questions, three:

Where are you from? Really?

Do you have any living kin?

Did you ever have an accident that caused you to look the way you do now?

I took the notebook around Jumbo’s bed and held it so he could read my questions, which he did. Still lying on his side, he crooked his finger for my pencil and notebook, took them from me, and printed:

Too many places to list.

No.

Only my “birth.”