Brittle Innings

14

On my second evening in McKissic House, I tried to delay entering the hole I shared with Jumbo. Its heat and the idea of huddling on the other side of his throat-tickling grass mat while he slept or read-well, why bother going up? I couldn’t talk to him, of course, and the curtain he’d hung between us said he didn’t much care. Thank God. Maybe he’d taken me on as a roommate because I couldn’t talk.

Back from practice, I washed dishes, sat next to some guys playing hearts, and listened to dance-band music and news reports on the old cathedral Philco. John L. Lewis, said H. V. Kaltenborn, had taken his soft-coal miners out on a strike that had patriots gnashing their teeth. Up in Alaska, the Army’d finished mopping up Jap resistance on Attu, and the Eleventh Air Force kept on bombing the hell out of Kiska. Not caring for cards, I worked on a jigsaw puzzle-the Eiffel Tower-while listening to the radio. Nobody bothered me.

Finally, I had to go up. McKissic House had an eleven o’clock curfew. Rest and regular hours guarded Mister JayMac’s investment in us. He’d fine you for missing curfew.

Anyway, Jumbo lay stretched out on his bed reading. He’d tied back the grass mat divider so a breeze from the window could reach him, if a breeze ever blew up. His fan bumped and shimmied like a stripper in a whalebone corset. From the door I could see into the whole room. What I saw flabbergasted me.

Jumbo had put a big bronze vase of cut flowers-hydrangeas, snowballs, Queen Anne’s lace-on the floor next to my cot. The flowers helped. Except for the labels on the cans of his Joan of Arc red kidney beans, the room didn’t boast much color. The flowers livened the place up. I saw Jumbo look up at me-even in that heat, his eyes made me shiver-and started to walk over to my cot. Jumbo lifted his hand.

“You played well this morning.”

I ducked my head. He’d played well too. He’d knocked a heavy balata ball out of McKissic Field and fielded like a man with some kind of magnet for horsehides sewn into his glove. But his looks made me think of the other players’ guesses about him. Of injury, pain, and death. Up close, I had an aversion to his looks. Well, I was no prize myself.

My reaction to Jumbo reminded me of my reaction as a twelve-year-old to my best friend in Tenkiller after he’d had a sledding accident. My friend’s name was Kenneth Ward-Kenny for short. One snowy winter, Kenny’d cracked up on a Northern Flyer going over a ledge into a sink hole lined with briars. He dropped ten or twelve feet. The briars ripped and scraped him like so many darning needles wrapped in wet cotton. The plunge knocked Kenny out. He concussed. It took three of us to rescue him, and we may’ve hurt him even more pulling him up through all those white brambles to the edge of the drop-off. Kenny’s dad got there somehow and hurried him to the emergency room at the Cherokee County hospital. I didn’t visit Kenny in the hospital, but I saw him several days later at the Wards’ little house in Tenkiller.

Kenny didn’t look like Kenny. He looked like… I don’t know, the victim of a thousand wasp stings. Or a pit-bull attack. He had two puffy black eyes (actually, more red and purple than black), an out-of-kilter nose, and a set of lips more like an albino channel cat’s. Kenny’s looks scared and confused me. Away from his house, I started to think I hadn’t seen Kenny at all. Instead, I’d called on something strange, ugly, and maybe a quarter dead planted in the Wards’ house by UFO people. I didn’t go again. Even when Kenny got over his injuries and began looking like the buck-toothed kid I’d once known, a weirdness between us-disgust on his part, shame on mine-kept us from getting friendly again.

Jumbo made me feel the way Kenny, with his nose whacked askew and his eyes in bruised pouches, had made me feel.

“Last night,” Jumbo said, “I was, ah, less than friendly.”

Uh-uh. I pointed at myself, meaning he’d behaved more or less okay but I’d acted like a total jerk.

A lie.

Because he’d acted at least as jerky as I had, not speaking more than three sentences all evening and dividing his digs the way small-town Suthren doctors once split their waiting rooms into a half for coloreds and a half for whites.

“I hung that”-Jumbo nodded at the mat rucked up against one wall-”assuming you’d prefer a little privacy to no barrier at all.” Jumbo grimaced. He made a face. And he could make a face, a spasm of cheek and forehead muscles.

“Forgive. I seldom talk. U. S. slang confounds me. All my speech originates in the written word.” He gestured at his book shelves. “My tastes run to philosophy, science, religion, medicine, Victorian novels, and current events. And my tastes inevitably influence my diction.”

Wow. An attack-for Jumbo, anyway-of verbal diarrhea. It embarrassed him. He rubbed his hands like a man trying to coax blood into frost-bitten fingertips.

“To you, the mat must have appeared a method of exclusion, not a courtesy.”

I stayed mute, of course.

“If you want privacy, pull the mat out from the wall. If not, leave it.” He looked me in the eye. “At certain points, whatever your state of mind, I’ll draw the mat. Do not view my doing so as a sign of pique or ill favor. I sometimes require solitude.”

I nodded. Okay. Understood.

“And you have my standing consent to draw the mat whenever you wish. Would you care to do so now?”

Not really. Outside of Dunnagin’s counsel in the gazebo, no other talk I’d had in Georgia had lasted so long or promised so much. On the other hand, I couldn’t add much to it. So I started toward my cot again, and Jumbo halted me again.

“You’ve lost a button,” he said. “Give me your shirt.”

I undid the buttons I had, gave him my shirt, and sat down on my cot. Jumbo took a needle, thread, and a carved ivory button box from one of his shelves and sewed on the new button in five minutes. You’d’ve thought his sausage-size fingers would’ve made the task hard for him, but he did it like a pro, quick and neat.

“Here,” he said, holding up the shirt. It danced like a flag in the breeze from his fan, dropped like a windsock on a calm morning, then danced again. Fetching my shirt, I noticed the grooves, calluses, dents, and scars in the ends of Jumbo’s fingers. The skin looked dead at the tips, white or yellowish, with whorls of brown or feverish pink on their inner pads. The clay-and-persimmon smell came off him in ripples. Near to, his eyes were like peeled orange slices with the membranes still on. It was my lost friend Kenny Ward all over again.

On the floor by Jumbo’s headboard sat a cardboard box full of old-but not too dirty-baseballs. Most used balls in those days ended up in the servicemen’s Baseball Equipment Fund so the men at military posts here and overseas could play ball for training purposes or to relax. Even I knew that. The Baseball Equipment Fund was a big patriotic deal. So this box of balls struck me as suspiciously like hoarding. What did Jumbo plan to do with them? The team had all the baseballs it needed, and none of this battered bunch looked fit to plump out a scarecrow with, much less to toss or fungo around.

Jumbo reached down and grabbed a ball. He inserted his fingernails into its split seam and peeled its more or less glossy cover off. He dropped its balata core back into the box and spread the leather cover open on his knee. He rubbed the cover with his thumb, as if to work out its only visible stain and make it spotless again, then flip-flopped the spread cover and rubbed its other side.

“They lived once,” he said. “Think of it-these skins, once the hides of tall and powerful animals.” He stopped rubbing and laid the split jacket on top of the other baseballs in the box, the way you or I would return a silver dollar to a display of rare coins.

That chilled me. I slipped my shirt on.

Jumbo said, “May I call you Daniel rather than Mr Boles?”

I hesitated a second before nodding.

“Then you may call me-you may think of me-as Henry. Two men lodging together in such intimacy shouldn’t have to stand on oppressive formalities.”

I figured just the opposite, but what could I do? Jumbo had some age on me and deserved a little respect. He stuck out his hand to seal our bargain. I took it with as much zeal as I’d grab a hot wire.

“Daniel, know me from henceforth as Henry.” His hand felt cold and dry, spongy and hard-like sliding your palm into the grip of a solid-rubber statue.

Henry didn’t strike me as a suitable name for a power-hitting ballplayer. Hank did, like in Hank Greenberg, but Jumbo hadn’t asked me to call him Hank.

“A moment yet. I have a small present for you, Daniel.” From under his pillow, he took two notebooks and a handful of pencils snugged together with a rubber band. One notebook you could’ve used in school, a fat thing the size of a Leo Tolstoy novel. The other, a little bigger than a deck of cards, you could carry around in a pocket. One of the pencils, already sharpened, had a pocket clip on it. Jumbo dumped this caboodle into my hands.

“Should you wish to converse with me,” he said, “simply write in the smaller notebook, tear out that page, and hand it over. I will respond as its substance dictates.”

I hammocked Jumbo’s gifts in my shirt tail and duck-walked to my cot, where I spilled them all out.

“The larger notebook you may use as a journal,” Jumbo said, “chronicling your exploits throughout the remainder of the season.”

Hey, I’d graduated. Why would I want to scribble rehashes of ballgames in a notebook? It was the thought that counted, I guessed, but I’d’ve been happier with a candy bar or a risque pulp magazine. In the next moment, though, I started thinking I might enjoy keeping a record of my days in Highbridge. I didn’t plan to live in Georgia, after all, and one day I might like having a memory token of my minor league career here.

Jumbo, however spooky his looks or weird-sounding his talk, had begun to treat me like a roomy, not just a pestiferous kid Mister JayMac’d dumped on him. Probably, my play at McKissic Field had turned him around. What did that say for his scale of values? If I’d played lousy, would he’ve gone on treating me like a cockroach? But, hundreds of miles from Tenkiller, I appreciated his turnaround, whatever’d caused it.

I fell asleep in my clothes, with my notebooks and pencils nearby and Jumbo reading Wendell L. Willkie’s One World.

When I woke up, darkness everywhere.

Jumbo had pulled his woven-grass mat into place between us. I could smell it. I could also smell the gritty perfume of the hydrangeas in their bronze vase. I undressed and lay down again. Jumbo’s snores wheezed above the whirr of the fan, and our grass divider swayed.