Brittle Innings

23

The 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.