Brittle Innings

34

Miss Tulipa and Colonel Elshtain’d arrived in their Hudson Terraplane on Friday afternoon, too late to come to the game against the Seminoles. Miss Giselle had met them and welcomed them into her and Mister JayMac’s bungalow. Their dust-covered vehicle, its tire treads caked with red mud from an Alabama creek bottom, hunkered in front of the place.

“Daniel, you’re looking fit as a soldier,” Miss Tulipa said in the gazebo near Hellbender Pond. “Isn’t he, Clyde?”

“Yes,” the colonel said. “He should be a soldier.”

After breakfast, Darius had fetched me to the gazebo as a neutral meeting spot. The Elshtains hadn’t wanted to intrude on the players’ lodgings, and no player, Darius said, had set foot in Mister JayMac’s house since its construction in the first year of CVL play-not even such suspected favorites as Hoey, Muscles, Snow, or my illustrious roomy, Jumbo Clerval.

Not Jumbo, I’d wanted to tell Darius: Henry.

“Your mama’d beam to see you doing so well,” Miss Tulipa said. “How’s your laryngitis?”

To that point, I’d got by with nods and head shakes, grins and foot-shuffling. Shy fellas aren’t expected to talk much. Now, though, I had to continue my charade or fess up through a note or sign language. A bad case of laryngitis could dog you for quite a while, couldn’t it? I rubbed my throat and sadly shook my head.

“Pobrecito,” Miss Tulipa said. “What a trial for you.”

“I doubt it’s that vast a trial,” Colonel Elshtain said. “You’re simply imagining yourself in the lad’s predicament.”

Miss Tulipa looked the colonel hard in the eye. “At the moment, dear, I’m imagining you in his predicament.”

“If you successfully wish laryngitis on me, Tulipa, we’ll have a damnably hard time singing ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’ in rounds on our drive home.”

That made Tulipa smile. “ Clyde, go get Daniel’s gift from his mother from the car, would you?”

Colonel Elshtain clicked his heels-maybe sarcastically-and left to do as bid.

“Your mama misses you hugely,” Miss Tulipa said. “Good heavens!” A truly bizarre shape had begun to glide out of a tree-lined inlet of Hellbender Pond, and she put a hand to her heart like a movie actress who’s supposed to’ve seen a ghost or a moody mental figment of some sort. Then I reduced the shape on the pond to something familiar.

On a page from the little notebook I carried, I printed, Its just Henry my roomate in his kyyak.

Henry paddled his kayak out of the inlet towards us. His upper body came out of its manhole like a smokestack on an ocean liner. He almost seemed to be wearing the kayak, and it sat so low in the pond, with mosquitoes and noseeums haloing him, you feared it about to swamp or roll. It didn’t, and Henry dipped his double-bladed paddle this way and that with the same hefty grace he swung a clutch of bats in the on-deck circle. He nodded-but didn’t wave or smile-as the kayak slid by. Then he sculled it towards the far shore and headed into a flock of domestic ducks paddling out to meet him. He balanced his paddle on the prow and bombarded the ducks with handfuls of old cornbread.

Miss Tulipa couldn’t get over the sight. “That’s one of those, uh, Eskimo-ish boats, isn’t it?”

I nodded, then tapped a cigarette out of my pack. Before thinking to offer Miss Tulipa one, I’d already lit up. She stared dazedly across the water like a whaler’s wife yearning after her long-gone hubby-then looked back at me with a funny goggle of disappointment.

“Good Lord, Daniel, what’re you doing?”

I wanted to say, If I’m old enough to earn my own money, I’m old enough to smoke, but my youth wasn’t Miss Tulipa’s primary objection. She snatched the cigarette, flipped it to the gazebo’s decking, and ground it out with the toe of an ankle-strap Wedgie.

“You must have mayonnaise for brains, and it’s gone bad in the sun. Nobody with laryngitis has any more business smoking than a TB patient. Do you intend to grow polyps on your vocal cords? To make your condition chronic?”

It’s already chronic, I thought, but I acted contrite and sheepishly shook my head.

Colonel Elshtain returned from the Hudson with my gift from Mama. She’d wrapped it in birthday paper, but the gift’s shape told me it was either 1) a fishing pole, 2) an ax handle, or 3) a baseball bat. If pressed to guess, I’d’ve marked 3) with the smart-alecky confidence of a guy with a crib sheet.

In fact, Mama had sent me a bat, another Red Stix model. I peeled it free of its paper and swung it a few times. Swinging it gave me a peculiar heart twinge.

“Coach Brandon wanted you to have it,” Miss Tulipa said. “He gave it to your mama as soon as he learned you never got to use the first one in a real CVL game.” With a tender smugness, Miss Tulipa watched me swing the red stick. “Doesn’t Daniel look like a hitter, Clyde?”

“He is a hitter-his average proves it. But what he most looks like to me is a combat infantryman.”

“Behave yourself, Clyde.”

Out on the water, a duck settled on Henry’s shoulder. He fed it by hand. The ducks on the pond flapped and quacked like unbribed city councilmen.

“We look forward to seeing you play at shortstop.” Miss Tulipa stepped inside the arc of my biggest swing and kissed me on the forehead. “That’s from your mama.”

A clatter arose from the pond. Two or three of Henry’s ducks, including a green-capped mallard, beat their way aboard the kayak and assaulted Henry himself.

“Don’t be greedy!” he yelled. “Monsters!”

The mallard got to Henry’s head and began to tread him with the zest of a feathered Romeo. In self-defense, Henry knocked the mallard into a side-spin, grabbed his paddle, and purposely rolled his kayak. The ducks scattered, veering off towards the far shore or gooney-bird-walking the ruffled cocoa scum to what their BB-shot brains assumed a safe distance. Henry, with pure upper-body strength and the torque on his paddle, righted the kayak in a fountain of glittery spray.

Impressive. Colonel Elshtain gave Henry a half-bow and very lightly applauded his feat.

“Care to join me?” Henry called, hair and face dripping and the kayak itself streaming.

“Only as spectators this afternoon!” the colonel shouted back.

“Ah, but the water wonderfully refreshes one on a day of such oppressive heat.” Henry paddled towards the chokegrass and red-clover lawn stretching from the gazebo to the water.

“This afternoon,” Miss Tulipa said to me, “get a hit or two for your dear friends from Tenkiller.” That request made, she and the colonel retreated to their sister-in-law’s house before Henry could reach the shore.