Brittle Innings

36

We lost Saturday’s game against Opelika. Buck Hoey didn’t get a hit. Junior, at third, made two errors throwing the ball all that unaccustomed way across the infield. Pete Hay pitched six innings, but left trailing the Orphans five to aught, with the visitors playing too heads-up for us to creep back into it.

“Criminy!” Curriden shouted from the dugout when Junior made his second error. “Tkink! This aint the lousy sand-lots!”

“Wish you’d thought before your little trip to Penticuff Strip last night.” Mister JayMac passed in front of Curriden, who promptly shut up.

Opelika ’s at bat went on and on. When we finally got our third out, Mister JayMac eased over and put a hand on my knee. “A fine thing for Colonel Elshtain and my sister to see on one of their rare visits to Georgia. Another loss to Opelika and a sorry-ass performance to boot. Tomorrow, Mr Boles, you’ll start both games at short. Plan on leading us to an uplifting Fourth of July victory. I won’t have Tulipa telling your mama that her son, owing to his bad judgment and selfishness, spent Independence Day in a state of bench bondage.”

“Two uplifting victories,” Darius said from his perch down the bench. “Cain’t let these fellas settle for jes one, sir.”

“Absolutely not.” Mister JayMac seemed almost cheery, like he’d expected us to lose this one, like losing it would keep us from losing on the Fourth. He clapped his hands in a boosterly way as the Hellbenders dragged in for another go at the Orphan pitcher, Lester Affleck.

Henry was hitless in three at-bats, with a strikeout and two pop-ups to the second baseman. Leading off the inning, he cracked another pop-up, this one foul. It splintered his bat and drifted into the crowd for strike one. Henry gave the bat a flip, caught it by the barrel, and banged its knob on home plate. You could hear the hollow twang, like a chord on a bamboo harp, all over the stadium. He tossed the broken bat to Euclid and trudged over to us for a new one.

Because of my benching, Miss Tulipa still hadn’t seen my new Red Stix model do a lick of work in the CVL. I unracked Mama’s gift, via Coach Brandon and the Elshtains, and carried it to Henry. He took it with a brain-dead look of distracted raptness and gave it a swing.

“Lord God,” Turkey Sloan said, “what you doing with that bloody toothpick, Jumbo?”

Henry turned his gaze on me. “I could break it too.” I shrugged. At least the Elshtains wouldn’t have to wait until tomorrow to see their gift in action.

In the batter’s box again, Henry threatened Lester Affleck with my Red Stix timber. The crowd, and every Orphan sub in Opelika ’s dugout, scoffed, cracking wise or booing. Henry did look like a country doctor with a tongue depressor dipped in off-color gentian violet. That was okay. I still expected him to silence the scoffers with a wrist-flick home run, just like in a movie. He didn’t, though. He struck out on the next two pitches, badly missing a pair of changeups and almost losing his footing both times.

“Hey, Jumbo, nex time git you a telephone pole!” a soldier in the stands shouted.

Henry returned to the dugout and handed me my bat. “It may have bowed today, but it is still unbloodied. To you, then, I leave its successful initiation tomorrow.”

Thanks a lot, I thought.

In any case, Affleck finished with a shutout, only one of three games all year in which we failed to score.

“Yall come out tomorrow for a big Independence Day to-do here at McKissic Field,” PA announcer Milt Frye urged what was left of our crowd. “Two games for the price of one. Barbecue on the grounds. At least one win or your money back. If we take em both, free prizes for everyone leaving after the second game. We’ve also got a War Bond rally, some down-home gospel singing, and a Big Surprise. Yall be here now!” Frye might’ve gone on another three minutes, but somebody tracked a needle on our scratchy 78 RPM of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and the blare of the anthem shut him up.

When I left that evening, a group of carpenters’d come back in to work on their mysterious system of ramps.

Along with most of my fellow boarders, I ate a light supper in McKissic House, then retired to the front porch to take the breeze. Mister JayMac and Miss Giselle drove by in their Caddy with Colonel and Mrs Elshtam, going to a dinner engagement somewhere out of town. It sort of scalded me, but also sort of relieved me, they hadn’t asked me along.

Upstairs in my room-Henry had clean-up duties-I copied out some more of Henry’s journal. These sections summarized his journey away from Alaska and his ten-to-fifteen-year ramble through the American Northwest. In Washington State, Oregon, and Idaho, he pretty much weaned himself away from meat eating to a diet of carrots, tubers, greens, berries, and nuts. He hid from men, though, and haunted the woods.

Here’s one passage:

Even in my estrangement from the friendlier aspects of humanity, in the Cascades I often knew a melancholy joy. One afternoon, I experienced it while seated on a boulder overlooking a creek picketed by trees and curtained on either side by leaf mulch and moss. The plangent gurgling of the water and the azure brilliance of the sky combined to inspirit me-to such a degree that I broke into one of the festival chants of the Oongpekmut.

I do not sing well. My voice has such a barbaric timbre that it may discomfit even me. On this afternoon, however, my chant poured forth like a nightingale’s warble. Although the birds themselves fell silent and insects ceased to chirr, I adjuged it as melodious as the nightingale’s-wrongly, of course. Two warriors stepped from the shrubbery beyond the streambed and shot at me with bows. Although the banal repetitiveness of man’s aggression towards me had become highly predictable, this attack took me by surprise. Would my author’s race always greet my appearance with hostility and violence? Europeans, Asians, Siberians, Anglo-Saxons-even Innuit unfamiliar to me-all reacted as if I posed a danger reauiring swift eradication. My attackers, whose arrows flew wide or rebounded from my granite throne, wore the dress of the Sahaptin group of North American Indians: Cayuse, Pahuse, or Wallawalla. I identified them by their vestments and, when they audibly conferred, by certain quirks of their Penutian-derived tongue.

As my shock quitted me, I struggled to my feet to expel a roar of warning and reproach. The leather-clad indigenes withdrew behind a wall of huckleberry bushes.

I roared again.

Fulminating thus, I leapt from my boulder into the verdant ground-cover only a short dash from their conference place. This tactic, advance rather than retreat, bemused and affrighted the warlike indigenes.

“Sasquatch!” one of them cried.

They fled, ripping through the foliage and calling out, as if to unseen confederates, “Sasquatch! Sasquatch!”

Thereafter, apprised anew of my seemingly irrevocable pariahhood, I again took care to avoid betraying my presence either to the natives of the region or to the disregardant Anglo-Saxon invaders. I nonetheless continued to reconnoiter the villages and towns of both groups. How often I heard the alien shibboleth “Sasquatch!” on their lips, uniting these foes in their fear and misapprehension of me. Thus, in my retreat from Oongpek and my subsequent stay in the Pacific Northwest, I became a legend, which had its origin and growth in a mortifying lie.

Henry came into our room a few minutes after I’d read this passage. He liked me copying his journal. Although he’d gone kayaking in front of the Elshtains, I seemed to be the only soul in Highbridge-or anywhere-who understood exactly what that kayak meant in the tangled weave of his life. Or, as he liked to call it, his second life.

To everyone else, Henry presented the kayak as a hobby, a sportman’s hobby, and they bought this explanation the way they bought Henry himself, as a one-in-a-million fella with a talent for ballplaying and a caboodle of crotchets. You ignored these last, though, because, on the ball field, he produced.

Henry, alias Jumbo, towered over Muscles, but he didn’t scrape eight feet, as his creator’d written in the account published anonymously by Mrs Shelley in 1818 and released thirteen years later with an introduction in which she claimed authorship herself. I mean, a galoot eight feet tall would scare anyone, especially, I thought, folks of a stature akin to, or even smaller than, my own. With that thought in mind, I got out my notebook and wrote:

Youre not as tall as Dr F. says he made you. Why not.

The surprise of the day-a bigger surprise than having Mister JayMac bench me-occurred just then. Henry began to tug on the shoulder straps of the Extra Large overalls he’d worn to dinner, and his overalls collected in a starchy blue-and-white puddle at his ankles.

I’d never seen Henry drop trou before; neither, so far as I knew, had anybody else on the Hellbenders. On road trips, when he and I shared a room, he vanished into the lavatory to change clothes or doused or draped off every glimmer of light. In McKissic House, in temperatures that’d’ve floored a camel, he slept in loose pajama bottoms and kept a sheet up to his chin. The modesty of Hank Clerval would’ve gotten high marks from a Baptist preacher’s missus.

Now, though, Henry stood there in baggy boxers, dingy white skivvies, polka dots in a Dalmatian scatter from hip to fly. He backed up, dragging his overalls, and sat on his bed facing me. He stuck out his oakish legs-gray, purple, yellow, beige, so many colors they reminded me of a fleshy quilt. Pale scars ran in puckered bands around his lower calves, a band to each leg. Had Henry once worn anklets of barbed wire as a scourge, the way monks’d worn hair shirts or bankers and car salesmen wear neck ties? I stared at Henry’s legs. No wonder he didn’t shower with us, no wonder he sometimes hobbled like a crip.

“My pain receptors operate imperfectly, Daniel,” he said. “Or, let me rather say, those triggering bodily-as opposed to emotional-pain function unreliably. I decided to use this truth about myself to my advantage. In a remote section of the Ozarks, during Mr Cleveland’s second presidency, I thought to make myself less fearsome. If my height affrighted people, I would reduce it. If my flesh’s grisly damask caused distaste or consternation, I would seek a remedy for my complexion.”

Henry leaned forward and gripped his ankles. He looked like a giant being potty trained-Goliath’s kid, maybe, or Paul Bunyan’s.

“Of all peoples, only the Oongpekmut had accepted me as one of them. Winning their trust had taken more effort than I ever wanted to expend again. I wanted permanent cures, alterations in my bodily self that would ease my absorption into any human community I hopefully approached.”

Henry reached into the drift of his overalls, untied his shoes, and heeled them off. Kicking away shoes and overalls together, he sat there in his too-small cotton stockings.

“With great quantities of gin, a kitchen knife, and a hacksaw, I removed foot-long sections from the lower leg bones my creator had scavenged from either a charnel house or an abattoir. Among my father’s effects on the Caliban had been a small notebook detailing many of the surgical procedures he had employed to build, albeit not to animate, me. This miniature treatise I had read and reread on my journey from the Barents Sea to the Chukchi Peninsula, and then again at intervals during my stay among my woman Kariak’s Innuit-to the point of total familiarity and intuitive comprehension.

“Armed with this information, I had little trouble cutting and then reconnecting the appropriate bones. At the summer solstice, with much trepidation I shortened my left leg. After that autoexcision, I performed a similar medial amputation on my right leg”-Henry touched the white scar-”about two weeks later. By my creator’s design, I bleed enough to cleanse my wounds, but not so profusely as to deprive me of recuperative vigor. Thus, though at first unable to ramble abroad or to limp from one spot to another in my cave, I healed in the time I had privately alloted; that is to say, within three months, or by the autumnal equinox.

“This was an idyllic time for me, Daniel. In the early phases of my recovery, I had access to a storehouse of nuts, tubers, and dried fruits that I had laid by before abridging my height. I lay on my back in the cave, near a long-abandoned mill, and wrote poetry in my head or tried to solve self-posed geometric or mathematical enigmas. I resisted the urge to sing. Because I had foresightfully equipped my cave with rope ladders and wooden travel rods, I could hand-over-hand from one spot to another without putting any but a therapeutic stress on my lower extremities. This same system took on added import in the rehabilitation process, and it was not long before I again mastered the rudiments of walking.

“My self-surgery left me awkward afoot, but less alarmingly a giant when I crashed about upright. During the latter part of my healing, again ambulatory, I tested myself outdoors. I gathered mockernuts; inhaled the aroma of hand-crushed hickory leaves; and saw mergansers, crimson-headed canvas-backs, and delicate wood ducks scull the September skies. Life apart from man seemed an unutterable gift. Ahead, however, lay autumn’s drear gales and the winter’s enfortressing cold, a time that I bleakly awaited.

“Indeed, I often thought of insinuating myself into a human community as accepting as Kariak’s people had been. I trimmed my hair. I mixed many natural unguents, to repair the twisted lumpiness and hideous variegation of my complexion. I measured my progress in a shaving-mirror shard that I had found. In it, I saw that my lotions and poultices had turned my patchy skin an even pinkish gray. I could pass, I believed, for a lame, ugly Caucasian. No fastidious American woman would want me for a mate, but so long as I could chastely associate with talented men and women of goodwill, I could endure this lack of intimacy with a sympathetic female.

“Over the years, Daniel, I’ve endured, accommodating myself to a strenuous celibacy. It has proved less difficult than I feared. The years leach one-even a creature doomed, as I am, to a contingent immortality-of desire. A further mitigating factor is my sterility. I neither gainsay nor scorn the allure of erotic pleasure, but, for me, coitus sans any procreative potential loses some of its relevance, and so also its allure, and likewise its power to tempt. No longer do I blaze like a furnace. I don’t need women to fuel me. Thus, my capacities for a higher passion channel into three sustaining reservoirs: atonement, human companionship, and baseball.”

Baseball I got. Companionship I had a glimmering of. But atonement swept past like water in a spillway. Henry stood up. His sutured calves drew my gaze as surely as a starlet’s gams would’ve.

“I’ve revealed these signs of my self-mutilation, Daniel, to impress upon you the length to which loneliness and a need to belong once drove me. I do not regret having performed my surgery, but I do regret the evidence of it. The scars don’t pain me in a physical sense, but the mere sight of them lays a bruise on my heart. I entreat you then to look away.

“Look away.”

I looked away. Henry gathered up his overalls and scooped himself back into them. I didn’t see him do this-I heard the rustle of denim and the muffled clicks of brass snaps.