Brittle Innings

52

Eufaula had a decent ball club. Early in the season the Mudcats’d climbed to second on several occasions, jockeying with Opelika and LaGrange for the league lead. They always played us tough, especially when Zaron Childs pitched for them. That Friday evening Childs shut us out on a two-hitter, yielding safeties only to Worthy Bebout and to Norm Sudikoff as a pinch hitter. Milt Frye announced the Gendarmes had routed the Mockingbirds over to Quitman. Their win dropped us one game off the pace, with ten games remaining.

In the clubhouse, after Mister JayMac had praised Childs for his pitching and retreated to the ticket office, Curriden groused, “Childs threw great, but Mister JayMac’s great-niece softened us up for the bastid at dinner.”

“Don’t blame Phoebe,” Muscles said. “We stunk.”

“Look who got our hits-Bebout, who didn’t know what she was talking about, and Sudikoff, who wasn’t there to hear. Sidewinder Childs didn’t beat us. Phoebe Pharram did.”

“It’s a poor sort of man who can’t overcome some vexatious talk to play up to his capabilities,” Henry told Curriden.

“Listen to Mr Zero-for-Four,” Curriden said. “And didn’t that little gal’s ‘vexatious talk’ chase you clean off?”

“Can it,” Lamar Knowles said. “The game’s over.”

For some reason, everybody canned it. We all showered and dressed in a starched and testy silence.

On Saturday afternoon, calmer and better rested, we drubbed the Mudcats with a barrage of extra-base hits and a sideshow of stolen bases. Meanwhile, the Mockingbirds beat the Gendarmes. These results locked us and the ’Darmes in another first-place tie, our second of the month. We just had to keep the heat on Emmett Strock and his gang.

Eufaula’s manager, Grover Traffley, worked to stymie our momentum. He called on Zaron Childs, on one day’s rest, to face us again. Childs yielded nine hits, but only three runs, and the Mudcats beat us by scraping up a patchy rally in the top of the ninth and holding us scoreless in our final at bat. Naturally, the Gendarmes beat the ’Birds again, and we fell a game off the lead with eight games left, our last three a shoot-em-up showdown at McKissic Field.

Henry went out the window. He figured me dead to the world, but I heard him. The heat’d come down so pitiless on Highbridge that, before lying down, I’d yanked my sheets off my bed, carried them down the hall, and soaked them in cold water in the shower stall. Then I’d spread them on my mattress, stripped naked, and stretched out on them across from our fan. Doing all that had miffed Henry, but he’d’ve never admitted it, even if I’d driven bamboo slivers under his fingernails. Me, I didn’t care. Somehow or other, I had to get cool.

Anyway, I heard him when he went out. Without even trying, a guy Henry’s size could make a window-sash weight bump in its groove. He took up so much space that, when he left, you felt a Henry-shaped pocket in the air. I sat up, my chest already dry as talc, my backside still damp from the clammy sheets.

Had Pearl the opposum come back? I crept over and peered out. Henry’d already reached the fire stairs’ second-floor landing. I ducked back inside and pulled on a pair of jeans, nearly zippering my cock in my rush to follow him.

“It aint Pearl,” I told myself on the fire stairs. “Not even Henry’d give up this much sleep to befriend a possum.” A judgment I right quick proved.

Henry’d angled off into the pole-bean rows making up one corner of the victory garden between McKissic House and the bungalow behind it. I crept barefooted down the fire stairs and over the grass after him. A craggy chunk of moon silvered the garden, and Henry’s head and chest poked up so high I could see him picking his way even among the curling vines. Although he’d sworn a few days back he seldom lied, I knew he’d lied to me at least once. Also, his old impersonation of a human being was a Big Lie, one he ached to make true.

Anyway, creeping through velvety squash leaves, I half expected Miss LaRaina to spring up like Ruth amid the corn, a gleaner of leftover male hungers come to feed not only her weird Elimelech’s appetite but also her own. So it dumfounded me when the voice I heard talking to Henry belonged not to Phoebe’s wayward mama, but to Mister JayMac’s porcelain-pretty wife, Miss Giselle.

“Why here?” she said. “Darius’s old apartment would’ve been more private.” Leaves hid the woman from me, but even lying belly down with my cheek on a root-laced mass of clay, I knew her voice.

“Just so.” Henry’s voice was a gentle bassoon. “Discovery there would mean disgrace for us. Discovery here would afford us yet some hope of preserving our reputations.”

“But it isn’t very amenable to… to play.” Miss Giselle laughed, girlishly. I couldn’t remember hearing her laugh before, and the feel of it sent a troop of caterpillars marching pleasantly down my spine.

“Giselle, we mustn’t proceed on this precipitant course.”

“How you talk. I love how you talk.” In fact, Henry’s protest tickled the stew out of Miss Giselle. She laughed a little harder, pulling herself to Henry’s chest. “You sound like somebody out of a Brontë book.”

“On the road, I have few other-”

“Shhh. You can find a happier line to jilt me with than, ‘We mustn’t proceed on this precipitant course.’ How about ‘To go on as we have would be curtains for us both’?” She laughed again, but I didn’t know why.

“It frightens me, this series of trysts,” Henry said. “We expose to heartbreak even those from whom we hide.”

“Hide? Who’s hiding?”

“Don’t torment me. Neither tease nor quibble.”

For a moment, Miss Giselle and Henry stopped talking. I heard them hug, her crinoline against his T-shirt, and wriggled to see past the squash leaves and coiling bean vines to their meeting place-but with no luck. Then Miss Giselle said, “Come with me, big fella,” chuckling, and I could hear them rustling through the garden again. I rose to my knees and crawled hard myself. They went even faster, rattling foliage and snapping stalks, so I penguin-waddled after.

Following them got trickier the farther into the garden we went. Tomato plants and other knee-high crops began to replace the beans and walls of tasseled sweet corn that’d shielded me earlier. I could see better, but so could my prey and then-WHOOSH!-the stalks in the next garden section got taller, a copse of leafy half-pikes. The lovers vanished into it like Hansel and Gretel into an enchanted wood. Henry sank beneath the okra stalks, and Miss Giselle eased into his lap.

“And why have you led me here?” Henry said.

“To rekindle your ardor,” Miss Giselle said. “Forget all musts and shoulds. Behold the okra and read my mind.”

I edged nearer. The okra leaves shivered. The gouged profile of the moon spilled a soft pewter on their stalks and seamed pods. The pods stood up or out, like tapered hard-ons. If leprechauns could reach the height and hot-bloodedness of men, this was how their members would look in the real world: a forest of tender, silver-green pricks.

“Long have I desired to free myself of animal compulsion,” Henry said. “Until you, I believed I had.”

“Well, I want to enslave myself to it. Don’t let cowardly scruple send me back to my dry, dry marriage.”

“You seek revenge for infidelity and neglect?”

“Well, sure. But more of what I want has to do with… holding and being held. Riding your body to places I didn’t believe I could visit anymore.”

“I am a monster. A freak. The caprice of a tortured man’s vanity.”

“Henry, you’re beautiful.”

“I should offer you that homage.”

“Holding me, you do. I feel it from the inside out.”

“Even when I cry, ‘Kariak!’ ”

“Cry what you like. I can’t reproach a man whose emotional faithfulness to his only wife has outlasted her death.”

“No. But we must end this deceit, this betrayal of both Mister JayMac and our better selves.”

“This sweet deceit. Call it sweet.”

“Don’t torment me. Neither tease nor quibble.”

“Shhhh. Look here.” Miss Giselle grabbed an okra stalk.

“Don’t. It will produce an insupportable itch.” He meant that the prickly hairs on the okra pods would.

“I have you for that. Here.” Miss Giselle snapped off a pod several inches long. “Kizzy or Euclid or a boarder should have picked this one already. They’re tenderest-unlike you-when smaller. See. This one has a horny rind.”

Henry took the pod and flung it away. It whirled through the okra forest and struck me on the neck. I touched my grated skin and ducked even closer to the ground.

“Do you like gumbo?” Miss Giselle said. “The clear sweet ooze of the pod? The way it thickens and quickens?” Sitting on Henry’s knee, she kissed him on the forehead.

“But we make nothing together,” Henry whispered. “I have lifeless seed and you a desolated womb.”

“We make each other happy.” Miss Giselle shifted so her hands clutched his shoulders and her hips rose and fell to an unforced rhythm. I lay on the blush-fed thumping of my heart.

“GOD!” Henry shouted, a thunderclap. I expected McKissic House to empty, our teammates to come pouring out to see what’d happened. I didn’t dare move. Henry’d know me for a snoop, and Miss Giselle would have me booted off the team.

After a time, Henry and Miss Giselle moved again, crinoline on cotton. I hugged the earth.

“Take me to Darius’s old place. You can’t leave me now.”

“But the possibilities of discovery, scandal, disgrace-”

“Now, Henry. Now!”

Henry gathered up Miss Giselle. He carried her through the okra, tomatoes, squash, beans, sweet peas, cucumbers, and corn towards the Bomber’s garage and the room above it where Miss Giselle’s faithless husband’s bastard son had lived and grieved the biggest part of his resentful adulthood.

As soon as they’d gone, I crept quietly back to McKissic House.

Two hours later Henry came to bed. I pretended sleep. He pretended to believe it. But for an hour or more, he sat on his mattress with his arms around his knees, a gray hulk in our cramped and steamy room.