Brittle Innings

“The guy’s whackers,” Sosebee said.

“Seems healthy enough to me,” Du

“Get him out. Jesus H. Christ.”

Du

Tiptoeing through the rows of a victory garden, he pulled me along by the barrel of my bat. We crossed a stretch of lawn below the garden and Mister JayMac’s bungalow and ended up in a gazebo near a good-size pond.

In Tenkiller, the Elshtains had a gazebo. In his carpentry days, my dad’d built a few for townies with big yards and a need to show their money. Down South, gazebos sprout like toadstools. I don’t know why. They make little sense-moronic structures with roofs but no walls, more for show than everyday use. But Du

“Thanks,” Du

“Don’t panic, Da

Was he? I didn’t know.

“He doesn’t have a social knack as well developed as his vocabulary, I admit it, but that shouldn’t shake you-you’re not exactly a social lion yourself, I wouldn’t think, and even Harpo has a bigger vocabulary than you do.” He squeezed the bulb of an imaginary airhorn: Beep, beep.

“Look,” Du

My eyes grew hubcap round. I did feel chosen, I just didn’t know for what.

“Yeah, he’s big. Six-ten, seven, maybe seven-two. Hard to say. He sort of slouches. Taller than Howie Schultz, though. Schultz, the kid who plays first for Brooklyn. Sportswriters call him The Steeple. Got nixed for military service for being too tall. S one reason Mister JayMac hurried to sign Clerval-the Army wouldn’t come calling. A better reason is, Clerval’s a good country player. A bit slow, not a lot of range, but a champ at digging out bad throws and snagging tosses that’d sail slap over anybody else’s head. He’s also good at catching darters right back at him and shots down the foul line that might drop in for extra-base hits.”

I pulled my bat out from under the bench. I rolled its handle back and forth between my palms.

“Yeah, he can hit. Sort of. Last year his batting average hovered around.220 or so-poor for the minors, fatal for a guy with big-league ambitions. But he’s got a scary knack for making the hits he does get count. He’s slammed fence busters in spots that’d’ve killed us if he hadn’t come through. Killed us. So Mister JayMac gave him his own room. He’s valuable even if he isn’t quite bigs material.”

Du

“Here.” Du

I took an awkward puff. Back in Tenkiller, Coach Brandon had hated the habit. Called cigarettes wind-robbers. Sharing one with Du

“Old Golds,” Du

I couldn’t taste any “apple honey,” but I kept smoking. In a minute or two, I had a coughing fit. Du

“Around the loop, players started calling Clerval Jumbo. He tolerates it. Just don’t call him Goliath, Behemoth, or Whale. He hates Whale. Call him that, it’s like you’re knocking not only him but all the whales in the seas. Jumbo’s okay, though, because it’s fairly neutral. It just means he’s big, which he’d be a blind fool to deny.”

I kept coughing; a fuse sizzled straight down my tongue.

“No idea how old Clerval is,” Du

With one hand I smoked. With the other I scratched a mosquito bite on my shin. Blood stained my pants cuff, and flesh rode under my fingernails.

“Did you see him eating tonight?” Du

I let Du

“Hank, is it okay if young Boles here comes back in?”

The door swung open. Jumbo stood framed in it from the chest down. He bent at the knees and peered at us sideways.

“Come in, Mr Boles.”

“See you tomorrow,” Du

Jumbo had changed our room. A divider-a loosely woven grass mat-hung between his bed and my cot. He’d also put a quilt and a feather pillow on my cot and set up his revolving fan at the edge of the grass curtain so that it blew into his half of the room through part of its arc and into my half for the other. It moved hot air around, but also kept mosquitoes from drilling us like Texas oil fields.

“I intend to read a while. Tell me if the lamp disturbs you.” Jumbo ducked behind the mat, where his shadow hung, scaring the Tenkiller crap out of me. I sat down on the quilt he’d rustled up and stared at his lumpy silhouette.

Du

I lay down in my clothes. Mama Laurel, the Elshtains, Coach Brandon, Franklin Gooch, and everyone else in Tenkiller might as well’ve rocketed off to Mars. At last I slept. Later, I awoke in darkness. The fan still bumped away, and Jumbo still breathed over its whirr in deep, even gasps. Gasping myself, I went under again…