“There are combats enough about this planet,” Henry said. “Doesn’t the significance of this occasion”—gesturing toward FDR—“inspire you to at least a mean civility? I am shamed for every Hellbender here.”
Curriden and Muscles gasped and sputtered.
Beside FDR’s car, Mister JayMac said, “Sir, he speaks for me too. I hope you’ll forgive—”
“Forget it, Jay,” Mr. Roosevelt said. “Boys will be boys. High spirits and high stakes are a volatile mix, eh? We’re all susceptible to a bout of intemperance these days.”
“They’re out of Wednesday’s game against Cottonton,” Mister JayMac said.
“Not on my account, I hope. I’m inclined to believe their infra-dig donnybrook reflects a long and vexing day. Go easy. Roll out the velvet.”
“They’re suspended. You wouldn’t hang a medal around an erring battle captain’s neck either, sir.”
“Hear, hear,” Colonel Elshtain said.
FDR laughed. Surprisingly, he caught sight of Phoebe and me. “Ah, Miss Pharram, Mr. Boles, fine evening for a stroll. I bid you a pleasant farewell.”
Colonel Elshtain said, “Mr. President, if you would.” He and Miss Tulipa traded a look. FDR regarded me like I was a kid hospitalized with tuberculosis. My stomach did a sudden trout flop. My fingers chilled blue.
“You played sharp as a blade today, Daniel,” Mr. Roosevelt told me. “And I surmise you’ve a splendid future.”
I offered a strangled croak, trying not to look like a dumb orangutan.
“It’s all right. Your friends have told me of your handicap. Please regard it as a species of bond between us, different as our individual problems may appear.” FDR nodded at the colonel. “Very well. Let him in. I’m not going to do this in front of an admiring bog.”
Let who in? Do what in front of whom?
Colonel Elshtain opened the car’s rear door and nodded me in. “The President has something to tell you, Daniel. Ride to the front gate with him.”
Me? I hung there doubt-riddled and confused.
“Go on,” Phoebe said. “He won’t bite.”
FDR thought that hilarious. “What big teeth I have, he’s thinking. What a set of choppers. Well, Miss Pharram’s right—I hardly ever bite a potential Democratic voter.” He sobered pretty quick. “Hop in, Daniel.”
With everyone looking—even Muscles and Curriden, both like unrecognizable bog monsters—I climbed in next to FDR, behind a black chauffeur and a Secret Service agent dressed to the Beau Brummel nines. The President gave me a nod, and we drove up the slope past Darius’s apartment and McKissic House and down one leg of the circular drive to Angus Road. Fireflies winked as we purred through the summer evening.
“Colonel Elshtain asked me to break this news to you as a favor for past services skillfully rendered,” the President said. “He seemed to think its coming from me might soften it. I doubt that. All I can do is leaven the inevitable pain with an expression of our nation’s sincerest gratitude.”
Inevitable pain? What the hell?
The President fished a piece of paper—a telegram?—from an inside pocket of his linen coat. “My goodness, that’s clumsy. Forgive me.” He opened the paper out and studied it for a moment. “Daniel, your father died in the Aleutian Islands, on the sixteenth of June, not too long after the Fourth Infantry had retaken Attu from the Japanese. He’d flown to Attu with some Eleventh Air Force personnel from Umnak; they arrived in the wake of mopping-up exercises, and on an expedition of some sort to the interior, your father, Richard Oconostota Boles, and four other brave Americans died.” The President handed me the telegram. “That presents the unadorned facts, Daniel. The details I have from Colonel Elshtain, who himself has them from an officer in Graves Registration with the Alaska Command. In any event, your father died an honorable death in the service of his country.”
I held the telegram. We’d reached the front gate. The limousine, with its escort vehicles and outriders, stopped and idled. A mockingbird meowed from a pine across the road. I saw myself receiving this sorry news like somebody watching a film might follow an overhead shot of a motorcade and eavesdrop on the mutterings of a make-believe president. But FDR sat close enough to touch, and the crumbs from a loaf of French bread had funneled together in a fold of the removable seat’s dove-gray upholstery.
“I hear your parents lived apart these past few years,” FDR said. “On the other hand, a child’s affection for a parent seldom dies utterly after an estrangement, and I imagine—indeed, I hope—you still recall your father with a measure of fondness. I’m deeply honored, and likewise deeply sorry, to be the messenger of your pain.”
I couldn’t cry. You don’t sob—not, at least, if you’re a seventeen-year-old pro ballplayer—in the presence of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The gist of what he’d said didn’t corkscrew immediately into me anyway, and memories of my dad crowded fast and thick. I gave the Prez a nod, opened my door, and got out.
“A lift back up to the house?” he said.
I shook my head. My surroundings had gone all blurry and foreign, I could’ve been standing on a twilit African mud flat.
“A privilege to’ve made your acquaintance, Daniel.”
I nodded and then turned and trudged back up the lawn towards McKissic House. FDR and his crew processed off the grounds, into the honeysuckle drench of the evening.
Phoebe met me halfway, on a dead run. I handed her the telegram. She didn’t read it. Someone’d already told her what it said. She lifted her hands. She walked in a half circle. She threw herself at me, like I was a tackling dummy, and clung to me in a glut of rainy griefs. I hugged her back.
“Phoebe,” I said.
39
M
ore than a month had passed between my buggery by Pumphrey and word of Richard Oconostota Boles’s death. Call that month a fugue of dummyhood. No one in Highbridge, except Mister JayMac, had known me as anything other than a mute. So it sometimes seemed to me, and probably to others, my affliction had existed from childhood and would go into the grave with me . . . to everlasting muteness. Ha.
On the other hand, just getting Phoebe’s name out didn’t open the door for a whole stifled dictionary of yawps. My old friend the stammer rode half the words I did say, maybe more. Besides, I’d cast off the habit of talking. Silence seemed easier sometimes, nobler others, and sometimes just happily worrisome for the persnickety folks who wanted either answers or explanations out of me. If my tongue didn’t hurry to comply with the speech signals from Language Central, well, I didn’t sweat it. People talk too much anyhow. I prove that with my throat mike and these damned interviews.
“Danny can talk,” Phoebe announced, leading me back to the others. “He said my name.”
Miss Tulipa hugged me. Miss LaRaina hugged me. Kizzy appeared and rocked me to and fro with her forehead hard on my breastbone. Even Miss Giselle clocked in with a flurry of shoulder pats. Mister JayMac, the colonel, and the Hellbenders haunted the edges of my loss like clueless border guards.
“Such a trauma,” Miss Tulipa said. “Such a trauma to overcome your laryngitis.”
“You gots to be strong,” Kizzy said, her braids like spun-metal snakes in my hands. “Mr. Roozerfeld never told you that sad news to have you go lint-simple, Danny Bowes.”
I pushed Kizzy far enough back to gaze into her face. “I d-d-don’t c-care. I’m gl-glad my d-d-daddy’s dead.”
“A kid of the new school,” Hoey said from nearby. “A real lover of the fifth commandment.”
I found Hoey’s silhouette among all the others and glared at him. “Sc-scr-screw you.” Nobody whooped or laughed. In those days, you didn’t talk dirty in the presence of ladies, even if one was a woman of color and another had at best only a slippery claim on the title. So my retort to Hoey shocked the fellas as much as it did the gathered womenfolk, my champions and my comforters. Maybe only Phoebe appreciated the hassled defiance of it, and maybe she shouldn’t have. Everyone made allowances, though—not counting Hoey, I guess—and I got back to my room without being tarred and feathered.
Upstairs, Henry let me be. Huddled on my bed with our basket fan chasing fever chills down my arms and legs, I told myself even doing his duty to God and country hadn’t saved my father from hellfire. Anyone could reckon why. He deserved it, frying forever. He’d hurt Mama bad and nearlybout destroyed me, skipping out. He deserved a million-year broil in Beelzebub’s furnace.
Then I remembered Tenkiller’s abandoned icehouse, and Sparrow Alley, and the Boles & Son Jes-for-Fun Oklahoma World See-ries, and the sump of my bitterness started to evaporate. Did Satan grant pardons? Reprieves? Weekend furloughs?
The Hellbenders’ record on July 5, 1943, was twenty-two wins, seventeen losses; we’d played one game past the season’s official midpoint. We’d split our last six games with Opelika, who still had a game or two on us, the result of a fast getaway in May. And the Gendarmes, who’d beaten us two out of three in an away series at the end of June, still led the league.
In a meeting on Tuesday afternoon, Mister JayMac assessed the situation and told us what to do to ready ourselves for a successful stretch run: “Tomorrow morning, gentlemen, we go on the road to play the Boll Weevils and the Linenmakers. The next week they come here. These fellas play baseball like the Flying Tigers dance
Swan Lake
. If they beat us, we’ll deserve our enmirement in third or fourth place. Yesterday we whipped Lou Ed Dew’s hotshot Orphans twice. Congratulations. I heartily thank God you didn’t disappoint Mr. Roosevelt, gentlemen.”
“Thank God we didn’t disappoint you,” Buck Hoey said.
“Amen!”
amen’d a chorus of Hellbenders.
“But this is no time to suppose that jes because we’ve got our percherons harnessed and our wagon on track, we’re going to roll over everybody else like they were dust chickens. Uh-uh. So I am deeply perturbed that Mr. Curriden and Mr. Musselwhite, team
heroes
, elected by their off-the-field performance last night to sit out Wednesday’s contest against the Boll Weevils. Their absence from the lineup—nor do I mean to disparage or demoralize their replacements—could well cost us that game and deny us the psychological momentum to make the entire road trip a success. The rest of yall will jes have to gird up your loins in resolute and selfless compensation.”
“Why don’t you jes let em play?” Norm Sudikoff said. “It was only a kind of tiff.”
“A
tiff
? Howso a
tiff
, Mr. Sudikoff?”
“I mean, it looked like a all-out war, but only cuz they’re such bruisers to begin with. A ant boxin another ant don’t quake the ground like a couple of rhinos would. So, you know, jes let em play on Wednesday.”
Mister JayMac stared at Sudikoff the way a rube at a county fair ogles the bearded lady, wonderingly. “If I had the guts, Mr. Sudikoff, I’d bench them both for the whole road trip and leave them here to do scut work. But I lack em, I lack the necessary sand.”
“Well, sir, they’d probably only fight if you left em here without any supervision,” Sudikoff said.
“My rationale for taking them with us, Mr. Sudikoff—”
“Sir?”
“Hush, please. I’ve got something important to do here.” He looked at me. “Gentlemen, let me reintroduce you to Daniel Boles. Mr. Boles, please rise.”
I stood up.
“Would you like to greet your teammates?”
“Huh-hello,” I said.
Henry and Double Dunnagin led the room in a rapid clatter of applause. I smiled and bowed.
Cottonton’s ballpark, The Fields, looked like what the locals had named it, a big seashell fan of graded earth with no fences, no lights, no grass, and no clear-cut boundary with the cotton-growing acreage next to it. The Boll Weevils had a chicken-wire backstop, termite-gnawed bleachers along the baselines, and a shingled crate on telephone-pole pilings for a press box. As Mister JayMac had said in my first team meeting in Highbridge, a live goat’d once figured in a close decision at third. Even in Oklahoma, I’d seen boondocky high schools with better facilities than the Weevils had.
But sometimes they drew decent crowds—from whistle-stop and cotton-ginning communities all over the county. You could get four or five hundred people in the stands, even on a week night: farmers, railroad workers, gin operators, feed-and-seed merchants, beauticians, kids. Clem Eggling, a gin operator with a thousand acres of prime Alabama farmland, owned the club and at age forty-six still sometimes caught the opening game of a twin bill. He made his money scrimping on groundskeeping costs, salaries, and ballpark goodies. Watery lemonade, boiled eggs, and culled peanuts dominated the items at his refreshment stands, and you couldn’t get ice—shaved, cubed, or melting—unless you hauled it in yourself in an expensive refrigerated truck.
On Wednesday, with Muscles and Curriden out, we lost to the lowly Weevils by six runs. Hoey took Curriden’s spot at third, and Evans and Fanning subbed about four innings each in left field for Musselwhite. They fielded their places okay, but every Hellbender except Charlie Snow had forgotten how to hit, and the loss, again except for Snow’s bang-up play, qualified as a
dis
concerted team effort. Hard to say if Miss LaRaina’s rivals in the lineup would’ve made a whit of difference. The Boll Weevil’s pitcher, Hub Sisti, had us muttering to ourselves all evening.
In Cottonton, Henry and I stayed in a truckstop court called Edweena’s Comfy Cabins. If Cottonton’d ever had a hotel for farm-equipment suppliers and haberdashery drummers, it’d long since closed. Edweena’s Comfy Cabins got our business by default. Mister JayMac seldom had us leave Highbridge for an away series against the Weevils until the morning of our first game. That strategy ran the risk of a forfeit, if the
Brown Bomber
’s transmission dropped out, but it cut back our dependence on local lodgings. Henry and I had our ready-made digs, of course, but Cottonton natives willing to house enemy ballplayers didn’t run that deep or that trustworthy. Mister JayMac had to squeeze eighteen guys into three semi-friendly houses, and on our last road trip there in ’43, he negotiated the use of an empty jail cell, a bus-station pew at Harshanay Drugs, and two more Comfy Cabins—to keep from returning to the home of Weevils fans upset by our one-sided romps over every Cottonton hurler but Hub Sisti.
Darius remained the odd man out. He knew coloreds in other CVL towns, but didn’t seem to know any here. He could’ve had a black family put him up a night or two just by asking. Darius had a certain status. Driving the
Bomber
, doing for twenty or so ballplayers, made him a figure of some glamour. But Darius wouldn’t play on his league connections. Wouldn’t sweet-talk, trash-talk, or kowtow. Wouldn’t even ask outright and humbly, one downtrodden colored to another, for a cleanly place to lay his head. Pride and a festering resentment of Mister JayMac stymied him.
Not long after Hub Sisti’d shut us out, I stood in the open door of the Comfy Cabin called Gladiola Delight ruing my third hitless game in twenty-four starts. You could smell the DDT on the cotton plants across the road, and the used-washcloth odor of the linens in Gladiola Delight. Other Comfy Cabins were named Begonia Bliss, Daisy Dream, Marigold Manor, and Chrysanthemum Heaven. They all looked and smelled the same, though, and the only flowers in their rotting window boxes were dandelions and morning glories.
As I stood there, the
Bomber
growled past on the blacktop from The Fields, where we’d played our last two innings in the dusk. It headed into the empty landscape north of town.
“D-Darius,” I said.
“Looking for a place to sleep unmolested,” Henry said from behind a book. “The poor slob.” That was Henry’s shaky grasp of American slang. He meant
fella
, or
bugger
, or
joe
, not
slob
, but I knew that.
“Back l-l-later.” Before Henry could call out a question, I’d trotted to the blacktop. I hiked along it in the dark behind the twin embers of the bus’s taillights. Darius drove slow, maybe to keep a redneck cop from halting him, maybe to give himself a better chance to find a hidden parking place for the night—so those taillights stayed visible for a long time. I followed them easily. I lost ground, of course, but the road’s straightness kept the bus in view. Sometimes I could even hear its gears shifting, a sound like rocks bumping down a metal chute.
A mosquito came out of the cotton after me. Two or three damn mosquitoes. A blood-sucking
platoon
of em. Water lay oily in one shadowy ditch, a breeding ground. The blacktop gave way to gravel. The bigger pieces of gravel—fist-sized rocks—threw me off-stride. I had to find a tire rut and walk in it like a man in a narrow trench. Off to the west, the long charcoal profile of some eroded hills told me I hadn’t walked into the unbounded landscape of a nightmare. And a glance to my rear revealed the untidy lamp-lit boxes of Edweena’s Comfy Cabins. I could go back if I had to.
Suddenly, the
Brown Bomber
’s twin taillights jinked out of view and its hippoish side appeared in silhouette: a black rectangle with windows into a bigger blackness. Sound of rocks sliding on tin. The bus’s nose, behind its headlights, kept moving downward until a berm of earth and night had eaten the lights and swallowed the entire bus. Now I had no floating embers to follow and no sure way to recognize Darius’s turnoff when I came to it.
I kept walking. The DDT smell and the edgeless blackness all around me made me think I’d traipsed into the limbo where sick or worried people go when they filch a wink or two of shuteye from their pain. Nowhere. I groped along, though, and came to the side road, a dirt trail, where Darius’d vanished. Every step down this trail sent a lightning bolt up my spine. Shrubbery clustered near, and some sort of tree, an orphan plum or holly, grew up from the inlet of a cotton field, shielding most of the Bomber but its hood. I’d’ve never found the bus at the bottom of this cut without tracking it from my cabin’s very doorstep. I went up to the
Bomber
and banged on its side.
Behind me, a revolver’s hammer clicked. A gun barrel poked me in the neck.
“Tell me fast what the hell you want.”
“Darius.” (No stammer.)
“Jesus, Danl, that you?” The pistol barrel stopped poking me. “Man, you coulda got kilt. What you
doing
here?”
After saying his name, I couldn’t get another clear word out. Darius cursed and forced me up into the bus, its engine still cooling, popping and ticking. He prodded me down the main aisle to the long seat at the back.
“This spot’s yo favorite. Anyway, it’s somebody’s. Sit.”
Somehow, in that blackness, Darius seemed solider than me. I was a ghost, my skin and bones leached out and water-thin. Without his hand around my upper arm, I’d’ve vaporized into the stars like a pale gas.
“Sorry bout the gun. I uz taking a leak when you hit the road and come slapping down. Nigh on to scairt the piss back into me, white boy.”
That was funny, I guess, but I couldn’t laugh. Darius showed me his piece again, a snub-nose with a mother-of-pearl handle. He held it not to threaten, but to let me admire the way it shone in the cloudy starlight slanting in.
“They come to neck-burn me, Danl, well, I send a few on ahead befo I have to tap-dance air.” He pocketed the revolver in his khaki work pants. “Whatn hell you want?”
“You sl-sleep here?”
“On the
Bomber
? Sho. Better than a Comfy Cabin any day but Christmas. Plenty of beds to pick from. No loud radios playing. Hot and hot running breezes. Yeah, I sleep here.”
“Out in the c-country?”
“I like my privacy.”
“What about over in Quitman? Or L-Lanett?”
“What are you anyways, official Hellbender bed-checker? Or you jes want to thow yo pity at me?”
My tongue rolled up behind my top front teeth and stuck like a wet cabbage leaf.