Michael Bishop: Brittle Innings

Well, I knew enough to shut up. Standing on the foredeck loudly denouncing liars, I knew enough to lie. “I ast this guy limping past my door with Saturday’s paper if I could see it. He let me s-s-see it.”

During September, I had two follow-up operations, physical therapy with support bars and crutches (reminding me of Henry’s reconditioning efforts in Missouri, after his self-directed height-reduction surgery), several sessions with an imported Camp Penticuff nutpick, and more time to brood and dismalize than a stalled front-line regiment with trench foot. I filled in the time by writing Mama Laurel letters and reading a long downbeat novel about a young British doctor with a clubfoot.

When I could hobble about on crutches, Dr Nesheim released me. I spent my last two days in Highbridge in my old attic room at McKissic House. Everything Henry’d brought to furnish or decorate it was gone: the bed with its plywood bracing, the homemade bookcase, the woven-grass divider, the matted photo of a William Blake drawing, everything. Mister JayMac’d wanted to stick me in a downstairs room until my departure for Tenkiller, to spare me the pain of climbing and descending, but I wanted no other room, even when I saw how changed-how naked, emptied out, and big -its stripping had left it. I said my struggles up and down the stairs would be therapeutic.

“Clerval snuck in to get the smaller items, we think,” Mister JayMac told me on Monday. “They were gone when Curriden and I dismantled the bed and the book shelves.” (Once gone, I noticed, Hellbenders ceased to qualify as misters.)

“Henry stole his own stuff?”

“That’s a contradiction in terms, Mr Boles. However, as a fugitive from justice and a lodger in arrears, he trespassed to retrieve it-a trick he may’ve learned from Darius.”

“He didn’t mean to kill Hoey,” I said. “I mean, killing just wasn’t Henry’s way.”

“Well, I wouldn’t’ve blamed him if he had. What I find hardest to take is him forsaking the near-accomplished dream-the stupidity that compelled it.”

“He loved me,” I said.

A muscle beside Mister JayMac’s eye twitched. “Neither Clerval nor anyone else has touched your notebooks. Your gear is all jes as you left it. Cept Kizzy washed and flat-ironed your Hellbender blouse and a whole pancake stack of skivvies.”

How did Mister JayMac even know about my notebooks-there in my knife-gouged school desk, with its inked-in scratches and doodles-if they hadn’t been touched?

And, I understood, my notebooks now probably contained the only copy of “From Remorse to Self-Respect: My Second Life” in existence anywhere. Henry’s original had gone to carbon during Miss Giselle’s suicide. I ran my fingers over the desk’s oaken lid, but didn’t try to peek inside its book compartment.

Mister JayMac went to the window by the fire stairs. He gazed out over the victory garden and down the hand-mowed slope past his gazebo to Hellbender Pond. It’d been a rain-starved September; the corn’d turned to brown-paper spindles, and the grass had yellowish heat circles of different sizes-accursed fairy rings-singed into it in overlaps and stand-alone compass loops.

“Why do you suppose Giselle did that, Danny?” He had his back to me. “Had I hurt her that bad?”

Well, I could only stare.

“Cat got your tongue again, Mr Boles?”

“Nosir. It’s a hard question.”

“She really did care for me. I wouldn’t see it.”

“She probably cared a lot,” I said. “Caring too much can chase you furious.”

Mister JayMac turned around. “As if you knew jackshit about it.” His gaze drifted to the faded place where Henry’s only matted picture had hung.

“Jackshit, jillshit-I thought you hated potty talk, sir.”

“I’ll have Euclid bring you up a fan, this hotbox could use one.” He left, shutting me up in that hotbox alone. I could hear him clippity-clopping to the landing below.

Twenty or so minutes later, Euclid came up with a fan about five years older than Henry’s old model.

“Where’d Henry go after he gave you that letter, Euclid? How’d he look? Have you told anybody else you saw him?”

“Nobody buh you.”

“Okay, okay. Answer my other questions.”

Euclid was sneaking into puberty. His jaw had widened, his chest had a new fullness. In his threadbare linen shirt, glossy hardware-store britches, and floppy-soled shoes, he set the fan on the floor and plugged it in.

“Come like a robber when Detta Rae honky-tonkin,” he said. “Tol me gib you the ledder. Took off same way he come. Look big n scairy, thass how he look.”

“Where’d he come from? Where’d he go?”

“How you spec me to know? Come from hell, Danbo. Went the same place Darius done gone.”

“The same place Darius…?” But Euclid just switched on the fan, which bumped around the floor like a wind-up frog, and left. Henry’s midnight visit had scared the Georgia bejabbers out of him.

I crutched over to my bed and sat down. I had a ticket back to Oklahoma in my pocket. I’d leave on Friday, first day of October. What would I do in Tenkiller when I got there, though? It crossed my mind my most profitable option might be standing in front of the Cherokee Feed Store cadging dimes from home folks who mistook me for a wounded soldier…

One night later, rain. It wet the grass, the victory garden, the crazy whirr of the crickets. Earlier in the evening, I’d moved my fan to the window, and a fresh breeze a little after midnight made me reach down and rumble for a sheet-a first for me that summer (unless, of course, the sheet’d already been soaked in cold water). Then the fan spun moisture into the room, spitting icy droplets at my face and pillow.

The rain’d sharpened and picked up. It rattled the tin on the attic gables and cascaded down the fire stairs like some sort of stepping-stone waterfall. The gutters under the eaves clattered and gushed.

I sat up. A pitchfork of lightning jabbed down on the house’s Alabama side. Through the window I could see, just for a sec, the thrashing corn in the victory garden, the thrashing magnolias and sycamores near the pond, and the skeleton of the gazebo. Then, noisy blackness. Then another many-fingered electric claw-right behind a coal-chute judder of thunder-grabbed for the corn, the trees, the gazebo, the pond. I saw a figure in a canoe on the rain-whipped water, Miss Giselle’s ghost, or maybe just a floating pecan bough torn off its trunk by the storm.

My fan stopped prowling on the windowsill, its propellers creaked to a stall. The storm’d knocked our power out. To make sure, I reached up, shivering, and groped for the switch on the pole lamp beside my bed.

Thwick!

The dark dragged itself out like an endless roll of funeral bunting. McKissic House, probably half of Highbridge, was kilowattless. Yow. In town, you could usually get light with a finger flip, but now-torrents washing the factory district’s cobblestones, the peanut fields outside town, and the barracks at Camp Penticuff-nothing but clattering blackness. I huddled on my bed, scairt numb.

Thunder grumbled, more lightning cracked: God Himself homering to the seats over the universe’s edge. The crowd-which existed the way the dead exist-roared. The rain and the noise shook me; twinges beset my rebuilt knee, my jammed hip, the scars on my thigh. I prayed to Almighty God, and to my not quite so omnipotent mother.

A shape hovered into view on the topmost landing of the fire stairs; it filled the square of my window and bent there in silhouette like a shadow on a black-plastic movie screen. A horror movie. When the figure poked its head in the window and accidentally knocked my fan to the floor, I recognized it as Henry. A whole series of branching lightning strokes-like phosphorescent tuber roots, or a sky-size X-ray of nerve cells-lit up his crooked face from the sides. He grinned in his glum, turned-funny way.