Michael Bishop: Brittle Innings

Henry’s greasy hair lay plastered to his skull like Johnny Weissmuller’s after a fierce swim through a jungle lagoon. His eyes blinked yellow. His skin shone yellow. His teeth had the nicotine gleam of tobacco-stained store-boughts.

Maybe, I thought, our palship and his long letter aside, he’d come back to kill me-my reward for beating out Buck Hoey at short, getting Hoey traded, and setting up the conditions that’d prodded Henry into throwing Hoey out of a tree and then yanking his tongue out. I’d snarled the long comeback Henry’d engineered after his nightmare march through Europe, over a century and a half ago.

“Daniel”-whispering-“Daniel, may I come in?”

“Sure. Where’ve you been? What’re you doing?”

Henry’s Sunday-go-to-meeting shirt and his muddy coveralls were sodden, but he climbed over the sill anyway and stepped on the fan he’d already knocked to the floor. In the middle of the room, he held his arms out and let the water drenching his sleeves drip in shimmery membranes to the floor.

“Didn’t I promise you we would meet again?” The emptiness of our room-or his half of the room-quieted him, even though he’d helped to empty it.

“Henry, whaddaya want? They’ll catch you here, you’ll end up in the pokey.”

“No jail in Highbridge can hold me.”

“Why’d you have to kill Hoey? It was bad enough, what Hoey did to me.”

“My letter… I didn’t mean to kill him, but to avenge you. In the end, I left him speechless.”

“A funny word for dead, Henry.”

“Come away with me-not for long. A few days only. To see where I’ve sequestered myself.”

“I’m going home. I’ve got a ticket.”

“Some possess tickets for that destination. Some do not.”

These words lit up the inside of my skull. Henry’d left Hoey “speechless” out of regard for me, a pissed-off sense of abraded justice. He’d been my roommate. I could barely see him, a rain-soaked thing in the dark, but I used my crutches to stump over to him to give him a hug. My hands around his back got no closer than the rock-hard dimples on either side of his spine. He was too lean for love handles and too knurled for comfort, but I clove to him anyway, my crutches tumbled to the floor.

The bulb in my pole lamp pinged on, stinging our eyes. The fan Henry’d knocked to the floor began bumbling around. Henry looked twice as big in the light, and the fan sounded ten times as loud. Henry, still hugging me, pulled the fan’s plug and switched off the lamp.

“Come, Daniel. Escape with me.”

“I don’t need to. This aint my prison, and I haven’t done anything to run from the police for.”

My reasoning didn’t impress Henry. Even in the dark, he found my duffel and slapped it into my hands. “Pack.” He helped me, piling clothes from my cardboard chifforobe onto the bed. Neatly. It made me realize he had owl eyes, two built-in nightscopes. I began to pack. “Don’t forget your notebooks. They belong at the bottom, shielded and snug.” So I dug them out of the school desk beside my bed. Henry took them and put them at the bottom of my bag with one easy plunge of his arm. I piled my clothes in on top, and my ball gear in on top of my duds, and faced Henry with my duffel slung GI- or maybe Santa-style over my shoulder, a crutch in one arm pit.

“Out the window, Daniel. Into the rain and the bemusing tangles of the night.”

I couldn’t reply to such poppycock. I did a one-footed crutch-supported hop to the window. To my amazement, Euclid stood drenched on the fire-exit landing, waiting to take my bag and tote it down the slick wet stairs.

“Euclid!”

“Shoo,” he said. “Shoo-shoo. Keep yo mouf cloh n gid on ouw. Me, I gots to come on back fo dawk.”

We tip-toed-or, in my case, crutch-stumped-down the fire stairs in straggly single file, hurrying like the stoop-backed targets of a stoning. Down, we piled into a blue Studebaker Euclid said belonged to his mama, Detta Rae Satterfield. It had a “C” gas-rationing sticker on the windshield (like Colonel Elshtain’s Hudson Terraplane), but I couldn’t figure why, and didn’t have the sand to ask. Henry scrambled into the back seat with my duffel. I arranged myself up front, on the wide divan-like seat with Euclid. He’d propped himself on a cushion as near the steering wheel as he could get.

Believe me, a fourteen-year-old chauffeur did nothing to boost my confidence in Henry’s getaway plan.

Euclid backed us around McKissic House-not past the buggy house, but the other way-then drove straight through downtown Highbridge to the steel and concrete span that’d given the town its name. To my surprise, Euclid did all right, weaving only a bit. He let Henry tell him where to turn and how fast to go, and we never made more than thirty miles per hour on our entire seventy-some-odd-mile trip into eastern Alabama.

Because of the downpour and wartime speed limits, our destination-not home, but Henry’s hideaway and shrine-lay almost three hours away. It’d take Euclid that long again to return the Studebaker to his mama’s. If the highway patrol-an irritable crew, what with all the restrictions on driving-stopped him for a license check, he’d probably catch a hiding mean enough to turn his skinny brown butt eggplant-purple.

“There!” Henry barked after our spooky, kidney-jouncing ride. “Halt there, Euclid!”

Euclid halted. All I could see in the 3:30 A.M. drizzle was wet pasturage, some forlorn pines, and a rugged grid of reddish gulleys between the road and one weedy field.

“Nigh.” Euclid dropped us off at this unpromising-looking bump in the blacktop. “Yall behay, heah?”

Henry led me into the roadside brush: the blackberry vines, the pokeweed, the mimosa seedlings, the no-name stickery shrubs that snagged your cuffs and sent macelike burrs to hitchhike your socks. The rain’d slackened, thank God, but our shoes sank-often with sucking PLOOPs-both in the jumbled vegetable mulch and Alabama’s oozy pasta-sauce clay. I began to think I’d gone off my nut to ride to this muddy natural chessboard of weedy rubbish and cut-bank arroyos, especially with a set of crutches. I had a train ticket back to Oklahoma-so why’d I let Henry pied-piper me to the redneck boonies? “Where we goin, Henry? Henry! ”

He just forged ahead, a driven upright bundle of backwoods energy-like a bear, or a Sasquatch, or a mad semi-human spawn of the land. The rain, more drizzle now than gullywasher, held all nasty winged insects out of the air, but the fight to keep up without sinking kept me from relishing their absence.

“HENRY!”

He looked back. “A dry side-channel of Tholocco Creek-our destination. We’re nearly there.”

The “dry” side-channel, when we reached it, had water in it-not a full beck’s worth, but enough to put a cold squelch under your toes.

Anyway, squelching along in this tall gully, Henry led me to his hideaway: an earthen house tunneled into the bank of a drought-emptied creek. This shelter may’ve begun as a small cave, but, if so, Henry’d dug it out deeper and wider over the past two years, honeycombing the red earth with chambers. He’d also covered the creekbed doors with wild azalea, Allegheny hawthorne, and pine boughs. Nutlets from the hawthorne floated in the runoff sluicing down the cut. We waded into the earth house’s flooded entrance, then replaced the damp foliage that’d hidden it. A second chamber lodged higher and drier, and in that room, with coffee-can lanterns to see by, we spent most of the rest of the night.

Henry sat braced against one wall with his knees drawn up to his chin. I sat shivering on my duffel, my crutches stacked in front of me.

“Why have I brought you to this dank retreat?” Henry said. “I don’t doubt you must wonder.”