Michael Bishop: Brittle Innings

“Your name Boles?” the sergeant shouted. This scared me, but I nodded. “I’m First Sergeant Pumphrey. Private Overbeck told me about you! Described you to a T! You from Tenkiller, in Oklahoma?”

“Y-y-yessir!” I yelled back. Shaking again, not just from the rattling of the train.

“Sergeant!” he corrected me. “I’m not an officer! I’m not a gentleman! I’m damned sure no egg-sucking sir!”

“N-n-nosir!”

Pumphrey gestured at the train, the flashing rails, the marching ranks of cotton. “This is horseshit! Come on!” He yanked me into the sudden hush of the passenger car.

My ears gulped at the quiet. Pumphrey prodded me down the length of the coach, and then the length of another one, and so on until we reached a car with a lavatory. Pumphrey pushed me inside. Did he have queerish tendencies? Coach Brandon had warned us boys in fifth-period hygiene about that sort of crap, but I still didn’t get it. Half our male seniors had thought hygiene was a dirty word.

We had that lavatory almost to ourselves. The only other guy in there had his tailbone on the back edge of a toilet seat, his toes over the seat’s front edge and his arms around his knees to keep his shoes from slipping off and jolting him awake. His open mouth hissed softly. Pumphrey ignored him like he would a water stain and backed me up against a sink.

“I know your dad, Boles,” he said. “Until two weeks ago we served in the same goddamned support group at an Army airfield in the Aleuts. Ever hear of Otter Point?”

I shook my head.

“It’s on Umnak. Cold as a polar bear’s prick. Windier than Chicago. Foggier than a dry-ice factory.”

I couldn’t figure what Pumphrey wanted me to do. He seemed to blame me-or my daddy, if the part about knowing him wasn’t a lie or a smokescreen-for the Aleutian weather. His red lips flapped. Threads of spit webbed them.

“Cold, cold, cold,” he said. “Oil up there turns to peanut butter. You use blowtorches to thaw your bomber engines. If spray gets on an airplane’s windshield, it’s like trying to see through a sheet of pebbled glass. One drop of high-octane fuel on your skin-if you’re cluck enough to expose it-will lift a blister the size of a walnut. Follow?”

“Y-y-yessir.” I didn’t, but what the hell?

“I once saw your old man’s eyelids freeze shut. In our Quonset, I made him rack out on a cot with his face between the struts and the canvas webbing. Held a hot cup of coffee under his eyes. Kept saying, ‘Don’t touch yourself. Unless you want to go around with a finger glued to your eyeball forever.’ You hear me, kid?”

I nodded. Hard.

“At’s how well I knew your papa, Boles,” Sergeant Pumphrey said. “You favor him. Grow into those ears, you could almost pass for his natural get.”

My daddy, as I recalled him, had been a solid, good-looking man. Leaving aside my athletic ability, no one’d ever accused me of favoring him. Not in any physical way. I usually got told I didn’t resemble my father. And who feels lower than the homely kid of good-looking parents?

Pumphrey let go of my arm and pushed away from me. “Just how much’re you like your old man, anyway?”

That seemed a fair moment to beat it. Pumphrey was wound up, pacing and question-posing. I made a break.

Bam! Pumphrey slid between me and the door and nearlybout paddled me slaphappy with his lips.

“Hold it! Dickie Boles’s the worst excuse for a soldier-hell, for a human being-I’ve ever served with. A goldbrick and a back-stabber. Pray God, you take after your mama.”

“He ever m-m-mention m-me?” I said.

“I dunno. I guess. Said something once like he may’ve sired a son. May’ve. Like if he had, it would’ve made him a fraternity brother of God’s. Otherwise, kid, he was too busy rejigging duty rosters and miscounting ammo shipments to expend the effort.”

“He st-still up there?”

“Oh yeah. Oh yeah.” Pumphrey sort of giggled. “There’s ossifers on Umnak who think he should spend the rest of his natural life at Otter Point. For the sake of everybody down here in the free forty-eight.” Pumphrey moved aside again, and I stepped all over myself trying to get out of there.

“Hold it!” He grabbed me, breathing licorice or schnapps, something sweet and foul, into my face. “Not so fast, kiddo!” I felt strangled. What’d the crazy bruiser plan to do? “How much money you got on you, Boles?”

“M-m-money?”

“Yeah, m-m-money. Cash money. Your goddamned dad was all the time borrowing. Wouldn’t pay it back, neither. How much you got?”

I’d boarded the train with fifty bucks cash money, half of my first paycheck. I still had whatever I hadn’t spent.

Pumphrey spun me, shoved me against the wall, fumbled my billfold out of my hip pocket. Holding me in place, he counted out my money, crammed the bills into his own breast pocket, and flipped the billfold into a lavatory sink.

“You’re short. About fifty shy of what your old man owes me, kiddo.”

“I’m n-not my father’s k-k-keeper.”

“Maybe not. But I’m still out half a sawbuck. What’re you gonna do about it?”

“You’re st-st-stealing. You’re a d-d-damned th-thief.”

“Settling a debt don’t work out as theft, prick!” Pumphrey snatched me away from the wall, then slammed me back into it. My lip split. I cried out. “Hush, boy. Accounts still don’t tote. We gotta make em tote.”

Pumphrey pushed me into the stall next to the sleeping GI’s, wedged a hankie into my mouth, and spun me around again. When he yanked my pants down, and my shorts along with them, I finally had a two-bit notion of what he had in mind and lashed back at him with an elbow. He showed me the blade of a pocketknife, told me he’d take my liver by way of my rectum if I gave him any more grief, and bent me over the open commode. What he did then took about two minutes and hurt like fire.

“You still owe me,” Pumphrey said, yanking my pants back up. “Nine more wouldn’t break your daddy and me even.”

I’d started to cry.

“Stop it, Boles. Mention this to a soul, and your ass is mine forever.”

He left me there. I fetched my billfold, washed my face and hands, and stood at the mirror not recognizing myself. The PFC on the toilet-I could see his awkwardly sprawled body in the mirror-had slept through the whole assault, snoring like an asthmatic sea lion.

Some folks find sleeping on a train soothing, like lying under a tin roof with rain chattering down. Not me. The clickety-click of grooved iron wheels sliding on long metal tongues reminds me of an alarm clock ticking. I keep waiting for the bell to go off. I kept waiting for my train to derail.

I was near dead from humiliation, but if an alarm started to clatter, I’d spring up like a jack-in-the-box. (I’d claimed my berth after some soldiers got off at Camp Robinson and some others switched trains in Little Rock.) I drowsed some, but only after crying myself to sleep. Drowsing, I dreamt of my daddy, Richard Oconostota Boles.

My daddy’s folks came to Oklahoma -U. S. Injun Territory-with a remnant of the cholera-stricken Cherokees from what’s now Pickens County, Georgia. See, I had great-great-great-grandfolks, full-blooded native Americans on Daddy’s side, on the Trail of Tears. They wound up in a reservation settlement on the site of the town known today as Checotah.

Mama Laurel was a Norwegian Helvig, a paleface farmer’s daughter through and through, but she and Daddy met at a Lutheran church picnic on Tenkiller Lake while he was doing carpentry work for a Wells Fargo agent out of Muskogee. Daddy was nineteen when I was born, seven years younger than Mama. They had a hard go of it. Money stayed tight, and my father had a hurtful weakness for honky-tonking and catting around. Mama excused him because he’d been so young when they married-seventeen, just my age when I left Oklahoma on that train-and because she adored him, never mind he had the brain of a sly ten-year-old and the loving heart of an armadillo.