I let Dunnagin lead me back to the house and up the stairs to Jumbo’s room. Dunnagin knocked.
“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,” Dunnagin said. He did a swami’s farewell, touching his forehead and chin and rolling his hand over. Then he beat it back down the stairs.
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.
Dunnagin’s efforts to calm me didn’t calm me now I was back in Jumbo’s room. I heeled off my shoes thinking he was about to rip down the mat, grab me by the earlobes, and dump me out the window. Jumbo never did that, but sometimes his head would seem to turn my way and stare at me through the weave, his eyes-I imagined-leaking a thin yellow lava.
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…
9
The next morning, I woke before Jumbo. My mouth felt like it’d been emery-boarded and stuffed with cotton balls. (Dunnagin’s Old Golds?) The mosquito bites on my ankles and finger joints looked like razor nicks, I’d scratched them so hard. I needed a bath.
I rummaged up a towel and skulked past the mat dividing the room. In the early grayness, Jumbo lay atop his bed-clothes, in extra-large BVDs, a human mountain range-knees, hips, rib cage, shoulders, head. He lay twisted in a way you’d’ve thought impossible for the human form to get into without permanent damage, but his breathing-gentle, gasping snores-said just the opposite. The ugly galoot’d really gone under.
In sleep, though, Jumbo’s ugliness grew uglier. His body parts didn’t seem to fit. His stringy-haired block of a noggin didn’t belong with the bullish neck and the wide sloping shoulders under it. His proportions were more or less okay, I guess, but the colors and textures of his skin didn’t match up the way you’d’ve expected. It was like someone’d kneaded biscuit dough, cake dough, and a mass of Piedmont clay together without blending them. Even as he snored, Jumbo reminded me of a body, wounded or dead.
In the bathroom, I got presentable. I didn’t look in on Jumbo again.
I snuck downstairs to the parlor. Pettus, Jorgensen, and Roper had disappeared.
No one’d removed the easel and its charts. On the easel I saw a map of Penticuff Strip, with all the honky tonks, tattoo dens, and “horizontal refreshment stations” Mister JayMac had declared off-limits to us, saying hidebound morality didn’t lead him to discourage us from visiting these dives, only his certainty no Hellbender with any sand could venture over there without getting in a brawl.
“Those Camp Penticuff boys see the Strip as their private party turf,” Mister JayMac’d lectured. “Way they see it, any able-bodied male who shows up there in civvies is a pussy-stealing shirker who needs his balls kicked. If you go, don’t expect me to foot your hospital bills or your hoosegow bail. I’ll cut you loose first. I’ll tell your draft boards you’re ready for basic training and a quick-march slog into combat. Yall got that?”
“Yessir!” everybody said.
This morning, though, I thought it awfully dumb or awfully thoughtful of him to leave in plain view a map of all the barrel houses and sin cribs we’d do so well to avoid. I stood there in the bad light trying to memorize that map and its prime attractions: The Hot Spot, Corporal John’s, The Wing and Thigh, Effie McGee’s. I’d worked from the Strip entrance at Market Street to Pawnshop Row, about three quarters along it, when a voice from the dining room whirled me like a caught-out burglar.
“Up so early,” Kizzy said, “you can hep me git my breakfuss going, Mister Danl.” She waved me toward her with a hand made ghostly by biscuit flour, then banged back through the kitchen door like I’d follow her in on command. Overnight, I’d gone from Mr Bowes to Mister Danl-a step down, I thought. And why’d she singled me out for KP this morning? Hadn’t I done my duty last night?
My gut told me to do what Kizzy asked-I always did what grownups said. But if I’d stayed in my room like all the other slugabeds, I wouldn’t’ve had to make a decision. Kizzy was stiffing me for my Ben Franklin up-and-at-em ethic. Not fair. So I turned again to Darius’s map of Penticuff Strip.
The kitchen door swung open. I didn’t even look up. With a finger, I traced the distance from GI George’s Camera Shop to a dancehall called, I swear to God, the Jitterbuggery. “Mr Boles,” a drawly female voice said, “Kizzy just asked for your help. Come at once. Please.” The “please” was a sop to the fact the speaker and I were both white. Confusion held me a second, then I double-timed it. Just inside the kitchen’s doors-boy, it smelled good in there!-the white woman who’d spoken to me was flensing strips from a greasy slab of bacon.
Seeing bacon startled me. Meat rationing’d begun at the end of March, and Mama and I had tried to support the war effort by eating cold cereals. Goochie had called this “gut patriotism.” He hated cereals for breakfast, meatless chili for lunch, scrambled eggs for dinner twice a week. At McKissic House, though, no one had to sacrifice much.
“Grease these baking sheets,” the white woman said. “Then halve and squeeze those oranges, please. The juicer’s over there. At least a pitcher’s worth for starters. See if you can’t strain out those noxious little seeds. A seed in a glass of orange juice is an irritant and a reproof.”
This woman, at fifty-something, looked several years older than my mama. She wore a floral-print dress, all blue and violet, with a clean white apron over it-like a dairy maid or a Swiss nun. Her hair shone whiter and softer than the slab of pork under her hands, but a beautician had cut it like a girl’s, swept it up high and drawn it back in wings over her ears, with a cameo clasp at the base of her neck. She had pink lips, dark eyebrows, and eyes like blue aggies. To me, she was… the sunrise in an apron.
Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t develop an instant crush. I just realized a female as striking as this intruder in Kizzy’s kitchen was a bird of paradise. She belonged in a storm of biscuit flour about like Vivien Leigh belonged on her knees with a scrub brush in a public John. Just then I didn’t know much else about her. Maybe she secretly poisoned hummingbird feeders. One thing for sure-she could boss you like a topkick out to Camp Penticuff.