Jumbo had his back to this wind, his hair lifted and flew. He’d spread his arms, like an angel on the brink of soaring, or like somebody crucified.
Somewhere, a groundskeeper yanked a switch. All the lamps above Jumbo, eye after stinging eye, leapt on. Facets. Dozens of facets. They mirror-blazed like the compound eyes of a giant dragonfly. Brilliant. The blaze left me with shivering mother-of-pearl oyster shells at the back of my walloped eyeholes.
It seeped into me again-sight-in a slow-motion flash. But, lordy, Jumbo: His eyes turned silver. Then copper. Then gold. Then glassy amber, like a startled cat’s. His body jerked, rejerked, and jitterbugged without a single motion of either foot-like he’d convulsed from the knees up. His arms stiffened and flopped, and did it again, the way a man in the chair at Reidsville would twitch when our paid executioner got the go-ahead and slapped him a scorching jolt.
Thunders cracked over the stadium. People gasped a long “Ooooooh,” crooning their amaze over a fireworks show. Then, whatever’d happened to Jumbo-his rooftop recharging-stopped happening. It cycled itself through. It ended and let him go, and Jumbo lurched a stagger step towards me. And another. I wanted to scuttle crabwise back over the roof and down. But I leaned into the wind, grabbed the front of Jumbo’s shirt, and yanked him step by step to the ladder.
I waved Jumbo onto it. Its tubes shifted as soon as he’d climbed on. Him first, me second. Me going first would’ve been too much like Jack rushing in terror down the beanstalk ahead of the giant. What if Jumbo slipped? Falling, he’d strip me off too and ride me to a screaming marriage with the concrete. So Jumbo went first, and I pecked along after him, spiking his head softly every time he froze up.
Anyway, we made it down and clattered into our dugout only moments before Little Cuke Gordon cried, “Play ball, dammit!”
Mister JayMac had me leading off again, so I hurried to set myself in the batter’s box, still juiced from my escapade and stunned weak-kneed by the nearness of disqualification. Then Sundog Billy did ego surgery on me with his major league curve, striking me out on five pitches.
The storm-with all its rumblesome witchery-divided and drifted in lightning-figured banks around the Prefecture. Like the Red Sea parting. A miracle of sorts.
With that split storm chewing at the town’s edges, Jumbo played like a man on fire, his best game so far on this road trip: a pair of solo shots and a two-bagger off the right-field wall. But, Jumbo’s blasts aside, we blew that game and wound up two full games behind the Gendarmes, with no report yet on how Opelika’d fared.
In the clubhouse, Mister JayMac said we had to win both Saturday’s and Sunday’s games. If we did, we’d leave town tied with the Gendarmes for first. If we split them, we’d gain no ground. And if we lost em both…
Me, I really had the blues. Despite everybody-but-Jumbo’s dead bats, we’d gone into the last half-inning locked at two all. Then, with two outs and a chance at an extra at bat, I’d pumped a throw over Jumbo, sending three guys in the stands bailing for cover. My error let Fat Boy Fortenberry, a pinch hitter, score the winning run from second. Fortenberry! With his love handles, basset-hound gait, and asthma wheeze.
Hoey came over to console me: “Couldn’t cut the mustard, could you, Dumbo? Shows what you’re really made of-Twinkie filling.”
I shucked my gear and ducked into the shower room. Jumbo scrammed, and no one under the spigots said “Boo!” to me. As I dressed, the only guys to say, “Don’t worry bout it, you’ll pop em tomorrow,” were Knowles and Dunnagin.
Dunnagin gripped my shoulder as I buttoned my shirt. “If we’d put a few runs up, one flubbed throw wouldn’t’ve meant nada. This bunch still owes you. Boot away five or six more, and Hoey might have a case.”
I footed it alone from the stadium to the Lafayette. The storms that’d missed the city had regrouped. You heard them bellyaching above the copses of magnolias and yaupon holly southwest of the ballpark. Sheet and candle-wick lightning flickered on the diamond-cut tops of those trees. Snaky cloud tentacles reached into the sky over LaGrange and fanned long fringes of blackness into the gaps behind them.
Even before I’d turned onto the square facing our hotel, it’d begun to rain. It bucketed down.
Upstairs in room 322, Jumbo sprawled on the floor, doing Army-style crossover toe touches. The room had a thin carpet, and it and every other piece of fiber near him, including the mat he’d strung, reeked with his body odor. Why the exercise? He’d just played every inning of a killer game.
Jumbo nodded at me, but kept working. “I’m discharging an excess of energy. Otherwise, I won’t be able to sleep.” Then he stopped. “You’re drenched, Daniel.”
I sneezed. Outside, heaven’s waterworks emptied into the gutters. I shed my clothes, dried myself, and wrapped a bed sheet around me. I took down the grass mat dividing our room, rolled it up, slid it under Jumbo’s bed, and flopped down on my own. I faced away, clenching like a rolypoly. For the first time since Tenkiller, I shivered with cold, not fear.
Jumbo didn’t say anything. After a while, he got up and shuffled down the hall to the men’s bath. When he returned, he shut the light and lay down on the other bed-without a word, but also without trying to hang his curtain again.
23
The rain hung on all that night and all the next day, but bad weather didn’t much bug Jumbo. He had his books and took a reminiscing kind of pleasure in the storm. Me, I wanted to ask the Lafayette ’s other guests to join me in breaking up our room furniture. The nearer game time drew on the harder the drilling rain fell. Jumbo and I peered into Lafayette Square from our third-story lookout. The elms, the azaleas, and the statue of the square’s namesake seemed on the verge of melting into the Piedmont aquifer.
At four o’clock, a desk clerk-not the one who’d signed us in-brought word of the game’s cancellation. Mister JayMac had signed the message. He’d added we should eat well, hoard our strength, and get ready for two games on Sunday.
Never mind Mister JayMac’s instructions. Jumbo didn’t eat or sleep. He looked out the window, paced, or read. Between four-thirty and five, I took a nap, a nap clabbered with war dreams (insects stinging; bullets snapping past), dreams born of the rain’s fizz and snap. When I woke, Jumbo said, “Hello,” and held up a book-not The Human Comedy, or It Is Later Than You Think, but the Harry Emerson Fosdick he’d finished reading in Opelika.
“Listen,” he said: “ ‘A constructive faith is the supreme organizer of life, and, lacking it, like Humpty-Dumpty we fall and break to pieces, and the wonder is-’ ”
I sat up the better to hear him read.