“I let you, I let you when I can. But, Darius, I’ll see you in battle dress before I’ll let you sign with an uppish bunch of Ethiops who’re just as lief to file for bankruptcy as to play ten games back to back. How does Private Satterfield grab you?”
“Fine.”
“Fine? What do you mean, fine?”
“If I cain’t play baseball, how bout gitting me sent to the Tuskegee Army Airfield? Or to Shorter Field? Or mebbe to Dale Mabry Field down to Tallahassee?”
Mister JayMac laughed. “Got your sights set high, don’t you? Well, hear the straight skinny, Darius. The only place monkeys get to fly in combat is in The Wizard of Oz.”
Darius chug-a-lugged his whiskey and gave his mug to Mister JayMac, who set it and his own mug on the Bomber’s dash. He looked ready to climb down and stalk to the house. Darius got up and swung himself into the driver’s seat. He gripped the wheel, then lifted his fingers from the wet-paint tackiness of the liquor coating it.
“What you forgit, Mister JayMac, is monkeys come in more colors than one. Some got two-toned souls.”
Mister JayMac slammed his hand down on the dashboard. The mugs there jumped, but didn’t fall or break.
“Darius, don’t leave.”
Darius took his handkerchief and wiped the steering wheel, then his hands. “A different color monkey probably wouldn’t want to.”
“Don’t,” Mister JayMac said. Did he mean don’t leave or don’t talk that way or both? Darius stayed mum. Mister JayMac banged the door open, leapt out, and strode through the sawdust and pulverized shell litter on the floor.
I ducked to keep him from seeing me as he came past the bus’s rear. Behind me, he creaked the tin-plated door open and eased through this crack into the yard. The door rattled shut again, but the light that’d fanned in, a burst of white-orange sunlight and a storm of dancing motes, told me I hadn’t slept the whole day away.
Darius kept sitting behind the wheel. I couldn’t get off without him seeing me, and the talk I’d overheard didn’t incline me to show myself. Mister JayMac’d call me a filthy sneak, and Darius’d take me for a whitebread spy. So I lay low and waited for Darius to move.
Problem was, my pocketknife slipped from my pants and hit the floor with an echoey clunk and a metallic bang. It hit on its end, then toppled over on its side. Clunk-bang!
“Who’s back there?” Darius said.
I bit my bottom lip.
“Mice? Nazis? Cmon out, whoever you are.”
I sat up. Darius stared at me in the slanted rectangle of the rearview.
“Jumping Jesus,” he said. “What’re you doing back there, Danny boy?”
My shrug didn’t explain much, I guess.
“Git,” Darius said. “Leave me be.”
I picked up my pocketknife and other gear, and pussy-footed up the aisle, half expecting Darius to swat all my stuff out of my hands, push me down, and tell me how only creeps did what I’d just done. He kept sitting, though. He didn’t look at me, not even a glance in the rearview.
I got off the bus. Its baggage holders stood empty. Jumbo must’ve carried my bag upstairs. He must’ve enlisted everyone else’s help-everyone’s but Mister JayMac’s and Darius’s-to play a joke on me. Ha ha. As I left the garage, Darius stayed slouched behind the steering wheeclass="underline" hollow-eyed, hair-trigger, mute.
27
That evening, after dinner, a rap on our door. The room seemed smaller than usual because, during our road trip, a carpenter had put together a bed for me, with a headboard and sliding storage drawers under the mattress-my belated due as a Hellbender.
Anyway, the rapping startled us because we hadn’t heard anything, no tattle-tale creak of steps or floorboards. We should’ve heard something: I sat scribbling a letter to Mama Laurel, while Jumbo, despite hating most war-related stuff, read Burma Surgeon-because, as he put it, “Colonel Seagrave devotes himself to healing, not destruction.” Finally, though, we did hear.
Jumbo opened the door without getting up or losing his place. Kizzy Lorrows, a brown gnome of a long-haired Seminole woman. Her arms had flour on them, a rime like the gritty blow on a plum. So did half her forehead. She wiped her hands on her apron and pointed into the room at me.
“Danl, you got a telephone caw. Long distance. Better git yosef downstairs licky-spiddle.”
“That would be senseless,” Jumbo said. “Senseless.”
“His mama wants to talk to him. She don’t know his tongue stove up. He am told her.”
I stood up. I shook my head. Mama didn’t like the phone, but I should’ve guessed she’d eventually ring up to hear me stammer.
Well, eventually’d come, and Kizzy dismissed my head shakes with a floppy-wristed wave. “Ever minute you tarry you toss good money at them telephone folks. Cmon, honey boy.”
“I’ll speak for him,” Jumbo said. He got up and nodded at me. Kizzy barely reached his waist.
I grabbed notebook and pencil and hurried after them, my heart cinched and a-gallop. Kizzy let us run ahead of her down the two staircases to the foyer where a box-and-cradle phone hung on the wall. Jumbo had to bend over to use it. (Kizzy’d used a stool.)
“Mrs Boles, I’m your son’s roommate, Henry Clerval,” Jumbo told my mother. “Daniel is fine.”
Tell her I have larinjitus, I scribbled in my notebook.
“Except, I’m sorry to inform you, he’s contracted a severe case of laryngitis,” Jumbo said. “Otherwise, his strength and vigor put the rest of us to shame.”
Kizzy gave us both a scornful squint and strutted back to the kitchen, swinging her arms like a Munchkin. The parlor and game room were empty. Most of the other boarders had gone over to McKissic Field for a community softball tournament.
I wrote, Say its temporary say its from cheering to hard.
“Yessum. We won the last game of an otherwise frustrating road trip. Daniel played well.” He covered the mouthpiece. “Wherefore… why this subterfuge? Why not the truth?”
Upset her, I wrote. She’d want to come down here.
“When?” Jumbo said. “Why, quite recently.” He covered the mouthpiece again. “Under the aspect of eternity,” he told me, then spoke into the mouthpiece again: “Yessum, he plays hard, eats well, and sleeps a sufficiency.”
Mama said something.
“Yessum, plenty of sleep. Plenty.”
I held up a new message: SayIll call later say Im writing a letter. That last told the holy truth. No one could call me a neglectful son.
Jumbo gagged the mouthpiece with his hand. “She wishes to talk to you.” I shook my head. Jumbo slapped me with a look. “Yessum, he still has the use of his ears. No, no infection. No ear ache. A moment.” He passed me the tubelike earpiece. Static hissed at me, rough electrical surf.