I’d been copying Jumbo’s words-if they were his words-for nearly three hours. Boy, could he spin it out! His story had a raw power. So did his old-timey sentences. I stopped at “unforeseeable weathers of tomorrow” because those words ended the first section of his journal. Thumbing ahead, the less I thought it all an opera-sized fiction and the more I figured it a record of a man’s-an artificial person’s-long and peculiar life.
In fact, the next section of the journal had a title, “From Remorse to Self-Respect: My Second Life.”
By now I’d smoked seven cigarettes and sweated through my T-shirt. Jumbo didn’t just look like a monster, the victim of a crazed pituitary-he was a monster, the handmade stepson of a scientist whose name had become a synonym for… well, for Hollywood jeepery-creepery. Mister JayMac had given me to room with an inhuman critter who’d killed, cursed life, and stalked his shook-up maker to a packet ship in the Barents Sea. I was living with the thing!
Suddenly, in that hot attic: an icicle to the heart.
I heard Jumbo on the stairs. Despite his size, he didn’t have a heavy footfall, but the steps from the second floor to the third, if hit just right (or just wrong), creaked like a mast rigging, and Jumbo sometimes hit them so as to warn me he was on his way. Pretty thoughty. He didn’t want to catch me whacking off to a Varga girl, I guess. Or maybe he just hoped I’d reverse the favor. Anyway, I should’ve hurried to slide his stolen letters back into his journal, and his journal back into the bag, and the bag back into his kayak, and the kayak back under his bed, so he wouldn’t catch me snooping.
But I didn’t. A funny feeling grabbed me, and I convinced myself my snooping didn’t weigh a sou against the cruddy deception he’d worked on my teammates and me. Especially me. He’d tried to pass as a human being-On Being a Real Person, what a joke!-when he actually had blood lines similar to a can of Spam’s.
I put his letters in the journal, his log in the leather bag, and his bag in the kayak, but I left the kayak out from under the bed, a slap at his dishonesty.
Jumbo came in. “Hello, Daniel. It’s infernally hot up here. Why aren’t you-?” He saw the kayak. He saw that I hadn’t even bothered to replug its manhole with his grass mat, and he shot me a look. I shot it right back, cheeky as rip, condemning him for a liar.
Jumbo sighed and removed his ivory-tied leather bag from the kayak. He eased his marbled log book out of the bag. The letters fell out. The looseness of the ribbon holding them together-it unraveled as they fell-told Jumbo what he wanted to know: I’d eyeballed the contents. He made no move to pick up the letters.
Instead, he opened the log. He held it in one hand, like a hymnal, and licked his index finger so he could page through it. He turned three or four pages. He squinted at the book’s gutter, sniffed it, and made a face-which was sort of like Quasimodo pulling on a Halloween mask. Then puffed into the log and blew a scatter of cigarette ashes at me.
He knew. I knew. We both knew.
“Ah,” Jumbo said. He sat down on the edge of his bed and stared past me out the window.
Maybe I should’ve run for cover. An inhuman fiend had caught me red-handed-well, pink-handed-rummaging through his stuff. It stood to reason he’d want to wreak bone-crushing havoc on my person.
I couldn’t get scared. I’d lived with Jumbo a month. I’d trusted him enough as a teammate to make dozens of long throws across the infield to him. I’d eaten with him and listened to his manateelike gasps as he slept. He was my roomy. Besides, the idea of an inhuman fiend compiling private papers sort of contradicted itself. Most inhuman fiends don’t write memoirs. If they do-Mein Kampf, say, or The Enemy Within-they don’t often refer to themselves as fiends, demons, abominations, ogres, or wretches.
“You made excellent use of your afternoon, I see.” Jumbo put his log on his knees and flipped on through it. “You don’t disappoint me. I had hoped your curiosity would prompt you to this. Like nearly everyone else, Daniel, I yearn for a kindred spirit. A friend.”
Pardon me? Had Jumbo just implied that because I’d snooped on him, he’d now regard me as a friend?
“I wanted you to find the kayak,” he said. “And hoped that it would lead you to examine it further, even to the point of unloading it. I feared only that a superstitious scruple would prevent you from ransacking my belongings for their secrets.”
A scruple like honesty?
“Your activity this afternoon greatly relieves me. Now I don’t have to hide my origins or lie about myself. Thank you, Daniel, for having more curiosity than character.”
You’re welcome, I thought.
Was Jumbo pummeling me with sarcasms? He didn’t seem to be. He tapped the log in his lap. “How far did you read?”
I shrugged.
Jumbo set the log aside and stood. “The Karloff festival in LaGrange was a lucky event. Despite the pain those films often give me, I took you because I’d decided-almost decided-to reveal my true identity to you. The Frankenstein trilogy highlights the similarities and the differences, of bearing and behavior, between Karloff’s impersonation of a monster and my daily burlesque of a human being. On line there, I almost lost my nerve and tried to dissuade you from going in, but, happily, you insisted. My nerve failed me again inside the theater, but you prevailed there too. Tell me, then-did those films in any way prompt today’s meddling?”
I shrugged again.
But Jumbo had neared the truth. Since attending the Roxy, I’d allowed all my shapeless doubts about him to gel into one fat suspicion.
He paced. “Those movies corrupt events more accurately portrayed in the epistolary writings of Robert Walton.” He picked up the letters from the floor and went on pacing. “The world knows these events, however, as the first novel of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, wife of the English poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley. Daniel, have you ever read the text published as her novel Frankenstein?” I felt like I was listening to several different radios at the same time: too much information raining down. “Have you?” For the first time since returning to our room, Jumbo scared me.
I nodded because I had.
“Excellent. You apprehend that I am the ogre whose origins receive such injudicious, even libelous, treatment in the first Karloff film.” He shook the letters. “The fiend whose true history discloses itself here. Did you peruse these pages or only my journal?”
I nodded at the journal on his bed. I couldn’t explain that I’d skimmed Walton’s first four letters before… well, copying out the opening entry in his log.
“Before you question me, read these letters,” Jumbo said. “All of them.” He placed them on my desk, on the notebook I’d been using when I first heard his footsteps.
I picked up the letters.