Fadeaway Ankers said, “What would do old Highbridge proud is not have a uppity woolhead telling grown white men what to do. Jesus.”
Wham. Everybody on the Bomber went tight-jawed. Darius’d spoken by way of the rearview, about as boy-humble as he had it in him to be. Now he cut his eyes to one side, and all the rest of us Hellbenders could see of him in the mirror was the top of his head.
“As good as you throw,” Charlie Snow told Fadeaway, “you still aint made it to grown yet. And Darius wasn’t telling nobody nothing, he was passing a message.”
You expected Charlie Snow to field his center-field spot like a two-legged whitetail and to clutch-hit the team out of jams, but you didn’t expect him to open his mouth a passel, and ordinarily he obliged your expectations.
“I jes chunked a three-hitter at Opelika,” Fadeaway said. “How much more grown can a fella git?”
“Arm’s mature,” Snow said. “Head’s a baby.”
Muscles got up. “And the rest of us’re tired of listening to this hoo-hah. Let’s party with the President. Just mind your p’s and q’s, dammit!”
Darius levered the door open, and we began filing off the bus.
Off the Bomber, we edged towards the tents. Nobody had the nerve or the bumpkin grace to angle towards FDR’s roadster sofa and Park Avenue table setting, though. At the same time, no one could resist glancing over that way and trying to imagine what the President of the United States had to discuss with the McKissics, the Elshtains, or Miss LaRaina and Phoebe. Once or twice, the Great Man smiled and nodded or wagged his cigarette holder in a folksy greeting.
As Fadeaway sauntered around the Bomber’s nose with Evans and Sosebee, Darius put a hand on his shoulder. When he saw who’d touched him, Fadeaway’s nose wrinkled, and he triggered himself for curses, maybe even fisticuffs.
“Tell me what you think woolhead means.” Darius’s voice wasn’t much below its normal volume, but the generator and the box fans kept the other picnickers from hearing.
“Lemme tell you what uppity means,” Fadeaway said. “You could learn two new words jes by looking in a mirror.”
“I know more words than you got memories,” Darius said. “What woolhead means, Mister Ankers, is you aint got the belly to speak out nigger, or the class to call my name.”
Quickly and quietly, Sosebee grabbed Fadeaway’s arms from behind. “Easy, kid. Remember who-all’s here.”
“Remember this instead,” Darius said. “If it got figgered on sense and soundness stead of what it is, you’d come up the biggest nigger in town. Watch I don’t whup yo red ass black.” He stood glaring at Fadeaway when most folks, delivered of such a squelch, would’ve swaggered away.
Henry leaned over his shoulder. “Enough, Mr Satterfield. This is no time for a physical collision.”
“Sho,” Darius said. “Clision time jes never quite comes round, do it?” He pocketed his hands, backed away from the players stalled in front of the Bomber, and hiked up the slope to his apartment.
“Hey!” Kizzy called from one of the tents. “You, Darius, don’t you want no victuals?”
He just kept walking.
“Uppity nigger,” Fadeaway said under his breath.
Henry and I and the other Hellbenders ate. The family men had their families there, and more than a few-Buck Hoey and his boys, Charlie Snow and his childless wife, Turkey Sloan and his freckle-faced teenage daughter-ventured out on the pond in johnboats to fish.
At Mister JayMac’s prompting, Henry removed his kayak from the sawhorses near the buggy house, fetched it down to the pond under one arm, and demonstrated for the President how a man his size-the swatter of a “monsterish” home run-could paddle to and fro among the anglers’ boats with hardly a telltale ripple and not even one fish-disturbing splash. By this time, Mister JayMac’d coaxed me into the heart of FDR’s picnic circle, with the Elshtains, the Pharram females, and a few fussy suit types from D.C. All eyes followed Henry’s silken progress over the pond’s cocoa scum.
“Astonishing so large a man can move with that agility,” FDR said. “How’d he come by the kayak?”
“He says he built it,” Mister JayMac said. “And I’ve no cause to doubt him. Look how he handles it.”
“Indeed, if I could handle Congress half so well, I’d sleep more and haggle less with the likes of Senator George. God knows, I envy Mr Clerval’s finesse with the big stick, whether a ball bat or a kayak paddle.”
Mr Roosevelt had plenty of finesse with words. I milled about close enough to his car-seat divan to catch a lot of what he said, but the Elshtains and Miss LaRaina monopolized the time he didn’t give to the McKissics.
I marveled at Miss Giselle. With a glint in her eye, she watched Henry kayak and chatted with the President. How could she lap Mr Roosevelt in such honey-tongued politeness when his wife’s Christian name gagged her like ammonia ice?
“It’s my view Mussolini’s doomed,” Colonel Elshtain broke into their stateside chitchat. “Even he must know it. The air strike on Rome last month had to’ve told him so.”
“Il Duce’s an evil man,” Miss Giselle said, “but must we destroy the Holy See to uproot him? Is it necessary, sir, to bomb to rubble both the Vatican and the monuments of Rome to unseat this petty despot?”
“Not at all,” FDR said. “Nor shall we do so. I’ve urged the Vatican to try to get him to declare Rome an open city-to remove all military bases and personnel in and about Rome to the countryside, and to desist from using the city’s railroad facilities as reprovisioning conduits for either Hitler’s boys or the Italian infantry. If Benito listens to reason, Rome survives unscathed. If not, well, to my mind there’s not one Roman statue or one relic in the Vatican worth the blood of a single American soldier.”
Phoebe pulled me away from the presidential divan. We stalked along the pond, under the long banana-green fingers of a weeping willow, and through a hand-grenade scatter of cones from a magnolia tree farther up the bank. A quartet of Hellbenders-Sosebee, Dunnagin, Hay, and Parris-crooned “The Music Goes Round and Round,” “If I Didn’t Care,” and “Making Whoopee,” among other corny numbers, a capella. The clang of horseshoes in a pair of facing pits near the buggy house echoed like anchors bumping a ship’s hull.
“Bravo!” the President cried after one of the quartet’s songs. “Splendid, gentlemen!”
“I guess he’s all right,” Phoebe said, nodding downslope at the President’s tent. “For a New York swank.”
He seemed all right to me. I didn’t know you could, or even should, try to find fault with the President. Which was why Sloan’s snotty poem aboard the Bomber had made such an impression on me. To me, FDR was like a king. For the biggest part of my life, no one else had held his office.
“I know where you went the other night when you didn’t show up for dinner,” Phoebe said. “Penticuff Strip.”