One minute she admitted writing “pretty passionate” letters to servicemen and the next she suggested it embarrassed her to see a ballplayer setting his jock straight.
“We do have one thing in common,” Phoebe said.
Okay, I thought. Don’t keep me in suspense.
“Good reasons for not being in the military-I’m a woman, and yo’re, well, yo’re a dummy.”
Yeah. I put my hands behind my ears and made em flap like a flying elephant’s.
“Anyway, if you didn’t have yore… problem, you’d join the Army. Wouldn’t you?”
Hmmm. In another five and a half months, I’d be eligible for the draft. Maybe my dummyhood was a ploy I’d come up with, subconsciously, to sidestep it.
Dunnagin walked up behind us from the clubhouse. “You’re right, Phoeb. I know I’d rather be out killing Nips than chasing a CVL pennant. It burdens my mind, getting left out of all the fun.”
“Yo’re old, Dunnagin,” Phoebe said. “But not so all-fired old you couldn’t enlist.” She looked more or less pleased to see him.
“If only you knew,” Dunnagin said. “Methuselah’s got nothing on me. If I don’t make it back to the bigs this year, my career’s over. I’ll be yesterday’s papers.”
“You’d be doing more for the Uncle Sam in the Army. And more for yoresef.”
“I’m boosting civilian morale,” Dunnagin said. “I’m boosting player morale. They see me on the field, they think anybody can do it. They go home fortified and hopeful.”
“Shame on you,” Phoebe said.
Dunnagin didn’t look too abashed. “Danny, the Bomber’s about to leave. Hustle it up.”
I nodded, and Dunnagin wandered away.
Phoebe came down off the stair step. In the tank, Homer wriggled, stirring the murk-the first time I’d seen him look like anything other than a spongy piece of bark. Hooray. No ball team wants a dead or paralyzed critter for its mascot.
“Go git yore bus,” Phoebe said. “Yo’re keeping a slew of folks stewing in a real pressure cooker.”
I did a two-fingered salute.
“You do play a whangdoodle shortstop,” she said. “And you can run like a autumn crop fire.”
Unexpected praise. But I still wanted to add, Did you know I can outrun the word God? A local authority told me so today.
My speech problem, thank the Lord, kept my mouth shut.
14
On my second evening in McKissic House, I tried to delay entering the hole I shared with Jumbo. Its heat and the idea of huddling on the other side of his throat-tickling grass mat while he slept or read-well, why bother going up? I couldn’t talk to him, of course, and the curtain he’d hung between us said he didn’t much care. Thank God. Maybe he’d taken me on as a roommate because I couldn’t talk.
Back from practice, I washed dishes, sat next to some guys playing hearts, and listened to dance-band music and news reports on the old cathedral Philco. John L. Lewis, said H. V. Kaltenborn, had taken his soft-coal miners out on a strike that had patriots gnashing their teeth. Up in Alaska, the Army’d finished mopping up Jap resistance on Attu, and the Eleventh Air Force kept on bombing the hell out of Kiska. Not caring for cards, I worked on a jigsaw puzzle-the Eiffel Tower-while listening to the radio. Nobody bothered me.
Finally, I had to go up. McKissic House had an eleven o’clock curfew. Rest and regular hours guarded Mister JayMac’s investment in us. He’d fine you for missing curfew.
Anyway, Jumbo lay stretched out on his bed reading. He’d tied back the grass mat divider so a breeze from the window could reach him, if a breeze ever blew up. His fan bumped and shimmied like a stripper in a whalebone corset. From the door I could see into the whole room. What I saw flabbergasted me.
Jumbo had put a big bronze vase of cut flowers-hydrangeas, snowballs, Queen Anne’s lace-on the floor next to my cot. The flowers helped. Except for the labels on the cans of his Joan of Arc red kidney beans, the room didn’t boast much color. The flowers livened the place up. I saw Jumbo look up at me-even in that heat, his eyes made me shiver-and started to walk over to my cot. Jumbo lifted his hand.
“You played well this morning.”
I ducked my head. He’d played well too. He’d knocked a heavy balata ball out of McKissic Field and fielded like a man with some kind of magnet for horsehides sewn into his glove. But his looks made me think of the other players’ guesses about him. Of injury, pain, and death. Up close, I had an aversion to his looks. Well, I was no prize myself.
My reaction to Jumbo reminded me of my reaction as a twelve-year-old to my best friend in Tenkiller after he’d had a sledding accident. My friend’s name was Kenneth Ward-Kenny for short. One snowy winter, Kenny’d cracked up on a Northern Flyer going over a ledge into a sink hole lined with briars. He dropped ten or twelve feet. The briars ripped and scraped him like so many darning needles wrapped in wet cotton. The plunge knocked Kenny out. He concussed. It took three of us to rescue him, and we may’ve hurt him even more pulling him up through all those white brambles to the edge of the drop-off. Kenny’s dad got there somehow and hurried him to the emergency room at the Cherokee County hospital. I didn’t visit Kenny in the hospital, but I saw him several days later at the Wards’ little house in Tenkiller.
Kenny didn’t look like Kenny. He looked like… I don’t know, the victim of a thousand wasp stings. Or a pit-bull attack. He had two puffy black eyes (actually, more red and purple than black), an out-of-kilter nose, and a set of lips more like an albino channel cat’s. Kenny’s looks scared and confused me. Away from his house, I started to think I hadn’t seen Kenny at all. Instead, I’d called on something strange, ugly, and maybe a quarter dead planted in the Wards’ house by UFO people. I didn’t go again. Even when Kenny got over his injuries and began looking like the buck-toothed kid I’d once known, a weirdness between us-disgust on his part, shame on mine-kept us from getting friendly again.
Jumbo made me feel the way Kenny, with his nose whacked askew and his eyes in bruised pouches, had made me feel.
“Last night,” Jumbo said, “I was, ah, less than friendly.”
Uh-uh. I pointed at myself, meaning he’d behaved more or less okay but I’d acted like a total jerk.
A lie.
Because he’d acted at least as jerky as I had, not speaking more than three sentences all evening and dividing his digs the way small-town Suthren doctors once split their waiting rooms into a half for coloreds and a half for whites.
“I hung that”-Jumbo nodded at the mat rucked up against one wall-”assuming you’d prefer a little privacy to no barrier at all.” Jumbo grimaced. He made a face. And he could make a face, a spasm of cheek and forehead muscles.
“Forgive. I seldom talk. U. S. slang confounds me. All my speech originates in the written word.” He gestured at his book shelves. “My tastes run to philosophy, science, religion, medicine, Victorian novels, and current events. And my tastes inevitably influence my diction.”
Wow. An attack-for Jumbo, anyway-of verbal diarrhea. It embarrassed him. He rubbed his hands like a man trying to coax blood into frost-bitten fingertips.
“To you, the mat must have appeared a method of exclusion, not a courtesy.”
I stayed mute, of course.
“If you want privacy, pull the mat out from the wall. If not, leave it.” He looked me in the eye. “At certain points, whatever your state of mind, I’ll draw the mat. Do not view my doing so as a sign of pique or ill favor. I sometimes require solitude.”
I nodded. Okay. Understood.
“And you have my standing consent to draw the mat whenever you wish. Would you care to do so now?”
Not really. Outside of Dunnagin’s counsel in the gazebo, no other talk I’d had in Georgia had lasted so long or promised so much. On the other hand, I couldn’t add much to it. So I started toward my cot again, and Jumbo halted me again.