Brittle Innings

28

The next day, after a light workout at the ballpark, Jumbo borrowed Mister JayMac’s Caddy-he did get perks no one else did-and drove off into Alabama again. Why? He had no living kin there, although he’d lied about that before (if he wasn’t lying now), and even a quick trip over and back could leave you panting. On a steamy Georgia day, I’d’ve rather played some more ball than go for a ride in a blazing-hot auto.

Upstairs, I had lots to mull. Mama’d nearly found out I’d slid back into dummyhood again. To muddy the waters more, the Elshtains would arrive this weekend to visit the McKissics, and they’d easily discover what I’d tried to hide from my mama over the phone. Mama would find out from the Elshtains later, and although she might see, and even forgive, my lie as an attempt to spare her pain, she might also decide I should come home to Tenkiller for treatment and TLC.

I didn’t want to leave Highbridge. Despite the South’s summer swelter, the torments Buck Hoey and friends had aimed at me, and a roommate big enough to scare a Marine, I’d begun to adjust. To the weird rituals of McKissic House. To my role on the team. I liked playing ball for the Hellbenders. I didn’t want to return to the mile-long apron strings and the boredom of my life in dust-bowl Oklahoma. I loved Mama Laurel, sure, but I’d truly begun scrapping for my manhood-a sense of my stand-alone self-in the CVL.

While Jumbo prowled the oiled and gravel byways of Alabama, I had nothing to do. A few guys had gone to their part-time jobs at Foremost Forge or Highbridge Box & Crate. A few others had caught a trolley uptown to a matinee, and everybody else’d settled in to nap, play cards, or letter-write. I’d mailed Mama a letter just that morning. Cards, with no cricket chirps or dance-band music to play by, appealed to me about as much as a swig of bicarbonate.

Upstairs, I had idle hands. So I fired up a cigarette, crossed my arms, and rocked on my heels like a tough in a gangster show. Humphrey Bogart? George Brent? Lloyd Nolan? I had to’ve looked like one of em, right?

By degrees, though, I ambled across the room to Jumbo’s space: his humongous bed, his pine-plank-and-tin-can bookcase, his bedside wash stand and lamp table. I stood there puffing my Old Gold and eyeballing all this stuff. The book shelves I’d examined before. Along with new library books, they held poetry, novels, philosophy, history, and religious texts, many old and some in French or German.

I walked around the bed, sat down on it by the bookcase, and opened something in French by a woman named Christine de Pisan. The book’s paper smelled like dried beetle wings-dusty sharp, I mean-and sour ink. I couldn’t decode a word, once past stuff like le and la and amour. It all just stymied me. So I shut old Christine and stuck her back in the bookcase. Something-boredom, curiosity-made me look back between my legs. Up under Jumbo’s bed I saw crammed what looked like a small boat, a kind of Eskimo canoe.

Yeah, a kayak!

I dragged the skin-covered frame out from under the twin plyboards Jumbo slept on. There was barely room for it in the space between bed and bookcase. I had to turn it longways and straddle it. It hadn’t slid all that easily either, probably because Jumbo’d loaded it with stuff through its central manhole. Dustbunnies furred its sides.

The first thing I found in the cockpit was the mat he’d hung as a curtain until my angry fit in LaGrange. He’d folded it five or six times and stuffed it down into the manhole as a plug. I pulled it out and looked under it. There sat a loose bag of animal hides, tied at the neck with cords of sinew and knotted with little ivory beads. It smelled fusty-funny, in a way I can’t describe.

No matter how I resisted, that bag felt like a dare, a dare to look inside it. Pulling a kayak out from under a bed hadn’t struck me as prying, but removing that folded mat had inched me towards a bad self-feeling, and the bag posed an even harder test of my honor. I’d stooped, so to speak, to snoopery, and Mama hadn’t raised me to pry. But Jumbo needed unlocking worse than his bag did; maybe untying it would open him too.

Inside the bag, I found a journal bound in split and marbled leather, with a bundle of ribbon-tied letters between its last page and its back cover. The letter sheaf had the bulk of a small book. I studied it closely, but didn’t unknot the ribbon. The paper felt brittle, crisp as fallen leaves-I feared I might crumble some pages. At last, I withdrew the top letter, eased it from its envelope, and unfolded the first of four or five thin pages.

The handwriting-with all its squiggles, smudges, and such-was in English, not some unspeakable foreign lingo. The first letter, addressed to an English woman, was dated “December 11th, 1798.” It said, “You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings.” It took a minute to decipher that sentence, but once I’d figured it out, I read it again and went on to the rest.

The writer was a young “naval adventurer,” the captain of an English merchant ship sailing from a Russian port towards the North Pole. The man called himself Robert Walton, and he stupidly reckoned the polar cap a “country of eternal light,” despite the ice plains his ship would have to navigate to reach it. The English woman he wrote was his sister, Mrs Saville. In his fourth letter, which turned into a log of shipboard events, he said he and his men had seen a “sledge” on the ice. A manlike giant had mushed his dog team beyond them, out of telescope range. “This appearance,” Walton wrote his sister, “excited our unqualified wonder.” I guess so.

Anyway, his mention of a giant made me think Jumbo’d hidden the letters because they reported on his ancestors. I figured Walton had seen an early forebear of Jumbo’s on the sled, maybe Great-great-grandfather Clerval.

After four of Walton’s letters, I reached the opening of the life story of a fevered European rescued from the ice by Walton’s sailors. Walton had acted as this man’s secretary, writing down all he said, so even though you got the guy’s whole personal history, you got it in Walton’s handwriting. “I am by birth a Genevese,” the man told him, “and my family is one of the most distinguished of that republic.” Of course, I didn’t care rip about his la-di-da family.

So I refolded the letters and tied them up again with a ribbon such as could’ve decorated a ball gown for Napoleon’s Josephine. I was about to jam this sheaf into the journal or log that’d held them, and to stuff the log back into the funny skin bag, and the funny skin bag back into the kayak-when a powerful urge to check out the log overcame me and I thumbed it open at the beginning:

Here I commence a new life. In the wretchedness of the candle-end of my former existence, I hoped only to die. So far into the maw of ruthlessness and depravity had I fallen, albeit at the heartless prodding of my maker, that I now despised myself as the world did. I ached for death, for the surcease of unappealable extinction, and hopefully I commended my spirit to that bleak demesne.

Of a sudden, after who knows how long or wherefore my unwelcome reprieve, I breathe again. My damaged heart thumps in the cave of my chest. My frozen limbs stir. My eyes, moments ago eclipsed by a primordial dark, lift into focus the Arctic stars and the sapphirine ice of a world that yesterday, or centuries past, I all too gladly fled and foreswore. Today, like Christendom’s fabled Son of Man, I am resurrected.

This entry had no date, but it looked-old. It sounded old too. Reading it over, I could hear Jumbo speaking. So I also imagined him, once upon a time, writing them in a fancy hand-in English. He’d shaped his words a lot like Walton’s, almost like he’d used Walton’s for a model.

I carried Jumbo’s log to the school desk at the head of my new bed, where I started copying Jumbo’s story into my bigger notebook. It seemed important to do this-the most important thing I could do to keep Jumbo whole in my mind while I cut him open and laid him out like a lab frog in my crabbed copybook hand:

In homage to the merchant captain who set down in its entirety the story of my tormented maker, I indite in English this account of my final days as his creature. Of my new life subsequent to a perplexing resuscitation I also write. English leaps as readily to my brain, and thence to my hand, as does French. Did my brain once belong to a native of Albion? Whatever the case, I commence my new life with the fresh mental perspective afforded by the tongue of Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Milton.

What I now recollect of my old life is that after fleeing the ship on which had died the author at once of my being and its wretchedness, I could not steel myself to follow Frankenstein into the all-consuming abyss. Nay, I could not slay that which he had animated. Although I had promised Walton, in our unplanned meeting over my father’s corpse, that I would annihilate myself in flames, I temporized. I discovered excuses to sustain my body, that great puppet of patchwork flesh that hauled about the ice my anguish-freighted soul; and with my body, my consciousness.

As I delayed, the weather grew ever more vicious and storm-racked. The northern lights faded behind a veil of tattered and then granitic clouds, from which snow whirled in turbulent blizzards and beneath which the oceans turned to entrapping rock. Walton and his crew could not break their vessel from this white prison, nor did the storms or cold relent to hearten, with even a feeble glimmering of escape, these unhappy men. By mid-October, all aboard the Caliban, Walton’s ship, had perished, frozen, starved, or been slain; previously, however, the captain had bent himself to copying every single word of every unsent letter to his sister, as if this obsessive activity would both warm his bones and free the fast-held Caliban from the ice.

During the winter onslaught, I huddled with my sledge against the elements. I gathered about me my dogs. Around us, I erected a crude but fanciful fortification of ice. Inside the eye-stabbing brightness of this shelter, a dome on the groaning floes, I watched with pitiless interest the decline of my dogs, so cruelly deranged in their discomfort and hunger. They snarled at and bit one another, gnashing their teeth in fury, so that to prevent a massacre among them, I throttled the instigators, as I had throttled the foremost loved ones of my creator.

Even with their insulating fur, the dogs withstood the Arctic cold less well than I, for the howling of the gales invigorated me. Indeed, the continuous whipping of snow and pelletlike surface ice across that desert served only to confirm in me my decision to live.

Frankenstein, in assembling me from the bloodless leftovers of corpses, had unwittingly inured me to the depredations of polar cold. My dogs, however, suffered from it, turning on one another in terrifying fits of rapaciousness. In those same days, I so far forsook my preference for fruits, berries, and nuts that I ate the flesh of one of my animals. Later I distributed a moiety of its substance to the starved survivors.

At the end of these storms, I released from my pitted icehouse the only three dogs yet alive. With cries and menacing gestures, I chased them across that wasteland. They did not understand this eviction. Indeed, one dog sought to recover my affections with a fawning crawl and much ingratiating tail-wagging. At last, though, my unappeasable hostility conveyed itself to this animal and its four-lewed comrades: with a barrage of ice missiles I induced them to retreat.

If I could not die on a self-made funeral pile, perhaps I could take my life by striding over the floes to the pole itself. Unlike Walton, I had no expectation of encountering there an eye of balmy warmth, but rather a ravaging cyclone of such sharp cold that, in the space between heartbeats, it would annihilate me. Hoping for such a fate, I set off from my ice shelter in what I assumed the correct direction. Above me, the sky burned like an alarming white mirror.

At length I spied at some distance the shroud of ropes and canvas that tented an ice-locked ship. I recognized this vessel as the Caliban. What other vessel, at this bleak time of year, had ventured so far into the Arctic wastes? Whether the storm had disoriented me or some inner compass had guided my steps mockingly towards my maker’s wooden tomb, I know not. I knew only that I must complete my unplanned trek and board the ship. I did so with a curiosity greater than my revulsion at the thought of again exposing myself to human enmity.

I need not have trepidated. Every person aboard Walton’s ship, as earlier noted, had died of hunger, frost, or intestine violence among the crew. The Caliban entombed not only Frankenstein, but also Walton and his sailors. I trod, then, a ship of death, and only the decay-postponing steward-ship of the cold kept the odours of rot from checking my headlong inspection of the vessel.

Frankenstein, I should remark, had known a death-sleep longer than that of any other soul on the Caliban. I had no difficulty locating either him or Walton, however, for at some point in their ordeal the most vengefully inclined sailors, perhaps thinking to defile the bodies of those to whom they attributed the full burthen of their predicament, had brought the two men-one dead, one presumably yet alive-abovedecks. Here they had lashed them back to back to the forward mast. Here Walton had died, his body so disposed that he might gaze impotently upon the unfolding mutiny. My creator, meanwhile, faced the blankness of the northern sea, his eyes cracked like small glass balls, his lips the silver-blue of oiled metal. I had slain before, but never had I witnessed at one moment, among creatures purportedly rational, such desolation and carnage, nor had the terrible melancholy of this scene devolved wholly from the blows of wind and frost. Dogs and men, it occurred to me, shared a desperation-fed savagery.

Mayhap I laughed.

Abovedecks and below, I explored the Caliban. After hurriedly perusing and securing for myself both the packet of letters that Walton had written his sister and the copy that he had made, I returned to the bow mast and cut down the author of my grotesque form and so of my pariahhood. Frankenstein’s skin had pulled tight to his bones. His limbs had less pliancy than wood, not because rigor mortis had untowardly persisted but rather because the fluids of life had frozen in his veins. In this way was my maker rendered a macabre monument to his own vanity and hardness of heart. There on the deck, I kneaded him into a parody of flexibility. Then I threw him over my shoulder like a sack of meal and quitted the Caliban, leaping to the ice from a height that would have staggered a being of merely human parentage.

I stopped copying. If Jumbo had written this sensational stuff, he was laying claim to a sideways sort of kinship to a European scientist named… well, Frankenstein. He’d also confessed to an unspecified murder or murders: “I had slain before.” That thrilled me. I mean, it’d taken me nearly a month to persuade myself Jumbo, despite his size and looks, meant no one, least of all me, any harm. And now I’d just read four words in his own hand that shot down all my hard-earned notions of his harmlessness.

I lit a cigarette. The butts of a couple of others lay smoldering in the ashtray on my desk. My tongue tasted like a charred wedge of bologna.

Then a calming thought occurred, a thought that made more sense than tagging Jumbo the mad golem of an eighteenth-century anatomy student and chemist by the name of Frankenstein: Jumbo was writing a book, a novel. His bulk and his lopsided face had led him to see himself in Karloff’s screen monster-which he really didn’t much resemble-and to write an original story featuring himself in the monster’s role. That theory tied up a few of my frayed nerves.

I went back to reading and copying:

With Frankenstein’s corpse as freight, I struck out from Walton’s ship towards the south. In the long dusk at that latitude, directions were hard to verify. Still, both the rush of ice-capped sea currents and the benison of fuller sunlight told me that I had intuited my course aright. Even the lovely gyre-making of a raptor, shadowed on the snow, seemed to approve my migration route. Oddly, I had no idea what my destination must be or why I had undertaken this grueling journey; a month or more ago, I had thought to end all my journeyings in the swift uprush of a funeral blaze.

Almost insensate, I trudged the whiteness. I steered by the low-riding sun on a southeasterly oblique that at length brought me off the ice onto a vast range of undulant snow. I scarcely paused, either to moisten my parched lips or to poke beneath the glacial crust for a root or tuber with which to propitiate the gods of hunger. Whenever I chanced near crude fishing villages or inland settlements, I took pains to avoid confrontation with the inhabitants. I fled men as the tundra wolf does.

Indeed, I had for companions on one leg of my journey a pack of wolves. They trailed alongside, eager for me to stumble under the dead Frankenstein and so succumb to their fangs. Once, half exasperated, half exultant, I stooped and compacted a missile of ice. Immediately, I dispersed the pack by hurling this frozen shot into its ranks. It slew-yea, nearly decapitated-one lean but shaggy animal, the example of whose demise vividly impressed itself upon the others.

One morning, after a rare surrender to the call of sleep, I awoke to find myself and the inert nearby form of my creator surrounded by reindeer. These lithe beasts browsed that terrain as if he and I had inextricably melded with it. No alarm, or even skittishness, did we provoke in them, not even when I arose from my bed of snow and once more lay my father’s corpse over my shoulder. For miles, it seemed, I trudged with these deer, migrant with them, a fallen seraph among the ice waste’s ghostly kine.

An unexpected change in the weather at last effected our separation from the herd. A wind of gale proportions blasted ice grains across the snowscape. I howled into this howling. Land forms but an arm’s length away shewed as blurred geometries. I failed at them, for I wished both contact and certainty. Between the roaring gusts, I sometimes thought I saw fantastic cliffs, as white as milk and evanescent as truth.

At length I came to those ill-seen ramparts. Like a thousand panpipes the storm whistled, even as snow sleeted in interthreaded sheets. A channel in the rock led me blindly upwards. Had I known the precariousness of my ascent, with a corpse as entrammeling cargo, I would have thrown myself upon the nearest rock face and clung to it like an apperceptive lichen. Fortunately perhaps, I had no such understanding of the danger and so proceeded with the singlemindedness of a zealot.

It would have eased my task to drop Frankenstein and struggle on alone, but a stubborn scrupulosity prevented me; a perversity, many might accuse, for at some point on my trek I had resolved to recompense myself upon this man, who had so aggrieved and hurt me, by tearing his heart from his breast. I intended to feed that cold organ, piece by bitter piece, to the hawks of the Kara Sea, and no hardship met on my way could turn me from this aim.

The passion of my will notwithstanding, I weakened. The wind’s howling, combined with the unrelenting sting of ice and blasted rock, vitiated my strength. Fatigue came. In time, groping along a narrow ice ledge, I chanced upon a crevasse, a doorway into shelter. I crawled in, dragging my passenger with me. Here I obtained to a peacefulness in which I had nearly lost faith. Here, indeed, I slept.

Let me rather indite that like a peltless bear, I hibernated. How long I lay thus stupefied, wrapped about my sire’s body, I cannot tell. Somewhere in that sleep, I drifted so near the ivory reef of extinction that I dreamt myself moored to it. The deepest flint of my awareness now took as dead the foundered body that it had once animated. That iota’s last spark guttered towards darkness. Insofar as consciousness remained to me, it exulted in the nearness of its extinguishment.

Time passed. More time succeeded to this. Then, to my initial dismay and bewilderment, my shelter’s roof fell in-clamourously, precipitously-and a myriad spectacular figures of lightning revived me to the long heartache of the world. Precisely how this revival occurred, I cannot relate. Why it should have happened capsulates a mystery even more recondite. Lightning, thunder, biting sleet-meteorological phenomena seldom seen in train-assaulted my cavern, quickening in me the blood-borne engines of life. Although Frankenstein, my author, of course continued dead, I had reluctantly arisen. The outcome of this fleer at mortality lay hidden in the ice rains of the night and the unforeseeable weathers of tomorrow…

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.

Jumbo went to his bookcase and took out a stained volume. “Or reread this. Its text more or less duplicates the texts of Walton’s letters. Where they diverge, the letters represent the more accurate transcription of events.” He gave me the book and took the letters away. “But read the book. Its type is easier on the eye than Walton’s cursive.”

Jumbo tied his letters up again and placed them, along with his journal, into the beaded leather bag. He put the bag in the kayak and the mat into its cockpit, shoved the loaded kayak back under his bed, and abruptly left the room.