Brittle Innings

29

Reading a book on the sneak has a lot more allure than getting it thrown at you as an assignment. Oliver Twist as a book-report chore will bore you to lip drool. The same pages sampled in the library stacks will rev up your mind and carry you faster than a bullet train to a new world. I’d enjoyed reading Jumbo’s log. Whether I’d like rereading Frankenstein on his outright command was a moot question. I had half a mind to throw his plump little book out the window.

But I started it and ran headlong into the blah-blah-blahs that’d almost stopped me dead in my tracks in high school, junk like “diffusing a perpetual splendor,” “the inestimable benefit which I shall confer on all mankind,” “under your gentle and feminine fosterage,” and so on.

Luckily, the writer-Mary Shelley, Robert Walton, whoever-finally rolled out the cannons and calliopes, adrenaline-rousing stuff about whale-fishers, Russia, dog sledges, and a creature of “gigantic stature” out on the ice-sections that reminded me of Jumbo’s own log, of course, and even of his highfalutm style, but that riveted me to my chair anyway.

Pretty soon, I’d reached Victor Frankenstein’s account of trying to build a creature “about eight feet in height, and proportionately large.” It got to be evening. Jumbo came in and put a cake pan of vegetables and a fork in front of me.

“Eat,” he said.

I noticed that Jumbo’s face-yellow cheeks, watery eyes, bluish black lips-squared with the book’s first description of the monster. But I kept reading and ate without looking at the cake pan or tasting what Kizzy’d fixed.

I read all night. Jumbo may’ve walked the grounds or dozed on a parlor sofa. Who knows? Around four in the morning, he poked his head back in just as the fiend in Frankenstein says, “Polluted by crimes and torn by the bitterest remorse, where can I find rest but in death?”

Yeah, where? I motioned Jumbo in and read the story’s last three paragraphs.

“Well?” he said.

I tossed the book back and paced the room with my hands in my back pockets. I must’ve looked a little like the tormented anatomy student at the height of his project: eyes red-rimmed, hair sweaty, hands as fluttery as quail.

Jumbo had evolved out of the body and the personality of a patchwork thing gimmicked into life by Victor Frankenstein. In the account said to be Mrs Shelley’s, Jumbo’d had no name, just creature, monster, fiend, or demon, and nobody but nobody called him mister or sir. Henry Clerval, the name Jumbo used today, had once belonged to Frankenstein’s best friend, another of Jumbo’s early murder victims. So you had to believe he’d killed, or caused to die, at least five people, including the man who’d created him, and the friend named Clerval.

Thing is, despite Jumbo’s journal and his looks, I still didn’t quite buy that he was the monster. My mind’s eye kept casting back to that ship caught in the ice of the Barents Sea, but the off-chance that Hoey and his pals were trying to con me kept me from tumbling brain over butt to its “truth.”

“I asked you to read my story,” Jumbo said, “because you would understand that the crimes of my youth have had no sequel in this epoch of my life. I require an ally, Daniel.”

I rubbed my upper arms like somebody trying to stay warm in a meat locker. Every lobe of my brain felt more tightly packed than a butterball turkey.

“Practice in four hours,” Jumbo said. “Perhaps we should sleep.” He stretched out on his bed and, in thirty seconds or less, began to snort and wheeze.

My questions sorted themselves into a long, worry-laden file. In Mrs Shelley’s doctored transcription of the deathbed confession of Dr Frankenstein, his creature had been a true monster: eight feet tall. Nobody could look at him without cringing or picking up a stick. “No mortal could support the horror of that countenance,” Frankenstein had said, “a thing such as even Dante could not have conceived.” Which mostly proves Dante never visited Dixie: Jumbo had a fair claim on ugliness, but if you looked, he wasn’t much grottier than some of the folks prowling Kmart of an evening.

Other questions?

Well, the fiend in the “novel” has the agility and stamina of an Olympic athlete. Once, like an ape with vernier jets, he shinnies straight up the face of a small mountain. Jumbo had the upper-body look of a gorilla, but his bad legs wouldn’t let him scale a cliff that fast.

I also had to wonder again about Jumbo’s age. If he and the monster in Mrs Shelley’s “novel” were one and the same, what’d my roommate been doing for the past century and a half? No one that big could hide very long, at least not in a city or a town, and I couldn’t imagine how he’d ended up playing ball in Highbridge.

Finally, how did Jumbo feel about himself and everything that’d happened to him? Dr Frankenstein couldn’t tolerate his critter’s looks. He’d skedaddled soon after mumbo-jumboing awake the graveyard parts he’d used to model the thing. If you bought this Frankenstein foofaraw, Jumbo didn’t actually rate, biologically, as the doctor’s get-but the doctor’d made him, and if you give something life, you’re responsible for helping it out, right? Laws exist against running out on your kids, even against sitting on an alimony check. So Dr F. doesn’t stack up too well against your basic alimony jumper, some of whom have pretty good reasons for missing payments, and a lot of whom love their kids even if they can’t pay. But old Dr F. turned his back on his son-sorry, his creature-then lied to him and tore apart the cut-and-paste Eve beast he’d promised to build him as a way of making up for his fatherly short-comings.

As Jumbo slept, I mulled this stuff. I hiked around the room too keyed up to lie down and rest from nearly ten hours of straight reading. Even in his reddest-eyed condition, Jumbo’s daddy didn’t have much on me…

At practice that morning, Jumbo, Muscles, and I all played like sleepwalkers. My backasswardsness-once, a double-play toss from Junior bounced off my left tit-all went back to my rereading of Frankenstein. Jumbo’s slipshod play had a like explanation. He’d stayed out of our room to let me read.

But Musselwhite’s lousy play puzzled me-till I saw LaRaina Pharram sitting next to Phoebe in the left-field bleachers. Miss LaRaina wore a dress of orange, red, and white, like a lion leaping into a sunset full of cockatoos. She gave Muscles the eye and shifted around so her easel-splash dress whipped about her calves and pulled tight across her thighs. No wonder Muscles couldn’t motor. He’d probably been busier last night than I had.

“Oh, puh-leeze!” Phoebe said a few minutes into this show. “Act yore age, Mama!”

“Mind how you talk,” Miss LaRaina said amiably.

Phoebe got up and stalked all the way from the bleachers to the Hellbender dugout. After talking to Phoebe, Mister JayMac stood on the dugout step and yelled, “LaRaina, go home! You’re distracting the troops!”

“Could’ve fooled me,” Miss LaRaina yelled back. “A flat Coke’s got more fizz than this sorry crew!” But after blowing a kiss off her palm at Muscles (to Reese Curriden’s chagrin), she seized her pocketbook and sashayed out of view.

Finally, Mister JayMac whistled us in. “Yall stink today,” he said. “I doubt you could field a tumbleweed with a tennis net. A few of yall need deodorizing worsen the Highbridge sewage-treatment plant. Go home. Tomorrow’s another day, but it’d better be bettern this one or I’ll sell yall to Johnny Sayigh and move to Cuba.” He stomped off.

After practice, Phoebe met Jumbo and me in the parking lot at the Brown Bomber. She had on overalls, bebop shoes, and a floppy short-sleeved shirt that made her arms look as snappable as day-lily stalks.

“Come to dinner with Mama and me on Friday after the Marble Springs game,” she said. “Mama said I could ask.”

The invitation surprised me. It confused me a little too. I held the back of my hand to Jumbo’s stomach to ask if Phoebe meant him too.

Phoebe blushed. “I was asking you, Danny,” she said. “It, well, it wouldn’t…” She stared at her bebops.

From the bus, a rude farting sound and ugly laughter.

Jumbo said, “It wouldn’t look good for a bachelor to visit your house while your father’s still abroad.”

“Her daddy’s not a broad!” Turkey Sloan shouted out the nearest window. “He’s a captain!”

“Will you come?” Phoebe asked me.

Ack. I’d already had one dinner with Phoebe and her mama, and it hadn’t exactly gone down like an oyster on a slide of bourbon. Also, when Miss LaRaina wondered what kissing Jumbo would be like, Phoebe’d said, “Mama, that’s vile!” But what, when she’d cried that, had worried her more-the health of her folks’ marriage or the foulness of Jumbo’s looks? She’d really broadcast mixed signals on that one.

“Accept her invitation,” Jumbo said.

Miss LaRaina, at the curb in a gray ’38 Pontiac, mashed her horn-once, twice. Phoebe peered at me, half pleading but more than a smidgen peeved.

“He accepts,” Jumbo said. “Don’t you, Daniel?” His hand seized the back of my skull. Out of Phoebe’s view, he pushed my head forwards and, with a yank on my hair, tugged it back to upright. Then he let go.

“After Friday’s game then,” Phoebe said. “We’ll give you a ride soon’s you’ve showered.” She sort of skipped towards her mama’s smoky old Pontiac.

The Bomber carried us Hellbenders back to McKissic House. A crew of them razzed me about Phoebe, but Darius kept as quiet as a gambler computing blackjack odds.