Brittle Innings

3

Tenkiller was a side-track burg. So I caught the train in Tahlequah. Mister JayMac had sent me a ticket.

Colonel Elshtain had a C gas-rationing sticker on the divided window of his automobile, supposedly because his job at Deck Glider had such import to the national defense. Actually, I think, he had buddies in the War Department, who knew folks in the Office of Price Administration. Anyway, that C sticker got Colonel Elshtain all the gas he wanted, and he and Miss Tulipa drove Mama and me to the station in Tahlequah in his 1939 Hudson Terraplane. (That car was a picture of chrome and ivory. It even had a radio.) My only luggage was a duffel full of clothes. The handle of my favorite baseball bat-Coach Brandon had given it to me-stuck out of my bag, and my bag rode in the Hudson ’s trunk. In the back, next to Mama, I felt partly like a rich swell and partly like a murderer riding in style to the gallows.

On the station platform, Mama looked angry enough to spit. In truth, she’d just clamped her lips to keep from crying. I was grateful she was managing so well. No seventeen-year-old kid wants his mama blubbering all over him in public. And that railway depot was crowded. Tahlequah looked like Tulsa.

Recruits in civvies heading for Camp Gruber or Fort Sill. GIs going back to Chaffee, Benning, Polk, or Penticuff after furloughs. Cardboard suitcases and duffels. Parents and girls mingling with the sad-sack soldiers and recruits. All the guys were riding passenger trains, not troop-train expresses, with civilians like me in a near-invisible minority.

Some of the GIs wove back and forth through the redbrick station building. In buddy-buddy groups. Sometimes they’d stop near Mama and me to look me up and down. I was only to scoff at-soldier material like marshmallows are ammo. I could hardly believe I’d have to share a car with these rude and crude dogfaces. The ones with stripes on their sleeves scared the Cherokee piss out of me.

“You puny cur,” Mama said, “don’t forget to write.”

I only stood five-five, but Audie Murphy, who came along later, wound up the war’s most decorated soldier, and he was no bruiser either. Me, I was in tiptop trim. If I could play ball in the Chattahoochee heat, why’d so many of these wiseguy doughboys seem to think I couldn’t charge into Jap artillery fire? Why’d Mama assume I’d steam into vapor under the Georgia sun and never even send her a postcard?

“I can’t watch you leave. Be good. Do good.”

A pair of nuns came up, smiling. Only they weren’t nuns, but pillow-breasted Red Cross gals in habits and wimples. They had a hospital cart loaded with goodies, like stewardesses on a Delta flight. They took me for a recruit. They wanted to give me magazines, Tootsie Rolls, Lucky Strikes.

“He don’t want none,” Mama said. “Thank you.”

The Red Cross nuns toddled off, but the soldiers nearby didn’t. When Mama kissed me on the lips, a good slobbery one, they had a snicker riot. Mama left me with the Elshtains. I hoped the colonel would put the fear of God into those dogfaces by calling them down for crooked gig lines and ungentlemanly public comportment, but he didn’t. Soldiers on furlough were privileged characters, prodigal sons in gaberdine. Rightly so, maybe. They’d sweated out fourteen weeks of basic, and a lot of em, like Goochie, would come home as statistics, battle fatalities, instead of people. Colonel Elshtain understood. He’d served in the Great War, the War to End All Wars, and he understood.

Then the colonel and Miss Tulipa left too, and I was alone with all the trained heroes and smiling Red Cross nuns. A redcap directed us-everybody going my way, at least-to our coaches, and porters with hand trucks stowed our duffels in the proper baggage cars. Anyway, this rail ride from Oklahoma to Georgia gave me a new look at humanity. Time I jumped off that train, I’d’ve sworn the defense of the United States was in the hands of sadistic cretins. Jerks that shot up colored training camps in New York State and Louisiana. Yahoos that, a couple of months later, danced the hat dance on zoot-suiters in L.A. As a civvie, I felt like soft-shelled predator bait too. Forget that my draft status had everything to do with being seventeen and nothing to do with being afraid. Did a wish to cap off the last year of my childhood playing Class C baseball make me a coward?

They packed us aboard that train like cattle. On a mirror in the John, somebody’d taped an “Off the Record” cartoon of a GI in his skivvies standing outside a Pullman lavatory with his shaving gear. He fingers his stubbly jaw. “Great Scott!” he barks. “I must’ve shaved the guy next to me!” Every seat in every coach was taken; every aisle was a logjam.

I got up once, and a sergeant took my place. So I squeezed my way through the clicking coaches till I found the only empty seat in the last five Pullmans. I sat next to a PFC whose head looked like the bowling-ball jaw of the guy in the cartoon. A hulk, with a mug like a skinned Pekingese’s.

“How you know that seat’s not saved?” he asked me.

I wanted to say, “Screw you,” but the snarl in the PFC’s challenge had taken all my sand away. I hadn’t exactly had a quarryful to begin with.

The PFC said, “Nice ears, yokel. Buy em by the yard?”

I went “Duh” like the yokel he’d pegged me and laid a hand on my Adam’s apple to indicate my speech problem.

“Tonsillitis?” he said. “Strep throat? You got some kinda contagious damned communicative disease?”

“I have a st-st-stammer.”

“You do, huh? And astigmatism too if you couldn’t see I was holding this seat for Pumphrey.”

“P-P-Pum-?”

“P-P-Pum yourself,” he mocked. “What’s your name? I’d like to meet your whole yokel cl-cl-clan.”

He was probably from a real metropolis like Coffeyville or Enid, but I was a yokel.

“B-B-Boles,” I said. “D-D-Danny Boles.”

“Where from?”

“ Tenkiller, Oklahoma.” No stammer. Give me a medal. Send me to radio-announcer’s school.

“Well, Boles, ya goddamned Okie, move your skinny ass fore I line it with teeth.” The guy bumped me with his elbow. His nose floated in front of me like an elevator button I didn’t dare mash. “Hey, you’re still in Pumphrey’s seat.”

“B-but where can I g-g-go?”

He laughed. He couldn’t believe me, a kid innocent as bottled water. He put his thumb into the dent behind my chin, to show he meant for me to hop up. I jerked away and stumbled into the aisle-which jostled with foot traffic, landlubbers trying to get their rail legs.

I went enginewards. GIs, recruits, MPs with gunbelts sat jammed into their seats, not one tender female among them. Every car smelled of dried sweat, scorched khaki, cigarette smoke, caked boot polish.

I finally stopped on a platform between two coaches. An accordion-pleated rubber hood was supposed to join the cars (to keep passengers out of the wind and coal dust), but the train people hadn’t hooked it up. I rode the coupling. The wind felt good. So did being alone. The countryside had gentle hills, dogwoods and redbuds still showing color in amongst the evergreens. It got prettier the farther from Cherokee County we chugged. Had Congress designated the Injun Territories for their flatness and lack of trees? Probably.

I’d stood there a couple of minutes when a baby-faced GI banged through from the forward car. He scowled and patted his pockets. He shouted, “Got a smoke, buddy?”

“N-no, I d-d-don’t.”

“Screw you!” he shouted. Did he think I’d mugged a Red Cross lady for her cigarettes, then squirreled away my booty from regular Joes like him? I just stared at him. Maybe a 4-F civilian had snaked his girl, or a recruit had short-sheeted his bunk. Running into such meanness just then felt like having grain alcohol poured into a cut. My stare got harder. I lifted my fists to my ribs. The kid saw them shaking. He spit down at the tracks, easy-like, and returned to the coach he’d come from. That should’ve boosted my morale. I’d shown my steel and a GI had backed off. Problem was, he’d looked like a Campbell ’s Soup kid.

In all the wind and clatter, I began to cry. The platform had me for good, then. I couldn’t go back in with tears on my face. The GIs would’ve ridden me all the way to Georgia.

Our train wasn’t an express. It crawled through every podunk crossing, rattled to a chain-reaction stop in every town with as many as two letters to its name. Passengers lurched back and forth between coaches, but I clung to the coupling’s guard rail and ignored them.

It took an hour and a half to get to Fort Smith and another thirty minutes to pass through Fort Chaffee, the post southeast of it. Recruits off, GIs on. A trackside do-si-do. Finally, we clacked off through Arkansas again.

Later, in the dining car, I sat with three other guys who seemed to be loners too. A swabbie going to Pensacola and two dogfaces. We’d all been strangers, but the other fellas struck up a friendly debate about the credentials (Ol’ Diz would’ve said differentials) of the Cards without Enos Country Slaughter and the Dodgers without Pistol Pete Reiser, who ran full-tilt into outfield walls and knocked himself out.

My kind of debate. Except my vocal cords had a clamp on them. All I could do, like some kind of chimp, was point, nod, grunt, and grin. The other guys-the friendliest servicemen I’d yet bumped into-must’ve figured me for a runaway from the Oklahoma Institute for Hayseed Dummies. I paid my check and stumbled back to the coupling platform.

And stayed there, where my kidneys began to feel like hip-hugging cocktail shakers. In the fields whipping by, I could make out pole beans, snap beans, alfalfa, cotton. The soil had the richness of devil’s food cake. We drove deeper into the unreconstructed South. The air thickened, smells got odder, the unfamiliar crops sort of scared me.

A soldier came out onto my platform. I bent over my rail, but he didn’t go away. I could feel his stare seeping through the back of my shirt and up my arms-like kerosene through a pile of rags. Finally, I faced him.

An older guy. Stripes on his sleeves, ribbons on his breast pocket, heavy lips. His coloring reminded me of a slice of Spam. A sergeant. A vet of some combat theater, probably. I relaxed. Battle-tempered noncoms showed themselves hard-noses in training camps, but teddy bears with kids and women and well-meaning civilians.

“Your name Boles?” the sergeant shouted. This scared me, but I nodded. “I’m First Sergeant Pumphrey. Private Overbeck told me about you! Described you to a T! You from Tenkiller, in Oklahoma?”

“Y-y-yessir!” I yelled back. Shaking again, not just from the rattling of the train.

“Sergeant!” he corrected me. “I’m not an officer! I’m not a gentleman! I’m damned sure no egg-sucking sir!”

“N-n-nosir!”

Pumphrey gestured at the train, the flashing rails, the marching ranks of cotton. “This is horseshit! Come on!” He yanked me into the sudden hush of the passenger car.

My ears gulped at the quiet. Pumphrey prodded me down the length of the coach, and then the length of another one, and so on until we reached a car with a lavatory. Pumphrey pushed me inside. Did he have queerish tendencies? Coach Brandon had warned us boys in fifth-period hygiene about that sort of crap, but I still didn’t get it. Half our male seniors had thought hygiene was a dirty word.

We had that lavatory almost to ourselves. The only other guy in there had his tailbone on the back edge of a toilet seat, his toes over the seat’s front edge and his arms around his knees to keep his shoes from slipping off and jolting him awake. His open mouth hissed softly. Pumphrey ignored him like he would a water stain and backed me up against a sink.

“I know your dad, Boles,” he said. “Until two weeks ago we served in the same goddamned support group at an Army airfield in the Aleuts. Ever hear of Otter Point?”

I shook my head.

“It’s on Umnak. Cold as a polar bear’s prick. Windier than Chicago. Foggier than a dry-ice factory.”

I couldn’t figure what Pumphrey wanted me to do. He seemed to blame me-or my daddy, if the part about knowing him wasn’t a lie or a smokescreen-for the Aleutian weather. His red lips flapped. Threads of spit webbed them.

“Cold, cold, cold,” he said. “Oil up there turns to peanut butter. You use blowtorches to thaw your bomber engines. If spray gets on an airplane’s windshield, it’s like trying to see through a sheet of pebbled glass. One drop of high-octane fuel on your skin-if you’re cluck enough to expose it-will lift a blister the size of a walnut. Follow?”

“Y-y-yessir.” I didn’t, but what the hell?

“I once saw your old man’s eyelids freeze shut. In our Quonset, I made him rack out on a cot with his face between the struts and the canvas webbing. Held a hot cup of coffee under his eyes. Kept saying, ‘Don’t touch yourself. Unless you want to go around with a finger glued to your eyeball forever.’ You hear me, kid?”

I nodded. Hard.

“At’s how well I knew your papa, Boles,” Sergeant Pumphrey said. “You favor him. Grow into those ears, you could almost pass for his natural get.”

My daddy, as I recalled him, had been a solid, good-looking man. Leaving aside my athletic ability, no one’d ever accused me of favoring him. Not in any physical way. I usually got told I didn’t resemble my father. And who feels lower than the homely kid of good-looking parents?

Pumphrey let go of my arm and pushed away from me. “Just how much’re you like your old man, anyway?”

That seemed a fair moment to beat it. Pumphrey was wound up, pacing and question-posing. I made a break.

Bam! Pumphrey slid between me and the door and nearlybout paddled me slaphappy with his lips.

“Hold it! Dickie Boles’s the worst excuse for a soldier-hell, for a human being-I’ve ever served with. A goldbrick and a back-stabber. Pray God, you take after your mama.”

“He ever m-m-mention m-me?” I said.

“I dunno. I guess. Said something once like he may’ve sired a son. May’ve. Like if he had, it would’ve made him a fraternity brother of God’s. Otherwise, kid, he was too busy rejigging duty rosters and miscounting ammo shipments to expend the effort.”

“He st-still up there?”

“Oh yeah. Oh yeah.” Pumphrey sort of giggled. “There’s ossifers on Umnak who think he should spend the rest of his natural life at Otter Point. For the sake of everybody down here in the free forty-eight.” Pumphrey moved aside again, and I stepped all over myself trying to get out of there.

“Hold it!” He grabbed me, breathing licorice or schnapps, something sweet and foul, into my face. “Not so fast, kiddo!” I felt strangled. What’d the crazy bruiser plan to do? “How much money you got on you, Boles?”

“M-m-money?”

“Yeah, m-m-money. Cash money. Your goddamned dad was all the time borrowing. Wouldn’t pay it back, neither. How much you got?”

I’d boarded the train with fifty bucks cash money, half of my first paycheck. I still had whatever I hadn’t spent.

Pumphrey spun me, shoved me against the wall, fumbled my billfold out of my hip pocket. Holding me in place, he counted out my money, crammed the bills into his own breast pocket, and flipped the billfold into a lavatory sink.

“You’re short. About fifty shy of what your old man owes me, kiddo.”

“I’m n-not my father’s k-k-keeper.”

“Maybe not. But I’m still out half a sawbuck. What’re you gonna do about it?”

“You’re st-st-stealing. You’re a d-d-damned th-thief.”

“Settling a debt don’t work out as theft, prick!” Pumphrey snatched me away from the wall, then slammed me back into it. My lip split. I cried out. “Hush, boy. Accounts still don’t tote. We gotta make em tote.”

Pumphrey pushed me into the stall next to the sleeping GI’s, wedged a hankie into my mouth, and spun me around again. When he yanked my pants down, and my shorts along with them, I finally had a two-bit notion of what he had in mind and lashed back at him with an elbow. He showed me the blade of a pocketknife, told me he’d take my liver by way of my rectum if I gave him any more grief, and bent me over the open commode. What he did then took about two minutes and hurt like fire.

“You still owe me,” Pumphrey said, yanking my pants back up. “Nine more wouldn’t break your daddy and me even.”

I’d started to cry.

“Stop it, Boles. Mention this to a soul, and your ass is mine forever.”

He left me there. I fetched my billfold, washed my face and hands, and stood at the mirror not recognizing myself. The PFC on the toilet-I could see his awkwardly sprawled body in the mirror-had slept through the whole assault, snoring like an asthmatic sea lion.