Brittle Innings

4

Some folks find sleeping on a train soothing, like lying under a tin roof with rain chattering down. Not me. The clickety-click of grooved iron wheels sliding on long metal tongues reminds me of an alarm clock ticking. I keep waiting for the bell to go off. I kept waiting for my train to derail.

I was near dead from humiliation, but if an alarm started to clatter, I’d spring up like a jack-in-the-box. (I’d claimed my berth after some soldiers got off at Camp Robinson and some others switched trains in Little Rock.) I drowsed some, but only after crying myself to sleep. Drowsing, I dreamt of my daddy, Richard Oconostota Boles.

My daddy’s folks came to Oklahoma -U. S. Injun Territory-with a remnant of the cholera-stricken Cherokees from what’s now Pickens County, Georgia. See, I had great-great-great-grandfolks, full-blooded native Americans on Daddy’s side, on the Trail of Tears. They wound up in a reservation settlement on the site of the town known today as Checotah.

Mama Laurel was a Norwegian Helvig, a paleface farmer’s daughter through and through, but she and Daddy met at a Lutheran church picnic on Tenkiller Lake while he was doing carpentry work for a Wells Fargo agent out of Muskogee. Daddy was nineteen when I was born, seven years younger than Mama. They had a hard go of it. Money stayed tight, and my father had a hurtful weakness for honky-tonking and catting around. Mama excused him because he’d been so young when they married-seventeen, just my age when I left Oklahoma on that train-and because she adored him, never mind he had the brain of a sly ten-year-old and the loving heart of an armadillo.

Daddy played pickup baseball whenever he could, paid good money for bad illegal whiskey, and sparked all the “bad” young gals in and around Muskogee. He built barns, smoke-houses, and graineries for folk, and he learned auto mechanics from a local Pierce Arrow dealer. He loved cars. Well, no, their motors-their grease and pistons and belts.

A year before the stock market bottomed out, Daddy drove a trap from farm to farm selling Ful-O-Pep Mash, a chicken feed with cod-liver meal. It was supposed to prime a hen to lay eggs the size of baseballs. Mama said Daddy always held up a real baseball for skeptics, as if the mere sight would convince em. And the first time he drove his trap around hawking Ful-O-Pep, he did okay. Second visit, though, all a farmer had to do was hold one of his runty eggs next to Daddy’s baseball and the jig was up. The farmer’d say a sore-armed pitcher might appreciate the egg, but he felt cheated. Before long, Daddy quit drumming mash and locked into fixing farm machinery.

Mama had no job then. I was her job-a go-go mobile with a PA-system mouth.

Anyway, the market crashed, the Depression struck, and the Great Plains turned into dust sumps. Storms swept down even on our easternmost prairies and the hills around Tenkiller. Spooky roarers. The sun looked like a rusted garbage-can lid behind a big tea-stained curtain. Pure grit flowed through every chink in the shotgun hovel Daddy rented from Mr Neal on Tenkiller’s outskirts, coating every window ledge, shelf, and door lintel. It drifted into ridges under thresholds. Our gums bled. We mined our noses for booger pearls. Jobs dried up even faster than the land. Folks started to move.

On dust-free days, Dickie Boles played ball with me. He taught me how to catch and throw. I’d stand in front of the rear wall of Tenkiller’s abandoned icehouse hurling a rubber Spaldeen at it. (One of those hard pink hollow balls city kids used for stickball.) That sucker would bounce back faster than light. I’d field it bare-handed, quick-shift my feet, and snap it back at the bricks as hard as ever I could.

Daddy had me do that until I’d damned near drained off my last kilowatt of kid power. Time I was seven, I could play the bounce-backs for half an hour, bad hops and all, without booting a one or alley-ooping a single throw.

“If you can handle that,” Daddy’d say, “you can field em all.”

Daddy also taught me to hit. For that, he’d march me into the alley between the Cherokee Feed Store and Schlatt’s Small Appliances: Sparrow Alley. The chinks in the upper half of the feed-store wall sheltered hundreds of English sparrows, house sparrows, wrens. A sparrow apartment house. Those birds’d chirp and scold. If you didn’t take care, they’d get you with a whitewash bomblet or two.

In our alley games, the pitcher stood halfway along it. The hitter faced him from its streetside mouth, a broom or a mop handle for a bat. Daddy’d start, pitching the Spaldeen underhand. Before too long he’d go to a modified wind-up and a three-quarter delivery. I had to hit as many pitches on a clothesline to dead center as I could. No pulling or pushing the Spaldeen more than a foot or so to either side of my dad. If it hit a wall before getting past him, it was an out. A ricochet beyond him was a hit, though. So were uncaught blue darters up the middle. Rollers counted as fouls, but pop-ups were inning enders even if you’d just come in. A home run had to fly out the far end of Sparrow Alley in the air.

The Boles & Son Jes-for-Fun Oklahoma World See-ries. So Daddy called our games. If a dust squall didn’t blow up, we’d play until dark. Usually, Daddy beat me. If I won, I’d strut and preen. I’d brag to Mama. Today I know most of the games I took from Daddy were ones he let me have. Sometimes, though, he’d go on jake-leg binges and play me smashed. I’d beat him easy then, no charity to it.

Down a few runs, he’d lose the ball on purpose or break the broom handle over his knee and call me an upstart snot-nose. I got where I avoided him drunk, even though he was a pretty easy drunk, not a mean one, right up till I took a lead on him and he began to grasp how poorly he was doing, motor skills-wise. Strange to say, after Prohibition’d ended just about everywhere but Oklahoma, Daddy swore off drink for a while. Then, when I jumped him at alleyball, he’d laugh and call me “Tenkiller’s Ty Cobb.”

Dick Boles wasn’t Jesus Christ, but recalling him as he’d been when I was small, I couldn’t picture him like Sergeant Pumphrey did-as the sorriest man he’d ever had the bad luck to serve with. Until I was eleven or twelve, Dick Boles’d been a sockdalager daddy, good as a boy could want.

Lots of people, with the ruin of their farmlands, loaded up their pickups and set out for California ’s San Joaquin Valley: Okies. Will Rogers said they raised IQ levels in both states. Maybe so. The Boleses didn’t go. Daddy liked Oklahoma, and Mama still had kin about-in Muskogee and Tulsa, mostly. Jobs posed a problem, though, and in ’35 Daddy disappeared for eight months. Mama knew he wasn’t dead because he sent her twenty bucks a month through a cousin in Tahlequah. I attended school by then, and Mama clerked at Rexall.

Turned out, Daddy’d upped with the Civilian Conservation Corps. You had to be unmarried to join. Daddy fudged and got in anyway. He spent most of his time planting wind-breaks in Kansas, living in a camp between Coffeyville and Independence. The CCC gave him all his shots, fed him, and worked his tail off. Pay came to forty bucks a month, and, if the dust storms held off, all the fresh air and sunshine he could stand. Daddy snuck away in September, beelining it home. One of his bosses had acted like General Black Jack Pershing-plus, Daddy hadn’t been able to tinker with car engines as much as he liked.

In ’37 or ’38, Deck Glider opened its plant in Tenkiller. Probably Colonel Elshtain’s doing, using his connections. A few months later, Mama said good-bye to Rexall’s and went on the line at Deck Glider. Her take-home pay doubled. About this time, I guess, Daddy started breaking down into the no-account jerk Pumphrey remembered from Otter Point. He could’ve had him a job at Deck Glider too, but the very idea of hunching indoors over buffer-brush assemblies made him stir crazy. He figured Mama herself would finally crack and begged her to quit. She wouldn’t. He smuggled booze in from Fort Smith, or bought it off local leggers, and got stewed three or four times a week. He and Mama battled. Lots of times, they woke me up screeching like peacocks and shoving chairs around. Mornings, scratches on the floor would shine like yellow paint.

The summer World War Two started in Europe, Daddy cut out again. So what? I asked myself. So what? He hadn’t taken me to Sparrow Alley for months. I’d fire bounce-backs at the old icehouse, though, over and over-until my arms felt like window-sash weights. An outlet, you know. Therapy, a shrink today’d call it.

Mama and I expected Daddy back at any moment, the way he’d turned up, hungry puppy-like, after his unhappy stint with the CCC, but as the days wore on and the news from overseas got gloomier, we stopped expecting it. He didn’t wire us cash every month, the way he had before, and none of his cousins in the area would admit to having a clue about his whereabouts. Maybe they really didn’t, but Mama had her doubts.

In my Pullman berth, though, I dreamt about him.

My Red Stix team has to play a bunch of soldiers on a windy airfield in the Aleutians. Us Tenkillerites have on our regular flannel baseball togs, but the soldiers have dressed for the cold: boots, jackets with hoods, gloves like Army-drab oven mitts. An away game, see? The home team sets the playing conditions. I hop around at short, flapping my arms to keep warm. I hate playing soldiers because they’re older and more experienced. And, up in the Aleuts, they get last bat.

Bottom of an inning, pretty far along. Feels like we’ve played a week. Otter Point two, Tenkiller zero. Except for the screaming wind, my dream’s silent. Guys open their mouths, but nothing comes out. I can’t tell if the wind’s drowning our voices or floating overhead like piano notes at an old Buster Keaton flick.

After a while, I seem to be alone. I’ve got teammates, but shrouds of fog have swallowed them. They’re like ghosts in fuzzy straitjackets, I’m the only Red Stix player with a clear outline or any freedom of movement, the only Red Stix player acting fired up, but I’m… well, I’m scared.

When I move, my spikes strike fire-like wading through an ankle-high forest of Fourth of July sparklers. The airfield is a big checkerboard of holey steel mats. The engineers on Umnak have locked the mats together over the tundra as a runway for patched-up Flying Fortresses and Liberators. In newsreels, it’s called Marsden matting.

From that point on, every batted ball comes my way, every chance. Grounders skip at me like lopsided rocks. Pop-ups and liners are worse. Every time I dive or try to set myself, I snag my spikes in the grid and fall. The mats’ edges slice me up. My hands bleed, my knees look like tomato pulp.

C-c-come on, you g-guys! I yell. Ya g-g-gotta h-help me! The wind blows my words to Siberia. I only hear them because I yelled them into the godawful williwaw.

Hours later, I get the inning’s last out and hobble in for my own at bats. The other Red Stix have vanished. I’ve got to bring us back from what looks like sure defeat-the Umnak bunch must’ve scored a dozen times in their at bat-but the cold’s begun to gnaw into me. My fingers feel carrot-stick brittle. Two or three snap off when I pick up my bat.

I try to dig in against the Otter Point pitcher anyway. He jams me with an inside curve. The ball rotates in like a chunk of packed ice. When I foul it, mostly to protect myself, my thumb shatters. Now I’m holding the bat with one finger and the heel of my hand. How can I drive the ball even if I make contact? The outlook isn’t brilliant. I seem to fall apart the piecemeal way icebergs do. D-D-Daddy! I yell.

The Otter Point pitcher vanishes. So do the guys in Army-green parkas and gutta-percha boots behind him. Just like the Red Stix, gone. I stand at the plate, a perforated steel grid at the end of a steel runway. The runway looks like an ocean, an ocean of Marsden matting. It laps at the foothills of a squat rampart of mountains.

An airplane appears in a notch of the mountains. Its wings rock in the fog as it drops toward the field. A P-40 Warhawk, like the planes flown by Chenault and the Flying Tigers, tiger jaws painted on its snout. It comes straight at me. Behind the P-40, lightning splits the sky. Zigzagging fiery snakes of lightning. A thunderclap bounces the runway’s long steel gridwork, the first thing besides the wind I’ve really heard. More thunderclaps. They back up on one another and blend into one flat murmuring BOOOOM! The landing strip buckles in waves. If the P-40 doesn’t plow me under, the mats will hurl me down and stamp me like a waffle. But I freeze where I stand. The Warhawk’s pilot doesn’t drop his landing gear or try to land. He blitzes toward me a few feet above the steel plates, ahead of the crest of their buckle. If he won’t pull up, his propellers will dice me for sure.

Then I see the pilot in the cockpit. His face belongs to my father, Richard Oconostota Boles, but it’s a twisted version of the face I remember. His eyes bulge. His lips sneer. His nose lies flat, like a second-rate pug’s. Just before he yanks back on his joystick and goes roaring away toward the sea, he gives me a wink; a wink, for Christ’s sake.

Then the last running wave of the Marsden grid drops toward me, clattering. I cross my arms over my head in a stupid attempt to keep the panels from crushing me. The background keen of the wind seems a fit sort of white noise to what’s happening to me. I still can’t tell if its keening scours my mouth or comes from it, but so what? It suits our loss. Also, my daddy winked.

I jerked awake. The clicking of the rails echoed in my chest: clickety-clack, dickety-clack. Life meant more than baseball. The look on Daddy’s face rushing toward me in that P-40 was a look he’d really given me once, right down to the wink. Sitting there, I dredged up that old memory, the whole lousy business.

When I was thirteen, early one A.M., Richard Oconostota Boles and the former Laurel Helvig shouted and scraped chairs around. Again. I’d have to remap the living room in my head to get to the John without stubbing a toe. The shouting never let up. The shouts smeared into an angry howl. Sofa legs scraped, chair legs tap-danced.

Usually when my folks argued, at some point the noise level dropped off. A breather. Not this time. The din got so loud I wondered if they’d called in a few pals to help them argue. Then, atop the raised voices, I heard a storm of flaps and soft collisions-the noise you’d probably get if you set up a huge fan at one end of Sparrow Alley. Had Daddy released a bunch of bats in the front room?

“Tear up another one, Dickie, and I’ll kill you!”

“Try it! Jes try it!”

My leg’d gone to sleep, but I limped into the front room to see the row firsthand. I hoped just seeing me would shame my parents into making up.

But I walked into a holy mess. Daddy’d been playing Jack the Ripper with Mama’s Life magazines. Black-and-white photos of Hitler, Shirley Temple, Lou Gehrig, and so on shingled the floor. Bedsheet pages. Daddy’d torn them out and thrown them all over. One teetered on a lampshade. Marian Anderson at the Lincoln Memorial dangled from between a pair of Venetian-blind slats. I took in every detail because the room looked like a hand grenade’d deranged it.

“See there,” Mama said. “You’ve done woke up Danny.”

“Get out of here!” Daddy yelled. “Go back to bed!”

I stood there, in my too-short pajama bottoms, and Daddy hurled a rolled-up magazine at me. It opened out and slid to rest at my feet. All the coverless copies of Life lay strewn about like stepping-stones to a loony bin.

“Yell at me if you like!” Mama said. “Go ahead! But leave your son be!”

“Mine, is he? Look at him. He don’t favor me. He don’t favor me a bit.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Danny don’t look, or do, like I do. Moren likely, some two-bit smoothie planted the boy while I was over to Tahlequah trying to make some dough.”

“Filth! An adult’d be ashamed to say it.”

“I am ashamed. My son aint my son. My wife let somebody else spike her.” Daddy’s high pink color told his drunkenness.

Mama cried, “Lousy redskin scum!” and started for him. A Life squirted out from under her. She toppled before she could begin flailing away. Daddy caught her, but yanked her sideways and dumped her on the sofa like a potato sack. She made for him again, cursing and wailing. But Daddy seemed an even worse monster, the way he’d insulted us.

I charged, nearly slipping on a photo page. Daddy held me off with one hand. “Lousy redskin scum!” I said. A curse good enough for Mama was fine for me. I started to curse him again when he chopped me in the throat with his hand.

I crashed. It felt like he’d knocked my head off. If I looked back, I’d see my body jumping around like a neck-wrung chicken’s. I wanted to scream, but couldn’t even gargle.

Daddy’s bloated face came down for a look-see. “He don’t favor me, Laurel. And he don’t do like I do, neither.”

“Baseball,” Mama said from the sofa. “You taught him how to play. He does that the way you do.”

“Mebbe so. But it’s a trick.” Daddy gave me a goatish wink. “Well, you bastid, your mama’s secret’s safe with me.”

He slammed out the door without even scrounging up a change of clothes. Late August, early September, Hitler messing up folks’ lives in Europe. You heard about it on the radio. Like a fight between your parents scrawled in letters the size of buildings.

“Dick! Come back!” Mama shouted at Daddy, who’d just said he wasn’t. Finally, she realized her boy lay hurt.

My voice box had closed. I sat up amongst black-and-white portraits, still lifes, scenes of war. Except for the mark on my throat, I must’ve looked more or less okay. When I started breathing again, I was okay. But I didn’t talk again for two years. And when I did, I st-st-stammered.

On the troop train, I pulled on my clothes and made my way between curtained berths to the coupling where I liked to ride. The shanties of poor white and colored sharecroppers clicked by like old photos, or maybe negatives, of themselves. They looked as empty as I felt. My voice box’d closed again. When our locomotive whistled going into the curve on a kudzu-smothered ridge, I tried to mimic it. I tried to scream like that monster two-six-two engine.

Nothing came out.