Brittle Innings

58

Like a rescue worker scratching through tornado wreckage, I reread Henry’s letter. Although Miss LaRaina’d left me some matches, and a wastebasket sat near enough to drop the packet in and burn it without setting the whole hospital afire, I put the letter back in its envelope and slid it under my mattress. What lies I’d been spoonfed, what mealy-mouthed crapola.

“Nurse!” I yelled. “NURSE!”

By the luck of the shift, I got the same slick honey who’d told me a doctor’d scissor-clipped the Saturday Herald so his Army Air Corps cousin could read the clip. Baloney. Bohunk Choctaw. Anyway, she came in with her boyish perky flip-do and her creamy butt-hugger of a uniform-looking cute, looking put upon-and eyeballed me like I was a bedrid stink beetle.

“You don’t have to shout, Danny. Push yore call button.”

“Miss Giselle burnt herself up. Henry threw Buck Hoey out of a tree. Hoey croaked. Henry’s scrammed. The Herald’s run it all, but yall’ve pulled a damn ol hush-it-up on me.”

“Darlin, who you been talkin to?”

“Why in hell’d you try to keep it from me?”

“Talk that way, I’ll have to fetch some FiSoHex and scrub yore naughty mouf out.”

“Hells and damns you scrub. Flat-out lies you suck like Life Savers.”

That raised her dander. “I do as I’m told.” She flounced back to corridor headquarters.

When Phoebe came in, I waylaid her the same way. I stormed and bellyached. She drank in my rant as much through her eyes as her ears and squinted with tomboy skepticism.

“Well?”

“I liked you better tongue-tied.”

“I liked you better on the up and up, playing straight and letting the chips-”

“You mean the ch-ch-chips.” She ratcheted like a slipped bicycle chain. “Look, relax. Uncle JayMac, grief-struck like he was, and still is, didn’t want to dump any more on you than you’d awready got. Is that a crime?”

“But yall lied!”

“Who squealed, Ichabod? Who told you?”

Well, I knew enough to shut up. Standing on the foredeck loudly denouncing liars, I knew enough to lie. “I ast this guy limping past my door with Saturday’s paper if I could see it. He let me s-s-see it.”

During September, I had two follow-up operations, physical therapy with support bars and crutches (reminding me of Henry’s reconditioning efforts in Missouri, after his self-directed height-reduction surgery), several sessions with an imported Camp Penticuff nutpick, and more time to brood and dismalize than a stalled front-line regiment with trench foot. I filled in the time by writing Mama Laurel letters and reading a long downbeat novel about a young British doctor with a clubfoot.

When I could hobble about on crutches, Dr Nesheim released me. I spent my last two days in Highbridge in my old attic room at McKissic House. Everything Henry’d brought to furnish or decorate it was gone: the bed with its plywood bracing, the homemade bookcase, the woven-grass divider, the matted photo of a William Blake drawing, everything. Mister JayMac’d wanted to stick me in a downstairs room until my departure for Tenkiller, to spare me the pain of climbing and descending, but I wanted no other room, even when I saw how changed-how naked, emptied out, and big-its stripping had left it. I said my struggles up and down the stairs would be therapeutic.

“Clerval snuck in to get the smaller items, we think,” Mister JayMac told me on Monday. “They were gone when Curriden and I dismantled the bed and the book shelves.” (Once gone, I noticed, Hellbenders ceased to qualify as misters.)

“Henry stole his own stuff?”

“That’s a contradiction in terms, Mr Boles. However, as a fugitive from justice and a lodger in arrears, he trespassed to retrieve it-a trick he may’ve learned from Darius.”

“He didn’t mean to kill Hoey,” I said. “I mean, killing just wasn’t Henry’s way.”

“Well, I wouldn’t’ve blamed him if he had. What I find hardest to take is him forsaking the near-accomplished dream-the stupidity that compelled it.”

“He loved me,” I said.

A muscle beside Mister JayMac’s eye twitched. “Neither Clerval nor anyone else has touched your notebooks. Your gear is all jes as you left it. Cept Kizzy washed and flat-ironed your Hellbender blouse and a whole pancake stack of skivvies.”

How did Mister JayMac even know about my notebooks-there in my knife-gouged school desk, with its inked-in scratches and doodles-if they hadn’t been touched?

And, I understood, my notebooks now probably contained the only copy of “From Remorse to Self-Respect: My Second Life” in existence anywhere. Henry’s original had gone to carbon during Miss Giselle’s suicide. I ran my fingers over the desk’s oaken lid, but didn’t try to peek inside its book compartment.

Mister JayMac went to the window by the fire stairs. He gazed out over the victory garden and down the hand-mowed slope past his gazebo to Hellbender Pond. It’d been a rain-starved September; the corn’d turned to brown-paper spindles, and the grass had yellowish heat circles of different sizes-accursed fairy rings-singed into it in overlaps and stand-alone compass loops.

“Why do you suppose Giselle did that, Danny?” He had his back to me. “Had I hurt her that bad?”

Well, I could only stare.

“Cat got your tongue again, Mr Boles?”

“Nosir. It’s a hard question.”

“She really did care for me. I wouldn’t see it.”

“She probably cared a lot,” I said. “Caring too much can chase you furious.”

Mister JayMac turned around. “As if you knew jackshit about it.” His gaze drifted to the faded place where Henry’s only matted picture had hung.

“Jackshit, jillshit-I thought you hated potty talk, sir.”

“I’ll have Euclid bring you up a fan, this hotbox could use one.” He left, shutting me up in that hotbox alone. I could hear him clippity-clopping to the landing below.

Twenty or so minutes later, Euclid came up with a fan about five years older than Henry’s old model.

“Where’d Henry go after he gave you that letter, Euclid? How’d he look? Have you told anybody else you saw him?”

“Nobody buh you.”

“Okay, okay. Answer my other questions.”

Euclid was sneaking into puberty. His jaw had widened, his chest had a new fullness. In his threadbare linen shirt, glossy hardware-store britches, and floppy-soled shoes, he set the fan on the floor and plugged it in.

“Come like a robber when Detta Rae honky-tonkin,” he said. “Tol me gib you the ledder. Took off same way he come. Look big n scairy, thass how he look.”

“Where’d he come from? Where’d he go?”

“How you spec me to know? Come from hell, Danbo. Went the same place Darius done gone.”

“The same place Darius…?” But Euclid just switched on the fan, which bumped around the floor like a wind-up frog, and left. Henry’s midnight visit had scared the Georgia bejabbers out of him.

I crutched over to my bed and sat down. I had a ticket back to Oklahoma in my pocket. I’d leave on Friday, first day of October. What would I do in Tenkiller when I got there, though? It crossed my mind my most profitable option might be standing in front of the Cherokee Feed Store cadging dimes from home folks who mistook me for a wounded soldier…