“Telegram’s signed, ‘Laurel Boles, your loving mother,’ ” the clerk said. “Evening.” And before Jumbo could ask him who’d put him up to such a crappy stunt, he tossed his message down and scrammed. I turned and flung that goat at the wall. It burst a belly seam and spilled some stuffing. One of its horns twiddled out of true and flopped like a bird dog’s ear.

I walked to the window, grabbed the curtains, and began to cry like the rain. Jumbo stepped off his bed, with a rustle of ticking and a drum-brush creak of the springs, and towered at my back. He had no more notion what to do or say than I did. All I knew was, my.432 batting average and my prestidigitation at shortstop didn’t amount to a phony two-bit piece if I was homesick and crammed to my eyeteeth with fury. So Jumbo did something to distract me. He turned me around.

“Turkey Sloan,” he said. “Turkey Sloan probably wrote the ditty read to us by that… by that shitass impersonator of a Western Union man. Who helped Sloan?”

Buck Hoey, I thought, my comforter in the locker room.

“Buck Hoey,” Jumbo guessed. “Evans, Sosebee, and Sudikoff: malcontents, troublemakers.”

I’d known Hoey was my enemy, but it despunked me to hear a whole list of fellas who wanted to tire-iron me.

Jumbo read this news in my eyes. “Laugh at them. Laugh with them. Their playfulness”-he nodded at the poem- “may ride on spite, but it yet remains playfulness.” He picked up and looked at the poem. “This has some crude wit, Daniel.” He handed it to me.

I read it twice, memorizing it against my will, then tore it into confetti and hurled the pieces at Jumbo. He blinked in the face of my conniption, as one scalelike flake landed on and hung from his eyelid.

“Daniel,” he said. “Daniel.”

He may’ve meant to calm me, or to chide, but the weirdness of my name on his lips, the puzzle of what it told, lifted my hackles the way the stadium lights had cable-jumped him. I could feel my skin glowing. I reached down and picked up the stuffed goat that’d bounced off the wall. Hissing, I got my fingers into its split seam and gutted it. I popped its eye buttons, dehorned it, twisted its tail off, mangle-snapped its legs. Stuffing flew around us like the insulation blown from an attic when a devil wind’s sprung its roof. Anyway, Sloan and Hoey’s goat lay here and there in pieces, although I still had its whitish silver pelt in my hands. I knelt on the floor, gasping and hammering my fist.

Jumbo pinched my shoulders and drew me to my feet. His hands fumbled at my shirt, setting it straight, giving me an Army gig line.

“Let’s talk to that unprincipled clerk.” I let him guide me through the door and down the stairs. At the registration desk, the clerk sat listening to a radio. When he saw Jumbo and me marching towards him, his face seemed to pull across his cheekbones; he looked embalmed and rouged. He clicked off the radio like a man caught lollygagging.

“Who hired you to play a Western Union man?” Jumbo asked.

“That’s private information.” The clerk squirmed.

“No law protects mischief makers. Your allegiance has a vile monetary cast.”

“Loyalty to those who pay you isn’t a crime. Usually, it’s what they pay you for.”

“To how many buyers do you extend your loyalty?”

“That’s no business of yours either.” Squirming more.

“But if I paid you for it, it could be, yes?” Jumbo closed the Lafayette ’s counter book and leaned over it on one muscular forearm. “YES?”

The clerk pulled back. “What’d you have in mind?”

“NOTHING!!!” Jumbo boomed. “We know who paid you. Why should we bribe you for information already in our possession?”

“Bribe me? Listen-”

“LaGrange has a movie theater?” Jumbo cut him off in the shank of his huff. “We need the diversion of a film.”

“A movie theater?” The clerk was confused.

“I know your city supports at least one.”

“We have three. The Roxy’s nearest, just down the street.”

“When does its next feature presentation begin?”

“Seven thirty,” the clerk said, and Jumbo turned me towards the Lafayette ’s revolving door. “But it’s Saturday, right? The fourth Saturday of the month?”

“Yes,” Jumbo said.

“Then yall can’t go there tonight. You wouldn’t want to.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“Fourth Saturday of the month. It’s nigger night at the Roxy, place’ll be crawling with em.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“Well, the rain could hold a few of em out. But it’s finally stopping”-he nodded at the lobby’s only window-“and you’d have to declare martial law to keep em out after a day as dull as this un. Why don’t yall try the Cairo or the Pastime? They have colored-only balconies, but yall wouldn’t run slam into the foppery of nigger night.”

“My profoundest secret”-Jumbo leaned into the clerk’s face-“is that I am an honorary nigger.”

“A what?”

“And Daniel, whom others paid you to mock, cares less for his seatmates’ color than for the quality of the film.”

“Okay.” The clerk produced a copy of the LaGrange Daily News. “At the Cairo, Reveille with Beverly . At the Pastime, a Mickey Rooney thing. At the Roxy, a triple bill yall wouldn’t care to-”

“Hush,” Jumbo said.

“Yessir,” the clerk said.

And after a quick bite to eat in the nearby Magnolia Café, Jumbo and I hit the sidewalk, not in a downpour but a tingly drizzle, and walked through the early twilight to the Roxy for a triple feature of some sort.

24

It was nigger night at the Roxy for sure. Even the rain couldn’t spoil these folks’ Saturday evening. They’d turned out in chattering, straggle-in mobs. Groups of them clogged the sidewalk under the marquee and stretched around the corner from the box-office window.

One double file hugged the Roxy’s brick wall in a futile effort to keep the drizzle from beading their hair or soaking their out-for-fun finery. They couldn’t go to the ballpark to watch their Gendarmes bruise the Hellbenders again, but they could catch a delicious scream fest-three classic chillers for the price of one-here at the Roxy. The storm had no power to chain them in their mill houses.

The Roxy’d thrown LaGrange’s coloreds-and any other soul open-minded enough to wait for a ticket-a horror festival. The marquee told the story:

FRANKENSTEIN

BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN

SON OF FRANKENSTEIN

Boris Karloff as the Bogeyman to End All Bogeymen

When Jumbo saw the marquee and realized what he’d let himself in for, he had second thoughts. He mumbled something kindly about Reveille with Beverly. But I wanted this triple feature. I’d never seen a one of these films (even though I’d read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in high school), and I hoped the films would shear my mind away from dumbass thoughts of getting back at Hoey and his pals.

We finally reached the ticket window, and I handed in my money. Jumbo pushed up right behind me.

“If you haven’t already seen Frankenstein,” he said, “you may find it a… a primitive dramatic vehicle.”

Did he want to talk me out of seeing it? The white girl in the booth, with her hair in a kind of mesh oriole’s nest, said, “Ticket money, sir.” Jumbo paid her and shoved behind me into the salty popcorn smells of the lobby.

In its crush, he said, “Bride of Frankenstein surpasses in quality the film to which it is the sequel, and Son of Frankenstein features Karloff’s last essayal of the role that made him famous and a good performance by Bela Lugosi as Ygor. Should we stay for all three, however, we’ll violate curfew.”

Jumbo stood out like an ostrich in a parade of penguins. His whisper boomed above even the feisty talk of those black folks, and some of them looked at him like he’d arrived aboard an ambulance.