“Who’s back there?” Darius said.

I bit my bottom lip.

“Mice? Nazis? Cmon out, whoever you are.”

I sat up. Darius stared at me in the slanted rectangle of the rearview.

“Jumping Jesus,” he said. “What’re you doing back there, Danny boy?”

My shrug didn’t explain much, I guess.

“Git,” Darius said. “Leave me be.”

I picked up my pocketknife and other gear, and pussy-footed up the aisle, half expecting Darius to swat all my stuff out of my hands, push me down, and tell me how only creeps did what I’d just done. He kept sitting, though. He didn’t look at me, not even a glance in the rearview.

I got off the bus. Its baggage holders stood empty. Jumbo must’ve carried my bag upstairs. He must’ve enlisted everyone else’s help-everyone’s but Mister JayMac’s and Darius’s-to play a joke on me. Ha ha. As I left the garage, Darius stayed slouched behind the steering wheel: hollow-eyed, hair-trigger, mute.

27

That evening, after dinner, a rap on our door. The room seemed smaller than usual because, during our road trip, a carpenter had put together a bed for me, with a headboard and sliding storage drawers under the mattress-my belated due as a Hellbender.

Anyway, the rapping startled us because we hadn’t heard anything, no tattle-tale creak of steps or floorboards. We should’ve heard something: I sat scribbling a letter to Mama Laurel, while Jumbo, despite hating most war-related stuff, read Burma Surgeon-because, as he put it, “Colonel Seagrave devotes himself to healing, not destruction.” Finally, though, we did hear.

Jumbo opened the door without getting up or losing his place. Kizzy Lorrows, a brown gnome of a long-haired Seminole woman. Her arms had flour on them, a rime like the gritty blow on a plum. So did half her forehead. She wiped her hands on her apron and pointed into the room at me.

“Danl, you got a telephone caw. Long distance. Better git yosef downstairs licky-spiddle.”

“That would be senseless,” Jumbo said. “Senseless.”

“His mama wants to talk to him. She don’t know his tongue stove up. He am told her.”

I stood up. I shook my head. Mama didn’t like the phone, but I should’ve guessed she’d eventually ring up to hear me stammer.

Well, eventually’d come, and Kizzy dismissed my head shakes with a floppy-wristed wave. “Ever minute you tarry you toss good money at them telephone folks. Cmon, honey boy.”

“I’ll speak for him,” Jumbo said. He got up and nodded at me. Kizzy barely reached his waist.

I grabbed notebook and pencil and hurried after them, my heart cinched and a-gallop. Kizzy let us run ahead of her down the two staircases to the foyer where a box-and-cradle phone hung on the wall. Jumbo had to bend over to use it. (Kizzy’d used a stool.)

“Mrs Boles, I’m your son’s roommate, Henry Clerval,” Jumbo told my mother. “Daniel is fine.”

Tell her I have larinjitus, I scribbled in my notebook.

“Except, I’m sorry to inform you, he’s contracted a severe case of laryngitis,” Jumbo said. “Otherwise, his strength and vigor put the rest of us to shame.”

Kizzy gave us both a scornful squint and strutted back to the kitchen, swinging her arms like a Munchkin. The parlor and game room were empty. Most of the other boarders had gone over to McKissic Field for a community softball tournament.

I wrote, Say its temporary say its from cheering to hard.

“Yessum. We won the last game of an otherwise frustrating road trip. Daniel played well.” He covered the mouthpiece. “Wherefore… why this subterfuge? Why not the truth?”

Upset her, I wrote. She’d want to come down here.

“When?” Jumbo said. “Why, quite recently.” He covered the mouthpiece again. “Under the aspect of eternity,” he told me, then spoke into the mouthpiece again: “Yessum, he plays hard, eats well, and sleeps a sufficiency.”

Mama said something.

“Yessum, plenty of sleep. Plenty.”

I held up a new message: SayIll call later say Im writing a letter. That last told the holy truth. No one could call me a neglectful son.

Jumbo gagged the mouthpiece with his hand. “She wishes to talk to you.” I shook my head. Jumbo slapped me with a look. “Yessum, he still has the use of his ears. No, no infection. No ear ache. A moment.” He passed me the tubelike earpiece. Static hissed at me, rough electrical surf.

“Danny?” Mama said from hundreds of miles away. “Danny?”

Jumbo leaned into the tuliplike cup of a speaker. “He’s listening, Mrs Boles.”

“Danny… I miss… I miss you.”

“And he you in return, Mrs Boles,” Jumbo said.

“Thank you, Mr Clerver,” Mama said. “Danny, Colonel and Mrs Elshtain got plans to visit Highbridge this weekend. Come Sunday, it’s the Fourth. They’ll want to see you. I’m sending you a little something by way of Miss Tulipa. Look for it.”

“Yessum,” Jumbo said. “He will.”

“ ’Bye. Loveya. ’Bye now. ’Bye,” Mama said, her voice lost in the screak and gabble of the line.

Jumbo took the earpiece from me and cradled it. “Lying to a devoted parent robs one of the regard of honest men. Perhaps you have cause, perhaps you do not.”

And if I dont, I wrote, Im no longer a REAL PERSON???

“Cut to the quick.” Jumbo trudged across the foyer to the stairs, then went up, his body windowed between the balusters like a person caught in the frames of a film strip. Like the creature in the Frankenstein movies.

Anyway, I didn’t want to go upstairs with Jumbo-not yet, at least. He’d helped me with the telephone call, but he’d also accused me of lying, of not being a REAL PERSON. To hell with him, let him go.

Tardily, I followed Kizzy into the kitchen. At her center island, she stood rolling out dough for a huge blackberry and dewberry cobbler.

“Yo mama sweet to caw you, Danl. Course, mamas aint got much chice but to worry bout they chirren-s bred in, like a quail dog’s urge to pint.”

Kizzy’d stayed late. Sometimes she did. The kitchen of McKissic House (so long as she didn’t have to scrub pots or throw-mop the linoleum) gave her a sharper sense of home, I figured, than the four-room box of shingles, tarpaper, and sheet metal, over by Penticuff Strip, where she lived. Her “chirren”-Muscles said she had seven-had all grown up and married. All but a no-account son or two had moved away, to Atlanta or Chicago, and these homeboys, depending on how you viewed the matter, either didn’t torment Kizzy any longer or flat-out ignored her. Kizzy’s husband, a man she still called Oliver Bob, had died during the corn harvest of ’21, under a buckboard driven by a rattlesnake-mean white farmer.

I lit into scrubbing a pot tonight’s KP squad had left in the sink. I plunged into that pot up to my elbows. Above the sink, I could look through both a rippled window pane and the torn mesh of the screened-in porch.

Through them I saw the carriage house. An ivory trellis guided a strangle of rose vines up it to a raised window with a crooked jamb and two broken shutters. Darius slept there, over a storage room for ball equipment, over the garage where the Brown Bomber ticked and simmered. What did Darius do up there when he couldn’t sleep-when the call of another life clanged inside him like a fire alarm?

Kizzy said, “I told you Miss Giselle’s got no chirren. That’s true. She don’t. Cain’t have none. Once, thuddy-fo, thuddy-five years ago, she and Mister JayMac did have a chile. Come to em dumpling-fat, pink as a fresh red wriggler. But it took Miss Giselle bettern a day to have her, and when the baby do come, the secundines-what my mama cawed the foller-long-didn’t want to roller.”

I revved my elbow, but kept my ear cocked to Kizzy’s story. She’d begun it soon as she’d noticed me peering through the honeysuckle-loaded gloom at Darius’s window.