“Oh, puh-leeze!” Phoebe said a few minutes into this show. “Act yore age, Mama!”

“Mind how you talk,” Miss LaRaina said amiably.

Phoebe got up and stalked all the way from the bleachers to the Hellbender dugout. After talking to Phoebe, Mister JayMac stood on the dugout step and yelled, “LaRaina, go home! You’re distracting the troops!”

“Could’ve fooled me,” Miss LaRaina yelled back. “A flat Coke’s got more fizz than this sorry crew!” But after blowing a kiss off her palm at Muscles (to Reese Curriden’s chagrin), she seized her pocketbook and sashayed out of view.

Finally, Mister JayMac whistled us in. “Yall stink today,” he said. “I doubt you could field a tumbleweed with a tennis net. A few of yall need deodorizing worsen the Highbridge sewage-treatment plant. Go home. Tomorrow’s another day, but it’d better be bettern this one or I’ll sell yall to Johnny Sayigh and move to Cuba.” He stomped off.

After practice, Phoebe met Jumbo and me in the parking lot at the Brown Bomber. She had on overalls, bebop shoes, and a floppy short-sleeved shirt that made her arms look as snappable as day-lily stalks.

“Come to dinner with Mama and me on Friday after the Marble Springs game,” she said. “Mama said I could ask.”

The invitation surprised me. It confused me a little too. I held the back of my hand to Jumbo’s stomach to ask if Phoebe meant him too.

Phoebe blushed. “I was asking you, Danny,” she said. “It, well, it wouldn’t…” She stared at her bebops.

From the bus, a rude farting sound and ugly laughter.

Jumbo said, “It wouldn’t look good for a bachelor to visit your house while your father’s still abroad.”

“Her daddy’s not a broad!” Turkey Sloan shouted out the nearest window. “He’s a captain!”

“Will you come?” Phoebe asked me.

Ack. I’d already had one dinner with Phoebe and her mama, and it hadn’t exactly gone down like an oyster on a slide of bourbon. Also, when Miss LaRaina wondered what kissing Jumbo would be like, Phoebe’d said, “Mama, that’s vile!” But what, when she’d cried that, had worried her more-the health of her folks’ marriage or the foulness of Jumbo’s looks? She’d really broadcast mixed signals on that one.

“Accept her invitation,” Jumbo said.

Miss LaRaina, at the curb in a gray ’38 Pontiac, mashed her horn-once, twice. Phoebe peered at me, half pleading but more than a smidgen peeved.

“He accepts,” Jumbo said. “Don’t you, Daniel?” His hand seized the back of my skull. Out of Phoebe’s view, he pushed my head forwards and, with a yank on my hair, tugged it back to upright. Then he let go.

“After Friday’s game then,” Phoebe said. “We’ll give you a ride soon’s you’ve showered.” She sort of skipped towards her mama’s smoky old Pontiac.

The Bomber carried us Hellbenders back to McKissic House. A crew of them razzed me about Phoebe, but Darius kept as quiet as a gambler computing blackjack odds.

30

“Here.” Jumbo put his journal on my desk. “You’ve copied the first part of my log in your own hand.” He put my notebook down beside the log. “Continue. Act as my amanuensis, and copy the rest. One day, you can corroborate a story few would otherwise believe.”

Seeing the log and my notebook together embarrassed me, but I opened them and began reading the log where I’d left off, at Jumbo’s resurrection in the ice cave. With his blessing, I copied this new material as I read.

From Remorse to Self-Respect:

My Second Life

At the commencement of my new life, as throughout my old one, bitter cold scant afflicted me. I preferred it to the warmth of summer, responding to it as an assemblage of pistons, flywheels, and cogs responds to lubrication. My chief hindrance lay not in meteorological conditions, but in the body of my dead creator. I felt an obligation to keep it with me as both a macabre talisman and a relic of loathsome veneration. Wheresoever I ventured, I carried Frankenstein with me, initially slung over my shoulder or under my arm, but later arrayed on a sledge dressed with evergreen boughs, a rude travels, that I fastened by a barken harness to my waist and pulled, as a bride goes before her wedding train. Unlike a bride, I sought to deflect attention from my passage and so invariably travelled by night, frequently through thick forests or over rugged terrain. More than once, after a violent spill, I had to retrieve my passenger and lash him more firmly to his carrier.

What thoughts I had-what overriding goal-I cannot fully recall. I understood, I think, that in my second advent I had no more hope of gathering companions or of confounding likely foes than I had known in the unholy year of my first reign. Thus, I wandered the most remote and desolate places of Siberia, eschewing any human contact but availing myself of every chance to study the habits of the strange beings whose lands I traipsed.

As a result, having first mastered a language by eavesdropping on another drilling in French, I quite early added to my repertoire not only English and German, but also the curious Hyperborean tongues of the Kets, the Yukaghirs, the Luorawetians, and the Gilyaks. To these I added the dialects of other peoples scattered about the fjords and inlets of the Arctic Circle, not excluding the two chief dialects of the Innuits, or Esquimaux, across the Chukchi Sea in North America.

During one blizzard I took shelter in a hovel roofed with tundra blocks, chinked with peat moss, and protected on the northeast by gnarled cedars. In the dugout’s only room, the skeleton of a Cossack trapper, who had starved to death, kept me grinning company. I grew fonder of this mute lodger than I had ever been of Frankenstein, for I had no memory of abuse at his hands or of contumely from his lips. The corpses got on well, however, and I rejoiced in their undemonstrative friendship. Neither protested when I took the hovel’s only table as my desk.

Soon afterwards, I coaxed a corroded lamp into operation with oil from a covered bucket. With sufficient light to work by, I began to indite in my counterfeit of Walton’s cursive the texts of his epistles to Mrs Saville. As an icy northern siroc keened over the dugout, I scribbled for hours without respite.

Occasionally I paused to replenish the oil in my lamp or my paper from the stores of the Caliban. Several times, aghast at the indiscriminate rapaciousness of my hunger, I made a meal of stringy dried meat-fish, fowl, or mammal, I neither knew nor cared-purloined from a smokehouse earlier in my travels. Insofar as I knew diurnality, I finished my copy in sixor seven days and slumped across the table in a stupor of exhaustion.

Why such fever-blighted labour? Unless I discharged the obligations of my previous life, I felt, I could never turn the promise of my new incarnation to aught but catastrophe. That way I had already journeyed. I owed the ghost of Captain Walton my gratitude. In trying to tell his sister Mrs Saville of his activities, he had set down in all its grisly particulars the tale of my creation. He had also left a chronicle of my rejection and my subsequent career as a pitiless Fury. This record of my dashed hopes and my shameful crimes would henceforth lesson me. My debt to Walton for producing it demanded that I repay him by sending to Mrs Saville the letters, or legible copies of the letters, comprising that tale. Thus I had determined in the first lucid moments after my lightning-prodded rebirth. Perhaps selfishly, I had also resolved to claim the original documents as my own.

Dispatching even my copies of these epistles to Mrs Saville proved a formidable undertaking. I had sheltered miles from human habitation. No post-road or port was readily accessible. However, the unfortunate Cossack who had excavated the dugout had situated it near a river that hastened turbulently beneath a skin of ice to a bay on the Siberian Sea. With difficulty, I followed this frozen waterway to a bayside settlement, hauling on my travois my desiccated and indurate creator.