36

We lost Saturday’s game against Opelika. Buck Hoey didn’t get a hit. Junior, at third, made two errors throwing the ball all that unaccustomed way across the infield. Pete Hay pitched six innings, but left trailing the Orphans five to aught, with the visitors playing too heads-up for us to creep back into it.

“Criminy!” Curriden shouted from the dugout when Junior made his second error. “Tkink! This aint the lousy sand-lots!”

“Wish you’d thought before your little trip to Penticuff Strip last night.” Mister JayMac passed in front of Curriden, who promptly shut up.

Opelika ’s at bat went on and on. When we finally got our third out, Mister JayMac eased over and put a hand on my knee. “A fine thing for Colonel Elshtain and my sister to see on one of their rare visits to Georgia. Another loss to Opelika and a sorry-ass performance to boot. Tomorrow, Mr Boles, you’ll start both games at short. Plan on leading us to an uplifting Fourth of July victory. I won’t have Tulipa telling your mama that her son, owing to his bad judgment and selfishness, spent Independence Day in a state of bench bondage.”

“Two uplifting victories,” Darius said from his perch down the bench. “Cain’t let these fellas settle for jes one, sir.”

“Absolutely not.” Mister JayMac seemed almost cheery, like he’d expected us to lose this one, like losing it would keep us from losing on the Fourth. He clapped his hands in a boosterly way as the Hellbenders dragged in for another go at the Orphan pitcher, Lester Affleck.

Henry was hitless in three at-bats, with a strikeout and two pop-ups to the second baseman. Leading off the inning, he cracked another pop-up, this one foul. It splintered his bat and drifted into the crowd for strike one. Henry gave the bat a flip, caught it by the barrel, and banged its knob on home plate. You could hear the hollow twang, like a chord on a bamboo harp, all over the stadium. He tossed the broken bat to Euclid and trudged over to us for a new one.

Because of my benching, Miss Tulipa still hadn’t seen my new Red Stix model do a lick of work in the CVL. I unracked Mama’s gift, via Coach Brandon and the Elshtains, and carried it to Henry. He took it with a brain-dead look of distracted raptness and gave it a swing.

“Lord God,” Turkey Sloan said, “what you doing with that bloody toothpick, Jumbo?”

Henry turned his gaze on me. “I could break it too.” I shrugged. At least the Elshtains wouldn’t have to wait until tomorrow to see their gift in action.

In the batter’s box again, Henry threatened Lester Affleck with my Red Stix timber. The crowd, and every Orphan sub in Opelika ’s dugout, scoffed, cracking wise or booing. Henry did look like a country doctor with a tongue depressor dipped in off-color gentian violet. That was okay. I still expected him to silence the scoffers with a wrist-flick home run, just like in a movie. He didn’t, though. He struck out on the next two pitches, badly missing a pair of changeups and almost losing his footing both times.

“Hey, Jumbo, nex time git you a telephone pole!” a soldier in the stands shouted.

Henry returned to the dugout and handed me my bat. “It may have bowed today, but it is still unbloodied. To you, then, I leave its successful initiation tomorrow.”

Thanks a lot, I thought.

In any case, Affleck finished with a shutout, only one of three games all year in which we failed to score.

“Yall come out tomorrow for a big Independence Day to-do here at McKissic Field,” PA announcer Milt Frye urged what was left of our crowd. “Two games for the price of one. Barbecue on the grounds. At least one win or your money back. If we take em both, free prizes for everyone leaving after the second game. We’ve also got a War Bond rally, some down-home gospel singing, and a Big Surprise. Yall be here now!” Frye might’ve gone on another three minutes, but somebody tracked a needle on our scratchy 78 RPM of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and the blare of the anthem shut him up.

When I left that evening, a group of carpenters’d come back in to work on their mysterious system of ramps.

Along with most of my fellow boarders, I ate a light supper in McKissic House, then retired to the front porch to take the breeze. Mister JayMac and Miss Giselle drove by in their Caddy with Colonel and Mrs Elshtam, going to a dinner engagement somewhere out of town. It sort of scalded me, but also sort of relieved me, they hadn’t asked me along.

Upstairs in my room-Henry had clean-up duties-I copied out some more of Henry’s journal. These sections summarized his journey away from Alaska and his ten-to-fifteen-year ramble through the American Northwest. In Washington State, Oregon, and Idaho, he pretty much weaned himself away from meat eating to a diet of carrots, tubers, greens, berries, and nuts. He hid from men, though, and haunted the woods.

Here’s one passage:

Even in my estrangement from the friendlier aspects of humanity, in the Cascades I often knew a melancholy joy. One afternoon, I experienced it while seated on a boulder overlooking a creek picketed by trees and curtained on either side by leaf mulch and moss. The plangent gurgling of the water and the azure brilliance of the sky combined to inspirit me-to such a degree that I broke into one of the festival chants of the Oongpekmut.

I do not sing well. My voice has such a barbaric timbre that it may discomfit even me. On this afternoon, however, my chant poured forth like a nightingale’s warble. Although the birds themselves fell silent and insects ceased to chirr, I adjuged it as melodious as the nightingale’s-wrongly, of course. Two warriors stepped from the shrubbery beyond the streambed and shot at me with bows. Although the banal repetitiveness of man’s aggression towards me had become highly predictable, this attack took me by surprise. Would my author’s race always greet my appearance with hostility and violence? Europeans, Asians, Siberians, Anglo-Saxons-even Innuit unfamiliar to me-all reacted as if I posed a danger reauiring swift eradication. My attackers, whose arrows flew wide or rebounded from my granite throne, wore the dress of the Sahaptin group of North American Indians: Cayuse, Pahuse, or Wallawalla. I identified them by their vestments and, when they audibly conferred, by certain quirks of their Penutian-derived tongue.

As my shock quitted me, I struggled to my feet to expel a roar of warning and reproach. The leather-clad indigenes withdrew behind a wall of huckleberry bushes.

I roared again.

Fulminating thus, I leapt from my boulder into the verdant ground-cover only a short dash from their conference place. This tactic, advance rather than retreat, bemused and affrighted the warlike indigenes.

“Sasquatch!” one of them cried.

They fled, ripping through the foliage and calling out, as if to unseen confederates, “Sasquatch! Sasquatch!”

Thereafter, apprised anew of my seemingly irrevocable pariahhood, I again took care to avoid betraying my presence either to the natives of the region or to the disregardant Anglo-Saxon invaders. I nonetheless continued to reconnoiter the villages and towns of both groups. How often I heard the alien shibboleth “Sasquatch!” on their lips, uniting these foes in their fear and misapprehension of me. Thus, in my retreat from Oongpek and my subsequent stay in the Pacific Northwest, I became a legend, which had its origin and growth in a mortifying lie.

Henry came into our room a few minutes after I’d read this passage. He liked me copying his journal. Although he’d gone kayaking in front of the Elshtains, I seemed to be the only soul in Highbridge-or anywhere-who understood exactly what that kayak meant in the tangled weave of his life. Or, as he liked to call it, his second life.