Suddenly, the Brown Bomber’s taillights jinked out of view and its hippoish side appeared in silhouette: a black rectangle with windows into a bigger blackness. Sound of rocks sliding on tin. The bus’s nose, behind its headlights, kept moving downward until a berm of earth and night had eaten the lights and swallowed the entire bus. Now I had no floating embers to follow and no sure way to recognize Darius’s turnoff when I came to it.
I kept walking. The DDT smell and the edgeless blackness all around me made me think I’d traipsed into the limbo where sick or worried people go when they filch a wink or two of shuteye from their pain. Nowhere. I groped along, though, and came to the side road, a dirt trail, where Darius’d vanished. Every step down this trail sent a lightning bolt up my spine. Shrubbery clustered near, and some sort of tree, an orphan plum or holly, grew up from the inlet of a cotton field, shielding most of the Bomber but its hood. I’d’ve never found the bus at the bottom of this cut without tracking it from my cabin’s very doorstep. I went up to the Bomber and banged on its side.
Behind me, a revolver’s hammer clicked. A gun barrel poked me in the neck.
“Tell me fast what the hell you want.”
“Darius.” (No stammer.)
“Jesus, Danl, that you?” The pistol barrel stopped poking me. “Man, you coulda got kilt. What you doing here?”
After saying his name, I couldn’t get another clear word out. Darius cursed and forced me up into the Bomber, whose engine was still cooling, popping and ticking. He prodded me down the main aisle to the long seat at the back.
“This spot’s yo favorite. Anyway, it’s somebody’s. Sit.”
Somehow, in that blackness, Darius seemed solider than me. I was a ghost, my skin and bones leached out and water-thin. Without his hand around my upper arm, I’d’ve vaporized into the stars like some kind of pale gas.
“Sorry bout the gun. I uz taking a leak when you hit the road and come slapping down. Nigh on to scairt the piss back into me, white boy.”
That was funny, I guess, but I couldn’t laugh. Darius showed me his piece again, a snub-nose with a mother-of-pearl handle. He held it not to threaten, but to give me a chance to admire the way it shone in the cloudy starlight slanting in.
“They come to neck-burn me, Danl, well, I send a few on ahead befo I have to tap-dance air.” He pocketed the revolver in his khaki work pants. “Whatn hell you want?”
“You sl-sleep here?”
“On the Bomber? Sho. Better than a Comfy Cabin any day but Christmas. Plenty of beds to pick from. No loud radios playing. Hot and hot running breezes. Yeah, I sleep here.”
“Out in the c-country?”
“I like my privacy.”
“What about over in Quitman? Or L-Lanett?”
“What are you anyways, official Hellbender bed-checker? Or you jes want to thow yo pity at me?”
My tongue rolled up behind my top front teeth and stuck like a wet cabbage leaf.
“Suppose I thow it back, Danl? Daddy dead. Yo mouth don’t work. Rooming with old Mumbo-Jumbo Clerval. How you like my pity dripped on you like sorghum?”
Not much. Turnabout maybe represented fair play, but it mocked my Christian concern for Darius by putting my own dumb mug in the mirror he held up. He hummed something bluesy and reached a paper sack out from under our seat. The sack held a bottle. Pray God it isn’t sloe gin, I thought.
Darius swigged, wiped his mouth, and offered me a pull. It stank like sour-mash whiskey, the cheapest and strongest kind. I shook my head.
“Lissen, Danl. In nearlybout every CVL city but Cottonton, I know womens. Who give me rest, and take it too, and give it back again. Only in this redneck town do I got to park in the boonies to nab my Z’s. Some ways, though, it’s a relief. It’s peaceful.” He swigged again. “The part that aint, aint got nothing to do with where I sleep. It got to do with how I live. Only times I live jes like I want, I’m sleeping, and where I do it don’t strip it down to”-jabbing his chin at the snow-blanket mirage of the nearby cotton-”to that, to what you can see out a window or pint to on a map.”
I said, “Y-yeah,” and got up. Darius didn’t try to stop me. I’d trespassed his private property, even if it moved with him like the dusty shell of a turtle.
“Better foot it back. I done found my spot, and toting you back’s like to stir some pleecemans to hassle me out of here.”
I laddered up the aisle, plucking each seat back to keep from falling over.
“Shhhhhhh,” Darius shushed me. Loud.
Did he really think Clem Eggling or some other clay-footed rube out here in deepest Alabamastan was going to hear me? I glanced back through the gloom. Darius toasted me with his bottle and canted his head to one side.
“Look down. And hush yo plinking. You gon wake the boy.”
I looked. A good-size bundle lay on a seat about midway along the bus, a lumpy smudge on the cushion. It breathed. I squatted for a closer study: Euclid, Darius’s half brother and our sometime batboy, depending on if the away park in question would let him fetch for us. Ordinarily, Mister JayMac made him stay in Highbridge. The only way I could imagine him getting to Cottonton was by stowing away in the luggage bin. Tonight, Euclid slept like a rain-ripened bag of concrete mix, heavy and hard,
“Tuckered,” Darius said. “Prostrated by his ride over.”
No kidding. But Euclid’s being huddled there cheered me. Darius had some company, a pick-me-up warmer than his whiskey and not quite so dire as his handgun.
“Anything happen to me,” Darius said, “that boy got to git past it to his own tomorry. Remind him o that, Danl.”
Remind him? What could happen to Darius? He could drink himself to a retching stupor. He could use his pistol to take a core sample of his own gray matter. That scared me-not the first notion, but the second. A barn owl hooted from somewhere off-road, and the tremolo of its call echoed through the bus like a sighing brake. How could I leave?
“Go on. You done misunderstood me. I’m okay. Got me no-hitters to thow, homers to knock. Jes cain’t figger out where. Anyways, git!” I climbed down into the velvety dust. Darius slid over to an open window and peered out at me.
“Quip hadn’t no sass on his speedball tonight. Too bad. Mine a turned them Weevil bats to dick sponge. Everybody knows it, but aint nobody gon let it happen.”
“G-g-good night,” I said.
Darius had parked behind a full-blown holly. The needle tips of its glossy leaves pricked me as I squeezed past it to the path up to the main road. A bauble of moon-varnished blood erupted on one thumb, and I sucked it as I walked.
Darius didn’t shoot himself or Euclid. He didn’t drive the Bomber off to Birmingham to cadge a tryout with the Black Barons or to Moton Field near Tuskegee in hopes of becoming a replacement flyer in the air squadron commanded by Benjamin O. Davis, Jr. He showed up at The Fields the next afternoon at three and spent about twenty minutes briefing our regulars on how to hit the Boll Weevil starting hurler’s best pitch, a forkball. We hit it. We hit it so often Eggling yanked the guy by the fourth.
After that, all the homies in Cottonton’s open-sided flea box hung around less to root their Weevils on than to watch our starters, even Curriden and Musselwhite, put on a power-hitting show that made their fielders wish Eggling had anted up enough cash money for a fence-to spare them the shame of chasing down balls that in any other CVL park would’ve been ground-rule home runs. To compensate, they started playing deeper and deeper, but guys like Junior, Skinny, Dunnagin, Snow, and me countered by dropping Texas leaguers in front of them like mortar shells.
We whipped Cottonton by fourteen runs, to achieve a split, and drove to Lanett the next morning for a four-game weekend series-with Euclid out of the luggage bin and in a front seat across from Mister JayMac. (He got chewed out for stowing away, though-royally chewed out.) At Chattahoochee Field, the Linenmakers, even though last in league standings, played us tough as cross-tie spikes. We split with them too, winning on Friday night, dropping both ends of a Saturday twin bill, and nosing by them on Sunday on Henry’s home run, his twenty-eighth of the season, twelve more than the next guy, Lon Musselwhite, a teammate, and Ed Bantling, the Gendarme catcher.