Brittle Innings by Michael Bishop Page B

lampshade. Marian Anderson at the Lincoln Memorial dangled from between a pair of Venetian-blind slats. I took in every detail because the room looked like a hand grenade had deranged it.
    “See there,” Mama said. “You’ve done woke up Danny.”
    “Get out of here!” Daddy yelled. “Go back to bed!”
    I stood there in my too-short pajama bottoms, and Daddy hurled a rolled-up magazine at me. It opened out and slid to rest at my feet. All the coverless copies of Life lay about like stepping-stones to a loony bin.
    “Yell at me if you like!” Mama said. “Go ahead! But leave your son be!”
    “Mine, is he? Look at him. He don’t favor me. He don’t favor me a bit.”
    “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    “Danny don’t look, or do, like I do. Moren likely, some smoothie planted the boy while I was over to Tahlequah trying to make some dough.”
    “Filth! An adult’d be ashamed to say it.”
    “I am ashamed. My son aint my son. My wife let somebody else spike her.” Daddy’s high pink color told his drunkenness.
    Mama cried, “Lousy redskin scum!” and started for him. A Life squirted out from under her. She toppled before she could begin flailing away. Daddy caught her, but yanked her sideways and dumped her on the sofa like a potato sack. She made for him again, cursing and wailing. But Daddy seemed an even worse monster, the way he’d insulted us. I charged, nearly slipping on a photo page. Daddy held me off with one hand. “Lousy redskin scum!” I said. A curse good enough for Mama was fine for me. I started to curse him again when he chopped me in the throat with his hand. I crashed. It felt like he’d knocked my head off. If I looked back, I’d see my body jumping around like a neck-wrung chicken’s. I wanted to scream, but couldn’t even gargle.
    Daddy’s bloated face came down for a look-see. “He don’t favor me, Laurel. And he don’t do like I do, neither.”
    “Baseball,” Mama said from the sofa. “You taught him how to play. He does that the way you do.”
    “Mebbe so. But it’s a trick.” Daddy gave me a goatish wink. “Well, you bastid, your mama’s secret’s safe with me.”
    He slammed out the door without even scrounging up a change of clothes. Late August, early September, Hitler messing up folks’ lives in Europe. You heard about it on the radio. Like a fight between your parents scrawled in letters the size of buildings.
    “Dick! Come back!” Mama shouted at Daddy, who’d just said he wasn’t. Finally, she realized her boy lay hurt.
    My voice box had closed. I sat up amongst black-and-white portraits, still lifes, scenes of war. Except for the mark on my throat, I must’ve looked more or less okay. When I started breathing again, I was okay. But I didn’t talk again for two years. And when I did, I st-st-stammered.

    *

    On the troop train, I pulled on my clothes and made my way between curtained berths to the coupling where I liked to ride. The shanties of poor white and colored sharecroppers clicked by like old photos, or maybe negatives, of themselves. They looked as empty as I felt. My voice box had closed again. When our locomotive whistled going into the curve on a kudzu-smothered ridge, I tried to mimic it. I tried to scream like that monster two-six-two engine.
    Nothing came out.

5

    T hat night between cars lasted forever. I kept expecting Pumphrey to come through. The sun did come up, finally, and we rattled into Georgia over the Chattahoochee River and a swaying trestle bridge. The tracks looked like poured mercury. Early June, but already godawful hot. If we stopped in some podunk town or weedy switching yard, gnats and noseeums attacked us in eggbeater tornadoes.
    Oklahoma got hot—its dust storms could blast you raw—but Georgia’s heat came like the rolling smoke of a junkyard tire fire. Once, its land had been wooded, but loggers and peanut fanners had cut the trees and turned it into a clayey plain. We chugged over it into a sprawl of