“Then she musta run up on Quip there in the dark,” Worthy Bebout said.
“Can it,” Muscles told Bebout, pretty mildly.
Henry’s blotchy face crawled with embarrassment. “I have always treated your mother with courtesy, Miss Pharram. And she has always reciprocated, in word and deed, my regard for her. I decry this depreciation of her character.”
“Bushwa n Burma-Shave, Mr Clerval. Why do you lie to me? Yo’re her latest throb.”
Henry scraped his chair back and stood up. Phoebe’s hand slipped from his shoulder like a wind-nudged scarf. “I rarely lie,” he said. “Nor do I now. Mrs Pharram and I have never been paramours. Such allegations wound her more deeply than they ever could me; I resent them unequivocally on her behalf. Excuse me. I can hardly eat under these conditions.” He left the dining room and trudged upstairs. Noisily.
Phoebe sat down in his chair without trying to pull it back up to the table. Her feet didn’t reach the floor. “So which one of yall’s seeing my mama now? Or is it one of them rotten creeps out to Cotton Creek?”
“Phoebe, your mama’s got standards,” Muscles said. “She never messes with married men. That reduces the possibility she’ll hurt anyone but herself and her… her friend.”
“Whatm I, Mr Musselwhite? A hank of hair? And what’s my daddy, cannon fodder?”
Kizzy came in. I had the feeling she’d heard everything and bided her time until a chance to play peacemaker came up.
“Hush now, gal. They gon hear you aw the way over to the farmer’s market. Let the mens eat. Come in here with me and have some coconut cream pie.” She eased Phoebe out of Henry’s chair and stepped her back towards the kitchen, hugging Phoebe to her with a flour-dusted arm.
“I don’t like coconut,” Phoebe said. “I told you that bout a zillion times, Kizzy. A zillion n one.”
“Then don’t eat it. Have a slice of my apple instead.”
At the door, Phoebe made Kizzy halt. She turned back towards the table and pierced me with a glittering, green-eyed stare. “Did you tell em, Danny? Did you make shore ever last one of em knew?”
I couldn’t speak.
“Knock it off, Phoeb,” Muscles said. “This is crap.”
“What’s to t-t-tell?” I said. “There’s nothing to tell.”
Phoebe’s eyes seemed to pinwheel a question at me, then a look of understanding, and finally a thank-you-or, at least, a grudging smile.
Kizzy banged her hip into the swinging door and more or less dragged Phoebe through it into a realm of wood-stove heat and Kizzy-made delectables.
52
Eufaula had a decent ball club. Early in the season the Mudcats’d climbed to second on several occasions, jockeying with Opelika and LaGrange for the league lead. They always played us tough, especially when Zaron Childs pitched for them. That Friday evening Childs shut us out on a two-hitter, yielding safeties only to Worthy Bebout and to Norm Sudikoff as a pinch hitter. Milt Frye announced the Gendarmes had routed the Mockingbirds over to Quitman. Their win dropped us one game off the pace, with ten games remaining.
In the clubhouse, after Mister JayMac had praised Childs for his pitching and retreated to the ticket office, Curriden groused, “Childs threw great, but Mister JayMac’s great-niece softened us up for the bastid at dinner.”
“Don’t blame Phoebe,” Muscles said. “We stunk.”
“Look who got our hits-Bebout, who didn’t know what she was talking about, and Sudikoff, who wasn’t there to hear. Sidewinder Childs didn’t beat us. Phoebe Pharram did.”
“It’s a poor sort of man who can’t overcome some vexatious talk to play up to his capabilities,” Henry told Curriden.
“Listen to Mr Zero-for-Four,” Curriden said. “And didn’t that little gal’s ‘vexatious talk’ chase you clean off?”
“Can it,” Lamar Knowles said. “The game’s over.”
For some reason, everybody canned it. We all showered and dressed in a starched and testy silence.
On Saturday afternoon, calmer and better rested, we drubbed the Mudcats with a barrage of extra-base hits and a sideshow of stolen bases. Meanwhile, the Mockingbirds beat the Gendarmes. These results locked us and the ’Darmes in another first-place tie, our second of the month. We just had to keep the heat on Emmett Strock and his gang.
Eufaula’s manager, Grover Traffley, worked to stymie our momentum. He called on Zaron Childs, on one day’s rest, to face us again. Childs yielded nine hits, but only three runs, and the Mudcats beat us by scraping up a patchy rally in the top of the ninth and holding us scoreless in our final at bat. Naturally, the Gendarmes beat the ’Birds again, and we fell a game off the lead with eight games left, our last three a shoot-em-up showdown at McKissic Field.
Henry went out the window. He figured me dead to the world, but I heard him. The heat’d come down so pitiless on Highbridge that, before lying down, I’d yanked my sheets off my bed, carried them down the hall, and soaked them in cold water in the shower stall. Then I’d spread them on my mattress, stripped naked, and stretched out on them across from our fan. Doing all that had miffed Henry, but he’d’ve never admitted it, even if I’d driven bamboo slivers under his fingernails. Me, I didn’t care. Somehow or other, I had to get cool.
Anyway, I heard him when he went out. Without even trying, a guy Henry’s size could make a window-sash weight bump in its groove. He took up so much space that, when he left, you felt a Henry-shaped pocket in the air. I sat up, my chest already dry as talc, my backside still damp from the clammy sheets.
Had Pearl the opposum come back? I crept over and peered out. Henry’d already reached the fire stairs’ second-floor landing. I ducked back inside and pulled on a pair of jeans, nearly zippering my cock in my rush to follow him.
“It aint Pearl,” I told myself on the fire stairs. “Not even Henry’d give up this much sleep to befriend a possum.” A judgment I right quick proved.
Henry’d angled off into the pole-bean rows making up one corner of the victory garden between McKissic House and the bungalow behind it. I crept barefooted down the fire stairs and over the grass after him. A craggy chunk of moon silvered the garden, and Henry’s head and chest poked up so high I could see him picking his way even among the curling vines. Although he’d sworn a few days back he seldom lied, I knew he’d lied to me at least once. Also, his old impersonation of a human being was a Big Lie, one he ached to make true.
Anyway, creeping through velvety squash leaves, I half expected Miss LaRaina to spring up like Ruth amid the corn, a gleaner of leftover male hungers come to feed not only her weird Elimelech’s appetite but also her own. So it dumfounded me when the voice I heard talking to Henry belonged not to Phoebe’s wayward mama, but to Mister JayMac’s porcelain-pretty wife, Miss Giselle.
“Why here?” she said. “Darius’s old apartment would’ve been more private.” Leaves hid the woman from me, but even lying belly down with my cheek on a root-laced mass of clay, I knew her voice.