I also got a kick out of the PFC announcing the game: “Now pitching for the Zanies, Whim-Wham? Dinkum-Do to center? And taking over at shortstop, Gumbo Giddyup?”
Three innings into the game, I figured out the Zany playing right field and going by the name Cuffy was none other than Darius Satterfield. His clown suit couldn’t hide his muscular lankiness. The greasy white makeup melting on his cheek bones and the green and purple wig raying out from his head like a crown of vat-dyed yarn-well, that crap kept me from making a positive ID for an inning or three, but it couldn’t blind me forever to the smoothness of Cuffy’s play or the whiplash grace of his hitting.
I wanted to wade down the bleacher tier and pull Darius aside for a chat, but I never got within a hundred feet of him till the same ended and he sat under an awning of the barracks building provided as the Zanies’ locker room. While Coach Brandon talked to his DI buddy, I limped into Darius’s line of sight. When he saw me, his eyeballs gave me a bounce and his hand snapped up like it meant to hold me at bay.
“Danl Boles. Sweet gentle Jesus.”
“What happened to the Splendid Dominicans, Darius?”
He studied me real good. “You look kinda puny, hoss. What happened to you?”
I gave him the short version and pressed my own question.
“Us Dominicans ran out of gas. Coupons. Working capital. Also goodwill. Mister Cozy got us all back to KayCee with him, but we had creditors galore and jes dropped apart. So I’m here today and mebbe tomorry as”-spreading the balloon sleeves of his arms-“a damn ol American-Afrique Zany.”
“Mister JayMac’d love to see you back in Highbridge.”
“Well, he aint big enough to beat me no mo, and I aint big enough to let him try.” He pulled off his wig and used it to daub at the sweat-runneled grease on his face. “Sorry bout yo setback, Danl. Real, real sorry.”
“He’s your daddy. At least you got one. Miss Giselle’s dead and he needs you.”
“I heard that, bout po Miss Giselle. But Mister JayMac needs me like a hound needs another tic.”
“You gonna stay with these… Zanies?”
“Nosir. Gonna quit em and join up. A man cain’t play ball in wartime. I guess his duty lies elsewhere, but the war angles gainst you and it’s a sorry style ball that gits played anyway. Take this turkey strut today.”
“The wrong team was wearing the clown suits.”
“Amen.”
“Still, you should go home. You should let Mister JayMac help you get into a decent unit. You should probably-”
“Danl, put yo cumulated wisdom in a croker sack with a cow flop and burn it fo a night light. Nice to see you again.”
Darius strolled around the corner and into the building. I tried to follow him. An MP with a billy and a.45 pistol in an unsnapped leather holster blocked my way: “Zanies only. You a Zany, kiddo?”
I tried to wait, to meet Darius when he came back out in his civvies with his teammates, but Coach Brandon found me, and took me home, and I never saw Darius again. So far as I know, he never played integrated pro ball, and I sometimes think he died overseas after enlisting-maybe right there at Camp Gruber-under a phony name.
62
Three years later I received a registered letter from Seattle, Washington. It contained round-trip airline tickets to Seattle from Tulsa, with stopovers in Denver, Salt Lake City, and Spokane. From Seattle, I had other tickets to Juneau, Alaska, from Juneau to Anchorage, and from Anchorage to Kodiak Island. The packet also contained a money order for two hundred dollars and a note:
Dear Daniel,
I have found your father’s grave on Attu Island, at the westernmost extremity of the Aleutian archipelago. Allow yourself two weeks and embark upon a pilgrimage to your sire’s final resting place. I enclose money and tickets to return you to Oklahoma at the conclusion of your valedictory journey. I will meet you at the airfield at Kodiak. You may recognise me by the stalk of wild celery I wear as a boutonniere.
Faithfully, “J.” H. C.
Like I’d need some sort of corny sign. Unless he’d cut himself down to a Munchkin’s height or had plastic surgery on his ugly mug.
Anyway, the idea of a trip scared me. I’d never flown before, and the distance and the layovers terrified me. I broke the news to Mama, though, and told her both who’d sent the tickets and that I planned to go. She knew Henry from a creased team photograph as “that big ugly-gawky fella m the back,” and from my letters home as a pretty decent roommate, and from stories out of Highbridge at the end of the ’43 season as an on-the-lam murder suspect.
It’d crossed my mind that Mama might take this news and pass it on to Miss Tulipa, or Mayor Stone, or our new county sheriff, but I couldn’t fly off thousands of miles without taking that chance and trusting Mama to trust me.
“Dick Boles don’t deserve a graveside visitor,” Mama Laurel said. “Nor such a journey from the son he fled.”
“Even so, I’m going, Mama.”
“Take the Brownie then. Take some pictures.”
On my trip, I must’ve smoked a carton-two cartons-of cigarettes in all those different airports and on the flights themselves. I was twenty years old, almost legally an adult, but because of all my travel, bad meals, and missed sleep, I had an outbreak of schoolboy acne that upped my dependence on tobacco. By the time my umpteenth flight-this one aboard a small Electra prop plane-came down through a tattered fog and landed on Kodiak’s airstrip, I had a lung-crumping cough.
Henry stood on the edge of the field near the parking lot. No one could miss him, even though he’d separated himself from the other two parties there to greet the plane. As a sure ID, though, he clutched a pale yellow stalk of wild celery in one hand. It also struck me, as I wobbled towards him, his face looked awfully ugly and fearsome that afternoon-most likely because of the ivory labrets, carven like polar bears, he’d inserted in the cheek holes (in Highbridge, mere scar-tissue welts) at the corners of his mouth.
“Roomy,” I said.
Henry glanced about him, at the overarching sky and the nearby mountains visible through cloud or fog wisps. “Yes,” he said, “but on clear days it seems even moreso.”
A Russian Aleut by the name of Dorofey Golodoff-Henry called him Fego-flew us in a beat-up light aircraft to Nikolski, an Aleut village on Umnak, where my father’d been stationed during the war. Fego lived near Nikolski in a barabara, or dugout sod house, that put me in mind of Henry’s underground hideaway in a branch of Tholocco Creek in Alabama. We spent the night with Fego, a burly Asiatic-looking man with a broad squashed nose and long jet-black hair. I had a couple of inches of height on him, but he out-weighed me by forty pounds or more, even though he moved from room to room in his house with the speed and agility of an otter. For supper, he fed us steamed clams, batter-fried octopus, and a salad of kelp, wild onions, and Fox Islands celery.