“Hey there, Danny. Swell bat.”
“Get him off the hall with that thing!” Mariani yelled. “The twerp’s gone round it.”
Dunnagin came over. He asked to see the bat. I pulled it back, cocking it. Everybody else on the hall-Mariani, Parris, Heggie, Dobbs, Knowles, Curriden-had shut up. Dunnagin kept smiling, kept coming on. He said he understood how arriving in Highbridge on a steamy day and getting paired off with Jumbo could “tetch a fella.” He took my elbow, even though I could’ve knocked his head off with one swing, and steered me into his room. His roomy, a pitcher name of Jerry Wayne Sosebee, bridled to see me.
“For God’s sake, Double,” he said, “don’t bring the crazy kid in here. I’m trying to balance my checkbook.”
But Dunnagin, without even wrenching my bat away, had already closed the door. Sosebee stood up. He wore nothing but a pair of khaki boxer shorts and eyed me like I’d brought cholera. His side of the room-a room twice as big as Jumbo’s hotbox-boasted photos of family members, pets, a Ford sedan on blocks. He’d papered the wall next to his bed with Varga girl pinups from Esquire. Even half unglued, I ogled them.
“The guy’s whackers,” Sosebee said.
“Seems healthy enough to me,” Dunnagin said.
“Get him out. Jesus H. Christ.”
Dunnagin shuffled on a pair of trousers and a T-shirt, flipped Sosebee a salute, and led me down the stairs and out of the house.
Tiptoeing through the rows of a victory garden, he pulled me along by the barrel of my bat. We crossed a stretch of lawn below the garden and Mister JayMac’s bungalow and ended up in a gazebo near a good-size pond.
In Tenkiller, the Elshtains had a gazebo. In his carpentry days, my dad’d built a few for townies with big yards and a need to show their money. Down South, gazebos sprout like toadstools. I don’t know why. They make little sense-moronic structures with roofs but no walls, more for show than everyday use. But Dunnagin pulled me up the steps of this one and made me put my keister on a bench inside it. I held my bat between my knees, where it jutted up like a bodacious hard-on. Dunnagin laughed. I set it down and rolled it under my bench with my foot.
“Thanks,” Dunnagin said. He began to pace. It wasn’t quite dark yet. Only a couple of stars twinkled. You could smell these typical Hothlepoya County smells drifting in from town or from the countryside and colliding with each other. One smell was of plowed earth, like rotting burlap. Heavier, though, was the sweet, starchy fragrance from the Goober Pride peanut butter factory. Back then, these stinks haunted Highbridge, especially the trackside factory districts. In residential neighborhoods where Dutch elms, maples, and oaks could filter some of the peanutty stench out of the dead air, it dropped to tolerable levels. Nowadays, I can’t catch a whiff of it without thinking first of gazebos and second of Highbridge.
“Don’t panic, Danny,” Dunnagin said, pacing barefoot in front of me. He had his hands in his back pants pockets. Plenty of room there-he hardly had any fanny at all. “Jumbo hasn’t killed anybody yet. He looks like death blown up to dirigible size and painted battleship gray, but, I mean, hey, he’s human, isn’t he?”
Was he? I didn’t know.
“He doesn’t have a social knack as well developed as his vocabulary, I admit it, but that shouldn’t shake you-you’re not exactly a social lion yourself, I wouldn’t think, and even Harpo has a bigger vocabulary than you do.” He squeezed the bulb of an imaginary airhorn: Beep, beep.
“Look,” Dunnagin went on, “you should feel flattered he took you. Clerval had the only private room in McKissic House.” Dunnagin stopped pacing. I had my eyes on his feet. He didn’t start talking again until I raised my sights to his face. “Mister JayMac assigned that attic room to Clerval last year, his first on the club, and I’d’ve figured him about as ready to take on a roomy as Hitler to show up at a kosher gig in Miami. So you should feel honored. Chosen, even.”
My eyes grew hubcap round. I did feel chosen, I just didn’t know for what.
“Yeah, he’s big. Six-ten, seven, maybe seven-two. Hard to say. He sort of slouches. Taller than Howie Schultz, though. Schultz, the kid who plays first for Brooklyn. Sportswriters call him The Steeple. Got nixed for military service for being too tall. S one reason Mister JayMac hurried to sign Clerval-the Army wouldn’t come calling. A better reason is, Clerval’s a good country player. A bit slow, not a lot of range, but a champ at digging out bad throws and snagging tosses that’d sail slap over anybody else’s head. He’s also good at catching darters right back at him and shots down the foul line that might drop in for extra-base hits.”
I pulled my bat out from under the bench. I rolled its handle back and forth between my palms.
“Yeah, he can hit. Sort of. Last year his batting average hovered around.220 or so-poor for the minors, fatal for a guy with big-league ambitions. But he’s got a scary knack for making the hits he does get count. He’s slammed fence busters in spots that’d’ve killed us if he hadn’t come through. Killed us. So Mister JayMac gave him his own room. He’s valuable even if he isn’t quite bigs material.”
Dunnagin took my bat and sighted along it at the evening star. Then he swung it a few times. Me, I swatted mosquitoes, a swarm from the shallows of Hellbender Pond.
“Here.” Dunnagin handed the bat back to me. “Cigarette?” He shook a couple out of his pack, stuck one in my mouth, and lit me up. “Sometimes the smoke’ll run the bastards off.” He meant the mosquitoes. “Soothe your nerves too.”
I took an awkward puff. Back in Tenkiller, Coach Brandon had hated the habit. Called cigarettes wind-robbers. Sharing one with Dunnagin felt a lot like breaking training.
“Old Golds,” Dunnagin said. “They got this apple honey stuff in em to keep their tobacco moist.”
I couldn’t taste any “apple honey,” but I kept smoking. In a minute or two, I had a coughing fit. Dunnagin didn’t notice.
“Around the loop, players started calling Clerval Jumbo. He tolerates it. Just don’t call him Goliath, Behemoth, or Whale. He hates Whale. Call him that, it’s like you’re knocking not only him but all the whales in the seas. Jumbo’s okay, though, because it’s fairly neutral. It just means he’s big, which he’d be a blind fool to deny.”
I kept coughing; a fuse sizzled straight down my tongue.
“No idea how old Clerval is,” Dunnagin said. “Thirty? Maybe thirty-five or -six. He sometimes limps around like a crip. Other times, he’s light on his feet as Astaire. Even DiMaggio’d die for Clerval’s swing on his good days. I sure would.”
With one hand I smoked. With the other I scratched a mosquito bite on my shin. Blood stained my pants cuff, and flesh rode under my fingernails.
“Did you see him eating tonight?” Dunnagin asked me. “Take a look at him and you’d assume he’s a meat-eating barbarian. Nosir. He’s a vegetarian, a strict one. Won’t touch chicken or eggs. Eats a ton of produce a week, though. And Goober Pride peanut butter. Practice mornings, game days, he devours half a jar. Good thing he’s near the source, eh?” Dunnagin rubbed his chin. “Come on. I’ll walk you back up. Clerval won’t bite. He only bites vegetables.”