I didn’t move. Mostly, I didn’t move. An old friend found the door of my shorts and poked his head through for a one-eyed look around. I was about to ease my old pal when Skinny Dobbs came up the main staircase shuffling like a drunk. He crossed to his and Curriden’s room. He didn’t have a hangover, he just hadn’t slept much. My old pal collapsed in wrinkles. On her way out, Curriden’s wife had probably told Dobbs, sleeping on a parlor sofa, he could slink back to his room-her and Reese’s conjugal visit was over.
I crept back upstairs, with a side trip to the steamed-up John, and sacked out again. Didn’t get much shuteye, though. I kept seeing that lady jaybird-nude on the stairs.
The CVL, I learned, had started playing Sunday games in its very first season. People called Dixie the Bible Belt. Even at midweek, street preachers in Highbridge could work up a powerful rant and a healthy amening crowd. Nobody opposed Sunday baseball, though. It took place after church and ranked right up there with God, flag, motherhood, and hunting.
Fadeaway Ankers started the final game of our series against Lanett-on either two or three days’ rest, depending on whether you figured it like Fadeaway or Mister JayMac. During his warm-ups, he grinned and preened and threw screaming BBs, like he enjoyed being out there, which, I guess, he did. He wanted his first Linenmaker hitter bad as a starveling bluetick wants its next soup bone. And he struck him out.
Mister JayMac had tapped me, Junior, and Skinny to start too. Unofficially, it was Rookies’ Day. Officially, it was War Bonds Day.
In the outfield, groundskeepers had hung War Bonds banners over some of the biggest signboards, with the okay of the companies whose ads they hid:
IT’S TEN MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT!
WAKE UP, AMERICANS…
YOUR COUNTRY’S MOST FATEFUL HOUR IS NEAR!
DON’T BE TIGHTER WITH YOUR MONEY THAN
WITH THE LIVES OF YOUR SONS!
MONEY TO PAY FOR THE WAR, YES;
BUT NONE AT ALL FOR FRILLS IN THE
CIVIL OPERATIONS OF ANY OF OUR GOVERNING BODIES.
THAT IS THE EDICT OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.
Neither Skinny nor Curriden looked at full speed. Even though Curriden hadn’t gotten up for church, he could barely haul his ass around. That gal in the towel might as well’ve strapped an icebox to his back, he had so little vim. Skinny looked sharper; he could run and throw. Sometimes, though, he stopped dead and opened his eyes so wide he seemed to be trying to breathe through his eye balls.
“What ails you two?” Mister JayMac asked after our second at bat. “Yall stay up last night herding woolyboogers? I swan, Mr Curriden, with some rouge on your cheeks, you’d look like a dead man.” He put Hoey at third for Curriden and Evans into right for Skinny.
When he did, Hoey said, “Why don’t you move Dumbo over to third and let me pick up where I left off Friday? Sir.”
Mister JayMac just looked at him, his eyes as dead blue as an old lady’s hair rinse. From then on, though, Hoey played next to me at Curriden’s spot, never making an error. None of the right-handed Linenmakers could pull Fadeaway’s scroogie, and none of their lefties ever hit to third.
The game was a walkover. I rapped my first extra-base hit, a triple off the EDICT OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE banner, and a single too. Every other Hellbender, Hoey and Evans excepted, got good wood too, and when Fadeaway’d finished pitching the sixth, Mister JayMac lifted him for Sosebee.
“That’s plumb stupid!” Fadeaway shouted in the dugout when he realized what’d happened. “I got a three-hitter going!”
“Relax, Mr Ankers,” Mister JayMac said. “All you can do if you stay in is lose it.”
“My daddy taught me to finish what I start.”
Parris said, “He shoulda taught you a little respect for-”
Mister JayMac made a hush-up gesture at Parris. “You like to finish what you start, Mr Ankers?”
“Damn right!”
“Then I want you to know you started six innings. You’ve jes finished em. A helluva fine job you did for us too, start to finish.”
Fadeaway looked confused, a bird dog thrown off the scent. Then Mister JayMac’s “reasoning” sunk in, and he bought it, the whole bolt. He strolled along the bench and sat down next to Haystack with a hambone-licking smirk on his face.
“You won’t lose,” Haystack said. “You’ll either win or get a no-decision if Sosebee fucks up. You’re sitting pretty.”
“I don’t sit no other way,” Fadeaway said.
Sosebee’s stuff didn’t sizzle, but the Linenmakers couldn’t hit a raindrop in a south Georgia thunderstorm. At game’s end, the scoreboard read 13-0. The crowd whooped so loud we could hardly hear the recording of the National Anthem.
Afterwards, Mister JayMac cornered me in the dugout. “You youngsters’ve come along jes fine, Mr Boles. My sister Tulipa is a bred-in-the-bone baseball gal, but she never scouted me a kid worth leftover pot liquor till she stumbled on you. You’re hitting.750 after two games, and you play short as good as anybody, including Ligonier Hoey.” Ligonier was Buck Hoey’s real first name-he came from a town in Pennsylvania called Ligonier. So he went by Buck.
“Grab a shower and meet me under the grandstand in your street togs,” Mister JayMac said. “Dinner’s on me tonight.”
Why not Fadeaway, Junior, and Skinny too? I thought. Why not Jumbo, for that matter? He’d had another long home run and another errorless day at first. Did proving the shrewdness of Miss Tulipa’s judgment entitle you to dine every Sunday evening with the boss?
I met Mister JayMac in the concessions area. He stood next to Homer’s tank, talking to two people-females?-half-hidden by girder shadows. One of the females, I saw, was Phoebe. The other had to be her mama, the daughter of Mister JayMac’s dead brother. Made sense, I guess, but my heart double-clutched-I hadn’t seen Phoebe at any of our recent games-and my hands turned cold as ice tongs.
“Ah, Mr Boles!” Mister JayMac shouted. “Got some ladies here I’d like you to meet!”
I sauntered over. Phoebe was Phoebe, of course-but tonight she had on a dress instead of blue jeans, and a pair of tiny gold earrings instead of one gaudy exploded pearl. In her open-toed heels and her wide-brimmed straw hat, she looked like a miniature woman. Her mother… well, I reddened. My eyes glanced down to flit over the candy wrappers and dirty popcorn around the base of the aquarium.
“Mrs Luther Pharram, better known around here as LaRaina, and her lovely daughter Phoebe,” Mister JayMac said. “Ladies, Mr Daniel Boles-Mr Boles, Mrs Pharram and Phoebe.”
Not too long ago, LaRaina Pharram and I’d bumped into each other between the second and third floors at McKissic House, only she’d worn a towel and I’d worn shorts and an all-over blush. My blush’d come back, prickly as radioactive shellac. Miss LaRaina, despite the damage she’d wreaked on Curriden and Skinny, looked bright-eyed and amused. Every time I glanced up, she gave me a batted eyelash-mockery-and a smile halfway between a grin and a pout.
We have a secret, her grin-pout said. Aren’t you glad you can’t tell my uncle? “Sorry, Uncle JayMac,” LaRaina Pharram said aloud, “but I can’t call this handsome fella Mr Boles.”
Handsome! More mockery. I wanted not to like this woman-she had a husband overseas, she’d spent the night playing slip-skins with a ballplayer, she’d gotten a big kick out of my embarrassment, and now she was making mock of me-but I still felt more or less kindly toward her.
Mister JayMac said Miss LaRaina could call me Daniel, if she liked, but he’d stick to Mr Boles.