The second game of the twin bill didn’t go much better. Dew had scared up a gangleshanks kid from the Florida pan-handle to pitch for him, a kid named Marion Root. Root threw a sidearm speedball that shrunk a fraction of an inch for every foot it covered to the plate. By the time it reached us, it looked like a petrified hummingbird’s egg.

ROOT FOR ROOT said a banner in the outfield. Orphan fans did, and he carried a two-hitter into the ninth.

Luckily, so’d our own sodbuster ace, Fadeaway Ankers, and in our last bat before extra innings, Henry polewhacked a Root hummingbird egg all the way to Sea Island, scoring himself and Worthy Bebout, who’d taken a sidearm fastball in the ribs swinging for the bleachers. We held on in the bottom half of the inning for a two-to-goose-egg win. The split kept us in a tie for first with LaGrange.

That night Henry told me Marion Root’d go up to the bigs. Not only that, Henry said, but Root would make a reputation for himself the equal of Bob Feller’s or Johnny Vander Meer’s. Not long after he’d pitched against us, though, Root reported for induction into the Army and spent the next seventeen weeks at the Infantry Replacement Center at Camp Wheeler near Augusta. He died the next winter at Anzio with the U.S. 45th Division, two weeks after going overseas.

Sunday’s game against Opelika deserves no commemoration. We lost it. The score was sixteen to three, and none of our runs was earned. No excuses-the Orphans wrapped, waxed, and shellacked us.

One truly screwy thing did happen in the bottom of the eighth. On an easy liner to center, Bebout cried, “Woodrow! Woodrow, you take it!” and dropped to his knees. The ball carried over Bebout’s head, allowing two runners to score and the hitter to reach third as Skinny hurried to chase it down.

“What the hell was that?” Curriden yelled at Bebout.

“He missed it!” Bebout shouted. “My sorry brother flat-out missed it!”

Amazingly, the Gendarmes lost to the Eufaula Mudcats in the Prefecture. The entire season, then, boiled down to our final three games against them at McKissic Field.

54

Almost every day the Herald featured the Hellbenders in the right-hand column on its sports page. Once they ran a photo of me-my bleached-out face and chest above the inky smudge of my knickerbockers-under the headline “Tenkiller Speedster Hopes to Help / Our Hellbenders Lug the Bunting.”

A husky spinster lady who used the byline O. A. Drummond had written the piece, with more appeal to front-office press releases than to interviews or personal reporting. You often saw Miz Drummond at the stadium, dressed, even in the dog-days humidity and glare, like a fox-hunting freak: knee-high boots, tweed skirt, puff-sleeved blouse, snap-brim tweed hat. She never visited the clubhouse-the Hellbenders would’ve hooted her out in a skink’s eyeblink-but always sat at a typewriter in the press box, three chairs from Milt Frye.

Anyway, I’d sent a copy of Miz Drummond’s story to Mama and folded another copy into my wallet as a pick-me-up after a poor performance. Not long after getting my vocal cords back, I’d gone to Double Dunnagin with my ratty clipping and showed it to him.

“Whattuz l-l-lug the b-b-bunting m-mean?”

“To win the pennant, kid.”

“So why d-didn’t sh-she say s-s-so?”

“Cause she’s a writer and lug the bunting’s more poetic You oughta be asking Sloan.”

By the end of August, though, we’d put ourselves in a place to lug the bunting, for real, and Miz Drummond’s daily squib for the Herald was plugging the final LaGrange series like the next Joe Louis bout-twice on the front page, next to wire reports about U. S. naval operations around New Guinea and the Solomons. Highbridge had pennant fever. If FDR wanted the CVL and Mister JayMac’s club to boost the morale of our locals, well, we were doing a bang-up job. Even a runt like Trapdoor Evans-speaking talentwise-couldn’t walk through the farmer’s market without drawing autograph hounds.

Henry didn’t borrow Mister JayMac’s Caddy on any of our off days leading up to Friday’s game. Far as I could tell, he didn’t once rendezvous in the victory garden or in Darius’s old room with Miss Giselle. He slept in his own bed, getting six or seven hours of shuteye a night. He read two very brainy books Anatole Maguin’s The Pariah and Victor-René Durastante’s Self-Evolution and Self-Extinguishment. (I jotted the titles down in my notebook.) He’d focus on two pages at once, close his eyes like a camera shutter, and then page forward again-a method I hadn’t seen him use before, like maybe he wanted to speed up his reading to beat the end of the season.

“Those any g-good?” I asked him about his books.

“Provocative. I wish I had them in the original French, but Mrs Hocking could get them only in these somewhat clumsy translations.” He finished the shorter book-the Maguin-in an hour, but spent most of one afternoon on the Durastante.

What Henry did Thursday and Friday, I don’t know. I took Phoebe to a matinee at the Exotic on Thursday (Above Suspicion with Joan Crawford and Fred MacMurray) and spent my entire Friday-until going to the ballpark-clerking with her at Hitch & Shirleen’s.

We didn’t moon over each other, or try to smooch, or even spend much time holding hands. We just hung around and talked, or hung around and didn’t talk, and that horrible morning in her house over to Cotton Creek fell further into our pasts, like it’d happened in ’38 to somebody else. When Phoebe had to wait on a customer or ring up a sale, I sat on a stool behind the counter and struggled to read The Pariah.

“That any good, Ichabod?”

“I d-dunno. Not much happens. This Frenchie in Senegal lives for a year in the basement of a government b-b-building, and nobody knows he’s there. Or’d c-care if they did.”

“Sounds a lot like Mr Bebout.”

“Henry l-liked it.”

“Well, Henry’s a genius. A certified aigghead.”

What could I say to that?

“He’s the nicest ugly man I ever knew,” Phoebe said. “But put up that stupid book and talk to me.”

So I did.

No one could say Buck Hoey’d fueled a late-season surge by the Gendarmes because they’d played well all season. On the other hand, Hoey almost singlehandedly kept the ‘Darmes’ juices flowing in August-by his bullyragging, drive, and sheer revengeful orneriness. He wanted his new club to beat his old club so bad Emmett Strock would’ve had to shoot him to keep him off the field. In fact, the Hoey-for-Fortenberry-plus-cash trade quickly began to look like the worst player swap Mister JayMac’d ever engineered.

You see, Strock put Hoey on third base, for Binkie Lister, where he didn’t have to cover so much infield as he did at short. That move, along with Hoey’s natural grit and his ill will towards his former boss, gave him the energy to raise his batting average sixty points. He also began using what he knew about the windups and body talk of CVL pitchers to steal bases (not really like him) and his Durocherlike talent for hurling insults to gig rival batters from his spot at third (exactly his style). He got under the skin of hitters, who rewarded his obnoxiousness by losing their cool and wasting their at bats. As a result (we heard), the same Buck Hoey who’d once launched a barrage of Burma-Shave jars in the Prefecture had become the darling of LaGrange. Even Binkie Lister, reduced to a backup role, liked Hoey; and Cliff Nugent, the ‘Darmes’ biggest star, recognized Hoey’s value and didn’t begrudge him his popularity.

Luckily, we had the Gendarmes at McKissic Field, where, what with the neck-to-neckness of the pennant race and all the rabble-rousing feature stories about us in the Herald, we also had a sellout. An oversell, in fact.

I dressed out in a stock room at Hitch & Shirleen’s, across the shady street from the ballpark. Fans began to arrive four or five hours before the game’s scheduled 7:30 P.M. starting time. Whites and coloreds, GIs and civs, occupied the stadium like a celebrating army.