“Yessuh.” Euclid shot out of the dugout and hustled up the steps to the press box.

“Cmon!” Mister JayMac yelled. “Draw a line under what Milt Frye jes blabbed to the world! Grab the flag!”

So happened, Henry had the lead-off spot against Sundog Billy in the bottom of the seventh. First pitch, he smacked it like a Bobby Jones tee shot. The snap of his bat was like a molar cracking on a jawbreaker. Everybody rose, even us guys in the dugout. If this was a balata ball, a big league cull, Henry’d just launched it into low earth orbit, a pre-Sputnik Sputnik.

The score stood four to three, Hellbenders.

Curriden fanned, as Wallace bore down. Heggie one-hopped a nubber to the second baseman for our second out. Euclid came back into the dugout. Henry buttonholed him even before Mister JayMac could get over to him.

“And what did you discover?”

“What did Mr Frye say?” Mister JayMac chimed in.

Euclid stood dwarfed by the two men. He kept his eyes on the tobacco-stained concrete floor.

“Speak up, Euclid!” Mister JayMac said.

“Say Miz Giselle tol him,” Euclid whispered.

“Holy fire! How’d she even know?”

“She overheard,” Henry said. “And this is my recompense.”

“Your what?”

Henry waved off the question and sat back down next to me as Euclid slunk back to his own roost next to Bebout. Dunnagin ended the inning by skying a hard-hit but shallow fly to Nugent in center. We had a one-run lead and two more Gendarme at bats to survive. We survived the first un, but couldn’t up our lead in our own trip to town.

In the top of the ninth, Fadeaway suckered Jim Keating, a pinch hitter for Wallace, on a third-strike sinker into the dirt. Dunnagin trapped it with his mitt and swiped it across Keating’s backside for a quick-thinking assist on the putout. One down. Two outs to the CVL championship. The crowd sounded like the ocean in a hurricane swell.

Buck Hoey came to the plate. Bingo! A blue darter into left center, right over my head. Hoey rounded first like he had it in mind to keep on coming. Musselwhite rifled the ball in to me, though, and Hoey retreated to first, mumbling something that got a weird grin from Henry, a half-innocent, half-psycho grin.

Nugent came up. He hadn’t had a good night, but he led Strock’s boys in hitting, with an average approaching.330. I expected Mister JayMac to signal Fadeaway to walk him, to get to the slumping Jed Balmore, LaGrange’s second baseman, but Mister JayMac refused to put the go-ahead run on base this late in the game. He wristed a paint-brushing gesture at Fadeaway, a sign to paint the plate’s corners-to give Nugent nothing in the fat of the strike zone.

Craftily, Nugent worked the count to three and two. He fouled off four pitches that plate umpire Grayson Dover-Mister JayMac’d pulled strings to keep Polidori out of this series-might’ve retired Nugent on, otherwise. Then, Fadeaway’s tenth pitch, Nugent hit a low, twisting shot at Junior between first and second, almost on the outfield grass.

On the pitch, Hoey’d broken for second. He had to leap Nugent’s ground-hugger to avoid putting himself out, but his skip step didn’t slow him. As I ran to cover second, Junior bobbled the roller, got his grip again, and whipped a sidearm throw towards second in the hope, the near certainty, I’d get there in time to catch it, toe-kick the bag, and fire to Henry for a game-ending double-play.

Junior-to-Dumbo-to-Jumbo. A riff on the famous Dumbo-to-Junior-to-Jumbo combo.

Hoey was barreling. I picked off Junior’s stinger at belt height. Hoey slammed the dirt and slid towards me feet first, cleats high. His spikes looked big, a grizzy’s fangs ready to tear. When I kicked second, one of Hoey’s shoes bit me in the groin and ripped into my left inner thigh. I began to fall. Little Cuke Gordon’d planted himself to see the force, and he twisted his face as he thumbed Hoey out. Falling, I sidearmed the ball to Henry as hard as I could and watched in agony as his glove hand reached damn-near halfway down the base path to meet it. His right leg strained back towards first to close the double-play circuit.

An instant before Nugent’s foot hit the bag, the ball went thwack! in Henry’s mitt, and Little Cuke threw his arm up in another show-boaty gotcha! Even face-down in the clay, I had to admire the guy’s dramatic flair.

The game was over. The Hellbenders-my Hellbenders-had won. Our fans bounced up and down, do-si-do’d in the aisles, yodeled rebel yells, howled like wolves.

Then I stopped noticing because every part of me below my waist on my left leg seemed to’ve caught fire. I rolled to my back. It wasn’t quite five in the afternoon, but the sky looked black and I saw stadium’s lights blazing against that blackness, two dozen or so tall fuzzy haloes, shrinking and bloating. Stars swam into the blackness between the haloes, and my head bloated along with them, like someone’d jammed a hissing air hose into my ear. The fire in my leg got hotter, my skin crisped like a burning paper sack, a mayhem of fluids seeped into the clay.

Buck Hoey’s face blocked the haloes and the stars. “Nice play, Dumbo.” A pair of baseball shoes fell out of the sky and bounced on my stomach. “Wear these in the bigs, kid. If you ever really get there.”

Hoey vanished.

Where Hoey’d stood, the sky ran afternoon blue again. I pushed the shoes off my belly and doubled over, clutching my leg and making a noise that opened into a scream. Or maybe I didn’t scream, for some of our fans-GIs, teenagers, feisty little boys-had scrambled onto the field to run about waving caps and souvenir pennants. They swung one another around like square dancers. None of them seemed to hear me. The National Anthem played scratchily, blaring through the PA system, but I guess nobody could hear it either. Junior Heggie knelt beside me, with Henry right behind him, and then, better late than never, Mister JayMac showed-dogged, I imagine, by memories of Charlie Snow’s last day.

“Daniel!” Mister JayMac cried. “Daniel, can you stand?”

Uh-uh. I thought maybe I was screaming again-a scream ricocheted between my ears-but Henry waved his arm at somebody near the clubhouse.

“A canvas litter for Daniel!” he shouted. “Immediately!”

I passed out-into dry-ice fog and a field of parka-clad ballplayers frozen against the brittle light pulsing without letup through the grayness.

56

Not until the next morning did I come around.

I lay flat-out in bed in a private room in the Hothlepoya County Hospital. A private room meant Mister JayMac, using his political clout and the full power of his checkbook, had sprung for my treatment with almost everything he had to spring with. Charlie Snow’d died on him. Danny Boles wouldn’t.

A bearded man in a white lab coat introduced himself to me as Dr Nesheim. He straddled a chair next to my bed, his arms on the chair back and his chin on his clasped hands. “Woozy? Take your time. You’ve got beaucoups of time.” Buck Hoey, I learned, had done for me. With one set of spikes, he’d shattered my right kneecap; with the other, torn the muscles of my left inner thigh. Then, throwing to Henry, I’d fallen, and fallen wrong, and done something very, very bad to my hip.

“Want me to sweeten the news for you, son, or would you rather take it all in one nasty gulp?”

One nasty gulp? How much more nastiness did this man want me to gag down?

Even so, I said, “One nasty gulp.”

“The orthopedic details of your injuries probably don’t matter much to you right now,” Dr Nesheim said. “But they’re severe.”

“How severe?”

“You won’t be able to play ball again.”

“Our season’s over. What about next year?”

“Not likely, Danny. That fella who spiked you, he’s pretty much undercut your hopes of fame in the majors. Rehabilitation is going to be long, painful, and… well, incomplete.”