“I’m a ballplayer! A shortstop! That’s what I am!”

“That was something you did, son. Now you’re going to have to redefine yourself in quite different terms.”

“I’m a ballplayer,” I said.

Dr Nesheim said, “The only consolation I can give you-if it will console-is, you won’t have to worry about the draft or going off to war. Not as a dogface or swabbie, anyway. Uncle Sam won’t want you any more than the Phillies do.”

I was two and a half months shy of eighteen. I put my arm over my face and cried. Dr Nesheim patted me on the arm and left. I didn’t fault him. He seemed a decent enough joe-he’d given it to me in one nasty gulp, a dose of Epsom salts for the only life plan I’d ever made for myself. I didn’t believe I couldn’t use that plan anymore… and I did believe. The way my lower body felt like a sack full of broken glass told me all I needed to know about the reliability of Dr Nesheim’s prognosis.

Hoey’d gotten back at me for beating him out at shortstop, for taking away a pair of his baseball shoes, for my role in his ejection from a big game in LaGrange, and for greasing the duckboards of his late-season trade to the Gendarmes. Yessir, he’d decommissioned my wagon.

I spent the last two days of August and most of September in the Hothlepoya County Hospital. Between them, the Hellbenders and the Phillies paid for my stay. Mama and I could’ve never managed the bills. Deck Glider, Inc., had no medical plan for its line workers and mid-level managers, and even with a bonus for helping Mister JayMac’s club to the CVL pennant, I hadn’t cleared half a grand that summer.

During my first two days in the hospital, everyone on the team, except Henry and Mister JayMac, visited me. Even Trapdoor Evans and Turkey Sloan came by-with Sosebee, Ankers, and Sudikoff-to wish me a fast recovery and to laud me for turning the last double play of the year. Henry hadn’t come, I figured, because he’d had to report to the Phillies, and their front office’d wired him money for a tram ticket, probably in a first-class Pullman. No one else told me different-not at first anyways.

The visitor I most appreciated on Monday, though, was Phoebe. She came late in the day with Miss LaRaina, bringing a small box of Baby Ruth candy bars, a bouquet of crape myrtle and hydrangeas, and several tattered Saturday Evening Posts. Miss LaRaina sat subdued-almost prim-by my bed, but Phoebe twirled a finger in a stray lock on my forehead and smoothed back the hair at my temples.

“How you feelin, Ichabod?”

“Rotten. Howm I sposed to feel?”

“With yore fingers, or yore toes, or yore nose. Or yore… whatever.”

“Phoebe,” Miss LaRaina said tiredly.

“Mama’s doing better, guy. She’s seeing this really sweet Army nutpick out to the camp.”

Nutpick?

“Phoebe,” Miss LaRaina said again.

“Well, he’s helped, yore kindly dome doctor has. He’s got you to relax, to think some bout Daddy n me, to spend a little time to home.”

“I never didn’t think about yall, Phoebe. But I suppose I did think about myself more, and the terrible unfairness of my place in this dreadful war.”

Terrible unfairness.

“But Danny doesn’t want to hear this,” Miss LaRaina said. “We came to be mood lifters, angels of mercy, not a tear-jerker episode of ‘Captain Pharram’s Family.’ ” She tapped a cigarette from a pack of Luckies. “Mind if I smoke, Danny? Keeps my hands busy and sort of rebraids my frazzled nerves.”

“Not if I can have one too,” I told her.

Phoebe took a cigarette from her mother, stuck it between my lips, lit me up. I bathed my lungs in smoke and blew out a whole stack of wobbly airborne doughnuts. The quick high the smoke gave me-the sensation of floating-lifted my mind away from the throb in my hip, the burn in my groin. Tobacco, the opium of the people.

“How come Mister JayMac aint been by?”

The silence spilling from Phoebe and her mama came down in deafening Niagara Falls torrents.

“How many top-heavy nurses been in here to jab needles in yore butt?” Phoebe suddenly asked me.

“Five or six. They can’t stay away. I lose count.”

“Phoebe,” Miss LaRaina said tiredly.

“Oh, cmon, Mama. Yore doctor said to behave responsibly, not to chain yoresef to a church pew.”

“Phoebe, I’d appreciate it if-”

I blew a smoke ring and cut Miss LaRaina off. “How come Mister JayMac hasn’t visited me?”

Phoebe and her mama did that hurry-not-to-answer thing they’d already done once. Like Mariani coiling a spaghetti strand around a fork tine, Phoebe spiraled my forelock around her finger. The ash on Miss LaRaina’s cigarette, meanwhile, grew like Pinocchio’s nose. This time I waited.

“We’ve all suffered an unexpected loss,” Miss LaRaina said. “You see, Miss Giselle is dead. She died either quite late last night or very early this morning.”

“Cripes. Did Mister JayMac shoot her?” (For telling Frye to announce our call-up? For going the carnal hanky-panky route with Henry? And, if the second, how had Mister JayMac found out?)

“Uh-uh,” Phoebe said. “Miss Giselle kilt herself.”

“How? Why?” I may’ve known the answer to at least one of those questions, but I needed to hear it said. No, I needed a denial, a lie that didn’t impeach my roommate. Now, too, I began to understand the bouts of dumbness that’d fallen on Phoebe and Miss LaRaina when I mentioned Miss Giselle or asked about Mister JayMac. Someone’d told them not to drop any more bad news on me than Dr Nesheim already had.

“What about Henry? Is Henry all right?”

Another uh-oh look between Phoebe and her mama.

“What’s happened to him?” I demanded.

“He’s fine,” Miss LaRaina said quickly. “He’s just-fine.”

“Uh-uh,” I said. “I’m owed some truth. Let’s have it.”

“Listen to him, Mama,” Phoebe said. “He’s done got shut of his stutter. Completely, nearlybout.”

“Phoebe, it’s either completely or it aint,” I said.

“Why, you’re right,” Miss LaRaina said. “He’s become a regular Demosthenian.” They marveled over me.

“Tell me what’s happened to Henry, blast it.”

Miss LaRaina said, “Once he knew how bad Buck Hoey’d hurt you, he left and got just sloppy drunk over it.”

“Yesterday was Sunday,” I said. “And Henry don’t drink.”

“Ordinarily, no,” Miss LaRaina said, “but this spiking business unnerved him, and I’ve never known a Hellbender who wanted a bottle not to find one. Reese-Mr Curriden-always had two or three hidden in his room. He’d distribute too. Hoarding’s not his way, even in a whiskey drought.”

“Mama,” Phoebe said, looking at her feet.

“It’s all right, child. Major Blumlein said to own up to my trespasses, not to cache them under a lamp-stand.”

“He didn’t tell you to parade em in front of Daddy.”

“Your daddy isn’t here.” Miss LaRaina surveyed my room. “That young man there answers to Danny, not Daddy, and I assume him chivalrous enough to keep his own counsel.” She blew smoke sidelong, holding her cigarette Bette Davis style. “Are you?” she asked me.

“Yessum.”

“Well, then. Henry sends his regrets.”

“Will he visit me before he leaves for Philly?”

“That’s probably up to him and the railway timetable.” Miss LaRaina smiled and took another sexy drag on the nub of her Lucky. She caught a knuckle’s length of falling ash in one palm and dumped it in the terra-cotta pot of crape myrtle and hydrangea blossoms at her feet.

We talked another ten or fifteen minutes, mostly about Miss Giselle-her generosity, her loving-kindness, her sacrifices for Mister JayMac and the Hellbenders. Then Miss LaRaina said I looked peaked. She and Phoebe had better go. The staff didn’t want me overtaxed.

“Then tell em to write their congressmen,” I said. “Look, I’m strong enough for yall to stay.”

“Not if we fuss,” Miss LaRaina said. “Fussin’ll lay you down faster than a mile-long footrace.”

Phoebe kissed me on the forehead. “I’ll be back. Ever day till yo’re out.”