Mister JayMac grabbed the pole of the driver’s cage and pulled himself up. He sported a string tie and a white linen coat. If we didn’t get rolling soon, his ballplayers would start slinging off enough BTUs to give every last joe aboard a drop-dead case of heat prostration.

“Don’t yall worry who thesere boys are,” he said. “Worry about how piss-poor yall played today.” He paused, more for effect than from tiredness. “I could drum up a half dozen 4-Fs in a TB ward who’d look sharper than yall did this morning. So think, gentlemen, on your many personal deficiencies.”

You could hear Euclid turning comic-book pages.

“Understand?” Mister JayMac said.

“Yessir!” nearly everyone on the Bomber said, like recruits out to Camp Penticuff.

“Meeting in the parlor this evening right after supper,” Mister JayMac said. “I want everybody there. Understood?”

“Everybody?” the infielder named Hoey said. “Even Jumbo?”

“I said everybody.”

“So why wasn’t Jumbo at practice, sir?” Number Seven said. “We could’ve used him at first. His subs made him look like Nijinski. Compared to those galoots, he is Nijinski.”

“Take a leap, Buck!” Norm Sudikoff shouted.

“Jumbo Hank Clerval had some personal business in Alabama to attend to,” Mister JayMac said. “He’ll be at our meeting tonight, Mr Hoey, never you fear.”

Buck Hoey, the shortstop, just wouldn’t let up: “ Alabama? How’d Jumbo get to Alabama?”

“He borrowed my car,” Mister JayMac said,

“Your Caddy?” Hoey said. “How’d Jumbo get to be such a privileged character? Going four for four gainst Marble Springs? Shit-a-load, sir, I once hit for the cycle gainst those palookas, and you never loaned me a car. What’s Jumbo got anyway? Proof of some kinda draft-board hanky-panky?”

The other men on the Brown Bomber ducked; they cowered in their places. The only soul among us not drawn gut-tight with shock and worry, except maybe Hoey, was Euclid. He was paging through Plastic Man for maybe the twentieth time.

“Let it go, Mr Hoey,” Mister JayMac said.

“Jesus,” Hoey started. “You’d think the guy was-”

“Let it go.”

Hoey let it go. Didn’t seem too trodden upon, though. He seemed happy. Mister JayMac sat down. Darius put the bus in gear, and we bumped out of the parking lot onto a boulevard lined with water oaks. Hoey caught my eye and waved at all the browbeaten ballplayers in front of us.

“Ever see such a bunch of pantywaists?” he asked.

I could only look at him. Hoey was the stud I’d have to beat out to become a regular. Worse luck, he was lean, tough, and not to be messed with.

“S matter with you, kid? Cat got your tongue?”

6

Darius drove us to McKissic House, the team boardinghouse where Mister JayMac, for part of everyone’s monthly salary, put up all the single men on his team. In McKissic House, this entire summer, I’d eat my meals and spend my nights when the Hellbenders didn’t have an away game.

Cripes, I thought when our bus growled up the semicircular drive. How great, not to have to wear down my shoe leather looking for a place to rent-especially with Camp Penticuff so close and wartime housing so tight that roomers doubling up with relatives or friends matter-of-factly read the obits to get a jump on likely vacancies.

Because Mister JayMac owned a dozen or more old mill houses in the Cotton Creek area of Highbridge, he’d taken that worry off all his players’ shoulders. Men with wives and kids in town, I learned later, rented these tarboxes from Mister JayMac for at least six months, April through September, his minimum lease. In October, he’d offer his vacant houses to military transients, but with the stipulation they clear out at the end of March so married Hellbenders could reclaim the premises in time for the new season. In a military town with beaucoups of demand for rental properties, he had a high-handed marketing approach, maybe even a greedy-seeming one, but Mister JayMac didn’t care about the money he could make-he could do that renting to either GIs or players-but about the welfare of his immediate employees during each CVL season. So most of us looked at Mister JayMac not as a robber baron but as our very own Daddy Warbucks.

Only two-thirds of the Hellbenders made the trip all the way from McKissic Field to McKissic House. Darius drove first to the Cotton Creek neighborhood, where six men rented houses, and dropped them off. Buck Hoey, the wiseguy shortstop who’d bellyached about the first baseman who hadn’t come to practice, hopped down last, near a blue frame house with more shrubs and a prettier paint job than any house around it. When Hoey got off, I relaxed a bit.

As for McKissic House, it hunkered back from Angus Road, on a woodsy stand of acreage on Highbridge’s southeastern corner, floating among the magnolias and the leafy pecan trees like a man-of-war. It had cupolas, turrets, gables, a widow’s walk, and a pair of outside staircases for fire escapes. It wasn’t Tara, though: no columns. Also, Mister JayMac’s ancestors had built it after, not before, the War Between the States.

The front half of the house smacked your eyes out. It had a wrap-around porch with fresh-painted balusters and a half dozen or more rocking chairs. It had shutters and a huge oaken door with a stained-glass fanlight above it. It had plum-colored draperies in the windows and umbrella ferns in hanging baskets. The whole place shone white, like some kind of lighter-than-air marble.

Coming around the drive, though, you saw that the back part of McKissic House didn’t keep up appearances. No shutters on the sides. In places, boards overlapped on a fallen slant. Paint had cracked or curled or flaked or flat-out vanished. One tricky back wall had a two-tone color, light above and dark below, like an unfinished kitchen cabinet nailed to a barn’s weathered side. I still liked what I saw. It outdid any place I’d ever lived. It had such size and so many build-ons I imagined myself prowling through it for weeks, finding hidden passages, secret nooks, the decaying skeletons of roomers who’d lost their way and starved to death. McKissic House spoke to the strangled poet in me, stirring a wormy sort of dread into my blood. Could I last a whole summer in one of its closed-in rooms?

“You new boys,” Mister JayMac said from the bus’s step well, “make yourselves to home, best yall can. Supper’s at five-thirty, team meeting an hour later. Darius’ll settle you in. Tomorrow, spot challenges and an intrasquad tussel of big-time importance.”

Mister JayMac got off, climbed the wide fan of steps into McKissic House, and went inside. Everybody else but Darius, me, Euclid, and the other three rookies piled out after him.

“Shoo,” Darius said. “Kizzy’ll give you somethin befo dinner. Yall gots to be hongry.”

Ankers, Dobbs, and Heggie got off the bus and jostled up the steps. I held my seat.

Darius said, “You deef as well as dumb?” He regarded me in the rearview.

I shook my head. I thought Darius would coddle me a tad, give me a little encouragement. Instead, he shut the Brown Bomber’s door and jammed the bus into gear. He bounced it off the gravel drive, through a lane of pecans and dogwoods, and past one of McKissic House’s shabby pine-board fire escapes to the backyard. To keep from cracking my head on the bus’s tin ceiling, I hung on for precious life.

Darius braked by a screened-in porch on the side of the house, not far from an old carriage house. The porch’s fly-blown screen had tears in it; its splintery steps, just off the kitchen, canted this way and that. The house’s rain gutters had rusted through; sections hung loose, like chutes at a gravel quarry. The eaves, if you looked up from under, had neat little holes bored into them, like somebody’d corkscrewed hooks in there, to swing mum or begonia pots from. Carpenter bees had drilled the holes, though, not a flower-mad lodger. The only decorations between the porch and the carriage house were a compost heap, some rusted-out metal pans, and a tractor cannibalized for war scrap.