“Careful,” Rick Roper, a utility player, said. “Heggie may be out for you like Bowes is out for Hoey.”

Boles, I thought: Boles! I tried to talk. What I got was a loud gargle that shut me up quicker than a right jab to the mouth. I could feel myself reddening, burning like I’d plunged my whole head into a bucket of liniment.

Musselwhite had just started to speak when the biggest, nigh-on to ugliest, man I’d ever seen came lumbering in. He had to stoop to get under the transom between the dining room and the parlor. Like Ankers, he wore overalls. His overalls were the biggest pair I’d ever seen, enough denim to outfit every man jack in an Oklahoma oil field. He also wore a long-sleeved white shirt and a brown cap with a fancy H for Highbridge on it. His face was out of alignment somehow, like a pumpkin cut in two and put back together wrong. It even had the color of a blotchy pumpkin. He looked semi-Oriental. At the corners of his bottom lip, two pale scars rucked up, like lopsided buttons. His eyes brimmed with a yellow goo. He wiped them with the back of one meaty hand, then wiped that hand on his overalls. His bare feet reminded me of gray rubber galoshes, but they were only feet-a Titan’s feet, with horny calluses, ropy veins, and ingrown toenails.

The Titan pulled out the thronelike chair at the end of the table and lowered himself into it. Even sitting, he had a good foot on Musselwhite. A helluvan entrance. Ankers, Heggie, and Dobbs had frozen in place, with tea glasses or forks lifted to their mouths. Me too, I guess.

“Gentlemen, meet Jumbo Hank Clerval,” Musselwhite said. “Glad you could join us, Jumbo.”

“Thank you.” The big guy’s voice was like a ship’s gun booming over deep water.

“Meet the new guys,” Musselwhite said. “Ankers, Dobbs, Heggie, and Bowes. Bowes is their silver-tongued spokesman.”

“Call him Boles,” Parris said. “With an l.”

“Delighted to meet yall,” Jumbo said, glancing at us with what seemed like real curiosity. Despite the yall, he had a Frenchified accent, an odd lilt that rode the natural booming of his voice. Jumbo-how else could I think of him?-turned to me. “How do yall like Highbridge, Mr Boles?”

“Boles aint my spokesman,” Ankers said. “I am.”

“Actually, Mr Clerval, Danny cain’t talk,” Junior Heggie said, a hiccup in his voice. Everybody, including Jumbo and me, looked at Junior as if he’d belched at a piano recital. Not that I didn’t welcome his explanation; only that, being so bashful, he’d boggled us all just by speaking. “But I’m shore he can play ball,” he hurried to add.

“He looks like a player,” Jumbo said.

“He looks like a chitlin with ears,” Trapdoor Evans said.

I flushed tomato-red again. The whole table, except for Heggie and Jumbo, guffawed. In Jumbo’s case, I couldn’t tell if he hated jabs at people’s looks or if he had the sense of humor of a cast-iron pot. In my view, Evans hadn’t meant to hurt me; just to get off a funny saying, a josh.

“Too bad about your disability, Mr Boles,” Jumbo said. “I’m Henry Clerval. Muscles”-he nodded at Lon Musselwhite-“has an imperfect grasp of the etiquette of introductions.”

Mariani whistled, meaning, “Boy, he popped you, Muscles,” but Jumbo frowned at the other guys’ sniggerings.

“You’re a big one to talk about my imperfect Emily Posts,” Musselwhite said. “Coming down here with your cap on. You owe the house kitty a dime, Jumbo.”

“A dime!” the ballplayers all cried. “Ante up! Ante up!”

Jumbo’s yellow eyes darted. Bare feet were okay at Kizzy’s table, I guess, but wearing a cap indoors was a McKissic House no-no. Like you’d been raised in a pigsty. Jumbo yanked it off and pressed it down into his lap, out of sight. His hair was greasy black, with a shock of silver-white in the middle of his lumpy forehead and streaks of nickel-gray around his mangled-looking ears. Cripes, I thought, if you staggered into him on a pitch-black street, the fella’d give you about twelve quick heart attacks. Even the overhead lights and the ragging of his fellow Hellbenders couldn’t hide his weirdness. I was ugly, but this guy’d been put together in a meat-packing plant by clumsy blind men.

Everyone called Clerval Jumbo, including Musselwhite, and Musselwhite towered over half the guys on the team. It was scary, those two big palookas sitting there and Jumbo making Musselwhite look like a midget. I wanted to bolt for my room, but I didn’t have a room yet. About then, a line job at Deck Glider back in Tenkiller didn’t seem so bad a fate.

Although I didn’t get up and run, I had a devil of a time eating. Not Jumbo. He anted up his dime and dug in, paying no attention to the war talk, baseball gossip, and gripes about wages or family problems going on around him. He asked for, or picked off in the passing, every bowl of vegetables on the table. In fact, he wiped out the mashed potatoes, the field peas, the okra, and the squash. He drank a pitcher of water. He inhaled half a wheel of cornbread and a dozen biscuits. He cut one of Kizzy’s banana cream pies in two and knocked back half of it like it was a jigger of hooch. The last to stumble in, he finished chowing down first, then laid his greasy napkin aside and sazed cowlike and content around him.

“Please excuse me,” he said to Muscles in his bassoon of a voice.

“You’re excused.” Musselwhite gnawed on his second or third pork chop. “If there’s an excuse for you.”

Jumbo said, “Gentlemen,” then unfolded upward from his chair. He ducked out clutching his Hellbenders cap and made his way up the foyer staircase. The stairs creaked under him (but not much more than they would’ve for Junior Heggie or me); and he disappeared, leaving behind a fleet of empty bowls, his own slick china plate, and a table of half-amazed men. Not even the old hands, it hit me, had totally adjusted to either his looks or the shows he put on at mealtimes.

“The Great Thunderfoot,” Reese Curriden said.

“Hell, that’s Sudikoff,” Trapdoor Evans said. “Jumbo’s dainty next to Sudikoff. A regular twinkletoes.”

Sudikoff, a married fella, wasn’t there to defend himself. He was chief backup at first base, though: the graceful lummox who’d tried to fill in for Jumbo at practice.

I can’t recall much else about my first sit-down meal in Highbridge, not even if I got a piece of Kizzy’s banana cream pie, a treat renowned countywide. Jumbo’s performance wiped every later impression of that meal right out of my head.

7

Soon after, every Hellbender, including married fellas from the Cotton Creek district, along with our driver and unofficial team manager, Darius Satterfield, had crowded into the parlor for Mister JayMac’s big meeting.

The only person not there to begin with was Jumbo Clerval, who, like Buck Hoey had charged that afternoon, seemed to have a weird privileged-character status. Well, why not? “When does a gorilla show up for dinner?” “Whenever he damn well feels like it.”

Anyway, the parlor burst with edgy ballplayers, not counting Jumbo. Sweat ran down my sides. Every face in the room, even with a fan creaking overhead, looked greasily sequin-sprinkled. Chairs, footstools, sofa backs, even the floor-players sat or sprawled on any sort of furniture, or surface, they could find.

In wrinkled seersucker trousers and a sweated-out dress shirt, Mister JayMac had worked his way, along with Darius, to the front of the parlor. Darius set up an easel and a book of flip charts to help Mister JayMac explain the Hellbenders and the CVL to Ankers, Dobbs, Heggie, and me. It meant a tedious rehash for the old hands, but nobody squawked. Not even Buck Hoey, who perched on a sofa back to the rear, an expression on his face like, Hey, what a welcome refresher, we’re all so lucky to get the full scoop again.