A smattering of claps. Hoey, Jumbo, and Parris didn’t clap at all. But this time, Mister JayMac didn’t jump all over his men for cold-shouldering us.

He had Darius flip the chart page. Another chart came up. Then another one after that. And so on. A chart showing which CVL teams had ex-big leaguers. A map of Highbridge’s business district, another of the part of town called Penticuff Strip, and even one of Camp Penticuff itself, down to parade grounds, dining halls, obstacle courses, and ball fields. Would we all be inducted if we didn’t pass muster as Hellbenders? Anyway, Darius kept flipping the charts, and the grandfather clock in the foyer kept bonging out the quarter hours.

Finally, blueprints of every floor of McKissic House.

“Okay,” Mister JayMac said. “Who’s rooming with whom?”

The boardinghouse had two rooms for ballplayer-lodgers on the first floor, four on the second story, and a sort of garret nook on the third. Us rookies’d settle in faster, the theory went, if we each had an old hand for a roommate.

“Sir, don’t we need to see who’s gonna get cut before we start assigning roommates?” Sweet Gus Pettus said.

Mister JayMac studied Pettus sorrowfully, his head cocked. “To be fair, yes. But I already know who I think’ll be gone by tomorrow noon. You, Mr Pettus. Also, Charlie Jorgensen, Rick Roper, and Bobby Collum. Mr Collum rents from me over in Cotton Creek, but all four of yall should be thinking about finding other work and moving out.”

“What?” Rick Roper cried. “What? Spot challenges tomorrow and you’re not even waiting to see how we do?”

“Mr Roper, you’ve played seventeen innings at shortstop this year,” Mister JayMac said, “but you have three times as many errors as Mr Hoey, who’s played over a hundred. You’ve fanned every time you’ve come up to bat.”

Roper shut up. You could tell Pettus, Jorgensen, and Collum because they sat like glum statues. Roper went into a pathetic hangdog hunker of his own.

“For room-assignment purposes,” Mister JayMac said, “I’m going to assume that tomorrow at this time the four men whose surnames I’ve called will no longer be around. If any of yall want a head start on a new life, I’ll give you your pay and a small severance check. I’m no heartless monster, gentlemen.”

“No he aint,” Hoey said. “Ask Jumbo. The boss loant him his car.”

Mister JayMac looked at Jumbo. “And you, Mr Clerval, why did I have to send Euclid to fetch you?”

“Sir, I fell asleep. My errand earlier today fatigued me.”

“What errand was that?” Hoey asked Jumbo.

“A personal errand. A private matter.”

“He got his ashes hauled!” somebody shouted.

“If he did,” Hoey said, “it took a dump truck to do it.”

“Hush,” Mister JayMac said. Nobody did. “Knock it off! We have room assignments to make and swapping out to do.”

Heggie, Dobbs, and Ankers got picked for roomies right away, by Knowles, Curriden, and Musselwhite, and the guys identified as culls were thrown out on their ears. No one, though, jumped to take me.

“Dumbo with Jumbo,” Buck Hoey said. “A perfect match.”

Dumbo. The nickname the smart-alecks back in Tenkiller had hung on me. Hoey was just like the jerk back home who’d offered to buy me a ticket to Dumbo because, “S a good idea to stay in touch with your fambly, kid.”

Jumbo studied me with his custardy eyes. “Okay,” he said. “I agree to take Mr Boles into my roost.”

Jumbo’s apartment was the only third-floor room set aside for boarders. If you could trust Mister JayMac’s wall chart, roost was a great name for it. Every guy at the meeting looked back and forth between Jumbo and me. Cripes. He was the kind of joker you have bad dreams about, and Mister JayMac was going to let him take me upstairs to his… roost.

8

I’d left my duffel and my bat in the kitchen. When I went to get them, Curriden and Parris, on KP that week, followed me in and said I should start scrubbing dishes. I glared. Pro ballplayers, scrubbing dishes? Why couldn’t Kizzy do them? Getting thrown into Jumbo Clerval’s dutches had soured my mood, but I still couldn’t see why Mister JayMac’d pay a skinny old female shine just to cook and slouch around. Hadn’t he also hired her as a housekeeper? Why have colored help if your paid white ballplayers had to pitch in to help the help?

Kizzy read my mind. “Danl Bowes, I cooks and cooks. Aint nobody in this house goes hongry. You hongry?”

Nowhere like. If I’d taken another crumb, I’d’ve burst like a ripened pimple. I shook my head.

“Then you best git it in yo head to hep. Else I’m gone, off to do fo folks what’ll preciate it.” She poked me with a finger like a voodoo bone. “Hear what I say, Danl Bowes?”

This time I nodded. I heard her.

Parris said, “You run off Kizzy, Boles, you might as well be dead. Word gets round you chased her, you will be dead.”

“I loves to cook,” Kizzy said, “but hates to mess wi the pots and pans, the spills and overbiles that come wi a fixin bringe. When Mister JayMac stole me from Mrs Lullworth’s in ’thuddy-eight, he say I don’t have to mess wi aw that truck again. So I won’t, Danl Bowes, I gots me options.”

“You go on now,” Curriden told her. “Quip and me and this rude boy here’ll finish up.”

Kizzy rinsed-“rinched,” she said-her hands off, gathered her stuff up, and limped to the porch door off the kitchen. She sported a flapper’s hat from the roaring twenties and a picnic basket-size handbag. She looked back at us. “Mo pie in the Frigidaire. Yall gits hongry, go to it.” And she left in a slicked-up Model T, its gas coupons courtesy of Mister JayMac.

“Too damned uppity for her own good, all right,” Curriden said when she’d gone. “But who’s going to tell her?”

Parris got Junior Heggie to come down to help me scrub pots and towel-dry plates. The sink had been installed for a person no more than five feet tall. I could see why Curriden had wanted to hand the dishwashing chores on to a rookie. It killed me to stoop over that basin, and Curriden had a good half foot on me.

By the time Heggie and I finished, the team meeting had long since broken up. The guys who lived in Cotton Creek-Hoey, Nutter, Sloan, and four others-had ridden back to the old mill district in Mister JayMac’s Caddy. He’d chauffeured them himself, eight men packed like sardines into his two-seater, with Hoey, according to one report, perched on Norm Sudikoff s lap like Charlie McCarthy on Edgar Bergen’s.

“See there,” Parris told me when we’d heard this story, “Hoey’s a dummy too.”

Jumbo waited in the parlor. Three of Mister JayMac’s culls sat with him looking glum and confused. (A fourth, Bob Collum, had returned to Cotton Creek with Hoey and pals, probably to tell his wife some dicey times lay ahead.) When I came in, the culls looked up at me like I was their hangman.

“This way to our room,” Jumbo said. He ducked into the foyer and lumbered for the stairs. I wanted to follow him about as much as I wanted rheumatic fever.

One fella got up from the card table he’d been sitting at and stopped me: Roper, a rangy player with eyes like tenpenny nailheads and a foul cigarette stink on his breath. Just then, though, I couldn’t put a name to his face. (One convenient thing about being a dummy-you can forget other folks’ names without them realizing it.)

Roper dropped a long arm over my shoulder. “If you’re any good atall, Boles,” he said, talking into my ear, “I’m history. Spot challenges tomorrow, but Mister Jesus JayMac’s already throwed me out. I roomed with Muscles, but he’s already showing that Ankers kid my half of the premises. Is that fair?”

I couldn’t shake my head. Roper’s hand’d clamped the back of my neck-it felt like a claw.

“We’re subs, scrubs, third-stringers,” he said, yanking my head around, to look at Pettus and Jorgensen. “Expendables. You and them other wet-eared recruits have done for us. So I hope yall’re worth it, us getting booted.” He finally let go.