Pettus and Jorgensen eyed me from the card table. Even before being dropped from the club, they’d been semievicted from their rooms.

Where would Pettus and Jorgensen sleep? On sofas? In musty old chairs? I felt sorry for them. They looked sledgehammered, like heifers about to crash. I didn’t feel that sorry for Roper. He wanted to blame me for the whole room-and-roster shuffle, but I felt no guilt-I hadn’t bombed Pearl Harbor either.

The real culprit was the war itself. CVL teams made do in ’43 with twenty-man rosters; marginal guys over that number had to face the blade. In most CVL towns, a twenty-man roster gave management a payroll that didn’t chew up the season’s gate. It also squared pretty well with the manpower needs of the Selective Service Acts and each club’s search for usable talent.

“Dick Roper’s my name,” Roper said. “I may have to leave this bunch of shitasses, but yall’ll hear from me again.”

(Actually, we did. He got drafted later that summer-one of the reasons Mister JayMac released him, I imagine, and fought in Europe with the Ninth Army. Today he’s a U. S. Congressman from a district in western Georgia, a born-again shill for the national gun lobby.)

Jumbo came back from the foyer to get me. Roper retreated to the card table and his cast-off buddies. If Jumbo felt sorry for them, he didn’t show it. He took my bag-in his hand, it resembled a sack of marbles-and made for the stairs again. Following him, I knew he reared up to seven feet, maybe seven-two. In Tenkiller, I’d never seen anybody even close to that size. Six foot took the cake. In fact, Lon Musselwhite was the biggest man I’d ever seen until Jumbo came along, and I hadn’t seen Muscles until just that morning.

Anyway, I had my doubts about soldiering up the stairs behind Jumbo. It reminded me of beanstalk climbing. Fee-fi-fo-fum. The steps creaked. Once we’d reached the second floor and the steps to the third, the house-with its mildewed wainscoting, wavy picture molding, and uneven hardwood floors-had started to seem as echoey and crooked as a fairy-tale castle.

We finally hit the third floor. A T-shaped hall divided it. We went down the crossbar to the house’s southwest side. Jumbo keyed open his door and nodded me in. Not counting the kitchen, this was the hottest room in McKissic House I’d yet visited, the stiflingest by far. Jumbo didn’t say two words, just pointed me to the corner under a gable roof. He dragged over a canvas cot for me to stow my gear under and to sleep on: an Army cot, bought or liberated from Camp Penticuff. Jumbo broke it open and set it up for me.

No need for blankets, but I’d’ve looked with favor on a pillow and a sheet. I didn’t relish undressing in front of Jumbo, but because I usually slept in my skivvies, a showdown would eventually come-unless I copped out and slept in my clothes. The heat nixed that notion. My first bad dream, even one of Aleutian snows and icy Marsden matting, would trigger a killing fever attack. But I couldn’t tell Jumbo how I felt, what I wanted, why I ached to cry, and he didn’t ask. At least my smelly cot sat next to a window and an outside fire escape. But Jumbo’d probably let me camp there because he was too tall to move easily under the gable’s ceiling.

Jumbo had a bed with white iron bedposts, two sets of springs laid side by side, and a couple of rectangles of scrap plywood on the springs. The setup didn’t look comfy, granted, but it had my cot beat all the way to the nearest mattress factory. Well, okay. Jumbo had let me into his room. He was the landlord, I was the tenant. But why couldn’t I have a bed too? After all, McKissic House didn’t shelter convicts or street bums.

“You’ll adjust,” Jumbo said. “After a time, the heat becomes bearable.”

Wham! it hit me: my rookie status, the attic room, the hideous galoot I had to live with. I broke down and sobbed, like I had on the train. Anywhere else, with anybody else, I’d’ve tried to hide how trampled on and scared I felt. Jumbo, though, I let watch.

Then I reached under my cot, pulled my Red Stix bat out of my bag, and stood there glaring and wringing the bat’s handle. I didn’t plan to clobber Jumbo-he’d’ve clobbered me back, I thought-just to squeeze out some sawdust to catch my tears in.

Jumbo had a dust-clogged revolving fan with a metal safety basket. It rested on a pitcher stand between his bed and my cot. He turned the fan toward me and switched it on. It buck-danced around, moving muggy air. If he’d hoped the fan would improve my mood, it didn’t.

I continued to cry.

In his frock coat and patched trousers, like a hulking Abe Lincoln in a Mathew Brady photograph, Jumbo sat down on his bed. He didn’t seem to be sweating, just steaming comfortably from the inside. He gave off a clayey smell, a smell with a soothing edge to it but also a buzzing persimmonish feel; not a sick-making smell, but a different one.

Crying, I noticed Jumbo’d done a few things to make his attic homey. Semihomey. Shelves lined the wall behind his bed, pine planks he’d made into a bookcase with the aid of several large cans of Joan of Arc red kidney beans. He’d used these cans the way folks today use cinderblocks, as braces between the shelves. He’d stacked them eight cans high, in three columns, two cans per column between each shelf.

Books glutted the shelves. Over them he had this William Blake reproduction of Adam and Eve being kicked out of Eden by angels with fiery swords. It looked like Jumbo had cut the picture out of a magazine-Life?-and glued it to a piece of cardboard with a mat of green construction paper but no glass. Then he’d hooked it on a loop of wire to a nail in the wall.

Anyway, the books, the fan, and the magazine picture didn’t do much to hide the fact he lived in a grungy third-story oven. Now I lived in it with him.

In the old days, English noblemen with crazy wives or daughters stashed their women in attics like this one and hid the keys in old ships’ trunks.

Say something, I thought. Say something, you lummox.

But he didn’t. He didn’t even shed his stupid coat. He sat there, sorry or maybe embarrassed for me, miffed at himself for agreeing to take me in. I slammed past his bed into the hall, Jumbo didn’t try to stop me. Either he didn’t care to risk my anger or my leaving didn’t exactly crush him.

I stumbled down the stairs. On the second floor, some players, including Heggie and Dobbs, stood around in the hall, the doors to their bedrooms open. I startled them. Sure I did-a nutso-looking kid with a bat trying to find something to break.

Double Dunnagin flapped out of his room in shower thongs and a bathrobe. He copped in a wink how I was primed to let go of my wayward, ornery pain.

“Hey there, Danny. Swell bat.”

“Get him off the hall with that thing!” Mariani yelled. “The twerp’s gone round it.”

Dunnagin came over. He asked to see the bat. I pulled it back, cocking it. Everybody else on the hall-Mariani, Parris, Heggie, Dobbs, Knowles, Curriden-had shut up. Dunnagin kept smiling, kept coming on. He said he understood how arriving in Highbridge on a steamy day and getting paired off with Jumbo could “tetch a fella.” He took my elbow, even though I could’ve knocked his head off with one swing, and steered me into his room. His roomy, a pitcher name of Jerry Wayne Sosebee, bridled to see me.

“For God’s sake, Double,” he said, “don’t bring the crazy kid in here. I’m trying to balance my checkbook.”

But Dunnagin, without even wrenching my bat away, had already closed the door. Sosebee stood up. He wore nothing but a pair of khaki boxer shorts and eyed me like I’d brought cholera. His side of the room-a room twice as big as Jumbo’s hotbox-boasted photos of family members, pets, a Ford sedan on blocks. He’d papered the wall next to his bed with Varga girl pinups from Esquire. Even half unglued, I ogled them.