“The guy’s whackers,” Sosebee said.

“Seems healthy enough to me,” Dunnagin said.

“Get him out. Jesus H. Christ.”

Dunnagin shuffled on a pair of trousers and a T-shirt, flipped Sosebee a salute, and led me down the stairs and out of the house.

Tiptoeing through the rows of a victory garden, he pulled me along by the barrel of my bat. We crossed a stretch of lawn below the garden and Mister JayMac’s bungalow and ended up in a gazebo near a good-size pond.

In Tenkiller, the Elshtains had a gazebo. In his carpentry days, my dad’d built a few for townies with big yards and a need to show their money. Down South, gazebos sprout like toadstools. I don’t know why. They make little sense-moronic structures with roofs but no walls, more for show than everyday use. But Dunnagin pulled me up the steps of this one and made me put my keister on a bench inside it. I held my bat between my knees, where it jutted up like a bodacious hard-on. Dunnagin laughed. I set it down and rolled it under my bench with my foot.

“Thanks,” Dunnagin said. He began to pace. It wasn’t quite dark yet. Only a couple of stars twinkled. You could smell these typical Hothlepoya County smells drifting in from town or from the countryside and colliding with each other. One smell was of plowed earth, like rotting burlap. Heavier, though, was the sweet, starchy fragrance from the Goober Pride peanut butter factory. Back then, these stinks haunted Highbridge, especially the trackside factory districts. In residential neighborhoods where Dutch elms, maples, and oaks could filter some of the peanutty stench out of the dead air, it dropped to tolerable levels. Nowadays, I can’t catch a whiff of it without thinking first of gazebos and second of Highbridge.

“Don’t panic, Danny,” Dunnagin said, pacing barefoot in front of me. He had his hands in his back pants pockets. Plenty of room there-he hardly had any fanny at all. “Jumbo hasn’t killed anybody yet. He looks like death blown up to dirigible size and painted battleship gray, but, I mean, hey, he’s human, isn’t he?”

Was he? I didn’t know.

“He doesn’t have a social knack as well developed as his vocabulary, I admit it, but that shouldn’t shake you-you’re not exactly a social lion yourself, I wouldn’t think, and even Harpo has a bigger vocabulary than you do.” He squeezed the bulb of an imaginary airhorn: Beep, beep.

“Look,” Dunnagin went on, “you should feel flattered he took you. Clerval had the only private room in McKissic House.” Dunnagin stopped pacing. I had my eyes on his feet. He didn’t start talking again until I raised my sights to his face. “Mister JayMac assigned that attic room to Clerval last year, his first on the club, and I’d’ve figured him about as ready to take on a roomy as Hitler to show up at a kosher gig in Miami. So you should feel honored. Chosen, even.”

My eyes grew hubcap round. I did feel chosen, I just didn’t know for what.

“Yeah, he’s big. Six-ten, seven, maybe seven-two. Hard to say. He sort of slouches. Taller than Howie Schultz, though. Schultz, the kid who plays first for Brooklyn. Sportswriters call him The Steeple. Got nixed for military service for being too tall. S one reason Mister JayMac hurried to sign Clerval-the Army wouldn’t come calling. A better reason is, Clerval’s a good country player. A bit slow, not a lot of range, but a champ at digging out bad throws and snagging tosses that’d sail slap over anybody else’s head. He’s also good at catching darters right back at him and shots down the foul line that might drop in for extra-base hits.”

I pulled my bat out from under the bench. I rolled its handle back and forth between my palms.

“Yeah, he can hit. Sort of. Last year his batting average hovered around.220 or so-poor for the minors, fatal for a guy with big-league ambitions. But he’s got a scary knack for making the hits he does get count. He’s slammed fence busters in spots that’d’ve killed us if he hadn’t come through. Killed us. So Mister JayMac gave him his own room. He’s valuable even if he isn’t quite bigs material.”

Dunnagin took my bat and sighted along it at the evening star. Then he swung it a few times. Me, I swatted mosquitoes, a swarm from the shallows of Hellbender Pond.

“Here.” Dunnagin handed the bat back to me. “Cigarette?” He shook a couple out of his pack, stuck one in my mouth, and lit me up. “Sometimes the smoke’ll run the bastards off.” He meant the mosquitoes. “Soothe your nerves too.”

I took an awkward puff. Back in Tenkiller, Coach Brandon had hated the habit. Called cigarettes wind-robbers. Sharing one with Dunnagin felt a lot like breaking training.

“Old Golds,” Dunnagin said. “They got this apple honey stuff in em to keep their tobacco moist.”

I couldn’t taste any “apple honey,” but I kept smoking. In a minute or two, I had a coughing fit. Dunnagin didn’t notice.

“Around the loop, players started calling Clerval Jumbo. He tolerates it. Just don’t call him Goliath, Behemoth, or Whale. He hates Whale. Call him that, it’s like you’re knocking not only him but all the whales in the seas. Jumbo’s okay, though, because it’s fairly neutral. It just means he’s big, which he’d be a blind fool to deny.”

I kept coughing; a fuse sizzled straight down my tongue.

“No idea how old Clerval is,” Dunnagin said. “Thirty? Maybe thirty-five or -six. He sometimes limps around like a crip. Other times, he’s light on his feet as Astaire. Even DiMaggio’d die for Clerval’s swing on his good days. I sure would.”

With one hand I smoked. With the other I scratched a mosquito bite on my shin. Blood stained my pants cuff, and flesh rode under my fingernails.

“Did you see him eating tonight?” Dunnagin asked me. “Take a look at him and you’d assume he’s a meat-eating barbarian. Nosir. He’s a vegetarian, a strict one. Won’t touch chicken or eggs. Eats a ton of produce a week, though. And Goober Pride peanut butter. Practice mornings, game days, he devours half a jar. Good thing he’s near the source, eh?” Dunnagin rubbed his chin. “Come on. I’ll walk you back up. Clerval won’t bite. He only bites vegetables.”

I let Dunnagin lead me back to the house and up the stairs to Jumbo’s room. Dunnagin knocked.

“Hank, is it okay if young Boles here comes back in?”

The door swung open. Jumbo stood framed in it from the chest down. He bent at the knees and peered at us sideways.

“Come in, Mr Boles.”

“See you tomorrow,” Dunnagin said. He did a swami’s farewell, touching his forehead and chin and rolling his hand over. Then he beat it back down the stairs.

Jumbo had changed our room. A divider-a loosely woven grass mat-hung between his bed and my cot. He’d also put a quilt and a feather pillow on my cot and set up his revolving fan at the edge of the grass curtain so that it blew into his half of the room through part of its arc and into my half for the other. It moved hot air around, but also kept mosquitoes from drilling us like Texas oil fields.

“I intend to read a while. Tell me if the lamp disturbs you.” Jumbo ducked behind the mat, where his shadow hung, scaring the Tenkiller crap out of me. I sat down on the quilt he’d rustled up and stared at his lumpy silhouette.

Dunnagin’s efforts to calm me didn’t calm me now I was back in Jumbo’s room. I heeled off my shoes thinking he was about to rip down the mat, grab me by the earlobes, and dump me out the window. Jumbo never did that, but sometimes his head would seem to turn my way and stare at me through the weave, his eyes-I imagined-leaking a thin yellow lava.

I lay down in my clothes. Mama Laurel, the Elshtains, Coach Brandon, Franklin Gooch, and everyone else in Tenkiller might as well’ve rocketed off to Mars. At last I slept. Later, I awoke in darkness. The fan still bumped away, and Jumbo still breathed over its whirr in deep, even gasps. Gasping myself, I went under again…