Darius had to’ve heard him, but he strolled to the A-squad dugout with his back straight and his head up and spoke not a word.

Just about then, I saw somebody in the bleachers behind our dugout: Phoebe Pharram, Mister JayMac’s great-niece.

My first thought-pretending not to see her-was, Did she see my hit? Did she see me steal second? Did she see me slide into third like the great Mike “King” Kelly?

Dumb. Phoebe was jail bait and blood kin to my boss. Why in Cupid’s name would she take a bead on me anyway? “Ichabod,” she’d called me-the high-pockets drip in an old American short story. Besides being a drip, I couldn’t talk. For God’s sake, my nickname was Dumbo.

The game goose-egged on.

But in the bottom of the eighth, Jumbo rambowed one off Fadeaway over the right-field wall, and Fadeaway fell apart, yielding four more quick runs on a series of walks and hits, including a triple by Darius.

Fadeaway slapped his glove against his leg. His face got this weird stove-in look. He began blubbering. Mister JayMac went out to the mound.

“That hulksome galoot!” Fadeaway nodded in at Jumbo. “Him and that biggity damned nigger!”

“Shut up and sit down.” Mister JayMac put Quip Parris in for Fadeaway. Parris retired the next three batters. Darius trotted home on Hoey’s sacrifice fly, though, and at the end of eight full innings the score stood six to zip.

That was the final score, although in the top of the ninth I sent Charlie Snow to the wall for a long out, the best hit ball of the game against Darius.

At the end, Darius shone with sweat. It encased and oiled him. I could see him pitching another nine, eighteen, maybe even twenty-seven innings-without grouse or twinge. Darius shone like a jewel.

13

In the clubhouse, Mister JayMac gave Junior, Fadeaway, Dobbs, and me our own lockers. Mine’d belonged to Bob Collum, a popular player axed along with Sweet Gus Pettus, Roper, and Jorgensen. We peeled off the faded masking tape marked with their names and stuck on new strips marked with ours. My locker hunched between Curriden’s and Jumbo’s. Curriden sat next to me removing stirrup socks, then skinning out of his clay-stained sanitaries. Jumbo’d flat-out disappeared.

“You did good out there, Dumbo,” Curriden said. “A leg hit and a liner to the wall.”

I nodded my thanks, silently damning Hoey for hanging that nickname on me again.

“Darius no-hit yall except for that legger,” Curriden said, “so you were the B boys’ heavy artillery today.”

I grinned, sort of, and took off my sweat-sopped shirt. Behind us, a shower ran. Dunnagin stood in it singing “I’m Getting Tired So I Can Sleep,” crooning in a tenor better than half your big-band soloists’. It echoed out to us prettier than a clarinet.

“No one wants to bat against Darius,” Curriden said. “If he uz white and his manager let him pitch every other day, he’d win thirty-five games a year in the CVL. Forty. And you, a bony little dink, lined out to Snow up against the Feen-A-Mint sign. That makes you bout the hittingest thing, ever, against Darius, Dumbo. No crap.”

I looked around. Had Darius and Jumbo gone back to McKissic House in their uniforms? Cripes. Sweaty flannels weigh a ton. And the smell…

Curriden stood up buck naked. “Darius showers on the visitors’ side-else he’d have to wait for us to finish up in here.”

I tapped Jumbo’s locker.

“Jumbo?” Curriden said. “Keeps an extra glove in there. Some sanitaries. Cept for that, he don’t use it at all. Won’t shower here. Foots it back to McKissic House.”

“There’s something wrong with him,” Turkey Sloan said from Fadeaway’s bench. “He’s different from the rest of us.” Sloan looked at me. “Till you come along, sweet cheeks, none of us but him had a private room.”

Something wrong with him? Like what? “I reckon he was born with some oddball deformity,” Sloan said, like he’d just read my mind.

“Or it’s a war injury,” Hoey said. “From the last war. A problem like that guy in the Hemingway book had.”

“The Germans blew his pecker off?” Parris said. “Naw, the poor guy’s an auto-wreck victim-that’s my theory.”

There was an empty lapse in the guessing. Hoey seized Parris and knuckled the crown of his head. “Your theory makes me feel like a heartless jerk.”

Parris weaseled away. “People should feel like what they are-so they don’t wake up thinking they’re Albert Schweitzer. Or Jack Benny.”

“ ‘Oh, Rochester,’ ” somebody said in Benny’s radio voice: “ ‘Oh, Rochester.’ ”

In a gravelly copy of the voice of the colored fella that played Rochester, somebody else said, “ ‘Yes, boss?’ ”

This back-and-forth went on all around me. I couldn’t get into it. Even if I could’ve talked, I’d’ve felt too much like the new kid in the neighborhood.

I went to the farthest spigot in the shower room and faced into it so the other guys in there could see only my skinny backside and jutting ears.

“Listen, Okie,” Mariani said. “Don’t drop the soap. You bend down to fetch it, Norman there starts to get ideas.”

“Screw you, wop,” Sudikoff said.

“Baby, don’t you wish,” Mariani said.

Don’t drop the soap. I flash-backed on Pumphrey and the lavatory on the troop train. As quickly as I could, I finished showering, dressed, and beat it.

Outside, I walked under a bleacher section, part of the concession area behind home plate-a cave for hot-dog stands and program hawkers. Shady. Semicool. All around me, support girders, chain-link gates, and cubbyholes for vendors.

Then I saw Phoebe-beside an aquarium in the main gangway. Coming through the turnstiles from the parking lot, you got funneled past this tank, a yard long and two feet tall, mounted on a belt-high base. Phoebe’d climbed to the tank’s rim on a set of movable wooden steps.

“Hello, Daniel Helvig Boles.” Her voice echoed.

I lifted my hand: How, squaw. Did Mister JayMac use tropical fish to homify his ballpark? Did Phoebe have to feed them?

“Cmere, Boles.” She waved me towards her. “I don’t bite. If yo’re careful, neither does Homer.”

I walked over. Even without a stool, I stood about as high as she did. Water in the tank. A gravel bottom. A thin strip of sunken wood. Some ferns, like seaweed on stalks, poking up from the gravel, hula-dancing in the currents.

“You met Homer yet, Boles?”

I shook my head.

“Well, look,” she said. “Locking’s how you meet him. I won’t pull him out for you to shake his iddy-biddy hand.”

I bent. I stared. The narrow strip of bark hovering above the sand, floating in the tank’s thready green murk, had eyes. One end of the mystery thing resembled a tail.

“There,” Phoebe said. “You’ve just met Homer.”

I kept staring at the critter. It really did look like a piece of bark. With legs. With eyes. Like sombody’d epoxied it out of sycamore cork and pecan twigs.

“Donchu even know what Homer is, Boles?”

I just kept staring at him. It. Whatever it was. I might not know much, but a lunk who tipped his ignorance to a girl was doomed to regret it.

“You don’t know what Homer is,” Phoebe accused.

I tapped my head to show her I’d already safely stored the information. I was a walking Smithsonian Institution.

“Horsefeathers. You don’t know squonk, do you, Dumbo?”

Dumbo! I’d’ve rather she called me Ichabod. If she’d said it again, I’d’ve strangled her.

“Homer’s yore stupid team’s mascot, stupid. A hellbender. You ever heard of a hellbender, Okie boy?”

Phoebe Pharram seemed to want to show me up, like some pitchers will taunt a patsy they’ve just struck out. I stood a frog’s hair away from dumping her into the tank.

“I’ll bet you think a hellbender’s a damned soul who breaks alla Mr Pitchfork’s rules,” Phoebe said.