Anyway, I went three for four. A squib behind second base was my first safe bingle in money ball. A row of GIs gave me a standing O-out of sheer relief the Hellbenders wouldn’t stink worse than the stadium did, like we had last night. They loved it I could put wood on the ball.

Hoey, coaching first, sauntered over to me as I returned to the bag after making my turn. The center fielder’d just faked a throw behind me, a threat I hadn’t much credited.

“Don’t let the cheers go to your head. Those guys’d cheer a little old lady tripping on a popcorn box.”

I watched Charlie Snow, a super hitter, settle in and tap his spikes with a Louisville Slugger he’d lathed into the shape of a skinny champagne bottle.

“Me, I’d be ashamed to reach base with a dying gull like the one you goofy-bunted out there,” Hoey said.

I shrugged. My batting average was a perfect thousand-at least for now.

“Watch O’Connor’s pick-off move. Get tagged out here and you might as well’ve gone down swinging.”

“Back in the coach’s box,” the umpire Happy Polidori told Hoey, “and leave the poor kid be.”

“Up yours, Polidori. It’s my job to give advice to kids with marshmallows for brains.”

“Move it,” Polidori said. “Your body, not your mouth.”

With no go-ahead from anyone, I stole second on O’Connor’s first pitch. The GIs came to their feet, whooping. Lanett’s catcher didn’t even try to throw me out. I lifted a hand to Hoey-to show him I hadn’t hurt myself, not to mock him-but he kicked up a cloud of red dirt, p.o.’d.

Snow hit a long single to right. I came home. The whole rest of the game went like that. We ended up winning eight to three-no laugher, as I say, but no knuckle-whitener either. My other two hits were a bunt toward first and a high bounder off the pitcher’s rubber. Hoey badmouthed them too, calling them luck, saying the next time I went to church I should drop a C-note in the plate. It almost, not quite, relieved me when the Linenmaker right fielder ran down my longest clout of the day and webbed it against the Belk-Gallant sign for the game’s second-to-last out.

Hoey applauded this catch. He liked seeing me robbed of a four-for-four outing on a ball I’d flat-out creamed.

At shortstop, though, I did manage a perfect day. Despite his earlier brag, Mariani didn’t pitch well. Junior and I consistently got him out of jams by turning double plays or knocking down potential RBI rollers. On our double plays, we clicked like castenets.

“For the fourth time today,” Milt Frye told us all, “your double-play combo was Boles-to-Heggie-to-Clerval, tying a team record set back in ’39.”

Whistles, applause, foot-stomping. Mrs Atwill swung into an up-tempo version of “I Get a Kick Out of You.”

“Danny Boles hails from Tenkiller, Oklahoma,” Frye said. Then, stretching it: “Boy’s got a few quarts of Cherokee blood, making him the first uprooted Injun to find his way back South on the Trail of Cheers.” Frye said Junior Heggie, a Georgia boy from Valdosta, deserved some applause too, and Hoey’s spit probably turned to battery acid in his mouth.

After the game, a scratchy recording of the National Anthem blasted through the speakers. I stood on our dugout’s top step with my cap over my heart listening to the boozy chorusing of our remaining fans. Mister JayMac had to order the field lamps snuffed to get them to leave.

In the clubhouse, Lamar Knowles told Junior and me if we kept it up, Boles-to-Heggie-to-Clerval would become as famous in the CVL as Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance was in the bigs. He wasn’t kissing tail either-he meant it. Junior’d taken his starting job, and Knowles could’ve moped or cried beginner’s luck, but he didn’t. My respect for him hitched right up the pole.

After we’d showered, Mister JayMac came in and said the most important thing about the evening’s game wasn’t breaking in some jittery rookies or tying the old club double-play mark, but that for the first time since our season opener on May the 7th, the Hellbenders had a winning record.

“Tonight, gentlemen, we stand nine and eight. That’s good: a winning percentage of about.530. But it won’t take this or any other pennant. Beat these loom-operating yokels one more time, tomorrow, and we’ll head down to Quitman on Wednesday to pluck the Mockingbirds three out of three. Opelika lost again tonight, and LaGrange is in another extra-innings brawl with Cottonton.

“Keep scratching and clawing, gentlemen. By the end of August, we should be at the king-rooster top of the whole CVL cock pile.”

Everybody slapped backs and hurrahed.

Hoey said, “Who starts at short tomorrow?”

That turned our jazz-band parade through an empty swimming pool into echoey silence.

Mister JayMac said, “Given our performance in our past two games, who do you think should start tomorrow?”

“Given my performance over the past sixteen games, I don’t think that’s a fair question. Sir.”

“Perhaps we should vote on our lineups every day. Ask team members to judge the fairness of my decrees.”

Hoey shut up. He could win this debate only with a pistol or a hypnotist’s help. Everyone but Evans, Sloan, and a couple of others wanted him to clam up. He’d turned our victory party into a nitpicky postmortem.

“Good,” Mister JayMac said. “Curfew tonight’s one A.M. No, to hell with that. Be in bed by midnight and sleep late tomorrow.” He left.

Oh yeah. In that night’s game, Jumbo didn’t have a hit, but he’d sucked up every chance at first smarter than a Hoover and played his monster heart out. So if Buck Hoey was ammonia under our noses, Jumbo was honeysuckle and mint.

16

That night-three or four in the morning-I had a powerful urge to pee. Kizzy’d set metal pitchers of lemonade all over the parlor after our game, and I’d drunk gallons of it. I’d sweated away a lot, but about a quart still ached for release, so I got up, tiptoed past Jumbo’s bed, and bumbled down the hall to the third-floor John. Weird thing: When I got there, light showed in the cracks around the door, the knob wouldn’t turn, and I could hear a rough drizzle on tin.

It wasn’t Jumbo. He’d been in bed, a forbidding ridge of lumps and gulleys wheezing dreamily. Somebody from downstairs had come upstairs. Why? Had Sosebee organized a crap shoot up here? It teed me off. Where’d this Hellbender palooka get off hijacking our shower?

My bladder was a pulled-pin bomblet. I needed relief. I didn’t have time for the jerk in the shower to finish up, towel down, and let me in. I’d flood the hall first. I looked for alternatives: open windows, flower pots, umbrella stands. But nothing presented itself. I had just one option, to creep downstairs and check out the bathroom on Dunnagin, Junior, and everybody else’s floor. So down I went. Each step on that narrow staircase threatened to trigger me. If I went off, I’d turn the steps into a waterfall and drown my teammates in their beds-everyone in McKissic House but Jumbo and the skinnydipper in our shower.

I kept my bladder dammed and reached the second floor. Nobody was in its bathroom. Nobody. I dashed in and drained off my pain. My physical pain. It still irked me some unknown soul had stolen our bathroom. The one down here had four times the square footage and more soap and toilet paper. Why would another lodger sneak upstairs to ours?

For privacy, maybe. Somebody on the second floor didn’t want spectators while he showered.

I started back upstairs. As I groped my way up, somebody else groped down, and I froze at the bottom of the chute. The person coming down looked suspiciously-deliciously-like a woman. By the glow of an electric sconce on the wall, I could see that although the woman had some age on her-late thirties, early forties-she was a looker, maybe even something of a vamp.