“I haven’t forgotten. You shouldn’t either.”

Miss LaRaina blew out a stream of smoke like a genie from an Arabian lamp. Get me out of here, I wished. My fidgets pulled Miss LaRaina’s attention.

“Your all-knowing boss thinks I’m a neglectful mother, Daniel.”

“No, LaRaina,” Mister JayMac said. “It’s just that-”

She cut him off. “Actually, he fears I may be a… a bad example. Is that it, Uncle?”

“The times’re out of joint, LaRaina. The climate’s at once permissive and judgmental. For your sake, as well as Phoebe’s, you should try to hold your reputation as wife and mother above reproach.”

“Ah,” Miss LaRaina said. “Caesar’s wife.”

“If the analogy fits.”

“ ‘Do as I say and not as I do.’ ” Miss LaRaina stubbed out her quarter-smoked cigarette in an ashtray, grinding it like a woman with a grudge.

“LaRaina,” Mister JayMac said.

“He hates it. I’m often as enamored-hypothetically-of the players he imports as he is. What can I say, Daniel? I like men. I’m young yet. All my hormones work.”

“You’ve said a good deal too much.” Mister JayMac didn’t raise his voice: he might’ve just said, It’s raining out.

“Uncle Jay understands hormones,” Miss LaRaina said. “Even though he was born during the Trojan War, his flare up in all their ancient splendor at least twice a week.”

I wanted out of there bad. A spaniel that strays into a family argument gets its butt kicked.

Darius dropped off Miss LaRaina and Phoebe at their house in Cotton Creek and drove Mister JayMac and me home to McKissic House.

I felt nothing but relief getting back upstairs with Jumbo, even in our stifling attic room.

“Good evening,” he said, then went back to reading Willkie’s One World. Because he’d nearlybout finished it, he didn’t say another word to me until bedtime.

“Good night, Daniel.”

Believe me, I’d appreciated his silence up till then.

18

In the second week of June, we went on the road against Quitman and Marble Springs and played good ball.

We didn’t sweep either series, though. That next Saturday, we split a doubleheader against the Seminoles, losing the opener on a squeeze bunt RBI in the bottom of the twelfth. Talk about peeved! We revved for revenge in the so-called nightcap (so-called because the sun never had a chance to set) and shellacked them three to zip in about ninety minutes. We got some nutritious shuteye that night and ambushed the poor saps again on Sunday.

At the end of my first road trip, we had fourteen wins and ten losses. Because Opelika and LaGrange had been playing like drunken Looney Tune characters, the pennant race tightened. We had a homestand against Eufaula and a big road trip against the Orphans and the Gendarmes scheduled at the end of the next week. I got a glow on thinking about it. Wins in those games could say a lot about that summer’s final standings.

Now, some pro leagues, including the Negro bigs, liked to play a split season because they always had more personnel changes than the two white major loops. At summer’s end, they had two pennant winners, a first- and a second-half champeen, and a playoff to decide the overall victor. Mister JayMac’s wartime philosophy-and he had a lot of say in the CVL-was simple: Since no team’d get more than a half dozen new guys once play started, we should pull one hard-fought season with the guys on board. If one team ran away with it, attendance might falter, but that summer we had balance at the top and lots of jockeying around during the dog-day swelter. So the fans never jumped ship. Even bunglers like the Boll Weevils, the Linenmakers, and the Quitman Mockingbirds drew crowds when Highbridge and the other top teams came to town.

On the road, we traveled in the Bomber, with Darius at the wheel and Mister JayMac in the catbird seat behind him. In other towns, the boss depended on taxies for transportation, or obliging locals with cars, or his own sore feet. But because he had a lot of friends around south Georgia, you seldom saw him walking. Sometimes he’d hijack the Bomber. Ration stamps for gas never posed him a problem.

Hellbender players didn’t stay in motor courts or hotels-with the exception, of course, of Hank Clerval. Jumbo wanted lodgings in commercial hostelries, and he got his way because, well, he could play. Also, he cowed even Mister JayMac, who still didn’t care for Jumbo’s taste for private rooms-his arrangements with locals to board his players were thriftier than running a hotel tab. I benefited from Jumbo’s stand because I got to stay with him in hotels. Or I guess I did. Maybe I just lost my chance to meet some charming folks. But whether in Highbridge, Quitman, or Marble Springs, where we shared a beat-up cabin in a motor court near Seminole Park, I often felt like a cockroach, a bug underfoot. Jumbo seemed more at home in these places than I did.

With a draw on my first paycheck (I never told anybody a soldier on the train had stolen my money), I’d bought a used radio, but Jumbo didn’t like me to play it, not even to catch up on war news. He preferred books to radio programs. He thought war, even news about it, “uncivilized.” When I turned on my set in our motel, he clomped around his mat and clicked it off, the scars at his lip corners glowing like coals.

“The hostilities of nations revolt me. They prey upon and increase the petty insecurities of men.”

Unlike baseball, I thought.

But, hey, what a speech. Jumbo belonged in politics. He should run for dogcatcher. If he nixed public appearances and ran a radio campaign, he might even win.

I sat there on my cot, scared and angry. Couldn’t he’ve just asked me to turn the radio down? Somehow, though, he picked up on how bad he’d browned me off.

“I’m a pacifist, Daniel. Even had I not been too tall for the services, conscience would have required me to resist my own induction. Frankly, I would have run away.”

This speech didn’t bleach the blackness out of my mood. At my first team meeting, he’d labeled bad ballplayers traitors. Now he was talking lily-livered trash.

“My only citizenship, if I possess one, is Swiss. In both war and peace, Switzerland remains neutral.” Jumbo lumbered back to his bed. Outside, a thousand cicadas whirred.

Bus trips aboard the Bomber would fag you out faster than a boulder-pushing contest. The speed limit was thirty-five miles per hour. That turned a trip to Cottonton, our farthest pull, into a five-hour fatigue fest. Mister JayMac tried to avoid travel on game days, but if we had two series on the same road trip, he couldn’t arrange off-day travel. Usually, though, CVL schedule makers set it up so back-to-back away series occurred against teams just two or three hours apart. On my first road trip, we lost to Quitman on Friday night and left town at nine the next day to get to Marble Springs by noon, two hours before the twin bill we split there. The ride’d drained us so bad, we did great not to drop both games.

If you began fresh and had a cloud cover, the bus rides could be a hoot. Sosebee played guitar, Fanning harmonica, and just about everybody else could mouth a Kleenex-and-comb kazoo or drum a seat back. Dunnagin and several other guys sang. Darius told funny courting stories, on himself, his buddies, or players no longer with the team, tales that skirted sleaze by zeroing in on his heroes’ hopes, then ticking off all their missed connections and comeuppances. We’d fall out laughing, but not Old Stoneface, Darius. His singing voice, though, was a frog’s croak, and the only musical instrument he really knew how to play was the Brown Bomber’s clutch.

Riding back to Highbridge, Mister JayMac always made us review our games. With a score book open on his seat, he’d defend or apologize for so-so plays, and asking everybody to analyze our botches. We’d also discuss opposing hitters-how we’d got them out, how to retire them in future games.