Jumbo stood up. “I confront my accuser.”

Sosebee’s jowly gills went ashy-gray, but he kept facing Jumbo across five seat backs. He didn’t sit.

“Mr Sosebee must speak for others too,” Jumbo said. “How many agree that Mr JayMac’s kindnesses to me have undone your good will or degraded the quality of your play?”

No one answered.

“A fair question,” Mister JayMac said. “Do any of you play sloppy ball because Jumbo gets commercial rooms on the road?”

“I resent the special treatment,” Trapdoor Evans allowed. “I don’t play any worse for it, though.”

“It’d be hard for you to play any worse than you did this past weekend,” Buck Hoey said.

“An honest admission,” Mister JayMac said. “Give credit.”

That remark-praise instead of a lynching-opened some more guys’ mouths. Sloan, Sudikoff, and Fanning all spoke up-not malcontents, exactly, but ballplayers who always looked outside themselves for Christs to hang on trees.

Jumbo said, “Last year I lodged alone, both in Highbridge and on the road. By nature I’m a solitary person, and Mister JayMac saw that I could tolerate the compelled camaraderie of our sport, or of any joint human enterprise, for only so long. I did not demand this favor. I asked it humbly and received it most gratefully.”

“He speaks true,” Mister JayMac said.

Sosebee kept standing: Jumbo was answering his charge. He looked less hepped than before, though. His skin had turned ashy-gray. Sweat showed in loops under the arms of his shirt.

“I would have agreed to the lodgings that Mister JayMac arranges for us,” Jumbo said, “except that small children and a great many female adults find mine a fearsome presence. I also discomfit not a few men. I didn’t wish to test the hospitality of Mister JayMac’s host families by presenting myself to them as a guest. I had no wish to burden them.”

“He still speaks true,” Mister JayMac said.

“Once last year, I might add, an innkeeper in Eufaula refused me a room because my appearance… offended him. I made no clamor. I simply went elsewhere.”

“So why’d you accept Dumbo as a roomy this season?” Jerry Wayne Sosebee asked.

“It was time,” Jumbo said.

“And Dumbo’s as close to nobody as Jumbo could get without taking nobody,” Hoey said.

“I assure Mr Sosebee that Daniel cannot talk,” Jumbo said, “but I reject the slur that his inability to speak renders him a cipher.”

“Translation!” Hoey shouted. “Translation, please!”

Jumbo put one big raw hand on his chest. “Mr Sosebee, if you still feel that I must relinquish the privileges I enjoy, I have a compact to propose. A deal.”

“What deal?” Sosebee said.

“I will come down to the second floor of McKissic House if you will take me as your roommate.”

Sosebee looked at Jumbo, then at Mister JayMac. No one wanted to give him any help. “Never mind,” he said. “Forgit it.” He lowered himself back to his seat. Either he or the seat cushion sighed like a bellows.

“Mr Sosebee,” Muscles said, “the court fines you two bits for trying to initiate a meritless proceeding. Case closed! Court adjourned!”

So ended that morning’s Rolling Assizes.

Forty minutes later, we hit the outskirts of Highbridge, gagged on the sweet stinks of the Goober Pride peanut butter factory, and waved at a gaggle of colored young uns waving like mad at us. Their heroes’d come home.

19

Halfway through June, I’d played in-actually played in-seven straight games. Hoey got into our games, if he got in at all, as a pinch hitter or a late-innings sub. On my first road trip, I’d had two off games in a row, the loss on Friday night to Quitman and the loss of the twin-bill opener against Marble Springs on Saturday afternoon. Mister JayMac put Hoey in for me in the seventh inning of the loss to the Seminoles, but I felt sure he hadn’t won the job back. And he hadn’t. I played every inning of our next two games, strong wins, and got more hits than any other Hellbender but Charlie Snow, who’d slipped into such a groove that his bat fired off hits with the lickety-split golly-wow of a machine-gun.

Hoey didn’t cotton to my success, but he did stop hazing me as a flash-in-the-pan. He had to. My stats were radioactive. Of course, my statistics didn’t stay that bright all season-nobody’s could’ve-but they informed my skeptical teammates I could play. In the long run, I’d even help the bench riders, malcontents, and jerks who didn’t like me.

Up to a point, anyway.

Hoey’s living arrangements made it hard to read his changing feelings about me. He had a wife, a family, a house of his own. At our workouts he gave me tips-how to set up against certain hitters, how to flip the ball to Junior to speed his crossover pivot on double plays, how to drag bunt for a safety instead of just a sacrifice. He didn’t teach me like a man voluntarily passing on these skills-more like somebody with six months to live tying a ribbon round his life. Did he badmouth me at home? His kids didn’t act like he did. They didn’t blink at me like I was a messy roadkill, a polecat, say, or an armadillo.

Back from that first road trip, I sat down to write Mama a letter and to send her some money. (Jumbo was reading.) I ought to’ve written her sooner, but how could I say a soldier’d buggered me and I’d gone dummy again? Long-distance calls were out (Uncle Sam asked you to keep the lines open for servicemen and emergency messages), and I didn’t relish trying to explain my roomy was an ogre of a pacifist.

My first letter home:

Dear Mama,

Sorry not to write before now but Im fine. You know that already I think. If my train had recked or somebody had killed me in ball practice by mistake youdve got a telegram saying I was dead. I know you havent. People here seem nice, more or less. My roomate reads alot. Im batting over 500 and starting nearlybout every game. Hows work? Use this money for yourself. Next time I write Ill send more.

Love, Danny

I’d already had three letters from Mama, one mailed the day I left Tenkiller. It came the day we squeaked by Lanett, three to two. Everyone boarding in McKissic House got mail in care of its Angus Road address, but Miss Giselle sorted through it and slipped the right letters into the right cubby-holes at our post-office wall in the foyer. Mama’s letters-she never wrote more than a page-made me homesick and kept me going at the same time. I sent her clippings, to make up for the fact my notes never ran longer than a Listenne label.

One of Mama’s letters-I still have them-complained about a recent act of Congress:

Those co-kniving gasbags in Washington have done come up with a legal crime called PAY AS YOU GO. They ask your boss to figure about how much you would owe in taxes at the end of a year, and they order him to hold back enough each month to cover it. It’ll tell in our paychecks, this BILL will. Money I used to get won’t be there any more. They say its to keep us from feeling poleaxt come taxing time, but why let these THIEVES IN SUITS fiddle with our pay, just to keep us working fokes “ahead of the game”? It’s butt-in-skee, if you ask me, uppity and dictatorlike. Watch out, Danny, their going to get you to. Old FDR turns redder every year. By the time this DAMN WAR ends, look for a Hammer & Cycle right in the middle of the Stars & Stripes.

In mid-June, we had a four-day layoff between our win over the Seminoles in Marble Springs and our first home game with the Eufaula Mudcats on Friday. A part of one of those days we used to travel, but the other three, Tuesday through Thursday, felt like holidays. Practice in the A.M.’s at McKissic Field, then drowsy hot afternoons and radio-filled evenings.

Junior taught me to play poker, and he, Fadeaway, Skinny, and I would lock up in cutthroat five-card stud, with piles of buttons (supplied by Kizzy) for chips and pitchers of lemonade for refreshment (likewise). If a game seemed about to turn into a fistfight, Miss Giselle’d threaten us with fines or room arrest. She seldom had to threaten twice. Once, though, Skinny accused Fadeaway of palming an ace and left the table to find a bat to rehabilitate Fadeaway with. Miss Giselle grabbed Skinny on his way back into the parlor, wrassled the bat away from him, and sent him upstairs.