“Rise and shine,” he mumbled, entering from the porch. “Flash them brushed-up ivories, folks.” Sleepy banter, but a kind of tucked-under grumbling too.

Miss Giselle’d treated Darius pretty well since we’d been back in Highbridge, but she turned on him now faster than a rabid birddog. “I’ll have no more of your rackety wake-ups around here,” she said. “I mean it, Darius. I’m sick of the noise and your idiot cheeriness.”

“I never meant em to be lullabyes.”

“Don’t do it anymore.”

Darius pulled in his chin. “Wake the boarders up?”

“Go shouting through the house like a fishmonger. I hate it. I wholeheartedly despise it.”

“How’d you like me to git everbody up?”

“Walk up the stairs. Knock on each door. Announce in a low and civil tone that it’s nearly time to eat. Understand?”

“Yessum. Simple directions in simple English. That’ll do it fo me awmost ever time.”

“Leave those biscuits alone!” Miss Giselle snapped. “And never mind your piddling little ritual this morning. Mr Boles here will do it for you today.”

“He can knock, ma’am, but he cain’t talk. I’d be pleased to truck upstairs with him to hep.”

“Then you’ll be damned before you’re pleased, Darius. I want you out of this house until Kizzy calls you back to eat. For now, Mr Boles must do the best he can with his knuckles and his youthful imagination. Out, please.”

Darius left, head up. Kizzy kept mum.

The use I put my imagination to was climbing to the third floor and waking Jumbo first. I scribbled him a note about what Miss Giselle wanted me to do, and he lumbered from room to room with me. I’d knock, and he’d say, “Breakfast. Rise and shine. Don’t compel us to come in after you.” No one stayed too long in bed after hearing him say that.

At breakfast itself, Mister JayMac put in an appearance. A show of solidarity with his players before a big road trip to Opelika and LaGrange. He didn’t sit at the head or foot of the table-Muscles and Jumbo had those spots-but squoze in between Vito Mariani and me like any other journeyman ’Bender.

Funny thing, though-Miss Giselle did him the V.I.P. honor of bringing him his own humongous platter, with three cigarlike sausages, a steaming dipper scoop of cheese grits, and a puffy cream-colored omelet, like the sort of pale-yellow cravat you’d rent from a tuxedo shop. At first I thought, Well, I guess a guy can take this I’m-just-a-regular-Joe stuff too far. Except Mister JayMac scowled when his wife put the platter in front of him, like he figured she meant to make him look bad-uppish and scornful-with such showboaty favoritism.

“What’d you put in this highfalutin aigg?” he asked before Miss Giselle could get back to the kitchen.

“Ham, diced bell pepper, tomato, onions, a dash of tabasco sauce.” Miss Giselle cocked her head. “Why?”

“The green’s bell peppers?”

“It is. Did you think I’d chopped the bitterest dandelion stems I could find into it?”

“ Nome, not really. Thing is, Darius don’t much care for bell peppers, honey.”

Miss Giselle crossed her arms. “But I made that for you, Jay.”

“Well, who ast you to? I eat what the boys eat, you know that. So take this masterpiece omelet to Darius. He can eat around the pesky damned peppers.”

Darius took breakfast at a junk counter on the screened-in porch-out of the kitchen, out of the dining room, out of the way. He was out there now, finishing up.

“He won’t want it,” Miss Giselle said. “He’s already eaten enough for three normal men.”

“Take it to him anyway. Let him decide. I can’t abide special treatment.”

“Well, I won’t take it to him, Jay, for I can’t abide abuse or humiliation. And I won’t abide them.”

For the next few seconds, all anyone could hear was forks scraping china and Muscles glugging back his juice.

“This food can’t go to waste,” Mister JayMac finally said. “Take it to Darius.”

Miss Giselle closed her eyes, hugged herself, and swayed, like a grieving mama at a funeral. Her posture-and her sudden silence-gave everybody an even bigger discomfort than her and Mister JayMac’s arguing had. So I pushed back my chair, picked up the ritzy breakfast, and headed for the kitchen with it-my stab at doing my blessed best as a peacemaker.

Behind me, I heard Jumbo say, “I’ll walk Miss Giselle back to your house, sir.”

“You do that,” Mister JayMac said.

On the screened porch, I set Mister JayMac’s breakfast in front of Darius, who’d already eaten several biscuits and a couple of fried sunny-side-uppers. He gave me a wary sidelong look, but pulled the plate to him and dug in. Just then, Jumbo ducked into view with Miss Giselle on his arm and Miss Giselle in some sort of glassy-eyed trance.

“An apt diversion,” Jumbo told me. “You cerebrate as well off the field as on.” He helped Miss Giselle down the rickety porch steps and through the dewy victory garden to the bungalow out back. They made an odd pair, those two. Of course, Jumbo and anybody made a freakish twosome.

I slouched back to the dining room.

22

On the way to Opelika on Wednesday, the Brown Bomber had a blowout, and Jumbo bruised his thighs supporting the bus’s front bumper when the jack slipped. We lost our game against the Orphans that night and split with them in a doubleheader on the following day.

As we rolled into LaGrange on Friday, the air had a silken, sluggish feel. Its taste, falling from a sky more dirty-cream than blue, had a heavy rain tang. You don’t forget that taste, its dust-laying potential grabs you even at the crazy-making height of a drought.

“Bless it,” Mister JayMac said, “I don’t want a rainout.”

“Sir, if we uz primed to lose again, it’d be a blessing,” Fanning said. “For everbody.”

Mister JayMac whirled on him. “If us losing tonight would guarantee bumper crops, I’d still rather win and swallow the consequences than lose this one and wax fat!”

Darius and a few of us others dragged suitcases and duffels out of the Bomber’s luggage bins and passed them around to the guys they belonged to. Some Hellbenders walked to the houses of their host families. Others got picked up in fancy cars and driven there.

Jumbo and I, like Mutt-and-Jeff drummers, hiked through town to the Lafayette Hotel. The desk clerk wore a white shirt and the kimono-swirled vest of a blackjack dealer. He had an Army recruit’s haircut, though, and didn’t at first answer Jumbo’s questions about our reservations because we’d spooked him barging in. New there, he had a nellyboyish way about him that may’ve explained how he’d sidestepped the draft.

“ClerVALL,” he said finally, flipping through his book. “ClerVALL, -VALL, -VALL. Mmmmmm. That’s French, isn’t it?”

“With one -vall, it could be,” Jumbo said. “My father hailed from Switzerland.” The boom in his voice startled the clerk crapless all over again.

“Oh, yes,” he managed. “Yall’re ballplayers. Hellbenders, no less. Room 322. Mr Suiter has you down for three nights.”

“Key, please,” Jumbo said.

“Do you play when it rains?” the clerk asked. “Or is that, ah, football?”

“Football,” Jumbo said.

“Then yall may get a rest this weekend. Storms’re coming-tonight, tomorrow, who knows? Swell view of Lafayette Square from the third floor. Hope yall enjoy.”

We trudged the stairs because the elevator didn’t work. Our room had two single beds, a chest of drawers with a metal basin and a china pitcher on top of it, and ugly water-stained wallpaper: chrysanthemums, over and over.

As per usual, Jumbo dragged a length of clothesline from his suitcase and rigged a curtain out of it and the grass mat he’d also packed. Ouch. I thought we’d built an iffy sort of bond, a truce with doorways in it. For now, though, he didn’t draw the mat across its string.

Instead, he dumped his books onto the tufted bedspread of the bed nearer the door, then lined the books by height along the baseboard there. He’d finished On Being a Real Person our first night in Opelika. Now, he eeny-meeny-minied his books and wound up with Saroyan’s The Human Comedy. He lowered himself to his bed, twanged the bedsprings getting comfortable, and flapped the cover open.