Anyway, we made it down and clattered into our dugout only moments before Little Cuke Gordon cried, “Play ball, dammit!”

Mister JayMac had me leading off again, so I hurried to set myself in the batter’s box, still juiced from my escapade and stunned weak-kneed by the nearness of disqualification. Then Sundog Billy did ego surgery on me with his major league curve, striking me out on five pitches.

The storm-with all its rumblesome witchery-divided and drifted in lightning-figured banks around the Prefecture. Like the Red Sea parting. A miracle of sorts.

With that split storm chewing at the town’s edges, Jumbo played like a man on fire, his best game so far on this road trip: a pair of solo shots and a two-bagger off the right-field wall. But, Jumbo’s blasts aside, we blew that game and wound up two full games behind the Gendarmes, with no report yet on how Opelika’d fared.

In the clubhouse, Mister JayMac said we had to win both Saturday’s and Sunday’s games. If we did, we’d leave town tied with the Gendarmes for first. If we split them, we’d gain no ground. And if we lost em both…

Me, I really had the blues. Despite everybody-but-Jumbo’s dead bats, we’d gone into the last half-inning locked at two all. Then, with two outs and a chance at an extra at bat, I’d pumped a throw over Jumbo, sending three guys in the stands bailing for cover. My error let Fat Boy Fortenberry, a pinch hitter, score the winning run from second. Fortenberry! With his love handles, basset-hound gait, and asthma wheeze.

Hoey came over to console me: “Couldn’t cut the mustard, could you, Dumbo? Shows what you’re really made of-Twinkie filling.”

I shucked my gear and ducked into the shower room. Jumbo scrammed, and no one under the spigots said “Boo!” to me. As I dressed, the only guys to say, “Don’t worry bout it, you’ll pop em tomorrow,” were Knowles and Dunnagin.

Dunnagin gripped my shoulder as I buttoned my shirt. “If we’d put a few runs up, one flubbed throw wouldn’t’ve meant nada. This bunch still owes you. Boot away five or six more, and Hoey might have a case.”

I footed it alone from the stadium to the Lafayette. The storms that’d missed the city had regrouped. You heard them bellyaching above the copses of magnolias and yaupon holly southwest of the ballpark. Sheet and candle-wick lightning flickered on the diamond-cut tops of those trees. Snaky cloud tentacles reached into the sky over LaGrange and fanned long fringes of blackness into the gaps behind them.

Even before I’d turned onto the square facing our hotel, it’d begun to rain. It bucketed down.

Upstairs in room 322, Jumbo sprawled on the floor, doing Army-style crossover toe touches. The room had a thin carpet, and it and every other piece of fiber near him, including the mat he’d strung, reeked with his body odor. Why the exercise? He’d just played every inning of a killer game.

Jumbo nodded at me, but kept working. “I’m discharging an excess of energy. Otherwise, I won’t be able to sleep.” Then he stopped. “You’re drenched, Daniel.”

I sneezed. Outside, heaven’s waterworks emptied into the gutters. I shed my clothes, dried myself, and wrapped a bed sheet around me. I took down the grass mat dividing our room, rolled it up, slid it under Jumbo’s bed, and flopped down on my own. I faced away, clenching like a rolypoly. For the first time since Tenkiller, I shivered with cold, not fear.

Jumbo didn’t say anything. After a while, he got up and shuffled down the hall to the men’s bath. When he returned, he shut the light and lay down on the other bed-without a word, but also without trying to hang his curtain again.

23

The rain hung on all that night and all the next day, but bad weather didn’t much bug Jumbo. He had his books and took a reminiscing kind of pleasure in the storm. Me, I wanted to ask the Lafayette ’s other guests to join me in breaking up our room furniture. The nearer game time drew on the harder the drilling rain fell. Jumbo and I peered into Lafayette Square from our third-story lookout. The elms, the azaleas, and the statue of the square’s namesake seemed on the verge of melting into the Piedmont aquifer.

At four o’clock, a desk clerk-not the one who’d signed us in-brought word of the game’s cancellation. Mister JayMac had signed the message. He’d added we should eat well, hoard our strength, and get ready for two games on Sunday.

Never mind Mister JayMac’s instructions. Jumbo didn’t eat or sleep. He looked out the window, paced, or read. Between four-thirty and five, I took a nap, a nap clabbered with war dreams (insects stinging; bullets snapping past), dreams born of the rain’s fizz and snap. When I woke, Jumbo said, “Hello,” and held up a book-not The Human Comedy, or It Is Later Than You Think, but the Harry Emerson Fosdick he’d finished reading in Opelika.

“Listen,” he said: “ ‘A constructive faith is the supreme organizer of life, and, lacking it, like Humpty-Dumpty we fall and break to pieces, and the wonder is-’ ”

I sat up the better to hear him read.

“ ‘-and the wonder is whether all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can ever put us together again.’ ” Jumbo’s lemon-drop eyeballs rolled up into his forehead, leaving his sockets empty-windowed and spooksome. Blank of eye, he said, “Neither a king nor his horsemen first put us together. We should hardly expect them to reassemble us when the world has destroyed us.” His eyes clicked back. If only they’d seemed to belong to him, their reappearance might have steadied me. They didn’t, though, and if not for the clattering downpour and the shaming sadness of Jumbo’s words, I’d’ve bolted.

“Perhaps I’ll take more pleasure in Mr Smith’s Life in a Putty Knife Factory,” Jumbo said. He reached over (the galoot had to’ve been double-, maybe triple-jointed) and chose another title from his row of books. Just as he’d thumbed the book open, there came a rapping at our door: Tap, tappa, tap tap; tap tap. You know, Shave and a haircut, two bits.

“YES?” Jumbo boomed.

That gave the knocker a start. “Uh… Western Union.”

“YES?” Jumbo boomed again.

“Delivery for, uh, ah, it says here, ‘Mr Daniel Boles, shortstop of the Highbridge Hellbenders.’ ”

I hunched my neck. I’d never had a Western Union delivery in my life.

“Maybe it’s the bigs, Daniel,” Jumbo said. “Maybe Mr Cox of the Phillies has had his scouts observing you.”

Then those scouts’d seen me throw away last night’s game. Jumbo’d go up before me, even with his drag-ass base-running.

“WHOM IS THE MESSAGE FROM?” Jumbo said.

“Mrs Laurel Boles,” the messenger in the hall said, “of, uh, cripes, I don’t know, somewhere in Oklahoma.”

Jumbo lifted an eyebrow. “Your mother, Daniel?”

I’d already started for the door. Mama wrote, but never telephoned or sent packages-she was too frugal.

The joe in the hall didn’t look like a Western Union guy. In fact, it was the clerk who’d checked us in. I reached for my delivery, whatever it was.

“Not so fast,” he said, a hand behind his back. The other clutched a sheet of onion-skin paper, which he lifted to chest level. “I must read this to you-a singing telegram that isn’t sung.” He read it in a snotty sing-song, though:

“My dear darling Daniel,

My dear dummy child,

When out in your flannels,

Don’t throw it wild.

“I like the ball white, son.

Why did you soil it?

What the’Benders had won,

You flushed down the toilet.

“Your shame like your words, lad,

Must stick in your throat.

So to cuddle at night, kid,

You’ve got… MY GOAT!”

Here the clerk pulled a stuffed toy goat, with a furry chin beard, from behind his back and thrust it at me.