The ushers showed up again-startled to find Jumbo, a giant shadow with his head just below the projector window, at the center of the commotion, railing at the film on screen and the blameless folks who’d paid their hard-got money to see it. I tried to lever Jumbo back down.

“Fie on these blood wallows!” he shouted. “These hymns to corruption! My patience exhausts itself!”

The ushers exchanged a look. Who’d move first to give him the old heave-ho? Thank God, Jumbo hadn’t gone off on an all-out woozy tear yet. He saw the worried boys.

“No need to oust me bodily,” he told them. “My friend and I are leaving.”

“Good riddance,” somebody several rows up said. “Sho hope we can git on wi our blood waller in peace.”

Jumbo edged aislewards, pulling me with him and apologizing to anyone near enough to hear. A third of the remaining audience clapped when he opened the door to the lobby. That hurt him. Through two whole films, he’d behaved himself. Not until a drunk’d called him a “damn ol viper,” not until the pressure of Mister JayMac’s curfew began niggling him, and not until a slew of scenes into the third movie had he stood up to protest the mayhem and the morbid stuff. Now his fellow moviegoers-some of em, anyway-applauded his exit. The unfairness of that slapped him like a gas-soaked rag. Out in the lobby, I watched shock and hurt ripple over his face in frame-by-frame waves. Rage shook him. He let go of me and turned back towards the theater-to tear out a seat by its floor bolts and hurl it with a roar into the crowd?

“He’s completely superhuman!” Wolf Frankenstein would say. “The entire structure of the blood is quite different from that of a normal human being!”

“Come on,” one of the ushers said. “You don’t wanna let a bunch of niggers git under your skin.”

“You do, they’ll shore change its color for you,” the other usher said. And both ushers laughed.

Jumbo’s rage drained away. He didn’t rip up a seat. He growled and swung his arm at everyone in a tired wave. He left the hall again and paced the foyer, where the coming-attraction posters shone in glass boxes.

Together we walked through the muggy air to our hotel. Jumbo stooped as he slouched, but his size still suggested Karloff’s killer hobgoblin. On my first day in Highbridge, I’d figured him for a giant in coveralls. Now, shook up by three movies and the superstitious venom of a wino, I wondered if he was even human.

Back in our room, I went to bed under his chilly stare, but tonight it seemed one more penalty, along with Sloan’s fake telegram and Hoey’s stuffed goat, for throwing away the first game of our first series against the Gendarmes.

I couldn’t sleep. From the creakings of his bedsprings and his moans, I assumed Jumbo couldn’t either. He’d said nothing on our walk back from the Roxy and nothing since we’d settled in. A fly on the wall would’ve had a devil of a time figuring out which of us was the dummy. I’d stopped believing that he might strangle me in my bed, but I hated thinking that at the Roxy’s triple bill we’d become unmoored from each other, shoved apart like two boats on a vast, poisoned lake.

Jumbo made a noise like a cow getting sidetracked in the middle of a low and ending with a snork. I rolled over and switched on my bedside lamp. Shadows leapt onto the walls. Jumbo’d heard me, but he lay facing away, a one-man mountain range. I got out of bed and found my message notebook. With a pencil I printed out a question, two questions, three:

Where are you from? Really?

Do you have any living kin?

Did you ever have an accident that caused you to look the way you do now?

I took the notebook around Jumbo’s bed and held it so he could read my questions, which he did. Still lying on his side, he crooked his finger for my pencil and notebook, took them from me, and printed:

Too many places to list.

No.

Only my “birth.”

He gave the notebook back to me and closed his eyes. I sat down on my bed and read his answers over and over again, like he’d written them in an alphabet with hundreds and hundreds of meanings in every letter. Too many places to list, No, and Only my “birth,” I figured, put into code his whole mysterious biography. Why had he put birth in quotation marks? After our evening together, I was afraid I knew.

25

Mister JayMac dropped by our room at eight the next morning to tell us the Gendarmes’ owner, Mr John Sayigh, wanted to play a doubleheader that afternoon to make up for yesterday’s rainout. The weather report-sunny with high cumulus-promised us a shot at it.

“What of the field?” Jumbo asked.

“The groundskeepers got a tarp over the infield on Friday night. Outfield’s pretty scjuishy, though, and it’ll take some doing to firm up some spots where the tarp didn’t do its job. Mr Sayigh suggests volunteers from both our clubs show up at the park within the next hour or so to tackle the drying-out.”

“Yessir.”

“Begging your pardons, but both you fellas look like you could use some drying out too. Didn’t go honky-tonking last night, did you? A little arm-wrasslin with John Barleycorn?”

“We went to a movie,” Jumbo said.

Three movies, I thought.

Mister JayMac turned to me. “Didn’t you sleep? You look about as peaked as I’ve ever seen you.”

“He’ll look swell after some labor on Mr Sayigh’s field,” Jumbo said.

“Let me stress,” said Mister JayMac, frown lines between his eyes, “that neither Mr Sayigh nor I expect anyone to work who’d rather idle the morning away or go to worship services. In fact, if you don’t want to assist with field repairs, I’d like yall to come with me to church.”

“We’ll assist,” Jumbo said.

“All right. If everything goes well, today’s opener will start at two. The Gendarmes’ front office plans to announce the time over the radio and pass out flyers to folks leaving church. I expect a good crowd.”

“Yessir,” Jumbo said.

I found the empty hide of the stuffed goat the desk clerk’d brought me yesterday and handed it to Mister JayMac.

“What’s this?” he said.

“A toy,” Jumbo said. “Please return it to Mr Hoey, who must have sent it to our room in an unfortunate mix-up.”

“Looks a little the worse for wear,” Mister JayMac said. It did. That goat was dishrag-limp. Mister JayMac turned the empty skin over in his hands and said good-bye. I halted him again and gave him the goat’s picked-off eye buttons. Mister JayMac wrinkled his forehead and left.

Jumbo and I suited out in our flannels, splurged on a taxi, and rode to the Prefecture. True to Mister JayMac’s word, a half dozen groundskeepers’d beaten us to the task. With rakes, brooms, zinc buckets, wooden drags, and burlap bags of sand or sawdust, they struggled to repair the field. Jumbo and I went to work with three other Hellbenders-Dunnagin, Knowles, and Sudikoff-and maybe ten of the Gendarmes. Most of the guys treated this shit detail as a party, cracking wise and singing in rounds. It went okay.

Nowadays, you’ve got beaucoups of ways to dry out a field. You can sprinkle this more or less new-fangled chemical product called Diamond Dry around and let it absorb the water. You can vacuum up standing puddles with a machine. Or pour gasoline on the wet spots, flip a match in, and boil some of the moisture away. (Course, you can also burn down your ballpark.) Hell, nowadays you can hire a helicopter to hover over the swamp like a flying blow-dryer.

Back then, though, nobody’d heard of Diamond Dry or outdoor vacuums. Because of rationing and the hazard to your stands, no one would’ve thought of using gasoline. Helicopters? Ha! Not until ’39 did Sikorsky-first name, Igor-make one of those ungainly contraptions fly.

So you used other methods. You helped your grounds-keepers by wielding brooms to spread the water out, by forming bucket brigades to scoop it up and dump it elswhere, and by digging runoff trenches. That Sunday morning, some of us swept, some of us bailed, some of us scattered sawdust or hay around. By noon, Jumbo and I’d burnt our energy reserves down to fumes, but our labors guaranteed a game or two that afternoon, and the wives of some of the Gendarme players brought us a covered-dish dinner. Jumbo ate for the first time since his rooftop juicing on Friday night: creamed sweet corn, snap beans, yellow-squash casserole, tomato slices, popcorn okra, and creamed potatoes. The food was lukewarm, the women’d toted it so far, but it tasted like manna to me, even the meat dishes Jumbo wouldn’t let himself touch.