On his way in to the bench, Darius collected the game ball from Henry and ambled straight to Fadeaway. Mister JayMac hurried to interpose himself, but Darius stepped around him and slapped the ball into Fadeaway’s chest.

“You thow, boy. Save yo precious wager.”

“Darius, I’ll pull you when it’s time,” Mister JayMac said.

“I’m sittin,” Darius said. “I jes guv yall six of the best I got. Let this eggsuck boy carry yall from here.”

“Neither of you has a thing to say about it,” Mister JayMac said. “Darius, you pitch.”

“Nosir. I’m gone.”

Major Dexter waddled over in his umpire’s gear. “They need that ball for warm-ups. Toss it back out, please.”

Fadeaway tossed the ball to Turtlemouth Clark. Then he sat back down, his eyes on the clayey dust between his shoes.

Mister JayMac grabbed Darius’s shirt. “This club belongs to me-you pitch because I say you do, nigger!” Despite the crowd noise, everyone on our bench heard this. Mister JayMac heard it himself and looked around.

“So much belongs to you,” Darius said distinctly.

“I’m sorry,” Mister JayMac said. “You’ve held these fellas in check the whole way. Keep on doing it.”

“Nosir. I brung yall far’s I can.” Darius stripped to his ribbed gray undershirt and dropped his Hellbenders blouse into Fadeaway’s lap. Fadeaway pushed it into the dirt, like he would’ve a grungy dishrag.

“Damn it,” Mister JayMac whispered to himself.

Darius walked through a gate and between a pair of bleacher sections towards the Brown Bomber. The soldiers in the stands watched him go with the same sledgehammered curiosity felt by us Hellbenders. Some of the GIs hollered, “Way to sling that baby!” or “Hallelujah!” Darius raised one arm and held it over his head until he’d disappeared from view.

“Batter up!” Major Dexter yelled. “We need a batter!”

In the top of the seventh, Henry jacked Turtlemouth’s first pitch so far over the right-field fence that everyone-everyone-stood up to watch it arc off into infinity.

“Ooooiiiuuuweeoo!” went Lamar Knowles. “Never seen nobody but Jumbo pole em like that!”

His amazed jubilation didn’t extend to the troops. They admired the crunch of Henry’s home run, but not Turtlemouth blowing his shutout or yielding a crucial run this late in the game. In any case, Turtlemouth wiped his forehead and mowed down-like a man with a Catling gun-Reese Curriden, Junior Heggie, and Double Dunnagin.

In the bottom of the inning, Fadeaway swaggered out to pitch. A few disgruntled GIs shot him the razz. They sensed he might have rabbit ears and got on him like cats on a camel cricket: “Fade away, Fadeaway! Oh, fade away, please today, oh, faded ofay, Fadeaway!” And so on. Fadeaway adjusted. He left off strutting and buckled down. In his first inning of work, he allowed one solid single but emerged unscored-on and quietly cocky. It’d taken me six innings to get the strut he’d picked up facing only four Dominican hitters.

In the top of the eighth, Skinny Dobbs, Fadeaway Ankers, and I came up against Turtlemouth-Skinny and I for only the third time, Fadeaway for his first. Skinny and Fadeaway lined and struck out respectively, and Henry stopped me as I started up to the plate.

“I know what you should do,” he said.

“Yeah. H-h-hit it where they aint.”

He took me by the shoulders, gently. “Bunt.”

“B-b-bunt?”

“Push it down the third-base line, Daniel. Mr Clark has a weakness fielding bunts.”

“H-h-how do you kn-know?”

“Mr Clark has an inner-ear problem. I read it in a Negro paper from Birmingham.”

“Inner-ear problem?”

“If you push the ball down the line, Mr Clark will lose his balance trying to retrieve it. With your speed, Daniel, you’ll have a hit.”

I had no quarrel with Henry’s suggestion. In my two at bats, I’d fanned and reached base on a strategic charity ticket. This time, then, I squared around, into the blazing sweep of Turtlemouth’s sidearm curve, and, yielding with the pitch, let the ball plunk off my bat and sprinted.

To improve your chances of legging out a doubtful hit, you lower your head and dig. As Satchel Paige said, you don’t look back; either somebody might be gaining on you or you’ve stolen a second or two from your ultimate time. God save my soul, but I peeked to see how Turtlemouth’d attacked my bunt. When I did, I saw him grab for the ball, wheel around his outstretched arm like a besotted maypole dancer, and topple into the dirt. He underhanded a throw to first as he fell, but the ball-by now I was digging again, burning jet fuel-sailed on him, and his wild throw got me all the way to second.

Turtlemouth, walking back to the mound, paused to consider me on second. He sneezed and rubbed his nose. “Done got there so fast you guv me pneumonia.” He got back into his stance and toed the rubber from a stretch.

Snow brought me home with a double to the right-field gap, making the score two to nothing. Muscles stranded Snow with a wing-shot gull to the left fielder, and the rest of us trotted back out to defend our lead against the cream of Mister Cozy’s batting order. The afternoon’s fractured dazzle hung on us like warm honey, golden and clingy.

44

Despite the sunshine, and the peanut scorch drifting over us from town, the rest of that game played out like a wine drunk-some kind of drunk, with the slide-show lurchiness of a bad dream. At shortstop, I watched it all happen, my mouth full of worry flannel.

In the bottom of the eighth, the first bat showed up. I don’t mean baseball bat either. I mean living bat, a flying varmint with tattered wings. Against the rinsed blue of the sky, it seemed so humdrum, as it dive-bombed the field and swerved up from a thousand near collisions, that most of us mistook it for a bird-if we mistook it for anything other than a scudding magnolia leaf. Then more such wheeling varmints swept into view, and I wondered if a pigeon breeder on the roof of a nearby barracks had emptied his dovecotes. But the varmints got thicker and noisier, breaking into squadrons and chirping like airborne crickets, and I knew them for bats, several pesky flights of them. They stirred more breeze than the day did, zooming from the stands to the outfield, and from the fences to the stands, pip-pip-pipping so damned tinnily I started thinking of them as… as pip-squeaks.

In the black half of the eighth, the Dominicans sent up first baseman Gumbo Garcia, center fielder Tommy Christmas, and right fielder Gator Partlow. Fadeaway walked Garcia. The bats blew back and forth overhead like curls of newspaper char from summer’s own chimney. Fadeaway punched Christmas a ticket to first, just like he had Garcia.

Major Dexter’s GIs began to sway and foot-stamp.

Fadeaway struck out Partlow on a slider-slider-speedball setup, and Dunnagin jumped out from behind his third swing and snapped off a bullet to Henry that nailed Tommy Christmas two feet off the bag. Christmas died on his knees, ducking all the stooping bats a-twitter over the field.

The GIs went as dead as a knobbed-off radio station.

Now the Dominicans had two outs and only the melon-footed and heavy-ribbed Garcia still on second. Fadeaway walked third baseman Judd Davies.

“Buckle down!” Mister JayMac shouted, really hacked.

Fadeaway may’ve tried, but on his first pitch to Oscar Wall, the left fielder, Wall reached back, his front leg off the ground, and clobbered Fadeaway’s best scroogie an Alabama ton. He almost seemed to hit it one-handed-his left hand swept away from the bat handle on his follow-through, while the ball itself hurtled up and away, into a cloud of dive-bombing bats.

I could imagine Fadeaway praying, Dear God, let it hit one of them varmints. I prayed too. Only a lucky midair intercept would prevent Wall’s blast from carrying to the fence and tying us at two apiece. And if it cleared the fence, the Dominicans would likely beat us.