“Why do people do this?” Phoebe said.

“To make other people,” I said. (Just then, I couldn’t imagine pleasure entering the equation.)

“I’d as lief adopt. Or… or die childless.”

A breeze drifting through the room dried the sweat my backside. I shivered, and shivered again.

“Don’t!” Phoebe cried. Then: “There’s got to be a better way. Ungh. To make other people. Ungh. Got to. Unnggh!”

I came, not very pleasingly for Phoebe, or me, or the good name of screwing in general. I hadn’t had a more interesting morning before breakfast since arriving in Highbridge, or maybe since my own original birthday, granted-but interesting isn’t the same as delightful, and I wondered if maybe Henry’s creator hadn’t hit upon something smart and useful after all, in sexless parenthood.

Phoebe sort of slipped away from the kiss I tried to plant on her cold forehead. I got up, gathered my clothes, and went into the bathroom to lose the drooping rubber, scrub myself up, and get dressed again. When I returned to Phoebe’s bedroom, she lay right where I’d left her-except she’d pulled the sheet over her bosoms and masked her eyes with one freckled forearm. Why hadn’t we set each other smoldering? You usually get some smoke, maybe even a fire, when you rub two sticks together.

“Okay,” she said, not looking at me. “Now tell everbody. Ever Hellbender, ever rival player, ever idjit fan.”

“I won’t tell anybody.”

Phoebe sat up, keeping herself covered. “I’m telling you to tell, Danny. I want you to.”

“Gentlemen d-d-don’t.”

“Crap-doodle. Gentlemen don’t eat at The Wing n Thigh.”

“I d-didn’t either.” Phoebe and I’d bumped into different dead ends of the same alley maze. “Besides, Mister JayMac’d k-k-kill me, Phoeb.”

“Tote yore sorry sef out of here, you mollycoddle! Git! I hope I never see you-or another slimy willie-long’s I live!” She didn’t cry, but her bottom lip pooched out and rolled over on itself like a chimpanzee’s.

I turned, walked through the house, and yanked open the screen door giving onto the porch.

“You drip!” Phoebe yelled after me. “Tell em all-tell everbody-how you come over n jazzed me!”

I lurched on outside and kicked Phoebe’s bike. Then I walked back to McKissic House through Cotton Creek, past a corner of Alligator Park and then row after row of stalls at the barely stirring farmer’s market.

49

That Saturday afternoon we had a doubleheader against the Gendarmes, with one game to follow on Sunday, and a two-game series to begin on Wednesday in LaGrange. Five games in seven days against the league leaders, with no more crack at catching them until a three-game homestand at the fag end of August.

“It’s do or die,” Vito Mariani said in the clubhouse before Saturday’s opener.

“ ‘Do or die,’ ” Turkey Sloan mocked. “ ‘Do or die.’ Lordy, s that the Eye-talian gift of gab?”

“It is do-or-die time,” Mariani said. “We lose even one today, Turkey, we make up no ground at all.”

“You can’t inspire these downhome worldlies with clichés-with bromides and bushwah.”

“I shouldn’t have to inspire em at all,” Mariani said. “That’s Mister JayMac’s job. But he aint even here.”

“ ‘Do or die.’ ” Turkey Sloan shook his head. “Gentlemen, forgive poor Vito. He should’ve said-he could’ve said-‘Excel or expire,’ ‘Put up or perish,’ or ‘Suck it in or succumb,’ but all that twitched his low-grade dago brain was ‘Do or die.’ ”

“Shut up, Sloan,” Creighton Nutter said, “or I’ll dock you a day’s pay for pointless jibber-jabber.”

Not hush, but shut up. Mister JayMac’d left town to find a replacement for Charlie Snow. In his absence, by decree and appointment, Nutter was acting Hellbender manager-with full power to play us where he liked, use his own dugout strategies, and, if needed, fine our bunglers, layabouts, and hooligans. Sloan shut up. He knew Nutter’d gig him in a minute.

Well, whether you like Mariani’s “Do or die” or Sloan’s “Suck it in or succumb,” we lost our opener to the Gendarmes and dropped four games off the pace. Roric Gundy pitched nine innings for our visitors, yielding just three hits and one run. He no longer telegraphed his curveball-someone’d finally cautioned him about the telltale flaw in his windup. I struck out twice, remembering Phoebe nude on her knees and her parting cry, “Tell everybody how you come over here n jazzed me!”

With Jerry Wayne Sosebee on the mound and better hitting, we won the afternoon’s second game and finished three games back, just where we’d begun it. We’d missed Charlie Snow’s presence, though-his whip-quick wrists and reliability at the plate. I also missed seeing either Phoebe or Miss LaRaina in the stands. Had they ducked out on me at this bend in the season? Or galloped off into the boonies with Mister JayMac on his hush-hush, do-or-die talent search?

On Sunday, ten minutes before game time, Mister JayMac showed up in our dugout with Charlie Snow’s replacement: a thin, pale, twenty-five- or -six-year-old named Worthy Bebout. Bebout had eyes like a Weimaraner’s, hair about that sickly color, and a hand shake as firm as boiled elbow macaroni. His arms hung too far out of his sleeves, and his pants ended too high on his legs, leaving his stirrup socks and sannies exposed and giving him the look of a fannyless stork.

“Mr Bebout hails from Wedowee, Alabama,” Mister JayMac told us. “Played semipro ball with Ipenson Textiles out of Phenix City.”

At Mister JayMac’s urging, Bebout came along the bench to shake hands. (“Ol pasta grip,” Sloan called him later.) He mumbled his hellos, then sat in the dugout’s farthest corner, his knees and shoulders twisted in and his pale face as empty and deadpan as a new-bought skillet.

“How come he’s not in the m-military?” I asked Henry.

Henry shrugged, but most of us thought Bebout’d finagled-or, worse, maybe even deserved-an NP, or “neuropsychiatric,” rejection. He gave off the waves of a serious crazy.

Probably because Mister JayMac was still pulling strings to have him enrolled as a CVL player, Bebout didn’t start our Sunday afternoon game against the Gendarmes. Four innings along, though, Mister JayMac got a go-ahead from the three-man commission that ran the league (just as Mister JayMac, by wile, guile, and noblesse oblige, wanted it to); and he pinch hit Bebout for Trapdoor Evans at the first chance.

The score stood at two each. Bebout responded by swinging so hard at three straight Dink Dewhurst curveballs he almost wrapped himself around his bat. The crowd booed, but Bebout just unwrapped himself and shuffled back to the dug-out wearing a quirky smile. With nearly every other Hellbender watching, Bebout dipped a pinch of snuff from the tin in his back pocket, sucked it into his mouth, and rubbed his upper gum with the first joint of his pinky.

The game went on. In the seventh, Bebout made two super catches, a shoestring grab and a last-second leap-and-snatch to prevent a Gendarme extra-baser off the Feen-A-Mint sign. A couple of minutes later, several of us clustered around him in the dugout to congratulate him.

“S okay,” Bebout said, refreshing his dip from the snuff tin that’d made a raised circle on his hip pocket.

As Skinny stood in to bat, Junior Heggie sat down next to me. “Ever dip snuff, Danl?”

I shook my head. I was a smoker.

“You ever start, don’t bum a pinch from Bebout there.”

“Why not? He t-tight with it?”

“Oh no, he’d give you some all right, but the screwball dips dirt,” he said. “That lil tin in his pocket’s brimful of loose Wedowee dirt! Dirt, by damn!”

Dobbs singled. Quip Parris struck out. I drew a walk. Worthy Bebout came up behind me in Charlie Snow’s old batting slot. The fans cheered him for the catches he’d made, but set themselves for his second CVL at bat with show-me furrows on their brows. No one could forget his debut as a hitter: three torso-twisting swings and no contact.