“Yessir,” Hoey said sarcastically.

Creighton Nutter’s pitching kept us in it until the seventh. In the top of that inning, I came up with Skinny Dobbs on first-he’d drawn Sundog Billy’s only walk of the evening-and one out. I laid down a bunt, dropping it off my Red Stix bat as pretty as a biscuit and about as frisky. Ed Bantling scrambled out from behind the plate, Wallace off the mound, and Binkie Lister in from third. Although Lister made the play, his throw to first baseman Harvey Coombs got there a full second too late to turn my infield hit into just another well-placed sacrifice.

Polidori blew the call. Trumpeted it. Tuba’d it. Thumbed me out. Claimed I’d jumped over the bag. Shoot, I’d banged my ankle hitting it.

Hoey, coaching first, exploded. Tore into Polidori like a terrier into a rat’s nest. Jigged before him like a runamok Osterizer. It was like he’d forgotten, now I had my voice back, I could gripe for myself. Then Hoey flat-handed Polidori in the chest and staggered him.

“YOU’RE OUTTA HERE!” Polidori shouted, a hand on his heart.

Hoey wouldn’t leave. He’d gone flaming bonkers. He cursed and snarled, edging around like a cougar on uppers. Nobody-I mean, nobody-could slow his het-up prowl. The crowd leapt to its feet. When they booed, their boos fell like ton upon ton of flapping canvas. It scared me pissless.

Fans started hurling sample jars of Burma-Shave onto the field, heaving the bulk of these samples towards first base. Just before the game, a pair of fast-talking drummers had passed out the samples to every adult male coming in. Now, those jars rained down like porcelain hail. One jar clipped Hoey on the arm. Polidori, Coombs, and I backed deeper into the outfield. Hoey followed after-not to escape the barrage but to keep cursing the hapless Happy Polidori, for the jar that’d hit him had had no more effect than a poppy seed.

The PA announcer scolded the crowd. The police threatened arrests. In the outfield, Hoey continued to fume and storm. Finally, Mister JayMac sent Muscles, Curriden, Fanning, and Sudikoff out there-at some peril, for the crowd started catcalling at once-to subdue Hoey and drag him, thrashing and frothing, if need be, into the clubhouse. This took several minutes because Hoey tried to elude our press-gang, meanwhile heaping dogshit on Polidon’s pedigree.

“You ignorant dago!” Hoey dodged Mister JayMac’s posse. “Your mama bore you purblind on muscatel!”

“You bigot!” Polidori cried. “You froggy bilge mucker!”

Muscles tackled Hoey behind second base. The crowd cheered. Curriden, Fanning, and the others picked him up and, with Muscles gripping his belt, littered him back towards our dugout like a battlefield casualty. I scurried along behind them: Polidori had called me out and wouldn’t change his mind-not in front of these fans, not after blotting up so much of Hoey’s abuse.

Once the cops, the PA announcer, and our rescue squad had restored some order, and the groundskeepers had a wheel-barrow full of Burma-Shave jars, Sundog Billy struck out Heggie to squelch our “rally.” Nutter shut down the ’Darmes after a lead-off single in the bottom half of the inning, and so on and so on, until the bottom of the ninth, with the score locked at two apiece and half the citizenry of LaGrange trying to deafen us with cow bells.

“To hell wi the Hellbenders! To hell with em all! Tonight they go down! Tonight they do fall!”

I felt nose high to a tic’s rump. All the vocal scorn had even begun to get to Nutter. Veteran or no, he could sense the rising heat. He threw two wild pitches in a row and walked the Gendarme shortstop Tucker DeShong. Bang! Mister JayMac lifted Nutter for Vito Mariani, who got the next two batters to pop up. One more out and we went into extra innings.

Cliff Nugent, LaGrange’s center fielder and best clutch hitter, came up. Mariani got two strikes on him and wasted two pitches trying to sucker him into a strikeout. His fifth pitch, a curve, broke on the outer edge of the plate-too close for a man with a couple of strikes to let go by-and Nugent drove it on a dying clothesline into the right-field corner. Foul. Six inches foul. Maybe a foot.

Happy Polidori watched the ball sail over his head and skid on the divoted turf. He faced second base and chopped his right arm down to signal the drive fair. Nugent sped up again, rounded first, and churned for second. Skinny Dobbs couldn’t believe the call, but he chased down the ball, which’d already caromed off the fence in foul territory, and tried to throw it home to keep DeShong from scoring. The throw reached Dunnagin on three feeble hops, too late, and the stands swayed like racketing freight cars.

“Mais oui!” chanted the crowd: “But yes!”

The Gendarmes had beaten us by a run and stretched their lead to three full games. Polidori’d blown the most crucial call in the entire ballgame. Mister JayMac couldn’t protest it because a hundred or more people had jumped the fences to pound their heroes on the backs, and Polidori and his fellow ump had already hurried off the field.

In the clubhouse, Mister JayMac paced a strip of concrete like a badger.

“Home cooking!” Buck Hoey shouted. Because he’d showered after his ejection, he wore civvies, like Mister JayMac. Turkey Sloan’d already given him the partisan Hellbender take on Polidori’s gaffe.

“They stole this one!” somebody yelled.

“Bastids ambushed us!”

“They bought Polidori’s ass, thass what! They bought it!”

“YALL HUSH!” Mister JayMac cried.

We hushed. Mister JayMac had his chin on his breast-bone and his hands fisted in the pockets of his pants. He’d stopped pacing, but one leg jiggled, like the leg of a hound agitated by a belly rub.

“I don’t think Mr Polidori japped us once this evening-till that call on Mr Nugent’s liner to right.”

“He had it in for us all evenin, sir!” Curriden said.

“I asked neither your nor anyone else’s opinion.”

Curriden shut his eyes. All of us wanted to denounce the one-sided calls and the unruly crowd. Hometowning hurt. It’d cost us an important game. But we simply stood in our sweaty smelly funk waiting for the Word.

“Mr Polidori made beaucoups of mistakes,” Mister JayMac said, “but all but the last one stemmed, I believe, from misapprehension and the bullying of the crowd-which, let me remind you, pays its money to supply that ingredient. Rafe Polidori knows his business. Under ordinary circumstances-”

“Mister JayMac,” Muscles said. “Sir, I-”

An upraised hand cut him off. “-he calls em as he sees em, and he usually sees them pretty well. Tonight, gentlemen, what we witnessed in the bottom of the ninth did not signal any blatant Gendarme bribery, but Mr Polidori’s personal response to the shenanigans of Ligonier Hoey two innings earlier.”

“Sir-”

“Don’t interrupt, Hoey.” (Not “Mr Hoey,” just “Hoey.”) “Mr Polidori should be an impartial ajudicator on the ball field, but, like all of us, he consists of flesh, blood, and certain deep-seated prejudices bespeaking the imperfection of his humanity. What was brittle in him snapped when you baited him beyond his God-given level of tolerance.”

“You’re blaming me for the bastid’s call?”

“For precipitating it. Yes I do. Your actions in our half of the seventh stank on ice.”

“I was standing up for Dumbo here. For the Hellbenders.”

“You like to got Mr Boles conked with a shave-cream jar and the game ruled a forfeit against us. Mr Boles escaped a concussion, thank God, but your team, I remind you, lost.”

Nobody spoke.

“Stay tonight and tomorrow with the family putting you up, but don’t report to the Prefecture tomorrow. Read a magazine. Listen to the radio. Don’t show up here. Stay away.”

“Am I suspended?”

“Let me think on that.” Mister JayMac looked us square in the eyes. “Go on and shower.”