“No. But we must end this deceit, this betrayal of both Mister JayMac and our better selves.”

“This sweet deceit. Call it sweet.”

“Don’t torment me. Neither tease nor quibble.”

“Shhhh. Look here.” Miss Giselle grabbed an okra stalk.

“Don’t. It will produce an insupportable itch.” He meant that the prickly hairs on the okra pods would.

“I have you for that. Here.” Miss Giselle snapped off a pod several inches long. “Kizzy or Euclid or a boarder should have picked this one already. They’re tenderest-unlike you-when smaller. See. This one has a horny rind.”

Henry took the pod and flung it away. It whirled through the okra forest and struck me on the neck. I touched my grated skin and ducked even closer to the ground.

“Do you like gumbo?” Miss Giselle said. “The clear sweet ooze of the pod? The way it thickens and quickens?” Sitting on Henry’s knee, she kissed him on the forehead.

“But we make nothing together,” Henry whispered. “I have lifeless seed and you a desolated womb.”

“We make each other happy.” Miss Giselle shifted so her hands clutched his shoulders and her hips rose and fell to an unforced rhythm. I lay on the blush-fed thumping of my heart.

“GOD!” Henry shouted, a thunderclap. I expected McKissic House to empty, our teammates to come pouring out to see what’d happened. I didn’t dare move. Henry’d know me for a snoop, and Miss Giselle would have me booted off the team.

After a time, Henry and Miss Giselle moved again, crinoline on cotton. I hugged the earth.

“Take me to Darius’s old place. You can’t leave me now.”

“But the possibilities of discovery, scandal, disgrace-”

“Now, Henry. Now!”

Henry gathered up Miss Giselle. He carried her through the okra, tomatoes, squash, beans, sweet peas, cucumbers, and corn towards the Bomber’s garage and the room above it where Miss Giselle’s faithless husband’s bastard son had lived and grieved the biggest part of his resentful adulthood.

As soon as they’d gone, I crept quietly back to McKissic House.

Two hours later Henry came to bed. I pretended sleep. He pretended to believe it. But for an hour or more, he sat on his mattress with his arms around his knees, a gray hulk in our cramped and steamy room.

Playing ball, you forgot the war. Riding the Brown Bomber, you read the papers or talked about it. The fact my dad’d died in the Aleutians made me listen up to any news from the Akskan theater.

On a road trip to Lanett, I read a story in the Highbridge Herald about Allied forces invading the island of Kiska, only to find-after taking beaucoups of casualties in the bedlam and fog:-the Japs’d already evacuated it. In other words, we’d defeated an enemy no longer there. The press called it the “blunder at Kiska.” Nobody could figure how, or when, the Japs’d managed to pull their otherwise doomed troops off the island. I showed this story to Henry, who’d been riding with his head lolling against the window and his hands twitching in his lap. He read it and handed the paper back.

“Stupid,” I said. “We let em get away.”

“The resourcefulness of the Japanese spared thousands from the maw of death. Why do you long to glut it?”

“They’re Japs, Henry-bloodthirsty, conniving m-monkeys.”

“A few may deserve your censure. Many more do not. War homogenizes the good and the bad. I can only applaud those who escaped. Had the Allies shown a like wit, resisting panic and withholding their fire, no one would have died.”

“That’s crap,” I said. “The Japs left mines and b-booby traps behind.” The newspaper said over a hundred men on the destroyer Abner Read were hurt or drowned when their ship hit a mine. How could Henry side with the lousy Japs?

Henry said nothing.

Dunnagin leaned over our seat back. “How’d they manage to get away so clean? The Japs?”

“Alaskan foes-Aleutian fogs-swirl and deceive,” Henry said. “The Japanese used them, and the capriciousness of fate, to avert many deaths.”

“You mean they got lucky,” Dunnagin said.

“Perhaps everyone got lucky.”

“Cept them poor guys on the Abner Read and the d-dogfaces blown to srn-smithereens by b-b-booby traps!”

Henry grunted. The war that’d once appalled, now just seemed to bore him. He let his head loll against the window again, where it was buffeted by Sudikoff’s herky-jerky driving and maybe by troubling thoughts of Miss Giselle. No wonder he couldn’t hold the war on a front burner.

Three seats ahead of us, Bebout leapt up and had some sort of weird schizo fit. Waving one arm, he baptized everyone around him with spastic finger flicks, like a holy-roller on speed.

“Norman!” he yelled. “NORMAN!”

Sudikoff was driving. “What?” he shouted back. “What?”

Bebout went into a long nonsensical spiel about the angel Gabriel and his brother Woodrow and who-knows-what-else? I’d never heard anything like it.

Sudikoff said, “Cain’t yall git that joker to shuddup? If you don’t, I’m like to have a accident.”

Mister JayMac came back to Bebout, put an arm around him, and eventually got him quieted down.

“The guy’s a walking Looney Toon,” Curriden said. “I think he’s snapped.”

Bebout rested easy the last thirty miles of our ride-but in Lanett, getting off the Bomber, he dumped a tin of Wedowee Snuff into Larnar Knowles’s shirt pocket and patted it, like a mama giving her son a fresh handkerchief. Lamar took it as a joke, thank God, and the incident blew over.

Still, a lot of us worried Bebout would have one of his spells during a game. Thank goodness, though, a ballpark and playing ball seemed to calm and invigorate him at the same time-and, except for Henry, he played as well as any of the rest of us against the Linenmakers.

On Thursday and Friday evenings, despite a lot of noisy support from the Lanett crowds, the Linenmakers couldn’t stay with us. We beat them seven to two and thirteen to zip. Henry had three home runs in the series-his concentration during this road trip rarely faltered-and twelve RBIs. He now had thirty-nine homers on the year and led his nearest competitor in that department-Lon Musselwhite, who had a solo shot on Friday-by a dozen and a half.

Given that the CVL season had only half the number of games played by the majors, Henry had a better home-run percentage than Ruth’d had in his top three seasons with the Yankees. In the bigs, with the same homer percentage he’d had in Highbridge, Henry would’ve hit eighty-two! Even Lanett’s fans cheered when the third of his blasts sailed over the right-field wall into an egret-lined branch of the Chattahoochee.

In the same series, I did okay myself-seven hits in eight at bats. Every time Henry walloped a fence-clearer, I trotted home ahead of him. In fact, all of us feasted on Linenmaker pitching, and when we left on Saturday morning for Opelika, we rolled out with a certain greedy regret. Our second victory in Lanett, coupled with a rare Gendarme loss to the Boll Weevils, had lifted us into another first-place tie.

Lou Ed Dew, manager of the Orphans, had his team loaded for Hellbender. They’d dropped six games back and could finish in a tie for first only if they won all six of their remaining games while we and the Gendarmes booted ours. In other words, the Orphans had no chance-we concluded our season with three home games against LaGrange. Either the Hellbenders or the Gendarmes would win the pennant. The Orphans still had a shot at second, though, and a chance to scuttle our dreams before we returned home. Lou Ed Dew meant to scuttle em.

That weekend series-a doubleheader on Saturday and a singleton on Sunday afternoon-turned prickly as soon as the Orphans’ ace, Smiley Clough, took the mound. He threw high and tight at least once a batsman, a whistling low-bridger loosed with an oops-I-didn’t-mean-to-do-that smirk. You didn’t know whether to go after Clough with your bat or to sympathize with his control problems. Time we realized he needed his skull cracked and his smirk rubbed south, Clough had a deuce-to-zip lead and a breaking ball Nutter swore took its unhittable kink from a smear of KY jelly. Whatever, Clough went the full nine innings and shut us out.