want you guys to lay back and wait for the fastball,’ Roger told us. ‘McCracken’s got a killer curve, a mean slider, a big-league change-up you can break your back on. But his fastball’s nothing. He uses it to set up his other pitches. If we can keep from swinging at anything outside the strike zone, he’ll give up lots of walks. Then he’ll have to throw the fastball and, when he does, we’ll hammer it.’
Though Roger’s strategy went against McCracken’s statistics, it was Roger’s game, and Roger’s money was bet on it.
All that week, in the afternoons, Roger Cash worked out at the abandoned ball field behind the lumberyard. Sometimes I acted as his catcher, but more often he employed Walt Swan, a brother to Dusty. He paid Walt five dollars cash after every workout.
In the evenings, accompanied by his trusty road atlas, he played the mileage game in every bar in the area. Dad heard at work that Roger was picking up several hundred dollars in winnings each night.
‘It’s also a way for me to become known real quickly,’ Roger said. ‘It will help assure a good turnout for the game on Sunday.’
By the end of his third evening in town he had a very pretty brunette on his arm. She had a pleasant laugh, a crooked smile, and pale brown, almond-shaped eyes. She was a cocktail waitress at Hot Mama’s on the outskirts of town. Her name was Jacqueline, and she spent the rest of the nights that week in Roger’s room, except the night before the big game.
‘Do you have any objection, Gil,’ Roger asked my dad our first night at supper, ‘to my having occasional female company in my room?’
Dad looked up from his chicken-fried steak.
‘You can bring a goat to your room as far as I’m concerned,’ he said, ‘as long as you’re quiet.’
It was during that week before the challenge game, that I found out a lot about distances myself. Like myself, most of my friends were just discovering girls. Most of our discoveries involved talk. We talked about the mystery of them, we talked about them individually and collectively, often in a disparaging manner learned from older boys at the Springtime Café or the Main Street Pool Hall.
Byron had gone to the movies a number of times with a green-eyed girl named Janice, who wore no lipstick or make-up because her family belonged to a fanatical religious group that thought the end of the world was imminent, and that everyone should be in a natural state when the end came.
‘I asked her why she wears clothes,’ Byron said, after his fourth and final date, ‘and she said, “Modesty. The Lord expects modesty from all His creations.”’
It was on that date he discovered the only reason her parents let her go out with him was that he seemed a likely candidate for conversion. That evening, when they arrived back at her house after the show – her father drove them to the movie and picked them up at the Springtime Café afterward – their preacher, Pastor Valentine, and eight members of the congregation were camped in Janice’s living room, which, Byron said, was decorated like a church.
Pastor Valentine conducted an impromptu service, and every- one prayed loud and long for Byron’s wandering soul. They said many unkind things about the Catholic Church in general and the Pope in particular, having wrongly assumed, I suppose because of our last name being French, that Byron was a practicing Roman Catholic. We had never attended any church, and Dad said our family had had no religious affiliation for at least three generations. ‘I have no intention of breaking with tradition,’ Byron said.
Meanwhile I was in love for the first time. Or, more accurately, I had let being in love move from my imagination to real life. Her name was Julie Dorn, and I had become enamored of her just at the end of the school year. She was a farm girl, almost my height and fifteen pounds heavier. She was clean-up hitter for the high-school girls’ softball team, and I liked her because she wasn’t a giggler, and always looked me in the eye when we talked. She drove a four-ton grain truck to school.
I was attracted to her straightforwardness, her toughness. Julie tolerated my interest in her, but made it plain she would prefer a more masculine beau, probably one of the broad-shouldered farm boys who knew how to deliver calves and had bronzed arms the size of fence posts. She often teased me about my ignorance of farms and was slightly contemptuous of what she saw as my lack of physical strength. Also, she wasn’t impressed by my baseball playing, even though I was often the star of the team both offensively and defensively. She preferred to watch the boys she was attracted to grunt like dinosaurs on the football field. To add to my woes, I didn’t drive yet. Julie had been driving farm equipment since she was ten years old.
I called on her about once a week, walking the three miles of narrow pavement that passed her family’s farm. She would entertain me in the dark parlor, or we would walk in the sweet dusk, watching fireflies rising, sparkling, dissolving in our path. We even kissed a few times. But Julie never let me forget that my interest in her was much greater than her interest in me.
A couple of days after Roger Cash appeared in town, I walked out to the Dorn farm, arriving at mid-afternoon on a high-skied, blazing day. The farm house was tall and sad-looking, badly in need of paint. I knocked at the side door; like farmers everywhere the Dorns did not use their front door. One of Julie’s aunts answered, wiping perspiration from her forehead with the back of her hand.
‘Julie and her sister are coiling hay in the north pasture,’ she said.
1 could not see into the house because of the thick screen on the door, but from the dark interior came the smell of pork roast, the fumes mouth-watering, almost tangible.
I walked through a grove of trees, enjoying the temporary coolness in the midst of the fiery day. I picked a bluebell, split the bell, and rooted out the teardrop of honey inside.
In a half-swathed field of red clover, Julie and a younger sister were at work with pitchforks, layering the hay into coils, which, when finished, resembled giant beehives.
‘You townies don’t know how good you’ve got it,’ Julie said, driving the tines of her fork into the earth, stilling the vibrating handle, then leaning on it as if it were a tree.
She was flushed and perspiring. Her copper-colored hair spilled over her forehead and was flecked with clover seeds. She wore jeans and a short-sleeved blouse the color of cowslips. The back and underarms of the blouse were soaked dark. She wasn’t wearing a bra. I realized that even after my three-mile walk I was still cool. I was wearing a white open-necked shirt and khaki shorts. Even though my hair was lightened by the sun, I had not tanned much. Julie’s arms and face were sunblackened, her hair bleached golden in spots.
‘Can I help?’ I asked, hoping to win favor.
‘Sure,’ Julie said, smiling too knowingly, as if there was some private joke. ‘Beat it,’ she said to her sister. The younger girl stabbed her fork into the ground and raced off, happy to be relieved of an unpleasant job.
I have probably never worked as hard as I did in the next fifteen minutes – and accomplished less. I might as well have been trying to coil water with that pitchfork. Julie offered no advice. As I worked, I babbled on about my new friend, Roger Cash, and the upcoming baseball game, mileages, distances, posters, concessions, while accumulating a pitiful pile of clover that bore no resemblance to the waist-high beehives Julie and her sister had created, the hay swirled in circular patterns, the swaths interlocked, impervious to wind, resistant to rain.
While I worked Julie sat in the shade of a dark green coil, smoking, a crockery water jug bathed in condensation beside her.
I finally gave up, red-faced and disheveled.
‘It’s not as easy as it looks,’ I said.
Julie grinned with what I hoped was tolerance rather than contempt. ‘You people in town live so far away,’ she said, her tone still not definable.
‘It’s