The Stories of J.F. Powers (New York Review Books Classics) by J.F. Powers

piglike eyes.”
    “Wait a minute, Jamesie!”
    “Bill. Go ahead. Fix me.”
    “O.K. But you don’t get to be Bill all the time.”
    “Now blow your foul breath in my face.”
    “There!”
    “Now ask me to have a cigar. Go ahead.”
    Blackie was offering Bill a cigar, but Bill knew it was to get him to break training and refused it.
    “I see through you, Blackie.” No, that was wrong. He had to conceal his true thoughts and let Blackie play him for a fool. Soon enough his time would come and . . . “Thanks for the cigar, Blackie,” he said. “I thought it was a cheap one. Thanks, I’ll smoke it later.”
    “I paid a quarter for it.”
    “Hey, that’s too much, Francis!”
    “Well, if I’m the head of the powerful—”
    Mr Murgatroyd came to the back door and told Francis to get ready.
    “I can’t go to the game, Jamesie,” Francis said. “I have to caddy for him.”
    Jamesie got a ride with the calliope when it had to stop at the corner for the light. The calliope was not playing now, but yesterday it had roamed the streets, all red and gold and glittering like a hussy among the pious, black Fords parked on the Square, blaring and showing off, with a sign, Jayville vs. Beardstown.
    The ball park fence was painted a swampy green except for an occasional new board. Over the single ticket window cut in the fence hung a sign done in the severe black and white railroad manner, “Home of the Jayville Independents,” but everybody called them the “Indees.”
    Jamesie bought a bottle of Green River out of his savings and made the most of it, swallowing it in sips, calling upon his willpower under the sun. He returned the bottle and stood for a while by the ticket window making designs in the dust with the corrugated soles of his new tennis shoes. Ding Bell, with a pretty lady on his arm and carrying the black official scorebook, passed inside without paying, and joked about it.
    The Beardstown players arrived from sixty miles away with threatening cheers. Their chartered bus stood steaming and dusty from the trip. The players wore gray suits with “Barons” written across their chests and had the names of sponsors on their backs—Palms Café, Rusty’s Wrecking, Coca-Cola.
    Jamesie recognized some of the Barons but put down a desire to speak to them.
    The last man to leave the bus, Jamesie thought, must be Guez, the new pitcher imported from East St Louis for the game. Ding Bell had it in the Dope Box that “Saliva Joe” was one of the few spitters left in the business, had been up in the Three Eye a few years, was a full-blooded Cuban, and ate a bottle of aspirins a game, just like candy.
    The dark pitcher’s fame was too much for Jamesie. He walked alongside Guez. He smelled the salt and pepper of the gray uniform, saw the scarred plate on the right toe, saw the tears in the striped stockings—the marks of bravery or moths— heard the distant chomp of tobacco being chewed, felt—almost—the iron drape of the flannel, and was reduced to friendliness with the pitcher, the enemy.
    “Are you a real Cuban?”
    Guez looked down, rebuking Jamesie with a brief stare, and growled, “Go away.”
    Jamesie gazed after the pitcher. He told himself that he hated Guez—that’s what he did, hated him! But it didn’t do much good. He looked around to see if anybody had been watching, but nobody had, and he wanted somebody his size to vanquish—somebody who might think Guez was as good as Lefty. He wanted to bet a million dollars on Lefty against Guez, but there was nobody to take him up on it.
    The Indees began to arrive in ones and twos, already in uniform but carrying their spikes in their hands. Jamesie spoke to all of them except J. G. Nickerson, the manager. J. G. always glared at kids. He thought they were stealing his baseballs and laughing about it behind his back. He was a great one for signaling with a score card from the bench, like Connie Mack, and Ding Bell had ventured to say that managers