They was no swagger to him. He was all business. He took a practice cut, squeezed the rosin bag, tapped the toe of each shoe with his bat, and stepped right in. Even from centerfield I could tell he had two inches and fifty pounds on me. The crowd hushed. Sam turned and looked at us, and I knew he would pitch to him. I hunched over and talked.

Hum tha hum tha hard baby hum tha

The pleadings rose from all over the field like foreign folks praying to some outlandish god. Sam reared back, his red cap bright in the sunlight.

O’Malley rode the first pitch over the left centerfield fence. It bounced off the railroad track across the creek and disappeared in the bushes on the mountainside.

OK Sam OK only two only two

The Davidson right fielder popped up to third and we retreated to the dugout, shaken. We poked each other to make sure we was still yet alive.

“C.J. up!” Isom hollered.

I stepped in to face the Davidson pitcher, Froggy Lester. Froggy was all right. He worked at Felco oncet and come to Annadel to drink his beer and shoot his pool before he moved to Davidson. I pretended he was Lytton Davidson. He worked me to three and two, and I sent a high fastball over the left fielder’s head and all the way to the fence. I went into second standing up. Acrost the way I heard Violet shrieking above the noise of the other Annadel fans. She stood and waved her arms. I raised my cap.

Doc sacrificed me to third and a long fly by Ralph Day brung me on home. We couldn’t do nothing else and trailed 2–1 going into the bottom of the second. But scoring had relieved the pressure, like puncturing a boil. Sam settled down and started in to pitch the game of his life. I never seen him throw so hard before or since. He struck out one in the second, and three straight in the third. When O’Malley come up in the fourth, Sam took a while with his pitch. O’Malley went after the first one again, but this time it carried high into the deepest part of centerfield and seemed to drift in the wind. I got under it, leaped, caught it as I banged against the fence. Lytton Davidson stood up in the dugout, stuck his hands in his pockets, and turned his back. I held the ball high over my head and brought it off the field like a trophy of war. Isom leaped on my back.

“Holy shit! What a catch!”

“We may win this jump!” Antoine Jones bounced up and down.

“Well,” I drawled, “that’s one quarter of Mister Davidson’s investment that he done lost.”

“It was inside,” Sam gloated. “He got trouble inside. His wrists aint strong, I can tell.”

We all laughed because we knew, especially Sam, that O’Malley had hit the hell out of the ball, that the wind held it up and even then it had been close.