And he took off from second just as Sticky Joe Beam came out of that octopus throwing motion of his, had a hair of a moment to see the white man’s eyes bulge out big as his belly, and Luther’s feet moved so fast the ground ran under him more than he ran over it. He could actually feel it moving like a river in early spring, and he pictured Tyrell Hawke standing at third, twitching because he’d laid out all night drinking, and Luther was counting on that because he wasn’t just settling for third today, no sir, thinking that’s right, you best believe baseball is a game of speed and I’m the speediest son of a bitch any ya’ll ever see, and when he raised his head, the first thing he saw was Tyrell’s glove right beside his ear. The next thing he saw, just to his left, was the ball, a shooting star gone sideways and pouring smoke. Luther shouted “Boo!” and it came out sharp and high and, yep, Tyrell’s glove jerked up three inches. Luther ducked, and that ball sizzled under Tyrell’s glove and kissed the hairs on the back of Luther’s neck, hot as the razor in Moby’s Barbershop on Meridian Avenue, and he hit the third base bag with the tiptoes of his right foot and came barreling up the line, the ground shooting so fast under his feet he felt like he might just run out of it, go off the edge of a cliff, right off the edge of the world maybe. He could hear the catcher, Ransom Boynton, shouting for the ball, shouting, “Hea’ now! Hea’ now!” He looked up, saw Ransom a few yards ahead, saw that ball coming in his eyes, in the tightening of his kneecaps, and Luther took a gulp of air the size of an ice block and turned his calves into springs and his feet into pistol hammers. He hit Ransom so hard he barely felt him, just went right over him and saw the ball slap into the wooden fence behind home at the exact moment his foot hit the plate, the two sounds—one hard and clean, the other scuffed and dusty—wrapping around each other. And he thought: Faster than any of y’all even dream of being.

He came to a stop against the chests of his teammates. In their pawing and hooting, he turned around to see the look on the fat white man’s face, but he wasn’t at the tree line anymore. No, he was almost at second base, running across the field toward Luther, little baby’s face all jiggly and smiling and his eyes spinning in their sockets like he’d just turned five and someone had told him he was getting a pony and he couldn’t do nothing to control his body, had to just shake and jump and run for the happiness of it.

And Luther got a real look at that face and thought: No.

But then Ransom Boynton stepped up beside him and said it out loud: