For her own part, Angie sat right where she was. Out of shock and dismay and a certain sense of fate. Tony went through life dragging mayhem behind him; it was a fact, and now that the worst had happened—was happening—a calm came over her. She sat there with a half-eaten Frito pie in one hand and a spoon suspended in the other and watched two dozen men, women, and children streaming over the field. There was a dog, too, a goofy beagle mix with floppy ears, though Angie had no idea where he had come from. Somebody tell the director to lose the dog, she thought, it’s just too much. And then she hiccupped a laugh.

Tony was cutting a wide circle that would—she saw this now—bring him right back to the bleachers, a bold move indeed if he thought she was any kind of protection when it came to Tab Darling. Then she realized that Win Walker was standing just behind her with a half dozen other men.

“Aren’t you going to do anything?” she asked.

“It’ll take care of itself,” said Win. “It’s just Tab working off a little frustration.”

“Tab won’t hurt him none,” offered someone Angie recognized as a teller at the bank.

“Or not so much as you’d notice,” somebody else said.

Tony came to a shuddering stop right in front of them. He was heaving hard for breath, but his eyes gleamed with his own familiar brand of crazy excitement.

She began, “Don’t—”

But he wasn’t even looking at her anymore. Tab caught up and plowed directly into Tony as if he were first base and the call was bound to be a close one. They went down into the dirt, whirling arms and legs putting up a cloud of dust.

Harriet shouted, “Tab, you idiot! This isn’t about him, it’s about you!” And then she threw herself onto her husband’s back.

“Oh, Lordie,” called out the third baseman. “Everybody into the pool.”

Angie whirled on Win Walker. “What were you saying about nobody getting hurt?”

He shot her an irritated look and ran down the bleachers to wade into the fray, which was expanding—it seemed to Angie—exponentially. Tony, she saw with huge relief, was crawling away, and nobody seemed to notice.

“I guess old Tab is madder than we thought,” said Wyeth Horton, the English teacher with the two-foot-long beard. “But you got to admit, the Roses sure do know how to throw a party.”

City Hospital was a squat, homely building directly across from the park.

“Other ball teams go for a beer,” Angie told Wyeth Horton. “But you all form a parade and walk over to the emergency room.”