THREE



It was possible that Aunt Bertie could have been the kind of aunt who is maternal. Plump, tight in cotton dresses, smelling of powder. Or she might, like her brother, Flynn's father, have grown to become a river rat, dressing in denim Oshkosh, fingers that smelled of worms and the bait bucket.
At times she had been both of these, but now she was settled into someone tailored and a little cold, a little skittish. It happens to furniture too, Flynn thought. The little stuffed chair in the parlour at a certain age is covered over in brocade, never sat upon. A smell of naptha.

"Hello, Jackie, running up and down the river again, I see."

Bertie kissed him by pressing her cheek against his. She has learned these ways, this style, from television soap operas. She has decided to become the still-attractive but matronly woman played in these dramas by the women who model mature clothes for mail order catalogues.

Bertie has no special insights. She knew what Flynn had done because he stank and had not changed clothes when he awoke in the motel in Massena.

"I got your lovely note." Bertie gestured toward the drumtop table where Flynn's postcard sat propped against two baseballs.

"You will sign those for the neighbors, won't you Jackie?"

Years before Flynn had told her how they brought in the cartons of baseballs to be signed in the clubhouse. Bertie was impressed by the fact that the players receive a check for this use of their property, and she began to find baseballs a worthy project. Each time Flynn saw her, she had more baseballs for the neighbors. Often they were the slippery, vinyl balls sold in discount stores, sometimes they were Haitian leather, gaping at the stitches, the kind of flaw you hoped to find once or twice a game before the umpire discovered. A pitch would dip or flare when you could spin a cut stitch off your finger.

"What happened to the ones I sent you?"

The balls on the table said "Little Leaguer" and felt like they had rocks within them. Flynn had sent her a mint condition box of the real thing two years before.

"Pardon me, Jackie?"

Bertie came back from the kitchen where she was doubtlessly making tea, something she always tried to foist on him.

"I'm going to make some eggs and a pitcher of Bloody Marys, Bert. No tea, thank you."

"I hope you're not drinking, Jack."

Was he, he wondered. Blackouts? No, too Ray Millandish.

"What happened to the new balls?"

"You are very popular with the people in your hometown, Jackie."

"Even when I never signed them?"

Bertie gazed innocently upon him. She probably had a closet upstairs full of baseballs, like the old men of Flynn's youth who saved tires and string for the next war. In the event of nuclear war, Bertie would be the new commissioner of the World Baseball Association.

"After the revolution," Flynn said, "Castro gave each child in Cuba a ball and bat."

Bertie smiled and followed him into the kitchen and sat at the table, her tea steaming under the needlepoint cozy before her. She wrinkled her nose when Flynn poured dry mustard into the eggs, but helped him find green onions. He made the Bloody Marys with V-8 and worcestershire and Mohawk vodka he found in the usual place under the sink. She had no tobasco, so he stirred cayenne pepper into the juice.

"Your arm hurting you, darling?"

Bert had noticed. Flynn had disdained the hot shower that morning, drove left handed into town. It hurt like hell.

"Likely will until my grave, Bert." He spoke with his mouth full, she did not like this much, "Price of admission, darling, remember when I used to say I'd give an arm and a leg to play in the bigs? Well, they collected."

"Your leg hurt too?"

Flynn laughed too hard and splittered yellow specks of egg on the tablecloth. Wiping it off made it worse.

Well, yes it does, but that don't count, sweetheart. The leg at least feels like it's still part of the same body.

Bertie began to cry. The tears did not suit her new personage, and Flynn wanted to comfort her. Yet there was a sinking feeling within him, a sour mix of the tinny vegetable juice and the eggs and mustard. He knew she wouldn't cry like this because he laughed at her.

"Poor, poor Jackie," she said, "I'm sorry you have so much sadness to bear. How long will it take, do you think?"

Flynn stared at her in perfect terror, yet feeling his face compose, showing none of what he felt. There are certain small rewards for a life given to a game.

So it wasn't just a single smudge, not just Emma who was out of place in this flight of his. What else was there? He couldn't ask Bert, so he merely continued to stare, benign and blank and--he thought--the perfect picture of the woe or grief or whatever it was he supposed Bertie thought he felt now.

She let him off.

"You'll want a shower, of course, won't you, Jackie? There's no need to run off into unpleasantness first thing."

"No," he allowed, thinking perhaps he could call Leonard and ask what it was he should know.

On the way upstairs, he signed the baseballs and looked at his own postcard for a clue to what should be done.

Bertie,
I know you share my feeling. I will be there in three days
after a drive up along the river. Thank you, darling



He had signed the card, Jack Flynn, in the little boy scrawl.

The shower covered his shoulders and drummed against the mass of muscle in the triangular hollow below. Flynn loved water because it was never anything but itself; he loved it in all its forms. It was an unusual thing for a river dweller, for water was what you went upon, looked on, or plumbed through with lines, sticks, or the blunt paddles of a motor prop. It was never to be known, only used, seen there in the distance, the white glare of the ice sheet in February light. Yet each of the showers, in Clayton and now at Bertie's had the tang of river under the chemical sniff. The water itself held memory and dim knowledge. Mud and eelgrass, a fragrance like the flesh of bullheads. During eighteen years, his halflife, he had come to use water as a tool, the swirling salt of the trainer's whirlpool, little blocks of cloudy ice in a plastic tub, your arm dead and white under the blue mound of cubes. At some early age Flynn had learned why water was said to be an element, long before he had known how to think in those terms. Water sliced itself into segments, it held like gem and then dissipated with its own will, it divided and subdivided and merged, carressed, attacked, surrounded and drowned. It came from nowhere, it obeyed only itself and th murmuring commands of falling, welling, pooling, boiling. He loved showers and baths and swimmming and rain. The drip from the dugout roof in a rain delay, the sheets of rain curling in from the power alleys and across the infield tarp, the cat's paws of rain on the river, the steaming needles of the shower turning his arm red and alive as he soaked it. The end of it, the last few drips like breath, evaporation, the river disappearing as the road cut inward.

He was looking for Emma now. She knew.

Ogdensburg was flat and dusty and old in the sunlight. The cinderblock motel was surrounded by a sea of tarmac. The maid would have turned the television off, the screen dimming in a slow glare in the empty, darkened room. Flynn tried to remember if Emma had screamed when he hit her.

He had not been able to stay long at home with Bertie, although he left his things there, intending to go back. Massena was cool under the tunneling shade of its trees, its clean white bungalows and broad houses adrift on emerald lawns--everything Ogdensburg was not this afternoon. Yet he had to go out.

Bertie had been watching the soaps when he came down from the shower, perched on her Lay-z-boy, her feet hardly skimming the carpet. She sailed through the afternoons this way he knew. Before she was aware of him back there in the room, he watched her watch the television. She moved her lips minutely, silently whispering the words of the characters as they spoke, the whispering sometimes interrupted by a surprised smile, an expression of woe or fear, the near-smile of scandals.

Under the soft sloth of her face her brother's face lay in outline like a statue under a sheet. Flynn's father's long bones and nose and his tough, fibrous lips were shadowed in his sister, silked over with puffy flesh, a hint of ladylike jowls. Bertie's eyes were more deeply set, wider than he remembered his father's, but she had his broad eyebrows, dark still though her hair was grey, unplucked though she had blued the eyelids with silvery shadow.

Flynn looked at the creases and chizeled folds of the face of the cowboy before him. Remington's bronze was tobacco brown, like leather really, which was how they talked of cowboys. It was a mistake to look for Emma here in the museum of the cowboy artist. She would have no interest in lariats and the pained grins of rearing horses. Emma would be found near flowered teas, camomile and lavender, purslane.

"Oh Jack, you scared me," Bertie had said.

He had studied her face then, witness now instead of spy. She was frightened of something, you could see that, perhaps frightened at the events unfolding on the screen before her, perhaps frightened by the effort of being what she must be this and each afternoon, perhaps by what Flynn could not remember having come here to do. Yet she was also beautiful and kind and all those things a boy remembered about an aunt; it was not really fair to think her cold, she had merely made choices.

"I think I'm going out for awhile."

"There?" She caught her breath with the question, making an expression like she made when the soap opera surprised her.

"Maybe."

"Would you like a roast, or something light?"

"I'm not sure about dinner."

"I can turn the air conditioning on, if you like. I don't use it much for myself."

Flynn nodded. Bertie was already paying more attention to the program before her than she did to this commonplace talk.

He would let her go on sailing. Whatever it was he had to do could not be so urgent. He had allowed it three days in his postcard, and Bertie seemed unhurried about it now.

She was whispering along with the actors again.

"I'll call if I'm not coming back tonight."

"Emma was here, you know. Early this morning before you came."

"No, I didn't know that," Flynn said.

"She has a nasty bruise," Bertie said. It was news solely, she gave no sign of purpose in it.

Flynn nodded and left.

On Water Street he found her, walking in a yellow sundress, the street empty otherwise. It had not been long since he left the Remington Museum, three or four turns around concentric blocks of rivertown tenements, two long glides down one way thoroughfares, and then here to the blind end of Water Street.

She entered a new Buick and drove off. A rental car, Flynn knew by the "Z" plates. He tried to keep her in his eye, she had not seen him. As she drove away, Flynn could see that she kept her windows up, using the air conditioner no doubt kept her fresh in the yellow dress. Flynn, on the other hand, kept his windows down. You had to hear to drive, his father could hear the river above the burring noise of a trolling motor, above the roar and growl of the main outboard. He could hear fish down through the surface and depth of water.

He was a hero.

Flynn lost her in a change of signals out near the highway. He saw her weave the auburn Buick up into traffic and along north. Women were weavers, the good ones at least. He would not chase her. If she had come to Bertie's once, she would be back again.

Flynn headed for Canada but stopped short of the bridge at the little league field. Walking across the cinder parking lot, he stopped and for a long time studied the towers of the old mental hospital in the middle distance. There was something familiar there, more than the still-adhering childhood fears of the substantial dark brown towers, the bony parapets and the severe, square walls of the Victorian nuthouse. That castle of rumor had become offices now; the kids who played on these fields--on land ceded by the state from what had been the hospital's dairy operation--would not recognize the castle for anything more than it was, an offical place with stones only darker than the old limestone armory in town. Even the iron gates were gone, and the claw-topped iron spike fences were replaced by the same chainlink that also surrounded the outfield of each diamond. Cream brick bland buildings clustered in a little campus on the grounds behind the old hospital. These were the new hospital, now called a care facility, and only the helplessly mad and the frail were no longer released into halfway houses in surrounding towns. The remaining patients roamed within sight of the diamonds, up and back on simple paths through the green, the nurses or orderlies standing among them like creatures of salt, crisply white. The moaning rose up.

"Hey batter hey batter hey batter hey..."

Everywhere they moaned so now, kids did. Infield chatter had become foreign, the endless singsong of mullahs, something sad and distant and hypnotic, ceasing at the release of each pitch.

Flynn resisted turning to the games for a moment, still staring at the dark brown building, its mullionless renovated windows like so many eyes blankly staring. He was reminded of his father, in the time when they had first operated on the cancer. He too was a shell then, seemingly benign. Flynn believed neither.

His feet turned in the soft stones of the parking lot, a familiar sound. He squinted ahead to the ball fields. You do not recall this bleakness, how it was all sunlight even then, glaring burdock along the roots of the chainlink, ragweed outside the outfield margins, small boys holding gloves before their own squinting eyes like great soft shields, kicking dirt and helpless in the sun, steamy and choking dust in the center of the scrubby infield.

These days they returned to red plastic drums of cold water, Eskimo coolers like the big leagues, instead of the long-handled dipper and pail.

It has not been that long for so much to change.

The moan rose up again and stopped with the pitch, the magnesium ping of the metal bat, whipping the ball back and out as the colors shifted in the field. The umpire, tanned horribly brown as the Remington cowboy, walked toward the water cooler. He drank and spat and leaned against the backstop watching the pitcher warm up. He was a skeletal and ominous man, dark patches of sweat under each arm of his faded black teeshirt, beancap pushed back on his skull, an equally faded pillow protector slung from an arm at his hip, instep guards flapping.

"Play ball!" he shouted in a drawl, nodded toward Flynn.
He was so thin when he died we draped the white teeshirts around him, tucking the excess under his bony hips.

Until even the touch of the cotton tortured him. Then we propped the sheet with styrofoam cups so it wouldn't touch him.

"SteeeReyekk!"

A bovine moan and click at the hip. He thumps the pillow protector up under the chin, squats to line the strike zone up, the iron mask leaning over the catcher. One and one Flynn figures, fastball on the fists. The metal bat thunks when he saws him off, a bloopy sound after the ball falls foul, exactly like a rock makes sinking into deep, still water.

One and two. Waste one away.

But Flynn shakes it off. Inside curve and take a little off, in this kind of sun you can catch him anticipating you'll go by the book.

A perfect pitch sails in and trims a little space of white at the knee. The iron mask turns away and the hand drops to click the count even.

Flynn comes four steps off the mound to take the ball and stare the cowboy eyes behind the iron.

Fitch slips the iron off to meet Flynn's gaze. Cerulean blue and placid eyes dare him. Flynn shakes his head and walks back up. Fitch is mopping sweat and unready to crouch yet. He too was fooled, Flynn knows. Sometimes the smart pitch catches everyone unready even when it trims the white. Two and two, Flynn rubs the ball, steps down and off for the hand to mouth, rubs both palms against the leather until they buck and skid. Fitch is ready to crouch.

Flynn asks for another ball, lofts this one in with a girlish fling. Fitch looks at its innocent face and drops it back in the pouch, throws out the same skiddy bastard Flynn's twice rejected.

Flynn promptly throws it back and Fitch smiles, pressing the smile in his lips so it doesn't show. Hamburg gets up from his crouch and strolls out with the new ball, rubbing it gently with splayed fingers, knuckles like purple knots. The home fans boo the visiting Flynn as Hotshot walks off to find the pine tar rag.

"Tired, Jack?"

"Never felt better, Hamburg. Asshole missed it, didn't he?"

"Sure he did, Jack, but you gotta pitch to Hotshot not to Fitch."

Hamburg takes the opportunity to grab his cup and rearrange and air the contents. Flynn laughs toward Fitch and turns back while Hamburg jogs back down.

"S'a count, Fitch?"

Fitch shows it like he really didn't know. Even Hotshot laughs.

Flynn fires a pisspea off and low, really smokes it. Fitch pulls the rope and bellows and Hotshot stands there long enough to hear the boobirds while Flynn walks in.

"It's a unfair world, Hotshot," Fitch says, and he too walks back to get water.

"Bad weather for a fireballer, boys," Flynn announces.

The skipper thinks it's funny. Wolfman rubs his constant bat, glaring at the skipper. Wolfman is a jujuman and he thinks Flynn speaks voodoo magic, and he don't like no one to joke when Jack throws.

He proves it by hitting one out, high and long and disappearing slowly into stretching hands in the deep rightfield upper deck.

"Just gotta go with the pitch, boys, don't you see?" The skipper cackles at this wonderful joke of his own, but this time it's okay since Flynn is up a run, and up the steps of the dugout waiting to give the jujuman five.

It ends that way, proving the validity of magic and the virtues of the book. Flynn goes to eleven and five, three point two ERA.

Smokey Joe's Band prepares a red carpet of white towels to lead the way to Flynn's locker. It is the first time in five starts that they have not had to work, and Flynn's complete game has enabled them two games of spit-in-the-cup in the bullpen. Flynn is a hero.

The press has decided so also for today, so Flynn fixes a new wad of Beechnut and Levi Garrett to enable him to think of quotable quotes. Wolfman, in his opposite cubbie, also sacrifices a postgame brew long enough to meet the press. The jujuman doesn't look the reporters in the eyes. Instead he glares at Flynn. It is love, Flynn knows. Wolfman believes that Flynn produces homeruns for him. Flynn tips an imaginary hat to the Wolf during one of the glaring moments; Wolfman nods and lights another of the smelly French cigarettes which the skipper believes to be impregnated with hashish. The man from the Morning Herald slips on one of the ceremonial towels, twisting his ankle. Serves him goddamn right, Flynn thinks, and he heads off to get a ham sandwich before his shower.

Flynn sees bony, purple ankles in high-back slippers next to him. The faint spray of burst vessels under the white skin reminds him of the catcher's knuckles, reminds him of Emma's delicate bruise. The leather slippers are covered with a skim of fine white dust from the cinders. Above the slippers the cuff of the grey trousers is frayed where it barely laps the ankle; a blue seersucker bathrobe ends at the thighs, it is tied at the waist in knots. Under too short sleeves skinny, hard arms end in huge hams, the fingers long and faintly blue. On the inside forearm facing him is a tattoo: LIVE FREE OR DIE. This is an old warrior.

"Afternoon," Flynn says.

"I was your bird dog, Jack, remember me?"

It is Ichabod Crane who speaks to Flynn, white strands combed akimbo over the craggy Dutch forehead, reddened eyes blazing in the deep, dark sockets of the skull. Flynn smells Old Spice and chaw, Mail Pouch: treat yourself to the best. The old man squits through the teeth, making brown dots in the cinders. Flynn begins to walk and the fellow shuffles after him, slippers scuffing fast and light as a firewalker.

"Oh yeah?" Flynn tests. "What'd I do the Legion champion year?"

"Seven Oh, three shutouts, no hitter where they allowed a flukey unearned run on ya!"

Old Ichabod squeals a high laugh and, squit-squit, dots the cinders.

"Hey batter hey..."

"Called Fred Billings in Albany after your first game that year but they didn't mind me. When you wrapped it up, he called back and said I could offer $5000 to sign right away and I only laughed at him. Knew there was scouts already offered your Dad twice that and the cham-peen-ship was coming up..."

He-he-he, Ichabod's wheezing laugh acknowledged an old wisdom: baseball organizations were sometimes slow and stupid. Flynn nodded.

Flynn stared at his father, unused to such guile in him.

Joe Flynn had made the Vice-President of the Cardinals come down to the boathouse with them. He rummaged through the tackle boxes shaking the trays more than Jack had ever seen him do before. It was the only sign of anxiety in the old river guide.

"Rappala," Flynn's father said and held the jointed, silver minnow up for the Vice-President to see.

"Fine bass lure," the VP said. They were not stupid men.

His father held a bright thing up.

"Double ought spoon," the VP said. It was a game.

Flynn wondered why he was there. He decided then that whatever they decided he would reject it, he did not like to be played with.

His father held up a banana curve of wood with great hooks.
"Afraid you got me there, Mr. Flynn."

"Muskie plug, my own design," Flynn's father placed it in the VP's hand. "You can have it. Don't work worth a damn, maybe you can figure what it needs."

"Jack's a fine young man," the VP said.

"So say he does sign up now. I heard there's boys never see these big bonuses. Play ten games in some mountain league and then they find out the damn bonus' got as many twists as this river."

"There are performance features in some bonuses, yes. This one too. Not, however, in the matter of the twenty thousand signing bonus. That I assure you I am prepared to present today."

Flynn watched his father catch his breath as he pretended to hunt through the rods on the rack. Suddenly he felt sad. He wanted his father to say yes right now, take the check and pay off the business debt. He wanted to ask the VP if he and Dad could talk in private, tell his father he loved him, loved how he bargained with this clean-smelling, tailored man.

"Although..." the VP tantalized. Flynn's father turned too quickly from the rack, the VP could see he had them hooked. Flynn knew that.

"I would like," the VP spoke softly, paused to drag it out, "I would like to set up some photographs of the signing, and we'd need the check for that." He smiled like a man with a fish.

"Jack's going to college," his father said.

Flynn blurted no aloud, his father stared him down.

"It's been a pleasure talking to you, sir," his father said, "and I know you have Jack's interests in mind, but his mother and me have always wanted him to go to college."

Later Flynn's father spat it out. "Trim bastard's afraid I'd run and cash the damn check before he gets his picture! Screw em! We ain't about to sell you cheap, Jackie. That money'd get you a house and..." He was going to say business, Flynn knew. "A house and all and set you up in case it didn't work out, but I'll be damned if we let em cow us, son. Your mother and me, we want the best for you, and there's some fine colleges want to see you play for them."

That afternoon they went out to visit his sister. Flynn watched her crazy eyes as their father tried to explain it all to her. She understood money well enough, it bought candy bars and oranges, but Jack knew she couldn't follow the part about the Vice President and colleges. He saw it build up in her until she cried, then he stood uncomfortably watching his mother wipe the tears away from the overgrown girlish eyes, watched her stroke the huge and tender skull.

"I'm sorry, Jackie," his sister wept, "I'm so sorry, Jackie..."

Flynn knew she had convinced herself she did something wrong that lost him this chance. He stood and rocked on the burning soles of his sweating feet, unable to say anything. They had led her away from the dayroom still crying. Flynn walked out to the car alone to give his father a chance to cry also.

Now he walked with the old bird dog to the side of the backstop.

"You make any money one me, Mr....?"

"Willard," the old man said, "Willard Walker, called me Restless Willard when I pitched in Triple A."

Hell yes, Flynn knew him, looked him in the face again to see. They were all there under the changing skin, the dead and the old, there under the aging flesh.

"Pleased to see you again, Will," Flynn said and extended a hand.

"Sorry, I can't," Willard said, then he whispered. "I catch diseases easy, can't stand to touch no more. Caught things from nigger boys and fish. Used to fish with your father, especially when they tried to sign you."

He whispered again, "Don't use no coins anymore, nor no spoon nor fork neither. Studied up more immunology than most doctors. I'm eighty-three and I'll live to be two hundred."
Willard blinked a few times and then leaned in toward the fence using the gaps in the chainlink like goggles. He kept his hands pinned behind his back and his feet planted three feet from the fence, leaning gangly and fragile as a bony boomerang, careful to touch nothing.

The boy pitching threw from the extreme left side of the rubber and still came inside with his heat. He was plump and sweaty and mad at himself, and between pitches he stole glances to the bench where a tan, hard muscled man, his thigh swathed in ace bandages, stood and nodded.

"Don't open up your shoulder, remember what we talked about when I warmed you up. Is he inside, Kenny? Is he inside? He says you're inside, get over on the rubber."

Flynn knew the man had to be the pitcher's father. The other coach, a stocky man with blinky eyes, could not disguise his scowls each time the pitcher's father spoke.

The little mullahs moaned and stopped, moaned and stopped as he loaded the bases.

"He ain't extending his arm," Willard said, still leaning at the absurd angle. The umpire nodded vigorously behind the catcher, he and the bird dog seemingly used to this running color commentary.

"Shouldn't ah listened to his danged father. Boy needs a coach."

Umpire nodded. Willard tensed with the pitch. The batter, a Mexican-looking lefty, ponged a neat little single into right field. The right fielder, charging, scooped the ball on one hop into his floppy mitt, pulled it out and reared back in one motion, pegging a true one hop to the plate. The relay man waved to the throw as it passed him and the catcher, a scrappy little kid wearing glasses under his mask, placed the tag and threw right back to second, his Yeager-style throat protector flapping.

He had caught the Mexican kid stretching the hit and bunching two runners between him and third. The second baseman waved a tag down in the proximity of the sliding men. The umpire waved him out from halfway up to the mound in noisy appreciation of two good throws. The Mex kid had beat the tag clean but it didn't matter.

Flynn hunted for the plump young pitcher and found him walking off toward the shade, his father's arm slung heavily around his shoulder, his head bent to his ear. You could see the tension in the rigid way the kid walked; with an arm like his, he'd end up a catcher if he played.

The umpire leered through the fence at them, resettling his bean cap over a sweaty thatch of yellowy silver hair.

"Right fielder's a prospect, Red," Willard said to the ump.

"Got a rifle, Willard," the ump spat a gob of brown, bit a fresh wad from the rope chaw in his bag, then extended it through the fence to Willard. "Looks like your escort's nearing, Restless."

The ump gestured beyond. Flynn turned to see the orderly ginger-footing across the cinders in floppy thong shower clogs.

"You know Jack Flynn," Willard said, as pleased as could be.

The ump nodded and stuck two crabbed fingers through the chainlink for Flynn to shake. The fingers were brown and dirt caked. The ump was a nice man and liked to work kids.

"Come on, Mr. Walker," the orderly said, reaching for Willard's shoulder.

"No need to touch him," Flynn said as Willard angled away from the grasping fingers.

"Guess not," the orderly said. He and Willard started slowly back across the hot stones.

"Here!" Flynn shouted out, and went after the orderly.

"This is to buy him chaw, and I want it in his account, hear? I'll give a call to check on it."

"Sure thing, Mr. Flynn," the orderly said, unblinkingly honest. Flynn felt awful about checking up on him and peeled another twenty off.

"Here for you too, for looking after him."

"Can't take tips," the orderly said, "Thank you anyway."

Willard waved from the gate near the hospital grounds.

"Damn decent of you, Flynn," the ump said and turned to shout play ball.

Flynn wondered how the orderly knew his name, had he been near enough to hear Willard say it, or had he known it from somewhere.

A woman in a yellow dress walked through the distant hospital grounds. Flynn felt the dust coating his throat.

Yessir, there's some places in the big show where'd it come in right handy to have the nuthouse gate next to the park, boys...


He didn't stay to watch the game.


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