EIGHT
Bertie Flynn lined up the cigarette filters like spent cartridges on the table before her. She allowed herself ten Virgina Slims a day and no more, having read once that you reduce your life by ten years for each pack of cigarettes you smoke. She was willing to sacrifice five.
Outside the kitchen window hummingbirds backed in and out of the orange funnels of the trumpet vine against the side of the garage. The vine was slowly ripping the garage apart, one thick and woody section of it had already thrust itself between the shingles of the roof and the sheathing, popping the nails. Another section, thick as a baby's grey arm, had all but ripped away a two-by-four faschia piece.
She didn't know who she would call, now that Mr. Rosebaum the carpenter was dead. A woman alone had to find people to care for her.
Jack couldn't do it. Sometimes she wondered if he knew anything more than how to throw a baseball, and now even that was gone, with him holding his arm at his side all of the time like it was a dead child.
She smiled. The fresh ham in the oven crisped and spattered, the aroma in the room. The central air conditioning hummed and sighed. The birds held themselves in the air before the orange trumpets like boats easing into a slip. Jack would enjoy a good meal, it would give him strength, for the arm, for the awful task ahead.
On the television news there was word of an accident on the river. A couple were fishing near Edgewood when a large unindentified boat struck them, throwing the wife in the water. A boat captain from nearby Cherry Island assisted in getting the woman out of the river. The larger boat returned and inquired about possible injury before steaming off. The Coast Guard was investigating.
Bertie considered the idea of a wife in the water. Jack would like the story, she felt sure, although she did not know why.
Maybe because always the big boats steamed off.
A week or so ago, a man had sailed one of the old St. Lawrence skiffs off Summerland Island. His name was Herrick and he was out of Cape Vincent and Bertie thought perhaps she knew them.
Oh, you didn't see the skiffs anymore. The captains leaning fore and back, dancing along the grating to keep her on the tack, making up with their weight for the lack of rudder. There were great old boats on the river once, and now they were mostly in the museum in Clayton, or paraded out on special occasions. Once the old Narra Mattah had come all the way up to the Eisenhower lock on a dinner cruise. If she'd known, she would have gone to see it. There were some ladies from church took a day trip down to Calumet Island and they sailed out on her, on the Narra, after dinner. It didn't cost a cent extra, and she should have gone then too.
Weather promised hot but there was an elbow of low pressure closing in, and it was clear the jokey kid on the teevee didn't know what was going to happen.
Joe knew the weather on the river good as most.
Bertie thought she might cry. It was stupid sitting here with the weather on the teevee and a roast cooking in the oven that Jack might not come back to eat. It was ugly to be alone.
There! She'd tell him that when he came back. Ugly and cruel with the flowers eating up your garage.
She lit another of the beige, flower enscrolled cigarettes. Three to go, two if you saved one for after dinner. She did not cry.
Jack was never her favorite. Jim was. She was as excited about him going into the army as she was about Jack going into the major leagues. All Jim needed was a chance to straighten out, and President Kennedy would give it to him.
Protect any foe and fight any friend, he said.
No, that was backwards, fight foes and protect friends, JFK had said. The wind was blustery then and that old Vermont poet kept grabbing at his papers to keep them from flying away while he read his poem, his white hair flipping in the gusts. Ike sitting there like a potato. He was younger when he came down to dedicate the locks; he and the Queen could of made a couple, no matter what kind of foul talk Joey spread about her.
Jackie was the queen of the US, and you just had to ignore all that talk about the policewoman with the Hanes legs who was on the teevee all the time now talking naughty with Johnny Carson.
The sports came on the teevee and she turned to see it.
She laughed.
"Well, there you are," she said aloud. "Old habits die hard..."
She was wondering about news of their Jackie, and there was none, of course.
Bertie had chosen a life alone, there was no question about that, and no regrets, really, about the decision, only about the ugliness of a roast turning brown alone.
She had had a sweetheart and lost him, the gentlest man who ever lived. He used to take her out on a wooden skiff with long oars; sometimes he'd use one oar to pole her through the shallows, watching fat old frogs plop from the banks.
Pneumonia took him. The red-haired and fair skinned ones hardly ever survived in the days before sulfa was in general use.
He wouldn't tan, the freckles only spread and darkened.
Pneumonia took Nell, too, that and some virus they didn't have a name for. It was the damndest family for viruses. One that touched Esther in the head, and Jim himself had to be crazy to go off like that and end up in the river.
Cancer, they said, was maybe a virus, too, and that's, of course, what took Joey, shrinking him down before letting him go.
Could be that there's a virus infects the tobacco plant, comes in your lungs when you smoke and just grows there like worms.
She counted the cartridges on the table. Four beige filters.
A life alone saved you from complications. Sex drifted away though you never lost it. Only the urgency, you know. Like that blond with the legs flirting with Carson and having evenings at the White House. Or Marilyn Monroe, warm air pushing her skirts up.
There was a big fuss last year when a bunch of nudie dancers starting making the rounds of the North Country clubs. All men, wearing silver jockstraps someone said down to church. The women rushing out to spend ten bucks to drink a beer and see them, shoving dollar bills into the jockstraps.
My Red was a handsome man, poling the skiff along in his white linens, brushing away the gnats from his face, singing, "Sailing, sailing..."
She turned the roast down.
You never lost it. A woman was an open receptacle, like the flowers of the trumpet vine.
Emma was trouble. Jack should try to fix things up with Karen, have some children. Life was children.
She wanted to cry again. There was a story on the teevee earlier in the summer, a young boy almost electrocuted swimming off near Sylvan Island. Turns out the electric company forgot to disconnect a power line from an unused cottage. They said on the news that the shock sent his arms flying into the air, and his face contorted with an awful pain. He managed to swim to the dock, but it was his grandma who saved him. She called the power company the moment she saw the boy in trouble.
It was the kind of story gave you dreams.
Jim was the dreamer in the family. They didn't give him that. Oh, he was rough, and sometimes mean-spirited, and he gave Nell lip, but there was goodness in him. He did things. It was Jim who crawled up on the ladder and pulled leaves from the eavestrough each year for her. It was Jim who painted the back side of the garage. He'd look in on someone, come driving up in that loud car with the spangley paint he called candy apple, and the chrome things hanging down the side, and he'd jump out, looking surly and grim and come walking into the vestibule like he was daring you. What's wrong now, Bert, he'd say. It was defiance. You saw a lot of defiance in them then, in the kids. It wasn't like what came later, the beards and sandals and sloth. All the whining.
Bertie liked defiance better, though she cried for days when the two waves met just once, in 1970, when the little girl was laying dead in a puddle of her own blood there in Ohio, her friend looking up with all that defiance and pain on her face. America had gone wrong sometime there, Bertie knew. You couldn't go into your schools and kill your young like that, and you couldn't send them off to be killed either. It was Jim told her that. He had come back somewhere in that time, a real man by then, one of the Rangers, strapping and dashing in his beret and his scarf and his patent leather boots.
"It's crap, Aunt Bertie," he told her when they sat in the front room drinking beers together, just them two.
"Hell, I don't blame Jack for signing that thing in the paper, Bert. I'd do the same if I thought it would get me anywhere. I'm thirty years old and I'm supposed to be a leader of men... They're boys, Bert. Poor, dumb farm boys, and river boys, and black kids and they're scared, and I'm scared, and the boys in pajamas we're fighting are scared too... Everyone just floats away, you know, Bert. We just float away all night and stumble out in the morning to kill something..."
She didn't know. She hadn't known, but she didn't like to see Jim in pain.
She didn't know then that he was taking pokes at his pain with tiny needles, putting them in his eye, and ear lobe, and ankle to keep from being discovered. He drank beers in nearly one swallow then, and he poured himself a water glass of gin and drank it too in gulps, but she didn't know he was a hophead.
They had laughed because he was on a river, despite himself. Everyone knew Jim didn't care much for the river, but Bertie, almost alone in all the world, knew that the river was as much the problem with Jim as the way Nell babied Jack.
A river can be a daunting thing, by day or night. It's like hearing your heart beat sometimes; you just want to get out of whatever this thing is that goes on without you. It hit Jim that way. He was fair skinned and fey as her Red had been, and the sun on the river always made his eyes squint, and the river nights chilled him, and there was Joey, so strong and handsome, almost always on the dock, about to set out on it, and Jim had to defy him. He was one of a sweet generation, grown into defiance because they had nothing else. Jim had to defy Joey because he was afraid of the river.
It was too easy to say all this, of course. Jim had to take the blame for himself. And there was the virus or chromosome or whatever it was that affected the Flynns and made them so sad. But you had to wonder whether he might not have made something more of himself without the river.
Certainly he would have lived to be something more if the river hadn't been there to take him when he ran off that road that night after fighting with Joey.
But even in Viet Nam, he was stuck to the river. It made him laugh, made her laugh with him.
"They call it a patrol boat, Bert, but it seems about ten feet shorter than Dad's guide boat. Hell, I have half a mind to take some gear back with me and continue in the family business, over there..."
He drained a beer and stared at her with reddened eyes.
"Course the fishin' might not be so good with all that gunfire and them stinking bodies floating in the river..."
He just shook it off--she had admired how he could do that, just shake off an awful thought, like a dog drying himself--and he stared at her in silence for awhile. "Well...," he said, "what's wrong now, Bert?" and he laughed, but unlike old times. "Better get me on the job before these brown screamers get me..."
He held the beer bottle up, brown screamers was an odd name for it.
(Flynn laughs. For some time now in the interview he has been trolling deeper water, as it were, his forehead and eyes showing a darker mood. Now, suddenly, when you would expect the question to throw him still deeper, he bobs up again, laughing.) Oh yeah, I took hell in the clubhouse for that protest. They'd call me Red, you know, Flynnik, or more creative things. You gotta understand that baseball appeals to the All-American type, the hulking farm boy type. (Laughs) 'Course you could look up how many of them spent any time in the service in them years, whole lotta 4-F's or 1-Y's or whatever in the majors... But from the columnists and Sporting News types... I mean, I was used to it, you know. My father was a war hero, you see, and my brother was as near we got to heroes in that war... Hell, even my Aunt Bertie gave me guff about getting involved...
(He seems to consider a moment, then continues in a low voice.) You just shake it off, you know, like a hunting dog in the rain...like a bad sign. You know that song? "Born under a bad sign..." Sometimes it seemed that way...for all of us... (Once again he is trolling deep; it isn't a time to ask questions. All one can do is wait out the pause; Flynn is a moody man. He begins slowly again, as if picking his way through underwater weeds.) Lotsa bad signs in those days... Lotta bad, bad medicine.... You remember what they called '68? (I shake my head, no. He laughs grimly, as if tasting the irony.) "The Year of the Pitcher..." Hah! McLain won 31, Bullet Bob won 22 and the series. Nellie Briles, the new right hand hope over there after they traded me, came up a game short, went 19 and 11, and he's a year younger than me. Christsakes, Gibby won 15 straight, pitched near that many shutouts and twice that many complete games and ends up flirting wih an ERA of one...(Flynn mellows momentarily, lost in the deep water of memory. It is clear that Bob Gibson is a personal hero of his.) He never changed, you know... I'd see him around in later years, but never around the batting cage, never smiling, though maybe if he wasn't goin' that day he'd nod, you know, for old times, and those eyes of his were still deep wells, you know, miles deep and calm water at the bottom... That man could pitch! I mean he was angry inside but calm and cool as some old lack bass, you know... He ate 'em up in the series, he really did. Seventeen straight K's in the first game and McLain is looking on like it's a pitching clinic... (Flynn leans forward, speaking earnestly now; he's anxious, it seems, to establish his credentials, as if that were necessary.) You know I covered that series for the teevee. I can still see that rope that Northrup hit... There's Hoot watching that sucker shoot out of there, and Curt's got the damn thing printed, you know, like on a fish finder... Then suddenly you know Flood's misjudged it--it happens that fast, when you watch the fielder, not the ball--and he knows he's lost it, and Hoot does too, and it skips through to the wall, and two guys are in... After that Gibby's rhythm is broke--you can see the way his back arches, see it in the weight on his shoulders...and Curt's out there with his hands on his knees, wishing he could get it back, but knowing, like everybody does, that the Tigers are gonna get the rings... (Drops his voice) My whole damn year went like that, you know...my whole damn year. I'd been two years away from the Cards and when you're in a broadcast booth, you ain't supposed to take sides...but my whole damn year was gone...
Maybe they were right, you know? Maybe it started when that damned ad appeared in the Times, but you know when I think it began?
No. When?
In '67, when the world was burning up, you know...when the cities went up, and there was Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King and all those kids trying to hold it together, and the whole damn world went up in smoke... By '68, you knew it was gone. When they shot Kennedy and King it was only finishing it off, you know, the late innings... When Wolfman left, I couldn't blame him. I was surprised Richie Allen didn't go with him then; it wasn't any time to be a black man in America... Wasn't any time to be in America... I tell you my old man and me had it out then, but he was smart enough to know there wasn't any grounds to stand on, you know? I mean he didn't have the heart to fight, and he was worried about my brother...
Where'd Wolfman go then, Jack?
You mean you don't know. (Of course I didn't know, no one did, but I tried to stay calm about it. It was a kind of scoop, however many years after the fact. No one really knew the motivation of either of the fabled Philly boys.) He flew away. He took those broken wings and learned to fly... (He laughs painfully here.) That was maybe the worst blow-out the Wolf and I ever had, before the real parting, I mean...I was playing that song, you know it? From the White Album...? "Blackbird singing in the dead of the night..." I was real excited about it. I mean, it all seemed to mean something, and I had it on the tape player in the clubhouse down in Florida, you know. I was playing it kinda loud so the Wolfman could hear it, though I didn't say nothing or nothing... All of a sudden, he smashes the tape player, you know. Blam! The bat comes down and cracks the tape player into splinters and the tape goes all flooey... Crack! (Flynn stares directly at me, there is still some shock in his eyes, even recalling the event.) I was twenty-five goddamn years old and I thought the world was some crystal palace, you know... I was Mr. Flake, the Flynn-nik, and suddenly it was all crazy and ugly... I just looked at him, you know, just stared into those burning black eyes... "Honkey motherfuckers gonna tell us how to do it, huh?" He said something like that and laughed, fishing the bat real gentle-like through the mess he made out of my tape player... "No thanks, Jack," he said. It wasn't my name he was saying, it was like black dudes talk, they call you Jack, you know... "No fuckin' thanks, Jack!" he said. "We be on our own from now on, mother fucker..." I could hear the other soul brothers laughing, real mean and low like in the back, but I didn't look back. I just gathered up the pieces of the player and tossed it in the trash barrel. It meant something... I felt like a goddamn fool, and I knew why he was pissed... He gimme a C-note for it a week or so later, but I wouldn't take it, you know. I felt real damn embarrassed and dumb-assed and...white...
So where did he go? Wolfman? Where'd he go when he jumped the team?
He ran away to Copenhagen. (Laughs) He and his girlfriend they took a commercial flight to Europe the morning after King got shot. Wolfman was convinced they would be hunting blacks in the streets, and he felt sure someone would try to get him on the field, you know. He was so damn open out there in the field. He knew it would only take a fair shot with a rifle to get him... He wasn't far from right about that, you know?
Why'd he come back?
(Flynn skewers my eyes with his, giving a look as if he feels he has told enough. He considers a moment and you can see the decision cross his face. The sense is that he thinks enough time has passed to tell this story. He tells it blankly, without any apparent emphasis.) They'd been there three, four days, you know, when they decided to take a ferry between somewhere and somewhere. Copenhagen and France...or Amsterdam and somewhere... I don't remember just where, and it doesn't matter... Comes time to get off the boat and the customs won't let them into France, you know, puts them right back on the ferry. Wolfman's girl then was a real pale blond, a white chick, real real pretty...and they told her she could get off, but he would have to stay, they weren't going to let him in... So she and Wolfman got back on. It was a bitter cold, damp night. They went back to Amsterdam or wherever the hell, and they wouldn't let him off! They just grinned at him, like "Fuck him!" and put him back on the boat. Now normally Wolfman when he's riled, he's a mean son of a bitch, but this time he's so heartsick and sad and cold and lost that he just starts crying, he cries the whole way back across... (Flynn pauses, considers.) I'm gonna finish this son of a bitch of a story, but I don't want you printing it unless the Wolfman says it's okay, right? You understand? The man's mad enough with me, already, I don't want to cross him, you dig?
I understand.
(Flynn nods once, and then once again. It isn't quite a threat, but it is making things clear, like setting a hook.) Man was like a brother to me once upon a time... (He nods again.) I don't want to cross him now, no matter what's gone on since...
I understand, Jack. It's a promise.
Alright... So Wolf and his girl they cried together almost all night on the ferry, until finally Wolfman tells her they been jacked around too much and they got to get help, you know? So he tells her to get off and make a call to the team offices... But she won't! She won't leave him... They argue but she won't let him stay there alone like the man without a country... But by then there's people who know this crap that's going on, a friendly guy on the ferry crew, a coupla white American tourists, you know... Somebody calls the American Consulate and a young, crewcut bureaucrat shows up on the ferry, somebody from the consulate... He doesn't say anything to Wolfman, you know, he just talks with the girlfriend, because he can see how Wolf is shook up and because he's a really sensitive guy... The ferry docks again. "Come on," the crewcut guy says. They walk to customs. The customs guys are smiling. They start shaking their heads at Wolfman, waving their hands like to stop him. The guy from the consulate steps in front of them and flashes his ID. "Let them in, you frog fucks," he says, "or I'll blow you motherfuckers right out of the water..." They walked ashore and Wolfman hugged the dude and took a cab right to the airport. He and his girl came back that same morning...
(Flynn leans back and, surprisingly, takes a cigarette from my pack, lights it, and takes what seems an exploratory puff, holding it out sideways before him after taking the drag, examining the filter. It is shocking in a way to see him smoke, like seeing the good kid in your class toss an awkward spitball toward the teacher. I tell him this, and he laughs.)
Not me... (Laughs again, twirls the cigarette in his fingers) Spitball's not me, I never loaded 'em up much, couldn't get the hang of it. Now maybe Hamburg would scratch one up on his shinguard buckle now and then... (Laughs) Wolfman hit three homers in a game against the Mets that year behind me...oh, he was angry that year... (The mood has returned after some lightness.) I remember, in Detroit, it was like a meteor hit, you know, a crater of cinders and burnt buildings... (Laughs sardonically) Grand Avenue... I think that's a street there...burnt. I went 13 and 16 that year and didn't finish ten games; it was a long slide into the seventies... I couldn't finish anything... I'm in my mid-twenties and starting to think of packing it in, you know. Saw two of my heroes finish it off, one the right way, one wrong...
Did it affect your marriage?
(Flynn's eyes flash, he stubs the mostly unsmoked cigarette out.) I don't want to talk about that.
Okay then, talk about your heroes. Who? Gibson and...?
No...Koufax...Koufax and Bunning. I mean, Gibson was too special to be my hero, you know? I mean, I couldn't touch that, I couldn't see myself there. Koufax, I could see. Bunning... (He gives a cockeyed smile, the mood seeming to change again.) Time has a way of clipping itself into segments, you know, especially when you play this game... It's like fishing over a stretch of water, some good holes where it keeps coming, flat water where you watch the dragonflies, then a patch of chop water and weeds, where the brave can make out...Where the survivors are...
So start with the good holes...
(Flynn laughs.) Went eight and four two straight years, that's a .667 winning percentage. Figured I kept up that pace I'd have it licked, get to put my locker stool in Cooperstown... (Laughs) Sadecki's two years older than me and he gets twenty, and the way I figure it I'm two years away from that...
You were right!
(Laughs) I was right...but it wasn't that easy, you know. There's a little matter of learning to pitch. I learned by watching, mostly. Got nineteen starts the World Series year, and learned by watching Hoot and Ray and listening to McCarver, every damn chance I got...watching Koufax too, and Bunning for that matter. Sandy got his third no-hitter, you know, and Bunning pitched a perfect game against the Mets, and I walked one man to close out my World Series record... (Laughs loudly.) It was a hell of a year when you think of it. I thought the world was a piece of cheesecake, you know... I mean Bing gets fired and it looks like the Skipper's going too and we're plain out of it, when Brock starts producing and Schultzie starts vulching for us, then Philly drops ten in a row, and there we are, the Series staring us in the face if we just take the Mets once and we drop two in a row... Shit, it's an exciting life when you're a kid and spot-starting and you don't know no better... The last day of the season and kapow! We win it of course! (Laughs) I got so drunk that night, I twisted all night at some disco--they called them that then too--and you woulda thought I was Bo Belinsky, or his boy, Chance, though I didn't have Chancey's twenty wins, you know, and never did get near enough to win a Cy Young...
Restless Willard's voice sounded like Donald Duck's from behind the paper pollen mask. He sat perched on a nest of toilet paper on the tufted leather seat of the Maserati, gripping the padded dash before him.
"These here Mazeroski's a fast car, ain't they Flynn?"
"Speedometer tops out at 160, Willard."
"Never hit for average, though, do they?"
"Want to try, Willard?"
"Noosir," he huffed, "Nossir...you can dodge micro-organisms, Flynn, but don't have no luck with trees..."
Flynn laughed with Willard. They were heading toward Massena because Emma never came back.
"Tell me how it was, Jack," Willard asked. "Tell me 'bout the Worl'Series..."
Almost shit my pants, Willard, almost shit my pants. I was young and foolish and just sittin' there in the pen, wondering who the hell's gonna get us out of this kind of heavy trouble when the bullpen phone rings... "Get up, Flynn," they says and I damn near shit my pants... I was gonna be a World Series hero, Restless, and I didn't know Yankees from jackshit... After Schultzie gets knocked out, Gordie gives Mantle a double down the line that looks like a rocket shot; he's walking Howard when the phone rings... My first two warm-ups I overthrow and my arm hurts like a snake bit it. "Calm the hell down, pretty boy," Uecker says. "This here Yankee pretty boy ain't gonna touch Gordie anyway." Just then we hear the shouting rise up all around us, like the world's ending in a flood of noise, and Pepitone singles off the wall. "Better bear down, pretty boy," Ueck says, "looks like it's your day to shine..." So I throw one over his head and it skips onto the field and the boys snicker, even though we're about to lose our ass...
"The new Rip Sewell," Uech shouts as he settles back down, and Tresh settles back into the batters box miles away. "Yanks'll never touch this boy's eephus..."
"I should hope not, thweety," some wiseass lisps, "Flynn-boy, we tole you about the big city." he says, still lisping like a queer, "Never let anyone touch your eephus..."
I was starting to laugh myself when the roar comes up again and we all spot Tresh's high fly and then the Skipper walks out into the rain of boos and next thing I know he's waving his right arm.
"That's you, pud," Uecker says. "Don't frig up..."
I throw one sweet fast ball in on Boyer, just throwing strikes like the Skip ordered, you know, right into his kitchen. The whole damn park's cheering like I'm Hoot himself, you know, and they're getting on McKinley about every inside pitch anyway after Pepitone turned that foul tick of Gibby's into a hip-by-pitch, if you know what I mean.
Suddenly I feel this wet, cold river of sweat down my spine, and I lose it altogether, Restless. I start thinking: hell, I'm in the World Series and it's only my second year and everyone's watching me at home and I can end this rally, you know...
Then I realize I've already nodded to McCarver and I don't know what the hell I agreed to pitch...and I realize I haven't checked the baserunners, and that I don't know for a fact who's on base at all... But instead of stopping, you know, like I would have later on in life, instead of settling down, I just try to figure out from Timmy's target what the hell he expects me to throw. It looks like outside, and that's a good bet after inside gas, so I throw a fast one on the outside and McCarver has to make like a long-armed monkey to keep it from going by, and he comes running out to tell me what kind of asshole I am, and how that wasn't no curve, and the river of sweat is running so bad that I think it's gotta show on my back, and my bowels are turning again, and I check each of Tim's signs carefully, and check the runners real careful, and play peek-a-boo with my stretch and I walk Boyer on three more pitches...
Keane comes out and takes the ball. Craig finishes it off as good as you can an 8-3 whitewash, and so ends my World Series career, and you can look it up in the register...
And Jack comes in, about two hours after the roast is done, with this scarecrow creature he calls his friend, the friend done up in a white paper surgical mask and carrying a little bottle of oxygen and a mask like some miniature scuba diver, and an old fashioned leather satchel mostly filled with toilet paper, which he spreads out over the Lay-Z-Boy while I get the dinner on, and Jack whispers how this Willard fellow is going to stay with us -- with "us" is what he says -- for awhile, and all the while the old coot is laughing at some game show and mocking the contestants in the foulest language you've ever heard, and he never stops laughing all night, just like some loon out on a lake, and I think the world's gone crazy, and besides that, Jack's done nothing yet about Esther.
Ah, Red, life isn't half so ugly when you give it a chance, not with dawn coming like a morning glory unfurling, and white gulls in from the river looking for scraps and shelter from the storm.
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