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catching a ball on the first hop, jumping and swiveling in the air to rocket it to any base before the runner got there. He would dive and roll in the grass for a hard-hit grounder, and he would be up in a shot and his aim never missed its mark.
    Sam Haislett was entranced. He couldn’t be coaxed or begged away from the edge of the field. He just had to watch every move.
    At the plate, the bat seemed a natural extension of Charlie’s long arms. He took a stance like a pro, legs wide, angled far back from the plate, and when the ball was pitched to him, even by the fastest of the fastball pitchers, he would lean slightly back, and smack that thing into kingdom come, every time, any pitch.
    Sam watched his every move, and he fell in love. His Beebo was all the baseball pictures in all the newspapers come to life. He was Jackie and Joe together. To watch him swing, or swivel and throw, his eye unnerved, his aim true, gave Sam his first sight of the power and possibilities that lay dormant in his tiny body. He had never seen anything so beautiful.
    Nobody had. The edges of the diamond filled up with onlookers, and they all picked up on the nickname Sam shouted out, until every time Charlie swung the bat, every breath was caught, every voice yelled out, “BEEEEEBO!!” at the crack of the hard wood bat on the scuffed leather of the ball. They were seeing something they’d never seen before, man or woman, not in real life, and nobody there ever forgot it, and the nickname was fixed in their minds from that day on, like Babe, or Joey D.
    “Must have played some ball, that boy,” said one of the men. “Maybe even pro.”
    “Probably not. Maybe Triple A. But he’s played.”
    When he finally came off the field, Charlie Beale’s neck and his shoulders were rosy and running with sweat, and the crowd drifted away with him, losing interest once he’d left the field. Without him, the game was over.
    Somebody grabbed a towel from the trunk of a car, and he thanked her, and wiped himself down, and put his shirt back on, and every woman watched him until the last button was buttoned. The men stood around, clapping him on the back. Way to go, Beebo. Way to go. It was their way of saying Beebo was fine with them, wherever he came from, however strangely he talked, he was okay.
    With the crowd drifting off, Charlie noticed Sam, and he walked him on to the field, and knelt behind him in the batter’s box, and gave the boy his first lesson in how to hold a bat, how to keep his eye fixed on the ball and never waver, and swing from the hips. Sam never again swung a bat in his life that he didn’t feel Charlie behind him, Charlie’s hands on his, Charlie’s arms leading him back and forward again and into the ball, sending it into the far reaches of the field where the eye couldn’t even follow it. For the rest of his life, every time he waited for a pitch he heard Charlie’s voice in his ear, telling him that the power came not from the arms but from the hips.
    Later, cooling off, Charlie sat with Will and Alma, while Sam still hung out at the edge of the ball field, waiting for the minute Charlie might pick up the bat again, not wanting to ask but not wanting to miss it, and Alma told him everybody’s story.
    “They seem like nice people,” Charlie said, looking out at all the folks, everybody in clean shirts and dresses, greeting each other as though they hadn’t seen one another for a long, long time.
    “I’ll tell you a story,” Alma said. “A story my mother told me, from back in the Depression. The town drunk is sitting on the courthouse steps. A tramp walks into the town, like this, like any town, and he stops and says, ‘What kind of town is this?’ he asks, and the drunk lifts his eyebrows, looks him over, and says, ‘Oh, it’s a terrible town. It’s full of liars and cheaters and people who live for nothing but being mean.’
    “And the tramp thanks him and moves on to the next town, hoping for better. A