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Alistair, outside."
    "Wait a sec, Cuz. What's all the commotion about?"
    "You know damned well. The pitching roster."
    Kerry had the nerve to speak up. "We voted on it. Fair and square."
    "Who voted for it? You, yourself, and you? This is a team, remember?"
    "Doesn't make any difference," Alistair said. "You two would have been outvoted anyway."
    "Who suddenly made you manager of this team?" I asked. "You don't even live here!" I spat out the words.
    "I'm manager of the team," Ronny said.
    "Since when? Another phony vote this morning? We don't have a manager. And there's no reason to move Augie down because one guy hit a home run off him last week."
    "There's a perfectly good reason," Alistair said. "He can't follow the catcher's suggestions." The catcher, of course, being himself. "Whereas everyone on the roster now can."
    "There's no rule I ever read that says the pitcher's got to do what the catcher says!" Augie finally spoke up on his own behalf.
    "Al's the best pitcher we ever had," Ronny said. "He tagged two guys coming home last night."
    Thus revealing that they'd played a game and hadn't even told us.
    "Look, Cuz." Alistair had pulled out the roster they'd schemed on all morning. "Augie's on it."
    I looked. "Fifth. After Ronny and Tony and Bob Cuffy—and Kerry?" I looked at the little squirt with disdain. "This one couldn't pitch horse-shit into a barn with a shovel."
    "That's the roster we agreed on," Ronny said.
    "You're shortstop," Alistair said, attempting a final placation.
    "Forget it! I'm not playing shortstop or any other position with cheaters. Not tomorrow and not ever again!"
    "Me either," Augie said.
    "Me either," Bob Cuffy unexpectedly piped up, followed by Carmine.
    "We'll put together our own team," I said.
    Now, this was clearly an unexpected move, and compelling in its potential for disaster to their plans.
    "I've got an idea," Alistair said, suddenly conciliatory. "Since you won't accept the democratic way, how about we flip a coin for it?"
    "Whose leaded coin?" I asked. We all had one.
    It was Guy who came up with the brilliant idea that we shoot marbles for the winning roster: it required skill as well as chance and would take time, not a few seconds, thus allowing us all to feel that something competitive—and thus real—was taking place.
    We agreed to meet back at the spot in an hour to shoot for the roster. Whoever won would then gracefully concede defeat and accept the winners' roster. At least for tomorrow's game.
    Augie was the best marble player among the four of us, so we all rode over to his house and spent a half hour picking through his collection of marbles to find five other ones to complement his winner, a big, almost pure ebony, completely unfaceted onyx. On the way over I stopped at my house, dashed into my bedroom, and grabbed my own bag of playing marbles.
    We arrived back at Ronny's garage. He'd cleared a space in the dirt in back of it and drawn a circle with a stick. The rules were agreed upon: six marbles each until all the marbles were gone but the winning one.
    I shouldn't have been surprised that Alistair had gotten himself selected as their side's champion. But there he was, already hunkered down, six carefully selected marbles from the others' collection at his side. I recognized Guy's tortoiseshell and Tony's blue-and-white sailboat, so named because that's what the facet looked like when you held it up to the light.
    Ronny and Bob Cuffy did fingers for choosing, three out of four, and Ronny won. Augie placed his least valuable agate into the circle, and Alistair shot it far out past the lines with a big, badly colored cat's-eye. That became Alistair's and went into the center. Augie sliced it right to the other side of the circle line. Alistair chose a pinkstone agate as man, and Augie shot that out too. But he could only side-slice the tortoise-shell, and he lost two stones to Alistair before he had another go at it. By then the tortoiseshell had been retired (to