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warning track. I didn’t know he was gone, too. What happened?”
    Les is starting to fade.
    “I think he drowned,” he says, and then he lies back, and I suggest that we let him get some rest.
    “I’ll be back soon,” Jimmy says, grabbing his hand so hard that I’m afraid he’ll dislodge the IV line. “We’ll talk some more. Remember Frannie Fling? You can’t talk about ’64 without Frannie coming up.”
    Les opens his eyes and then shakes his head. And then he’s asleep.
    I walk Jimmy back out to his car. I need a smoke break.
    “So Haas and, what, Rittenhouse, they’re gone, too?”
    “Rittenbacker. Hit fifteen home runs and struck out 138 times. Had a hole in his strike zone you coulda drove a truck through.”
    I’m thinking Jimmy’s maybe an idiot savant, rather than just the first part.
    “But, yeah, if Les said they’re gone, they’re gone. That’s a shame. We’re all getting old.”
    Not that old, I’m thinking. A thought sprouts in the arid landscape of my brain.
    “It’d be interesting to do something on the old Vees. Readers eat up that whatever-happened-to stuff.”
    Jimmy snorts.
    “Sounds like you better find some that’s still above ground.”
    He’s getting into a Chevy that looks like it’s about one oil change from antique status.
    I thank him for coming.
    “Aw, it ain’t nothing.”
    And then he tells me how Les, back when he ran a roofing company, paid most of Jimmy’s hospital bills one winter when Jumpin’ Jimmy had to have an emergency appendectomy and found out his health insurance with the team ended with the last out the season before.
    “Les,” he says, “he’s a prince. I couldn’t get him to take a cent for it. Must have cost him thousands, even back then. He’s like that fella in the Bible, the good Sammerian.”
    “Samaritan?”
    “Whatever.”
    “Oh,” I ask Jimmy as he gets the Chevy to start on the third try. “Who was that you mentioned there at the end? Frannie somebody.”
    Jimmy shakes his head.
    “Frannie Fling. Her real name was Frances Flynn. That’s kind of a sad story. Maybe you can get Les to tell you that one when he wakes up. Whoa. Look at the time. Gotta go. Ain’t got but four days to get that field ready.”
    And with that, Jumpin’ Jimmy drives away. Through the exhaust fumes, I can see his head bouncing up and down, like a life-size bobblehead doll, like he’s listening to some music that the rest of us can’t hear.

Chapter Five    
    M ONDAY
    B uford “Bootie” Carmichael is sitting back fat and comfortable in his plush chair, talking too loud. Both the chair and Bootie dwarf their smaller, more streamlined peers. The other sports writers, who look like they all got together and ran a 10K before breakfast, are sitting in the ergonomically correct, cheap-as-shit chairs the company provides. As with raises, the suits are minimalist when it comes to office furniture.
    Bootie’s chair isn’t standard issue. He picked it out and had it delivered to the sports department. Anyone who knows Bootie is pretty sure no money changed hands in the deal. The week after he ensconced his butt on his new throne, he wrote a column about how comfortable it was, praising the store that “sold” it to him. Bootie has been doing business like that since before I came to work here.
    He’s at least thirty years older than any of the other five reporters, three male and two female, who share the sports department with him this morning. I can’t help but notice that the young lions’ conversations tend to be very businesslike and to the point. Bootie, on the other hand, likes to ramble. Two of the other reporters are plugged in to iPods.
    “The hell you say!” he roars for the third time, laughing so hard I’m thinking about giving him the Heimlich maneuver, if I could get his fat ass out of his chair long enough to do it. I’m not sure any of his colleagues would bother with trying to save Bootie.
    “He said he turned Clemson down