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church and watch him, because Everett told me he got in trouble once for saying “Call us Diz and Pee for short” right on national TV. Pee Wee Reese seems nice enough, and I guess he was one heck of a ballplayer, but as an announcer Pee isn’t a bad name for him, since he just sort of pees out what’s happened after it’s happened even though you saw it better yourself. Right now, for instance, he is saying that Mantle just struck out (“Change-up,” says Papa), and that it’s a crying shame his homer drifted foul because foul homers don’t count, and if it had counted the score would be a lot different than it is right now. Dizzy is more the way Everett is at a ballgame. He tells you things you hadn’t noticed, and things that have nothing to do with what’s happening, and he gets mad at umps, makes fun of bad plays and players, calls errors “eras” and basemen “sackers,” tells lies, brags, invents fake statistics to win arguments, and generally grates on Pee Wee’s nerves till you feel you’re really living through a flesh-and-blood ballgame instead of sitting in your house staring at a box. Right now, for instance,Diz is saying that a foul ball should be considered fair, provided a pitcher hits it. A foul that pops backward over the backstop and into the fans should count as a homer for a pitcher, he says. And when Pee Wee says he’s not so sure about that, Dizzy roars, “You were a
shortstop!
What do
you
know?”
    “I’ll tell you what I know,” Pee Wee says. “I know all you folks out there are gonna be real pleased with these fine products!” And onto the screen pops a couple of housewives who start having a poop fit when they see how clean their new dish soap got the dinner plates.
    Papa is different than anybody I ever saw watch baseball. We get to watch the World Series with him when the games don’t fall on Sabbath, and we watch live minor league ball together most Sundays (usually the Triple A Tugs down in Portland, who Papa used to massacre almost single-handed, and who he might be pitching for today if it weren’t for his thumb). Papa’s ball-watching style is to just sit there like a hawk on a fencepost, not saying a word unless something really good or really strange happens, but when the game’s a tight one he looks almost crazy, his eyes get so big and black. He looks crazy right now, in fact, and he’s only staring at the dish soap.
    He’s just fired up another Lucky. I used to like to watch him smoke, but his hands didn’t shake then, and he didn’t smoke even half as many. I guess he quit once, when I was little, but after the thumb thing happened and the twins were born and Mama had an operation called a hysterectomy and afterward almost died and was so weak and weepy for a year that Grandawma and her bulldog Gomorrah had to give up their house in Pullman and come live with us to help out with the twins, he took it up again with a vengeance.
    Papa’s friend Roy told Everett recently that Papa would be a foreman at the mill if it wasn’t for his thumb. If that’s true, it doesn’t make much sense, since as a foreman Papa wouldn’t need his crushed thumb at all. Maybe Roy means he’s not a foreman because of the lawsuit …
    Papa’s lawsuit started last March, when Mama read in the paper about some surgeon down in Portland who removed a big toe off a guy and built him a new thumb out of it. Papa wasn’t any too excited by this, but Mama made an appointment anyway, and they drove on down to see what the surgeon would say. The guy’s name was Dr. Boyd Franken, and he was a frank ’un all right: I guess when he saw Papa’s scars and X rays he started cussing so bad that Papa had to ask him to quit. He apologized, but said that the creature who’d tried to rebuild Papa’s thumb must have been a Mallard or Pintail or Quacky Campbell maybe. Papatold Dr. Franken the guy had seemed human enough. “He better never lose a button off his shirt, then,” Franken said,