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nobody. I work at the park.”
    “You line baseball fields?”
    “Yep. I do that.”
    “You live at the Y. You drive the park pickup. You like butterscotch Krimpets.”
    Grayson shook his head. “Not as much as you. I was just eating ’em to be friendly, so’s you wouldn’t have to eafr’em all by yourself.”
    “And there’s another thing about you.” Maniac joked. “You’re a liar.”
    They both laughed.
    Grayson opened the door.
    “Wait—” called Maniac. “What did you want to grow up to be when you were a kid?”
    Grayson paused in the doorway. He looked out into the night. “A baseball player,” he said. He turned out the light and closed the door.

25
    I n the morning Grayson bought Maniac an Egg McMuffin and a large orange juice. He bought the same thing for himself, so they ate breakfast together in the baseball-equipment room.
    “You sent me to bed without a story last night,” Maniac kidded.
    Grayson brushed a yellow speck of egg from his white stubble. “I don’t got no stories. I told you.”
    “You wanted to be a baseball player.”
    “That ain’t no story.”
    “Well, did you become one?”
    Grayson drank half his orange juice. “Just the Minors,” he muttered.
    Maniac yelped, “The
Minors!
”
    “Couldn’t never make it to the Majors.” There was a frayed weariness in the old man’s words, as though they had long since worn out.
    “Grayson — the
Minors.
Man, you must have been
good.
What position did you play?”
    Grayson said, “Pitcher.” This word, unlike the others, was not worn at all, but fresh and robust. It startled Maniac. It declared: I am not what you see. I am not a line-laying, pickup-driving, live-at-the-Y, bean-brained parkhand. I am not rickety, whiskered worm chow.
I am a pitcher.
    Maniac had sensed there was something more to the old man; now he knew what it was. “Grayson, what’s your first name?”
    The old man fidgeted. “Earl. But call me Grayson, like ever’body.” He looked at the clock on the wall. “Gotta go.”
    “Grayson, wait —”
    “I’m late for work. You oughta be in school.”
    He was gone.
    Grayson returned at noon, bearing zeps and sodas, and was not allowed to leave until he told Maniac one story about the Minor Leagues.
    So he told the kid about his first day in the Minors, with Bluefield, West Virginia, in the Appalachian League. Class D. “Can’t get no lower’n that,” he told the kid. “That’s where you broke in. Don’t have D ball no more.”
    He told about thumbing a ride to Bluefield, and, when he got there, going up to a gas station attendant and asking which way to the ballpark. And the gas station man told him, “Sure, but first I gotta ask you something. You’re a new ballplayer, right? Just comin’ on board?” And Grayson said, “Yep, that’s right.” And the man said, “I thought so. Well then, you’re just gonna want to make your first stop right over there” —he pointed across the street — “that there restaurant, the Blue Star. You just go right on in there and sit yourself down and tell the waitress you want the biggest steak on the menu. And anything else you want, too, because it’s all on the house. The Blue Star treats every new rookie to his first meal in town free.” He gave a wink. “They want your business.”
    Great,
thought Grayson, and he did just that; Only when he got up and left, the restaurant owner came running after him down the street, all mad at Grayson for skipping out. And when Grayson told him he was a rookie just picking up his free first meal, the owner got even madder. Seems the gas station man was a real card and liked to welcome dumb rookies with his little practical joke.
    And that’s how it came to be that when the Bluefield Bullets took the field that day, they did so without the services of their new pitcher, who was back in the kitchen of the Blue Star restaurant, doing dishes to work off a sixteen-ounce steak, half a broiled chicken, and two pieces