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Show Car Baseball Butch and Fenn Stories 34 of that shirt. In the winter, he wears a wicked hat with brown ear muffs tied across the top. We've never seen his wife. He tore the garage down after the time he discovered his daughter Carol playing doctor inside with Parley. He pulled the whole frame over with a chain on his Plymouth. It was that fall that he started driving Carol the three blocks home from school every day. Carol was in my class and I really liked her short hair. I voted for her for vice-president; she had great hair to vote for. When we would come out of class, the blue Plymouth would be there, and she'd get in and they'd drive away. After that old man Wilkes tried to run Parley over for a while. Butch and Fenn and I would be walking home from school down Concord and hear a screaming skid behind us and turn to see the Plymouth swerving hard in the gravel and Parley sweep away up some driveway. The car would slide still at an angle on the street and stay there for a minute, growling. Parley is a tall, skinny kid, two years older than we are, and he is a good sprinter. It's a pretty good neighborhood, nevertheless: a million kids, only a few of them under deadly assault from adults. We watch Mr. Wilkes carefully, partly from fear, partly for a weather report. When he rolls his sleeves, we know spring is really here, and we will have baseball in the thousand versions we've made up. It's the only game there is, but there are a lot of ways to play. |