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Show Car Baseball Butch and Fenn Stories 69 "Oh, why don't we change the rules every time we lose." "Hey, I ran already. I just don't think you should be able to use the same star twice." Butch closes his mouth, twists one corner up and one corner down, and finally says only: "M.M." "Yeah, yeah," Fenn says. "We'll get it." At full dark, my father comes out of the house and tells us: now settle down boys. He leans on the fence and talks to my friends. As I listen, I realize he is the only parent in the whole neighborhood who talks to the kids. He guesses Mitch Miller when he hears of the game, and he stands to go in, looking over our heads at the dark world. Sometimes I wonder what he is thinking, but he just says, "Now settle down boys," and goes in the house. The nights we sleep out at Butch's no one comes out to see us, and we sleep back, way back past the small ditch in the weeds. Early in the summer I can barely stand to sleep down there, the smell of the weeds is so powerful it seems dangerous. When we do sleep out there, all night the house rumbles, rocking with light and a variety of hangings. They should really get a back door. One night as we lay suffocating in the underbrush, I heard a crash and rose to my elbows to see a man fall out of the back of the house followed closely by a flying shovel and then Budd. The man ran around and around the old Studebaker racked on blocks in the driveway while Budd tried to |