fit in the truck. He had to stop off in Birmingham, Alabama, to pick up another eighteen hundred feet of soft wire. And when the goddamn truck broke down as he was getting on the Interstate, Dennis had to wait there over a week while they special-ordered parts and finally did the job. He said to Billy Darwin the last time he called him from the road, 'You know it's major work when they have to pull the head off the engine.'
Darwin didn't ask what was wrong with it. All he said was, 'So the life of a daredevil isn't all cute girls and getting laid.'
Sounding like a nice guy while putting you in your place, looking down at what you did for a living.
Dennis had never said anything about getting laid. What he should do, ask Billy Darwin if he'd like to climb the ladder. See if he had the nerve to look down from up there.
2
THE TANK, PAINTED A LIGHT BLUE with curvy white lines on it to look like waves-Billy Darwin 's idea but okay with Dennis-was in place out on the sweep of lawn. Dennis changed his mind about using that river water full of silt. He spoke to Darwin about it and Darwin got the Tunica Fire Department to fill the tank from a hydrant by the hotel, giving each of the firefighters a hundred-dollar chip they could play with or cash in. Dennis would bet they played and hoped they won.
It was the Tishomingo Lodge amp; Casino's celebrity host, Charlie Hoke, the ex-ballplayer, who got Dennis a place to stay, a room in a private home for a hundred a week. No meals, but he could cook if he cleaned up after.
'Vernice,' Charlie said, 'is on a diet and hardly cooks anymore, goddamn it.' Vernice, a nicelooking redhead if a bit plump-which was okay with Dennis, he liked redheads-owned the house, a three-bedroom bungalow with a screened porch on School Street in Tunica, the school at one end, two bail bond offices at the other. Vernice was a waitress at Isle of Capri. Charlie Hoke was supposed to be her live-in boyfriend, but had his own room so Dennis couldn't tell how much time he spent with Vernice. They acted like they'd been married twenty-five years. After Dennis looked at his room and agreed to take it, Vernice said, 'I never met a high diver before. Is it scary?' Dennis believed he could get next to Vernice without breaking Charlie's heart.
It was Charlie, also, who got Dennis a rigger.
This was a man by the name of Floyd Showers from Biloxi, a skinny guy in his fifties with a sunken mouth and skidrow ways about him. He always had a pint of Maker's Mark and cigarette butts in the pockets of the threadbare suitcoat he wore with his overalls, wore it even during the heat of day. Floyd had worked county fairs on the Gulf Coast and showed he knew how to stake down and tie off guy wires, adjusting the block and tackle to pull forty to sixty pounds of pressure. Charlie mentioned Floyd had done time on a burglary conviction, but said don't worry about it, Floyd wasn't apt to get in any trouble.
This final day of setting up they were working late to finish. Dennis in red trunks stood on the top perch-there was another perch below at forty feet-looking down at Floyd tying off the last of the wires. Dennis pressed down on his end and felt it taut.
It was early evening, the sun going down over Arkansas across the river. No one sitting by the pool, the patio in shade now. About an hour ago Dennis had spotted Vernice in her pink Isle of Capri waitress uniform with Charlie out on the lawn talking. It surprised Dennis to see her here at Tishomingo. She had looked this way to give him a wave as she walked back to the hotel. Charlie had returned to the weird attraction he worked and was still there: a wirefence enclosure that looked like half a tennis court and a sign on it that read:
CHICKASAW CHARLIE 'S PITCHING CAGE
LET'S SEE YOUR ARM!
What Charlie had there, inside the enclosure, was a pitching rubber at one end and a tarp with a strike zone painted on it hanging sixty feet six inches away. You made your throw and a radar gun timed the speed of the baseball getting to the tarp and flashed it on a screen mounted in there on the fence. Five bucks a throw. Get three in a row in the strike zone, you got three more chances free. Hum one in ninety-nine miles an hour or better, you won ten thousand dollars. Or you could challenge Chickasaw Charlie. If this big ex-ballplayer with the beer gut, fifty-six years of age, failed to beat your throw, you won a hundred bucks.
It looked easy.
The first time Dennis left his work and wandered over there to see what was going on, Charlie said to him, 'Watch 'em. These young hotshots and farm boys come here thinking they have an arm. Watch this kid with the shoulders.' Wearing his John Deere cap backwards. 'He throws harder'n sixty mile an hour I'll kiss him on the mouth.' The kid went into his stretch, brought the ball up to his chest with both hands and threw it, Dennis believed, as hard as he could. The radar screen flashed 54. Charlie said, 'See?' and to the kid, 'Boy, my older sister can throw harder'n that. You ever see a knuckleball? I'm gonna show you a knuckler. Look here, how you hold it with the tips of your fingers.' Charlie stepped on the rubber, went into his stretch and threw a ball that seemed to float toward the tarp before it dipped into the dirt and the radar screen registered 66. Charlie said to Dennis, 'They throw with their arm, you notice? 'Stead of using their whole body. You play any ball?'
'Not once I climbed up on a diving board. I follow the American League,' Dennis said. 'Now and then I'll bet the Yankees, except if they're playing Detroit.'
'You're smart, you know it? How 'bout the '84 Series?'
'Who was in it?'
'De-troit won it off the Padres. You remember it?' No, but it didn't matter, Charlie kept talking. 'I was up with the Tigers and pitched in what became the final game. Went in in the fifth and struck out the side. I got Brown and Salazar on called third strikes. I hit Wiggins by mistake, put him on, and got the mighty Tony Gwynn to go down swinging at sixty-mile-an-hour knucklers. I went two and a third innings, threw twenty-six pitches and only five of 'em were balls. I hit Wiggins on a nothingand-two count, so you know I wasn't throwing at him. I come inside on him a speck too close. See, I was never afraid to come inside. I've struck out Al Oliver, Gorman Thomas and Jim Rice. Darrell Evans, Mike Schmidt, Bill Madlock, Willie McGee, Don Mattingly, and I fanned Wade Boggs twice in the same game-if those names mean anything to you.'
Later on that day Billy Darwin had come out to see how Dennis was doing. By then he and Floyd Showers had put up four sections of ladder and the metal scaffolding that supported a diving board three meters above the rear side of the tank. Dennis told the boss they'd finish tomorrow and then started talking about Charlie Hoke, amazed that a man his age was still able to throw as hard as he did.
Darwin said, 'He tell you about all the big hitters he's struck out, and what he threw them?'
'I can't believe I've never heard of him,' Dennis said, and saw that hint of a superior grin Darwin used.
'He tell you where he struck them out?'
“Ask him,” Darwin said.
Dennis thought of it now looking down from his perch. Have a beer with Charlie and listen to baseball stories. He believed Charlie was still over at his pitching cage across the lawn. He hadn't seen him leave, though it was hard to tell, the wire fence dark green against a stand of trees over there. He could yell for Charlie to come out and when he appeared show him a flying reverse somersault.
Dennis' gaze lifted from the pitching cage and the trees to a view of empty farmland reaching to hotels that seemed to have no business being there. The hotel next door invited its patrons to enjoy 'Caribbean Splendor' but was called Isle of Capri. Like the Tishomingo's patio bar looked more South Seas than Indian.
Two guys in shirtsleeves, one wearing a hat, were by the bar. Dennis hadn't noticed them before. It looked like a cowboy hat.
When the hotel did try for Indian atmosphere-like the mural in the office reception area: Plains Indians in war bonnets hunting buffalo-they got it wrong. Charlie said Chief Tishomingo and his Chickasaws might've seen buffalo in Oklahoma, after they got shipped there, but they sure never saw any in Mississippi. Tishomingo himself never even got to Oklahoma. Charlie said he was a direct descendant of the old chief, born in Corinth over east of here, fifteen miles from the Tishomingo County line.
