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.