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?"

"Where? I don't know what you mean."

“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.

The two guys were out at the edge of the patio now, this side of the swimming pool. Yeah, it was a cowboy hat, light-colored.