corner of Seventh with the plaster deer in the yard, and he leaned it in the corner of his bedroom beside the window where he could see it when he woke up. It was a Louisville Slugger, a 125, thirty-three inches, thirty-one ounces, ash, the grain running tight and straight down the barrel, and it had a burn mark near the trademark where somebody had once sanded something off and then darkened the spot with a wood-burning pen so it would not look sanded. Above the burn, in black marker that had faded to gray, Garrick had written his own initials. G.T. Small. Like he was not sure he had the right.
His mother asked him about it once, the first year he started carrying it. Ruthann Thiel worked days cleaning houses up on Grand Avenue, where the old river money lived in brick and limestone, and nights two shifts a week at the Hubinger plant out on the levee, and she did not have a lot of time for asking about things. But she was standing in his doorway one night with a laundry basket on her hip and she said, "You know they lock that dugout, honey."
"I know."
"So you don't have to haul that thing back and forth every day."
"I like having it," he said.
She looked at the bat in the corner and then at him, and something passed over her face that he could not read, and she said, "All right," and went on down the hall. She never asked again. He sometimes thought she knew exactly where the bat had come from. He sometimes thought she was the only other person in the world who did.
The bully on the Keokuk Chiefs was named Shug Kettleman, and he was not the kind of bully you saw in the movies, the kind with a leather jacket and a sneer and two friends who laughed at everything he said. Shug had friends, but they were ordinary friends. He did not sneer. He was six foot one and broad through the shoulders and he played first base and batted cleanup, and he was, by the general agreement of everyone in southeast Iowa who followed high school baseball, the best hitter Keokuk had produced in a decade. The Daily Gate City ran his picture three times his sophomore year. He had a nice smile and good teeth and he called the lunch ladies ma'am.
He also took things.