Free The Brothers K by David James Duncan

They’re good eatin’, Dizzy told him. Ump looked tempted, but still gave him the boot. “Anyhow we won,” says Diz.
    “Uh-huh,” says Pee Wee. Papa smiles.
    Then Kubek sees another perfect fake-grease sinker coming at him, and he feels so helpless that he just gives up the ghost—but his ghost does something brilliant: it bunts. It’s not a very good bunt, way too short, but with two strikes against him he caught the Indians flat-footed, and for a wooden-headed fellow The Kube is not slow. Romana, the catcher, has to fire a snap throw. It arrives in time. It also arrives an inchor so over the top of Vic Power’s big first baseman’s glove, and sails way out into right field.
    Papa roars and starts pounding my back. Kubek pounds for second. Harvey Kuenn runs the ball down in right, but there’s no play at second. Kubek stands beaming like Pinocchio on the bag. “That could hurt ’em!” Pee Wee says. “That error was a mistake! Mistakes at this stage could hurt these Indians bad!”
    Papa is looking at me like I’m some kind of terrifyingly tricky guy. “You’re not Riverboat Sloan the gambler, are you?”
    “Nope.”
    “Starvation Whitey, the famous pool hustler and all-round man of chance?”
    “Nope.”
    “How ’bout a prophet, then? The next Ellen G. White maybe?”
    I can tell by his face that he thinks this is funny, but I don’t get it. All I know about Ellen G. White is that she was this super-religious 1800s lady who resembled our bulldog Gomorrah and wrote a book called The Gift of Prophecy, and the Adventists liked her book so much they hang her picture all over their churches, making it look like it’s always Halloween. All I know about Ellen G. White is she isn’t funny. Peter read her book once, and discovered she was the culprit who talked Adventists into banning meat-eating and makeup and jewelry and such. He said she also laid down the law about not going out on the town on Friday nights, but Everett argued that, judging by her face, it’d be a snowy Friday night in hell before anybody ever asked her. Everett said Sister White wasted her life as a prophetess, because she could’ve struck it rich as a bookie. But Peter told Everett no way. All Ellen G. White knew, Pete said, was how to hornswoggle religious people—who are the most hornswogglable people on earth—whereas a good bookie knows how to hornswoggle
gamblers
, who are nothing but a bunch of hornswogglers themselves. Find yourself a prophet with the gifts of a good bookie, Pete says, like Krishna in the Bog of Vod Geeta, and maybe you got something. Otherwise, he says, forget it.
    But Papa’s still looking at me, waiting for an answer …
    “I’d rather be a bookie than a prophet,” I tell him.
    He frowns at me a second, then laughs so hard you’d think I was Bob Hope.
    I still don’t get it. “Concentrate!” I tell him. “Concentrate on the ballgame!”
    ·  ·  ·  ·
    C letis Boyer should be up next. Everett calls him Foetus Boyer, but luckily I forget why. Papa says Boyer usually bats about last, but he was red-hot last week so Stengel juggled his whole lineup to move him up to sixth—and today he has popped out, hit into a double play, and gawked at a called third strike. Stengel jerks him and sends in Elston Howard.
    Elston Howard is the Yanks’ normal catcher now that Yogi’s getting old, but I guess he needed rest, or else the Bear was feeling frisky today. Howard’s planet is exactly like ours, Everett says, except the first and last names are all reversed: Howard Elston, his name should be.
    The fans are giving Mudcat Grant a standing ovation. They just figured out that except for Maris’s solo homer he’s been pitching a two-hit shutout against the best team in baseball—because the public address announcer just told them so. They go on cheering so long that Howard Elston has plenty of time to loosen up, while Mudcat just stands there getting tight and nervous. I take a look at Irwin’s