listens to a great lecture, unwilling to miss a single utterance for fear a kernel of information might slip past. Functionally illiterate, Jerry nonetheless could quote statistics for any player on the team from his slow ingestion of each game. Should Jerry miss a game, which much to his consternation happened on occasion, he sat in the same chair, studying the box score from The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Taking approximately the same length of time it took to play, Jerry imagined the game. Play by play, he relived it inning by inning, deciphering the words and numbers, adding them to the totals he kept in his head. Once the season ended, on through to April, like the bear of a man he was Jerry went into a hibernation of sorts. His survival instincts slowed him down, telling him to stay reasonably drunk, and as warm as possible. A year after they married, in the trough of the depression, Jerry lost his job. In those years, a man stood little chance of finding work again. He became like a downed animal on a mass migration. Given up for dead, the rest of the herd would silently walk around him, as they pushed forward in hopes of making it to greener pastures. When the baseball season ended, Jerry left the only city he’d ever known. Never having ventured more than twenty miles from the confluence of the city’s three rivers, he went south, intent on joining one of the New Deal’s works programs. Jerry had earnestly promised to send money as soon as he found work, but after three hard-fought months, Dahlia lost faith and filed abandonment papers. No one in Pittsburgh ever heard from him again. Whether poor, simple Jerry was dead or alive, or ever found the works projects, remained unknown. Perhaps he went hobo, riding the rails with Woody Guthrie. Or maybe, overshooting his target in Tennessee, found the Pirates’ spring training camp in Florida and mistook it for heaven. In Mrs. Taylor’s opinion, when Dahlia moved back into the boardinghouse, Jerry simply got lost. Mostly, she was pleased to have Bob, who by then had started calling her Mrs. Momma Taylor, back under her roof. 4 P.M. COUNT
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