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sign that said Addison Stadium a good-sized picture of a black bird holding something white in his mouth, when I heard somebody say something to me.
    He was a white man who looked to have been out in the sun a lot. He was blue-eyed, but tanned almost like the leather of a glove and wrinkled at the corners of his eyes and around his mouth like the hide you’d see on an old man’s neck.
    â€œWhat kind of a bat is that?” he said, nodding toward my tow sack.
    â€œIt’s a baseball bat,” I said.
    â€œI had done figured that part out on my own,” he said. “That was easy. But it don’t seem like that bat got its start in Louisville, Kentucky. Did it?”
    â€œNo. It come from Texas. From the Big Thicket. I made it.”
    â€œNo kidding? Is it a model or something? I see it’s not ash or maple. Are you making them to sell?”
    â€œI’ve made a good many of them, but I don’t make bats to sell. No.”
    â€œMind if I look at it?” the man said, shifting his weight a little the way you will when you want something to happen and are getting ready for it to take place.
    â€œSure,” I said, handing it to him. “Just as long as you don’t hit a ball with it.”
    He took the bat, backed away from where I was standing, and settled into a right-handed batting stance. He took a cut with my bat, easy at first, then another, and finally a full swing.
    â€œIt’s got a nice balance,” he said, turning the bat up to look at the barrel, the end, and then the knob. “It’s got a few nicks down here past the sweet spot, but it’s got a real good feel to it. It ain’t beat up.”
    â€œNo,” I said. “It’s been took care of.”
    â€œYou said something a while ago I want to ask you about. You said I could look at it long as I don’t hit a ball with it. Why’d you say that?”
    â€œWhat I’m afraid of, if you’d hit a ball with it, is that I don’t know for sure if there’s any hits left in this bat. And if some is left, I don’t want to waste a one of them,” I said.
    â€œOh, hell,” the man started to laugh. “You’re a baseball player.”
    â€œThat told you that, what I just said?”
    â€œYep, it sure did. You’re as crazy as a shithouse rat, just like the rest of us.”
    And that’s how I first met Dynamite Dunn, though when he introduced himself to me, he didn’t call himself that. That name was one somebody had come up with to put on the score cards and the rosters and for writers in the sport pages of the newspapers to use when they did their stories about the Rice Birds. He told me his real one, Herman Allan Dunn.
    I never met but one or two players in my time in the Evangeline League who would call themselves by their nicknames. Both of them had something wrong with their thinking, too, the ones who would announce themselves with a name like “Legs LeBlanc” or “Streak Magill.”
    I’m not saying players wouldn’t answer to the nickname put on them. Once your teammates started calling you by some tag they come up with, you had to go along with it and act like it didn’t bother you to have to answer to it, because if they found out you didn’t like being called something in particular, that would be all the name you’d ever hear again from them.
    Now in the Evangeline League, that name you made for yourself was put on you by other people, maybe because of the way you looked or some way you acted or something you had done once that was good. Or was bad. That could be a good thing for you if your luck held. Or it could make folks laugh when they said or heard that nickname, because of the way it’d come to you.
    Let me tell how Herman Allen Dunn got to be called Dynamite Dunn, and you’ll see what I’m talking about. It was his first year with the Rice Birds. He come to bat with the bases