The Pitch

The job description was one page long, and Mara had read it four times in the car, and had somehow never got as far as item nine.

"Item nine," said Bradley Grimsley, tapping it with a pen. He was the business manager of the Savannah Fiddlers, a pleasant, tired-looking man of about forty in a short-sleeved dress shirt, with a pager on his belt and a calculator beside his telephone. His office was under the grandstand at Pulaski Field, and it smelled of popcorn oil and old paper. "Mascot duties, as assigned. You did read it."

"I read it," said Mara, which was nearly true.

"Good. Then you know." He smiled, the way a dentist smiles. "Community relations assistant. Six twenty-five an hour. School visits, the Rotary lunch, the radio remote at the Piggly Wiggly. And on game nights, Fiddlesticks."

"Fiddlesticks," said Mara.

"Our crab." Bradley pointed with the pen at a framed photograph on the wall: a large brown-and-orange shape standing on a dugout roof in 1971, waving one enormous claw at a crowd in summer hats. "He's been with the club twenty-seven years. You'll be the ninth person inside him." He handed Mara a key on a loop of string. "Storeroom's at the end of the corridor. Game's at seven-oh-five. Try not to fall off anything."

It was the first of June, 1998, and the hottest morning Mara had ever stood in. Pulaski Field sat on the east edge of Savannah where the city gave up and the marsh began: a long concrete grandstand from 1941 under a tin roof painted navy blue, thirty-eight hundred green seats, a hand-turned scoreboard in left field and, beyond the outfield fence, nothing but cordgrass and sky and a great white egret standing in the shallows as if it had bought a ticket. Somewhere high up under the roof, an organ was playing something slow and grand to nobody at all.

Mara had graduated from college three weeks earlier with a degree in communications, a minor in theater, no plan and a used car with no air conditioning. This had seemed, on the telephone, like a job in baseball. Standing in Bradley's office with the pen tapping item nine, Mara began to suspect it was a job in a costume, which was not quite the same thing.

The storeroom was a concrete room behind a steel door, full of things the club had stopped needing: a pitching machine with no arm, three boxes of 1989 yearbooks, a rack of navy-and-white uniforms, and, sitting on a folding chair under a bare bulb, with its eyes on stalks and its mouth in a wide foam grin, the head of a crab the size of a washing machine.

The rest of him hung from a hook on the wall. A brown-and-orange shell like a dome tent. Six stubby legs on a sort of skirt. One small, sensible claw. And one giant claw, the size of a bass drum, with a pincer that opened and shut on a string.

Mara looked at the crab, and the crab grinned back.

The organ loft hung under the roof directly over home plate, up a ladder that was more like a fire escape. In it, at a wooden console with two keyboards and a fan blowing on her music, sat a small woman of about seventy in a sun visor and pearls.

"You're the new crab," she said, without turning round. "I'm Lurleen. I've played here since 1961. I've seen eight crabs come and go, and I'll tell you what I tell all of them." She played a cheerful little chord. "Sideways, sugar. A crab walks sideways. The minute you walk forward in that suit, every child in this ballpark knows there's a person inside it."

"Is that bad?"

Lurleen turned round at last and looked at Mara over her sunglasses for a long, thoughtful moment.

"In this ballpark," she said, "it's the worst thing there is."

At six-forty that evening, Mara stood in the tunnel behind the home dugout, inside Fiddlesticks.

It was very dark in there, and very hot, and it smelled of twenty-seven summers. The head sat on a padded hoop on Mara's shoulders, and the only way to see out was through a strip of black mesh in the crab's grinning mouth, which showed a slot of world about the width of a mail slot, mostly sky. The giant claw strapped onto Mara's left arm and weighed as much as a bag of groceries. The legs swung against Mara's knees.

Up in the loft, Lurleen began the Fiddlesticks entrance music. Somewhere beyond the slot, a crowd made a small, polite noise.

Mara took a deep breath of crab, turned sideways, and stepped out.

It went well for three steps. On the fourth, the giant claw caught the dugout rail, the shell swung, and Mara discovered that the top step of the home dugout at Pulaski Field was nine inches higher than it looked from inside a crab's mouth. Mara went down the steps in a long, slow, foam-padded somersault and fetched up on the dugout floor on her back, legs in the air, at the feet of the Fiddlers' manager.

Hoyt Baxley, sixty-three years old and thirty-eight of them in baseball, looked down at the crab for a long moment over a mouthful of sunflower seeds.

"Get that thing out of my dugout," he said.