Yet, despite the wild urination and the curled-up dead man, Stern's pain diminished gradually. Sometimes, when he sat in the fields on endlessly long afternoons, waiting for the days to pass, he would probe his middle cautiously, as though he expected to find that the ulcer had only been playing dead and would leap out at him suddenly, bigger than ever. But the circle of pain had grown small and Stern thought how wonderful it would be if the kike man was getting smaller too, if when he got back to his house, he could find the man completely gone, his house erased, all traces of him vanished, as though he'd been taken by acid or never existed. * * * * * One morning, late in Stern's stay, word spread that two industrial teams were coming to play baseball for the patients at the Home. There was much excitement, and Stern felt sorry for those shriveled people whose only fun had been at YMCA's and merchant marine recreation parlors. Not one had ever seen _My Fair Lady_, and it was small wonder they looked forward with such delight to a clash between two industrial teams. In early evening, the night of the game, Stern took his place in the dumb march formation and walked to the field, poking his belly and feeling around for the pain flower. It had been replaced by a thin, crawling brocade of tenderness that seemed to lay wet on the front of his body and was a little better than the other. But he wondered whether the ulcer might not roll forth in a great flower once again, at the first trace of friction, and then he would have the two, the flower and the brocade. He was aware that in just a few days he would have to go back to the kike man. What would happen if he merely drove by once, saw the man's great arms taking out garbage cans, and felt the flower instantly fill his stomach, one glimpse wiping out five weeks at the Grove Rest Home? And what if it went on that way, five weeks at Grove, one glimpse at arms, another five weeks at Grove, arms, until one day the flower billowed out too far and burst and everything important ran out of him and there was no more? Stern walked behind the tall, sputtering, explosive boy, who led the march with Rooney in his arms. "You know who we ought to take up a collection for?" Rooney asked Stern as the Rest Home people took seats in the front row of the small grandstand. "Who's that?" asked Stern. "Yogi Berra," cackled Rooney. "I understand he's down to his last thirty-five cents." The tall boy poured him onto a bench in the front row and he clung gelatinlike to it, saying, "That Berra doesn't make ten bucks the whole season," and shaking with laughter. Stern sat between the tall, erupting young boy and Feldner. The boy, who was alternately nice and violent to Stern, asked him, "Did you ever play any ball before you picked up all that ass fat?"