Emporia. Now that town I remember. Quite well. The town, I mean. Not the game. ’Cause there weren’t no game.
“What do you mean?” Mr. Ed Norris was saying when me and Buckskin arrived at the city’s baseball field. He wasn’t talking to us, but to this weasel in a straw hat and spectacles pushed far down his crooked nose. Behind him stood four, five fellows bigger than some fat steers I’d seen in cattle cars bound for to the Kansas City packing houses.
“The contract said we were to play the National Bloomer Girls,” said the straw-hatted weasel, emphasizing the word girls.
“And I am manager of the National Bloomer Girls,” Mr. Norris said. “You will be playing the Bloomer Girls.”
The weasel pointed at me. “Girls? Mister, I sure ain’t fondling that witch.” But he didn’t say fondling or witch.
“I don’t know, Vern,” said one of the ruffians behind him. “The little one’s sexful. Very sexful indeed.”
Them other tough hombres took to sniggering, and my face turned redder than a fresh-popped blister after the dead skin’s got ripped off. See, we wasn’t in our Bloomer Girls uniform. Buckskin and me had gotten up before all the girls, gotten up before Waddell and McConnell, too, but that usually happened. We’d left the hotel with Buckskin dressed in plaid trousers and a bib-front shirt and me wearing the duds that I’d worn to Mound City, which had at least got washed in that tub in Toronto.
“But the other?” The big bruiser eyed Buckskin, then immediately shut up, and the sniggering stopped, on account that Buckskin give all of them one of his I’m-a-mad-dog-killer looks.
But Mr. Norris and that fellow Vern kept right on arguing. The weasel saying he wasn’t going to risk losing a game to girls that wasn’t really girls at all, even though most of us were girls—just not me and Buckskin or Lady Waddell or Nellie McConnell. After all, it takes nine players to field a baseball team and us fellows totaled only four. So most of us were girls, just not us, you see.
Anyway, Mr. Norris refused to return the advance he had got paid, or his appearance fee—since he did show up—and that explained how come he had that shiner surrounding his left eye when we seen him later that afternoon.
Buckskin said to me: “Let’s go.” So the two of us left the baseball field and didn’t come back on account there wasn’t no game that day. But Mr. Norris stayed, which is how come his eye got black by the time we seen him next.
Having gotten paid, Buckskin, carrying his bat bag and a smaller grip with his glove and uniform, led me to a tonsorial parlor called the Elk Barber Shop where he got shaved.
“Close,” he told the barber. “Real close.”
So I told another of the three barbers in that shop that I’d like me a shave, too, but Buckskin said that I couldn’t have no shave. Seems he thought it might cause my face to break out and then I wouldn’t look like some virginal goddess no more, which got all three of the barbers and two gents waiting for their shaves and haircuts laughing mighty hard. All it got me was a red face.
But I didn’t hold no grudge too long, since after his shave, Buckskin took me to Tiffany’s Corner Bakery, and, by golly, the bread loafs they dished out was about as long as my bat. After that, we went to do some shopping. I wanted to go to this place with this fancy-dressed guy in a newspaper advertisement pasted on the front door, but Buckskin just kept on walking.
I ended up spending most of my first pay at G. W. Newman’s Dry Goods Co.—they was having a sale. Can’t complain too much, I reckon. Buckskin let me pick out a boy’s suit for three dollars and forty-nine cents, a pair of dollar-seventy-five shoes that was on sale for ninety-eight cents, undergarments, socks, some everyday trousers, and two shirts. Then we wandered over to the ladies area, Buckskin saying real loud that my ma’s birthday was coming up, which turned me sad, ’cause it started me thinking about my real ma, Gertrude Grace. I knew what we was buying was for me, on account Buckskin held up a black mercerized—whatever that meant—skirt to my waist.
“She’s about your size, I do believe,” Buckskin said as he measured that skirt against me, aware of a gray-haired lady holding up her spectacles as she stared in our direction. “Can’t believe how big you’ve grown. Tall as your mother already,” he said in an excited, loud voice.
The old lady lowered her glasses, made herself smile, but she still kept glancing over her shoulder whilst Buckskin tossed some female unmentionables, a wrap, some dress linings, a bonnet, and some other girlie stuff in my arms.
I had to pay for all that, too. Buckskin sprung for a lady’s valise, where he stored some of my new female clothes, and then said that he’d buy me dinner, not that I was very hungry after eating that big loaf of bread we’d chowed down earlier.
We walked down the boardwalk in the direction of the hotel, me carrying a few packages wrapped in brown paper and tied up with twine in one hand and the valise and a sack of baseball gear in the other. Suddenly, Buckskin shoved me down an alley we was passing and leaped in right behind me. He pushed me against the wall, and he brung up that baseball bat bag, holding his breath as he whispered for me not to say nothing, not to even breathe. He kept his eye on two fellows—who looked pretty much like the drawings I’d seen in Owen Wister’s The Virginian—as they slowly rode their ponies down Cunningham Street.
After they’d gone out of sight, and once me and Buckskin could breathe again, we sprung out of that alley and didn’t stop till Buckskin hurried me inside this place called Haynes Brothers’, according to the sign. Inside, a puny man wearing a visor and apron looked up and laid a big old Remington revolver on the counter. I jumped back, but then saw that the cylinder wasn’t even in the pistol and the barrel had a stick poking down it. Don’t think he thought we meant to rob him, which sure seemed to be what Buckskin had in mind as hard and as fast as he opened and slammed the door and shoved me inside.
“I’d like a box of Forty-Five-Nineties,” Buckskin said after he nodded at the man.
The little man pushed back his visor. “That’s a mighty big caliber, mister. Ain’t what most folks shoot around here … now that the buffalo’s all gone.”
I think the man was trying for a joke, but Buckskin’s brusque “Yeah” let him know that he wasn’t interested in funny.
“I’ll have to look in the back to see if I got any,” the fellow said.
Four minutes later he come back with a box that he was wiping dust from with a handkerchief before setting it atop the counter near the register. He excused himself as he thumbed through papers underneath the register to find out the price of a box of .45-90 shells. He had trouble, ’cause whilst he had been in the storeroom getting the shells meant for hunting battleships or elephants, Buckskin had drawn down the shades on the door and one of the big windows.
“Is there anything else, sir?” the man asked whilst wetting his lips with his tongue and glancing at the shades.
“No …” Buckskin stopped and stepped back to study the revolvers and other manly things displayed inside the glass case.
“How much for the Lightning? And that pair of binoculars?”
Maybe twenty minutes later, Buckskin stuck the revolver in the waistband at his back, which his jacket covered. The shells he put inside his baseball bat bag. The spyglasses he give me to carry, which I hung around my neck. He thanked the man, and on his way out the door, Buckskin pulled the shades back up. Then he looked up and down the street before he come full out onto the boardwalk. Almost like we was trying to beat out a weak roller back to the mound, we returned to the Nutting Hotel.
We went up the back staircase, real sneaky. Since Buckskin told me not to say one word, I didn’t ask how come, being savvy enough to figure out that it didn’t have nothing to do with the fact that pretty Ruth Eagan might see us not outfitted like Bloomers or girls.
Things got even stranger once inside our room. He locked the door. Waddell and McConnell wasn’t in the room. I figured
they was either out drinking or looking for a card game, since McConnell had bragged that he and Waddell, dressed as Bloomers, had made some money playing poker on the train ride from Toledo. Seems the two had sat with a couple of businessmen in the smoking car who were in their cups. They drank with them until the two was out cold, then Waddell relieved them of all their greenbacks. They used that money to play cards with two other gents who thought they was teaching poker to the two girls. Them fellows couldn’t scarcely believe the luck those two had playing poker for the first time.
“Get dressed,” Buckskin ordered me, after we had been in the room less than ten minutes. He tossed me a skirt, looking like he wasn’t gonna brook no argument.
After we got all duded up like women, we walked to the Normal school.
* * * * *
Sitting on Perley’s hill, Buckskin used his new binoculars to watch some young ladies as they practiced baseball.
“I know what you’re thinking, kid,” Buckskin said, “but this isn’t Coventry, those aren’t Lady Godivas, and I’m no Peep-
ing Tom.”
Didn’t know what he was talking about. Still don’t. Just before I wrote that there sentence, Buckskin told me I’d have to learn that for myself. Maybe I will, someday.
What I, a sixteen-year-old, was thinking at that particular time on that day was that it sure weren’t fair that, up here and pretty much out of sight, Buckskin, at least ten years older than me and maybe as much as twenty, got to watch girls at the Normal school play baseball through binoculars whilst I just used my eyes. Perley’s hill might not be no mountain, us still being in Kansas, but it was still a right far piece to watch girls run the bases or bend over to scoop up soft rollers in the infield.
When I tired of straining my eyes, I found something else to hold my attention, and it got me to thinking.
A ladies’ pocketbook lay between Buckskin’s legs, and it was open, so I had a good view of them ivory grips of his new Lightning revolver, and I knew why he brung it and left his skinny bat bag under our bed at the Nutting Hotel. A lady in a poke-shaped bonnet, cotton blouse, and skirt hauling a long, heavy thin bag would draw too much attention. I’d told Buckskin that I could cart them binoculars in the sack that once held all my regular duds, but he made me put them spyglasses in my new valise. The valise wouldn’t get much attention, neither.
Two women sitting on a hill, watching girls practice baseball, I also reckoned, wouldn’t result in no lynching, unless they was discovered to be a man and a boy.
I didn’t ask Buckskin why he was spying on the Normal baseball girls. Wasn’t sure I wanted to know.
But one thing I’d already figured out, having seen that Lightning in the pocketbook and understanding that his long bag carried a .45-90 rifle as well as baseball bats.
Yep, Russ Waddell had spoke the truth the other night when he’d said: “We’re all running away from something.”
Chapter Eight
The Sun
Chanute, Kansas
May 24, 1906
The National Bloomer Girls baseball team of Kansas City will play the Eagles at Athletic Park next Monday, May 28. The “girls” are said to play a good game of baseball and have a record of winning games. The team is composed of all girls, and the pitcher is a wonder … Those who think a woman cannot throw a ball straight will be greatly surprised at the excellent game the Bloomer Girls put up.
“Hold your hand out, palm toward me,” Buckskin ordered.
In another hotel room, in another town, we were getting dressed for the game against Chanute. I’d been looking at my fingernails, ’cause Mr. Norris asked me to pitch this game and let Russ “Lady” Waddell rest his arm. I give Buckskin a funny look but did like he told me.
“Spread your fingers out.”
When I done that, Buckskin nodded. “That’s how a woman looks at her nails.”
“Huh?”
Buckskin laughed. “You were bending your fingers toward you, looking at your nails. That’s how men look at their nails. One of the differences between men and women. Usually. Not always. But usually.”
I went back to studying my nails the way I usually done, on account that I ain’t no female.
“That’s a good way to arouse suspicion.” Buckskin sounded and looked right serious.
Not that I had to do this, but I took in everything that was in the room—the other bed, the dresser, the washbasin, our grips, Buckskin’s bat bag that held a .45-90 rifle, his pocketbook that held a .38-caliber Colt, some books he had bought at a store once we arrived in town, the window with the shades drawn by Buckskin, at my stockings and shoes, and then back at Buckskin.
“There ain’t nobody in here but us,” I informed him.
Which he clearly knew himself ’cause Waddell, having the day off, said he was going to find a … well, that was Waddell’s personal business, and you don’t need to know what he was seeking. Learnt later he found what he was looking for, and he found something else, since he had to see a doc about that when we reached Dodge City. McConnell had gone with him, ’cause he said he’d like to see what a town like Chanute had for harlots, which is why Buckskin and me was alone in our room.
“You don’t want to get caught,” Buckskin said.
I thought about coming back with I think you’re the one who don’t want to get caught. Wish I had, ’cause I don’t usually think up replies that fast, but I just parted my lips, then closed them, and that’s when Buckskin asked: “You ever treaded the boards?”
“My pa worked for a railroad. He weren’t no carpenter.”
Chuckling, Buckskin shook his head. “You’re a wonder, kid.” Then he told me that he once dreamed of being a thespian, which he knew I wouldn’t understand. So he told me what a thespian was, and that’s how come he knew about Romeo and Juliet—which we went to last month as I think I’ve already mentioned whilst waiting for the trial. He told me he even rode around with a troupe for a time but left it in St. Joe. And that’s when I figured out what we—I mean, he—had been doing on Perley’s hill back in Emporia. Spying on the Normal girls, but not out of prurient—another one of Buckskin’s hifalutin words —desires but to learn more about how to act whilst pretending to be a Bloomer Girl.
Anyhow, that’s what we mostly did before the game. And then we played the game. As a team we stunk. After, we all rode over to the Harvey House to eat supper and wait for the next Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe train to take us to wherever it was we was supposed to be going. The reason I can’t remember where is ’cause Ruth Eagan come over and sat down where Buckskin and me was wolfing down steaks and corn and drinking our coffee and she says: “It’s time.”
Buckskin—well, I guess he’d actually be Dolly Madison, seeing as how he still wore his Bloomer Girls’ uniform—nodded, and he pulled out some money from his pocketbook and laid it on the table. He wiped his mouth daintily with a napkin and then checked his fingernails the way a gal is supposed to do. When Ruth stood, so did Buckskin, and he told me to come along. I paid for my meal and grabbed my bag that held my bat and glove. Buckskin had his bag, which held his arsenal of baseball bats and gloves, as well as his dangersome firearms. I stood and followed Ruth right along with Buckskin, trying to figure out what she meant when she’d told us that it was time, since I knew the train wasn’t due for another two hours.
Ruth led the way. We walked out of the eating place and found the stairs and went up them to the second floor of the fancy building which is where the Santa Fe’s Kansas Division was headquartered. But there weren’t no railroaders in that room. Only Bloomer Girls.
“Sorry we’re late,” Ruth said happily, “Mother.” That last word came out like she was cussing, but she wouldn’t say no dirty word, ’cause Ruth Eagan is not only pretty but a real lady, and I knew she was explaining that she was late—for what, I didn’t know—on account that her ma had made it happen.
&nbs
p; Then Maggie Casey stood, and Maggie wasn’t no lady at all, for I’d heard her cuss aplenty on the baseball fields, usually playing in right field while I’d be playing mostly on second base. But I’d been pitching on this day, ’cause Russ “Lady” Waddell had asked to rest his arm, but it wasn’t his arm that needed resting, it was his head, though he had had to use that arm to drink all that forty-rod the night before, which had caused the grief in his noggin this day. So from my position as pitcher, I’d been able to hear some of the things Maggie Casey had called the Chanute ballists.
They weren’t pleasant words.
Maggie glared like a mad dog at me and Buckskin, pointed her finger at us, and said: “What are you two doing here?”
Iffen you hang around baseball teams long enough, you learn something about right fielders. They ain’t real smart. ’Cause you ain’t gotta have much of a brain to play right field. All you need is an arm that’s strong enough to break a baseball bat in half and throw a ball something like a tenth of a mile in the air, real, real hard. Maggie Casey could do that. During our game that day, she had drilled a Santa Fe brakeman right in his ribs as he was trying to score on a fly he had lofted to the canvas fence. Knocked the wind out of him, it did, meaning Maggie’s thrown ball, and that allowed Nelse “Nellie” McConnell to run over and pick up the ball and tag the wheezing brakeman out. At that, some peace officers come out of the stands and lifted the brakeman up, who screamed that two or three ribs of his had been busted and please, God, don’t let them puncture his lungs. They carted him out of our makeshift baseball park, and it took a long time before the manager of the town-ball team could find a volunteer to replace the brakeman. He finally did, only that fellow struck out in his two at-bats and seemed relieved about it.
“I invited them, Maggie,” Ruth said.
“You invited them?” I ain’t sure which of those words Maggie Casey emphasized most. Come close to being a three-way tie.
Agnes McGuire, who played a decent second base when Mr. Norris didn’t make her sell programs or collect tickets, reached up and tried to grab Maggie’s shirt sleeve to give it a gentle tug in a peacekeeping way—’cause second-baggers, me included, is usually trying to keep the peace in one way or another. Maggie slapped Agnes’s hand, and Agnes, well, she got her hand out of the vicinity of Maggie’s big hams and decided to forget about keeping peace in the meeting room.
Buckskin, Bloomers, and Me Page 6