“He’s not releasing you or me,” Buckskin said.
“How do you know?”
“Because I scare the sunshine out of Ed.” At this point, you know that Buckskin did not say sunshine.
“I don’t cotton to the notion of having a robber for a teammate,” I said. I already had to deal with Louis Friedman, who did not steal, as far as I knew, but who I did not like, on account he took up too much time with Ruth.
“We’ll keep an eye on him,” Buckskin said.
Five minutes later the train whistle blew, so Buckskin and me rose from that uncomfortable bench and stepped out onto the platform. My heart started pounding when I saw the black smoke pouring out of the stack as the train got closer, bringing Ruth so much closer to my heart.
Eighteen of Methuselah’s lifetimes passed before that smoking, squeaking, ringing, grunting, whistling locomotive come to a stop. Buckskin and me waited as the porter ran around, a mama and a baby got off and was greeted by a vaquero—whatever that is—–in a black hat and with silver buttons running up both sides of his pants. I’d never seen pants that had to be buttoned on the sides as well as where buttons usually go on britches. Then the boxcar was opened, and our crew began taking out our equipment, which meant that this was the right train.
Next thing I knew, Maggie Casey was leaping down from the train, not even taking the porter’s offer of his big hand, not even acknowledging the fellow. She turned around and bellowed: “Come on, Bloomers, let’s see if the whiskey and men here are any better than they was the last time we visited!” This sounded more like something Nelse McConnell would’ve said, only he would’ve substituted men for a word much more impolite than women.
Carrie Cassady climbed down next, but she let the porter help her. When she saw Buckskin and me, she smiled and waved happily. Buckskin and me waved back as other Bloomer Girls got out. My heart just sank when Mrs. Eagan stepped onto the platform and brought out a fan that she unfolded and started fanning herself, on account that it was hot and dusty in Las Animas.
It should not have affected me that way, because I knew that Ruth would not have come to Colorado without her ma, so I recovered right quick, because beautiful Ruth stepped off the train next.
I smiled.
Till my heart broke into a million pieces.
For the next person who climbed down from the car wasn’t no Bloomer Girl but Louis Friedman, the correspondent for the Sporting News, Variety, and any other publication that would pay him to write. He had the audacity to take Ruth’s arm and escort her away from Maggie Casey, who was barking orders at the other Bloomer Girls and telling Carrie Cassady to stop acting like a child by waving at strangers. Carrie Cassady said something too soft for us to hear over the screeching, clanging, and grunting of the engine, and the screaming of the baby that belonged to the mama and the vaquero. So maybe you see why my heart smashed into little pieces.
Maggie Casey turned around and saw us, and then she raised her hand, but it wasn’t no friendly wave, as it was the back of her hand that she let us see, along with her lowered thumb and every finger but the middle one, which ain’t a polite kind of wave but was something ballists often done to an umpire after a terrible call, as long as the umpire wasn’t looking. I’d done that, too, but to a pitcher who threw a fastball too close to my head.
Mrs. Eagan walked alongside Ruth. Louis Friedman stopped to shake our hands. Buckskin told them where the hotel was, and Ruth looked at me and smiled and said: “It’s nice to see you again.” But she didn’t say my name, neither Lucy Totton nor my real name, and Mrs. Eagan asked if it was always this dusty in Las Animas. Buckskin shrugged, and the hacks started arriving, so Ruth and her ma and that inkslinging rapscallion—picked up that word my ownself from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—and got a ride to the hotel.
At length, Mr. Ed Norris emerged from the train with two strangers who were decked out in toppers and Bloomer Girls duds. We greeted Mr. Norris and Snail Snyder, who wasn’t no bigger than me but had eyes real close together above his crooked nose, and Charlie Barngrover, who smelt like a busted whiskey keg. He had trouble keeping his balance when Buckskin and me reached out to shake his hand.
Chapter Nineteen
La Junta Tribune
La Junta, Colorado • July 25, 1906
The La Junta team kicked, and the Blooming Girls picked up their dolls and things and announced that they were going back home and would never speak to the La Junta boys again as long as they lived.
Buckskin looked at Mr. Norris and asked: “Where’s Nelse?”
“Where do you think?” he answered, which wasn’t an answer.
Buckskin give our manager one of them looks. “He’s in jail?” Buck said next.
The little weasel named Snail smirked. “Instead of bustin’ up a saloon, he busted up the Palace Drugstore. Picked up a Spaldin’ bat they was sellin’ and went loco. Ruint every croquet set they had in the store. Then he went to work on the laxatives, the aspirin, soda pops, and the telephone.”
“You didn’t bail him out?” Buckskin said.
“No bail,” our manager said. “Not after he broke a policeman’s arm with that bat.”
“Your ex-catcher must like coppers as much as he likes croquet,” the weasel said, sniggering.
Charlie Barngrover, who needed a shave if he wanted to pass for a Bloomer Girl, threw hisself into the conversation. “It’s a meaningless sport.”
Buckskin and Mr. Norris paid them no mind. The latter said: “Your West isn’t so wild anymore. By Jehovah, in Dodge they’re making residents put tags on their dogs these days. Charge a dollar a year.”
Making no comment about Dodge City’s dogs or nothing else, Buckskin handed what he called “our Colorado itinerary” to Mr. Norris, who studied it after spitting out his cigar onto the platform.
He nodded after reading it over and said: “One thing’s missing.”
Buckskin waited.
“Who runs the gambling in these towns?”
Buckskin didn’t answer, said instead: “Without Nelse, who’s your catcher? I don’t think it’s this runt.”
“Who you callin’ a runt?” the weasel said.
Buckskin gave Snail a mean stare. “Would you prefer robber?”
“He wasn’t convicted, Buck,” Mr. Norris said.
Charlie Barngrover laughed. “ ’Cause he busted out of what Effingham calls a jail.”
Mr. Norris took charge, which ain’t nothing he done regular, but I was glad, because it likely stopped some fisticuffs from erupting at the depot. I was already missing Waddell and Nelse, especially ’cause we had booked a room at a hotel that had Buckskin, me, the weasel, and the drunk sharing a room.
“Let’s find the hotel,” the weasel said. “I’m hungry.”
“Try the oysters,” Buckskin told him.
* * * * *
Buckskin had to catch the game against Las Animas and La Junta, and I had to pitch both on account that Charlie Barngrover was in his cups. No, in his cups doesn’t quite draw the right picture. Some of the boys who put up our canvas fences and the grandstand had to haul Charlie Barngrover in a wheelbarrow from the ballpark to the depot. See, Mr. Norris done all he could to keep any liquor out of our new Lady Waddell’s reach, but Charlie Barngrover outsmarted him.
We lost them games against Las Animas … La Junta … Lamar.
Dark times.
Ruth spent so much time with Louis Friedman and her ma, I hardly got a chance to talk to her and really only saw her when I’d be pitching and have to check the runner on first base. To make up for my lack of contact with her, I’d make quite a few throws to her at first, never coming close to getting the base runner out, and wearing out Ruth’s four-dollar Spalding mitt, till the spectators started yelling obscenities at me to throw to the batter and quit stalling.
Darkest of times.
&nb
sp; “Do you know what wins more ball games than anything else?” Buckskin asked me as we rode the train to Trinidad. They’d left Charlie Barngrover, by the way, in the boxcar with the benches, grandstand, fences, and other equipment, so he could sleep off his bender.
“Scoring runs,” I said, which we hadn’t been doing much of since the Bloomer Girls come to Colorado.
Buckskin grinned but shook his head. “It’s how the players get along … how they work together.”
Which made me feel blue way down in my heart and soul, ’cause way back in Kansas, I had gotten along real fine with kind, pretty Ruth. Now Maggie Casey talked to me more than Ruth, and what Maggie said wasn’t always friendly.
“You reckon it’s us?” I asked. “The girls were doing real good in Kansas.”
“No,” Buckskin said.
“Charlie and Snail?”
He shook his head.
“We wasn’t with the team for a whole month,” I said. “Maybe something happened.” That sent the blood rushing to my head and caused me to ball my fingers till my fists shook and my knuckles turned white. Me thinking that the something was Louis Friedman.
But Buckskin didn’t mention that inkslinger. He called our manager into question. “Ed’s up to something,” Buckskin said.
Which sort of disappointed me, as I’d been imagining sending a pitch so wild that Buckskin wouldn’t be able to catch it before it hit Louis Friedman in his lips and teeth and nose and then went through his face like Buckskin’s .45-90 bullet had gone through Charles Gallagher’s chest back in Axtell, Kansas.
“Could be the attitude,” I suggested after my anger died down. “Though I ain’t seen none of the girls suffering from a bleeding nose.”
Buckskin give me a curious look. “Altitude,” he finally said. “Not attitude.”
I shrugged.
“Do you think Ed’s been acting a little strange, kid?”
Another shrug.
“When a team loses, it’s the manager who gets the blame,” Buckskin muttered to himself.
“Or the umpire,” I added.
“Ed’s up to something,” Buckskin said.
“So’s Friedman,” I whispered.
“What?” Buckskin said.
“Nothing.”
Buckskin pondered more. I devised plans that would result in painful injuries for Louis Friedman till the noise of the train moving in the night put me to sleep.
* * * * *
It was Denver where Maggie Casey got fed up. Buckskin had been catching every game, and that was all right for a ballist like Nelse McConnell, who didn’t know no better, because he was stupid and couldn’t play no position but catcher. But Buckskin was a thinker and a planner and, usually, a third baseman—and, yeah, a killer and a crack shot and a reader of anything with words—but Mr. Norris wouldn’t give him a break. Me, neither. I pitched every game, and Buckskin, in his topper and a catcher’s mitt that didn’t really fit him, catched every game.
Till Maggie Casey got into Mr. Norris’s face right before our game in Denver, and she called our manager all sorts of bad things, saying he was a disgrace, and that if he didn’t let Carrie Cassady pitch against the Bears and have Maud Nelson catch, Mr. Ed Norris would rue the day.
That got Charlie Barngrover to laughing, but he stopped when Maggie Casey snatched the glove off his lap and pulled out all the little bottles of whiskey that he’d been hiding inside his mitt. Charlie’s face turned whiter than fresh snow on the highest peak in the Colorado Rockies, and then turned redder than a plate of beets—which are disgusting and should never be served nowhere—when Maggie ripped open his shirt and grabbed his unmentionables and plucked out two large grapefruits that he had stuffed in there so he’d look more like a girl than a drunk ballist.
Maggie Casey tossed one of the grapefruits to Katie Maloney and another to Gypsie O’Hearn as she said: “See if those taste like gin, girls.”
Charlie Barngrover’s mouth hung open as he sucked in a deep, deep breath—not because he wasn’t used to the altitude, but because Maggie Casey had found out where he hid his gin and rye and bourbon and corn liquor and bitters.
“You’ll find a syringe in his shaving kit,” Maggie said. “He puts liquor in fruit … grapefruit, lemons, oranges … whatever he can find. When he can’t find fruit, he juices up his tobacco plugs.”
Which led me to wonder how come he could swallow his liquor but not the tobacco juice. That stuff had made me sicker than a dog when I tried it when I was twelve, playing with a bunch of farm boys. One of them boys said he had learnt how to swallow tobacco juice without getting sick, but he never told me the secret to it. But that was fine, ’cause I never wanted to stick that grossness into my mouth again.
Maggie put a long finger underneath Barngrover’s nose. “If I ever smell liquor on your breath again, buster, I’ll rip off your head and spit down the hole.”
Barngrover disappeared quick after the game in Denver. Didn’t say good-bye or draw his time. Nobody missed him much, and Maggie banned any kind of fruit that people could suck on at our bench.
Buckskin and me didn’t play in the Denver game. The Bloomer Girls didn’t win, but they played good.
Buckskin whispered to me: “Remember this day, kid. This is the day when the Bloomer Girls’ luck turned.”
Chapter Twenty
Whitehorn News
Whitehorn, Colorado • July 20, 1906
It is truly marvelous how skillfully these girls can handle a baseball while the pitching of Miss Carrie Cassady, who is a left-handed wonder, is remarkable. She has been named Lady Waddell, after the famous southpaw of the Philadelphia American baseball club, and is the best lady ball player on earth. All of the fans in the city, and especially the ladies and children, should turn out and see this wonderful team of lady artists play the great national game.
The Bloomer Girls started winning, and after Snail Snyder got hisself arrested for robbing the Pike’s Peak Poultry Yards—never found out if he was stealing eggs or Rose Comb Rhode Island Reds. Still, folks and the law take their birds and yolks serious in Colorado Springs, and since the weasel had stole Buckskin’s double-action Colt to commit the crime, the law and the judge, who prided hisself on his winter layers and good roasters, wasn’t inclined to give Snail no bail, since the Bloomers were leaving Colorado Springs and wouldn’t be in the state of Colorado for long. Mr. Norris didn’t have much choice but to play mostly girls, though I pitched every third day when Buckskin usually catched.
The lineup was usually this: Carrie Cassady or Gypsie O’Hearn pitched. Maggie Casey, Pearl Murphy, and Katie Maloney in the outfield. Sue Malarkey at second and Agnes McGuire at shortstop. Maude Sullivan and Ruth Eagan at the corners. Maud Nelson, who wasn’t a bad pitcher at all and could play practically anywhere on the field, and Jessie Dailey played when they weren’t selling programs or tickets.
They got good, our girls, didn’t get tired out from the altitude, and Carrie Cassady had a spitball that was impossible to hit, even though it ain’t ladylike for even Quaker girls from Salem, Ohio, to spit.
Once, when it wasn’t the third day, meaning I didn’t have to pitch, I asked Mr. Norris if he’d like me to sell programs or tickets. He pulled out his cigar, squinted his eyes, and said: “You ain’t that pretty, bub.” Which was truthful, if rude. I didn’t bother to ask him if he’d want Buckskin to give one of the Bloomer Girls a rest from hawking programs, because while I ain’t as pretty as that sweet waitress in Salida, I look better than Buckskin Compton, and he cuts a much finer figure than Mr. Norris.
* * * * *
Colorado’s mountains were beautiful. We ate a mess of trout, which tasted great. Not one nose on any of the Bloomer Girls bled, and in the mountains, unlike on the plains, nary a single Coloradan refused to pay the two bits to watch our games. They wanted to see the Bloomers play, and usually, excepting o
n them third days when Buckskin and me played, they actually seen girls play baseball against men.
Buckskin and me were having breakfast before taking the rented wagons to Whitehorn, which didn’t have no train. I’d ordered trout and eggs, though I’d never tried fish for breakfast before, but it was sure good for supper. The waitress, who was prettier than Ruth, smiled and said that was what she liked for breakfast, too. I grinned, and she said she had been to the baseball game the day before. And I said that I had, too, praying silently that she had not seen me on the bench decked out like a female.
“Don’t you love the geese?” she asked.
I nodded. “I’ve never played a game where geese …” Only I shut up because I didn’t want her to know that I could have played in that game dressed up as a Bloomer Girl.
“You play baseball?” She asked that like some people would say: You own a gold mine?
I shrugged. “Second base. Some pitching. Anywhere.”
She didn’t bring up the geese again, so I’ll explain that in Salida, Colorado, geese often rest themselves in the outfield, center field mostly, but it depends on the shade. And no visiting team nor the Salida Nine is allowed to harm no geese or even try to shoo them big birds out of the playing area. They’re just a part of the ground rules that the umpire told everybody before the game. But if you know anything about a goose, you already know that only a fool would try to herd a goose or two from anywhere, because geese is mean, fierce birds that’ll attack anyone. Folks here in Salida come to see the games in the summer and fall, hoping that a ball will drop in the outfield and get them geese madder than ganders. They enjoy watching an outfielder try to get the ball and throw it in without getting pecked or crapped on.
Maggie Casey wasn’t eating breakfast that morning, ’cause she’d agitated a mama goose in center field and got her throwing hand scratched up bad. The Salidans at the game had sure loved that. Made me and Buckskin chuckle, but not once Maggie Casey run in after the inning, cussing and screaming, and forcing me and Maud Nelson to find a clean cloth to put over her bleeding hand.
Buckskin, Bloomers, and Me Page 14