Rue thought about that.
He leaned closer to her, and she could smell his cigarette breath. “Five hundred every time you do what we ask. Like every three or four starts. Nobody will ever know.”
Rue did the math. She probably had fifteen more starts left in the season, so he was talking about two thousand bucks, maybe more. A lot of money.
But lose on purpose? How could she do that? “No,” she said, draining the last of her drink and getting to her feet. “Still no.”
Her wide eyes, her quiet voice, making him disbelieve her. “You’ll come around,” he said. “You’ll change your mind.”
She turned away.
“Your problem is, you think you’ve got a choice,” he called after her. “But you don’t.”
The first time she heard that from him, but not the last.
Diamond Ruby. Belle of the Ball. Queen of Diamonds. The “Out” Girl.
The Angel of Brooklyn.
Silent Rue, sometimes, because of her fragile voice.
Even just plain Rue every once in a while. It made for a good headline joke: “Opponents Rue the Day Captain Mansfield Signed Girl Phenom.”
She’d been just fifteen when the old Army officer who owned the Coney Island Comets came to watch her pitch in Marine Park. By then she’d gotten some local attention, not that it mattered much to her. All she wanted to do was pitch, win, and collect the money she was owed to help her family scrape along.
Captain Mansfield, bluff, loud, friendly, looking at his team like it was a toy, had other ideas. “Sign with me,” he’d said, “and we’ll make a fortune.”
Underneath all his jollity he was a smart businessman. Because he certainly made himself a pretty penny from all the fans who came to the ballpark to watch Diamond Ruby, the freak of nature straight out of a Coney Island sideshow, pitch. To see this little girl with the unhittable fastball and knee-buckling curve mow down men who were heading to the majors, or who’d already been there and were heading down.
But very few of those pretty pennies ever made it into Diamond Ruby’s pockets.
Rue’s first pitch to the Babe bounced two feet in front of the plate, skipped past Jimmy Connelly, the Comets’ catcher, and rolled all the way to the backstop.
The crowd howled. Some of them were Comets fans — she could see a scattering of familiar faces — but most were here for the show, the spectacle, the Babe. If the girl pitcher made a fool of herself, that was okay with them.
But Rue had never bounced a pitch by mistake in her life. No, that wasn’t true, sure she had, once or twice. On rainy days, or freezing ones, when the ball felt like a chunk of ice in her hand.
It was warm and sunny today, though.
She met Babe Ruth a week after Captain Mansfield and the Yankees’ owner, Colonel Rupert, old war buddies, arranged the big exhibition game. The Comets, with Rue starting, would face a team of minor-leaguers and local stars... plus the Babe, the only one who really mattered. The two owners knowing that even in the depths of the Great Depression, people would hand over their hard-earned dollars for a chance to see, as one of the tabloids put it, “Big Bam vs. Great Gams.”
The Bambino was game for it. He was game for anything. Hospitals, orphanages, boxing rings, football fields, rodeos — just promise him some diversion and he’d be there.
They gathered for lunch at Lundy’s Clam Shack, a little place built on wooden stilts over Sheepshead Bay. Rue and the Babe and his business manager, a silent man in an expensive suit who sipped coffee and kept a close eye on both of them throughout the meal, and dapper Colonel Ruppert and Captain Mansfield, who kept grinning like kids on Christmas morning. All the other tables in the shack were empty, and Rue knew that this single lunch was probably costing more than she earned all year.
While they talked, the Bambino ate a mountain of steamed clams, drowning each one in butter before chomping it down. Rue tried to keep count, but lost track after thirty-four. That was early in the lunch.
“Call me Jidge,” Ruth told her. He called her “kid,” but that was okay, it was what he called almost everybody. And anyway, she was a kid, and sure felt like one facing the Babe across a table. He was bigger than she’d thought from the newsreels and pictures, and under his extra flesh she could see the rippling muscles of his arms and torso.
He saw her looking at him. “So, kid, you think you can strike me out?”
She shrugged.
“Well,” he said, “I think I can hit your best pitch into the Atlantic Ocean.”
“Atlantic’s behind home plate,” she said. “Foul territory.”
His eyes narrowed. “Okay, the Pacific. Just take the ball a little longer to get there.”
“Might take longer than you think,” she said.
The Babe stared at her, then began to laugh. “Okay,” he said, as if she’d passed a test. “I got an idea. Let’s make this fun.”
“Oh, I know it’s going to be fun, Jidge,” Captain Mansfield said.
The Babe shot him a look that shut him up and turned back to Rue. “Tell you what, kid,” he said. “You bounce the first one, get everybody laughing. Then you give me something funny, like a big old curve, and I’ll swing and miss by a mile.” His face crinkled into a grin. “I’ll kick up a big fuss, a real hullabaloo, which should get the folks’ attention.”
“And after that?” Rue asked.
“After that?” Serious now, he gave her a direct look, a look of supreme self-confidence.
“After that, no script,” he said. “Just you against me, kid.”
The Babe missed Rue’s second pitch by at least three feet, spinning so hard after his wild swing that it looked like he was trying to drill himself into the ground. He stared out at her in what seemed like shocked disbelief, then threw his bat to the ground with such violence that it raised a puff of dust when it hit. Stomping around the plate, he swore and shook his fists and waved his arms around, while Jimmy Connelly and old Byron Mack, the umpire, the other players on the field, and the whole enormous bellowing crowd, ate it up.
Rue thought the grandstands might come down around her ears.
Finally Jimmy threw the ball back to her. The Babe picked up his bat and started settling himself into his stance. But then he stopped, and Rue saw him grin. He raised his bat and pointed with it towards the deepest part of centerfield.
“The Pacific Ocean, kid,” he called out.
Rue started to laugh, but the sound caught in her throat. Rubbing the ball between her palms, she let her gaze slide away from the Babe to a man sitting in the front row of the stands just to the left of home plate. A man who remained entirely still while the fans surged around him.
An old man with wiry white hair, bushy eyebrows, a lined face, and pale, piercing eyes that never seemed to blink.
Rue felt her heart thump against her ribs. She dragged her attention back to home plate. Jimmy gave her the sign: One finger for a fastball.
Just you against me, kid.
It was time.
“It’s time,” the old man said. “Well past time. This can’t go any further.”
Rue didn’t know what he was talking about. “Further?”
“Girls aren’t meant to play baseball,” he said.
Rue had heard it before, many times before, usually from opposing players before she faced them, and then again — in a different tone — after. She’d been hearing it since she was nine, and the words had long since lost any meaning to her.
Until now, just two days before her confrontation with Babe Ruth.