He laughed. “I had lessons.”
He was teasing her. She shook her head, then waited. When he didn’t say anything else, she grabbed a handful of sand and let it spill through her fingers. “Tell me about baseball.”
His arms tightened around her, then fell away for a moment. She hadn’t fooled him.
He shifted around her until he was sitting beside her, his legs drawn up and his arms resting on them. He didn’t look at her. “Baseball’s a game. You play with a bat, a glove, and a ball.”
She reached out and touched his arm. “Don’t. Please. I saw you in the jungle. Hitting those nuts over the trees. Theodore told me you wouldn’t teach him how to play. Why? What happened?”
He picked up a small rock made smooth by the constant motion of the sea. He tossed it lightly as if it were a ball. She knew now that she’d seen him do this before, never knowing it was not just a habit, but a clue to part of his past.
He turned. “How much do you want to know?”
“Enough to understand.”
He waited, then said, “Sometimes, sweetheart, I’m not certain I understand.”
“Please, Hank.”
He stared at the rock, rubbing it with his thumb. “I left Pittsburgh when I was fifteen. It was leave or go to jail.” He looked not at her, but at the sea. “I’d been caught stealing on the streets. The cop that caught me was tired of throwing my butt in jail and told me to get the hell outta town or he’d lock me up and see that I never got out.
“So I left and worked my way to Philadelphia. I lived under a railroad trestle for a few months with some others in a makeshift vagrant shanty, stealing food to get by, sleeping under scraps of tin.”
“At fifteen?”
“Yeah.” He gave a wry laugh and looked at her. “What were you doing at fifteen?”
“Going to school, playing Parcheesi with friends, just doing what most fifteen-year-old girls in San Francisco did.”
He was looking at her as if she were batty. “Parcheesi?”
“Yes, well, better than playing poker.”
“I didn’t play poker at fifteen.”
“You didn’t?” She cocked her head and stared back at him.
“Nope. Didn’t learn how to mark a deck of cards until I was sixteen.”
She groaned. “Finish your story.”
“I’d been living on the street for close to a year, when one day I went to a baseball field. I’d heard there was food to scavenge. The Athletics were playing Boston, and the park was filled. Street vendors flocked to the park to sell sausages and beer. But better than the food, there were pockets to pick. So I started hanging out at the ballpark, taking what I could.
“Then I picked the wrong pocket—the team owner, Billy Hobart—and got caught. Billy ran me down.” Hank shook his head. “I never could run worth a damn, even as a kid.”
Margaret smiled at him, but she knew they both were only smiling at his wry comment, the way people laugh at a carnival clown who gets a bucket of water thrown in his face. The way something can be funny, but painfully sad at the same time.
“He dragged me back by the neck and made me work, worked my butt off, cleaning the field, repairing the benches and fences in that ballpark. Hell, he even had me cleaning the privies.”
“You didn’t try to run away?”
“Only once. I got about as far as left field. The whole team cornered me. From then on he had a guard stand by me with a billy club in one hand and a .45 in the other.”
He paused, staring out at the sea again before he looked down at the sand for a second. “I called that son of a bitch every name I could, but I worked. Before long he had me taking meals with the team and gave me a bunk in the corner of the player room. It took a few months, but by then I didn’t want to leave. It was as if I had become part of the team, although I still gave Billy a passel of crap.
“The next season they had me hitting the ball once in a while and subbing in at practice. He pissed me off so badly one day at bat that when the pitch came I didn’t see the baseball. All I saw was red. I hit that ball out of the park. Billy walked out to Whoop-la Hunter—”
“Whoopla?”
