“That is easy.” The man with the ball puffed out his chest and tossed a silver trade dollar into the bowl. It rang sweetly. “I will put the ball on him, no matter what he does.”
Liu Han turned to the crowd. “Clear a path, please. Clear a path so the foreign devil can run.” Chattering among themselves, the people moved aside to form a narrow lane. Bobby Fiore walked down it. When he was almost a hundred feet from the man with the ball, he turned and bowed to him. The arrogant fellow did not return his courtesy. A couple of people clucked reproachfully at that, but most didn’t think a foreign devil deserved much courtesy.
Bobby Fiore bowed again, then ran straight at the man with the ball. The Chinese man clutched it in both hands, as if it were a rock. He set himself for a collision as Fiore bore down on him.
But the collision never came. At the last instant, Fiore threw himself to the ground on his hip and thigh and hooked around the clumsy lunge the man made with the ball. His foot came down on the stuffed bag. “Safe!” he yelled in his own language.
Liu Han didn’t quite know what safe meant, but she knew it meant he’d won. “Who’s next?” she called, taking the ball from the disgruntled Chinese man.
“Wait!” he said angrily, then turned and played to the crowd: “You all saw that! The foreign devil cheated me!”
Fear coursed through Liu Han. She called Bobby Fiore yang kwei-tse-foreign devil-herself, but only to identify him. In the angry man’s mouth, it was a cry to turn an audience into a mob.
Before she could answer, Fiore spoke for himself in clumsy Chinese: “Not cheat. Not say let win. He quick, he win. He slooow.” He stretched the last word out in a way no native Chinese would have used, but one insultingly effective.
“He’s right, Wu-you missed him by a li,” someone yelled from the crowd. The miss hadn’t really been a third of a mile, but it hadn’t been close, either.
“Here, give me the ball now,” someone else said. “I’ll put it on the foreign devil.” He said yang kwei-tse the same way Liu Han did, to name Bobby Fiore, not to revile him.
Liu Han pointed to the bowl. As Wu stamped away, the next player tossed in some paper money from Manchukuo. It wasn’t worth as much as silver, and Liu Han did not like it because of what Manchukuo’s Japanese puppet masters had done to China-and to her own family, just before the Lizards came. But the Japanese were still fighting hard against the Lizards, which gave them prestige they hadn’t had before. She let the bills lay, handed the man the ball.
Bobby Fiore brushed dirt off his pants, shooed the spectators back so he could take his running start. The Chinese man stood in front of the bag, holding the ball in his left hand and leaning left, as if to make sure Fiore wouldn’t use on him the trick that had fooled the first player.
Bobby Fiore ran down the aisle of chattering Chinese, as before. When he got within a couple of strides of the waiting Chinese, he took a small step in the direction the fellow was leaning. “Ha!” the man cried in triumph, and brought the ball down.
But Bobby Fiore was not there to be tagged. After that small step made the man commit himself, Fiore took a long, hard stride on his other leg, changing directions as nimbly as any acrobat Liu Han had ever seen. The man tagged to the left; Bobby Fiore slid to the right. “Safe!” he yelled again.
The man with the ball ruefully flipped it to Liu Han. His sheepish grin said he knew he’d been outsmarted. “Let’s see if this fellow can put the ball on the foreign devil,” he said, now using the label almost in admiration. “If I couldn’t, I’ll make a side bet he can’t, either.”
Another man set down a meaty slab of pork ribs to pay for the privilege of trying to tag Bobby Fiore. The fellow making side bets did a brisk business: now that Fiore had gone one way and then the other, what tricks could he have left?
He promptly demonstrated a new one. Instead of going right or left, he dove straight toward the bag on his belly, snaked a hand through his opponent’s legs, and grabbed the bag before the ball touched his back. “Safe!” Now a couple of people in the crowd raised the victory cry with him.
He kept running and sliding as long as men were willing to pay to try to put the ball on him. Sometimes he’d hook one way, sometimes the other, and once in a while he’d dive straight in. A couple of people did manage to guess right and tag him, but Liu Han watched the bowl fill with money and the mat with food. They were doing well.
When the sport began to seem routine rather than novel, Liu Han called, “Who wants revenge?” She tossed the ball up and down in her hand. “You can throw at the foreign devil now. He will not dodge, but if you hit him anywhere but his two hands, you win three times what you wager. Who will try?”
While she warmed up the crowd, Bobby Fiore put on the padded leather glove he’d had made along with the ball. He stood in front of the wall of a shack, then made a fist with his other hand and pounded it into the glove, as if confident no one would be able to touch him.
“From how close do we get to throw?” asked the man who’d been making side bets.
Liu Han paced off about forty feet. Bobby Fiore grinned at her. “Do you want to try?” she asked the man.
“Yes, I’ll fling at him,” he answered, dropping more money into the bowl. “I’ll put it right between his ugly round eyes, you see if I don’t.”
He tossed the ball into the air once or twice, as if to get the feel of it in his hand, and then, as he’d said, threw it right at Bobby Fiore’s head. Whack! The noise it made striking that peculiar leather glove was like a gunshot. It startled Liu Han, and startled the people in the crowd even more. A couple of them let out frightened squawks. Bobby Fiore rolled the ball back to Liu Han.
She stooped to pick it up. Before long, that wouldn’t be easy, not with her belly growing. “Who’s next?” she asked.
“Whoever it is, he can wager with me that he misses, too,” said the fellow who liked to make side bets. “I’ll pay five to one if he hits.” If he couldn’t beat Bobby Fiore, he was convinced nobody could.
The next gambler paid Liu Han and let fly. Wham! That wasn’t ball hitting glove, that was ball banging against the side of the shack-the man had thrown too wildly for Bobby Fiore to catch his offering. Fiore picked up the ball and tossed it gently back to him. “You try again,” he said; he’d practiced the phrase with Liu Han.
Before the fellow could take another throw at him, the old woman who lived in the shack came out and screamed at Liu Han: “What are you doing? Are you trying to frighten me out of my wits? Stop hitting my poor house with a club. I thought a bomb landed on it.”
“No bomb, grandmother,” Liu Han said politely. “We are only playing a gambling game.” The old woman kept on screaming until Liu Han gave her three trade dollars. Then she disappeared back into her shack, obviously not caring what happened to it after that.
The fellow who hadn’t thrown straight took another shot at Bobby Fiore. This time he was on target, but Fiore caught the ball. The man squalled curses like a scalded cat.
If the old woman had thought that first ball was like a bomb landing, she must have figured the Lizards had singled out her house for bombardment practice by the time the next hour had passed. One of the things Liu Han discovered about her countrymen during that time was that they didn’t throw very well. A couple of them missed the shack altogether. That sent boys chasing wildly after the runaway ball, and meant Liu Han had to pay small bribes to get it back.
When no one else felt like trying to hit the quick-handed foreign devil, Liu Han said, “Who has a bottle or clay pot he doesn’t mind losing?”