The Brooklyn Nine

by Alan Gratz

The other girls stopped changing into their uniforms and stared. Kat gave a little wave and heard someone snort.

  Ms. Hunter, the team chaperone, cleared her throat. “Everyone, meet the newest Grand Rapids Chick: Katherine Flint from Brooklyn, New York.”

  “Kat,” she corrected. “Everybody calls me Kat.”

  A couple of the girls laughed, and someone made a little “meow” sound.

  An older man in a baseball uniform walked in and the girls suddenly looked busy. Kat figured he must be the manager.

  “This the new girl?” he asked.

  Kat held out her hand. “Kat. Katherine. Flint,” she said, nervous. The manager didn’t shake her hand.

  “You play infield or outfield?”

  “Well, either one, I guess, but—”

  “Ziggy’s leg is twisted, so you’ll play second today. Get suited up,” he said, then disappeared into his office again.

  Kat ran her hands down the side of her dress, looking for pockets that weren’t there. Why had she packed the last of her gum in her suitcase?

  A lanky blond girl lacing up her spikes eyeballed Kat and shook her head. “We’re gonna lose twenty to nothing.”

  Kat had tried out for the All-American Girls Professional Ball League last year when she was fourteen, but they told her she was too young. This year they had told her the same thing, but then just after the start of the season she got the call—there were already so many injuries the league was giving her a chance. Could she meet the team in Fort Wayne, Indiana, by the end of the week?

  Darn tootin’ she could.

  Ms. Hunter brought Kat a uniform like the rest of the girls wore, a belted dress with a tunic that buttoned up the side. In the middle of the tunic was the round logo of the Grand Rapids Chicks. Kat looked at herself in the mirror. The skirt had no pleat to it, and Kat felt like she was wearing a parachute. Worse, the hemline came down to her knees. She felt a little corny putting on a skirt to play baseball or softball or whatever it was they were calling the game the girls played. Ever since the war had started, girls everywhere had been wearing pants and dungarees. But Kat wasn’t getting paid to design uniforms, she reminded herself, she was getting paid to play baseball. She would have worn a sack cloth if they’d asked her to.

  “You’ll do great, Katherine,” Ms. Hunter told her. “And I’ve found a glove for you to use in the game.”

  “I don’t suppose there’s anyplace I could get a stick of Orbit, is there?” Kat asked. Orbit was her favorite kind of gum.

  “Marilyn,” Ms. Hunter called. A girl almost the same age as Kat came running over. “Marilyn, can you run to the concession stand and bring back a pack of Orbit gum for Kat?”

  Ms. Hunter gave her a nickel and the girl hurried off.

  “Thanks,” Kat said. She ran her hands down her sides and caught herself again. If she didn’t get control she’d be touching wood again soon—and in a dugout with all those bats, that could be a problem.

  Kat saw one of the players nudge another and nod at her. “Straight off the train and already she’s making demands.”

  Not a good start, Kat thought.

  Before the team took the field, the manager came back to give them a pep talk, such as it was.

  “All right girls, listen up. We’re awful. The papers say the Chicks can’t buy a win, but I’m gonna prove them wrong. You beat the Fort Wayne Daisies today and I’ll give each of you a five-dollar bill. Including Ms. Hunter.”

  That was the sum total of his speech.

  Kat marched up the staircase with the other girls into the bright sunshine of an Indiana afternoon. She was blinded at first, but when she finally was able to look around she saw . . . people. Hundreds, maybe thousands of people! As many as might be at a Brooklyn Dodgers game. The stands all up and down the first and third base lines were packed and the fans cheered as the team stepped onto the field.

  Kat spun where she stood and laughed. For a moment her laughing was the only sound she could hear, the crowd and the band and the loudspeakers fading into the background like someone had turned down the volume on the wireless of her life. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt the sun so warm on her skin, or laughed so hard, or felt so alive. She was a million miles away from her father’s war letters, her mother’s ten-hour-a-day job, Hattie’s victory garden. For the first time in years she wasn’t worried about blackouts or scrap drives or food rations. Kat was a Grand Rapids Chick—a professional baseball player!—and she wanted this feeling to last forever.

  When Kat came back to her senses she was the only one left on the field. The Chicks were already in their dugout, and they stared at her like she was a void coupon. Kat quickly dipped down under the awning and started touching the ends of baseball bats sticking out of a box.

  “Looks like they’re recruiting from the nuthouse now,” the tall blond girl said. Embarrassed as she was, Kat couldn’t stop—until Marilyn the bat girl came running up with a pack of Orbit. Kat almost kissed her.

  “Thank you thank you thank you,” she said, ripping the pack open and popping a stick in her mouth. She immediately felt better, and the urge to touch the bats was gone.

  Every last one of the girls in the dugout stared at her like she was crazy.

  “V for victory time, girls!” Ms. Hunter called. “V for victory.”

  Kat was confused, but she followed the other girls out onto the field where they formed a V shape with the girl at the point standing on home plate. A V for victory in the war against Germany and Japan, Kat guessed. She ran to the last place on the end of one of the letter’s arms just as the band began to warble “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

  When the anthem was over Kat ran to second base by way of first. Touching the bag was one of her rituals, and to break it would mean she’d lay an egg for sure. That didn’t make the look from the girl at first base any easier to swallow, though.

  No, Kat thought, definitely not a good start.

  Kat held her own at second, handling three chances in the first two innings just fine. In the meantime, she liked watching the pitcher, the tall blond girl who’d said the Chicks were going to lose with Kat in the lineup. She had a big windmill windup, and she’d swing her long arm in a circle a few times before slinging the ball at the plate. Pow! The ball would pop in with such force that Kat didn’t know how anybody could hit it.

  Luckily she didn’t have to, and the Daisies pitcher wasn’t nearly so crafty. When Kat came up to bat in the third the pitcher laid a fat one right across the plate that Kat laced to right for a hit. She got another single in the fifth and a double in the seventh and scored both times. But neither time was she met at the plate by her teammates, and they gave her the silent treatment in the dugout like they didn’t want her there. Kat took a seat at the far end of the bench, away from all the players, and touched the end of every bat in the box.

  Thanks to Kat the Chicks won the game—their first in six tries, she found out later—and the manager made good on his promise of five bucks each to the girls. Even so, none of the girls would speak to her, and on the bus ride back to their hotel she was the only girl to sit by herself. As she peered out the window at the passing streetlights, Kat wondered if coming here had been a terrible mistake. The team didn’t want her, and if they didn’t want her, well, she could just go home to Brooklyn . . . But the thought of going back to that life, that world, almost brought her to tears.

  Just when she thought things couldn’t get any worse, Ms. Hunter told her she’d be rooming with Connie Wisniewski, the tall blond pitcher who’d made fun of her in the dugout. Kat waited for the rest of the girls to pull their luggage out of the bottom of the bus and hauled her own bag into the hotel by herself. She eyed a couch in the lobby and wondered if she’d be sleeping there tonight.

  Kat found her room and put the key in the lock, half expecting the bolt to be latched. It was unlocked, but that was just the first of the surprises. The entire team was crammed into her room, and they cheered for her as
Connie Wisniewski swept her up in a hug.

  “What? But, I don’t—” Kat tried to say.

  “I’m so sorry for being snippy,” Connie said. “You just looked so small and dolled up when Ms. Hunter brought you from the station, and we haven’t won in so long.”

  Girls clapped Kat on the back and introduced themselves, laughing about how hard it was to keep giving her the cold shoulder while she single-handedly won the game for them.

  “It was all my idea, I’m afraid,” Connie told her. “Consider this your initiation.”

  Ms. Hunter came by and shooed the other girls off to their own rooms.

  Kat gasped. “My mother’s scorebook! I gave it to Ms. Hunter before the game!”

  Connie caught her at the door. “Calm down, calm down.” Connie pulled the scorebook from her satchel and handed it to Kat. “I wondered when you’d notice.”

  Kat wiped tears from her eyes. “If I had lost this—it’s got every game me and my mother have ever seen in it, all the old Brooklyn Robins games she went to as a kid.”

  “Yeah, well, there was one missing, so I added it at the end.”

  Kat flipped through to the last used page. It was today’s game—the Grand Rapids Chicks versus the Fort Wayne Daisies. Kat hugged Connie.

  “The first of many, kid. You’re gonna be here a long time, Kat. I know it.”

  Connie peeked out the door down the hall, then flipped open her suitcase and pulled out a pair of pants.

  “Come on. Get dressed.”

  “Get dressed? For what? It’s after curfew.”

  Connie went to the window and slid it open. “We’re sneaking out to a party.”

  “What, are we going to climb out the window like monkeys?” Kat asked.

  Connie looked back, one leg already over the sill.

  “Of course not. How many monkeys do you think have ever climbed down a hotel fire escape?”

  The party was in a cemetery. The Fort Wayne catcher lived in her own place beside a graveyard, and that was where she threw shindigs when visiting players came to town.

  Kat touched trees as they made their way deeper among the tombstones.

  “Don’t get spooked,” Connie told her. “We haven’t once been loud enough to raise the dead.”

  Not that they weren’t trying, Kat thought. Someone had brought a portable phonograph player, and Frank Sinatra was crooning “Saturday Night (Is the Loneliest Night of the Week)” with a backup chorus of Daisies bobbysoxers. The rest of the girls sat on gravestones sipping beers and smoking cigarettes.

  “Hi-de-ho!” a woman called, and she hopped down to give Connie a hug. Connie introduced her as Pepper Paire, the star catcher for the Fort Wayne Daisies.

  Kat ogled the cemetery and the broad, bright sky full of stars. “I can’t believe I’m here,” she said.

  “In a cemetery?” Pepper asked.

  “In a cemetery, in Fort Wayne, in Indiana, in the league.”

  “First day,” Connie explained.

  “Ah,” said Pepper. She smiled. “Yeah. You know, back home during the Depression, I used to play on this little softball team sponsored by the local grocery. If we won, we each got to go back to the store and fill up a bag with as much stuff as we could cram into it. Now I get paid a hundred dollars a week.”

  “More’n my pa ever earned in a week, that’s for sure,” Connie said.

  Pepper raised her bottle. “Pennies from heaven,” she said.

  “Where are you from?” Kat asked Pepper.

  “Los Angeles.”

  Kat moved closer to her, making sure not to step on any graves. “What’s it like? California, I mean. I’ve only heard stories.”

  “It’s always sunny in Los Angeles,” Pepper said. “Sunny and warm. Not like here. And there’s movie stars all over. You see ’em in the drugstores, in diners, walking along on the streets. There’s professional softball leagues for girls too. They pay you if you’re good enough. Not like this, but enough to make a living.”

  “I always wanted to play ball for a living,” Kat said.

  Pepper smiled. “Who doesn’t, kid? Who doesn’t?”

  There was an argument over what would be played next on the phonograph. Eventually the Bing Crosby fans won out and the graveyard was serenaded by “Swinging on a Star.” Kat stared up at the constellations. She’d never seen so many stars in the sky, not from New York, where lights burned night and day.

  “I don’t think she heard you,” Connie said.

  Kat blinked. “What?” Had someone asked her a question?

  “She looks like she has a lot on her mind,” Pepper said. “She needs to talk to Mrs. Murphy.”

  Pepper beckoned for Kat to follow her, and they walked alone to a quiet part of the cemetery. The catcher stopped in front of a small, simple gravestone that said only: “Hope Murphy.”

  “Kat, meet Mrs. Murphy,” said Pepper. She brushed the top of the stone like she was cleaning it. “How you been, Mrs. Murphy? I’ve been on a road trip, so I haven’t had a chance to drop by and say hello.”

  Kat looked around, wondering if this was another initiation.

  “I come out here sometimes and talk to Mrs. Murphy,” Pepper said. “I tell her all my deepest, darkest secrets.”

  “Who is she? I mean, did you know her?”

  Pepper shook her head. “Just another gal like us. All she ever did and was, all that’s left is her name.” Pepper put a hand on Kat’s shoulder. “You tell Mrs. Murphy whatever it is you’ve got on your mind. She’ll listen. She’s good at that.”

  Pepper left Kat alone at the grave. Kat looked around, sure a gang of players was waiting to jump out and laugh at her the minute she started talking to the stone.

  “Um, hi,” Kat said. “I um, I don’t . . .” She looked around again. There wasn’t anywhere Pepper or the other girls could be hiding, and the party carried on behind her. “I guess I do have something to say. Something I’ve never told anybody. I don’t—I don’t want the war to end. I want my dad back safe of course, but I wouldn’t be here, now, without the war. There wouldn’t even be a girls’ league. And my mom, she’s so smart, so good with numbers, but she only got a job as an engineer because all the men are off fighting. And Hattie, she’s smart too, and she could go to school, get a good job if she wanted. The whole world’s different now because of the war, and I know that there’s less food and things to go around, and everybody’s working so hard, and people are dying, but—”

  Kat closed her eyes, ashamed of what she was saying.

  “I wish it could be like this forever.”

  Kat backed away from Mrs. Murphy and tripped on another stone. She hadn’t realized she was standing on someone else’s grave.

  2

  Coach Meyer moved Kat up a couple of places in the lineup at home against the Rockford Peaches. She came to bat in the second with two girls on and no outs, and took time to do her pre-hitting ritual: Touch both ends of the bat, touch both toes, and draw an H in the sand, for “hit.”

  “You gonna hit sometime before the war ends, rookie?” the catcher asked.

  Kat nodded to the umpire that she was ready and the pitcher went into her windup. The first pitch was a hanging curveball, and Kat sent it high and deep to right, where it banged off the wall of a lock factory for a home run. The crowd went dizzy. Connie, who was coaching first base that day, cheered Kat as she ran the bases, and the Chicks poured out of the dugout to celebrate with her when she reached home plate.

  “You put one in orbit!”

  “Like her gum!”

  “You’re the cat’s meow, Kat!”

  “She’s a killer!”

  “Killer Kat!”

  Kat tried to get back to the dugout, but Alma Ziegler wouldn’t let her.

  “You gotta run the gauntlet,” she told Kat. Was this some new initiation? A girl pointed Kat toward the first base line, where Kat saw Grand Rapids fans beckoning to her. Still not sure what she was in for, she ran over and found that every one
of them wanted to shake her hand or clap her on the back.

  The Chicks won their second game in a row, and the girls took Kat out on the town for dinner and then loaded up on the bus again for the next day’s game in Kenosha against the Comets. Kat stuck with Connie, and together they sat mesmerized for a moment by the passing streetlights outside their window.

  “Round and round the lake we go, where we stop, nobody knows,” Connie whispered. “I probably been around Lake Michigan more times than Chief Pontiac.”

  “Have you been in the league a long time?” Kat asked.

  “Just since last season. I came in with the Chicks when they were in Milwaukee. We won the whole thing, but nobody came out to see us. Same thing happened to the Millerettes in Minneapolis. But Grand Rapids has been great, same as Kenosha, Racine, Rockford, and the rest. Good crowds, good people.”

  “One of the fans today,” Kat said, “when I went over to ‘run the gauntlet’? One of them slipped me a dollar bill!”

  Connie laughed. “I know! They do that sometimes. Teeny Petras made fifty dollars that way last season! Sent every bit of it back to her mother in Jersey.”

  “I also—I also got this.” She handed Connie a slip of paper with a man’s name and telephone exchange written on it.

  “Ohhhh, no.” Connie wadded the paper up and tossed it back over her head. “You’re too young for that sort of thing. Looks like I’m gonna have to stick to you like glue, kid. Keep you away from Grand Rapids’ more sinister element.”

  Kat smiled. She knew Connie was only kidding about the sinister element, but she was glad to have a friend. She was glad for so many things right now, and immediately felt guilty for it. She took a paper gum wrapper out of her pocket to fold it into little squares.

  “So what’s with you and the gum and the bats?” Connie asked.

  “The bats?”

  “Touching all the bats in the dugout.”

  Kat blushed. “I—I sometimes get nervous and have to touch all the wood I can see.” She reached over and touched the wood frame of the bus window.

  “You loony or something?”

  “It wasn’t always this bad, but once my dad got drafted—”