Tilting the Balance

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.