The whistle blew again, and none of the white men had so much as moved, and even though the coloreds had seemed to walk slow, they were almost all off the field.

Except Sticky Joe Beam. He came over and picked up the bat Babe had used. He rested it on his shoulder and looked into Babe’s face.

Babe held out his hand. “Great game, Mr. Beam.”

Sticky Joe Beam gave no indication he saw Babe’s hand.

He said, “Believe that’s your train, suh,” and walked off the field.

Babe went back onto the train. He had a drink at the bar.

The train left Ohio and hurtled through Pennsylvania. Ruth sat by himself and drank and looked out at Pennsylvania in all its scrabbled hills and dust. He thought of his father who’d died two weeks ago in Baltimore during a fight with his second wife’s brother, Benjie Sipes. Babe’s father got in two punches and Sipes only got in one, but it was that one that counted because his father’s head hit the curb and he died at University Hospital a few hours later.

The papers made a big deal of it for a couple of days. They asked for his opinion, for his feelings. Babe said he was sorry the man was dead. It was a sad thing.

His father had dumped him in reform school when he was eight. Said he needed to learn some manners. Said he was tired of trying to teach him how to mind his mother and him. Said some time at Saint Mary’s would do him good. Said he had a saloon to run. He’d be back to pick him up when he learned to mind.

His mother died while he was in there.

It was a sad thing, he’d told the papers. A sad thing.

He kept waiting to feel something. He’d been waiting for two weeks.

In general, the only time he felt anything, outside of the self-pity he felt when very drunk, was when he hit a ball. Not when he pitched it. Not when he caught it. Only when he hit it. When the wood connected with the cowhide and he swiveled his hips and pivoted his shoulders and the muscles in his thighs and calves tightened and he felt the surge of his body as it finished the swing of the black bat and the white ball soared faster and higher than anything on the planet. That’s why he’d changed his mind and taken the swing this afternoon, because he’d had to. It was too fat, too pure, just sitting there. That’s why he’d done it. That’s all there was to that story. That’s all there was.

He got in a poker game with McInnis and Jones and Mann and Hollocher, but everyone kept talking about the strike and the war (no one mentioned the game; it was as if they’d all agreed it never happened), so he took a long, long nap and when he got up, they were almost through New York and he had a few more drinks to cut the sludge in his brain, and he took Harry Hooper’s hat off his head while he was sleeping and put his fist through the top of it and then placed it back on Harry Hooper’s head and someone laughed and someone else said, “Gidge, don’t you respect nothing?” So he took another hat, this one off Stu Springer, head of the Cubs’ sales department, and he punched a hole in that one and soon half the car was flinging hats at him and egging him on and he climbed up on top of the seats and crawled from one to the next making “hoo hoo hoo” sounds like an ape and feeling a sudden, unexplainable pride that welled up through his legs and arms like stalks of wheat gone mad with the growing, and he shouted, “I am the ape man! I am Babe Fucking Ruth. I will eat you!”