Dirty Rice (11 page)

That lead held up the rest of the game, and the Rice Birds got three more men safe home, and after Hookey left in the eighth inning with two men on, the Millers got a run across before a man hit into a double play off a knuckler throwed by Harry Nolan. I got on base twice more, once on a single through the left side and once on a walk, and I got drove in for a run by G.D. Squires. I was killed just the one time, a long fly to the opposite field that the man in left made a good catch on at the wall, but that didn't hurt me much. The Rice Birds was up by three runs at the time, and nobody had to act like I was a dead man sitting on the bench when I'd had to carry my bat back to the dugout. That bat did pick up a lot more weight when that fielder caught my fly, though, and I felt every ounce of it. A bat that lost a hit will take it hard and sink into itself. I knew I couldn't use that particular one again, so I dug my thumbnail into the end of the knob to mark it. We was through with each other.

I didn't have but two chances in right field, a couple of easy flies, and a bouncer off Hookey Irwin that got past the first baseman. I handled it all right, Hookey pitched a strong game, and the Rice Birds got to go into the clubhouse in another team's home, us the ones still alive and joking and hollering and not wanting to take off the uniforms and leave. We wanted to stay together in the same place a little while longer. The Crowley Millers had to be the quiet ones, trying to get out quick from that place that didn't smell right now, and where the light was dim and the loudest sounds you could hear was somebody's cleats hitting the floor when they took their shoes off and the water dripping from the shower heads in the other room.

Like I said, it ain't that far from Rayne to Crowley, so we all loaded into the bus to ride back home and spend the night. The ones who ran the Rice Birds was always looking for a way to save a dollar or two, and they figured it cost less to haul us back and forth to home from road games whenever it was close enough rather than have to pay for us to spend the night before we played another game in that stand.

“They squeeze the nickel until the buffalo craps,” Dynamite Dunn would always say those nights when we bumped along them highways coming back from places like Opelousas and New Iberia and sometimes even as far as Alexandria. You can sleep on a bus like that one when you're tired enough. But it ain't easy, and you'll wake up pulling into Rayne, Louisiana, more wore out than when you got on the bus back yonder where you'd just played nine innings or sometimes eighteen when it'd been a doubleheader.

Worse thing, though, about them trips wasn't getting off that bus in front of Addison Stadium. No, the worst thing about coming back to Rayne in the middle of a road series was thinking that you had to get back up in a few hours and load up for that ride back again to where you'd been to play another one to finish up the schedule. That made you tired just thinking about it as you fell into bed.

Most of us was young enough to stand it, though, and not be so whipped down we couldn't do it again, over and over, whenever Poke Bateau fired up the engine and put the bus in gear to haul us all to the next place to play. The older Rice Bird players suffered the most from that movement from one place to another and back to where we'd started, but they complained about it a lot less than the younger ones did. The young ones could afford to moan and whine and threaten to play sick so they wouldn't have to take that long bus ride wherever it was headed this trip. They was still in the middle of being alive, and couldn't feel that time coming on them yet when nobody would want to haul them anywhere to let them play baseball and get paid for it. They could still brag and get away with making threats they wouldn't carry out.

The old ones felt that time poking up its head in the aches in their muscles and their ligaments and bones and bellies and feet. They knew that time was coming when they'd be dead men as far as the Rice Birds and the Evangeline League was concerned or cared, and it was on its way like a freight train.

We wasn't thinking about things like that when we loaded up outside the Crowley Millers' for our trip back to Rayne after coming out on top in the first game of the season for the Rayne Rice Birds, though. We wasn't studying the end of nothing, and we wasn't looking back any further than what'd happened in the last three hours or so. Everything was going on right then for all of us, and time had stopped reminding us of what might've happened bad before and what might happen tomorrow.

When me and Mike Gonzales got on the bus, waiting like rookies was supposed to do until everybody else had already climbed aboard, we headed for the seat we'd sat in coming from Rayne to Crowley, the one over the wheel well with no room for your legs, the one that carried every bump the wheels made straight up into your backbone. Nobody was sitting in it, and Mike got there first. As he started to swing around to get into the seat, somebody hollered out. “Naw, y'all can't ride in that one. It's took.”

It was Dynamite Dunn talking, but some other ones started chiming in, too. “Wait till you strike out with the bases loaded, Gemar,” G.D. Squires said. “And you will, hoss, trust me on this. Then you can take your rightful seat right yonder.”

“Cuba,” Tubby Dean said, and everybody started laughing as soon as he said that word, some of them saying
si senor
over and over, “you can't sit down there again in that seat until you get picked off first base or throwed out sliding. And that will come, too. That seat there is the seat of penitence, and you going to find plenty of opportunity to spend time in it.”

“Not tonight,” G.D.Squires said. “No, sir, you damn rookies got half of our hits and scored two of our runs, so you can't have that seat of honor this trip. Get your asses to the back of the toad mobile.”

People hooted and hollered at us all the way down the aisle of the bus, and me and Mike ended up on the wide seat at the rear, able that night to let our legs stretch out as far as they'd go.

“What you got to say for yourself, Gemar Batiste?” Zeb Munger said, leaning over the back of the seat in front of me. “Any advice you got to give to a man that struck out three times in that damn game?”

“All I can say is try to avoid that situation,” I said, judging Zeb was joking and not trying to pick an argument. “That's what I tell myself, but most of the time I don't listen to what I'm saying.”

He laughed at that, so I felt easier in my mind about why he'd asked me that question.

“Can I ask you something?” I said, feeling Mike Gonzales give a little flinch beside me on that back seat. Mike was always on the lookout about what people said to him and he said to them. Conversations made him nervous. Unlike me, Mike did like to talk a lot to anybody that'd listen to him and even to ones who didn't want to or wouldn't. So he'd learned to be anxious about what words might mean to people, though he couldn't stop himself from pouring them out into the air.

He knew he was likely to get into trouble by saying some of the things he said, but he loved to hear himself talk, I believe, and he did do a good job of making himself understood. Too damn good, sometimes, like I said. Anyway, Zeb Munger said sure he'd try to answer what I wanted to ask him, so I asked it.

“I hear lots of folks calling this bus by a name,” I said. “G.D. said it just now. He said what we're riding in here is the toad mobile. Why do y'all call this vehicle that?”

My experience with toads back in the Nation wasn't near as frequent or as interesting as my encounters with frogs, though both creatures looked a lot alike. Thinking back to the stories I'd heard the old men tell us young ones as long as we'd listen to them, I can remember three or four tales about Frog, but not a single one about Toad. He lived in the Big Thicket, and you'd see evidence of him and his kinfolks crawling around on the ground lots of times, but he never figured enough in anything that mattered to the People to make his way into a story. That wasn't true of Frog. He was one of the original animals that swam down into the deep water and brought up the mud that Abba Mikko used for material to make the first people with, and Frog was the first creature to warn folks that the big flood was coming, the one that killed almost everything alive then but the People. Without Frog, nobody would be still here. Toad, though, never did much and never got no notice for the little he did do. Why name a bus for him?

“That's right,” Zeb Munger said and started laughing, “you new ones hadn't figured that out yet. You hadn't been looking close enough to find it out for yourself.”

“Well,” I said, “what I've been thinking is maybe this bus is called the toad mobile because it's so slow and ugly looking.”

“A good guess, but that ain't it, rookie,” Zeb said. “Let me put it this way to you. You ever noticed Dutch not wearing his cap on his head, inside or outside of the house?”

I had to admit I hadn't, but if you'd pressed me to say why the manager of the Rice Birds always wore his hat, I'd have said maybe his hair was falling out of his head like it will do with most white men the older they get. You'll never see an Indian, no matter what nation he comes from, with his head all slicked off because his hair won't grow there no more. It will turn the color of opossum's hair when the Indian gets old, some shade of gray and maybe even dead white, but it'll still be hair on his head left until he leaves this world. McKinley Short Eyes always told us that the hair on a white man's head died and never came back because the white man was always figuring ways to take away land from Indians and use it all up. That kind of constant figuring will wear out the roots of a white man's hair from the inside out, McKinley Short Eyes said. It ain't natural to spend all your time trying to get together land that don't rightfully belong to you. Do that night and day, and your hair will quit on you.

“I've seen that,” I told Zeb Munger, “but I never studied on why it is.”

“The reason why Dutch keeps his head covered up with a cap most of the time, and you can watch and check me on this, is that he keeps a toad in that cap on top of his head.”

“A toad?” Mike Gonzales said. “Alive?”

“Of course alive,” Zeb said. “Would you want to have a dead toad riding around on your head?”

“Naw,” Mike said. “Not dead nor alive. But I was thinking maybe it was a dried up toad. You know, something Dutch would be keeping in his cap for a mojo. Something to bring him luck.”

“I one time asked Dutch that very thing about why he did it,” Zeb said. “Is it for a good luck charm like a rabbit's foot or a special penny or something? But he said no. Then you know what he told me?”

“No, what?” Mike and me said at the same time.

“He said,” Zeb said, talking louder than he'd have to for me and Mike to hear him, so I could tell he wanted to broadcast what he was saying to whoever else in that part of the bus might be listening. “Dutch said it was simple. He's bald as a coot on top of his head, and he says that live toad crawling around on that bare skin up there feels good to him.”

“I don't like nothing crawling in my hair,” Mike Gonzales said. “Anything I feel on my head I got to get off of it as quick as I can.”

“How old is his toad?” I asked Zeb. “How long's Dutch had him up there?”

“It ain't the same toad all the time, Gemar. Hell, toads die off. Sometimes they'll run off, too, when they get the chance. I know Dutch has lost a bunch of them for as long as I been with the Rice Birds. He had the same habit back when he was in the Sally League, too, I heard people say. So, no, it's different toads that Dutch has crawl around on his head underneath his cap. He'll get a new one when he needs a replacement. It's like when you bring in somebody off the bench when something goes wrong with a player.”

“When he gets sick or something,” Mike said. “Maybe messes up at bat or makes too many errors.”

“That's one way to look at it,” Zeb said. “But I will tell you one thing. No matter what particular toad Dutch is got up underneath that cap crawling around on his head and soothing his nerves, one thing stays the same. The name of the toad is always Herbert.”

“Herbert,” I said, and Zeb Munger nodded and said the same name back to me.

“Maybe that's Dutch's daddy's name,” Mike said. “Maybe a toad on the head runs in the family.”

Zeb Munger laughed at that until he started coughing so hard he had to turn around in his seat to do it. No matter what Zeb had said about the toad not meaning anything to Dutch but giving him a nice feeling as it moved around on his bald head, I knew better than that. Toad meant something to Dutch Bernson, and he was carrying around what Toad signified to him in every movement Toad made on the manager's head. I hadn't figured out what that was yet, but I was glad to know it. Hearing that about Dutch and Herbert made me feel a lot better about the manager of the Rice Birds as I rode back to Rayne after playing my first game in the Evangeline League, and it still does.

• • •

In less than ten or twelve hours later, we was loading up in the toad mobile for the trip back to Crowley for the second game in that stand. When we'd got back to Miz Doucette's on Serenity Street late that night before, me and Mike didn't make much racket going to our room and crawling into our beds, and we didn't hear any sound from anybody else in the house. The next morning when I was going into the room where we ate our meals, though, I did catch sight of Miz Doucette's daughter going down the hall and out the front door, wearing a dress with polka dots on it and carrying a satchel in her hand. She heard me, looked back over her shoulder and smiled that way that made me not be able to smile back, much less think of anything to say.

“Y'all won yesterday,” she said. “I heard some of the game on the radio. That's real good.”

I nodded, standing in the door to the room where my breakfast was waiting, and wondered if Teeny Doucette would be interested in hearing the facts about Dutch Bernson and the toad named Herbert crawling around on his head under his baseball cap. That was the thing that came into my head at the time, and I tell it now to show how seeing that woman would mess up my way of thinking. Every time she showed up, it made me feel like I'd been stung by enough wasps to paralyze me.