Dirty Rice (14 page)

“One way only can you tell when you're looking at the Big Man Eater, and he tries to hide that all the time. But, see, when Abba Mikko let the Big Man Eater loose on the world, he fixed it so you can tell him when you see him. Abba Mikko did give us that much advantage.”

“Don't be bringing in nobody else to this story, now, Gemar. How can you tell the Big Man Eater? That's what we want to know.” G.D. Squires said. “Does he walk funny or something? Has he got false teeth?”

After everybody stopped laughing at what G.D. had just said, I held out my hand before me, and I answered G.D.'s question.

“The Big Man Eater wants one thing from any human being he sees, and it's the thing he lacks and won't never get final hold of. He thinks he will, though, and that's why he's restless all the time and can't find any way to lie down and sleep and quit thinking about what he ain't got. The way you can tell him is the Big Man Eater won't never let you see his feet.”

“His feet?”

“He will never take off his shoes, since he ain't got real feet. What's he's got on the end of his legs between him and the ground to get around with ain't like a human's.”

“What's his feet look like?” Mike said. “They real big or something?”

“His feet,” I answered, pointing down at the floor where my own feet were resting there in the Bon Soir Club, “is like big buzzard claws. Three toes front and one back. Yellow and hard with no skin on them. Long sharp things to grab with, but nothing flat to stand on. There is no rest in them feet for the Big Man Eater ever. He has got to keep moving, and all he can do is hop around and perch like a buzzard on a tree snag. He can't stand quiet, and he can't get no ease. He cannot rear back and take his rest.”

“Goddamn,” Dynamite Dunn said. “He sounds like a catcher.”

“He is like a catcher,” I said. “The Big Man Eater wants to stand up and be easy, but he can't ever do that, and it makes him mean all the time.”

“Poor son of a bitch,” Dynamite said. “Let's drink to the Big Man Eater.”

“I can't afford to do that,” I said. “If I do, he'll take my feet and my rest away from me from now on out.”

It was just about then that I looked off across the room to where something had caught my eye.

It was a human shape, a woman's body moving to the music coming from the band on the platform by the dance floor, and I watched myself walk between the couples on the dance floor, their heads close together and their faces touching as I headed toward the woman. I could hear Dynamite Dunn saying my name behind me, laughing along with the other two at the table, and I wanted to turn back to tell them I knew what I was doing, but my body wouldn't listen to my head. It knew where it wanted to go and was taking steps to get there, and my head was just along for the ride.

“Look out for her feet, Gemar,” Dynamite hollered at me. “She might be the Big Man Eater.”

About then, I felt my mouth open to start talking to the shape I was moving toward. “Teeny,” my mouth said to the woman half turned away from me as she moved in close step to the music with a man tangled up tight against her, “Teeny Doucette, they want me to look at your feet.”

She didn't seem to hear me at first, her back turned to me like it was at that point in the dance, but the man looking over her shoulder did. “What'd you just say to this lady, Jay Bird?” he said, lifting his head up from where his face had been mashed up against Teeny's throat and pointing his chin in my direction.

“I'm not Jay Bird,” I said. With my left hand I pulled Teeny away from the hold the man had on her and pushed her to one side, and with my right I hit him in the middle of his face right where his nose joined onto it, just above where his chin was sticking out at me. He went on over backwards and skidded a good ways on the dance floor. When he got up and came at me, I hit him again, this time a little higher on his head just below where his hair started.

The people up on the stage with the guitars and fiddles and drums and the piano never stopped playing their music, and that was an ongoing advantage to the ones on the floor still wanting to dance. They did open up a little working space around where me and the man who'd had the tight hold on Teeny Doucette were scuffling, but most of them dancers in the Bon Soir kept on sliding around that nice slick floor.

The fellow who'd called me by the wrong name, Jay Bird, didn't come back at me but one more time, so all in all I didn't have to hit him but three times before he stopped getting up. He finally just sat there in one place on the slick floor for a spell, and by the time he'd climbed up and threw up his hands to let me know he didn't want to go on with the scuffle, Dynamite Dunn had come up and grabbed me and led me off toward the door leading outside.

“Wait a minute,” I could hear G.D. Squires hollering, “what about all this free liquor we supposed to be able to drink in here tonight on Sal Florio's tab? Goddamn, I don't want to lose that.”

“Ask them for a full bottle for us to take to the car,” Dynamite said. “We going to have to settle for that. We got to get out of here.”

“Why?” G.D. said. “Gemar's just drunk. It wasn't nothing but a little pushing and shoving. Let's sit on back down.”

“It's a hell of a lot more than that,” Dynamite said, pulling at me to get me moving toward the door at a faster pace. “Didn't you see who Gemar knocked down three times?” And without waiting for G.D. to answer, he said, “That was Clayton LeBlanc sitting on the floor holding his head.”

“Oh, shit,” G.D. Squires said. “Drink up everything in every glass still here on the table, Gonzales, and I'll go up to the bar and ask for a bottle to take with us. We got to go.”

“Wait a minute,” I heard myself saying to Dynamite, “I can't leave here yet. Where's Teeny Doucette got off to?”

“She's gone, goddamn it, Gemar,” Dynamite said. “She hit the door as soon as you hit LeBlanc. And you ain't got time to find her now. We got to move before Clayton LeBlanc gets himself together enough to think to find out who you are.”

“I ain't Jay Bird,” I said.

The room shifted to one side just about then, and then righted itself, and I closed my left eye so my right one could keep things level for a while. I knew somehow if I tried to keep walking with both eyes open that it'd be too much struggle between the two of them for things to stay steady enough for me to move on.

I don't remember getting in G.D.'s car, but I do recollect the way the gravel it was parked on felt under my feet as Dynamite and Mike Gonzales steered me along. It crunched under my shoes, and I kept wanting it to convince me the ground wasn't going to shift beneath me and throw me down. It wouldn't tell me that, and I knew the earth would not seem steady to me again for a while. Gemar Batiste was sliding on shifting sands that could open up at any minute and let him down.

“Shit,” I said, using the English cussword so Dynamite would understand the nature of my comment. “Shit, Dynamite,” I said as I rode in the backseat of G.D.'s humpbacked car beside Mike, “I feel like everything is about to fall out from underneath me.”

“You didn't hit Clayton LeBlanc with a left, did you?” he said back. “I didn't see the first lick, but the other ones was all right-handed.”

“It was all rights I saw,” Mike Gonzales said.

“Does your left hand hurt?” G.D. said.

“My head hurts, and my heart hurts,” I said. “My left hand feels fine.”

“To hell with your goddamn heart,” Dynamite Dunn said. “I ain't worried about that, and after practice tomorrow your head will be back to normal.”

“He'll still be crazy, though,” Mike Gonzales said.

“Crazy's fine, crazy's ain't nothing to worry about,” Dynamite said. “Crazy comes with the territory and that's where we're all living, here in the state of crazy. But if that left hand is still all right, everything that counts is right up to snuff.”

“Gemar was just lucky he didn't use his pitching hand,” G.D. Squires said from the driver's seat, making a swallowing sound as he lifted a bottle to his mouth. “Didn't think to swing it, I guess.”

“No,” I said. “I was saving my left so if I needed it.”

“When you would need it to pitch, you mean,” Dynamite said.

“Not to pitch, no,” I said. “I was saving it to use on that Cannibal who was holding on to Teeny Doucette, if my right didn't work.”

“I told you he was still crazy,” Mike Gonzales said. “See what I said?”

“Shut up and hand me that bottle,” Dynamite said. “I got to think what I can say to Dutch if he hears about this shit.”

“Clayton LeBlanc,” G.D. Squires said. “Goddamn Clayton LeBlanc. That's who it had to be.”

“Clayton LeBlanc,” Dynamite Dunn answered back. “That's right. Where's that whiskey, you damn hog?”

When I woke up the next morning, I was in my bed in the room in Miz Doucette's house, and Mike Gonzales was saying something to me.

“Gemar,” he said. “Come out of there. I know you ain't dead because your chest's still going up and down. You may want to be dead, but it ain't going to be that easy, hoss.”

I opened one eye, letting the other one stay closed in the dark a little longer. “I need some water,” I said to Mike. He was already dressed to go show up at Addison Stadium for practice, I saw. He was way ahead of me.

“It's hard for me to believe you still want water after what amount of it you drank last night,” Mike said. “You kept me running to fill up that pitcher for you.”

“Did she see me come in?”

“If you talking about Teeny, I didn't see no sign of her once we got back to the house, but I expect Miz Doucette could tell we was here. That woman can hear a rat sneeze through a closed and locked door.”

“Y'all have to carry me in?”

“Naw,” Mike said and laughed. “That was the funniest thing about it. I never before in my life saw a man dead asleep be able to walk a straight line, not run into the wall or no furniture, take off his clothes, and get into his bed without making a sign he knew where he was.”

“I didn't know where I was,” I said. “My body knew what to do, but I didn't.”

“Now, they was ready to carry you in the house, Dynamite and G.D. was, and they wanted to bet me you couldn't make it on your own. I wish I'd took them up on it. I'd won me some money.”

“If you'll get me one more drink of water, I won't ask you for no more,” I said. “And then I'll get ready to go to practice.”

“All right,” Mike Gonzales said, “but don't go back on off to sleep while I'm getting it. And don't be possuming when I get back in here, neither. We got to get going.”

By the time I'd get to Addison Stadium, lots of the Rice Bird players would've heard from Dynamite and G.D. some version of what had happened the night before in the Bon Soir Club in Lafayette.

Most of that story would be lies, but that didn't matter. In the middle of all the twisting of the story that'd take place would be something that applied in a true way to what I'd done and what G.D. and Dynamite and everybody else in the story had done. And I'd have to live with that and with the fact that I'd be seeing Teeny Doucette sometime later.

I was surprised when nobody said much to me when we got to the stadium. Everybody seemed lively enough in the clubhouse, happy we'd won two out of three of the first games of the season, and Dutch was acting the way he always did. Not letting on that anything worth taking satisfaction in had took place in the game before, and frowning his usual amount as he told us what we needed to be working on if we intended to do any good in the next stand.

“Don't be acting like anything that's already happened is going to happen again,” he told us as we all stood around him in a circle on the grass in left field away from the skinned-off basepaths, waiting him out. “Yeah, we beat the Millers last night, but you know what, boys?” he said, looking around like he'd asked a real question he wanted somebody to answer.

“Today's a brand-new day,” Phil Pellicore said to me in a low voice.

“Today's a brand-new day,” Dutch Bernson said. “It ain't nothing guaranteed.”

• • •

After we'd taken our laps around the field, I felt a lot better, and I was even sorry I hadn't had anything to eat that morning. The sun was hot, and it did me good to be out in it, sweating and breathing hard, and wanting a drink of water and something in my belly. So when Dynamite Dunn and I got off to one side, and I began to throw easy to him, I didn't consider myself near as bad off.

“How you feel, Gemar?” Dynamite said, throwing the ball back to me after catching a soft curve I'd pitched him and then taking a couple of steps toward me. “You back in the land of the living yet?”

“I believe I'll make it,” I said. “That's a lesson to me about whiskey I thought I'd already learned before.”

“A man will forget that lesson and a lot of other ones, too. And he'll do it over and over again. We ain't said anything to anybody about the Bon Soir and Clayton LeBlanc, if you're worried about that,” Dynamite said. “Except about getting all them free drinks from Sal Florio. That's worth talking about.”

“What I drank proved out to be not free.”

“Well, you just got to pace yourself. That's the secret.”

“A Coushatta can't pace his self that good,” I said and motioned with the ball in my hand that I was ready to try a fastball. “All he can do is watch himself.”

“You mean be careful?” Dynamite said, getting down into his catcher's stance.

“Naw,” I said, and dipped forward to start my windup. “I mean watch his body do what's it's going to do. All a Coushatta can do is stand back and wait to see it happen.” I threw the fastball, and it popped a little in Dynamite's mitt.

“You ain't dead yet,” he said, lobbing the ball back to me. “I see a little sign of life coming back. Eat you a big plate of rice with hot sauce on it at dinner time, and things'll pick right up.”

“Let me ask you something,” I said a little later on after working the ball in and out and up and down a few times.

“Show me a couple of more curves and a drop or two, and I'll be open for business.”

“Two things,” I said to Dynamite Dunn after finishing up that part of my pitching practice, “that I'm wondering about.”

“Just two? Hell, that ain't much. I wonder about more than two things before I get out of bed in the morning.”

“Who is this man named Clayton LeBlanc, that fellow that called me Jay Bird, and why did it get y'all all stirred up when I knocked him loose from Teeny Doucette?”

“Gemar, let me see if I can clear up some of this mystery for you,” Dynamite said, getting up of his crouch and starting to rub the backs of his legs just above the knee where catchers always feel the strain worse. “Clayton LeBlanc has got the same last name as a man with financial interest in the Rice Birds, Legon LeBlanc, and what that means is that Legon is the daddy of Clayton. So the man you knocked on his ass a couple of times in the Bon Soir Club is real close kin to the people you working for.”

“Huh,” I said. “I thought it was three times I knocked him down.”

“Who's counting besides you? I bet Clayton would say he wasn't knocked down a time, neither. He just slipped on that slick dance floor. That's all.”

“I knocked him down,” I said. “I know what I did.”

“Don't be proud of it, hoss. Just claim to anybody that asks about it that you was drunk and don't even remember doing it. Say you thought it was somebody else you swung at. Say you're one sorry rookie pitcher. Let me tell you something else, too. Something you better get by heart.”

“All right,” I said. “I don't mind saying all that, but it ain't the truth.”

“To hell with the truth,” Dynamite said. “Truth don't matter. Hadn't you learned that yet?”

“I'm learning all kinds of thing, I reckon,” I said. “What's the other thing you want to tell me?”

“Here it is. Teeny Doucette was right where she wanted to be last night, dancing there in the Bon Soir Club with Clayton LeBlanc. You didn't save her from nothing. She didn't need no protection. You got to understand that.”

“Not the way he was seized up to her,” I said. “With his mouth all up against her neck like a cannibal will do to somebody he's got a hold of.”

“A cannibal? Jesus Christ, Gemar. Where do you get that kind of notion?”

“It don't matter where I got knowing what I know,” I said. “I saw what was happening, and I did what I was supposed to do.”

“You know what money is? Do you know what people have to do to get hold of some of it and make a living these days? Don't you know you got to put on sale what people will buy and you better hope that what you got to trade is what they want?”

“I didn't see no trading taking place last night in that honky-tonk,” I said, wanting to throw the ball in my hand as hard as I could into a catcher's mitt or up against the outfield wall if there didn't happen to be a catcher around to show me a target. I needed something to aim a hard throw at. “I know what I saw.”

“Trading's taking place every day all day long,” Dynamite Dunn said. “All night, too, let me tell you. You got to learn to live with that. Teeny Doucette's done learned that already.”

“I ain't going to do that, Dynamite,” I said. “I'm not trading nothing with nobody, and I don't want to know about trading one thing for another. I'm just going to play baseball in the Evangeline League as long as I want to for as long as they'll let me.”

“That's trading, Gemar,” Dynamite said. “That's pure and simple trading.”

“Not when I'm throwing the ball by somebody that's trying to hit it,” I said. “Nor when I'm up at the plate with a piece of wood in my hands to keep that other one from throwing that ball by me. Not then. That ain't trading. That's baseball.”

“I see it ain't no use talking to you,” Dynamite said, smiling big.

“I want to throw some fastballs,” I told him. “I'm tired of talking. Set up.”

“All right, Gemar,” Dynamite said, pulling his mask down over his face, “let me get my poor old legs bent down in that squat again. Show me what you going to get them boys out with in the next game you pitch.”