Dirty Rice (26 page)

“Depends on the living conditions, Mike. If the soil ain't good enough to grow a good crop and your arrows can't hit nothing worth eating, you will get bad hungry. Once that happens, you stop thinking about whether what you eat can talk or not. If it moves around and has got flesh on its bones, it could be your next meal, if you're lucky.”

“Talking about next meal, did you take a look yet at what they got on that table in that little room yonder? Everything you can think of to eat, Gemar. I ain't even talking about what else it is to drink in there.”

“Any long pig on that table, you reckon, Mike?” I said. “Anything that don't need skinning to eat?”

“You ain't about to turn my stomach today, no matter what you say,” Mike said. “I'm not going to be suspicious about what I'm eating. It's all good, and I'm just going to eat the living hell out of it. I'm fixing to get real full for a change.”

After a long time of running full tilt, the boat began to slow, the Red Bird's crest of water sank down and died away, and we came to a stop in the middle of that part of the Gulf. “Gentlemen,” Tony Guidry called out. “Here's our first hole to start fishing in. I expect they're waiting for us.”

“How can you tell where to stop?” Mike said. “It looks all the same to me out here.”

Legon LeBlanc and Tony Guidry got a good chuckle out of that, and both of them pointed to the man at the wheel of the boat. “He knows where they hang out,” Guidry said. “That's why he's called a guide. He's been here before, and he remembers.”

“How does he know that?” I said, figuring I'd give the co-owners a chance to laugh at me, too. It was my turn. “I guess I missed the road sign.”

That was a chance for a real belly laugh for them, and they took full advantage of it. Wiping his eyes, Legon LeBlanc turned to Tony Guidry, as though he was the only one in hearing distance. “Tony,” he said, getting ready to do some hoorawing, “you've been telling me that Gemar Batiste is too serious a man to crack a joke, and here he is got us laughing like he's Bob Hope.”

“He fooled me,” Guidry said. “Let's see if him and Mike are fisherman now.”

It turned out everybody was a fisherman that day. As soon as the Mexican deckhands would get a chunk of bait put on our hooks and we'd let them down, we'd feel the fish hit. All we had to do was crank them up then, let the deckhands take them off, throw them into a compartment full of blocks of ice in the floor of the boat, put more bait on the hooks, and let the lines down and do it again.

After a while, all of us but Mike got tired of doing that, and me and Legon LeBlanc and Tony Guidry watched him haul out the fish by himself until he quit too and asked for another beer. The deckhands washed down the blood in the bottom of the boat, stowed the bait, and put the rods back into their holders as the
Gulf Dream
rocked back and forth in the troughs of the waves.

“Catching this bunch of grouper and amber jack is a hell of a lot of fun,” Tony Guidry said. “But just taking a break and being on the water is good by itself, don't y'all think?”

Everybody agreed with that and took another sip of beer, me along with them now, thirsty after all that lifting of fish out of the sea. “You know something, though,” Legon LeBlanc said. “Not many folks can afford to do something like this. Take a break from work. Go fishing and drink beer. Get a little entertainment in their daily life.”

“Not the average man,” Tony Guidry said. “Not these days. Hell, all that poor bastard can hope to do, if he has a job to take a break from, is to go watch a baseball game, maybe. See his hometown team play somebody else's hometown team. Forget his troubles for part of the day.”

“It's a shame what this country's come to,” Legon LeBlanc said. “It used to be a poor man's dream. If he worked hard, tended to business, he could raise a family, put a roof over them, keep them fed, take them to a damn ballgame now and then, and look forward to a long and happy life.”

“That's one of the things I'm proudest about,” Tony Guidry said. “Being able to provide the means for the everyday man to get a little fun in his life for him and his wife and little ones.”

“You're talking about exactly what I'm thinking about, I do believe,” Legon LeBlanc said, lifting his bottle of Jax toward his partner. “I mean the Rayne Rice Birds, the team these boys here are doing such a fine job for.”

“You got it,” Guidry said. “I mean that down to the ground. It's taking its toll on us, but so far we been able to keep going. Meet the payroll, pay the light bill, keep the doors open and the team playing so folks can watch them.”

“Let's be honest with these boys, Tony,” LeBlanc said. “They're full grown men and they're providing interest and spark to the team, and they deserve to hear directly from you and me just what the situation is. These boys are winners.”

“Hell, yeah, let's do it. We depend on them and what they're doing. And you know what? They're depending on us, too. Am I telling the truth or not? Tell me now.”

We all said he was, and Tony Guidry kept talking. “The way things are going for the Rice Birds, people are sure wanting to come see them play. At least more than they did last year. And that's good, but I hate to say it ain't good enough.”

“Real baseball fans are showing up more than usual all right,” Legon LeBlanc said. “But you need a lot more people in the park than just these old boys that love to see a game of ball played. I wished that wasn't true. But you need the ones that don't know a damn thing about good baseball. They are the majority.”

“They are, for sure, and that's a true fact,” Tony Guidry said. Him claiming a thing was a true fact put me on edge as soon as I heard the words come out of his mouth. It didn't take me long growing up in the Nation to know that when the whites start testifying to the truth of something you better start looking around for the rest of what they're fixing to say. If you have to swear a thing is true, it's likely something else coming that'll turn you around and get you headed in another direction. If a thing is true, you don't need to claim that it is to get people to believe. They ought to be able to look at it and tell. The truth don't need to be worrying about how to convince you.

“I don't want to get too deep into matters of finance with our crackerjack shortstop and with Gemar Batiste, the Most Valuable All-Star Player in the Evangeline League. That ain't their territory, just like baseball ain't mine,” Tony Guidry said. “If they wanted to, these two fellows could start talking about the inner workings of the game, and I'd just be sitting here listening and sucking on my thumb like a child.”

“I know what you mean,” Legon LeBlanc said. “Let's just break it down simple for Gemar and Mike. See if I'm getting the message across right, partner, and if I'm not, just jump on in and help me out.”

“Fair enough,” Tony Guidry said, looking at me and then at Mike with an expression on his face that told me to get ready to listen close. It was about to be something said that would need a careful figuring out.

“It's a question of intake and output,” LeBlanc said. “What the Rayne Rice Bird enterprise is pulling in is not taking care of what we're putting out. We're spending more than we're making. Now, that sounds like we're up Shit Creek without a paddle, but that ain't the way it has to be.” Tony Guidry nodded hard at that, but didn't say anything. Instead he lifted his beer bottle toward both me and Mike to ask if we wanted another one. Mike did.

“We do have some real advantages, though,” Legon LeBlanc said. “If we got the sense to use them right. Just winning games comes first and gets the horse started, but that won't draw enough people in to make things work in the long run. We have got to find more ways to get attention and to make folks want to come see the show at Addison Stadium and on the road in every town we play in.”

“Tell it on out,” Tony Guidry said. “You are hitting the ball right on the nose, Legon.”

“We got our best asset for providing that extra special thing sitting right here on this boat with us,” LeBlanc said. “And you know who I'm talking about. It's Chief Batiste of the Alabama Indian Tribe, that's who it is.”

“Let me get this straight for Gemar's benefit,” the other co-owner said. “You are not saying that the Chief has got to pitch or hit any better than he's been doing. Or Mike Gonzales neither. That is not your point.”

“It couldn't be that,” LeBlanc said. “What else could a reasonable man ask the Chief to do on the baseball field? We are talking about the most talented ballplayer the Rice Birds have seen in a long time. Hell, let's not limit it to our team. The whole Evangeline League hasn't seen a rookie have this kind of year before. No, I don't mean he's got to play better ball. Do you understand that, Gemar?”

“I guess so,” I said. “But every ballplayer could do better than he does. It ain't a game where anything's ever perfect. Most of the time you don't do right.”

“I wish you would listen to the wisdom of this young man, Tony,” Legon LeBlanc said, spinning around to stare directly at his partner. “That's what I mean when I talk about his intelligence.”

Here it comes, I told myself, the rest of what was left out when they started swearing something was a true fact. What's going to be said now is the part that makes that true fact a lie. It's going to be like that bar of chocolate candy I bought as a kid in the Carter Lumber Company Commissary in Camp Ruby, Texas, when I laid my nickel in trade on the counter and walked outside to stand on the gallery and eat it. It wasn't until I got the wrapper off and took my first bite off the end of the bar, making it a little one so the chocolate would last me as long as I could stand to hold back, that I saw the white worms working in a cluster just under the surface of what I had taken into my mouth to eat.

I took it back inside the commissary, but Mr. Milton Redd wouldn't give me my nickel back, since he said he wasn't the one that made the candy in the first place. He told me I could just pick the worms out and eat what was still good, but instead I gave it to a fice dog sitting outside the store under the edge of the porch. He wasn't particular and ate it right up, worms and all.

“Here's what we think the Rice Birds can do to take advantage of not what you do on the baseball diamond, but what you are when you're doing it,” Legon LeBlanc said. “Are you following me, Gemar?”

I figured I was, but I shook my head no and looked puzzled as best I could make myself do that. “You mean what I'm doing when I pitch or when I bat?” I said.

“No, I mean as an Indian. Why do you think all these newspapers in the Evangeline League towns and even in New Orleans and the radio stations all over Louisiana are giving you and the Rice Birds so much show?” he said.

“Because I've been helping Rayne beat the other ones?”

“That is a necessary condition, I got to admit,” Legon LeBlanc said. “But it's not the main reason for all that attention we're talking about. Didn't Dutch Bernson speak to you about playing up the Indian connection and what that might do for us?”

“He did say something about that, but I guess I didn't know what he meant exactly.”

“Let me spell it out for the Chief,” Tony Guidry said. “This is the part that gets me fired up and ready to go. I purely love to talk about it.”

“Go ahead,” LeBlanc said and lifted his bottle of Jax toward me. I nodded yes, and one of the Mexican deckhands reached into the tub of ice and beer, opened one, and handed it to me. “Get him one of those napkins to wrap around it,” LeBlanc told the Mexican.

“All right. Picture this at the beginning of the next home game you pitch there in Rayne, Chief,” Tony Guidry said. “Warm-up is over, and you're ready to go. All of a sudden, you walk off the mound and climb down into the dugout and go back into the clubhouse. The umpire acts like he doesn't know what's going on, hollers at Dutch and says where's your pitcher. Dutch walks out to the plate and throws his hands up and acts like he don't have a clue about what's happening. He starts talking to the catcher, and Dynamite Dunn acts like he is as puzzled as the rest of them. The crowd is into it now, and they start hollering. See, we've already told a couple of the loudest mouths there what to holler. Where's the Chief, they're yelling. We want the Chief. Everybody is starting to go nuts.”

“I'm getting goosebumps just hearing you talk about it, Tony,” LeBlanc said. “Look at the hair on the back of my arms, how it's standing up.”

“Then, just as folks are getting riled up and yelling and asking each other what's going on, you start hearing through the loudspeaker a drum beating. It's a tom-tom sound, see, like in the picture shows, and maybe one of them Indian-sounding whistles too. I don't know about that part yet. Just the drum by itself sounds more dangerous, but I ain't decided yet. Then out of the dugout, here you come bounding onto the field. But you don't walk out to the mound yet. Not hardly. You're wearing a big old Indian war bonnet, a real fancy one just full of feathers and beads and rawhide strings and stuff, and you break into your Alabama tribe war dance for a half a minute or so. You ain't wearing moccasins, though, we decided, because that'd slow things down too much getting the game started, changing shoes and all. It'd make the umpires and the Evangeline League commissioner nervous. And after you danced a little bit and hollered your Indian chant, maybe shook a tomahawk in the air—that ain't decided yet, either, we're still working on it—Dutch takes your warbonnet off your head or maybe you do that and hand it to him, and then he carries it to the dugout, and you get up on the mound, ready to get the game started.

“You and Dynamite decide what the first pitch is going to be, naturally. Hell, it's a baseball game, and we ain't about to call the shots on that. That's your business. But whatever you throw first, the announcer calls it an Indian name. Thunder Bolt or Snake Crawler or something else we tell him to say.”