Dirty Rice (3 page)

The last time I'd had something to eat was when I finished up a can of sardines just before getting off the L and N freight in Lafayette, so I was feeling a little weak. I figured I'd better see the manager pretty quick and get him to let me do my tryout to get on with the Rice Bird baseball team before it got too much later in the morning, or else I might not show what all I could do. Maybe I could hurry things along a little.

“I need to talk to this manager myself,” I said to Dunn. “I'm feeling like I need to eat something, too. You think we can go see him right now?”

“We can go eat breakfast before we knock on Dutch's door, if you want to,” Dunn said, and pointed at a building across the street. “There's a diner over yonder that ain't worth a damn. You got any money?”

“I got two bits,” I said and fingered the last coin left in my pocket.

“That'll get you three doughnuts and a cup of coffee,” Dunn said. “You want to let me carry that bat for you?”

Both folks working in the diner knew Dunn, and that's when I first heard him called by his nickname Dynamite. I could tell he didn't particularly care to have me hear him called that. It didn't take us long to eat them doughnuts that woman brought us, and in a little while we were back across the street.

“Dutch is in there in what he calls his office,” Dunn said, nodding at the door marked PRIVATE.

Dunn had to knock for a good while before somebody hollered to wait a minute and then the door opened up and we could see who it was talking, a man that was probably only about forty something. He was wearing a baseball cap, even though he was inside the building. He had on a regular shirt and pants, though, and a pair of cowboy boots that looked run down.

“What you want, Dynamite?” he said. “Shouldn't you be in bed this time of morning, or is it just the shank end of night to you?”

“No, I got me a good rest last night, in the back seat of somebody's car behind the icehouse. That's why I'm here to see you. Remember you told me to come by early so you could let me know where you'd located for me to room this season?”

“Yeah, that's right,” Dutch said. “I do have a list of old ladies in Rayne dying to rent you boys rooms this year, like always. Who's this with you? The man that owns the car?”

Dutch was a little stooped in the shoulders, and like Dynamite Dunn, his eyes were a pale shade of blue like they'd been bleached out by looking into the sun too much. Too long in the infield.

“No, I don't expect he even owns a car,” Dunn said. “Do you, Gemar?”

I shook my head no, and he went on. “He does own a bat like you've never seen before, though, Dutch. Keeps it in a big old cloth sack and won't let me use it.”

“That ain't nothing new, Dynamite,” Dutch said. “I've seen you not use a lot of bats a lot of times.”

“Tell Dutch what you told me, Gemar,” Dunn said. “See can you get Mr. Bernson's attention.”

“My name is Gemar Batiste,” I said to Dutch. “From the Alabama-Coushatta Nation in Texas. A man called Leonard Piquet saw me play baseball and said he would send you a telegram about me. He claimed you would let me try out to play for the Rayne Rice Birds.”

“I don't get many telegrams from Piquet,” Dutch Bernson said, “but I did get that one all right. Damn if you didn't show up like he said you would.”

Dutch was looking at me, starting down at my feet and then moving his gaze up my body to my neck. “You ain't near as big a fellow as I would expect from reading that telegram from Piquet,” he said. “He said you could pitch. He said you could hit the ball a ways, too. Can you do that, Gemar?”

“Sometimes,” I said. “If I get enough of it. Sometimes I die.”

“You die?” Dutch said, looking me in the face now.

“Shit,” Dynamite Dunn said. “I never heard it said like that before.”

“So you want to try out for us, huh? How do you propose you do that? No offense intended, but I ain't never seen you play no baseball. All I got is a telegram from Leonard Piquet, a man that's always hoping to cash in some way somehow if something pans out right for him. I ain't saying Leonard lies on purpose, now. Don't get me wrong. But he does live in hope, and living like that will cause a man to believe in what he's had no opportunity to see yet. You follow what I'm saying?”

“Yes, manager,” I said.

“Listen, Gemar,” Dutch said. “Come on in here and we'll see if we can find you a set of cleats back in the locker room that'll fit you. Bring your bat and your stuff.”

“He ain't going to use his own bat yet, I don't imagine,” Dynamite Dunn said. “Are you, Gemar?”

“Not if y'all got some other bats I could use. I don't want to use my red oak bat right now, unless I just have to.”

“Ask him why not,” Dunn said to Dutch Bernson as I followed him inside into the little room that was his office. “Ask him why he won't use his own bat now.”

“I'll do that later, Dynamite,” Dutch said. “You show Gemar where the locker room is and find him some cleats. I'm fixing to warm Hookey Irwin up a little bit so he can make a few pitches to Gemar.”

“Is Hookey here already?” Dynamite Dunn said. “I ain't seen him yet.”

“He slept on a cot in the locker room last night. He didn't know nobody with an empty back seat in his automobile behind the icehouse, I reckon. He ain't that lucky.”

“I'd a lot rather been on a cot in the stadium,” Dynamite said. “I didn't know I had that option.”

“You don't have that option,” Dutch said. “You ain't a pitcher. Go put on a catcher's mitt.”

“I got to have a mask and a chest protector if I got to catch Hookey this morning,” Dynamite Dunn said. “He's liable to be as wild as a cyclone this time of year.”

“Put on all you want to,” Dutch said. “But first get them cleats for Gemar. Find him a cap, too.”

We found several pairs of baseball shoes that fit me good enough to wear. I picked out some that looked pretty well broke in.

I put them on and walked around a little on the cement floor of the locker room, feeling the cleats slide some on the hard surface and decided they'd do me all right for this try out business.

“What size is your head?” Dynamite Dunn asked. He was rummaging through a wooden box of clothes, pulling out jerseys and uniform knickers, and now and then a cap. “Some of these been washed and some has been put up dirty,” he said, “and that was last year. I believe they strong enough by now to walk off by themselves if they took a mind to.”

“I don't know what size hat I wear,” I said, reaching for the one Dynamite was holding. “Let me see that one.”

He handed it to me, I put it on, and it fit well enough. “That's one of them old caps,” he said. “Back before the name was changed to the Rice Birds. That one there has got a Rayne Red Sox sign on it. Don't you want to wear one that's up to date while you're trying out for the job?”

“This one feels all right,” I said. “I don't care if it's old.”

“Maybe that means it's lucky. You can't tell for sure, though, what's going to work for or against you. Lucky pieces will fool you. If you could tell that difference, everybody'd be batting three hundred.”

I pulled out the first bat I touched in a rack pushed up in the corner of the locker room, and I followed him out into the corridor leading toward daylight. So my first time to step onto the playing field of the Rayne Rice Birds I was carrying a bat and wearing cleats that made that clinking sound of metal rubbing against the cement of the hall.

My feet felt different when the cleats sank into what they were touching as I walked on the dirt and then the grass it led up to. It stopped feeling like I was sliding along on something too hard to get a purchase on.

Dutch Bernson was behind home plate, bent over a little at the waist with a catcher's mitt held up for a target. I understood why he was standing like that. You don't get down in that crouch that binds and stretches every muscle and sinew of your legs unless you have to. You don't do it for fun.

The pitcher was on the mound, throwing easy and slow, not taking much of a windup, and he acted like he didn't see me and Dunn come onto the field. I would've acted the same way, if I'd had the job of testing somebody who is claiming to be able to do what you do.

“Gemar Batiste,” Dutch Bernson said, slinging the catcher's mitt off his hand and stepping out from behind the plate, “I see Dunn found you some shoes and a cap.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see that the pitcher was fooling with his glove, acting like something on it needed to be adjusted. I kept my head pointed straight ahead.

“Gemar,” Dutch Bernson said, “this man that's about to throw to you is Hookey Irwin, and he had the best won-lost record in the Evangeline League last year. He was twenty-one and nine, and he did that on a team that finished fourth in the standings. Ain't that right, Hookey?”

The pitcher didn't say anything, still trying to fix whatever it was that was wrong with his glove, and then he finally looked up toward Dutch and nodded. “You're the one that keeps count of all that kind of thing, Dutch,” he said. “I just try to get the ball over the plate, best I can.”

“Bullshit,” Dynamite Dunn said to me in a low voice. “That little sucker studies and squeezes every number he can out of every game he pitches.”

“Hookey Irwin,” Dutch was saying. “This young fellow here is Gemar Batiste, and he's a full-blooded Indian from Texas. He claims he's a ballplayer, and he wants to see can he hit you.”

Hookey Irwin finally looked at me then. We both nodded, but didn't have anything to say to each other yet, and Dynamite Dunn started getting set up behind the plate. In a minute or two, Hookey Irwin started throwing to the catcher, with Dutch standing way off to one side, and I began fiddling with the bat I'd picked out in the locker room. It was a little heavier than I would have liked, but it felt all right in general. I swung it a few times to get the feel of it, not putting much into it since I was still cold.

Hookey Irwin was a right-hander, so I would be batting left-handed and that was a good thing since I was a natural lefty. I had taught myself playing on them sawmill teams to switch hit.

Hookey was shorter than I was by about half a head, compact in his body and in his motion, and I figured him to be more of a control pitcher than one who would try to overpower a batter with fastballs. He wasn't throwing hard as he warmed up, keeping every pitch about the same tempo, and I knew that he wasn't really worried about me. He wasn't pitching in a game and didn't think he'd have to strain to show me up.

Hookey Irwin wouldn't be about to let up on me. His first pitch wouldn't be one of the control pitches he was using to warm up as he threw to the catcher. No. When I came up to the plate, it would be his best fastball. He would hope I'd let it go by, surprised by the difference between it and what I'd been seeing him do so far, and then he'd spring on me them curves and drops and what folks call a slider now. I'd be so confused I wouldn't get my timing right, and I would be puzzled as to what he'd throw next and that would keep him one pitch ahead of me, and Hookey Irwin would show his manager what he still had, no matter how weak the batter was he was facing.

Hookey threw another curve, nodded twice at Dynamite Dunn, and caught the return throw. He then looked up at the sky, back down at the ground and stood there, waiting for me to come up to the plate.

“Batter up,” Dutch Bernson said, as I began to walk toward home. The cleats on my borrowed shoes felt good to me digging into the ground, and I looked around me. There wasn't any crowd there, but Addison Stadium was fixed convenient so people could have a good place to sit and watch from when the time came.

I walked to the first base side of the batter's box and tapped my bat on home plate like I always did. Then I settled into my stance, a closed one so as not to let an inside pitch be out of my range, and I looked at the pitcher on the mound, staring down at me while he held the ball hid in his glove.

The pitcher looked toward the mitt the catcher was holding up just behind and to the side of my left knee, rocked back in his motion, came forward in his stride and about three-quarters' overhand in his pitch, and released all that movement bringing that fastball toward me. The white circle the ball made was growing fast like the full moon over Lost Man Marsh in the Nation of the Alabama-Coushattas, and I could tell that circle needed to be stopped before it got by me and vanished into the darkness waiting behind. I started my swing and my bat, met the ball just as it crossed the plate where everything was still safe, and the crack it made rang in the empty stadium.

My swing hadn't gotten under the ball enough to get it over the right field fence, so it carried like a line drive, hitting the top edge of a Jax Beer sign about twenty feet fair inside the foul line and bouncing back and rolling toward us, coming to a stop in the high grass just short of the base path.

“I believe if you'd hit that ball a little harder, Gemar, we wouldn't have to walk so far to pick it back up,” Dutch Bernson said. I could feel Dynamite Dunn starting to stand up behind me, his catcher's gear creaking. I leaned forward and knocked the bat on the side of my right shoe, but that was just a way I could keep from looking up at Hookey Irwin out on the mound. I didn't need to let him see me sneaking a peek to see how he was taking things right then.

“Want a new ball?” Dynamite Dunn said to his pitcher and whipped a throw by my ear to get another one to him. The air it raised coming that close to my head lifted a little bit of my hair.

Now instead of being one pitch behind Hookey Irwin, I was one pitch ahead of him, a situation that gets on a pitcher's nerves. He had figured I wouldn't be expecting him to put his best fastball right over the plate the first time he pitched to me, and I had let him know with what I did with that fastball that I was on to what he was up to. I had read him the first time I faced him. Now he had to try to get out of that hole.