Dirty Rice (31 page)

“You heard what he just said,” Dutch hollered again. “We got to get back to Rayne. Now we got us an extra game to play that we never counted on. It's work to do, gentlemen. Let's load up and leave.”

“We ain't going to sleep here tonight?” Phil Pellicore said. “You mean we got to ride on that bus all the way back to Rayne before we can get to bed?”

“Yes, we do,” Dutch said. “I don't want to hear no argument about it. We got to get ready to play Alexandria, and that's got things all sped up. We didn't know we'd have to think about that.”

“At least some of us didn't,” Dynamite said. “I reckon I'll give you that all right, Dutch. Where's that sorry liquor you been bragging about, G.D.? I need something to put me to sleep.”

“Knock yourself in the head with a bat then,” G.D. said. “I'll help you do it.”

A while later in the toad mobile Mike Gonzales sat beside me in the usual seat we took for away games, trying to get me to talk to him. I was answering every direct question he put to me, I will say.

“You still think Harry took that bunt sign off, Gemar?” Mike said again.

“Mike,” I said. “I know what you did when you popped up that bunt right back to the pitcher, and you know it, too, so don't expect me to act like we're talking about something real. I won't do it no more.”

“Well, all right,” he said and sat quiet for a minute, and I let my ears pick up the regular sound of the wheels on the bus bumping over dividers between the highway slabs. Maybe I can listen to those bumps coming as regular as water running over rocks and I can lull my head into staying in that one place without dozing off. I might be able to get some rest out of doing it.

“Do you want me to tell you about why I did it?” Mike Gonzales said in a low voice not much above a whisper.

“I think I know already,” I said, “not every part of it, but all I want to know. All I can stand to know.”

“It's about money, mainly,” Mike said. “That's what made me do it. Needing money.”

I didn't say anything back to that, putting my mind on the sound of the tires bumping over the asphalt between the concrete slabs of that road we were traveling.

“What I am sorry about was you having to take the loss,” Mike said. “Since it wasn't really no lack in your pitching that made Monroe come out ahead. You wasn't in it.”

“I was in it, all right,” I said. “Don't fool yourself none about that.”

“It's never going to bother you in no lasting way, Gemar,” he said. “Nobody's ever going to lay it on you. See, they all know how you pitch and how you hit. That's all set up and proved for good. You already done that and showed folks where you belong. Besides, all it just means is we got to play one more game than we thought we had to. That ain't nothing to worry about.”

“You ever stepped up on a mound of dirt with a ball in your hand you got to offer up to let somebody take a lick at it with a bat?” I said.

“No, but hell. You was born to do that. I wasn't.”

“There ain't nobody born to play baseball, and do it right,” I said. “You got to make yourself up to be a man able to do it.”

“That's the difference between me and you. Somebody else made me up. I didn't have no choice in the matter. I ain't been give no selection to choose from.”

I decided to give Mike the room he was asking for, maybe let him talk until he quit. “What you mean by saying you didn't make yourself up? You think I did? Or anybody else riding in this toad mobile had anything to do with it?”

“Here's what I mean, Gemar,” Mike said, his voice lifting a little as he started off telling his story. “They call me a Cuban, and I call myself that, too. What do you call yourself?”

“A left-handed pitcher. Bat from either side of the plate, though, according to who I'm facing. I taught myself how to do that.”

“That ain't all you call yourself, and you know what I mean. Now, if I call myself a Cuban, that means they can let me play ball in the Evangeline League, long as I go along and get along. They don't have to think about what I am. I can joke about being a redbone, and I am that. But most folks don't make no distinction between a redbone and a colored man, unless it's to their benefit.”

“I know that, and they sure don't call me anything but what I am. I don't need to get into that name-calling business, though, do I?'

“No,” Mike said. “See, but being an Indian now, that don't hold you back none like it will me if they have to call me a colored man. You can play ball anywhere you're good enough to do it. I can't do that. I got to stay low level, keep it minor. Raise my head high enough for folks to have to notice it, and I got to leave wherever I am.”

“Long as you play a good game at shortstop, they ain't going to make you quit,” I said. “You ought to keep your mind set on that.”

“I might have to leave the Evangeline League any minute, Gemar. And that's why I got to get hold of all I can while I'm still in a spot where I can get at it. I got to think ahead. You don't have to do that. And that's why if somebody puts me where I can grab at some money, I got to do it right now. I got to think about myself, Chief Batiste.”

“I don't like to be called that name, especially by people that know me.”

“Nobody knows you. And nobody knows me. They know what you are, and they know what I am, for damn sure. But that ain't the same thing. Whenever it gets to the place where they got to admit to somebody what I am, they got to kick my ass out. But that ain't so for you. And there's the difference. You just an Indian and that's good enough to let you hang around. Me, I'm a nigger saying I'm a Cuban and claiming I'm a redbone. You ain't got that trouble, Gemar.”

That was the way the talks me and Mike had on that subject always went, and generally one of them sessions would stop about the time Mike got to the place where he called himself a nigger. This time, though, it was different between me and Mike. Before when he'd talk like that to me, I'd always just tell myself he was trying to do himself some good in his mind. Just keep my mouth shut and get along.

Now it was different, after what I'd seen Mike do in the last inning of that game against Monroe. Something real had happened, outside in the world and not just inside Mike's head where he was the only one who had to live there. He'd brought his head problem onto the diamond. Something hadn't been kept outside them lines that ought to have stayed in its true place. He'd let it slip over to the wrong side.

“It's different kinds of trouble, shortstop,” I said. “I can look at you and tell what color you are by doing that, and you can do the same when you look at me. Anybody can do that. You're a nigger. I'm a flathead Indian supposed to be carrying a tomahawk and wearing a bonnet and maybe about to go on the warpath. I'm a hang-around-the-fort. But you know what? On the baseball diamond, that don't mean shit to nobody. When you claim you missed a sign from the third base coach and you didn't, now that's the difference, no matter what color you are.”

“You see things too simple, pitcher,” Mike said. “See, the way I figure it, as soon as some white bastard thinks about me being a nigger, that means I can do anything I have to do to get a hold of some of them dollars the white man has hogged all to himself.”

“It don't matter to me about money and how you get it,” I said, keeping my eyes fixed on the dark woods outside the lights of the bus. “I don't judge you on that.”

“Well, we're okay then. We see it the same way.”

“I ain't finished talking, but I'm about to be,” I said. “Here's the rest of it. The way a man plays baseball, the way he tries to hit what the pitcher's trying to get by him, and the way he tries to stop the other ones from getting home when he's out in the field, that's the only way baseball will judge you. That's the rule for deciding what's done right and what's done wrong. It's been fixed like that since the game started up, from then to now, since the People have been playing it. You can hold up what you done against that rule and measure how you played it. You can see what's true and what's done right and what matters, and that's what baseball will tell you. Go against that, and there ain't no way you can ever be redeemed. You ain't never going to be pure like a bird. You're done with. You're over. You're out. Go sit on the bench, look down at the rest of the trash lying on the ground in front of you, and study that.”

I looked outside the bus window, as though I'd be able to see something in the dark, but all that came back at me was the reflection of my face in the glass. I didn't much want to look at that, so I closed my eyes and acted like I was sleeping. I wasn't, though, and I stayed awake until I saw the sun coming up over the flat country and the rice fields covered with water early in the morning as we made it into Rayne, Louisiana.

Catchers like to talk more than anybody else on a ball team. These days, whenever the folks in the rest home wheel me down the hall and put me in front of the TV set so I can watch what they think I want to, a ball game on a screen, I always expect that at least one of them commentators talking on the program will be a busted-up old catcher. It's very seldom you hear an old pitcher telling about what's going on in a game on TV, and I have yet to see a retired outfielder taking care of that job. What the TV people want is somebody willing to talk a mile a minute during the whole time the game is on the air, and that's why they end up hiring catchers to do it.

One time when the Rice Birds was playing the Lake Charles Explorers in their ballpark, a field that backed up directly onto a marsh just the other side of the fence, I noticed something big lying up on a hummock that stuck up out of the water. It was an alligator, quiet there in the sun like they will get when their bellies is full and they don't have to worry about finding something to eat just then. He was resting so still he didn't look like he was alive, but I knew he was. He had one eye open like he was watching a little bit of the game going on just the other side of where he lived in the marsh, and I called out to him to say howdy. He didn't make no sign he'd heard me, but it felt good to me to have some company out there in right field where I was up close to the wall playing the man at bat deep, since he'd been known to hit some long balls that direction. “Ho, Alligator,” I said. “I believe we got the Explorers where we want them.” Alligator didn't answer me, but I figured he was thinking the same way I was, out there with me in the outfield in that hot Louisiana sun.

So early on in that game with the Alexandria Aces, the one they were calling sudden death in the newspapers and on the radio, the one Dutch Bernson had put me in to pitch with just two days rest, I thought I knew why Dynamite Dunn had decided to trot out to the mound to hand me the ball instead of tossing it back. The muscles in the back of his thighs hurt a little, I figured, and he wanted some relief, or he'd got lonesome up there behind the plate, the only man on the field having to squat down like that and look at the back of the man holding a bat and facing away from him, and Dynamite wanted to tell me something I didn't need to hear. He couldn't say a word I wouldn't be able to predict.

I knew we had to win this one before we'd be the team to face Opelousas in the three-game playoff that would end up the season in the Evangeline League. I didn't need to be told no encouraging words, and I knew just how I wanted to pitch to the batter at the plate.

“How you feel?” Dynamite said, holding out the ball toward me, but not letting go of it yet. I looked him in the eye, but I didn't say anything back to him.

“You're doing fine, Gemar,” Dynamite said. “Keep it humming, and I'll do my best to catch every damn one of them.” That was the encouraging word he felt obliged to give me, and I nodded and reached for the ball, which he wasn't ready to turn loose yet.

“You seen her yet?”

“Who?” I said.

“She's wearing a yellow dress, sitting right behind the home plate screen. I thought she'd have caught your eye by now.”

“Teeny?” I said.

“Teeny Doucette. Yessir. Pretty as you please, right up there between Clayton LeBlanc and his old daddy, Legon.”

“I never look up in the stands when I'm pitching,” I said.

“I know that, pitcher. That's why I'm telling you. To save you the trouble of having to crane your neck.”

“Go to hell, Dynamite,” I said. “I don't know her.”

“I bet you wish you didn't, all right,” Dynamite said, letting me take the ball out of his hand. “She knows you, though. Didn't you hear her holler your name when you struck out Moon Trahan?”

“I just hear noise when I'm pitching. Here he comes. Get on back behind the plate.”

Dynamite turned around to wave at the umpire, Dewey Potts, and he said one more thing. “It's a scout from the White Sox up yonder, too, in case you're interested. Right behind that good-looking girl in the yellow dress, the one you claim you don't know.”

I wasn't worried about a baseball scout from the Chicago White Sox, nor from anywhere else right then, since I'd never had trouble keeping my mind on what might hurt me when I was pitching a game. It was that man up there with a club in his hand looking to do me wrong that I studied.

Teeny Doucette popping up in my head was something that I hadn't been faced with before, though, and I was both pissed off at Dynamite Dunn and obliged to him for letting me know she was there watching me pitch. Maybe if Dynamite hadn't told me she was there and how to spot her, I never would have known it at all or at least until the game with the Aces was over with. But what if some sweat had got in my eyes while I was up on the mound, hot as it was that day, and I had took off my cap with the picture of the Rice Bird on it, and wiped the sleeve of my uniform shirt across my face? Maybe I'd have looked up and saw that flash of yellow behind the wire screen and recognized the woman wearing that dress by knowing it could be only her black hair shining in the sun the way it would do.

It ain't a good thing for a man to try to pitch a game of baseball with his mind divided into more than one part. You have got to see just one thing at a time when you're throwing a ball toward a man who wants to hit it back and whose aim is to ruin what you're working on. And that one thing you're seeing is a little spot. And that spot is located on a bigger spot, the place where the catcher is going to hold his mitt for you to see it if he's doing the job he's hired out for, and that's all you see. Your mind is on that until the ball is safe where you want it to be. You see like you're looking down a gun sight.

Usually, I'd never had no real trouble collecting my mind together before I would throw one pitch and another up there. But now that I knew Teeny Doucette was up there in the stands along with the fellow I'd had to knock down three times in the Bon Soir Club in Lafayette, and her looking down at what I was doing in that game against Alexandria, I felt afraid I might lose that good tight hold on my mind I needed to do my job right.

I took some time rubbing the ball up, hoping the batter would get sore at me for taking so long and that he'd back out of the box to make me wait a little. He did that in a little while, lifting a hand to the umpire and stepping back to pull at his uniform and take a half swing in the empty air, and then finally start to step back in. Him doing all that bought me a little time to think of what I might put in my head to keep my mind settled, and by the time he was looking out at me again, I'd found something to think about other than not trying to see Teeny Doucette in her yellow dress.

I went into my windup to pitch the ball so the batter could reach it if he was good enough, but with enough on it that he couldn't do anything with it. I put it right by him and into the spot on Dynamite Dunn's catcher's mitt where it was supposed to go.

I kept my mind in one piece, even when some of the Alexandria batters would hit one of my pitches.

When it was over, we didn't have to come to bat in the last half of the ninth inning, since we were ahead already, and the sudden death was suffered by the Aces. The last man I faced I struck out on four pitches, and the final one he swung at late and missed by a foot. The ball popped into Dynamite Dunn's mitt like the sound of a drum hit hard one time. Dynamite ran out to grab me, and I let him do that, though I usually wouldn't allow him to hug me up like a catcher will.

When we all got back in the clubhouse, everybody was yelling and carrying on and throwing stuff up in the air. Rice Bird caps, gloves, shirts and socks, anything portable. The room had more people in it than I'd ever seen after a game before. Lots of them I recognized, like Tommy Grenier from the
Rayne Tribune
newspaper, and Sal Florio and Soapy Tonton, and Tony Guidry and Legon LeBlanc, and folks who ran the stores and businesses in town, the ones I'd seen across counters in cafés and the drugstore and the Joy Theater and places like that. And then some other folks brand new to me, mainly men wearing new-looking suits and hats, and some women, too. I figured they must have been wives of the men I hadn't seen before, from the way they was dressed and how old they were. But a few of the women was young ones, wearing lighter colored dresses and lots of lipstick and rouge and powder on their faces. The women stood mainly just outside the door, not coming far inside the room, I noticed, keeping a little distance from all them loud ballplayers with their shirts unbuttoned and pulled out of their pants and their shoes off and their mouths open to whoop and holler and carry on.

There was tubs of bottles of beer on ice waiting for us, and everybody was sucking down Jax and some other brands I hadn't seen before, here and there bottles of whiskey passing around from one man to the other. G.D. Squires hadn't been off the field more than two minutes, but he looked like he'd already managed to get drunk. “Damn, Chief Batiste,” he said. “We done got ourselves into the Evangeline League playoffs. Kiss my ass, if that ain't going to be a show.”

“Gemar,” Dynamite said. “Look here at my catching hand, you crazy Texas Indian. It's red as fire from them damn fastballs you been burning in there.”

I thought to remind him I was from the Nation and not from Texas, but I let it go. Somebody stuck a Jax beer in my hand, and I tilted back my head and took a big sip from it. That allowed me to look toward the door to the outside where the women were edging away, and I wondered if Teeny Doucette would have come down to the clubhouse with Legon LeBlanc and his son. I caught a glimpse of something yellow just outside the door, and I wished I hadn't. If I wandered over there and found out that yellow dress was the one Dynamite had told me Teeny was wearing and she was in it and saw me, what would I say to her? What if the man she'd come to the game with was standing there talking to her? Would I just have to slink off like I was scared, or would I lose my head and say something that'd made me look like I was addled? Would Clayton LeBlanc say something to me that I couldn't abide? Would I have to act crazy like an Indian in a picture show would do? Would he need knocking down again? Why would he? Would I do it? What would come of it if I did?

It was a hell of a lot easier to pitch nine innings than to think about all that, I figured, so I turned my back to the door and looked around for somebody to talk to that wouldn't call up so many questions for me. That turned out to be Harry Nolan, sitting on a bench with two beer bottles empty beside him and one still half-full in his hand. I wanted me a good sized pinch of mikko root, and I promised myself I'd take care of that before the day was over.

“Well, pitcher,” Harry said, looking up at me and tipping his bottle in my direction like he was saluting. “I didn't witness a single Rice Bird miss a sign from me today. But I see you did what you supposed to do one more time again. Here's to you.”

“Thanks, Harry,” I said. “But there ain't that many real hitters on the Alexandria team. It wasn't that hard a job out there.”

“You can still stand up like a man and say stuff like that, and I expect you'll be able to do it for a while longer.”

I didn't ask him what that meant. It never took long for Harry to start explaining, and it didn't then.

“When you're young and in your prime and still strong as a bull, you can act like you ain't impressed with yourself. Yessir, you can pitch a game like you just did, with a scout from Chicago come down here to take a look at you, and people hollering your name and slapping you on the back and wanting to touch you for luck, and you don't have to brag. People'll do that for you, and all you got to do is stand there and say shucks it wasn't nothing.”

“Some of that might be right, but I don't think about things like that. I just throw the ball up there and try to stay out of the way if they hit it back at me.”

“You don't have to think about stuff like that, pitcher,” Harry Nolan said and took a drink of beer. “No you don't. Not yet. The time when you got to think about what you've done and what you can do, that ain't got here yet. You still working at the mindless stage. I don't mean mindless, like dumb, now. I mean not mindful. That don't require no reflection. You don't have to tell your arm and your legs and your back what they ought to do. They just do it on their own, and all you got to do is stand back and watch them work. You ain't required yet to give orders and hope they're carried out like you want.”

“That's the way to celebrate a win, Harry,” Dynamite Dunn said from where he was standing looking at us, with a bottle of beer in one hand and a lit cigar in the other one. “Telling Gemar cheerful shit like that. I believe you missed your calling. You are misplaced professionally. You ought to be running a funeral home.”