Dirty Rice (32 page)

“I ain't bothering Gemar,” Harry said. “Nothing anybody can say to him now is going to make him feel bad. Ain't that right, pitcher?”

“I can feel bad on my own without no help from a soul,” I said. “I don't need nobody to tell me how to feel about a thing. I will listen to preachers and teachers and folks like that talking about how a man ought to feel, though, sometimes, just to see what they're saying.”

“That's the point, pitcher, that I'm trying to make,” Harry said. “But what can a broke-down reliever say to you? Don't listen to me. Hell, no. I advise against it. So take my advice and don't listen. I can't tell you nothing.”

“Nobody can tell anybody how to feel,” I said. “You got to handle that all by yourself on your own.”

I walked off then and left Dynamite and Harry Nolan still trying to get each other's goat, and I headed for where my regular clothes was located. If the women that'd been standing just outside the door had cleared out, I figured I could get out of my uniform and slide on outside the Addison Stadium clubhouse. I felt like I needed to catch a little breeze in my face if one was blowing outside in the street, but I wasn't counting on that. Down in South Louisiana, you hardly ever got a chance to have a medium-sized movement of air come over you. It was either blowing like a hurricane or dead still in all them towns where the Evangeline League teams played. It was not a place to catch a moderate breeze.

I had to get by Dutch Bernson before I could slip out of the clubhouse, though. I knew he'd want to remind me about what I already knew about the playoff games coming up with Opelousas. He was a manager, and he believed he had to be reminding players what to do and what to think about all the time. A manager will look for ways to see things going wrong. It's his nature and he's got to follow it, the same way Crow has got to holler full-time at any other bird he runs across.

I spotted Dutch across the room with his back turned to me, talking hard and fast to one of the men I'd never seen before, a fellow wearing a suit and tie and a Panama hat, and I figured that gave me a good chance to get out of there without having to deal with anybody else. Dynamite Dunn did call my name as he saw me leaving, wanting to get me to go with a bunch of the ballplayers to a honky-tonk in Rayne, I expected, but I made like I didn't hear him and made it outside without having to stop again. I didn't want my head tore up with whiskey that night.

I was outside the ballpark just in time to catch sight of Teeny Doucette about a block down the street climbing in the backseat of a big black sedan, the door of it being held open by Clayton LeBlanc. She was wearing that yellow dress, all right. I was glad I hadn't seen her in it when I was pitching, and it didn't go me any good to see her getting in the car with the Big Man Eater then, neither. When Clayton got inside, the Buick took off and passed by where I was waiting to cross the street. I could have beat them across, if I'd wanted to. I just stood there when they drove by, and all of the folks in the car waved at me and the man in the passenger's seat in the front hollered through the window at me.

“Good game, Chief,” he said. “Real good game. Hot damn.”

I kept my eyes off the backseat where Teeny was sitting, and I lifted my hand up in the air as they drove off.

It was later on way after midnight while I was lying in my bed that she came into my room. I thought at first it might be Mike Gonzales looking for home, but the soft way the door opened told me it couldn't be him. It came open gradual and quiet, and it didn't bang into the wall the way it would have if Mike had been finding his way to bed, his belly full of whiskey and his head roaring like an empty gourd with wind blowing through it.

“Gemar,” she said. “Are you asleep?” She spoke in a voice so low that I couldn't have heard her if I had been dozing or if it had been somebody other than her.

“No,” I said to Teeny Doucette. “I can't go to sleep. I'm just resting my eyes here in the dark.” There wasn't much light so I couldn't see her face, just the shadow she made as she closed the door behind her.

“You didn't want to see me today,” Teeny said, “in the stadium after the game and then when you were outside standing by yourself when we went by you in the car. Why was that? I waved at you. I know you saw me.”

“How could you know that? I didn't lean down to see who was in that big car going by me.”

“That's how I knew. I could tell you didn't want to see me because you were looking off so you couldn't.”

“All right. I'll tell you the truth. I didn't want to see you. I couldn't stand to see you.”

“Don't you like me, Gemar?”

“You were wearing that yellow dress,” I said. “That's one reason I didn't want to see you. I was not going to look for you, no matter if I did know you were there.”

“I'm sorry you feel that way about me. Not even wanting to let me know you saw I was there.”

I didn't say anything to that, and I kept my eyes fixed on the place on the wall behind her. I told myself that if I kept looking at that spot I wouldn't run the chance of catching a glimpse of Teeny's face when she moved into the light coming through the window behind me. I figured that might help me get through what was happening in that little room.

“I've been wanting to talk to you, Gemar,” she said, now almost close for me to touch her. “And I've been waiting for you to let me know you'd listen to me.”

I said her name, and then waited to see what other words would come out of my mouth next, but none did.

“There's something I want to tell you, and if I don't tell it now, I think I'll never get another chance to.”

“Why is that?” I said, sitting up now on the side of my bed.

“One reason is that you'll be leaving directly, as soon as all the games the Rice Birds are going to play get over with. It's only three left. Then you'll move out of this house and out of Louisiana, too, I expect.”

“Maybe just two games left,” I said. “Depends on which team comes out ahead first. One might beat the other one two in a row.”

“The other reason,” Teeny said and stopped, like she was trying to think of the absolute right way to tell what she wanted me to hear, “is that I'm going to marry Clayton LeBlanc. He's been after me to do that for a long time, and tonight I finally told him I would.”

“White folks always say the same thing when they hear that news from another one, don't they?” I said. “It's congratulations, ain't it? That's the word they always come up with. I guess I ought to say it to you right now. Congratulations.”

“We've been going together off and on for a long time, and Mama will be so glad I'm engaged to Clayton LeBlanc. It's my chance to get set up right, and it doesn't last long for a girl, that chance if it comes. I got to think about my future.”

“No, I reckon that chance doesn't last long. The Big Man Eater can always find himself another thing to kill and eat if the first one gets away. The woods is full of game.”

“I know you don't think much of him, Gemar,” Teeny said. “He's real different from the kind of man you are. He's not like you.”

“No, and I hope I'll never be like a Big Man Eater. It's a temptation for an Alabama or a Coushatta to go in that direction, though, and you got to fight it all the time. It's an easy way to go, and it pays off real good if you can stand to live like one of them. You got to watch your feet all the time to be sure what you're walking around on stays normal. That's the first sign you're becoming a Big Man Eater, the way your feet start to curl up into claws.”

“I don't know what you mean when you talk like that,” Teeny said. “But I'll never get the kind of things you say out of my head. Not for the rest of my life.”

“Only one thing I'm surprised about, though, hearing that marrying news from you, Teeny. Why did he wait so long for you to give in to him, when it's so many others that'd be glad to let him take his fill the first time he asked?”

“Clayton says it's because he loves me,” Teeny said. “He says he'd wait forever for me to say yes to him. He says there's nobody else in this world that compares to me. He says he is sick with love for me.”

“Big Man Eaters are bad to lie, Teeny. The truth is not in them, and they don't even know when they're telling it or not. Talking to them is like asking Hawk if it bothers him to hear Rabbit cry out the way he does when Hawk sinks his beak in his neck. Hawk don't even understand the question, if you asked him, no matter how you put it. He will pay it no mind. He's too busy sharpening his tools.”

That was when Teeny reached out her hand and touched my face on the cheek, high up toward the hairline. It left a mark, there where her fingers touched me, one I can still feel today if I want to call it up. I kept my eyes closed so I couldn't see her face as she got close to me in that dark room. “Don't you want to touch me again, Gemar?” she said. “Don't you want to kiss me?”

“No, I won't kiss you. I can't do that.”

“Why not? You did before.”

“Because when I kiss you, I'll be touching you, and I can't stand to do that again. Not no more.”

“So you don't want to make love to me one last time? Is that what you're saying?”

“Making love to you, if that's what you want to call it, is not touching you in the way I mean,” I said. “Doing that, what a man and a woman do when they lie down together, that's like what you learn in school, one of the lessons it's hard to get at first. It's like the times tables, when seven times seven is always forty-nine and never another number, and after you got that by heart, you never have to think about it again. It ain't never new again. It's just something you say over and over until you don't need to think about it again. It's there when you need to use it, waiting with no trouble attached to it. The trouble and pain of learning it is over and done with.”

“Kissing me would be different from the other thing?”

“Every time I would kiss you, it would be brand new. It's like the first time you drink water. You needed it then to live, but you didn't know until you tasted it that first time. Then you knew you'll need it later. It's always good to you, and you never get tired of it, no matter how many times you take that first sip.”

“You won't kiss me then, Gemar?” Teeny said and moved her hand against that spot on my face that's still there and will be until I'm gone. “But you'll let me come to you in your bed?”

“I can't kiss you, Teeny,” I said and pulled her to me. “It would hurt me too much to have to remember that I was doing that for the last time. But my body can love your body, and I can watch that happen without it killing me. That's not me, and it's not you. It's just what we live in.”

“Everything you say and think is upside down,” Teeny said. “It doesn't make sense.”

“That's true,” I said. “That's the way Abba Mikko made the human beings, and that's what I have to live with.”

“Oh, God,” Teeny said, folding into me, and then she said my name twice in a way that has lasted down through the years since that night in her mama's house.

“Teeny, you got to leave this room before it starts getting light,” I told her as she lay down beside me. “Please.”

“Don't be afraid Mama will see me. She's not here. She's spending the night in Crowley at my aunt's house.”

“I'm not scared she'll be able to see you leaving my room in the daylight,” I said. “I'm afraid I will.”

Dutch Bernson told us he'd thought long and hard about the way he would go about using his pitchers in the playoff games against the Opelousas Indians. He explained the day before the first game was going to be played in Rayne. “Boys,” he said, sitting in his little office with the three of us crammed in there, leaning up against the wall facing him, “we had to do some finagling, but we won the coin toss, so we get to play the first game here in Rayne. You see what that means.”

“I see it means we got to be the ones to toss the coin and call it in the air and then get to tell what side come up ourselves,” Hookey said. “Was it a four-bit piece or a silver dollar that Sal Florio let you borrow to do the job?”

“Now Sal wasn't the one that throwed it,” Dutch said, “but he did happen to have a silver dollar in his pocket when the commissioner and the owners got together with us managers to see who'd get to play two out of the three games at home, if it come to that.”

“I wish I could take a look at that chunk of silver,” Cliff Labbé said. “I bet it's one of a kind.”

“Not in Louisiana, Cliff,” Hookey said. “You'll find them two-headed coins every time you turn around in the Pelican State.”

“Just leave that stuff alone,” Dutch said, squirming a little in his chair like his pants were binding him. “Everybody was satisfied with the arrangements, and the way we come to that decision ain't the point. Listen to what I'm saying, and you might learn something.”

“I'm too dumb to learn a thing more,” Cliff Labbé said. “My head is as full of stuff as I'm going to let it get. But go ahead, manager. Tell us what we need to know.”

“All right, here it is,” Dutch said.

What he said to us had to do with which one of us would be on the mound in each of the games against Opelousas. Dutch had it figured it out and put it down on a piece of paper full of our names and circles and lines and numbers and arrows connecting one thing with another. I swear that scrap of paper looked like a sentence that had been diagrammed in Miz Mary Peace's English class back in the Annette schoolhouse. The more he tried to explain, the harder it was to understand it. But what the pitching order came down to was this.

Dutch would put Cliff Labbé on the mound for the first game, hoping if he won that one that the manager would have his two strongest pitchers ready for the next one or two, if it came to that. “I don't want to hurt your feelings now, Cliff,” Dutch said, “but I want Gemar to pitch the second game, whatever happens in the first one. That second one is going to be in Opelousas, and the crowd there has got the chance to be a lot bigger than what it'll be in Rayne. It's a lot easier to get folks from New Orleans and Baton Rouge to come to Opelousas instead of Rayne, and the gate'll be a lot bigger if we get Gemar to pitch that second game. Hell, he's the one getting all the attention for all kinds of reasons that I ain't going to take the time to list. You follow me?”

“You can't hurt my feelings, Dutch,” Cliff Labbé said. “I been in baseball long enough not to have a single feeling left. All I got now is nerves, and them just shot all to hell.”

“Line drives will do that,” Hookey Irwin said, “whistling by your head.”

“It ain't just that,” Cliff said. “What's really reduced me to the pitiful state I'm in now is sons of bitches slacking off on me in the field.”

“That's a fact of life,” Hookey said. “I go along with you on that. The sorry ass infielders will let you down just when you need them.”

“That ain't no way to talk about your teammates,” Dutch said. “We all in this together, and I see that proved every day on the diamond. What you think about all this whining, Gemar?”

“I don't like to depend on other folks,” I said. “But I don't see any way around having to when you're playing a game of ball.”

“Strike all the bastards out,” Hookey said. “That's the only other option you got when you're trying to pitch.”

“Easy to say,” Cliff said. “Damn easy to say.”

“There ain't nothing easy in baseball,” Dutch Bernson said. “Except making an error. But anyway, that's the plans, boys, and I advise you to get a good night's sleep between now and then and don't eat nothing strange tasting.”

So I was set to play center field in that first game, Dutch saying he hated to use me that way so close to a game I'd be pitching but he needed my bat. I didn't mind that none, though, like I never did. I'd a whole lot rather be out on the field instead of the bench in any game played by a team I was on, and coming to bat was always satisfying for me in them days. Standing out in the sunshine in center field and waiting to catch a fly ball or chase down a hit didn't put any strong pressure on me, neither. It was a lot better to be moving around instead of watching another man pitch and everybody but me come to bat when it was my team's turn.

When the time came for that first game of the playoff for the championship of the Evangeline League, it seemed like everybody in Rayne showed up for it, including Chief Rice Bird in his Indian costume and a bunch of girls wearing short red dresses and ball caps. They had put in a row of benches and chairs down the first and third base lines to help hold all the extra ticket buyers. The ball girls danced and shook it up and sang behind home plate, Chief Rice Bird did his war dance and chopped with his tomahawk, the announcer talked in English and in French, lots of loud Cajun music got played by two different bands, and three or four folks got up in front of a microphone and talked into it through the loudspeakers.

I was throwing a ball back and forth from center field to right with G.D. Squires, warming up while the ceremonies went on, and Cliff Labbé was pitching to Dynamite Dunn over by the wall in right field, trying to break a sweat to get ready. “Pitcher,” G.D. said to me, “this here is fun, ain't it? You got to admit it.”

“Right now it is,” I said. “It sure is.” And it was that afternoon in early September, the sun hot on my shoulders with a little breeze blowing in from center field and making the flags pop a little, what was being said on the loudspeakers causing the people in the stands to holler and laugh now and then, popcorn and peanut sellers yelling out what they had for sale, them pretty girls in their short dresses showing off and squealing and hopping around. I was even getting a kick out of seeing Chief Rice Bird stumble around in his dance. The white folks were having themselves a time, and it was amusing, as long as you didn't let yourself think too much about it.

That was what I would call a side benefit to me for playing baseball back then. Times like that before a game started up for real made everything outside of the lines of the diamond and the fence around the ballpark start to get blurry and lose colors and get gray. What was making noise stopped doing that, the car and truck engines easing up and the whistles at the rice drying mills dying down and the hollering in the stands blending into a steady drone. Things stopped pushing on the temples of my head, and the air around me got thicker on the ball field than it ever was outside the lines that marked it. It took no effort to draw in a breath of sweet air, and my feet felt smooth and light on the ground. Everything that was designed to move did it easier and weighed less. Nothing that was going on was random.

“How many hits you going to get today, Gemar?” G.D. Squires called out to me as he threw the ball in my direction. “How many RBIs?”

“I don't know,” I said. “But I'll tell you one true thing.”

“What's that, Chief Batiste?”

“Ever how many it is, it'll be one more than you get.”

“Damn, you redskins are a pesky bunch,” he said. “Impolite and uppity.”

“We ain't got no respect for our elders,” I said and fired the ball back to him hard enough to make G.D. laugh out loud that hot September day in Acadia Parish right before all the final things started.

• • •

That first game against the Opelousas Indians was pretty much straight-up baseball. Cliff Labbé pitched all right for the Rice Birds, and so did Perry Allers for the Indians. Going into the eighth inning, the score was tied up at three runs, and both pitchers looked like they had enough to finish without breaking down. Who won was going to depend on which man on which side got a hit that came at a good time and whether the fielding stayed steady to keep an easy run from coming in.

All the runs had been hard to come by. Everything that happened was earned, and most of the folks watching in the stands knew enough about baseball to appreciate that. By the time the Opelousas Indians came to bat in the top of the ninth, you could tell that the players on both teams had put enough into that game to want to win it bad. All of us showed we'd made an investment, and we needed for it to pay off. It had put a taste in the mouth we had to get the full benefit out of.

Cliff was still pitching pretty stout, and I felt like he might be able to hold them for three more outs and then we'd have a chance to finish the thing off in the bottom of the ninth. No baseball player wants a game to have to go into extra innings, no matter what they might claim. It gets too sudden when you do that. How many times can you keep bearing down on every pitch? I admit that extra innings get the fans all worked up and crazy, but they ain't the ones standing in at bat or trying to make a play on a hard hit ball in the field. Extra innings make you think too much about how things can end so bad so quick. There ain't no margin left. Death ain't a foot away.

Opelousas got two men on base right quick in the ninth, one on a single and then a walk when Cliff Labbé cut it too fine on a three-two count. The next man up hit a fly in my direction deep enough so that when I caught it by the wall, the man on second had tagged up and was scooting toward third. I let loose with a throw toward third, and as I did, I figured I'd got enough on it to where the ball had more than a good chance to beat the runner to the bag. It would have, too, except that Mike Gonzales jumped up at the edge of the grass, caught the ball in full flight toward third, and cut off what I was trying to deliver. By the time he'd spun around and throwed to Milton Spears on the base, the runner was sliding in safe.

G.D. Squires had run over close to me when I went back for the long drive, so that made it easy for him to say to me what he did. “He wasn't thinking right,” he said. “Our little Cuban shortstop.”

“Mike was thinking,” I said. “Ain't no doubt about that. Thinking way too much.” That's all we said to each other. After the runner had called time and dusted himself off and stepped back onto the bag, we listened to the folks in the stands from Opelousas whoop and holler for a while. Cliff Labbé rubbed up the ball, talked a little bit to Dynamite Dunn who'd come out to the mound to slow things down, and then he set back to work. He did good, too, striking out the next man up, and that made two gone, with the runner on third and the other one on second where he ended up while Mike Gonzales was playing cut-off man.

The next man at bat for the Opelousas Indians was Cotton Tatum who could hit the ball hard and who liked to be at the plate when there were men on base. I moved in closer, thinking to play up for a line drive from him and still get back if he hit it in my direction and over my head. I needn't have bothered, though, because the first pitch Cliff Labbé made to him was a good one, a curve that broke low and made Cotton Tatum misjudge it. When his bat met the ball, it was a little too high and it sent a sharp little grounder bouncing toward where Mike Gonzales was playing him about halfway between second and third.

I didn't have to look to know what was coming. Mike Gonzales took a little hop to one side, fielded the ball clean, and reared back to throw it to Tubby Dean at first base, the easy out to take. When he let it go, I didn't watch the ball. I knew where it was going, and I didn't have to follow that. Instead, I kept my eyes on Tubby Dean who made the highest jump I ever saw him accomplish the whole time I played on the Rice Bird team alongside him. Tubby was a big man, and he looked a little soft and awkward, but he wasn't that. Like some big men can do, he moved his feet good, and he could stretch out a long way at first, and he could get off the ground higher than anyone would've believed he could. All that didn't let him catch the ball the shortstop threw over his head by four feet, though, and by the time he'd run it down and throwed to Dynamite Dunn at home, both runners for Opelousas had come in safe.

We made up one run in the bottom of the ninth, but that's all the Rice Birds could come up with. Opelousas beat us by one, and Cliff Labbé lost one of the best games I saw him pitch that year I spent in the Evangeline League. There ain't no guaranteed payoff for pitching well, and everybody who's ever stepped up on a mound at the center of a diamond knows that. You can make bad pitches that the other team hits all over the park, and you can still win. You can pitch a close hard game and show good stuff the whole way through it, like Cliff Labbé did in that series with the Indians, and you can still come up whipped. It's times when baseball don't care a bit about how good you are and how hard you work to win. The game likes to mock you now and then, just to show you how little you can count on effort paying off and how hard work and good intentions can't be trusted. That's what ballplayers are talking about when they claim their nerves is shot. They get afraid to depend on anything happening good any more. They've lost their faith, and that's a hurtful and nervous state to be in.