Dirty Rice (8 page)

“How old you got to be to drink beer in Louisiana?” Mike Gonzales said.

“Old enough to ask for it,” Dynamite said, “and be able to hold the bottle up to your mouth on your own.” He gave a laugh at what he'd just said and then shook a finger back and forth in front of his face. “Wait. Naw. I take that back. Because I have seen more than once a baby's mama hold her bottle of Jax up to the young'un's mouth so he could take a swig at it.”

“Maybe I'm old enough to have my own bottle then,” Mike said. “Is that what you're drinking? Jax?”

“It is,” Dynamite said. “And I can testify to how it's helped me over the years. Oh, the relief it provides when taken as a fortifier.”

In a minute or two, a woman wearing a short dress and carrying a tray came by our table and Dynamite told her to bring him a beer and two more for me and Mike. Back in Texas, I had taken the odd drink or two when somebody on the reservation offered me one. I didn't really like the taste of it, particularly the kind generally drunk by Alabamas and Coushattas in the Nation. Nobody in the Nation ever drank beer if they could get anything else stronger.

So when the woman came back with the bottles of Jax beer, I sipped away at mine like I was drinking red soda pop. That wasn't the way Dynamite Dunn and Mike Gonzales drank theirs, though.

“Let me ask you something, Dynamite,” Mike said. “I've heard of slot machines before, but I ain't ever seen one. Is that what all that is over yonder up against the wall?” He pointed toward a line of people, mostly men, all sticking coins in machines in front of them and pulling down a handle every time the money hit bottom. Now and then somebody would holler out.

“I forget how ignorant you boys coming into Louisiana for the first time always seem to be,” Dynamite said. “Yessir, that is before God a bunch of slot machines those folks are working on, and vice versa. And you ought to bow your heads every time you hear somebody pull that arm down and holler or cuss at what happens when they do it.”

“Why's that?” Mike said and tilted his bottle up to get at the last little.

“That's what makes the eagle scream on Friday, that's why. Or least gives him the chance to scream, if things are going right. Them machines right over yonder, that's what owns the Rayne Rice Birds and the Opelousas Indians and the Crowley Millers and the Alexandria Aces and the whole damn Evangeline League. You owe them babies the very fact you might get to play baseball and get paid for doing it.”

We all turned and regarded the line of slot machine players for a space, me sipping at my Jax a little at the time and the other two shaking their Jax bottles from side to side as if they could make some more beer form up inside if they handled the containers just right.

“How can the slot machines own a baseball team?” I asked.

“Here is a lesson for you, Gemar,” Dynamite said, looking around for the woman who'd brought the beer to the table. “There ain't no way for folks to get more money out of a slot machine than they put into it. That's a fact. I'm talking about the long run, now, not some five-dollar pay off, see. It's a steady income out of them machines, and that income goes into the pockets of the same people that owns all the Evangeline League teams. So a few of them nickels and quarters the fools over there are slamming into the slot machines makes up what we all get paid for paying baseball.”

“Huh,” Mike Gonzales said. “Do we get paid in change every Friday? I'd a whole lot rather get folding money.”

“I see I hadn't got time to explain it all to you, the way money works in Louisiana,” Dynamite said. “Damn, where is that woman with the Jax? Let's just put it this way. In Louisiana, the ordinary fellow is not disposed to know how to handle money. See, money goes in the machines, and a little comes out, but not much. It stays where you put it. Most of the coins end up with Tony Guidry and Legon LeBlanc and Fleance Boudreau and Nips Petry and all the rest of them boys that own everything and everybody in the Hot Sauce League. A little leaks out to the ballplayers and the managers and the rest of all us working sons of bitches, and it all keeps flowing just as smooth as water when there ain't no stoppage in the pipeline. They get theirs, we get ours, and finally Huey gets his. Everybody stays happy.”

“Huey?” I said. “Is he a Rice Bird?”

“Naw,” Dynamite said and laughed real big. “He's the Kingfish. He's at the end of that pipeline, when all that money gets to where it's going, after the siphoning off is over with and everybody's done got his full share.”

“The Kingfish,” Mike Gonzales said. “Is that another team in the Evangeline League I ain't heard about?”

“The Kingfish is the whole damn team in Louisiana,” Dynamite said. “He tells everybody where to play. I guess where y'all are from, you ain't used to having a government like we got, one that works on the pipeline principle.”

About then, the woman brought three more bottles of Jax, but I didn't need one yet, so I gave that extra one to Mike. He appeared glad to get it.

“So this Kingfish is a man?” he said. “That's what you're saying.”

“The Kingfish is THE man, son,” Dynamite said, “and the last thing he's worried about is a nickel or a dime or a quarter. He's got his mind always set on what's coming and how much it's going to amount to when the counting is all done. And let me tell you, hoss, he forevermore knows how to tally it all up. No matter who throws the dice and how they land, the Kingfish knows what them dots add up to.”

By then, I had about finished drinking all the beer in my bottle of Jax, and I figured now was the time to get Dynamite to talking about the landlady's daughter. Judging from the rate he was going through the bottles the woman in the real short dress was bringing him and Mike Gonzales, he wouldn't be interested in much more than getting his next set of drinks lined up. If he operated the way I'd seen people back on the reservation carry on once they'd got the right amount of drink in them, all Dynamite would be wanting to do was maybe start singing out loud, or beginning to dance, or more likely looking for somebody that needed whipping. So I tried to find a way to ease into talking about what was on my mind, Teeny Doucette.

“Has Miz Velma Doucette got just the one child?” I said.

Dynamite set his bottle down on the table and lowered his head. “It didn't take long, did it, Gemar?” he said.

“Didn't take long for what?” I said, leaning back in my chair like I was trying to see around him to watch something happening among the crowd of folks feeding money into the slot machines at the far wall.

“You know what I'm talking about. And so does Mike over there sucking on that bottle of Jax. I'm talking about the way she looks at you the first time she lays eyes on you, like you're the one she's been wanting to meet up with and talk to for the longest time, and now you have finally showed up. And she can't wait to let you know how glad she is to see you at long last.”

“Well,” I said, feeling myself giving in, “I guess so.”

“I guess you do guess so, pitcher,” Dynamite said. “I expect you think the way she looked at you and talked to you that you got a reason to feel encouraged. You imagine if it's starting out as strong as that first look she gives you promises it might that it could be clear sailing ahead for you.”

“I don't know what you mean,” I said, wishing all of a sudden that I had another Jax beer to take a sip from. More than a sip—a big swallow. Somebody at the slot machines let out a big holler and held out both hands to catch what was falling out of the machine he'd been feeding. People around him started cussing and slamming their hands on the sides of their machines.

“I can't tell you anything that'll help you, Gemar,” Dynamite said. “But just the one thing. Augustine Doucette may be only a eighteen or nineteen year old girl, the way she looks and acts, but she's got a heart that never ages. She was born full grown, and I ain't just talking about the way she's put together.”

“I could tell she's got bad ju-ju, the first time I saw her,” Mike Gonzales said. “That girl will witch you.”

“I don't know nothing about nobody's heart,” I said. “And I don't want to.” I reached out my hand and picked up one of the Jax bottles that Dynamite hadn't finished off yet, and drank what was left in it.

“You better pray to Jesus you stay that way,” Dynamite said. “Let's get Louselle to bring us another round. I still got enough money for just that much, but no more.”

“We owe you one,” Mike Gonzales said.

“I see you damn rookies can't count, neither,” Dynamite Dunn said.

Dutch Bernson worked us pretty hard for the next eight or ten days, right up to the time we all loaded into the bus that would take us to Crowley to play a three game stand with the Millers. He was nervous, like a manager always is, and he had all kinds of pieces of paper he'd wrote on to study every time we came to practice. The main thing he was trying to do was to get the right lineup on the field for what trouble might be coming for us.

“Sometimes I feel like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest,” he'd say to us in the morning after we'd done our laps around the field inside Addison Stadium. “I just get off a good one, and that causes me to fall on my own ass, and by the time I get back up again, some sneaking son of a bitch has slipped up behind me and is about to hang his boot in my rear end.”

“And that's before I can get off my own next kick,” G.D. Squires said to me in a low voice, standing beside me. Dutch said exactly the same thing loud enough for everybody there inside the stadium to hear. G.D. grunted and looked at me, satisfied. I gave him the nod he wanted, and Dutch Bernson went on saying the rest of what he always told us.

It was two kinds of old hands on the Rice Birds team that early time in the season. Of the ones who'd been playing before, I mean. The first bunch had reason to think they'd been doing all right in the past and ought to be able to do the same thing this year. They had something still left, they felt pretty good, and wasn't hurting bad enough to be afraid they wouldn't get over the aches and sprains and blisters and sore spots here and there. If it kept on like this, they figured, they'd play out the season, draw a regular paycheck, and get to come back next year. They didn't think any further ahead than that, and didn't want to.

The other bunch of the Rice Birds that had been around for a while knew something they didn't want to talk to anybody about. They couldn't help but look up ahead of where they were now and see themselves closing in on something narrow and dark. To them, coming to practice every morning and afternoon wasn't just a time to feel their sore spots getting better in the sunshine and the kinks working out in their legs and arms and backs and chests as they started moving around some. To them, it was like in one of them old stories in the Nation about Rabbit when he's by himself moving toward home through the shadows close to the end of day. The light is fading, and Rabbit can't see like he used to, and he can't run near as quick as he once did, and he's afraid to look up when he hears something moving above his head. It could be just Crow flying to his roost at the end of the day. But it could be Hawk or Owl floating above Rabbit as quiet as thistle fluff, waiting for the right time to drop out of the sky with his talons stuck out for sinking into something good to eat.

The third bunch of Rice Birds early in that season was the one that me and Mike Gonzales and a few other ones belonged to. We hadn't made it like them first two bunches had.

The new ones were strong then, the way you feel when you ain't never felt any way but that. A man who's fallen sick can get well, and once he does that he thinks it's good to be healthy that way again. But things're different now, and he knows it. He knows now he can get sick, he can get hurt, and he has got something to compare the way he feels now to the way he felt then when he wasn't strong. It's only a matter of time until it comes back, and he knows it will. His job is not to think about that. But it is a hard and lonely task he's set for himself.

Dutch had me pitching a good deal in them early practice days when we were getting ready to play our first game of the season in the Evangeline League. He had me running a lot, and that didn't bother me none. I could run all day then, even in that heavy air in Louisiana. He had me doing more batting practice than the rest of the pitchers. I knew he wouldn't let me pitch the first game against the Crowley Millers, nor probably any of them first three. He already had pitchers, two of them among the best in the league, Hookey Irwin and Cliff Labbé.

Ballplayers are bad to take things personal, and the most tender of all is a pitcher. His feelings will get hurt over things an outfielder won't even notice. I have seen pitchers get so mad they would hit a concrete wall full-strength with their pitching hand. The sense a pitcher's got when he's pitching don't translate well to what he does when he's off the mound. So when Dutch Bernson called me in to his office to talk a day or two before we was set to get on the bus and go to Crowley, I figured I knew what he was going to tell me.

When I walked in that day, he was sitting behind his desk, and he had his Rice Bird cap on, even though he was inside.

“Gemar,” Dutch Bernson said, “take a load off your feet. Is Miz Doucette feeding you and Gonzales enough?”

“Most of the time,” I said. “Yes sir, she is. Lots of rice in everything she cooks.”

“Y'all getting along all right, you and the Cuban, living there together?”

“We get along fine,” I said. “We ain't there in our room much except to sleep.”

“Can you talk his language?” Dutch said and grinned at me. He had a full load of tobacco in his mouth. He was always a neat chewer, not like a lot of baseball players.

“I can talk his talk as good as he can talk mine,” I said. “We talk fine to each other.”

“That's good, that's real good. I know what you saying. But to get at the business at hand, I've been working on the lineup for the opening game with Crowley, and I'm thinking I'm going to maybe start you in right field.”

I nodded. Dutch looked down at the sheet of paper in front of him and touched his finger to it. “I'm figuring I'll have Hookey Irwin on the mound the first game and then I'll use Cliff the next night. I don't know when I'll start you at pitcher yet, but I want to do that when the time comes.”

“All right,” I said. “I'll be ready.”

“What do you think about right field?'

“It's a good field for a left-hander to play,” I said. “On throws to second base, but you have to turn a lot so you can field balls down the right field line. It's a good angle to throw from once you catch the ball, though.”

“You don't have to turn like a righty, that's what you're saying before you throw?”

“Yes sir, a lefty's already turned. A hit ball down the line comes to him where it ought to, so it's comfortable when he makes the throw,” I said. “I don't know how many left-handed hitters Crowley's got, but with Hookey pitching, I ought to have a restful day in right field.”

“Has Hookey talked much to you yet, Gemar?”

Hookey hadn't said one word to me yet, but I knew if I told Dutch Bernson that it might give him even more to worry about, so I acted like I was thinking before I answered. “Not much,” I finally said. “That I can remember.”

“He don't ever talk much to nobody, so don't let that bother you. What I've been telling you about right field I'm just thinking about, you understand. There ain't no guarantees. You might sit on the bench that whole three games with the Millers.”

I told him I understood and left Dutch in his office, and the next time he spoke directly to me was when we all got on the bus to take us to Crowley.

Before we left to get on the bus that next day, all of us got together in the clubhouse to get ready to leave. It was the first time of the season we'd be doing that, and everybody was feeling tight and a little keyed-up. Nobody wanted to show that directly, though, and that way of acting among ballplayers was the same in the Evangeline League as I'd seen back in the sawmill leagues in East Texas.

You could always tell the players having a hard time getting easy enough in their minds to get ready to go on and do their jobs. It generally wasn't the ones who were making the most racket, hollering at each other, telling jokes, jiggling up and down as they talked, not being able to sit down for more than a minute at a time, and all the other ways a man will show his body's got a deep need to do something right now. No, the ones having the hardest time getting ready was the ones that was the quietest.

They would sit and look into their carrying bags like there was a precious thing inside that would run off and leave them if they didn't keep an eye on it. A few would lean back and look way off like they were considering something that deserved close and quiet attention. Some of them would close their eyes like they were dozing off, but what they was seeing with their eyes shut was not a good thing to look at.

You will hear folks who've never played the game of baseball say it is a team sport. They will talk about the nine players on the field working together and winning together and losing together, and they will act happy and gratified to declare that nobody on a team is on his own. That ain't right. When some creature dies, deer or bear or raccoon or catfish or a man at bat with the bases loaded, all the rest of them don't feel anything but glad they ain't the dead one.

So that early afternoon, sitting there in the clubhouse in Rayne, Louisiana, about to go off to play my first game for the Rice Birds in the Evangeline League, I wasn't thinking about the team or the man on the bench there beside me. It happened to be the relief pitcher, Harry Nolan, who'd talked to me a little bit during them early practice days. He wasn't saying anything, and I wasn't, neither. He had his head down like he was studying something on the floor.

“Well, pitcher,” he said. “First game of the season for some of us, I reckon.”

“I'm not the pitcher today,” I said. “Right field's where I'm going to be.”

“I know that,” he said. “But you'll be pitching, not too long from now. Everybody knows that.”

“Dutch ain't said anything about that,” I said. “So, I don't know.”

“Dutch is always worried about a lot of things,” Harry Nolan said. “But he ain't worried about whether you're going to pitch or not. No, he's got other things heavier than that on his mind.”

“I guess winning this first game's what he's thinking about now.”

“Oh, he wants to win it, sure,” Harry Nolan said. “But he's so much still in the middle of other things that winning this one ain't got a real high priority right now. I tell you who wants to win it, though. Hookey Irwin wants to win this one, more than anybody in this whole bunch. He sure does.”

“Is he got something against the Crowley team?”

“No, he ain't got nothing against no team or nobody. He's got something against you, I imagine, from what I hear.”

“He ought not to take that personal,” I said. “I was just trying to get hired on by the Rice Birds. I didn't mean nothing.”

“That is the very thing that'll piss Hookey off the most, if he ever hears you say it,” Harry Nolan said. “He'd rest a lot more easy in his mind if he thought you hated his guts. Despised his mama, and had slapped his daddy silly. All that would satisfy him fine.”

“I ain't got nothing against him.”

“You better quit saying stuff like that,” Harry Nolan said. “He won't put up with it.”

“Why's Hookey Irwin want to win this first game more than Dutch?” I said. “Like I said, is it something personal?”

“He wants to win it because he's pitching today, Gemar Batiste,” Harry Nolan said. “He's a pitcher, in the name of God. That's all the game any pitcher wants the team to win. If he had his way, the only games his team would win would be the ones where he's the pitcher.”

“I can believe some of that, but not all,” I said. “Even a pitcher not pitching a game can't be satisfied to see his team lose it.”

“I will tell you one thing. You look a lot older than you are, son,” Harry Nolan said, reaching down into his bag. “But don't listen to a relief pitcher, like I told you before. I can't say nothing to you worth worrying about. We gotta get on the road to Crowley and I'm going to take me a piss.”

I leaned down and finally got my shoes tied to my satisfaction, though I knew I'd have to redo that four or five times before the game started in Crowley. Every ballplayer's got something that needs constant fixing and adjustment, and I'd found out in the sawmill leagues it was my shoestrings I had to worry about. Once in a game against Sour Lake when I was playing for Camp Ruby, I'd been trying to take an extra base on a ball I'd hit hard to right field. I knew it'd got out to the fielder too quick for me to do it easy, but I had made a good turn at first and figured I could beat his throw if I legged it and made a good slide. Just before I went into it, though, I stepped on a shoestring tied with too much slack in it, and found myself all turned sideways in a knot when the second baseman got the ball. I never forgot the look on his face when he put that tag on my foot just short of the bag. I was called out, and I was dead on my feet as I trotted back to the Camp Ruby bench, nobody looking at me since the rally was over. I've always fixed my shoelaces right since that time one of them killed me.