The House of Daniel (14 page)

“Let me come in,” the vampire said. Like the one I'd bumped into in Ponca City, it talked like anybody else. Had a West Texas drawl thick enough to slice, in fact. “Let me come in, and I'll make you free like me.”

“Tell me another one,” I couldn't help answering the undead thing. The conjure man's tout tried to sell me freedom, too. It's as American as apple pie—if you're dumb enough to buy it. Or if times are hard enough for you.

The vampire should have sold Pierce-Arrows or something. Maybe it had, back before it got bit. “I mean it,” it said. “Freedom from want, freedom from sorrow … All you need is a neck, and you're as rich as a Rockefeller. In the brotherhood of blood, you're as good as everyone else. You won't have to scramble for steaks any more.”

“No—you have to scramble away from stakes,” I said, and mimed pounding one into the vampire's heart. It flinched back from the window glass. The room might've been pitch-dark, but it could see in there fine.

A neck, and you're as rich as a Rockefeller. The brotherhood of blood
. Ever since the Russians went and slaughtered their Czar, people who aren't in Russia have wondered if vampires are running things over there. The Russians sure talk like that a lot of the time. And is it an accident their new flag is red?

“Let me in,” this one said. “You won't need to worry about the fancy new convertible, either. You'll fly like me.” I wasn't so sure about flying. It could hang outside the window without visible means of support, though. I had to give it that.

Eddie Lelivelt laughed at it. “Fat lot of good a convertible'd do you now, huh? First touch of sun and what are you? Dust in the wind.”

That made the vampire flinch again. But it didn't quit. It must've been hungry itself. “Don't you want to live for yourselves, by yourselves, with no one to tell you what to do any more?”

What I wanted to do was go back to sleep. I pulled the cross out from below the undershirt I was wearing. It flared, the same color as the lightning a couple of nights earlier. In the dark room, it seemed about as bright as a lightning bolt, too.

“Go away!” I said. “You aren't invited in!”

When my eyes got used to the dark again, the vampire was gone. I stuck the cross back where it belonged and rolled over in bed. Five minutes later, I was sleeping some more. Eddie beat me to it, though. I heard him snoring before I dropped off myself.

*   *   *

West again on US 80 the next morning. The farther we went, the paler and the more sun-scorched the country got. Cactus. Sagebrush. Gray dirt. White sand. I've seen some sad and sorry prairie. This here wasn't prairie. This here was desert. I hoped we had a couple of extra jugs of water in case the radiator overheated—or in case we did.

The little town of Barstow was like an oasis in that desert. They raised all kinds of crops around there, on account of they got the water they needed from the Red Bluff dam not far away.

Four or five miles farther on, we crossed over the river on an iron bridge that hadn't been painted in too long. Big streaks of rust ran down it. It was still strong enough to take our weight, yeah. How long would it stay that way, though, if nobody cared for it?

As soon as we got to the far side, Wes let out a whoop: “West of the Pecos! No law here!”

Some of us laughed. Some groaned. From behind the wheel, Harv said, “Let's go out there and steal us a herd of buses, then.” He got himself some laughs and some groans, too.

Town of Pecos is right on the west side of the river. Like Midland and Odessa, it's a cow town and an oil town. It's about the same size as each of them, too. I don't think Pecos ever had a team in a pro league. Didn't mean they didn't have three or four clubs that played on weekends and split the gate. We were playing the Pecos Peccaries—a peccary is a little wild hog.

“Not the Pecos Bills?” I said.

“There is a team with that handle,” Harv said. “The Peccaries are better—and they promised us a bigger share of the money.”

So much for my try at a joke. We went out there to swing the bat and chase flies. The infielders would practice on grounders, and then they'd go through their phantom infield drill to give the crowd something to ooh and ahh about. You need to liven them up any way you can.

Watching us, some of the Peccaries seemed ready to ooh and ahh, too. I heard one of their men going off say, “I've got trouble believing I'm on the same field with the House of Daniel.”

I hoped more of them felt that way. I hoped they'd go right on doing it. If they figured we were bound to beat 'em, it would mean as much as if they started every at-bat with a strike already on 'em.

We batted around in the top of the first and scored four times. I doubled in the last one myself. If they hadn't thought we were world-beaters before then, we did our best to convince 'em.

Fidgety Frank took the hill. He'd pitched afternoon before last, but he didn't care. He was like Walt Edwards back in Ponca City. Not being able to throw real hard didn't bother him one bit. He couldn't throw all that hard even with plenty of rest. Hey, raw speed counts, but only so much. Put a little on, take a little off, vary when you do it, and you'll have the other side swinging at shadows and talking to themselves when they go back to the dugout after a popup or a roller back to the box.

Fidgety Frank was puffing and blowing out there. He was working hard even if he wasn't throwing hard. He got a hit of his own in the third, a booming, run-scoring double into the gap in right-center. He might have been happier to sit on the bench with the rest of us while the inning played out.

But another double cashed him in. That made it 6-0. You could watch the air go out of the Peccaries as though they were so many leaky inner tubes. If any of them had thought they were going to whip us, they started to see that it wouldn't go their way today.

Sure enough, we breezed home, 11-3. Fidgety Frank got tired in the late innings and served up a few fat ones. Or maybe he did it on purpose, the way a card sharp'll let a sucker win a hand once in a while to keep him in the game. I don't know. Didn't matter one way or the other.

After the game was over, the Peccary who couldn't believe he was playing against us brought around one of our advertising posters and had us all sign it.

“I'm gonna get it framed. I'll hang it on my wall when I do,” he said.

“Most of the time, our flyers get hung right on top of a
POST NO BILLS
sign,” Harv said. We laughed about that, for all the world as if it weren't true. When you win a game by eight runs, laughing comes easy.

A kid came up to me with a sheet of paper and a pencil. “Will you sign this?” he said. He couldn't have been more than nine.

“Here you go.” I did it. I'd never signed an autograph in my life, and now I'd done two in five minutes. I thought that was pretty funny, too, in a different kind of way.

“I want to play for the House of Daniel myself, when I can grow me a beard,” the kid piped.

“Maybe you will,” I told him. He had a while to wait.

The Peccaries' manager came over to make nice with Harv. Since they hadn't thrown at us or tried to rack up our infielders after we got the big lead, Harv made nice with him, too. “Maybe you'll get us next time,” he said.

“Mebbe.” The other guy sounded as though he wished he could believe it. “You Pecosed us but good today, though.”

Harv stuck a finger in his ear, the way you will when you aren't sure you heard right. “We did what?”

“You Pecosed us,” their manager repeated. “In the old days, when there really wasn't any law in these parts, you'd shoot somebody, then you'd fill his carcass with rocks before you chucked it in the river so it wouldn't come up again. That was Pecosin'.”

“How about that?” Harv said. “Nice little town you had here, huh? They don't do that any more, do they?”

“Not over a ballgame, anyways,” the local answered. “Not with you fellas—y'all are famous. If we were playin' a team from Fort Stockton, though, say, and it was one of those games where the benches cleared two or three times, well, some folks might get a tad upset over somethin' like that.”

“Do tell?” Harv said tonelessly. “Do they, um, Pecos people in Fort Stockton, too? We've got a game there tomorrow.”

“Nah.” The Peccaries' manager shook his head. “Oh, they might shoot you. Fort Stockton's about half greaser, and they got themselves some excitable boys. But they wouldn't chuck you in the river afterwards. They ain't got no river. They draw their water from Comanche Springs instead.”

“Thanks. That takes a load off my mind.” Harv sounded as mild as milk. The Peccaries' boss man kind of scratched his head, wondering whether Harv had just needled him and this whole part of Texas on the sly.

*   *   *

Fort Stockton is about fifty miles southeast of Pecos down US 285. If that's not the lonesomest stretch of highway the good Lord ever made, I don't know what would be. Empty in Texas seems emptier than anywhere else, on account of there's so much of it and it stretches so far. Desert and sun and every once in a while a dust devil swirling and grinning.

We could tell when we got to the ground Comanche Springs watered—ten square miles of it, maybe more. Wherever the ditches reached, the gray and the yellow and the faded tan turned green. It's good enough land if only you can irrigate it. Most places, they couldn't. Without the friendly water elementals and the free-flowing spring, Fort Stockton'd be one more dance floor for the dust devils.

Wherever the ditches reached, shacks popped up beside 'em like toadstools. Packing crates, scrap lumber, tar paper, rocks, corrugated sheet iron for a roof if they were lucky, all kinds of junk slapped together any old way … You wouldn't believe how many Mexicans lived in each one. I sure didn't.

Power? Running water? They didn't imagine that stuff, much less have it. They didn't even have outhouses. I watched a kid squatting over the edge of one of those ditches, doing his business happy as you please. His mama would draw water out of that ditch to wash with, and to cook with, and to drink.

When I lived in Enid, I was poor. I knew it. Everybody else did, too. In case I hadn't, plenty of other folks would've been glad to point it out to me. But you know what? Till I saw those shacks, and that kid crapping in the irrigation channel, I didn't have any idea what poor meant.

Don't get me wrong. It's not just greasers living that way these days. If anything, the Mexicans may cope with it easier, on account of they didn't have it any better south of the border. But you can find shantytowns outside of a lot of cities, and hungry, miserable people living in 'em, too.

No wonder folks want conjure men to take away whatever it is that makes 'em people. Zombies don't care about being poor—or anything else. No wonder vampires recruit more vampires, and no wonder so many are willing to kiss sunshine good-bye. Every vampire's as good—or as bad—as every other one. The thing outside the window in Odessa had that much straight.

No wonder even the people who stay human, which is most of 'em, can't figure out what to do next. Nothing seems to help much. No wonder politics are so fouled up. The questions look bigger than the answers. Since the Big Bubble popped, it's like we've fallen and we can't get up.

But you know what else? Some of those skinny, dirty, raggedy Mexican kids were playing ball. Oh, not with a real baseball, not unless they stole one. Not a real bat, either, or I don't think so—whatever they or their fathers could fix up from more scrap lumber. Gloves? Gloves were for people who could buy them.

They made do without 'em. They played. They had fun. You watch something like that, you remember baseball's a game. Play it for money and it's a different game. They played it 'cause they liked playing it. That was reason enough for them. More than reason enough.

Harv was eyeballing those shacks, too, while he drove past them. What he said about it was, “I wonder if anybody in this whole place will be able to shell out four bits for a ticket.”

If the crowd didn't come, he wouldn't pay us after the game. Well, he would, but not much. The team would lose money on the stop. If you went on losing money, you couldn't keep going. Yeah, baseball for the House of Daniel wasn't the same game as it was for those shantytown boys.

Things looked better when we got into the real town of Fort Stockton. They still looked kind of Mexican, because some of the buildings on the town square were made out of mud brick. Adobe, they called it. Put an overhanging roof on it so the rain can't melt it down and it'll last about as long as the other kind of brick.

There was the Hotel Fort Stockton, too. No mud brick there—all columns and fancywork. It would have been something to see twenty years earlier, I guess, when the gilding hadn't peeled away from the plaster yet and the sun hadn't bleached the paint. Now it just looked as though they ought to run up something new to take its place.

The train station looked the same way. So did the ballpark, which sat right behind it. I don't think it was as old as the Hotel Fort Stockton, but it wasn't much newer. Crows sat on the edge of the roof that kept the sun off some of the grandstand. They weren't buzzards waiting for something to die, but they might as well have been.

You always wonder what the team you're gonna play against calls itself. The Fort Stockton nine were the Panthers. A panther is a painter is a cougar is a catamount is a puma is a mountain lion. It would've been fun if they had a cat's head on their shirts like us. But they just spelled out PANTHERS across their chests in blue block letters. Hard to get less exciting than that.

Three or four of their players had dark skins and black, black hair and funny angles in their faces. Mexican Panthers, that's what they were. The white men on the team didn't seem to mind. Texans will let Mexicans get by with things they wouldn't take for a second from colored folks. Sometimes they will. When they feel like it. They didn't make the Mexicans in the crowd sit down the line by themselves in the hot sun—I will say that for them.