The House of Daniel (19 page)

A dust devil tall as a three-story building paced the bus for a while, sneering down at us. He wasn't big enough to pick up the bus and throw it away, and the Federal Wizards' Administration wards the highways anyhow. But wards wear out, or they aren't quite right, or sometimes a devil's too mean and strong to be warded. Then you end up in the newspapers, maybe even on the radio. Not here, though. He finally blew off to bother something else.

Right outside of Alamogordo, the road goes through what they call White Sands. It's that gypsum stuff that they mine in Texas. Only here it's not down in a mine with the earth elementals and all. It's spread out over acres—no, over whole square miles—of ground. It shines in the sun, which is how the place got its name. Hardly anything will grow in it, and what does is strange. Not like the plants in ordinary dirt and sand just a few miles away, I mean. Even the lizards and bugs and things are peculiar.

Alamogordo is bigger than La Mesa, smaller than Las Cruces. It's a lumbering and railroad town. There's a marble works, too; they get the stone from a canyon a few miles away. And they've got the New Mexico School for the Blind there. I never would have found out about that if we hadn't driven past it on the way to our roominghouse, which was only a few blocks farther east.

When we did drive by it, Harv started laughing fit to bust a gut. “What's so funny?” Eddie asked him.

“Now I know where they get 'em,” Harv said.

“Where who gets what?” Eddie sounded a touch peevish. Can't say as I blame him, either. When somebody answers your question by not answering it, you've got the right to be annoyed. But Harv wouldn't explain. He seemed to think he already had. And he kept cackling like a chicken after we got to the roominghouse.

Even though it's not a big place, Alamogordo's got a couple of semipro teams. We were playing the Rebels. I didn't know till I got there that they fought in New Mexico during the States War. The South tried to take it away from the North. They couldn't manage, which I guess is how come Willard played with the white guys and Mexicans on the Blue Sox.

No colored fellas on the Rebels. They did have a Chinaman, though, playing third base. Harv remembered him from the last time he came through. “Listen, Mike, you better get our uniforms clean!” he yelled. The Chinaman—Mike—grinned and waved back at him. Turned out Harv wasn't just trying to get under his skin. Mike and three of his brothers ran the best laundry in town. To me, Harv added, “A team called the Rebels has to have Mike on it—his last name's Lee!”

I chuckled. “Good thing you didn't say it was Beauregard.” Harv shied a pebble my way.

Place we played at wasn't even a city park. It was the high school's baseball diamond. It wasn't quite so bumpy and rocky as a cow pasture, but it came close. The grandstand was none too big, either. I was starting to get a feel for such things. Breaking even here would be the best we could hope for, and this was liable to be another place where Harv cut my pay so I didn't make more than the regulars.

Most of what I remember about the game is, we won. The other thing is, Mike the Chinaman smoked one over my head and all the way out to the chain-link fence. I tried to throw him out at third, but I couldn't do it: he tripled standing up. He wasn't a big guy or broad-shouldered or anything. Big or not, he could hit. Maybe working the laundry gave him strong wrists. I dunno.

Oh, and we found out why Harv laughed so much. The base umpire called Azariah out at first when he beat the throw by half a step, easy. “I know where you came from, dad-gum it!” Harv shouted from the dugout.

That ump walked right into it. He asked, “What do you mean, where I came from?”

“You came from the New Mexico School for the Blind, that's what!” Harv bellowed.

He got to watch the rest of the game from the stands, because the umpire screeched “You're gone!” and gave him the thumb. But it was worth it. Everybody heard him, and everybody busted up.

I nailed the kind of crowd it was—I sure did. After the game, Harv gave me four singles and a silver cartwheel and said, “Sorry, Snake, but this is what I've got for you today.”

“Hey, it's better than nothing,” I answered. People have said that a lot since the Big Bubble busted, and they mean it every single time they do.

“You're all right, Snake,” Harv said. He was all right in my book, too—better than all right.

“What is there to do in Alamogordo?” I asked him.

“They've got a movie thee-ay-ter, if you feel like that,” Harv said.

I shrugged. I'd seen the film in El Paso. I didn't know if I wanted to do that again so soon. I didn't know if I wanted to shell out another quarter, either. I was making better than decent money playing for the House of Daniel, but I'd been broke so long that it didn't seem real to me. I socked away every penny I could, against the time when the well ran dry.

“Or you can sit around and watch the railroad ties grow,” Harv said.

“That sounds exciting,” I told him. We kinda rolled our eyes at each other. I suppose, if I'd felt like looking a bit, I could've found a sporting house. Alamogordo was big enough to have one. But that would've cost more than a movie. And I don't care for bought fun unless I've got the urge so bad I purely can't stand it any more. You'd rather lie down with somebody who cares about you, not about the money you just set on the dresser.

For supper, we could pick either Fred Harvey food at the train station or Mexican stuff closer to the roominghouse. The Mexican was cheaper, but I had a craving for fried chicken, so I went to the station with Eddie and Azariah and a couple of other guys. It was good, I will say. Cost me forty cents with a slice of cherry pie.

We got back to the roominghouse at the same time as the fellas who'd eaten those enchiladas and beans and tortillas. A card game started, but most of us went to bed. Another bus ride tomorrow morning. Another game tomorrow afternoon. I was sure ready for sleep. I'd just started finding out what a grind playing every day was.

I woke up with a start in the middle of the night. Eddie snored away in the other bed. Not a vampire at the window this time. I knew it was a dream. But what a dream! The whole northern skyline exploded with light, the brightest light anywhere, brighter than the sun, brighter than anything. The roar that went with it sounded like the end of the world.

For all I could tell, that flash and that roar
were
the end of the world, or at least the end of Alamogordo … in the silly dream. Can't imagine why that kind of crazy stuff boiled up in my head then. That and one word, just one, to go with it. Trinity.

Isn't it all the silliest thing you ever heard? If I was dreaming of the Trinity, shouldn't I have done it in Las Cruces? And like I've said, I'm not even Catholic.

*   *   *

We had a long haul the next morning, all the way east to Artesia. We went more than a hundred miles, through the Sacramento Mountains and the national forest in them and then down to the high plains country that looked as though it belonged to West Texas. I do believe it's even barer and drier, though.

They named Artesia for the first well they dug there. They made a bargain with the water elementals deep underground. That well's been going for years and years, and it's never run dry. They cooked up a sweet deal with the earth elementals, too, because Artesia's as big an oil town as Midland or Odessa. Sheep graze on alfalfa near town, and Angora goats gnaw anything that grows on the hillsides farther away.

Brainard Park in Artesia is a peculiar place to play a ballgame. It's a real baseball park, with a partly roofed grandstand and all. But they plopped it down on a funny-shaped piece of ground and did the best they could. It's 360 down the right-field line, but only 350 to dead center. I don't know how far it is out to left. The distance sign's fallen off the tin wall; a rectangle of darker green paint shows where it used to hang. Farther to left than it is to center—I'm sure of that.

The tin wall is higher in center than it is down either line. They tried to keep balls from flying out of there, yeah. But that wall would need to be as tall as the Pierce-Arrow Building in New York City to stop all those Chinese home runs.

When I said so, Harv came back with, “Yeah, I bet that Mike Lee on the Rebels has hit one or two out of here.”

Did I wince? Did I groan? I know darn well I did. Sometimes you get topped, that's all. Harv topped me there.

And then the Artesia Drillers topped us. Fidgety Frank was on the mound for the House of Daniel, and he didn't have anything. His fastballs ran straight—no dip, no dive. His curves hung up there in the strike zone, just asking to get creamed. When he tried to change speeds, the Drillers waited on him and hit the slow stuff as though they knew it was coming.

For all I knew, they did. They got plenty of runners on second base to peer in and steal signs. Those tin fences already had lots of dents. The way the ball kept clanking off them, they got some more. And two or three sailed over that joke of a wall behind me. You say
I hit the ball out to dead center
, it's usually quite a poke. Not at Brainard Park.

We were hitting some, too, enough to keep the Drillers interested but not enough to catch up. The guy running the scoreboard had plenty of zeroes and ones painted on flat sheets of tin. He wasn't using those much, though. I wondered if he'd run low on fours and fives. It wasn't a tidy game. It wasn't anything like a tidy game. I will say the fans got their four bits' worth. By the time the dust settled, the Drillers beat us, 17-13.

Looking out at the final, Harv shook his head. “By the score, anybody'd think we were playing football out here.”

“Did we make a couple of field goals or miss an extra point?” Eddie asked.

“Way we were kicking the ball today, I'd bet on the field goals,” Harv said. Our glovework had been about as bad as the rest of it. A pitcher doesn't give up seventeen runs all by himself, not even in a joke of a ballpark like that. The whole team has to help out, and we did. Booted grounders, throws to the wrong base, bad throws to the right base … I made one of those. That day, it wasn't as if I stood out from the crowd.

The Drillers' manager was so tickled, he slapped Harv on the back almost hard enough to knock him down. “I don't expect we'd get you every time, but we got you today,” he said.

“Yeah, you did.” Harv kept it short. I could see why. The Drillers weren't a bad team, but they didn't come close to the Las Cruces Blue Sox. That was a solid outfit. They played the game the way it ought to be played, even if they did have a colored guy in center.

Even if Fidgety Frank were sharp, this would've been a high-scoring game. In a place like Brainard Park, you won't get pitchers' duels. Well, you will, but you'll never know it by the scoreboard. Since Frank was about as flat as a mouse under a steamroller, we didn't get it done.

“We had a good gate, too,” the Drillers' manager went on.

“Yeah, we did.” Harv still wasn't talking much. No, he didn't like to lose, not for beans. But he sounded a little less end-of-the-world gloomy. Brainard Park had the ridiculous little playing field, but the stands held 4,500 people. They hadn't been full, but they hadn't been far from it.

Artesia's never yet had a minor-league team. Semipro ball was as good as those folks knew. And when it comes to semipro ball, the House of Daniel tops the heap. And here they'd gone and trounced us.

Over in the dugout, Fidgety Frank had his sleeve rolled all the way up to his shoulder. Wes was slathering liniment on his arm. It smelled something like mint and something like moonshine and something like hot peppers. If you put it on spare ribs, it would probably cook 'em without any fire.

Fidgety Frank looked up into the burning blue sky. “Don't see any buzzards circling,” he said. “Danged if I know why. That thing is dead. Somebody oughta cut it off and bury it.” He sounded embarrassed. Get clobbered the way he did and you would, too.

“I got me some plumbing work that needs doing,” the Drillers' boss said. “With what we brought in, I can just about afford it.”

“Good for you, then,” Harv said. “We're on the road so much, the only plumbing I worry about is what's hooked up to the radiator on the bus.”

“Must be nice, playing so often.” The man from Artesia sounded as if he wished he were riding with us.

“Well, it's a living,” Harv told him. “Not an easy one all the time. Sometimes we have days like today. Sometimes the bus breaks down or the road washes out. Sometimes we get a rotten crowd, and we lose money for the stop. Can't take too many of those. Sometimes we get the other kind of rotten crowd, the kind that throws stuff at us. And all the greasy spoons we eat at, I guzzle more bicarb and Bromo-Seltzer than you ever seen.”

“Hey, I can do that when my wife makes pot roast and onions.” The Drillers' manager chuckled, but then he frowned. “Been a while since she's done that. These days, it's oxtail stew and boiled tripe when it isn't noodles and cottage cheese.”

“Times are tough all over,” Harv said. “I've seen more of it than you—oh, you bet I have. Oil wells, they kinda keep you from knowing just how rugged it can get.”

“I wouldn't be surprised,” the Artesia man answered. “My brother-in-law, he headed out to California. Now he's scuffling there instead of here. Where do you fellows go next?”

“Hobbs,” Harv said. “Do I remember straight? Isn't the ballpark there even smaller'n this one?” He waited for the Drillers' manager to nod, then cut loose with a sigh. “We'll have to see what we can do about that, I guess.”

We cleaned up and found one more greasy spoon for dinner. I've had worse, but I've sure had better. When we came out, the full moon blazed low in the eastern sky like a twenty-dollar goldpiece. It was gorgeous, but you don't always want to be out on full-moon nights.