The House of Daniel (23 page)

He grinned again. His teeth looked real white, the way colored folks' do against their dark skins—except for one in the top center. That one was gold. “Hey, I got lucky,” he said. He'd come from somewhere in the South. You could hear it when he talked. It made me homesick.

“Lucky, nothing,” I told him. “You can play down there.”

He touched the brim of his cap. “I thanks you kindly.” One of his eyebrows went up. It changed the shape of the grin. He could hear where I came from, too. “Mighty nice of you to say so. You ain't too bad yourself. I thought I got that one by you in the sixth, and you almost threw me out.”

“Nah. You had the bag.” I stuck out my hand. Hey, in for a penny, in for a pound. After a beat, he shook with me. If you didn't think about it, it was just like shaking hands with anybody else.

They had showers under the grandstand. Those were tiled—adobe showers wouldn't be smart. We got into our street clothes. Harv didn't know how to feel. He was gloomy 'cause we'd lost but happy about the gate receipts. A split of the doubleheader, you could call it.

*   *   *

When we came out to walk to the bus, a couple of Indians were sitting with their backs to the adobe outer wall, enjoying the shade. One of them had a pint in his pocket. He took a drink, then passed it to his friend. They didn't look likely to go anywhere except to sleep for quite a while. I'd seen the same thing in Enid. It's sad, but there you are. Too many of 'em don't hold their liquor well. It ends up holding them instead.

A kid—thirteen; fourteen, tops—popped out of nowhere and said, “Spare a dime?”

I never had to beg in the streets. I came close a few times, which helped get me started doing this and that for Big Stu. I don't know if I could've done it. I've got a funny kind of pride, but it's pride just the same. If I got hungry enough, though … Well, you never know for sure.

This kid was so scrawny, he had to be plenty hungry. I reached into my pocket and gave him a quarter. I hoped somebody would've given me a little something if I had to beg. “Here,” I said. “Get yourself some food.”

“Thanks, Mister!” By the surprised way he said it, he'd had a lot of people tell him to dry up and blow away. Times were hard for him, but times were hard for darn near everybody. He scooted off with the silver clenched in his fist.

“That was a Christian thing to do, Snake,” Harv said.

Well, I went and did it anyway
was the first thing that came into my head. I didn't let it out, which was bound to be just as well. Harv tried to live what he believed. He said that was how he preached, by example. “Kid looked like he could use a hamburger or something” was what I did tell him.

“That he did,” Harv agreed. “But not everybody would have given him the chance to get one.”

I kinda shrugged. “I know what empty feels like. I ought to. Playing ball for the House of Daniel, this here is the most money I ever made in my life.”

“You've had it rugged, all right.” That was Fidgety Frank. He was half joking, half not. He was like the rest of the team—he didn't care to lose. Made him sore as a bear that swatted a hornets' nest instead of a beehive.

You will lose some of the time. You know that going in. The House of Daniel plays the best semipros. Some of 'em could be pros. Some of 'em were pros only a couple of years ago, like the Dons. Sometimes the House of Daniel plays real pro teams. Hard to get matches like that, though, because the pros know they can lose to us, same as we can lose to good semipros. Losing to us embarrasses pros the same way losing even to good semipros embarrasses us.

The door to the bus creaked closed. It was supposed to hiss closed, but the bus sounded as tired as we were. We'd come a long way from Roswell, and we'd lost. Somehow, you're twice as tired when you lose as when you win.

But Harv didn't take us straight back to the motor lodge. He stopped at a Consolidated Crystal office first. “Be right back, boys,” he said. “Gotta send me a message.” And in he went, as sneaky as though he were playing a spy in a thriller.

He came out with a big old grin on his face, the kind of grin you get when you know something and other people don't. “What's going on, Harv?” Fidgety Frank asked him.

“Not a thing, Frank, not a thing,” Harv answered, which was such obvious bushwa that we all hooted at him. Even Azariah hooted, and he's as churchy as Harv.

But Harv didn't say anything more. He kept that I-know-a-secret smile on his mug all the way back to the motor lodge. He kept it all the way through supper at a chop-suey house down the street. And he kept it when we walked back to the lodge from the chop-suey house.

It was getting dark by then. I looked up into the sky. All I saw were a bunch of stars coming out. No flying hubcaps. They must've been back in Roswell, doing whatever flying hubcaps do. Flying.

Most of the guys went into their cabins. I stayed out for a while. So did Eddie. So did Wes. So did Fidgety Frank. We talked baseball. We talked life on the road. We talked about everything under the sun except how come Harv needed to send a Consolidated Crystal message, and how come he looked as though he had canary feathers in his beard.

No, we didn't say anything about any of that. No, not a word, not one single, solitary word. We just stood around killing time. We mostly kept our hands in our pockets like kids pretending to be tough guys. Wes and Fidgety Frank smoked a few cigarettes. Eddie and I didn't use 'em. I never got the habit. When I was back in Enid, it cost too much money. Anything that cost any money at all cost too much in those days.

A shooting star sparked across the sky, there and gone before you could be sure you saw it. There are more of them after midnight, but you get some in the early nighttime, too. “
Not
a flying hubcap,” Eddie said. Was that also in my mind? Oh, just a little.

So we talked about flying hubcaps for a while. Since even the fellas who lived in Roswell didn't know what they were, we didn't find any answers. Sure came up with some interesting questions, though.

Fidgety Frank had just lit another coffin nail when a carpet came up the road toward the motor lodge. We all watched it, all of us trying to make as though we were doing no such thing. The carpet stopped in front of the cabin where Harv was staying. By the light over the cabin door, we could see that the fellow riding it wore a gray-blue jacket of a cut everybody knows. We couldn't see that the brass buttons on the jacket were stamped CC for Consolidated Crystal, but we didn't really need to.

The deliveryman gave Harv the message. Harv closed the door. The CC man got back on the carpet. Casual as could be, Wes asked him, “Where'd that message come from? Do you know who sent it?”

“I can't tell you anything like that,” the deliveryman answered. Wes handed him a folded-up bill. When he unfolded it, he coughed. No, I don't know how big it was. Big enough to make him cough, that's how big. Real fast, he said, “It's from Pittsburgh, from some guy on the Crawdads, whatever the Crawdads are. But you never heard that from me.” He sailed out of there faster than he had any business going.

“Huh,” Fidgety Frank said when the Consolidated Crystal deliveryman was gone. The CC fella might not have known about the Pittsburgh Crawdads, but we sure did. They were only one of the two or three best colored teams in the country. They traveled in a couple of big old limousines. People had been telling stories about Carpetbag Booker, who pitched for them, as long as I could remember. Job Gregson, their catcher, hit balls farther than anybody, and I mean anybody.

“Are they coming out for the
Post
tournament?” I asked.

“Don't know,” Fidgety Frank said. Wes and Eddie both shrugged. If they did come out, they'd have a good chance of winning. We all knew that.

“What's Harv cooking up?” Wes answered his own question: “Whatever it is, it's gotta be something juicy. But what?”

“Can't ask him,” Eddie said. “If he knows we know, boy, will we catch it.” So would the CC deliveryman, but we didn't waste any time caring about him.

“I almost wish we didn't find out,” I said. “Now we've got more questions about this than we do about the flying hubcaps.”

“We won't ever get answers about those, though,” Wes said. “This stuff with the Crawdads, we'll find out pretty quick, whatever's going on.”

“But I want to know now,” Eddie said. I was thinking the same thing.

Wes let out a smart-aleck chuckle. “Gives you something to look forward to, don't it? Me, I'm going to bed. We've got another game tomorrow. We've always got another game tomorrow.”

He had that right. I thought curiosity would keep me up. It did, too, for a good three minutes, maybe even five. Another game tomorrow. Always another game tomorrow. Well, I knew what I'd be doing, anyway.

*   *   *

What I'd be doing was getting on the bus and going up to Santa Fe for a game there the next afternoon. Nobody said a word about the Pittsburgh Crawdads. Harv didn't think anyone else knew. Oh, wouldn't he have reamed us out if one of us asked him something like
Hey, Harv, gonna get Job Gregson to catch for us?

When you go up from Albuquerque to Santa Fe, you go up every which way you can. You go north—you go east, too, but you do go north. And you go up, as in up. Albuquerque's just under a mile high—I think I said that before. Santa Fe's at 7,000 feet.

And you notice the difference. At a mile up, you feel pretty much the way you always do, especially if you've been in high country for a bit, the way we had. Climb another couple of thousand feet on a two-hour bus ride and all of a sudden every staircase feels as though it's got three or four extra steps in it. You stop to catch your breath when you shouldn't need to. If you do something where you really need to, you mostly can't.

It's so high up, it's not even hot. But you can sunburn lickety-split, on account of there's less air between you and the sun. Hit a baseball and it goes and goes. Pitch one … Well, you can try. Curveballs don't want to curve. Fastballs won't hop the way they do down closer to sea level.

It was a pretty place. It was old, too—settled from Mexico more than three hundred years ago. On this side of the ocean, that made it ancient. I don't reckon anything in Oklahoma is even one hundred years old, let alone three. And it looked old. It was like Albuquerque, only more so. Everything either was made of adobe or else wasn't but looked as though it were. That kinda grows on you after a while. It makes a town look like it belongs where it is, not like it just got plopped down there by happenstance. Santa Fe's the state capital, too.

Some of the mountains around the town still had snow on them. If Santa Fe was high, they were higher. Every so often, you'd see an eagle circling maybe even higher yet.

Santa Fe'd had semipro teams for as long as anybody. It's never been in a pro league. The Santa Fe Saints played at Fort Marcy Park. No adobe there. Chain-link fences and wooden bleachers. If the bleachers were smaller, it would look like a high-school field.

It was too small to be as high up as it was. Only went 302 in left and 318 in right. Center was 395. That wouldn't be a big ballyard at sea level. Up 7,000 feet, and even I started looking like Job Gregson. Well, hitting like him, anyhow. From what I heard, he was twice as wide as me and more than twice as black. But I had no trouble clouting 'em over the fence in batting practice.

Wes said, “Why don't you let Frank pitch today, Harv? I don't want to get blamed for a mess of a game.” I don't know whether he was grousing about my batting-practice homers or his own curves that wouldn't.

“I'm still pooped from yesterday,” Fidgety Frank said. “Give the ball to Eddie. He can throw a few innings.”

“I'll do it. If you aren't scared of what'll happen, I'm not, either,” Eddie said. Some position players are convinced they can pitch. Once in a while, they're right. More often, what happens is something to be scared of.

“Wes, you'll run your fat behind up on the mound, and that's all there is to it,” Harv said. “If you get knocked around, I expect we can jump on whatever they've got chucking, too.” He rolled his eyes. No, I'd never want to manage a baseball team.

More than half of the folks in the crowd looked Mexican. When they chattered or yelled, you heard Spanish with the English. But New Mexico isn't like Texas. You saw that even more in Santa Fe than you did anywhere else. In Santa Fe, the Mexicans looked down their noses at the Yankees for being Johnny-come-latelies. They were the old families, and some of 'em were rich old families, too. Gringos? They didn't need any miserable gringos, or they didn't reckon they did.

The Saints were split the same way as the crowd. I heard some of the Yankees on the team calling each other gringo when they practiced: “Don't boot that one, gringo, or you'll warm the bench!” Stuff like that. They laughed. They thought it was funny, the same way colored folks will call each other names where they'd pull out a knife if they heard 'em from a white guy.

Harv turned out to know what he was talking about. He usually did, which was one reason he did a good job of riding herd on the House of Daniel. We landed on the Santa Fe pitcher with both feet. We batted around in the first inning, and scored five runs. Nothing makes a pitcher happier than taking the hill with a big lead. Wes gave one back in his half of the first, but you think you ought to get a medal if you only give up one in Fort Marcy Park at 7,000 feet.

We got three more in the second. Their manager—he was a fat little Mexican guy who I found out later was the assistant attorney general for the state of New Mexico—made a slow, sad walk out to the mound from the dugout. Their pitcher made a slow, sad walk into the dugout from the mound. A new guy came in. He got the last out.